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Joining me today on Names: A New Perspective is Brian McClellan, author of the awesome Promise of Blood (review) and Orbit’s latest debut. The book releases tomorrow and I definitely recommend that you all check it out. Gunpowder fantasy plus end-of-the-world prophecies? I’m all for it! Reading the book was a blast and I’m looking forward to the sequel, The Crimson Campaign, when it comes out next year in February. The wait is simply too long! Here’s what Brian has to say on the topic of names. The Difficulty of Names by Brian McClellan Every character has a name. Whether is be a proper name, or a placeholder, or a title, every character is known as something. It’s how we differentiate between characters within a work of fiction—so names are very obviously important. Names have different meanings to different people. A name—or even the ethnic background of a name (South American, Irish, Russian, etc) may have connotations within a culture. Names can be used as descriptors. Some names have a suffix or prefix that provides more information about them such as education, community standing, or profession. Names are simple things with complicated meanings. How much meaning an author decides to put behind a name is completely up to them. Some authors regard names as being incredibly important not just as a descriptor but as a story mechanic. In Patrick Rothfuss’ NAME OF THE WIND, knowing the true name of something or someone will allow you to control it. In the movie A Fistful of Dollars, Clint Eastwood’s character is left nameless in order to add to the character’s mystery. In writing PROMISE OF BLOOD, I chose to give each of the characters a name that would tell the reader something about them. Field Marshal Tamas is a military man, “field marshal” being a title that usually refers to the highest rank in an army. Historically, a person who is raised to field marshal is a man of remarkable leadership and tactical abilities. They might even command armies from multiple countries as was the case with Arthur Wellesley, who commanded the Seventh Coalition against Napoleon during the Hundred Days. The background for this title gives readers a sense of the man when they are first introduced to Tamas. Inspector Adamat is an investigator. The title of “Inspector” often brings to mind murder mysteries, police dramas, or Sherlock Holmes, all of which help add to the overall feel the reader has for the character. His given name is also very close to the word “adamant.” I couldn’t say for sure whether that was subconscious or happy coincidence, but it helps give the character depth. Captain Taniel Two-shot requires more context in order for the reader to fully appreciate his name. As a captain in the Adran army he is a man of rank and skill. The suffix of “Two-shot” is explained through character interaction as Taniel’s remarkable ability to fire two bullets from his rifle as the same time, manipulating both with his powder mage abilities to make two kills. Something that has always bothered me in large epic fantasies was when two characters had similar sounding names and I nearly changed Taniel’s name on several occasions because it shares the same first two letters as Tamas’. I decided to keep both names how they were, however, because I felt their similar sound helped to strengthen the familial relationship (father and son) in the eyes of the reader. This was especially important because of their lack of surnames. Names, as you can see, are an important part of the narrative. They aid in immersing the reader within the world both as worldbuilding devices—in the case of Taniel Two-shot—and by bridging the gap between a writer’s fictional world and that of the real world. ***** Brian McClellan on Twitter, Facebook, and Web. The next guest on the blog is another debut author, Christian Schoon, on the 18. A new schedule of authors is not up as yet, but it should be ready soon. So keep checking back for updates! Advertisements |
Map of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway The Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway (popularly known as the Tenn-Tom) is a 234-mile (377 km) man-made waterway that extends from the Tennessee River to the junction of the Black Warrior-Tombigbee River system near Demopolis, Alabama, United States. The Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway links commercial navigation from the nation's midsection to the Gulf of Mexico. The major features of the waterway are ten locks and dams, a 175-foot-deep (53 m) cut between the Tombigbee River watershed and the Tennessee River watershed, and 234 miles (377 km) of navigation channels.[1] The ten locks are 9 by 110 by 600 feet (2.7 m × 33.5 m × 182.9 m), the same dimension as the locks on the Mississippi above Lock and Dam 26 at Alton, Illinois.[2][3] Under construction for twelve years by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway was completed in December 1984 at a total cost of nearly $2 billion.[4] The Tenn-Tom encompasses 17 public ports and terminals, 110,000 acres (450 km2) of land, and another 88,000 acres (360 km2) managed by state conservation agencies for wildlife habitat preservation and recreational use.[4] Early history and construction [ edit ] First proposed in the Colonial period, the idea for a commercial waterway link between the Tennessee and Tombigbee rivers did not receive serious attention until the advent of steamboat traffic in the early nineteenth century. As steamboat efficiency gains caused water transport costs to decline, in 1875 engineers surveyed a potential canal route for the first time.[5] However, they issued a negative report, emphasizing that prohibitive cost estimates kept the project from economic feasibility.[5] Enthusiasm for the project languished until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The development of the Tennessee River by the TVA, especially the construction of the Pickwick Lock and Dam in 1938, helped decrease the Tenn-Tom's potential economic costs and increase its potential benefits. Pickwick Lake's design included an embayment on its south shore at Yellow Creek, which would permit the design and construction of an entrance to a future southward waterway (leading to the Tombigbee River), should it be decided that such a waterway should be built in the future. Later, construction (under World War II emergency authorization) of Kentucky Dam at Gilbertsville, Kentucky, near the mouth of the Tennessee River's entrance into the Ohio River, would complete the "northern" half of the future waterway.[5] As early as 1941 the proposal was combined with other waterways, such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, with the aim of building broader political support.[6] Additionally, political candidates began to favor the construction of the waterway for political reasons, that is, in order to appeal to the voters in the South, rather than for economic reasons. In the early 1960s it was proposed that the canal could be created by use of atomic blasts.[7] As part of his "Southern Strategy" for reelection, President Nixon included $1 million in the Corps of Engineers' 1971 budget to start construction of the Tenn-Tom.[8] Funding shortages and legal challenges delayed construction until December 1972, but President Nixon's efforts nevertheless initiated official Tenn-Tom waterway construction.[8] The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began work on the project in 1972. During the construction process, land excavation reached about 175 feet (53 m) in depth and required the excavation of nearly 310 million cubic yards of soil (the equivalent of more than 100 million dump truck loads). The project was completed on December 12, 1984, nearly two years ahead of schedule.[9] Controversy [ edit ] The $2 billion in required funding for the Tenn-Tom waterway was repeatedly attacked by elected representatives and political organizations. Opponents asserted that the estimated economic benefits of the waterway by the Corps of Engineers were unsupportable based on projected traffic volume. The waterway's essential economic rationales—that it would generate a demand for industries to locate along its banks, and use its barge handling capacity—simply did not (as its critics correctly predicted) materialize, nor did the growth in traffic volume on the existing Missouri – Ohio – Mississippi waterway require a second parallel route (the Tenn-Tom), between Cairo, Illinois, and the Gulf of Mexico. Immediately after his election, President Jimmy Carter announced a plan to slash Tenn-Tom federal funding. By 1977, the Tenn-Tom was merely one of many such Corps of Engineers projects that had been initiated on the dubious rationale that they would somehow directly or indirectly return to the Treasury their cost(s) of construction. Carter, and the economic advisors recruited to his administration, objected not only to the "waste" of taxpayer dollars on pork-barrel projects; they strongly disapproved of the distortions in investment that such expenditures caused within the "real" economy.[8] However, after over 6,500 waterway supporters attended a public hearing held in Columbus, Mississippi, as part of Carter's review of the waterway, the President withdrew his opposition.[8] A series of lawsuits were filed by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad to halt construction of the waterway.[10] Railroad companies, who served as a major transport alternative and stood to potentially lose the most value from its creation, asserted that the waterway construction violated the National Environmental Policy Act.[10] Nevertheless, federal courts ruled in favor of the project.[10] An article published in the Tuscaloosa News on January 9, 2005, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the opening of the canal noted that it carried just 7 million tons of cargo in 2004,[2] only one-quarter of the 28 million tons proponents of the canal had projected for the canal's first year. The Mississippi, in contrast, carried 307 million tons of cargo in 2004. Proponents had predicted the canal would carry 99 million tons by 2035. Economic impact [ edit ] When completed, the Tenn-Tom waterway's total cost was $1.992 billion, including non-federal costs, which led some political and economic commentators to deride the Tenn-Tom waterway as "pork-barrel politics at its worst".[5] For the first few years after its creation these criticisms appeared valid. The Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway had opened in the midst of an economic recession in the barge business, which resulted in initially disappointingly low use of the waterway.[10] The 1988 drought, however, closed the Mississippi River and shifted traffic to the Tenn-Tom canal.[8] This coincided with an economic turnaround on the Tennessee-Tombigbee corridor, wherein trade tonnage and commercial investment increased steadily over several years. The two primary commodities shipped via the Tenn-Tom are coal and timber products, together comprising about 70 percent of total commercial shipping on the waterway.[11] The Tenn-Tom also provides access to over 34 million acres (140,000 km2) of commercial forests and approximately two-thirds of all recoverable coal reserves in the nation. Industries that utilize these natural resources have found the waterway to be their most cost-efficient mode of transportation.[11] Other popular Tenn-Tom trade products include grain, gravel, sand, and iron. According to a 2009 Troy University study, since 1996 the United States has realized a direct, indirect, and induced economic impact of nearly $43 billion due to the existence and usage of the Tenn-Tom Waterway, and it has directly created more than 29,000 jobs.[11] Without the waterway as a viable source of transportation, an average of 284,000 additional truckloads per year would be required to handle the materials currently being shipped.[11] Divide Cut [ edit ] Divide Cut seen from the Holcut Memorial site The Divide Cut ( ) is a 29 mi (47 km) canal that makes the connection to the Tennessee River. It connects Pickwick Lake on the Tennessee to Bay Springs Lake, at Mississippi Highway 30. The cut carries the waterway between the Tennessee River watershed, which eventually empties into the Ohio River, and the Tombigbee River watershed, which eventually empties into the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile. Pickwick Lake is a popular location for water sports such as waterskiing and wakeboarding. For construction of the Divide Cut, the entire town of Holcut, Mississippi, had to be removed and demolished. Today, the Holcut Memorial lies alongside the waterway on the previous site of the town. Locks and dams [ edit ] Map all coordinates using: OpenStreetMap Download coordinates as: KML · GPX The waterway is composed of ten locks (listed below from north to south along the waterway): Gallery [ edit ] The Divide Cut under construction in the early 1980s Amory Lock at Amory, Mississippi An Illinois Central Railroad (IC) bridge over the waterway at mile 424.8 Detailed map of the Divide Cut (Corps of Engineers) Amory Lock Notes [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ] |
A federal appeals court on Thursday struck another blow against the Trump administration's efforts to temporarily halt immigration from six majority-Muslim countries, upholding a nationwide injunction that blocks the travel ban in President Trump's second executive order on the issue. A majority of a full sitting of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that although President Trump had broad power to deny entry into the United States, his executive order "stands to cause irreparable harm to individuals across the nation." "The question for this Court, distilled to its essential form, is whether the Constitution ... remains 'a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace,'" Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote in the majority opinion. "And if so, whether it protects Plaintiffs’ right to challenge an Executive Order that in text speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination." Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement that the Justice Department will seek review of the Fourth Circuit's decision by the US Supreme Court. "The Department of Justice strongly disagrees with the decision of the divided court, which blocks the President’s efforts to strengthen this country’s national security," Sessions said. "As the dissenting judges explained, the executive order is a constitutional exercise of the President’s duty to protect our communities from terrorism. The President is not required to admit people from countries that sponsor or shelter terrorism, until he determines that they can be properly vetted and do not pose a security risk to the United States.” The ruling is the first appellate court ruling on the second executive order, which was signed March 6. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit also heard arguments earlier this month over a more broad injunction against the executive order out of Hawaii, but has yet to release its decision. A Ninth Circuit ruling in February that allowed an injunction against Trump's first attempt at a travel ban to stand paved the way for the second version. The second executive order would halt immigration from six countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen – for 90 days while the administration reviewed immigration policies. The Fourth Circuit held that the challengers were likely to succeed on their claims that the travel ban was in reality intended to be a Muslim ban and violated the Constitution's Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from favoring or disfavoring a particular religion. Gregory wrote that, despite the administration's arguments that the executive order on its face had nothing to do with religion, the plaintiffs presented enough evidence that the national security justification was a "pretext for its religious purpose." The judges rejected the Justice Department's arguments that the court shouldn't give weight to Trump's campaign statements in favor of a Muslim ban, quoting them at length. The court also cited post-inauguration statements by Trump and his advisors about the administration's two attempts at a travel ban — the second version was signed after the first one was repeatedly struck down by courts as likely unconstitutional — including Trump's remarks that the second version was a "watered down version of the first order." "These statements, taken together, provide direct, specific evidence of what motivated both EO-1 and EO-2: President Trump’s desire to exclude Muslims from the United States," Gregory wrote. "We need not probe anyone’s heart of hearts to discover the purpose of EO-2, for President Trump and his aides have explained it on numerous occasions and in no uncertain terms." Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants’ Rights Project, argued the case for the challengers. “President Trump’s Muslim ban violates the Constitution, as this decision strongly reaffirms. The Constitution’s prohibition on actions disfavoring or condemning any religion is a fundamental protection for all of us, and we can all be glad that the court today rejected the government’s request to set that principle aside," Jadwat said in a statement. The Fourth Circuit, which heard arguments on May 8, upheld in large part the injunction entered by a Maryland federal district court blocking the travel ban. US District Judge Theodore Chuang in April enjoined all of the federal officials and agencies sued, including President Trump individually, from enforcing the travel ban. The Fourth Circuit found that Chuang erred in including the president in his order, but otherwise upheld the entirety of the injunction. Ten of the thirteen judges that heard arguments in the case voted to uphold the injunction: Gregory and judges Diana Gribbon Motz, William Traxler Jr., Robert King, Barbara Milano Keenan, James Wynn Jr., Albert Diaz, Henry Floyd, Stephanie Thacker, and Pamela Harris. Wynn wrote a separate, concurring opinion that called the travel ban "invidious discrimination." "Invidious discrimination that is shrouded in layers of legality is no less an insult to our Constitution than naked invidious discrimination," Wynn wrote, drawing comparisons to two now widely-disavowed US Supreme Court decisions that upheld political actions that were used to justify slavery and Japanese internment during World War II: Dred Scott and Korematsu. Traxler didn't join the entirety of Gregory's majority opinion, instead writing a one-paragraph concurring opinion that only said that he joined in the decision to uphold the nationwide injunction. This could mean that he disagreed with Gregory's analysis, or only agreed in part. The other three judges — Judges Paul Niemeyer, Dennis Shedd, and G. Steven Agee — dissented, each writing their own opinions about their disagreements with the majority. Niemeyer wrote that the majority was wrong to look beyond the facially neutral text of the executive order. "In looking behind the face of the government’s action for facts to show the alleged bad faith, rather than looking for bad faith on the face of the executive action itself, the majority grants itself the power to conduct an extratextual search for evidence suggesting bad faith, which is exactly what three Supreme Court opinions have prohibited," he wrote. Niemeyer also warned that it was dangerous for courts to consider campaign statements in a case like this. Anticipating that the legal fight over the travel ban would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court, he added that the justices "surely will shudder at the majority's adoption of this new rule that has no limits or bounds." "Because of their nature, campaign statements are unbounded resources by which to find intent of various kinds. They are often short-hand for larger ideas; they are explained, modified, retracted, and amplified as they are repeated and as new circumstances and arguments arise. And they are often ambiguous. A court applying the majority’s new rule could thus have free reign to select whichever expression of a candidate’s developing ideas best supports its desired conclusion," he wrote. Shedd wrote in his dissenting opinion that the administration had presented legitimate national security concerns in adopting the executive order. "Regrettably, at the end of the day, the real losers in this case are the millions of individual Americans whose security is threatened on a daily basis by those who seek to do us harm," he wrote. Two judges recused from the case, J. Harvie Wilkinson III and Allyson Duncan. Wilkinson recused because his son-in-law is Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, who argued the case for the government. The reasons for Duncan's recusal are unknown. This is a developing news story. Please check back at BuzzFeed News for the latest. |
The professor aimed to show maths can solve life's problems Professor Dwight Barkley, of Warwick University, calculates there are three key factors that decide the timing of the wearisome question. Crucial in putting off the first prompt about the proximity of the destination are on-board activities for children. So no activities equals a question before leaving the driveway, he said. The equation for the time it takes for a child to ask the question is: one, plus the number of activities to do, divided by the number of children in the car squared. To get the final answer, that figure is then added to the time it took the family to get into the car and set off on their journey. "Mathematics can help answer many of life's questions," said Prof Barkley "This equation can be a fun way to think about the problem of keeping children entertained on a family car journey." |
New Delhi: Come 2017, Indian Railways is likely to raise fares in order to cough up sufficient resources for strengthening track and upgrading safety-related infrastructure. As per a PTI report, Railways is mulling increasing fares in a bid to raise resources after the Finance Ministry rejected its proposal of a special safety fund. According to the proposal, a safety cess will be levied to generate funds for strengthening track and upgrading signalling system and elimination of unmanned level crossings among other safety-related works to prevent mishaps. The report added that earlier Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu had written a letter to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley seeking Rs 1,19,183 crore to create the special Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh for undertaking various safety works. Since, the Finance Ministry has agreed to provide 25 percent of the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh and is said to have asked the Railways to raise 75 percent of resources on its own by raising fares, Railways is left with no option but to raise passenger fares. “Though the Railway Minister is not in favour of raising fares at this juncture when passenger bookings are falling and fares of AC-2 and AC-1 are already on higher side, the reluctance of Finance Ministry to provide a bail-out package has left the minister with no option,” PTI quoted a source. According to the plan, the cess on Sleeper, Second Class and AC-3 will be higher while it will be marginal for AC-2 and AC-1. A final decision on raising fares is yet to be taken as modalities are still being worked out, added the news wire. |
With increased investment activity in bitcoin (btc) and cryptocurrency, it’s important to consider any tax consequences that may arise. Outlined below are the tax consequences for probably the most common situation we see; btc purchased for long term growth. If you acquire btc for the purpose of disposal, IRD default position is that any gain or loss will be taxable income. This is their default starting position because btc is normally acquire for the dominant purpose of disposal. Unlike alternative investments (such as shares or bonds, or other personal property), btc is a non-income producing asset and does not provide any benefit when being held . Therefore, the nature of btc strongly indicates that it was acquired for the dominant purpose of ultimately disposing of it; otherwise why would you buy it? There may be some circumstances where IRD may accept that btc has was acquired for purposes other than eventual disposal. For example, btc is acquired for the dominant purpose of building up a diversified portfolio of property that the person will not necessarily realise, or as a long-term investment that the personal will not necessarily realise. In the situation where btc is not acquired for the purpose of ultimate disposal it would need to be supported by clear and completing evidence. In other situations of acquiring non-income producing assets (such as gold), IRD have stated that merely describing the property or the reason it was acquired will not answer the question of whether the was a dominant purpose of disposal. For example, describing btc as being acquired for a long-term investment, a hedge against inflation, for portfolio diversification, or as a store of value outside the monetary system is not sufficient to negate a dominant purpose of disposal. The person’s underlying motive should not be confused with their purpose. When btc is acquired for the purpose of disposal is sold, a deduction for the cost of the btc is allowed, subject to normal rules. Just as any increase in value will mean that any profits will be taxed, if btc has decreased in value and is sold for less than its cost, this will result in a deductible loss. Other expenditure, such as interest on money borrowed to purchase the btc, may also be deductible. For example, John borrows $20,000 at 5% pa to buy btc. John sells the btc 1 year later for $50,000. Sale price $50,000 Less: Cost price $20,000 Interest paid $1,000 Equals: Taxable income $29,000 There are also GST implications and slight variations of the above for those mining btc. Also be aware of exchanging goods and services for btc (a barter transaction at present). If these situations apply, feel free to give Tim a call or email: 02041224440 or tim@agbizaccountants.co.nz Watch this space as we see the IRD release more information in early 2018. There is also some talk that IRD may follow Australia’s lead that btc be classified as ‘money’ which would change the current GST treatment. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and should not be relied on for tax, legal or accounting advice. You should consult your own tax, legal and accounting advisors before engaging in any transaction. |
A crowdfunding page raising money for lawsuits filed on behalf of Louisiana police against the Black Lives Matter group has been removed because it does ‘not promote harmony.’ The page was set up by a personal injury lawyer, Donna Grodner, who wanted to raise $20,000 in funds for suits she has filed against the activist movement on behalf of Baton Rouge police officers. The Black Lives Matter movement began in 2012 in response to teenager Trayvon Martin’s killing by George Zimmerman. It calls for an end to racism and the killing of black people by police. Grodner has filed two suits against the leaders of the group, including Deray Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie on behalf of Louisiana police. Crowdfunding site, YouCaring, removed the campaign from its site on Sunday, saying it’s not the right platform for such a cause. “In alignment with our mission, we removed this fundraiser because it was not within our community guidelines around promoting harmony,” Marketing Officer Maly Ly told NewsHour Weekend, as cited by Yahoo. “We are not the right platform to air grievances, or engage in contentious disputes or controversial public opinion.” Grodner created a page on another crowdfunding site, GoFundMe, after being removed from YouCaring. First lawsuit – debris injury One of the suits filed by Grodner accuses BLM of being responsible for an unnamed officer reportedly getting hit by debris at a July 9 protest, which took place after the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling and motorist Philando Castile a day later in Minnesota. A “rock-like substance” hit the officer in the face, causing him to lose his teeth, the Seattle Times reports. The suit doesn’t accuse Mckesson of throwing anything, but of having “incited violence” on behalf of BLM. The suit was filed in November and in March, a judge said the question was “whether under Louisiana law, Black Lives Matter is capable of suing and being sued,” and is yet to make that decision. A lawsuit was filed on Sunday against Baton Rouge and Louisiana police by 13 protesters and two journalists arrested during the same Baton Rouge protests. Second suit – Gavin Long shooting The second suit, filed Friday in Baton Rouge, accuses the movement of being responsible for an attack on police by gunman Gavin Long on July 17, 2016. Two police officers and a sheriff died, and two deputies and an officer were injured in the attack. BLM members Mckesson, Elzie, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi are named in the suit, which alleges the “violence was caused or contributed to by the leaders of and by “BLACK LIVES MATTER” a militant anti-police national organization.” The suit, filed by one of the officers injured in the attack, seeks at least $75,000 in damages and claims BLM are to blame for the man’s injuries as it “incited violence against police,” and “did nothing to dissuade the ongoing violence and injury to police.” The suit accuses the group of having “justified the violence as necessary to the movement and war.” "By embracing and supporting violence in protest that could have been conducted peacefully, BLM declared a virtual war on police," it says. Long, a recently discharged Marine, left a three-page note saying he wanted to target police officers because of the justice system’s failure to hold “bad” cops accountable for their actions, and to “create substantial change within America’s police force and judicial system.” Long had not attended any BLM protests, an investigative report found, the Washington Post reports. |
Can management of soil biodiversity enhance positive effects along the food processing chain in ways that are currently not predicted by parameters measured at harvest? Do the effects of soil biodiversity on postharvest processes increase with the intimacy of the association with the crop (e.g., endophytes vs food web effects)? Are postharvest effects of soil biodiversity stronger for plant parts that are in direct contact with soil? Are postharvest effects of soil biodiversity attenuated with length of production chain, degree of processing, and/or time to consumption? Can emerging technologies in food science (e.g., mild processing technologies including pulsed electric fields, ultrasound, and pulsed light) serve to preserve any positive effects of soil biodiversity on food? Can reduced microbial loads (organisms that reduce food quality) due to beneficial soil biodiversity effects reduce the necessity of harsher food processing, thus reducing costs? Do soil biodiversity consequences for reduction of food waste (e.g., through better storage properties) exceed the effects on yield in terms of how much food reaches the consumer per unit area of agricultural field? What is the relative importance of soil biodiversity compared with other soil and management factors for the quantity and quality of food reaching the consumer? |
On October 18, a Saarland court passed down unusually mild sentences to three so-called “darknet dealers.” The men had distributed mushrooms, LSD, heroin, and amphetamine for several months before their arrest, the police said. After authorities intercepted packages addressed to one of the three dealers, they raided the suspect’s apartment and struck gold: the feathers had maintained whiteboards with active deals, customer names, and payment statuses. Although the board contributed nothing to the arrest of all three dealers, their “carefully managed business” directly impacted the case and subsequent sentencing. The incriminating whiteboards led to quick confessions from the men, given the combined weight of the evidence collected by law enforcement. The case moved from arrest to sentencing in a matter of weeks. In the time between hearings, authorities released very little information. An ongoing investigation that first reached the press in August, along with the inherent investigation into the trio’s customers more than likely impacted the case’s sensitivity. In August, elsewhere in Germany, police had uncovered a darknet drug trafficking group and numerous local customers. The investigation, an official spokesperson announced, had really taken off after German police intercepted a package of drugs from the darknet earlier that month. At the time of the announcement, law enforcement had already learned that the drug trafficking group consisted of three suspects. Kriminalpolizei in a nearby city had previously found that a darknet dealer lived—or sold, at least—from somewhere within the region. But identification of the men did not occur until after police in Saarland intercepted a package headed towards Wadgassen. One of the defendants, a 31-year-old named Patrik C., had ordered the package. And then several more. In total, the intercepted drugs weighed several kilograms, but officials never released a precise figure. Police then raided an apartment in Wadgassen that belonged to all three suspects. There, they found the whiteboards (and other drug-related evidence, including drugs). The oldest defendant, Patrik C., controlled and managed the orders. The other two, 25-year-old Philip B. and 23-year-old Yannik K. played unspecified roles in the conspiracy. Like in the Shiny Flakes case, the records identified buyers and incriminated the dealers. In addition to the nicknames of buyers, the men had written down information that directly linked some customers. This includes real names and addresses. In the final hearing, the presiding judge sentenced Patrik C. and Philip B. to two years probation and fined them both $6,800. Yannik K. received a softer punishment than his older partners: 19 months on probation and a $3,500 fine. |
An astonishing selection of Alan Moore‘s original scripts and sketches for the landmark graphic novel, with copious annotations, commentary, and illustrations by Eddie Campbell. Here for the first time are a set of pages, including some of Moore’s greatest writing, which have never been seen by anyone except his collaborator. Joining them are Campbell’s first-hand accounts of the project’s decade-long development, complete with photos, anecdotes, disagreements, and wry confessions. Arranged in narrative order, these perspectives form a fascinating mosaic, an opportunity to read FROM HELL with fresh eyes, and a tour inside the minds of two giants of their field. …but then they would, wouldn’t they? To get the real story, I wrote to Eddie Campbell, who did all the actual heavy lifting on this book, to see what he had to say about it. Along the way we discussed Bryan Talbot, Steve Moore’s middle name, and whether or not Hayley Campbell turned out normal… Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Tell me about The From Hell Companion. Eddie Campbell: The From Hell Companion is a selection of extra material and background stuff all relating to From Hell the book. It’s arranged in such a way that it becomes a retelling of the story from a bunch of new angles, including the personal and publishing histories. I mean to say that I’ve used excerpts from Alan’s scripts and thumbnail sketches, but I haven’t just dumped them in there in separate sections. I’ve woven it all together in narrative sequence, with technical commentaries, short essays and speculations, as well as anecdotes, photos and previously unseen artwork of mine. Plenty of digressions. The rarest thing I have is a 15,000 word synopsis that Alan wrote describing the second half of the book for the benefit of the movie production company. They bought the rights when we were only up to chapter 8, you see. The attraction of this synopsis is that it has a few sequences that play out differently from the finished book that everybody is familiar with. Again, I’ve worked these in where they belong narratively. PÓM: What prompted you to do this now? EC: Alan and I had planned to do something for quite some time, usually intending for it to coincide with the fifteenth or twentieth anniversary of starting or finishing From Hell. But Alan was never quite free enough from other absorbing subjects and we kept missing the boat with it. I had done a public talk in 2011 for which, in need of a subject, I had pulled out an old From Hell script anecdote. This went over so well that I thought I could put the whole book together myself, using all the materials available, both Alan’s and mine, but without having to wait for anyone. Once motivated, it came together very quickly as though it had always been waiting to happen, which of course it had. PÓM: The thing with a book like The From Hell Companion, is it gives us a look at the process – I mean, people who say things like ‘I’ve read everything that Alan Moore has written’ couldn’t be more wrong, because what he wrote was the script, which they rarely get to see. What they’ve actually read is his script as processed through an artist – you in this case – so the opportunity to get a look at some of the process of the conversion of Alan’s raw script into the finished product is always an interesting and illuminating one. EC: Yes, this is a book about processes. I bring the reader in on a couple of problems that have to be solved and show possible solutions as we go along. From Hell is like a huge big machine with a nice clean orderly front panel. And when you unscrew it and take that off, beneath it you see a complex of wires and cogs and moving parts caked with lubricant. That’s the Companion. After only seeing the front panel for years, this new version of the machine makes the whole thing interesting in ways you never thought of before. : I’ve been having a quick look through the pdf you sent me, and there are a few things that I’m particularly taken with. There’s the research photos of London, withand(no relation), for a start. And there’s a few places where you compare and contrast your original illustrations with scenes from the film. There’s a sort of common theme here, of things going from one medium to another. EC: (No relation) has become Steve’s official name, have you noticed that? He should have it made permanent by deed poll. Yes, from one medium to another. I also do a lot of putting Alan’s thumbnail sketches next to the finished page, both shown at approximately the same size. Alan made those all through the years, in his notebooks, not just for From Hell, for all his works, but the artist never got to see them. So there were some real revelations there for me when I got hold of them. Particularly in regard to how close they sometimes are to the finished page, and then there are some that I changed for one reason or other, and I tell the reader what the reasoning was for the changes. I show a lot of the thinking that went on behind the book, and draw the reader into the arguments between one thing and another. From Hell would be complicated enough just at the forensic level, but there are all these additional aesthetic complications. I make extra narrative layers out of it, new sub-plots. Like, for instance, how to you draw a character and at the same time say maybe she wasn’t there. The graphics of theory and guesswork is one of the running themes. PÓM: I’m also fascinated by the piece with the illustrations by your daughter Hayley when she was seven years old, showing herself being killed in all sorts of ways. I mean, I met her recently, and she seems quite normal… EC: That was a late addition. I thought I needed to shine a light of joy into the grimness of it all, so we ask, how did all of this look from a child’s perspective. Around about chapter six I became aware that my daughter was sitting in the room drawing her own version of the HORRORS. I don’t mean she was drawing From Hell. Her book was much more original than that. She was drawing a compendium of all the possible ways of dying. She drew over thirty of these before she ran out of steam. She was only seven after all, and had little experience of dying. But yeah, she seems quite normal. She must have got it all out of her system. PÓM: I was talking to her about it just now, and she says she’d like to get it published. I know she’s working on a book about Neil Gaiman, at the moment [to be published by Ilex Press in March 2014]. Have you seen any of that? EC: I think that first book of hers, The Ripper File as she titled it, was the place where she found herself as an author. We all have that first one, the first time we genuinely expressed something about the actual contents of our head instead of doing the thing we had been ordered or expected to do, like our homework. And Hayley has now arrived at the stage where she has written an official book, one for a publisher I mean, as opposed to one for the sheer urgent joy of making it, and I think she’s at the stage where she has to argue with editors who want to turn it back into that homework she avoided. The most difficult part of writing a book is that phase where you have to argue with the editor who wants a somewhat different book from the one you delivered. I still get that myself, even with The From Hell Companion, believe it or not. PÓM: Are we ever likely to see the full scripts of From Hell published in book form, do you think? I’d love to see that series of them that Steve Bissette‘s SpiderBaby Grafix were doing finished. EC: Who knows? But we’re missing a couple of chapters. I got around that in the Companion by filling in those spots with other stuff. I think also it would require a very serious scholarly interest to enable a person to read all of it like that. Inevitably a great deal of the script is essentially tending to the business of getting everything in the right place. I’ve selected the more exciting pieces of pure writing, and some of it really is very very good. For anybody interested in Alan’s work, there will be some great things in the book, most of it never seen before. And about the same amount again of my own theoretical stuff too. So there is a great deal here for anybody interested in the theory of what makes comics work. All those ‘literaries’ might learn a thing or two. PÓM: Did you ever have any theories of your own about Jack the Ripper, about who it might have been, either before or after doing the book? EC: My theory is that we cannot stand the idea that the universe is random, so we have invented god and conspiracy theories. We would prefer to believe that evil people are in control than that nobody is in control. PÓM: You were recently writing – whilst being rude about that lovely Bryan Talbot – about your Basic Rules of Comprehension for comics. EC: I love making rules, just to see people’s reactions. Artists all want to be rule-breaking punks. So if I say ‘shave after your shower because then your face will have been already softened by the hot water’, they say ‘don’t tell me what to do, I’m going to do it the other way round, I’ll shave before my shower so that the spray washes away all the foam and shavings’. Or if I say ‘don’t get your socks wet or you’ll get feet cramps in your later years’ they’ll say ‘fuck you Dad, I’m going to stand in the puddles and see if you like it, yeah fuck you’. I picked on Bryan because now that he’s got that honorary doctorate he’ll definitely take umbrage at me thinking I know more than he does. ‘Eat shit Campbell!’ he’ll shout. PÓM: Are these actually collected together anywhere? EC: No. In fact I threw them out after the first time I wrote them. And then when I needed something to put on my blog I tried to remember them, except I gave the ones I could recall the wrong numbers, which I only know because my rough notes for the original set turned up later. But really, I think comics have become quite unreadable. The amount of effort required to get through one far outweighs the nutritional benefit. They are like celery in this respect. All those young turks should get more orderly in their storytelling. Then they’ll say, maybe them rules do make sense, maybe we should have been wearing the socks inside the shoes after all. Anyway, there’s a lot of those technical arguments in the Companion, about why it was done one way instead of another. Stuff about the complicated organizational strategies you need to think about in doing long-form comics. PÓM: Is there any news on when we should expect to see the two volumes of Bacchus? EC: They keep getting delayed. The Spanish edition will be out before the English language one. PÓM: And there’s that book you published electronically, Dapper John. Are we ever going to see a physical edition of that? EC: It’s an ebook [PÓM edits to add: Actually an iPad/iPhone App] because Russell Willis wanted to do it and nobody else was asking. I imagine everything will be ebooks eventually. And then print books will make an unexplainable comeback, like we are now seeing with vinyl. PÓM: Is there anything else I should be asking you about? And forthcoming books I don’t know about, films, TV series, anything at all? EC: There’s the book I’ve done with Neil Gaiman titled The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountain. That’s another one that keeps getting delayed. It’s been ready to print for a year now. PÓM: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Eddie. EC: Thank you, Porridge. have I pronounced that right? You’re doing some fine work around the edges of our medium. Long may you continue! …so now you know. Like this: Like Loading... |
