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Weight Loss in Men versus Weight Loss in Women – The Facts
The fact is men easily lose weight more than women do which is the saddest part. There are several reasons beyond this but the bottom line is if both man and woman lie back on the field and stare at the sky for one hour, the man burns more calories than what the woman do. This statement given, there are notable differences between weight loss in men and weight loss in women.Weight Loss in Men versus Weight Loss in Women
Fact #1: Metabolism is Faster in Men than in Women
During the resting period, men burn more calories than women do since they are bigger. The resting metabolic rate (RMR) for women is about 10 calories per pound while in men their RMR is 11 calories per pound. RMR is the amount of calories you use up when you are completely at rest just for your bodily functions in order to work properly. If your body is big, the more calories it burns. Take for example a man weighing 180 pounds would burn 1,980 calories if he just lies and stares at the sky all day while a woman weighing 140 pounds doing the same thing will only burn 1,400 calories.
Fact #2: Fat Stores are More in Women than in Men
In order to lose weight averaging to one pound a week, a person must reduce his caloric intake of 500 calories a day or must burn another 500 calories a day or rather create the deficit through cutting back on calories or performing calorie burning activity. This pound should come from body fat. The mere fact that women carry more body fat than men do is because the woman’s body is designated for pregnancy and breastfeeding and this body fat is essential for both of these biological processes. One pound of fat deducted from a woman’s body would still leave more fat behind the same pound which comes from a man of the same height and weight.
Fact #3: Lifestyle is Crucial to Weight Loss in Both Genders
Lifestyle has something to do with the differences between men and women as they lose weight. Naturally, women burn fewer calories than the amount of calories men usually burn in a day merely because of metabolism and according to Weight Watchers, women are not as active as men. Men usually burn 37 % more calories just by moving compare to how much women burn in an average 24 hour period. The reason is men tend to engage in skilled and manual work which women do not and men are inclined to throw a football together with their friends on Sunday afternoon.
Fact #4: There are Recommendations for Women
Because women have a hard time of losing weight, they must set a goal to lose weight and try to do as efficiently as men do. Since it takes longer for women to lose weight, choosing a diet is very important and you must do something that you can sustain for some time. Doing a crash diet can probably help you take off weight quickly but the pounds are not likely to stay off. Make your goal to create a deficit of about 500 calories per day and do it constantly to trim off one pound a week through combination of eating healthy and exercising 30 minutes a day.
Weight loss in men and in women is affected by different factors. One must know the differences between these two issues.
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What's New in Entity Framework 5.0?
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In this blog post, I will be talking about the new 5.0 release of Entity Framework. I hope you find it informative and enjoyable.
Agenda (Click to jump)
Performance optimizations
Enum support
Spatial data types
Code first improvements
DbContext generation
Multiple diagrams per model
Table-valued functions
Batch import of stored procedures
Performance Optimizations
For years, I have been working with various platforms and languages, utilizing different data access technologies – from JDBC to ADO.NET and Entity Framework. Back in the days when I was a Java developer working with Hibernate, writing my own XML mapping configuration (no Generate from Database option), there is one question that is still valid today. What's the catch? We have automatic configuration, generation, and mapping. We have LINQ to Entities doing all the work for us including generating the SQL and allowing us to use the build-in CLR functionality in order to produce working queries relatively easily. So really, what's the catch?
Well, you saw the title of the section.
The main problem is that all of this goodness comes with a price in terms of performance. All object relational mappers produce a well-known overhead and many companies, which require high-performance applications, ask themselves: “Is it worth it? Is it too slow or too heavy?”
The answer? Yes, it is. But that's why we, the engineers, are here - to make it work faster and keep the benefits measured in production time. If you just install Entity Framework (EF) and start it, you'll need to make a refactor sooner or later.
Getting straight to the point, Entity Framework 5.0 uses the so-called "auto-compiled" queries feature which compiles (read "translates") the Entity SQL or LINQ to Entities expression tree in a pure SQL (or T-SQL) code. In order to do some accurate measurements, we need to get few things straight:
1. Don't look at the very first query sent. During that query, the framework "warms up" and configures the views and all other components it needs.
2. Next, don't look at the first invocation of a given query. During that time, EF caches parts of the query, so the subsequent calls can be faster. This doesn't mean the query is compiled. It's not...yet.
3. Take into consideration that .NET 4.5 is an "in-place" upgrade, meaning that once it is installed, you will not have any indications that the new version is actually installed (no GAC folder, no 4.5 assemblies, no registry entry). You also can’t go back to .NET 4.0 so even if you target 4.0 in project properties, it will still use the 4.5 run-time.
I've run a few performance tests here. I created a slow query (few joins, dozens of filters, and ternary operators) and measured its performance via .NET 4.0 with Entity Framework 4.0 (on another machine, of course), and .NET 4.5 with Entity Framework 5.0.
The results (tested with 4 core CPU and 8GB of RAM, Windows 7, and SQL Server 2008):
• Without auto-compiled query - 40ms
• With auto-complied query - 10ms
• With manual use of the CompliedQuery class - 5ms
You are going to get some out-of-the-box performance benefits by simply installing EF5 and .NET 4.5. If you want faster query generation, use the CompiledQuery class instead, but be prepared to change your current DAL architecture to support this.
Enum Support
There is a support for enumerations in EF 5.0. In order to activate it, create a scalar property of structure Int32 in the .edmx, right-click on it, and select “Convert to Enum”.
Spatial Data Types
Another interesting feature is the support of spatial data types in SQL server. For those who are not aware of them, these types are geography and geometry related classes which allow us to work directly with such data inside the SQL Server (like geographic locations or geometrical representation of something). Below are the related available CLR types. The blue boxes are concrete classes.
It is actually quite impressive. For example, if you have a table with points (longitude and latitude) of office locations, you can visualize them directly in SQL Server. You can also utilize a number of functions such as calculating the distance between two points. With EF 5.0 , we can do it in C# (or any CLS supported language for that matter). Note that there are still too few resources on the internet related to this feature, so prepare to dig if you plan to use it.
Code First now works with LocalDB
DbContext is now the default generated context
DbContext is nothing new. A wrapper around ObjectContext, generated with the help of T4 templates, utilizing the convention-over-configuration principle with POCO classes. It generates something like this:
public partial class AdventureWorks2008Entities : DbContext
public AdventureWorks2008Entities()
: base("name=AdventureWorks2008Entities")
protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)
throw new UnintentionalCodeFirstException();
public DbSet Products { get; set; }
public DbSet ProductModels { get; set; }
public DbSet ProductSubcategories { get; set; }
public DbSet UnitMeasures { get; set; }
And the entities look like this:
public partial class ProductSubcategory
public ProductSubcategory()
this.Products = new HashSet();
public int ProductSubcategoryID { get; set; }
public int ProductCategoryID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public System.Guid rowguid { get; set; }
public System.DateTime ModifiedDate { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection Products { get; set; }
Multiple diagrams per model
Table-valued functions
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[GetCategories]()
SELECT [CategoryID],
FROM [dbo].[Categories]
var query = from c in context.GetCategoriesDirect()
select c;
Batch import of stored procedures
What about Entity Framework 6.0?
Actually, the alpha version of Entity Framework 6.0 is now available in NuGet. You can download it if you like.
Here is a list of pre-announced features:
Task-based Async - Allowing EF to take advantage of .NET 4.5 async support with async queries, updates, etc.
Custom Code First Conventions - Allowing custom conventions to be written and registered with Code First.
That is all from me. I hope you learned something new!
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When looking at the profile page for a user, the summaries for questions and answers have a maximum length which, when exceeded, turns into an ellipsis. When a question gets closed, the normal [closed] text is appended to the end of the title, like so:
I know this one is closed.
However, the tooltip for hovering doesn't contain that same [closed] text. So what? Well, it becomes more annoying for questions which do get cut off, because the text isn't there, and the tooltip doesn't contain it either.
I don't know this one is closed.
The question above is closed. However, since the end is ellipsed and the tooltip doesn't have the [closed] text to indicate this, I wouldn't know that unless I actually clicked through to the question itself. Even then, if it's an answer I may not be scrolled by default to a position where I'd even be able to tell if the question is closed or not.
Can we append the [closed] text (and other appended texts) to the hover tooltip in these summary boxes? It's natural behavior to hover over text to get the full title of something when the end is ellipsed to indicate more follows. It's not as helpful when that text doesn't contain all the information you'd normally expect to find there.
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Good suggestion, I would go even further and suggest changing the background of closed questions - deleted posts have pale red background in the profile (e.g. in the favorites tab) maybe closed posts can have pale yellow or something like that to clearly indicate they are closed without even having to read the title. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Jun 27 '12 at 6:21
@ShaWizDowArd Nice idea! I didn't think of that. – Alenanno Jun 27 '12 at 10:16
Thanks, I think it was suggested before though (as part of something else, but still) and pretty much ignored. Might be worth looking for it and bumping? – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Jun 27 '12 at 10:18
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It was already discussed before with some suggestions (even from me) but here is a final and simple suggestion that in my opinion will hunt down the badge hunters.
Now that the number of reviewers was raised to at least 3 on Stack Overflow, when there is a suggested edit rejected by three and approved by one user we can assume for almost certain that the one user was utterly wrong; either badge hunting, random vote just for fun or whatever.
I suggest that same way that users are blocked from suggesting further edits for X days after Y suggestions are rejected, users who were in 1-3 minority in the review for A times in a row, will be blocked from reviewing any further suggested edits for B hours, instead getting a friendly message.
Sensible numbers are 3 for A and 24 for B, but it doesn't really matter as long as something is done with those users.
Can't do without example so here they are. Same user, several really bad approvals. Exhibit #1 and Exhibit #2. Don't think I need to explain why those two edits are invalid.
Note: unlike other past suggestions, I'm not asking to check approve/reject rate of the user; it's totally fine to only approve suggestions without ever rejecting, as long as all the approvals are valid.
share|improve this question
Probably a separate feature request, but I would love to see my own track record of reviewing to see where I am approving or rejecting edits that the majority agree or disagree, so i can keep tabs on my own review performance. – psubsee2003 Oct 25 '12 at 13:06
@psubsee2003 you mean this? – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 13:08
Not specifically, I do check that as I go now, but I was thinking of something more along the lines of a running total. Something like a quick 2 or 3 line statistic that shows 25% of rejected suggestions approved and 12% of accepted suggestions rejected. Or even more details so I can see how many I am the only accept vote or the only reject vote. – psubsee2003 Oct 25 '12 at 13:19
I know I said I wouldn't comment on this issue anymore, but... is that really TheTXI? (It sure looks a hell of a lot like it.) – BoltClock's a Unicorn Oct 25 '12 at 13:20
By the way, one of my old posts caught the eyes of a couple of rogue reviewers. Let it be known to the lovable meta-monsters here that I have now set up a little hit list of users who make bad reviews on my posts, starting with the two users who approved that edit. No word on publicity yet ;) – BoltClock's a Unicorn Oct 25 '12 at 13:32
@psubsee2003 interesting, but probably "too much". You can probably construct a query in here to find those exotic details. :) – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 13:38
@ShaWizDowArd probably right, but would be useful for new 2K users who really want to see if they are doing things right. I didn't think of using DE, but since the data is from June and I didn't get to 2K until Sept, probably not going to help me too much initially. – psubsee2003 Oct 25 '12 at 13:48
@psu just sift through some of the reviews.. looking at 20 of those should give you good enough prospective. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 13:51
I think you need another variable - C would be the timeframe. "Users who were in 1-3 minority in the review for A times within C timeframe, will be blocked from reviewing any further suggested edits for B hours". Also, I think percentages would be better than hard numbers, since if you go through a very high number of reviews a day you are much more likely to hit the "ban" threshold than if you only go through a few a day. – Rachel Oct 25 '12 at 15:22
This has been suggested, in various froms, by several people in the main "how to fix reviews" question. When you assume that the majority was correct and the minority was wrong the system fall flat on it's face when there are a significant number of bad reviewers, often enough to even outnumber the good reviewers (at least some of the time). I can't count the number of times I made a good review and several others rubber-stamped the wrong review. This system would punish me for that. This system only works if there are very few bad reviewers. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 16:16
It seems that so few people have noticed that these problems became much more pronounced with the new /review changes. Two of the big changes are adding badges, and a leaderboard to show who has done the most reviews. This has caused a lot of people who never cared to do reviews for reviews sake to start doing them just for the acknowledgement. Take away the acknowledgement and those reviewers will go away again. Yes, these problems all existed before those changes, but they were much less pronounced. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 16:40
@Servy It's not just rewards, but oddly ease of use of the new review system. Previously, it took more effort to review. I wonder how visibility of both review items and their result comes in to play with the new review system. – Jason Sturges Oct 25 '12 at 17:03
@gnat good point; having that will indeed render this request pretty much obsolete. :) – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 19:49
@Servy indeed, my request heavily relies on the majority of reviewers to be educated. So maybe wait a little until such thing is achieved.. :/ – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 20:05
-1 If I get unlucky and have 3 morons doing a bad review 3 times in a row, I should get banned from reviewing? – Stijn Aug 12 at 7:14
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5 Answers
This is all a probability game, right? Hypothetically, if 1% of reviewers are bad, then the chance of this working would be
99% * 99% * 1% * 3 = 2.94% (two correct reviews and one incorrect review)
while the chance of a false positive would be
1% * 1% * 99% * 3 = 0.03% (two incorrect reviewers overruling a correct reviewer)
The rest of the time, you get agreement, in which case the review doesn't count against anyone. Okay, not super-effective, but it would probably help some in the long run. If you increase the number of bad reviewers to 20%, the numbers become
80% * 80% * 80% = 51.2% (good result: correct review)
80% * 80% * 20% * 3 = 38.4% (best result: correct review and bad reviewer caught)
20% * 20% * 80% * 3 = 9.6% (worst result: wrong review and good reviewer caught)
20% * 20% * 20% = 0.8% (bad result: incorrect review)
How often do we get bad reviews in practice? Remember, the figure has to include not only idiot badge grinders but also well-meaning users who just aren't good at reviewing and occasional bad choices from good reviewers. Twenty percent doesn't seem unreasonable, and at that point, this feature would ding a good reviewer once for every four times it gets a bad one.
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Sorry for being heavy, read your answer twice and still not sure I understand if you think it's a good idea or bad idea? – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 17:12
I presented some numbers. It's up to you to decide whether a 1:4 ratio is acceptable or not (or whether 20% was an accurate estimate). If you really want my opinion: I think the proposal is a bad idea. – Pops Oct 25 '12 at 17:19
OK valid point; now that I changed to "users who were in 1-3 minority in the review for A times in a row" the numbers greatly change; User who repeatedly act against the majority decision isn't likely to be innocent victim. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 20:07
@ShaWizDowArd That depends on what you fix all of the numbers to, and how accurate they are. If the number of poor reviewers is sufficiently high, or A is set to just a few items, you'll still get lots of false positives. As A goes up it will reduce false positives, but also increase false negatives. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 20:09
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So what is the underlying problem here, given that we agree that there are poor quality reviewers in the queue frequently performing the incorrect review action?
Is the problem that posts are being approved when they should be rejected, or rejected when they should be approved? That's what I would assert is the main problem.
Another problem that some people seem to have is that people are getting shiny badges when they didn't actually do the work the badge is designed to recognize. Personally, I don't much care about this. I'd be willing to give everyone the gold reviewer badge for free if it meant perfect reviews (unfortunately it won't).
If we build a system by which we assume that the majority is correct, and therefore punish those not voting with the majority, then we're saying that all, or almost all, of the items going through the current review queue are being properly handled. Some people, here or there, are performing the wrong action, but it's never enough to actually result in the majority action being incorrect. That is the only situation in which it would be appropriate to punish the minority voter.
If that's the situation we're in then we don't even have a problem. The correct actions are being taken, so there is nothing to worry about. A few people might get an undeserved badge here or there, but the review process is still solving it's actual duty of improving the content on the site.
If we still have a problem then the problem is a result of there being enough poor reviewers that they actually make a majority decision to perform the wrong action, and they do it frequently enough to make a significant difference. This means that if we have a problem at all that this proposed solution won't actually help solve it. It would mean that "correct" reviewers would be punished and incorrect reviewers would not.
So if there is a problem it doesn't help solve it (or even makes it worse) and if there is no problem then well...there's no problem and we don't need to add a solution.
There is no case where implementing this proposed change would result in improving the site.
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This does not work. The problem is in the fact that you are choosing to do this based on it happening three times in a row. This assumes that such a bad reviewer does most of his or her reviewer incorrectly.
However, when an edit is approved, the poor reviewer will have reviewed correctly and as such, the counter will be reset according to this plan. As such, you would need three consecutive rejected edits in order to be able to catch anyone in this proposed system.
In my experience the large majority of edits is approved, and as such it will rarely happen that three consecutive edits are rejected. This means this system does not work.
I decided to do some number crunching. I said in the comments I wasn't sure about how to do the math, but at that time I was trying to do some rules I was taught that I both didn't know too well and were hard (if at all possible) to apply to this problem. As it turned out, I just needed to step back and use some general math knowledge instead.
Basically, this involves three cases. First off, you might just have had two rejects last. In this case, you have either the chance p that it's done by the next edit review (p * 1) and the inverse chance that we're going to do have an approved edit and have to start over. (p is the part of the edits that get approved). If we have only just had our first reject in a row, then we have a p chance we reject another review and from there we go to the two rejects we discussed above, and otherwise we once again have an approved edit and have to start over. Finally if we start without any streak of rejected edits, have a p chance to advance to the previous case of having a streak of one, and otherwise we do a review and end up right where we started: without a streak.
Now I know that may not have been too clear, but maybe it'll be clearer if I put it in formulas:
M(n): the number of moves we'll expect before three consecutive rejected reviews
when we currently have a running streak of n rejected reviews
M(2): p + (1 - p) * (M(0) + 1)
M(1): p * (M(2) + 1) + (1 - p) * (M(0) + 1)
M(0): p * (M(1) + 1) + (1 - p) * (M(0) + 1)
Substitution gives us:
M(0) = p*(p*(p + (1 - p)*(S0 + 1) + 1) + (1 - p)*(S0 + 1) + 1) + (1 - p)*(S0 + 1)
Which can be rewritten as (I renamed M(0) to M here as we're only looking at the whole thing from the beginning now):
M = p^2 + p + 1 + (-p^3 + 1) * M
The first thing I was going to calculate was how long it takes when we only assume that 50% of all edits is rejected. Filling in p = 0.5 gives you M = 14, which is exactly what the web has to say about the topic (just google consecutive coin flips). From there, let's add a bit more realism to our model.
Let's say that 45% of edits are unanimously accepted, 45% are unanimously rejected and 10% of all edits are disputed by true reviewers. Let's say that on those question, 50% of all valid reviewers votes to reject and 50% votes to accept. Now let's see what that means for our badge hunter.
A question that our badge hunter sees has him in it. The undisputed questions are simple, but the disputed questions are a little harder. The idea is that whenever he ends up voting to accept a disputed edit, we'll need the first three other reviewers that are reviewing the question to reject it, or otherwise it won't be a 3v1 and won't count against his streak. Like we did silently before, let's assume that there are no other malicious reviewers for now.
