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TUTORIALS: DEPTH OF FIELD Depth of field refers to the range of distance that appears acceptably sharp. It varies depending on camera type, aperture and focusing distance, although print size and viewing distance can also influence our perception of depth of field. This tutorial is designed to give a better intuitive and technical understanding for photography, and provides a depth of field calculator to show how it varies with your camera settings. The depth of field does not abruptly change from sharp to unsharp, but instead occurs as a gradual transition. In fact, everything immediately in front of or in back of the focusing distance begins to lose sharpness — even if this is not perceived by our eyes or by the resolution of the camera. CIRCLE OF CONFUSION Since there is no critical point of transition, a more rigorous term called the "circle of confusion" is used to define how much a point needs to be blurred in order to be perceived as unsharp. When the circle of confusion becomes perceptible to our eyes, this region is said to be outside the depth of field and thus no longer "acceptably sharp." The circle of confusion above has been exaggerated for clarity; in reality this would be only a tiny fraction of the camera sensor's area. When does the circle of confusion become perceptible to our eyes? An acceptably sharp circle of confusion is loosely defined as one which would go unnoticed when enlarged to a standard 8x10 inch print, and observed from a standard viewing distance of about 1 foot. At this viewing distance and print size, camera manufacturers assume a circle of confusion is negligible if no larger than 0.01 inches (when enlarged). As a result, camera manufacturers use the 0.01 inch standard when providing lens depth of field markers (shown below for f/22 on a 50mm lens). In reality, a person with 20/20 vision or better can distinguish features 1/3 this size, and so the circle of confusion has to be even smaller than this to achieve acceptable sharpness throughout. A different maximum circle of confusion also applies for each print size and viewing distance combination. In the earlier example of blurred dots, the circle of confusion is actually smaller than the resolution of your screen for the two dots on either side of the focal point, and so these are considered within the depth of field. Alternatively, the depth of field can be based on when the circle of confusion becomes larger than the size of your digital camera's pixels. Note that depth of field only sets a maximum value for the circle of confusion, and does not describe what happens to regions once they become out of focus. These regions are also called "bokeh," from Japanese (pronounced bo-ké). Two images with identical depth of field may have significantly different bokeh, as this depends on the shape of the lens diaphragm. In reality, the circle of confusion is usually not actually a circle, but is only approximated as such when it is very small. When it becomes large, most lenses will render it as a polygonal shape with 5-8 sides. CONTROLLING DEPTH OF FIELD Although print size and viewing distance influence how large the circle of confusion appears to our eyes, aperture and focusing distance are the two main factors that determine how big the circle of confusion will be on your camera's sensor. Larger apertures (smaller F-stop number) and closer focusing distances produce a shallower depth of field. The following test maintains the same focus distance, but changes the aperture setting: note: images taken with a 200 mm lens (320 mm field of view on a 35 mm camera) CLARIFICATION: FOCAL LENGTH AND DEPTH OF FIELD Note that focal length has not been listed as influencing depth of field, contrary to popular belief. Even though telephoto lenses appear to create a much shallower depth of field, this is mainly because they are often used to magnify the subject when one is unable to get closer. If the subject occupies the same fraction of the image (constant magnification) for both a telephoto and a wide angle lens, the total depth of field is virtually* constant with focal length! This would of course require you to either get much closer with a wide angle lens or much farther with a telephoto lens, as demonstrated in the following chart: Focal Length (mm) Focus Distance (m) Depth of Field (m) 10 0.5 0.482 20 1.0 0.421 50 2.5 0.406 100 5.0 0.404 200 10 0.404 400 20 0.404 Note: Depth of field calculations are at f/4.0 on a camera with a 1.6X crop factor, using a circle of confusion of 0.0206 mm. Note how there is indeed a subtle change for the smallest focal lengths. This is a real effect, but is negligible compared to both aperture and focusing distance. Even though the total depth of field is virtually constant, the fraction of the depth of field which is in front of and behind the focus distance does change with focal length, as demonstrated below: Distribution of the Depth of Field Focal Length (mm) Rear Front 10 70.2 % 29.8 % 20 60.1 % 39.9 % 50 54.0 % 46.0 % 100 52.0 % 48.0 % 200 51.0 % 49.0 % 400 50.5 % 49.5 % This exposes a limitation of the traditional DoF concept: it only accounts for the total DoF and not its distribution around the focal plane, even though both may contribute to the perception of sharpness. Note how a wide angle lens provides a more gradually fading DoF behind the focal plane than in front, which is important for traditional landscape photographs. Longer focal lengths may also appear to have a shallower depth of field because they enlarge the background relative to the foreground (due to their narrower angle of view). This can make an out of focus background look even more out of focus because its blur has become enlarged. However, this is another concept entirely, since depth of field only describes the sharp region of a photo — not the blurred regions. On the other hand, when standing in the same place and focusing on a subject at the same distance, a longer focal length lens will have a shallower depth of field (even though the pictures will frame the subject entirely differently). This is more representative of everyday use, but is an effect due to higher magnification, not focal length. Depth of field also appears shallower for SLR cameras than for compact digital cameras, because SLR cameras require a longer focal length to achieve the same field of view (see the tutorial on digital camera sensor sizes for more on this topic). *Technical Note: We describe depth of field as being virtually constant because there are limiting cases where this does not hold true. For focal distances resulting in high magnification, or very near the hyperfocal distance, wide angle lenses may provide a greater DoF than telephoto lenses. On the other hand, at high magnification the traditional DoF calculation becomes inaccurate due to another factor: pupil magnification. This reduces the DoF advantage for most wide angle lenses, and increases it for telephoto and macro lenses. At the other limiting case, near the hyperfocal distance, the increase in DoF arises because the wide angle lens has a greater rear DoF, and can thus more easily attain critical sharpness at infinity. CALCULATING DEPTH OF FIELD In order to calculate the depth of field, one needs to first decide on an appropriate value for the maximum allowable circle of confusion. This is based on both the camera type (sensor or film size), and on the viewing distance / print size combination. Needless to say, knowing what this will be ahead of time often isn't straightforward. Try out the depth of field calculator tool to help you find this for your specific situation. DEPTH OF FOCUS & APERTURE VISUALIZATION Another implication of the circle of confusion is the concept of depth of focus (also called the "focus spread"). It differs from depth of field because it describes the distance over which light is focused at the camera's sensor, as opposed to the subject: Diagram depicting depth of focus versus camera aperture. The purple lines comprising the edge of each shaded region represent the extreme angles at which light could potentially enter the aperture. The interior of the purple shaded regions represents all other possible angles. The key concept is this: when an object is in focus, light rays originating from that point converge at a point on the camera's sensor. If the light rays hit the sensor at slightly different locations (arriving at a disc instead of a point), then this object will be rendered as out of focus — and increasingly so depending on how far apart the light rays are. OTHER NOTES Why not just use the smallest aperture (largest number) to achieve the best possible depth of field? Other than the fact that this may require prohibitively long shutter speeds without a camera tripod, too small of an aperture softens the image by creating a larger circle of confusion (or "Airy disk") due to an effect called diffraction — even within the plane of focus. Diffraction quickly becomes more of a limiting factor than depth of field as the aperture gets smaller. Despite their extreme depth of field, this is also why "pinhole cameras" have limited resolution. For macro photography (high magnification), the depth of field is actually influenced by another factor: pupil magnification. This is equal to one for lenses which are internally symmetric, although for wide angle and telephoto lenses this is greater or less than one, respectively. A greater depth of field is achieved (than would be ordinarily calculated) for a pupil magnification less than one, whereas the pupil magnification does not change the calculation when it is equal to one. The problem is that the pupil magnification is usually not provided by lens manufacturers, and one can only roughly estimate it visually. OTHER WEBSITES & FURTHER READING |
By , 10 SAN JOSE, Calif. — Three semiconductor veterans announced plans for an incubator dedicated to helping chip startups design their first prototypes. Silicon Catalyst aims to provide support for a sector many traditional venture capitalists have fled. Keysight, Synopsys, and TSMC have signed exclusive deals to provide tools and services to the incubator. Silicon Catalyst aims to select its first batch of about 10 chip startups before April. The company seeks startups in markets such as the Internet of Things, biotech, mobile, energy, and transportation, typically with fewer than 10 employees and less than $2 million of prior financing. In addition to office space and computers, it will give them as much as $500,000 in seed funding and $1 million to $2 million in goods and services from its partners, including free access to EDA and test tools, as well as a spot for their prototype on a multi-project wafer. The incubator is setting up a network of mentors and links to other investors. In turn, it will typically ask for less than 20% equity in the startups. The deal aims to provide a faster and more frugal path to market than traditional venture capital, which may take the majority of a startup's equity. In any case, most VCs have turned their attention to software and services startups that they say generally need less funding and produce higher and faster returns. "This is the most interesting time ever to innovate in silicon, because all the exciting end markets will require new semiconductor innovations at their heart," said Mike Noonen, co-founder of Silicon Catalyst and a former sales executive at Globalfoundries and NXP. "But most of the traditional investors have moved on. They treat silicon like toxic plutonium, because there's a belief there's a long time to revenue and it requires a big investment." Noonen co-founded Silicon Catalyst with Dan Armbrust, the former president of the Sematech research consortium, and Dan Lazansky, a former Agilent executive and founder of Denali. The incubator got some seed funding from its founding trio and is now raising $10 million to bankroll its first group of startups. Silicon Catalyst expects to germinate chip startups for about 12-24 months. Next page: A farm team for Intel, Samsung |
https://www.fromdev.com/2010/12/interview-questions-hadoop-mapreduce.html A good understanding ofis required to leverage the power of Hadoop. Below are few important practical questions which can be asked to a Senior Experienced Hadoop Developer in an interview. I learned the answers to them during my CCHD (Cloudera Certified Haddop Developer) certification. I hope you will find them useful. This list primarily includes questions related toHadoop is the most popular platform for. The Hadoop ecosystem is huge and involves many supporting frameworks and tools to effectively run and manage it. This article focuses on the core of Hadoop concepts and its technique to handle enormous data.Hadoop is a huge ecosystem and referring to a good hadoop book is highly recommended.Below list of hadoop interview questions and answers that may prove useful for beginners and experts alike. These are common set of questions that you may face at big data job interview or a hadoop certification exam (like CCHD). JobTracker is the daemon service for submitting and tracking MapReduce jobs in Hadoop. There is only One Job Tracker process run on any hadoop cluster. Job Tracker runs on its own JVM process. In a typical production cluster its run on a separate machine. Each slave node is configured with job tracker node location. The JobTracker is single point of failure for the Hadoop MapReduce service. If it goes down, all running jobs are halted. JobTracker in Hadoop performs following actions(from Hadoop Wiki:) Client applications submit jobs to the Job tracker. The JobTracker talks to the NameNode to determine the location of the data The JobTracker locates TaskTracker nodes with available slots at or near the data The JobTracker submits the work to the chosen TaskTracker nodes. The TaskTracker nodes are monitored. If they do not submit heartbeat signals often enough, they are deemed to have failed and the work is scheduled on a different TaskTracker. A TaskTracker will notify the JobTracker when a task fails. The JobTracker decides what to do then: it may resubmit the job elsewhere, it may mark that specific record as something to avoid, and it may may even blacklist the TaskTracker as unreliable. When the work is completed, the JobTracker updates its status. Client applications can poll the JobTracker for information. The TaskTrackers send out heartbeat messages to the JobTracker, usually every few minutes, to reassure the JobTracker that it is still alive. These message also inform the JobTracker of the number of available slots, so the JobTracker can stay up to date with where in the cluster work can be delegated. When the JobTracker tries to find somewhere to schedule a task within the MapReduce operations, it first looks for an empty slot on the same server that hosts the DataNode containing the data, and if not, it looks for an empty slot on a machine in the same rack. A TaskTracker is a slave node daemon in the cluster that accepts tasks (Map, Reduce and Shuffle operations) from a JobTracker. There is only One Task Tracker process run on any hadoop slave node. Task Tracker runs on its own JVM process. Every TaskTracker is configured with a set of slots, these indicate the number of tasks that it can accept. The TaskTracker starts a separate JVM processes to do the actual work (called as Task Instance) this is to ensure that process failure does not take down the task tracker. The TaskTracker monitors these task instances, capturing the output and exit codes. When the Task instances finish, successfully or not, the task tracker notifies the JobTracker. The TaskTrackers also send out heartbeat messages to the JobTracker, usually every few minutes, to reassure the JobTracker that it is still alive. These message also inform the JobTracker of the number of available slots, so the JobTracker can stay up to date with where in the cluster work can be delegated. Task instances are the actual MapReduce jobs which are run on each slave node. The TaskTracker starts a separate JVM processes to do the actual work (called as Task Instance) this is to ensure that process failure does not take down the task tracker. Each Task Instance runs on its own JVM process. There can be multiple processes of task instance running on a slave node. This is based on the number of slots configured on task tracker. By default a new task instance JVM process is spawned for a task. Hadoop is comprised of five separate daemons. Each of these daemon run in its own JVM. Following 3 Daemons run on Master nodes NameNode - This daemon stores and maintains the metadata for HDFS. Secondary NameNode - Performs housekeeping functions for the NameNode. JobTracker - Manages MapReduce jobs, distributes individual tasks to machines running the Task Tracker. Following 2 Daemons run on each Slave nodes DataNode – Stores actual HDFS data blocks. TaskTracker - Responsible for instantiating and monitoring individual Map and Reduce tasks. Single instance of a Task Tracker is run on each Slave node. Task tracker is run as a separate JVM process. Single instance of a DataNode daemon is run on each Slave node. DataNode daemon is run as a separate JVM process. One or Multiple instances of Task Instance is run on each slave node. Each task instance is run as a separate JVM process. The number of Task instances can be controlled by configuration. Typically a high end machine is configured to run more task instances. The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a distributed file system designed to run on commodity hardware. It has many similarities with existing distributed file systems. However, the differences from other distributed file systems are significant. Following are differences between HDFS and NAS In HDFS Data Blocks are distributed across local drives of all machines in a cluster. Whereas in NAS data is stored on dedicated hardware. HDFS is designed to work with MapReduce System, since computation are moved to data. NAS is not suitable for MapReduce since data is stored seperately from the computations. HDFS runs on a cluster of machines and provides redundancy usinga replication protocal. Whereas NAS is provided by a single machine therefore does not provide data redundancy. NameNode periodically receives a Heartbeat and a Blockreport from each of the DataNodes in the cluster. Receipt of a Heartbeat implies that the DataNode is functioning properly. A Blockreport contains a list of all blocks on a DataNode. When NameNode notices that it has not recieved a hearbeat message from a data node after a certain amount of time, the data node is marked as dead. Since blocks will be under replicated the system begins replicating the blocks that were stored on the dead datanode. The NameNode Orchestrates the replication of data blocks from one datanode to another. The replication data transfer happens directly between datanodes and the data never passes through the namenode. Nope, MapReduce programming model does not allow reducers to communicate with each other. Reducers run in isolation. Yes, Setting the number of reducers to zero is a valid configuration in Hadoop. When you set the reducers to zero no reducers will be executed, and the output of each mapper will be stored to a separate file on HDFS. [This is different from the condition when reducers are set to a number greater than zero and the Mappers output (intermediate data) is written to the Local file system(NOT HDFS) of each mappter slave node.] The mapper output (intermediate data) is stored on the Local file system (NOT HDFS) of each individual mapper nodes. This is typically a temporary directory location which can be setup in config by the hadoop administrator. The intermediate data is cleaned up after the Hadoop Job completes. Combiners are used to increase the efficiency of a MapReduce program. They are used to aggregate intermediate map output locally on individual mapper outputs. Combiners can help you reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred across to the reducers. You can use your reducer code as a combiner if the operation performed is commutative and associative. The execution of combiner is not guaranteed, Hadoop may or may not execute a combiner. Also, if required it may execute it more then 1 times. Therefore your MapReduce jobs should not depend on the combiners execution. org.apache.hadoop.io.Writable is a Java interface. Any key or value type in the Hadoop Map-Reduce framework implements this interface. Implementations typically implement a static read(DataInput) method which constructs a new instance, calls readFields(DataInput) and returns the instance. org.apache.hadoop.io.WritableComparable is a Java interface. Any type which is to be used as a key in the Hadoop Map-Reduce framework should implement this interface. WritableComparable objects can be compared to each other using Comparators. The Key must implement the org.apache.hadoop.io.WritableComparable interface. The value must implement the org.apache.hadoop.io.Writable interface. org.apache.hadoop.mapred.lib.IdentityMapper Implements the identity function, mapping inputs directly to outputs. If MapReduce programmer do not set the Mapper Class using JobConf.setMapperClass then IdentityMapper.class is used as a default value. org.apache.hadoop.mapred.lib.IdentityReducer Performs no reduction, writing all input values directly to the output. If MapReduce programmer do not set the Reducer Class using JobConf.setReducerClass then IdentityReducer.class is used as a default value. Speculative execution is a way of coping with individual Machine performance. In large clusters where hundreds or thousands of machines are involved there may be machines which are not performing as fast as others. This may result in delays in a full job due to only one machine not performaing well. To avoid this, speculative execution in hadoop can run multiple copies of same map or reduce task on different slave nodes. The results from first node to finish are used. In a MapReduce job reducers do not start executing the reduce method until the all Map jobs have completed. Reducers start copying intermediate key-value pairs from the mappers as soon as they are available. The programmer defined reduce method is called only after all the mappers have finished. Reducers start copying intermediate key-value pairs from the mappers as soon as they are available. The progress calculation also takes in account the processing of data transfer which is done by reduce process, therefore the reduce progress starts showing up as soon as any intermediate key-value pair for a mapper is available to be transferred to reducer. Though the reducer progress is updated still the programmer defined reduce method is called only after all the mappers have finished. HDFS, the Hadoop Distributed File System, is responsible for storing huge data on the cluster. This is a distributed file system designed to run on commodity hardware. It has many similarities with existing distributed file systems. However, the differences from other distributed file systems are significant. HDFS is highly fault-tolerant and is designed to be deployed on low-cost hardware. HDFS provides high throughput access to application data and is suitable for applications that have large data sets. HDFS is designed to support very large files. Applications that are compatible with HDFS are those that deal with large data sets. These applications write their data only once but they read it one or more times and require these reads to be satisfied at streaming speeds. HDFS supports write-once-read-many semantics on files. In HDFS data is split into blocks and distributed across multiple nodes in the cluster. Each block is typically 64Mb or 128Mb in size. Each block is replicated multiple times. Default is to replicate each block three times. Replicas are stored on different nodes. HDFS utilizes the local file system to store each HDFS block as a separate file. HDFS Block size can not be compared with the traditional file system block size. The NameNode is the centerpiece of an HDFS file system. It keeps the directory tree of all files in the file system, and tracks where across the cluster the file data is kept. It does not store the data of these files itself. There is only One NameNode process run on any hadoop cluster. NameNode runs on its own JVM process. In a typical production cluster its run on a separate machine. The NameNode is a Single Point of Failure for the HDFS Cluster. When the NameNode goes down, the file system goes offline. Client applications talk to the NameNode whenever they wish to locate a file, or when they want to add/copy/move/delete a file. The NameNode responds the successful requests by returning a list of relevant DataNode servers where the data lives. A DataNode stores data in the Hadoop File System HDFS. There is only One DataNode process run on any hadoop slave node. DataNode runs on its own JVM process. On startup, a DataNode connects to the NameNode. DataNode instances can talk to each other, this is mostly during replicating data. The Client communication to HDFS happens using Hadoop HDFS API. Client applications talk to the NameNode whenever they wish to locate a file, or when they want to add/copy/move/delete a file on HDFS. The NameNode responds the successful requests by returning a list of relevant DataNode servers where the data lives. Client applications can talk directly to a DataNode, once the NameNode has provided the location of the data. HDFS is designed to reliably store very large files across machines in a large cluster. It stores each file as a sequence of blocks; all blocks in a file except the last block are the same size. The blocks of a file are replicated for fault tolerance. The block size and replication factor are configurable per file. An application can specify the number of replicas of a file. The replication factor can be specified at file creation time and can be changed later. Files in HDFS are write-once and have strictly one writer at any time. The NameNode makes all decisions regarding replication of blocks. HDFS uses rack-aware replica placement policy. In default configuration there are total 3 copies of a datablock on HDFS, 2 copies are stored on datanodes on same rack and 3rd copy on a different rack. Can you think of a questions which is not part of this post? Please don't forget to share it with me in comments section & I will try to include it in the list. |
