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At a teaching workshop last week, a new faculty member asked me how I felt about students using laptops in the classroom. I replied, “I ask students not to use laptops in my classroom—unless a student tells me they need or strongly prefer a laptop to take notes (for any reason), in which case we make that work.” She looked relieved to have this endorsement of a learning zone with fewer electronic distractions. I am far from alone in asking students not to use laptops (or phones) in class. Some of my colleagues, though, seem surprised that I don’t get pushback from students about this policy. I like to think it has something to do with my taking the time to explain my laptop policy for the class and then working hard to keep up my end of the contract. Let me explain. On the first day of class, students and I spend the first 30-40 minutes learning something new about how language works (in order to set the tone for the class), and then we go over the syllabus. When we get to the laptop policy, I pause and say, “Let me tell you why I ask you generally not to use laptops in class.” And here’s the gist of what I say after that: First, if you have your laptop open, it is almost impossible not to check email or briefly surf the Internet, even if you don’t mean to or have told yourself that you won’t. I have the same impulse if I have my laptop open in a meeting. The problem is that studies indicate that this kind of multitasking impairs learning; once we are on email/the web, we are no longer paying very good attention to what is happening in class. (And there is no evidence I know of that “practice” at doing this kind of multitasking is going to make you better at it!) Now I know that one could argue that it is your choice about whether you want to use this hour and 20 minutes to engage actively with the material at hand, or whether you would like to multitask. You’re not bothering anyone (one could argue) as you quietly do your email or check Facebook. Here’s the problem with that theory: From what we can tell, you are actually damaging the learning environment for others, even if you’re being quiet about it. A study published in 2013 found that not only did the multitasking student in a classroom do worse on a postclass test on the material, so did the peers who could see the computer. In other words, the off-task laptop use distracted not just the laptop user but also the group of students behind the laptop user. (And I get it, believe me. I was once in a lecture where the woman in front of me was shoe shopping, and I found myself thinking at one point, “No, not the pink ones!” I don’t remember all that much else about the lecture.) In addition, I can find your multitasking on a laptop a bit distracting as the instructor because sometimes you are not typing at the right times; I am not saying anything noteworthy and yet you are engrossed in typing, which suggests that you are doing something other than being fully engaged in our class. And that distracts my attention. There’s also the issue of the classroom environment. I like to foster a sense of conversation here, even in a class of 100 students. If you are on a laptop, I and your peers are often looking at the back of your computer screen and the top of your head, rather than all of us making eye contact with each other. Learning happens best in a classroom when everyone is actively engaged with one another in the exchange of information. This can mean looking up from your notes to listen and to talk with others, which means you may need to make strategic decisions about what to write down. Note-taking is designed to support the learning and retention of material we talk about in class; note-taking itself is not learning. And speaking of what you choose to write down … A study that came out in June—and which got a lot of buzz in the mainstream press—suggests that taking notes by hand rather than typing them on a laptop improves comprehension of the material. While students taking notes on a laptop (and only taking notes—they were not allowed to multitask) wrote down more of the material covered in class, they were often typing what the instructor said verbatim, which seems to have led to less processing of the material. The students taking notes by hand had to do more synthesizing and condensing as they wrote because they could not get everything down. As a result, they learned the material better.* I think there is also something to the ease with which one can create visual connections on a handwritten page through arrows, flow charts, etc. I figure it is also good for all of us to break addictive patterns with email, texting, Facebook, etc. When you step back, it seems a bit silly that we can’t go for 80 minutes without checking our phones or other devices. Really, for most of us, what are the odds of an emergency that can’t wait an hour? We have developed the habit of checking, and you can see this class as a chance to create or reinforce a habit of not checking too. Of course, if you need or strongly prefer a laptop for taking notes or accessing readings in class for any reason, please come talk with me, and I am happy to make that work. I’ll just ask you to commit to using the laptop only for class-related work. There is legitimate disagreement in academe about no-laptop policies (see, for example, a critique of such policies by Dennis Baron, who writes a blog about language and technology). And obviously, different classes have different technology needs. For the classes I teach, I come down on the no-laptop side unless we need access to computer software or the Internet to do a class activity together (in which case students with laptops can share with those without them). In the end, though, we as instructors need to take responsibility for ensuring that class time is well used if we’re asking students to be fully present. As I say to students, it is a contract. I am asking them to come to every class, to do the assigned reading and any other assignments ahead of time, and to engage fully in the classroom conversation without multitasking on their laptops or phones. My end of that contract is that I will do everything in my power to make it worth their time to be there. ______ * Dan Rockmore, in the June New Yorker piece linked to above, about his decision to ban laptops in the classroom, suggests having students read some of these studies, and I have had good success with my initial attempts. Image via Diane Gottsman Want more stories from The Chronicle? Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. |
en:Kazamm / Wikimedia Commons Approximately 6,300 travel and hospitality workers near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport will soon see their wages increase to at least $15 per hour thanks to a ballot initiative that passed by just 77 votes, with about 6,000 ballots cast. Opponents of the measure believe it will drive businesses away and hurt the local economy. Supporters of it believe that workers deserve a much higher wage and that it will convince other nearby communities to do so as well, eliminating the incentives for businesses to locate elsewhere. The evidence on minimum wage increases is mixed and it's not yet clear what impact it will have on the economy. It's a huge increase from Washington state's current minimum wage of $9.32, but it's also confined to an area that is already attractive for businesses thanks to the local airport. The great part about this measure is that we can learn a lot from it. It's a natural experiment to determine the effects of a major minimum wage hike. Do companies move away? Do they jack up prices? Do they cut back on labor? This ballot measure can now help us answer those questions. This was one of the things that Manhattan Institute fellow Scott Winship stressed to me in our interview: Ultimately, you can't really figure out whether something is working or not without randomized experiments. We ought to institutionalize randomized experiments within the federal government by essentially allowing waivers for pretty much anything that the federal government funds. Allow states to make all sorts of policy choices or policy changes to programs like food stamps or TANF or SSI for instance and evaluate them in a rigorous way. We ought to find what works and defund what doesn't work. Implementing a $15 minimum wage nationally could have disastrous effects, but we really don't know what would happen. Instead of taking that risk though, we can use states and towns as labyrinths to test the idea to find out if it is effective. That's why it's great to see this ballot measure pass. It will provide us with ample evidence for larger policy decisions. The same can be said of Switzerland's referendum for an unconditional basic income. There are strong arguments on either side for whether this will work or not. Ultimately, we don't have enough evidence to know for sure. Implementing it in the United States would be incredibly risky as it's not just a major policy change, but also an untested one. This is why Megan McArdle, who opposes a universal basic income, said, "Overall, I'd really like to see Switzerland pass this, if only so we can observe the effects." The United States cannot simply implement radical policy ideas without numerous other towns, states or countries trying them first. But that doesn't mean those radical policies wouldn't be successful in the U.S. It just means that we need other people to test them first - including other communities in the United States. That's exactly what the region near the Seattle Tacoma International Airport is doing. We should be thankful for it. |
Jennifer MacIntyre, Canada's climate change ambassador, is stepping down after the sudden death of her husband. "It is with mixed emotions that I must step down as Canada's Ambassador for Climate Change," MacIntyre tweeted on Tuesday afternoon. "The opportunity to advance Canada's international #ClimateChange #CleanGrowth agenda was an immense privilege. I am confident Canada's important #climate leadership will continue." Her husband, Michael Fink, passed away in October. He was 48 years old. The couple met when they were each in St. Petersburg, Russia. According to an obituary, he had worked for the National Nuclear Security Administration — contributing to American efforts to "secure weapons-grade nuclear material around the world" — and was dedicated to the cause of nuclear non-proliferation. "Michael spent the final years of his career with Switzerland's Arktis Radiation Detectors, and his daughters are always proud to say 'Daddy works to stop bombs,'" the obituary said. MacIntyre was appointed in June, filling a position that had been vacant since January 2015. She was previously Canada's ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein. In her own tweet, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna thanked MacIntyre for her leadership and dedication to the issue of climate change. "I want to thank Jennifer for her amazing service," McKenna added in a statement from China, where she is travelling. "She was a very effective climate ambassador and a strong support for our government's efforts to promote climate action and clean growth in the global arena. Climate diplomacy is extremely important and we will be seeking a replacement for this position in due course. "We are very sorry to see Jennifer leave for personal reasons, but we wish her all the best and deeply appreciate her contribution as Canada's first female ambassador for climate change." |
A former Facebook executive has said he feels “tremendous guilt” for his work on “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”, while citing the lynching of seven people in Jharkhand that was triggered by a hoax on WhatsApp. Chamath Palihapitiya, now the CEO of Social Capital, joined Facebook in 2007 and rose to become its vice president for user growth before he left the social media giant in 2011. The Sri Lankan-origin tech entrepreneur said Facebook users would have to decide whether they want to be “programmed” and how much of their “intellectual independence” they were willing to give up. Palihapitiya made the remarks while speaking at an event at the Stanford business school last month but they were reported by several websites only on Monday. He made particular mention of the lynchings in Jharkhand – caused by a hoax on WhatsApp, which is now owned by Facebook – to drive home his point that social media is “eroding the core foundations of how people behave” with each other. “There was a hoax in WhatsApp where in some like village in India, people were afraid that their kids were going to get kidnapped etc and then there were these lynchings that happened as a result, where people were like vigilante, running around, they think they found the person, I mean seriously,” he said. “That’s what we’re dealing with…Imagine when you take that to the extreme – where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s a really, really bad state of affairs and we compound the problem.” Palihapitiya said he felt “tremendous guilt” for the tools he helped create for Facebook, though he added that he believes the company “overwhelmingly does good in the world”. “It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he said. “If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you, if you push back on it, we have a chance to control it, rein it in. It is a point in time where people need to hard break from some of these tools and some of things you rely on – the short term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.” Referring to allegations of Russian meddling in the US elections through social media, he added: “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem, this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.” Palihapitiya said people on Facebook “curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection” to get rewarded with “hearts, likes thumbs up” and conflated that with value and the truth. “Instead, what it really is, is fake brittle popularity that is short term and leaves you even more vacant and empty,” he said. Palihapitiya joined a growing list of critics of Facebook, especially after concerns about how online platforms and the proliferation of fake news affected the outcome of the US presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK. Last month, Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker criticised the way the company exploits a “vulnerability in human psychology” by creating a “social-validation feedback loop”. First Published: Dec 12, 2017 21:35 IST |
IN THE age-old war between cats and dogs, canines might just have struck the killer blow. A border collie called Chaser has been taught the names of 1022 items – more than any other animal. She can also categorise them according to function and shape, something children learn to do around the age of 3. Chaser follows in the footsteps of Rico, who trained at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Rico had a “vocabulary” of 200 words and could identify new objects in a group of familiar objects by a process of elimination, according to a study published in 2004. To find out whether there was a limit to the number of words a border collie could learn, psychologists Alliston Reid and John Pilley of Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, started an intensive training programme with Chaser. Over three years, they taught the collie the names of 1022 toys by introducing them to her one by one, getting her to fetch the toy and then repeating the name to reinforce the association. Advertisement The team regularly tested Chaser on her entire vocabulary. Groups of 20 toys were chosen at random and put in a separate room from where Chaser had to retrieve them by name. The toys were in another room so the trainer would not unintentionally give Chaser cues about which toy to choose. According to Reid, the dog completed 838 of these tests over 3 years and never got less than 18 out of 20 right (Behavioural Processes, DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2010.11.007). Chaser was also taught to categorise the named objects, complete tasks such as touching the toy with her nose or paw, and like Rico, she could infer the name of a new object from a set of familiar objects. “The experimenters did a lot of controls to exclude alternative explanations, although from my experience the results are simply too good,” says Ádám Miklósi, founder of the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. Other dogs perform similar tasks, he says, but they usually make more mistakes. He thinks Chaser’s intensive training explains the difference. “This study shows that this dog has good skills for comprehension but the production side of communication is missing,” says Miklósi. Others animals have demonstrated impressive feats of learning in which they also vocalise the words they learn, such as Alex, the grey parrot, who could make sentences out of about 100 words. |
All continues to not be well in the world of Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies. Another exchange has been hacked, with the perpetrators making off with 76.69 bitcoins (a little under $50,000 at current trading rates). On Tuesday, the owner of the Poloniex exchange admitted on the Bitcoin Talk forum that around “12.3 percent of the BTC on Poloniex” was stolen. Poloniex did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment. Poloniex owner Busoni explained that the hacker found a flaw in his site's code that processes withdrawals. The hacker discovered that multiple simultaneous withdrawals are processed essentially at the same time and that the system's software doesn't check quickly enough for a negative balance, so they are still processed. The site's owner went on to add that the “major problem here is that the auditing and security features were not explicitly looking for negative balances.” So what’s next? The company can’t cover the losses, so its users will. He added: |
Ahead of its Wednesday upfront party, the network announced it has picked up an animated "Harold & Kumar" project to pilot along with a handful of others. Ahead of Adult Swim’s upfront party Wednesday night, the Turner-owned network has announced a collection of pilots. Among the younger-skewing net’s development projects: an animated Harold & Kumar project and an animated effort from Community’s Dan Harmon. Here’s a look at Adult Swim’s pilots: Untitled Animated Harold & Kumar Project (In Development) A Lionsgate-produced animated version of the eponymous stoner comedy series. As The Hollywood Reporter first reported in November, film stars John Cho and Kal Penn are on board to voice Harold and Kumar, respectively, while A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas scribes Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are attached to pen the script. Rick & Morty A genius inventor and his less-than-genius grandson and the life journeys they share. The 30-minute project hails from Harmon (Community, Channel 101) and Justin Roiland. Colonel Wallace (Working Title) The 15-minute project from Greg Cohen (Late Night With Conan O'Brien, King of the Hill, TV Funhouse) that centers on an eccentric Southern fried chicken magnate and his adventures with his family. Coffin Dodgers A half-hour project, from Dave Silverstein and Matt Jeser (Drawn Together), about misfit grumps who get into Animal House-style trouble at a cozy suburban retirement home. Green Bench: The American Day Dream A group of friends have pooled their money to buy a large office space for their business. The only problem is they haven’t quite figured out what that business is. In the meantime, it’s an awesome headquarters where their petty, self-centered and mischievous minds can wander. The half-hour project come from the Internet sketch comedy sensation Green Bench and produced by Dakota Pictures. Freestyle Love Supreme The half-hour live-action comedy from Ars Nova (Black Dynamite, In the Heights) revolves around IT guys who work on their freestyle rapping at the office, much to the annoyance of their co-workers. King Star King A 15-minute animated pilot from JJ Villard (Monsters vs. Aliens) and Eric Kaplan (The Big Bang Theory) about a modern-day He-man who’s half-warrior, half-idiot. Rolling With Dad The half-hour animated effort centers on a brilliant but disabled man dealing with his much less intelligent family. The project counts Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter; Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows) and David Katzenberg (The Hard Times of RJ Berger) as producers. |
The experience of a 41-year-old woman with pneumonia this week highlights the growing problem of overcrowding in Ontario hospitals, in spite of the measures already taken by the province to open more beds. Holly Pothiah went to a hospital in Brampton, but then had to be rushed by ambulance to an Etobicoke hospital because of a shortage of space. She ended up spending one day in a hallway followed by more than two days in the emergency department because no rooms were available there — a problem doctors say is on the rise and will only get worse if this flu season is as bad as predicted. Pothiah was not feeling well Monday morning, so she and her husband went to Brampton Civic Hospital's emergency department. She was seen quickly and diagnosed with pneumonia, but hospital staff said they weren't accepting any more patients. "They told us it could be days before she could get a bed, because there weren't enough beds available," said her husband Mark Pothiah. "She was 34th in line for a bed." A photo taken by Holly Pothiah's husband showing a patients waiting in a hallway in an emergency department. Hospital overcrowding may get worse with flu season. (Submitted by Mark Pothiah) The hospital confirms that a "Code Gridlock" was declared that day. That's when there is a surge of admitted patients waiting in the emergency department for a bed. Mark Pothiah says a doctor spent hours calling around trying to find a bed for his wife, but finally told them to go by ambulance to Etobicoke General Hospital's emergency department. Patients siting in the middle of the hallway There, it took them almost an hour before they checked his wife's vital signs and another two hours before a doctor saw her. She ended up spending the night in a hallway along with many others, says Pothiah. How do you expect a nurse or a doctor to treat their patients if they are sitting in the middle of a hallway? - Mark Pothiah "How do you expect a nurse or a doctor to treat their patients if they are sitting in the middle of a hallway?" said Pothiah. "The great nurses and doctors we have don't have what they need to help these patients in a quick and orderly manner." By mid-day Thursday, Pothiah says his wife finally got a room, but he is concerned because she should have been isolated so nobody else could get infected. Staff had put up a sign near her telling people to stay away unless had on a mask, gloves and gown. "This needs to change because she's going to be okay, but it's all these other people. I feel so bad when I see them sitting in the middle of the hallway. They're in agony, in pain," Pothiah told CBC Toronto. Overcrowding in hospitals gets provincial attention It's not the first case of patients jammed in hallways in the GTA, but the government had taken steps to address the over crowding, says Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins. "Brampton Civic received 37 new acute care beds. In addition, Etobicoke General, also part of William Osler Health Network, received 22 new beds," Hoskins said. The province announced in November that it's spending $41 million for 100 beds in the GTA. That includes the redevelopment of Peel Memorial Centre, which will help relieve the burden on other area hospitals. Another photo taken by Mark Pothiah showing overcrowding in a GTA emergency department. (Mark Pothiah) "It's a very high growth area. So we've responded, I believe, effectively and certainly those beds have been allocated and are available," said Hoskins. He added that he hoped the hospitals would have the new beds within days or weeks of the Nov. 9 announcement, so they would be available by the height of flu season. Adding beds means adding staff But Dr. Naveed Mohammad, the vice president of medical affairs for the William Osler Health System, says adding beds is a complicated task. When a bed is provided to a hospital, what the ministry provides is a set dollar amount for that bed. What is more challenging is to find all the staffing that is needed around that bed. - Dr. Naveed Mohammad "When a bed is provided to a hospital, what the ministry provides is a set dollar amount for that bed. What is more challenging is to find all the staffing that is needed around that bed," said Mohammad. "We have to hire nurses and clerical support." Dr. Naveed Mohammad, vice president of medical affairs for the William Osler Health System, to which both Etobicoke General and Brampton Civic belong, says adding beds is a complicated task. (Castell/CBC) The hospital has held job fairs, but hiring staff is a time-consuming process and the health network has only been able to open eight new beds at Etobicoke General and six at Brampton Civic. "The other beds will be coming online as we are hiring," said Mohammad, adding that more beds will be opened at the end of December and into 2018. "The surge period runs from early December until March, so the new beds will benefit us throughout the surge period as we bring on the new staff," he said. Hospitals not designed for higher volume of patients Brampton Civic and Etobicoke General are over capacity due to a higher volume of patients than they were designed for. Last fiscal year, Brampton Civic saw more than 140,000 visits to its emergency department and Etobicoke General almost 80,000. Brampton Civic emergency department sees more patients than the emergency departments at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the Hospital for Sick Children combined. Brampton Civic Hospital's emergency ward could not accommodate the number of patients that needed treatment. (Castell/CBC) A severe flu season is predicted and Mohammad says preparations such as coordinating with nursing homes, paramedics and public health units, are underway in case a surge in patients does materialize. But he says if history plays out and predictions are correct, hallway patients will likely be a more common sight over the next few weeks and into the spring. |
Icons used correctly can enhance both the user experience and look of your interface. Sadly, more and more designers are using them in the wrong way. And it’s hurting both the usability and accessibility of the interface. My dad and his TED app I love to watch my dad use technology. It’s such a great learning experience for me as an interaction designer. He is 57, wears glasses when reading and always delays getting a new phone until his old one completely stops working. You see, he does not like to learn new technology. He just wants his stuff to do what he needs it to do without having to think. My dad does a lot of long distance flying. So recently, he asked me: Can I download TED-talks to watch on flights? I answered as I always do to that type of question: I don’t know. Try! Then I stood behind his shoulder looking at how he tried to solve it. Not helping, just looking. I love it! The only thing missing was a bowl of popcorn. He quite quickly found a video. He looked at his options. Four icons. He hesitated a bit, looking through them. It could be the heart or the list icon with a plus sign. But he decided to go for the down arrow. It looked the most correct. Which it was. But he clearly felt a bit unsure. He got some sort of notification that a file was downloading by the Android operating system. But then he immediately started looking for the downloaded clip in the app. Did it work? Where was it now? The main menu of TED is a collection of five icons: My dad started clicking the icons one by one, clearly not understanding what any of them meant. He could not rule out a single icon. Since he felt unsure of them all, he gave each page a very limited amount of scanning. When he couldn’t find the downloaded clip in the app he went out of the app and looked for some kind of folder where the video could have ended up. “Maybe it’s in a Downloaded folder” he mumbled. Clearly hoping his Android had a file system like his computer. Which it does, but not as visible as on desktop computers so he couldn’t find it. Then he gave up. It’s not worth it. So I had to step in and help, and I found the downloaded clip under the last icon, the one that looks like a user profile. He had clicked that but not had the energy to look closely enough. Too tired from checking every other place that he thought could be correct. So this story illustrates one key problem with how many interfaces use icons… Icons could mean a lot of things The icons are given meaning by the user, in regard to the task they’re carrying out at the moment. Icons are like abstract paintings. They get different meanings for different people. It’s all through the eyes of an observer. And that ambiguity is really exciting with art. But not so much in user interfaces. What’s the icon for offline downloads? It could be a folder, star, heart, down arrow. Or even a profile icon, like in the TED app. It’s very hard to rule out any one icon. So what I’m trying to say is that icons don’t work alone. Icons should have labels When icons are used to save space, things go wrong. Icons should not be used in that way. To a designer of tight mobile interfaces, using an icon to save space is really compelling. At first glance, the interface looks so clean and tidy! However, for the user it’s usually the second glance that counts. The one where they look at the icon when they are carrying out a task. My dad doesn’t give a poop that the interface has a clean first impression if it confuses him when he’s trying to get something done. And your other users probably work in the same way. You recognize an icon used to save space by a lack of a text label. Icons without labels suck Here are some examples of interfaces with labels without icons. The Gmail app. It took me – an interaction designer – an eternity to find the “Mark as unread” feature which I want to use all the time. It’s the mail icon. And the box with the down arrow means “archive”, not “download”. I recall at least three different people I’ve had to help download an app from the App Store after they exclaimed “where the hell is the download button?”. Yes, my dad is one of them. A cloud with a down arrow? Apple, you can do better than that. Instagram is packed with icons without labels. You can probably guess what they do, but you probably have to do a fair bit of thinking and you’ll not feel totally confident. You should aim to make your users feel confident. Icons without labels are not only a problem in digital interfaces. Ever wondered why you always use the same setting on your oven, dishwasher or washing machine? Probably because you have no idea what the other features mean. Here’s a washing machine I came across in France that made me go “Merde sacré bleu”! Icons + labels = true love If you label icons, they suddenly become awesome, accessible and understandable. An icon with a label: makes it easier for the user to find the most important features – the ones with icons. makes it easier to remember where you clicked the next time you come back. makes the interface more aesthetically pleasing than if there were just text buttons. A text and icon combination also improves the experience for people who have a hard time reading, like many users with dyslexia, autism, aphasia or other reading impairments. Icons with labels are awesome Below are some examples of interfaces that label icons. The Tripadvisor app uses icons with text labels on their startpage and on their tab navigation menu. Just for comparison, here’s what it would look like without the text labels. Not as clear without the labels, huh? Headspace uses text or icons with text labels. Never icons by themselves. Slack uses icons with labels in their menu. They also use colors to highlight some of them. Together this assists their users’ memory and lightens up the look and feel. Quora uses icons with text labels both in the header and footer of their app. But hey, I’ll just show a tooltip! Are you considering solving the “my-stupid-users-don’t-understand-the-icons” problem by showing tooltips when the user hovers over icons? An understandable – yet not excusable – mistake. Why is this not a good solution? Well, two main reasons: You can’t hover on touchscreens. Not all users use a mouse, for example a lot of people with motor impairments. Lesson one in accessibility is to make it possible to navigate your interface using a keyboard only. Yes, there are exceptions There are some icons you can use without a label. Like a trash can for delete: Or the magnifying glass for search. But even that icon’s functionality can differ. Sometimes it means zoom or preview: The main thing to know is that the number of universally understood icons are far fewer than you think. If you’re reading this post, you probably live in a bubble where your the people you hang with are far more tech savvy than most people out there. So just because you and your friends and colleagues know what the icon means, doesn’t mean everyone does. Kids now days don’t even recognize the floppy disk as a save icon. Oh my! Where’s this world heading? Another good example is the hamburger menu icon. You probably know what it’s for. And it’s in interfaces everywhere! But A/B tests have shown many people don’t use the hamburger menu icon if it’s missing a label. |