Abstract We use new data on the pre- and postmigration wages of immigrants to the United States to measure wage gains at migration. The average immigrant from a middle-income or poor country increases their wage by a factor of two to three upon migration. This wage gain is small relative to the underlying gap in GDP per worker. In a development accounting framework, this finding implies that switching countries accounts for 40% of cross-country income differences, while human capital accounts for 60%. Wage gains decline with education, consistent with imperfect substitution between skill types. We augment our analysis to allow for this possibility and bound the human capital share in development accounting to between one-half and two-thirds. We also provide results on the importance of premigration sector of employment, assimilation, and skill transfer. I. Introduction One of the central challenges for economists is to explain the large differences in gross domestic product (GDP) per worker across countries. Development accounting provides a useful first step toward this goal. It measures the relative contribution of physical capital, human capital, and total factor productivity (TFP) in accounting for cross-country income differences. These accounting results can help highlight the types of theories or mechanisms most likely to explain cross-country income differences. For example, a consensus in the literature that physical capital accounts for a small fraction of income differences has led researchers to deemphasize theories that assign a prominent role to variation in physical capital per worker.1 The main unsettled question in this literature is the relative importance of TFP versus human capital in accounting for cross-country income differences. The literature has tried a number of approaches to measuring human capital and reached little consensus on the answer. Since TFP is measured as a residual explanatory factor, wide variation in measured human capital stocks implies wide variation in measured TFP and hence substantial disagreement about the relative contribution of the two. For example, the literature has found that human capital accounts for anywhere from one-fifth to four-fifths of cross-country income differences, with TFP in turn accounting for anywhere from three-fifths to none.2 Our contribution to this debate is to provide new evidence drawing on the experiences of immigrants to the United States. Intuitively, immigrants provide valuable information because they enter the United States with the human capital they acquired in their birth country, but not their birth country’s physical capital or TFP. Hence, their labor market performance in the United States conveys information about their human capital separated from the other two country-specific factors. On the other hand, working with immigrants presents two well-known challenges. First, immigrants are selected: their human capital is not the same as the human capital of a randomly chosen person in their birth country. Second, their labor market performance may not accurately reflect their human capital if skills transfer imperfectly across countries.3 We address these challenges by bringing to bear new data on the pre- and postmigration labor market experiences of immigrants. Our main data source is the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), a sample of adult immigrants granted lawful permanent residence in the United States in 2003 (colloquially, green card recipients) (Jasso et al. 2007). We augment the NIS by using two additional data sources—the Mexican Migration Project and the Latin American Migration Project (jointly, the Migration Projects, or MPs), which collect similar information from immigrants who are not necessarily lawful permanent residents, who may have entered the United States illegally, and who are much less selected on observed characteristics.4 We use these data in three ways. First, we construct a measure of the importance of human capital for development accounting based on immigrants’ wage gains at migration. Second, we address the challenge of selection by comparing the premigration characteristics of immigrants to nonmigrants. Third, we address the challenge of skill transferability by comparing the pre- to postmigration occupations of immigrants. We start by revisiting the standard development accounting framework, focusing on the assumptions necessary to draw aggregate implications from the labor market experiences of immigrants. The most direct measure of the importance of physical capital and TFP is the wage gain at migration relative to the difference in GDP per worker. Intuitively, an immigrant has the same human capital but different physical capital and TFP before and after migrating. The wage gain at migration is thus an index of the relative importance of these country-specific factors, while the residual can be attributed to gaps in human capital per worker. In addition to simplicity, this measure also has the useful feature that it controls for selection in a straightforward manner by studying the wages of the exact same worker in two different countries. Our empirical work thus relies heavily on a comparison of pre- to postmigration wages. The NIS offers carefully constructed and detailed wage data. It surveyed immigrants about up to two premigration jobs and up to three postmigration jobs. It also allowed for a great deal of flexibility in how workers report their earnings. They could report their premigration earnings from working in any country, denominated in any currency, from any reference year, at whatever pay frequency they preferred. We discuss in detail how we adjust these data for exchange rate, purchasing power parity (PPP), and differences in reporting year to arrive at estimates of their premigration and postmigration hourly wages, both denominated in real PPP-adjusted U.S. dollars. We also provide numerous robustness checks to address possible confounding issues such as episodes of inflation or currency revaluation. We use these data to construct the wage change at migration relative to the gap in PPP GDP per worker. We focus on immigrants from poor countries, with GDP per worker less than one-quarter of the U.S. level. The average wage gain at migration is 38% of the total gap in GDP per worker, implying that 38% of cross-country income differences are accounted for by physical capital and TFP, with the remaining 62% accounted for by human capital. Jones (2014) emphasizes that development accounting results are sensitive to allowing for imperfect substitution between unskilled and skilled labor. We show that the wage gain at migration is larger for less educated immigrants. This finding is evidence of imperfect substitution: unskilled immigrants find their skills to be relatively scarcer in the U.S. labor market and hence experience larger wage gains compared to skilled immigrants. Our benchmark results bound the role of human capital in development accounting with imperfect substitutes; the plausible range is one-half to two-thirds. Under additional assumptions, we can provide a point estimate of the human capital share under imperfect substitutes, which we find to be 60%. Our findings attribute a much higher share to human capital than earlier papers in the literature that used immigrant earnings (Hendricks 2002; Schoellman 2012). These earlier papers lacked data on premigration wages and so drew inferences based on a comparison of the postmigration wages of immigrants from poor and rich countries. The underlying assumption was that immigrants from poor countries and rich countries are similarly selected. Our data allow us to control for selection directly. We can also go a step further and back out the implied degree of selection by comparing the premigration characteristics of immigrants to those of nonmigrants. We find that immigrants are highly selected on characteristics such as education or wages, and that immigrants from poor countries are much more selected on these characteristics than immigrants from rich countries. The correlation between selection and birth country development biased the inferences in the existing literature. The data also allow us to measure the transferability of immigrants’ skills. To investigate this issue, we compare the premigration and postmigration occupations of immigrants. Most immigrants switch occupations upon migration. Furthermore, most immigrants experience occupational downgrading, meaning that their postmigration occupation is lower paying than their premigration occupation, as judged by the mean wage of natives in those occupations. To the extent that this occupational downgrading represents imperfect skill transfer, it implies that we may be understating postmigration wages and the wage gains at migration, which would lead us to understate the role of country and overstate the role of human capital. We investigate several ways to adjust for occupational downgrading and find that doing so lowers the human capital share to roughly one-half. In addition to the work mentioned above, our article is also closely related to two literatures that use retrospective or panel data to investigate wage gains. The first literature specifically studies the wage gains for international immigrants, as we do, but typically for a very particular set of migrants (from just one country to another, or employed at a single firm). A particularly interesting set of these papers studies wage gains in special cases in which immigration slots are granted by lottery, allowing the authors to disentangle selection on gains to migration (see Gibson and McKenzie 2012; Clemens 2013; and especially the short-run and long-run gains in McKenzie, Stillman, and Gibson 2010 and Gibson et al. forthcoming). It is comforting that these papers typically find wage gains that are in line with ours (when compared to the size of the GDP per worker gap).5 The main difference from our work is that we have a broader sample (immigrants from many countries to the United States), and that we are focused on the aggregate implications for development accounting. In this sense we are closer to Jasso, Rosenzweig, and Smith (2002) and Rosenzweig (2010), who also use the NIS data and the pre- and postmigration experiences of immigrants but instead use this information to think about relative prices of different skills and factor price equalization. The second literature looks at the wage gains of workers who switch sectors or regions in a country and relates them to sectoral or regional productivity gaps (Alvarez 2017; Hicks et al. 2017). The rest of the article proceeds as follows. Section II introduces the development accounting framework and the mapping from our micro evidence on immigrants to aggregate cross-country income differences. Section III discusses the data and how we construct comparable pre- and postmigration hourly wages. Section IV provides the main results. Section V quantifies the importance of selection and Section VI the importance of skill transferability. Section VII concludes. II. Development Accounting Framework We begin by outlining the simplest development accounting framework, following the literature closely (see Caselli 2005 or Hsieh and Klenow 2010 for recent overviews). Our focus is on clarifying the assumptions needed to draw aggregate inferences from evidence on the wage gains at immigration. \begin{eqnarray*} Y_c = K_c^{\alpha }(A_cH_c)^{1-\alpha }, \end{eqnarray*} c is country c’s PPP-adjusted GDP, K c is its physical capital stock, A c is its total factor productivity, and H c ≡ h c L c is the total labor input, which in turn can be decomposed into human capital per worker h c and the number of workers L c . The aggregate production function is standard: where Yis country c’s PPP-adjusted GDP, Kis its physical capital stock, Ais its total factor productivity, and H≡ his the total labor input, which in turn can be decomposed into human capital per worker hand the number of workers L \begin{eqnarray} y_c &= \left(\frac{K_c}{Y_c}\right)^\frac{\alpha }{1-\alpha } A_c h_c, \end{eqnarray} (1) c denotes PPP GDP per worker. The goal of development accounting is to decompose the large cross-country differences in y into three proximate sources, given on the right-hand side: capital-output ratios, TFP, and average human capital. In this article we focus primarily on distinguishing the share of human capital versus the other two factors jointly, so we define |$z_c \equiv \left(\frac{K_c}{Y_c}\right)^\frac{\alpha }{1-\alpha } A_c$| . We call this term the country component, because it is what changes when immigrants move to a new country, while their human capital remains the same. Following Klenow and Rodríguez-Clare (1997) , we rewrite the production function in per worker terms: where ydenotes PPP GDP per worker. The goal of development accounting is to decompose the large cross-country differences in y into three proximate sources, given on the right-hand side: capital-output ratios, TFP, and average human capital. In this article we focus primarily on distinguishing the share of human capital versus the other two factors jointly, so we define. We call this term the country component, because it is what changes when immigrants move to a new country, while their human capital remains the same. \begin{eqnarray} 1 &= & \displaystyle \frac{\log (z_c) - \log (z_{c^{\prime }})}{\log (y_c) - \log (y_{c^{\prime }})} + \frac{\log (h_c)-\log (h_{c^{\prime }})}{\log (y_c)-\log (y_{c^{\prime }})} onumber \\ &\equiv & \displaystyle \text{share}_{\text{country}} + \text{share}_{\text{human capital}}. \end{eqnarray} (2) We conduct our accounting exercises in log-levels. Doing so produces results that are additive and order-invariant. Our focus is on separating the relative contribution of human capital from the other two terms in accounting for the difference in PPP GDP per worker between c and c΄: II.A. Wage Gains of Immigrants and Development Accounting Implications c of human capital at the prevailing wage per unit of human capital ω c to maximize profits: \begin{eqnarray*} \max _{H_c} K_c^{\alpha }\left(A_cH_c\right)^{1-\alpha } - \omega _cH_c. \end{eqnarray*} c = (1 − α)z c , where z c is defined as in the previous subsection. We use the wages of immigrants to inform us about the role of country and human capital for development accounting. Our approach builds on the insights of Bils and Klenow (2000) , who showed that wages are informative about human capital under two assumptions. First, workers of different types are assumed to be perfect substitutes. In this case, workers may provide varying quantities of human capital, but the total labor supply is simply the total human capital of all workers. We relax this assumption in Section II.B . Second, labor markets are assumed to be perfectly competitive, so that workers are paid their marginal product. Given these assumptions, the representative firm hires a total quantity Hof human capital at the prevailing wage per unit of human capital ωto maximize profits: The first-order condition of the firm implies that the wage per unit of human capital is ω= (1 − α)z, where zis defined as in the previous subsection. i,c , is then the product of the wage per unit of human capital and the amount of human capital the worker possesses: \begin{eqnarray} \log (w_{i,c}) &= \log \left[ (1-\alpha )z_c\right] + \log (h_i). \end{eqnarray} (3) The observed hourly wage of worker i in country c, w, is then the product of the wage per unit of human capital and the amount of human capital the worker possesses: \begin{eqnarray} \frac{\log (w_{i,U.S.}) - \log (w_{i,c})}{\log (y_{U.S.}) - \log (y_c)} = \frac{\log (z_{U.S.}) - \log (z_c)}{\log (y_{U.S.}) - \log (y_c)} = \text{share}_{\text{country}}. \end{eqnarray} (4) human capital ≡ 1 − share country . Intuitively, a worker who migrates keeps the same human capital but switches physical capital and TFP levels. We study how much this changes the worker’s wages relative to the total gap in GDP per worker. If the change in wages were as large as the gap in GDP per worker, then we would conclude that country accounts for all of the cross-country income differences, with no role for human capital. If there were no change in wages, then we would conclude that human capital accounts for all of the cross-country income differences, with no role for country. Our goal is to calculate where we stand between these two polar cases. Given that we have data on both pre- and postmigration wages of immigrants, we can construct the log-wage gain to migration. If labor markets are competitive in both countries, then we can divide the log-wage gain at migration by the log-GDP per worker difference between U.S. and c to measure the share of cross-country income differences accounted for by the country component: We construct share≡ 1 − share. Intuitively, a worker who migrates keeps the same human capital but switches physical capital and TFP levels. We study how much this changes the worker’s wages relative to the total gap in GDP per worker. If the change in wages were as large as the gap in GDP per worker, then we would conclude that country accounts for all of the cross-country income differences, with no role for human capital. If there were no change in wages, then we would conclude that human capital accounts for all of the cross-country income differences, with no role for country. Our goal is to calculate where we stand between these two polar cases. Note that this statistic controls for the usual selection concern, namely that immigrants may be more talented or harder working than nonmigrants, because it uses wage observations from the same worker in two countries. In Section V we quantify the extent of selection by comparing the premigration wages of immigrants to the wages of nonmigrants. If immigrants were instead selected on the gains to migration, as in McKenzie, Stillman, and Gibson (2010), then our accounting metric would actually understate the share of human capital in development accounting. II.B. Development Accounting with Imperfect Substitution \begin{eqnarray*} H_c = \left(\theta _{u}H_{u,c}^{\frac{\sigma -1}{\sigma }} + \theta _sH_{s,c}^{\frac{\sigma -1}{\sigma }}\right)^{\frac{\sigma }{\sigma -1}}, \end{eqnarray*} u,c and H s,c are the quantity of unskilled and skilled labor in country c, which are combined with weights θ u and θ s and an elasticity of substitution σ. We also consider a framework with imperfect substitution between unskilled and skilled labor, motivated by the work of Jones (2014) . In this case, the human capital aggregator is given by where Hand Hare the quantity of unskilled and skilled labor in country c, which are combined with weights θand θand an elasticity of substitution σ. \begin{eqnarray} \log (w_{j,U.S.}) &-& \log (w_{j,c}) = \log (z_{U.S.})-\log (z_c) onumber\\ && +\, \frac{1}{\sigma } \left[ \log \left(\frac{H_{U.S.}}{H_{j,U.S.}}\right) - \log \left(\frac{H_{c}}{H_{j,c}}\right) \right]. \end{eqnarray} (5) U.S. ) − log (z c ) because the United States is abundant in skilled labor, which pushes down the relative price of skilled labor (given the usual restriction σ > 0). By similar logic, unskilled immigrants’ wage gains will be larger than log (z U.S. ) − log (z c ). We continue to maintain the assumption that labor markets in both countries are competitive and workers are paid their marginal product. In this case, the wage gain at migration of any worker who provides type j ∈ {u, s} labor is As with the perfect substitutes case, the wage gain depends on the change in z. In the imperfect substitutes case there is a second term that captures the change in the relative price of type j labor, which in turn depends on the change in the relative supply of type j labor. Skilled immigrants’ wage gains will be smaller than log (z) − log (z) because the United States is abundant in skilled labor, which pushes down the relative price of skilled labor (given the usual restriction σ > 0). By similar logic, unskilled immigrants’ wage gains will be larger than log (z) − log (z). \begin{eqnarray} 1&-& \frac{\log (w_{u,U.S.}) - \log (w_{u,c})}{\log (y_{U.S.}) - \log (y_c)} \le \text{share}_{\text{human capital}} onumber\\ \le 1&-& \frac{\log (w_{s,U.S.}) - \log (w_{s,c})}{\log (y_{U.S.}) - \log (y_c)} . \end{eqnarray} (6) c . It relies only on exploiting the large differences in the relative supplies of unskilled and skilled labor documented in Equation (5) can be interpreted as a simple test for imperfect substitution between skill types: if skilled and unskilled workers are imperfect substitutes, then unskilled workers should have larger wage gains at migration. We implement this test below and find support for imperfect substitution. In this case it also suggests a method to bound the importance of country effects in development accounting. Wage gains of unskilled workers overstate the importance of country-specific factors, because their wage gains capture in part the fact that unskilled labor is relatively scarce in the United States. Thus, their wage gains provide an upper bound on the role of country and a lower bound on the role of human capital. By a similar logic, the wage gains of skilled workers provide a lower bound on the role of country and an upper bound on the role of human capital, which allows us to bound the contribution of human capital in development accounting as This bounding approach sidesteps a number of challenges in specifying H. It relies only on exploiting the large differences in the relative supplies of unskilled and skilled labor documented in Barro and Lee (2013) . Now that we have outlined our approach, it is time to turn to the data. III. Data Our main data source is the NIS, a representative sample of adult immigrants granted lawful permanent residence in the United States (colloquially, green card recipients) between May and November 2003, drawn from government administrative records (Jasso et al. 2005, 2007). It includes both newly arrived immigrants granted lawful permanent residency from abroad and immigrants who adjusted to lawful permanent residency after previously entering the United States through other means. The survey consists of two rounds: round 1 was conducted in 2003–2004, shortly after the immigrants adjusted status. A follow-up round 2 was conducted in 2007–2009. The Online Appendix contains details on this and other data sources used in this article, including sample restrictions, sample sizes, and so on. The NIS includes four main types of information that we exploit. First, it surveys respondents about the usual set of demographic characteristics such as age and education, including detailed questions on where immigrants acquired their education. Second, it contains administrative data on the type of visa they used to enter the United States. Third, it surveys them about their labor market experiences in the United States. In round 1 they were asked about their first job after migration and their current (year 2003–2004) job. In round 2 they were again asked about their current (year 2007–2009) job. Fourth, it surveys them about their experiences before entering the United States, particularly their labor market experiences. Immigrants were asked in round 1 about up to two jobs before entry, their first (after age 16) and last (if different from the first). For all jobs, we know standard information such as earnings, hours and weeks worked, industry, and occupation. Given our focus on the premigration wages of immigrants and the wage gains at migration, it is important that immigrants’ reported wages be accurate. Fortunately, the NIS was careful to allow immigrants a great deal of flexibility in reporting their premigration earnings. Immigrants reported both how much they earned and the frequency at which they were paid (hourly, daily, etc.). They also chose what year this report pertains to, what country they were working in, and what currency they were paid in. This flexibility is important because it allows immigrants to report earnings in the most natural way for them, rather than forcing them to do conversions. It also allows for unusual or nonobvious situations, such as the use of the U.S. dollar as a medium of payment even outside the United States, or the tendency for European migrants to remember their earnings denominated in pre-euro currencies or euros. The NIS provides a manual with the steps necessary to produce PPP-adjusted hourly wages in U.S. dollars. First, we use the reported earnings, payment frequency, and hours and weeks worked to construct the hourly wage for all immigrants. Second, we adjust the hourly wage to U.S. dollars by using the market exchange rate prevailing at the time. Third, we adjust wages for PPP. Note that in cases in which immigrants report the “natural” currency for their country (e.g., pesos in Mexico), these latter two adjustments are equivalent to simply dividing by the PPP exchange rate. Our exchange rates and PPP adjustments come from the Penn World Tables, mostly PWT 7.1, although we explored also using PWT 9.0. We exclude immigrants who report being paid in currencies that were subsequently devalued and flag immigrants who report unusual country-currency pairs (e.g., liras in Brazil) or who report being paid in currencies with high inflation for possible exclusion to minimize concerns about measurement error. At this point, we have several estimates of both pre- and postmigration wages at different dates reported in U.S. dollars and adjusted for cost of living. Conceptually, the last step is to adjust these wages to a common date and construct the wage gains at migration. This step is complicated somewhat by immigrant assimilation: immigrants’ occupational status, wages, and earnings are generally found to grow more quickly than those of comparable natives in the years after migration (Akresh 2008; Duleep 2015). This fact has three possible interpretations. First, it could be that initial wages are temporarily depressed by the absence of “search capital,” meaning that immigrants have not yet found a job that suits them and values their talents. In this case, it would be preferable to focus on later postmigration jobs. Second, it could be that immigrants acquire human capital more rapidly than natives after migration, perhaps in response to the change in environment. Finally, it could be that immigrant wage patterns are driven by a composition effect through selective return migration based on wages (Lubotsky 2007). In these latter cases, it would be preferable to focus on earlier postmigration jobs. There is no clear consensus in the literature about the relative importance of these three effects.6 For our baseline results, we combine wage estimates from different jobs to maximize our sample size. We use the most recent valid premigration wage. For postmigration wages, we give preference to the 2003–2004 estimate but use the first postmigration estimate or the estimate in the 2007–2009 follow-up if a valid estimate of the 2003–2004 wage is not available. We consider an estimate of the wage to be valid if we can construct the adjusted hourly wage; if it falls within the range of $0.01 to $1,000 an hour; for premigration wages, if the wage was from 1983 or later; and for postmigration jobs, if the immigrant had no education in the United States before working in that job. We convert all wages into year 2003 wages by adjusting for the wage growth of observably similar natives between year t and 2003 in the Current Population Survey, where we use age, gender, and education as our observable characteristics. This adjustment corrects for inflation and life-cycle wage growth. Any excess wage growth due to assimilation is thus included in the measured wage gain at migration, which is the conservative choice in our approach. We further explore the importance of assimilation by studying how wages and the wage gain at migration evolve over time and across successive jobs in the Online Appendix. Our data support assimilation but we find it plays a modest role in our calculations. After these checks, the remaining immigrants from poor countries have straightforward immigration-job histories. For example, more than 80% of the resulting sample had never lived outside their birth country for more than six months before permanently immigrating to the United States. Again, more than 80% report working their first U.S. job within one year of their last premigration job; more than three-fourths of immigrants satisfy both restrictions. Our results are robust to focusing on this group. The final sample includes 2,006 immigrants with data on both pre- and postmigration wages that we use for our exercises. See the Online Appendix for details on the number of immigrants dropped by each of our sample restrictions. There we also compare the baseline sample to samples of immigrants who have only pre- or postmigration wages and show that they do not differ greatly on observed characteristics. We also compare the NIS to the sample of immigrants in the American Community Survey, a standard data set used in the literature. Recall that our goal is to compare the log-wage change at migration to the log difference in GDP per worker in 2005 from PWT 7.1. Confidentiality restrictions prevent us from reporting statistics by country of origin in all but a few cases. For this reason, our baseline approach is to report statistics for five income categories, constructed on the basis of PPP GDP per worker relative to the United States: less than |$\frac{1}{16}$|, |$\frac{1}{16}$|–|$\frac{1}{8}$|, |$\frac{1}{8}$|–|$\frac{1}{4}$|, |$\frac{1}{4}$|–|$\frac{1}{2}$|, and |$\frac{1}{2}$|–1 (we exclude the few immigrants from countries richer than the United States). Panel A of Table I lists the three countries with the most observations within each category. TABLE I Country group Most sampled countries N Panel A: NIS sample by GDP per worker category (relative to United States) |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| Ethiopia, Nigeria, Vietnam 281 |$\frac{1}{16}-\frac{1}{8}$| India, Philippines, China 617 |$\frac{1}{8}-\frac{1}{4}$| Dominican Rep., Ukraine, El Salvador 436 |$\frac{1}{4}-\frac{1}{2}$| Mexico, Poland, Russia 263 |$\frac{1}{2}-1$| Canada, United Kingdom, Korea 409 Panel B: MP sample by subsample Mexican MP Mexico 1,910 Latin American MP Dominican Rep., El Salvador, Nicaragua 224 Country group Most sampled countries N Panel A: NIS sample by GDP per worker category (relative to United States) |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| Ethiopia, Nigeria, Vietnam 281 |$\frac{1}{16}-\frac{1}{8}$| India, Philippines, China 617 |$\frac{1}{8}-\frac{1}{4}$| Dominican Rep., Ukraine, El Salvador 436 |$\frac{1}{4}-\frac{1}{2}$| Mexico, Poland, Russia 263 |$\frac{1}{2}-1$| Canada, United Kingdom, Korea 409 Panel B: MP sample by subsample Mexican MP Mexico 1,910 Latin American MP Dominican Rep., El Salvador, Nicaragua 224 View Large TABLE I Country group Most sampled countries N Panel A: NIS sample by GDP per worker category (relative to United States) |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| Ethiopia, Nigeria, Vietnam 281 |$\frac{1}{16}-\frac{1}{8}$| India, Philippines, China 617 |$\frac{1}{8}-\frac{1}{4}$| Dominican Rep., Ukraine, El Salvador 436 |$\frac{1}{4}-\frac{1}{2}$| Mexico, Poland, Russia 263 |$\frac{1}{2}-1$| Canada, United Kingdom, Korea 409 Panel B: MP sample by subsample Mexican MP Mexico 1,910 Latin American MP Dominican Rep., El Salvador, Nicaragua 224 Country group Most sampled countries N Panel A: NIS sample by GDP per worker category (relative to United States) |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| Ethiopia, Nigeria, Vietnam 281 |$\frac{1}{16}-\frac{1}{8}$| India, Philippines, China 617 |$\frac{1}{8}-\frac{1}{4}$| Dominican Rep., Ukraine, El Salvador 436 |$\frac{1}{4}-\frac{1}{2}$| Mexico, Poland, Russia 263 |$\frac{1}{2}-1$| Canada, United Kingdom, Korea 409 Panel B: MP sample by subsample Mexican MP Mexico 1,910 Latin American MP Dominican Rep., El Salvador, Nicaragua 224 View Large III.A. Migration Projects Although the NIS data are ideal for our purposes in most respects, they do have one limitation: they are confined to lawful permanent residents. The vast majority of these immigrants entered the country through legal channels. As we document below, this sample turns out to be highly selected on a wide variety of dimensions, including premigration education, occupation, and wage. It is useful to be able to study the wage gains of less selected immigrants. We accomplish this goal by adding data from the Mexican and Latin American Migration Projects (MPs) when appropriate. The MPs are collections of surveys that share a common basic design, implemented in Mexico and nine other Latin American countries. In each survey year, the survey team identifies several communities where the interviewers expect some international migration activity. The communities are chosen to represent diverse sizes, but they are not representative of the country. In each community, a representative sample of households is interviewed. In addition, some surveys interview a small number of households that originate in the sampled communities but currently reside in the United States. The surveys collect basic demographic information and individual job histories from household heads and their spouses. Job histories start with the first job ever held and record the start and end dates, location, and occupation. Wages are recorded for each person’s first and last home country job and first and last job held abroad (including the United States). These wages allow us to calculate the wage change at migration, albeit typically in the opposite fashion (e.g., the wage loss upon returning to the foreign country). We limit our attention to native-born household heads and spouses aged 18 to 75 with valid responses to key variables and who report being paid in their country’s local currency (as defined in PWT 7.1). We adjust wages and impose the same sample selection criteria as for the NIS. As with the NIS, we aggregate results from the MP data for reporting purposes. We report results separately for the Mexican and Latin American Migration Projects. The former is the bulk of the overall MP sample; the latter covers fewer migrants scattered across eight other poorer Latin American countries. Panel B of Table I gives the sample size and the most common source countries for the MP data. IV. Results We now turn to our results. We begin by discussing the basic patterns of wages, reported in 2003 U.S. dollars. We compute the mean pre- and postmigration log wage by PPP GDP per worker category in the NIS data. The exponentiated results are plotted in Figure I, Panels A and C for the NIS and MP samples, with the exact figures given in Table II. Histograms of the underlying distributions of premigration wages, postmigration wages, and the wage gains at migration are available in the Online Appendix. Both pre- and postmigration wages are positively correlated with development, although the trend is not strong and Mexico stands as an obvious outlier. Most striking are the high levels of premigration wages for immigrants from poor countries: the PPP-adjusted hourly wage is $2.82 even for immigrants from the very poorest countries. TABLE II Hourly wage Development accounting Premig. Postmig. Wage GDP h 95% C.I. Group gain gap share Panel A: NIS sample by GDP per worker category |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| $2.82 $8.91 3.2 31.8 0.66 (0.60, 0.73) |$\frac{1}{16}-\frac{1}{8}$| $4.19 $11.83 2.8 11.9 0.58 (0.54, 0.62) |$\frac{1}{8}-\frac{1}{4}$| $4.95 $9.48 1.9 5.6 0.63 (0.55, 0.71) |$\frac{1}{4}-\frac{1}{2}$| $5.05 $9.11 1.8 3.0 0.48 (0.34, 0.62) |$\frac{1}{2}-1$| $12.64 $15.18 1.2 1.3 0.48 (−0.23, 1.19) Panel B: MP sample by subsample Latin American MP $4.84 $7.05 1.5 7.0 0.79 (0.71, 0.87) Mexican MP $2.96 $6.04 2.0 2.9 0.33 (0.29, 0.37) Hourly wage Development accounting Premig. Postmig. Wage GDP h 95% C.I. Group gain gap share Panel A: NIS sample by GDP per worker category |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| $2.82 $8.91 3.2 31.8 0.66 (0.60, 0.73) |$\frac{1}{16}-\frac{1}{8}$| $4.19 $11.83 2.8 11.9 0.58 (0.54, 0.62) |$\frac{1}{8}-\frac{1}{4}$| $4.95 $9.48 1.9 5.6 0.63 (0.55, 0.71) |$\frac{1}{4}-\frac{1}{2}$| $5.05 $9.11 1.8 3.0 0.48 (0.34, 0.62) |$\frac{1}{2}-1$| $12.64 $15.18 1.2 1.3 0.48 (−0.23, 1.19) Panel B: MP sample by subsample Latin American MP $4.84 $7.05 1.5 7.0 0.79 (0.71, 0.87) Mexican MP $2.96 $6.04 2.0 2.9 0.33 (0.29, 0.37) View Large TABLE II Hourly wage Development accounting Premig. Postmig. Wage GDP h 95% C.I. Group gain gap share Panel A: NIS sample by GDP per worker category |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| $2.82 $8.91 3.2 31.8 0.66 (0.60, 0.73) |$\frac{1}{16}-\frac{1}{8}$| $4.19 $11.83 2.8 11.9 0.58 (0.54, 0.62) |$\frac{1}{8}-\frac{1}{4}$| $4.95 $9.48 1.9 5.6 0.63 (0.55, 0.71) |$\frac{1}{4}-\frac{1}{2}$| $5.05 $9.11 1.8 3.0 0.48 (0.34, 0.62) |$\frac{1}{2}-1$| $12.64 $15.18 1.2 1.3 0.48 (−0.23, 1.19) Panel B: MP sample by subsample Latin American MP $4.84 $7.05 1.5 7.0 0.79 (0.71, 0.87) Mexican MP $2.96 $6.04 2.0 2.9 0.33 (0.29, 0.37) Hourly wage Development accounting Premig. Postmig. Wage GDP h 95% C.I. Group gain gap share Panel A: NIS sample by GDP per worker category |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| $2.82 $8.91 3.2 31.8 0.66 (0.60, 0.73) |$\frac{1}{16}-\frac{1}{8}$| $4.19 $11.83 2.8 11.9 0.58 (0.54, 0.62) |$\frac{1}{8}-\frac{1}{4}$| $4.95 $9.48 1.9 5.6 0.63 (0.55, 0.71) |$\frac{1}{4}-\frac{1}{2}$| $5.05 $9.11 1.8 3.0 0.48 (0.34, 0.62) |$\frac{1}{2}-1$| $12.64 $15.18 1.2 1.3 0.48 (−0.23, 1.19) Panel B: MP sample by subsample Latin American MP $4.84 $7.05 1.5 7.0 0.79 (0.71, 0.87) Mexican MP $2.96 $6.04 2.0 2.9 0.33 (0.29, 0.37) View Large A key statistic for our approach is the wage gain at migration, which we compute for each individual as the log of the ratio of postmigration to premigration wages. We average this statistic by GDP per worker category and plot the exponentiated results in Figure I, Panels B and D for the NIS and MP samples, with the exact figures given in Table II. The average immigrant has a substantial wage gain at migration. The wage gain is negatively correlated with development, as one would expect; immigrants from the poorest countries gain by a factor of 3.2, while immigrants from the richest gain by a factor of 1.3. Mexico is again a clear outlier with larger wage gains of 2.0. The gains for immigrants from poor countries are quite small relative to the gap in GDP per worker, suggesting that the country component plays a small role in development accounting. We formalize this idea in the next subsection. IV.A. Accounting Implications Recall from equation (4) that our measure of the importance of human capital is 1 minus the log-wage change at migration relative to the log-GDP per worker gap. We construct the implied share for every immigrant in our sample. We then compute the mean of the share within each subsample for the NIS or the MP. The resulting estimates and 95% confidence intervals are given in Table II.7 Our primary focus is on poor countries because they are of greater interest for development accounting. Thus, in the NIS sample we focus for the remainder of the article on immigrants from the three poorest income groups, or those with GDP per worker less than one-quarter of the United States. The estimates from these three groups cover a narrow range of 0.58–0.66 with fairly tight confidence intervals. When pooled, the implied share of human capital in development accounting is 62% against a share of country-specific factors of only 38%. The 95% confidence interval is narrow, ranging from 58% to 65%, implying that we can rule out that human capital accounts for as little as even half of cross-country income differences. We estimate the same statistics for the MP sample. The implied human capital share for the Latin American MP is 79%, as opposed to a much lower figure of 33% in the Mexican MP. When we pool the two, we find a combined figure of 38%. In the next section, we show that much of this difference can be explained by the composition of immigrants from Mexico. The Online Appendix contains a lengthy exploration of these results and their robustness, focusing on the NIS sample where we know many more details and covariates of interest. We provide results by country (when possible) and visa status. We show how they are affected by the process of assimilation. And we show that they are robust to the details of how wages are constructed, currencies are converted, who is included in the sample, and so on. There is some variation across these robustness checks, but the implied human capital share is almost always greater than one-half. We now turn to extending the standard development accounting analysis to explore imperfect substitution between skill groups. IV.B. Development Accounting and Imperfect Substitution Our analysis of the case of imperfect substitution draws on the model laid out in Section II.B. We begin by exploring whether the wage gains at migration vary systematically with education. To do so, we pool the NIS and the MP samples. As stated already, in the former we focus on immigrants from countries with GDP per worker less than one-quarter of the United States. We include Mexican immigrants in the MP sample even though Mexico has GDP per worker more than one-quarter of the United States because Mexican immigrants are the bulk of the MP sample and are much less educated on average, which is critical for our results in this section. We measure education using data on degree attainment or years spent in school. Workers are divided into five groups: those with no exposure to high school (less than 9 years of schooling); those with some high school but no degree (9–11 years); those with a high school degree (12 years); those with some college but not a bachelor’s degree (13–15 years); and those with a bachelor’s degree or more (16 or more years of schooling). We estimate wage gains at migration as a function of education level, controlling for country fixed effects. The results are given in Table III. The coefficients capture the log-wage gain relative to the omitted category, which is college graduates. The coefficients are all positive, indicating that less educated workers have larger wage gains. For those without any exposure to college, they are also large and statistically significant. For example, the coefficient on “no high school” indicates that immigrants who have never been to high school gain 82% more on migration to the United States than immigrants with a college degree. These results help us begin to understand why Mexican immigrants in the MP sample have such large wage gains at migration: they are very poorly educated (62% have no exposure to high school). These results provide evidence that workers of different skill levels are imperfect substitutes. TABLE III Education category Estimated wage gain effect No high school 0.599*** (0.073) Some high school 0.463*** (0.076) High school graduate 0.264*** (0.073) Some college 0.132 (0.101) Country fixed effects x Observations 3,539 Education category Estimated wage gain effect No high school 0.599*** (0.073) Some high school 0.463*** (0.076) High school graduate 0.264*** (0.073) Some college 0.132 (0.101) Country fixed effects x Observations 3,539 View Large TABLE III Education category Estimated wage gain effect No high school 0.599*** (0.073) Some high school 0.463*** (0.076) High school graduate 0.264*** (0.073) Some college 0.132 (0.101) Country fixed effects x Observations 3,539 Education category Estimated wage gain effect No high school 0.599*** (0.073) Some high school 0.463*** (0.076) High school graduate 0.264*** (0.073) Some college 0.132 (0.101) Country fixed effects x Observations 3,539 View Large We augment our development accounting results to allow for imperfect substitution between skill groups. We start with the bounding approach of equation (6). This approach requires us to partition our five education groups into two broad categories: unskilled and skilled. We explore three partitions, where the cutoff to be skilled ranges from some high school to some college. We focus on immigrants from countries with less than one-quarter of U.S. GDP per worker in the NIS sample so that figures will be comparable with the baseline figure reported above. For each possible partition, we construct the human capital share of development, accounting separately for unskilled and skilled immigrants. The results of this procedure are given in Table IV. The plausible range for human capital is in line with other robustness checks, extending from a little less than one-half to a little less than two-thirds. The point estimates we derive in the perfect substitutes case are close to the upper bounds. This makes sense because most workers in our data are highly skilled. Since the perfect substitutes case takes the simple average across workers and most workers are skilled, it naturally produces results closer to the upper bound. TABLE IV Cutoff for skilled group Lower bound Upper bound Any high school 0.49 0.63 High school graduate 0.54 0.64 Any college 0.60 0.63 Cutoff for skilled group Lower bound Upper bound Any high school 0.49 0.63 High school graduate 0.54 0.64 Any college 0.60 0.63 View Large TABLE IV Cutoff for skilled group Lower bound Upper bound Any high school 0.49 0.63 High school graduate 0.54 0.64 Any college 0.60 0.63 Cutoff for skilled group Lower bound Upper bound Any high school 0.49 0.63 High school graduate 0.54 0.64 Any college 0.60 0.63 View Large As a complementary approach we also construct human capital stocks directly, which requires us to impose further structure but allows us to produce point estimates of the human capital share. We group immigrants from poor countries in the NIS and the MP into a single composite country and compare them to the United States, in line with previous sections. We start by separating the total quantity of type j labor into the product of the human capital per worker and the number of workers, H j,c ≡ h j,c L j,c . We construct measures of L j,c by country using the data of Barro and Lee (2013). Their education categories map fairly neatly to ours. We assume that workers with different education levels within the unskilled or skilled group are perfect substitutes, allowing us to aggregate them using data on typical school duration and an assumed 10% rate of return per year of schooling (Banerjee and Duflo 2005). See the Online Appendix for details and the resulting relative skilled labor supply by country. u,U.S. ≡ 1, z U.S. ≡ 1, and θ u = θ s ≡ 1. We then need to recover five parameters of interest: the three remaining unobserved human capital qualities h j,c , the elasticity of substitution σ, and the country effect z c . We do so using a procedure conceptually similar to \begin{eqnarray} \frac{w_{s,c}}{w_{u,c}}&=\left(\frac{H_{s,c}}{H_{u,c}}\right)^{-\frac{1}{\sigma }}\frac{h_{s,c}}{h_{u,c}}. \end{eqnarray} (7) We normalize h≡ 1, z≡ 1, and θ= θ≡ 1. We then need to recover five parameters of interest: the three remaining unobserved human capital qualities h, the elasticity of substitution σ, and the country effect z. We do so using a procedure conceptually similar to Jones (2014) : we solve for the five unknown parameters that satisfy five key equations from the CES model of Section II.B : the wage gains at migration by skill type ( equation (5) ); the overall GDP per worker gap; and the skill premium by country, given by: The main difference between our approach and Jones (2014) is that we bring to bear new data on the wage gains at migration and use this to help us pin down σ. Table V shows the results of this calculation. The second and third columns show that we find gaps in the human capital per worker for both unskilled and skilled workers. The gaps are generally larger for skilled workers, perhaps reflecting differences in education quality across countries. TABLE V Cutoff for skilled group |$\frac{h_{u,p}}{h_{u,U.S.}}$| |$\frac{h_{s,p}}{h_{s,U.S.}}$| σ h share Any high school 0.49 0.30 8.03 0.63 High school graduate 0.45 0.29 4.84 0.59 Any college 0.39 0.39 5.46 0.60 Cutoff for skilled group |$\frac{h_{u,p}}{h_{u,U.S.}}$| |$\frac{h_{s,p}}{h_{s,U.S.}}$| σ h share Any high school 0.49 0.30 8.03 0.63 High school graduate 0.45 0.29 4.84 0.59 Any college 0.39 0.39 5.46 0.60 View Large TABLE V Cutoff for skilled group |$\frac{h_{u,p}}{h_{u,U.S.}}$| |$\frac{h_{s,p}}{h_{s,U.S.}}$| σ h share Any high school 0.49 0.30 8.03 0.63 High school graduate 0.45 0.29 4.84 0.59 Any college 0.39 0.39 5.46 0.60 Cutoff for skilled group |$\frac{h_{u,p}}{h_{u,U.S.}}$| |$\frac{h_{s,p}}{h_{s,U.S.}}$| σ h share Any high school 0.49 0.30 8.03 0.63 High school graduate 0.45 0.29 4.84 0.59 Any college 0.39 0.39 5.46 0.60 View Large The fourth column of Table V gives the implied elasticity of substitution, which ranges from roughly 5 to 8 depending on the division between unskilled and skilled labor. These values are larger than those typically estimated or used in the literature (Katz and Murphy 1992; Ciccone and Peri 2005; Jones 2014). Our view is that we are estimating a very long-run elasticity of substitution, which allows for additional, slow-moving margins of adjustment that may happen in response to the large differences in relative skill abundance between poor countries and the United States. For example, Acemoglu (2002) and Caselli and Coleman (2006) provide theories where technology responds endogenously to factor endowments, generating differences between the short-run and long-run elasticity of substitution. Finally, the fifth column gives the implied human capital share in development accounting, which is consistently around 60%. The results vary little across different possible partitions between unskilled and skilled labor because h u,c and h s,c are calculated in each case to fit the wage gains of unskilled and skilled workers as we vary the partition. One possible concern about both calculations in this section is that they rely on the wage gains of unskilled workers while our sample has few such workers. To explore this concern we perform similar calculations where we set h u,p = h u,U.S. ≡ 1 instead of matching the wage gains at migration of unskilled workers. This assumption implies that all unskilled workers in the world provide the same labor services; unskilled immigrants from poor countries then earn the same wages as unskilled Americans. The implied human capital share in development accounting is modestly lower: 59% when workers with any high school are skilled or 46% when high school graduates and above are skilled, in line with our earlier range of results. To push the human capital share much lower would require us to include workers with some college in the unskilled category; given the assumption h u,c ≡ 1, this implies that the majority of the world’s population, including all high school graduates, provides identical unskilled labor services. Even this extremely strong assumption would only push the human capital share in development accounting to 36%. These calculations all produce much larger wage gains for unskilled workers than we observe in our sample, a factor of 7.6 instead of 3.0–3.7 in the data. Overall, the evidence supports imperfect substitution between unskilled and skilled workers. The human capital share in development accounting can be bounded between one-half and two-thirds; our best estimate from direct calculations is that it is around 60%. We now turn to quantifying selection, which is important for understanding why our results differ from those in the literature. V. Selection We measure the importance of human capital for development accounting by comparing the wage gains at migration to the total gap in GDP per worker. As discussed in Section II.A, this deals with the simplest form of immigrant selection. However, it is of interest to back out the implied degree of selection, which is the gap between immigrants’ premigration characteristics and the characteristics of nonmigrants born in the same country. The patterns and degree of selection are of interest in their own right. As we show below, they are also useful for understanding why our results differ so much from those in the literature. V.A. Selection and Wages |$\frac{w_{i,c}}{\overline{w_{c}}}$| . Given the widespread prevalence of self-employment in poor countries, we substitute |$\overline{w_c} = (1-\alpha _c)\frac{y_c}{n_c}$| to approximate the mean labor income per hour of all workers (instead of using only wages of wage workers.) Here, n c is hours worked per worker per year. c does not vary systematically with average income, while \begin{eqnarray} \rho _{i} = \frac{w_{i,c}}{\overline{w_{U.S.}}}\frac{y_{U.S.}}{y_c}. \end{eqnarray} (8) We start by measuring the implied extent of selection on wages. In principle, one would like to compare the premigration hourly wage of immigrant i to the mean wage of nonmigrants born in the same country,. Given the widespread prevalence of self-employment in poor countries, we substituteto approximate the mean labor income per hour of all workers (instead of using only wages of wage workers.) Here, nis hours worked per worker per year. Gollin (2002) documents that αdoes not vary systematically with average income, while Bick, Fuchs-Schündeln, and Lagakos (forthcoming ) document that hours worked per employed person do not differ much between the United States and poor countries. If we assume that these two factors are roughly constant, we arrive at a simple measure of selection for an individual: In words, this equation says immigrants are highly selected if the ratio of their premigration wage to GDP per worker is high relative to the benchmark, which is the mean wage of Americans relative to U.S. GDP per worker. We construct this measure of selection for all individuals in the NIS and MPs. For the NIS we average the results by GDP per worker category. For the MPs we differentiate between the large Mexican sample originating in the Mexican Migration Project and then pool the remaining poorer countries with much smaller samples from the Latin American Migration Project. The resulting measures of selection are plotted as “total selection” in Figure II. This exercise has two main takeaways. First, immigrants are substantially selected on premigration wages, with a mean selection of more than two for the entire sample. Second, the degree of selection varies systematically with PPP GDP per worker. Immigrants from the poorest countries are selected by a factor of 6, whereas immigrants from the richest countries are nearly unselected by this measure. We also find that immigrants from Mexico are roughly unselected, in line with an existing literature that debates whether the selection is positive or negative (Morága 2011). Figure I View largeDownload slide Wages, Wage Gains, and GDP per worker Figure I View largeDownload slide Wages, Wage Gains, and GDP per worker Figure II View largeDownload slide Selection of Immigrants Figure II View largeDownload slide Selection of Immigrants A second question is whether this selection corresponds with observed characteristics of workers. To test this, we construct a measure of residual wages and selection along the lines of Hendricks (2002). The basic idea is to use a log-wage regression on a sample of natives to estimate the effect of observable characteristics, in this case age and education. We do so using the 2004 American Community Survey (ACS), which is a large representative sample that closely matches the time frame of the NIS. We construct a measure of selection on observable characteristics by valuing the difference in age and education of immigrants and nonmigrants with the estimated coefficients. Our data on the characteristics of nonmigrants come from Barro and Lee (2013), who give the educational attainment and age composition of the population for most countries worldwide. We then study selection on unobservables, which is the portion of selection on premigration wages that remains after netting out selection on observables as constructed above. The results are shown again in Figure II.8 Immigrants from the poorest countries are much more selected on unobserved characteristics than those from the richest countries. The degree and pattern of selection are interesting in their own right, but they also help explain why our results differ so much from the previous literature, particularly the results in Hendricks (2002). Hendricks (2002) shows that residual wages are only modestly higher for immigrants from rich countries relative to those from poor countries. Under the assumption that these immigrants are equally selected on unobserved human capital, this finding implies relatively small differences in the human capital of nonmigrants in rich and poor countries.9 This logic is central to his result that human capital accounts for little of cross-country income differences. Our data support the finding that residual (postmigration) wages are only modestly higher for immigrants from rich countries relative to those from poor countries. In the Online Appendix we show that the estimated relationship in the NIS is in line with the literature. However, Figure II suggests a very different interpretation of this finding. Immigrants from poorer countries are much more selected on unobserved characteristics than are immigrants from rich countries. The implied gap in human capital between nonmigrants from rich and poor countries is thus found to be much larger than that in Hendricks (2002). Our results are also larger than those in Schoellman (2012). That paper relies on a different identifying assumption, namely that selection on residual wages is uncorrelated with schooling for a given country. Although our sample size is too small to test this prediction, we show in the Online Appendix that selection on residual wages is not strongly correlated with schooling within a GDP per worker category. The more likely reason that our results are larger is that Schoellman (2012) has a more limited scope in trying to account for differences in quality-adjusted schooling, whereas our results include in principle all forms of human capital, including experience (as in Lagakos et al. forthcoming) or health. V.B. Selection on Other Characteristics Selection on residual characteristics plays an important role in explaining why our results differ from those in the previous literature. Given this role, we explore other nonwage attributes of immigrants from poor countries to see if they support strong selection. We start with the NIS sample, focusing particularly on the immigrants from the very poorest countries (less than |$\frac{1}{16}$| of U.S. GDP per worker). These immigrants are highly selected on education, with an average of 13 years of schooling. Thirty-two percent have a college degree, while only 18% have not graduated from high school. This finding is similar to what is reported in Schoellman (2012), namely, that immigrants from poor countries are much more educated than nonmigrants born in the same country. Immigrants are also highly selected on nonwage occupational characteristics. For example, 79% of immigrants from the poorest countries were employed for wages in their premigration job, which stands at odds with the general prevalence of self-employment in poor countries. Selection on occupation is also strong. If we focus on 25 broad occupation categories, the most commonly reported are sales and related, office and administrative support, management, and education and training. Combined, they account for more than half of all premigration occupations. Only a single immigrant in the poorest group of countries reported having previously worked in agriculture, forestry, and fishing, even though this occupation group accounts for the majority of employment in most poor countries (Restuccia, Yang, and Zhu 2008). Selection in the MPs is broadly similar except for Mexican immigrants, who are much less selected. They are much less educated, with only 7.1 years of schooling on average, and 60% have no exposure to high school. Furthermore, they are actually overrepresentative of agriculture; 31% worked in agriculture, as compared to 15% of nonmigrants. V.C. Selection and Sectoral Wage Gaps Selection on premigration employment implies that our results intersect with the growing literature that documents sectoral and regional labor productivity gaps in poor countries (Caselli 2005; Restuccia, Yang, and Zhu 2008; Herrendorf and Valentinyi 2012). Two potential explanations account for these gaps. The first is selection by high human capital workers into nonagriculture and urban areas. In this case, the scarcity of former agricultural workers in our sample is simply another sign of strong selection on human capital. The second is gaps in the marginal value product of labor between sectors or regions combined with a “barrier” that prevents workers from reallocating to the sector or region with the higher marginal value product of labor. In this case, the NIS has oversampled immigrants from the most productive portions of poor countries. The extent to which selection or barriers account for sectoral productivity gaps is still an open question in the literature (Gollin, Lagakos, and Waugh 2014; Hicks et al. 2017; Herrendorf and Schoellman forthcoming). We can test these two hypotheses using our data. The barriers view implies that immigrants who previously lived in unproductive areas or worked in unproductive sectors had lower wages, which in turn implies a larger wage gain at migration (assuming, as is conventional, that there are no such gaps in the United States). Thus, we look for heterogeneity in the wage gains at migration by sector and region of premigration employment. For sector we focus on whether the immigrant was employed in agriculture or nonagriculture. For region we know only whether an immigrant grew up in a rural or an urban area, and only for the NIS. We estimate wage gains as a function of country fixed effects and sector or region using the pooled NIS and MP samples of immigrants from countries with GDP per worker less than one-quarter of the United States, plus immigrants from Mexico. The results are given in columns (1) and (2) of Table VI. The effects of sector and region are large and statistically significant. Immigrants who previously worked in agriculture gain 71% more at migration than those who worked in nonagriculture; immigrants who grew up in rural areas gained 33% more than those who grew up in urban areas. One potential concern is that these results confound the effects of education. Columns (3) and (4) show the result of estimating the wage gain as a joint function of sector or region and education.10 The results for sector are reduced only modestly, the results for region more so. These results are evidence in favor of gaps in the marginal value product of labor, especially between sectors. They also help us further understand the high wage gains at migration for Mexican immigrants: Mexican immigrants are by far the most likely to have worked in agriculture before migrating. TABLE VI (1) (2) (3) (4) Agriculture 0.536*** 0.476*** (0.053) (0.054) Grew up rural 0.285*** 0.197** (0.079) (0.081) No high school 0.495*** 0.664*** (0.073) (0.157) Some high school 0.431*** 0.358*** (0.076) (0.138 ) High school graduate 0.259*** 0.175* (0.072) (0.104 ) Some college 0.136 0.251* (0.100) (0.144) Country fixed effects x x x x Observations 3,539 1,400 3,539 1,400 (1) (2) (3) (4) Agriculture 0.536*** 0.476*** (0.053) (0.054) Grew up rural 0.285*** 0.197** (0.079) (0.081) No high school 0.495*** 0.664*** (0.073) (0.157) Some high school 0.431*** 0.358*** (0.076) (0.138 ) High school graduate 0.259*** 0.175* (0.072) (0.104 ) Some college 0.136 0.251* (0.100) (0.144) Country fixed effects x x x x Observations 3,539 1,400 3,539 1,400 View Large TABLE VI (1) (2) (3) (4) Agriculture 0.536*** 0.476*** (0.053) (0.054) Grew up rural 0.285*** 0.197** (0.079) (0.081) No high school 0.495*** 0.664*** (0.073) (0.157) Some high school 0.431*** 0.358*** (0.076) (0.138 ) High school graduate 0.259*** 0.175* (0.072) (0.104 ) Some college 0.136 0.251* (0.100) (0.144) Country fixed effects x x x x Observations 3,539 1,400 3,539 1,400 (1) (2) (3) (4) Agriculture 0.536*** 0.476*** (0.053) (0.054) Grew up rural 0.285*** 0.197** (0.079) (0.081) No high school 0.495*** 0.664*** (0.073) (0.157) Some high school 0.431*** 0.358*** (0.076) (0.138 ) High school graduate 0.259*** 0.175* (0.072) (0.104 ) Some college 0.136 0.251* (0.100) (0.144) Country fixed effects x x x x Observations 3,539 1,400 3,539 1,400 View Large These gaps imply that each country’s aggregate z and our average wage gains at migration are affected by the sectoral composition of employment. For logical consistency, the sectoral employment shares used to calculate each object should match, but the selection of immigrants implies that they do not. To correct for this mismatch, we construct the human capital share in development, accounting separately for workers who previously worked in nonagriculture and in agriculture. We then reweight the two using the employment share in agriculture of the corresponding country group, taken from World Bank (2014). We make this correction for the baseline NIS sample. Agricultural workers are undersampled: they are 1.1% of the sample, versus 33% for nonmigrants. Correcting for this undersampling puts more weight on the large wage gains of agricultural immigrants, but the effect is modest: the implied human capital share is 55% instead of 62% in the baseline. This calculation puts a lot of weight on a small number of agricultural workers in the NIS. However, we get similar results if we pool the NIS with the MP with or without Mexico, which helps expand the sample of agricultural workers used in the calculation. A second question of interest is whether these results are more important for the very poorest countries where agriculture is more common. For example, countries in our poorest GDP per worker group have a 60% agricultural employment share. However, we know little about the wage gains at migration for agricultural workers from the poorest countries because our sample includes only one such worker. We can provide some preliminary calculations if we assume that agricultural workers would gain 0.536 more than nonagricultural workers, as implied by column (1) of Table VI.11 In this case adjusting for composition effects reduces the human capital share from 68% to 57%. An effect twice as large would reduce the human capital share to 47%. VI. Skill Transferability Our baseline estimates measure the importance of country by comparing the pre- and postmigration wages of a fixed individual. If immigrants are able to use their human capital equally in the two countries, then the gap in wages is entirely determined by country-specific factors. However, a common concern with immigrants is that their skills may not transfer perfectly when they migrate. This could happen either if skills are heterogeneous and they have acquired skills that are not highly valued in the United States, or if barriers such as accreditation, licensure, or discrimination prevent them from fully utilizing their skills. The first goal of this section is to provide evidence on skill transferability by studying proxies for skill transfer. Our main evidence comes from comparing immigrants’ pre- and postmigration occupations. We focus on the NIS sample, which has detailed and consistent codes for each occupation. We document that occupational switching is widespread and that most immigrants move to lower-paying jobs, which is a possible sign of imperfect skill transfer. We then consider the importance of this finding for our development accounting results. If immigrants have skills but cannot use them in the United States, then this barrier depresses their postmigration wage and the wage gain at migration. It then follows that we understate the role of country and overstate the role of human capital in development accounting. Conservative corrections for skill transfer push our estimate of the human capital share down toward one-half. VI.A. Evidence on Skill Transferability Our main measure for skill transfer comes from comparing immigrants’ pre- and postmigration occupations.12 Measuring skill transferability through occupational changes is subject to two biases that push in opposite directions and are not easy to quantify. On the one hand, we are assuming that immigrants who do not practice their premigration occupation do so because of a lack of skill transferability, ruling out a lack of skill altogether (i.e., they may simply have been unqualified). On the other hand, our measure does not capture within-occupation skill loss. For example, we capture doctors who are forced to work as taxi drivers but not specialized doctors forced to work as family doctors. However, we note that the NIS uses the 2000 U.S. Census occupation codes, which include over 450 possible occupational choices. With these two caveats in mind, we now turn to analyzing occupational switches. We begin by examining the frequency of occupation switches. Most immigrants switch jobs after migrating. The fraction staying in the same occupation is shown in the third column of Table VII and ranges from 6% to 25% depending on the level of development. This figure is driven mostly by changes to entirely new occupations; if we aggregate to broad occupation groups, still only 15–41% of immigrants work in the same broad occupation group after migrating. TABLE VII Occupational switch (%) GDP category Lower-paying Same occupation Higher-paying Mean change (%) |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| 68 9 23 −17 |$\frac{1}{16}$| – |$\frac{1}{8}$| 61 16 22 −15 |$\frac{1}{8}$| – |$\frac{1}{4}$| 67 6 26 −16 |$\frac{1}{4}$| – |$\frac{1}{2}$| 60 10 30 −13 |${>}\frac{1}{2}$| 49 25 26 0 Occupational switch (%) GDP category Lower-paying Same occupation Higher-paying Mean change (%) |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| 68 9 23 −17 |$\frac{1}{16}$| – |$\frac{1}{8}$| 61 16 22 −15 |$\frac{1}{8}$| – |$\frac{1}{4}$| 67 6 26 −16 |$\frac{1}{4}$| – |$\frac{1}{2}$| 60 10 30 −13 |${>}\frac{1}{2}$| 49 25 26 0 View Large TABLE VII Occupational switch (%) GDP category Lower-paying Same occupation Higher-paying Mean change (%) |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| 68 9 23 −17 |$\frac{1}{16}$| – |$\frac{1}{8}$| 61 16 22 −15 |$\frac{1}{8}$| – |$\frac{1}{4}$| 67 6 26 −16 |$\frac{1}{4}$| – |$\frac{1}{2}$| 60 10 30 −13 |${>}\frac{1}{2}$| 49 25 26 0 Occupational switch (%) GDP category Lower-paying Same occupation Higher-paying Mean change (%) |${<}\frac{1}{16}$| 68 9 23 −17 |$\frac{1}{16}$| – |$\frac{1}{8}$| 61 16 22 −15 |$\frac{1}{8}$| – |$\frac{1}{4}$| 67 6 26 −16 |$\frac{1}{4}$| – |$\frac{1}{2}$| 60 10 30 −13 |${>}\frac{1}{2}$| 49 25 26 0 View Large A change in occupation does not indicate whether the new occupation is better or worse than the old occupation. As a proxy for the “quality” of an occupation, we construct the mean wage of natives employed in the occupation from the 2004 ACS. We merge this mean wage by occupation with both the pre- and postmigration occupations of immigrants in the NIS. This procedure provides us with a quantitative ranking of each immigrant’s pre- and postmigration occupation and hence a measure of the extent to which an immigrant’s new job is better or worse than his or her old one. For example, take an immigrant who worked as a physician in his or her birth country but works as a taxi driver in the United States. Based on the observation that the mean wage of taxi drivers in the United States is $9.58 while the mean wage of physicians is $37.11, we would infer that the immigrant’s occupational switch involved a downgrade. The extent of the change in mean wages (74%) provides a metric to suggest that the occupational downgrading was significant. The remaining columns of Table VII show a sense of the distribution and average change in occupation at arrival. Roughly two-thirds of immigrants move to a lower-paying job after migrating, while only one-quarter move to a higher-paying job, except for the highest GDP per worker group. The mean change in occupation quality (again, judged by mean native wage) is a loss of 13%–17% upon migration. Only immigrants from the richest countries report little occupational downgrading at migration. One interpretation of this finding is that most immigrants cannot perfectly transfer their skills to the United States. Since occupations are only an imperfect measure of skill transfer, we also explore other proxies for ability to transfer skills, with a focus on two that we think are likely to be particularly relevant for immigrants: language and networks. For the former, we find that immigrants who speak English, and particularly those who use English at work, have larger wage gains and less occupational downgrading at migration. For the latter, we find that the extent of occupational downgrading declines over time, consistent with a theory in which immigrants need to build up networks: the first postmigration job is 18% worse, the round 1 job 14% worse, and the round 2 job 9% worse than the premigration job (wages also rise; see the Online Appendix for details). We also have two proxies for immigrants who may have had networks even before immigrating to the United States. Both immigrants who entered on employment visas and those who report having had a job offer in hand before immigrating to the United States report larger wage gains and less occupational downgrading at migration. These proxies only add to the evidence that skill transfer is imperfect and the extent of skill transfer varies among immigrants. We now show how to correct our development accounting results for this imperfect skill transfer. VI.B. Development Accounting with Imperfect Skill Transfer If we interpret these findings as evidence of imperfect skill transfer, then they have important implications for our development accounting results. We explore this idea further in three ways, focusing throughout on the NIS sample of immigrants from countries with less than one-quarter of U.S. GDP per worker. First, since our index of occupational downgrading is smaller for later jobs, it may be more appropriate to use the wage gains and human capital share of later jobs. Using the wage gain from the last job leads to a human capital share of 0.53 instead of 0.62. Second, we check the robustness of our results to focusing on groups for whom skill transfer is likely to be less of a problem. The NIS includes four main groups: immigrants who entered the United States on employment visas, those who entered the United States with a job offer in hand, those who work in the same detailed occupation before and after migrating, and those who speak English at work. The implied development accounting results for these subsamples are shown along with the baseline in Table VIII. While human capital accounts for 62% of cross-country income differences in the baseline, it accounts for 45%–59% when focusing on these subsamples. TABLE VIII Robustness check Human capital share 95% C.I. Baseline 0.62 (0.58, 0.65) Employment visa 0.56 (0.50, 0.62) Job offer before migrating 0.45 (0.36, 0.55) Same narrow occupation 0.56 (0.48, 0.64) English at work 0.59 (0.54, 0.63) Skill transfer: mean wage 0.55 (0.52, 0.59) Robustness check Human capital share 95% C.I. Baseline 0.62 (0.58, 0.65) Employment visa 0.56 (0.50, 0.62) Job offer before migrating 0.45 (0.36, 0.55) Same narrow occupation 0.56 (0.48, 0.64) English at work 0.59 (0.54, 0.63) Skill transfer: mean wage 0.55 (0.52, 0.59) View Large TABLE VIII Robustness check Human capital share 95% C.I. Baseline 0.62 (0.58, 0.65) Employment visa 0.56 (0.50, 0.62) Job offer before migrating 0.45 (0.36, 0.55) Same narrow occupation 0.56 (0.48, 0.64) English at work 0.59 (0.54, 0.63) Skill transfer: mean wage 0.55 (0.52, 0.59) Robustness check Human capital share 95% C.I. Baseline 0.62 (0.58, 0.65) Employment visa 0.56 (0.50, 0.62) Job offer before migrating 0.45 (0.36, 0.55) Same narrow occupation 0.56 (0.48, 0.64) English at work 0.59 (0.54, 0.63) Skill transfer: mean wage 0.55 (0.52, 0.59) View Large As a second check, we consider imputing to immigrants a higher wage if they experienced occupational downgrading. This step is logical if the main reason for occupational downgrading is an artificial barrier such as licensure rather than a lack of skills among immigrants. By increasing the postmigration wage of immigrants, we also increase the implied wage gains at migration and lower the implied human capital share for development accounting. We implement this idea by adding to each downgraded immigrant’s wage the gap in mean native wages between his or her pre- and postmigration occupations. For example, take an immigrant who reports having been a doctor before arriving in the United States, but who is now a taxi driver earning $8 an hour. We would add to this wage the difference between the mean native wage of doctors and taxi drivers, which is $27.53, resulting in a total wage of $35.53. The resulting adjustment is substantial, increasing the mean postmigration wage of immigrants by 14%. We then recompute wage gains at migration and the human capital share in development accounting. The results are reported in the last row of Table VIII. We find that human capital in this case would still account for more than half of cross-country income differences. This section offers two main takeaways. First, most immigrants switch to lower-paying occupations when they immigrate to the United States. If this fact is interpreted as the result of imperfect skill transfer, then our baseline results overstate the importance of human capital for development accounting. We conduct several checks that suggest that correcting for imperfect skill transfer could lower the human capital share to 45%–59%, which is still much larger than the standard result in the literature. On the other hand, if occupational downgrading indicates a lack of skills, then the baseline result of 62% is appropriate. VII. Conclusion In this article, we use data on pre- and postmigration outcomes of immigrants along with an extended development accounting framework to infer the importance of human capital versus country in accounting for cross-country income differences. Our key finding is that immigrants’ wage gains at migration are small relative to gaps in PPP GDP per worker. Using the standard development accounting framework in which workers of different types are perfect substitutes, these figures imply that human capital accounts for 62% of cross-country income differences. Wage gains are larger for less educated immigrants and those who previously worked in agriculture, so we also consider extending the development accounting results to allow for imperfect substitution between workers of different types and sectoral productivity gaps within poor countries. A plausible range of variation for the human capital share is from just under one-half to two-thirds. We also provide novel evidence on two issues frequently raised in the literature. First, we find that immigrants are highly selected on observable and unobservable characteristics. Both forms of selection are negatively correlated with development. Second, we study skill transfer through immigrants’ changes in occupation. We find evidence that immigrants move to lower-paying occupations upon arrival. We provide calculations to show that reasonable corrections for this possible imperfect skill transfer lower the human capital share in development accounting to roughly one-half. Supplementary Material An Online Appendix for this article can be found at The Quarterly Journal of Economics online. Data and code replicating the tables and figures in this article can be found in Hendricks and Schoellman (2017), in the Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/IPIBQP. 