New Delhi: BJP on Friday hit back at Rahul Gandhi after he attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying he has to "grow out of diapers". Reacting sharply to Rahul's remark that the Vasundhara Raje government's "remote" was with Lalit Modi in London, it said Congress was used to running governments by remote control and believed it was a "model" but it was not so in BJP. Party secretary Siddharth Nath Singh lashed out at the Congress vice president at a briefing soon after he targeted the Centre and Rajasthan government over a host of issues, including land bill and Lalit Modi scandal, and took a jibe at Modi saying people will reduce his "56-inch chest to 5.6 inches". "He has to grow out of diapers he is wearing. His remarks, behaviour remind us that he remains a baby in diapers," Singh said while raking up the alleged scams during the Congress-led UPA rule and controversial land deals involving Rahul's brother-in-law Robert Vadra. Referring to a Lalit Modi tweet, the BJP leader spoke about the likely "deal of Rs 500-600 crore involving your (Rahul Gandhi) mother's sister" and said he should also speak about it. "Rahul Gandhi has spoken about land, remote control and also 56 inch. As I said he is a toddler and it is not nice to give advise to a toddler. But Congress is giving him big responsibility so let us offer him an unsolicited advise. You have a right to criticise us. But criticise us on facts.... "You should assume a more constructive role. You wasted 10 years.... From 2G, Coalgate, 'damadji', you have now come down to 'istifa ji'," he said mockingly, referring to the opposition's demand for the resignation of several BJP leaders over their alleged involvement in Vyapam scam and Lalit Modi scandal. Addressing party workers in Rajasthan, Rahul today said "This 56-inch chest (of Narendra Modi) will turn into 5.6 inches in six months. And who will turn this into 5.6 inches, it is the Congress party, people of the country, the farmers and the labourers." Taking repeated jibes at the Vasundhara Raje government, he called it a "Lalit Modi sarkar". BJP leader Siddharth Nath Singh said "the 56-inch chest has been realised due to the blessing of crores of Indians" and Rahul should not dare measure it. "Or, it will prove costly," he said. Modi had spoken frequently about "56-inch chest", a reference to strong leadership, during the Lok Sabha election and it has been used by Congress to taunt him. Referring to Rahul's barbs at the Modi government over land bill and his claim that Congress will not allow an inch of land to be acquired under it, Singh said he should also speak "about how Vadra managed to acquire so much of properties in Haryana". On Rahul's remark that the Raje government's "remote" was with Lalit Modi in London, BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli said, "Congress was used to running governments by remote control and believed it was a model. It is not so in BJP." |
The NDP government is not pinning its financial hopes on a hefty improvement in oil prices, says Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci. With a budget burdened by an economic slump and the cost of fighting the Fort McMurray wildfire, the deficit is expected to soar to a record $10.9 billion, according to a quarterly financial update unveiled Tuesday. One of the few bright spots in the government's gloomy financial situation is a slight increase in the price of oil. The province now expects a barrel of crude oil to average $45 (US) this year, rather than the $42 figure budgeted for in April's budget. If the projection pans out, it will funnel $744 million in extra revenue into provincial coffers, compared to spring revenue projections. Although oil markets are difficult to predict, Ceci says the province is playing it safe, while trying to wean Alberta off its fixation with oil revenues. "We're not waiting for $80 oil. We've built our budget around the possibility of having $39 oil," Ceci said Wednesday in an interview with CBC Radio's Edmonton AM radio show. "No, It's not a balanced budget, but it's a budget that we can see balancing," he added. "But we do need to hold the line on spending … and we do need to diversify our economy. We've been too narrowly focused on one commodity as the way to get out of this downturn, and it hasn't worked." The economic downturn has drained Alberta's contingency account. The rainy-day fund will be dried up this year, and the province will rely on borrowing for funding shortfalls. But Ceci remains optimistic about budget projections. "We think it's a conservative approach and one that reflects where private sector forecasters are going," he said. "I know it's a difficult time for many, many people in Alberta, but relative to many other places, even in Canada, we have an excellent quality of life, we have an excellent province with great infrastructure." If budget price estimates for the benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil are too low, Ceci and the government may be blamed for low-balling revenue projections. But the Alberta government vastly underestimated the oil slump last year. And Alberta's financial picture has remained gloomy since. Overall, the quarterly forecast calls for the economy to shrink by 2.7 per cent this fiscal year. Added to the estimated 3.7 per cent contraction of the economy in 2015, it's the largest two-year consecutive decline in the economy since the early 1980s. |
INDIANAPOLIS – Clean eating, vegan foods and plant-based diets may sound like a nightmare for foodies who crave sweet glazed chicken and the beloved breaded Indiana tenderloin, but for others, it’s a lifestyle. While cleaning up your diet may mean ditching the sweet snacks and midnight munchies, it could also mean eliminating or limiting your meat intake. Did you know some of Indy’s best restaurants are vegetarian and vegan friendly? If you’re on the hunt for a dish full of flavor, spices and herbs – but without the meat – here are some of Indy’s must try vegetarian and vegan-friendly restaurants. Three Carrots: The city’s only completely vegan restaurant. Made to order and grab-and-go options available but serves popular items like seitan gyros, buffalo mac and country-fried seitan Ezra’s Enlightened Café: Features many vegan options as it specializes in raw, plant-based foods Vitality Bowls: Offers a wide variety of acai bowls, smoothies and juices Twenty Tap: Try vegan appetizers like edamame or veggie buffalo wings and order the vegan bahn mi sandwich for dinner. Public Greens: Clearly marked vegan dishes like grilled cabbage and fried polenta The Garden Table: Menu serves acai bowls, vegetarian salads, soups and drinks Mimi Blue Meatballs: Specializes in meat but has vegan veggie balls and side options for vegans Duos Kitchen: Offers marked vegetarian items like the baked tofu sandwich, veggie burger and quinoa croquette Shoefly Public House: Has vegetarian and vegan salads. Also serves a vegan "no-meatloaf" The Sinking Ship: You’ll find seitan BBQ wings, vegan chili, and vegan burgers 3 Sisters Café: Multiple vegan items marked on their breakfast, lunch and dinner menus 317 Burger: Offers a vegan veggie burger and deep-fried zucchini sandwich A Piece of Cake: Makes cakes to order including vegan cakes, pies and cupcakes Abyssinia Ethiopian Restaurant: A variety of vegetarian and vegan soups and entrees Bazbeaux: Vegetarian and vegan salads along with vegan and gluten-free crust pizzas. Broad Ripple Ice Cream Station (BRICS): Selection of vegan ice cream with vegan cones available upon request Yard House: Offers an entire separate vegetarian and vegan menu Broad Ripple Brew Pub: Offers separate vegetarian and vegan menu with other vegan specials Café Patachou: Vegan items marked on menu Divvy: Vegan plates are specifically marked and include squash tots, soft pretzel bites, edamame hummus, vegetable bisque and more Flatwater restaurant: Serves several vegan options including: Korean lettuce wraps with grilled seitan, seitan tacos, rice noodle salad and grilled veggies. Freshii (inside the Fashion Mall at Keystone): Offers great variety of vegan bowls, burritos, salads and wraps The Mellow Mushroom: Has vegan options including its signature “Herb” Veggie Burger made from quinoa, kale, brown rice and roasted mushrooms. Seasons 52: Offers a separate vegan and vegetarian menu, including the Vegetarian Tasting, a variety of vegetarian items on a single dish The Flying Cupcake: Bakery has jumbo and regular-sized vegan cupcakes, cookies The following map and parts of the above listing were provided by organizers of the Indy VegFest , a vegetarian and vegan festival happening April 29, 2017. |
#GamerGate has been slandered in the media and defamed by Wikipedia. It’s no surprise given that consumers are going directly after the media outlets that they feel have failed in their job of being ethical and pro-consumer. Caught in the crossfire between the media and gamers are game developers. The devs are just trying to make good games. However, the media’s finger-pointing hasn’t been limited to demonizing their own audience, they’ve also taken to silencing and badgering the artists and creators of interactive entertainment content as well. One of the developers who knows full well about the demonization of artwork and having said art altered to fit the views of those offended by certain forms of gender depiction, is Larian Studios’ Thierry Van Gyseghem, an animator and artist who worked on the PC RPG Divinity: Original Sin. Thierry was subject to a lot of criticism following a blog post called “Save The Boob-Plate”, where he spoke out against critics who wanted his artwork for the cover of the game to be less sexually flavored, since the midriff of the female on the box art was exposed. These attacks against artists have been a perpetual occurrence over nearly eight months since #GamerGate started, from attacking an astrophysicists for a shirt he wore, to decrying the cover of a Batman comic for showcasing violence against women. Artists and creators across the entertainment spectrum have been put under strong scrutiny to alter or change things that don’t fit the purview of some puritans. I managed to get in word with Thierry about these issues as part of a #LetDevsSpeak sub-movement where developers have been speaking up about these divisive issues and sharing their opinions on the matter. This also ties into a Rebuild Initiative to help bridge the gap in communication between the gaming community and the gaming media. You can check out the interview below. It should be noted that Thierry speaks solely from his point of view and does not attempt to represent the views or opinions of Larian Studios. Billy: One of the things I was curious about was when the controversy broke out over the boob-plate armor, was it actually Kickstarter backers sending most of the criticisms or was it relegated to the gaming media and pockets of social media sub-communities? Thierry: The original cover art had been used for nearly a year at that point, we even had a booth on E3 2012, without a complaint. It was a very small vocal minority that complained about the cover design when we went on kickstarter. Because of the kickstarter campaign there were certain gaming media sites that picked up on it and amplified the complains, I think we all know which sites are the most vigilant in their political agenda. I can only assume social media sub-communities will have added to it also. Billy: For the people who actually bought Divinity: Original Sin, do you know if there was any strong feedback regarding how they felt about the character designs and whether or not they thought they were appropriate, cool, over-dressed or under-dressed? I only ask because it doesn’t seem like character attire is much of a topic in the user review section for Divinity. Thierry: I think at this point the comments on the in game armours have died out, and I haven’t skimmed all the reviews for it of course. I do recall a series of forum threads discussing both the female armour that still showed some flesh (the fact many of male population did too remained undiscussed and never caused people to be upset) and the fact she’s wearing heels. It has been a topic, but not in such an amount it overshadowed all the good feedback received on the game as whole. Billy: Lately there’s been a lot of controversy over creative freedoms that developers can or should exercise with character designs. How much of it do you feel is legitimate criticisms and how much of it do you feel is social politics invading the creative design space? Thierry: Criticism is formed by opinions, and opinions are formed by what we see, hear and read. So yes I do feel that social politics has a hand in the criticism that is thrown at creative freedom because it’s politics that decides what we see, hear and read. It’s remarkable that you can almost pinpoint the critiques to certain parts in the world, since different parts of the world have different politics. So in that regard, no I don’t think there are that many legitimate critiques on character design as all of it is just pure taste and preference based. You can like something, or you can dislike something. Feel free to walk away if you don’t like it, but don’t harass the creator for it and wave your political flag. Billy: One of the arguments on a sub-Reddit discussing your post from DeviantArt about “Save the Boob-Plate” claimed that the media pressuring game studios to alter or change artistic choices for characters isn’t censorship. People like Jim Sterling and Jonathan McIntosh have also claimed that it isn’t necessarily censorship to pressure developers to change their artistic vision for characters or story designs. As an artist, how do you deal with these kind of criticisms and how it affects what you do and what you produce? Thierry: I’ve read comments like that, and I find it remarkable that they dismiss my opinion piece by dissecting my vocabulary and attacking my choice of words. But I will admit that I’ve misused some wording but my intent is still the same. When you own a pizza place and one day the mob enters your little shack, threatens you by saying if I don’t stop selling pepperoni pizza’s they’ll do anything in their power to make sure you go out of business, then what should we call this? Blackmail? Censorship? Harassment? Extortion? or simply a trade embargo? In the end the story remains the same, you are forced to rethink your actions and it leaves a shadow hanging over your creations. Every artist deals with criticism differently, I feel that inevitably your next piece will already be affected by it, consciously or unconsciously. Billy: Some developers have started standing their ground when it comes to artistic merit and character design choices. Other developers like Mark Kern and Adrian Chmielraz have started pushing for more developers to speak up and engage in a two-way conversation using things like the LetDevsSpeak hashtag. How do you feel about developers having a right to reply when it comes to attacks against their work and how do you feel about developers bypassing the typical PR checkpoint to engage directly with their audience? Thierry: I can only feel very positive about this. I think a two-way conversation with devs is the way out of this mess. Problems are solved when both parties go and sit around the table and talk towards a solution. I truly belief in a human-to-human relationship between devs and fans, and if a company can afford it to bypass a PR checkpoint I believe it’s worth it. But I guess many companies need to rely on PR checkpoints for exposure, and those checkpoints know it. Billy: There’s a pretty big rift right now between game journalists and their audience. There’s a lot of tension surrounding divisive topics about gender and social politics in gaming. Many sites opt to shutdown or close off comment sections when these topics pop up, while others simply censor dissenting opinions. What do you think gamers and developers can do to help foster healthy communication about controversial subject matter involving gender politics, character designs and social issues without instantly resorting to censorship and threads being locked down? Thierry: There is indeed a big rift between journalist and their audience. And as far as I see it they have for a large part themselves to thank for it. But don’t get me wrong, it’s undeniable true that the gaming environment has been a boys club for a long time and I see no reason at all not to invite women to game either. I think this is an admirable goal. Seeing that media is infinite and developers can expand on it infinitely I’m convinced the tactics by which game diversity is achieved are very wrong. I say this because giving women the games they like should not result in taking away or moderating the games the boys like. I think it’s cheap and weak to attack existing franchises, shame them in what they are doing and force through guilt to change their content. Feminism has shown what women can do, that they are strong and no less than men, so why don’t they prove it by coming up with their own franchises? We’ve seen this happen in television and it worked, Sex and the City has proven this. I don’t have any ready answer on how the industry can solve this, I’m still at a point that I’m trying to balance myself out in this storm and get some clarity on this matter. I do think the industry can build towards a healthy environment again if we all start to respect each other again for our differences and preferences. The consumers are just upset because they getting rocks thrown at them. When articles appear that say for instances gamers are dead or articles that attack gamers in their identity–an identity most of them have assumed decades ago–that just upsets people. I’ll probably do some stereotyping here, but I can imagine that most of the gamers were the ones that got bullied in their childhood, or still are. And now it’s happening again in the world they escape to. I can understand their rage if people keep sending them messages they have no place in this world. So if we start with respecting each other, we can then start to positive reinforce the games we love and invest in new games we love. That’s how you create diversity! All this without taking a piss on things you don’t agree with. (Huge, huge thanks to Thierry Van Gyseghem for taking time to answer the questions. Divinity: Original Sin is available right now for PC. You can learn more about the game by paying a visit to the official website or you can check out more of Thierry’s work over on his DeviantArt page) |
Anyone got a charger? If you're tearing your hair out at your phone running out of juice all the time, it could be that your favorite apps are to blame. New research suggests that up to 75 percent of free Android apps' battery use is spent on advertisements and other hidden tasks. New Scientist reports the findings from Indiana's Purdue University, where curious boffins built special software to analyze apps' power demands. For example, the research reveals (PDF) that smash hit Angry Birds, among others, spends just a fifth of the power it uses on actually playing the fowl-flinging game. Instead, nearly half of the energy used by the app goes toward checking where you are using GPS and downloading adverts over 3G that are specific to your location. Read more of "Free Android apps waste 75 per cent of power on adverts" at Crave UK. |
If you want a friend in Washington, the saying goes, get a dog. If you want a whole bunch of friends in Washington, get a dog park. And if you want to earn some enemies in Washington, get involved in political skirmishing over it. In the summer of 2012, after an empty lot in Northeast DC’s NoMa was used for an outdoor movie screening, “one of the gates was left unlocked,” says neighbor Susan Goldfarb. “Somebody discovered that and went in—and word kind of spread.” Soon, dozens of dogs and their owners were using the fenced-in expanse as a makeshift dog park. At all hours of the day and night for about a year and a half, neighbors congregated behind the chain link at Second and L streets to socialize while their dogs ran free on a piece of land larger than a football field. The human contingent was racially and generationally diverse—it included millennial renters from the new luxury apartments around the NoMa–Gallaudet Metro stop along with older residents from established areas to the south and east. “I’m 51 and have two little puppies, and I’m hanging out with twentysomethings right out of college,” says Cari Shane. “Everything about it was perfect.” Of course, the people were trespassing, but if the police or landowner ever noticed, neither bothered to intervene. It likely didn’t hurt that the group periodically got together with garbage bags to tidy up the place. Nonetheless, in one of the fastest-growing patches of the city, Dog Heaven couldn’t last forever. In 2014, the developer Toll Brothers got approval to start construction on a 525-unit apartment complex atop the lot. So Goldfarb and Shane got to work collecting signatures. They came up with a list of 437 dogs, owned by 400 humans, who had been using the land. They then brought a signed petition to Robin-Eve Jasper, head of the NoMa Business Improvement District, to make the case that the neighborhood needed a real dog park. New dog parks—and the gentrification they’ve come to symbolize—are contentious in DC. When Eckington residents lobbied (unsuccessfully) to get one built on Lincoln Road, Northeast, in 2013, opponents argued that pets of newcomers were being prioritized over play space for neighborhood kids. A similar fight ensued in Takoma, where, after a six-year battle, the District denied a dog-park proposal last year. But in NoMa, the effort met with little resistance. Because the neighborhood was essentially built from scratch in the last decade, there wasn’t an entrenched residential community to contend with. By 2014, Jasper says, it was clear the area was in dire need of green space: “We really missed the boat on that.” Planners had initially envisioned NoMa as a series of office buildings. Instead, it grew into a pocket of 44,000 residents and 5,000 occupied apartments. In 2015, Jasper’s group used grant money from the city to acquire an 8,000-square-foot parcel for the dog park, a block from the old makeshift one. Exactly what the space would include was hashed out during a series of community meetings. Phil Tahtakran, a member of the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission, says the Business Improvement District helped deter critics by emphasizing that the spot was “small and shady most of the year” and not ideal for another use. Neighbors who wanted space for kids also walked away with something: A fenced playground will occupy another part of the site. About five years after the gate at Second and L was left ajar, the NoMa Dog Park is slated to open this fall. The landscape-architecture firm Lee and Associates designed it with high-end artificial turf and an agility structure for the dogs to play on. It’s a victory for the neighborhood’s canine residents, to be sure. But it’s hard to imagine they won’t miss their old, city-block-size mud pit. This article appears in the October 2017 issue of Washingtonian. Join the conversation! |