The Apple Watch is either a hit or a failure, depending on who you ask, but one thing’s for certain: June was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month for the US traditional watch industry. As reported by Bloomberg, data from market research firm NPD Group shows that traditional watch sales in the United States dropped by 14 percent in the month of June, as compared to June 2014. According to Bloomberg, that represents the biggest year-over-year drop in watch sales since 2008. Watches in the $100-$149.99 price range took the biggest hit, NPD’s data shows: Sales of timepieces in that range fell by 24 percent. In general, the sub-$1000 watch market declined in June, Bloomberg notes. Why this matters: Such a dropoff in traditional watch sales may suggest that the Apple Watch is starting to affect the traditional watch market. In Apple’s last quarterly earnings call, CEO Tim Cook stated that Apple Watch sales increased in June, contrary to media reports: Such an increase in sales may have contributed to sluggish sales of traditional watches. Other factors in play? Just the same, plenty of other factors may be coming into play here. As Bloomberg notes, NPD cites market saturation of “lower-priced fashion brands” as another factor contributing to the sales decline. On the other hand, comments from Apple’s suppliers suggest that Apple Watch sales may not be as great as hoped. Also, Apple refuses to provide sales numbers for the Apple Watch, which means that sales estimates are, at best, educated guesses. Either way, it’s too hard to draw conclusions based on one month’s worth of sales data. If sales bounce back, June’s dropoff was probably a blip on the radar. But if the declines continue, well, maybe there’s something to this Apple Watch thing. |
Sebastião Salgado has won every major prize a photographer can receive, with his crisp, compassionate black-and-white images, many of them from war zones and other locations of human suffering, hanging on the walls of museums, galleries and private collections around the world. His books, including “Workers,” “Migrations,” “Sahel” and, most recently, the nature-oriented “Genesis,” have consistently met with commercial and critical success. Now, as if to complete the picture, a documentary film about Mr. Salgado, 71, and his work is about to opens in theaters across the United States. “The Salt of the Earth,” a collaborative effort between the German director Wim Wenders, who is also a photographer, and Mr. Salgado’s son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, was nominated for the Oscar for best documentary film, won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival last spring and last month was also awarded a César, the French equivalent of an Academy Award. The documentary features Mr. Salgado explaining, in French and Portuguese, how he came to take some of his best-known images, such as those from the Serra Pelada series shot in a gold mine in the Amazon 30 years ago. But it also makes clear that his path to becoming a renowned photographer was arduous: He was born deep in the isolated Brazilian interior, scrimped to get an economics degree, left his country and took refuge in France after a military dictatorship seized power in Brazil, and in the mid-1990s suffered what he called “a deep psychological crisis” after covering the genocidal civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia and had to recalibrate the focus of his work. Nowadays, although “my vision of the human being has not changed, I no longer think just of my own species,” Mr. Salgado, speaking in Portuguese, said in a telephone interview from his studio in Paris last month. “That’s not my only preoccupation. Today I think of the other species too, of the ants, the termites, the whales, they are as important as my own. The behavior of our species, what we do to nature, to other species, to each other, is awful, so I have the same skepticism about us that I always had.” That broadened interest in environmental concerns is documented in detail in “The Salt of the Earth,” which shows him working on the “Genesis” project in locales as far-flung as the Amazon, the Arctic and New Guinea and also accompanies him as he tries to undo the environmental degradation afflicting his native region through a foundation he set up for that purpose, the Instituto Terra. Mr. Salgado talked about those and other subjects with Larry Rohter. Their conversation has been edited. Q. You’ve largely avoided movies in the past. What made you willing to do this documentary film? Was it because your son was involved? A. It wasn’t a decision taken easily in the beginning. Juliano had always wanted to do the story of his family, he’s the child of immigrants, we came here to Paris and in the beginning we were kind of refugees, it was during the time of the Brazilian dictatorship, and we remained here. You must have seen the film and noted that my father is in it. That was done around 1998 or 1999, when Juliano was very young, just starting to do cinema. Then, around 2009, Wim Wenders came to our house, and I showed him the photographs from “Genesis.” I said to him, ‘This is the project I am working on.’ I made a slide show, I did conferences, I put some music to it. I didn’t know anything about cinema, but I asked: Is there a way to make a film of this? That was my idea. In my head, I really wanted the images to enter into that world in some fashion. Feature A look back at Sebastião Salgado’s work featured on Lens. Migrant in a World of Migrants Q. Wim Wenders makes a very interesting observation in the film, saying that your training as an economist helped prepare you for the kind of photography you do. Do you think that’s true? Did it help, and if so, in what way? A. Yes, it helped. In reality, when you consider a photographer, he’s the fruit of his heritage. My visual heritage comes from the mountains where I grew up and a lot of my intellectual heritage from having been an economist. The economics I did was not the economics of business administration, it’s not micro. I did macroeconomics — the economics of public finances, political economy, I studied Marx and Keynes. In reality, that kind of economics is a kind of quantified sociology, so that kind of preparation gave me a real training. I had to study, I had to read a lot of philosophy, political science, I had to read a whole bunch of things that gave me a solid grounding, and that was something fabulous. So when I became a photographer, I had a series of instruments for analysis and synthesis, and clearly all of that helped me. I would also mention my origins as a Brazilian, from a country in social gestation. So I came with all of that in my head, and my photography is that. And here’s another thing: I am an immigrant, so I was also doing my own story. All of this contributes to my work. My work is the result of my training, my heritage, cultural and ideological and ethical. Q. You’re always described as a “social photographer.” Do you agree with that assessment? A. It’s limiting. Listen, I am not a social photographer. I am not an economic photographer. I’m not a photojournalist. Photography is much more than that. Photography is my life. It’s my way of life, and my language. I went to photograph the things that I had a great curiosity to see and to organize. I felt a certain revulsion, and a compulsion to show that others also have dignity, that dignity is not an exclusive property of the rich countries of the north but exists all over the planet. That’s what photography was for me, my language, my life and my way of going about and doing things. I’m a photographer without adjectives, and that is a big privilege, because photography as an instrument for capturing images is today being totally transformed. The telephones that exist today, the majority of photographs taken now are with them, and people have completely modified them on their computers. So photography is being transformed into something else. Maybe in 20 or 30 years it will no longer exist, it will have become something else. I’m not saying this with any kind of criticism, I don’t have any bitterness in me, it’s evolution, that’s the way it goes. There are new options, so let’s go there, that’s what our society has done. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’ve been immensely privileged to have been able for 40 or 50 years of my life to go wherever I wanted and participate in history. That’s one of the things that most surprised me in the movie, to see the proof that I had the privilege to take part in the main stories of the time I live in, to be there. Photo Q. Should we regard the “Genesis” project, with its focus on nature and the environment, as a continuation of your previous work? Or is it a rupture with your past? A. No, in no way. I’ve always worked with stories. This is a story I wanted to do at that moment. You know, I discovered photography when I was already in Paris, preparing for a doctorate in economics. But the first images of my life, I saw them there at my father’s ranch, as a child, and they remained in my head. I took Wim to shoot there, and in the film there’s an image where I’m seated in what seems like a photograph, and then I begin to move. That’s where my father would take me when I was a boy. The ranch was large, and it took four or five hours on foot to get to that place, since my father didn’t like to ride on horseback. We’d get there and sit, mainly at the end of October or the beginning of November, the beginning of the rainy season, when the clouds would arrive, loaded and heavy, and the light would be remarkable. It was such a variety of light, with those mountains in the distance, like you see in the film. That gave me such a sensation of pleasure, it was the most beautiful and profound thing I’d seen in my life. In reality, I only came to photography later, but the images were already there, and that light! Even today that’s where it comes from, from those places. Q. Critics sometimes say that your images are “too pretty” in their portrayal of horrible things. How do you react to that? A. It’s not my problem. I can’t do what I do in any other way. Once I was talking with [Gabriel] García Márquez, he had become a friend and helped me with certain stories, and he said to me: ‘I basically write the same thing over and over. They are different versions of the same story.’ And it’s true. He couldn’t write in any fashion other than the way he did. When you write, you have your style, you have your form. Photographers are like that too, except that our language is a formal language, an aesthetic. Because we work within a square space it’s formal by necessity. So I can’t do things any other way than my own. There are people who like that, people who don’t, people who critique. Fine. But that’s the problem of people who look at the pictures. They may be right, they may be wrong, but it’s their problem, not mine. Photo Q. I have a philosophical question regarding how you think about what you do. Is it journalism or art or both? A. I don’t consider myself an artist. I have a concept of art that might be a little different, as something that tells the big story of humanity. The other day I was at a museum exhibition in Barcelona with my wife, a beautiful exposition of African art, of work instruments, pots for carrying water, etc. At the moment they were made, they were not art objects, but instruments for daily living that referred to that people and which today are considered art objects because they tell a story about that people. If by chance my photographs, 50 or 60 years from now, should be considered a reference to the moment in history in which I lived, if they should remain that for future generations, then I think they might be an artistic product that made an artistic contribution and have become everyone’s heritage. But I can’t say that with the photography I am doing that I have achieved that, because that would be enormously pretentious on my part. I have to wait for history to say whether they are or are not. I know that few people can do photography, that you have to feel that instinct within you in that fraction of a second. Not everyone can do that, I recognize this. A photograph has my story, my ethic, my aesthetic, my ideology. It’s all there, my father, my mother. So it has a strong diversity, it tells stories. But you have to wait awhile to see. I feel very uncomfortable when I see a photographer presenting himself as an artist. I don’t have that pretension. Q. So now that you’ve been involved in a movie, I was wondering: Will you ever do cinema again? A. No, once is sufficient. Enough already. Because there’s something I discovered about movie people: They are on a planet that it is completely different from photography. We photographers are instinctive, when something happens, we are there, photography becomes part of the phenomenon. You have to do it in a fraction of a second, you’re inside it. But when movie people are with you, oh my God, it’s so slow! And it takes a lot of time and energy, because you’re repeating things over and over. Cinema is very tough, very demanding. So I prefer photography. Follow @SSalgadoGenesis and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook. |
As the New England Patriots recently learned, deflating game balls can attract a ton of unwanted attention. But in the wild, animals inflate and deflate every day—and they're doing it because they want all that attention. Take the greater sage-grouse. World Wildlife Fund (WWF) ecologist Kevin Ellison has seen the massive birds in action as they puff out their throat sacs during a mating ritual. Their inflated throats basically function as a drum to amplify the dull plopping noise that males make to attract females, he explains. They can be heard up to three miles (five kilometers) away. "It's functioning as a way to broadcast 'hey, there's a bunch of males here,'" he says, much the way a lot of screaming or cheering would announce that a group is watching a football game. In honor of the 11 balls involved in Deflate-gate, here's a list of 11 animals that inflate and deflate all the time—naturally, and legally. Pufferfish: Caught in the mouth of a predator, like a river otter, the pufferfish inflates its yellow underbelly to make itself too big to eat. The self-defense mechanism also protects the would-be attacker, because the pufferfish's gallbladder is poisonous. Freaks of Nature: Self-Inflating Fish Watch the pufferfish self-defense mechanism in action. Namaque rain frog: These tiny frogs (they're less than two inches, or five centimeters, long) burrow underground most of their lives. When they sense a predator coming, they puff themselves up and let out a series of high-pitched squeaks. Red-eyed tree frog: Using air from their lungs, males can stretch the area beneath their mouths so thin that the normally green skin is nearly transparent. As air bounces around inside, it creates a loud mating call. Magnificent frigatebird: It takes nearly an hour for males to inflate the gular pouches in their throats. The birds are aiming to amplify the soft tapping they make as a mating noise, and the result is a brilliant red, balloon-shaped pouch that stands out against their black feathers. Bustards: Male great bustards also inflate their throats during mating displays. The ritual includes fanning their feathers and twisting them upside down, as well as jutting out their tails. Elephant seal: Elephant seals inflate their noses and face off in snorting contests as a way to prove their worth as mates. Some of them are able to expand their nose by nearly a foot. Howler monkeys: Inflating their air sacs helps howler monkeys become one of the loudest animals out there. In addition to mating, the sound is crucial for protection and communication. Howler Monkeys Don't tell these howler monkeys to pipe down. They won't unless they are sleeping, which is about 15 hours a day. Puff adder: This large, venomous snake takes its name from the way it reacts when it feels threatened: It puffs up its entire body. It also hisses, letting potential predators know it's a good idea to back off. Walrus: When they're ready to fall asleep, these large sea-dwellers puff up their necks to create a natural pillow. Once inflated, the two sacs keep the walrus's head above water as it sleeps. Like many of the other species here, the males also use the sacs to their benefit during mating season. Orangutans: Orangutans have inflatable pouches along their necks that can expand to hold more than a gallon, or nearly six liters. Surprisingly, the pouches inflate when air is exhaled, rather than on the inhale. Studies have shown the sacs help amplify the orangutan's calls, but it's also possible that they help with climbing, breathing, or floating, according to the book Primate Audition. And here's another NFL tie-in: Whether you root for the Seattle Seahawks or the New England Patriots on Sunday, you're cheering on a predator of one of these magnificent self-inflating animals. Sage Grouse Watch the mating rituals of the sage grouse. "Grouse are sometimes hunted by hawks and eagles," Ellison added, while New England's early patriots helped hunt a relative of the sage-grouse, the heath hen, into extinction. |
I was a robo-signer NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- It only took him a second to sign each foreclosure document. That's how good Tam Doan got at his job in Bank of America's pre-sale foreclosure department in Southern California. Of course, he didn't have time to actually read the paperwork he was signing, he said, and in some cases, he didn't even know what documents he was putting his pen to. "I had no idea what I was signing," said Doan. "Either you were in or you were out." The recent revelation that loan servicers had employees sign thousands of documents a month without verifying the information has thrown the foreclosure system into chaos. Judges are increasingly questioning whether the servicers have their paperwork in order. Several of the largest servicers, including Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), have halted foreclosures while they review their paperwork and processes. They want to ensure that the documents at the heart of the concerns -- proof of the note, or debt -- were signed properly. Doan approached CNNMoney after the so-called robo-signing scandal came to light last month. After 18 months at Bank of America, he was terminated in early September for failing to follow policy, according to the servicer. He said he was fired for how he calculated the value on homes destined for foreclosure sale. If a property was missing a certification that the bank had done all it could to help the borrower, Doan said he would set the home's value at 100% of the debt owed. The bank's policy, however, was to set it at 85%, he said. Doan said he hoped the higher price would make it harder for the bank to sell the house at auction, and thus prompt Bank of America to work things out with the borrower. He said he was also cited for not reporting to his bosses when an appraisal showed the foreclosure would result in a loss of more than $200,000. Bank of America said Doan was involved only in an isolated part of the foreclosure process, and that his actions do not represent either its employees or the company's overall operations. The servicer said it has many checks that catch errors, and if a mistake is found, it is corrected. "We're not claiming perfection, nor can we," said Dan Frahm, a bank spokesman. "We are committed to getting our process right and giving our customers confidence they are being treated fairly." Doan joined the servicer in late 2008, after spending 12 years in the securitization department at Countrywide Financial, which was acquired by Bank of America. His unit was responsible for getting delinquent loans ready for foreclosure sale. He joined Countrywide as an intern, working an evening shift while studying marketing at California State University at Los Angeles. He loved the job and it paid well, so when a full-time position opened up, he jumped at it. Unlike Countrywide, which he described as orderly, Doan said Bank of America's foreclosure operations were chaotic and stressful. There weren't enough people to do the job and they didn't receive the training needed to do it properly. "With the volume coming in, we were getting inundated," he said, noting his workday often lasted from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. "We were signing documents right and left." Of course, Doan could have spoken to his superiors about his concerns. But, he said he didn't report his discomfort because he wanted to be seen as a team player. He feared he'd forfeit any chance of a promotion -- and could even lose his job -- if he complained. Bank of America, however, said it has numerous avenues employees can pursue if they witnessed any problems with the foreclosure process. Different documents Doan dealt with several types of documents and did varying levels of verification. He did not handle the paperwork involving the notes, he said. The paperwork he robo-signed most often were the notices to delinquent borrowers that the servicer was proceeding to foreclosure. By signing that document, he was affirming that the bank had reviewed the loan and it didn't qualify for a modification. But, he said, the reality was he had no idea whether Bank of America had really tried to save the borrower's home. "We had no knowledge of whether the foreclosure could proceed or couldn't, but regardless, we signed the documents to get these foreclosures out of the way," he said, noting that he assumed another department had checked that the review was done. In his final weeks on the job, a notary routinely left him stacks of 20-page files, each one with a tab indicating where he needed to sign or initial. He had no idea what those documents were. He spent so many hours writing his name that his signature morphed into a series of four circles overlapping one another. He said that he and his co-workers joked that they got so used to the rapid-fire signatures that they started signing personal paperwork that way. Doan, however, said he didn't whip through every document placed before him. One of his main tasks was checking the appraisal values and property conditions on homes going through the foreclosure process, as well as making sure there was no litigation that would block the sale. This he did do. The servicer's attorneys would also send him court documents he needed to review and sign. He often checked the simpler items, such as the unpaid balance or loan maturity date. But he said he didn't have time to get into the more complex issues, such as checking the interest rate on certain adjustable rate mortgages. Doan isn't sure what his next step will be. He currently runs a cake-decorating company with his fiancé, while he figures out a new career path. He would consider returning to the mortgage industry since it had been so good to him, allowing him to buy a house, live comfortably and provide for his young daughter. While Bank of America has accused him of trying to take advantage of the current media frenzy surrounding robo-signing, he said he is speaking out because the servicer wrongfully terminated him. Now that he's not in the thick of the foreclosure process, Doan said he has had time to reflect on what his actions meant. Each signature likely led to a borrower losing his or her home. While he got numb to that fact while he was on the job, he now feels guilty. "I shudder to think how many foreclosure documents have my name on it," he said. |
December 5, 2018 Tier 1: Empire Specific Holiday Hat Tier 2: 20 Certs, Basic Implant Pack Tier 3: 100 Certs, Auraximas Banner Tier 4: "Grouchy" Title & "The Little Helper" Shotgun The coldest season of the year has arrived, bringing forth some chilling soldiers to the battlefields of Auraxis!A faction of snowmen has sprung up across the planet, perfect for earning XP and getting in some target practice as you work towards wrapping up a victory for your empire. You'll also find a deployablein your infantry utility slot - deploy this snowman and it will do it's best to protect you from incoming threats.You can also get your squad in the Auraximas spirit by picking up an assortment of! You'll also find that C4 models will appear as presents and ammo boxes will look just like your favorite candy box, which makes opening up these presents a lot more fun.And of course, there are presents that you can earn yourself by completing theOnce unlocked, you'll be able to use these gifts even once the snow melts away.On top of all the battlefield fun, don't forget that the 31 Days of Auraximas deal is happening in the Depot right now! Each day in December you'll be able to purchase a special item or get a great deal. For more details, check out that articleThis event will be available in game throughout the holidays up until, so santa-suit up, grab your snowman, and head out into the snow! |
Donald Trump will wrap up his presidential bid where it all began: New Hampshire. The GOP nominee will host his final rally before Election Day in Manchester, where he held his first official campaign event and where he claimed his first primary state victory. But Trump’s decision to end in the Granite State may be more than nostalgia and symbolism. Polls are tightening in New Hampshire and show Trump within striking distance of Hillary Clinton, whose lead there has been cut in half over the last week in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The state has just four electoral votes -- but if Trump could run the table in other battleground states, those votes could be mighty. Such a scenario would be a big stretch for Trump. He would have to win North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Nevada and Utah. But under those circumstances, current RCP polling averages show Clinton would have 273 electoral votes to Trump’s 265. And if New Hampshire went Republican, the race would be tied 269 to 269. But Trump is looking at an extremely narrow path to the presidency in which each electoral vote will make a difference. And while he is hoping to penetrate blue states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, new polling there shows an even greater climb. In nearly every circumstance, New Hampshire is vital. “New Hampshire always seems to finds a way to be influential in presidential politics,” former Gov. John H. Sununu, a Republican whose son is now running for governor there, told RCP. Last week, Clinton led in the RCP average by eight points. The state is still hers to lose -- her lead is 0.8 points – but Republicans are seeing their candidate quickly make up ground. A GOP source in the state shared internal polling with RCP that showed Trump gaining necessary ground within his party. Three weeks ago, he lagged behind by 11 points, with 69 percent of support from Republicans. Two weeks ago, he was behind by four points, with 76 percent of GOPers backing him. Last week, Clinton led by three points, with 84 percent of Republicans supporting their nominee. And a WBUR poll released Thursday morning showed Trump inching ahead by a single percentage point. “Republicans are coming home,” the source said, noting that Trump’s numbers improved as he was in the news less and the spotlight remained on Clinton. New Hampshire does not have early voting, so the final days of a campaign can be particularly influential. Strategists in the state say Clinton is still likely to win New Hampshire but that the growing GOP movement is welcome news to Sen. Kelly Ayotte and some other Republicans running down the ballot. Ayotte’s re-election race, in which she is currently tied with Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan, could determine the balance of power in the upper chamber next year. “I don't think he can win any more voters. The question is whether [Clinton] has so thoroughly soured her soft voters,” says Ryan Williams, a GOP strategist and veteran of New Hampshire campaigns, including Mitt Romney’s in 2012. Romney also spent the eve of Election Day in New Hampshire, campaigning at the same venue Trump will appear Monday night: Southern New Hampshire University. Obama led by 2 points on Election Day and won the state by 5.6 points. Democrats believe their ground effort will overcome any slides in the polls, and often point to their united ticket as a sign of strength. Ayotte rescinded her endorsement of Trump last month after news of the now infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. Clinton campaigned with Hassan and progressive star Elizabeth Warren in the state last week. Bernie Sanders, who won New Hampshire by 22 points in the Democratic primary, has swing through the state several times since then, endorsing Clinton there this summer. On Tuesday, he campaigned for her on two college campuses. “We have a genuinely united ticket working together, and that’s going to make a world of difference for the entire ticket,” New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley told RCP last week. But amid tightening polls, the Clinton campaign isn’t taking any electoral votes for granted. The campaign announced it would send President Obama, its top surrogate, to rally on behalf of Clinton in Durham, N.H., on Monday. A WBUR-University of New Hampshire poll released Tuesday found Clinton leading Trump among likely voters, 46 percent to 39 percent, with 6 percent going to Gary Johnson and 1 percent to Jill Stein. The survey, taken last Wednesday through Sunday, found 5 percent undecided. In mid-October, the same poll showed Clinton with a 15-point lead. The poll found Clinton getting more support from Democrats (89 percent) than Trump did with Republicans (78 percent). But Trump led among independents by 4 points. Still, 60 percent of New Hampshire voters think Clinton will win the election, according to the poll. And Trump is slightly more unpopular there than Clinton. In addition to hosting his final event in Manchester next week, Trump will travel to Atkinson, N.H., for a rally on Friday afternoon. Daughter Ivanka Trump will make two stops in the state on Thursday, in Hollis and Nashua. Republicans in the state think Trump will be able to capitalize on the harsh spotlight Clinton has been in following news that the FBI would be examining more emails possibly connected to her private server and the projected increase in ObamaCare premiums. “I think what happened last Friday reminded people of the association of corruption with the Clintons and Democratic Party,” Sununu said. Still, he wasn’t ready to make a prediction about who would win the state. “This is a turnout election more than any election I’ve ever seen,” he said. Caitlin Huey-Burns is a national political reporter for RealClearPolitics. She can be reached at chueyburns@realclearpolitics.com. Follow her on Twitter @CHueyBurnsRCP. |