The chance of having three consecutive reject votes on a disputed question are 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.125. As such, 87.5% of all disputed questions will be combo breakers. We had 10% disputed questions, so that brings us to 8.75%. So our combo breakers are now 0.45 + 0.0875 = 0.5375, which means that p drops to 0.4625. Throwing p into our function gives us: M = 16.945, we're almost down to triggering the system only once a day.
Now let's add other badge hunters into the mix. If we meet another badge hunter on any question that would otherwise be a 3v1, it becomes a combo breaker, as he'll also accept it. Assuming one percent of the reviewers are bad apples, the chance of that happening is: 0.01 * 1 * 1 * 3 = 0.03 As such we have to decrease our 3v1 losses by 0.4625 * 0.03 = 0.013875. Now p = 0.448725. Fill it in and we get M = 18.2626.
With the maximum number of reviews per day being 20, this means on average each bad reviewer will get banned only once per day. This means that a single day ban won't do any real good for the system - I believe it may mean a decrease of badge hunter reviews by somewhere between 25% - 50%, but I don't feel like doing the math on that as well (nor do I feel like recombining this result with my previous results and take this into account for the number of other badge hunters encountered). Of course, this system could be manipulated by punishing harder on multiple day-bans in a short period of time, but I think the situation is actually quite a bit worse than what I described here, as the numbers I used are pretty generous.
So can we just up the number of days you are review-banned for? Let's take a look at the false positives for that:
On a disputed question, you have 50% chance to vote to accept. If you do and the first three other people to vote on it are either badge hunters or happen to vote to reject. The chances of this happening on any disputed question are: 0.5 * (0.01 + 0.99 * 0.5) * (0.01 + 0.99 * 0.5) * (0.01 + 0.99 * 0.5) = 0.06439. On a clear reject, the chances of a false positive are 0.01 * 0.01 * 0.01 = 0.000001. The total chance of a false positive on any question our real reviewer reviews is thus 0.06439 * 0.1 + 0.000001 * 0.45 = 0.0064394. Usiong p = 0.0064394 we get M = 3769375. A reviewer doing 20 reviews each day would on average be banned for more than a day each 3769375 / 20 = 188468 days. If he does his 20 reviews every single day of the year, that's once every 3769375 / 365 = 10327 years. This sounds acceptable enough to me. Let's take a look at this from one more angle. Going back to M = 3769375, and let's say this time that a 1000 valid reviews are done every day, giving us an average 3769375 / 1000 = 3769 days before any legitimate reviewer is banned, which still over 10 years, which again is acceptable in my opinion.
So it looks like a ban longer than a single day is needed for enough of a punishment on a three streak of 3v1s. However, one should note that I believe the numbers I used are quite optimistic and as such, I believe you would need a ban of quite a bit more than a day to make this effective. It also looks like the false positive won't be too much of a problem. However, here we have the same problems with the numbers we used and on top of that we're not dealing with fact that some people accept more easily than others, meaning that someone who may not be too good a reviewer but isn't a badge hunter may well be banned by this system. The question is how long a ban you're willing to give this person.
Before we wrap this up, I want to look at one more thing: varying the length of the streak required for a ban. Let's start off with a streak of 2. Here the problem is false positives, so let's look at that. Our function becomes M = p + 1 (-p^2 + 1) * M Filling in p = 0.06439 from above, we get M = 155, meaning that for every eight days a legitimate reviewer does his 20 reviews, he'll get banned once (on average of course). This might be acceptable if you realize that most people spending much time on this website will have a lot of experience so might well have too much experience to be affected by this. However, if we add to the mix that my numbers were optimistic estimates and that some people are more inclined to accept than others without being badge hunters, and I don't think this system holds up. So how about making the streak size 4 then? In that case, our function becomes M = p^3 + p^2 + p + 1 + (-p^4 + 1) * M. Here the problem is how long it takes to catch our bad guys, so we input p = 0.448725 from above. We get M = 42.9275, which is over 2 days and is already getting into dangerous territory. A quick look also show that if the real chance is 0.1 lower, this has the effect of increasing the time to catch a bad reviewer to over 5 days, whereas it would still be about one and a half day with a streak of three. This gets out of hand pretty quickly and I'd say that this is not in any way effective (and we're getting into territory where a ban has to be so long that a single false positive is unacceptable) unless my estimates are actually quite accurate (or the difference is on the other side of what I thought them to be). In brief, I don't think using different streak lengths is a possibility.
In the end, the number crunching provided nothing surprising (to me anyway) but I hope it provides the numbers to back up my original claims that this system doesn't work.
And for good measure, here is all the assumptions I made in my calculations:
45% of all edits are rejected by all good reviewers
45% of all edits are accepted by all good reviewers
10% of all edits are disputed
A good reviewer will accept 50% and reject 50% of all contested questions
(There is no difference between contested questions.)
1% of all reviewers are bad
bad reviewers accept in 100% of cases
Each day, an average of 1000 times someone votes to reject or accept an edit
(For the last one goes that I have only used it in one calculation, which
wasn't too exact anyway)
As per request, here's the math for 25% bad apples:
Once again, we'll add other badge hunters into the mix. The chance of any question that was otherwise going to be a 3v1 having another badge hunter is: 0.25 * 1 * 1 * 3 = 0.75 As such we have to decrease our 3v1 losses by 0.4625 * 0.75 = 0.346875. Now p = 0.115625. Fill it in and we get M = 730.359. Basically we won't catch people legitimately.
The chance of a false positive becomes 0.1 * 0.5 * (0.25 + 0.75 * 0.5) * (0.25 + 0.75 * 0.5) * (0.25 + 0.75 * 0.5) + 0.45 * 0.25 * 0.25 * 0.25 = 0.01923 filling it in we get that it takes 143381 edits on average to get a false positive, which is still sort of acceptable until we start adding poor sincere reviewers and the dynamics of the real world.
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Actually, I find that close to 50% of suggested edits, on average, should be rejected. At least, that's my historical voting record. I tend to be a bit more strict than others, so maybe a 35-40% rejection rate would be a more conservative estimate, but that's still quite high, really. – Servy Nov 14 '12 at 16:52
@Servy: you shouldn't look at what should be rejected, but at what is rejected. The proposed system is based on majority vote, not on "what should be done". As for the math on 50% votes, my gut says it still takes a long time to get to three consecutive rejected answers, but I'm having some trouble coming up with the exact math. – Jasper Nov 14 '12 at 17:17
If 50% of the reviews should actually be rejected then the odds of getting three in a row are (.5)^3, which is 0.125, not all that low. As Pop.'s answer shows, if the percentage of bad reviewers isn't small the false positive rate can get not so small as well. – Servy Nov 14 '12 at 17:21
@Servy That's not what I was talking about. I was talking about how long it would take before you get three consecutive rejected edits. It's not all that relevant, though. – Jasper Nov 15 '12 at 0:50
@Servy: I added the math now. – Jasper Nov 15 '12 at 15:25
"1% of all reviewers are bad" I reject that assumption. I would use something much, much higher than that. Somewhere in the ballpark of 25% at least. – Servy Nov 15 '12 at 15:27
@Servy The point is that it will only make things worse on both the side of catching legitimate badge hunters and the side of false positives. However, I've added the math as per your request. – Jasper Nov 15 '12 at 16:07
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I do think a quality review system based on statistics is appropriate, but using the pure number of disagreements with the crowd rather than relative number of times they disagree is a bad call. Especially when you consider that out of the two examples you hand-selected to demonstrate the need to punish minority reviewers, one of them is wrong! #Exhibit 1 is a perfectly legitimate edit that should have been accepted! The reviewer removed extraneous code that wasn't being referenced anywhere and therefore wasn't germane to the question in a generalized sense. We WANT people to do this type of cleanup, but three reviewers looked at it, didn't bother to understand why lines of code were being removed and said "Nope!"... it's the majority who are wrong here, and this happens A LOT.
With some non-trivial frequency, the obvious review is not the correct review, so we need to be very very careful with any filter that blindly presumes that the popular vote is the correct vote.
I want to clarify that just because our friend TheTXI was correct and the majority was wrong in Exhibit 1, it does not make TheTXI a good reviewer. His approval on Exhibit 2 is basically unforgivable: Approving an incorrect edit to the code of a four-year old accepted answer to a core question with 95 upvotes, and which is likely a core resource for many programmers is downright dangerous. I suspect that his reasonable approval in case #1 was incidental rather than intentional and there should be a system for hitting his rep or suspending his review privileges. It just shouldn't rely on a simple and often-wrong heuristic like disagreeing with the majority. There's a huge amount of subjectivity in some of the review process (definitions of "trivial" vary by reviewer; some people prefer that certain types of edits be referred back to the original author as a comment rather than making the correction themselves; the term "off topic" has as many definitions as there are reviewers, etc etc).
We clearly need to do something to improve the review process, but basing it on whether you agree with the majority is not it.
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I have seen many edits like that which were rejected for being too trivial (a very easy reason to use), the situation is unlikely to improve unless the review eligibility also takes tag participation into account. – prusswan Oct 25 '12 at 16:10
Ben is correct here, the answer in Example 1 will actually fail as those columns don't exist – Nathan Koop Oct 25 '12 at 16:10
Instead of editing the question, perhaps that should have been pointed out to the OP for the OP to edit. Maybe it contributes to the problem, and now the context is lost. Certainly it decouples the answers which included that code. This should have been addressed in the answer. – Jason Sturges Oct 25 '12 at 16:18
@JasonSturges -If the reviewers had bothered to look at the original question (and noted that the question had been edited to a way that left the answers incorrect) it would have been obvious that the subsequent suggested edits to Lews Therin's answer were appropriate. I simply see this as lazy reviewing (and another reason why the review system should show more context) – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 16:23
@BenD Saloni attempted to alter both question and answer, and the only comment given is "code changes". I think the entire review system is broken. – Jason Sturges Oct 25 '12 at 16:30
@JasonSturges - I'm starting to agree. Abuse is rampant and actively discourages thoughtful review. There are "obvious" reviews (incomprehensible posts, link-only answers, three word questions, etc) but must reviews should take time, and I think we're starting to see the fastest gun in the west problem emerging in the review queue. – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 16:39
@BenD Yep, and the result is that either good reviewers become bad reviewers so that they can actually get credit for their reviews, or they just stop reviewing (from the queues) entirely (I fall into this bucket) both of which increase the ratio of bad reviewers to good reviewers, thus feeding the cycle and making the problem worse. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 16:44
I feel your pain. I've moved into (almost) only reviewing close votes so I actually have time to read through it. And even then you sometimes miss your window of opportunity when you actually try to vote. – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 16:48
Totally disagree about "perfectly legitimate edit". Removing or changing code in posts is sure recipe for errors and disasters. Think that something is wrong/not needed? Post comment and let the author change it. I will always reject those suggestions. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 17:15
@ShaWizDowArd - Why? Perhaps Saloni should not have edited the question in the first place, but why request an edit rather than just making the edit when it's obvious and makes a no-longer-accurate answer correct? Why would you reject an edit that is both substantive and makes the answer more applicable and accurate? How could this possibly constitute a "really bad approval[]"? – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 18:10
@ShaWizDowArd Consider the case where the person did post a comment an the OP said, "sure, you're right, that should be removed" but didn't edit the actual question. (I see things like this a lot where new users don't know they can edit their content.) I will then go in and edit the code/post/whatever to reflect the proposed changes in comments. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 19:29
@Servy and Ben - I don't argue that sometimes such edit might be valid. But removing lines of code just because they are not vital part of the answer/question is not a valid edit in my opinion. I won't rollback or start edit combat in such case but also won't approve it. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 19:56
@ShaWizDowArd - this might sometimes be the case, but extraneous code makes answers less clear, and in this case might confuse future visitors (especially ones who don't know to look at edit histories). Why not just have it be concise and correct. Regardless, this whole discussion is exactly why an automatic review-lock based on majority opinion won't work: subjectivity. We disagree on what constitutes a reasonable edit but I don't think either of us is doing a disservice to the review process when we vote... so long as we're being thoughtful and thorough. – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 20:06
I just want it to be consistent with the current auto block system for suggested edits. User who keep suggesting code changes might be successful sometimes, but enough rejections and he'll be blocked. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 20:10
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In the name of fun and games, why not have the minority reviewer(s) "donate" rep to the other reviewers? This will "encourage" reviewers to carefully consider the actions of their peers and affirm the majority decision.
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That's not what I meant. So far there are no "fines" and I don't want this to be the first. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 17:11
@Sha I prefer to see it as a wager that overturns the isolated nature of the reviewing process. A bunch of people farming their own gear in a MMO isn't how the game is meant to be played. – prusswan Oct 25 '12 at 17:14
It's not a game and I'm sorry you see it that way. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 17:16
Unless you take away the badges and rep and whatnot, it will remain a game. – prusswan Oct 25 '12 at 17:20
I disagree with this, but it does have an interesting grain to it. Rep is supposed to be a "measurement of how much the community trusts you"... your rep SHOULD suffer if your reviews make you untrustworthy. I vehemently disagree with using simple majorities, but perhaps a "I challenge this review" trigger, which subjects the review to scrutiny, with rep docked from the reviewer if it's found wanting. – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 18:17
I didn't downvote the answer because I feel that losing rep for a bad review is a bad idea, I docked it because I don't feel that a simple majority is a good measure of the quality of a review. I am often in the majority because I took the time to look in depth, beyond the obvious, or because I took a stand on a borderline suggestion. This would punish me for that. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 19:27
@Servy in that case the rules of determining the majority should be improved, right now it is too "simple" – prusswan Oct 26 '12 at 8:32
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I just heard Careers is going to hide your CV from at least your current employer. would it be possible to allow us (the programmers waging the wars against the oppressive pointy haired bosses) to input aliases for companies also to prevent them from finding us under different names. My problem is that my current company has: an official name, a nickname which everyone refers to it as, we were bought out, and our parent company then was bought out. The company could search careers with any of these four names exposing my search to my boss.
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This is a good point. I work for the parent company of a lot of regional companies and I wouldn't want to appear on any of their searches. +1 – XMLbog Oct 16 '09 at 13:00
That is to say I work for the Mushroom Kingdom, which reigns over various worlds, castles, dungeons and star roads. – XMLbog Oct 16 '09 at 13:01
My fear especially is that for those of who have larger scores (even people who have over 10k is relatively small when compared to the overall pool of programmers in the world), it's really hard for us to hide in plain view. – Kevin Oct 16 '09 at 13:03
I think I came up with a more generic solution: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/29424/… – flybywire Feb 1 '10 at 14:24
Why would you want to do this? It's not like my employer doesn't already know what my CV looks like – warren Nov 30 '10 at 14:56
Because if it's available for employers to search on it, it will tip them off that you are potentially looking for another job. – Kevin Dec 1 '10 at 17:58
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4 Answers
up vote 9 down vote accepted
This is implemented already in part -- if any of the companies you worked for are a case-insensitive match to the company name of the employer doing the search, you are automatically removed from any of their search results.
This is fully 100% automatic and requires no intervention on your part (other than populating the company names accurately).
Company doing the search is ACME Incorporated
You've worked for the following companies: Initech, Foo Astronomical Instruments, and Acme Incorporated
You will not show up in this company's searches because your employment history includes an exact string match to ACME Incorporated.
Usual caveats apply, this is string matching ...
In Careers 2.0, you can mark yourself as "not actively looking for a job" while still remaining searchable. The UI makes it very clear to employers that these are just people in our database, not people actively looking for a job. See Not actively seeking work in Careers: I'd like to display this for more information
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As always, you are the man Jeff. (btw, congrats on being ranked as one of the top 30 most influential developers). – Kevin Nov 13 '09 at 14:17
Have you considered this: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/29424/… ? – flybywire Feb 1 '10 at 14:24
any progress on the regex mentioned here? – Kip Nov 28 '10 at 0:01
@David Hypothetically speaking, what if I were looking for a job, but didn't want to reveal that to my employer? – Anna Lear May 13 '11 at 20:23
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Will it be possible for me to view other CV's as somebody that looks for a job? How would you then filter out employees I should not see? Overlapping current employers?
My current employer will probably have a normal account and not use the company name. What name he will use will be impossible to foresee. The RegEx has to be very general to do what you ask for, something like .*
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It better not be possible for job seekers to view other private CVs - I really don't want folks plagiarizing my awesome works of fiction! – Shog9 Oct 16 '09 at 14:10
This should be made into its own question. I want to know! – TM. Oct 19 '09 at 22:25
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Podcast 70 suggests that you'll be able to supply a regular expression to match employers against. That should be flexible enough to do what you need.
Or to put it another way: currently, you have one problem (hiding your CV from your current employer). When you have the option of using regular expressions, you'll have two problems :)
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wow I totally missed, that....I must not have enough coffee. – Kevin Oct 16 '09 at 13:09
+1 for relevant quoting of "2 problems" :) – DVK Oct 16 '09 at 14:30
We are no longer planning on providing a regex, since being able to flag yourself as passively looking for a job should make it less awkward if your current employer finds you. See meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/80893/… – David Fullerton May 13 '11 at 20:23
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Would it not just be easier to allow you to hide your CV from any employer matching a set of terms you can set yourself?
Edit: As Jon said, you will be allowed to use the power of REGULAR EXPRESSIONS to filter out who you do not want to view your CV.
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+1 if we can use wildcards. – XMLbog Oct 16 '09 at 13:06
yeah, that's what I was thinking, sorry I wasn't clear. – Kevin Oct 16 '09 at 13:07
I really love the regular expression bit - you could consider it as a minus first interview question - can you write a regex that effectively filters out your previous employers? – Tamas Czinege Oct 16 '09 at 13:15
@DrJokepu: No dice. My employer's name is written in XML. – XMLbog Oct 16 '09 at 13:17
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I am trying to figure out the best way to learn new things on Stack Exchange, and ultimately design a study plan to help myself and others. To this end, I'd like to hear how others use these websites to achieve this end.
I am a programmer, and thus naturally inclined to use Stack Overflow.
Here is what I currently do:
• I have a list of interested tags
• I try to read questions from each tag, as much as I can (sort of random)
• If a question that I can answer catches my eye, which happens rarely, I give it a shot
• I occasionally ask questions regarding problems I confront at work or encounter while reading technical books/articles or watching video lectures
I am not sure if this is an effective way to achieve my goal of learning new things on this site, and I want to refine it.
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2 Answers
up vote 7 down vote accepted
Frequently I'll try to answer a question that I don't already know the answer too. I'll go digging through google and documentation and stuff and see if I can get an answer that will help the asker. Even if I'm unsure of it, I'll post it anyway. If it's incorrect it gets down-voted and its no big deal, I wasn't planning on it being 100% correct anyway. Then I'll go and read the up-voted answers to see what I did wrong/how it should have been answered.
This is actually how I taught myself how to program a few years back.
Plus, you get them right more frequently then you would expect.
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When I find an interesting question but don't know the answer to it, I'll research the answer. Once I've found a solution that works, I'll go back and refresh the page - usually, someone else will have posted an answer by that point, so I'll compare what I found with what they suggest - thereby learning both from my own research and that of others.
I'm absolutely terrible at asking questions, being much too impatient when it comes to finding answers for the problems I face day-to-day... Indeed, all but one of the questions I've asked on Stack Overflow were prompted by other questions on Stack Overflow. So I tend to avoid asking questions - there are plenty of people with real problems who can use the help.
I also try to spend a bit of time editing questions and answers. Plenty of folks struggle with English and/or Markdown and can use the help. A nice side-effect of this is that it exposes me to topics I'd otherwise avoid.