Share. It won't be rainbows and sunshine in Tinkerworld for long. It won't be rainbows and sunshine in Tinkerworld for long. Exit Theatre Mode The vibrant world in The Last Tinker: City of Colors' demo easily drew me in at first glance. From start to finish the entire thing looks like one big, bright pinata, with wide-eyed animal characters wandering through a colorful world and props made out of cardboard, paper, and glue. In this platforming adventure, you play as a young monkey named Koru. Koru's quest will eventually revolve around bringing color back to the world, or at least that's what trailers like the one above have led me to believe, but for now the demo is all about familiarizing yourself with him, the Tinkerworld he lives in, and the simple controls. Getting Koru to a race was my main goal, but I had to earn some money for the admission fee before I could compete. Koru's friend, Tap the sheep, guides Koru to villagers who need help. I liked how I could press "T" and he'd fly out in front of me, leaving a trail of confetti in his wake as he whisked towards the best route to find the villagers. Wait for me, Tap! “ Koru auto-jumps across platforms and obstacles. Considering Koru's a monkey, I thought he would be a spritely fellow. It turns out, even though you're free to explore wherever you want, Koru's movement is somewhat limited. You can't jump whenever you please in The Last Tinker. Rather, Koru auto-jumps across platforms and obstacles. With that in mind, the main challenge of platforming comes from determining where you need to go and how to get there, rather than the actual process of bounding over different areas. This guided platforming was a bit unusual at first, but it actually made gameplay quite fluid during the heavier platforming sections. Jumping up and down over octopus tentacles then running straight up a vine in one swift movement felt nice. I feel like younger gamers, and those who have trouble jumping in other platformers, will enjoy the auto-jump mechanic. While I was able to get used to the platforming style rather quickly, I wasn't a huge fan of the combat. Koru may be known in his village as a strong fighter, but he felt slow when duking it out against red lizard bullies. He can punch and dodge enemies with a simple click of the mouse, and I essentially just mashed mouse clicks to take care of every bad guy. Eventually Koru was rewarded with some special gloves, but the demo ended before I had a chance to see if they made him any stronger, added more elements to combat, or if they just looked cool. Whether I was wandering through Tinkertown completing tasks for villagers or simply talking to my buddy Tap, the sound design of The Last Tinker adds an extra cute and bubbly layer. Everything isn't happy and joyous in this town, but the noises the characters make rather than reading the dialogue are charming. The demo finishes up after the race, but not before a red lizard beats the absolute crap out of little Tap the sheep. Poor guy! This is when you learn that Koru can unlock special powers within himself that he'll eventually need to not only heal Tap, but also all of Tinkerworld. With that in mind, I was definitely left feeling curious about what happens next in this colorful adventure. Leah B. Jackson is both an Associate Editor at IGN and Corgi megafan, and not necessarily in that order. Follow her on Twitter and MyIGN! |
The inhabitants of the planet Thundera evacuate just before it is destroyed. They were pursued by a band of mutants. All but one of their escape ships was destroyed. Only a small group of Thunderans (Thundercats) remained. With only half engine power, the group, which was led by Jaga, had to set a course for the nearest planet. Jaga commanded their ship while the other 7 were in their stasis tubes. Jaga died on their journey to Third Earth and their ship crashed there. Soon they made friends with various groups in the area and they designed a fortress. Mumm-Ra the centuries-old embodiment of evil, along with the mutants that destroyed the rest of the Thunderans are a constant threat. But Lion-O, the new leader of the Thundercats, with his weapon the "Sword of Omens" will help the Thundercats to have a standing chance. Written by D. Darnoc |
Make simple Christmas tree ornaments from glue! It’s time for some easy Christmas crafts for kids and these Christmas tree ornaments are deceptively easy to make. They also make great suncatchers for window decorations. We love hanging ours on the tree because the colors from the Christmas tree shine through and make the ornaments shine even more. Today we’re joining up with my blogging friends from All Things Kids to bring you fun and easy Christmas activities for toddlers and preschoolers! Check below for more fun activities. Affiliate links provided for your convenience, see my disclosure for more info. These trees are based off of the heart suncatchers we made in the summer. This craft is great for preschoolers but it’s simple enough that even toddlers can easily do it!! Also be aware before you start, this craft takes several days to dry. Glue Suncatchers: A Christmas Tree Ornament Craft! Materials: Set out your cookie cutter on a piece of parchment or wax paper & the have your kids fill the cookie cutter with glue. We then added beads and sequins to the glue. After they added all the decorations they wanted on their Christmas trees we set them in an area where they wouldn’t be disturbed. As I mentioned above it takes several days for these to dry, two of ours took 2 days and one took 3 to be dry enough for us to pop them out. I’ve found that they pop out easier if I do it as soon as the glue dries vs waiting a few days after it dries completely. Ours popped out with no issues, just push them out gently along the edges. Once they are dry and popped out you can use a knife or a pen to poke a hole in the top and add a piece for string to hang it. Tada! That’s one adorable Christmas tree ornament that is sure to brighten any window or look great on your tree! Here’s some more Christmas crafts from my blogging friends: Stackadoo Printed Christmas Tree Cards from Frogs Snails & Puppy Dog Tails Pipe Cleaner Christmas Trees from Craftulate Tape Resist Christmas Presents from House of Burke Children’s Books about the True Holiday Spirit from All Done Monkey Christmas Memory Countdown from JDaniel4’s Mom Recycled Ornament Garland Craft from Sugar Aunts Looking for more crafts and activities? Check out our index for 100+ plus kids activities! Find activities by theme, materials, skills, age and much more! |
A two-year-old boy missing since Saturday in B.C.'s Premier Lake Provincial Campground has been found safe and in good health. Kimberley RCMP say Issac Leuenberger was found this morning near Yankee Lake, a walk of kilometres from the park's campground. "A searcher heard a noise and thought it was a bird or chipmunk, and here's the young boy just off the trail," said Cpl. Chris Newel. "People here are just ecstatic and can't believe the outcome. We're just so grateful." Newel said that aside from a couple of scratches, the boy is in good condition. He went missing around 7 p.m. PT Saturday while on a walk with his mother and two siblings.The family searched the area for 45 minutes, but couldn't find him and called police. Search crews including a police dog combed the area through Saturday night. On Sunday, police said 70 volunteers and two helicopters helped with the search. The campground is about an hour's drive north of Kimberley. |
In reviewing new-drug applications for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has maintained that claims of improved cognition should be accompanied by evidence of improvement in function. However, the premise that effective cognitive improvement will be manifested in the functional assessment of patients is untenable in the case of early-stage Alzheimer's disease, which is increasingly the target of drug-development efforts. We simply do not yet have drug-development tools that are validated to provide measures of function in patients with Alzheimer's disease before the onset of overt dementia. Improvement in function, moreover, could lag substantially behind cognitive improvement mediated by pharmacologic agents early in the course of the disease. In view of the devastating effects of this disease on patients and their families, along with its growing prevalence, innovative approaches to trial design and end-point selection are urgently needed, especially as the drug-development community turns its sights on early stages of the disease. The current landscape of research and drug development in Alzheimer's disease offers a study in contrasts. On the positive side, numerous discoveries over the past decade have begun to unmask complex pathophysiological processes that underlie disease progression. Such advances have, in part, resulted from large, well-organized observational studies, such as the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), that have elucidated various disease biomarkers that reflect, or even predict, the progression of disease. On the negative side, drug discovery has been disappointing. Despite all best efforts to translate mechanistic insights concerning Alzheimer's disease into new drug products, several candidate agents have failed to demonstrate efficacy in large, well-designed, phase 3 clinical trials of late-stage disease. The hallmark pathological feature of Alzheimer's disease is the presence of brain plaques, consisting primarily of β-amyloid peptide aggregates. Accordingly, the abnormal production and aggregation of β-amyloid peptide, associated particularly with late-stage disease, has been the principal target of many drug-development efforts, including the recent phase 3 efforts that failed to result in new drug products. To account for these disappointing results of trials involving patients with overt dementia, a leading theory posits that the attempts at intervention may have been made too late in the progression of disease, at a stage when neuronal damage had become too widespread. According to some models, levels of β-amyloid peptide in the brain reach a plateau before the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer's disease are apparent.1 A further hurdle to interpreting clinical failures is our limited understanding of how β-amyloid production may contribute to the pathophysiology of the disease. Because the biologic role of β-amyloid peptides is uncertain, researchers are also investigating alternative targets of intervention at various stages of progression. The focus of drug development in Alzheimer's disease has increasingly been earlier disease stages, before overt dementia. This refinement of focus, however, raises important new challenges because the subtleties of cognitive impairment in patients with early-stage Alzheimer's can be difficult to assess. Moreover, the range of focus must extend to healthy people who are merely at risk for the disease but could benefit from preventive therapies. In recognition of these shifting challenges, the FDA has developed guidance for the design and execution of clinical trials involving patients who do not present with dementia.2 One aspect of the FDA guidance covers the selection of patients for trials in early-stage Alzheimer's disease. In particular, we have acknowledged the consensus emerging within the Alzheimer's research community that clinical diagnosis of early cognitive impairment might be paired productively with appropriate biomarkers of disease — criteria that have been delineated and are being validated by various working groups.3,4 Such biomarkers might include brain amyloid load (e.g., as measured by positron-emission tomography) and cerebrospinal fluid levels of β-amyloid and tau proteins. Ongoing efforts by the research community to qualify biomarkers in clinical trial designs and methods for enriching study populations with patients with early-stage Alzheimer's disease reflect important FDA priorities. Potential Regulatory Pathways in Early Alzheimer's Disease. As the focus of drug development moves to earlier stages of Alzheimer's disease, new guidance from the FDA suggests potential approaches to trial design that allow for regulatory flexibility and innovation. CDR-SB denotes Clinical Dementia Rating Sum of Boxes score. A specific suggestion that is also offered in the agency's guidance for trials focusing on patients in whom overt dementia seems imminent is the use of a single scale that combines assessment of both cognition and function, such as the score on the Clinical Dementia Rating Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB), which rates patients on a series of six domains covering various aspects of cognition and daily functioning.5 For patients whose disease is at an even earlier clinical stage, so that functional impairment would be more difficult to assess, it might be feasible to approve a drug through the FDA's accelerated approval pathway on the basis of assessment of cognitive outcome alone. The accelerated-approval mechanism allows drugs that address an unmet medical need to be approved on the basis of a surrogate end point or an intermediate clinical end point (e.g., a sensitive cognitive measure), with the stipulation that postapproval studies will be conducted to verify the clinical benefit. Such a regulatory process may hold promise for facilitating the approval of treatments that appear to be effective in early Alzheimer's disease, when patients might be expected to derive the greatest benefit (see figure). Despite our growing understanding of the relationship between various disease-based biomarkers and the clinical course of Alzheimer's disease, it remains unclear whether the effect of a drug on one or more such biomarkers can actually predict a meaningful clinical benefit. This concern was reinforced by the recent phase 3 trials of amyloid-lowering agents that failed to improve cognition despite appearing to interact with putative targets in the brain. It remains possible that an effect of an intervention on one or more biomarkers could someday be accepted as predictive of a clinical benefit, but further research will clearly be needed before the effect of an intervention on a single biomarker alone could be considered an adequate surrogate measure for the purposes of accelerated approval of a candidate drug for early Alzheimer's disease. As the focus of drug development has shifted to earlier stages of Alzheimer's disease, many new and challenging scientific questions have emerged, and the regulatory framework under which such therapies are evaluated should evolve accordingly. The FDA remains committed to innovative approaches to the evaluation of drugs that are in clinical development. Effective treatments for the devastating disorder that is Alzheimer's disease are urgently needed, as the world's population continues to age. |
I observe a lot of different Pub Trends, but some of them don’t warrant an entire article to themselves. So here is a 5-in-1 interesting stat fueled trends that have been happening over the last few months. Lightning Slow? Leshrac’s Lightning Storm has received a bunch of changes over the last few patches, including the addition of a brief slow. However these don’t seem to be paying off as Leshracs who level Lightning are more likely to lose than those who don’t. The trend is that Leshracs who opt for Attribute Bonus at levels 9, 10, 12, 13 and/or 14 win more than people who get Lightning Storm at that level. Additionally, the Stun + Edict build at the early levels also happens to beat out the Stun + Lightning build. This is very interesting, since a third of Leshracs go Lightning. Cause vs Correlation is a massive argument for Skill Builds (aka, Do people get Lightning more when they are losing?) One factor is that Leshrac has no massive win rate difference between skill brackets, so there’s no false positives from this. Another is that Leshrac builds are determined at Level 2; before most teams have a big advantage. The Lawnmower Leshrac build is incredibly powerful; you press a couple buttons and then run around mowing everyone down with incredible aoe damage. It also allows you to get crucial early game towers. This suggests to me that 6.82 should buff Lightning, since the stats say the skill doesn’t measure up just yet. The recent buffs improved Lightning for the third of people who chose it, but not to the point where they win more than Team Edict. Hmm…. now all we need is a Team Edict t-shirt. Tusks Are Improving When Snowball was reworked in 6.81 it effectively raised the Skill Floor of the hero, resulting in a massive drop for his pub win rate to 39%. Luckily this win rate was not forever. Over the weeks the average Tusk player improved as they became more used to the ability. A few minor buffs in 6.81b to Tusk also helped push him along. The trend however is very clear: Tusks are getting ever so slightly better every week. Tusk had about a 43.6% win rate in June, going to 44.8% in July, and for the week of July 28 – Aug 3, his win rate was 45.1%. Even better, his win rate is higher in the Very High skill bracket. For the week mentioned above he has a 47% win rate in Very High, which is also steadily increasing. His pick rate has remained steady over the last few fortnights, so no shenanigans there. It snakes up and down, but overall it’s a slow and steady upward inclination. I am very interested to see where the Tusk train will stop, he had about a 47.5% win rate before the rework. Can he overtake it? Necrophos To Boot Necrophos has an insanely high pub win rate, but there’s also a wide variety in boot choices for the hero. However what is popular isn’t always the best, so I ran the numbers, ignoring Boots of Speed + Travel as always since the data is too skewed for those options. Boot choice is a great item to see the effectiveness of, since people chose them very early into the game and are less impacted by a hero winning/losing in that game (except Speed/Travels). Radiance has really high win rate because people almost always get Radiance when they are winning (such as on Spectre, Centaur, Bristleback, etc) the 4 main boot options however don’t generally fall to into this trap. You can see that Power Treads are the predominate boot choice in both Skill Brackets, but decline in Very High as they mostly flow into Phase Boots. I compared the boot’s win rate in that bracket, to the win rate of the hero in that bracket . Interestingly, Necrophos with Arcanes wins more than those with Power Treads. A lot more. Which means I can say that the statistics strongly suggest that Arcane Boots are the best choice for the hero for how he is played in pubs. Which also lead me to saying that whatever role and/or play style Necrophos is playing in games that he gets Arcane Boots in, is the statistically superior way to play Necrophos. Necrophos uses a lot of mana and being able to safely have enough mana to use your abilities is vital. People underestimate how much mana he uses, especially with a fast Mekanism. Relying on Sadist is often an unreliable option, perhaps even causing you to Scythe someone for Sadist, and not for the skill itself. Which is more important now that Scythe adds +30% respawn timer. I assume that Necrophos with Arcanes are less likely to get levels of Sadist early on, which is important as Skill Builds that skip early levels of Sadist also have a slight win rate edge. Like with Pugna, Arcane Boots also help your entire team with Deathballing, which is when a Necrophos level advantage and constant heals come in handy. These few issues are my two cents on the problem with treads as evident by their winrate. Advertisements |
Turnover expectations are particularly negative in the construction sector and business services, according to the Bank’s 12 regional agents Danny Lawson/PA Britain’s decision to leave the European Union will hurt capital spending, hiring and turnover during the coming year, according to a survey of businesses by the Bank of England’s agents. The 12 regional agents, who speak to hundreds of companies around the UK each month, said that every sector of the economy, from manufacturing to consumer services, was negative about hiring and investment spending plans. The agents, who are considered the “eyes and ears of Threadneedle Street”, said that turnover expectations were particularly negative in the construction sector, which is vulnerable to economic uncertainty because of the time frames involved, as well as in business services. The expected slowdown in the professional and financial services sector was being affected by weak levels of investment in… |
Opposition’s plan would increase funding by $2.5bn over four years and induce universities to ensure higher rates of completion Labor has given Malcolm Turnbull an immediate policy fight – releasing a new higher education policy to counter the Coalition’s long-stalled “reforms” even before the government’s new ministry has been sworn in. University fees: research rather than teaching could soak up extra funds Read more The policy promises a $2.5bn net increase to higher education funding – more than reversing the Coalition’s proposed 20% cut to the average federal funding for a bachelor degree, a saving that has been factored into the current budget even though the measure has not passed the Senate. Labor will abandon the Coalition’s controversial plan to deregulate university fees, allowing them to charge more. It will retain the Gillard government’s 2012 decision to remove previous limits on bachelor degree student numbers, but will ditch plans to extend this demand-driven system to diplomas and associate degrees from non-university providers, like private colleges. And it will impose new restrictions on universities to ensure higher rates of completion. The release of the long-awaited Labor higher education plan is a strategic response to Malcolm Turnbull’s elevation as prime minister and his vow that the political debate would return to policy, setting up the policy contest as the parties prepare for an election year. It targets a portfolio where government’s reforms have been stalled in the Senate since its 2014 budget and appear to have little chance of passing and which is being taken over by a new minister, senator Simon Birmingham. Labor argues more students are leaving university with a debt, but no degree, because of attrition rates of over 20% and rising – as universities concentrate on enrolments rather than completions because of the design of the current funding system. The dropout rate is even higher among regional students (26.3%), lower socioeconomic groups (27.3%) and Indigenous students (45.8%). Labor will set a goal of increasing the number of students finishing their degrees by 20,000 a year from 2020, building completion rates into the “financial incentives” set in new “performance and accountability charters” and new funding agreements with each tertiary institution. It will try to make sure universities do not meet the new completion targets by simply making it easier for students to pass by beefing up the Tertiary Education Quality Standards regulator and giving it another $31m. The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, was to use a speech on Monday to promise that by 2018 a Labor government would pay on average $11,800 per year per undergraduate student – 27% more per student than the Liberals’ as-yet-unlegislated plan. He was to say this increase would mean that on average, over the next decade, a Labor government would invest an additional $9,000 in each student’s education for a typical three-year degree. The increased federal funding should reduce the costs borne by students compared to estimated costs under the government’s now-stalled scheme. Labor says its plan would reduce the cost of a five year medicine degree from $125,155 to $52,615 and the cost of a four year law degree from $86,024 to $42,092. University fee deregulation: Coalition's $20,000 fight to keep modelling secret Read more The Gillard government removed limits on domestic bachelor-degree student numbers at public universities in 2012, moving to a system where funding was provided to support as many people as institutions enrolled. That saw a 22% increase in student numbers between 2009 and 2013, according to a review commissioned by the Coalition, while the total cost of the commonwealth grant scheme increased from $4.1bn to $6.1bn over the same period. Under Labor’s plan costs are reined in by dropping the expansion of the demand-driven system beyond universities, and by the new degree-completion incentives which could deter universities from enrolling students unlikely to be able to pass. The $2.5bn cost over four years is a net cost. The additional per-student funding will actually cost an extra $3.86bn over four years, but the decision to dump the extension of the demand-driven system will save $1.21bn and a $100m scheme to help rural universities to adapt to the Coalition reforms will also be scrapped. |
Earlier today, Mercy For Animals filed a false advertising complaint with the California attorney general against Foster Farms and American Humane Association for torturing animals and lying to the public about it. The complaint comes on the heels of an announcement by the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office that criminal animal cruelty charges were filed against Foster Farms employee Gabriel Cevallos, who was caught on hidden camera ripping out fistfuls of feathers from live birds, repeatedly hitting a bird with a severed chicken leg, and tossing live birds around as if they were basketballs. Cevallos was charged with violating California’s animal cruelty laws after an MFA undercover investigation of several Foster Farms facilities showed multiple Foster Farms workers throwing baby chicks onto the ground with no regard for their welfare and punching, beating, and torturing birds before violently slamming them into shackles. MFA also uncovered evidence of birds scalded alive in hot water feather-removal tanks. Watch the footage that led to the charges here: Despite clear evidence of ongoing and malicious animal abuse at multiple Foster Farms facilities, AHA continues to award the poultry company its “American Humane Certified” seal of approval. MFA is asking the attorney general’s office to take action against Foster Farms and AHA by prohibiting use of the meaningless American Humane Certified logo on Foster Farms chicken products. AHA “standards,” which cover more than 1 billion animals, fall far below those of virtually every other humane certification program and barely exceed even the minimal standards set by the factory farming industry itself. According to Consumer Reports , AHA’s program “does not require certain standards that consumers are likely to expect from a welfare label, and producers can be certified without fulfilling 100% of the requirements.” In addition to Foster Farms, AHA has certified some of the cruelest factory farms in North America, including Butterball and Hillandale Farms, which have also been caught on video abusing animals. American Humane Certified producers like Foster Farms are permitted to cram hundreds of thousands of birds inside dark, windowless sheds with no access to sunlight or outdoor space for their entire lives. AHA standards allow factory farms to mutilate animals without painkillers, including burning off the tips of birds’ sensitive beaks. Despite endorsing less cruel systems in 2010, AHA also continues to allow Foster Farms and other producers to slaughter chickens using outdated systems that dump, shackle, shock, and slit the throats of conscious animals. Birds subjected to such killing systems routinely endure physical violence from workers who throw, kick, and punch them. Please take action by signing our petition urging AHA and Foster Farms to implement meaningful animal welfare policies at once. Vegetarian Starter Guide. Remember, the best way to prevent needless cruelty to these birds and other farmed animals is to leave meat, eggs, and dairy off our plates. Visit ChooseVeg.com to order a copy of our free |