As Americans enter middle age they become more likely to be very obese WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Blacks are among the most likely in the United States to be very obese, with about 9% falling into obese class II and 6% obese class III -- the highest Body Mass Index (BMI) categories. Asians are by far the least likely to fall into these two classes of obesity. Hispanics are on par with whites for each obesity class. Relationships by race and the others presented in this article hold true even when controlling for age, ethnicity, race, marital status, gender, employment, income, education, and region. The findings are based on data collected as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index from Jan. 1, 2010 through May 31, 2012, and include interviews with more than 800,000 American adults aged 18 and older. Gallup calculates respondents' BMIs using the standard formula based on their self-reported height and weight. An average of 26.3% of all respondents surveyed reported a height and weight that led to a BMI calculation high enough to be categorized as obese. Gallup and Healthways have been tracking Americans' BMI levels daily since January 2008 and find obesity is slightly higher now than it was in 2008. The World Health Organization defines a normal BMI range as being 18.50 to 24.99. It labels BMIs of 25.00 to less than 30.00 as overweight/pre-obese. BMIs of 30.00 or higher fall into one of three classes of obesity: Obese class I = 30.00 to 34.99 Obese class II = 35.00 to 39.99 Obese class III = 40.00 or higher Those with BMIs of 40 or higher -- obese class III -- are also frequently considered "morbidly obese." Based on their self-reports of height and weight, nearly 4% of American adults overall are this obese, with a total of about one in 10 with BMIs high enough to place them in the two highest obesity classes. However, all groups are more likely to fall on the lower end of the obesity scale than the higher end. While men are more likely than women in general to be obese, including obese class I, women and men are equally likely to fall into obese class II -- and women are, in fact, more likely than men to have a BMI high enough to put them in obese class III. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also previously found that women are more likely than men to fall into obese class III, based on data from the 2007-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which measured respondents' actual height and weight. As with obesity in general, each of the three classes of obesity rise precipitously as Americans age -- peaking in late middle-age -- but then drop off as Americans enter their 70s. Part of the drop-off as age increases may be related to the shorter life expectancy among those who are obese. Income and education level are also related to Americans' obesity levels. Those Americans with the lowest income levels and who are the least educated are the most likely to be very obese. About 5% of low-income Americans have BMIs high enough to put them in obese class III, but that falls to 2.9% among those with annual incomes of $36,000 to less than $90,000, and 1.8% among high-income Americans ($90,000 or more per year). Similarly, 4.4% of Americans with a high school education or less are categorized as class III obese. That falls as education rises -- to 3.6% among Americans with some college or vocational education, then to 2.3% among college graduates, and further to 1.8% among postgraduates. Unemployed Americans are more likely than those who are employed to have high enough BMIs to be in obese classes II and III. But, the unemployed are only slightly more likely than the employed to be in obese class I. This finding expands on a recent Gallup analysis showing that the unemployed are more likely than the employed to be obese in general. It may reveal that a lower level of obesity isn't as prohibitive to working as the more severe classes of obesity can be. Bottom Line Obesity of all types is related to higher levels of chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes as well as a lower quality of life -- including worse emotional health, more daily pain, and more missed work. It is also tied to shorter life expectancy. The more obese an individual is, the more likely he or she is to experience these types of problems. And, those who are morbidly obese -- with BMIs of 40 or higher -- are the most at risk. Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index data reveal that black, low-income, middle-aged, less-educated, and unemployed Americans are the most likely to be very obese, including morbidly obese. As government, business, and healthcare leaders continue to try to develop policies and programs to reduce obesity in the United States, they may need to target specific efforts toward these high-risk groups. On the other hand, the study of those groups that are less likely to be obese -- including Asians, very young and very old Americans, and those with higher socioeconomic status -- may provide insights into behaviors and practices associated with a more normal weight. The U.S. government is already taking steps to further address the nation's obesity problem, with the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force putting out in June new guidelines for obesity screenings. The task force is recommending that all adults get screened for obesity and that doctors should refer patients with a BMI of 30 or higher to "intensive, multicomponent behavioral interventions." As more Americans gain access to doctors through the 2010 Affordable Care Act, it is possible that guidelines such as these will have an even greater impact on reducing obesity in the United States. Gallup will be publishing an in-depth series further exploring why certain groups -- such as blacks and middle-aged Americans -- are more likely to be obese than others -- such as Asians. The forthcoming analysis will reveal the key predictors of obesity and will shed light on what else can be done to reduce it. |
'It was one of Stephen Fry's first shoots since he quit Cell Mates. I found this spot and asked him to look nervous' Three years before I took this, Stephen Fry had appeared in Cell Mates in the West End. After a bad review, he freaked out and did a runner. It was a big story: everyone wanted to know where he had gone. They found him holed up in Belgium. The incident made him go public about his bipolar disorder. In 1998 I was asked to shoot Fry for the Sunday Times. It was pretty much the first time he'd been photographed since. It was one of those difficult shoots where you're sent to meet someone in a hotel room. I always found those setups annoying: there were always some nasty ruched curtains in the background, you only had a few minutes, and it was all bit of a production line, with five shoots back to back in the same room. But it is a challenge: you have to come up with a picture that's different from everyone else's. In these situations I go early and scout the place. I saw the columns and thought, 'There's something there.' I had planned something more classical; I think of Stephen as very learned, so I wanted a bit of gravitas. When he looked through the columns I remember saying, 'That looks really nice, now can you look a bit more nervous?' – which he did straightaway. I knew it was a good picture. It was a happy accident, but as you get better you have more happy accidents. The skill lies in tipping the odds in your favour. Someone suggested I enter the photograph in a competition, and it won a British Picture Editors award. When you shoot a celebrity there's a hoo-ha around it: publicists, stylists, hair and makeup. It's harder to get something one-on-one. Plus, they've been photographed so much, they have a more practised view of how they wish to appear; it's difficult to get a new image from them. I always found, in the days when I used to load film, that once you put the camera down the person's face would always change – that's when I would watch most carefully. You could see what they were really like. Then I'd pick up the camera and try to recreate that. I'm not a photojournalist; I'm an observer and I'm very bossy. It instils a lot of confidence in your subject if you're precise about what you want. It's easier for them to trust you. CV Born: London, 1969. Studied: No training, but "I got serious at 14 when I was given the keys to the school darkroom." Inspirations: "Ansel Adams, technically speaking. People no longer bother with the craft." Top tip: "Specialise. I see a lot of students doing a bit of everything; they're all over the place. Pick a project and work out what it is you enjoy doing." |
Death as a Beginning. Both Ragnarök and Final Crisis begin with the unthinkable: the death of a god. For Ragnarök, it is the death of Baldr that signifies that something is very wrong in the world and that a great change is about to take place, as LoCicero says, “[t]he tragic death of Baldr was the single event that set the wheels of the Norse Apocalypse into motion” (LoCicero 142). O’Donoghue agrees, taking not also of the narrative shift that occurs in the story:[t]he death of Baldr is recounted just as the volva moves from recollection to prophetic vision, and his killing is presented as a decisive event in the inexorable progress to Ragnarök (O’Donoghue “What“ 87). For Final Crisis it is the death of Orion in the first chapter that portends the great disasters about to happen. The deaths of both Baldr and Orion take place at the hands of family. Baldr was killed unwittingly by his blind brother Hod. For some time, Baldr had been having dreams about his impending death. Baldr’s mother Frigg petitions all things on earth to keep Baldr from harm, all things that is save for mistletoe, which she did not see as a threat. To celebrate his invulnerability, all of the Gods attempt to hurt Baldr with anything they can find. Hod, Baldr’s brother does not take part in the festivities because he is blind. Loki, the Norse trickster god and agent of Chaos chides Hod for not participating and then gives him a spear of mistletoe and guides his aim. Baldr is struck by the mistletoe and immediately falls dead. The gods then go to Hel, the goddess of the underworld and the dead and ask her to return Baldr to life. Hel says that she will do so only if everyone on earth sheds tears for Baldr. The gods send messengers all over the world and ask everyone to weep for Baldr and all do except for Loki in the guise of a giantess and so Baldr must remain dead. Ultimately, Baldr is reborn after the events of Ragnarök and he reconciles with his brother Hod and they become gods of the new world (Sturluson 65-68, 77). Because one of the main points of Final Crisis is that time and space have become distorted and are gradually breaking apart, the death of Orion is fragmented. We see Orion dying in chapter one, where he warns detective Turpin that Darkseid and the other evil New Gods are hiding on earth. We see the bullet strike Orion in chapter three and we see Darkseid fire the bullet in chapter seven. Incidentally, because of the time distortions, when Darkseid fires the bullet he is on the verge of death from being shot earlier by Batman in chapter six with the very same bullet. Like Baldr, Orion dies at the hand of family, in this case his father the tyrant god Darkseid, but unlike Baldr whose brother Hod unwittingly kills him, Orion’s murder is deliberate. Orion is killed by his father Darkseid, presumably because Darkseid saw his son as being the only one who could stop him. After all, when addressing the other members of the Justice League in chapter one, Superman speaks of the power wielded by the New Gods with a kind of awe, saying that they are “capable of cracking the planet in half” (Morrison Chapter 1). Each death in its own way contributes to the destruction that follows. Although Baldr is killed by his brother, the murder was engineered by Loki, the Norse trickster god. For the sole purpose it seems, of bringing chaos and disorder to the world of the gods. In a pantheon of warrior-gods, Baldr stands very much apart from the rest due to his beauty and gentle nature: “the best of all gods: the most beautiful (so radiant he glows) and the wisest. He is also the most merciful” (O’Donoghue Norse 74). Baldr’s death takes the other gods completely by surprise, not only because they believed him to be immortal but because he was so gentle and radiant. “Baldr’s death left the gods speechless and so weak that they were unable to muster the strength to lift him in their arms” (Sturluson 66). In the context of the story, his death seems almost absurd, which is precisely Loki’s goal. This introduction of randomness or chaos into the lives of the gods is the moment that their world begins to fall apart. It is possible that ancient people from whom the myth of Ragnarök originally came placed a high value on the notion of order and (as much as was possible) predictability and stability. So the death of a god, particularly one as beloved as Baldr would seem like “the beginning of the end.” In Volume three of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, in a story titled “The Pact” which was originally published as The New Gods #7 in 1972, Orion’s adopted father Highfather, the leader of the Gods of New Genesis, refers to Orion having a “great destiny” (Kirby 88). In the Fourth World Omnibus volume 4, Orion speaks of a prophecy, saying that” “it is written that the father of Apokalipse shall meet his banished sons in the red light of the fire pits—and there they shall decide this war…I am Darkseid’s son! When I clash with Darkseid the war will end! (Kirby 77). Orion is fierce, a god of war. Although he was raised on New Genesis, he has never been able to quell his ferocity or his fiery temper. Instead, Orion has devoted his life to channeling his aggression toward defeating the forces of Darkseid. Before the prophecy can be fulfilled however, Darkseid murders his son with a bullet that is fired backwards through time, “[f]rom here where he no longer exists, Orion cannot see me. As all times become one time, the time has come to strike” (Morrison, chapter 10). In so doing, Darkseid thwarts prophecy, usurping it with his own vision of order. This usurpation of the future and brute imposition of will is what sets in motion the events of Final Crisis. If Loki, as a chaotic trickster god, is seen is the great villain of Ragnarök, or at least the one who puts in into motion, then it reflects in some way the perception of randomness or chaos in the ancient world. Darkseid is a tyrant and as such his nature is the exact opposite of Loki’s. Darkseid exists to impose his strict order upon every living being in the universe through the spread of the “Anti-Life Equation”–mathematical proof that free will is an illusion. At the end of chapter three, Darkseid’s agents unleash the Anti-Life Equation through every electronic system on earth, anyone who hears it becomes an extension of Darkseid, and thus his absolute rule is established on earth. If ancient people feared chaos, then it seems people of the 21st century fear tyranny and the loss of free will. Ultimately, for both Baldr and Orion, their futures do not end with their murders. Baldr is reborn at the end of Ragnarök as is his brother Hod to become gods of the new world. As for Orion, When Darkseid is finally destroyed through the combined efforts of Batman and DC’s speedster hero The Flash his body becomes a singularity, “a black hole at the base of creation” (Morrison, chapter 10), and from this singularity Apokalipse is reborn as New Genesis. While the New Gods, most of whom had died before the events of Final Crisis (or “off panel” as they say in comics) are also reborn, “returned to guide the destiny of a new world” (Morrison chapter 10). Carl Jung speaks of this idea of death and resurrection of gods as a reflection of humanity’s desire to evolve and change, saying: “the connection between the suprapersonal or collective unconscious means an extension of man beyond himself; it means death for his personal being and a rebirth in a new dimension, as was literally enacted in certain of the ancient mysteries. It is certainly true that without the sacrifice of man as he is, man as he was—and always will be—cannot be attained” (Segal 103). The need to grow, to learn, to evolve has been a part of humanity’s DNA from the very beginning and this is reflected in myths both ancient and (post) modern. The Ash and the Orrery. Norse mythology holds that the known universe is divided roughly into nine worlds, all of which are connected through the great ash tree Yggdrasil: Nine worlds I knew, the nine in the tree With mighty roots beneath the mold. (Bellows 3 Stanza 2) The nine worlds are: Asgard, Midgard, Niflheim, Alfheim, Vanaheim, Muspellheim, Svartalfaheim, Jotunheim, and Hel. In Norse mythology, these worlds are defined based on their inhabitants or their properties: gods:Asgard, Vanaheim, humans: Midgard, giants: Jotunheim, Elves: Alfheim, Svartalfaheim, the dead: Hel, ice: Niflheim or fire: Muspellheim (Lindow). These worlds are all connected to the great Ash tree, Yggdrasil, “located in the center of the universe, uniting it” (Lindow 319). Davidson describes Yggdrasil as “the fixed center of this series of worlds which were believed to have had a definite beginning and to be destined to eventual destruction.” (Davidson 190). Lindow also says that. “[t]he tree functions on both the vertical axis (trunk) and the horizontal axis (roots) and structural readings of mythology, such as those of Eleazar Meletinskij, have suggested that these have varying functions: wisdom on the vertical axis and history on the horizontal axis…the tree brings not just spatial unity to the mythology…it also brought chronological unity” (Lindow 321,322). Norse mythology therefore depicts the universe as a group of worlds connected through living matter, the tree and all of time and space exist within it. The DC Universe exists as a multiverse that consists of fifty-two parallel earths, and thus fifty-two parallel realities. In Final Crisis, we see a great machine called the “Multiversal Orrery,” within which resides the fifty-two earths of the multiverse. The Orrery is watched-over by a group of celestial beings known as “The Monitors.” According to Morrison, the Monitors are “named after writer-gods from different cultures. So Uotan is named after Odin or Wotan from the Norse/Germanic tradition. Ogama is Ogma from the Celtic gods. Hermuz is after Hermes, the Greek god. Tahoteh is after Thoth, the Egyptian god” (Morrison IGN 2). It is fitting that this fictional universe is constantly being observed by gods of writing. The common theme between the two depictions of the universe is the idea that there is more than one world, that indeed there are numerous other worlds and that they are all connected. Physicist Michio Kaku, in his book Parallel Worlds writes about the idea of multiple universes saying, we may live in a sea of such universes, like a bubble floating in an ocean of other bubbles. In fact, a better word than ‘universe’ would be ‘multiverse’ or ‘megaverse’”(14). Of course, the idea of multiple universes has been a part of comic books, almost since they were invented. Morrison himself has used it as a plot device in many of his stories like The Invisibles, Animal Man, and even his earliest work, Zenith. But what about the ancient cultures from which the story of Ragnarök first arose? Consider the depiction of the universe: multiple worlds connected by a great ash tree–universes connected by a living organism. Perhaps these people knew intuitively what physicists today are just now beginning to consider. Take for example Kaku’s illustration of inflation: According to this theory[inflation], a tiny patch of a universe may suddenly inflate and “bud,” sprouting “daughter” universe or “baby” universe, which may in turn bud another baby universe, with this budding process continuing forever. Imagine blowing soap bubbles into the air. If we blow hard enough, we see that some of the soap bubbles split in half and generate new soap bubbles. In the same way, universes may be continually giving birth to new universes. (Kaku 14) The terms he uses, like “bud” and “sprouting” evoke plant imagery. Morrison’s depiction of the Multiversal Orrery is entirely mechanical save for the fifty-two earths all interconnected, yet the image recalls the Sephirot, the Qabalistic “Tree of Life.” The theory of parallel universes is also based on the idea known as “string theory:” [y]ou can think of it [matter] as a violin string or a guitar string. If you pluck it a certain way you get a certain frequency. But if you pluck it a different way you can get more frequencies on this string and in fact you have different notes. Nature is made up of the notes, all of these musical notes that are played on these superstrings (Ovrut Horizon). Kaku goes on to say that “ [t]he universe is a symphony and the laws of physics are harmonies of a superstring” (Kaku Horizon). This connection of vibration and sound and music with the mechanics of the universe appears in both Ragnarök and Final Crisis. Consider this scene from Ragnarök: …and fate is heard in the note of the Gjallarhorn; Loud blows Heimdall the horn is aloft, In fear quake all who on Hel-roads are. (Bellows 20 Stanza 46) Sturluson, in his version adds a crucial element by mentioning Yggdrasil, thus showing that the sound of the Gjallarhorn resonates throughout the entire universe: “Heimdall stands up and blows the Gjallarhorn with all his strength. He awakens all the gods…the ash Yggdrasil shakes, and nothing, whether in heaven or earth is without fear” (Sturluson 72). The last chapter of Final Crisis, chapter ten, opens on an alternate earth where Nubia, a Wonder Woman analogue uses a gigantic machine called “the Wonder Horn,” which, as she says is “a gift from the Universals in mythic time before time…”to be used only once, when all else has failed.” With it, she summons not only the heroes of her earth, but the heroes from other universes as well (although it is never said, it is almost certain that Morrison had the Gjallarhorn in mind when he wrote this sequence). The Superman of this alternate world describes the music of the Wonder Horn as “universe shaking.”Chapters four and five of Final Crisis focus on Superman as he attempts to save the life of his wife, Lois Lane. Superman is told by one of the Monitors that the only way to save Lois’s life is with a substance known as “The Bleed.” The Bleed exists between the various universes and it binds them together. Superman then goes on a journey with other Supermen from the multiverse to fight the ultimate evil, Mandrakk—a twisted, vampiric Monitor who exists to devour stories and who seeks to wipe out all of existence. The ship that the Supermen use to travel throughout the multiverse, the Ultima Thule (which, incidentally bares a strong resemblance to the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine), is powered by universal vibrations. Just before it crashes, Captain Marvel says “the ship’s completely out of tune! Either that or the whole universe is out of tune!” (chapter 4). Later, at the climax of the story, Superman—the Superman from the DC universe proper—confronts the disembodied spirit of Darkseid, armed with the knowledge he gained during his journey through the multiverse, and says “the worlds of the multiverse vibrate together Darkseid, and make this…sound like an orchestra. Everything’s just vibrations, really. And counter-vibrations that cancel them out.” Superman then sings the sound of the Wonder Horn—the sound identified earlier as the “music of the spheres, the sound of the tides of the infinite,” and Darkseid is destroyed, or rather converted into a black hole existing “at the base of creation” The great ash Yggdrasil, with its branches and roots joining together various worlds, and the Multiversal Orrery with each of the fifty-two worlds of the DC universe all united within a great machine seem to be related to the idea of matter being made up of “strings” that connect not just the worlds, but everything within them. Morrison, in an interview with, echoes this idea: There’s one organism that lives in the planet earth, one living thing, and it’s three billion years old, And we’re all connected through time to the first mitochondrial DNA cell that appeared in the ocean three and a half billion years ago; that cell has divided through time, and that cell is in every one of your cells still dividing. So we call contain part of this primordial cell (Morrison Publishers Weekly). Physicist and philosopher David Bohm, whose books have been an influence on Morrison’s stories over the years (in an issue of Animal Man, Bohm’s book Unfolding Meaning can be clearly seen in one panel), speaks of a theory of “Implicate Order” where all matter in the universe is connected. Additionally, Bohm states that, “The mental and the material are two sides to one reality” (20). In explaining this bold assertion, Bohm says: The implicate order suggests a possible solution to the Cartesian duality which has pervaded much of human thinking over the ages. Instead of saying that there are two orders—the explicate order of extended structure and something like an implicate order of thinking—we are proposing, to a large extent, on the basis of recent development in physics, that matter is also that way. And if we extend it to say that brain matter and nerve matter are that way, then in some way perhaps, mind and matter interweave. (20) Morrison explicitly addresses this point in chapter five of Final Crisis with the character Captain Atom, the “Quantum Superman of Earth 4” who, upon seeing a glimpse of the mechanics of the universe says “there are no dualities. Only symmetries.” Both Morrison and Bohm seem to be echoing sentiments expressed by Joseph Campbell who says, “the universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures in the world—all things and beings—are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation and back into which they must dissolve” (221). Time and Rebirth. Ragnarök is a story that exists out of time. It is told as a kind of prophecy, but a prophecy for an ancient time, a time before the Christian god came to prominence among the people of Northern Europe, as Lindow notes: “[a]ccording to the Hauksbok redaction of the poem, ‘the powerful one’ then comes, and this looks like a reference to the Christian deity”(257). Because it is neither wholly past or future, history or prophecy, The story of Ragnarök exists as a kind of fractured alternate reality where time is uncertain, which adds to the feeling of chaos and of living in a world where everything, even reality, is collapsing. Final Crisis, as noted earlier, is a story where time and space are gradually breaking breaking apart. Morrison says in an interview that Final Crisis is “all about endings and apocalypses. It shows the DCU degrading, drained of all meaning, drained even of stories and characters, reduced to nothing but darkness…. We even break down the conventional storytelling modes at the end until there’s nothing familiar left in an effort to convey what the end of a universe might feel like”(Morrison Newsarama).The early chapters are mostly laid out more or less sequentially, giving the reader a sense of time passing and events progressing more or less logically. However, by the fourth chapter, the distortions of time and space brought on by Darkseid begin to manifest themselves metatextually in the panel layouts on the page as well as the shift in art (J.G. Jones, the artist on the first three issues fell behind and other artists, most notably Doug Mahnke, were brought in to complete the story). The story itself also jumps from scene to scene with little regard for continuity. All of this serves to create within the reader a sense of apocalyptic dread and also uncertainty. The uncertainty is a key point for Final Crisis. Anyone who reads mainstream comics, knows that by the end of the story the villain will be defeated and order will be restored, and of course, Final Crisis is no exception. By the end, evil has been vanquished and order is in the process of being restored. However, for Final Crisis the ending seems less important (largely because it is a foregone conclusion) than everything leading to it. Morrison says he was concerned with “unmaking the DC Universe to the point of destruction then showing how its own internal rules will work to homeostatically reset it, Superman always saves the day or he’s not Superman. It’s a self-perpetuating idea” (Morrison IGN 1). Morrison approaches the DC Universe as if it were a kind of sentient being, which is in keeping with his general ideas about the nature of the universe, fictional or otherwise. The myth of Ragnarök and Final Crisis both end with new beginnings. Westley Bergen says that “if apocalyptic literature is written to groups in crisis, it must offer them something in response to that crisis” (Bergen 10). Indeed both stories offer the promise of a rebirth, that life will continue ”[t]he earth will shoot up from the sea, and it will be green and beautiful” (Sturluson 77). In the story of Ragnarök, the rebirth of the universe speaks to the idea of change and growth. The old Gods die and their sons take their place and in time these sons too will die and another God will replace them. For Final Crisis, Morrison chooses to show the destruction and rebirth of the DC Universe as a metatextual commentary on the circular nature of the universe and of stories. The remaining free humans and superheroes on earth put all of the stories of everything that has so far transpired into a rocket and fire the rocket out into the multiverse, reminiscent of Superman’s origins where his Kryptonian parents placed him in a rocket and sent him to Earth before his homeworld Krypton exploded. So the DC Universe “ends” in exactly the same way it began—in Action Comics #1 in 1937—with a rocket fired from a doomed planet. The rebirth of the DC multiverse occurs when Superman, using a device referred to alternately as a “God Weapon” and “The Miracle Machine” (chapter 9) wishes for a happy ending at the exact moment the multiverse collapses. Thus, the DC Universe is restored. But for how long? Conclusion. When people think of mythology, the images most often conjured in their minds belong to stories that are thousands of years old. Yet mythology has always been a part of our existence and we will continue to create new mythologies and revise old ones until we cease to exist. In the 21st century, we live in a world of instantaneous communication and access to knowledge, the possibility of parallel universes and alternate realities. Fire and stones have been replaced by electricity and silicon. Jung says that “[n]uclear Physics has begotten in the layman’s head an uncertainty of judgment that far exceeds that of physicists and makes things appear possible which but a short time ago would have been declared nonsensical” (Segal 71). Marshal McLuhan says “myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentally and on single planes” (McLuhan, 25).We live God-like lives, yet we seldom acknowledge it. And because our experiences are so different from those of our ancestors, our mythologies are also different, at least with regard to how we present them: Superman, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, James Bond—these and other lager-than-life figures are the counterparts of the classic superheroes of the past. While they may differ from the latter in that science, rather than the Gods, provided them with their extraordinary gifts, and while they often wear more colorful costumes and speak in other languages, the two groups are far more similar than they appear to be at first glance. (LoCicero 5) Character names change over time and the way stories are told change, but the stories themselves change very little. Heroes rise up to face seemingly unstoppable evil, and worlds die and are reborn. Works Cited. The Poetic Edda: The Mythological Poems. 1923. Trans. Henry Adams Bellows. New York: Dover, 2004. Bergen, Westley J. “The New Apocalyptic: Modern American Apocalyptic Fiction and its Ancient and Modern Roots.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. Fall 2008 vol. 20 1-15. Bohm, David. Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue. New York, Routledge, 1985. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Novato: New World, 2008. Davis, H.R. Ellis. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. New York: Penguin, 1965. Evanier, Mark. Kirby: King of Comics. New York: Abrams, 2008. Kaku, Michio. Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos. New York: Doubleday, 2005 Kirby, Jack. Mark Evanier, Grant Morrison, et al. Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus. 4 vols. New York: DC Comics, 2007, 2008. Lindow, John. Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. LoCicero, Don. Superheroes and Gods: A Comparative Study from Babylonia to Batman. Jefferson: McFarland, 2008. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994. Morrison, Grant J.G. Jones, et al. Final Crisis. 2008. New York, DC Comics 2009. Morrison, Grant. Interview with Dan Phillips. “Inside the Mind of Grant Morrison.” IGN.com. February 3, 2009: 1-6. http://comics.ign.com/articles/950/950703p1.html Morrison, Grant. Interview with David A. Lewis. “Grant Morrison Talks Comics, Magic, Life and Death.” Publishers Weekly. August 12, 2008. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6586371.html Morrison, Grant. Interview with Matt Brady. “Final Crisis Exit Interview, Part 1 ” Newsarama.com. 28 January, 2009: http://www.newsarama.com/comics/010928-Grant-Final-Crisis.html. Morrison, Grant. Interview with Scott Thill. “Grant Morrison Talks Brainy Comics, Sexy Apocalypse.” Wired.com. March 19, 2009. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/03/mid-life-crisis/ O’Donoghue, Heather. From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of Norse Myths. City: I.B. Tauris and Company, 2009. O’Donoghue, Heather. “What Has Baldr to Do with Lamech? The Lethal Shot of a Blind Man in Old Norse Myth and Jewish Exegetical Traditions.” Medium Ævum 72.1 (2003): 82-107. Oziewicz, Marek. “Joseph Campbell’s New Mythology.” The AnaChronist. 13. (2007-2008): 114- 130. “Parallel Universes.” Horizon. Michio Kaku and Burt Ovrut. BBC Two. Thursday 14 February 2002. Segal, Robert A. ed. Jung on Mythology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Sigurosson, Jakob. Sam 66. 1765-1766. Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/S%C3%81M_66 Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda. Trans. Jesse L. Byok. London: Penguin, 2005. Wagner, Wilhelm Heine, M.W. Macdowall and W.S.W. Anson. Asgard and the Gods: The Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors, Forming a Complete Manual of Norse Mythology. London, 1886. |