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Agree with your second point. I, however, am completely different in relation to #1 - I post first, ask questions later. If I'm not totally sure, I Google it. Once, I answered a one-sentence question right, thought I had it wrong (edited it again), then rolled it back. Needless to say, the asker (who was watching carefully) got a bit confused :). – Lucas Jones Jul 15 '09 at 23:04
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Thursday, September 17, 2009
Home Office comes clean over 100% SWINE FLU vaccination
Now, remember, the vaccine for this three parts swine, two parts bird, one part human novel virus is basically untested. Pertinent questions about the amounts of aluminium hydroxide, mercury, squalene-based adjuvants and CANCER VIRUSES in the swine flu(sic) vaccine still remain. On top of this, a document has fallen into certain hands that outlines plans for 100% vaccination of the UK population agaisnt 'swine flu'.
A UK government document dated July 20th has surfaced that issues instructions to local government officials responsible for managing a "swine flu" pandemic emergency to establish centralised "specialist mass vaccination centers".
It is stated that the document is meant "only" for emergency planning agencies such as Regional Resilience Teams (RRT), and Local Resilence Teams (LRTs), and "not for wider circulation."
An emphasis is given to the need to plan for "mass fatalities" as a matter of inevitability rather than as a possibility and with crematoria to play a critical role.
Also, it is stated that the UK government has the capacity to purchase up to 132 million doses from Baxter and GSK to accomplish the goal of 100% "coverage".
Either this is a BLATANT EUGENICS ENDGAME ATTACK on all of us or our governments are innoculating us against a Global Bioweapons attack. It really is time for the Home Office to come clean about why they intend to 100% vaccinate this country against a flu that shouldn't exist, an engineered novel virus that's nothing like 'seasonal flu'. Give us the truth, no matter how bad and we'll deal with the fallout.
Here's the kicker, did you know that the World Health Organisation was a Rothschild-Rockefeller creation? Do your fucking research, people. Beat this game.
1 comment:
nomadrush said...
It just gets more unbelievable by the day doesn't it!
They are now saying in the USA that soon you won't be able to travel away from your home, unless you are wearing a micro-chipped bracelet proving you have had the vaccine.
This stinks!
Ross Hemsworth
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Klingonomics 2
Kling's argument that the current recession involves a need to reallocate resources, is plausible. It seems likely that resources need to be moved away from producing single family homes, building SUV's and other low mileage vehicles, and perhaps less financial engineering on Wall Street. The resources need to be redeployed to more valuable uses. Because this adjustment takes time, the productive capacity of the economy will be temporarily depressed.
What is remarkable, however, is Kling's view that the decrease in productive capacity somehow generates a matching decrease in nominal expenditure. He argues that "recalculation" generates a reduction in "y," that is real income. Given "P," the price level, that implies a decrease in "Y," nominal income and nominal expenditure. And given "M," the quantity of money, this necessarily implies a decrease in "V," the income velocity of money. From the equation of exchange MV = Py, V = Py/M.
However, the income velocity of money is equal to the reciprocal of the ratio of real money balances to real income, or k. This decrease in "V" is simultaneously an increase in k. Somehow, the readjustment in the allocation of resources that is temporarily causing depressed productive capacity must be causing people to be willing to hold increased real money balances, despite being made poorer by that lower real income. Not only is this implausible on its face, it would be remarkable that they would be willing to expand money holdings the exact amount necessary to cause nominal expenditure and income to drop with the productive capacity of the economy.
The usual market-clearing, real business cycle approach would be to argue that P instantly and smoothly adjusts so that real expenditure (MV/P) is equal to the productive capacity of the economy. From deep within this perspective, the current value of P is always at the level such that the real volume of expenditures matches the productive capacity of the economy. If observed real output has fallen, then it must be that productive capacity has fallen. From that perspective, real income (y) is always equal to productive capacity, and MV simply determines the value of P needed to make real expenditure equal to that capacity.
If, on the other hand, prices are sticky, then real expenditures are not necessarily equal to productive capacity. If one simply asserts that nominal expenditures drop so that at current prices, real expenditures are equal to capacity, then it is evident that velocity, and more fundamentally, the demand to hold money must be adjusting. Why would people adjust the amount of money they choose to hold so that nominal expenditures exactly track the adjustment in resource allocation from relatively less valued to relatively more valued goods?
The most likely answer is that there is no such reason. Kling is simply mistaken. There is no particular reason to believe that the current level of nominal or real expenditure is equal to the productive capacity of the economy. A great recalculation may have depressed the productive capacity of the economy, but a drop in nominal expenditure may have caused real expenditure and real income to fall well below that productive capacity. The great recalculation may have increased structural unemployment, and so the natural rate of unemployment, but the drop in nominal expenditure, may have caused the unemployment rate to rise above the natural unemployment rate.
1 comment:
1. Bill: it's good to see you blogging!
One wonders what Arnold would draw if forced to draw an AD curve? His AS curve is presumably vertical, but would his AD curve be horizontal? If not, what is holding the price level fixed? And if it is horizontal, what determines its height?
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When Steven Seagal was sued earlier this week for sexual assault and trafficking women for sex, CBS News dug up an excerpt from a 1998 interview with Movieline where actress Jenny McCarthy appeared to confirm Seagal's tendency for inappropriate behavior. We reached into our back issues to provide you with the entire anecdote.
Movieline's Stephen Rebello conducted the interview with McCarthy to promote her new film BASEketball, and the actress was unusually candid, discussing all the film parts she'd lost, like Mallrats ("Kevin Smith didn't even wait until I was out of the office to start laughing. So rude"), and the ones she'd turned down, like Drew Barrymore's role in Batman Forever ("I didn't want to play a fluff") and Elizabeth Berkeley's in The First Wives Club ("Even though that movie would have let me work with one of my absolute idols, Goldie Hawn, I wouldn't play a girl who sleeps with someone to get fame").
The audition that really wounded her, as Rebello would find out, was the one she had to do in front of Seagal:
When I press her on the subject, the hurt in her voice says she's still freaked. "I went to the audition for Under Siege 2 with, like, 15 other Jenny McCarthys. These girls came in and out of his office and I was last. Steven comes out and goes, 'Hmm, so you're last.' I'm thinking, 'Shouldn't a casting person be doing this?' I go inside his carpet, which has shag carpet and this huge couch, and he's by himself and says, 'Sit on the couch.' I have my [script pages] and I say, 'OK, I'm ready,' but he says, 'No, I want to find out about you.' I knew what was coming. He goes, 'So, you were Playmate of the Year,' and I was trying to go--" Here, McCarthy breaks off and adopts a Laverne & Shirley blue-collar foghorn delivery: "Yeah, but, like, I lived in Chicago, see, and..."
The accent was apparently no turnoff. "I was wearing this very baggy dress," she continues, "which I always wear to auditions, with my hair pulled back. I'm listening to him go on and on about how he found his soul in Asia and is one with himself and whatever. When I said, 'Well, I'm ready to read,' he said, 'Stand up, you have to be kind of sexy in the movie and in that dress, I can't tell.' I stand up and he goes, 'Take off your dress.' I said, 'What?' and he said, 'There's nudity.' I said, 'No, there's not, or I wouldn't be here right now.' He said again, 'There's nudity,' and I said, 'The pages are right in front of me. There's no nudity.' He goes, 'Take off your dress.' I just started crying and said, 'Rent my [Playboy] video, you a**hole!' and ran out to the car." That wasn't quite the end of it. "I'm closing my car door and he grabs me and says, 'Don't you ever tell anybody.' He won't sue me or say anything because he knows it's true. If I saw him today, I would still say, 'You're a f***ing a**hole and I really hope you change your ways.'"
Seagal's lawyer, Marty Singer, said this week about the sex claims: "The lawsuit filed by Kayden Nguyen against Steven Seagal is a ridiculous and absurd claim by a disgruntled ex-employee who was fired for using illegal narcotics." He also called the suit a "complete fabrication without a scintilla of truth."
• Sheepypie says:
Why are people saying that JM is doing this to get attention? The "Exclusive" interview they are referencing was given 12 YEARS AGO! They are just trying to get in on a new story by showing a pattern of behavior for SS dating back many years. And she wasn't claiming to be innocent all of the sudden. She was right to leave his office and to talk about it. Maybe she had fun doing Playboy but that doesn't mean it's the only side of her. If you're being cast as a nude model, you can expect to take your clothes off. Not if you are being cast in a conventional movie. Other actresses have done nudity in films; does that mean they are expected to take their top off during every casting? Of course not.
Dayze: You sound a little bitter. Talk about getting off-topic. Phew. I can't believe you are a counsellor. Were your sons ever able to have a normal relationship? You probably gave them an anxiety attack every time they tried to have sex. Tell us... what is the "real reason" woman are trying to have sex? Did you give your children ANY HOPE that there are loving, caring women in the world who want to be with them because they love them, or did you just tell them that all women are irresponsible gold diggers who have crazy families and are trying to rope them in by having a baby, which they will neglect or abort? Obviously you DIDN'T raise your sons right if all they are attracting are sex crazed girls coming to their room at midnight. There are lots of respectable, independent women who aren't desperate to rope a man. I've always said the best way to teach is by example. Instead, YOU chose to relate to your sons the horror stories told to you by your emotionally disturbed patients, and tales of Russian mind-control. Smart.
• Javalation says:
Seagal should seek out "Big" Ben Roethlisberger to provide dating tips. Poor Ben is young, dumb and usually too drunk to remember any lines, so must resort to exposing his shortcomings to the drunkest girl in the house. Steven has developed the ploy of I'm so evolved I've mastered Tantra, so sex with me is a spiritual experience. Perhaps this line has lost some of its charm as he's aged and gotten fat, but who knows, it just might be the ticket for Ben.
• raw says:
Steven, you are being extremely disrespectful and immature. You should know better then to let everyone here push your buttons to the point where you feel you must threaten them with physical violence. You know, there is always someone tougher then you - why do you seem so anxious to "crack their arms" etc... Stay calm and ride this thing out. Like everything else It too will pass!
• micky says:
to RAW my comment steven seagal is not disrespectful or immature I think to be honest the only person who's immature points right at you there is martial artists out there who maybe better.... that's not what it's all about he doesn't feel threatened by nobody or uses physical violence towards women more of a protector he's not violent never has been you may see him using violence in his movies that's completely different that's steven seagal's acting side..... it's what makes him lots of money in the movie world it's just a JOB a place of work but take away this and he's got music love respect for everyone he comes into contact with..... jean claude van damme hit his wife why because hes on drugs that's why cocaine you don't really know anything you do you ???????????
• Bogey says:
Steven Seagal has always been a very untalented actor. Kids and developmentally arrested adults go to see his movies for the violence and the martial arts bull!
Common, a fat overweight middle aged man in a ponytail who dyes his hair jet black to look more oriental? He is a joke, and yes he can wipe the floor with me but he'd still be a joke-LOL What a loser-ask his ex wife Kelly LeBrock!
• Thomas says:
I think Steven Seagal was a good actor,but now he's a middle aged man trying to do things that he can't do as before.His age is starting to show.He should retire and live his life in Japan where he would probably be happier.I do think he has sexual issues,and treats women as objects.
• Harley Pero says:
Hi, I have found pretty helpful information and tips on your site, but can’t find an answer for my question, what are some finger/hand exercises to prevent carpal tunnel? I know of foot exercises for when one wears stilettos or high heels. What about fingers?
• [...] (yes, all women) got $50k just to keep their blowholes shut about Lord Steven’s piggery. Jenny McCarthy said he orded her to strip for an audition (for a flick with no nude scenes). Jaime Pressley [...]
• micky says:
theres' far too many lies have been spread about steven seagal he has done a lot of things to help kids in Thailand against sexual assults and raping why would he make sexual advances to jenny McCarty ex playboy well say no more after has money..... then more like to rune his good nature because hes not a drugged up actor like rest of them out there who are spending there money on crack heroine under siege 2 it was another actress that did that... she was ex playboy / Baywatch star ...... if he had made these against children women how come he hasn't been sent to prison hes only human stop reading internet crap which is printed on the papers also
• micky says:
continued if steven seagal had done this F.B.I would be on steven seagal like a rat up a drain pipe giving him interrogation over it.... they wouldn't bother if he is an actor martial arts superstar all these rumours and lies whats been spread about him it's totally disgusting I could understand if he took drugs and drink or spending his money on heroine but he doesn't then you could write print comments about him.... why would he want to make sexual advances towards women when hes married a lovely wife children of his own.... infact speaking of children YES they would also interview his children if hes made sexual advances towards them ...... same as this with gene le bell its on the internet videos well its crap anyway. it goes on saying how judo gene le bell choked out steven seagal on one of his movie sets lol what a joke another plank wanting to make a name for himself...... same as ex wife Kelly la brock she's another village idiot saying steven seagal used to beat her up / control her wow is that all you can do slate him slag him off steven seagal is the most greatest man on this planet...... he's done a lot for this world... helped out kids in Thailand find better homes by getting them away from street crime off the streets in Bangkok and into real protective homes..... and not raped or used for sexual favours.....so how can you say all these bad hurtful things towards steven seagal you must have complete sad lifes to be honest and believe rumours and lies..... STOP believing everything you read in newspapers / internet same jean claude van dam another druggie movie star who claimed he offered to fight steven seagal at a party.... jean claude van damme threw a kick towards steven seagal he just laughed and walked away.. jean claude van damme said to steven seagal.... do you fancy a fight ?? steven seagal walked away not because he's scared it's because he has respect for himself 6th dan black belt in the Japanese art of aikido yeah ok you fight him then..... if steven seagal would have hit jean claude van damme. he would have filed a law suit against steven seagal and took him to crown count for assult to make some money out off him.... to fund his drug habbit ?
• micky says:
including not just women but men slating him also because they wont get a great background .like he's got there's other martial artists out there chuck Norris / Michael dudicoff / late bruce lee / jeff wincott / jean claude van damme / Jackie chan but have these actors martial artists gone all the way in there life no they haven't steven seagal has ... it's all down to 100% jealously with people today.... this is why you wont leave him alone..... you always have to read newspaper shit about him. internet bullshit he has martial arts skills aikido / karate / kendo / he's put these great skills to 100% useage into his movies that's why but steven seagal has not made any sexual advances towards women its all ballocks anybody who knows steven seagal personally will say also ??????
• micky says:
get out in the real world I can see most of you here haven't got any social lifes and most of your time is spent reading newspapers / magazines / internet get out in the real world ?
• micky says:
there's nothing wrong steven seagal at all what so ever it's just jealously lies and rumours you all like to spread about him ....... what's wrong with you all are you jealous because you can't have a good background like him buddist aikido lived in japan for many years speaks Japanese practiced karate / kendo followed a japanese way of life honour respect married a beautiful Japanese lady put his money to good use need I say more answer NO I don't ?????????????
• micky says:
this is all a load crap it's just another newspaper reporter getting its useless information for more useless people just to make a name for him / she more money KYLE BUCHANAN who's wrote this article ??????????????????????
• […] “EXCLUSIVE: The Full Steven Seagal Story Jenny McCarthy Told Movieline in 1998″ by Kyle Buchanan, a re-print of an excerpt from a profile by Stephen […]
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Patriots Report Card: Aaron Hernandez Breaks Out, Special Teams Deliver Against BroncosThe Patriots overcame a slow start Sunday to roll through the Broncos, clinch the AFC East title and close in on a first-round bye. That's not a bad day's work.
There were also some coaching moves that paid off, timely plays by the special teams and a reminder that the Patriots' other tight end is pretty good, too. New England is now 11-3 and holds the top seed in the AFC playoff picture.
Let's break out the grades.
Tom Brady threw for 320 yards and two touchdowns, and he added another score on the ground.
What grade would you give the Patriots offense?
The tackling and gap control in run defense was atrociously bad for the first three series, but the Patriots stepped up in a big way when they made the switch to a 3-4 in Andre Carter's absence. New England's defense was much, much better throughout the rest of the game as its offense went to work.
What grade would you give the Patriots defense?
Special Teams
Stephen Gostkowski kicked a pair of field goals, including one after the punting unit recovered a fumble at the end of the second quarter. Plus, the coverage units did a solid job, and Julian Edelman kept the Patriots from getting pinned deep by Broncos punter Britton Colquitt.
What grade would you give the Patriots special teams?
The defensive adjustment was impressive, particularly on the heels of Carter's injury. It's hard to fault the coaching staff for the defense's poor start out of the gate because that was mostly about tackling and execution. Lastly, the decision to fly the team to Denver on Friday appeared to pay dividends.
What grade would you give the Patriots coaching?
Mark Anderson
He's shifted to outside linebacker in recent weeks, and that's where he played Sunday in the 3-4. Anderson constantly brought pressure and had two sacks and a fumble recovery. His motor changed the pace of New England's defensive performance.
Unsung Hero
Aaron Hernandez
It's a tough week to dole out this honor because a lot of guys played at a high level and made some big plays. Brady was even considered for the way he ran the offense in the face of that pressure, but to call him unsung would be a reach. Hernandez had a career day and needed to be very good in the absence of wide receiver Deion Branch. Plus, the Broncos swarmed tight end Rob Gronkowski, so Hernandez stepped up and showed opposing defenses why the Patriots are so tough to stop.
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BBC News
watch One-Minute World News
Last Updated: Tuesday, 27 December 2005, 00:20 GMT
Gnashers may be secret of success
Image of white teeth
People rate whitened teeth as more attractive
A person's teeth may influence whether they will be successful in life, say a team of social psychologists.
Researchers from King's College London found volunteers rated the same individuals less favourably when their mug shots showed visible tooth decay.
Those with rotten teeth were deemed less clever, less popular and less well adjusted - as were crowded teeth.
In comparison those with whitened teeth were rated as more attractive and successful than normal.
Hollywood smiles
Professor Tim Newton who carried out the research said: "I would have thought that people would prefer natural looking teeth, but actually they don't."
Image of Ken Dodd
Comedian Ken Dodd
Lead singer of Queen Freddie Mercury
Lead singer of the Pogues Shane McGowan
Writer and broadcaster Janet Street-Porter
DJ turned actor Goldie
The difference was even greater when the pictures were of women, suggesting people judge women more than men based on looks alone.
Yet, there are many famous people who have achieved success with less than perfect smiles, he said.
For some, such as Ken Dodd, their gnashers are their trademarks.
Indeed DJ turned actor Clifford Prince or "Goldie" got his nickname after living in Miami earning a living making and selling gold tooth caps.
But other celebrities strive for the perfect smile and have cosmetic dental procedures such as bleaching or caps.
If you are attractive and you have a bit of decay you can probably get away with it
Professor Newton
Actors Tom Cruise and Cary Grant both had one of their front teeth missing. Tom has since had his corrected.
Professor Newton said his studies suggested that people who were already above average in attractiveness stakes stood a better chance of carrying off a less than perfect smile than people who were not so naturally attractive.
"If you are attractive and you have a bit of decay you can probably get away with it."
Tooth obsessed
But people who are not classically beautiful may have other attributes that make up for it, such as an outstanding wit, he said.
It also appears that people's expectations about what makes a beautiful smile have changed.
I see people every week who want something done to improve the appearance of their teeth
Professor Jimmy Steele, a consultant dentist at Newcastle University
Professor Newton said people today associate perfectly straight, white teeth with beauty because of the Hollywood images they see in magazines and on TV.