Well! This is quite an exciting week in US politics. It's been a long slog but the conclusion has been reached, with all the narratives of the past few months – years, really – dovetailing into one beautiful and inevitable conclusion, one that all US citizens can gaze upon and sigh, "Ah, yes: this, yes this, is America." I am speaking, of course, of the supremely American news story that broke on Sunday in which Lindsay Lohan – for it was she – allegedly got into a fight in a cheesy New York hotel with a 25-year-old Republican congressional aide called Christian LaBella. Politics and Lohan: ahhhh, you meet at last. This alleged event happened allegedly at the end of a long alleged night of what we Americans call "partying". Lohan allegedly realised LaBella had allegedly taken photos of her allegedly engaged in the aforementioned alleged partying, and words and possibly more were exchanged. And you know this LaBella dude must be cool because not only did he allegedly party with Lohan but his Facebook photo shows him grinning next to that ultimate homeboy, VP candidate Paul Ryan. The Republicans, Lohan, a cellphone, a hotel scrap at 6am: this is the natural crescendo to the modern American story. The peak has been reached; prepare for the bends as we plummet downwards. And speaking of plummeting ever downwards, it's the first presidential debate tomorrow night. Which is yet another big event in US politics this week. Oh ambassador, with all of this political excitement you are spoiling us. We can all only cross our fingers that Lohan will make a guest appearance in this one, too, and, really, that isn't beyond the realms of possibility. Yet more usually, the debates – and yes, there is more than one of them – can get a little, um, what's the word? It's on the very tip … that's it: boring. Indeed, being boring was pretty much Obama's strategy last time round, which is why not even the Washington Post – a publication so wonky it excitedly describes this week's debate as "a cultural event" – can remember a single "genuinely memorable" moment from the 2008 debates with John McCain due to Obama's attack plan of being "serious and sober" and "milking the clock". This is Washington Post speak for "being boring". Obama's own team have said they are preparing him to be "workmanlike". Again, read "boring, and don't set your Sky+ to record". Mitt Romney might provide some comedy, albeit wholly unintentionally. News that he has been in a concrete bunker for the past few days being reprogrammed for the debate dismayed those who find his pied dans la bouche moments the only things that make this election bearable. But then, great news! His team, for reasons known only to them, informed the New York Times that they have prepared some "zingers" for their candidate, which he has been practising "since August". Spontaneous rib ticklers! Which Romney has been reciting to himself since August! I think the world will knock itself off its own axis through the violence of our collective guffaws. So how to make these events even more fun? Welcome to the bluffer's guide (with added games). How to talk about the debates beforehand Easy! Simply say any of the following sentences in any order you fancy: "The debates don't matter"; "Let's not forget the seminal Kennedy v Nixon debate in 1960"; "Reagan v Mondale debate in 1984"; "Gore v Bush in 2000"; "Kerry beat Bush in the debates in 2004, remember"; "Romney needs to land a zinger of the 'senator, you are no Jack Kennedy' ilk, like Bentsen said to Quayle in 1988, but then, unlike Bentsen, um, win"; "Obama is an orator not a debater"; "Romney is no good on the attack"; "They're both impatient"; "It's all scripted, you know"; "Of course I'm staying up to watch". How to talk about them afterwards "He only needed to survive"; "You could tell they practised"; "They practised?"; "Where were the zingers?"; "It's the VP debates next week that will be really fun"; "This was just domestic diplomacy – it's the foreign diplomacy debate that will be really interesting"; "It's just entertainment"; "The questions were terrible"; "God, that was boring". Drinking game! Every time Obama or Romney says any of the following, knock back a shot. You'll be drunk by the end of the crucial first half hour, which will make the remaining hour a bit more enjoyable: "Let me be clear about this." "The figures just don't add up." "That's just plain wrong." "The American people deserve better." "The American people are smart enough to see through that." "The American people have suffered." "Folks." "I love this country." "My wife/my family/my mother." Bonus drink!!!! "President George W Bush" – if Romney says this name, for the Republican party the equivalent of the Scottish play, you may drink a whole magnum to celebrate. But he probably won't, so no need to stock up on the champers. |
MUMBAI: No curfews. No deadlines. No cops that turned the music down. On 26th January, 1950, Republic Day Balls and cabarets went on till 4am with bohemian bands like The Hawaiian Hot Shots and Johny Baptist piping in. The Church of North India held a special mass to celebrate the formation of the republic and the Great Eastern Circus advertised the “greatest feats never seen in India before”.They weren’t, presumably, referring to the Constitution. The Three Musketeers was playing at Metro and a film called Deewar was on at Opera House, a couple of decades before Amitabh Bachchan arrived on the scene.The Times of India, now in its 175th year, was around to chronicle the mood, 64 years to a day, when India gifted itself a Constitution, welcomed its first president Rajendra Prasad and bid adieu to its last governor-general, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari.The men and women now largely confined to history textbooks were seen arguing , debating and shaking hands across the yellowing newsprint.Given the “warmest good wishes” and “blessings of peace and prosperity” that His Majesty the King of England showered on the Republic of India across the front page of the newspaper , it’s hard to imagine that he was referring to a country just emerging from a bitter battle for independence from British rule.Lord Mountbatten wrote a moving piece on how he was “so closely associated with the transfer of power from British to Indian hands andwiththeearly stages of Indian independence that my thoughts will be more than ever with India when the final stage is reached and she becomes an independent sovereign republic on Jan 26, 894 days after her independence”.Lord Clydesmuir , once governor of Bombay , as it was then called , sent his greetings to the city “of which my wife and I retain such happy and affectionate memories.”While Bombay’s iconic Victoria Terminus was aglow the night before Republic Day, all eyes were on Delhi that day. “Peasants, politicians, Princes and diplomats from far and wide are already pouring into the city to witness this epoch-making event, and the whole city wears a festive air with arches and bunting, flowers and flags, while at night it will be transformed into a fairyland by bushes and trees floodlit by multicoloured electric bulbs,” said the front page,which adding, “AllDelhi is agog today.”The two forces that were absent on Republic Day were felt most acutely in the newspaper- Mahatma Gandhi and the British Raj.Sardar Patel lamented the fact that Gandhi was not around to witness the day. “Unhappily he is not amongst us but he is watching us from above and I have no doubt his blessings and good wishes are with us on this supreme occasion in our national history,” said Patel of the Mahatma .While those who confuse Republic Day with Independence Day may be metwith much annoyance today, they may not be entirely wrong. “Although we obtained independence on August 15, 1947, it was not complete in the sense of the pledge that we took. Today, by the Grace of God, that pledge has been completely fulfilled,”said Patel.Greetings for the Republic poured in from across the world with many countries identifying withIndia. “Thewholeworld realises the deep significance of the independence of India, but I think there is no country which realises its significance more than Indonesia does,” said Dr Soekarno, the first president of Indonesia. “Because of our traditional sympathy with India, the people of the United States are particularly happy to send expressions of goodwill on this occasion,” said America’s Harry Truman Page 5 of the newspaper bore the handwritten musical notes for Jana Gana Mana , with Tagore’s name on one side and the words “fairly brisk” scrawled at the other , presumably referring to the pace at which the National Anthem ought to be played .The constitution was discussed threadbare, with photos of the constituent assembly splashed across the paper. The sari-clad lady members of the constituent assembly had a photograph to themselves. A short piece spoke of socialist dissent ; two socialist members of the constituent assembly did not sign the final document.A prophetic piece by British MP Sir Stanley Reed analyzing the constitution spoke of some apprehension expressed about “the over-riding power in the centre to declare a state of emergency … .” This was a good 25 years before a state of emergency was declared .Not everything about the day’s newspaper had to do with the constitution. There was enough space for college hockey tournaments, weightlifting and the London stock exchange. |
As one might expect of a Bahamian tropical paradise, Blue Island abounds with powdery beaches and romantic coves, mango and banana trees, and miles of trails for hiking and biking. At the heart of this 700-acre idyll—the largest private island in the Bahamas—a gleaming white six-bedroom residence rises from a hilltop that reaches 90 feet above the sea. But Blue Island (formerly known as both Innocence Island and Hog Cay) owes its allure to more than its serenity and size. “Blue is the only private island in the Bahamas with its own jet port,” said property manager Steve Donovan as our plane—a Cessna Citation—touched down lightly on the 5,700-foot-long landing strip and taxied to the far end of the runway. “The air field is built to accommodate planes up to the size of a business jet.” Perhaps even more appealing is the fact that visitors to Blue, which is located among the many private islands in the exclusive Exumas chain, can clear customs right on the landing strip. Indeed, waiting to welcome us to the Bahamas was a customs and immigration official who stood by a second, smaller plane at the air field. Such a seamless journey is a rarity for a private island. “Your trip to other private islands may begin in a Falcon or G2,” Donovan said, “but to get where you’re going you have to transfer to a boat or ferry.” The conveniences of a jet-accommodating air field and customs capabilities put many of the world’s potential private-island owners within easy reach. “We are just three hours from New York, five hours from Los Angeles, or eleven hours from Moscow,” Donovan said. “It makes Blue both the most exclusive and the most accessible private island in the Bahamas.” What sets Blue apart, however, isn’t just what’s there, but what isn’t—tourists. “There is virtually no place you can go that has not been discovered or developed and turned into a mass-market destination,” Donovan said. “The only place to escape the tourists and paparazzi is a private island, where the ocean becomes a kind of moat.” Thus the appeal of the Exumas for Johnny Depp, David Copperfield, Bernard Arnault, and the Aga Khan. “They are all fabulously rich, and they all own lavish hideaways in the Exumas. But no matter how wealthy they are, there’s one thing we have today that nobody else has.” To be sure, Depp might be a celebrated movie star, but he can’t do with his private island what Donovan and I were doing—flying to Blue Island for lunch and returning to Palm Beach in time for afternoon cocktails. It was the kind of experience some might say money can’t buy. Except that now it can because Blue—beaches, docks, main house, observation towers, iguanas, air field, and all—is for sale for $125 million. “This isn’t like real estate anywhere else in the world,” Donovan said. “You can’t compare comps, or even features and acreage, because this isn’t like any other place on Earth. It’s an event, a moment, an emotion, and bragging rights. It’s not just the biggest private island in the Bahamas, it’s also the most expensive.” |
Britain lowered its security threat level to “severe” on Saturday following significant activity by police investigating the suicide bomb attack in Manchester, Prime Minister Theresa May said. The level was raised to “critical” - meaning another attack was thought to be imminent - after Monday’s bombing at a pop concert in Manchester. It has now been downgraded to “severe”, which means an attack is considered highly likely. As a result, soldiers who have been assisting police, would be withdrawn from Britain’s streets from midnight on Monday. Two more suspects held Police arrested two more suspects Saturday over the deadly Manchester concert bombing, as Britons began a sunny holiday long weekend under heightened security. Greater Manchester Police said two men, aged 20 and 22, were detained early Saturday in the northwest England city on suspicion of terrorism offenses. Police used an explosive device to get into a property to make the arrests. Police say they are now holding 11 men, aged between 18 and 44, in custody and have made major progress in their investigation. Mark Rowley, Britain’s top counterterrorism police officer, said authorities have dismantled a “large part” of the network around bomber Salman Abedi. But he said there were still “gaps in our understanding” of the plot, as investigators probed Abedi’s potential links to the militants in Britain, Europe, Libya and the Middle East. The 22-year-old Briton of Libyan descent died in Monday’s explosion, which killed 22 people and wounded dozens as crowds were leaving an Ariana Grande concert. PM May returns Prime Minister Theresa May returned early from the G-7 summit in Sicily, and will chair a meeting of the government’s COBRA emergency committee on Saturday. Hundreds of soldiers have been sent to replace police at high-profile sites including Buckingham Palace and Parliament, and police armed with submachine guns are being deployed in city centers, transit hubs, tourist areas and major events. Earlier, despite the critical alert, police have urged people to go out and enjoy themselves over the three-day holiday weekend. More than 1,000 armed police are on standby as major events including the Football Association Cup Final and the Premiership Rugby Final are expected to draw tens of thousands of people. Manchester is slowly returning to normal, though dozens of people remain hospitalized and the damaged arena and adjacent Victoria train station remain closed. Grande has promised to return to Manchester for a benefit concert. In a statement Friday, she said “I’ll be returning to the incredibly brave city of Manchester to spend time with my fans and to have a benefit concert in honor of and to raise money for the victims and their families.” “Our response to this violence must be to come closer together, to help each other, to love more, to sing louder and to live more kindly and generously than we did before,” she said. “We will not quit or operate in fear. We won’t let this divide us. We won’t let hate win.” Last Update: Saturday, 27 May 2017 KSA 14:25 - GMT 11:25 |
A man in a pub recently told me that Tori Amos is every bit as good as Kate Bush, but people can’t see it because they “don’t actually like her very much”. Perhaps he was on to something. If Bush admitted on Woman’s Hour, as Amos did last week, that she likes to dress up in thigh-high boots and a faux-fur gilet and stand among the cows in the rural Cornish idyll she shares with her husband and child, it would be in-keeping with everything that makes her so attractive. But it made poor old Tori sound like a kook, and not for the first time. For many she does not inspire romantic awe like Bush, but rather the kind of cool feeling we have towards Yoko Ono. Looking at the tiny woman on stage tonight in the turquoise pant suit and specs, a superfan tells me: “Every year she goes somewhere in the Amazon and sees this real shaman and takes all this LSD. She is a proper free spirit!” My first thought is: groo. But I wouldn’t think groo if Joni Mitchell did it, would I? Amos is performing her new album Gold Dust at the Albert Hall, a classical re-working of her songs with the Dutch Metropole Orchestra and two pianos. On this hallowed stage 43 years ago Deep Purple premiered their bombastic Concerto For Group And Orchestra with the Royal Philharmonic. Rick Wakeman and fellow prog giant Keith Emerson have also swivelled here over the years, reaching between multiple keyboards, the latter – like Amos – thrusting his hips out in gestures of neo-classical confidence. Tori may not stick knives in her piano but she does have a habit of punching it triumphantly as each song ends – and shedding her long sheet music with a flourish, letting each page tumble on to the floor like the scarves of Scheherazade. I don’t know when I last saw this kind of behaviour from a “popstar” – though she’s not the only one to have reworked her songs with an orchestra recently; Peter Gabriel and Antony Hegarty have done the same. Like them, Amos strikes you as a bit of a “cold fish” – musical ambition on this scale is intimidating in the pop world, and hard to warm to. It shouldn’t really be so – she grins broadly tonight; she even starts the first piece, 1992’s Flying Dutchman, in a different key to the orchestra and realises after a minute or a so with a great big “fuck! I fucked it up again!” |
Egypt’s president Abdel Fatteh el-Sissi is calling for a United Nations intervention in Libya against Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) affiliates, an escalation in rhetoric that analysts say could foil a delicate peace process and push tumultuous Libya into full-scale civil war. Sissi made the remarks in an interview with France’s Europe 1 Radio on Tuesday, a day after his government launched unilateral airstrikes in the Libyan city of Derna, where a local militia that calls itself the “Barqa Province” of ISIL is based. Those strikes, Sissi explained, were “a kind of self-defense” for the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian migrant workers — albeit by a separate ISIL affiliate elsewhere in Libya — depicted in a graphic video this week. "We will not allow them to cut off the heads of our sons," Sissi said. “I think there is no choice” but for a U.N.-backed coalition to join Egypt in stamping out the “terrorist” militias." His comments came on the fourth anniversary of Libya’s uprising against ex-dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was executed in the streets of Tripoli in 2011 on the back of NATO strikes. The country has since devolved into a chaotic scramble for power by an array of localized militias, most of them spawned during the anti-Gaddafi uprising. Libya is now effectively split between two rival governments: one in the capital, Tripoli, which is allied with self-described Islamist forces and, Sissi alleges, tolerant of ISIL's affiliates in Libya; and another, anti-Islamist body based in the eastern city of Tobruk, which has the staunch backing of Egypt and several Western powers. But analysts do not believe Sissi has in mind a surgical counter-terror operation against the ISIL presence in Libya, which constitutes just three of the country's innumerable militia groups. Rather, his idea of an intervention would more likely be aimed at channeling global anti-ISIL sentiment towards substantive support for Tobruk’s military allies, spearheaded by ex-Libyan general Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army. Sissi has long been accused of arming Haftar's forces under the table; now they believe he wants to overtly build them into a force that can vanquish the Tripoli alliance. “The killing of the Copts was of very serious concern, but it also provided a good excuse for Egypt to up its military involvement in Libya — something it has hinted at for a while now,” said Claudia Gazzini, Libya analyst for the International Crisis Group. Sissi, a former general who rose to power when Egypt’s military removed the Muslim Brotherhood from power in 2013, has long regarded the rise of self-described Islamist factions in Libya as a national security threat to Egypt and the region. Since taking the reins in Cairo, he has overseen a fierce crackdown on the Brotherhood, declaring the group a terrorist organization and trying to link its ideology to violence in the Sinai Peninsula. Domestically, his case for intervention in Egypt's neighbor may be bolstered by growing anti-ISIL sentiment. Shortly before the brutal murder of the Coptic workers, an armed faction that claimed to be ISIL's outpost into the Sinai killed 30 security personnel in a suicide attack. Sissi has argued these groups have their roots in lawless Libya, which provides them a lifeline of arms and fighters just across the border. “There is this narrative of a big Islamic conspiracy worldwide that Sissi wants to fight against,” said Karim Mezran, a Libya specialist at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. “He wants to drag the international community into a so-called peacekeeping operation in support of his side.” Though the U.S. and other Western powers are wary of the Tripoli government, and particularly its alleged ties with Libyan ISIL affiliates, it is not clear who would sign onto this so-called “peacekeeping” force. France, which led the 2011 NATO strikes in the country, has made overtures to Sissi and recently sold Egypt 24 fighter jets. But other countries may have cold feet about staging another intervention, seeing as how those strikes helped birth Libya's current turmoil. The Egyptian escalation also comes at a particularly delicate moment. The two governments — Tripoli and Tobruk — signed a cease-fire deal last month, with the goal that some sort of unity government could be reached in the coming weeks. Even talk of foreign military intervention could jeopardize a hoped-for deal, since Haftar will be less likely to compromise if he anticipates greater support. Still, even in the absence of an international coalition, there are fears that more unilateral Egyptian strikes or even a ground invasion could be on the horizon. Last summer, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates staged isolated airstrikes on Tripoli-aligned factions in an unprecedented move many saw as testing the waters for future unilateral actions in the region. Monday's strikes were the deadliest Egyptian action yet, killing up to 60 ISIL fighters as well as, reportedly, civilians. “It’s the usual story: There is an enemy at our borders, so everybody quiet down and don’t criticize the government,” Mezran said. “But this will be disastrous. Siding with one side against another will only push the country towards civil war.” Egypt's foreign minister, Sameh Shukri, has been deployed to New York to consult on the case for intervention at the UN. He may argue that combating ISIL outposts in Libya is a natural extension of the the U.S.-led coalition effort already striking the group’s vast strongholds across Syria and Iraq, however spurious that analogy. “I think Egypt is either aiming for a UN mandate for military intervention, or an outright denial so that it legitimizes Egypt going in unilaterally,” said Gazzini. “Either way, it’s a dangerous gamble to go into Libya, with all its various factions, and think that you can support one side without a peace deal already in hand.” |
Victoria Burrow in Victoria, MN recently opened. The restaurant features street food and drinks served out of our shipping containers along with a wide range of fun activities — axe-throwing, mini-golf, bocce ball, virtual reality, an arcade, darts, bean-bag toss/corn hole, oversized Connect 4 and more! Victoria Burrow bought two 20’ containers from Super Cubes - a red one-trip/”new” container and a blue used/wind- and water-tight container. They cut up the containers to use as decor throughout the restaurant. Customers are able to experience our containers by first walking through a set of blue container doors and then are greeted by a container display in the entry way. Another cool attraction is the restaurant bar. The bar is physically made up of red container doors, side and portions of the container wall that are awning over the bar area. If you ever want to experience seeing a container from the inside, here is your chance! You are able to sit inside one of the containers while enjoying your meal. You can hang out on the original container floor which also has an opening to the unique bar. The container area acts almost as a private seating section within the bigger space of the restaurant. From “inside” the container, customers can REALLY take in the physical container structure, as well see all other distinct aspects of the restaurant. If this seating area is taken up, no worries! Tucked back by the axe-throwing area, there is a second smaller seating section made out of container roofs. Diners also can experience the containers up close when ordering and picking up their food. Similar to food trucks, all food items are ordered and picked up at concession windows that are made out of the containers. We really enjoyed seeing the containers transformed — from first meeting with customer at the container yard to pick out their containers to viewing end product - Victoria Burrows restaurant! To get more of a live effect, just click on all of our pictures! Now, do you have big plans for containers? Call us at 877-374-5452 and we’ll help you with it! |