Which one is right? I have tended to side with the first narrative. But that seems like all the more reason to give some further consideration to the second, which gets a comprehensive treatment in a new paper by the economists John Bound and Nicolas Morales of the University of Michigan, and Gaurav Khanna at the University of California, San Diego. During the internet boom between 1994 and 2001, technology companies took in many more high-skilled foreign born workers, as the annual cap on H-1B visas grew from 65,000 to 195,000. In their analysis of this period, Bound, Khanna, and Morales conclude that high-skill foreign workers led to more innovation, cheaper products, and higher tech profits. But the availability of cheaper labor also hurt native-born engineers. “In the absence of immigration, wages for U.S. computer scientists would have been 2.6 percent to 5.1 percent higher and employment in computer science for U.S. workers would have been 6.1 percent to 10.8 percent higher in 2001,” the authors write. This is not the first time economists have pointed out a dark side of the H-1B program. A 2016 paper by several economists from the University of Notre Dame, UC Berkeley, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury similarly found evidence that H-1B visas crowded out employment for other workers and "lead to lower average employee earnings and higher firm profits." The technology community has been outspoken in its defense of the H-1B program, framing it in language that pays homage to American values like diversity, inclusion, and innovation. But it also serves the less honorable goal of restraining wage growth. In 2015, several tech companies including Apple and Google agreed to pay $415 million after accusations that they had a so-called "no-poaching" agreement that prevented workers from bidding up their wages with competing offers. The H-1B visa program similarly restrains the growth of labor costs, except it’s disguised as a policy of openness. Those are the reasons to be cynical about the H-1B program. But here are several reasons to still support the H-1B program, despite an understanding of its downsides. First, foreign-born students have become an integral part of higher-ed financing. Cash-strapped public universities get billions of dollars from foreigners who pay full tuition. But once these students have graduated with a valuable degree, it doesn’t make much sense for the United States to kick them out. Yes, they have already paid for college. But U.S. colleges have also invested resources and time in them, too. Sending their talent and future earnings to other countries wastes their potential contribution to U.S communities, business, and tax coffers. Second, if tech companies cannot hire immigrants through the H-1B program, it is too simplistic to assume they’ll always give that job to another American at a higher wage. Any company has options beyond hiring an immigrant and hiring a native born worker. They can often offshore or automate the work. Indeed, if the U.S. were to shut down or dramatically shrink its H-1B program, companies might hire talent outside the U.S. |
The fates of many Broncos’ players have already been decided. After the fourth preseason game against the Arizona Cardinals Thursday night, the last few roster spots will be determined. Running back Ronnie Hillman and rookie returner Khalif Raymond are both fighting uphill battles to make the team. Kapri Bibbs and Jordan Norwood are trying to hold off these players for one more game, and hold onto their own jobs. The most interesting battle this week will be at running back. Last year, Ronnie Hillman led the team in both rushing yards (863) and touchdowns (7). Hillman has not developed into the game-changing speed back that the team had hoped for when they drafted him in the third round back in 2012. He has had trouble breaking arm tackles, but has been exceptional when he can make it through the first level of the defense. Although this will be his 5th year in the NFL, Hillman is only 24 years old and he clearly brings a unique skill set to the Broncos’ roster, as the rest of the stable has been known more for their power than their speed. Bibbs is a 23-year-old running back with zero NFL regular season carries, but his impact on special teams might give him an edge over Hillman. Bibbs is a key special teamer for Denver, while Hillman’s 5-foot 9-inch, 196-pound frame makes it difficult for him to make tackles in kick coverage. Bibbs played his college football at Colorado State, where he ran for 1741 yards and 31 touchdowns with an average of 6.2 yards per carry in his sophomore year (after not starting for the first six games of the season). Clearly Bibbs has the potential to be a solid runner, but he has not been able to adapt his game to fit the NFL. Wide receiver is another position that could see some surprise cuts. Demaryius Thomas, Emmanuel Sanders, Bennie Fowler and Cody Latimer are all locks to make the roster, but the fifth and sixth spots are still up for grabs. Jordan Taylor, Peyton Manning’s favorite rehab target last year, seems to have done enough during training camp to secure the fifth spot. The sixth spot will likely go to either 29-year-old Jordan Norwood or undrafted rookie Khalif Raymond. Norwood and Raymond play a similar game, and the winner of the job will also be Denver’s punt returner. Norwood has played for the Broncos, Buccaneers, Browns and Eagles over the course of his seven-year career. His most productive season came with Cleveland when he caught 23 passes for 268 yards and a touchdown in 2011. Most of Norwood’s value comes as a returner. At 5’11” and 180 pounds, his shiftiness and good hands make him a safe and productive punt, and occasionally kickoff, returner. In Super Bowl 50, Norwood broke off a Super Bowl record 61-yard punt return, setting up a field goal that gave Denver a 13-7 lead over Carolina. Khalif Raymond played college football at College of the Holy Cross, competing in the Patriot League. Raymond has been electric in training camp, showing off his speed and quickness. He has dodged tacklers and caught punts in heavy traffic. Raymond will have a hard time beating out Norwood, due to his lack of experience. Experience is crucial as a returner, as any drop can cost the team a game. Raymond needs to have a big game against the Cardinals if he is going to make the 53-man roster. Paxton Lynch will play the entire game for Denver, leaving Trevor Siemian to rest for the season opener, and Mark Sanchez on the bench. Lynch has shown that he has potential in the preseason, making difficult passes and showing his athletic ability. He needs to continue to improve his reads and speed up his decision-making. Quick decisions will be particularly important Thursday, as he will be left behind a weak offensive-line with all of the starters expected to rest. Arizona has multiple talented pass-rushers, including first-round draft pick Robert Nkemdiche. The Broncos play the Cardinals in Arizona on Thursday, September 1st, at 7:30 P.M. MST. The game will not be broadcast live nationally, but can be seen online with a subscription or trial to NFL GamePass. A replay will be broadcast on NFL Network on Saturday, September 3, at 8 A.M. MST. For quality up-to-date sports reporting, visit our website, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter. |
Biopic to chart rise of maverick comedian who became famous for characters such as Sid Snot and Cupid Stunt He was one of broadcasting's most-loved entertainers – a maverick comedian who delighted radio and television audiences with his comic characters and a quick, sometimes controversial wit that more than once saw him lose his job. Now Kenny Everett is to be celebrated on BBC4, with a 90-minute biopic that focuses on his relationship with his wife, singer Lee Middleton – they married in 1966 and separated in 1979 – and charts his rise from rebellious young DJ to rebellious household name. The Best Possible Taste takes its name from the catchphrase of Everett's American chatshow host, Cupid Stunt, one of the performer's most famous comic creations alongside Sid Snot. Both characters feature in BBC4's film about Everett, who died in 1995 of an Aids-related illness. Everett is played by newcomer Oliver Lansley, while former Coronation Street actor Katherine Kelly plays Middleton. The script is by Tim Whitnall, best known for writing the stage play Morecambe, about comedian Eric. "Kenny Everett was a genuine original: wild and unfocused maybe, but also deliciously anarchic and always entertaining," said Richard Klein, the controller of BBC4. "In many ways Kenny was a very modern celebrity, wearing his heart on his sleeve while coping with a complex life. Re-evaluating this talented and exuberant personality, enabling audiences to reconsider Kenny's undoubted impact and legacy, makes this a very BBC4 drama." Everett's infamous appearance at a 1983 Young Conservatives' conference, where he shouted "Let's bomb Russia" and "Let's kick Michael Foot's stick away", will feature alongside tales from his radio career on pirate, commercial and BBC stations. The comedian also had hugely popular television shows on first ITV and then BBC. |
Accessibility is an important part of any app. Whether you're developing a new app or improving an existing one, consider the accessibility of your app's components. By integrating accessibility features and services, you can improve your app's usability, particularly for users with disabilities. Note: Although it's beneficial to add accessibility features in your app, you should use them only for the purpose of helping users with disabilities interact with your app. Impact of accessibility By integrating accessibility features in your app, you make it more inclusive: Increase your app's reach. According to The World Bank, 15% of the world's population has some type of disability. People with disabilities depend on accessible apps and services to communicate, learn, and work. By making your app more accessible, you can reach more users. Improve your app's versatility. Accessibility can make it easier for all users, not only those with disabilities, to interact with your app. For example, if someone is using your app while cooking, they can use voice commands instead of touch gestures to navigate. |
Bandai Namco has released new Gundam Breaker 3 details and screenshots, introducing the game’s basic customization, merge-based strengthening system, and latest playable Gunpla. Get the information below. ■ Basic Customization Your Own, One-of-a-Kind Gundam In the Gundam Breaker series, in which you collect the head, body, arms, legs, backpack, weapons, and shields from enemies, it’s possible to create a one-of-a-kind Gundam. Since there are over 150 participating mobile suits, approximately 75 billion differnt combinations can be realized, save for weapons and shields. Your Mobile Suit configuration is displayed on the right of the screen. You can even make full use of Gunpla techniques like coloring and weathering. By changing your arms to a different Mobile Suit’s, your Mobile Suit’s abilities and armaments will change. It should be noted that you can not set individual arms, one by one. You can set techniques to various buttons, including your special “EX-Action” move, awakening “Burst Action” techniques, and armaments attached to parts. Builders Parts For the first time, Gundam Breaker 3 is equipped with a “Builders Parts” feature. This is a new customization element that lets you equip each part with various additions. Whether it’s the head, body, arms, left arm, right arm, both legs, left leg, right leg, middle of the backpack, both sides of the backpack, left side of the backpack, or right side of the backpack, try adding additional armaments and decorations within the slot’s limits. Equip a “canon” on your shoulder. Of course, via “Actions,” you can assign a button to the canon for use in battle. In Builders Parts, you can adjust the XYZ positioning, XYZ rotation, and even the scale. Fill up the slots and create a Gundam all your own! ■ Strengthening System In Gundam Breaker 3, you can strengthen parts through four different methods: single merge, batch merge, plastic merge, and derivation merge. Single Merge Merge the part you want to strengthen with one different part (material part). The part you want to strengthen will receive a level up, ability enhancement, ability inheritance, and rarity raise. The merged material part will be lost. Batch Merge Merge the part you want to strengthen with a multiple of different parts (material parts). Since the parts you no longer need are put together and merged, there is no ability inheritance or rarity raise. (However, if the part you want to strengthen has the same ability as the material parts, that ability will be strengthened.) The material parts you merged will be lost. Plastic Merge Merge the part you want to strengthen with the experience point-raising items (plastic), and ability-strengthening and inheritance items (cubes) obtained during missions. The part you want to strengthen will receive a level up, ability enhancement, and ability inheritance. The plastic and cubes you merged will be lost. Derivation Merge Merge selected parts with different parts (material parts) to produce new parts. The new parts will receive a level up, ability enhancement, ability inheritance, and rarity raise. The merged parts will be lost. ■ Latest Playable Gunpla Serpent Custom Garplant TR-5 [Fiver] Fazz |
A few weeks back someone posted this as an open topic on Facebook and some of them were hilarious. A copious amount of Diet Mountain Dew and a bad sense of humor led to my following master list of things never heard at a gaming table (Dungeons and Dragons or any other RPG for that matter.) Let’s leave that treasure for the next group that passes by. Guys, we need more of a plan than “kill him!” Let’s bury Bob’s character with the magic items he owns…he’d want it that way. Don’t loot that dead body, it’s disrespectful. I’ll go and negotiate with that pack of bloodthirsty Orcs. One set of dice will do for me thanks. Let me jump in that pit and check out the bottom. Whatever you do, protect our NPC’s. I would hate to see innocent people get injured or killed. We’re saved – I happen to have a 10 foot pole! An ancient red dragon? I’ve got this covered. Watch me charm that Medusa… Game of Thrones is a little lame for me. I’ve explored a lot of dungeons without taking along torches. I challenge the cockatrice to a staring contest. Stop wasting your time mapping…how complicated can a dungeon be? My alignment is very important to me. Wait a sec, let me get into character… Let’s let the thief divide the treasure for us. Put the assassin at the rear of our party. You can have my share of the treasure. Who in their right mind buys a DocWagon Card? I want nothing to do with that magic sword/ring/armor/shield/mace, etc. Killing that goblin doesn’t feel right to me. Hand me those potions, I’ll try them all. I’m going to use that D20 that keeps giving me one’s…it’s due to start paying off. Charging them head-on will only piss them off. My character is not attached to his horse. I caught the pickpocket in the act? Good. I tell him, “Shoo!” We are just being unjustifiably paranoid – let’s rush in. Quick, everyone douse your characters in oil and set them on fire. I’ll sit this battle out. You guys should be able to handle this. I’ve got too much treasure already – you take my share. I’ll hold them off while the rest of you get away. Playing Paladins is so much fun! Let me heal you first, your character is more important than mine. God as my witness, I thought gelatinous cubes could burn. It’s only a patch of mold, why are you so edgy? I don’t need to remove my armor before jumping in that pool. No, I’m pretty sure I’ve used my last arrow. I wonder what happens if you mix the potions together? Today’s a good day to switch alignment. Traits? What are those for? I’m going to give my share of the booty to the church. We don’t need to check under the bridge before crossing it. My character’s name is “Pansy.” Oh boy, a cursed sword of gender-changing! I’ve been looking for one of these. Hold up, I’m not quite sure how this rule works… I’m not upset at my character’s death, it’s just a piece of paper after all Hot damn, my thief just successfully picked your pocket dude! Wow – look at that halfling tear into them. Quick – everyone into the portable hole. Why worry – it’s just a Rust Monster. A bar fight? No thanks, sounds too dangerous to me. I cover the hole in my spacesuit with my glove – does that stop the leak? The best way to deal with this swamp is to simply wade into it. Excuse me, I’ve been keeping track and I am out of food and water. Whew, I rolled a one. Oh boy, the DM is rolling a lot of dice behind the screen, this is going to be fun! Ignore that Goblin Shaman and concentrate on his flunkies. That fog that’s rolling in is a good sign. Your thief is willing to carry my backpack? Awesome. Hey, we don’t want any trouble here. We need to bury the guys we killed, even if it does take us a day. Ya gotta respect the dead. I don’t believe in luck. You tell the head of the Thieves Guild he can kiss my ass… We should steer clear of that abandoned castle. I’m sure the river is shallow and safe to cross; follow me. Your interpretation of the rule is better than mine. Sure it says it’s the Gate to Hell, but I’m sure that’s a trick. What is this Monty Python and the Holy Grail movie you guys keep referencing? Checking for traps is such a waste of time. It’s best to follow the orders of the city watch. They pick those guys for their brilliance. Having your girlfriend join our game is going to be a blast for the rest of us. I think we should take the dragon at its word. That die bumped a pencil before rolling a 20; let me re-roll it. Don’t worry about me, I still have 3 hit points. I was going to use Conan as the basis for my Barbarian, but I went with Andy Dick instead. I try and charm the Drow priestess. We should not set fire the building. There might be innocent people inside. set fire the building. There might be innocent people inside. I’ll let the poison run its course. Don’t waste your cure spell on me. Let’s huddle close together then move on the dragon. Don’t waste that resurrection spell on my character. I’ll just roll up a first level character and start over. I take a deep breath, hold it, and open the airlock. A Deck of Many Things? I’ll take ten draws! Let the survivors go, they’ve learned their lesson. Why don’t we encourage our bard to sing a song now? One pack of C4 should be enough to do the job. This 300 year old bridge over the deep gorge looks sturdy to me. I took morbid obesity as a player flaw/quirk. I don’t care about experience points. It’s all about the thrill of battle for me. What are the odds of that wolf that bit me having lycanthropy? It would be immoral to use that refugee convoy for cover. Stand and fight where we are. I’m counting on this grenade to have a slow burning fuse. He’s a highly-educated Barbarian… Someone else should try and seduce the barmaid. I’m holding his possessions for his next of kin. No thanks, I don’t like pizza. No thanks, I don’t like Taco Bell. Radiation …why worry about something you can’t see? The wizard said he’d lead the attack with the fighters bringing up the rear. It’s cool, I chose Raccoon as one of my character’s languages. I move into the enemy crossfire to confuse them. You are wasting time looking for secret doors. They are skeletons…what possible threat could they pose? Go ahead and use my dice. Are you sure those things spray acid? Sure those aliens look scary, but I’m sure their intentions are peaceful. Our battle plan takes into account every contingency. I saw Dune last night — I think I can ride this Purple Worm. This dark ,dreary, overgrown road is the best one of us to travel at night. The guards won’t have time to raise the alarm. I want my character to take the point position. Send the NPC’s to the rear, we don’t want them getting injured. Why no, I’ve never heard of Xena. Was that a TV show? The DM’s flavor text was my favorite part of the evening. We’re out of food, it’s time to start considering cannibalism to survive. Look at those cute harmless winged monkeys… I spit in the Oracle’s eye. My paladin is a party animal. It doesn’t matter what miniature you use to represent my character. Don’t you think your last comment to the barmaid was a little sexist? Trust me, summoning Cthulhu will change the entire dynamic of the battle. No, I’ve never heard of this Princess Bride film. Is it any good? I don’t care if it’s a 10×10 room, unleash the fireball spell! I’m going to flash around a lot of money…let the locals know I’m loaded. I’ll pass on carrying those extra clips of ammo (extra arrows, etc.) Here, take my last healing potion. Of course we will surrender our weapons — we don’t want any trouble here. That Beholder will never see us coming. My pencil broke – I’ll use an ink pen on my character sheet. Here’s an idea: use the dwarf as a battering ram. We don’t have enough elves or gnomes in our party. My druid happily sets fire to the forest. (To the DM) I think you should recalculate the radius of the blast. I’m pretty sure the whole party is in it. Next step in the plan…we sneak up on that tank. Does anyone know where you can get a pedicure in this village? If I use my last teleportation charge I won’t be able to see the end of the battle. That singing sword is so cool. That pack of rats doesn’t look dangerous. Star Trek – is that a TV show? You can use the catapult to launch me over the wall and into the city. I tell them if they don’t surrender we will just pack up our things and move on. I’ve based my character on someone from the Twilight series of books. My bard leads the attack using his mandolin as a club. (To the DM) I don’t mean to interrupt, but I don’t think you’re rolling enough damage dice. I’m saving that fireball spell for when things go south. No, I don’t think your Elven archer is too cliché. I spent most of my money on clothing rather than weapons and exploring gear. I’ve got a good feeling about this slave trader. He seems honest to me. I don’t need a rope tied to me, it’s only a 75 foot drop. I cut loose my bags of treasure so I can run faster. I trust your character’s surgical skills. I brought apple slices and celery as a snack for our gaming session. There’s a limit to the amount of flaming oil flasks you can carry. I try and reason with the Gargoyle/Owlbear. Those peasants look innocent enough to me; let’s ride on. I’m sure the Orcs will grant us good surrender terms. My fighter’s primary weapon is a dagger. My secondary weapon is a high Charisma. I’m still not entirely convinced this armor is cursed. It’s okay that you stole that scroll out of my backpack, you’re just playing your character accurately. Use the secret door? I don’t think so. We don’t know where that might lead. No, I trust that you rolled what you said you rolled. Come on guys, violence never solves anything. I’m encumbered? I’ll leave that heavy magical broadsword behind. You can go ahead and count that 20 you got when the die fell on the floor. You got natural 18’s in three of your character’s stats? Boy did you roll lucky! The DM is reading a lot of flavor text – so we know nothing is going to happen here. I’m convinced those flames are an illusion. I chose hoarder as a quirk. I drop my weapons to show the Giant that I mean him no harm. I’ll run out and get the dragon’s attention so you can move in for a rear attack. Quick, everyone play dead. My half-orc barbarian will try and charm the Ogre Queen. Oh cool, a sword with a higher intelligence than me! This will come in handy. Let the wizard cast his spell, then we rush him. Send in the halfling assault team. A Landshark? Is that a joke? My character’s goal is to start a farm, be a serf to a local lord, settle down and have some kids. Try the trigger word “Apocalypse.” That open sewer is nothing to be concerned about. You can test that wand on me. A trip to another plane will be a a hoot. To show Odin that I’m worthy, I walk up and slap the old God right in the face. Maybe that zombie bite won’t get infected. To prove the staircase isn’t rickety, I jump up and down on it a few times. I try to use Turn Undead on the Lich. We will get away from the forest fire by climbing those trees. I jump on the Griffith’s back and dig in my spurs. My familiar isn’t annoying or an inconvenience is it? That’s okay, you don’t have to pay us – we do this kind of thing for the fun of it. I’m telling you, this 1966 VW Beatle is the perfect getaway car. Don’t attack yet, let’s see what he’s summoning first. You don’t think we’re being too sexist do you? Hold up, my character can’t move that fast because I’m encumbered. This would be a good time for me to switch alignments and character classes. This game will make you cool. Chicks dig guys that role play well. You’re right, we should donate the treasure to that orphanage. Why don’t you give my experience points to Bob, he worked harder than I did. Let the gamemaster finish rolling for my explosive decompression damage, then I’ll tell you my next action. Let’s take a break from playing and get some exercise. Naa, I’ll level up in the next session. I don’t want to rush into things. Those heavily armed and armored statues are there for decoration, I’m sure of it. My thief is too cool to hide in the shadows. Awe cool, a bronze sword. I can finally toss that iron one. Let’s not attack. If we just understand their motivations, we can arrive at a compromise of some sort without the need for violence. I don’t care which edition of the game we play. Here, take a look at my character sheet and double-check my math. Spell duration? Is that important? Using miniatures makes the game play faster. I rolled a 1 on my grenade toss. Any chance that it’s a dud? I pretend to be lawful good. If we just walk through the room and ignore them, they’ll ignore us. I don’t know if this matters, but when the wizard hit me with a lightning bolt, the whole party was standing in a puddle of water with me. Does that change the results at all? I based my character on Pee Wee Herman. I never read The Hobbit…but I thought the movies were Oscar-worthy though. This dungeon could use a new coat of paint. No, my first level wizard didn’t take Magic Missile as one of his spells. I thought that ventriloquism would be more useful. Cancel the air strike – we can take these guys on hand-to-hand. I feel it is better for my peasants to love me rather than fear me. I think it best that we stick with the core rulebooks – the supplements don’t help us much. Let’s make sure our campfire is big – it will scare away any potential threats. Only use a half-flask of oil – I don’t want to waste it. Let the princess rescue herself. Combining Call of Cthulhu and Clue for the campaign was pure brilliant on your part. I maxed out on the quirks for my character. Forget the gold, dibs on those ingots of copper. I toss down my weapon…time to get all MMA on this guy’s ass. What would my dwarven fighter want with a warhammer (or battleaxe)? I read something in one of the novels that might apply here, but we should just ignore it. Before we move to the next room, let’s make sure we clean up our mess. We tell the lord that he can keep the reward money, it was enough that we rescued his daughter. The Dungeon Master is always right. Have the artillery drop on our current position – I’m sure we’ll come through the barrage okay. These odds seem imbalanced in this battle. I wish the DM would toss in a few more baddies for us to fight. The best way to check for traps is to just walk down the hallway and see what happens. We can trust the Drow assassin. I never thought I’d say it but there IS such a thing as too much treasure. My character is named Snooki. There’s only one way to take out a giant, one-on-one combat using a sling. We’ll attack the vampire lord’s crypt at midnight – when he’d least expect it. Boy the DM is making this easy for us. I don’t think that crack in my spacesuit helmet is big enough to warrant concern. Excuse me, you forgot to make a random encounter roll. My plan? Has anyone seen the movie, The 300 …? …? I chug the holy water – does that heal my chest wound? I’m pretty sure the dungeon is abandoned after all of these years. I ignore the pentagram and burning candles on the floor. This reminds me of the last time we played Chutes and Ladders… We don’t have to fight those kobolds -we can probably outrun them and avoid the battle altogether. The treasure you’ve described is too big for the creatures that were defending it. If you want we can give you a few minutes to scale it back. The Prius will make a perfect getaway car. Hold up there, isn’t that a bit of overkill? Download a bootleg sourcebook for free? No thanks. I want to make sure the designers and the company get their fair share. I ignore that strange character that has been trailing me. He’s probably just curious where I bought my boots. The joke’s on you, I’m not wearing any armor. Oh boy, strange glowing runes. I step out onto the ice to test its thickness. I’ll hold the torch while we wade across this pit filled with oil. So the Codpiece of Arrow Attraction is a cursed artifact? Don’t take that stuff from the tomb…were not grave robbers. I’m not embracing the image you’re portraying, can you provide me more flavor text before I rush into battle? I do my best fighting from high up in a tree. We don’t have to burn that dead troll’s corpse. My superhero took high speed flight but I didn’t take super strength. I mean how much damage can a landing do? I invite the local magistrate and the captain of the city guard to kiss my codpiece. Drat – I was hoping to simply incapacitate him. Quick, punch a hole in the bottom of our boat. Of course we will treat you mercifully if you surrender. Hey buddy, I came into this pub for a cold drink, not to get sucked into some lame-ass adventure. Just because he’s an old wizard doesn’t mean he’s high level…maybe he just got started late in life. Maybe we shouldn’t blow up the building to take out the terrorists. This probably isn’t a good time to mention that my wizard is out of spell components. Let’s make this interesting – I’ll roll a lower number die for damage. Sure it’s fair you make me fight then heal the rest of the party. What do you mean there are no power ups in this game? You guys are laughing with me, not at me, right? How do I know if you’re not an evil cutthroat? I shift into the difficult terrain for the battle. Who would boobytrap a wooden chest? I’ll open it. Can we wrap this game session up? The Kardashians are coming on in ten minutes. Is there a minimum number of spells I have to take? A strange smell fills the air? I breathe it in deeply. My monk refuses to use weapons in battle. It would be dishonorable. I know I fell 200 feet, but did you factor in I was wearing armor? That had to shave a few points of damage. Guys draw your weapons. I need some practice with this new vorpal sword. This character is too good, he’ll make the other characters look bad. Let me roll up something more mundane. I’ll walk the next few miles – my horse could use a break. I think you need to re-roll the damage. My character was carrying eight flasks of oil when the fireball hit him. I know a shortcut through the ancient burial grounds that will save us time. Quick, into the dark forbidding forest. We’ll be safe there. The enemy is too stupid to set an ambush. Don’t worry about them, ghosts aren’t real. Oh good, a dark forbidding cave, that’s just what we needed. I think it’s great that you’re checking online for clarification of that ruling. I don’t care if it is a temple to an evil god, we shouldn’t desecrate it. I’m not going to read that scroll, who knows what it might do. Remember men, we’re not doing this for the money. Hand me that bowl of celery, I need a snack before getting back to the game. While we’re in the middle of this battle, perhaps we should stop here for the night and pick up in the fight next week. They won’t respect you if you don’t insult them. Say something about his mother. We happily pay the toll. Doesn’t inflammable mean the same thing as fireproof? I refuse to disbelieve. If he wants to fist fight, then that’s exactly what I’ll do. Why don’t you lead the party? I’m more of a follower anyway. I drink the vial marked with the skull and crossbones. See, setting fire to the Alchemist’s shop was a great idea. Revenge just doesn’t feel in line with my character’s backstory. I draw my tactical battle plans from the masters — Scooby Doo, Inspector Gadget, and Maxwell Smart. I’m going to use the Top Hat from the Monopoly set to represent my character. Hold your fire, we might hit innocent bystanders. He’s down to one hit point…let him go, he’ll tell of this battle and send fear into the hearts of our enemies. My motto: Always trust the corporation’s robot. My character pretends to be a statue at avoid drawing attention. I’ll take the late watch. Nothing ever attacks after midnight anyways. We don’t need to double-tie the knots. Well, if you say it’s in the rulebook, I trust you. My “adventures” in my cubicle at work are much more fun than this game. We set up our camp in the haunted graveyard. Dragon breath can’t do too much damage. We sure were lucky you played a Gnome character. D&D? I thought we were going to play Mystery Date! Advertisements |