In the 100 or so volunteers he tested, he found when people had been looking at pictures of others with these so-called "perfect smiles" they were likely to be less satisfied with their own facial appearance as a result.
In the future, he said it would be interesting to investigate how the attitude differences he found in his studies might impact on peoples' lives.
"For example, if you had two identical people going for the same job, but one had worse teeth than the other, would he be less likely to get the job?" he asked.
Professor Jimmy Steele, a consultant dentist at Newcastle University, said: "If you went back even 10 years ago, footballers often had bad or even no teeth. Now footballers have dental makeovers.
"It's changed the general public's expectations substantially and what we perceive as normal."
Indeed, manufacturers of porcelains and other dental materials used to make artificial teeth have had to produce new whiter shades to match these trends and expectations.
Professor Steel added: "In some ways it is quite positive because it encourages people to look after their teeth."
But he said expectations could be unrealistic and might detract away from the fundamental aspects of healthy dentition - people focusing on what looks good rather than what makes for a healthy smile.
He said it was also putting pressure on dental services.
"It has major implications for the health service. It's generating a demand that can only be partially met.
"I see people every week in my clinic who want something done to improve the appearance of their teeth, and it's not just young people.
"I recently had an 82-year-old lady who wanted orthodontic treatment to straighten her teeth, which is something that we would normally do on 13-year-olds."
Celebrities spark dental trips
18 May 04 | Health
Gold teeth are a gold mine
03 Aug 01 | Business
'Breastfeed for straight teeth'
18 Nov 04 | Health
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Page last updated at 11:51 GMT, Saturday, 23 August 2008 12:51 UK
What next for President Musharraf?
The resignation of President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan marks something of a watershed in the country's troubled recent history as Chris Morris reports.
Former President Pervez Musharraf
Mr Musharraf resigned after being threatened with impeachment
"Where's Musharraf's farm?" we asked a man on the road.
"First left, on the left," he said.
"You can't miss it."
We passed another man, sitting under a hedge, next to a cart loaded with apples.
And just around the corner, we came to a gate covered in muddy, plastic sheeting.
A bit of a come down from the pomp and circumstance of the presidency, but beggars can't be choosers.
If he stays in Pakistan, and if his political opponents don't try to throw him in jail, this is where the former President, General (retired) Pervez Musharraf will soon make his home.
Dangerous places
The surrounding fence was beginning to rust a little, but it had been topped off with gleaming coils of what looked like brand new razor wire.
And like the emperor who had no clothes, no-one in his immediate circle seemed willing to tell him that his time was up
Inside, piles of bricks lay next to a half-built drive and a cement mixer stood idle.
In the background a large house was well on the way to completion. But it certainly did not look like the owner had been expecting to move in any time soon.
The labourers were under strict instructions not to let us through the gates, but as we turned to leave, a few slightly better-dressed gentlemen appeared.
"You shouldn't come here again," one of them said gravely, "it's dangerous for you."
Now there are undoubtedly quite a few dangerous places in Pakistan, but the hedgerows of suburban Islamabad do not quite fit into that category.
Confronting death
If it is dangerous for anyone, it is probably dangerous for Pervez Musharraf. This is a man whom Islamist militants have tried to kill more than once.
Pakistan"s ruling coalition leaders: Asif Ali Zardari (left), Nawaz Sharif (centre left), Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman (centre right) and Asfand Yarwali (right)
Pakistan's ruling coalition must now choose a new president
Given the chance, they will try again. Protecting him will be a security nightmare. But he has always seemed serenely confident that he can survive almost anything.
"I have confronted death and defied it several times in the past," he writes in his autobiography, "because destiny and fate have always smiled on me."
So will he really stay?
Well, according to reports from friends who went to see him after Monday's resignation, that is exactly his plan.
They paint a picture of a changed man with a weight off his shoulders, but still living for now in grand military accommodation.
"He's playing tennis and relaxing with his family," said one supporter.
"He was in a good mood, very relaxed. With no official duties, he was completely different."
But then again, his friends and his official spokesman had been rubbishing reports of his impending resignation until about 10 minutes before he went on TV to speak to the nation.
So who knows?
Civilian politicians have often failed to live up to expectations in Pakistan
If all the rumours that had been doing the rounds had been correct, the soon-to-be former president would have resigned three times and left the country twice, well before his lengthy televised address.
There was a Saudi plane waiting at the airport... A British diplomat pulling the strings... He was going to fight on, he was going to flee... The military were with him. No they weren't... and so on and so forth.
Stopping a rumour, they say, is like trying to un-ring a bell. But the bells had been tolling loud and clear for Pervez Musharraf for quite some time.
Right to the very end, it was clear that he still thought he was the best man for the job, perhaps the only man who could save Pakistan.
"I always put Pakistan first," he said, "always Pakistan first."
Unlike other elements, he suggested darkly, who think they are more important than the country and are trying to betray it.
Insurgency and inflation
The last image of Pervez Musharraf as president was of a man staring rather wistfully from an open car window, his hand raised in military salute.
An appropriate farewell for a leader who was never elected by the people, in a country which for all its current troubles, values the idea of democracy.
But civilian politicians have often failed to live up to expectations in Pakistan.
And at a time when insurgency and inflation are both rising fast, there is an enormous responsibility on their shoulders.
One striking thing about this week's transfer of power was that the Pakistani army was prepared to step aside and watch, as its former chief was backed into a corner and forced to resign.
That is a rare event in Pakistan. And now those who claim a democratic mandate will have to prove they are worthy of that trust.
Wherever he ends up former President Musharraf will probably be watching them closely, perhaps playing one of his favourite games of bridge, and wondering with the rest of us, who has got the ace up their sleeve.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 23rd August, 2008 at 1100 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.
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April 22nd, 2010
09:46 AM ET
'South Park' Mohammed issue sparks debate among Muslims
A message on the "South Park" website explaining why the second part of an episode involving Mohammed can't be streamed online yet.
It took seven minutes of a "South Park" episode to change a devout Muslim’s features from an entertained smile to complete disapproval. He told his colleague, Lebanese blogger Bilal el-Houri, as he walked away from the screening, “This is disgusting.”
What the young man (he prefers to remain anonymous) found disgusting was the depiction of Islam’s revered Prophet Mohammed as a bear mascot in "South Park’s" 200th episode. The depiction was the show authors’ sarcastic attempt to highlight media’s uneasy dealing with the father of Islam as not to offend Muslims who consider any depiction of their prophet as blasphemous.
Since his followers insist on him not being shown in any form, producers have always struggled with ways to include Mohammed in story lines without showing him. The most famous of those depictions is the classic Hollywood movie ‘The Message’ by Mustafa al-Akkad about the life of Prophet Mohammed. Being Muslim himself, al-Akkad directed his entire film with extreme sensitivity building the character of the prophet around the wind or the light so it’s a presence that is felt or experienced but not seen.
The "South Park" episode showing Mohammed disguised in a bear suit earned the show creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker a jihadist campaign and a serious warning from a radical Islamic group based in New York City. The group posted on its website Revolutionmuslim.com a video filled with reminders of what fundamentalist Muslims did to those who in their eyes “insulted” their prophet.
On Wednesday night the episode continued the storyline of Mohammed in part II of the episode– but it aired with additional audio bleeps and image blocks reading “CENSORED." They also didn't have the episode streaming on their Web site. There was however, this message from the creators:
Comedy Central confirmed they added additional bleeps to the show than what was in the original cut. Whether the decision was an attempt to appeal to Muslims or to keep angry sentiment at bay, nobody knows, but tackling the issue of Mohammed in any way, beeps and censor marks included, still sparks concern among Muslims.
Blogger Bilal el-Houri is agnostic but he grew up in a Muslim family in the mostly Muslim region of the Middle East. He said, “My first thoughts on the episode were "haha!", but then I realized how deep and complicated this issue is.”
El-Houri observed that the "South Park" episode highlighted the fear from “barbaric Muslim retaliation” when a Muslim symbol is featured in the media. He said Muslims should focus on convincing others not to show iconic figure out of “respect to Islam” instead.
Having been brought up as a Muslim, she said she grew up with the notion that one “shouldn’t criticize Allah, Islam or the Prophet” but she herself became a prominent critic of Islam. Her screenplay for Theo Van Gogh's movie ‘Submission’ brought her death threats. She had been living under protection since Van Gogh’s assassination of fear for her life. She describes the reaction to the depiction of Mohammed as “ridiculous” and thinks the solution lies in “scrutinizing Islam and criticizing it in the same way that we criticize Christianity, Judaism and other ideologies and other religions.”
"Equal opportunity scrutiny, equal opportunity offense," she told CNN's Anderson Cooper.
On "South Park’"s Facebook discussion boards, Muslims vented their frustration trying to explain why depicting their prophet is offensive and blamed South Park for fanning the tensions that already exist in the world around this subject. Under the title “Respect my Religion,” posts were mainly defensive. Most tried to expand on their belief that Islam is a religion of peace that respects other religions and prophets. Others blamed the extremists for “hijacking” their religion and using it to justify murdering and threatening people who don’t agree with them.
Muslim fans of "South Park" focused more on the episode which one of them thought was a “let down” in its redundancy of the old “controversial Prophet Mohammed depiction.”
Zainab Sher said, “2 b honest 200 episode wasnt funny at all to me!” She then added, “Bringing Mohammad back! when you know it is a sensitive issue […] seems to me southpark is running out of ideas!!! that angle just brought everything down.”
Omar Latif kept his comments simple, “DISAPPOINTED with showing our prophet.”
Ahmed Ata Saada said he had seen all "South Park" episodes and he found them “very fun.” But he found it “ridiculous” to make fun of other people’s beliefs and sacred religion. Many other Muslims joined in agreement while non-Muslims comments focused on the right to freedom of speech.
Part II of the 200th episode brought more of the same and the reaction does not seem to have picked up anywhere around the Muslim world yet. But the episode did seem to have a clear self-censorship which could have resulted from the warning. The reason for this could be a simple one. In every instance where violence ensued from published or broadcast material that offended Islam, the strong reaction was not immediate or spontaneous. It took time to build steam through video distribution in mosques and on the Internet, supported by clerics and religious leaders’ incitement during sermons and speeches.
It is true that hundreds and thousands took to the streets especially following the Danish cartoons controversy. Many of them protested violently burning buildings, cars and calling for the death of the cartoonist. But it is equally true that the majority of Muslims did not take to the streets and expressed their dismay rather peacefully or did not comment at all.
While millions around the world watched the violence in the streets of Islamabad, Cairo, and Beirut, there were many other Muslims who appeared on shows to condemn the violence committed in their name and under what they considered it to be the guise of defending Islam. They called for calm and talked about the peaceful nature of Islam instead.
Many mainstream Muslim clerics and devout Muslims have said repeatedly that the problem with the Muslim scripture, the Quran, is that it is vast, complex and appears at times to be contradictory. They attribute that to the belief that the verses are based on unique situations that occurred during the life of Prophet Mohammed but don’t apply to modern-day life.
It is a known fact that the Quran is open to interpretation; unlike other religions, Muslims don’t have a single entity to make a final call on certain issues. This leaves the door open to local clerics to issue Fatwas or religious edicts, based on their personal belief which could be ultra orthodox, moderate and many shades in between.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Bilal el-Houri, like many experts and scholars who speak up about this subject, put the responsibility in the hands of the majority moderate Muslims. Hirsi Ali points out that the Quran contains verses calling for the killing of non-believers. She said, “There are some people who want to act on it, and there are some people who don’t. The majority of Muslims do not want to act on the scripture, but they are silent when fellow Muslims do.”
Blogger Bilal el-Houri has seen both sides first hand in the Middle East. He says no matter how "cruel" the South Park episode is, “it should be a wake up call to Muslims around the world about how they are being portrayed, and instead of grunting and calling for boycotts and other actions, “they should begin by respecting free speech” and they should ask themselves, "why?"
Beside the intended humor in "South Park’s" 200th episodes I and II, there seems to be a message about the role of the world’s leading religions with a special emphasis on Islam’s state of affairs. Judging by the many bleeps censoring every time the word Mohammed was uttered and covering the entire “moral” of the episodes if one may call it that. It seems that the creators of South Park are sending the same message as Hirsi Ali and el-Houri; that open dialogue is the way to go.
In the midst of "South Park’s" many jokes and jabs, one can conclude that moderate Muslims can take away a message already articulated by many. By enforcing strict rules on depiction of their prophet, they allow the extremists to get all the attention. By doing so, they draw negative attention to their religion, alienate themselves and allow their message to be lost in censorship.
soundoff (222 Responses)
1. Andrew B. Bosma
If not now... when?
When will we seriously address the threat of capitulating to fundamentalist thinking?
I mean, look, I can certainly see the sound reasoning behind why MUSLIMS would be forbidden from depicting Mohammed in any way, shape or form: because Mohammed (or whoever it was who issued the decree), understood man's tendency to idolize people. You see, he wanted the focus to be on the Qua'ran instead of the man. Okay, I got it. And that's fine. (I mean, makes sense given what happened during Moses' absence from his people when he ascended Mt. Sainai to bring God's [written] commandments down from the mountaintop for them).
But, as such, it must be emphasized that this decree against depicting Mohammed is and always has been strictly imposed upon Muslims... AND MUSLIMS ONLY.
Muslim FUNDAMENTALISTS seek to twist and distort the teachings of Islam to their own selfish ambitions by trying to force the non-Muslim rest of the world to adopt Muslim standards.
It's time for the Muslim NON-extremists to start confronting the crazies operating in the name of Islam and Allah.
It troubles me greatly that you don't see a movement among modern, socially-progressive Muslims to denounce fundamentalism in all its guises but especially those that operate under their own religious label 'Muslim'.
April 22, 2010 at 11:30 am | Report abuse | Reply
2. Josiah
This is getting old.. move on already.. Muslim's should just shrug their shoulders, and move on.. I mean in Christianity when you are struck you are supposed to turn the other cheek right?.. well that can even be the same when they portray Jesus..Shrug thier Shoulders (turn their cheeks) and move on!! Thats why you don't hear controversy with Christians.. this is plain and simple.. Its not like you will get struck down if you (muslims) shrug your shoulders and ignore it or even laugh... c'mon.. where is the humor.. Guess the making of that movie "Looking for Comedy in a Muslim World" never got flack whe it came out.. so whats the big deal.. South Park portrayed a Muslim prophet inside of a Bear Costume...ok why are Muslims so ashamed to Show off or even display their beloved prophet?? Buddah is shown, Many of the Hindu gods are shown, Jesus is shown, Moses is shown, what gives?? Did he even exist?? Stop complaining and shrug your shoulders and MOVE ON!!!!!!
April 22, 2010 at 11:34 am | Report abuse | Reply
3. Abdul Aziz
What amuses me about this article is that the two "Muslim Scholars" aren't muslim at all and have obviously left the religion based on their own negative experiences (which I would never invalidate.) However If you are going to provide a balanced voice for the muslim community as it relates to how we view the depiction of the Prophet Muhammed (peace and blessings be upon him) Please reach out to people who do not consider themselves atheists. I do not understand why we as muslims get so upset when unbelievers depict our prophet (pbuh) in negative ways or talk against Islam. It is the duty of the shaitan to do such. We don't have to do anything but believe in what we believe in and allow others to believe what they believe Like Surah Al-Kafirun tells us. The Quran explicitly tells us that this is the way:
Say (O Prophet): O ye who reject faith! (1)
لَآ أَعۡبُدُ مَا تَعۡبُدُونَ
I worship not that which ye worship; (2)
وَلَآ أَنتُمۡ عَـٰبِدُونَ مَآ أَعۡبُدُ
Nor worship ye that which I worship. (3)
وَلَآ أَنَا۟ عَابِدٌ۬ مَّا عَبَدتُّمۡ
وَلَآ أَنتُمۡ عَـٰبِدُونَ مَآ أَعۡبُدُ
Nor will ye worship that which I worship. (5)
لَكُمۡ دِينُكُمۡ وَلِىَ دِينِ
The key part being Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion.
Let the unbelievers do what they will because there is nothing we can do about it.
April 22, 2010 at 11:40 am | Report abuse | Reply
4. Ellie M
What's wrong with people these days? Did you completely miss the fact that they made fun of almost every other religous leader, too? It's not like South park is singling out a religion and bashing it. I thought that the 200th episode was hilarious. People need to stop being so sensitive and get over it. It's just a cartoon tv show(and an awesome one at that). There are worse things to freak out about. We keep bending over backwards because of fear of violence. Well we can always fight violence with violence. We need to stop allowing radical groups to make our decisions for us.
April 22, 2010 at 11:45 am | Report abuse | Reply
5. John
You know, the following string of 8 ascii characters .. mohammed .. isn't a picture of the man, but it does represent him in text, and muslims are not offended. But if I choose a different set of 5 ascii characters .. Ç:-]= .. to represent him in text, should muslims now be offended? After all, some people might chose to tilt their heads and imagine seeing a turbin, eyes, nose, mouth, and beard - and suddently to them its now a picture. Should CNN print this comment? Or censor it for fear of it generating death threats. What has this world of ours become?
April 22, 2010 at 11:49 am | Report abuse | Reply
6. Vinnie
Deluded. Absolute delusion. Delusions of grandeur found in a book. In a book called the Koran/Quran.
South Park is less so. Where is the South Park religion?
April 22, 2010 at 11:50 am | Report abuse | Reply
7. SMW
South Park shows no mercy to any religion. Wouldn't not showing this episode be like giving into the threats and fear that terrorist try to push upon us. Not that I believe all Islams are terrorists. I don't believe that at all, but for the ones that are, they try to bully the world into fearing them. I think this shows that we wont be bullied or fear stricken into silence.
April 22, 2010 at 11:55 am | Report abuse | Reply
8. Trey
The fact that these people burned down buildings because of a Danish cartoon in the 1st place shows you how crazy they are...they need to get their heads right...
USA USA USA!!!
April 22, 2010 at 12:03 pm | Report abuse | Reply
9. mordrud
I wish someone in hollywood would make a real movie about Mohamed and the rise of the Islamic empire. I know it would be controversial to show someone playing Mohamed but tough puckies. People are so afraid of other peoples crazy eccentric behavior that they tip toe around. I think a history based – well researched movie or miniseries about Mohamed and Omar would be very enlightening and educational to the world.
April 22, 2010 at 12:07 pm | Report abuse | Reply
10. mark Montgomery
Muslims are too sensitive and it's time we stopped kissing their butts. If a muslim draws a caricature of Jesus we Christains are not going to hunt him down and kill him. I keep copies of the "Muhammed" cartoons on my computer and share them with folks all over the world. Try to stop me. Mark Montgomery NYC, NY
April 22, 2010 at 12:17 pm | Report abuse | Reply
11. lord of the isles
The white male Christian is the evil satan. Everything bad in this world comes from the evil white man. Specifically those whites north of Italy and Spain, Those evil doomed northern Europeans and our Christianity. Islam is such a disenfranchised helpless little religion, only stuggling to bring peace happiness and joy to those who believe in MOE-HAM-ADD...hey I said HAM is'nt that pig flesh?!?!? Hey do the Moslems/Islamic Sunny sheeeeeite know this? Their prophet has a little porcine in his name..oooohhhhhh. Let me guess now some is-lam-ic fundementalist is screaming "DEATH TO THE INFIDEL". Grow up, not everyone likes you or your silly cult of moons and stars. Go back to your sand box, make your 5 year old daughter marry some 50 year old camel rapist, and when she tries to free herself from this insanity, stone her to death like you normally do, or like the latest one, cut off her nose. Yeah a real great religion..belong to us or we KILL YOU.