We just met with the team behind the Oculus Rift, which started out as a DIY project that quickly morphed into into a Kickstarter success story. Oculus is here at CES showing off the dev kit it plans to ship out to backers in March, and got a chance to play with near-final hardware and software and see what founder Palmer Luckey hopes will be the next big sea change in gaming. The hardware is straightforward — but playing the Rift is anything but The developer hardware we checked out still doesn't feel quite up to what you'd expect out of a shipping product, but it's a lot closer to that than what our own Ross Miller checked out this past summer. It's all pretty straightforward — there are two lenses in a ski mask-style head-mounted display that combine to form a 1280 x 800 display, just like before. Each eye sees 640 x 800 pixels and while that still sounds like a low resolution in 2013, you can't judge the product on that single spec alone. The rest of the hardware simply consists of a break-out control box you use to plug the Rift into your computer; it features DVI, HDMI, micro-USB and power. While the hardware may be straightforward, the experience of using the Rift is anything but. Strapping on the Rift and stepping into that virtual, 3D world was a lot like seeing a 3D movie for the first time — it's initially a shock to your system. The Oculus team says that lag and latency in the final dev kit will be improved over what I tried, and that'll probably go a long way towards improving the experience. It certainly wasn't bad, just rather jarring. Being able to turn completely around in 360-degrees was another surprise — and a delight. Of course, in most games, you won't be looking all the way around, but the level of immersion is extremely high. In the demos I tried, the trickiest thing was deciding between using the right analog stick on the Xbox 360 controller to look around versus actually turning my head. While trying Unreal Tournament, the Oculus team told me that I'd have better luck if I actually looked in the direction of my enemies, making for a slightly tough adjustment period. And while exploring a snowy medieval town in the Epic Citadel tech demo, I probably bumped into the wall more times than I would have using a standard monitor and control scheme. There's a definite adjustment period and learning curve But the immersion trumps all, even despite the Rift's relatively low resolution. Walking into a church after being out in the open sky felt claustrophobic and enclosing, and the feeling of looking around a vast outdoor world while in reality sitting at a desk was both jarring and fascinating. There's going to be a definite adjustment period and learning curve for those diving into the world of the Oculus Rift, but those who manage to make the transition may find themselves getting lost in that world pretty quickly. The story behind Oculus is almost as interesting as the Rift itself — founder Palmer Luckey spent several years developing his own VR headset because the options on the market just didn't meet what he was looking for, and he initially meant to sell it on Kickstarter as a disassembled, DIY kit. That all changed after ID Software's John Carmack heard about Luckey's project — Luckey actually let him borrow his headset back over the summer, and the buzz it generated turned Oculus Rift from a DIY project into something with much grander aspirations. To learn more about the genesis of Oculus, where the company goes from here, and a look at the Rift in action, check out our interview with Luckey and VP of Product Nate Mitchell. |
A new report from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) suggests something many of us could have guessed: every situation which involves a citizen and a cop should not end in a Tasering of the former. Nor are cops trying their hardest to avoid using this usually non-lethal, but still nasty weapon. The report, according to the NYCU's website looked at: 851 Taser incident reports from eight police departments across the state as well as 10 departments’ policies and guidelines for using the weapons, which deliver up to 50,000 volts of electricity and have caused the deaths of more than a dozen New Yorkers in recent years. Here are a few of the more damning conclusions: Fifteen percent of incident reports indicated clearly inappropriate Taser use, such as officers shocking people who were already handcuffed or restrained. Only 15 percent of documented Taser incidents involved people who were armed or who were thought to be armed, belying the myth that Tasers are most frequently used as an alternative to deadly force. In 75 percent of incidents, no verbal warnings were reported, despite expert recommendations that verbal warnings precede Taser firings. 40 percent of the Taser incidents analyzed involved at-risk subjects, such as children, the elderly, the visibly infirm and individuals who are seriously intoxicated or mentally ill. Plenty more depressing bullet points here. The NYCU also concluded that record-keeping was incredibly lax in incidents of Taser use and that most police in the state -- besides the NYPD -- are following TASER International guidelines, not international law enforcement guidelines for use. Link by way of this Gawker post, which points to plenty of dubious Taser incidents. Reason on police and on Tasers, particularly their part in the death of Californian Allen Kephart, after he was pulled over by police. That grim story is outlined in the Reason.tv video below. (Paul Detrick also recently noted an October 19 decision by the 9th Circuit Court about Tasers and excessive force which has potential ramifications for Kephart's parents' lawsuit.) |
Russian government hackers carried out a cyberattack against one U.S. voting software vendor last August and launched a spear-phishing attack targeting local U.S. organizations days before the 2016 U.S. election, according to a highly classified report within the National Security Agency. CBS News confirmed the authenticity of the report Monday after the 5-page document was published by The Intercept. Sections of the report have been redacted by U.S. intelligence, CBS News' Jeff Pegues reports, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has declined to comment on it. One of the four authors who wrote The Intercept's story about the NSA report tweeted that nothing in the report indicated that "the actual voting machines or vote tabulations were compromised" in November's election. Former DNI James Clapper, who left his post before President Trump's inauguration, has repeatedly said that there was no evidence that Russia changed any vote tallies in the U.S. election. The report itself doesn't offer raw intelligence, The Intercept said, but analyzes intelligence the NSA recently acquired. The report is dated May 5, and one part says it was based on information that became available in April. Russian government hackers within the country's intelligence service masqueraded as an e-voting vendor in an email to trick local U.S. government employees into opening documents that were "invisibly tainted with potent malware," The Intercept reports. Late last August, the report says that these hackers sent emails that seemed to be from Google to workers at an election software company in the U.S., the report said. The Intercept pointed out that while the company wasn't directly named, the NSA's report referenced the company VR Systems several times. Its products are used in eight states: California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. The NSA found that there were seven "potential victims" at the unnamed company and at least one person's account was likely compromised. In late October, the hackers set up a Gmail account that appeared to be from an employee at VR Systems and launched a spear-phishing attack in the days following against local government organizations, The Intercept reports. "It is unknown whether the aforementioned spear-phishing deployment successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed by the cyber actor," the NSA's report says. The report's summary also noted two other hacking operations in which another email address was created to "potentially used to offer election-related products and services, presumably to U.S.-based targets." The hackers also "sent test emails to two non-existent accounts ostensibly associated with absentee balloting, presumably with the purpose of creating those accounts to mimic legitimate services." The test emails appeared to be sent to accounts that appeared to be associated with American Samoa's Election Office. This comes just as former FBI Director James Comey is set to testify publicly before Congress for the first time since President Trump fired him on May 9. He will appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday in both open and closed session. |
Stories of interest you might have missed… The search for a rival for Rory McIlroy begins with Rickie Fowler. "I definitely have some work to do but there is a potential of him and I being able to play against each other for a long time to come, both being the same age," Fowler said in this column by Tara Sullivan of the North New Jersey newspaper the Record. Pinterest R&A via Getty Images Rory Rickie.jpg (Getty Images photo) Cameron Tringale still isn't sure about the stroke in question at the PGA Championship, but chose to err on the side of integrity and disqualified himself days later for having signed an incorrect scorecard. "I didn't want the way I play this game or my integrity questioned," he said in this story by ESPN's Bob Harig . He "eventually came to the decision that there's enough doubt that I want to take myself out." "As Jimmy Walker stood on the tee at the fifth hole at Ridgewood Country Club, sun peered through the clouds, and a refrain popped into his head: reapply, reapply. So out came the sunscreen, and a smattering quickly smeared its way across Walker's chin and cheeks." Zach Schonbrum in the New York Times recounts Walker's recent surgery to remove a small basal cell carcinoma on his left cheek, skin cancer. Gunn Yang's U.S. Amateur victory was a surprise to most, but not to his instructor Glen Daugherty. "I've told Gunn for two years, You don't know it yet, but you're as good as any amateur out there,'" Daugherty told Tod Leonard of the UT-San Diego . "You're going to be somebody who will do well on the [PGA] tour someday. These college kids are beating you now, but they won't be for long.'" Web.com Tour player Harold Varner III asks a reasonable question in this Businessweek story on him: "I don't understand why people still think along those terms, like, Man, he's the only black kid out here.' Why can I not just be a kid?" Follow @JohnStrege |
Out today is the latest Doctor Who adventure for the Fourth Doctor and Romana... Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Silent Scream is now available, written by James Goss and starring Tom Baker, Lalla Ward, John Leeson and Pamela Salem: On the set of a busy Hollywood movie in the late 1920s, a damsel is in distress! As cameras roll, she opens her mouth to scream and... nothing comes out. Nothing at all. It's happened again. The Doctor, Romana and K9 have arrived in a terrified Tinseltown. A new film is being made and several stars of the silent screen are viewing it as a potential comeback... but it may prove a poisoned chalice. Actors are vanishing and strange creatures stalk the streets. Something evil is lurking behind the scenery. Can the Doctor stop it when he doesn't have a voice? It's time for his close-up... Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Silent Scream can be bought for £8.99 on Download or £10.99 on CD - or as part of the entire sixth series Subscription: all nine stories for just £65 or £75 respectively! Money-saving bundles are available for the previous five series of Doctor Who - The Fourth Adventures, covering stories featuring Tom Baker with Louise Jameson as Leela, and both Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward as Romana. Next year's seventh series - released as two four-story boxed sets, or eight digital releases - can be subscribed to here for just £40 on Download or £45 on CD. All CD purchases unlock a digital version as an exclusive to Big Finish listeners - use our free Apple and Android download/playback app for a truly mobile listening experience! |
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, said the cash-starved state could generate more than a billion dollars by taxing pot growers and sellers. Ammiano predicted that the public would support loosening marijuana laws that require substantial public funds to enforce. Before California could legalize marijuana, however, it also might have to persuade the federal government to alter its prohibition on cannabis. Ammiano said federal officials may be receptive to such changes under the administration of President Barack Obama. "We may be on a parallel track here," said Ammiano, a freshman legislator who was sworn into office less than three months ago. The Drug Policy Alliance, an advocate of loosening pot laws, applauded Ammiano's proposal. "Marijuana already plays a huge role in the California economy," said Stephen Gutwillig, the group's California state director. "It's a revenue opportunity we literally can't afford to ignore any longer." Assemblyman Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, said legalizing marijuana would be a bad idea. He said he considers pot a "gateway drug" from which many users graduate to harder and more dangerous substances. "I don't think we're particularly well served in our society to further accommodate or even encourage something that's going to be unproductive and damaging to the individual -- especially not for the reason of generating revenue," he said. Ammiano's bill, Assembly Bill 390, would allow marijuana to be sold openly - like alcohol - in retail outlets statewide. The state would gain by charging sellers a fee of $50 per ounce. Pot growers also would be charged under the measure. Snipped Complete Article: http://www.sacbee.com/breaking/story/1646399.html Source: Sacramento Bee (CA) Author: Jim Sanders Published: February 23, 2009 Copyright: 2009 The Sacramento Bee Contact: opinion@sacbee.com Website: http://www.sacbee.com/ CannabisNews -- Cannabis Archives http://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml |
In the fall of 2009, I left the United States to spend a school year teaching English in China. There were many things to do before leaving, but one of the more pleasurable was choosing which books would see me through the year. When my friend Ellen suggested taking Anthony Powell’s series A Dance to the Music of Time, I felt a click, the sort you feel when someone suggests a thing and you realize that is exactly what you intended to do all along. I packed the whole series and spent the next nine months living in China but letting a great deal of my imaginative life take place in mid-20th-century England. For those who haven’t heard about the series or seen its tantalizing spines lined up on some bookstore shelf, Dance is a sequence of 12 novels, generally published as four volumes of three novels each. The series takes its name from a 17th-century painting by the French artist Nicholas Poussin, which depicts the four seasons as nymphs dancing in a circle while a winged Father Time plays for them on the harp. (The American editions of the books, published by the University of Chicago Press, use Poussin’s artwork and put one of the nymphs on the spine of each volume, so that when lined up the four volumes create an eye-catching work of art on one’s shelf.) The books take place in England over the course of nearly 60 years, starting between the World Wars and ending in the 1970s. Various people have claimed that Dance is the definitive work of the British 20th century. The whole series is one entry on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels of the century, which is a bit of a cheat, although there’s no good way to select one novel from the set. Evelyn Waugh called the books “more realistic than A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, to which it is often compared, and much funnier.” (Surely, if Waugh had tried, he could have come up with a more ringing endorsement than “funnier than Proust.”) In any case, the books were a great success in both Britain and America upon their publication, but heaps of praise from people like Evelyn Waugh do not always secure a devoted, continuing readership once a book is no longer new. And these books deserve a continuing readership. They are masterful, they are deeply artful — and they are also rather fun. They contain a wealth of comedy, closely observed as the best serious work but with an additional twist that makes for a startled laugh when you suddenly realize what’s going on. They deserve to be popular. They deserve to be widely read and loved. These are the first books I can recall reading as an adult that made me want to go join the official society of fans of the author. Those who love these books love them for a lifetime; they are so rich and so pleasurable that they bear revisiting over the years as the reader grows alongside the characters and finds new ways to understand the story. And yet, in point of fact, nobody I know has read them, though I know a couple people who have been meaning to get around to it. And so I am taking to the Internet to make my own case for Powell to anyone out there who is in search of a new reading project as I was, or who simply needs something to read on these winter days. Without further ado, then, seven reasons why these books deserve to be read: Reason #1: They are unique. This series is really a comic epic, and a fictional memoir of a person’s social life. It is a British social novel scaled way, way up. A quick setup before going further: These books are narrated by Nick Jenkins. He shares a remarkable number of biographical details with one Mr. Anthony Powell, but we’ll take him on his own terms. Nick starts by telling us about his school days (outside sources say the school is Eton, though the text never indicates this) and university life (outside sources, Oxford, ditto) in the late 1910s to early ’20s, and the story continues through marriage, career, military service in the Second World War, and subsequent middle to old age in and around the London literary scene. Nick is the only person who appears in every novel in the series, but he is not very keen on telling us much about himself. What he recounts are stories about social interactions at school, in the military, and in a roughly defined community of London literati, rather than stories about himself going to school, being an officer, and working as a writer. Nick is more likely to tell us what someone else appeared to be thinking than what he himself was thinking. His own marriage is sketched in the lightest possible lines, his children only hinted at. “It is difficult to talk about one’s wife,” he says, and so he doesn’t do it. He turns his considerable powers of understanding on other people instead — on other people, and on books. Reason #2: They’re playfully, livably literary. Nick is the kind of narrator who behaves as if he is actually writing the books; he serves as our author, rather than a conversation partner or a character into whose head we are allowed access. This works particularly well because the character is a writer. He doesn’t tell us the titles of any of his novels, though; the only book of his we’re allowed to know about is a scholarly work on Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, and that is included because it plays into his pattern of relating life to books. Nick shares what lines or ideas from other writers are playing through his head but not what stories he’s thinking up himself, rather in the way he is much more likely to recount a conversation with someone else than a solitary train of thought. For the bookish amongst us — a category that surely includes nearly everybody willing to pick up these books — this kind of thought process will look rather endearingly familiar. As such it’s a comforting way in to the bigger stuff in the novels, the Second World War chief among them. Nick has a handful of attempted conversations about literature while in the army, the bulk of which fail so spectacularly that I laughed out loud while reading. There’s a fellow soldier who has a book of Kipling secreted away but is barely able to say anything about it. At the opposite end of the spectrum there’s David Pennistone, who though “capable, even brilliant, at explaining philosophic niceties or the minutiae of official dialectic, was entirely unable to present a clear narrative of his own daily life, past or present.” That’s obviously a problem not shared by our fearless narrator, but Nick and Pennistone are a kind of kindred spirit nevertheless and their conversations, however brief, are a relief from the military absurdity surrounding them. Nick himself introduces literature into a lot of conversations that have nothing to do with literature, and it seldom works — as he comments after one of these conversations, “I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.” The last scene of The Military Philosophers (the ninth book) is an end-of-war service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Nick spends the whole time thinking about the poetry and song lyrics used in the service. The older he gets, the more his reading informs what he tells us of his life, especially Burton. The last novel takes place in the late 1960s and early ’70s, but is suffused with concepts and stories from the 17th century. Reason #3: Do you like England? These books are completely, uniquely, and ineluctably English. Apart from a trip to France in the first book, some time in Ireland in the third volume, and an interlude in Venice in Temporary Kings (the 11th book), the entire series takes place in England. I think it’s fair to assume our narrator never crosses the Atlantic (though Powell himself traveled rather extensively). The foreigners in the novels, who include French, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, American, and a prince from a never-named Balkan country are seen through English eyes, and there’s a lot to be perceived about the British characters in the way they think and talk about these foreigners. I suspect Powell understood America somewhat better than his narrator, who comes across as rather naive on the subject — there’s a charming conversation at one point about Americans who are descended from signers of the Declaration of Independence, and it makes American social strata sound as arcane as those of ancient Mesopotamia. As a boy who’s just finished school, Nick spends a short time in France, and he seems a little surprised that the Norwegian and the Swede he meets there don’t get along, being from such similar cultures. The novels are not parochial — Nick is educated and observant — but they come from a very definite cultural perspective. I should not neglect to mention that Powell, though he spent his life in England, came from a very old Welsh family, whose name he preferred to pronounce in the traditional fashion (rhyming with “noel”). He gave Nick a Welsh name as well, but any influence of Wales in the text is so subtle as to be invisible to this American reader. England pervades every bit of the books, though perhaps most notably the humor: Reason #4: They are wonderfully funny. Dance is certainly a comedy, but it can’t afford to be a classical comedy with happy endings for all. In any work covering such a vast period of time, there will inevitably be many deaths to read about. As it happens, that time includes the Second World War, and there are some deaths that occur right out of the blue while the story is occupying itself with social matters. These are sometimes ridiculous, but never ridiculed; sometimes tragic, but never eulogized. There’s no denial of tragedy, in other words, but Nick manages to acknowledge it and then move on to tell us about the next social occasion. He doesn’t laugh out loud at what he sees going on around him. He doesn’t tend to tell the reader that someone is funny, and no one ever says he’s funny either. But he is, terrifically so. The humor is dry, sidelong, sneaky. The trick is to notice that Powell doesn’t take the social world he’s describing very seriously. It would be easier to notice this if the books didn’t look like they should themselves be taken very seriously indeed, if they were less hefty and classical — the Poussin nymphs on the American editions are beautiful but a little intimidating. If you can forget about them for a while and get into the small-paperback spirit of reading, you can appreciate the absurdity of this little exchange, where Nick and his former head of house from Eton are conversing in a library and a boy comes by to ask the teacher a question: We were interrupted at this moment by a very small boy, who had come to stand close by where we were talking. It would be truer to say we were inhibited by his presence, because no direct interruption took place. Dispelling about him an aura of immense, if not wholly convincing goodness, his intention was evidently to accost Le Bas in short course, at the same time ostentatiously to avoid any implication that he could be so lacking in good manners as to break into a conversation or attempt to overhear it. . . . ‘What do you want?’ ‘I can wait, sir.’ This assurance that his own hopes were wholly unimportant, that Youth was prepared to waste valuable time indefinitely while Age span out its senile conference, did not in the least impress Le Bas, too conversant with the ways of boys not to be for ever on his guard. Is that too dry for an introduction? If so, perhaps I should mention that there is also a butler who gets attacked by a monkey. Powell’s portrayal of servants is quite funny, actually. At the time when these books were being written, P.G. Wodehouse was already making virtuosic use of the comic possibilities of the English serving class, most famously in the form of the hyper-competent Jeeves. Powell cut against the Wodehouse grain by making his servant characters only middling in competence and by having them intrude in the life of the household at the most inconvenient times, highlighting the strangeness of two entirely different categories of person living in a house together. The aforementioned butler works for an upper-class Communist, who doesn’t want a butler or really believe in having butlers, but can’t manage his enormous house without one, and there’s a sadly droll tone to their interactions. The funniest novels are those in Volume 3, the war volume, possibly from a need to counterbalance the effect of the war on the narrative, possibly because the military is just so rich in comic possibilities: The General turned savagely on Gwatkin, who had fallen into a kind of trance, but now started agonisingly to life again. “No porridge?” “No porridge, sir.” General Liddament pondered this assertion for some seconds in resentful silence. He seemed to be considering porridge in all its aspects, bad as well as good. At last he came out with an unequivocal moral judgment. “There ought to be porridge,” he said. Reason #5: There is a judicious amount of world history. By this I mostly mean World War II. Nick is just old enough when the war starts that he’s more of a military bureaucrat than a soldier, so none of these books is a War Novel in the customary mold. That said, it made me feel more powerfully about the London Blitz than anything, fiction or nonfiction, has ever done before. In the war volumes, the humor is a little broader, with fewer subtle verbal jabs at social gatherings and more caricatures of superior officers (such as the two colonels named Eric and Derrick). And, as one would expect, the bad things that happen are far more serious. Nick, being who and what he is, gives us these things — the party hit by a bomb, the deaths that come out of the blue — without very much comment. There’s a section in The Military Philosophers where he says, “I was briefly in tears,” and I found it the most poignant bit of fiction I’d read for a very long time. Mostly, though, he continues to portray his life by way of the people with whom he surrounds himself, and to cope with uncertainty, discomfort, and death by finding comfort in the literary and intellectual. Others, of course, respond to the war in very different ways, for instance, Reason #6: Widmerpool. Kenneth Widmerpool is one of only two characters besides Nick who appear in both the first novel of the series and the last. When he is first introduced, he’s a boy at the same school as Nick, a little older than our narrator, and his defining attribute is “the wrong kind of overcoat,” which “was only remarkable in itself as a vehicle for the comment it aroused, insomuch that an element in Widmerpool himself had proved indigestible to the community.” This indigestibility serves Widmerpool surprisingly well. Possessed of no virtues but ambition, he is almost always able to convince his superiors that he’s especially worth promoting, rather than especially repulsive. Throughout the 12 novels, he turns up like a bad apple, and nearly every time he does so, his social or professional or military status has increased. “It was Widmerpool” is the most frequently repeated line in the books. Widmerpool himself may be the most deeply realized shallow person in English writing. His sense of his own importance, and his ability to force others to treat him as important, propel him to stations he does not deserve and cannot capably fulfill, and he is just competent enough to keep rising up in the world. Nick is none too pleased to be thrown together with Widmerpool so often, but he maintains his characteristic detachment on the matter. A different writer might treat the contrast between the two men as a moral one, but in Dance it is almost entirely aesthetic, and it is all the richer for it. The two of them, writer and bureaucrat, meet and part and re-meet over the course of the dance with an inevitability that is somehow both wearying and wonderful. Reason #7: The books are both discreet and entertainingly frank. The romantic relationships in this series are an utter mess. Almost everyone who gets married gets divorced, usually sooner rather than later; there’s infidelity all over the place; there is voyeurism and necrophilia and people showing up in the nude at surprising times. But it’s not lurid, simply because of the manner of writing. Nick tells us about a few sexual encounters before his own marriage, and he does so in a way that leaves no real doubt what’s going on but that includes no description whatsoever. The love scenes divert their gaze away from physical details and instead are all about character, behavior, and the degree to which people’s emotions are engaged (and whether they’re engaged equally, which they almost never are). Homosexuality, incidentally, gets a rather interesting treatment in these novels. Early on — this would be in the 1920s and ’30s — it’s hinted at much more subtly than the hints of what’s happening in those love scenes. As time goes on there are clearer hints, often in the form of rumors that turn out to be true perhaps half the time, though there are also a couple scenes where a walk-on character is casually identified as a lesbian. In the post-WWII novels, the word “queer” is introduced, apparently in the process of taking on its new meaning. (There’s a conversation in Temporary Kings that illustrates this very well, where someone asks Nick if a mutual acquaintance is “queer:” “Is he?” “Homosexual?” “Of course.” “I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s very normal either.”) The word and the concept then move into the mainstream of the narrative until there are, in Hearing Secret Harmonies (the final book), an acknowledged male couple, an occult community where everyone is expected to have sex with everyone else for ritual purposes, and a number of offhand references to off-screen gay characters that don’t seem to surprise anyone. Overall, the effect is that of a narrator with a strong sense of personal privacy but a very mild sense of shame. Like Melville’s Ishmael, he may choose to look away but he never flinches. If you are not convinced… If none of this has persuaded you that you need to read 12 British novels right now, here is what I recommend. Get hold of Volume 2 or a copy of the last novel in it, The Kindly Ones. Read the first chapter. It takes place in 1914, earlier than the rest of the saga, and it is the most self-contained bit of the series. If you don’t have the time or the will to read all 12 novels, this one chapter gives you some of the best they have to offer; I can’t imagine a better account of the start of World War I from a domestic, English point of view. If you think you don’t have the time or the will, this chapter might convince you it’s really not such a daunting task, and that this is a story and a voice worth settling down with for the long haul. |
Last year I was taken aback by the presence of a Nicaraguan company that really changed my mind on Nicaraguan cigars. That company was Ezra Zion, and both of their blends impressed me enough to make my Top 12 of 2012, with the Reagan being my cigar of the year. I was not alone in my love of the brand, as they continued to make a huge splash across the bloggers and social media, along with a packed house sun up to sundown at IPCPR. Of course this year I was drooling at the show waiting to sample their newest blends, and the Tantrum was right up my alley being the corona whore I am. To my surprise, the Tantrum blend was touted as a powerhouse, appearing much different from their medium-bodied blends I fell in love with. I did smoke several at the show, but wanted to wait until the hype had cleared until I sat down to review it. So I waited four months and revisited the blend to see if the hype was warranted, and without a doubt, these guys have another hit on their hands. Wrapper: '99 Nicaraguan Corojo Binder: AA Nicaraguan aged 5-7 years Filler: AA Nicaraguan aged 5-7 years Dry Draw: cinnamon, brown sugar, red pepper on the finish First Third: Right off the bat red pepper went all Mike Tyson on my palate, with a cedar bat beating my taste buds into submission. There was some brown sugar in the background, but the beginning is rather strong, but subsides about five minutes in. The Tantrum went from full-bodied to medium-full rather quickly, and the brown sugar note took the lead on the draw. The pepper and cedar sat mid tongue, with the pepper settling on my lips. Second Third: The draw became much smoother at this point, but the retro was still banging with pepper. I felt that the Tantrum had moved into the medium world for a short while, with the brown sugar picking up some burnt sugar notes as well. At that point, a major shift took place, with a wonderful almond liqueur note arriving. The combination of notes were pepper, cedar, burnt sugar, almonds, and the burn of the retro that reminded me of liqueur. By the end of this third, the body picked back up again, with excellent complexity given the strength. Final Third: The almond liqueur note was running solid, with a blast of cocoa entering the mix as well. The cocoa note signified another significant shift, which was surprising for such a small cigar. I picked up notes of vanilla cream towards the nub, with the liqueur finish running strong to the end. The pepper and cedar were still alive and well, but not overpowering; rather, adding increased depth to the blend notes that were showing up late in the game. Construction: No complaints Final Thoughts: What can I say, other than these guys hit another homerun. I will admit, this cigar is a bit too strong for my tastes, but the quality of tobacco and blend is unreal. This is a spicy cigar a guy like me can handle, and personally, I was taken aback when I heard folks telling me it was a powerhouse. This is spice blended with class, and I had no problem smoking these in the morning with coffee really. As an avid corona smoker, who has at least 500 coronas on hand at any given time, the Tantrum was arguably one of the most complex coronas I have experienced. I will warn old school smokers or mild-medium fans, the Tantrum will throw a can of whoop ass at ya, and may be a bit much. However, pair it with a good spirit or strong coffee and the finish pops, without leaving a heavy aftertaste. I definitely recommend this cigar to the modern palate, folks whom like strong cigars, and fans of Nicaraguan tobacco in general. Given this is an extremely limited edition; I highly suggest buying them (CLICK HERE to buy Ezra Zion Tantrum)while you can. For me, I will be tucking some away for a few years to let that pepper settle just enough to hit my palate perfectly. Follow me @CatfishBluezz |
BARCELONA — In the center of Barcelona’s scenic old city, a once-historic bookshop is being turned into a store for Mango, the giant clothing retailer. A maker of combs, founded in 1922, is now a big-name bag store. And a toy store, owned by the same family since the Spanish Civil War, has been converted into an outlet for Geox, the Italian footwear company. The changes are more than the result of the kind of creeping gentrification that has reshaped so many cities worldwide. Here, and across Spain, historic districts are being transformed as tens of thousands of small, often family-run shops face the end of decades of rent controls this year. It is not that the establishments did not know the changes were coming — they had 20 years’ warning. But slowly, now suddenly, that time has arrived, provoking 11th-hour resistance as small shops are pushed from historic districts by an inundation of international brands, which are virtually the only ones that can afford the staggering spike in rents. The rapid turnover has spurred soul-searching and debate about just how far the city should go to protect its distinctive character in the face of the homogenization that accompanies the arrival of multinational chain stores. |
This post explains how to add Google Oauth2 login in a Flask web app using the requests-oauthlib package for OAuth 2.0 and flask-sqlalchemy. To get started, first we have to create a project in Google Developers Console to get client key and secret. Creating a Google project First go to Google Developers Console. Sign in using your Google credentials if you haven’t already. There will be a list of projects(if you have previously created any). Click on Create Project to create a new project. Provide a project name in the dialog box and press enter. For explanation purposes, lets say the project name is test-project-123xyz. test-project-123xyz will appear in the list of projects after creation. Now go to the project page. Click APIs and Auth -> Credentials in the sidebar. Then goto the OAuth Consent Screen . Provide the Product Name (you can also provide other details but they are optional). Product Name is what users see when they are logging into your application using Google. Now click on the Credentials part of the same page. Then click on Add Credentials and then select OAuth 2.0 client ID . Select Application Type as Web Application, Provide a Name , Authorized Javascript origins and Authorized redirect URIs and click on Create . During development, we will use localhost as our URL. Later, for production, we can add our original URL. The redirect URIs is important here as this is the URL the users will be redirected to after Google Login. Make sure that all the urls use https protocol as OAuth2 supports only https . After the above step, you will be presented with a dialog box having your client ID and client secret . Copy both the strings and save in a text file as we will be needing these later. Creating a User table in Database We will be using flask-sqlalchemy to handle DB operations. This is what our User table looks like. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 class User ( db . Model ): __tablename__ = "users" id = db . Column ( db . Integer , primary_key = True ) email = db . Column ( db . String ( 100 ), unique = True , nullable = False ) name = db . Column ( db . String ( 100 ), nullable = True ) avatar = db . Column ( db . String ( 200 )) active = db . Column ( db . Boolean , default = False ) tokens = db . Column ( db . Text ) created_at = db . Column ( db . DateTime , default = datetime . datetime . utcnow ()) The tokens column stores the access and refresh tokens JSON, dumped as string. Creating configuration for our app. If using flask-login to manage user sessions, we can check whether a user is logged in or not. If not logged in, we redirect the user to a login page that contains the link to Google login. Lets create a config.py that has our Google OAuth credentials and our app configuration. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 import os basedir = os . path . abspath ( os . path . dirname ( __file__ )) class Auth : CLIENT_ID = ( '688061596571-3c13n0uho6qe34hjqj2apincmqk86ddj' '.apps.googleusercontent.com' ) CLIENT_SECRET = 'JXf7Ic_jfCam1S7lBJalDyPZ' REDIRECT_URI = 'https://localhost:5000/gCallback' AUTH_URI = 'https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth' TOKEN_URI = 'https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token' USER_INFO = 'https://www.googleapis.com/userinfo/v2/me' class Config : APP_NAME = "Test Google Login" SECRET_KEY = os . environ . get ( "SECRET_KEY" ) or "somethingsecret" class DevConfig ( Config ): DEBUG = True SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = 'sqlite:///' + os . path . join ( basedir , "test.db" ) class ProdConfig ( Config ): DEBUG = True SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = 'sqlite:///' + os . path . join ( basedir , "prod.db" ) config = { "dev" : DevConfig , "prod" : ProdConfig , "default" : DevConfig } Here, REDIRECT_URI is what we set in Google Developers Console, is what we set in Google Developers Console, AUTH_URI is where the user is taken to for Google login, is where the user is taken to for Google login, TOKEN_URI is used to exchange a temporary token for an access_token and is used to exchange a temporary token for an and USER_INFO is the URL used for retrieving user information like name, email, etc after successful authentication. is the URL used for retrieving user information like name, email, etc after successful authentication. SCOPE is the types of user information that we will be accessing after the user authenticates our app. Google OAuth2 Playground has a list of scopes that can be added. Implementing the URL routes for login and callback After the configuration is done, we have to create a Flask app, load configurations and finally define our routes. 1 2 3 4 5 6 app = Flask ( __name__ ) app . config . from_object ( config [ 'dev' ]) db = SQLAlchemy ( app ) login_manager = LoginManager ( app ) login_manager . login_view = "login" login_manager . session_protection = "strong" requests_oauthlib.OAuth2Session helper: We create a helper function get_google_auth that we will use to create OAuth2Session object based on the arguments provided. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 def get_google_auth ( state = None , token = None ): if token : return OAuth2Session ( Auth . CLIENT_ID , token = token ) if state : return OAuth2Session ( Auth . CLIENT_ID , state = state , redirect_uri = Auth . REDIRECT_URI ) oauth = OAuth2Session ( Auth . CLIENT_ID , redirect_uri = Auth . REDIRECT_URI , scope = Auth . SCOPE ) return oauth When none of the parameters are provided, e.g. google = get_google_auth() , it creates a new OAuth2Session with a new state. , it creates a new with a new state. If state is provided, that means we have to get a token . is provided, that means we have to get a . If token is provided, that means we only have to get an access_token and this is the final step. Root URL: 1 2 3 4 @app.route ( '/' ) @login_required def index (): return render_template ( 'index.html' ) This route is only served to logged in user. If a user is not logged in, they are redirected to login route as set previously using login_manager.login_view = "login" . Login URL: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 @app.route ( '/login' ) def login (): if current_user . is_authenticated : return redirect ( url_for ( 'index' )) google = get_google_auth () auth_url , state = google . authorization_url ( Auth . AUTH_URI , access_type = 'offline' ) session [ 'oauth_state' ] = state return render_template ( 'login.html' , auth_url = auth_url ) Here we save the value of state in cookie using session['oauth_state'] = state to be used later. Callback URL: Here, the route gCallback must be the same as we mentioned in our project page in Google Developers Console. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 @app.route ( '/gCallback' ) def callback (): # Redirect user to home page if already logged in. if current_user is not None and current_user . is_authenticated : return redirect ( url_for ( 'index' )) if 'error' in request . args : if request . args . get ( 'error' ) == 'access_denied' : return 'You denied access.' return 'Error encountered.' if 'code' not in request . args and 'state' not in request . args : return redirect ( url_for ( 'login' )) else : # Execution reaches here when user has # successfully authenticated our app. google = get_google_auth ( state = session [ 'oauth_state' ]) try : token = google . fetch_token ( Auth . TOKEN_URI , client_secret = Auth . CLIENT_SECRET , authorization_response = request . url ) except HTTPError : return 'HTTPError occurred.' google = get_google_auth ( token = token ) resp = google . get ( Auth . USER_INFO ) if resp . status_code == 200 : user_data = resp . json () email = user_data [ 'email' ] user = User . query . filter_by ( email = email ) . first () if user is None : user = User () user . email = email user . name = user_data [ 'name' ] print ( token ) user . tokens = json . dumps ( token ) user . avatar = user_data [ 'picture' ] db . session . add ( user ) db . session . commit () login_user ( user ) return redirect ( url_for ( 'index' )) return 'Could not fetch your information.' In the above code, We check if a user is already logged in. If yes, we then redirect them to the home page. Then we check if the url has an error query parameter. This check is done to handle cases where a user after going to the Google login page, denies access. We then return an appropriate message to the user. query parameter. This check is done to handle cases where a user after going to the Google login page, denies access. We then return an appropriate message to the user. We then check if the url contains code and state parameters or not. If these are not in the URL, this means that someone tried to access the URL directly. So we redirect them to the login page. and parameters or not. If these are not in the URL, this means that someone tried to access the URL directly. So we redirect them to the login page. After handling all the side cases, we finally handle the case where the user has successfully authenticated our app. In this case, we create a new OAuth2Session object by passing the state parameter. Then we try to get an access_token from Google using token = google . fetch_token ( Auth . TOKEN_URI , client_secret = Auth . CLIENT_SECRET , authorization_response = request . url ) If error occurs, we return appropriate message to user. After getting the token successfully, we again create a new OAuth2Session by setting the token parameter. successfully, we again create a new by setting the parameter. Finally we try to access the user information using google = get_google_auth ( token = token ) resp = google . get ( Auth . USER_INFO ) The user information is a JSON of the form: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 { "family_name" : "Doe" , "name" : "John Doe" , "picture" : "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-asdasdas/asdasdad/asdasd/daadsas/photo.jpg" , "locale" : "en" , "gender" : "male" , "email" : "john@gmail.com" , "link" : "https://plus.google.com/+JohnDoe" , "given_name" : "John" , "id" : "1109367330250025112153346" , "verified_email" : true } After getting the user information, its upto us to how to handle the information. In the callback code, we handle the information by: First we check if a user with the retrieved email is already in the DB or not. If user is not found, we create a new user and assign the email to it. is already in the DB or not. If user is not found, we create a new and assign the to it. Then we set the other attributes like avatar , tokens and then finally commit the changes to DB. , and then finally commit the changes to DB. After commiting the changes, we login the user using login_user(user) and then redirect the user to home page. To run the above code, first create the DB by opening the python console and executing: from app import db db . create_all () Then create a test ssl certificate using werkzeug : from werkzeug.serving import make_ssl_devcert make_ssl_devcert ( './ssl' , host = 'localhost' ) Finally create a file run.py in the same directory as app.py and add the following code and finally run python run.py : from app import app app . run ( debug = True , ssl_context = ( './ssl.crt' , './ssl.key' )) Edit From the comments, I have come to know that many of you have been running into problems with successfully running the flask server. It was a mistake from my side which I have realized in last few days. In Step 6 above, while adding a redirect uri in the Google Project Console, I attached a screenshot in which, the redirect uri was http://localhost:5000/gCallback instead of it starting with https . So I have updated the screenshot in which I have added both http and https . You should add both http and https URLs as redirect uri. Also add both http://localhost:5000 and https://localhost:5000 in the Authorized Javascript Origins. Also if you want to simply run the flask server on http instead of https, add the following 2 lines of code at the top of your app.py |