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Japanese mobile carrier SoftBank is teaming up with Apple manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group in a global push to manufacture and sell robots for the home and workplace. Foxconn and Alibaba are each investing ¥14.5 billion (US$118 million) in SoftBank Robotics Holdings (SRH), for a stake of about 20 percent each of the company, with SoftBank holding the remaining 60 percent. SRH is a holding company for SoftBank's robotics business, which will begin sales of the carrier's Pepper communications robot for Japanese consumers on Saturday. It plans to first sell 1,000 units, priced at ¥198,000 (US$1,600) with a monthly cloud connection fee of ¥14,800 (US$120)and monthly insurance of ¥9,800 (US$80). The hardware price is low for a robot as sophisticated as Pepper. The venture is aimed at manufacturing Pepper and distributing it overseas, though sales outside Japan would not begin until next year. While they are focused on household robots, the trio of companies will shift to develop robots for businesses beginning in the fall of this year. "Pepper will be the first step," SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said at an event where he was joined by Foxconn CEO Terry Gou and Alibaba founder Jack Ma. "We started in Japan but we will make this into a global business." Robotics will make up a major part of SoftBank's business in a few decades, Son said, as Gou and Ma echoed his long-term vision for robots playing an increasingly indispensable role in society. "Whether you like it or not, robots will be as popular as cars and will play a very important role in the next 30 years," Ma said. Son, however, said SoftBank doesn't expect to make a profit in the first four years by selling Pepper, which costs significantly more to make than its sale price. The company is hoping the robot will grow emotionally with its owners and become a genuine family member, so that users won't get bored of it. The partnership follows an announcement on Wednesday by U.S. warehouse robot maker Fetch Robotics that it had received a $20 million investment from SoftBank to help it meet greater demand from fulfillment centers. Son showed off the latest "emotion engine" for Pepper, a software system that can help it recognize emotions in humans and develop its own artificial feelings. When Pepper is ignored by its owners, for instance, it can mimic a state of being withdrawn and sad. When it's praised and showered with affection, it becomes happy. The latest version of the robot has a CPU that's four times faster than the one unveiled last year. Through its cloud connection, Pepper will learn from other robots, but it will not be able to share private information or data related to its owners, according to SoftBank. "Pepper will become smarter every day by itself," Son said. "Hundreds of thousands, million of Peppers in the future, will teach each other and learn from each other simultaneously." In a demo, a map of concentric circles representing Pepper's emotions was displayed on its chest tablet. The innermost circle represents basic feelings such as like or hate while the outer circles represent more complex emotions such as frustration and impatience. As the machine mimics emotional states, different parts of the map light up in red or green. Based on research by Cocoro SB, a cloud AI firm, Pepper's emotion engine runs on a simulation of the action of hormones and neurotransmitters in the human brain, with digital versions of dopamine, cortisol and six other chemical messengers changing in response to stimuli processed by its cameras, touch sensors and other input devices. But don't fret about the family bot flying into a rage and destroying furniture. It will never get sulky or refuse to communicate, but how it responds will change according to its "mood." Content providers such as Japanese advertising giant Dentsu worked with SoftBank to script responses for the robot as part of its synthetic personality. "He's like Dennis the Menace without the pranks," said SoftBank Robotics engineer Sean McKelvey, referring to the U.S. comic strip character of that name, a five-year-old boy whoh gets up to mischief. McKelvey has spent so much time with Pepper that he can't resist using pronouns when describing the machine; SoftBank officially views Pepper as male. "He's spunky and says things off the cuff." While Pepper can't do the dishes or laundry, SoftBank said it will have about 200 apps to make it somewhat useful. Pepper's Diary, for instance, involves the bot taking snapshots of family events and writing journal entries. Son said that could serve as a repository of family memories for decades, like an intelligent photo album. Pepper does have rudimentary hand function, however, and can grasp light objects. In another demo, the robot was handing out packets of tissues, grabbing them from containers attached to its waist and proffering them to people nearby. That's actually something done by countless human workers in Japan. Karaoke parlors and other establishments trying to grab commuters' attention print ads on tissue packets and pay people to hand them out at subway stations. In a humorous twist, Cocoro SB will hire out Pepper to such companies in Tokyo starting in July, adding to the robot's resume, which includes hawking smartphones and coffee machines. Pepper's hourly rate for giving out tissues will be ¥1,500 (US$12), nearly double the minimum wage for humans in the capital. Tim Hornyak covers Japan and emerging technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Tim on Twitter at @robotopia. |
“We’ll see you next week on Wednesday,” right? This kind of thing happens. It’s sort of Mediterranean, that probably fits a place called Pleiades. There’s still some work to do here, but it’s a pretty good start. You might notice we’re a bit late. We ran into an issue with palette swapping between day and night, which was unexpected. It wasn’t a huge issue in Belring, but somewhere along the line junk colors accumulated in La Folia’s tileset. While it has around 64 actual colors, when we were processing it Spriteman would return around nearly two hundred. We spent all night trying to figure it out and figure out why the color orders were changing and why we had so many extras, but in the morning we managed a solution thanks to Dave…. though it did require some time and work to implement.With that out of the way, here’s what we finished:And now with life breathed into it:Sorry for the delay on this one - we nearly had it sorted yesterday. I wanna take this opportunity to let you know that even if we’re not working loudly (or on schedule), we are working. Even if we aren’t professionals, we’re still trying to get the hang of this for the sake of everyone who’s waiting on us. |
Some places in this world seem mysterious to the point where they almost seem to be beyond the comprehension of mankind. There are mysteries in these places that defy any attempts to explain them, and the very soil and water itself here seems to reverberate with some evil force that pervades its very being. These mysterious places seem to draw death, misfortune, and the bizarre to them like a magnet, and if there are indeed cursed places in this world then these are them. One such enigmatic place can be found nestled within the rolling, verdant foothills of the northern mountains of the U.S. state of Georgia. This is a locale that has long been associated with strange phenomena, weird creatures, and most sinister of all, a large number of inexplicable deaths and unsolved murders. This is the cursed lake of Georgia. Lying in the northern part of the U.S. state of Georgia, sprawled out among the foothills of the North Georgia Mountains for 26 miles, 75 meters (258 feet) deep at its deepest point and with an area of 150 km2 (59 square miles) of water and 1,114 km (692 miles) of shoreline, is Lake Sidney Lanier, commonly referred to as simply Lake Lanier. Actually a manmade reservoir, Lake Lanier is the largest lake in Georgia and even sports a chain of islands that were originally large hills before the lake was formed. The origins of Lake Lanier can be traced back to 1948, when the U.S. government purchased a 100-acre farm from a river ferry operator by the name of Henry Shadburn in order to start a water project on the Chattahoochee River for the purpose of providing the city of Atlanta with hydroelectricity, flood control and water supply. In 1950, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began breaking ground and constructing the Buford Dam on the Chattahoochee River, which would be completed in 1956 and begin the process of flooding the foothills to create the lake. The creation of Lake Lanier was beset with problems from the beginning. Funding for the project faced numerous hurdles which stopped and started construction to the point where it is amazing it was actually finished on schedule. Additionally, the Corps of Engineers, as well as the states which use the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin and the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa River Basin, comprised of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, all squabbled over water flow requirements, consumption caps, how the water should be used, and whether to give it priority as a water supply, hydroelectricity source, or even recreation, all of this while juggling the federal laws that demanded water be set aside for threatened or endangered species that lived in or around Chattahoochee River. The states of Alabama and Florida were particularly unhappy about how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regulated the flow of water from Lake Lanier to their states. There was even debate over what the lake should be called, with the builders finally settling on the name of the poet Sidney Lanier. Then there was the rather destructive nature of the lake’s creation. The U.S. government began a mad dash to ravenously purchase land from private companies, farmers, and anyone else who lived in the area that would inevitably wind up underwater. During the 5 years it took for the lake to completely fill to its intended water level, the government would buy up over 50,000 acres of prime farmland and pristine wilderness, moving more than 250 families, 15 businesses, and even relocating 20 cemeteries along with their corpses in the process. As the nooks and crannies of the mountain foothills filled with surging water, the inexorable spread of the lake devoured entire towns along with their buildings and houses, farmland, fields, bridges, toll gates, historical landmarks, river ferry businesses, a racetrack called Looper Speedway, country roads, forests, and other lakes. Many of the structures that would be inundated were simply left as is, so that if one were to walk along the lake’s bottom one would find submerged towns complete with roads, walls, and houses all eerily intact; abandoned underwater ghost towns inhabited only by fish and perhaps ghosts of the past. Even the ferries that were put out of business by the lake’s creation were simply abandoned to become rusting hulks littering the bottom and the shore. This rather eerie history and the spooky presence of whole underwater ghost towns, derelict ghost ships, and desecrated cemeteries, are far from the only strange things about Lake Lanier, and indeed it has accrued a rather sinister reputation for drawing death and suffering to itself. Over the years, there have been an inordinate amount of deaths associated with the lake, ranging from boating accidents, drownings, and even a fair number of drivers who have lost control of their vehicles to go careening off of roads to crash into the water. There are various stories of boats hitting something in the water only for it to turn out there was nothing there, boats or other watercraft capsizing for no apparent reason, and sudden, dangerous rogue waves that seem to come from nowhere without warning to maraud across the surface. Many of the drowning cases are somewhat odd in that they have happened very close to shore with strong swimmers and in calm conditions, which considering the history of the lake have given rise to rumors that Lake Lanier is somehow haunted or cursed. Some who have almost drowned here and lived to tell the tale have told of feeling as if they were being pulled underwater or held under by unseen hands, or of having the air suddenly seem to leave their lungs and cause exhaustion with startling suddenness. In some of the cases, people who drowned fairly close to shore have had their bodies turn up in positions far from where they died, which is probably due to currents but when mixed with spooky rumors becomes a case of ghostly forces dragging corpses through the water before discarding them. In 2011, this menacing reputation for accidents and deaths began to get more public attention when there were a total of 17 deaths on Lake Lanier, many due to freak accidents. In 2012 the trend continued when a quick succession of violent deaths and horrific injuries occurred here which made national news. The first of this wave of deaths happened on June 18, 2012, when 9-year-old Jake Prince and his brother Griffin, 13, were riding a pontoon out on the lake and were struck and killed by a speeding boat driven by a Johns Creek business owner named Paul J Bennett, 44. Mere weeks after this tragic accident, on July 9, 11-year-old Kile Glover, who happened to be the son of the popular pop star Usher’s ex-wife, Tameka Foster, was struck while riding an inner tube by a family acquaintance riding a jet ski and rendered braindead. Although doctors struggled to save his life, he died two weeks later on July 21 and was taken off life support. A 15-year old friend of the boy’s was also seriously injured in the same incident, but ultimately recovered. These tragic accidents took the media by storm, and before long Lake Lanier was being deemed “cursed” and “a death trap” by the news and social media sites such as Twitter, with many people insisting that it was an evil, vile place that was best avoided. While these were perhaps the most high profile deaths to occur on Lake Lanier, these sorts of accidents and drownings have been happening with unsettling frequency since the lake was first opened to the public. While a lot of people have been quick to call the lake cursed, one of the more likely reasons for these incidents is probably due to the area’s rapid rise as a popular place to visit. Besides being a water source and hydroelectric plant for Atlanta and the surrounding areas, from around 1962, Lake Lanier has become a popular recreational area complete with hotels, full-service boating marinas, restaurants, campgrounds, stables, beaches, a golf course, and even a full water park. People of all ages come here for boating, swimming, fishing, camping, and other outdoor activities, to the tune of around 8 million visitors a year. Adding to the dangers already inherent with so many droves of people converging on the lake, often with a good amount of alcohol involved, there are also very few regulations for operating boats or motorized water craft and those that are in place are weakly enforced. With so many people driving around in boats and swimming, in many cases under the influence of alcohol, there are bound to be quite a few accidents. Yet nevertheless, there are still those who insist that even considering these circumstances the number of deaths, weird accidents, and injuries at Lake Lanier is unusually high, and believe the lake is truly cursed, haunted, or both. In addition to the myriad freak accidents and drownings that seem to constantly plague the area, Lake Lanier has been the location for more bizarre and mysterious deaths and disappearances that still remain unsolved. One such case revolves around a Georgia man by the name of Kelly Nash, 25, who went missing from his home in Buford, Georgia, on January 5, 2015. Early that morning at 4AM, Nash awoke with flu-like symptoms such as coughing and sneezing, and told his girlfriend Jessica Sexton, who was with him at the time, that he felt terrible and should probably see a doctor before going back to bed. Sexton then woke up again at 7:30 AM to find that Nash was gone and had not taken his wallet, car keys or ID with him. When Nash still had not returned that evening, police were called in and it was discovered that a 9mm pistol was missing from the house but none of Nash’s other belongings were missing or out of place. A massive search would subsequently be launched for Nash, involving authorities, family and friends, and dogs specially trained to sniff out dead bodies, and a $50,000 reward was offered for any information, yet no trace of the man or his whereabouts were found. It was not until one month after his strange disappearance, on February 8, that Nash’s badly decomposed body was found in Lake Lanier by a fisherman. Nash was still wearing the pajama pants and dark shirt that he’d had on when he went missing, and although the body appeared to have no major trauma, it was found that he had suffered a single gunshot wound to the head. The crime has never been solved and it is unclear why he chose to go out in the middle of the night in his sleeping clothes, how he ended up at the lake, and whether he committed suicide, if there was foul play involved, or if the lake’s alleged curse had anything to do with it. In another mysterious case, a 16-year-old Gainesville High School student by the name of Hannah Truelove went missing from an apartment complex near Lake Lanier where she lived with her mother on the morning of Aug. 24, 2012. The following day, Hannah’s body was found in a wooded area by the lakeside by another resident of the apartment complex. The girl had been stabbed multiple times, yet it was unclear if the wounds were life threatening and the actual cause of death remained elusive, although authorities were able to rule out drowning. Making the case even creepier was a series of tweets Hannah had made on Twitter shortly before her death that expressed general discontent with her life at the apartment complex and her fear of a stalker, with one chilling tweet allegedly stating “So scared right now.” Hannah’s father would later claim that his daughter had made no mention of being under any duress and had not seemed any different or more upset than usual in the days leading up to her disappearance and death. Authorities were never able to glean any insights or information from the tweets, and indeed no leads would ever come up and no suspects were ever apprehended in the case, despite a major investigation and exhaustive interviews with neighbors and nearby residents, none of whom had seen or heard anything suspicious on the day in question, as well as continuous pleas for any information pertaining to the case. Hannah Truelove’s death remains a mystery. One of the most notorious deaths associated with Lake Lanier is also the source of one of its alleged ghostly mysteries. In April of 1958, a young woman who worked at Riverside Military Academy, Delia Parker Young, and her friend, Susie Roberts, headed off to Three Gables in Dawsonville in Susie’s 1954 Ford for a night out. They would never return. A subsequent investigation into their disappearance discovered that they had visited a gas station that night and left without paying. The only clue left at the scene was a set of skid marks across the road which seemed to suggest that the car had skidded off of Lanier Bridge on Dawsonville Highway and into the lake below, yet no vehicle could be found. Divers who were brought in to search for the car were unable to locate it due to poor visibility in the murky water and the masses of sheared off tree trunks that litter the lake’s bottom. For 18 months, police were unable to find any further clues and no trace of the missing women or the car, but then a fisherman named C.A. Simpson made a gruesome discovery when the decomposed body of what was thought to be that of Delia Parker Young suddenly floated up out of the depths. Oddly, the corpse, which could not be completely positively identified at the time, was missing two toes from the left foot and both hands. It was never ascertained just why the body was missing its hands and toes or what the cause of death had been. With no way of knowing if the corpse was that of Delia, it was eventually buried in an unmarked grave in in Alta Vista Cemetery. The body of Susie Roberts and the car remained missing, despite repeated searches. The mystery would baffle authorities for decades until November of 1990, when construction on an expansion of Lanier Bridge was under way. As construction crews were dredging the bottom of the lake in order to set up pillars for the expansion, they uncovered a rusted out hulk of a 1954 Ford which held within it the remains of a human body. The car had been hidden within tree trunks, mud, and other detritus in 90 feet of water on a steep slope. The body was decomposed to the point of being unidentifiable, but the belongings found on it, including a purse, rings, and watch were able to conclusively prove that the body was that of the long missing Susie Roberts. In light of this discovery, it was concluded that the other body had indeed been Delia Parker Young, the headstone was changed accordingly, and Susie Roberts was buried beside her. Interestingly, although the deaths of Delia Parker Young and Susie Roberts is an old, mostly forgotten case, it has spawned one of the area’s most persistent and frightening local legends. It is said that a ghostly young woman dressed in a blue dress and missing her hands can sometimes be seen walking up and down the length of Lanier Bridge, and is said to be the ghost of Delia Parker Young, since she had been dressed in a blue dress on the night of her death and her body had been found minus hands. According to those who claim to have seen the ghost, which has since become known as The Lady of the Lake, Delia’s restless spirit seems to be searching for her missing hands. The reports of mysterious forces pulling swimmers underwater or causing boats to capsize, and the Lady of the Lake are not the only cases of potentially paranormal happenings on Lake Lanier. There have been occasional reports of a mysterious raft equipped with a lantern on a pole, ridden by a shadowy figure that uses a pole to push it along, and which allegedly appears and disappears out of nowhere. In one particularly harrowing account, two fishermen saw the ghostly raft while out on the lake fishing in a rowboat on one cold autumn night at around 1 AM in the morning. In this case the mysterious raft was around half a mile away and in an estimated 45 feet of water, yet the rider was bizarrely pushing it along with a pole nevertheless. At one point this enigmatic figure shouted something to the two fishermen and proceeded to jump off of the raft into freezing water to swim towards them. This alarmed the two fishermen, who pulled in their lines and were in a hurry to get out of there, thinking it was perhaps someone meaning to do them harm. It was at this point that the lantern on the raft abruptly went out. When the fishermen shone their boat’s spotlight out across the water they could find no sign of the raft or the mysterious occupant who had jumped into the water. The black surface of the lake remained calm and the raft would not appear again. Ghosts, freak accidents, and mysterious murders are also not the only weird things apparently going on at Lake Lanier. Local fishermen have long insisted that there are gigantic catfish in the lake which reportedly reach sizes of 5 to 7 feet long and are said to swallow dogs that get to close to the water and even attack swimmers and divers. These giant catfish are said to be particularly attracted to the deep waters below Buford Dam, and there are various accounts from divers working in the area to examine the dam or fix bridges who have seen the huge fish for themselves, which were scary enough to supposedly make some of the divers refuse to go back into the water there ever again. One of the most popular local tales concerning the alleged giant catfish of Lake Lanier concerns a truck carrying live chickens, which supposedly hurtled off of the Thompson Bridge in the 1980s and sank to the bottom along with its cargo. Divers were then sent in to examine the wreckage and to their horror found catfish “the size of 12-year-old boys” gathered about the sunken truck and engaged in a ravenous feeding frenzy swallowing the chickens whole. Other stories have described fishermen hooking into the enormous fish and having their boats towed around the lake. It is unclear whether these reports of giant catfish in Lake Lanier are true, exaggerations, or pure urban legend, but it is certainly enough to give one pause before getting into the water here. With its history of abundant accidents and drownings, mysterious deaths, ghostly phenomena, and colossal catfish, Lake Lanier certainly has its fair share of strange mysteries. What is going on here? Are the accidents merely the results of the dangers inherit to a place where many people are gathering and drinking, or is the lake truly cursed? Are the deaths just regular crimes or is there something more at work? Are the ghosts and giant catfish just spooky local lore, tall tales, and superstition, or is there more to it than that? Whatever answers may lie behind these various mysteries, they are certainly strange, and it is hard to look at Georgia’s largest lake without wondering what they may be. |
By Gareth Porter For more than three decades, the United States and its European allies have committed one fundamental error after another in the process of creating a commonly held narrative that Iran was secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. The story of how suspicions of the Iranian programme hardened into convictions is a cautionary tale of political and institutional interests systematically distorting the judgments of both policymakers and intelligence analysts. Too many of these basic errors have been committed along the way to cover them all in a single article. But four major failures of policymaking and intelligence represent the broad outlines of this systematic problem. Denial of Iranian Rights, Followed by Denial of the Truth The first failure, which set in train all the others, involved the US trying to strangle the nuclear programme of the Islamic Republic in its cradle and then blithely acting as though it bore no responsibility for the resulting shift in Iranian nuclear policy. It all started with a decision by the Reagan administration early in the Iran-Iraq war in 1983 to put diplomatic pressure on its allies to stop all nuclear cooperation with Iran. France was pressed to forbid a French-based multilateral consortium from providing the nuclear fuel that Iran had counted on for its lone nuclear reactor at Bushehr. The US State Department acknowledged at the time that it had no evidence that Iran was working on or even wanted nuclear weapons. That US effort to choke off any nuclear assistance to Iran thus represented an extremely serious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guaranteed Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology. Not surprisingly Iran responded to that US denial of its nuclear rights by defying US wishes and acquiring the technology to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel itself on the black market and later through negotiations with China and Russia. US aggressiveness toward Iran’s nuclear programme had backfired. But instead of recognising that it had made a serious error, Washington compounded the original policy blunder by treating the Iranian response as prima facie evidence of nuclear weapons intent. In 1995 Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in the course of explaining an order by President Bill Clinton banning all US trade and investment in Iran, accused Iran of having an “organised structure dedicated to acquiring and developing nuclear weapons.” That was an obvious reference to the Iranian efforts to acquire centrifuge and other enrichment technology. The Clinton administration thus acted as though there was no relationship between Iran’s interest in obtaining gas centrifuge technology and the US denial policy that preceded it. The Intelligence Goes Wrong The CIA and other Western intelligence agencies began to drift away from reality on the Iran nuclear issue in the early 1990s, when Western intelligence agencies were gleefully poring over intercepted telexes from Sharif University in Tehran seeking various “dual use” technologies – those that could be used either for a nuclear programme or for non-nuclear applications. They had found that the telex number on many of the messages was that of the Physics Research Centre, which was known to do research for the Iranian defence ministry. That was enough to convince them that Iran was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons programme. The telexes ultimately turned out to be false positives, however. In late 2007 and early 2008, Iran turned over detailed documentation showing that every one of the “dual use” procurement items sought in those telexes had been requested by various faculties of Sharif University for faculty and student research. And the Physics Research Centre’s telex number was on the telexes because the former head of the organisation was teaching at the university and had been asked to help in the procurement of the items. The intelligence analysts had wrongly interpreted the inherently ambiguous “dual use” evidence as confirming pre-existing suspicions of Iran’s intentions. That analytical failure was a template for a series of four intelligence assessments of the Iranian nuclear programme by the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center and later by the US intelligence community as a whole that falsely concluded that Iran had an active nuclear weapons development programme as of the time of the assessment. That string of false positives raises serious questions about the 2007 US national intelligence estimate by a team of analysts that had just repeated the same mistake in a draft estimate only a few months earlier. Ignoring the Fatwa Against Chemical Weapons The belief of Western governments that Iran must have pursued nuclear weapons has been based on their ignorance of a pivotal historical episode that should have caused them to question that belief. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Saddam’s troops attacked Iran with chemical weapons many times, killing 20,000 Iranians and severely injuring 100,000. Yet Iran never retaliated with its own chemical weapons, as Joost Hiltermann’s A Poisonous Affair, the authoritative source on chemical attacks in that war, has documented. That fact poses a fundamental challenge to the Western narrative on the Iran nuclear issue, because there is no credible explanation for the Iranian failure to retaliate with chemical weapons other than the fact that supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forbidden the possession and use of all weapons of mass destruction as illicit in Islam. The Revolutionary Guards acted on their own to acquire the capability to produce mustard gas weapons, as the wartime Iranian Minister for military procurement has confirmed in a recent interview. But his account of his meetings with supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini also confirms that Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against such weapons early in the war and repeated it in 1987. The implications of that historical episode for an understanding of the politics of WMD policy in Iran are obviously far-reaching. It lends strong credibility to the Iranian claim that the current supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons is an absolute bar to Iran possessing such weapons. But the news media has continued to dismiss the problem by clinging to an old narrative, which was based on false information that Iran not only had possessed chemical weapons but also had used them. Refusing to Acknowledge the Weaponisation Evidence is Tainted For nearly a decade, the international politics of the Iran nuclear issue have revolved around intelligence documents and reports of Iran nuclear weapons work. A 1,000-page cache of documents that surfaced in 2004 showed the redesign of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to accommodate a nuclear weapon and high explosives experiments that could only be used for nuclear weapons. More incriminating intelligence documents followed in 2008-09. The IAEA has now been investigating them for nine years. But Western governments, abetted by compliant news media coverage, have chosen to ignore the considerable evidence that these documents were of very dubious origins. Contrary to the cover story that the documents were passed on to Western intelligence by a participant in a covert Iranian programme or by a German spy, a former senior German foreign office official has now revealed that the German intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, obtained them from a sometime source who was a member of the Iranian exile terrorist organisation Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK). The MEK was then serving Israel’s Mossad as a means of laundering alleged intelligence, so it is safe to assume that the documents came from Israel. IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei (1997-2009), who insisted that the documents had not been authenticated, recalled in his memoirs, “No-one knew if any of this was real.” Against the wishes of the Bush administration, he refused to use them as evidence against Iran. Major contradictions between information in the papers and the independently verifiable timelines of Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes indicated that the authors were not Iranian specialists. The re-entry vehicle depicted in the studies, for example, was not the one that Iran was redesigning at the time and that was revealed to the world only after the documents were handed over. El Baradei also revealed that a subsequent series of intelligence documents, which included the claim that Iran had installed a large cylinder at Parchin to test atomic weapons designs, had been passed on to the IAEA directly by Israel. That intelligence proved to be equally problematic: former IAEA nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley found the Parchin cylinder claim technically implausible. The US government and its Western allies have all closed their eyes, however, to the evidence that these documents were designed to justify US action by the United States against the Islamic republic. The political convenience of the accepted narrative of the Iran nuclear issue has continued to suppress any active interest in learning the truth. Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national security policy. His latest book, “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” was published in February 2014. This article originally appeared in Middle East Eye. The statements, views, and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of EMerging Equity. This article was originally published on Counterpunch Copyright © Counterpunch |
Pope Francis is doubtless on his way to Philadelphia now to explain to young Ahmad Shakoor that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” “Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14) “US teen pleads guilty to IS-inspired plot to kill pope,” AFP, April 3, 2017: Washington (AFP) – A New Jersey teen pleaded guilty Monday to a plot allegedly inspired by the Islamic State group to kill Pope Francis during his 2015 visit to the United States. The US Justice Department said Santos Colon, 15 years old at the time, sought to recruit a sniper to shoot the pope as he celebrated mass in Philadelphia on September 27, 2015. Colon also allegedly planned to set off explosives. But the teen unwittingly recruited an undercover FBI agent for the job, and was arrested quietly 12 days before the event. “Colon engaged someone he believed would be the sniper, but in reality was an undercover FBI employee. Colon engaged in target reconnaissance with an FBI confidential source and instructed the source to purchase materials to make explosive devices,” the Justice Department said in a statement. Court documents said Colon sought to carry out the act in support of the Islamic State group and that he had used the adopted name Ahmad Shakoor. In a plea bargain with prosecutors, Colon, now 17, agreed to forego trial and plead guilty as an adult to one charge of providing material support to a terror group. With the deal, prosecutors dropped three other charges filed against him as a juvenile. Court documents said the charges were in relation to the Islamic State group, which Washington has designated a foreign terrorist organization…. Colon faces a maximum of 15 years in prison but sentencing would likely be held off until 2021 while he undergoes psychiatric treatment in a secure facility. In a plea statement, Colon acknowledged having been a patient in a mental institution in the past. |
MANILA, Philippines (UPDATE) – Fire killed 2 children in Las Piñas Friday morning allegedly after their father decided to save his fighting roosters first. Authorities said a fire broke out in Manggahan Village, BF Resort Drive in Las Piñas at 10:55 a.m. Two children, identified as Adrian, 5, and John Rick Luto, 2, were killed after being trapped in the second floor of their home. The victims' mother, Maria, blamed her husband, Orlando, for letting 2 of their kids die. She said Orlando rescued his fighting roosters first and neglected the children. “Bitbit bitbit niya ‘yung mga manok tapos sinasabi nila sa kanya, ‘’Yung anak mo nandoon,’ pero wala lang siyang pakialam,” said one of Orlando’s children. The victims' father, meanwhile, passed the blame to his other children who were tasked to look after their younger siblings. "Sila ang nagaalaga diyan sa taas bakit ako ang aakusahan nila?” he said. The Luto couple has 13 children, 4 of whom were at home when the fire struck. Two of their children escaped the fire. All of the families belongings were burned in the fire, which razed some 25 homes. Firefighters took one hour to put out the fire. On Thursday, 2 children were also killed as fire razed their home in Lorenzo Compound, Barangay Talon Uno in Las Piñas. -- Reports from Niko Baua, ABS-CBN News; Alex Calda and Ricky Velasco, radio dzMM |