12. Divune
I hope they would get their 72 virgins right now, but instead stop crying like little babies about mohammad related stuff.
April 22, 2010 at 12:26 pm | Report abuse | Reply
13. me
Listen ppl .. Mohammed was NOT GOD.. so get over it .. you seem to accept it and laugh when Christ was on.. Southpark doesnt pick and choose, so lets just move on .. he was a human, so lets not make more of it than it is.. This is why the rest of the world thinks middle easterns are a bunch of angry ppl .. HYPOCRTICeS
April 22, 2010 at 12:32 pm | Report abuse | Reply
14. simplicity
why cant we simply refrain from "intentionally" doing things that obviously upset other fellow human beings. this seems to be upsetting not one or two, but an awful lot of people is it not? wouldn't the world be so much more peaceful if we make the feeblest attempt to not "knowingly" do things that hurt or offend others? is it really that difficult? or are we just ignorant to the fact, because we just don't give a damn...
April 22, 2010 at 12:34 pm | Report abuse | Reply
15. me
oh and BTW, welcome to USA.. Freedom of Speech .. something Islam doe not allow nor tolerates
April 22, 2010 at 12:36 pm | Report abuse | Reply
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Windows 8 to offer easier file management
But studies done by Microsoft confirmed that parts of the Windows 7 copy experience can be "cluttered and confusing." This is especially true if you're are copying or moving files and folders with the same names or copying or moving multiple files one after the other.
Related stories:
Windows 8 prerelease launching in coming months
Microsoft lists 'App Store' as a Windows 8 feature
Windows 8 to fully support USB 3.0
To offer a more user-friendly file management experience in Windows 8, Microsoft came up with three goals: 1) create a single place to manage and monitor all files being copied; 2) remove distractions and give people just the information they need; and 3) put people in more control of their copy operations.
As as result, Windows 8 users will see four new features in the upcoming operating system designed to simplify the chore of copying and moving files.
First, in past versions of Windows, a separate progress dialog box would pop up for each new file that you were copying or moving. This could sometimes result in dozens of different file copy boxes floating around the screen. Windows 8 consolidates the process into one dialog box for all files being copied or moved where you can more easily view and control each individual file.
Windows 8 will display a single dialog box even when copying multiple files.
(Credit: Microsoft)
Second, users will be able to stop, pause, and resume each file being copied or moved and view the source or destination folder while the process is running.
Third, Microsoft's estimates on how long a file will take to copy or move have always been something of a joke, which Simons even admitted in his blog. We've all seen file copy messages that keep changing the estimate dramatically, jumping from something like 5 minutes to 1 hour and then to 15 minutes and then back to an hour.
Instead of guessing how long a file will take to copy, Windows 8 will offer a new graph detailing the data transfer speed, the transfer rate trend, and how much data is left to transfer. Though that sounds more complicated than a simple estimate, it promises to be more accurate.
Fourth, people can sometimes be confused by filename conflicts or collisions, which occur when the same filename exists in both the source and destination folders during a copy or move. For Windows 8, Microsoft has redesigned the box that pops up during a file collision, which Simons feels will be more efficient and easier to understand.
Windows 8 will present a clearer dialog box in the event of duplicate filenames.
(Credit: Microsoft)
As one final tweak that should please a lot of people, Microsoft is doing away with some of the redundant and often annoying dialog boxes that appear when managing files, such as, "Are you sure you want to delete this file?" or "Are you sure you want to merge these folders?"
All of the new file management improvements add up to "building a significantly improved copy experience, one that is unified, concise, and clear, and which puts you in control of your experience," Simons added.
Gift Guide: Digital stocking stuffers under $50
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Getting cash for crashed gadgets
Why pay to recycle? Web-based services will pay you for mailing in old electronics.
The new BuyMyTronics, (via EcoGeek) from the same people behind BuyMyBrokeniPod, will accept game consoles from a GameBoy to an Xbox, as well as iPods and iPhones. According to the site's online estimate, a dead Wii in the original box would fetch $62.25, sent via PayPal or check. If you like the deal, just sign up and ship out the goods.
SecondRotation also pays for gaming consoles, PDAs, phones, camcorders, GPS devices, and digital cameras. But its estimate rated the value of the same broken Wii as a gaping zero.
Too bad I can't find a site that wants my TI 99/4-A, circa 1981. I guess that's better fit for a vintage computer sale, Craigslist, FreeCycle, or eBay.
At least someone will give me a kickback for mailing in an old Motorola RAZR V3. CellforCash would pay $13, SimplySellular would fork over $23, and SellYourCell would offer $20. SecondRotation beat them all with its $30 trade-in estimate. BuyMyTronics is working to add trade-in options for cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, and camcorders.
Of course, you can also recycle a wireless phone without getting paid, or pay a small fee to GreenCitizen if you find walking into their San Francisco or Silicon Valley trade-in shop convenient. Trade-in services, including curbside pickup, from HP and Dell have good reputations.
Services such as these either refurbish and resell used gear, donate the old tech to schools or needy nonprofit groups, or send the stuff straight into something like a meat grinder for hardware, later reclaiming valuable metals to sell. SecondRotation resells the items on eBay, as does BuyMyTronics, which also donates castoff parts to artists. The staff of BuyMyTronics also aims to be "green" by reusing packaging materials and walking most of the hundreds of goods it deals with each month over to the post office.
However, many other recycling services make it a practice to ship used electronics overseas, where it's likely to poison the health of people and ecosystems. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition lists recyclers services that recycle responsibly.
Gift Guide: Digital stocking stuffers under $50
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Posters for Ang Lee movies are typically unimaginative, so I was pretty shocked when I saw the new one-sheet for Lee's latest, Lust, Caution. It isn't exactly an innovative design, but it is a lot more interesting than his usual head-shot type of poster. I like it even better than the Brokeback Mountain look-away-in-shame artwork. And if we can base the quality of Lee's movies on their posters (just look at the awful designs for Hulk and Ride with the Devil to see how it works), then Lust, Caution could be his best film to date. This poster, with its browning tones and its shadows, make the film look like it's directed by Wong Kar Wai (whose films also didn't have good posters until recently). It could just be because Tony Leung stars, or because of that dress, but for me the poster evokes Wong's In the Mood for Love. I am surprised that Joan Chen isn't featured anywhere, but I guess they preferred to spotlight newcomer Tang Wei, who gets even better exposure here than Leung (though it must be said that Leung's profile is more recognizable than many other stars').
Lust, Caution is Lee's return to Chinese-language filmmaking again following Hulk and Brokeback, and it marks his first film after winning the Oscar for the latter film. He is again working with executive producer James Schamus of Focus Features and he has brought back Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon producer William Kong and screenwriter Wang Hui-Ling. Lee's longtime editor Tim Squyres also returns after not working on Brokeback. It seems the only collaborator that Lee is keeping from his Oscar darling is cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. Lust, Caution is set in WWII Shanghai and involves a plot to assassinate an intelligence chief in the Japanese-backed Chinese government. Leung plays the intelligence chief, Chen plays his wife and Tang is a student who seduces Leung's the character in order to set up the assassination. Focus will open the film in limited release September 28.
Check out the trailer after the jump.
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A Natural History of Menopause
Menopause is defined as an ending, a lack: you can't know you're in it till it's over. That's the dance, said a doctor I asked. To medicine, it's the one-year anniversary of a woman's last period. Just that day, that 24-hour spot of time.
To most women, the word carries much more weight. Hot flashes. Mood swings. A feeling of falling apart. Aches in the teeth, the joints, the eyes. Osteoporosis. The end of fertility—and of desire, too? The transformation from "babe" into "crone." The door to old age.
I fear beginning to look like my mother, with a very large stomach, said a woman in one survey. Others noted:
Wrinkling, pot-belly, old-looking skin.
It's a negative image of a body "drying up."
Weight gain is a constant struggle.
I dislike feeling old.
"Notable was the absence of any sense of achievement, or gained status, associated with becoming menopausal," noted the researchers who conducted the survey. "Rather, the anticipated benefits had more to do with the termination of currently annoying or troubling conditions."
Recently an anthropologist did find a biological reason for "the change": as a way to secure the health of the youngsters in a family while their mother is nursing a newborn. Post-menopausal females are prodigious food-gatherers, she found, and keep their grandchildren well fed. The news was uplifting: menopause may be a good thing for the species. But the anthropologist's work carried a downside as well. She named her idea "The Grandmother Hypothesis." (At menopause, I wonder, will I become white haired and apple-cheeked? Will I learn patience and pie-baking?)
Doctors talk about the perimenopause, those years (and we're talking five, more or less) of fluctuating fertility, when a woman's once punctual periods start wandering over the days and weeks. When it comes, the blood may gush—a sign frighteningly like that of some cancers. Just the irregularity of it all takes some getting used to. Especially when no one can tell you why.
"Why do women continue to feel they don't know anything about menopause when there are so many books on the bookshelves now?," asked Phyllis Mansfield, who had conducted the survey cited above. "Because every woman's menopause is unique," she answered herself, "and no study has validated that uniqueness."
Mathematics, oddly, may give women that validation: mathematics and almost a quarter of a million urine samples. These are the telling points of a $2 million study, funded by the National Institutes of Health last July, joining Mansfield and anthropologists Jim Wood, Darryl Holman, and Kathleen O'Connor at Penn State, with demographer Maxine Weinstein at Georgetown University and nurse-physiologist Ann Voda of The Tremin Trust at the University of Utah.
Mansfield is a psychologist, a health educator, and a scholar of women's studies. She has a reassuring manner and a soothing voice, yet she's effusive and energetic when talking about what drives her; for an activist she's unusually optimistic. She offered me chocolate when I came to her office: someone baked brownies for a birthday treat. When she spoke of her new project she sat very still. "All my research is done with the aim of giving women the information that will empower them. I want to help women. I want to help women manage a very scary transition—and it's scary because they don't know what to expect."
"It's a hot topic," said anthropologist Jim Wood of the menopause. "Because of the aging of the Baby Boom and also the development of new interventions for infertility that aren't just "treatments.' It's now possible for a woman to become pregnant after menopause, with donor eggs, a simulated hormonal milieu. There's no overwhelming technical reason why she shouldn't be able to do this." Wood has the kind of enthusiasm that is barely contained in his frame. His gestures are large, his vocabulary lively. He does professorial stuff: writes flow charts on the blackboard, knits his fingers behind his head, yet he can discuss without blushing such things as breastfeeding and menstrual blood. His research landed him in New Guinea, just out of graduate school, collecting urine and trying to unravel, by reading hormonal signs, why women are sometimes fertile, sometimes not, why their cycles suddenly end. "To discover the dearth of information on these questions was absolutely mindboggling," he exclaimed.
Darryl Holman was one of Wood's graduate students and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the lab. He rivals Wood's enthusiasm (and though a younger man, beats him hands down on length of beard), but his is a more gentle, inquiring manner. He's quick to blame his own bad assumptions for the trick his data from Bangladesh played on him. With a team of Bangladeshi field workers, he collected 20,000 urine samples one year. He was assessing rates of fetal loss—how often women became pregnant but lost the fetus before they knew it—and menopause factored into his tests. "If I'd only known," he mused. "If I'd not read the literature, I would have done a better study." He laughed and explained: "I went to Bangladesh believing women over 43 had a good chance of being post-menopausal. There'd been a study in the early "80s in this same area, and it found the mean age at menopause was 43.6. That's on the low end, but it's consistent with studies of menopause in developing countries," the theory being that menopause has something to do with poor nutrition or stress. "So I only collected women up to age 48," Holman said. "By chance I got a few older than that because the field worker messed up." A statistical analysis including these strays showed the mean age at menopause to be between 49 and 51. "My conclusion now is that this belief that menopause occurs earlier in developing countries is not true. It's hooey. I went back and reviewed the literature very carefully, and in all the studies that showed a really early age at menopause, the statistical analyses were flawed."
Statistical analyses are Holman's cup of tea. He talked of being "the statistical interpreter" of the menopause group, of being interested in "building etiologic models, mechanistic models, of how we think the biology is working," of being "quite proud of the follicular depletion model" that he and Wood have developed to explain menopause. "But I want to apply it as well," he added. "We're trying to understand what menopause is."
"There's another reason why women want to do this, to be a part of this study," said Kathleen O'Connor. O'Connor, also a postdoc, actually runs the lab. She's the one who has to go down to Walmart to collect the 200 clipboards, 200 Tupperware freezer containers, and 1200 styrofoam boxes. She's the one who'll be in charge of packing and sending the stuff out to the women volunteers and organizing hormonal assays on the quarter of a million urine samples they return. She's assayed her own urine as well. "It's fun experimenting on yourself," she kidded. There's a quickness, a cut-to-the-chase efficiency about O'Connor that's lacking in the other three Penn Staters on the team. She sorted through a stack of files looking for something, grabbed a napkin when she couldn't come up with a blank scrap to draw a diagram on. She showed me the chart: two hormones fluctuating like out-of-sync waves across a span of 30 days. "It's so cool to see that," she said, "when you get a profile of your hormones across your cycle, it's so cool. You learn what your body is doing. It's a reward in itself."
"I'm taking urine samples myself, too," noted Mansfield. "Kathy and I can sit around and say, You know what it's like when you can't open the freezer box because your hands are too stiff first thing in the morning?" She smiled. "It's very important to know what you're asking other people to do."
The "other people," in this case, are a group of 150 to 200 35- to 55-year-old women selected from the Tremin Trust Menstruation and Reproductive History Program. Beginning in 1934, when Alan Treloar of the University of Minnesota enrolled the 2350 women of cohort 1, and continuing with the 1600 women of cohort 2, who were recruited in the 1960s and "70s, the Tremin Trust women have kept menstrual calendars, recording the beginning and ending dates of each of their periods on a standardized card and, on its reverse, any "unusual events" that might have affected their cycles, such as pregnancies, births, abortions, surgeries, illnesses, use of medication, or lapses in their record-keeping. A year-end health report recorded their living arrangements and household composition, education, medical and smoking histories, exercise routines, and sources of stress or support. "Since 1967," Wood and his colleagues wrote in their grant proposal, "analyses drawing upon the Tremin Trust database have made significant contributions to our understanding of the human menstrual cycle. . . . Most of what we know about age patterns of menstruation, including during the menopausal transition, is based upon the Tremin Trust sample."
Mansfield met Ann Voda, current director of the Tremin Trust, at a conference the year after the Trust moved to the University of Utah in 1984. Both were asking questions about the menstrual cycle: "Not medicalizing," Mansfield said, "but asking different questions, saying, What do women experience? We were not making assumptions that menstrual events were signs of illness. They may be different from what women experience at other times, but not illness."
In 1990, the two started a study using a subset of the Tremin Trust women, those aged 35 to 55 who were still menstruating. They focused on heavy bleeding. "We asked the women to report not just when their periods started and stopped, but we devised a scale to measure how much bleeding was occuring. Women do notice if their period is longer or shorter, but what they most notice is this heavy bleeding." The women's yearly health report was expanded to include questions about changes in their bodies, their cycles, moods, sexual response, hot flashes, and other conditions related to menopause. "We asked them how they negotiated decision-making with their physicians on hormone treatments, and where they got their information on menopause." Voda and Mansfield also asked, Why do you stay in this project? "Mostly to help other women, the subjects said. They felt they had been so much better informed by being in the project," Mansfield noted. Some had listed Edith Bunker of TV's "All in the Family" as one of their chief sources of information before joining the study. I can't talk to my physician about this, one said. Another: Two doctors told me when I asked about when to expect menopause, "Ask your mother.' Thanks anyway. A third: My mother told me nothing about the menstrual cycle or menopause. It was hush-hush.
Independently of Mansfield, Wood and Maxine Weinstein had contacted Voda about using the Tremin Trust to look at the hormonal profile over menopause. It was Voda who linked Wood and Mansfield, both at Penn State. "It was natural for us to put together a grant proposal," said Mansfield. But it took several rewrites before a federal agency agreed to fund it. ("Our fear was that the government would take so long that the women would be past menopause," Mansfield said. "This was going to be the last try, they're getting old.") Funding came through in July "97, and Mansfield admitted that the protocol was improved by the review process. "We did a quick pilot study," she explained, "with women in this area collecting their urine in a device Darryl devised. We were able to show the government that we did have a method women would easily comply with."
It's not a method easy on the lab. "We're getting daily samples from a large number of women over a long range of time," said O'Connor, "it's unprecedented. It'll open a window into the biology." It'll be a lot of work. Each woman will get a 15-pound "urine collection kit" each year: 185 "urine collection devices" (one a day for six months, then she can take a six-month break), a plastic freezer storage case, sheets of labels, sealing tape, seven 8-ounce refrigerant gel packs (one extra for travel), six postpaid polyfoam mailing boxes, and an instruction sheet on a clipboard. The easy-to-use urine collection device, which Holman hopes to patent, obviates the need for the subject to process urine in any way, e.g. to pour it from one container to another, according to the grant proposal. Each morning, the woman collects her own urine, seals the vial, attaches that day's sample identification number to the vial, and then places it into the plastic container provided for storing the specimens in her freezer. On the label she does "a little bit of record-keeping," noting if she's menstruating, taking birth control pills, eating large amounts of soy protein ("Some studies find an effect on the hormones we're looking at," said O'Connor. "It's controversial."), any medicines she might be using.
"Altogether," said O'Connor, "it should take her three to five minutes, max."
At the end of each month, she'll ship her 30-odd vials toUniversity Park via overnight express.
"We'll probably need 12 freezers here in the lab," said O'Connor. "We're hoping to get 40,000 urine samples a year." From each daily sample O'Connor and her assistants will take a one-milliliter aliquot, freezing the rest of the 10-to-15 milliliter sample. The urine in each aliquot will be used in four hormone assays, testing for forms of estradiol, progesterone, follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), and luteinizing hormone (LH). "Each of the assays," said O'Connor, "takes about a week to run. At 36 samples per plate, 30 plates at a time, we'll be doing about 1,000 samples a week. A robotic pipetter will do a lot of the work for us," she added. "That'll help prevent carpal tunnel syndrome from repeat pipetting. But it will still be an enormous amount of work. That's why other people haven't done this before."
Over the last year, processing Holman's 20,000 Bangladeshi urine samples, O'Connor has streamlined the assaying. "Every day of the week we take out the plates, line them up, and do something to them. It's like working in your kitchen. The samples have a wide range of colors. They're quite pretty. There is a distinctive odor—" She laughed. "I get a lot of comments from the genetics people down the hall, especially when we're boiling it. But it's better than working with blood or feces."
Mansfield, meanwhile, is in charge of keeping the samples coming in. "My job," she explained, "is to make calls to every woman on the project and find out how she's doing. To make sure she doesn't have questions, that her morale is good." Mansfield will also be the one integrating the women's label jottings and yearly surveys with the hormonal assays—"that is, placing what we're finding in the lab in the context of women's lives: the stressful events, new jobs, divorces, deaths; what the women are taking, in terms of medical products or herbs; and how they're feeling: What is going on when their LH and FSH are sky high?
"We've learned that all changes are alarming to women," Mansfield said, citing her earlier work with Voda. "A woman who has a 32-day cycle will become totally alarmed if she has a 35-day period, when for another woman that's totally normal. No one has documented what all the changes are over the menopause. Treloar did some of it, the man who started the Tremin Trust."