I've developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin. It's completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust. Give it a try, or take a look at the screenshots and design paper:Download Bitcoin v0.1 at http://www.bitcoin.org The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection to secure their files, placing trust in the system administrator to keep their information private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors. Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter what.It's time we had the same thing for money. With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless.One of the fundamental building blocks for such a system is digital signatures. A digital coin contains the public key of its owner. To transfer it, the owner signs the coin together with the public key of the next owner. Anyone can check the signatures to verify the chain of ownership. It works well to secure ownership, but leaves one big problem unsolved: double-spending. Any owner could try to re-spend an already spent coin by signing it again to another owner. The usual solution is for a trusted company with a central database to check for double-spending, but that just gets back to the trust model. In its central position, the company can override the users, and the fees needed to support the company make micropayments impractical.Bitcoin's solution is to use a peer-to-peer network to check for double-spending. In a nutshell, the network works like a distributed timestamp server, stamping the first transaction to spend a coin. It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle. For details on how it works, see the design paper at http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf The result is a distributed system with no single point of failure. Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of the P2P network to check for double-spending.Satoshi Nakamoto |
Origin Edit Bruns-Memorial in Reckahn, "He was a teacher" The basic foundations of a generic Prussian primary education system were laid out by Frederick the Great with his Generallandschulreglement, a decree of 1763, authored by Johann Julius Hecker. Hecker had already before (in 1748) founded the first teacher's seminary in Prussia. His concept of providing teachers with the means to cultivate mulberries for homespun silk, which was one of Frederick's favorite projects, found the King's favour.[2] It expanded the existing schooling system significantly and required that all young citizens, both girls and boys, be educated by mainly municipality-funded schools from the age of 5 to 13 or 14. Prussia was among the first countries in the world to introduce tax-funded and generally compulsory primary education.[3] In comparison, in France and Great Britain, compulsory schooling was not successfully enacted until the 1880s.[4] The Prussian system consisted of an eight-year course of primary education, called Volksschule. It provided not only basic technical skills needed in a modernizing world (such as reading and writing), but also music (singing) and religious (Christian) education in close cooperation with the churches and tried to impose a strict ethos of duty, sobriety and discipline. Mathematics and calculus were not compulsory at the start and taking such courses required additional payment by parents. Frederick the Great also formalized further educational stages, the Realschule and as the highest stage the gymnasium (state-funded secondary school), which served as a university-preparatory school.[5] Construction of schools received some state support, but they were often built on private initiative. Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow, a member of the local gentry and former cavalry officer in Reckahn, Brandenburg, installed such a school. Von Rochow cooperated with Heinrich Julius Bruns (1746–1794), a talented teacher of modest background. The two installed a model school for rural education that attracted more than 1,200 notable visitors between 1777 and 1794.[6] The Prussian system, after its modest beginnings, succeeded in reaching compulsory attendance, specific training for teachers, national testing for all students (of both genders), a prescribed national curriculum for each grade and mandatory kindergarten.[7] Training of teachers was increasingly organized via private seminaries. Hecker had already in 1748 founded the first "Lehrerseminar", but the density and impact of the seminary system improving significantly until the end of the 18th century.[8] In 1810, Prussia introduced state certification requirements for teachers, which significantly raised the standard of teaching.[9] The final examination, Abitur, was introduced in 1788, implemented in all Prussian secondary schools by 1812 and extended to all of Germany in 1871. Passing the Abitur was a prerequisite to entering the learned professions and higher echelons of the civil service. The state-controlled Abitur remains in place in modern Germany. The Prussian system had by the 1830s attained the following characteristics:[10] Free primary schooling, at least for poor citizens Professional teachers trained in specialized colleges A basic salary for teachers and recognition of teaching as a profession An extended school year to better involve children of farmers Funding to build schools Supervision at national and classroom level to ensure quality instruction Curriculum inculcating a strong national identity, involvement of science and technology Secular instruction (but with religion as a topic included in the curriculum) Outreach Edit Spread to other countries Edit Policy borrowing and exchange Edit References Edit Further reading Edit |
(A) There are data showing beyond question a gender gap, with women living longer than men, especially in economically developed societies. There is greater male vulnerability to the major causes of human death. (B) In lower animals there are data suggesting a female survival advantage to adult life in many species, but the observations do not consider longevity or survival to an advanced age. (C) In laboratory rodents kept under controlled conditions the relationship of sex to longevity is variable, with males sometimes showing greater longevity than females and with life span being dependent on factors like breeding and diet. (D) Similar genetic and hormonal processes operate in humans and in non‐human mammals including the genetic mechanism of sex determination, the hormonal consequences of sex determination, and the effects of hormones on processes which affect longevity such as cholesterol levels and immune functions. (E) Causes of death in humans and animals are different, and it seems unlikely, therefore, that the same mechanisms could be determinants of longevity in all mammalian species. (F) Human male and female longevity continue to change, and it is likely that the gender gap will narrow, with societal and medical changes in post‐industrial societies reducing the male disadvantages in behaviour and in the handling of cholesterol. (G) It remains an important question whether part of the gender gap seen in humans is based on other differences in the basic biology of males and females. |
Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s freshly-announced nominee for the US Supreme Court, has spent his career weighing matters of life and death. His views on life—that it is sacred and “intrinsically valuable”—are likely to shape court decisions in areas from abortion to assisted suicide for decades to come. Gorsuch is a 49-year-old Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals judge with a Harvard law degree and a PhD in legal philosophy from Oxford. He is likely best known for his role in Hobby Lobby vs. Sebelius, a case challenging the Affordable Care Act’s coverage of birth control based on religious objections. In that case, Gorsuch ruled on the side of the company back in 2013, before it eventually wound its way to the Supreme Court, where that view was upheld. The precedent-setting case allowed corporations to decline coverage of contraceptives based on religious views. Advertisement But Gorsuch’s views on life and death have not been restricted to his writings from the bench. In 2006, he published The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, a philosophical treatise outlining the legal and ethical debate surrounding assisted suicide. The book has been praised for its measuredness and rigor in assessing end of life issues from a bioethical standpoint, rather than one that was theological or political. And yet, Gorsuch, a Jesuit-educated Episcopalian, makes clear that he firmly opposes assisted suicide and euthanasia. “All human beings are intrinsically valuable,” he writes in the book, “and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.” Advertisement “Once we open the door to excusing or justifying the intentional taking of life as ‘necessary,’” he writes, “we introduce the real possibility that the lives of some persons (very possibly the weakest and most vulnerable among us) may be deemed less ‘valuable,’ and receive less protection from the law, than others.” His views on the end of life have obvious implications for the beginning of life, though despite assertions that he is a “pro-life pick,” Gorsuch has at no point come out explicitly as an opponent of abortion. Rather, his point of view seems grounded in whether things like abortion and birth control obey the letter of existing laws. In his book, Gorsuch said Roe v. Wade created a “new right” to abortion access, rather than applying and interpreting the country’s existing laws. During his nomination announcement, he emphasized that he does not believe that this is the purpose of the court. Advertisement “In our legal order it is for Congress and not the courts to write new laws,” Gorsuch said. “It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people’s representatives.” But in the book, he also seems to suggest that the 1992 Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision created a more sound legal reasoning for abortion rights. The case reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, finding that “matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.” It also created a new standard for vetting restrictions on abortion rights, determining that restrictions were invalid when they resulted in “undue burden.” “The plurality in Casey expressly sought to provide a firmer basis for the abortion right and to shore up the reasoning behind Roe’s result,” Gorsuch wrote. “In doing so, the Casey plurality purposefully eschewed any effort to examine the history of abortion regulation, stressing instead the importance of ‘reasoned judgment’ in assessing whether to continue recognizing the constitutional right to abortion.” Advertisement No matter his views, it’s unlikely that in a challenge to Roe v. Wade he would vote much differently than his would-be predecessor, the conservative Antonin Scalia who desperately desired to overturn Roe v. Wade. The issues at the root of Gorsuch’s personal moral philosophy are likely to show up in the Supreme Court again. The last time the Supreme Court took up a case involving “death with dignity” legislation was in 2006, and it left the matter far from settled, determining only that an Oregon state death with dignity law was valid. In recent years, multiple states have passed laws legalizing death with dignity—including California and Gorsuch’s home state of Colorado. His time on the bench is certain to be one in which we see bioethical challenges once never dreamed of. Genetic engineering and other advanced technology make possible challenges to our basic notion of what it means to be human. In his book, Gorsuch notes that intolerable pain is not a good argument in favor of assisted suicide, which risks creating a world in which some lives are less valuable than others. These are the same moral inquiries that surround dystopian concerns over the inequalities that might be created once we’re genetically engineering superhuman and designer babies. How will he apply that thinking to issues of the future? Advertisement A line from Gorsuch himself may be the most prescient predictor. “Far from definitively resolving the assisted suicide issue,” he wrote, “the court’s decisions seem to assure that the debate over assisted suicide and euthanasia is not yet over—and may have only begun.” |
Mopho www.davesmithinstruments.com Dave Smith Instruments Released: December 2008 Approx: 300 Euro Tetra www.davesmithinstruments.com Dave Smith Instruments Released: August 2009 Approx: 600 Euro Dark Energy www.doepfer.de Doepfer Released: January 2010 Approx: 300 Euro SEM Reissue www.tomoberheim.com Tom Oberheim Released: July 2009 CV Patch version: Approx 600 Euro MIDI version: Approx 700 Euro Panel only version: Approx 500 Euro Kraftzwerg www.mfberlin.de MFB Released: August 2008 Approx: 580 Euro Thingamagoop 2 www.bleeplabs.com/thingamagoop2 Bleep Labs Released: November 2009 Approx 200 Euro Even after a decade of development, no soft synth to date has been a true replacement for real analog gear. Sure, some plug-ins have come close—notably FXpansion's impressive DCAM suite of analog emulations—but the fact remains, if you wantsound you need the real thing.Lately, there's been a bit of a renaissance for analog hardware synths. A few years back, Dave Smith—the inventor of the Prophet 5 and, well, MIDI itself—unleashed a brand new Prophet for the 21st century, then followed it up with a slew of truly affordable successors. Tom Oberheim recently jumped into the fray with a flawless recreation of his legendary SEM unit. Modular behemoth, Doepfer, recently released a baby modular for entry-level users. Heck, even boutique developers like Bleep Labs have produced analog toys for less than 200 euro.To help producers get a better idea of the current state of the industry, we've created a guide to some of the analog synths on the market today under 1000 euro. In our opinion, these are the best and the brightest at the moment. But if the trend keeps up, there will surely be more to come.Hot on the heels of Dave Smith's reintroduction of the legendary Prophet, DSI released the monophonic Mopho. Sporting a slightly different voice architecture than the Prophet, the Mopho's all-analog signal path features two oscillators, a resonant lowpass filter that can function in either 12dB or 24dB per octave mode, four LFOs, three envelopes, four 16-step sequencers, tons of modulation routing optionsthe ability to process external audio signals through its filter and amplifier sections, making the Mopho both a synth and a solid effects unit.The sound is a bit more aggressive than the Prophet, since the audio input allows the oscillators to be overdriven with a touch of feedback. Adding low-end emphasis are two sub-oscillators—one for each of the primary oscillators—that track their pitches one octave lower.The original Mopho module comes in a package about the size of a hardcover novel and is controlled via standard MIDI in/out connections. But this year's NAMM show heralded the arrival of the Mopho Keyboard edition, which adds a two-and-a-half octave keyboard and a bunch of knobs for real-time tweakage.If the Mopho's synthesis engine piques your interest, then you'll definitely want to get up to speed on DSI's recently introduced Tetra.Essentially four Mophos in an identically sized package, the Tetra packs a ton of synthesis power for its street price. The Tetra's four voices can also be configured multi-timbrally. That is, each of the voices can have its own unique settings so it reallylike having four Mophos going at once. Better still, the Tetra also includes a direct USB port for much faster response times than the ancient MIDI standard. Granted, this USB port is strictly for sending note and controller information—no audio amenities here—so you'll still need a decent audio interface to capture the beauty of this synth.Another audio-oriented distinction is the fact that the Tetra doesn't include the Mopho's external audio input, so you can't feed any other signals into its synthesis engine. This isn't a huge deal when you consider that this box is basically a four-voice Prophet 08 with sub-oscillators and a faster interface, minus the P08's luxurious array of knobs. As a result, if you're looking for a real analog polysynth for under a grand, the Tetra is the only one worth investigating.Germany's Doepfer is one of the biggest names in modular synthesis hardware, so last year's introduction of their entry-level baby modular, the Dark Energy, has created quite a stir. Consisting of a single VCO, 24db/oct lowpass VCF, ADSR envelope and two LFOs that extend well into the audio range, the Dark Energy's simplicity belies its power. The oscillator can blend square waves with either triangle or sawtooth with a twist of a knob and can also be used to modulate the filter cutoff ala FM synthesis. The envelopes can be switched into a super-fast mode for really tight transients. Using the LFOs in the audio range can create anything from dirty sideband mayhem to extreme talkbox effects. What's more, the Dark Energy can translate its USB control directly into control voltages for sequencing vintage gear like the Roland SH-101.So what's the catch? Well, because the Dark Energy is 100% analog with no digital encoding on the knobs, there's no way to store presets. For some users, this could be a critical omission. On the other hand, the lack of digitization means that the knobs are incredibly sensitive—moving them even slightly can radically change a sound, just like classic gear from the '70s and '80s.To be absolutely candid here, I've been using the Dark Energy for four months now and it has become my go-to synth. Warm, big bass? No problem. Crazy modulation weirdness? Check. In-your-face percussive patches? Done and done. This synth covers a ton of ground in a tiny package that sits neatly next to my laptop at all times. Truly the perfect beginner's synth if you can live without the ability to store your own patches.After a year of buzz, Tom Oberheim's long-awaited SEM reissue has finally hit the stores—and it was well worth the wait. In Oberheim's words, the reissue is 98% identical circuit-wise, with a few improvements thrown in for good measure. The original SEM was a mainstay for '70s artists, with a big following in the progressive rock world. The architecture featured two oscillators, triangle-wave LFO, amp envelope, filter envelope and one of the coolest analog filter implementations on the planet.Unlike most classic analog synths, the SEM included something called a state-variable filter that can operate in lowpass, highpass or notch modes in a continuously variable manner—as well as a switchable bandpass mode. On most synths, multimode filtering operation works via a switch. That is, each mode is a discrete option. Here, you can smoothly morph between modes, creating sweeps that are near impossible to achieve via any other technology.While some users will want the MIDI version—so they can sequence the device via a standard MIDI interface—diehard synthesists will likely opt for the control voltage (CV) version, which includes an integrated patch panel for modular-style re-routing. The caveat with that version is that you'll need a CV interface of some sort, like say, the Doepfer Dark Energy—which is an outstanding solution, in my opinion. The two units combined should serve as a badass baby modular rig with a sound that transcends either device on its own.There's been quite a buzz surrounding the MFB Kraftzwerg's modular-style design and extensive feature set. And for good reason.The desktop wedge houses three VCOs that can deliver hard sync effects, a 24dB/oct lowpass VCF, noise generator, ring modulation, two LFOs and two envelopes. The modular capabilities on the Kraftzwerg are a definite notch up from the Dark Energy, with voltage control options for all of the essentials and then some. With some clever oscillator patching, it should be possible to create dirty, metallic FM and ringmod effects.Throw in some switchable envelope curves and CV in and out on the LFO rates and there are a lot of sonic options here that would be impossible to nail on virtual analog hardware or software. As with the Dark Energy, though, you can't store presets for future recall so, again, your mileage may vary. Based on the online audio demo examples and the extensive feature spec, the Kraftzwerg's price tag is a rather reasonable point of entry for a unit of this scope. Definitely worth further investigation for sound designers looking for something other than "me-too" synth patches.If experimental sonics are your cuppa tea and the recession has tightened your purse strings to the point of snapping, you should take a closer look at Bleep Labs' Thingamagoop 2. It may simply look like a little robot, but the sounds that come out of this beastie are quite monstrous indeed. The robot eye is actually a photocell that controls pitch. The LEDacle "antenna" houses a flexible LED that can be used to drive the photocell. Kind of like a 21st century Theremin.The voice circuitry consists of an analog VCO that can be switched into one of five continuously variable modes courtesy of its programmable Arduino chip: sample & hold, arpeggio 1, arpeggio 2, white noise and audio rate digital data (kind of like bit-crushing). An LFO delivers either amplitude modulation, using a square wave or triangle wave based pulse-width modulation for really thick trance lead effects. The LFO can also be pushed into the audio range for ring mod type effects that go far beyond anything else in this price range.Rounding out the synth are control voltage in and out connectors for attaching the Thingamagoop to vintage gear. While the Thingamagoop's oscillator doesn't calibrate to the one-volt-per-octave standard, it's still quite handy for creating pitched effects in either direction that would be hard to achieve otherwise. |
Share on Pinterest Pin it IKEA’s much hyped new creation, the SLADDA bicycle, is now for sale in the US. The bicycle comes flat-packed and requires some assembly of course (it is IKEA), but once the bike is put together it should be very low maintenance. This bicycle is powered by a belt drive, which is a rustproof, durable and maintenance-free alternative to a regular chain. The automatic 2-gear system is integrated into the rear hub, so there are no wires that rust or break. SLADDA also boasts a click-in system for accessories such as front and back racks, and a bike bag that can be transformed into a backpack. The bicycle was created in partnership with Oskar Juhlin, Jan Puranen and Kristian Eke of Veryday design studio and it has been awarded ‘Best of the Best’ in the Product Design category of the Red Dot design awards, the top prize reserved for ground-breaking new designs. There is also a practical trailer developed to solve heavy transportation needs, as well as helmets, a U-lock and pump. The regular price for the SLADDA bicycle is $499.00 while the price for IKEA FAMILY member is $399.00. The SLADDA Bicycle trailer clocks in at $169.00 and the IKEA FAMILY member price is $129.00. |
2014 USA Boxing Nationals #Womensboxing Final Results! The finals of the 2014 USA Boxing National Championships were an exciting mixture of the expected and the unexpected. Olympians Marlen Esparza, Queen Underwood and Claressa Shields each came away with a national championship in their respective Olympic weight class, but each in her own way. Esparza won a decisive and unprecedented 8th National title by out boxing her able 112 lbs. division opponent Virginia Fuchs. In the lightweight (132 lbs.) division, Queen Underwood fought a tough battle against “rival” Mikaela Mayer who gave a terrific performance. Underwood came out ahead with the split decision, 2-1, but all things being equal — both fighters deserved the crown. Claressa Shields for her part fought a hard an unrelenting battle against veteran Franchon Crews to take the middleweight (165 lbs.) national title — her first as an elite woman fighter, in a performance that rivaled any in her gold medal winning year. Alex Love a member of the U. S. Army’s elite athlete team put on a terrific performance to gain the title with her 3-0 win over Natalie Gonzalez, and perennial winner Christina Cruz also won 3-0. Other winners included Tiara Brown who out-fought Lisa Porter in a tough bruiser to gain the split decision, as well as Destiny Chearino who gained her first title in her bout against Jasmine Singh. To round out the winners, defending 152 lbs. champion Danyelle Wolf impressed with her 3-0 victory over Melissa Kelly. In the heavyweight division (178+ lbs), Krystal Dixon gained an upset winner over last year’s champion, Denise Rico, with a 3-0. Dara Shen also impressed with a 3-0 win over Heidi Henriksen in the 178 lbs. division. And the 2014 USA Boxing National Boxing Champions are: 106 lbs/female: Alex Love, Seattle, Wash./U.S. Army, dec. Natalie Gonzalez, New Rochelle, N.Y., 3-0 112 lbs/female: Marlen Esparza, Houston, Texas dec. Virginia Fuchs, Kemah, Texas, 3-0 119 lbs/female: Christina Cruz, New York, N.Y., dec. Amanda Pavone, Burlington, Mass., 3-0 125 lbs/female: Tiara Brown, Lehigh Acres, Fla., dec. Lisa Porter, Valley Village, Calif., 2-1 132 lbs/female: Queen Underwood, Seattle, Wash., dec. Mikaela Mayer, Los Angeles, Calif., 2-1 141 lbs/female: Destiny Chearino, Warwick, R.I., dec. Jasmine Singh, Anaheim, Calif., 3-0 152 lbs/female: Danyelle Wolf, San Francisco, Calif., dec. Melissa Kelly, Somerville, Mass., 3-0 165 lbs/female: Claressa Shields, Flirnt, Mich., dec. Franchon Crews, Baltimore, Md., 3-0 178 lbs/female: Dara Shen, Alexandria, Va., dec. Heidi Henriksen, St. Louis, Park, Minn., 3-0 178+ lbs/female: Krystal Dixon, New Rochelle, N.Y., dec. Denise Rico, E. Los Angeles, Calif., 3-0 |