Camelopardalis is a large but faint constellation of the northern sky representing a giraffe. The constellation was introduced in 1612 or 1613 by Petrus Plancius.[3] Some older astronomy books give Camelopardalus or Camelopardus as alternative spellings of the name, but the official version recognized by the International Astronomical Union is Camelopardalis. Etymology [ edit ] First attested in English in 1785, the word camelopardalis comes from Latin,[4] and it is the romanization of the Greek "καμηλοπάρδαλις" meaning "giraffe",[5] from "κάμηλος" (kamēlos), "camel"[6] + "πάρδαλις" (pardalis), "leopard",[7] because it has a long neck like a camel and spots like a leopard. Features [ edit ] The constellation Camelopardalis as it can be seen by the naked eye. Stars [ edit ] Although Camelopardalis is the 18th largest constellation, it is not a particularly bright constellation, as the brightest stars are only of fourth magnitude. In fact, it only contains four stars below (brighter than) magnitude 5.0. Other variable stars are U Camelopardalis, VZ Camelopardalis, and Mira variables T Camelopardalis, X Camelopardalis, and R Camelopardalis. RU Camelopardalis is one of the brighter Type II Cepheids visible in the night sky. In 2011 a supernova was discovered in the constellation.[11] Deep-sky objects [ edit ] Camelopardalis is in the part of the celestial sphere facing away from the galactic plane. Accordingly, many distant galaxies are visible within its borders. NGC 2403 is a galaxy in the M81 group of galaxies, located approximately 12 million light-years from Earth with a redshift of 0.00043. It is classified as being between an elliptical and a spiral galaxy because it has faint arms and a large central bulge. NGC 2403 was first discovered by the 18th century astronomer William Herschel, who was working in England at the time. It has an integrated magnitude of 8.0 and is approximately 0.25° long. NGC 1502 is a magnitude 6.9 open cluster about 3,000 light years from Earth. It has about 45 bright members, and features a double star of magnitude 7.0 at its center.[13] NGC 1502 is also associated with Kemble's Cascade, a simple but beautiful asterism appearing in the sky as a chain of stars 2.5° long that is parallel to the Milky Way and is pointed towards Cassiopeia. NGC 1501 is a planetary nebula located roughly 1.4° south of NGC 1502. IC 342 is one of the brightest two galaxies in the IC 342/Maffei Group of galaxies. The dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 1569 is a magnitude 11.9 starburst galaxy, about 11 million light years away. NGC 2655 is a large lenticular galaxy with visual magnitude 10.1. MS0735.6+7421 is a galaxy cluster with a redshift of 0.216, located 2.6 billion light-years from Earth. It is unique for its intracluster medium, which emits X-rays at a very high rate. This galaxy cluster features two cavities 600,000 light-years in diameter, caused by its central supermassive black hole, which emits jets of matter. MS0735.6+7421 is one of the largest and most distant examples of this phenomenon. Tombaugh 5 is a fairly dim open cluster in Camelopardalis. It has an overall magnitude of 8.4 and is located 5,800 light-years from Earth. It is a Shapley class c and Trumpler class III 1 r cluster, meaning that it is irregularly shaped and appears loose. Though it is detached from the star field, it is not concentrated at its center at all. It has more than 100 stars which do not vary widely in brightness, mostly being of the 15th and 16th magnitude. NGC 2146 is an 11th magnitude barred spiral starburst galaxy conspicuously warped by interaction with a neighbour. MACS0647-JD, one of the possible candidates for the farthest known galaxies in the universe (z= 10.7), is also in Camelopardalis. Meteor showers [ edit ] The annual May meteor shower Camelopardalids from comet 209P/LINEAR have a radiant in Camelopardalis. Space exploration [ edit ] The space probe Voyager 1 is moving in the direction of this constellation, though it will not be nearing any of the stars in this constellation for many thousands of years, by which time its power source will be long dead. History [ edit ] Urania's Mirror, a set of constellation cards published in London c.1823. Above it are shown the now-abandoned constellations of [16] Camelopardalis as depicted in, a set of constellation cards published in London c.1823. Above it are shown the now-abandoned constellations of Tarandus and Custos Messium Camelopardalis is not one of Ptolemy's 48 constellations in the Almagest.[17] It was created by Petrus Plancius in 1613. It first appeared in a globe designed by him and produced by Pieter van den Keere. One year later, Jakob Bartsch featured it in his atlas. Johannes Hevelius depicted this constellation in his works which were so influential that it was referred to as Camelopardali Hevelii or abbreviated as Camelopard. Hevel. Part of the constellation was hived off to form the constellation Sciurus Volans, the Flying Squirrel, by William Croswell in 1810. However this was not taken up by later cartographers.[18] Equivalents [ edit ] In Chinese astronomy, the stars of Camelopardalis are located within a group of circumpolar stars called the Purple Forbidden Enclosure (紫微垣 Zǐ Wēi Yuán). See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Citations References |
Please support us by disabling your ad blocker on our site. Medical student's death ruled a suicide DP File Photo Second-year medical student Ari Frosch’s death on Sept. 22 was declared a suicide, The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, Mass. reported this week. Frosch was on a leave of absence at the time. He was 26 years old. An investigation by local and state authorities in Massachusetts determined the cause of death, a spokesman for the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office told the Chronicle. Students at the Perelman School of Medicine were alerted of Frosch’s death on Sept. 26 in an email from Vice Provost for University Life Valarie Swain-Cade McCoullum. The email was co-signed by Senior Vice Dean for Education at the Perelman School of Medicine and was sent on behalf of President Amy Gutmann and Provost Vincent Price. CAMPUS RESOURCES: Perelman School of Medicine Advising: 215-898-7190 Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS): 215-898-7021 (Nights and weekends, ask for CAPS counselor on call.) Division of Public Safety: 24/7 “HELP” line, 215-898-HELP (215-898-4357) Student Health Service: 215-746-3535 Student Intervention Services: 215-898-6081 University Chaplain’s Office: 215-898-8456 Medical Education Administration Gail Morrison, MD: Senior Vice Dean for Education: 215-840-4963 Stanley Goldfarb, MD: Associate Dean for Curriculum: 610-716-5820 Jon Morris, MD: Associate Dean for Student Affairs: 215-313-6990 “In sadness and with affectionate reflection, we write today to share that Ari Frosch, a second-year Medical student, died suddenly last week at home with family in Newton, Massachusetts,” the email said. Frosch completed his undergraduate studies at Colorado College in 2012, and went on to work at Bryn Mawr College and the National Cancer Institute before enrolling at Penn. Cade’s email also detailed Frosch’s dedication to community service. “Ari spoke fluent Spanish, had worked in Mexico, and volunteered at Puentes de Salud (“Bridges of Health”), a nonprofit dedicated to improving the health of Philadelphia’s Latino community. He loved rock climbing and also gave his time and talents to Habitat for Humanity,” she wrote. Frosch’s father and brother also attended Penn, each earning their medical degree from the Perelman School of Medicine in 1976 and 2014, respectively. Frosch’s death is the eleventh of a Penn student since February 2013 to be ruled a suicide. City News Editor Dan Spinelli contributed reporting. PennConnects Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian. |
The Diocese of Camden, New Jersey has a message for high school football players: either respect the National Anthem or be prepared to ride the bench. Any player or coach for high school sports teams in the diocese who does not “demonstrate appropriate respect” during the Star-Spangled Banner will be subject to a two-game suspension, Philly.com reports. Click here to join Todd’s American Dispatch: a must-read for Conservatives! The Catholics are doing what the National Football League refuses to do. “Our schools are founded on the teaching of respect and honor; respect and honor for God, country and duly appointed authority,” Supt. Mary Boyle wrote to Catholic high schools in the diocese. “The best approach is helping our young people understand that blood was sacrificed so that we all can enjoy the gifts of our faith and our country.” Players, coaches and administrators are expected to show respect during prayer, pledges and the playing of the national anthem, she declared. “Failure to demonstrate appropriate respect will result in suspension from play (2 games) or dismissal from the team for subsequent offense,” she wrote. Bishop Eustace’s football team requires young men to stand at attention. “Helmet under left arm. Stand straight. Chest out. Eyes ahead,” assistant athletic director Frank DelRossi told the newspaper. “We think it’s important, and our kids do too.” The Catholics don't mess around, folks. In recent days -- many professional football players have demonstrated contempt for the Armed Forces as well as our national anthem. The disgraceful trend was started by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kapernick – who refused to stand as a way of protesting perceived racial oppression and inequality. Mr. Kaepernick is a self-center, unpatriotic dunderhead. But to be fair -- it's hard for a football player to stand up for America when he's got his head up his hindquarters. To be clear -- professional football players have a Constitutional right to demonstrate their hatred of America. They have a right to denigrate our troops and desecrate the flag. But we have rights, too. We have the right to boycott their games along with the corporate sponsors who finance their anti-American platforms. Eli Harold, a 49ers teammate who raised his fist in defiance of our nation, told ESPN he was furious that fans objected to the protest. “What really pissed me off was when Kap was getting snaps at the end of the game and the crowd was booing,” he told ESPN. “I’m not throwing shots at our fans. It’s not about that. Liberty and justice for all. Just because this man is standing up for something he believes in doesn’t give you the right to boo him. I just don’t understand it, man. I really don’t.” Eli Harold, you dolt, it’s called the First Amendment. Fans most certainly do have the right to boo and heckle and boycott. Now you understand why so many people are disgusted with the National Football League. And that’s why it was so refreshing to hear about the edict handed down by the Diocese of Camden. They are teaching young men to be patriots -- men of honor and duty. It’s instruction that’s badly needed in the National Football League. Maybe the diocese could send a delegation of nuns to the next 49ers game -- armed with rulers. |
Richard Coverdale, 24, of North Yorkshire in the United Kingdom was sentenced to three-and-a-half years jail after burglars discovered images and videos of child abuse on his laptop and turned it over to police. Coverdale’s laptop was stolen during a burglary on August 19, 2008. However, on examining the contents of the laptop’s hard disk, the thieves discovered pornographic images that were disturbing enough that they felt compelled to turn it over to authorities, by way of a tip off. According to acting Detective Sergeant Chris Stone: Whilst they were carrying out an offence themselves, it is commendable that they did the right thing and this in turn has helped bring a serious offender to justice. In the course of the investigation Coverdale confessed to downloading pictures of children and speaking to girls in chatrooms, one of whom he had exposed himself to via webcam a few days prior to the burglary. Following the incident, the girl in question said that she had felt degraded and humiliated and had resorted to self harm. In sentencing, Judge Brian Forster QC, stated that Coverdale had ‘conducted a calculated scam against the girl’. Coverdale was sentenced to three-and-a-half years jail, banned from working with children for the rest of his life and will be issued with a ‘sexual offences prevention order’. Since Coverdale’s arrest, a 38-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman were apprehended in connection with the burglary. Both were sentenced to 12-month community orders, while the woman must also meet regularly with a probation officer. [Daily Mail] |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption How are Brics economies faring? The humidity and sub-tropical rain in South Africa's port city of Durban is doing little to dampen the enthusiasm for the fifth Brics summit, the first time the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have met in Africa. The grouping has come a long way since 2001, when the acronym was first coined by the then head of global economics for Goldman Sachs, Jim O'Neill. The largest emerging economies represent 25.9% of the world's land mass, 43% of the population and 17% of global trade. The group also accounts for a quarter of the world's gross domestic product (GDP) in terms of purchasing power parity. Indeed, a recent report from the United Nations Development Programme states that "by 2020, the combined economic output of three leading developing countries alone - Brazil, China and India - will surpass the aggregate production of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the United States". Enthusiasts will spend this week pointing to the latest woes of the eurozone and the crisis in Cyprus, to give force to their argument that the fulcrum of world economics is changing and the Brics are at the centre of that change. "We've never seen the total realignment of global politics and economics the way we've seen in the last two to three years," says Abdullah Verachia from the consultants Frontier Advisory. "That's why this Brics grouping has become so influential." 'Stimulating conversations' Others are less enthusiastic. Ruchir Sharma, the head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley, points out that the Brics are split over commodity prices. China and India, which import vast amounts of commodities, want lower prices. The exporters of Brazil, Russia and South Africa want higher prices. There are also several other sources of tension between the Brics on trade issues. Cheap imports from China into South Africa have been blamed for at least part of the decline in the country's manufacturing sector. South Africa itself has been taken to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in a row over the import of Brazilian chickens. Regulations and bureaucratic red tape in India have also troubled its Brics partners. "Making it easy to do business is certainly something that will assist in the growth of trade between the Brics countries," says Sunil Joshi, chief executive of Neotel, a South African telecoms company largely owned by the Indian conglomerate Tata. "I think intellectually stimulating conversations will happen at the Brics Summit to enable that. "We look forward to some of the progress being made in that space." Location and cost Image caption Brics leaders hope to build on progress made at last year's summit One of the biggest conversations that is due to happen at the summit is about the possible foundation of a Brics bank. There is a tremendous desire to set up a development bank that would aim to improve infrastructure within the Brics nations. Part of this desire stems from a feeling of mistrust that the Brics, particularly China, have towards established structures such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. But while the member countries need additional sources of funding to undertake large infrastructure projects, experts do see potential problems. One question is, where would the bank would be headquartered? South Africa is keen to play host, but it is also thought that Russia feels Moscow would be the best location. There is also the issue of money, or rather - how much would the member states be willing to put in? One figure being banded about is $10bn each - chump change to China, but a major outlay for the much smaller South African economy. What is fair? The rationale behind equal contributions would be to make it an even playing field - no one country could dominate the Brics bank. Image caption Traditional Zulu dancers greeted delegates as they arrived at Durban's King Shaka airport But this is not the only consideration. "South Africa's under 3% of the total Brics's economy size," says Catherine Grant, of the South African Institute of International Affairs. "So is it really fair to have equal contributions into a pool like this? "I think it'll be another couple of years before a Brics bank will actually come into operation." Nonetheless, the enthusiasm to make this Brics summit a success remains, especially on the part of the host, South Africa. If that enthusiasm comes close to that displayed by the traditional Zulu dancers greeting the arriving delegates at Durban's King Shaka airport, success will be almost guaranteed. |
It’s not a novel observation that in today’s impossibly fragmented media, Americans are more likely to choose the venues that conform to their political beliefs. I don’t happen to believe that makes for a well-informed public—it’s not simple nostalgia to remember an era, not so long ago, when this wasn’t the case. It’s a bit hard to fathom, especially among those who follow national news closely, whom you’d expect would like to balance contrasting opinions and come to their conclusions, but I suppose it’s the natural outcome of financially struggling mainstream periodicals and television stations to chase, as they say, eyeballs, by upping the bias to at least maintain a hard-core base. Sunday’s New York Times “Review” is a case in point. On the eve of the Democratic Convention, the skinny 12-page section contained seven articles that were anti-Trump; overkill would be an understatement. I understand that with the virtual elimination of Time and Newsweek—still prosperous and popular in the late-1990s—Sunday newspapers are, whether consciously or not, trying to fill that niche, a re-hash of the week’s events. And it wouldn’t surprise me if in the next five or 10 years, the remaining newspapers limit print distribution to Sundays only, and rely on digital for rest of the week. The best Times article was by Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia and longtime left-wing writer. One of the myths of this presidential campaign is that it closely resembles the chaos of 1968, when Richard Nixon nosed out Hubert Humphrey, with an assist from George Wallace, in a country torn apart by riots, assassinations, nearly 17,000 dead in the Vietnam War, and a culture that pitted young vs. old. Gitlin, an activist back then, summarizes the differences neatly, but as a diehard liberal he can’t skip over Trump. Recalling Nixon’s repeated invocation of the “silent majority,” and the Democratic Party’s disarray, Gitlin writes: “[T]oday’s operative majority may be the one panicked by the thought of Donald Trump in the White House.” Perhaps, but like most liberals who expect a decisive Hillary Clinton win in November, New Yorker Gitlin isn’t considering, or comprehending, Trump’s popularity, and doesn’t realize that the GOP candidate—who may or may not lose, too early to tell—has tapped an admittedly weird and angry vein in America. I’m sure there are millions of voters who’d never admit to a pollster—or friends and co-workers—that they’re going to choose Trump. Too embarrassing! The rest of the articles/op-eds lacked Gitlin’s insight. Of course, Frank Bruni phoned his story in, headlined, “Donald Trump’s Sham Patriotism,” re-hashing all of Trump’s scummy claims over the past year. His slur on Sen. John McCain; his deferments during Vietnam; kind words about Vladimir Putin; the delay in his financial contribution to veterans; advocacy of torture; refusal to release tax returns; the proposed ban on Muslims (which Trump waffles on), disturbing xenophobia, racism and contradictory protectionism (likely popular with a lot of Democrats). And that’s it. He could’ve—actually he has—written this three or six months ago. Jill Filipovic, a feminist, kicks in with a piece about how Trump would be an awful role model for women. Nicholas Kristof uses his 700 words to conclude that Trump’s a racist. Maureen Dowd, who’s fascinated by Trump (and would undoubtedly prefer to write about him rather than Hillary in the next four years, as a career revival), also revealed little, though I’m sure she was tickled by her lead sentence: “Like any comic book villain, Donald Trump is reveling in conjuring a dystopia.” Putative conservative Ross Douthat said Trump was a “carnival barker.” Hadn’t heard that one before. And the top editorial observed that Trump’s a dunce (my word) on world affairs, and the importance of international alliances, saying the man doesn’t listen to anyone. Again, you’d think there would be more than one Hillary Clinton piece aside from Gail Collins’ mash-note, just to mix up the content and provide intellectual fodder for the Times’ readers. But in 2016, that’s not the way media works: it’s preaching to the converted week after week after week. The public’s getting cheated. —Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER1955 |
EvilGenius's scanlation of Berserk, which Mune personally translated from Japanese into English. Image courtesy Mune. Against the backdrop of shrieking demons rallying for battle against human forces, Mune entered text into the comic's empty speech bubbles. "Originally they were but men," he wrote. "By virtue of uncommon tenacity were they reborn through causality." No one turns piracy into poetry quite like Mune. Eight years of rendering the blockbuster manga Berserk's Japanese dialogue into English has lent Mune respect in the underground digital landscape of otaku, the Japanese term for a manga and anime fanatic. His prose, admirers say, is vivid yet linguistically accurate. He can translate florid, archaic kanji into lyrical English dialogue. The digital Berserk pages bearing his words are clean with deep, black lines. Mune, 26, is a scanlator, an underground manga-lover who scans, translates, edits, and disseminates Japanese comics to overseas audiences, unofficially and without publishers' consent. His brand of piracy is more time-consuming than most; immediately after a Berserk chapter's release, he and his team of five scanlators begin to slave hours away over Photoshop with a Japanese dictionary. Scanlating one manga chapter can take them over 30 hours. In the past, Mune, who heads up the EvilGenius scanlation group, has stayed up for the duration of a project. He has never been paid for this work. Also, it's illegal. Since the mid-90s, when manga was just entering Westerners' consciousness, factions of scanlators have been illicitly editing and circulating Japanese manga abroad. Manga's epic storylines, ranging from cavity-sweet to torture porn, appealed to freaks, art geeks, and literature lovers alike. Tight-knit fan communities formed around manga, an exotic cultural pocket whose occasional godless gore and panty shots would make any suburban mom queasy. But since few series were released in English, Americans had no pipeline to the goods. The painstaking art of scanlation rose out of the desire for American fans to read Japanese manga without waiting—possibly forever—for publishers to release official translations of their favorite comics. Now, since more manga series are being released to US audiences, scanlators produce their bootleg translations in part to compensate for what are, in their belief, the flawed translations publishing companies produce. Scanlators, out of their die-hard love for manga, hold tight to the belief that scanlation can be good for the manga economy—how else will grass-fed Americans discover affinities for manga artifacts like tentacle monsters and cherry-blossomed love stories? Scanlations, scanlators like Mune argue, grow the fan base, which eventually inspire fans to buy the licensed books and merchandise. Publishers and creators, on the other hand, argue that scanlation has no redeeming qualities, that scanlations undercut the quality and even the viability of these comics. Between publishers and manga pirates, who stands on higher ground? ***** Over the last decade, the relationship between manga publishers and scanlators has grown increasingly tense. In 2010, the manga artist Rei Hiroe, best known for his series Black Lagoon, told his Twitter followers that he wanted the otaku who pirated his manga to "contract pancreatic cancer" after he discovered that someone "smugly" posted his art online in a ZIP file. In reply, the creator of the famous Hellsing manga, Kouta Hirano, added that he hoped the pirates would catch a disease so unheard of and incurable that doctors would "shit themselves laughing" about the poor sod's death. The MAG (Manga-Anime Guardians) project of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry reported that over 50 percent of manga and anime fans in America are consuming pirated material. The estimated cost of damage from online piracy, they said, is approximately $20 billion dollars. MAG did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Creators and artists in Japan are crippled as scanlation sways consumers away from official merchandise. The time-consuming and meticulous process of creating manga is not compensated by millions of fans who can effortlessly access the material online. The worst-case scenario is that this monetary deficit causes a series to be cancelled, and its creator left penniless. Nobody wins. But then there's "Gum," a scanlation historian of sorts, who believes that scanlation helped spread awareness of manga to the English-speaking world. In 2009, he meticulously documented the fraught history of scanlation on his site InsideScanlation.com. According to his account, one of the first major scanlation projects took place in 1996, three years after Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma ½ (published by Viz, owned by Shueisha) was released in English at what fans perceived as a frustratingly leisurely pace. To appease English-speaking otaku, a man named Jason Satoru Doyama pioneered a translation project called "The Ranma ½ Project." Soon, more projects appeared to address fans' demand for manga that was either slowly translated or, some thought, never to be translated. Primitive sites like GeoCities and AngelFire hosted Americanized versions of the first widely-translated manga, the classics Dragon Ball, Naruto, and Love Hina. Fans would edit the original comics using Microsoft Paint and release their scanlations over IRCs like #MangaScans. But the quality of the scans and translations, so coveted and beloved by otaku around the world, was extremely poor. Fine lines depicting throbbing muscles would blur into each other. A lover's first kiss would be offset by gaping blank space once populated with Japanese text. "I want to maintain a level of quality, especially since I'm working on something I'm personally a fan of." Enter Mune, who began spearheading Berserk's scanlation because he loathed the poor quality of both scanlation and official translation efforts. It was, in his opinion, a disservice to the original work. A card-carrying otaku, Mune now champions some of the highest "industry standards" in the underground manga translation world. "We want to do justice to the source material," he told me. "I want to maintain a level of quality, especially since I'm working on something I'm personally a fan of." During high school in his native Sweden, Mune started taking Japanese classes after discovering an affinity for Japanese video games. He soon reached a passable level of proficiency and picked up a Japanese copy of Naruto, a long-running manga about a young, blonde ninja. "Wow," he thought, skimming through its script, "this is really easy." In 2004, Mune found online his first "raw copy"—scanlator speak for untranslated digital manga pages—and convened with other students in his Japanese class over MSN chat. His friends opened up the pages in Photoshop, fiddled with the black levels, "cleaned" the manga (the low-quality paper is "basically toilet paper that's been recycled 15 times," he said) and deleted the Japanese text. Meanwhile, Mune deciphered the Japanese and rendered it into intelligible English. He then relayed his translations over MSN messenger. His friends typed them into the empty speech bubbles on the digital pages. They posted it on NarutoFan.com's forums, and celebrated a job well done. Eight years after Mune took ownership of Berserk's scanlation, he's become widely respected for his better-than-official scanlations. The mark of EvilGenius's mastery, a fan told me, is the group's "redrawing" efforts: Because Japanese reads right-to-left and top-to-bottom, scanlators adjust speech bubbles to accommodate English prose, which reads basically the opposite way. But reformatting speech bubbles leaves blank space on the page. So Mune's team of five hardcore Berserk scanlators "redraw" the comics, completing severed arms and background scenery in the style of the original manga artist (they even fill in blank space where a scanned comic's binding would be), like so: EvilGenius's scanlation of a "splash page" (a full page illustration) in Berserk. Image courtesy Mune. Despite Mune's and other scanlators' drive to sacrifice hours in the name of perfection, the publishing community argues that scanlation creates an environment where the material is perceived to have no value. Scanlation, in their opinion, sets a low bar for the quality of comics. Scanners can be decades-old. Deep, black lines often evaporate into gray. Worse, publishers argue, the translations are pitifully novice. Kurt Hassler, the editorial director of the American manga publishing company Yen Press, has been battling scanlators for 15 years. (In a past life, Hassler was the manga buyer at the now-defunct Borders Books.) In addition to encouraging low-quality content, he told told me, scanlators "co-opt [the] creators' intentions for the quality and production of their material." Until a few years ago, scanlations couldn't hold a candle to the quality of print comics. Some scanlation text today is still absolute drivel, overborne by low-resolution images. But every scanlator interviewed for this story attested that they continue scanlating partly because they don't appreciate the low-quality or interpretative efforts of publishers' official translations. They complain that official translations will often Americanize artifacts of Japanese culture to make their product palatable. "Ramen" morphs into "spaghetti" while American publishers will localize Japanese names to bland "Dereks" and "Serenas." Other times, flagrant sexuality or illicit drug use are censored entirely. Mune complained that publishers' redrawing efforts are sloppy. In 2007, Jessica Wolf, the operator of scanlation site Freelance-Manga, wrote to Viz, the publisher behind sword-and-sorcery "feudal fairy tale" Inuyasha, demanding that they "stop treating the series like crap." She detailed her disappointment with Viz's official translations in two e-mails compiled after she polled Inuyasha fans. "A vast majority of individuals cited the practice of flipping pages to read left to right as the biggest turn-off to Viz manga . . . [it] changes the original art and does a disservice to both Rumiko Takahashis work and the fans," Wolf wrote. "Many people would like to see the use of more traditional Japanese speech instituted in the Inuyasha manga." She also called out Viz's decision to leave out Japanese honorifics, which, in her opinion, compromised the manga's integrity. She closed her e-mail with a list of over 22 instances of translation errors compiled by members of the Inuyasha fan community. In an emailed response, Viz's Ian Robertson, the former supervising editor for Inuyasha, reportedly told Wolf that he "talked to the editor of the Inuyasha profiles book and we will be correcting the errors you mentioned for our second printing. I will be doing the same for the manga." A Viz representative told me that they are always looking to improve their manga franchises, but did not disclose how often they do so at the behest of pirates. ***** Viz's interaction with Freelance-Manga is out of the ordinary, considering that publishers usually communicate with scanlation site webmasters through cease-and-desist notices. Antagonism, rather than cooperation, mars the relationship between scanlators and publishers. Hassler pinpointed 2006 as the turning point in publishers' relationship with scanlators. Prior to that, he said, scanlators were mostly harmless groups of nerds sharing their favorite titles with fellow otaku. But when scanlation aggregators like MangaHelpers.com cropped up in the mid-2000s, "scanlations started having a direct and significant impact on the manga publishing industry as a whole." Around 2007, when scanlation aggregators skyrocketed in popularity, over-the-table manga had reached its peak market value in America at about $200 million a year. Gum estimates that there was a 100 percent increase in scanlation efforts after this point, with 50 manga releases a day swelling to 100. Manga's market value then declined until 2013, when it's believed the manga Attack on Titan, with its 15 tedious volumes of naked giants snacking on humans, raised it. "It really isn't a coincidence that manga sales in the US plummeted after aggregator sites started popping up and garnering so much traffic," Hassler said. "Prior to that, manga sales had been on a steep incline, frankly unlike anything that was going on in publishing at the time." "But then you had a whole new wave of readers whose first introduction was through scanlation, and the industry suffered appreciably," he continued. "You saw any number of manga publishers in the US folding, and Japanese publishers found their international licensing revenue severely impacted. It has taken years for the industry to start to rebound, but even now, it remains a fraction of what it was prior to the establishment of the aggregator sites." (Publishing industry analyst and ICv2 CEO Milton Griep estimated that the quantity of manga volumes published in North America plummeted from 1,500 in 2007 to 695 in 2011. While it's difficult to prove definitively that the upsurge in aggregators directly caused the collapse of American manga, one of the 1,000 most accessed sites in the late 2000s was, in fact, the scanlation aggregator Onemanga.com.) MangaHelpers.com, formerly one of the largest scanlation aggregators, had since 2005 unlawfully facilitated the scanning, translation and dissemination of those pages for English audiences. They were a sort of all-in-one resource for both scanlators and readers. Their forums were full of raws ready to be edited and translated by scanlation groups that met and coordinated over their interface. After the scanlations were complete, MangaHelpers.com hosted them on the site's reader. "NJT," the 31-year-old founder of MangaHelpers.com, birthed the aggregator to make scanlations accessible to people who weren't about to go on a backwoods IRC to get their manga fix. "It's all about a battle over who provides the better service," NJT told me. "Who can provide the fastest, highest quality service? It's a matter of making content as pleasing to the user as possible." NJT's effort to spread a love for manga was thwarted in 2009 with a cease-and-desist letter from Kondasha Comics. MangaHelpers, which facilitates translations to this day, subsequently took down its content. A year later, panicked over a newly-formed coalition of 36 angry manga publishers, MangaHelpers announced that it would no longer host pirated scans of manga pages. Today, they're still the major resource for the translated text populating speech bubbles in other sites' scanlations. A decade of facilitating underground scanlation efforts has changed NJT's approach to piracy. He said he wants to go white—that is, scanlate manga in the light of day. NJT now aspires to broker quality manga translation under the auspices of publishing companies. MangaHelpers, he believes, has the potential to act as a sort of otaku Napster, innovating the publishing scene by making content as accessible and fan-centered as possible. In a few years, he had hoped, it would develop into an otaku Spotify. "Getting the blessing from the publishers to do what we enjoy while it also benefits them would certainly be one step closer to bridging the gap between fans and publishers," NJT told Gum in an interview, "ultimately creating more opportunities and better relationships and thus making everyone happy. The future of MH is trying to make it one where scanlations aren't frowned upon, and where the publishers can openly work with fans to make a better (manga)reading experience for everyone." "We've been pirating your material to a lot of people… How's it going?" One fall morning in Tokyo, NJT came out from behind his keyboard in an effort to realize MangaHelpers' potential as an otaku Napster. His goal? Bridge the gap between publisher and pirate. Donning a suit and carrying a briefcase, NJT nervously exited Tokyo's Jimbocho subway station and entered the eight-story building housing the offices of Shueisha, the publishing company that reportedly owns 30 percent of Japan's manga market. The pages of staples like Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece had been assembled in their offices. (According to NJT, MangaHelpers welcomed 6.5 million visitors a month in 2010; that same year, Shueisha reported its first annual loss: around $49 million dollars.) NJT and a colleague at MangaHelpers had memorized a point-by-point presentation that he hoped would convince Shueisha to partner with their unlawful enterprise. It would be a tense meeting. "We already put our heads into a guillotine," NJT recalled. "That's how strongly we felt about this." Over a dozen Shueisha employees assembled to hear out NJT, whose ambitious presentation proposed a combined effort to indirectly address the grievances—timing lags and errors in official publishing—that fuel scanlators' craft. His aim was to abolish the need for his illegal digital manga economy. In this new arrangement, scanlators would be contractors and the site would block scanlations of manga that had been translated "officially." MangaHelpers would herald the decline of Japanese comic piracy. "Here we are, a couple of pirates, going to the Shueisha office to say, 'We've been pirating your material to a lot of people… How's it going?'" NJT joked uncomfortably. In the end, Shueisha turned him down. The publisher didn't want to work with a "black" business, citing MangaHelpers' long history as pirates. Today, MangaHelpers still thrives underground, subsisting off a digital labor economy of gleefully unpaid fans. NJT is now pessimistic about joint ventures. But Mune and other scanlators insist that scanlation is still growing the manga fan base, paving the way for otaku to spend more money on publishers' franchises. Mune said he's discovered a trove of manga from scanlation sites. His Berserk fandom moved him to purchase the volumes—what scanlators say is a win-win for publishers and pirates. Today, the official English translations of Berserk rest on Mune's shelf, still lovingly untouched in shrink wrap. When I asked how his translation matches up, he paused and replied, "I haven't actually checked." |
February 29, 2016 By admin In Uncategorized 591 What Does It Mean For Me When A Car Manufacturer Stops Making My Car? With Toyota’s recent announcement that are going to be dropping the popular Scion brand, many Scion car owners are left with quite a few very important questions. The biggest one of them all, is “How is this going to affect me?”. There are a couple of things to factor in here, as Toyota has announced that they will be dropping the brand, but rebadging many of the models, which simply means that Toyota will keep making some of the cars, but under the Toyota brand instead. For people wondering if they will still be able to get service for their cars, undoubtedly the answer is yes. Most car manufactures keep replacement parts and engines for production cars for a number of years even after they stop making them. They understand that people will still be looking to service these vehicles and are still willing to sell goods and services even after the cars are no longer being made. Usually these supply chains will last for a limited number of years, so while it may be easy to find parts for a few short years, long term it may not be tenable to maintain a Scion model. Toyota No longer Producing Scions Will Affect Certain Car Model’s Value Occasionally other manufacturers will step in and make parts that fit people’s needs but these are either going to somewhat expensive or difficult to obtain, so maintenance could become a very real issue down the road. Realistically and most importantly this may affect the resale value of some of the Scion models. The Scion models that Toyota will continue to produce under the Toyota brand, will not see much change in their values, but the cars that they choose not to reproduce will be affected. As they stop producing some of the cars, it will be harder and harder to service and maintain those vehicles, and this will certainly affect certain car values and not in a positive way. Before you get your hopes up about turning a Scion into a collector’s car, know that most cars take up to 20 years in order to be considered collectibles and there has to be an element of demand. Scions were produced in such mass quantities that we don’t think that there will be a considerable collectors market for the cars even 20 years from now, but who knows? Either way a safe bet would be to get your car appraised and weigh your options. If you currently own a Scion model that is going to be discontinued it would be wise to get your car appraised sooner rather than later, and see what options you have available to you. As dealerships across the country stop doing service and moving towards other models, it may become more and more expensive to maintain a car that is losing value far more rapidly than a similar car from a different manufacturer. If you’re looking for a fast an easy car appraisal come on by to CarDrop, and we’ll be more than glad to offer you a free estimate on what your car may be worth. The offer is good for ten days, and there are no strings attached. Better to armed with the knowledge of what your Scion is worth now, than to be disappointed down the road, when you decide to upgrade down the road. |