Nearly three million office visits are made by women between ages 25 and 54 each year for complaints related to menstrual disorders; the annual visit rate for abnormal bleeding is 7.2 per 100 women, Mansfield and her colleagues note in their grant proposal. Changes in menstrual patterns have been linked to osteoporosis, cardiovascular risk, cancers of the breast and endometrium, thyroid and pituitary disorders, and other health problems. Yet no one knows the full range of "normal." Despite recent work on the biology of menopause, little is known at the population level about variation among women in the perimenopausal transition or how that variation relates to their earlier experiences.
"Here's the Reader's Digest Condensed Version," Wood began. He was giving me the lab's working model, their theory of what menopause is. When Holman had explained it to me, he used equations; O'Connor scrapped the math and pulled out illustrations and graphs. Wood began with the basics.
"Up in your head you have the hypothalmus." He drew a box on the blackboard. "A little lower down in the head you have the pituitary gland. The hypothalmus releases gonadotropic releasing hormone, GnRH. That stimulates a couple of hormones known as FSH and LH, the gonadotropins, which in turn stimulate the ovary and are critical in maintaining regular cycles. These hormones select which follicle in the ovary is going to develop into an egg. What we think is happening with this selection process is that a lot of follicles begin developing, then randomly die by a process called atresia. Atresia is the default value. But the idea is that if a follicle has started to develop at such a time that it presents the right hormone receptor during a previous month's cycle, it will be selected—it will be rescued from atresia and go on to become an egg.
"The developing follicles in the ovary feed back to the pituitary gland by releasing steroids—estradiol, which is a form of estrogen, and progesterone are the most important." At the blackboard, Wood finished drawing boxes for the pituitary and ovary and linked them with a pattern of arrows. "Except for a brief period mid-cycle, these feedbacks are mostly negative, that is, they suppress the production of hormones. The exception is estradiol. Just before ovulation, it switches over in a way that's still mysterious to a positive feedback. But it's the negative feedback from the follicles at the beginning of the cycle that's critical for getting a normal cycle underway.
"We now know with fair confidence," Wood said, speaking for science in general, "that menopause is driven by this process of follicular depletion." Or, as O'Connor had put it, "Aging comes from the ovaries." It works like this: A girl is born with upwards of a million follicles in her ovaries. Like the cells in the brain and the eye, these follicles are never replaced when they die. Unlike brain cells, dying off is what follicles do naturally: by the time a girl reaches puberty and her hormones kick in, she will have lost all but some 100,000 of them. Every month after that, a dozen or more follicles will begin to grow, only one of which is usually selected to mature and be released at ovulation. By the time she is 45 (at least according to the handful of studies that have been done using autopsy cases or ovaries that had to be surgically removed), a woman's follicles will number only about a thousand. "What happens in menopause," said Wood, "is that once you've run out of follicles, all the hormonal feedback is removed. FSH and LH go up to very high levels and randomly fluctuate, which is what we believe is responsible for hot flashes.
"The big mysteries in this research have to do with the mechanisms of follicular depletion," Wood added. "But from the statistical information, it looks like a process that begins prenatally and randomly continues. There's a random exhaustion of follicles ending with menopause." That statistical pattern lends itself to "some fairly simple mathematical models," said Wood. (As Holman had noted. "It looks like an exponential process, like a radioactive half-life.") Wood continued, "As modelers, we thought, If the process is as straightforward as that, then we should be able to develop a mathematical model of follicular depletion that could tell us what the age distribution of menopause should look like, and it should tell us something about the variation in ages of when women reach menopause.
"So we developed a model. But as we started playing around with the model more, and the implications of the model, we thought, There really shouldn't be such a thing as menopause. It's an arbitrary definition: If you haven't experienced vaginal bleeding in 12 months, you're post-menopausal. But the model told us there should be a very long upper tail"—that is, that a graph of bleeding episodes over a woman's lifetime wouldn't show just monthly clusters of dots that suddenly stop; the dots would instead at some point start spacing out and looking erratic, tailing off little by little until they eventually gave out.
"But then, we asked, Why do we see these long lags between bleeding at higher ages? It turns out that it has to do with interarrival times in superimposed pure-death processes."
Huh? Wood saw the blank look on my face and laughed, a great guffaw. "This loss of follicles can be modelled in a way that statistical modellers call a "pure-death process.' That's a subclass of what statisticians call "birth-death processes,' but here you have a stock of something and the only thing that can happen to them is that you can lose them.
"It's a very strange biological reality.
"What our model predicted was that at any age you had a possibility of having a period of time where there was no follicular development. In a young woman, that period of time might be milli-seconds long, but it's there. In an older woman, it can be very long indeed. Menopause, in a way, is just a very long phase before follicular development. Which means that a woman well past "menopause' could still get some vaginal bleeding. This is what our model predicts."
He smiled. "It's a lot nicer than thinking that something very wrong is going on if you get bleeding after menopause," he added.
Back to the science: "So then we got to wondering if these interarrival times left any hormonal signature? We searched the literature and we found it.
"We used to think that if you saw a combination of low steroids and high gonadotropins that it was the signature of menopause. But if our model was right, there should be a period in any woman's cycle when no steroids were released and we would see high gonadotropins. And we found a handful of cases. There was no explanation given. These were just weird times when the women were not producing steroids and their gonadotropins went real high. One endocrinologist went so far as to label this the "hypoestrogenic-hypergonadotrophic period.' He only saw it in one woman.
"At the same time, we were doing a pilot study for our NIH grant proposal. Kathy was collecting urine in women of a wide age range, and as data came in, hey presto! There was our own hypoestrogenic-hypergonadotrophic phase. It looked like what you'd expect during one of our interarrival times.
"Then we said—and this idea took a long time coming—we said, occasionally you'd expect to see one of these in a younger woman. We looked at our data on younger women and, by God, there it was. No steroids, and the gonadotropins would start to go up. They didn't get very far. As soon as you got hormonal evidence that another follicle was developing, the gonadotropins went right back down. When we looked at the full set of younger women, some showed no sign of this phase, some showed one day, some three or four days. But never very long phases.
"And we started to think the following brave thoughts. Let's call them hypotheses. We think these inactive phases will turn out to be a normal part of the perimenopausal transition. They will get longer—the age progression turned out to be quite regular. It makes sense to think of menopause as a very long inactive phase that could be followed by another round of follicular development if there are follicles left. And the fact that the inactive phase is getting longer, but that there's a lot of variability, explains why women's cycles are so different. It also explains a lot of what have been hitherto mysterious connections between hormone levels and menopause."
Just like women throughout the ages, I've long compared my cycles to the moon's. I wax and I wane. I come to a glowing fullness at ovulation, I get sharper and more prickly as I approach the dark respite and the cycle begins anew. The metaphor, woman as moon, doesn't bear up under too much analysis. Yet imagine this: If the moon were mortal, if she aged as I do, those dark nights that we call the new moon would increase. The month would linger. One night of darkness now, maybe two. Five nights when I'm 45. By the time I'm 55, years and years might go by without moonlight, and then, suddenly, a sliver of moon.
"We can predict, mathematically, how long it will take since the last cycle before an ovary begins putting out estradiol," Holman said, "and it depends on a woman's age. At 30 years of age, it's really short. At 45, it's really noticeable.
"We call this period the inactive phase of the cycle. We're proposing that there are three phases of the menstrual cycle, not two.
"The other two are the follicular phase and the luteal phase. During the follicular phase, the follicles are growing. The luteal phase is after ovulation, which means that the selected follicle has turned into a corpus luteum. That's when progesterone starts going up, to finish preparing the lining of the uterus for implantation." Sometimes in post-menopausal women, Holman noted, when their ovaries are removed for one reason or another, a corpus luteum is found inside. In other cases, a woman believed to be post-menopausal will get pregnant. A hysterectomy is often prescribed if a woman two or three years past menopause suddenly begins again to have vaginal bleeding, yet such a lag, in her case, could be normal: merely an extra-long phase before a last follicle develops.
To counteract some side effects of menopause, such as mood swings and hot flashes, as well as to protect against osteoporosis, physicians often suggest estrogen replacement therapy: According to the New York Times, Premarin, an estrogen replacement, is the most widely used prescription drug in the United States. "One of the things physicians typically do before a woman goes on estrogen replacement therapy," Holman explained, "is to take a blood test for hormones. If our model is right, a woman who has a single blood sample taken and looks menopausal may still have another bleeding episode. You need to know what part of her cycle the woman is in. It's not recognized that a woman can go six months in an inactive stage and yet suddenly have one of her follicles grow."
Plus, added O'Connor, "When is she going to go to the doctor? When she's unhappy. When she's in this inactive phase. Why does she feel lousy? Because her gonadotropins are high and her steroids are low. It's been a routine part of her cycle, but now it's become longer and more frequent because she's older. Those gonadotropin peaks used to be very narrow, only a day or less, before the steroids would also get high. Now it's a longer period of time."
"We're hopeful," said Wood, "that by gaining a clearer picture of the processes involved we can come up with much more reasonable guidelines for estrogen replacement therapy. For instance, how long might it be before a woman is likely to be making these hormones herself again? That's something we could predict."
Plus, added Mansfield, "There might be patterns in the way a woman's menstrual cycle changes during menopause. That's not interesting in itself, but what if we could predict patterns? For instance, what if every woman who had one child had a certain pattern, and it differed from that of a woman who had no children? Wouldn't that help women to know?"
"There might be other things that affect the rate of follicular depletion," said Holman. "We haven't identified specific ones, because the data are still being entered, but besides pregnancies, these might be the age at menarche, the use of birth control, the length of the cycle, even things like smoking. There's an epidemiological finding that women who smoke have earlier menopause. That might be purely a coincidence, nobody knows the mechanism, but smoking might kill follicles or it might affect a woman endocrinologically somehow. Right now there's not a lot of evidence that anything affects follicular depletion very much, but this study will let us look for factors that might somehow affect the underlying rate."
Said Wood, "Adding this inactive phase to our model of follicular depletion is really a powerful concept in understanding the aging of the reproductive system. It's an elegant way to explain some phenomena that haven't been tied together before. And it can make some pretty strong predictions. It can give a woman a better understanding of her own pattern, and some idea of what she is going to go through as she ages, based on her previous reproductive history. And it can tell us something about hormone patterns and the underlying biology of what is normal."
A compelling reason for studying changes in the pattern of menstrual bleeding during the perimenopause is related to the frequency of hysterectomies in the U.S., Wood and his colleagues write. Hysterectomy, still the most common surgical procedure performed on women, is often precipitated by self-diagnosed changes in bleeding pattern or menstrual disorders.
Knowledge of what sort of menstrual changes to expect is therefore essential to women's well-being.
"At what point do we say a bleeding pattern or a hormonal pattern is 'abnormal'?" Wood asked. "My own thought is that we've been too quick to label it that."
James W. Wood, Ph.D., is professor of anthropology in the College of the Liberal Arts, 517 Carpenter Bldg., University Park, PA 16802; 814-865-1936; jww3@psu.edu. Phyllis Kernoff Mansfield, Ph.D., is professor of women's studies and health education in the College of the Liberal Arts, 14 Sparks Bldg.; 863-0356; pkm@psu.edu. Darryl Holman, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow in the Population Research Institute, Intercollege Research Programs, 714 Oswald Bldg.; 863-1823; holman@pop.psu.edu. Kathleen O'Connor, Ph.D., is also a postdoctoral fellow in the Population Research Institute, 510 Carpenter Bldg.; 863-7740; oconnor@pop.psu.edu. Their current research is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Helen Redman's illustrations for this article appear on her Web site, "Birthing the Crone: Menopause and Aging Through the Artist's Eyes." The site combines powerful images and text to explore menopause and the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual changes women experience as they age. She encourages women "to learn how to remain healthy and vital and to appreciate their bodies as they transform into the crone,' the pinnacle of femail life experience and wiseon," Redman says.
Last Updated May 01, 1998
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Massive computing effort to evaluate national hydrological models
University Park, Pa. — A team of Penn State civil engineers has received one of the largest single-year allocations of supercomputing hours made for 2010.
The engineers, led by Patrick Reed, associate professor of civil engineering, recently received 6 million hours on a large-scale supercomputing system for their project titled "Massively Parallel Simulation and Evaluation of Hydrologic Monitoring, Prediction and Management Systems Under Uncertainty."
According to Reed, researchers can routinely use thousands of hours of computational time on supercomputers to solve complex problems. "Once you go up and towards a million hours, you need special access," he said.
Reed's team will utilize the Texas Advanced Computing Center's Ranger system at the University of Texas at Austin. "The six million service units represent one of the largest allocation blocks they will give," he explained. "For us to get this, we had to compete nationally."
Reed has been modeling local watersheds for a number of years and researching related aspects such as drought management, the effect of large river basins and climate change. The 6 million computing hours will allow the research team, which includes Thorsten Wagener, associate professor of civil engineering, and Reed Maxwell, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines, to scale their models up to the regional and national level.
"We'll be looking at the Susquehanna River basin, but in addition to that, we have collaborations with Princeton University and the National Weather Service where we will have models of watersheds throughout the United States," he said.
Reed stated that the effort to evaluate and advance his simulation of a national water resource model will demand a massive amount of computing power.
"Right now, there's a lot of different kinds of hydrologic models and prediction frameworks out there. The goal of our project is to go from simple models that are very local, modeling stream flow at a single point in the river, all the way up to a national water resources model of the United States."
Much of the work will involve evaluating existing models. "How good are our data sets right now, and where can we fall in that predictive continuum to get good flood forecasts or to make long-term predictions?" he asked. "You have to account for uncertainty, which means running thousands or even more simulations to statistically really understand what a model is doing or is capable of doing. That's where the supercomputing comes in."
Reed said the National Weather Service became involved because the agency was seeking more accurate tools for flood forecasting.
"The National Weather Service wants more complex models in generating a flood forecast," he explained. Current flood forecasting models base their predictions on what's termed a "lumped model" ? essentially gathering all of the information involving a river, such as rainfall and evaporation, and using the average to create a flood prediction.
What the National Weather Service hopes to do is more accurately forecast flooding in different parts of a given river basin. "The move is away from a single-point time series to grids of time series where you start to distribute across space. Then that way, you're not just forecasting at a single point in a river basin, but at all the major outlets, all the major points of interest within a river basin simultaneously."
He said, "They want to do a broader sweep of analysis. Every six hours they do flood forecasts and it's a tremendously challenging job. But not only do they want to do more flood forecasting, but drought as well. They want to use the model's prediction not only in stream flow, but also soil moisture."
Being able to accurately model regional and national water basins will also allow scientists to better understand the impact of climate change, Reed added.
"As climate comes into focus and as land use changes, problems are moving from the large, urbanized streams up into the watershed. Now we're becoming concerned with the ecological ramifications of change in these small headwaters," he said. "Trout in Pennsylvania would be a huge example. These are streams that are extremely temperature sensitive and species that are extremely temperature sensitive, so making some predictions or having an understanding of our predictive skills up into these smaller streams that are ungauged is difficult."
Reed said, "As land use, population growth, climate — all these variables — are changing, the classic engineering approach to water resources management of 'the past will reflect the future' is not so true anymore. We have to fundamentally understand how we make these predictions, what observations we need to improve them, then improve our science and then use that science to advance our engineered solutions. These tools will create a whole new spectrum of possibilities for design engineers and scientists."
Last Updated November 02, 2010
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Updated: 10/08/2013 02:44 | By Agence France-Presse
China grabs limelight from wounded US at Asia-Pac summit
China took centre-stage at an Asia-Pacific summit on Monday, adopting a leadership role on the strength of its new-found economic might as the United States struggles to overcome its budget paralysis.
China grabs limelight from wounded US at Asia-Pac summit
Russia's President Vladimir Putin (left) talks to China's President Xi Jinping (right) as they arrive for a retreat session at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Nusa Dua on the Indonesian resort island of Bali on October 7, 2013
The US federal shutdown has stopped US President Barack Obama from attending the two-day Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit on the Indonesian island of Bali, and another meeting this week of East Asian leaders in Brunei.
US Secretary of State John Kerry stressed Obama's determination to remain engaged with the Pacific Rim region. But his absence left the arena clear for the leader of one-party China to trumpet the mounting heft of the world's second largest economy.
"China will firmly uphold regional peace and stability and help cement a foundation for a win-win situation in the Asia-Pacific," President Xi Jinping told an APEC business forum, as he emphasised his country was the biggest trading partner and export market for many nations in the region.
Prior to a gala dinner, at which Indonesia resurrected an APEC tradition of dressing up the leaders in artisan designs, Xi also sought in his speech to adopt a healing and united tone.
"China cannot develop in isolation of the Asia-Pacific and the Asia-Pacific cannot prosper without China," he said, stressing that his country's recent economic slowdown was the intended result of policies designed to put growth on a more sustainable path.
"We the Chinese often say a family in harmony prospers. As a member of the Asia-Pacific family, China is ready to live in amity with other family members and help each other."
The communist leader has been touring Southeast Asia, where there is much disquiet about China's territorial ambitions, and also touted the benefits of free trade pacts after securing commercial deals worth tens of billions of dollars in Indonesia and Malaysia.
China is involved in talks on a trade agreement grouping 16 East Asian nations just as Washington's rival "Trans-Pacific Partnership" (TPP) of 12 countries appears to be running into trouble.
While sympathetic to Obama's political plight, the leaders of US allies in APEC such as Singapore expressed disappointment that he had been unable to throw his presidential weight personally behind the TPP and Washington's stop-start "pivot" towards Asia.
An unprecedented default by the holder of the world's reserve currency would affect "the entire planet, and not just those countries with a strong geographical and economic linkage to the US", Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said in Bali.
But Kerry, taking Obama's place at APEC, said the president's epic tussle with the Republicans was merely "a moment in politics" that did not deflect the United States from its strategic goals.
"I want to emphasise that there is nothing that will shake the commitment of the rebalance to Asia that President Obama is leading," Kerry told the business forum.
Previewing Tuesday's final summit declaration in Bali, the ministers said that "global growth is too weak, risks remain tilted to the downside, and the economic outlook suggests growth is likely to be slower and less balanced than desired".
Before he called off his foreign travel, Obama had intended to preside over a top-level round of talks among the TPP countries in Bali on Tuesday.
But doubts about the pact are gathering pace, and also about Obama's vaunted "pivot".
Attending APEC "would have been a golden opportunity for America and President Obama himself to show leadership in that context of the new emphasis towards Asia", Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said.
Najib sees the end-of-year deadline for the TPP as "very tight" given mounting discord over issues such as market access and protection of intellectual property.
But Kerry said a deal was still achievable in the timeframe, as he sought to sell the merits of the pact.
"At a time when all of us seek strong and sustainable growth, TPP is creating a race to the top, not to the bottom. It is reaching for the highest standards of all," he said in his speech.
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Lon Kruger's good idea had a bad ending
By Michael Baldwin Published: July 14, 2011
Lon Kruger went to Atlanta Hawks management before the 2002-03 NBA season with a radical proposal.
Kruger's idea was to build a marketing plan around the Hawks making the playoffs. If the Hawks reached postseason, all season ticket holders would be given free first-round tickets.
"Crowd interest was very low," Kruger said. "The enthusiasm for the Hawks was low. We were just trying to do something to pique interest."