Cuts proposed by House Republicans to programs designed to weed out waste and abuse within Social Security could end up costing taxpayers more in the long run than the spending cuts themselves are designed to save, according to the program’s chief actuary. An appropriations bill that last week cleared a GOP-led subcommittee slashes 2013 funding for disability reviews and eligibility redeterminations, which seek to ensure that seniors and other eligible beneficiaries don’t receive more funds than they are entitled to. The proposed cuts would shave this specific budget item from the $1.024 billion agreed upon in the debt limit law last year to $272 million, saving nearly $800 million.In a Thursday letter responding to inquiring House Democrats, Social Security’s chief actuary Stephen C. Goss concludes that cuts will cost taxpayers “between $5 billion and $6 billion more over the lifetime of those who would not be reassessed due to the reduced funding.” The projection assumes the funding cuts are only for 2013 and restored thereafter. The actuary’s report does not address the impact on taxpayers in later years, but an aide to Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), who requested the report, argued that “it’s safe to say a similar cut in future years would cause additional taxpayer losses of the same magnitude.” In other words, House Republicans are seeking to eliminate safeguards within the Social Security system that are proven to save taxpayers far more money that they cost. It’s an assessment that Democrats opposed to the cuts were quick to highlight. “First they voted to end Medicare. Now they have proposed slashing almost $800 million from Social Security’s operating budget,” said Becerra, a leadership member and top Democrat on the Ways & Means subcommittee on Social Security. “What’s worse, the bulk of this reckless cut would shortchange Social Security’s ability to fight waste, fraud and abuse. In the end, as much as $6 billion of the taxpayers’ money could be lost. Social Security’s money should be going towards the benefits of those who have earned it.” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) piled on: ‘”No business in America would cut an investment that produces between $6 and $9 in savings for every one dollar spent, but that’s the very plan Congressional Republicans have put forward. They follow their extreme ideology even when it is clearly contradicted by common sense.” Two Republican aides on the Ways & Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over Social Security, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill may not get a vote on the House floor, much less become law. Leadership is increasingly inclined to pass a stopgap measure to continue government funding at existing levels when it expires Oct. 1, for fear of being seen as inciting a shutdown just weeks away from Election Day. |
BlueJay said: Thanks for the welcome Chunk! Gardner - It started as a buffer between the cold basement concrete floor (wintertime) and the roots. Now it's just habit, plus I like having a layer of rock for soil life to pull from.... I dunno, replicating shallow bedrock naturally found in my area? I say it's habit now because I did a couple with no rock on the bottom and there is zero zilch nada difference with rock or no rock on the bottom. BulbaStoned - LOL maybe it goes back to IC, everything organic in the organic forum. I never even thought about it nor looked at other sub forums. Went straight here to organics for organic gardening and hadn't really planned to look elsewhere. Click to expand... |
· by · When is the output of a copyright-protected software program itself protected by copyright? This is a case of first impression for any court of appeals which is pending at the Ninth Circuit. The case is Design Data Corporation v. Unigate Enterprise, Inc., 14-16701. On 17 October, 2016, counsels for both parties presented their arguments at the Ninth Circuit to a three-judge panel, composed of Judge Consuelo M. Callahan, Judge Michael Daly Hawkins and Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz. Design Data Corporation (DDC) has created a computer aided design (CAD) steel detailing software, SDS/2, which can be used to draw 2-D and 3-D drawings and models of structural steel components. The designs can only be viewed through the SDS/2 software, the SDS/2 Viewer software, and in electronic images exported from SDS/2. Unigate Enterprise (UE) is a company which provides steel detailing CAD files to its clients in the U.S. It does not produce the files itself, but instead outsources their production to contractors in China. DDC believed that UE had used the SDS/2 software illegally. Representatives of DDC visited UE’s office in August 2012 and UE allowed the representatives to search UE’s computers and copy some files. They found a folder containing installation files for SDS/2 and three patch files which can be used to circumvent SDS/2’s licensing requirement. Defendants admitted during discovery that one of its co-owners downloaded a copy of SDS/2 to an external hard drive, but that she believed this copy to be a free demonstration copy of the software, and that she did not install the software, nor did she try to use it. UE admitted that SDS/2 had been used to create files and drawings in five of its projects, but argued that they were made by contractors in China. DDC sued UE for direct copyright infringement, claiming it had illegally downloaded a copy of the software and also had copied files and images which are output of the SDS/2 software protected by copyright. It also sued UE for contributory copyright infringement claiming that UE imported from China infringing files and images generated by SDS/2 in violation of 17 U.S.C. §602. UE moved for summary judgment, claiming that merely downloading a software program without installing or using is de minimis copying and that therefore not direct infringement. UE also argued that it cannot be held liable for contributory infringement, as “wholly extraterritorial acts of infringement cannot support a claim under the Copyright Act even when authorized by a party in the United States,” quoting Subafilms, Ltd. v. MGM-Pathe Communications Co., 24 F.3d 1088, 1092, 1995 (9th Cir.1994). On August 6, 2014, Judge William Orrick from the Northern District Court of California granted Defendants’ motion for summary judgment both for contributory infringement and direct infringement. Defendants had correctly argued that they could not be sued for contributory infringement. Judge Orrick also found that downloading a copy of SDS/2 “without any evidence that the copy was installed or used… amount[ed] at most to a de minimis ‘technical’ violation that is not actionable as a matter of law.” DDC appealed to the Ninth Circuit, asking the Court to reverse summary judgment. DDC’s counsel argued before the Ninth Circuit that UE did “consciously implement a business model… that was designed to exploit a breach in the copyright protection afforded to software developers by shifting its infringement of [Plaintiff’s software] overseas.” However, as UE cannot be sued for contributory infringement, DDC argued instead that UE directly infringed its copyright by downloading the software and by reproducing the output of the software program which is protected by copyright. Direct infringement: did UE violate copyright law by copying DDC’s software? Judge Callahan and Judge Hurwitz were both troubled by the fact that UE had advertised on its site that it used the SDS/2 software. UE’s counsel answered that UE was counting on contractors to use it, but admitted that UE had never asked DDC if it was indeed true that the contractors were legally using the software. UE admitted it had downloaded the software, and therefore copied it, but argued it had not used it and therefore this de minimis copying was not actionable. DDC argued that, by downloading the software, UE had copied the entire SDS/2software code and therefore the copying was not de minimis. Judge Hurwitz asked UE’s counsel whether the de minimis doctrine should apply each time someone copies a work protected by copyright, even if he does not use it, and the UE’s counsel answered in the affirmative. Direct infringement: is the output of the software protected by copyright? DDC argued also that UE has directly infringed the SDS/2 software because it has copied the steel component designs which are a visual display of the software, and are as such output of the software also protected by copyright. For Judge Hurwitz, this is the “really interesting issue in this case.” However, not every output of a software is protectable by copyright. The question of when the output of a computer program is protectable by copyright has not yet been answered by any court which makes it an issue of first impression. Software’s source code, which is human-readable, and its object code, which is machine-readable, are both protectable by copyright as literary works, if they are original and fixed in a tangible medium of expression. However, the functional elements of the software, such as its systems or procedures, are not protected by copyright since copyright law does not protect process, system, and method of operation. Judge Orrick had quoted Altai and found that the “job files” and the other documents produced by the SDS/2 software “are data not covered by copyright.” Courts often use the abstraction-filtration-comparison test, first coined by the Second Circuit in Computer Assocs. Int’l v. Altai, to assess which parts of a software program are protected by copyright. The Second Circuit specified that the decision “[did] not control infringement actions regarding categorically distinct works, such as… products of computer programs.” There is no case where a court used the abstraction-filtration-comparison test to determine whether the output of a software has been infringed. Judge Hurwitz asked DDC’s counsel what makes in her view a particular output protectable by copyright. She offered a test: an output would be protected by copyright if one can tie some sort of creative expression that is included in that output as having emanated from the software. Judge Hurwitz asked her what percentage of creative expression would trigger copyright protection. What if 80% of the creative expression originates from the software user? She conceded that in this case the output would “probably not” be protected by copyright. Judge Callahan found this test too complicated. UE’s counsel then proposed another test. The output would be protected to the extent that it includes creative expression that has been fixed in the software and embodied in the output. However, if there is additional creative content added to the output by a user, and therefore the proportionality is too imbalanced and weights too heavily in favor of the user, it could be found under the abstract-filtration-comparison test not original and thus not protected. Judge Hurwitz said, that while there is no case addressing the issue, some seem to suggest that the output of a software program may be, in some instances, so substantially similar to the software program that it deserves protection. Judge Hurwitz noted, however, that plaintiff must show substantial similarity. DDC’s counsel argued that there is not only substantial similarity, but even identity, because, if one inputs the same data into the software, one gets the same design out of it, in an expression which is fixed. But Judge Callahan quoted paragraph 721.6 of the Compendium of U. S. Copyright Office Practice about the “Relationship Between a Computer Program and a Work Created with a Computer or a Computer Program,” which explains that “ownership of the copyright in a work is distinct from ownership of any material object that may be used to create that work.” Judge Callahan asked DDC’s counsel whether this was relevant to the case and she answered that DDC owns the copyright in the software and also owns a copyright in “unnecessary creative expression that accompanies that.” She specified that DDC is not arguing that it owns the copyright in the entire design of the component, only in the expression that accompanies it. DDC considers this to be direct infringement, as it is a derivative work of the component of the software image files. On rebuttal, Judge Hurwitz asked again DDC’s counsel to explain the relationship between both the creative input of the software and the creative input of its users, and how and when the ratio of these two creative inputs would trigger, or not, the copyright protection of the output. DDC’s counsel answered that DDC is focused on expressive content that is not in the actual design of the component, such as the font or the colors used, the shape of a comment box, or the placement of certain components around the design which appear in the design file, but which are not the design itself. She argued that these elements must be identified using the abstraction-filtration-comparison test to find out whether some elements are protected by copyright, but conceded that there was not any computer software case which used this test. Image is courtesy of Flickr user Rick Kimpel under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license. This article was first published on the the TTLF Newsletter on Transatlantic Antitrust and IPR Developments published by the Stanford-Vienna Transatlantic Technology Law Forum. by |
Weekend update: Ver Ka Sazabi get’s completed! Since my last update, I’ve gotten the third section of the kit painted, the weapon systems done, all the wiring for the 35 or so LED on the sucker wired up and working, and finished the rather simplistic display base. Here’s a quick little comparison between the finished kit and the snapped up kit. Short list of mods: The upper torso chest piece was beefed up and reshaped. The slits were filled with styrene and a hexagon cutout with mesh inserts wad added. The neck cables were replaced with a magnet wire spring, wiring, and metal collars. The waist cables were replaced with magnet wire and metal collars. Fuel tanks added some styrene and metal minus mold details. Head antenna was extended with styrene. Back of the head was extended with styrene. Shoulder ends were extended and flared out slightly with styrene. The Sazabi long rifle was cut and modified with a scope, dual ammo mag, free floating RIS system, over a ported outer barrel encasing an inner barrel, with a silencer. (yes, why would a GIANT robot need a silencer, very good question. I have no idea how to answer that… um… because it looks damn cool, yeah, that’s the answer!) Mono eye modified with a metal collar to focus light in one direction. 36 LEDs in total, 35 of those cast in resin thrusters and wired up to a reed switch and battery assembly. Read about the final bits for this build as well as the full set of completed pictures after the jump! The last third of the third building group, the legs, get painted in the same fashion as the other two sections described in earlier posts. White base over the grey primer, masking, metallics, unmasked, the clear reds. I decided to use the funnels as a means to break up all the red, so I first sprayed them with white base. In hindsight, I should have first sprayed these red parts with mr color primer, then sprayed the white base. Too much red was bleeding through the white. Over this white, I sprayed Mr Color clear yellow, so the funnels are a bright lemon yellow. The internals to the funnels were painted with various metallic tones and then assembled and decaled. With that done, they were assembled into the funnel pods. The rifle progress was shown in an earlier post. I finally got that finished with paint and decals. The main rifle was sprayed first with Mr Color Metallic Black (Metal Black) depending on what label you stumbled upon, but it’s the same product number. Over this to lower emphasis on the rather large metallic flakes, I sprayed alclad gun metal with worked to tone things down slightly. Close ups for the rifle. The scope lenses were done with aurora stickers from ako hobby. The silencer got a dual tone finish with Alclad burnt iron fading into the Mr Color Metal Black/Alclad Gun Metal combination. The LEDs embedded in the resin thruster parts were masked off then painted with Alclad steel. The backpack thrusters were cut up and LEDs were fit into the spots and wired up internally. And a quick test with a battery ensures it all works. One of the things that made working on this project so fluid with cutting up the kit into three sections was the decals. Doing the kit in three distinct parts was similar to working on three distinct kits. Paint, decals, clear. The decal sheet for this kit was fairly daunting, so cutting up the kit into three parts really helped. The following decal layout is for the lower leg pieces only. With everything painted, decaled, and clear coated. A few days of curing was set for the parts before they were masked to paint the small details. I could have easily gone in and hand painted these little details, but the texturing would have been completely off. So parafilm and sticky tak was used to mask off the areas for some quick sprays of Alclad burnt iron. I love the Sazabi design. I love the shield. However, having the Saz holding the shield obscures a good third of the body and work, so this is my solution to displaying the shield with the kit. Use the shield as part of the base. And for a base, I wanted something simple so as the focus on the display is the Sazabi, not everything else around. The solution, encasing it in a block of clear resin. Starting off, the kit was built, painted, and decaled. In hindsight, I should have let the damn parts cure for a full week and/or clear coated the parts before rushing into the next step. Using a box from my Resin SD Kampfer, I first layed down a thin layer of polyurethane clear resin. That dried and cured fairly quickly, and since the box didn’t fit into my pressure pot, it had to be cured in the normal atmosphere. So since the urethane cured so quickly, there are a decent number of tiny bubbles trapped and visible as the bottom most layer. With the base layer cured, the shield was placed into the box and I mixed a large batch of enamel clear resin that has a much slower cure time. The slower cure time also helps as the process isn’t as exothermic as the urethane resin curing. It would be a horrific shame if the curing clear resin melted the shield. However, I wasn’t completely unscathed, not allowing the paint to cure and not clear coating it led to the paints bleeding. Granted it does kinda look cool, but it isn’t what I was intending to do. To quote Bob Ross, “we don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents” I guess. The first layer of enamel clear resin didn’t cover the entire shield, so it was left for about a day and a half to solidify, then another layer of enamel resin was poured. This layer found yet another “happy little accident”, and bubbles from air trapped within the shield surfaced. The resin cured for another day and a half so the bubbles were hard enough to cut apart and clip off some of the excess. The last layer of enamel resin was poured, and using a bamboo skewer, I poked around the bubbled areas to ensure that the resin filled in those spots, and that really worked to help remove the bubbles from the previous pour. The resin pouring process happened a few weeks ago, and after checking the hardness over the past week, this weekend was good for finishing the base. The box was cut apart, but some of the box is still sticking to the cured resin. After all, resin is an adhesive. So with most of the box cut off, the entire block and clinging cardboard was soaked in water for several hours. Soaking helped peel away more of the cardboard. Another soaking session removed the rest of the cardboard, but left a sticky residue. The residue is sanded away leaving the clear resin block free of any paper products. A quick spray of clear gloss along the sides makes everything water clear. Last week saw the wiring from the painted resin thruster pieces through frame parts of individual sections. Each leg piece holds three separatly wired LED assemblies, the front thruster, larger rear thruster, and the 3 part rear thruster. As the leg is assembled, the wiring is threaded through and the three sections are wired together at the back of the knee area. Below is a comparison of the mess of wiring with the wires tied together neatly to form a single positive and negative pair that is then threaded up the rest of the leg. The wiring is tested out to make sure all three sections are lighting up. Next up is the reed switch assembly and test. The reed switch is a magnetically activated switch and makes a connection with a magnetic field is close by, in this case, a small rare earth magnet. From the LED assembly, the positive end is run to one end of the reed, and continued through the other end of the reed switch to the positive end of the battery source. The negative end of the LED assembly is run directly to the battery. The reed acts as a break along the positive wiring. Connecting a magnet, the wiring is completed, lighting up the LED assembly. With the test successful, the reed switch goes into the neck/collar piece. It is wired and glued into position. Returning to the arm sub assembly, the three thruster parts here are threaded and wired together similarly to how the legs are wired. Three parts combining into a single positive and negative pair that runs out of the lower shoulder connection joint. A quick test of the arm lights show that everything works. The arms and backpack are assembled to the upper torso piece along with the battery and reed switch assembly. The negative ends are threaded through the body and wired together as well as the positive ends wired together and connected to one end of the reed switch. The other end of the reed switch connects to the battery’s positive end. The negative end just connects to the combined negative wires tied together. Another quick light test of the upper body, this time with the battery and reed switch assembly. I’ve also added a simple connection that runs down the length of the upper torso. The waist will have a companion connector point so that the entire suit is wired as separate upper and lower entities. This will make traveling with the kit easier. Lower torso is wired together, the legs and waist skirt lights are combined along with the connector piece. With the wiring completed and the two halves of the Sazabi connected, I did a quick little video showing off the lights as well as the reed switch in action. And with the base completed last night, here is everything: Share this: Reddit Print Email Twitter Facebook Tumblr |
On April 25, 2014, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite observed dozens of fires burning in North Korea. Actively burning areas, detected by the thermal bands on MODIS, are outlined in red. Fields and grasslands appear light brown. Forests at lower elevations appear green; at higher elevations, forests are still brown at this time of year. Many fires appear in farming areas along rivers. While North Korea’s best agricultural land is located on the coastal plain in the western part of the country, many people farm marginal land along rivers in the mountainous areas. They use fire to clear debris from last year’s crops and to help fertilize the soil for the coming season. However, some of the fires were burning in heavily forested areas, suggesting that they might be wildfires. Drooping wires on aging power lines are a common cause of wildfires in North Korea, according to a report published in the Asia-Pacific Journal. Collectively, the fires produced enough smoke to send plumes of haze drifting east over the Sea of Japan. NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Adam Voiland. |
Published on December 20th, 2016 (December 20, 2016; Day 45) – Some time just before 1030hrs UTC this morning, Vendée Globe skipper Thomas Ruyant on his critically damaged IMOCA Le Souffle du Nord breathed a huge sigh of relief when he took on board two specialist technicians who were armed with a pump. With the bow section of his IMOCA flooded and the stern clear of the water, the boat pitching out of control, he had spent many uncertain hours fighting to bring his boat to safety, often losing steerage in big seas and buffeting winds which gusted to over 55 knots. Ruyant thought many times he was on the absolute brink of losing his boat and having to activate a rescue plan. The epic struggle of 35 year-old Vendée Globe first timer from the north east of France looked set to reach its best possible outcome, given the substantial structural damage to his boat. At 1530hrs UTC, with the two specialists on board and the pump working, Le Souffle du Nord was 25 miles – or about four hours – from the haven of Bluff, the southernmost town on South Island, New Zealand. Ruyant has limped more than 220 miles with his boat which threatened to split in two after hitting a hard object, which he believes to have been a shipping container, at 17kts on Sunday evening, December 18. “A few hours ago I thought it was all over for my mighty boat,” Ruyant told his team this morning. “I could no longer make headway in 45 knots of wind. I was below with one finger on the beacon button to ask to be picked up. I thought I was going to lose Le Souffle du Nord forever. I rounded up every couple of minutes. I couldn’t control my boat with the damage to the steering system. The rig was limp and I no longer had any backstays. It was all hanging by a thread. After that tricky moment and rounding the famous cape, I realised that I was going to make it. There was an incredible moment of satisfaction with the sun going down along the coast of New Zealand.” At the front of the Vendée Globe fleet race leader Armel Le Cléac’h had Banque Populaire VIII back in the money today, averaging over 20kts for sustained periods in a brisk southerly wind, making 454 nautical miles in the 24 hours to 22:00 UTC. He is expected at Cape Horn Friday morning (Dec 23). The French skipper may have a lead of nearly 500 miles, but second placed British skipper Alex Thomson (Hugo Boss) may yet profit from expected light winds and a high pressure zone installed north and east of the famous Cape Horn which might slow Le Cléac’h while Hugo Boss comes back at speed with stronger southerly winds on December 23. Fabrice Amedeo (Newrest-Matmut) passed the second major cape in the Vendée Globe, Cape Leeuwin at 0800 UTC this morning. He was followed four hours later by Alan Roura (La Fabrique). They are leading a group of five boats that are within 200 miles of each other. In a few hours, it will be the turn of Irishman, Enda O’Coineen (Kilcullen Voyager Team Ireland), then the American, Rich Wilson (Great American IV) and finally Frenchman, Eric Bellion (CommeUnSeulHomme). Wilson, who today was less than 30 miles from the Irish skipper who is presently racing with no computers and limited electrical instrumentation, confirmed today that he has seen the faint lights of O’Coineen’s Kilcullen Voyager Team Ireland as it overtook him. Because the Irish skipper is racing ‘blind’, Wilson spoke several times to O’Coineen last night to update him with the relative position of both boats. Rich Wilson recounted today: “We had an extensive conversation on the VHF (with Enda O’Coineen). He was overtaking me and has computer, electronic and AIS problems and he was not able to see us. So he also has some problems with the reefing system in the main and has still got one reef in the main. He is going like crazy. He would give me my GPS coordinate and I would plot them into Adrena and I could see where he was relative to us. Our radar was not able to pick him up as he was coming up from behind. He was shadowed by the mast. Over a couple of hours we spoke a couple of times. He was advancing on us and crossed our wake on the last position report at about five miles back. I was able to go out of the cockpit after a few minutes and just faintly pick out his lights. He was in good spirits and working away at things. He was going incredibly fast at the same time.” There has been respite between two systems for the group of five, today enjoying 20-knot NW’ly wind and slight seas, allowing them to go outside to check wear and tear on the deck hardware and carry out a few repairs to get ready for the Pacific. The next waypoint will in fact be Cape Horn. “Incredible! I can hardly believe it. This is going to be the best Christmas of my life, even if I’m going to miss my friends and family, wrote Alan Roura this morning. The Vendée Globe competitors have little time to ponder their loneliness, “It took me three hours to bring down the mainsail, change the broken car and then hoist it again. It’s annoying. I have quite a few little jobs to do and someone seems to have it in for me. I still have a winch to repair and there goes my day,” Arnaud Boissières told Vendée Live at midday. Nandor Fa and Fabrice Amedeo have also been busy repairing sails, while Jérémie Beyou has had a serious ingress of water. Quotes: Paul Meilhat (SMA): “The wind has eased. We still have a southerly, but I have to keep changing the sails. Things should improve in 24 hours. We are riding on the back of the low and picked up the wind a couple days ago. There is a tricky moment when we reach the middle. We can’t really get away from it. I was the first to run into the light winds. It’s nice that Jérémie is alongside, but we can’t talk over the VHF any more. I should be rounding Cape Horn in around a week. What is hard is that the wind is very unstable. It’s hard to rest with such shifts and the need to trim all the time. The sea state is fine. There’s a big swell from the west. I don’t feel cold, which is surprising.” Arnaud Boissières, La Mie Câline; “I have just finished changing my mainsail batten and have just hoisted the sail. There’s a bit of wind. It took me three hours in all to bring down the sail, change the car and hoist it again. I have had quite a lot of little jobs to do. Desjoyeaux said there’s a problem to deal with each day. I still have a winch to repair and there goes my day. To the south of Australia, we should get fine conditions. I hope to get the most out of the boat. I’m not too worried about the Pacific, even if the connection between the Indian and Pacific isn’t going to be easy.” UPDATE: This afternoon at 1415 UTC, Paul Meilhat contacted his team to inform them of a problem with his keel ram. The ram has a 40 cm (16 inch) crack and this has led to the keel canting leeward of the boat. Paul is in the process of blocking the system to try to get the keel in the middle. To carry out this operation, he bore away and is heading towards the north. It was after hearing an unusual noise early this afternoon that the skipper of SMA went to inspect his keel housing. He immediately realised that oil from the hydraulic circuit had flooded the ram compartment. He thought first of all that it was a pipe that had burst in the hydraulic circuit, but then noticed a 40 cm crack in the ram itself. SMA is currently in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2000 miles east of New Zealand. Ranking (Top 5 of 29 as of 22:00 FR) 1. Banque Populaire VIII, Armel Le Cléac’h (FRA), 7996 nm to finish 2. Hugo Boss, Alex Thomson (GBR), 497.08 nm to leader 3. Maître CoQ, Jérémie Beyou (FRA), 1423.43 nm 4. SMA, Paul Meilhat (FRA), 1542.66 nm 5. StMichel-Virbac, Jean-Pierre Dick (FRA), 1869.08 nm Race details – Tracker – Ranking – Facebook – VendeeGlobe TV Background: The eighth Vendée Globe, which began November 6 from Les Sables d’Olonn, France, is the only non-stop solo round the world race without assistance. Twenty-nine skippers representing four continents and ten nations set sail on IMOCA 60s in pursuit of the record time set by François Gabart in the 2012-13 race of 78 days, 2 hours and 16 minutes. For the first time in the history of the event, seven skippers will set sail on IMOCA 60s fitted with foils: six new boats (Banque Populaire VIII, Edmond de Rothschild, Hugo Boss, No Way Back, Safran, and StMichel-Virbac) and one older generation boat (Maitre Coq). The foils allow the boat to reduce displacement for speed gains in certain conditions. It will be a test to see if the gains can topple the traditional daggerboard configuration during the long and demanding race. Retirements: November 12, Day 7 – Tanguy de Lamotte, Initiatives Coeur, masthead crane failure November 19, Day 14 – Bertrand de Broc, MACSF, UFO collision November 22, Day 17 – Vincent Riou, PRB, UFO collision November 24, Day 19 – Morgan Lagravière, Safran, UFO collision December 4, Day 29 – Kojiro Shiraishi, Spirit of Yukoh, dismasted December 6, Day 31 – Kito de Pavant, Bastide Otio, UFO collision December 7, Day 32 – Sébastien Josse, Edmond de Rothschild, foil damage December 18, Day 43 – Thomas Ruyant, Le Souffle du Nord, UFO collision Source: Vendee Globe |