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers jointly published a final rule on May 27, 2015, defining the phrase “waters of the United States” under the federal Clean Water Act. This definition is critically important because it determines which water bodies are subject to federal permitting requirements and which waters are beyond federal authority. A clear definition has proved elusive in recent years, resulting in considerable confusion among regulators, landowners and developers. As a result of this confusion, jurisdictional determinations for small, isolated and ephemeral water bodies have often required intensive, fact-specific and time-consuming scientific analyses, without any definitive standards to guide the decision-making process. The final rule seeks to resolve this uncertainty by providing clarity, consistency and predictability. However, the rule is very controversial and would impose increased permitting requirements on virtually every type of land development and resource utilization. The rule’s impact will be felt particularly in the West, where there are numerous intermittent and seasonal water bodies that will fall under the rule’s coverage. The Final Rule’s Definition of “Waters of the United States” The final rule contains three categories of water bodies: waters that are automatically subject to federal jurisdiction; waters that are not automatically jurisdictional but that may be subject to federal authority on a case-by-case basis; and waters that not subject to federal jurisdiction. Automatically Jurisdictional Waters Under the final rule, the following waters are automatically jurisdictional: Traditional navigable waters (such as rivers, lakes and bays), interstate waters, and the territorial seas; Impoundments of waters that otherwise qualify as jurisdictional; “Tributaries”; and “Adjacent” waters. A large part of the controversy over the new rule is rooted in the definitions of “tributary” and “adjacent.” The rule defines “tributary” as any water body that both (1) has a defined bed and banks and an ordinary high water mark and (2) contributes flow, either directly or through another water, to a traditional navigable water, an interstate water, or the territorial seas. A water that qualifies under this definition does not lose its status as a tributary “if, for any length, there are one or more constructed breaks (such as bridges, culverts, pipes, or dams), or one or more natural breaks (such as wetlands along the run of a stream, debris piles, boulder fields, or a stream that flows underground) so long as a bed and banks and an ordinary high water mark can be identified upstream of the break.” There has been considerable debate and uncertainty over whether small streams with only intermittent or ephemeral flows are covered by the Clean Water Act. The new rule would resolve this issue by categorically asserting jurisdiction over such streams—regardless of the size or duration of the flow, regardless of whether the flow is natural or man-made, and regardless of whether the connection to a downstream water is distant or attenuated—if there is a bed and bank and a high water mark and any contribution of flow to a jurisdictional water. Many see this definition as a substantial broadening of federal jurisdiction, especially in western states such as Arizona where intermittent and ephemeral washes are a ubiquitous feature of the landscape. Further, the new rule expands the definition of “adjacent” in two important ways. First, the prior rules and guidance envisioned that an “adjacent” water body must be in close physical proximity to a jurisdictional water body such as a river or a lake. Under the new rule, a water body is “adjacent” if any portion of the water body is within the 100-year floodplain of a jurisdictional water and within 1,500 feet of the ordinary high water mark of that jurisdictional water. A water body also is “adjacent” if any portion of the water body is within 100 feet of the high water mark of a jurisdictional water, regardless of the size or location of the 100-year floodplain. Further, a water body is “adjacent” if any portion of the water body is within 1,500 feet of the high tide line of a tidally influenced water. Unlike the proposed rule that the agencies published in April 2014, which would have covered as “adjacent” virtually all water bodies located in the 100-year floodplain of a jurisdictional water, the final rule does impose a firm boundary on the definition of adjacency. But many still see the fixed distances established by the new rule as arbitrary and an unwarranted expansion of federal jurisdiction. Second, the prior Clean Water Act regulations covered only adjacent wetlands, based on the theory that wetlands are special aquatic features meriting a higher level of protection than other types of adjacent waters. The new rule eliminates this distinction, subjecting all adjacent waters to federal jurisdiction regardless of whether they qualify as wetlands. Case-by-Case “Significant Nexus” Determination In addition to water bodies that are automatically jurisdictional, the new rule includes two sets of water bodies that may be subject to federal jurisdiction on a case-by-case basis. The first set includes all water bodies within the 100-year floodplain of a jurisdictional water, as well as all water bodies within 4,000 feet of the high tide line or ordinary high water mark of a jurisdictional water. The second set consists of specifically identified categories of waters, such as prairie pot holes, western vernal pools and Texas coastal prairie wetlands. The case-by-case determination depends on whether there is a “significant nexus” to a jurisdictional water. A water body has a “significant nexus” if any one of a variety of functions performed by that water body (such as sediment trapping; filtering of pollutants; storage of runoff; export of organic matter; nutrient recycling; retention and attenuation of flood waters; etc.), either “alone or together with similarly situated waters in the region, contributes significantly to the chemical, physical or biological integrity” of a jurisdictional water. A “significant” contribution is any effect that is “more than speculative or insubstantial.” This is a fairly broad and open-ended standard, which appears to give substantial discretion to the agencies in making jurisdictional determinations. Non-Jurisdictional Waters The rule also defines which waters are not subject to federal jurisdiction, including waste treatment ponds, artificially irrigated areas that would revert to dry land if the irrigation were to cease, artificial waters created in dry land, puddles, storm water control features created in dry land, and upland ditches that meet specified requirements. Impacts of the New Rule The U.S. Supreme Court’s fractured decision in Rapanos v. United States, 547 U.S. 715 (2006) limited the Clean Water Act’s coverage to those waters that have a “significant nexus” to a navigable waterway, but the Court did not provide a precise definition of this key term. As a result, since the Rapanos decision was issued, the boundaries of federal jurisdiction under the Act have been notoriously unclear. The EPA and Corps have tried to address this uncertainty through interpretive guidance documents, but these efforts did little to answer the oft-posed question of where “the water ends and land begins.” In publishing the new rule, the EPA announced that the rule will help to provide greater clarity and consistency, in order to ensure that “waters protected under the Clean Water Act are more precisely defined and predictably determined, making permitting less costly, easier, and faster for businesses and industry.” The EPA further announced that the rule does not expand the agencies’ authority and “only protects the type of waters that have historically been covered by the Clean Water Act.” But at the same time the EPA also seems to acknowledge that the new rule is not merely designed to provide greater certainty for the regulated community. Indeed, the EPA has declared that the rule “marks the beginning of a new era in the history of the Clean Water Act” and “completes another chapter” in that history by establishing essential protections for our nation’s waters. In reality, however, it is likely that this new chapter has not yet been completed. It is almost certain that the new rule will be challenged in court. Further, as we outlined in a recent update, there also are a number of ongoing efforts in Congress to derail the rule, although any law that Congress enacts could very well encounter a presidential veto. The fundamental problem is the lack of any clear direction from Congress on what waters are covered by the Clean Water Act. The Act applies by its terms to “navigable waters,” which are defined merely as “waters of the United States.” As Justice Samuel Alito lamented in his concurring opinion in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, 132 S. Ct. 1367 (2012), “the words themselves are hopelessly indeterminate” and since the Clean Water Act was enacted in 1972 “Congress has done nothing to resolve this critical ambiguity.” In the midst of this uncertainty, the agencies have now reasserted and expanded their permitting authority. Ultimately, the issue may very well land back at the Supreme Court to come up with a definitive answer for when the Clean Water Act applies and when it does not. © 2015 Perkins Coie LLP |
US authorities are exaggerating the threat of terrorism while persecuting Muslims. Justin Lane Newscom Khalifah al-Akili, a 34-year-old Muslim American from the Pittsburgh area, was to publicly claim that he was the target of an FBI sting operation at a press conference last month. Had he not been arrested at his home one day before the press conference was to take place, al-Akili would have described how he was harassed and stalked by undercover FBI operatives, one of whose identity was exposed after a Google search of his phone number returned results linking him to another undercover entrapment case in New York state. Authorities claim that al-Akili “had made radical Islamic statements and that police had uncovered unspecified jihadist literature at his home,” as the Guardian’s Paul Harris reported (“‘Taliban sympathiser’ arrest prompts new questions about FBI tactics,” 26 March 2012). Al-Akili is currently in detention, charged with a firearms code violation related to a seven-second video of him firing a gun at a shooting range. Shortly before his arrest, al-Akili reached out to civil liberties groups, national Muslim organizations and the media with his claim of being targeted in an FBI entrapment plot. The timing of his arrest before the press conference hosted by the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms has caused some, including his lawyer, to suspect that his arrest was timed to prevent him from getting his story out. Story of entrapment At the press conference, al-Akili would have narrated how several months ago, he met a man who called himself Shareef, who would attend dawn prayers at an area mosque and, according to a National Coalition statement, would “with increasing frequency [turn] the conversation to fighting.” Shareef would repeatedly ask al-Akili to help him obtain a gun, which al-Akili refused to do (“Arrest of Muslim One Day before He Was to Participate in a NCPCF Press Conference,” 21 March 2012). Shareef promised to help al-Akili finance a restaurant if al-Akili would do something for him, “which al-Akili understood to mean some ‘act of violence against others,’” according to the statement. Al-Akili tried to avoid the man, but this proved difficult as Shareef lived only two blocks away. The National Coalition adds: “When Shareef offered to introduce al-Akili to a man he called his ‘brother,’ al-Akili tried to evade the meeting, but as he was walking back to his apartment from the store one night, Shareef pulled his vehicle up to al-Akili. A man got out of the passenger side, introduced himself as Mohammed, and said that he wanted to talk to al-Akili over coffee. Al-Akili made excuses, but when he got home the phone began to ring; it was Shareef and Mohammed downstairs, wanting to come in. Al-Akili pretended not to be at home.” Mohammed would again appear out of nowhere, insisting that al-Akili meet him. Al-Akili took down his phone number and would eventually run a Google search of it. This is how he found out that Mohammed was actually Shahed Hussain, an undercover FBI operative. According to an interview that al-Akili gave to the Times Union newspaper shortly before his arrest, when al-Akili asked Hussain whether he was an FBI informant, Hussain quickly ended the call and within a day, Shareef had vacated his apartment and vanished without a trace (“FBI informant in upstate stings, including Albany, surfaces in Pittsburgh case,” 17 March 2012). Federal convict to FBI darling When al-Akili ran a Google search of Mohammed’s phone number, he had found a reference to the Newburgh Four, a group of African American Muslim men who were convicted on the basis of testimony and secret recordings made by undercover informant Shahed Hussain. The four men, from an impoverished community in upstate New York, are currently serving lengthy prison sentences for participating in a plot to blow up Jewish targets and fire a Stinger missile at US military planes. Not exactly self-starters, the Newburgh Four were more likely motivated by financial gain than ideology. As Paul Harris reported in the Guardian last year, great material rewards including $250,000, free vacations and new cars were promised by Hussain to the alleged conspirators for their cooperation in the plot designed and encouraged by Hussain (“Newburgh Four: poor, black, and jailed under FBI ‘entrapment’ tactics”). Hussain even paid for the food and rent of one of the men, as the Associated Press reported (“Was too much offered?,” 22 September 2010). The men, all with serious troubles including jail time and mental health problems, may have believed they were playing Hussain — when Hussain gave one of them a camera to use for surveillance work related to the alleged plot, the camera was promptly sold. And when the same man, James Cromitie, tried to back out of the alleged plot, “Hussain said his overseas terrorist ‘brothers’ might cut his head off,” according to the Guardian. For his services, Hussain, “the sole personal witness for the FBI,” earned $100,000. Before setting his sights on Newburgh, Hussain was the government’s chief witness in the prosecution and conviction of two Muslim men in Albany, New York for money laundering to fund terror. As the Times Union reported in 2006, a loan promised by Hussain to one of the convicted men was the basis of the money laundering charges (“Informant for FBI is freed”). According to the paper, Hussain has been involved in the arrest and prosecution of more than a dozen persons. It was exposed during the Albany trial that the FBI recruited Hussain after he was arrested in December 2001 for taking bribes of several hundred dollars each as part of a ring to illegally give drivers licenses to immigrants who couldn’t pass the written examination. It was also revealed that he may have been involved in a homicide in Lahore, Pakistan. Role of undercover informants begs scrutiny Hussain isn’t exceptional as far as undercover FBI agents go — only that he was exceptionally bad at providing effective cover in the al-Akili case (al-Akili told the Times Union that Hussain and his colleague “were ‘too obvious’ and requested receipts even for small items they purchased like coffee and donuts”). A groundbreaking study by Mother Jones magazine and the Investigative Reporting Program published last year examined the prosecutions of more than 500 defendants in terrorism-related cases in the US. The investigation found that “nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants,” motivated by money or “the need to work off criminal or immigration violations” (“The Informants,” September/October 2011), as in the case of Hussain. Furthermore, “Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants. Of that, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur — an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.” Indeed, the report found that “With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings.” Because so few domestic terrorism cases actually go to trial — the specter of terror means juries almost always return guilty verdicts, so defendants usually take plea deals — the role of undercover FBI operatives in domestic terror cases rarely comes under scrutiny. “No real hunt” Rare insight into the FBI’s policy regarding undercover operatives was provided after ex-informant Craig Monteilh came forward about his role in the infiltration of Muslim communities in Orange County, California. Monteilh, who served time for passing fraudulent checks, told the Guardian last month that the FBI even “gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting,” and to record their “pillow talk” (“The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart: ‘There is no real hunt. It’s fixed’”). Monteilh’s provocateur tactics ironically prompted the community he was spying on to get a restraining order against him and he was reported to the FBI. The Guardian reports that Monteilh is now part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the FBI, and has “joined forces” with the people he once targeted “to campaign for their civil liberties.” Monteilh told the Guardian: “The way the FBI conducts their operations, it is all about entrapment … There is no real hunt. It’s fixed.” Persecution of Muslims despite low threat The study of domestic terrorism prosecution published by Mother Jones notes that “Ever since 9/11, counterterrorism has been the FBI’s No. 1 priority, consuming the lion’s share of its budget,” and the bureau now boasts “a roster of 15,000 spies — many of them tasked, as Hussain was, with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States.” However, a February report on “Muslim-American Terrorism in the Decade Since 9/11” by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that the scale of so-called homegrown Muslim-American terrorism “does not appear to have corroborated the warnings issued by government officials” for the year 2011. Finding a “relatively low level of radicalization among Muslim-Americans,” the report adds that the US government’s predicted surge in “homegrown Islamic terrorism” has not materialized and that the decline in prosecutions for funding terrorism, which makes up the bulk of domestic terrorism cases, “is particularly notable in view of the heightened scrutiny that terrorism financing now receives from law enforcement agencies.” Yet the extent to which the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have set Muslims in their sights is shocking. The Associated Press has published an explosive series of reports on leaked documents showing the New York Police Department’s mapping of Muslim communities and spying on student groups. And last month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act demonstrating that the FBI in San Francisco used a mosque outreach program to gather intelligence on Muslim organizations and their constituents “without any suspicion of wrongdoing” (“FBI FOIA Docs Show Use of “Mosque Outreach” for Illegal Intel Gathering”). On my blog for The Electronic Intifada, I have covered a domestic terrorism case in which three young men in North Carolina received decades-long prison sentences for providing material support to terror groups — even though government prosecutors failed to identify the specific terror groups to which the men are supposed to have provided support. Conversely, high-profile public figures have established close ties with and are providing advocacy to the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian dissident group on the US State Department’s designated foreign terrorist organization list. The US government is even providing training to this designated terrorist organization, according to a report by The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh (“Our men in Iran?,” 6 April 2012). Incidentally, reporter Chris Hedges and others are challenging the Obama administration in court about whether “civilian activists and journalists should not fear being detained under a new anti-terrorism law” (“Lawyers tested in court over anti-terrorism act,” Reuters, 29 March 2012). Of course, foreign policy is the driving force behind the development and application of anti-terror legislation, as the historic and contemporary targeting of Palestinian leaders and solidarity activists in the US reinforces. Opposition to the increasingly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are frequently used against defendants in terror trials, who are sometimes prosecuted after having refused to become informants themselves, as in the case of Tarek Mehanna, who received a 17.5 year prison sentence yesterday for various trumped-up terror charges. As the ACLU of Massachusetts commented last month, “if you are Muslim and criticize US foreign policy, you too can be prosecuted — unless you agree to play the FBI’s game” (“Double standards distort the judicial process”). The result of all this is that US Muslims like Khalifah al-Akili face lifetime sentences behind bars without having committed any acts of violence or harm as the government’s relentless drive to get terror convictions goes unchecked. Meanwhile the the civil liberties of entire communities are violated, burning whatever trust those communities may have had in the law enforcement that should be there to protect them, not go after them. Maureen Clare Murphy is managing editor of The Electronic Intifada. |
While reading an excellent writeup on LooseRounds.com, A brief history of FBI semiauto pistols, I remembered how much the handgun industry changed in the 1980s. In 1988 I was 20 years old and was looking forward to making my first handgun purchase. To make sure I made an informed decision, I ordered subscriptions to various gun magazines, such as Shooting Times. I read everything I could get my hands on about handguns. The article at LooseRounds reminded me of how the 1980s was a revolutionary time in handgun development. Handgun Revolution Going into the 1980s the vast majority of law enforcement still carried revolvers. Then there was the 1980 Norco shootout. Adoption of the Beretta M9 in 1985, which entered service in 1990. 1982 Glock introduced the Glock 17. 1984 SIG Sauer started production of the P226. 1985 Ruger P-Series started production. 1986 FBI Miami shootout. 1987 FBI started looking for a new handgun., resulting in the 40 S&W. 1988 Glock 19 started production. 1990 40 S&W started production. After the military test and the FBI studies, police departments all over the nation started adopting semi-automatic handguns. The military and FBI were a guiding light for police departments who were looking to make the transition. Test of Time Here we are 30 years later and the handguns from the 1980s have stood the test of time. Police departments all over the United States have adopted some version of the Glock. SIG Sauer P226 is still used by various military and police groups. Beretta M9 has just now been replaced by the U.S. military. 40 S&W used by police and federal agencies all over the United States. The Ruger P-series is still admired and sought after. Even though other cartridges have been developed, such as the .357 Sig, no other caliber has caught on like 40 S&W. 1980s Lasting Mark During the late 1980s and early 1990s I bought three handguns. They were a Beretta 92F, Ruger P90 and Ruger P91. I would put any of the three up against any handgun made in 2017. The 1980s left a lasting mark on handgun development and engineering. Companies like Sig, Beretta and Glock set the bar so high that here we are 30 years later and companies are still playing catch up. |
Unlike last year, Microsoft won’t have a press conference at Gamescom 2016 though there will be plenty of games to play (Gears of War 4, Forza Horizon 3, Halo Wars 2, ReCore, Sea of Thieves, We Happy Few, Everspace, Cuphead) and even an Xbox Fanfest. That said, Head of Xbox Division Phil Spencer confirmed that there will be “things to say this Fall”; he even teased a PlayStation Experience-like event, adding that he wants to visit fans that he didn’t have a chance to visit before. I'll miss Gamescom but @aarongreenberg will be there. We will have things to say this Fall, we'll find the right times. — Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) August 4, 2016 I want to visit some fans I haven't visited before and we have some things to say before end of 2016 so we'll find the times. — Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) August 4, 2016 Yes, we use to do this with the X0 events, like X09 etc in Europe, I like those. — Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) August 4, 2016 He mentioned European events that Microsoft used to organize in the past, like X09, so that’s a possibility. Another possibility is for Microsoft to organize a press conference at Paris Games Week, just like Sony probably will; this would allow them to tackle the competition directly. Spencer also said that work on the Phantom Dust remaster, due in 2017 on Windows PC and Xbox One, is progressing well. Just like pre-E3, @shannonloftis is keeping the secrets to herself. But my moles say things are progressing well. — Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) August 4, 2016 Finally, the Halo TV series is still alive. Alive. — Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) August 4, 2016 Stay tuned on Wccftech for an in-depth, thorough Gamescom 2016 coverage thanks to our on-site crew. |
'Fountains' of methane 1,000m across erupt from Arctic ice - a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide 'Methane fields on a scale not seen before' - researcher More than 100 fountains, but could be 'thousands' Could cause rapid climate change The Russian research vessel Academician Lavrentiev conducted a survey of 10,000 square miles of sea off the coast of eastern Siberia. They made a terrifying discovery - huge plumes of methane bubbles rising to the surface from the seabed. 'We found more than 100 fountains, some more than a kilometre across,' said Dr Igor Semiletov, 'These are methane fields on a scale not seen before. The emissions went directly into the atmosphere.' Far East Siberia: The melting of 'permafrost' under the sea has led to huge releases of methane - far more abrupt and intense than anything on land Earlier research conducted by Semiletov's team had concluded that the amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans. Now Semiletov thinks that could be an underestimate. The melting of the arctic shelf is melting 'permafrost' under the sea, which is releasing methane stored in the seabed as methane gas. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than any land-based release. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. Methane bubbles trapped in ice: Normally, bubbles from the seabed turn into carbon dioxide before reaching the surface, but the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is so shallow the methane travels directly into the atmosphere 'This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing.' 'Earlier we found torch or fountain-like structures like this,' Semiletov told the Independent. 'This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing.' 'Over a relatively small area, we found more than 100, but over a wider area, there should be thousands of them.' Semiletov's team used seismic and acoustic monitors to detect methane bubbles rising to the surface. Scientists estimate that the methane trapped under the ice shelf could lead to extremely rapid climate change. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or above water, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During Earth’s coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the planet warms and sea levels rise, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn’t have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. |
The Netherlands is a small country. You can drive from Schiphol to almost any corner of the country within a couple of hours. That said, a domestic KLM network may seem wholly unnecessary, but we did have a local subsidiary, which disappeared for a couple decades, before taking to the air as the Nederlandse Luchtvaartmaatschappij (NLM). After the Second World War, KLM had reopened its domestic network, with flights from Amsterdam to Groningen (via Leeuwarden), Maastricht and Enschede. But the network proved unprofitable, even after fares were dropped by a whopping 50%. This attracted a sharp increase in passengers, but even then profits were not forthcoming, prompting the KLM board to suspend domestic services towards the end of the 1940s. Bold step But the tide slowly began to turn. The northern and southern provinces of the Netherlands became more industrialised and the population grew, prompting demand for faster links through Schiphol to the major cities in west. After a period of trial services to assess demand, KLM took the bold step of establishing the Nederlandse Luchtvaartmaatschappij (NLM) in 1966. Initially, two routes were introduced: the Northern Line from Schiphol via Enschede to Groningen, and the Southern Line from Schiphol via Rotterdam and Eindhoven to Maastricht. The NLM fleet consisted of two Fokker F27 Friendships, which were leased from the Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF) and had to be converted for civilian purposes. The NLM payroll listed 21 men and 1 woman – the director’s secretary. The first flights to Schiphol were operated on 29 August 1966 from the airport at Eelde (Groningen) and Beek (Maastricht). In the 1966-67 annual report, the board reported a “satisfactory result”, with an average load factor of 46% for the Northern Line and 35% for the Southern Line in the first six months of operation. The two lines were, or course, primarily intended for corporate customers seeking quick connections, with arrival times at Schiphol carefully chosen to ensure easy transfers to international flights. But there was also another target group: youthful flight enthusiasts. Because KLM also saw NLM as a means to familiarise young people with aviation. Figures in subsequent years revealed that this was indeed the case, and many older people also experience their very first flight with NLM, which not only operated scheduled services, but also roundtrip excursions. Ups and downs The results improved slowly in the years thereafter. In 1972, KLM decided to serve each of the Dutch cities independently. By then the NLM fleet consisted of four Fokker F27s, making this possible. The network expanded in 1974, with the launch of the Eindhoven-Hamburg route, and again in 1975, with the Groningen-Bremen route. NLM later also served foreign destinations from Schiphol and Rotterdam, launching service to the British Channel Island of Guernsey in the summer of 1978, and to Madeira in the winter of that year. The airline celebrated its 10th anniversary in 1976, adding the name “Cityhopper” to its brand, making it more distinctive in foreign markets. One of the darkest days in the NLM Cityhopper’s history was 6 October 1981, when a Fokker F-28 Fellowship crashed near Moerdijk in a heavy thunderstorm. Everyone on board died, as did a fireman on the ground, who witnessed the accident and died of a heart attack. The extreme weather conditions subjected the aircraft to forces it was technically incapable of withstanding. This caused one of the wings to break off, resulting in the crash. The path to adulthood NLM Cityhopper’s network continued to expand in the 1970s and ‘80s, with more and more flights from Dutch regional airports to various European destinations. NLM Cityhopper also began operating more flights from Schiphol to European destinations, gradually becoming a so-called “feeder airline” for passengers transferring to international flights at Schiphol. In 1988, KLM took over the regional airline Netherlines, which was managed by a single board, together with NLM. The two KLM subsidiaries later merged and began operating under the name KLM Cityhopper BV in 1991. And this is where I draw the line, because the name NLM ceased to exist after 1991. When I asked former staff what it was like at NLM, they all agreed they were a tight-knit group. At first, staff were seconded to NLM from KLM, but later they become “true NLM-ers”. In 1976, the airline also formed its own “stewardess corps”, but this term doesn’t quite describe their status, because they were contract employees on the ground and stewardesses in the air. In short, the stewardess who checked you in also served you on board. Over a period of 25 years, NLM blossomed from a small airline, with 22 employees and two aircraft, into a fully-fledged carrier that currently operates around half of KLM’s European flights. KLM’s daughter company has become a city-hopping lady. |
The NRMA Insurance Western Sydney Wanderers are delighted to announce the return of club legend Mark Bridge on a two-year deal. Bridge will enter his fifth season in Red & Black after spending the last year with Chiangrai United in Thailand. Born and bred in Western Sydney, Bridge is a Wanderers Foundation Player having joined the club back in June 2012. He would go on to become arguably the most decorated player in Wanderers history and remains the only player to have won the Wanderers Medal for Player of the Year on two occasions. Bridge’s 112 appearances for the club is second only to Nikolai Topor-Stanley’s 125, while his record of 32 goals for the club was only just broken by Brendon Santalab last season. The forward will be hoping to pick up where he left of in season 2015/16, where he netted nine goals and provided eight assists as he helped the Wanderers to their third Grand Final appearance in four seasons. Bridge said he was excited about re-joining his hometown club. “I was raised in St Clair so for me to be back playing for this club, it holds a special place in my heart and hopefully I’m a part of it for a long time to come." The 31-year-old said he was eager to link-up once again with Tony Popovic and build on what they've achieved together so far. “Popa’s a great leader, I think he brings the best out of his players and he definitely gets the best out of me so it was a big part of me coming back. “As successful as this club has been in its short history, that Grand Final win has still alluded us so that’s definitely a massive driver for me this season." NRMA Insurance Western Sydney Wanderers Hyundai A-League 2017/18 squad: Goalkeepers: John Hall (Injury Replacement Player), Vedran Janjetovic, Jerrad Tyson Defenders: Jonathan Aspropotamitis, Keanu Baccus, Aritz Borda, Jack Clisby, Robert Cornthwaite, Brendan Hamill, Josh Risdon, Michael Thwaite Midfielders: Kearyn Baccus, Roly Bonevacia, Chris Herd, Steven Lustica, Jacob Melling, Marc Tokich Attackers: Mark Bridge, Jumpei Kusukami, Oriol Riera, Brendon Santalab, Lachlan Scott, Jaushua Sotirio Scholarship Players: Abraham Majok (Attacker), Nicholas Suman (Goalkeeper) |
By Angelos Anastasiou SOME 30.000 Turkish Cypriots who reside in the occupied areas have been excluded from the electoral roll due to a domino-effect bureaucratic deadlock. On the back of Turkish Cypriot journalist Sener Levent’s protest on Thursday, when he wrote an article calling for the postponement of the European Parliament elections in Cyprus because his son – and several others who had contacted him – were not included in the special electoral roll listing eligible Turkish Cypriot voters, many more came forth yesterday with the same claim. According to an amendment to Cyprus election law, passed last March, approximately 90.000 Turkish Cypriots aged 18 or more who hold a Republic of Cyprus ID card and reside in the occupied areas would be automatically granted voting rights, with no need to register in the electoral roll. In contrast, Turkish Cypriots aged 18 or over who hold a Republic of Cyprus ID card but reside in areas controlled by the government of Cyprus must register in order to be granted voting rights – just like Greek Cypriots and other residents. Therefore, the amendment made automatic eligibility conditional, depending solely on one’s residential address. The special electoral roll containing the automatic entries of Turkish Cypriots residing in the occupied areas was published by the Cyprus government on Wednesday. Many Turkish Cypriots were unable to find their names in the list, including Levent’s son, causing the Turkish Cypriot journalist’s public outburst. In it, Levent claimed to have received numerous phone calls from other Turkish Cypriots facing the same predicament. “This is a full-blown scandal, an embarrassment,” a furious Levent wrote. Addressing the issue, the Elections Commissioner Constantinos Nicolaides said that legislation relating to the registration of Turkish Cypriots has been followed “to the letter.” “I fully disagree and am sorry that such problems have arisen, perhaps due to the ignorance of those complaining,” he said. Head of the Interior Ministry’s Election Service Demetris Demetriou said that the relevant legislation is “crystal clear” and provides for all citizens residing in the occupied areas to be automatically eligible, based on the information submitted to the civil registration system. “This information is submitted to the civil registry in order to obtain documents issued by the civil registry – passports, identity cards, or other documents issued by the Republic,” he said. “During the submission of one such application, some of our fellow citizens stated their address in the occupied areas, and they were automatically included in the electoral roll. But a significant number stated no address, and another large number has stated an address in the government-controlled areas,” he said. “Our service followed the law to the letter, and it gave 58,637 Turkish Cypriots automatic voting rights,” he concluded. But increasingly, claims of bureaucratic incompetence seem to drown out the arguments made by the Election Service. Some claim that when Turkish Cypriots filled out applications to obtain Republic of Cyprus ID cards, information was transferred to the government database incorrectly. Instead of inputting applicants’ residential addresses, clerks seem to have been inputting their place of births, causing a giant problem that seems impossible to overcome by Sunday. Some 30,000 Turkish Cypriot residents of the occupied areas whose correct residential address in the north was never entered into the database, show on the system as residents of the government-controlled areas. And, having been told that they would be automatically included in the electoral roll, they never applied to register. Effectively, the Republic of Cyprus is denying tens of thousands of its citizens their civil rights. But while some in the occupied areas were quick to jump the gun with what they saw as a conspiracy by the Cyprus government to strip Turkish Cypriots of their democratic right to vote, others offered a more plausible explanation. Bureaucratic shortcomings are nothing new in Cyprus, and this issue was probably the result of a mismanaged initiative. But despite repeated appeals to the Elections Service, the Interior Ministry, the Ombudswoman and the EU’s representative office in Cyprus, no solution to the issue has been forthcoming. AKEL issued a statement lambasting the government’s poor handling of the issue, arguing that publishing an electoral roll containing thousands of names three days before the election left no room for fixing any problems. “On the other hand, this fact should not discourage those of our Turkish Cypriot compatriots who wish to vote and have been included on the electoral roll to do so on Sunday, sending their own messages,” AKEL said. But while Interior Minister Socratis Hasikos retorted on what he described as AKEL’s “feeble attempt to attract a few Turkish Cypriot votes”, he had nothing to offer on the substance of the issue. |