The final marketing plan was different from the plan pitched by Kruger. Team officials decided it wasn't sexy enough.
Before that season, team officials did make a guarantee, though. If the Hawks didn't make the playoffs, every season ticket holder would be refunded $125.
“The team thought it would play better, read better, if they did it the other way, which I was fine with,” Kruger said. “We just wanted to create a little interest.”
Kruger said he believed making the playoffs that season was a realistic goal.
After missing the playoffs three consecutive years, including two seasons under Kruger, the Hawks acquired veteran Glenn Robinson from Milwaukee. Robinson would complement veterans Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Theo Ratliff.
Atlanta also had a talented second-year guard, Jason Terry, who would eventually become the league's Sixth Man of the Year with the Dallas Mavericks.
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Thursday, November 13, 2008
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
Good ol' Keats.
The truth is: M has been out of town, so my meals have been sandwichy or fruit from the fruit platter-y.
The truth is: M does most of the dishes in our house.
The truth is: this is a very full sink of the girls' dishes.
But isn't it such a pretty sink of dirty dishes?
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problem icon
Links and Knots
problem icon
The interval 0 - 1 is marked into halves, quarters, eighths ... etc. Vertical lines are drawn at these points, heights depending on positions. What happens as this process goes on indefinitely?
problem icon
Voting Paradox
Binary Sequences
Bill from Reading School sent in this solution and other good solutions came in from Jax from Pate's School and Curt from Reigate College.
This problem can easily be solved through use of Georg Cantor's method for proving that the set of irrational numbers is uncountable. Suppose we tabulate the results of the coin-flipping so that one set of infinite tosses is one row. We might have something like this:
1) 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1...
2) 10 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1...
3) 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0...
and so on down and across the infinite list.
Now, we take a diagonal line, starting from the top left and going right and down. The first three digits in this sequence would be 0 0 1. Suppose that this diagonal line gives us a sequence A:
0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1...
Take the complements (remember that we are working in binary). The sequence becomes:
1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0...
This sequence B cannot appear anywhere in the table of coin tosses. Why is this true?
Try matching it up against the first row. Since the first digit of B is the first digit of line 1, but swapped, the sequence B clearly does not match the first row.
Try line 2: the second digit of B is again, taken from line 2 but swapped. Thus the sequence B does not correspond to line 2.
To generalise, the sequence B could almost correspond to some line n, but it would be incorrect at the nth place.
Thus the sequence B we have constructed cannot appear in the table.
This shows that the infinite set of all infinite sequences cannot be written in an ordered list because if we try to make an ordered list as above another sequence can be found which has not been included.
In contrast the infinite set of finite or terminating binary sequences can form an ordered list by defining an order in the following way. Take each binary sequence and treat it as the binary expansion of some integer. Thus the sequence 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 corresponds to 53 (since the initial 0 does not contribute). This mapping associates a non-negative integer with each member of the (infinite) set and therefore arranging the integers in order defines an ordered list.
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BaSTA – More fun than a Swedish sauna
One day, a few years ago, I was drinking with some fellow biologists in “Seminar Room A” opposite the Natural History Museum in Helsinki. The Sibelius Academy is next door to the museum, so we shared the bar with musicians. Once of the musicians came up to us with a plastic bag, and gave it to us saying that they thought we’d know what to do with it. In the bag was a dead gull.
Well, the other biologists knew what to do with it: it had a band on it so they took that off its leg, and dumped the body. The band was sent to the local banding centre, so they would know that the bird had died. And another datum was added to the store of human knowledge.
But what’s the point of banding birds and collected the bands after the bird’s dead? Because it helps us learn about how their populations are faring. We can learn a lot about survival from this sort of data, particularly if it’s combined with observations of birds when they’re alive. But this data is quite messy, so it needs some seriously fun statistics to get anything out of it.
The basic problem is that we don’t see every bird ever year. So, if we didn’t see a bird in one year, how do we know it was still alive? We can’t be sure, but we might be able to put a probability on it. It could be that it was dead, or it was alive but not seen. We can estimate the probability of not seeing the bird from observations of other birds. For example, if we look at all of the birds seen in the previous and subsequent years (i.e. ones we know exist and survived), then the proportion of those that we see is an estimate of the probability of seeing the bird if it was alive.
Once we know the probability of not seeing a bird, we can estimate the probability of it surviving (because we can write down the probabilities of death and of not being seen each year and sum these up to get the probability of never seeing the bird again. Seriously, it does work). Hence, we can estimate the probability of survival. This is helped if we know when some of the birds have died, because that tells us a lot more about the probability of dying and being recovered.
Now, in practice it gets more complicated, because we want to estimate survival that varies, e.g. because of the poor weather we’ve been having or because survival changes with age. Statistics has some standard approaches to do this, but they make it more complicated to estimate anything. So, either one needs to write your own computer code to do the analysis (which takes time, most biologist would also have to start of by learning to programme). Or someone has to write a programme that can take some straightforward inputs and do the complicated stuff itself.
All of which brings us to this video, expounding on the virtues of a computer package to do just that:
The package is based on an amazing piece of statistical software called R, which has taking over as the tool to use. This means biologists only have to learn to use R and they have a lot of tools at their fingertips for them to abuse.
The applications of these methods go beyond ecology. In the video they mention estimating historical survival of humans, but the methods have also been used to estimate HIV infection, and the numbers of political killings in Kosovo. If we have several incomplete lists of individuals in a population, these methods can help us estimate how incomplete they are, and if they are ordered in time we can estimate when individuals drop out, either through death or just moving away.
So, if you see a dead banded bird, pop over to the nearest ornithologist-filled pub and give them the band, or the whole bird if you really want to make their day.
This entry was posted in Ecology, Research Blogging, Statistics. Bookmark the permalink.
2 Responses to BaSTA – More fun than a Swedish sauna
1. Tom Webb says:
Fascinating stuff Bob. Particularly like the Airplane-inspired outtakes at the end!
Serious question though: do you know of anyone applying these kinds of methods to the fossil record? Seems like birth & death of species, under (very) incomplete sampling (what’s got preserved) would be an obvious application.
2. Bob O'Hara says:
I’ve started doing something similar, but I hadn’t been thinking of it in a MRR context. Lee Hsiang Liow seems to have been doing something too, or at least thinking about it. My impression is that the paleao people are behind in this regard.
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The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will reopen the old station at South Ferry in the first week of April, state officials said Thursday. The move would restore subway service to the southern terminus of the No. 1 line for the first time since superstorm Sandy.
The closed South Ferry Subway Station is pictured in January. Peter Foley for the Wall Street Journal
Reopening the outer loop of the old South Ferry station will revive some anachronistic features the MTA thought it had relegated to the past: Its short length forced riders to walk to the front five cars of a train to exit; and metal extenders were needed to bridge gaps between the platform and the train.
But Sandy—and more than four months in which riders had to walk north from the Staten Island Ferry landing to board the No. 1 train at Rector Street—have left the MTA no choice but to reopen the old station while the effort is under way to rebuild the new South Ferry station downstairs.
The restoration of service to the old South Ferry was a step MTA officials had once ruled out, even as the modern station beneath it lay in ruins after filling with brackish, corrosive floodwater during the Oct. 29 storm.
"It became clear that the time necessary to repair it would be too long a period to deny our customers a direct link to lower Manhattan," Mr. Prendergast said.
Restoration of No. 1 trains to South Ferry would leave just a single section of the subway system out of service because of storm damage, the A train between Howard Beach and Rockaway Park. Storm surge there knocked out the train tracks that cross Broad Channel.
Commuters welcomed the news that the old station would be restored to use.
"My commute time has doubled," said Sharon Johnson, 35 years old, of Staten Island, as she waited at the Staten Island ferry terminal. "If it were summer, the walk [from Rector St. Station] wouldn't be that bad, but it's not."
Other commuters said the closed station had given them an excuse to fit more exercise into their day. "It's just a little walk," said Carlos Diaz, 49, also of Staten Island. "It's a good walk. It's brisk, it's been kind of nice," Mr. Diaz said. "To be honest, it only adds about 10 minutes to the commute."
Work at South Ferry was under way earlier this week. A peek through a security gate revealed crews had already cut an opening in the wall that separates the modern South Ferry station from the platform of the outside loop track of the old station.
The MTA was also installing new lighting, repainting walls, and adding security cameras, radio connections and customer intercoms, the agency said, at a projected cost of $2 million.
How much the restoration of the new South Ferry station will cost remains an open question. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, MTA officials said it could cost as much as $600 million. Much of the cost was driven by the need to replace sensitive signal and communications equipment that was wrecked by salt corrosion from the flood. Mr. Prendergast said last month that the agency would evaluate whether it was possible to raise some sensitive equipment to new locations aboveground to protect against future floods.
The cost of repairs to South Ferry was especially frustrating to the agency because the station was so recently overhauled. It was expanded and modernized in a $545 million project concluded in 2009.
—Mara Gay contributed to this article.
Write to Ted Mann at
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Ram Singh was found dead at Tihar Jail, Delhi's main prison, at around 5:15 a.m., said his lawyer, V.K. Anand.
Police stand guard as an ambulance leaves Tihar Jail on Monday where one of the five men accused in the gang rape of a 23-year-old Indian woman hanged himself. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Delhi Outrage Over Gang Rape
A large number of protesters gathered outside Rashtrapati Bhawan, the President's Palace, in New Delhi on Dec. 22. Getty Images
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"He hanged himself [from] the ceiling with his own clothes," said Sunil Gupta, spokesman for Tihar Jail.
Mr. Gupta said Mr. Singh had three cellmates. He said the cellmates "were clueless about his intention to commit suicide. They were sleeping when the incident happened."
Rajinder Singh, Delhi's assistant commissioner of police, who is part of a special task force investigating the Delhi rape case, said Mr. Singh used his "own clothes" to hang himself.
"He used the sleeping mat to make a noose, string from his trousers as a rope to hang himself."
Mr. Singh's lawyer, who originally said that his client had killed himself in jail, hours later contested the police version.
"It is not possible he committed suicide. And the theory that he used his own clothes can't be true as there is high security inside the prison," Mr. Anand said.
Mr. Gupta denied allegations of negligence by the jail authorities. "I am aware media channels are accusing jail authorities for negligence but I deny this allegation. There are guards outside every ward here in Tihar. Ram Singh's ward, too, had sufficient guards. It is not possible to have guards outside every single jail," he said.
Mr. Gupta said the four other accused men at Tihar, who are in neighboring cells, are being closely watched by jail authorities following the suicide.
Addressing reporters in New Delhi, Indian Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said, "It's a major lapse. It's not a small incident. It's a suicide."
"A magisterial inquiry has been ordered. Things will be clear once the report comes," he added.
V.K. Anand, in the center, lawyer for Ram Singh, speaks with the media at the hospital where Mr. Singh's body is scheduled to arrive for autopsy in New Delhi on Monday. Reuters
The five men, along with a juvenile who faces juvenile-court proceedings, are accused of luring the young woman and a male friend onto a bus, then beating the friend and beating and sexually assaulting the woman with a metal rod before throwing both of them naked onto the side of a highway on the evening of Dec. 16.
The young woman, a physiotherapy student, later died of her injuries. Mr. Singh was the regular driver of the bus, one of thousands of private buses that ply the capital's streets.
The case drew widespread attention in India and world-wide for its brutality and for the spotlight it shone on India's failure to protect women. The bus traveled around south Delhi, near an enclave popular with diplomats, for about 45 minutes as the assault took place. Protesters marched in New Delhi and other Indian cities and the government has since moved to strengthen laws to deter crimes against women.
Assistant commissioner of police Rajinder Singh said Mr. Singh's body had been moved to a nearby hospital for a post mortem. "Only after the inquiry is done by special district magistrate, we can say what exactly happened," he said.
Reached by telephone, the father of the rape victim said: "We are feeling a bit relieved with this development. But we really don't know what more to say right now."
Mr. Anand said that during the last court hearing on Friday, Mr. Singh "looked cheerful since he met his 5-year-old son in the court." He said he didn't know what had driven Mr. Singh to this extreme step. "He was happy with the way the trial was proceeding."
A.P. Singh, a lawyer for Akshay Kumar and Vinay Sharma, two others facing trial, said he was skeptical about authorities' explanation that Mr. Singh hanged himself. "How is it possible for a prisoner to hang himself inside a jail cell? Is Tihar's security so weak?"
He added: "My clients are terrified, scared, they fear for their safety."
Mr. Singh's father said in an interview that the family, too, doubted the official version of events. "I had met him six days back," said Mange Lal. "He said the authorities are not treating him well." He also noted that Mr. Singh couldn't use one of his hands efficiently since an accident several years ago.
Tihar's spokesman has said the prisoners in the rape case have been treated properly and confirmed that authorities believe it was a suicide.
Following Mr. Singh's death, the trial being held at a special fast-track court at the Saket district court complex in south Delhi, was adjourned Monday.
The next date of hearing has been set for Tuesday.
--This article has been amended to include lawyer V.K. Anand's initial statement that he believed the death of his client Ram Singh to have been a suicide.
—Saurabh Chaturvedi, Rajesh Roy, R. Jai Krishna, and Aditi Malhotra contributed to this article.
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How has Jazz Influenced Modern Music
Jazz is as American as apple pie. It is original music, created in America. Jazz is the most influential of all music styles in the 20th century. No other music can make that claim. What jazz is, is a mainly improvisational style of playing with syncopated rhythms laid down under the melody. It was created in the Mississippi River Delta country, growing out of ragtime and the blues, in the early 1900′s.
And because it is an improvisational style of playing, there are many different periods of jazz and many different styles of playing jazz. In other words, there is always somebody, somewhere, doing something a little differently than the next guy around the corner. Looking at it historically, jazz followed the Black migration out of the south to the north,by way of Kansas City, Chicago and New York. Each city developed its own sound, from say the jazz that came to be in the French Quarter and lowlands of New Orleans.
Jazz can rightly be called the people’s music because it is heavily influenced by the surrounding social situation where it is played. It takes the day’s social issues and weaves a tune around them. Rock, R&B, Rap, hiphop and country take this cue from Jazz. The best of the other genres are the ones that do this with ease and remain the songs remembered by the people. The 20′s and 30′s are commonly referred to as the Jazz Age in America, and was style was at the height of its popularity. Not that it has ever gone out of style or favor. All things ebb and flow, but Jazz is eternal. The big names live on. Names like Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, Bird Brubeck and Miles are carved in history. Singers like Billie, Ella and Sarah need no last names and remain almost without peer.
The names of the artists who were influenced by jazz are equally memorable, starting with Jimi Hendrix, Chicago, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream. Tower of Power, Earth Wind and Fire, James Brown with his magnificent brass horn section. This list goes on ad infinitum and continues to present day.
Rap and hiphop naturally evolved from jazz. Many songs sample jazz greats and the beats created by the older music. The hiphop delivery reflects that created by jazz greats like Joe Williams. Many musicians have combined rap hiphop with jazz including the late great Miles Davis whose final album contained hiphop elements while he wove his magic around them. Quincy Jones, the master musician and band leader regularly weaves the three form together. Nowhere is this more apparent then his album Secret Garden, or The Dude, or Killer Joe.
The changing nature of jazz makes it immediately identifiable and easily adaptable to whatever is going on around it. Jazz is one of the greatest imports ever out of the United States and into Europe and beyond. Those who hear it take and make it their own and then send it back again to the America the country of its birth. Upon its return, the creators of the master plan take the new form, rework it into something else new and original and then send it back out in the world to begin the cycle again for whomever wants to pick it up, be it rock, alternative soul, or Japanese hiphop. It’s still all jazz.
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Friday, October 4, 2013
The longest route
I found myself in need today to share my local installation with a co-worker so that he can test a massive memory optimization I made.
Unfortunately me working from office and a ton of infrastructure with firewalls and what not between us I was forced to come up with a kind of non-standard solution to make it work. Here's what I've done:
1. The application runs locally on Tomcat (using Maven's tomcat6 plugin so mvn tomcat6:run)
2. Local Apache installation forwards requests from port 81 to 8080
3. An ssh tunnel is made that forwards my local port 81 to a remote port 8080 on a machine in Amazon
4. That remote machine has haproxy installed with a certificate that forwards local ports 80 and 443 to 8080 effectively allowing the user to login to my local installation
To test this I've used another Linux machine at home to login to with X forwarding enabled to locally view a remote Google Chrome running and accessing my local installation.
How can you not love Linux for that?
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Removing executable bit from files
I don't want to bore you with the details but I've been looking for a nice solution for this problem for a very long time. Today I came across this post:
chmod -R -x+X *
And life's simple again :)
Thanks to Pabouk (whoever you are)! You made my day!
Friday, August 23, 2013
Why documentation doesn't matter?
Well, it's not really true, it does matter - just not post mortem. It does tell the developer what to do - sometimes even how to do it. It tells the tester how to test it. After the release it's no longer valid nor accurate for anyone to use. Wanna know why?
A simple case
Imagine for a second there's a new position you just stepped into. It's this glorious application that everyone keeps talking about on the 'net. You took a position in one of the teams because you were certain that this can't be wrong - people have been doing that for years so good established processes and a proper technical documentation will be accompanied by a proper introduction training - something to take the edge off from new hires.
Introductory shock
I mean, woooow!!! You just came to the office, suddenly you realize nobody knows who you are, nobody seems to care. People seem to be rushing for no apparent reason through the floors - it's nothing like the place you've envisioned. But that's ok, right? You came here to do the job so let's get that notebook and let's get this show on the road!
Still positive, still passionate, still a foreigner - but you feel this is your chance! In this company, in this corporation there are endless possibilities! Here you will shine!
The second disaster
Ok, so you finally know where you sit, you've got your shiny new notebook on your desk trying to figure out what you've been given, trying to get your familiar tools installed so that you can finally kick start that 'being a developer at ' dream come true.
First of all you don't get to install whatever you want on company's property. No no.. There are rules in place preventing you to utilize whatever power Today's software market has to offer (commercial or OpenSource) so you're kinda stuck with what your new employer has carefully selected for you. You keep telling yourself that it's just a matter of time, that chemistry doesn't happen over night and that you'll get used to it. Why wouldn't you?
Anyways,... There comes the big moment: you're getting the sources! Obviously it's all going to be professional, high quality, top-to-bottom properly designed and brilliantly described in a few pages of perfect documentation. Well.. Our heroes rarely live up to our expectations and my friend this ain't no different. Suddenly it looks like some soft-skill course is more important than getting things done (the famous 'complete this course by today midnight or you'll be terminated' email floating around). Product training is something nobody heard within this walls since the company grew from 7 enthusiast to 1300 employees most of which have better things to do than to sit here, with you and explain obvious things - that seems like a giant waste of time, right?
So you're a professional, right?
And so you've got the code, you've got all the tools you shall need, you have access to the password-protected Maven repository and by all means - let's get to hacking! Obviously we need to start that thing first on that shiny new piece of equipment to compensate the lack of documentation with a debugger session. But wait! What's that error during compilation? Does that look like a broken test? NO!!! It's the code in one of the core modules that a colleague from abroad committed a few moments ago - just forgot to add that new class to version control before and it just so happened it landed this way on your machine. No worries! This is a good version control system so people's email addresses are there to chase that person and to give 'em hell! And so you do:
Dear John,
I've tried compiling our solution a moment ago but it seems like the code you committed Today lacks one of the new classes. Can you please check what's missing? Thanks!