The Wallabies team to take on the All Blacks for the final time in 2013 has been announced, with Peter Betham to make his debut in one of four changes to the starting line-up from the side that thrashed Argentina. Betham makes his Test debut, capping a stellar year for the 24-year-old flyer and follows the midweek withdrawal of fellow outside backs Joe Tomane and Chris Feauai-Sautia due to minor hamstring injuries. ACT Brumbies playmaker Matt Toomua has also earned his third starting appearance for Australia and will replace injured teammate Christian Leali’ifano (ankle) in the number 12 jersey. Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Reddit Email Share The unavailability of Scott Fardy (eye) has resulted in a re-shuffle of the team’s backrow with Ben McCalman earning a promotion from the bench to No.8, meaning vice-captain Ben Mowen will shift to the side of the scrum at blindside flanker. On the bench, NSW Waratahs backrower Dave Dennis and versatile Queensland Reds back Mike Harris are both in line to receive their first opportunities in the green and gold jersey for 2013. Will Genia will become just the 39th player to reach the prestigious 50-game milestone for Australia in Saturday night’s third Bledisloe Cup Test against New Zealand at Forsyth Barr Stadium. allabies coach Ewen McKenzie congratulated Genia and Betham on their respective milestones. “Will has been an amazing servant of Australian Rugby for a long time now so it’s extremely pleasing for him to reach 50 games, a huge career milestone in any player’s career,” McKenzie said. “He has an incredible drive to see Australia succeed at this level and you’ll no doubt see that in his performance against the All Blacks on Saturday night. Advertisement Advertisement “I think I speak for everyone when I congratulate Will on reaching the prestigious 50-game honour. “It will also be a hugely memorable occasion for Peter, who gets the opportunity to experience his first taste of Test Rugby in what will be a very hostile environment against a talented New Zealand team. “The reality of Rugby is that most players get an opportunity at the misfortune of one of their teammates, but it’s about what each individual does with that opportunity that counts the most. “That doesn’t just apply to Peter but to a number of guys who are receiving a chance this week. There is no better way to make your mark than by playing well against the All Blacks.” McKenzie said his squad was also looking forward to the challenge of a third Test against the All Blacks, who are aiming to win a record 30th consecutive game on home soil in New Zealand. “The All Blacks are the most consistent team in world Rugby and their record proves just how formidable they are when playing at home in front of their fans,” he said. “History indicates that playing the All Blacks is a significant challenge, but you want to be measuring yourself against the best performing teams in the world and we are very much looking forward to that on Saturday night. “It was pleasing to see us take a step in the right direction against Argentina, but the test for us now is to produce that form week-in and week-out. Advertisement Advertisement “At this level you need to back-up, play consistently and find solutions to win every game, which has been a large focus for us heading into this match.” Betham will become the 12th player to debut for Australia in 2013, joining: Scott Fardy, Chris Feauai-Sautia, Israel Folau, Bernard Foley, Tevita Kuridrani, Christian Leali’ifano, Jesse Mogg, Ben Mowen, Scott Sio, Matt Toomua, and Nic White. The Wallabies side to play New Zealand in the third Bledisloe Cup Test at Forsyth Barr Stadium on Saturday 19 October is: 1. James Slipper (Queensland Reds) 2. Stephen Moore (ACT Brumbies) 3. Ben Alexander (ACT Brumbies) 4. Rob Simmons (Queensland Reds) 5. James Horwill (c – Queensland Reds) 6. Ben Mowen (vc – ACT Brumbies) 7. Michael Hooper (NSW Waratahs) 8. Ben McCalman (Western Force) 9. Will Genia (Queensland Reds) 10. Quade Cooper (Queensland Reds) 11. Peter Betham (NSW Waratahs) 12. Matt Toomua (ACT Brumbies) 13. Tevita Kuridrani (ACT Brumbies) 14. Adam Ashley-Cooper (NSW Waratahs) 15. Israel Folau (NSW Waratahs) Bench: 16. Saia Fainga’a (Queensland Reds) 17. Benn Robinson (NSW Waratahs) 18. Sekope Kepu (NSW Waratahs) 19. Sitaleki Timani (NSW Waratahs) 20. Dave Dennis (NSW Waratahs) 21. Nic White (ACT Brumbies) 22. Mike Harris (Queensland Reds) 23. Bernard Foley (NSW Waratahs) |
Dear Miss Manners: While watching certain “judge’’ TV shows, I’ve noticed that when a plaintiff or defendant is given a tissue, there is never a “thank you’’ offered to the giver. It leads me to wonder: Is not thanking a person for this small favor considered somehow improper? Please help, as I am indeed befuddled. And as you will continue to be, if you look to television for demonstrations of proper manners. Miss Manners does not intend this as a simple sneer at the ignorance of etiquette that sprinkles so much drama — not just television, but film, theater and opera — with misleading cues. That is sadly the fact, but she can rant about that another time. Even well-done scripted shows should not be taken as exemplifying proper behavior. A function of etiquette in real life is to keep us from being at one another’s throats. But what would drama be without conflict? And this especially applies to courtroom drama, which can match — and exceed — real courtrooms in emotional tension. The crier on TV may be too distraught to observe niceties, or even generally rude. Life is different. Should you find yourself breaking down in court, do, please, thank the judge or other official who hands you a tissue. Dear Miss Manners: There is an email discussion group in our community that my wife is a member of. She and I each have our own desk with our own computer sitting on it. At her request, I always turn on my wife’s computer in the morning before she gets up. I’ve been reading my wife’s email on her computer at her desk after I turn it on to scan the group message subject lines and see if there is anything interesting enough to read. My wife got up early one morning and saw me doing this. She didn’t know I had a habit of reading her emails in the morning. She has gotten angry with me and told me to stop reading her email and feels I’ve crossed the line and invaded her privacy. I feel that I’m not invading her privacy, because the only emails I look at are from the community discussion group. Am I off base? Matrimony is no excuse for peeking into someone else’s mail, Miss Manners believes — as does your wife. So please stop. Dear Miss Manners: My fiance passed away a few days ago. Should I remove my engagement ring immediately? Or wait some period of time? His family has arranged a large service and celebration of life to be held in two months. Should I wear the ring on that occasion? There is a cadre of busybodies who have the nerve to pose as etiquette experts, telling the bereaved that they are no longer entitled to wear their rings. Besides being cruel, this is inaccurate. Miss Manners reminds you that the ring is yours, to wear whenever you wish. New Miss Manners columns are posted Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays on washingtonpost.com/advice. You can send questions to Miss Manners at her website, missmanners.com. |
Although Gordon managed to survive the resonance cascade and escape the laboratories, the situation was rapidly deteriorating. His only hope of reaching safety was the Black Mesa Transit System. Typically the one available tram was on the far platform. With the bridging offices becoming increasingly overrun with hostile lifeforms Gordon would have to work overtime if he was to make it. Basic Details Title: Bm Overtime Bm Overtime Filename: bm-sp-overtime.7z bm-sp-overtime.7z Size : 7.53MB 7.53MB Author: JamaicanDave JamaicanDave Date Released: 03 September 2016 Gauge Users Currently, Gauge does not operate with Black Mesa releases. Download Options Download to your HDD [7.53MB] Manual Installation Instructions If you require more help, please visit the Technical Help page. Copy bm_overtime.bsp into the …\Steam\SteamApps\common\Black Mesa\bms\maps folder Copy bm_overtime.ain into the …\Steam\SteamApps\common\Black Mesa\bms\maps\graphs folder. Launch Black Mesa Open the console and type map bm_overtime and now press ENTER. Videos None at this time. Screenshots WARNING: The screenshots contain spoilers. 1024 x 576 1366 x 768 1600 x 900 Reader Recommendations Avoid It! Think Twice Maybe Play It Later Play It Now! 6 recommendations, average score: 4.67 (out of 5), standard deviation: 0.22 ( recommendations, average score:(out of 5), standard deviation: 0.22 ( what's that? Total Downloads 1,049 Overall 0 Today 6 Last 7 days 27 Last 30 days 244 365 days Meta Review Data 7 comment(s) with meta review data. Installed: Users Manually: 7 Users Using Gauge Manually: Time Taken: Average: 0 Hours, 23 Mins Shortest: 0 Hours, 15 Mins by Longest: 0 Hours, 30 Mins by PlanetPhillip Total Time Played: 2 Hours, 40 Mins Statistics based oncomment(s) with meta review data. Categories ( ? ) Tags ( ? ) Collections ( ? ) If you believe this release is missing important tags, please suggest them in a comment? Jump to a review |
The Toronto Argonauts re-signed slotback Andre Durie to a contract extension Monday. The Argos announced Durie is under contract through the 2016 season. Durie signed with Toronto as an undrafted free agent in 2007 and has spent his entire Canadian Football League career with the club. "We believe Andre Durie is one of the most talented players in our league, and he's Canadian," Argos general manager Jim Barker said in a statement. "He has been a very productive member of our offence and a strong contributor on special teams. "Andre has proven to be a valuable member of the Toronto community and we're excited to keep him at home to continue his work on and off the field." Durie, 32, led the CFL with a career-high 92 catches last season for 986 yards and three touchdowns. The five-foot-10, 199-pound native of Mississauga, Ont., has spent his entire seven-year career with Toronto, helping the Argos win a Grey Cup title in 2012. "In 2007, the team believed in me and gave me a chance to play the game I truly love, even after an injury that nearly ended my career," Durie said. "I am very proud and excited to continue my career as an Argonaut and I will continue to play like every game could be my last for my city and this organization." Durie, who played running back during his university career at York, has registered 272 catches for 3,150 yards and 13 TDs with Toronto. |
Image copyright Getty Images In the year after the UK narrowly voted to exit the European Union, there was a small but significant increase in the population's feeling of wellbeing, official statistics show. The improvements in areas such as life satisfaction and happiness were seen only in England, however. Elsewhere, the rates flatlined. People in Northern Ireland continued to report the highest levels of wellbeing. Rates of anxiety increased slightly, but not significantly. To obtain the Office for National Statistics data, more than 100,000 adult UK residents were asked to answer the following questions, on a scale of nought to 10, with nought being "not at all" and 10 being "completely": Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile? Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday? Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday? A higher proportion of people reported very high levels of life satisfaction, happiness and feelings that life was worthwhile in the year ending June 2017 compared with the previous year. The average ratings at the end of June 2017 were: 7.7 out of 10 for life satisfaction 7.9 out of 10 for feeling worthwhile 7.5 out of 10 for happiness 2.9 out of 10 for anxiety The ONS statistical bulletin suggests possible social and economic factors that might help explain the results. "Employment and job satisfaction, our health, the quality of our relationships and our financial situation are just some of the aspects of our lives shown to have an effect," it says. For example, the employment rate is at its highest level since comparable records began in 1971 and the unemployment rate is at its joint lowest since 1975. There have also been improvements is gross domestic product per head and net national disposable income per head. But the ONS points out that real household disposable income per head has fallen for the fourth quarter in a row. Over the year the data covers there have been "various situations of uncertainty", says the ONS - a new prime minister, a vote to leave the EU and several terror attacks. "Considering this, it may be surprising that levels of personal wellbeing are increasing. However, it is important to note these figures are only reported at a country and national level, and are presented over the year. It is therefore possible that any sudden or individual change in personal wellbeing may not be seen in the data," it says. |
Tax progressivity and the government’s ability to collect additional tax revenue Hans Holter, Dirk Krueger, Serhiy Stepanchuk Since the Global Crisis, debt sustainability has received increasing attention. This column argues that the maximum sustainable debt level depends negatively on the progressivity of the tax system. The authors estimate that the US is still relatively far from the peak of its Laffer curve and from its maximally sustainable debt level. However, adopting a flat tax would raise the maximum sustainable debt from 330% to more than 350% of benchmark GDP, whereas adopting Danish-style progressivity would lower it to less than 250%. The recent massive expansion of public debt around the world during the Great Recession raises the question how much debt a government can maximally service by raising the level of taxes. Or, to phrase this classic public finance question differently, how much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing income taxes? The idea that total tax revenues are a single-peaked function of the level of tax rates dates back to at least Arthur Laffer, and the plot of total tax revenues against the average tax has been known as the ‘Laffer curve’ ever since. Deriving the Laffer curve for a specific economy (a country or collection of countries) is difficult on purely empirical grounds, since the time-series variation of the tax rate for a given country is typically small, and might not include tax rates close to the one maximising tax revenue. Therefore economists have typically relied on using models of the macroeconomy as laboratories in which the level of taxes can be varied in counterfactual experiments and the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues can be traced out, either analytically or with the use of computer simulations. In a recent influential paper, Matthias Trabandt and Harald Uhlig (2011) numerically characterise Laffer curves for the US and the EU14. They find that the peak of the labour income tax Laffer curve in both regions is located between an average tax rate of 50% and 70%, depending on the country and the parameterisations of the model. They also find that the US can increase labour income tax revenues by 30%, and the EU14 only by 8%. According to their analysis, some of the European countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, find themselves very close to the top of their respective Laffer curves, and can increase their labour income tax revenues only by 1%. The work of Trabandt and Uhlig (2011) is carried out in the context of the classical workhorse model in macroeconomics, the ‘representative agent’ model, where the economy consists of one representative household facing a flat labour income tax schedule, that is, the tax rate is independent of the level of income. However, in all OECD countries there is substantial heterogeneity across households in income, wealth, and other relevant economic characteristics. Furthermore, as we document below, all OECD countries have progressive tax schedules in which the average tax rate is higher for higher earners. Our research (Holter et al. 2014) investigates how tax progressivity and household heterogeneity impacts the Laffer curve. We argue that a more progressive labour income tax schedule significantly reduces the maximal amount of tax revenues a government can raise and that certain (but not all) dimensions of household heterogeneity crucially affect the shape of the Laffer curve. Measuring tax progressivity in OECD countries To approximate the actual labour income tax system, we use a parsimonious functional form proposed by Benabou (2002). It has only two parameters, one of which (θ0) controls the tax level, while the other one (θ1) controls tax progressivity. We use the data from the OECD’s online tax calculator to estimate such tax functions for different types of households (single, married without children, with children), and obtain for each country a ‘progressivity index’, a weighted average value of the progressivity parameter (θ1), using the shares of household types in the US as the weights. Column 2 in Table 1 shows the values of this progressivity index, whereas column 3 normalises them so that it is equal to 1 for the US. The table shows that there is considerable cross-country variation in labour income progressivity, with countries such as Japan, Switzerland, Portugal, and the US appearing at the low end of the progressivity spectrum, while the Nordic countries, Ireland, and the Netherlands finding themselves at the high end of this spectrum. Table 1. Tax progressivity in the OECD, 2000-07 Our model The impact of tax progressivity is closely linked to the degree of household heterogeneity, since under progressive taxes heterogeneous workers will face different average and marginal tax rates. At the same time, the answer to our question is closely connected to the individual (and then properly aggregated) response of labour supply to taxes. The microeconometric literature, as surveyed e.g. by Keane (2011), has found that both the intensive and extensive margins of labour supply (the latter especially for women), life-cycle considerations, and human capital accumulation are important determinants of these individual responses. We therefore develop a life cycle model with uninsurable idiosyncratic wage risk and endogenous human capital accumulation, as well as labour supply decisions along the intensive and extensive margins. In the model, households make a consumption–savings choice and decide on whether or not to participate in the labour market (the extensive margin), how many hours to work conditional on participation (the intensive margin), and thus how much labour market experience to accumulate (which in turn partially determines future earnings capacities). Why would we think that progressivity matters? Why does the degree of tax progressivity matter for the government’s ability to generate labour income tax revenues in an economy characterised by idiosyncratic wage risk and other sources of household heterogeneity? There are several, potentially opposing effects of the degree of tax progressivity on the response of tax revenues to the level of taxes. Keeping hours worked constant, with higher tax progressivity the government collects more tax from high earners and less tax from low earners. However, changes in tax progressivity typically affects hours worked of both groups. First, increasing tax progressivity induces differential income and substitution effects on the workers in different parts of the earnings distribution. In addition, the presence of an extensive margin typically leads to higher labour supply elasticity for individuals with low potential wages that decide whether or not to participate in the labour market. A more progressive tax system with relatively low tax rates around the participation margin, where the labour supply elasticity is high, may in fact help to increase revenue if more of these agents decide to participate in the labour market. Furthermore, in a life cycle model the presence of labour market risk will lead to higher labour supply elasticity for older agents due to a strong precautionary motive for younger agents (see Conesa et al. 2009). Because of more accumulated labour market experience, older agents have higher wages. Due to this effect a more progressive tax system may disproportionately reduce labour supply for high earners and lead to a reduction in tax revenue. Third, when agents undergo a meaningful life cycle, more progressive taxes will reduce the incentives for young agents to accumulate labour market experience and become high (and thus more highly taxed) earners. This effect will reduce tax revenues from agents at all ages as younger households will work less and older agents will have lower wages (in addition to working less). Finally, when human capital accumulation is modelled as years of labour market experience (learning by doing), as we do in our work, the life cycle human capital effect is counteracted by a greater short-term benefit (higher net wages in the short run) from accumulating human capital. Thus the question of how the degree of tax progressivity impacts the tax level–tax revenue relationship (i.e. the Laffer curve) is a complex and quantitative one. What we find We consider two alternative scenarios. According to the first, the government transfers the additional tax revenues as a lump-sum payment back to the households. According to the second, the government increases the stock of outstanding government debt and uses the additional tax revenues to pay the interest. The key difference between these thought experiments is that in the first, the lump-sum rebate induces a negative income effect on labour supply, whereas in the second experiment it doesn’t. The latter experiment also determines the maximally sustainable long run debt level in the economy. Figure 1 plots Laffer curves for the US economy for varying degrees of progressivity under our first, lump-sum rebate scenario. The x-axis displays the average tax rate and total tax revenues (as % of the current US scenario). The green line represents the actual current US progressivity and the vertical line at 17% the current average US tax rate. Holding tax progressivity constant (that is, climbing along the green line), we see that the US is still relatively far from the peak of its Laffer curve – with the current progressivity of the tax system, tax revenues can be increased by about 56% if the average tax rate on labour income is raised from 17% today to about 58%. Figure 1. The impact of tax progressivity on the Laffer curves (holding debt-to-GDP constant) We also see from Figure 1 that the design of the tax system has a considerable impact on the Laffer curve – a key finding of our work. Under a flat tax system (the black line) the maximal revenue that could be raised is about 6% higher than its counterpart under current US progressivity. A tax schedule with current US progressivity in turn can raise 7% more revenue than a tax system that is twice as progressive, similar to the actual tax system in Denmark (which, according to our estimates, has the most progressive tax system among our OECD sample – see Table 1). The left panel of Figure 2 shows the Laffer curves for the US economy under our second scenario, where extra tax revenues are used to service a larger government debt. Comparing Figure 2 to Figure 1 we observe that the peak of the Laffer curve is substantially higher when, instead of redistributing extra revenues to households, the government uses them to service additional government debt. Relative to the first scenario, the absence of a negative income effect on labour supply induces higher output and a larger tax base, despite the debt crowding-out of productive capital. The right panel of Figure 2 plots the maximum sustainable debt (as a fraction of benchmark US GDP) against the average tax rate for varying degrees of progressivity. For its current choice of progressivity (the green line), the US can sustain a debt burden of about 330% of its benchmark GDP, by increasing the average tax rate to about 42%. Thus, according to our findings the US is currently still nowhere close to its maximally sustainable debt levels, perhaps consistent with the fact that the risk premium on US debt in international bond markets is still quite low, although in recent years (after the time periods we use in the calibration) US debt has risen to 120% of GDP. From the right panel of Figure 2 we also observe that larger public debt can be sustained with a less progressive tax system. Converting to a flat tax system (the black line) increases the maximum sustainable debt to more than 350% of benchmark GDP, whereas adopting Danish tax progressivity lowers it to less than 250% of benchmark GDP. Figure 2. Tax revenue and maximum sustainable debt level by tax level and progressivity Summing up Our work argues that the extent of tax progressivity is an important determinant of maximal tax revenues and maximally sustainable debt levels in economies characterised by household heterogeneity. This of course does not imply that progressive income taxation is an undesirable policy choice; it might be called for to provide social insurance or to aid in generating a socially more desirable after-tax income distribution. What our paper has tried to quantify are how the limits to the size of the government (measured alternatively by tax revenues or debt) depend on this choice. References Benabou, R (2002), “Tax and Education Policy in a Heterogeneous Agent Economy: What Levels of Redistribution Maximize Growth and Efficiency?”, Econometrica 70: 481–517. Conesa, J C, S Kitao, and D Krueger (2009), “Taxing Capital? Not a Bad Idea After All!”, American Economic Review 99: 25–48. Holter, H, D Krueger, and S Stepanchuk (2014), “How Does Tax Progressivity and Household Heterogeneity Affect Laffer Curves?”, CEPR Discussion Paper 10259. Keane, M P (2011), “Labor Supply and Taxes: A Survey”, Journal of Economic Literature 49: 961–1045. Trabandt, M and H Uhlig (2011), “The Laffer Curve Revisited”, Journal of Monetary Economics 58: 305–327. |
Singing to females makes male birds' brains happy The melodious singing of birds has been long appreciated by humans, and has often been thought to reflect a particularly positive emotional state of the singer. In a new study published in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE on October 1, researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have demonstrated that this can be true. When male birds sang to attract females, specific "reward" areas of their brain were strongly activated. Such strong brain activation resulted in a similar change in brain reward function to that which is caused by addictive drugs. The brain of humans and other animals is programmed to have a positive emotional response to rewarding stimuli, such as food or sex. A critical part of this reward signal is thought to be provided by increased activity of neurons containing dopamine in the brain ventral tegmental area, VTA. Along with natural rewards, the same brain circuits can also be strongly activated by artificial rewards such as addictive drugs. Previous studies in mammals have found that after animals are given drugs such as cocaine or amphetamine, the strength of synaptic connections onto dopamine neurons in VTA is strongly increased, or potentiated. Such potentiation has been suggested to be an important long-lasting adaptation of brain function caused by drug use, and involved in maintenance of addictive behavior. Whether such potentiation can also be caused by more natural rewards has been less studied. Social interactions with others are critical for normal healthy life, and therefore should be rewarding for humans and also for other animals. In the new study in PLoS ONE, Ya-Chun Huang and Neal Hessler of the Vocal Behavior Mechanisms Lab examined one specific social behavior, courtship singing of songbirds. In the zebra finch, an Australian songbird, males sing in two different situations. Most importantly, males sing "directed song" during courtship of females. When males are alone, they produce "undirected song", possibly for practice or to communicate with birds they can't see. A previous study by this research group showed that only when males sang to attract a female, but not when they sang while alone, many unidentified neurons in the VTA were strongly activated. Huang and Hessler now show, in the current study, that such a natural social interaction, singing to a female, can cause the same kind of synaptic potentiation of VTA dopamine neurons as use of addictive drugs, while singing solo did not affect these neurons. Further study of this system should give insight into how both natural and artificial rewards interact with each other, and specifically how damage to brain reward systems during addiction can disrupt processing of natural rewards such as social interaction. This study also provides the clearest evidence so far that singing to a female is rewarding for male birds. This may not be surprising, as such courtship is a necessary step in producing offspring, and so should be a positive experience. Other studies have provided some evidence that in mammals, including humans, sexual behavior and attachment (as well as rewarding aspects of video games and chocolate) also depend on the same brain reward areas and dopamine. So, despite the distant evolutionary relationship between birds and humans, it may be that during such intense social interactions as courtship, both share some similar emotional state. |
Rooting a mobile device may not be a big deal these days, but not being able to root definitely is. Even the Library of Congress, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and White House can agree on that. Since the release of the Samsung Galaxy S3, the international electronics giant has been seen as a friend to the SoftModder community. One reason why is that they tend to drop their kernel sources and device firmwares before most devices even hit the shelves. Also, they ship their devices with unlocked bootloaders, though, that's before the carriers lock them up again (mainly Verizon and AT&T). So, the question is: Why Did Samsung Lock Their Kernels to Prevent Root? Earlier this week, Android developer AndreiLux wrote about why rooting will be impossible on newer stock kernels. The post caused quite a commotion in the Android development community, but is any of it warranted? AndreiLux pointed out a new feature in the Samsung Galaxy S4 kernel called: CONFIG_SEC_RESTRICT_SETUID This is a new addition to their kernel source code, and it's meant to prevent processes such as malware and exploits from changing a normal user to root user by using SETUID. The reason for this is simple—the vast majority of Samsung's user base will never be concerned about this. For them, security is key, and this closes the door on a major exploit. Exploits?!? GS3 owners will recall the brush up last year related to the Exynos exploit for many models of the device. By making the addition to the kernel source, Samsung closed the loop on the exploit—but at what cost? The new feature does not prevent the device from being rooted, but it does cause a false root. What I mean by that is, while you will be able to root your device like normal, you will not have access to su, or superuser, which is the key component to being able to access root privileges. Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? So Now What? Before you go running back to the store to return your Galaxy S4, remember, manufacturer restrictions only lead to developer workarounds. AndreiLux tells us installing a custom kernel will still allow us to have root access on our Galaxy S4s. For Softmodders, this is fairly straightforward, as many of us install custom kernels with ROM installations anyway. Or better yet, you can run a modified stock kernel. XDA forum member jeboo made a small, 1kb modification to the stock kernel that removes this feature, and you'll find this, or a custom kernel, coming to a ROM near you. The Bottom Line For those of us that are well versed in rooting, ROMs, and kernels, the impact here is minimal. While one door closed, another opened and we still maintain the ability to achieve true root on our devices. The concern of course is security, and by going around this kernel addition, it's a sure bet that our devices will be less secure. Samsung wants its core base to be secure with their devices, and with their push in to government agencies, they need their phones to be locked up tight. TL;DR The latest Exynos kernel update makes your device safer and more secure. With easy workarounds, it does not prevent you from achieving root. |
On her first day teaching at the school, a substitute teacher allegedly performed oral sex on a student while most of the students at the high school were attending a pep rally. Symone Greene, 22, was called to substitute teach at Options Public Charter School in Northeast Washington, D.C. on Friday, according to NBC Washington. A 17-year-old student told police that he gave his number to Greene and they exchanged texts including one in which the student asked if she was "kinky." She allegedly responded, "I don't tell ;) I show," according to court documents obtained by the station. The Washington Post reports that Greene and the student exchanged more text messages and the pair allegedly met in her classroom during the pep rally. The student reportedly secretly filmed Greene performing oral sex on him, and police say they've seen the video. Court documents said the student requested that she perform sex acts as many times as his football jersey number. He later showed the video to some of his fellow football players, the documents said. After the alleged assault, Greene told the student to "chill" because she could get in trouble, documents said. The Post notes that it's unclear how authorities became involved. MyFox DC reports that the police contacted Greene and told her they wanted to discuss an incident at the school. Greene then texted who she thought was the student, unaware that police had obtained his phone. "Please be real with me did u run ur mouth," the teacher allegedly texted. "I'm so scared. I swear imma cry [sic]." |
Support for high DPI monitors has been included in Fedora Workstation for some time now. If you use a monitor with a high enough DPI, Fedora Workstation automatically scales all the elements of the Desktop to a 2:1 ratio, and everything would display crisply and not too small. However, there are a couple of caveats with the current support. The scaling can currently only be either 1:1 or 2:1, there is no way to have fractional ratios. Additionally, the DPI scaling applies to all displays attached to your machine. So if you have a laptop with a high DPI and an external monitor with lower DPI, the scaling can get a little odd. Depending on your setup, one of the displays will render either super-small, or super-large. Both of these limitations have technical reasons; such as how to deal with fractions of pixels when scaling by something other than 2. However, in a recent blogpost, developer Matthias Clasen talks about how the technical issues in the underlying system have been addressed. To introduce mixed-DPI settings, the upstream developers have per-monitor framebuffers, updated the monitor configuration API, and added support for mixed DPIs to the Display Panel. Work is also underway upstream to tackle the fractional scaling issue. For further techincal details, be sure to read the post by Matthias. All this awesome work by the upstream developers means that in a Fedora release in the not to distant future, high DPI support will be much much better. |