A hierarchy of 4D polychoric point groups and some subgroups. Vertical positioning is grouped by order. Blue, green, and pink colors show reflectional, hybrid, and rotational groups. Some 4D point groups in Conway's notation In geometry, a point group in four dimensions is an isometry group in four dimensions that leaves the origin fixed, or correspondingly, an isometry group of a 3-sphere. History on four-dimensional groups [ edit ] Isometries of 4D point symmetry [ edit ] There are four basic isometries of 4-dimensional point symmetry: reflection symmetry, rotational symmetry, rotoreflection, and double rotation. Notation for groups [ edit ] Point groups in this article are given in Coxeter notation, which are based on Coxeter groups, with markups for extended groups and subgroups.[6] Coxeter notation has a direct correspondence the Coxeter diagram like [3,3,3], [4,3,3], [31,1,1], [3,4,3], [5,3,3], and [p,2,q]. These groups bound the 3-sphere into identical hyperspherical tetrahedral domains. The number of domains is the order of the group. The number of mirrors for an irreducible group is nh/2, where h is the Coxeter group's Coxeter number, n is the dimension (4).[7] For cross-referencing, also given here are quaternion based notations by Patrick du Val (1964)[8] and John Conway (2003).[9] Conway's notation allows the order of the group to be computed as a product of elements with chiral polyhedral group orders: (T=12, O=24, I=60). In Conway's notation, a (±) prefix implies central inversion, and a suffix (.2) implies mirror symmetry. Similarly Du Val's notation has an asterisk (*) superscript for mirror symmetry. Involution groups [ edit ] There are five involutional groups: no symmetry [ ]+, reflection symmetry [ ], 2-fold rotational symmetry [2]+, 2-fold rotoreflection [2+,2+], and central point symmetry [2+,2+,2+] as a 2-fold double rotation. Rank 4 Coxeter groups [ edit ] A polychoric group is one of five symmetry groups of the 4-dimensional regular polytopes. There are also three polyhedral prismatic groups, and an infinite set of duoprismatic groups. Each group defined by a Goursat tetrahedron fundamental domain bounded by mirror planes. The dihedral angles between the mirrors determine order of dihedral symmetry. The Coxeter–Dynkin diagram is a graph where nodes represent mirror planes, and edges are called branches, and labeled by their dihedral angle order between the mirrors. The term polychoron (plural polychora, adjective polychoric), from the Greek roots poly ("many") and choros ("room" or "space") and is advocated[10] by Norman Johnson and George Olshevsky in the context of uniform polychora (4-polytopes), and their related 4-dimensional symmetry groups.[11] Orthogonal subgroups B 4 can be decomposed into 2 orthogonal groups, 4A 1 and D 4 : F 4 can be decomposed into 2 orthogonal D 4 groups: B 3 ×A 1 can be decomposed into orthogonal groups, 4A 1 and D 3 : Rank 4 Coxeter groups allow a set of 4 mirrors to span 4-space, and divides the 3-sphere into tetrahedral fundamental domains. Lower rank Coxeter groups can only bound hosohedron or hosotope fundamental domains on the 3-sphere. Like the 3D polyhedral groups, the names of the 4D polychoric groups given are constructed by the Greek prefixes of the cell counts of the corresponding triangle-faced regular polytopes.[12] Extended symmetries exist in uniform polychora with symmetric ring-patterns within the Coxeter diagram construct. Chiral symmetries exist in alternated uniform polychora. Only irreducible groups have Coxeter numbers, but duoprismatic groups [p,2,p] can be doubled to [[p,2,p]] by adding a 2-fold gyration to the fundamental domain, and this gives an effective Coxeter number of 2p, for example the [4,2,4] and its full symmetry B 4 , [4,3,3] group with Coxeter number 8. Weyl group Conway Quaternion Abstract structure Coxeter diagram Coxeter notation Order Commutator subgroup Coxeter number (h) Mirrors (m) Full polychoric groups A 4 +1/60[I×I].21 S 5 [3,3,3] 120 [3,3,3]+ 5 10 D 4 ±1/3[T×T].2 1/2.2S 4 [31,1,1] 192 [31,1,1]+ 6 12 B 4 ±1/6[O×O].2 2S 4 = S 2 ≀S 4 [4,3,3] 384 8 4 12 F 4 ±1/2[O×O].2 3 3.2S 4 [3,4,3] 1152 [3+,4,3+] 12 12 12 H 4 ±[I×I].2 2.(A 5 ×A 5 ).2 [5,3,3] 14400 [5,3,3]+ 30 60 Full polyhedral prismatic groups A 3 A 1 +1/24[O×O].2 3 S 4 ×D 1 [3,3,2] = [3,3]×[ ] 48 [3,3]+ - 6 1 B 3 A 1 ±1/24[O×O].2 S 4 ×D 1 [4,3,2] = [4,3]×[ ] 96 - 3 6 1 H 3 A 1 ±1/60[I×I].2 A 5 ×D 1 [5,3,2] = [5,3]×[ ] 240 [5,3]+ - 15 1 Full duoprismatic groups 4A 1 = 2D 2 ±1/2[D 4 ×D 4 ] D 1 4 = D 2 2 [2,2,2] = [ ]4 = [2]2 16 [ ]+ 4 1 1 1 1 D 2 B 2 ±1/2[D 4 ×D 8 ] D 2 ×D 4 [2,2,4] = [2]×[4] 32 [2]+ - 1 1 2 2 D 2 A 2 ±1/2[D 4 ×D 6 ] D 2 ×D 3 [2,2,3] = [2]×[3] 24 [3]+ - 1 1 3 D 2 G 2 ±1/2[D 4 ×D 12 ] D 2 ×D 6 [2,2,6] = [2]×[6] 48 - 1 1 3 3 D 2 H 2 ±1/2[D 4 ×D 10 ] D 2 ×D 5 [2,2,5] = [2]×[5] 40 [5]+ - 1 1 5 2B 2 ±1/2[D 8 ×D 8 ] D 4 2 [4,2,4] = [4]2 64 [2+,2,2+] 8 2 2 2 2 B 2 A 2 ±1/2[D 8 ×D 6 ] D 4 ×D 3 [4,2,3] = [4]×[3] 48 [2+,2,3+] - 2 2 3 B 2 G 2 ±1/2[D 8 ×D 12 ] D 4 ×D 6 [4,2,6] = [4]×[6] 96 - 2 2 3 3 B 2 H 2 ±1/2[D 8 ×D 10 ] D 4 ×D 5 [4,2,5] = [4]×[5] 80 [2+,2,5+] - 2 2 5 2A 2 ±1/2[D 6 ×D 6 ] D 3 2 [3,2,3] = [3]2 36 [3+,2,3+] 6 3 3 A 2 G 2 ±1/2[D 6 ×D 12 ] D 3 ×D 6 [3,2,6] = [3]×[6] 72 - 3 3 3 2G 2 ±1/2[D 12 ×D 12 ] D 6 2 [6,2,6] = [6]2 144 12 3 3 3 3 A 2 H 2 ±1/2[D 6 ×D 10 ] D 3 ×D 5 [3,2,5] = [3]×[5] 60 [3+,2,5+] - 3 5 G 2 H 2 ±1/2[D 12 ×D 10 ] D 6 ×D 5 [6,2,5] = [6]×[5] 120 - 3 3 5 2H 2 ±1/2[D 10 ×D 10 ] D 5 2 [5,2,5] = [5]2 100 [5+,2,5+] 10 5 5 In general, p,q=2,3,4... 2I 2 (2p) ±1/2[D 4p ×D 4p ] D 2p 2 [2p,2,2p] = [2p]2 16p2 [p+,2,p+] 2p p p p p 2I 2 (p) ±1/2[D 2p ×D 2p ] D p 2 [p,2,p] = [p]2 4p2 2p p p I 2 (p)I 2 (q) ±1/2[D 4p ×D 4q ] D 2p ×D 2q [2p,2,2q] = [2p]×[2q] 16pq [p+,2,q+] - p p q q I 2 (p)I 2 (q) ±1/2[D 2p ×D 2q ] D p ×D q [p,2,q] = [p]×[q] 4pq - p q The symmetry order is equal to the number of cells of the regular polychoron times the symmetry of its cells. The omnitruncated dual polychora have cells that match the fundamental domains of the symmetry group. Chiral subgroups [ edit ] The 16-cell edges projected onto a 3-sphere represent 6 great circles of B4 symmetry. 3 circles meet at each vertex. Each circle represents axes of 4-fold symmetry. The 24-cell edges projected onto a 3-sphere represent the 16 great circles of F4 symmetry. Four circles meet at each vertex. Each circle represents axes of 3-fold symmetry. The 600-cell edges projected onto a 3-sphere represent 72 great circles of H4 symmetry. Six circles meet at each vertex. Each circle represent axes of 5-fold symmetry. Direct subgroups of the reflective 4-dimensional point groups are: Coxeter notation Conway Quaternion Structure Order Gyration axes Polychoric groups [3,3,3]+ +1/60[I× I ] A 5 60 10 3 10 2 [[3,3,3]]+ ±1/60[I× I ] A 5 ×Z 2 120 10 3 (10+?) 2 [31,1,1]+ ±1/3[T×T] 1/2.2A 4 96 16 3 18 2 [4,3,3]+ ±1/6[O×O] 2A 4 = A 2 ≀A 4 192 6 4 16 3 36 2 [3,4,3]+ ±1/2[O×O] 3.2A 4 576 18 4 16 3 16 3 72 2 [3+,4,3+] ±[T×T] 288 16 3 16 3 (72+18) 2 [[3+,4,3+]] ±[O×T] 576 32 3 (72+18+?) 2 [[3,4,3]]+ ±[O×O] 1152 18 4 32 3 (72+?) 2 [5,3,3]+ ±[I×I] 2.(A 5 ×A 5 ) 7200 72 5 200 3 450 2 Polyhedral prismatic groups [3,3,2]+ +1/ 24 [O× O ] A 4 ×Z 2 24 4 3 4 3 (6+6) 2 [4,3,2]+ ±1/24[O×O] S 4 ×Z 2 96 6 4 8 3 (3+6+12) 2 [5,3,2]+ ±1/60[I×I] A 5 ×Z 2 240 12 5 20 3 (15+30) 2 Duoprismatic groups [2,2,2]+ +1/2[D 4 ×D 4 ] 8 1 2 1 2 4 2 [3,2,3]+ +1/2[D 6 ×D 6 ] 18 1 3 1 3 9 2 [4,2,4]+ +1/2[D 8 ×D 8 ] 32 1 4 1 4 16 2 (p,q=2,3,4...), gcd(p,q)=1 [p,2,p]+ +1/2[D 2p ×D 2p ] 2p2 1 p 1 p (pp) 2 [p,2,q]+ +1/2[D 2p ×D 2q ] 2pq 1 p 1 q (pq) 2 [p+,2,q+] +[C p ×C q ] Z p ×Z q pq 1 p 1 q Pentachoric symmetry [ edit ] Pentachoric group – A 4 , [3,3,3], ( † /C 1 ;I/C 1 ) †* , Conway + 1 / 60 [I×I].2 1 ), named for the 5-cell (pentachoron), given by ringed Coxeter diagram hyper-tetrahedral group for extending the tetrahedral group [3,3]. There are 10 mirror hyperplanes in this group. It is isomorphic to the abstract symmetric group, S 5 . The extended pentachoric group , Aut( A 4 ), [[3,3,3]], (The doubling can be hinted by a folded diagram, †* /C 2 ;I/C 2 ) †* , Conway ± 1 / 60 [I× I ].2). It is isomorphic to the direct product of abstract groups: S 5 ×C 2 . The chiral extended pentachoric group is [[3,3,3]] + , ( † /C 2 ;I/C 2 ) † , Conway ± 1 / 60 [Ix I ]). This group represents the construction of the omnisnub 5-cell, 5 ×C 2 . The chiral pentachoric group is [3,3,3] + , ( † /C 1 ;I/C 1 ) † , Conway + 1 / 60 [I× I ]). It is isomorphic to the abstract alternating group, A 5 . The extended chiral pentachoric group is [[3,3,3] + ], order 120, (Du Val #51" (I † /C 1 ;I/C 1 ) – †* , Conway + 1 / 60 [IxI].2 3 ). Coxeter relates this group to the abstract group (4,6|2,3). [13] It is also isomorphic to the abstract symmetric group, S 5 . – , [3,3,3], ( /C ;I/C ) , Conway + / [I×I].2 ), named for the 5-cell (pentachoron), given by ringed Coxeter diagram for extending the tetrahedral group [3,3]. There are 10 mirror hyperplanes in this group. It is isomorphic to the abstract symmetric group, S . Hexadecachoric symmetry [ edit ] Icositetrachoric symmetry [ edit ] Icositetrachoric group – F 4 , [3,4,3], ( * , Conway [O×O].2 3 ), named for the 24-cell (icositetrachoron), demitesseractic symmetry [3 1,1,1 ] subgroups, as [3 * ,4,3] and [3,4,3 * ], as index 6 subgroups. The extended icositetrachoric group , Aut( F 4 ), [[3,4,3]], ( * , Conway ±[O×O].2). The chiral extended icositetrachoric group , [[3,4,3]] + , ( omnisnub 24-cell, The ionic diminished icositetrachoric groups , [3 + ,4,3] and [3,4,3 + ], ( * , Conway ±[T×T].2). This group leads to the snub 24-cell with construction The double diminished icositetrachoric group , [3 + ,4,3 + ] (the double diminishing can be shown by a gap in the diagram 4-branch: commutator subgroup of [3,4,3]. It can be extended as [[3 + ,4,3 + ]], ( The chiral icositetrachoric group is [3,4,3] + , ( 1 / 2 [O×O]). The extended chiral icositetrachoric group , [[3,4,3] + ] has order 1152, (Du Val #46 (O/T;O/T) − * , Conway ± 1 / 2 [OxO]. 2 ). Coxeter relates this group to the abstract group (4,8|2,3). [13] – , [3,4,3], ( , Conway [O×O].2 ), named for the 24-cell (icositetrachoron), demitesseractic symmetry [3 ] subgroups, as [3 ,4,3] and [3,4,3 ], as index 6 subgroups. Demitesseractic symmetry [ edit ] Demitesseractic group – D 4 , [3 1,1,1 ], [3,3 1,1 ] or [3,3,4,1 + ], ( − * , Conway ± 1 / 3 [T× T ].2), named for the (demitesseract) 4-demicube construction of the 16-cell, There are two types of extended symmetries by adding mirrors: <[3,3 1,1 ]> which becomes [4,3,3] by bisecting the fundamental domain by a mirror, with 3 orientations possible; and the full extended group [3[3 1,1,1 ]] becomes [3,4,3]. The chiral demitesseractic group is [3 1,1,1 ] + or [1 + ,4,(3,3) + ], ( 1 / 3 [T×T]). This group leads to the snub 24-cell with construction – , [3 ], [3,3 ] or [3,3,4,1 ], ( , Conway ± / [T× ].2), named for the (demitesseract) 4-demicube construction of the 16-cell, Hexacosichoric symmetry [ edit ] [5,3,3]+ 72 order-5 gyrations [5,3,3]+ 200 order-3 gyrations [5,3,3]+ 450 order-2 gyrations [5,3,3]+ all gyrations [5,3], icosahedral pyramidal group is isomorphic to 3d icosahedral symmetry Duoprismatic symmetry [ edit ] Duoprismatic groups – [p,2,q], ( pq , exist for all 2 ≤ p , q < ∞. There are p+q mirrors in this symmetry, which are trivially decomposed into two orthogonal sets of p and q mirrors of dihedral symmetry: [p] and [q]. The chiral subgroup is [p,2,p] + ,( pq . It can be doubled as [[2p,2,2p] + ]. If p and q are equal, [p,2,p], ( Doublings: [[p + ,2,p + ]], ( + ,2p]], [[2p + ,2 + ,2p + ]]. [p,2,∞], ( line groups in 3-space, [∞,2,∞], ( orbifold *2222). Subgroups include: [p + ,2,q], ( + ], ( + ,2,q + ], ( And for even values: [2p,2 + ,2q], ( + ,2q + ], ( + ,2q], ( + ], ( + ,2q + ], ( + ,(2,q) + ], ( + ,2 + ,2q + ], ( + ,2 + ,2q + ] + , ( – [p,2,q], ( , exist for all 2 ≤ , < ∞. There are p+q mirrors in this symmetry, which are trivially decomposed into two orthogonal sets of p and q mirrors of dihedral symmetry: [p] and [q]. Digonal duoprismatic group – [2,2,2], ( The chiral subgroup is [2,2,2] + , ( Extended [[2,2,2]], ( 4-4 duoprism has this extended symmetry, The chiral extended group is [[2,2,2]] + , order 16. Extended chiral subgroup is [[2,2,2] + ], order 16, with rotoreflection generators. It is isomorphic to the abstract group (4,4|2,2). Other extended [(3,3)[2,2,2]]=[4,3,3], order 384, #Hexadecachoric symmetry. The tesseract has this symmetry, as Ionic diminished subgroups is [2 + ,2,2], order 8. The double diminished subgroup is [2 + ,2,2 + ], order 4. Extended as [[2 + ,2,2 + ]], order 8. The rotoreflection subgroups are [2 + ,2 + ,2], [2,2 + ,2 + ], [2 + ,(2,2) + ], [(2,2) + ,2 + ] order 4. The triple diminished subgroup is [2 + ,2 + ,2 + ], ( double rotation and a 4D central inversion. Half subgroup is [1 + ,2,2,2]=[1,2,2], order 8. – [2,2,2], ( Triangular duoprismatic group – [3,2,3], The chiral subgroup is [3,2,3] + , order 18. Extended [[3,2,3]], order 72. The 3-3 duoprism has this extended symmetry, The chiral extended group is [[3,2,3]] + , order 36. Extended chiral subgroup is [[3,2,3] + ], order 36, with rotoreflection generators. It is isomorphic to the abstract group (4,4|2,3). Other extended [[3],2,3], [3,2,[3]], order 72, and are isomorphic to [6,2,3] and [3,2,6]. And [[3],2,[3]], order 144, and is isomorphic to [6,2,6]. And [[[3],2,[3]]], order 288, isomorphic to [[6,2,6]]. The 6–6 duoprism has this symmetry, as Ionic diminished subgroups are [3 + ,2,3], [3,2,3 + ], order 18. The double diminished subgroup is [3 + ,2,3 + ], order 9. Extended as [[3 + ,2,3 + ]], order 18. A high index subgroup is [3,2] , order 12, index 3, which is isomorphic to the dihedral symmetry in three dimensions group, [3,2], D 3h . [3,2] + , order 6 – [3,2,3], Square duoprismatic group – [4,2,4], The chiral subgroup is [4,2,4] + , order 32. Extended [[4,2,4]], order 128. The 4–4 duoprism has this extended symmetry, The chiral extended group is [[4,2,4]] + , order 64. Extended chiral subgroup is [[4,2,4] + ], order 64, with rotoreflection generators. It is isomorphic to the abstract group (4,4|2,4). Other extended [[4],2,4], [4,2,[4]], order 128, and are isomorphic to [8,2,4] and [4,2,8]. The 4–8 duoprism has this symmetry, as And [[4],2,[4]], order 256, and is isomorphic to [8,2,8]. And [[[4],2,[4]]], order 288, isomorphic to [[8,2,8]]. The 8–8 duoprism has this symmetry, as Ionic diminished subgroups are [4 + ,2,4], [4,2,4 + ], order 32. The double diminished subgroup is [4 + ,2,4 + ], order 16. Extended as [[4 + ,2,4 + ]], order 32. The rotoreflection subgroups are [4 + ,2 + ,4], [4,2 + ,4 + ], [4 + ,(2,4) + ], [(4,2) + ,4 + ], ( The triple diminished subgroup is [4 + ,2 + ,4 + ], ( Half subgroups are [1 + ,4,2,4]=[2,2,4], ( + ]=[4,2,2], ( [1 + ,4,2,4] + =[2,2,4] + , ( + ] + =[4,2,2] + , ( Half again subgroup is [1 + ,4,2,4,1 + ]=[2,2,2], ( [1 + ,4,2,4,1 + ] + = [1 + ,4,2 + ,4,1 + ] = [2,2,2] + , ( – [4,2,4], Summary [ edit ] This is a summary of 4-dimensional point groups in Coxeter notation. 227 of them are crystallographic point groups (for particular values of p and q).[14] (nc) is given for non-crystallographic groups. Some crystallographic group have their orders indexed (order.index) by their abstract group structure.[15] Finite groups [ ]: Symbol Order [1]+ 1.1 [1] = [ ] 2.1 [2]: Symbol Order [1+,2]+ 1.1 [2]+ 2.1 [2] 4.1 [2,2]: Symbol Order [2+,2+]+ = [(2+,2+,2+)] 1.1 [2+,2+] 2.1 [2,2]+ 4.1 [2+,2] 4.1 [2,2] 8.1 [2,2,2]: Symbol Order [(2+,2+,2+,2+)] = [2+,2+,2+]+ 1.1 [2+,2+,2+] 2.1 [2+,2,2+] 4.1 [(2,2)+,2+] 4 [[2+,2+,2+]] 4 [2,2,2]+ 8 [2+,2,2] 8.1 [(2,2)+,2] 8 [[2+,2,2+]] 8.1 [2,2,2] 16.1 [[2,2,2]]+ 16 [[2,2+,2]] 16 [[2,2,2]] 32 [p]: Symbol Order [p]+ p [p] 2p [p,2]: Symbol Order [p,2]+ 2p [p,2] 4p [2p,2+]: Symbol Order [2p,2+] 4p [2p+,2+] 2p [p,2,2]: Symbol Order [p+,2,2+] 2p [(p,2)+,2+] 2p [p,2,2]+ 4p [p,2,2+] 4p [p+,2,2] 4p [(p,2)+,2] 4p [p,2,2] 8p [2p,2+,2]: Symbol Order [2p+,2+,2+]+ p [2p+,2+,2+] 2p [2p+,2+,2] 4p [2p+,(2,2)+] 4p [2p,(2,2)+] 8p [2p,2+,2] 8p [p,2,q]: Symbol Order [p+,2,q+] pq [p,2,q]+ 2pq [p+,2,q] 2pq [p,2,q] 4pq [(p,2)+,2q]: Symbol Order [(p,2)+,2q+] 2pq [(p,2)+,2q] 4pq [2p,2,2q]: Symbol Order [2p+,2+,2q+]+= [(2p+,2+,2q+,2+)] pq [2p+,2+,2q+] 2pq [2p,2+,2q+] 4pq [((2p,2)+,(2q,2)+)] 4pq [2p,2+,2q] 8pq [[p,2,p]]: Symbol Order [[p+,2,p+]] 2p2 [[p,2,p]]+ 4p2 [[p,2,p]+] 4p2 [[p,2,p]] 8p2 [[2p,2,2p]]: Symbol Order [[(2p+,2+,2p+,2+)]] 2p2 [[2p+,2+,2p+]] 4p2 [[((2p,2)+,(2p,2)+)]] 8p2 [[2p,2+,2p]] 16p2 [3,3,2]: Symbol Order [(3,3)Δ,2,1+] ≅ [2,2]+ 4 [(3,3)Δ,2] ≅ [2,(2,2)+] 8 [(3,3)⅄,2,1+] ≅ [4,2+] 8 [(3,3)+,2,1+] = [3,3]+ 12.5 [(3,3)⅄,2] ≅ [2,4,2+] 16 [3,3,2,1+] = [3,3] 24 [(3,3)+,2] 24.10 [3,3,2]+ 24.10 [3,3,2] 48.36 [4,3,2]: Symbol Order [1+,4,3+,2,1+] = [3,3]+ 12 [3+,4,2+] 24 [(3,4)+,2+] 24 [1+,4,3+,2] = [(3,3)+,2] 24.10 [3+,4,2,1+] = [3+,4] 24.10 [(4,3)+,2,1+] = [4,3]+ 24.15 [1+,4,3,2,1+] = [3,3] 24 [1+,4,(3,2)+] = [3,3,2]+ 24 [3,4,2+] 48 [4,3+,2] 48.22 [4,(3,2)+] 48 [(4,3)+,2] 48.36 [1+,4,3,2] = [3,3,2] 48.36 [4,3,2,1+] = [4,3] 48.36 [4,3,2]+ 48.36 [4,3,2] 96.5 [5,3,2]: Symbol Order [(5,3)+,2,1+] = [5,3]+ 60.13 [5,3,2,1+] = [5,3] 120.2 [(5,3)+,2] 120.2 [5,3,2]+ 120.2 [5,3,2] 240 (nc) [31,1,1]: Symbol Order [31,1,1]Δ ≅[[4,2+,4]]+ 32 [31,1,1]⅄ 64 [31,1,1]+ 96.1 [31,1,1] 192.2 <[3,31,1]> = [4,3,3] 384.1 [3[31,1,1]] = [3,4,3] 1152.1 [3,3,3]: Symbol Order [3,3,3]+ 60.13 [3,3,3] 120.1 [[3,3,3]]+ 120.2 [[3,3,3]+] 120.1 [[3,3,3]] 240.1 [4,3,3]: Symbol Order [1+,4,(3,3)Δ] = [31,1,1]Δ ≅[[4,2+,4]]+ 32 [4,(3,3)Δ] = [2+,4[2,2,2]+] ≅[[4,2+,4]] 64 [1+,4,(3,3)⅄] = [31,1,1]⅄ 64 [1+,4,(3,3)+] = [31,1,1]+ 96.1 [4,(3,3)⅄] ≅ [[4,2,4]] 128 [1+,4,3,3] = [31,1,1] 192.2 [4,(3,3)+] 192.1 [4,3,3]+ 192.3 [4,3,3] 384.1 [3,4,3]: Symbol Order [3+,4,3+] 288.1 [3,4,3⅄] = [4,3,3] 384.1 [3,4,3]+ 576.2 [3+,4,3] 576.1 [[3+,4,3+]] 576 (nc) [3,4,3] 1152.1 [[3,4,3]]+ 1152 (nc) [[3,4,3]+] 1152 (nc) [[3,4,3]] 2304 (nc) [5,3,3]: Symbol Order [5,3,3]+ 7200 (nc) [5,3,3] 14400 (nc) See also [ edit ] |
Propaganda piece attempts to quell massive backlash against naked body scanners, TSA molestation Steve Watson Prisonplanet.com Monday, Nov 15th, 2010 Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano, now forever known as Big Sis – a reference to George Orwell’s 1984 – has been caught telling some big lies in an attempt to quell an enormous public backlash against the full body scanning technology and invasive pat-down procedures that have been implemented by the TSA in airports nationwide. In a blatant propaganda piece published by USA Today, Napolitano describes the scanning machines as safe and the pat-downs as “discreet”, in the face of a flood of complaints from scientists, pilots, flight attendants, privacy groups, parents, Muslim groups and everyday passengers, all rebelling against over the top security. “AIT machines are safe, efficient, and protect passenger privacy.” Napolitano writes in an article in which every single claim she makes can be easily disproved and revealed to be outright lies. Lie: The scanners are safe “They have been independently evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who have all affirmed their safety.” Napolitano claims, expecting the public to simply swallow the claim that NIST and the FDA are somehow “independent” of the federal government. As for Johns Hopkins University declaring the scanners safe, tell it to Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at the Johns Hopkins school of medicine. Love told AFP two days ago that “statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays”. “…we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner,” he added. So, unless you count skin cancer as safe, Napolitano is lying to you. According to other numerous real “independent” scientists who continue to speak out over the health hazards associated with the x-ray technology, the body scanners are far from safe. John Sedat, a University of California at San Francisco professor of biochemistry and biophysics and member of the National Academy of Sciences tells CNet that the machines have “mutagenic effects” and will increase the risk of cancer. Sedat previously sent a letter to the White House science Czar John P. Holdren, identifying the specific risk the machines pose to children and the elderly. The letter stated: “it appears that real independent safety data do not exist… There has not been sufficient review of the intermediate and long-term effects of radiation exposure associated with airport scanners. There is good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations.” The TSA has repeatedly stated that going through the machines is equal to the radiation encountered during just two minutes of a flight. However, this does not take into account that the scanning machines specifically target only the skin and the muscle tissue immediately beneath. The scanners are similar to C-Scans and fire ionizing radiation at those inside which penetrates a few centimeters into the flesh and reflects off the skin to form a naked body image. The firing of ionizing radiation at the body effectively “unzips” DNA, according to scientific research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The research shows that even very low doses of X-ray can delay or prevent cellular repair of damaged DNA, yet pregnant women and children will be subjected to the process as new guidelines including scanners are adopted. The Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety concluded in their report on the matter that governments must justify the use of the scanners and that a more accurate assessment of the health risks is needed. Pregnant women and children should not be subject to scanning, according to the report, adding that governments should consider “other techniques to achieve the same end without the use of ionizing radiation.” “The Committee cited the IAEA’s 1996 Basic Safety Standards agreement, drafted over three decades, that protects people from radiation. Frequent exposure to low doses of radiation can lead to cancer and birth defects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” reported Bloomberg. Scientists at Columbia University also entered the debate recently, warning that the dose emitted by the naked x-ray devices could be up to 20 times higher than originally estimated, likely contributing to an increase in a common type of skin cancer called basal cell carcinoma which affects the head and neck. “If all 800 million people who use airports every year were screened with X-rays then the very small individual risk multiplied by the large number of screened people might imply a potential public health or societal risk. The population risk has the potential to be significant,” said Dr David Brenner, head of Columbia University’s centre for radiological research. Lie: The scanners are effective “…the weapons and other dangerous and prohibited items we’ve found during AIT screenings have illustrated their security value time and again.” Napolitano claims in her propaganda piece. In reality, the machines would not have prevented the Christmas Day bomber from boarding Flight 253, according to their designers, and other security experts who have dismissed the devices as “useless”. The imaging machines cannot even detect explosive material, so claiming, as Napolitano does, that they are “our best defense against such threats” is misleading at best and at worst a complete lie. If the machines had detected “dangerous items” “time and again”, rest assured that the DHS and the TSA would make sure it was all over the news – such success stories have been decidedly absent from the media, unless you count “dangerous items” as baby milk, tubes of toothpaste or contact lens fluid. The idea that the machines are effective flies in the face of the viewpoint of surveillance experts who note that the scanners will do nothing to make air travel safer. Lie: The scanners cannot store/print/transmit images At first we were asked to believe that the imaging machines did not produce crisp images of naked bodies. In an effort to downplay the intrusion of privacy they really represent, the TSA routinely claimed that the images produced by the scanners are “ghostly” or “skeletal”. The passenger’s face is blurred and the image as a whole “resembles a fuzzy negative,” the TSA spokeswoman Kristin Lee told the media last year, prior to the underwear bombing attempt. After months of researchers, reporters and everyday travelers outing this as a complete lie, the DHS/TSA abandoned that approach and instead claimed that, although they were detailed naked images, it’s fine and dandy because they cannot be saved or transmitted. “The imaging technology that we use cannot store, export, print or transmit images.” Napolitano claims in her latest propaganda piece. Again not true. As we have previously detailed, the images that show in detail the naked genitals of men, women and children that have passed through the scanners can be transmitted and printed. As reported by Declan McCullagh of CNET earlier this year, “The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.” The proof comes in the form of a letter (PDF), obtained by The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), in which William Bordley, an associate general counsel with the Marshals Service, admits that “approximately 35,314 images…have been stored on the Brijot Gen2 machine” used in the Orlando, Fla. federal courthouse. EPIC says it has also obtained more than 100 images of electronically stripped individuals from the scanning devices used at federal courthouses. The disclosures come as part of a settlement of an EPIC Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Marshals Service. Brijot, the manufacturer of the body scanning equipment in question, also admits that its machine can store up to 40,000 images and records. EPIC, has filed two further lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security over the scanners, claiming that the DHS has refused to release at least 2,000 images it has stored from scanners currently in use in U.S. airports. EPIC’s lawsuit argues that the body scanners violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable” searches, as well as the Privacy Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, referencing religious laws about modesty. The group points to a further document (PDF) it has obtained from DHS showing that the machines used by the department’s TSA are not only able to record and store naked body images, but that they are mandated to do so. The TSA has admitted that this is the case, but claims that it is for training and testing purposes only, maintaining that the body scanners used at airports cannot “store, print or transmit images”. “In complying with our Freedom of Information Act request, the Marshals Service has helped the public more fully understand the capabilities of these devices,” EPIC President Marc Rotenberg said in a statement. “But the DHS continues to conceal the truth from American air travelers who could be subject to similar intrusive recorded searches in U.S. airports.” As if it was needed, further evidence also points to the fact that the images are actively being transmitted and printed in airports. Lie: Pat-downs are “discreet” In her headline, Napolitano calls the pat-down procedure offered as an alternative to the naked body scanners, or used in addition to them, as “discreet”. “Pat-downs have long been one of the many security measures used by the U.S. and countries across the world to make air travel as secure as possible.” she writes. What she does not explain is that the new pat down procedure, which now allows TSA agents to forcefully feel around breasts and genitalia, is currently conducted in full view of queuing passengers and has been described by many, including New York Times reporter Joe Sharkey, as a deliberate form of humiliation to discourage others from refusing the full body scans. The TSA also claims that the pat-downs are discreet, yet multiple accounts and reports prove otherwise. Flight attendants and pilots unions in particular have taken up issue with the pat-downs, with one union declaring “We don’t want them in uniform going through this enhanced screening where their private areas are being touched in public… They actually make contact with the genital area.” As reported by Reuters, parents are now demanding that the procedures be changed for children, after witnesses have described their children’s genitals being touched by men and women working for the TSA. “I didn’t think it was going to be as horrible as he was describing,” one father noted after an agent told him what he was going to do to the child before conducting the full body search. “At some point the terrorists have won.” the father added. The TSA says it is currently “reviewing” the procedure for children. Perhaps it should first review it’s policy on background checking its own employees, which by all accounts is woefully inadequate. Lie: “Risk based” security procedure Napolitano calls the TSA’s system “risk-based,” another total fallacy given the fact that the primary targets of airport oppression have been women, children, the elderly, and the physically disabled, all the categories of people who characteristically would pose the least risk in terms of terrorism. The procedure is completely random, emphasizing the fact that everyone is categorized as a potential terrorist. Lie: The scanners are popular with the public “These machines are now in use at airports nationwide, and the vast majority of travelers say they prefer this technology to alternative screening measures.” Napolitano writes. Another unsubstantiated claim, particularly given that a new Reuters poll shows that over 95% of Americans are now less likely to fly due to the crackdown in the wake of the dubious toner cartridge and underpants bombing scares. Furthermore, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act before the issue recently hit headlines again, and before the majority of airports even had the machines installed, have revealed that there were more than 600 formal complaints about the devices last year. Hardly a shining example of how popular the machines are. Lies Lies Lies Napolitano and the TSA have consistently lied to the American people about the open implementation of tyranny in our airports. They will continue to do so in an effort to make it appear that those who are revolting against their procedures are just a small minority, when in reality the the vast majority of sick and tired of being treated like slaves and having their fundamental freedoms trashed. On November 24th, ‘national opt-out day’, the world will see thousands and thousands standing up against measures that are not only set to become commonplace in airports everywhere, but are also scheduled to be implemented on our streets if we do not resist. OptOutDay.com declares: It’s the day ordinary citizens stand up for their rights, stand up for liberty, and protest the federal government’s desire to virtually strip us naked or submit to an “enhanced pat down” that touches people’s breasts and genitals. You should never have to explain to your children, “Remember that no stranger can touch or see your private area, unless it’s a government employee, then it’s OK.” The goal of National Opt Out Day is to send a message to our lawmakers that we demand change. No naked body scanners, no government-approved groping. We have a right to privacy and buying a plane ticket should not mean that we’re guilty until proven innocent. We urge our readers to join forces with these groups and organise peaceful protests at the nearest airport to you that has implemented body scanners and enhanced TSA pat downs. The issue has garnered such massive attention, largely due to coverage via The Drudge Report, that the federal government has been forced to declare it is considering scrapping the enhanced security procedures for pilots and flight attendants. The unified statements from pilots and flight attendants unions highlights the fact that coming together and declaring a mass refusal to submit to this can be effective, it is vital that it not be overlooked. —————————————————————— Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor at Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and regular contributor to Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England. This article was posted: Monday, November 15, 2010 at 11:10 am Print this page. 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California refuses to tolerate legal discrimination. Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill on Tuesday stating that state agencies cannot require workers to travel to states with laws that permit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. As the Sacramento Bee writes, the bill effectively prohibits any state-funded travel to states with “bathroom bills,” like the one that was passed in North Carolina this past spring. “Our zero-tolerance policy says there is no room for discrimination of any kind in California and [this bill] ensures that discrimination will not be tolerated beyond our borders,” Democratic Assemblyman Evan Low, who authored the bill, told the Sacramento Bee. North Carolina is the only state that has passed a statewide “bathroom bill,” formally known as HB2, which prevents people from using bathrooms in public buildings that don’t match up with their sex at birth, though other states have considered implementing similar laws. HB2 also thwarted local efforts to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in the workplace, and bars local governments from passing new anti-discriminatory legislation. The bill signed by Governor Brown on Tuesday could also ban travel to states that have passed “religious freedom” laws, such as Indiana which passed a bill that allows private businesses to refuse service based on a customer’s sexual orientation. The list of states banned from state-funded travel could add up to about 20. The bill would also apply to state colleges, including the University of California and California State University, potentially preventing sports teams from traveling to certain rival schools. California is the sixth state to pass a law like this—Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington have all beat it to the punch, as have dozens of cities and counties. Various companies and celebrities have also distanced themselves from North Carolina, canceling investments and concerts that would have brought business to the state. Wired has estimated that, after passing the law, North Carolina may already have lost more than $395 million from canceled tourism and investments. |
Photo by Elizabeth McSheffrey. Having your electoral process subverted by a shifty foreign power is a hot political trend around the world, but Canada has felt left out. But not anymore. A "bombshell" report submitted to Elections Canada alleges that buckets of unaccountable foreign cash were funneled into Canada through third party organizations like the Tides Foundation and Leadnow, who in turn tipped the results of the 2015 federal election in favour of the Justin Trudeau Liberals. Huge if true, as we say in the biz. But it's probably not. Here's why. Unsurprisingly, Canada Decides—the group behind the "bombshell" report—is run by three people with significant connections to the Tories: former Conservative MP Joan Crockatt, who narrowly lost her seat in 2015 to Liberal Kent Hehr; Brent Chapman, the husband of former Conservative MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay; and Chad Hallman, a 20 year-old political science undergraduate and conservative campus activist at the University of Toronto. Allegations of foreign money influencing Canadian politics goes back quite a way in Conservative circles. In 2012, then-Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver warned that radical environmentalists, funded by foreign special interest groups, were seeking to undermine Canada's petroleum sector. (Environmentalist charities and advocacy groups who opposed the Conservative government were later disproportionately targeted for auditing by the Canada Revenue Agency, a practice that the Liberal government has since rolled back.) Claims about foreign financing in the 2015 election in particular were first floated by right-wing activist Ezra Levant during the campaign, and by other Rebel commentators in the immediate aftermath. The story also occasionally resurfaced in other right-leaning outlets. The specific claims here, echoed by the Canada Decides report, is that rich liberal activists in the United States, including Illuminati puppet-master (((George Soros))), supplied anti-Conservative organizations as a way of circumventing laws limiting or prohibiting direct political donations. Whereas donations to individual candidates or political parties are banned for corporations and trade unions, and strictly capped to $1,550/year for individuals (to a given political party or a given riding association), the rules are much more slack around third parties like charities or other non-profit organizations. Donations to these groups are limited within six months of the writ dropping—which includes a ban on foreign money—but otherwise there is no cap on how much money they can accept from anyone, anywhere. There are definitely issues with political financing in Canada. But there is little indication that "foreign money" swayed the 2015 federal election as dramatically as the report suggests. For one, although the amount of money that can be donated to a third party outside of an active election season is theoretically infinite, what can be spent during an election is strictly limited. Third parties are capped at $439,410.81 on advertising during an election, and they are limited to $8,788.22 in any given riding. In an interview with Yahoo! in August 2015, University of Toronto political scientist Nelson Wiseman suggested that these caps likely played into Stephen Harper's motivation to call an early and prolonged election campaign. The long campaign not only restricted how much money could be given to third party organizations, but also meant that groups would have to make that $8,788 per riding stretch much further, meaning they would drastically limit the work such groups could do. The case of Leadnow, one of the groups specifically referenced both in the Canada Decides report and right-wing discourse more broadly, is particularly interesting here. Leadnow is an "anyone but Conservative" activist group who coordinated a strategic voting initiative in 2015 in 72 Tory swing ridings across Canada—that is, ridings where Conservatives won the seat by less than 15 percent of the vote in 2011, or where a Liberal, NDP, or Green MP had won against a second-place Conservative by less than 5 percent. Their stated aim was to support the candidate from whichever party their polling suggested would be most likely to beat the Tories in a given riding. They targeted 11 ridings in particular as high priority (where activists campaigned directly on the ground by canvassing, polling, etc.) and endorsed candidates in a further 18. Although candidates who received recommendation or support from Leadnow won in approximately 82 percent of their ridings, the campaign admitted in its 2015 post-mortem that it was difficult to accurately assess just how much of this was a direct result of the Leadnow's activity. The lasting success of Leadnow on Canadian politics is also suspect. They helped elect the Liberals on the assumption that it would usher in progressive environmental policies and electoral reform, so, it's unlikely that the international cabal of wealthy, oil-hating communists got a good return on their investments anyway. We can also see exactly how much money third parties spent in the election—just $137,545.75, nation-wide, in Leadnow's case. The Avaaz foundation, which is a left-wing organization based in New York which has a Canadian chapter, also registered as a third-party advertiser, but spent a paltry $24,458.22. Greenpeace? $2,887.58. Ecologist group 350.org? $1,098.61. By comparison, the Conservative Party spent nearly $20 million on advertising over the course of the election, not including what local campaigns spent. So while a review on tightening political financing rules in Canada is always welcome—especially at the provincial level—it's pretty unlikely that Canada Decides is blowing open a major story or undermining the legitimacy of the last federal election. But with the Liberals now poised to bring in reform on the exact sorts of problems the report highlights, its authors may just get their wish. Isn't democracy grand? Quite a steal if you ask me. Follow Drew Brown on Twitter. |