AUSTIN — Most Texans believe student loan debt is a major problem and that state government needs to fund financial aid for all college students, according to a new poll released Tuesday. "The most interesting thing that you see here is, on one hand, a set of very clear concerns by very high margins about student debt loan as a problem, and cost as an impediment for Texans who don't have a degree," said Jim Henson, a pollster and professor at the University of Texas at Austin who conducted the poll. "People are concerned about those things not because they think there's something wrong about higher education, but because they still attach such importance" to getting a college degree, he added. Most respondents said attaining a certificate, certification, or degree beyond high school was important to getting a better job, living a better life and being respected by others. |
Suspected LeT operative and key plotter of 26/11 terror strikes Abu Jundal has threatened to go on hunger strike if not taken out of solitary confinement. He said this in a letter submitted today by authorities of Arthur Road jail, where he has been lodged, to the special Maharashtra Control of Organised Crimes Act (MCOCOA) court which is trying him in connection with the 2006 Aurangabad arms haul case. "Jundal wrote this letter to jail authorities on March 28 that if he is not allowed to mingle with other prisoners then he would go on hunger strike," said his advocate Ejaz Naqvi. The hearing on the letter is likely tomorrow. Jundal is one of the 22 accused in the arms haul case wherein the Maharashtra ATS team had seized 30 kg RDX, 10 AK-47 assault rifles and 3,200 bullets on May 8, 2006 from three persons after chasing a Tata Sumo and an Indica car on Chandwad-Manmad highway near Aurangabad. The Indica was allegedly driven by Jundal, who managed to give police the slip at that time. According to prosecution, Jundal then drove to Malegaon and handed over the vehicle to an acquaintance before escaping to Pakistan via Bangladesh on a fake passport in May 2006. |
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) was the martial art that I had been searching for. It has everything. It is endlessly challenging, involves constant learning and has a great social environment. One of the major draw cards of BJJ is the regular pressure testing. At the end of each lesson, we ‘roll’. This involves attempting to control and submit our training partners who are attempting to avoid submission and whilst controlling you at the same time. Think something akin to full body ‘mercy’. The best part about BJJ is simply that it works. I have shared my thoughts on self-defense before, covering: martial art training, deescalation, avoidance, conflict and post conflict survival, but the summary is this – if you can avoid a fight, do so. Most of the fights you hear about are avoidable, and should never have occurred. Stay away from dangerous areas and if you get accosted or threatened, just swallow your ego, apologise and quickly leave the area. Really, unless you are grabbed, running is the best option. If somebody shapes up for a fight and doesn’t have their hands on you, run. If you have been grabbed, that’s where BJJ comes in. Throws, sweeps, pins and escapes are great at getting in control and enough of an advantage to escape. We train daily to deal with an a strong person, intent on holding us down. We are used to the physical contact, and best of all we know it works – because we have implemented these techniques repeatedly against resisting opponents. So why is BJJ the best for mental health? In my opnion, BJJ has the best social environment. The guys and girls that stick with it are usually quite humble and more than willing to share their knowledge. Whilst this is true for other martial arts, in my opinion BJJ practitioners are the most helpful. |
Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. This story first appeared in The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. BP has announced that it will square off against the federal government in court next week to fight “excessive” claims arising from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. In a combative statement, the oil giant said it had been open to a settlement in the civil trial, set to start on Monday in a federal court in New Orleans. But it had failed to reach a deal with federal government lawyers. The trial could potentially result in $21 billion in civil damages for BP, but the company said on Tuesday it would rather take its chances in court than continue negotiations with federal government lawyers. “Faced with demands that are excessive and not based on reality or the merits of the case, we are going to trial,” said Rupert Bondy, the BP’s general counsel, said in a statement. The trial is the last major hurdle to BP’s efforts to move beyond the fatal blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which killed 11 people and resulted in the biggest oil spill in US history. BP has already accepted criminal responsibility for the disaster, pleading guilty last November to manslaughter and lying to Congress and paying $4.5 billion in fines. It reached a separate $7.8 billion settlement earlier last year with thousands of local individuals that suffered economic damages because of the oil disaster. But Bondy indicated the company had become stuck trying to reach a deal on the big ticket item: up to $21 billion in fines for environmental damage arising from the oil disaster. The fines, which would be levied under the Clean Water Act, would go directly for coastal restoration in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other Gulf states. More than 40 lawyers for federal and state governments are expected to be in court on Monday. At issue are BP’s efforts to stop the doomed Macondo well, which gushed for three months before it was finally sealed off by company engineers. The Justice Department has said it would set out to prove that BP was “grossly negligent” in its response to the spill – a designation that would increase the burden of fines on the oil company to $4,300 a barrel. BP disputes the allegation of gross negligence. It argues that the court should take into consideration the $23 billion it has already spent on clean-up costs, and that it does not deserve to pay the maximum in fines under the Clean Water Act. “No company has done more, faster, to meet its commitment to economic and environmental restoration efforts in the wake of an industrial accident,” Bondy said in the statement. The trial before US district judge Carl Barbier is expected to unfold in two stages. The first phase, due to start next Monday, will try to determine the causes of the fatal blowout. It will also apportion blame between BP and its partners in the doomed Macondo well, Transocean and Halliburton. The second phase, due to get under way next September, will address the amount of oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico in the three months before BP engineers regained control of the runaway well. Federal government scientists have estimated that 4.9 million barrels of oil were released before the well was finally capped. BP, in its statement on Tuesday, repeated its argument that estimate was too high – going so far as to accuse the federal government of exaggerating its findings. “The government’s public estimate is simply wrong, and [is] overstated by at least 20%,” Bondy said. BP has consistently argued that the government’s estimate is off by about 20% – and said that at most it should be liable for 3.1 million barrels of spilled oil. The company also demanded the federal government subtract about 810,000 barrels of oil siphoned off directly from the well, without entering Gulf waters. That would shave another $3.4 billion off the maximum $21 billion penalty. |
Buy Photo Joe McKay speaks during the Blackfeet Business Council induction ceremony. (Photo: TRIBUNE FILE PHOTO)Buy Photo For two years, between the spring of 2012 and summer of 2014, the Blackfeet people suffered through one of the most chaotic and divisive periods of self-governance the tribe had experienced since its constitution was enacted in 1935. Personal attacks, repeated allegations of criminal misconduct, manipulation of constitutional authority, a refusal to negotiate — all contributed to a prolonged breakdown in the Blackfeet government that only ended with the installation of new tribal leadership in July 2014. During that troubled time, various shifting political factions voted to suspend or expel 10 different council members, and 13 different people claimed legitimate membership within the nine-member Blackfeet Tribal Business Council. There were repeated street protests, some verging upon riots, and confusion over which political faction could claim lawful authority prompted the Native American Bank to suspend authorization for the issuance of tribal checks. Tribal employees went unpaid, and the delivery of goods and services was delayed. Those chaotic times have now passed, however, many Blackfeet leaders both inside and outside the current administration argue broad constitutional reform must take place to ensure the type of governmental meltdown that occurred between 2012 and 2014 not be repeated. “What we saw in 2012 was that the law became whoever had the most votes, that they could interpret the Constitution any damn way they wanted to,” said Joe McKay, Blackfeet tribal councilmember and a driving force behind a new effort to rewrite the Blackfeet Constitution. “That’s why we had people being expelled on votes of three and four council members. The law became whatever the hell I want it to be if I have enough votes to get it done. The only thing that ended that chaos was the election.” During a two-day symposium held in Browning on Jan. 11 and 12, a broad assortment of tribal business leaders, educators, land and resource managers, government officials and community representatives met to discuss constitutional reform on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. “The symposium was an effort to educate the tribal membership about the process for change and the issues to be aware of going forward,” McKay said. Guest presenters included the co-director of the Harvard (University) Project on American Indian Economic Development, a former deputy assistant secretary of Indian affairs who is also an enrolled member of the Crow Tribe, and a University of Minnesota professor actively involved in constitutional reform for the White Earth (Ojibwe) Nation. The plans for constitutional reform on the Blackfeet Reservation are both urgent and ambitious. McKay said there is a limited window of opportunity for sweeping constitutional change, and that nothing less than a complete redrafting of the Blackfeet Constitution is required. “This is a rewrite of the entire governmental structure,” he added. “The goal of this group is, by the end of this calendar year, to have a document that the Blackfeet people can vote on.” Flaws in the Blackfeet Constitution were recognized almost from its inception. Promulgated following Congressional passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934, the Blackfeet were one of approximately 160 U.S. tribes that were handed ready-made constitutions drafted by representatives of the federal government. Though intended to re-establish the sovereignty of American Indian tribes, these IRA constitutions cemented an imposed system of self-government alien to the traditional institutions the tribes had operated under for centuries. “Indian tribes like the Blackfeet had their own unwritten forms of social democratic governments by which we regulated our own conduct – long before your folks ever got here,” McKay said. “Rather than look beyond the councils and see what tribes historically did, they looked and they saw tribal councils.” McKay said the tribal council form of government was imposed as a mechanism of control. It concentrated authority within a small group of appointed tribal leaders compliant to the manipulations of federal Indian agents. These IRA constitutions vested nearly all authority within the tribal councils, with no legislative branch of government or provisions for independent judiciaries. In much of Indian country today, tribal councils draft all the laws, control tribal assets, write public policy, can hire or dismiss tribal employees, and oversee the administration all the government offices – right down to a tribal court system where judges can be fired at will by a majority vote of the council. “It (the Blackfeet Constitution) doesn’t work, not just because of its legal provisions,” McKay said. “It doesn’t work because all the power of the tribe is vested in the tribal council. There’s no separation of powers, no checks and balances, and no ultimate accountability.” Less than a decade after its passage, social activists within the Blackfeet Tribe began to advocate for constitutional reform. Those efforts have been largely unsuccessful. “We’ve amended our constitution 11 times since 1935,” McKay said. “Most of those amendments had to do with the number on the tribal council and how we elect them. One had to do with membership – that was in 1962 – and one adopted the Plan of Operations. That was the only one that even looked at the power of the council and all it did was give them more power to administrate things.” McKay views the enactment of a “clear separation of powers” and the establishment of “an independent tribal court system with clear and fair rules” as fundamental to improving the quality of life for the Blackfeet people. “The best thing that we can do for our people in terms of creating jobs and hope is to create an environment where people will want to come and do business with us,” McKay said. “We want to send a message, not only to our own people, but to outsiders and non-Indians as well that they will be treated fairly in Blackfeet country.” Two big obstacles have repeatedly stood in the way of meaningful constitutional reform in Browning: the self-interest of sitting tribal councils to preserve their authority and the contentious issue of tribal membership. A freshman tribal councilman, McKay sits in the odd position of leading an effort to reduce the powers of his own office. To reconcile that apparent contradiction, he emphasizes that the movement for constitutional reform is not driven from within the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, but is led by a core group of about 20 community volunteers loosely organized as the Committee for Constitutional Change. “I have said this from the very beginning, we are not going to go to the council and get a resolution sanctioning us,” McKay said. “For the simple reason that if the council gets mad and decides to rescind their resolution, the theory would be that they could kill the effort. That’s what happened to the last effort in 2010. We’re not going to do that. The tribal council supports it, but it is not an effort that the tribal council itself created.” A major stumbling block for many of the prior reform efforts has been the contentious issue of tribal membership. Since 1962, the Blackfeet Constitution has defined those eligible for tribal membership as “all children having one-fourth degree of Blackfeet Indian blood or more born after the adoption of this amendment to any blood member of the Blackfeet Tribe.” In the intervening 53 years, debate over who is entitled to the benefits and privileges of tribal enrollment have frequently overshadowed attempts at broader constitutional reform. To avoid that pitfall, the Committee for Constitutional Changes has purposefully excluded debate on tribal membership. “This is not about redefining tribal membership,” McKay said. “This is solely about how we govern ourselves.” However, there is no denying that a legislative process so broad and inclusive has the potential to provoke strong opposition. “The resistance to change is great, and generally it is driven by fear,” McKay said. “Those who fear change are then willing to engage in misinformation and in outright lies to try to prevent the people from having the opportunity to vote. People will be out there spreading those lies and trying to rob tribal members of their right to make an independent decision. We understand and will deal with that.” To oppose an efforts at misinformation, McKay said that all meetings of the Committee for Constitutional Change are open to tribal membership, and that meetings of the recent symposium were videotaped and are now accessible on YouTube under the search title “Blackfeet Governance.” “Nothing that we’re doing is behind closed doors or secret in any way,” he said. “The next step is to begin the writing process. As we draft, we’ll put that out to the people and get their feedback – and we’ll continue that process until we have a document that we can present to the council that could get approved.” Read or Share this story: http://gftrib.com/1RqReaJ |
TRENTON -- A state Senate committee on Thursday resurrected two gun bills vetoed by Gov. Chris Christie at the end of the last legislative session. The Law and Public Safety Committee advanced new versions of the measures -- S180, which would prohibit carjackers, gang members and other violent criminals from possessing firearms, and S816, which would alter New Jersey's laws regarding "smart guns." The bills were among the more than 60 measures passed by the Legislature at the end of the 2014-15 session the governor "pocket vetoed." By neither signing nor vetoing the legislation, Christie -- a Republican presidential candidate -- allowed the bills to die. S180 passed both houses with near-unanimous bipartisan support, and Christie offered no formal explanation for not signing it. But on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, where Christie has emphasized his bonafides as a former federal prosecutor as he seeks the Republican nomination for president, the governor called the bill "stupid." Christie calls N.J. gun bill he vetoed 'stupid' The governor, speaking on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, lashed out against the New Jersey legislature on Thursday for sending another bill to his desk he painted as a useless proposal "Those laws already exist," Christie told a New Hampshire town hall. "Anybody who is a felon cannot own a firearm." But one of the bill's primary sponsors, Sen. Christopher "Kip" Bateman (R-Somerset), told NJ Advance Media it was drafted at the request of county prosecutors. While federal law prohibits felons from obtaining guns, Bateman said, state law enforcement officials could use the proposed law to prosecute violent criminals under New Jersey statutes when they commit gun crimes. "This is for state courts, and it gives (prosecutors) another offense to charge these criminals with," the senator said. "This had bipartisan support. I'm hoping we're going to have a frank discussion (with the governor) about it." Christie's office did not respond to a message seeking comment. New Jersey currently bans those convicted of murder, aggravated assault, burglary, extortion and other serious offenses from possessing firearms. The new bill would add carjacking, gang criminality, racketeering and making terroristic threats to offenses that would preclude gun possession. The second measure, sponsored by Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen), replaces the state's law regarding personalized handguns, also known as smart guns, which use various technologies to ensure only authorized users can operate a particular firearm. What is a 'smart gun' and why don't we have one? Most of the research into 'smart gun' technology has never made it out of the lab. Weinberg was also a sponsor of the legislation behind New Jersey's current law, on the books since 2002, which mandates only personalized handguns be offered for sale three years after they are properly vetted and on the market. But in the years after its passage, the gun industry has been slow to fully implement the technology, and the new bill would require that gun dealers offer at least one smart gun model after the technology is deemed viable. "What this bill does is roll back a gun regulation," Weinberg said, later adding: "I never thought I'd be in such a position, urging a rollback." Weinberg said the bill is aimed at encouraging the development of the technology, which President Obama has prioritized in a series of recent executive actions on gun control and firearm safety. The state attorney general would have to certify certain models of smart guns meet New Jersey's standards before the mandate would take effect, Weinberg said. Second Amendment advocates, including the Association of NJ Rifle and Pistol Clubs, oppose the measure, saying the state should completely roll back its smart gun mandate. The bill was advanced from the committee Thursday along party lines. S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook. |
Donald Trump. Richard Drew/AP Photo; Win McNamee/Getty Images President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday morning to ask the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Trump's possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, to instead look into "Fake News Networks." "Why Isn't the Senate Intel Committee looking into the Fake News Networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE!" Trump tweeted. Trump's tweet continues a media offensive that began Wednesday morning when NBC News reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called Trump a "moron" over the summer. Tillerson held a press conference Wednesday in which he said Trump "is smart," though he did not explicitly deny having called him a moron. Instead, he dismissed the report as "nonsense" that he would not address. "The @NBCNews story has just been totally refuted by Sec. Tillerson and @VP Pence. It is #FakeNews," Trump tweeted on Wednesday. "It was fake news — it was a totally phony story," Trump told reporters during a visit to Las Vegas to meet some of the victims of Sunday night's mass shooting. "It was made up by NBC. They just made it up." A representative for Tillerson did later explicitly deny the "moron" quip, but NBC News told Business Insider that it stood by its reporting. According to the latest statement by Senate Intelligence Committee leaders, "the issue of collusion" between the Trump campaign and Russia "is still open." Additionally, an obstruction-of-justice case may be building against Trump after he fired the head of the FBI while the bureau investigated his campaign. The committee on Wednesday also acknowledged the propaganda, or disinformation, that infiltrated US social-media networks before the election. Large tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have struggled lately at preventing their products from distributing fake news, but it's unclear whether Trump meant to include these companies in what he called "Fake News Networks." |
The president took to blatantly lying in the Tuesday morning installment of the hit new TV show known as “Let’s See How Crazy The President Can Be Today!” No, seriously though, Trump made claims while writing on Twitter early Tuesday morning that are patently false. He wrote, “I don’t know Putin, have no deals in Russia, and the haters are going crazy — yet Obama can make a deal with Iran, #1 in terror, no problem!” I don't know Putin, have no deals in Russia, and the haters are going crazy – yet Obama can make a deal with Iran, #1 in terror, no problem! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2017 It’s not immediately clear what the acute situational provocateur is that made Trump so uneasy and underlies this tweet. In other words, it’s not immediately clear why is Trump all of a sudden back on the topic of Russia again. In all honesty though, if the past is any indication, then one of the major networks likely just mentioned the controversy over Russia in their live broadcast. Trump, then, is sitting somewhere in the presidential residence getting riled up over a yet unknown cable news broadcast. What he’s claiming here, no matter what prompted him to make the claims, is, again, false. Trump does indeed have, at the very least, a long history of deals in Russia, and he has also claimed to “have a relationship with” Vladimir Putin. While speaking on the occasion of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which he owned, taking place in Moscow, Russia, the man who is now the president claimed, bluntly, to have a relationship with Putin. Twitter users dropped video of these 2013 comments of Trump’s over and over again in the comments section of his latest tweet. Trump talks about his relationship with Putin back in 2013 🤔 #Confused #1in pic.twitter.com/nDdzldE1gf — AJ Joshi Ⓥ (@AJ) February 7, 2017 Efforts to pin down the president’s presently standing ties to Russia remain relatively imprecise due to the fact that he refuses to release his tax returns, documents that would provide the most definitive evidence one way or the other as to the issue of Trump and Russia. However, there’s things publicly available like this quote from Donald Trump Jr., speaking of the family businesses in 2008: ‘We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia. There’s indeed a lot of money coming for new-builds and resale reflecting a trend in the Russian economy and, of course, the weak dollar versus the ruble.’ What Trump is referring to with Obama and Iran is both irrelevant and framed deceptively. Towards the end of the Obama presidency, the administration sent $400 million dollars to Iran. The arrival of this money in the Middle Eastern nation coincided with the release of Americans who were being held in the country. Obama’s opponents claimed that the money was a ransom deal. However, the money was funds that fell to Iran in the global financial reshuffling that resulted from the Iran Nuclear Deal-prompted sanctions lifting. Featured Image via MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images |
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