The following article was published in the July-August edition of Socialism Today. We are publishing here today because, in light of Trump’s victory, the anti-establishment revolt that shook British society contains many parallels and lessons for the new situation in the U.S. The vote to leave the EU has rocked capitalist institutions – in Britain and internationally. It is yet another reflection of the anger at mass poverty and savage austerity – and of the growing anti-establishment mood. And now the political aftershocks are beginning to reverberate. PETER TAAFFE writes. When faced with a popular revolt the strategists of capital have been heard privately to echo a former California politician: “The people have spoken… the bastards!” Following the EU referendum result we witnessed a public display of fury by the bourgeois ‘commentariat’ which expressed barely contained contempt for those who had dared to defy the powers-that-be and voted ‘Leave’. Polly Toynbee in the ‘liberal’ Guardian vented her rage against the “uneducated” leave voters who massively rejected austerity. Donald Tusk, Polish president of the European Council, declared that the British decision represented “the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also of western political civilization”. (Financial Times) The victory for the leave camp in the referendum has already had massive repercussions for the future of Britain and, particularly, for the labour movement here as well as in Europe. The vote – 52% to 48% – represents at bottom a predominantly working-class revolt against austerity and the Tory millionaire government of David Cameron and George Osborne which has laid waste to living standards and working-class communities. It is totally false to draw the utterly pessimistic conclusions which some small left groups have done that this result could lead to a ‘carnival of reaction’ in Britain and encourage right-wing forces in Europe and elsewhere. No doubt the European right will seek to exploit its outcome. But reports from the Left Bloc conference in Portugal, held immediately after the result, showed that representatives of the workers’ movement in Greece, France and Spain have been given a boost by the British referendum outcome. It is not automatic that reaction – through a figure like Boris Johnson or Michael Gove – can inherit the crown from Cameron and establish a firm base without the challenge of a general election, in which they can be defeated. The day before the referendum, teachers showed defiance of the government’s plans for academies by voting by over 90% for strike action on 5 July. In fact, a mini-strike wave is unfolding in Britain, including on Southern Railways and strikes involving the Bakers Union. Anti-Establishment Many workers who have come into conflict with the government seized hold of the opportunity presented by the referendum to strike a blow against the main enemy – the hated Cameron and Osborne. What it did not represent was a vindication of Johnson. On the contrary, the day after the referendum he was booed outside his house, and not just by the ‘Remain’ side. Also, in the days after the referendum, Socialist Party paper sellers on the streets met many who had voted remain and yet, through discussion, were convinced of our class arguments for leave on a socialist basis. This gave a glimpse of what would have been possible if the labour movement leaders had not lined up behind the austerity commander-in-chief, Cameron, who has now been consigned to the dustbin of history, as we predicted he would be if he lost the referendum. The relationship of forces between the organised working class and its allies and the government can be strengthened in favour of the trade union and labour movement, if it draws bold fighting conclusions from the outcome of the referendum. Without in any way prettifying all the forces involved on the leave side, the results of the referendum represent a major uprising of ordinary working-class people against the ruling elite. It is true that the binary choice of a referendum allows participants to vote on the same side as those who have quite different and opposite class reasons. This can politically skew the outcome, making it difficult to draw clear general conclusions. But not in this case. Traditional Labour areas and regions voted heavily against the government led by the two ‘big butchers’, Cameron and Osborne, with only Northern Ireland, Scotland and London voting for remain. Even where remain won a majority there was an unmistakable working-class determination to show ‘them’ – the Tories and the remain elite – that ‘enough is enough’. On the other hand, an estimated three quarters of young people who voted went for remain, which was a distorted but nevertheless understandable expression of an internationalist approach. They mistakenly saw the EU as a progressive factor – an openness towards Europe and the world. This was cynically exploited by the Tory ‘remainers’ and their supporters. As the Socialist Party consistently pointed out, the EU is a neoliberal construct, a capitalist and imperialist exploiter not just of the European working class but, through its trade deals, a collective oppressor of the masses in the neo-colonial world. There was a steely determination in many working-class areas in particular to turn out and vote leave. This was despite the unprecedented ‘project fear’ and hate campaign, with an array of bourgeois economists lined up predicting that the roof would fall in, there would be a new economic crisis, as well as Armageddon, and a third world war if the ‘people’ did not vote ‘the right way’ – that, is for remain. There was a determination to give the ‘toffs’ a bloody nose – those who do not have to live in the deprivation that the Tories and capitalism have created. There was an unprecedented mass participation in some working-class areas, including on council house estates, with the overall turnout an impressive 72%, higher than in the general election. Playing into the Right’s Hands It is true that the racist UK Independence Party (UKIP) was for leave, as was the Tory capitalist brutalist duo of Johnson and Gove, with an emphasis on scapegoating immigrants. Some workers were no doubt seduced by the anti-immigrant message of these reactionary forces. This was particularly the case because the official leadership of the labour movement, both within the Labour Party and the trade unions, played into their hands by completely abandoning an independent socialist, class and internationalist programme. The Socialist Party adopted such a class approach – both in this referendum and the one in 1975, when Jeremy Corbyn also held a similar anti-EU position. Now, unfortunately, Jeremy was trapped behind enemy lines, hemmed in by the Blairite remain creatures. And they have rewarded him with Hilary Benn and other plotters organising a coup against him. The right of the Labour Party would blame him for everything, no matter what he did, including the weather. They forced him – quite clearly reluctantly – into a remain position. He was damned if he did and would have been even more attacked if he didn’t! We pointed out during the campaign that if he would have come out clearly against the EU on socialist and internationalist lines, demanding a socialist Britain linked to a socialist confederation of Europe, he would have been in a stronger position. The choice then would not have been between two Tory gangs but a new general election in which the whole lot could be thrown out. The relationship of forces that could have developed out of such a campaign would have meant that this would immediately get a favourable response. Many workers rejected the racist programme of division but had legitimate concerns about the heavy pressure in crowded working-class areas on limited resources, school places, housing, etc. There is a real fear of a race to the bottom as even more low-paid, zero-hour jobs are created. The solution to this problem lies not in scaremongering against immigrants but in a programme which demands increased resources, particularly through the building of council homes, as well as a crash building programme for schools, rather than on the divisive academies that are planned. There are 50,000 empty properties in London alongside eleven million in the EU as a whole. Not a whiff of such a programme was heard during the campaign from the right-wing summits of the labour movement who spent their time appearing alongside vicious representatives of the class enemy in either the remain or leave camp. We were treated to the spectacle of the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, appearing with Cameron and ‘taking on’ Johnson in the defence of the capitalist EU. Previously in the mayoral contest he came out for more billionaires for London – it already has 141, the highest number in the world! This allowed Johnson to demagogically denounce the inherent inequality of the EU and to obscenely present himself as a defender of the ‘little man and woman’. The “Social Europe” Myth Tony Blair, accused during the Iraq war of ‘lying as he breathes’, reverted to type when he suddenly began to champion the rights of trade unions. In an article in the Daily Mirror, he had the gall to write “don’t abandon workers’ rights”. Yet he had spent thirteen years in power maintaining intact all of Margaret Thatcher’s anti-union laws! The hapless general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Frances O’Grady, woefully declared that workers would lose £38 a week by 2030 unless they lined up behind the bosses’ EU. It was the EU, not the trade unions as fighting organisations, which was scandalously presented in this way as a progressive vehicle for defending and lifting the living standards of working people. There could not be a greater expression of the complete bankruptcy of what is the leadership of the major workers’ organisation in Britain. The trade unions have found themselves in this baleful position because of their adaptation to the capitalist EU. In 1988, the EU Commissioner Jacques Delors offered to rescue the trade union leaders from the debilitating defeats in that decade – the miners’ strike, Wapping, the collapse of the struggle against council rate-capping – by selling the idea of a ‘social Europe’. This was always a false prospectus. Any legislation ratifying the rights of workers can only be achieved and maintained on the basis of struggle and industrial strength. But the trade union leaders, in gratitude, sang the French song ‘Frère Jacques’ to him for opening up a seemingly painless means of maintaining workers’ rights. From this flowed class collaboration policies like ‘partnership’ which, on the basis of a boom, could result in limited benefits during a period of economic upswing. But when the economic crisis struck – particularly since 2007-08 with its consequent historically extremely feeble growth – this has turned into the opposite: stagnant living standards and attacks on past gains on all fronts. It was quite scandalous that, faced with the recent offensive of Cameron and Osborne against trade union rights, the TUC did not organise effective industrial action. They then compounded this retreat by offering a trade-off to the government. They would campaign to remain in the EU if the government would make some concessions on issues such as the check-off scheme, etc, which the government duly promised to carry out. A Neoliberal Project The arguments of Blair and O’Grady that the EU protects the rights of working people through measures such as the working time directive is completely bogus. Any legislation that is introduced which may favour workers and the trade unions is the result, ultimately, of the power and organisation of the unions and not some innately ‘progressive’ inclination of the employers’ organisations, including the EU. Moreover, during the referendum campaign some of the more brutal and venal employers – like the airlines EasyJet and Ryanair – demonstrated just how they were prepared to consider strike-breaking when it suits their purpose, irrespective of any EU regulations. They proposed to the EU that it coordinates action in the summer to circumvent the effects of any industrial action by French air traffic controllers by allowing German controllers to take over their work. Let us remember that it was Ronald Reagan who initiated the dark era of neoliberalism in the US by firstly taking on and defeating air traffic controllers in 1981. The conditions that were then set became the benchmark for all other employers throughout the US. The fact that such measures can now be proposed for the EU indicates its vicious neoliberal character.It should be sufficient to mention the record of the EU on the issue of privatisation alone, for instance in relation to Greece, to implacably oppose remain on sound trade union principles. The EU has just forced on Greece a mass privatisation programme of 71,000 pieces of property and businesses, including selling off regional airports. A ‘progressive” EU to a Greek worker is in complete contradiction to their experiences at its hands! Millions are being forced back to live on the meagre pension of just one family member. There is no doubt that the struggles of the Greek workers will have been given an enormous boost by the defiance of the British working class in the course of the referendum. A new domino theory is posed for Europe, with the repercussions of the events in Britain reflected in a similar leave pattern in other countries, such as the Netherlands and Sweden, and maybe even Italy. They can follow the path of workers in Britain, not by reinforcing nationalism but by creating real solidarity among the workers of Europe on a trade union and political level, linked to the prospect of socialism. Nation States As we have argued since the inception of the predecessor of the EU – the Common Market – despite all their efforts, capitalism will never be able to carry through the real unification of Europe. Some Marxists challenge this and even invoked during the referendum campaign the writings of Leon Trotsky to justify their support for remain – and the idea that capitalism can actually carry through the historic task of unification and that this would be ‘progressive’. Such a conclusion – allegedly based on Trotsky’s writings – is false to the core. The urge to unify the continent flows from the needs of production and technique in the modern era. The productive forces have outgrown the narrow limits of private ownership by a handful of capitalists, on the one side, and the nation state, on the other. Modern industry – particularly the big monopolies, transnationals, etc – plan not just in terms of the markets of a country but of continents, and the biggest firms in terms of the whole world market. This expresses itself in the tendency towards the elimination of national barriers, limits on production, tariffs, etc, which goes alongside the creation of giant trading blocs like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). This process can be carried very far during a boom, as in the case of the EU. This happened in the ‘noughties’. This allowed some sections of the capitalists and, unfortunately, some Marxists to dream that capitalism could actually overcome national limits and proceed towards a unified European capitalist class. To justify their position, they scoured the works of Trotsky, using the following quote: “If the capitalist states of Europe succeeded in merging into an imperialist trust, this would be a step forward as compared with the existing situation, for it would first of all create a unified, all-European material base for the working-class movement. The proletariat would in this case have to fight not for the return to ‘autonomous’ national states, but for the conversion of the imperialist state trust into a European Republican Federation”. (The Programme of Peace, May 1917) Trotsky was quite clearly dealing here with a hypothetical situation which, moreover, he did not expect to materialise. It is also not a description of the EU, which has not ‘merged’ the nation states of Europe. He goes on to argue in the same article that “the democratic republican unification of Europe, a union really capable of guaranteeing the freedom of national development, is only possible on the road of a revolutionary struggle… by means of uprisings in individual countries, with the subsequent merger of these upheavals into a general European revolution”. Stoked-Up Anger The situation in Britain prior to the referendum and particularly following the results – expressing as it does the stoked-up anger of the working class against the Cameron/Osborne junta – offers a unique opportunity to completely transform the situation in favour of the working class. Even before the referendum the government had been compelled to undertake 20 u-turns or partial u-turns with the wheels threatening to come off the Tory chariot. It remains besieged on every front with the economy heading for another crisis, with the biggest trade deficit since 1948 – notwithstanding recent improvements. Unemployment has risen among young people and the catastrophe of the housing situation in London and other big cities continues unabated. One borough, Waltham Forest, has seen a 25% increase in the cost of houses in one year, while workers on the Butterfields estate face eviction and being sent into ‘internal exile’ to cities hundreds of miles away. This is so that rack-renting owners and landlords can sell off their humble dwellings to the well-off who are pouring in to snap up houses with vastly inflated prices. There is also a brewing revolt on wages which have dropped by 8% since 2007. This, let us remind TUC leader, Frances O’Grady, was when Britain was part of the EU! There is a growing revolt within unions, reflected at a number of their recent conferences. The Welsh TUC, due to the pressure from Socialist Party members, passed a series of motions, including support for council ‘needs budgets’, and were very sympathetic to the idea of the nationalisation of steel. These were passed virtually unanimously, with new and younger layers of workers in particular attending the gathering for the first time. At the GMB general union conference, motions for nationalisation appeared on the agenda for the first time in a long time. At the conference of the public-sector union, Unison, a new rank-and-file left organisation has been formed to spearhead the drive to transform this union from a moribund ‘witch-hunting’ outfit into a fighting, militant Unison able to mobilise the resistance of members. These all betoken a new combative era in Britain. Political Civil Wars At the same time, two “civil wars” – one in the Tory party, the other within Labour – have intensified in the wake of the referendum. As could have been predicted – and was by the Socialist Party – the attempt to mollify the Labour right by Corbyn’s supporters in Momentum and others, by moving to the remain camp during the referendum campaign, has not lessened their opposition to Corbyn but emboldened them. Within hours of the result, Margaret Hodge MP circulated a letter to the Parliamentary Labour Party for a motion of no confidence and a new leadership contest in a campaign with the obvious intention of removing Corbyn. The firing of Hilary Benn and the resignations of other shadow cabinet members followed. Clearly, the Labour Party remains in a halfway-house position – locked in an ongoing civil war between the rotten forces of the Blairites and anti-austerity, potentially increasingly socialist forces gathered around Jeremy Corbyn. But the opportunity had been squandered by the ‘left’ petty-bourgeois forces leading the pro-Corbyn organisation, Momentum. It initially promised an open and democratic regeneration of the labour movement with the centralised bureaucratic structure of Labour Party of the past swept away. However, under the disastrous sway of its current leadership, particularly Jon Lansman, the early promise evaporated as this leadership attempted to mollify the right. This served to embolden them in their determination to remove Corbyn and reinstitute the rule of the Blairites. Distrust of the right led the conference of the PCS civil service union to defeat a motion for affiliation to the Labour Party at this moment in time because the Blairite right still controls the party’s machine, particularly the Parliamentary Labour Party. Indeed, during the referendum campaign, 71 ‘fieldworkers’ were allocated by the Labour Party HQ to work for the defeated remain camp. PCS members were mindful of the fact that affiliation would require them to finance this Labour machine which, through the so-called ‘Compliance Unit’, acts as a right-wing barrier – a filter – to keep out of the Labour Party any working-class fighters who want to return the party to the path of socialism and struggle. If they cannot succeed in this task, the right is once more preparing to split the Labour Party. The referendum indicated this already through the close collaboration between ‘left-wing’ Tories and the Labour right. This unbelievably led to a proposal, which was not carried through, that MPs of both government and opposition sit on both sides of the House of Commons during the special session after the murder of the Labour MP, Jo Cox. During the remain campaign there was already an element of a national coalition – with right-wing Labour cosily collaborating with the ‘left’, ‘liberal’ Tories, as well as the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, the Lib-Dem leader, Tim Farron, concentrated all his initial post-referendum remarks on attacking Jeremy Corbyn for being insufficiently ardent in support of remain. So the civil war within the Labour Party which has existed since Corbyn’s election continues unabated – scarcely a day has gone passed without some attack aimed against him. The ‘blue-on-blue’ attacks – between Tory ‘friends’ – have also left lasting divisions between the Cameron/Osborne wing of the Tory party and the Johnson/Gove outfit. A new Tory leadership contest will widen these divisions and could result in an open separation, leading to some kind of alliance with the right of the Labour Party and also drawing in Liberal Democrats. The referendum was similar to a giant boulder being dropped into a lake with the ripple effect likely to last for months and years. It has already reverberated throughout Europe and could lead, ultimately, to the collapse of the euro and the break-up of the EU. It has posed the question of a new Scottish referendum which could lead to the splintering of the UK. The ramifications are also serious for Ireland, particularly for Northern Ireland, where a new ‘border poll’ has been demanded by Sinn Féin, which could ratchet up sectarianism in turn. However, in all the developments which will flow from the referendum, the labour movement must draw clear socialist conclusions and act accordingly by fighting on an independent working-class programme. The immediate demand is to fight for a democratically convened emergency labour movement conference, open to all pro-Corbyn left forces. The aim of such a conference should be to defend Jeremy Corbyn by defeating the attempted coup of the PLP plotters – by adopting clear socialist policies and democratic structures including a federal form of organisation. The EU referendum was an earthquake for the ruling class and their shadows in the labour movement, and the aftershocks will continue for some time. At the same time, it is a big opportunity to reconstruct the labour movement on democratic and socialist lines. |
I'm grateful to Matt Ridley for allowing me to post the text of his Angus Millar lecture at the RSA in Edinburgh. [Update: I have prepared a PDF version of the talk, which has the important slides as well.] It is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture. I have no idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley* the Oxford martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy. My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience? Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones. Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience. Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience. Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience. Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience. Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience. Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience. Are you with me so far? A few more examples. That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, 911 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal. Sorry to say that on Halloween, but that’s my opinion. Three more controversial ones. In my view, most of what Freud said was pseudoscience. So is quite a lot, though not all, of the argument for organic farming. So, in a sense by definition, is religious faith. It explicitly claims that there are truths that can be found by other means than observation and experiment. Now comes one that gave me an epiphany. Crop circles*. It was blindingly obvious to me that crop circles were likely to be man-made when I first starting investigating this phenomenon. I made some myself to prove it was easy to do*. This was long before Doug Bower and Dave Chorley fessed up to having started the whole craze after a night at the pub. Every other explanation – ley lines, alien spacecraft, plasma vortices, ball lightning – was balderdash. The entire field of “cereology” was pseudoscience, as the slightest brush with its bizarre practitioners easily demonstrated. Imagine my surprise then when I found I was the heretic and that serious journalists working not for tabloids but for Science Magazine, and for a Channel 4 documentary team, swallowed the argument of the cereologists that it was highly implausible that crop circles were all man-made. So I learnt lesson number 1: the stunning gullibility of the media. Put an “ology” after your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your propagandists. A Channel 4 team did the obvious thing – they got a group of students to make some crop circles and then asked the cereologist if they were “genuine” or “hoaxed” – ie, man made. He assured them they could not have been made by people. So they told him they had been made the night before. The man was poleaxed. It made great television. Yet the producer, who later became a government minister under Tony Blair, ended the segment of the programme by taking the cereologist’s side: “of course, not all crop circles are hoaxes”. What? The same happened when Doug and Dave owned up*; everybody just went on believing. They still do. Lesson number 2: debunking is like water off a duck’s back to pseudoscience. In medicine, I began to realize, the distinction between science and pseudoscience is not always easy. This is beautifully illustrated in an extraordinary novel by Rebecca Abrams, called Touching Distance*, based on the real story of an eighteenth century medical heretic, Alec Gordon of Aberdeen. Gordon was a true pioneer of the idea that childbed fever was spread by medical folk like himself and that hygiene was the solution to it. He hit upon this discovery long before Semelweiss and Lister. But he was ignored. Yet Abrams’s novel does not paint him purely as a rational hero, but as a flawed human being, a neglectful husband and a crank with some odd ideas – such as a dangerous obsession with bleeding his sick patients. He was a pseudoscientist one minute and scientist the next. Lesson number 3. We can all be both. Newton was an alchemist. Like antisepsis, many scientific truths began as heresies and fought long battles for acceptance against entrenched establishment wisdom that now appears irrational: continental drift, for example. Barry Marshall* was not just ignored but vilified when he first argued that stomach ulcers are caused by a particular bacterium. Antacid drugs were very profitable for the drug industry. Eventually he won the Nobel prize. Just this month Daniel Shechtman* won the Nobel prize for quasi crystals, having spent much of his career being vilified and exiled as a crank. “I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying.” That’s lesson number 4: the heretic is sometimes right. What sustains pseudoscience is confirmation bias. We look for and welcome the evidence that fits our pet theory; we ignore or question the evidence that contradicts it. We all do this all the time. It’s not, as we often assume, something that only our opponents indulge in. I do it, you do it, it takes a superhuman effort not to do it. That is what keeps myths alive, sustains conspiracy theories and keeps whole populations in thrall to strange superstitions. Bertrand Russell* pointed this out many years ago: “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.” Lesson no 5: keep a sharp eye out for confirmation bias in yourself and others. There have been some very good books on this recently. Michael Shermer’s “The Believing Brain”, Dan Gardner’s “Future Babble” and Tim Harford’s “Adapt”* are explorations of the power of confirmation bias. And what I find most unsettling of all is Gardner’s conclusion that knowledge is no defence against it; indeed, the more you know, the more you fall for confirmation bias. Expertise gives you the tools to seek out the confirmations you need to buttress your beliefs. Experts are worse at forecasting the future than non-experts. Philip Tetlock did the definitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts – political scientists, economists and journalists – and harvested 27,450 different specific judgments from them about the future then waited to see if they came true. The results were terrible. The experts were no better than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee”. Here’s what the Club of Rome said on the rear cover of the massive best-seller Limits to Growth in 1972*: “Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts.” "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts", said Richard Feynman. Lesson 6. Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future. Experts are worth listening to about the past, but not the future. Futurology is pseudoscience. Using these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change. Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists “believe” in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word “believe” about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing. So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed. I also think the climate debate is a massive distraction from much more urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overfishing. I was not always such a “lukewarmer”. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick*. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine. Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion*. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times. This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before. For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally. It was warmer in the Middle ages* and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster. Stalagmites*, tree lines and ice cores all confirm that it was significantly warmer 7000 years ago. Evidence from Greenland suggests that the Arctic ocean was probably ice free for part of the late summer at that time. Sea level* is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating. Greenland is losing ice at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6% per century. There has been no significant warming in Antarctica*, with the exception of the peninsula. Methane* has largely stopped increasing. Tropical storm* intensity and frequency have gone down, not up, in the last 20 years. Your probability* of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally than it was in the 1920s. Malaria* has retreated not expanded as the world has warmed. And so on. I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm. No doubt, there will be plenty of people thinking “what about x?” Well, if you have an X that persuades you that rapid and dangerous climate change is on the way, tell me about it. When I asked a senior government scientist this question, he replied with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. That is to say, a poorly understood hot episode, 55 million years ago, of uncertain duration, uncertain magnitude and uncertain cause. Meanwhile, I see confirmation bias everywhere in the climate debate. Hurricane Katrina, Mount Kilimanjaro, the extinction of golden toads – all cited wrongly as evidence of climate change. A snowy December, the BBC lectures us, is “just weather”; a flood in Pakistan or a drought in Texas is “the sort of weather we can expect more of”. A theory so flexible it can rationalize any outcome is a pseudoscientific theory. To see confirmation bias in action, you only have to read the climategate emails, documents that have undermined my faith in this country’s scientific institutions. It is bad enough that the emails unambiguously showed scientists plotting to cherry-pick data, subvert peer review, bully editors and evade freedom of information requests. What’s worse, to a science groupie like me, is that so much of the rest of the scientific community seemed OK with that. They essentially shrugged their shoulders and said, yeh, big deal, boys will be boys. Nor is there even any theoretical support for a dangerous future. The central issue is “sensitivity”: the amount of warming that you can expect from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels. On this, there is something close to consensus – at first. It is 1.2 degrees centigrade. Here’s* how the IPCC put it in its latest report. “In the idealised situation that the climate response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feedbacks operating…the global warming from GCMs would be around 1.2°C.” Paragraph 8.6.2.3. Now the paragraph goes on to argue that large, net positive feedbacks, mostly from water vapour, are likely to amplify this. But whereas there is good consensus about the 1.2 C, there is absolutely no consensus about the net positive feedback, as the IPCC also admits. Water vapour forms clouds and whether clouds in practice amplify or dampen any greenhouse warming remains in doubt. So to say there is a consensus about some global warming is true; to say there is a consensus about dangerous global warming is false. The sensitivity of the climate could be a harmless 1.2C, half of which has already been experienced, or it could be less if feedbacks are negative or it could be more if feedbacks are positive. What does the empirical evidence say? Since 1960 we have had roughly one-third of a doubling, so we must have had almost half of the greenhouse warming expected from a doubling – that’s elementary arithmetic, given that the curve is agreed to be logarithmic. Yet if you believe the surface thermometers* (the red and green lines), we have had about 0.6C of warming in that time, at the rate of less than 0.13C per decade – somewhat less if you believe the satellite thermometers (the blue and purple lines). So we are on track for 1.2C*. We are on the blue line, not the red line*. Remember Jim Hansen of NASA told us in 1988 to expect 2-4 degrees in 25 years. We are experiencing about one-tenth of that. We are below even the zero-emission path expected by the IPCC in 1990*. Ah, says the consensus, sulphur pollution has reduced the warming, delaying the impact, or the ocean has absorbed the extra heat. Neither of these post-hoc rationalisations fit the data: the southern hemisphere has warmed about half as fast as the northern* in the last 30 years, yet the majority of the sulphur emissions were in the northern hemisphere. And ocean heat content has decelerated, if not flattened, in the past decade*. By contrast, many heretical arguments seem to me to be paragons of science as it should be done: transparent, questioning and testable. For instance, earlier this year, a tenacious British mathematician named Nic Lewis started looking into the question of sensitivity and found* that the only wholly empirical estimate of sensitivity cited by the IPCC had been put through an illegitimate statistical procedure which effectively fattened its tail on the upward end – it hugely increased the apparent probability of high warming at the expense of low warming. When this is corrected, the theoretical probability of warming greater than 2.3C is very low indeed. Like all the other errors in the IPCC report, including the infamous suggestion that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 rather than 2350, this mistake exaggerates the potential warming. It is beyond coincidence that all these errors should be in the same direction. The source for the Himalayan glacier mistake was a non-peer reviewed WWF report and it occurred in a chapter, two of whose coordinating lead authors and a review editor were on WWF’s climate witness scientific advisory panel. Remember too that the glacier error was pointed out by reviewers, who were ignored, and that Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, dismissed the objectors as practitioners of “voodoo science”. Journalists are fond of saying that the IPCC report is based solely on the peer-reviewed literature. Rajendra Pachauri himself made that claim in 2008, saying*: “we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don't settle for anything less than that.” That’s a voodoo claim. The glacier claim was not peer reviewed; nor was the alteration to the sensitivity function Lewis spotted. The journalist Donna Laframboise got volunteers all over the world to help her count the times the IPCC used non-peer reviewed literature. Her conclusion is that*: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 - a full 30% - to be non peer-reviewed.” Yet even to say things like this is to commit heresy. To stand up and say, within a university or within the BBC, that you do not think global warming is dangerous gets you the sort of reaction that standing up in the Vatican and saying you don’t think God is good would get. Believe me, I have tried it. Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what? After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too. Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels. At least* sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture. At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish. At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary. At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005. At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel*. That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed. Handing the reins of power to pseudoscience has an unhappy history. Remember eugenics. Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency. “There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact,” said George Bernard Shaw*, “that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’’ By the skin of its teeth, mainly because of a brave Liberal MP called Josiah Wedgwood, Britain never handed legal power to the eugenics movement. Germany did. Or remember Trofim Lysenko*, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison. Am I going too far in making these comparisons? I don’t think so. James Hansen of NASA says oil firm executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Remember this is the man who is in charge of one of the supposedly impartial data sets about global temperatures.) John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said this year that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerant of pseudoscience", in which he included all forms of climate-change scepticism. The irony of course is that much of the green movement began as heretical dissent. Greenpeace went from demanding that the orthodox view of genetically modified crops be challenged, and that the Royal Society was not to be trusted, to demanding that heresy on climate change be ignored and the Royal Society could not be wrong. Talking of Greenpeace, did you know that the collective annual budget of Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth was more than a billion dollars globally last year? People sometimes ask me what’s the incentive for scientists to exaggerate climate change. But look at the sums of money available to those who do so, from the pressure groups, from governments and from big companies. It was not the sceptics who hired an ex News of the World deputy editor as a spin doctor after climategate, it was the University of East Anglia. By contrast scientists and most mainstream journalists risk their careers if they take a skeptical line, so dogmatic is the consensus view. It is left to the blogosphere to keep the flame of heresy alive and do the investigative reporting the media has forgotten how to do. In America*, Anthony Watts who crowd-sourced the errors in the siting of thermometers and runs wattsupwiththat.com; In Canada*, Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who bit by bit exposed the shocking story of the hockey stick and runs climateaudit.org. Here in Britain,* Andrew Montford, who dissected the shenanigans behind the climategate whitewash enquiries and runs bishop-hill.net. In Australia*, Joanne Nova, the former television science presenter who has pieced together the enormous sums of money that go to support vested interests in alarm, and runs joannenova.com.au. The remarkable thing about the heretics I have mentioned is that every single one is doing this in his or her spare time. They work for themselves, they earn a pittance from this work. There is no great fossil-fuel slush fund for sceptics. In conclusion, I’ve spent a lot of time on climate, but it could have been dietary fat, or nature and nurture. My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake. It needs heretics. Thank you very much for listening. |
Last night, Shaker High School graduate Jeff Hoffman made his second professional start for the Dunedin Blue Jays. The 2014 No. 9 overall draft pick took the loss on Tuesday night, throwing 4.1 innings, surrendering 10 hits and four earned runs. He had one walk and struck out four. Blue Jays broadcaster Marshall Kelner joined us today to talk about Hoffman's second start. He says the start was much better than the end numbers indicated. "Of the 10 hits he allowed, only three or four at most were hit hard. And that's being kind," he said. Furthermore, Kelner said that Hoffman's velocity was still in the 98-99 MPH range and that he did a better job keeping the ball down in the zone. Also, Hoffman is featuring a good variety of secondary pitches which is essential to his development. "The curveball is clearly going to be his out pitch," he said. While Kelner could not shed any light on the timetable for Hoffman's progression through the minor leagues, he did say that Hoffman's stuff is among the best that they have seen in the Florida State League. |
Cyber-weapon Flame, "most complex malware ever," identified by Kaspersky Lab The Moscow-based security firm credited with solving various mysteries around Stuxnet and Duqu today announced the discovery of Flame, a data-stealing virus said to have lurked on thousands of computers in the Mideast for as long as 5 years. A Kaspersky Lab spokesperson described it in a Reuters interview as "the most complex piece of malicious software discovered to date." Adds Bruce Sterling, "Given that this has been out in the wild for a couple of years now, what’s five times bigger than 'Flame' and even less understood?" Writing today at Wired News, Kim Zetter reports that Flame is believed to be "part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation." Kaspersky has a FAQ about Flame, here. (Image: Kaspersky Labs) |
For those of us who grew up in fundamentalist or authoritarian religions, the word “morality” can be like a red flag in front of a bull. Words like “morals” and “morality” can sometimes evoke powerful childhood images and feelings of a wrathful god making arbitrary rules and punishing the wrongdoer—forever! The words may also evoke painful memories of parents who said, “Do what I say, not what I do!” As we begin to think for ourselves and question authority, we can see all around us the truth of Mark Twain’s observation: “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.” But just maybe we need to be careful not to throw out the “baby” of morality with the dirty “bath water” of benighted, punitive religiosity and moralism. As Theravada teacher Thanissaro Bhikkhu notes in an article: “The [Buddha’s] Awakening also tells us that good and bad are not mere social conventions, but are built into the mechanics of how the world is constructed. We may be free to design our lives, but we are not free to change the underlying rules that determine what good and bad actions are, and how the process of kamma works itself out. Thus cultural relativism — even though it may have paved the way for many of us to leave our earlier religious orientations and enter the Buddhist fold — has no place once we are within that fold. There are certain ways of acting that are inherently unskillful, and we are fools if we insist on our right to behave in those ways.” Challenging words, but the “fools” refers to this teaching of the Buddha: Monks, these two are fools. Which two? The one who doesn’t see his transgression as a transgression, and the one who doesn’t rightfully pardon another who has confessed his transgression. These two are fools. “These two are wise people. Which two? The one who sees his transgression as a transgression, and the one who rightfully pardons another who has confessed his transgression. These two are wise people.” — AN 2:21 In Buddhism, morality is better understood as awakened virtue—something that is universally true, yes, but which appears in our individual hearts as we wake up to what works and what doesn’t work in terms of happiness. The Buddhist term for this awakened virtue is sīla, and it is an essential part of the spiritual path. Numerous places in the Pali canon the Buddha indicates that without sīla, one can’t develop deep concentration and discernment. In traditional Buddhism, meditation is not even taught until the moral precepts and virtues are explained and understood by students. Is this “moralism” on the part of “old school” Buddhist teachers? No! Actually, it’s the Buddha’s first important teaching on karma—that our actions, skillful or unskillful, filled with grasping and selfishness or not, largely determine our happiness. Sīla is the compassionate and wise outcome of understanding the importance of karma, of how we act and don’t act, in the spiritual path. Every genuine spiritual path teaches the importance of moral actions and thus that some actions promote happiness and good relations with others, and that other actions don’t. As the great Thai Forest teacher Ajahn Chah says in his characteristically simple and down-to-earth way: “It is only natural that when we put on dirty clothes and our bodies are dirty, that our minds too will feel uncomfortable and depressed. However, if we keep our bodies clean and wear clean, neat clothes, it makes our minds light and cheerful. So too, when morality is not kept, our bodily actions and speech are dirty, and this is a cause for making the mind unhappy, distressed and heavy. We are separated from right practice and this prevents us from penetrating in the essence of the Dhamma in our minds. The wholesome bodily actions and speech themselves depend on mind, properly trained, since mind orders body and speech. Therefore, we must continue practice by training our minds.” However, there are those who argue that morality is an “illusion” because they’ve adopted the mental stance that everything, finally, is an illusion. Because of its inseparability from karma, the Buddha never taught that morality is an illusion. But this is a classic error often made by theoretical non-dualists—an error, by the way, that all the great non-dual teachers avoid. Calling morality an “illusion,” one fails to see that as we grow spiritually we transcend and include what might look like, from the outside, conventional morality. A “moral” person may have little spirituality, but a truly spiritually-minded person will almost always act morally? Why? Because to see what is moral—to see what has virtue—is to see what causes suffering and what doesn’t cause suffering. It is to discern what burdens the mind and what frees the mind. If we have gained any degree of awakening, it’s been through working with karma—understanding the cause and effect of our actions So developing sīla can’t be skipped over on our way to nirvana! Western students, seeking to avoid the hypocrisy and moralism of conventional religiosity, often want a “morality free” spiritual path. But if you look deeply into karma, you’ll see there is no such thing. The sīla taught by the Buddha is an indispensable skill that one needs to unbind from those very things that obscure and defile the mind and heart. As the Buddha taught: “This is the way leading to discernment: when visiting a brahman or contemplative, to ask: ‘What is skillful, venerable sir? What is unskillful? What is blameworthy? What is blameless? What should be cultivated? What should not be cultivated? What, having been done by me, will be for my long-term harm & suffering? Or what, having been done by me, will be for my long-term welfare & happiness?’” — MN 135 The Buddha did teach moral precepts—not as a Buddist “ten commandments” but as skillful means to liberation. That’s why all schools of Buddhism teach that deep concentration and insight are impossible without developing sīla and living by life-tested moral precepts. We may not like moral precepts if we are not living in accord with them, but we are always free moral agents to see for ourselves, in our own lives, what works and doesn’t work. However, if we believe and act as if morality is an illusion, then we are a danger to ourselves and to others. Why? Let’s take a simple example. How about honesty? If honesty is an illusion, then what difference would it make if we were dishonest with ourselves and others? If dishonesty is an illusion “because everything is an illusion,” then dishonesty would have no karma. We would never reap the consequences of being dishonest with ourselves or others. If morality is an illusion, why not live as you want, without regard to any moral precepts, since it’s all “just an illusion” anyway? Well, how does being dishonest with ourselves and others work out in life practice? When we face temptation to do something harmful, (and yes, we all eventually learn that some actions are harmful!) are we helped in our aspiration for a happy life to believe that right and wrong are illusions, so we can behave any way we want? Do you like to be around a person who you can’t trust and is always lying and deceiving? Do you like to be around a person who sees you as an object to be used and consumed by him or her? How does that feel? When a friend betrays your trust, does it heal your heart to argue, intellectually, that the person did nothing wrong to you, because, “after all, morality is just an illusion?” When a parent or relative has emotionally or sexually abused you, do you want to hear that “there is no right or wrong” and that the abuse was “just an illusion?” That’s certainly great news for all those priests who sexually abused thousands of children! Clearly, the belief that morality is an illusion is the path to moral idiocy, the inability to discern right from wrong. In all the great spiritual traditions, the path to freedom from harm is being able to say to yourself, “I can see that what those actions are wrong!” And then doing the often very hard work of facing up to the consequences of wrong doing and sorting all the damage that was done by the wrong actions of ourselves or others. Until a person has begun to glimpse there is indeed good and evil, right and wrong, skillful actions and unskillful actions, a person only has the karma of suffering to teach him or her. And suffering can be a very powerful teacher! But isn’t it amazing how long we can continue to act in harmful ways and fail to see cause and effect at work? The Buddha taught a Noble Eightfold Path that included sīla—ethical conduct that awakens and develops virtue. The Buddha definitely maps out what thoughts and actions are skillful and what aren’t. He made clear what develops awakened virtue and what doesn’t. If we are interested in the Buddha’s path, it is our job to test this map in our own lives and see for ourselves what thoughts and actions lead to the end of suffering and what thoughts and actions bring lasting happiness. In a way, the Buddhist path is very simple. It can be summed up in one verse that embodies the three stages on the noble, happy path that leads to total freedom: To refrain from all evil, To do what is good, To purify the mind, This is the teaching of the Buddhas. Ajahn U Silananda ♥♥♥ |
When franchises are turned over the company's head office receives a sign-on fee from the new franchisee. It is not known if it also charges cancellation fees. The 7-Eleven convenience store at 354 Flushcombe Road, Prospect, is subject to a civil prosecution case. Credit:Wolter Peeters As part the process 7-Eleven raked in $9.56 million from changing over old franchisees with new franchisees during the last financial year which was ahead of the budgeted $8.5 million figure. That meant 7-Eleven Australia made an average of $140,514 for each of the store changeovers over the past year. According to the documents the convenience store chain had set an internal target 79 "changeovers" for the year across its network of 620 stores. There are currently 78 franchises up for sale. "Churning" is a common term in the franchise industry which refers to a practice where head office either terminates the franchisee agreement or allows a franchisee to terminate an agreement because they want to leave the network. A Fairfax Media/Four Corners investigation has uncovered massive underpayments to 7-Eleven employees. Credit:Arsineh Houspian A spokeswoman for 7-Eleven declined to address the issue of churn when asked about the volume of changeovers at the company's stores. "In the last financial year, 7-Eleven had 11 per cent of our total store network changeover. On average 7-Eleven franchisees remain with the company for just over 7 years, which is a long period for operators of a 24/7 business, thus we regard as a reflection on the strength and attractiveness of our model," the spokeswoman said. The store is then sold to a new franchisee and 7-Eleven head office collects a further franchising fee. In the wake of the wage scam scandal and criticism of the franchise model, 7-Eleven agreed to repay franchisee fees to any franchisee wanting to leave the network. It also agreed to almost triple the financial support offered to franchisees from $120,000 to $310,000. The US arm of the company, 7-Eleven Inc, has recently faced accusations of deliberately "churning" franchisees in order to reap more fees. Last year 1200 former 7-Eleven franchisees launched legal action against 7-Eleven Inc, alleging they had lost their franchises unfairly and were victims of the company's churn policy. 7-Eleven Inc has not responded to inquiries regarding legal action against the company. 7-Eleven has been rocked by revelations the company's head office in Australia has been complicit in a major cover-up of exploitation of workers at the chain's stores. A joint media investigation by Four Corners and BusinessDay revealed 69 per cent of stores reviewed in a four week period between July and August this year were not paying staff properly. The investigation also uncovered evidence of the financial plight of over a third of 7-Eleven's stores in Australia, forcing the company to extend income support to any stores that earn $310,000 or less a year in gross income – or a third of the company's entire network of stores. 7-Eleven has also begun a company-funded investigation into the widespread exploitation of thousands of workers across the convenience store giant's franchise network. The investigation will be led by former ACCC chairman Allan Fels, who has strongly criticised 7-Eleven's franchise model as encouraging wage fraud. A class action against 7-Eleven Australia and its US parent 7-Eleven Inc is being prepared by Levitt Robinson Solicitors. The internal documents on changeovers do not detail the reason why the franchisees left the business, though two of the four franchisees who have been subject to legal or regulatory action by Fair Work over the past seven years still operate 7-Eleven stores. The other two store owners who have been subject to Fair Work action have left the network. Levitt Robinson Solicitors principal Stewart Levitt said the store management agreement franchisees sign gave little protection to franchisees being "churned" by head office. "They're holding them [franchisees] essentially in a vice for the period of their tenure and therefore they are in a position to effectively dictate terms," Mr Levitt said. Do you know more? Email Adele Ferguson at aferguson@fairfaxmedia.com.au or Sarah Danckert at sarah.danckert@fairfaxmedia.com.au. |
STEVENS COUNTY, Wash. - Volunteers have been working around the clock to save dozens of dogs from the apparently 'deplorable conditions' they were found in. We first learned of this story late Wednesday night as three different agencies were working to save these dogs in south Stevens County. It's pretty remarkable what these dogs have been through. The Clayton Fairgrounds is donating their resources to house these dogs while heart and rescue for all figure out permanent situations. Wednesday night was the first night most of these dogs have spent inside in years. "When we first drove up, you're going up a hill and there is a couple dogs, and then you see more dogs, and you see dogs chained to trees,” said Jamie McAtee, from Rescue4All, a local non-profit organization that rescues and fosters animals in the Spokane area. "They lived out their whole lives like that. There was a mom and two five-week-old puppies that were in an enclosure with a blue tarp over it. When I stepped in, it was literally the most deplorable conditions you could possibly imagine. You step down and your whole shoe just ends up to mid shoe in feces,” said McAtee. Over the last day and a half, Rescue4All has been working with Spokane's Humane Evacuation Animal Rescue Team, or HEART, to get these roughly 40 dogs to safety. It's turned out to be a tremendous task they wouldn't be able to execute without help from the Stevens County Sheriff's Office. Deputy Jessica Garza, with the Stevens County Sheriff's Office was a part of the rescue team. "We had received calls, and we had two deputies respond two nights ago. When they realized what the situation entailed, they contacted me as I've done some rescues of smaller dogs before,” she said. “We went back to the property last night. The owners were cooperative and wanted the best for the dogs. They assisted us in getting as many as we could get loaded up before we lost daylight." The owners will likely face no charges, because it was clear they had provided food and water for the dogs, despite the reportedly horrendous living conditions. Under Stevens County law, anyone can have up to 25 breeding pairs, totalling 50 dogs, and puppies under 6 months do not count. "Without the owners working with us in this situation, our hands would've been tied. There was no criminal infractions, there was no violations of [WA state law]. They did have food,” said Garza. While no laws were technically violated, Stevens County severely lacks the resources to handle so many displaced dogs. So they're turning to the public for help. Garza said they need a wide array of supplies. "Lightweight blankets, towels, rags, cleaning supplies, people to doante food, dog food. We're not picky at this point, anything is better than what they were eating. We also need people that have knowledge of other organizations that we can get these dogs into that are reputable organizations, because this is too much for us to take on.” The dogs need to be triaged before Rescue4All is comfortable putting them up for adoption. So while eager parents might have to wait a week or two, these dogs desperately need time, money and attention. If you'd like to help, visit the Rescue4All website, here. |
Thirty people were killed when 41 tornadoes swept the South on April 27, 28, and 29, according to a new map by the National Weather Service. The color-coded map shows the paths of tornadoes over three days, and the numerical death count attached to specific tornadoes where people died. The death of University of Alabama swimmer John Servati is not in the count. Despite headlines across the country -- such as the Washington Post's "Alabama swimmer John Cervati killed by tornado" -- the weather service, upon preliminary investigation, does not consider Servati a tornado victim. "If you look at the location where the fatality occurred, it was nowhere near the tornado track," said John DeBlock, warning coordination meteorologist with the NWS in Birmingham. By accounts, Servati, 21, was killed when a retaining wall in the basement of his 22nd Avenue residence collapsed on him, perhaps due to high waters. The preliminary finding that a tornado didn't kill Servati is "based on the location of the relative track of the storm," DeBlock said. Semantics? There was a tornado. There were heavy rains. All part of a big storm wreaking havoc. Maybe so. But DeBlock says the weather service is looking at it through a statistical lens. "We don't want to put blame where it wasn't," DeBlock said. "As scientists we are interested in tracking these numbers for research." Certainly Servati's fatality could be called a "storm-related" death, said Brian Corbett, spokesman of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency. The agency has three tornado deaths in Alabama -- and that would include Servati's. It's not really an official designation or list -- it's just what is reported by the counties, he said. The two other deaths were in Limestone County in northern Alabama, an area of the Tennessee Valley where two others died over the Alabama border in Tennessee. DeBlock said the labeling of Servati's death is probably of little concern for the family. "Their child perished, it's a horrible situation regardless," he said. |
All you're thinking about today is food inflation, so we thought this point from Citi was good: The U.S. is a net exporter of food. But farm income benefits just a very small share of the population directly, and this income doesn't play a very large factor in assessing relative impact on U.S. consumers (all of whom eat). But food is a relatively low share of the U.S. consumer price basket, reflecting high developed world income levels, Importantly, food prices are also unusually stable in the U.S. For better or worse, this reflects the very high processing content of food. With it, production and marketing margins absorb most of the variation in raw food commodity prices that could erode consumer incomes. (We tally just 3.5% of the U.S. as direct, unprocessed food commodities). As such, there have been virtually no reports of "food price shocks" in the U.S., but several oil shocks in modern times. This chart comparing foodstuffs (commodities) with the actual CPI end food number is pretty remarkable for the large gap that has emerged. Someone is eating the costs, but it's not the end consumer, who, when they buy food, are paying for A LOT more than just input costs. citi So next time you moan about America's process-food diet, take a moment and realize how much this insulates us. Of course, what this means for our healthcare bill is another story... |
Rafael Nadal was forced to retire against Damir Dzumhur on a hot and muggy Saturday at the Miami Open presented by Itau. Dzumhur, No. 94 in the Emirates ATP Rankings, was up 2-6, 6-4, 3-0 in the second-round match when the Spaniard was unable to continue. Dzumhur had never beaten a Top-10 player in five previous attempts. “Everything was fine until the end of the first set,” Nadal said. “Then I started to feel dizzy, not very good. It was getting worse and worse. Finally, in the second set, I realised that I could not keep playing. “I wanted to finish the match, but I seriously could not. It was tough, because I felt I was playing well. I had good practices after a great week in Indian Wells. I stopped because I was concerned for my health, and I could not finish the match the way I was feeling.” Despite its final outcome, the match did not start auspiciously for Dzumhur. The Bosnian faced 12 break points in losing the one-sided opening set, and was the first to request the trainer. The 23 year old was visibly affected by Miami’s heat and humidity, but soldiered on after receiving assistance during the changeover. Nadal was unable to capitalise on Dzumhur’s discomfort. After breezing through his service games in the opening set, the left-hander won only 50 per cent of first-serve points the rest of the way (11/22) and was broken four times in as many opportunities in the last two sets. An ailing Nadal called for the trainer twice before retiring after an hour and 50 minutes. The Spaniard, a four-time finalist in Miami, will have to wait another year to capture the elusive title. “It’s definitely not the way I wanted to finish,” Dzumhur said. “It was really tough to play today. I also felt tired, heavy, and in some moments dizzy on the court. In the first set we played a very long second game. After that game I felt I could not run that well. “Between the first and second sets, I calle a medical time-out. I was really thinking about retirement, but just said to myself, ‘I'm playing Rafa. I don’t have a chance to play these guys every day. I want to enjoy this moment.’ So I tried to continue." In the third round, Dzumhur will face Mikhail Kukushkin, who advanced when Thomaz Bellucci retired at 7-5, 3-6. The Kazakh, No. 90 in the Emirates ATP Rankings, is into the third round in Miami for the first time. His previous third-round appearance in an ATP World Tour Masters 1000 event dates back to Indian Wells 2014 (l. to Lopez). |
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