Halloween is filled with the stuff of nightmares — costumed ghosts, vampires and slasher-movie monsters. But for some people, nightmares aren’t holiday fun. As many as 25 percent of adults have at least one nightmare a month. For a troubled 7 to 8 percent of the population, nightmares interrupt sleep at least once a week. But many people don’t realize that having chronic nightmares is a medical problem that can be treated. A nightmare is a complex dream that can cause high levels of anxiety and terror. Nightmares typically interrupt sleep as the mind plays out frightening scenes that involve imminent harm, like being chased, threatened or injured. For people who suffer from post-traumatic stress, nightmares tend to involve reliving the original horror of the traumatic event. It’s believed that nightmares occur when the brain is struggling to process stress or severe trauma. But for some people, the bad dreams essentially become a learned behavior, and the brain gets stuck in a pattern of troubling nightmares. In the past, therapists have encouraged patients to talk about their nightmares in hopes of resolving the underlying issues that cause them. But more recently, therapists have adopted “imagery rehearsal therapy,” a pioneering technique developed by Dr. Barry Krakow at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. Instead of focusing on the bad dream, imagery therapy looks for ways to rewrite a nightmare’s script. The concern is that talking too much about a troubling dream may serve to reinforce it. Imagery rehearsal therapy allows the dreamer to rewrite the nightmare during the day. After practicing basic imagery techniques — imagining yourself on a beach or eating a hamburger, for example — the troubled dreamer chooses a better version of the dream, explains Shelby Harris, clinical psychologist at the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center at Montefiore Hospital in New York. “We mention the nightmare once and forget about it,” Dr. Harris said. “I tell patients to change it anyway they wish. You can change a tiny bit of it, or change the whole thing.” The key is to “practice” the new version of the dream by imagining it a few times during the day. While the method is highly successful, helping about 70 percent of people who try it, it can work differently in different people. Some develop the ability to change the nightmare while they are having it. One patient of Dr. Harris was troubled by a dream in which she was attacked by sharks. During imagery therapy, the patient chose to change the sharks into dolphins. When she started to have the nightmare during her sleep, the sharks also changed into dolphins. Other sufferers notice that after therapy the nightmares disappear and the general quality of all their dreams starts to turn more positive. The therapy treatment is typically brief, lasting only two or three sessions. Children can also be taught the technique. “Practicing imagery during the day and changing imagery can really affect your imagery at night,” Dr. Harris said. Dr. Harris said people suffering from occasional nightmares can try rewriting the script of their nightmares on their own. But people who are waking often from nightmares or who are developing insomnia or a fear of sleeping should seek professional help before the problem becomes severe. “If you’re having a nightmare at night, you’re waking up, which makes you tired during the day, and you’re thinking about it,” Dr. Harris said. “Because it’s distressing, that causes more stress, which can cause more nightmares at night. It’s a cycle many people can’t break.” To learn more, visit Dr. Krakow’s Nightmare Treatment Center Web page and take the nightmare quiz to help determine your risk for a nightmare disorder. And read my colleague Natalie Angier’s recent Basics column on nightmares. |
After 10 years working as an illustrator, I've compiled 50 pearls of wisdom to help fellow illustrators. For a while I've been thinking about what I've learned on that journey, and how I can communicate it. I'm not a writer, so like with many other things, I needed to find a way of working first. For more than half a year I jotted down my thoughts as one-liners while working on illustration jobs. I collected a list, covering a range of facts, simple observations, bold statements and hyperbole. In the following 50 tips, I offer seven steps of in-depth advice first, followed by 43 quickfire thoughts, tips and tricks on the next page. As with all in life, take these – my subjective views on life as an illustrator – with a grain of salt. May they be of help on your own journey. 01. Forget style Avoid being compartmentalised by staying fluid In the illustration world, especially among young illustrators, people seem obsessed with talking about style – how to find a style, whether they should have more than one style, and so on. It has been said countless times, but I'll say it again: Just work and your 'style' will emerge (see how I can't help but use the word with inverted commas). Steadily working and observing your own drawings will help you to discover things in them that could be the seed for a whole body of work. If you are obsessed by somebody else's work, try copying it as an exercise (do not present it as your own, though). In that process, you will notice what suits you and what does not. I found doing such an exercise so tedious that it sent me running back to my own stuff very quickly. When working on an actual job, style is rarely a topic of conversation. I very seldom receive older images of mine as a reference for what is expected of me. My 'style' (I cringed a bit when writing that) has broadened nicely over recent years. Clients often even give me complete trust and thus freedom to choose what I think will work best. 02. Use paper Paper can be essential in the early stages of a project Digital methods of creation have undoubtedly become indispensable for communication and allow us to be immensely effective when finalising our work. But let's be honest: we cannot think on the screen yet. I've noticed that with a piece of paper in front of me, my sense of composition comes more naturally than it does on a screen. My hands and eyes are interacting with the area of the paper and measuring distances constantly. When sketching on the computer, I find that placing everything correctly requires a lot more tweaking. It is harder to keep a sense of the bigger picture when working digitally. Similarly, I also tried writing with a fountain pen and noticed how words and sentences started to flow out, like ink, naturally onto the paper. Thoughts formed easier than when I was typing on a keyboard. Paper is one of the oldest technologies we have. Cultural creation has been based on it for millennia. Let's not abandon it just yet, especially in the early stages of a project. Ask yourself if you need that new kit or just want it New software versions, texture packs, Photoshop brushes, Wacom tablets, iPads and Apple pencils are the tools of our trade. Even when working in analogue, it is almost impossible to steer clear of digital tools entirely. And while a tool can be motivating for a while, it is too easy to get obsessed by a constant need for the new. I think the problem is the way that we approach these tools as if they have magical properties. We imagine ourselves working with the tool in scenarios that are not realistic, and often do not reflect our actual way of working. For example, take the idea that if I only had that new iPad Pro, I would go out and make on-location drawings. But if I have never done an on-location drawing before in my life, the iPad will probably not get me to do it. Apply some sobriety to your kit wishlist – are the items on it actual needs or just wants? Ask yourself which of the tools that you already own have really had an impact on your work, to help you decide. Digital tools usually develop incrementally. So it's not often that a revolutionary product or software feature comes along that improves our way of working dramatically. Therefore, don't expect wonders from a new digital tool any more than you would expect any huge transformations from a new pencil. 04. Be realistic about time Pulling all-nighters really isn't very productive It is easy to make unreasonable assumptions about what you can achieve in one day. For example, having the idea that: "If only I hunker down properly today, I could finish the whole project." The end of the day will inevitably roll around and crush your plans. Nobody can really work for a full eight hours every day intellectually. It is impossible to stay focused and to concentrate on pushing a project forward in a meaningful way for such a long time. Many novelists do not write for more than four hours a day. A move to a six-hour working day in some Swedish companies even showed an increase in productivity. The way you think you are working is probably not congruent with the way you are actually working (see tip 22). We are constantly frustrated by our progress, while at the same time, we are – with a little discipline – remarkably consistent in our output. Why not accept reality and use it to our advantage? Plan more realistically to be less frustrated. Time can also be on your side. Looking at your work again tomorrow, instead of rushing it out today, will give you a more objective look and maybe even provide the chance to make the final tweak to push a drawing from good to great. 05. Don't steal other people's ideas You might copy an idea by accident, but don't do it on purpose I don't think copying ideas has a place in illustration. I pride myself on coming up with the right image, and thus the right idea for a given text. If nothing else, that is what separates me from stock art. And in times of a large, aware online public, it also seems foolish to steal ideas and not expect to be found out. That being said, I'm convinced that you can copy an idea entirely by accident or subconsciously. For each final illustration I make, I provide two or three (hopefully) original ideas. That amounts to me generating several hundred ideas per year. The numbers are high. As illustrators, our personal and professional backgrounds are often similar, so the symbols and references we have in our minds may also be similar. I think that having the same ideas is inevitable at times, however unlikely a mere coincidence seems at first glance. So please reflect on your outrage the next time it happens. 06. Know that big clients come with big hierarchies The bigger the client, the more pressure you'll have to face When graphic designer Kurt Weidemann redesigned the logo of German railway Deutsche Bahn in the early '90s, there was uproar in the press because he received a record fee of 200,000DM (about £152,000 in today's money) for his design services. For this fee, however, Weidemann had spent endless hours explaining his work to mid-level executives, and sat in many mind-numbing corporate meetings. He also got a lot of flak from the media when the design was finally revealed. On the surface, making an editorial drawing and one to be used in an advertising campaign is not that different. The higher fee for ad jobs is justified by the client buying a more comprehensive license. Where is the problem? Here it is: When working on ad jobs, you are usually working opposite a team of people in various positions, who are in turn responsible to a team representing the client. The result is that you are facing a hierarchy – or even two hierarchies – who all have a say on the outcome of what you are drawing. The result is a strictly controlled environment, and that means many revisions before everybody is happy. Like Weidemann, you are faced with a corporate machine. Unlike Weidemann, you might not have enough standing (or stamina) to protect the integrity of your work until the finish line. That is what you are compensated for. 07. Know thyself If you want to succeed, learn to recognise your strengths and weaknesses While you're studying illustration – either formally, or by yourself – you are exposed to great work by others. You feel jealous of your peers and in awe of the masters. You're inspired, you're confused, you try to create, and then you're frustrated by what you produce and how badly it compares. And in spite of it all, you're still driven to make something, so you try again. Although you are dealing a lot with your emotions in that whole turbulent process, you might not have learned to observe yourself and what you are doing yet. To be successful, you need to find out a lot of things about yourself first: What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? This is easier said than done, but start with simple things first. For example, what are your most productive working hours? Whether you work best at 6am or midnight, don't miss out on these hours, and try to plan the rest of your day around them. Once your needs are taken care of, you will become less anxious. You are the person you have to work with for the rest of your life, so get to know yourself. Be disciplined, of course, but also be accepting and tolerant. Next page: Quickfire tips and tricks for illustrators |
The "New Anime Project The Legend of the Galactic Heroes Event ~Star-Crossed~" unveiled the main cast, main staff, first promotional video, release schedule, and titles for Production I.G 's new anime of Yoshiki Tanaka 's epic science fiction novels The Legend of the Galactic Heroes on Wednesday. The new cast stars: Shunsuke Tada ( Kuroko's Basketball , STARMYU ) is directing the anime at Production I.G . Noboru Takagi ( Durarara!! , Kuroko's Basketball ) is in charge of the series scripts. Yoko Kikuchi ( Junjō Romantica , Kuroko's Basketball , Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi - The World's Greatest First Love ), Iwao Teraoka ( The Brave Police J-Decker guest character designs, Kuroko's Basketball storyboarder), and Katsura Tsushima ( Kuroko's Basketball episode animation director) are designing the characters, and Takayuki Goto ( Kuroko's Basketball , Blood-C ) is serving as chief animation director. Atsushi Takeuchi ( Napping Princess ) is directing the special effects, and Atsushi Takeuchi ( Appleseed , Ghost in the Shell , Yukikaze ), Shinji Usui ( 009 Re:Cyborg ), and Shinobu Tsuneki ( Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex , Psycho-Pass ) are drafting the mecha designs with original mecha designs by Naoyuki Kato ( The Legend of the Galactic Heroes novel illustrations, Starship Troopers ). Tanaka's Wright Staff management firm is supervising the project, and Kitty Entertainment is collaborating on the planning. Tokuma Shoten is collaborating on the production, and DMM Pictures is collaborating on producing with Shochiku and Production I.G . The first season, The Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These Kaikō (The New Thesis: Star-Crossed), will premiere next April as a 12-episode television series. The event screenings of the second "season," The Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These Seiran (The New Thesis: Stellar War), will then play in theaters, as three films of four episodes each, in 2019. Ryo Horikawa , Masashi Hironaka , and Nozomu Sasaki , the voice actors for Reinhard, Kircheis, and Julian in the earlier original video anime series of The Legend of the Galactic Heroes , attended the event with Tanaka, Tada, and the new voice cast. Kei Tomiyama , the original voice actor for Yang Wen-li, passed away in 1995. Tanaka's space opera novel series follows the epic conflict between the Galactic Empire and Free Planets Alliance, as well as the personal stories of Imperial Admiral Reinhard von Lohengramm and the Alliance's Yang Wen-Li. The 10 main novel volumes and four side-story volumes in The Legend of the Galactic Heroes saga have sold 15 million copies and earned Tanaka a Seiun Award. Besides Legend of the Galactic Heroes , Tanaka also wrote the original novel inspirations for The Heroic Legend of Arslan , Ryoko's Case File , Sohryuden - Legend of the Dragon Kings , and Tytania anime projects. Viz Media 's Haikasoru imprint has licensed the original novel series and released the fourth novel in June. It will release the fifth volume in November. The late director Noboru Ishiguro ( Macross , Orguss , Megazone 23 ) and his Artland anime studio spent more than a decade adapting the novels into a theatrical and video anime franchise , with over 100 installments, from 1988 to 2000. Sentai Filmworks has licensed the video anime series for home video. [Via Hachima Kikō] Update: Viz's latest novel releases added. Thanks, katscradle |
I received sooooo many wonderful gifts! - a wonderful letter - a crochet kit for cabled fingerless gloves, which included a lovely beaded stitch marker - frickin AWESOME Doctor Who stitch markers - and an absolutely AMAZING, WONDERFUL, and SPECTACULAR handmade crochet hook from my FAVORITE etsy seller! (www.etsy.com/shop/rparishwoodworks) I actually had this particular crochet hook saved in my favorites and was quite sad when it sold. I was so happy when it showed up in the package! I now own three of these crochet hooks and they are the most wonderful things, ever. They're destined to become heirloom pieces for me to pass down to my kids or grandkids someday. My grandfather thinks they're so awesome that he built me a display stand for them. :) Thank you so much, ezach4381. You truly are spectacular! |
Fiterman Hall would have seemed to be one of the least challenging rebuilding projects around ground zero. But it has slowly — very slowly — proved to be one of the more intransigent. The physical scope is straightforward enough. First, decontaminate and demolish Fiterman, a 15-story building on West Broadway that was used by the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a unit of the City University of New York, before being badly damaged on Sept. 11. Then, replace it. Neither the purpose nor the scale of the building would change significantly. Even the name would stay the same. But the future of the project is hung up on money — specifically, how much financing is or is not due from New York City. The Bloomberg administration says it has committed $80 million. University officials and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, however, said the city has committed only $20 million. That is a big discrepancy and more than an accounting exercise. The state’s Dormitory Authority, which would build the new Fiterman Hall for the City University, cannot issue a construction contract without a consensus between the university and the city on a budget and financing, said Marc Violette, press officer for the authority. Advertisement Continue reading the main story There were signs Friday that the impasse might be resolved. City Councilman Alan J. Gerson, who represents Lower Manhattan, said that he and Councilman Charles Barron had agreed to postpone for two weeks a hearing on the issue they had scheduled for Monday. |
The Wall Street Journal published an analysis of Facebook data to show what we can learn about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump supporters based on their unique Likes. It’s not necessarily scientific, but it sheds some light on some of the differences between the two worlds. When it comes to their favorite movies, for example, those who like Clinton overwhelmingly prefer Harry Potter. But Trump supporters? God’s Not Dead. The movie about a Christian student who outsmarts his stereotypical atheist professor. (No wonder The Hangover is popular in New England. If I knew my party was this deluded, I’d need to take a drink, too.) And what about favorite actors? Clinton fans love Star Trek‘s George Takei, a vocal LGBT activist. But Trump’s people? There’s John Wayne (the ultimate cowboy), Adam Sandler (the professional jackass), and… Goddammit… In Mississippi and Alabama, they consider Kirk Cameron a fine actor. Cameron wasn’t in God’s Not Dead, but he has appeared in a number of other shitty Christian films. How’s that for a political ad? “A vote for Trump means Kirk Cameron will appear in God’s Not Dead 3!” Both sides could use it, though I’m not sure who would benefit more. Hell, even if I didn’t already support her, I’d vote for Clinton just to prevent that. |
Militants have attacked a polio vaccination team in northwest Pakistan , detonating a roadside bomb before opening fire on their convoy. The attackers killed 12 members of the security escort for the team during the hour-long assault, and when rescuers approached the scene the gunmen also attacked them, according to Khan Faraz, a local official. Around a dozen wounded were taken to hospital, but others died on the road waiting for help to arrive, he said. Another official said all the casualties were members of the "levies" or Khasadar, both locally-recruited, government-backed militias. They were providing security for the health workers. Polio vaccination teams are frequently attacked, as are government security forces. A spokeswoman for UNICEF said it was unclear who was the target on this occasion. Some religious leaders have denounced the multi-billion dollar vaccination campaign as a cover for spying or a plot to secretly sterilise Muslim children. Pakistan is one of the last three countries in the world where polio remains endemic and the only one of those three where reported cases are increasing. The disease can kill or paralyse within hours. In a separate incident in western Baluchistan province, a roadside bomb killed three members of a government paramilitary force in Sorab, about 180 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Quetta. Shortly afterwards, the paramilitary Frontier Corps announced it had killed ten men in Sui, 200 miles southeast of Quetta. The Frontier Corps said they were carrying out an operation to search for militants who had bombed gas pipelines. Baluchistan, a mineral-rich and dirt-poor province, is home to a bloody separatist insurgency, other militant groups, drug lords and government-backed death squads. In recent weeks the Pakistani government has tried to initiate peace talks with the Taliban, an umbrella group of militant factions operating in Pakistan. But peace talks failed after the Taliban bombed a bus of policemen and a faction of the Taliban claimed to have executed 23 kidnapped men from a government-run paramilitary force. Their bodies were never found. The Pakistani military responded by bombing areas they identified as militant hideouts. A military spokesman says the attacks destroyed key hideouts and killed dozens of militants. The air operations have sparked speculation that a much-anticipated offensive may finally be launched in North Waziristan, a tribal area along the border with Afghanistan that is considered the Taliban’s main stronghold. |
Now that he's made his departure plans public, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs can focus on his next big event: his favorite college football team's bid for a national title. Should his Auburn Tigers beat the Oregon Ducks on Monday night, Gibbs says he plans a special D.C. celebration: a toilet paper roll on a White House tree. "If Auburn wins, I will come back, I will get a little agreement with the Secret Service," Gibbs said in an interview with the CBS College Sports Network to air tonight. "We'll put a couple of rolls [of toilet paper] up there, and then I can help take it down, so it doesn't look like we trashed the place." In Auburn, Ala. -- Gibbs' hometown -- residents roll a 150-year-old tree every time the Tigers win, something they've done on 13 occasions this season without a loss. Oregon is 12-0, and the game is too close to call. Last month, Gibbs told USA TODAY that he and 7-year-son Ethan did the same thing in their yard after Auburn's last two wins, a come-from-behind over arch rival Alabama and a blowout in the Southeastern Conference championship game against South Carolina. Gibbs -- who announced yesterday he would leave his White House post early next month -- will attend the Auburn-Oregon game Monday in Glendale, Ariz. In tonight's interview on The Tony Barnhart Show -- reported on by our friends at Politico -- Gibbs said President Obama is well aware of his passion for Auburn football: "We talk about it every week. We did during the season. I traveled during the season. During the LSU game, we were on the road. A bunch of people were in suits and I was wearing the Auburn shirt that I've worn for every game that I've watched this year. He (Obama) gets how big a deal this is for me. He enjoys and loves college football ... I've watched some of their games in my office. I've got a pretty decent size TV in there thankfully. Sometimes it's hard. One week we were on the road and I had to talk to the advance people about making sure that we had some TVs and could watch some games if we needed to." (Posted by David Jackson) |
Wikipedia: On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly recommended the adoption and implementation of the Partition Plan for Mandatory Palestine. The end of the British Mandate for Palestine was set for midnight on 14 May 1948. That day, David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the Zionist Organization and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel,” which would start to function from the termination of the mandate.[11][12][13] The borders of the new state were not specified. Neighboring Arab armies invaded the former Palestinian mandate on the next day and fought the Israeli forces. Elie Wiesel: For the Jewish child in me, Israel represents an irresistible call to hope, and Jerusalem a powerful love song. In my small Romanian town, nestled in the Carpathians, I often walked the streets imagining myself sitting on a bench somewhere in Judea, listening to a master explain the mystery of words, the strength of memories and the human thirst for miracles. With my grandfather, a fervent Chassid, I spoke Yiddish. He loved teaching me Chassidic tunes and, most of all, watching me pore over a Talmudic tractate. His dream was to live long enough for all of us to go together to the Holy Land and there welcome the Messiah. Indeed, I dreamed about the Messiah more than about a political Jewish state. Then what happened happened. Where was I on May 14, 1944? Still in the ghetto. I was 15. The first transport toward the unknown, organised in haste, was getting ready to leave or had just left. For us, destiny wore the mask of death of which the enemy had made its own saviour. May 14, 1948. Paris. Israel is about to be born. Stateless, I had already lived three years in France. Liberated from Buchenwald by the American Army in 1945, I was asked by an officer where I wanted to be repatriated. Like most of my friends, I answered that I wanted to go to Palestine, but the British mandate on immigration at the time had in effect closed those doors to us. In the end, OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants), an outstanding French Jewish humanitarian organisation, brought about 400 of us to France. I remember. It is a Friday. David Ben-Gurion reads the new Jewish state’s Declaration of Independence; radio stations all over the world broadcast it. In the evening, I go to synagogue. Jubilation. Strangers share their feelings. What? A Jewish state? Three years after the worst catastrophe in Jewish history? It is difficult for me to concentrate. … At that time, I was not yet keenly conscious of the fact that, in the lives of men as well as nations, the dream of one can — in an instant — turn into a nightmare for the other. The big question: What would have happened if the Palestinian leaders of that period had followed Israel’s example by declaring the establishment of an independent Palestinian state? Why did the Palestinian rulers, to quote the late Abba Eban, “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”? |
Normally, a debate “victory” doesn’t require quite so much damage control. Following Vice President Biden’s manic, careening ride through global politics last week, President Obama is left to make a variety of cleanups and clarifications. On Libya, Biden managed to further muddle a muddled narrative. His claim that the administration had no knowledge of requests for added security in Benghazi required immediate correction. He was “speaking about himself and the president,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney. Which served to highlight the culpability of the State Department and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — while Clinton’s husband is stumping the country to salvage Obama’s reelection effort. Biden went on to blame “the intelligence community” for the administration’s multiday misinformation campaign — even though elements of the intelligence community apparently knew the truth within 24 hours of the attack. Biden raised more uncomfortable questions about the Libyan fiasco than weeks of congressional hearings could manage. On Afghanistan, Biden described a policy of total and unconditional retreat that the Obama administration does not actually hold. “We are leaving in 2014, period,” said Biden. Responsible representatives of the administration put it a little differently: U.S. combat forces are leaving in 2014, but considerable special operations and training forces will remain to help prevent the Taliban from reestablishing a terrorocracy. Biden, in fact, was representing his own position in an internal White House debate — the abject-surrender option — rather than the administration’s stated view. During the debate, the other leader who must have been giggling was the Taliban’sMohammad Omar. On Iran, Biden seemed to indicate that the regime’s enrichment program is no longer a primary American concern since the republic doesn’t have anything to put the enriched uranium in. Enrichment is the most difficult part of developing a nuclear bomb. Once achieved, weaponization is a relatively short step. Biden’s response to Iran’s defiant enrichment march? “Let’s all calm down a little bit here.” So, in a mere 90 minutes, Biden managed to throw Hillary Clinton under the bus, CIA Director David Petraeus under the bus, our Afghan allies and the Afghan people under the bus and our Middle Eastern allies who fear an Iranian bomb under the bus. Which means that Obama, in trying to explain himself, is in for a bumpy ride. There is a reason Biden is generally kept out of press earshot. He is forever poised between an indiscretion and a different indiscretion. 1 of 87 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Toles looks to Election 2012 View Photos A collection of cartoons on the presidential race. Caption A collection of cartoons on the presidential race. Dec. 5, 2012 Tom Toles Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. But Biden’s performance will be forever remembered not for its content but for its tone. I have occasionally admired Biden’s emotional transparency and “happy warrior” enthusiasm. His debate presentation in Kentucky, in contrast, was a collection of disturbing, disorderly appetites. He displayed scene-chewing antics and preening exhibitionism and smirking rudeness and egotistical exuberance and bullying condescension. It was the attack of the feral ham actor. It would have been embarrassing if done in front of a mirror, much less on a debate stage. This has complicated Obama’s life in another way. The road-rage wing of the Democratic Party (the GOP has one as well) views the Biden meltdown as a pioneering achievement in political discourse. Former governor Howard Dean — an expert in nontraditional political deportment — argues that Biden is “an excellent role model” for Obama. Since adopting this model would disqualify Obama for the presidency, elements of the left are bound to be disappointed with the president’s debate performances. And it will be harder for Obama to claim the mantle of bipartisanship when his running mate is celebrated for his incivility. Biden has also marginally complicated the work of democracy. His supporters say that Joe is just being Joe — that he is one of a kind. But all ethics — from the Golden Rule to the categorical imperative — involve universalization. If Biden’s behavior were universalized, American politics would be a squalid, carnival sideshow. Or cable television. Whichever is worse. Americans have every right to hate politics if it looks like this. At the height of a close election, it is worth a reminder that civility is the essential democratic virtue. Civility is not the same thing as niceness. The high stakes of politics can produce intense disagreements. But manners — even cold, formal ones — communicate a modicum of mutual respect and preserve the possibility of cooperation. John Stuart Mill called democracy “government by discussion.” Biden has left our discussion more toxic — and Obama’s task more difficult. michaelgerson@washpost.com |
Hi. I would like to share dfhacks manipulator.cpp extended with the following features:An extra tab mode reveals units physical and mental attributes in a compact grid which is highlighted to improve readability. Coloring shows strong and weak attributes and also shows which particular attributes are exercised by the currently focused job & unit.The labor activation grid can also be color hinted to reveal best and worst performing roles for each unit. This aptitude coloring can demystify labor assignment and even for seasoned dwarf therapists could provide an intresting alternative account of the assigned labors.The aptitude ratings numeric scores (0~200) are also displayed along side the existing skill and experience rating fields.There are 9 theme options in total: legacy b&w, 4 tinted monocrome modes, and 4 degrees of aptitude hinting to choose from. The theme is cycled with a hotkey and setting is saved with the game and carrys to new games in the current session.Sorting is developed with simpler controls, subtle tweaks and highlighting of "group sorts" and with extra sorts by scores calculated of civil, performer, scholar, academic and martial skills and aptitudes.Here is arrival groups subsorted by martial,An extra tab mode calculates and reveals 'notices' which are strings of tips generated from various unit flags such as: DngrTrrn, RqRescue, RqDoctor, Trappd, Intoxcd. The notices are not exhaustive but are suprisingly informative for ongoing situations and tracking recovery.Here they are recounting the death throws of the fallen:Other tweaks include, persistent selection and focus to alleviate the impact of acidental exit, and pet nicknaming is handy for selection of sturdiest work animals.Some of the added code is substantial and some maybe too crafty but I think it is fairly well encapsulated and serviceable. The current version has been quite thoroughly playtested on Debian df v43.I hope the dfhack project can find time to try this and hopefully pass these features on to other players, there is an open pull request at the repo.Here is a mode like 'matrix blue pill' (Its just the blue highlight-set applied to all). |
I wasn't there, but when I hear architects speak of Toronto in the 1960s – and I try to listen as often as I can – it's hard not to smile: There was unbridled optimism, a sense of adventure, a feeling that the city was ripe for remoulding and that the spirit of Expo 67 wasn't confined to Montreal. It's as if everyone was drinking the same Kool-Aid. That generation, full of Kool-Aid and vinegar, went on to create Aeroquay One, Ontario Place, the Science Centre and the CN Tower. But, at some point in the 1980s, conservatism, design-by-committee, increased regulation, purse string tightening, and recurring recessions all put the kibosh on dreaming. This, one could argue, has lasted well into the 21st century. But, says architect Tye Farrow, a fan of Ontario Place since it opened in 1971, the time to dream big has come again. And Mr. Farrow has set his sights on another Toronto icon: the Bloor Viaduct. Story continues below advertisement Working with GRIP Metal, a company that is readying a new type of metal-strengthened plywood for the marketplace, Mr. Farrow has envisioned "Living Bridges." In an impressive 62-page booklet, he shows a transformed viaduct with new, diaphanous arches set atop the massive concrete piers that link the solid, black-steel arches that were riveted together from 1915 – 17. Set inside his new arches are hundreds of cylinders containing "individual housing suites" of about 350 square feet. Each contains a balcony, living room, kitchen, (relatively) large bathroom and a loft bedroom with a large desk. The Living Bridges concept features two rows of housing units, with space for commercial development and a pedestrian path. Farrow Partners "It came out of connecting the dots out of a few separate silos that are out there," Mr. Farrow explains. "The first is the whole issue of affordable housing." As Toronto becomes a more expensive city, the architect worries that the "massive brains" coming here to study at our universities won't be able to stay once they graduate. "We don't have shovel-ready properties that are affordable, that are near public transportation, that are in a good location," he continues. "And if you look at the product that's out there, there are a bunch of these shoeboxes that are miserable." The units in Mr. Farrow's Living Bridge, although small, are anything but miserable: sporting a barrel-vault roof clad in warm wood veneer, their structure allows for full-glass walls and a lack of bulkheads, since services and electrical are run through the "leftover" spaces generated between the curved shell and the flat walls and floor (these spaces also provide a handy place for kitchen cabinets and a sunken, Roman tub in the bathroom). And, since we're dreaming here, there's nothing to say a purchaser couldn't gang two tubes together, as cube-buyers have done at Moshe Safdie's Habitat. Unit access would be via elevators and stairs built into towers that extend from the bridge's existing piers. Underneath the double-row of housing units, there is ample room for soaring spaces containing restaurants, hotels or "social incubators." Below the roadway, there would be market stalls, tailors, coin laundries, or anything, really, that is necessary for daily life, as well as a pedestrian and bicycle path. The small residential units would sport barrel-vault roofs. Farrow Partners As the city struggles with how to provide more parkland, Mr. Farrow's roof structure would be vegetal manna from heaven: a linear park to rival New York's High Line. And, where the angle of ascent and descent might prove a little steep, pathways would zig and zag at a gradient gentle enough for a wheelchair just as they do on San Francisco's famous Lombard Street. And about San Francisco: University of Toronto professor/architect Larry Richards's wonderful quote, that Toronto is "San Francisco, upside down," makes its way into Mr. Farrow's booklet also. The reason? Our immense ravine system makes for dozens of bridges that connect established neighbourhoods together; in many cases, these are neighbourhoods that are no longer affordable for twentysomethings. Story continues below advertisement Units in the Living Bridge, however, would be inexpensive, Mr. Farrow explains, because the lightweight GRIP Metal material – which embeds thin sheets of metal with microhooks between the plies of wood – costs a fraction of concrete or stick-built, plus further savings could be achieved by building the units off site, trucking them to the bridge and then stacking them up. The federal government is "pumping tons of money into bridges and pipes and into transit," so why not create a new tax base to help? Of course, by creating new neighbourhoods out of thin air, there would be other benefits: Something that was once a single-use liability, a bridge, would become an asset with multiple uses, and Tourism Toronto would have a new attraction to trumpet to the world. The green roof would be a linear park to rival New York’s High Line. Farrow Partners The idea, although bold, is not new. Mr. Farrow acknowledges other "revenue-generating" bridges such as Florence's Ponte Vecchio, the shops along Pulteney Bridge in Bath, England, and the Kraemerbruecke Bridge in Erfurt, Germany, which Atlas Obscura states has "an entire neighbourhood clinging to its sides." But can we dream that big again? Can we spike the water with 1960s Kool-Aid? Perhaps it's already happened: The red tape around laneway housing is being untangled by a few dedicated souls; firms such as Partisans routinely push boundaries; the mayor is keen on Rail Deck Park; the Bentway is actually getting built; and rather than being laughed out of the room, Mr. Farrow is entertaining multiple offers to speak about Living Bridges at conferences around the globe. I just hope we build it first. |
It isn't clear how Apple intends to make money from the service. Indeed, the company may view a person-to-person offering mostly as a way to get more consumers to convert to its phones. Under the current discussions, Apple wouldn’t charge the banks for participating in its person-to-person payment service, said the person familiar with the talks. That is different from Apple Pay in which the banks pay Apple for each transaction Apple is in talks with U.S. banks over a potential person-to-person mobile payments service, reports The Wall Street Journal. Such a service would perhaps be positioned as an expansion to Apple Pay, and it would allow people to send each other payments, much like PayPal's Venmo or Square's Square Cash service.Little is known about the talks at this early date, but The Wall Street Journal says communication between Apple and the banks is ongoing and it's not known if Apple has inked any concrete deals. Apple is said to be speaking to Chase, Capital One, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank, but key details "remain in flux" and the technical details still need to be worked out.Person-to-person services like Venmo and Square Cash are used for personal payments and are useful for things like paying back a friend who bought dinner or splitting a rent payment. With Apple's system, iPhone and iPad owners could perhaps use Apple Pay to send secure payments to one another from a checking account.A launch date for the service is unclear as of yet, but Apple may be targeting a 2016 debut. |
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