Best regards,
One should thing that such an error like "code does not compile" would be spotted by some continuous integration environment where it's constantly tested to meed the high quality standards everyone talked about on the interview. It just so happens that the server CI is on went down 3 weeks ago and nobody noticed. Since everyone sat so far in the same room with nice flowers and A/C if John would commit the code with errors Sally would come over for a coffee and tell him to fix it. This time John is some 6000 miles away on another continent and just called it a day.
No worries - I'm a professional!
And so I'm capable of at least learning the inner workings of the system by going through that clear-cut set of unit and integration tests the project is obviously equipped with. So where are they?
The real life
As with any corporation there are rules: you don't moan, you be creative, think outside of the box, be proactive - and all that politely and politically correct. Following this path 2 weeks later you've got the application running, the database it talks to is across several VPN connections so it's ridiculously slow, most of the external systems don't respond since their security just isn't setup for your location (you being the new developer in the team abroad) and quite frankly you start to miss on the boss that told you you can go to hell because he's not going to be giving you anything you didn't earn with blood and sweat and tears.
So why doesn't documentation matter?
Plain and simple: if you think you have any form of documentation other than the application code itself you're mistaken. Anything talking about the code, telling you how things are is bullshit and does not mean a thing. Wanna know why? Because your compiler doesn't read wiki, it doesn't have access to your email account nor does he care at all about Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. All it's interested in is the funky looking wall of text in source files - that's the only specification, the only documentation, the only rule book that will tell you everything.
So for the love of God: KEEP IT CLEAN! You're gonna need it 'cause you're gonna read it over and over and over and over again. If your co-workers (co-located and those miles, miles away) don't understand the need for keeping things clean tell them it's important to you, that you don't want to work in manure.
And if they will not listen - to hell with them! Tell the world how things are so that the next person drown by the lucrative perspective of working in young and highly motivated team will stay away. Let other learn from your experience.
Post scriptum
If any of you felt this matches any of your previous experience I rush to say it's fiction (well at least some of it). The situation as a whole didn't happen at all (would have been a disaster and a case for a shrink afterwards :] ). It's just to underline the importance of clean code and the fact that the code is the ultimate documentation out there. Don't undermine it.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
It's been a while...
.. but I have not forgotten :) There was just not much going on in my life. A nice and quiet 6 months.
Recently I've been working on some health issues but nothing really serious. My doctor asked me to collect some statistics for heart parameters (pressure, pulse) for review. Since I hate dead-tree versions of pretty much everything I decided that it's the best time to renew my friendship with Ruby and Sinatra.
The challenge
The challenge for me was to write the app in about an hour, with possible extensions at a later time, but to start collecting evidence as soon as possible. Although I'm a huge Grails fan (like you didn't know that) I think it is just too damn heavy for simple data collection applications like the one I have had in mind - thus the obvious dilemma between PHP and Ruby/Sinatra. I really like the embedded nature of PHP but to write anything in a sane way one needs to employ frameworks like CakePHP and the like. I hate that. I wanted to have as minimalistic as possible, with everything just working in a matter of minutes.
My sweet Ruby, Dear Sinatra,
You all know what Sinatra in the Ruby space is, right? If you don't - just go to and find out. Here's what I did with it:
1. All in one construct with everything in one place (configuration, controller, views, css, javascript)
2. All of it takes 210 lines of code (63 Ruby, 143 Erubis and a few while lines for convinience)
3. Deployed to Heroku in a matter of minutes
4. Using MySQL backend because it was just convenient.
Heroku provided the infrastructure for free (the one web worker that's always for free), a free database and Git repository. With all that in place I was ready with the first usable version in about 30 minutes (that's how quick Ruby and Sinatra and Heroku are).
Iterate iterate iterate
As with everything in software development there are going to be bugs, there are going to be new requirements and there are going to be "things that could be done better". One of them was for me to be able to input new measurements using my phone's web browser (the simplest thing that could possibly work). And it worked right out of the box but the default font size is just so small on my S3 that I've had to go through a number of zoom-ins to make out what's in there. Every navigation to another page returned me to that ugly small fonts. Changing the font size to like 40 did the trick :)
Then there was the matter of inputting numbers into the edit boxes. See, the default keyboard is an alpha-numeric-on-request type of keyboard which means that to enter numbers you have to either long-tap on the screen every number you'd like to enter or to switch to the numeric-special-characters-page on every input box which was just plain ugly. Changing the input types to "number" did the trick. Fortunately I'm not using Firefox on my Mobile where this type of inputs are just plain text inputs (as per some sophisticated page that knows all about browser compatibility).
And there was light! I have had enough measurements to actually display them on a chart. I wanted it to be an interactive graph, obviously, so my first choice was Google Charts. Even though beautiful and easy to use almost out of the box I felt kind of cheated because it used Flash underneath the skin. That obviously didn't work on S3 so I needed some alternative. Dygraph to the rescure (with GViz interface) and in a matter of 10 minutes (including research) I've had my charts up for display.
A small snag
As it turns out MySQL by default doesn't understand time the way it's supposed to. It just knows that 13:21:43 is almost half past one but with no particular interest for time zone. An obvious way to overcome this issue was to set all times to UTC and convert them when interacting with the user. Piece of cake. I'd like to point out that the author of mysql2 gem could finally extend the thing to allow something else than 'utc' or 'local' for the automated conversion and life whould be a lot simpler.
I always believe that software should be written according to high standards, with proper code coverage, proper planning, agile mindset and clean code in the end. Even though I tend to not do TDD in the case of such simple project such as this I still think it makes sense in other cases. I know I shouldn't talk like this since I'm the "Mr TDD" among friends but guys let's face it: throw-away software happens all the time and there's no reason to follow the routine blindly even in the case of spikes. Production code you write for someone else - TDD all the way; spikes no.
I'll probably use the app for another week or two, maybe even for a couple of months, who knows. I just hope it'll give my doctor enough information to get me back on track.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Did you noticed Spring Loaded is here?
Here's how you use it:
Well - it isn't JRebel - but it is good enough!
Have fun!
Monday, December 10, 2012
Named inner classes in methods
public String getName(String user) {
JdbcTemplate template = new JdbcTemplate(this.datasource);
class NameExtractor implements ResultSetExtractor {
public String extractData(ResultSet rs)
throws SQLException, DataAccessException {
Have fun!
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Who cares?!
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Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Tuesday Tie-Up
We've got Blackhawks full of armed men flying over Chicago.
The Secret Service is running whores in Columbia.
Rivrdog said...
For the helos, this looks like ordinary MOUT to me.
Can't figure out why that Secret Service type balked at a $170 all-nighter cuenta por la puta. Try getting an all-nighter in Vegas and it will probably be 6-8 times that much.
To me, though, the curious thing is that all eleven of these agents were sucked into the fiesta de las putas. In that size of a group, there should have been at least one who stuck to his vows. This suggests that the agents were provided a "sweet deal", and perhaps that deal was arranged before they ever left the USA. If there was pre-arrangement, that definitely needs looking into, to see who the ultimate facilitator to that deal might have been. FARC? Hugo? Fidel?
Old NFO said...
Yep, bad week, and he'll blame it ALL on Bush... sigh
MSgt B said...
The DoD has regulations against that now.
Hell, they probably always have.
DiamondD said...
I don't understand why they need the Blackhawks and all of that security if the conference is in Chicago? It is illegal to own a gun in Chicago so no security needed.
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DepotFileDiff Class
[This is preliminary documentation and is subject to change.]
A diff between depot files in a Perforce repository.
Namespace: Perforce.P4
Assembly: p4api.net (in p4api.net.dll) Version: 2011.1.34.7706 (2011.1.34.7706.BETA)
public class DepotFileDiff
Visual Basic
Public Class DepotFileDiff
Visual C++
public ref class DepotFileDiff
p4 help diff2
diff2 -- Compare one set of depot files to another
p4 diff2 [options] fromFile[rev] toFile[rev]
p4 diff2 [options] -b branch [[fromFile[rev]] toFile[rev]]
p4 diff2 [options] -S stream [-P parent] [[fromFile[rev]] toFile[rev]]
options: -d<flags> -q -t -u
'p4 diff2' runs on the server to compare one set of depot files (the
'source') to another (the 'target'). Source and target file sets
can be specified on the 'p4 diff2' command line or through a branch
With a branch view, fromFile and toFile are optional; fromFile limits
the scope of the source file set, and toFile limits the scope of the
target. If only one file argument is given, it is assumed to be
fromFile and toFile can include revision specifiers; by default, the
head revisions are diffed. See 'p4 help revisions' for details
about specifying file revisions.
'p4 diff2' precedes each diffed file pair with a header line of the
following form:
==== source#rev (type) - target#rev (type) ==== summary
A source or target file shown as '<none>' means there is no file
at the specified name or revision to pair with its counterpart.
The summary status is one of the following: 'identical' means file
contents and types are identical, 'types' means file contents are
identical but the types are different, and 'content' means file
contents are different.
The -b flag makes 'p4 diff2' use a user-defined branch view. (See
'p4 help branch'.) The left side of the branch view is the source
and the right side is the target.
The -S flag makes 'p4 diff2' use a stream's branch view. (See 'p4
help stream'.) The stream is the source, and its parent is the
target. -P can be used to specify a parent stream other than the
stream's actual parent.
The -d<flags> modify the output of diffs as follows:
-dn (RCS)
-dc[n] (context)
-ds (summary)
-du[n] (unified)
-db (ignore whitespace changes)
-dw (ignore whitespace)
-dl (ignore line endings).
The optional argument to -dc specifies number of context lines.
The -q omits files that have identical content and types and
suppresses the actual diff for all files.
The -t flag forces 'p4 diff2' to diff binary files.
The -u flag uses the GNU diff -u format and displays only files
that differ. The file names and dates are in Perforce syntax, but
but the output can be used by the patch program.
Inheritance Hierarchy
See Also
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Pet of the Day
April 16, 2000
Today's Pet
Nominate Your Pet
Previous Pets
Pet Talk
About Us
Ugg, the Pet of the Day
Name: Ugg
Age: Eight years old
Gender: Male
Breed: Sicilian Donkey
Home: Ozarks, Missouri, USA
Ugg is eight years old and he is a miniature or Sicilian Donkey. Ugg is 34 inches tall at the shoulders but he thinks he is much, much taller. Ugg thinks he is a house donk and enjoys a little tv or a nap in front of the fireplace. We don't have the heart to tell him he's supposed to be outside in the pasture. His favorite snack is peppermint mints. Ugg lost his tail when he was just a baby, the bigger donks he was playing with bit it off. In fly season we have to attach a piece of garden hose to his tail so he can swish the flies away.
Find out how your pet
could be Pet of the Day.
|
January 27th, 2010
11:10 PM ET
4 years ago
CNN Fact Check: The 'Undiebomber' has spoken
(CNN) - Did the man accused of trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day clam up when read his rights?
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who delivered the Republican response to Obama's State of the Union address, included that assertion when he said the GOP had "serious concerns" over how the Obama administration treats suspected terrorists.
"Americans were shocked on Christmas Day to learn of the attempted bombing of a flight to Detroit," McDonnell said. "This foreign terror suspect was given the same legal rights as a U.S. citizen, and immediately stopped providing critical intelligence."
McDonnell's assertion is narrowly true - the suspect, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, did stop talking to FBI agents after being read his rights. But he was questioned twice before then, quickly spilling that he was trained in Yemen by al Qaeda operatives and giving up information that "has already proved useful in the fight against al Qaeda," a Justice Department spokesman told CNN last week.
Numerous Republicans have argued that AbdulMutallab should have been placed in military custody and subjected to more extensive interrogation. They have been joined by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. But the Obama administration has argued that civilian courts are the proper place for cases like AbdulMutallab's.
Filed under: Popular Posts • President Obama • SOTU fact check
soundoff (64 Responses)
1. Dutch/Bad Newz, VA
Republican talking points.
January 27, 2010 11:12 pm at 11:12 pm |
2. rjt
Who knows what else could hav been learned from this guy. Obama needs to look at it that way and nothing else.
January 27, 2010 11:13 pm at 11:13 pm |
3. right
he was right, this guy should have been treated just like the terrorist's treated the Americans in the videos that were shown on the arab networks,
January 27, 2010 11:14 pm at 11:14 pm |
4. Be serious......
why would he have talked....he knew he would not be tortured..... would be read his Miranda rights..... and would be lawyered up at taxpayer expense.......
He didn't say anything useful.....why would he? Because he likes Obama?
January 27, 2010 11:15 pm at 11:15 pm |
5. A thomas
He needed a water board session not Miranda that is for Americans
January 27, 2010 11:17 pm at 11:17 pm |
6. Thomas
who really cares about what a panel of so called experts have to say about the presidents speech, really?? no one on CNN is mentioning the statement about sound bites, and who cares about what they think about when certain topics were discussed at which point in the speech..this is the exact thing that was discussed..a little room full of people on can not agree on the color of crap...
January 27, 2010 11:18 pm at 11:18 pm |
7. Joel
Oh, for the love of... EVERYONE in the US has Miranda rights, not just US citizens. Take a basic civics course, McDonnell.
8. jmccrea for SC
There is not such thing as being narrowly true or narrowly false. If it is not true it's false. McConnell is too old to make up lies to support his agenda.
January 27, 2010 11:22 pm at 11:22 pm |
9. Anonymous
CNN is still drinking the kook aid. Wake up and stop protecting those that put our lives at risk.
10. porchhound
50 minutes of "interrogation" while he was drugged...Cops spend more time than that on shoplifters...WHAT WAS YOUR POINT?
11. Bobby
(CNN) – Did the man accused of trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day clam up when read his rights?------- TO WHICH CNN says this is narrowly true lol. I don't call it narrow when he was read his rights after only 50 minutes of interrogation. NO time to investigate to form the RIGHT questions and come back to him.
But CNN elected Obama now they have to defend him.
12. valwayne
The underwear bomber was read his Miranda rights within 12 hours of getting off that plane. They may have asked him some questions, but they certainly couldn't have interrogated him in that time. A careful interrogation takes days, weeks, possibly months to get all the possible information that might be useful and to insure the terrorists isn't just lying. In 12 hours they couldn't have gotten further than the terrorist cover story. We'll never know now if he was really answering truthfully and how much we might have gotten over a few more days or weeks. And isn't it funny that we still don't know who authorized reading him is Miranda rights and giving him a lawyer?
13. Bob
bob mcdonnell hopefully didn't say that without a smile. thats about a month after Christmas. he did talk. mcdonnell you are full of el toro popo.
14. maryann johnston
the PRESIDENT delivers a state of our UNION, enough said... there is no clause for a response...this political crap contributes to the divisions...makes independents sick...please stop giving either party of No equal time and let America hear what the President duly elected says..enough time is available on the news and talk shows for the opposition....tired of the gridlock, polittical blockage and simple partisan crapola
15. AZgrammy
What's the difference, eh?
Shoe Bomber – Richard Colvin Reid
Richard Colvin Reid, commonly known as Shoe Bomber, is a self-admitted member of Al Qaeda who was convicted by a U.S. federal court of attempting to destroy a commercial aircraft in-flight by detonating explosives hidden in his shoes.
His motive was terrorism.
Reid was immediately taken into custody after incident.
Three days later he was charged in U.S. federal court at Boston, Massachusetts in a criminal complaint with "interfering with performance of duties of flight crew members by assault or intimidation".
Crime was reported as carrying a penalty of up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Judge ordered Reid to be held in jail pending trial due to seriousness of charges and high risk that Reid would attempt to flee.
At that time, forensic results indicated Reid's shoes contained 10 ounces of C-4 plastic explosives, enough to blow a hole in plane and cause it to crash.
During a preliminary hearing which was held on December 28, an FBI agent testified that forensic analysis had identified chemicals as PETN, primary explosive, and TATP (triacetone triperoxide), a chemical needed to detonate bomb.
Prosecutor proceeded to obtain a grand jury indictment and on January 16, 2002, Reid was charged with eight criminal counts related to his acts of terrorism, namely:
* Attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction,
* Attempted homicide, placing an explosive device on an aircraft,
* Attempted murder,
* Interference with flight crew members and attendants,
* Atempted destruction of an aircraft, using a destructive device during and in relation to a crime of violence,
* Attempted wrecking of a mass transportation vehicle.
January 31, 2003, he was sentenced by Judge William Young to Life in Prison with NO possibility of parole...
Three Life sentences to be served consecutively…..
Eight fines of $250,000 each were also imposed.
During sentencing hearing Reid stated that he was an Enemy of United States and in league with Al-Qaeda.
Though Reid proclaimed he was a soldier of Allah under command of Osama Bin Laden, Judge Young declared:
'You are not an enemy combatant, you are a terrorist' ...
'Not a soldier in any army, you are a terrorist.
16. waveney Alfred
All this talk about the Christmas day Bomber,,,why was this man traveling to the USA with just a Visa, One-Way Ticket, no Passport..no Luggage and paid Cash... and a well dressed man came and vouched for him... man cannot be found...clothing no over coat or jacket... I beleive it was a set up by the CIA?
January 27, 2010 11:28 pm at 11:28 pm |
17. Robert Culver
Regardless of his feeling on the matter, he was in our borders and subject to our laws and our liberties. Once we start taking freedoms away from anybody we start to take them away from everyone.
18. Stortz
“McDonnell's assertion is narrowly true –“
Which is to say… McDonnell’s assertion is WIDELY FALSE!
19. against the grain
Obama is an idiot to not torture this terrorist fanatic! stupid bleeding heart liberals will never learn. what is the worst thing that can happen to these terrorists... they either die or end up in an American jail. Either one is a cake walk compaired to the way they currently live. the usa even knows where these camps are in Yeman. But won't go after them. Foolish!!!!!
20. Michael from Ventura
The Governor of Virginia was a polished, refined, politically ambitious politician. The presdient was the real leader tonight and his hopes for America were more than evident. I wonder if the baggers and gop smirkers like Mitch McConnell know how repulsive they are?
January 27, 2010 11:30 pm at 11:30 pm |
21. Winston Smith
"Narrowly true"? Some fact check, Matt. McDonnell claims the Knickerbomber clammed up after being Mirandized; you then confirm precisely that in the next paragraph. While suggesting the "narrowness" of the Governer's veracity, you elide mention of the less-than-an-hour interrogation or the "system worked" and "he acted alone" blunders. And since when does the media swallow what a Justice Dept spokesman says hook, line and sinker?
22. Randy Edwards
We should have put those explosive underpants back on him and threatened to detonate them. Then, when he told him everything, we should have detonated them and blow his stuff off.
The hell with what the rest of the World thinks about us. Law and principles is for losers.
23. Ronald Morris
Matt, your liberal bias is showing. Nothing narrow about the facts. Undiebomber was questioned twice without Miranda Warning and talked both times. As soon as he was offered the chance not to talk he stopped talking. If he had not been Mirandized he might still be talking.
Question, since terrorists have 5th Amendment rights do they also have 4th? The technology exists to look through walls and see people and hear voices. Is it a civil rights violation to use this technology in the field without a search warrant? It is illegaql in the US according to the Supreme Court for police to use this tech without a search warrant.
24. A disgusted former Republican
The Refuseniks try to spin everything including their obstructionism. They are the party of idiots.
January 27, 2010 11:32 pm at 11:32 pm |
25. John Ferris
The point the Governor was making is that he probably would have given up even more information if he had not been given the legal rights of a U.S. citizen. Who knows what else he knew and what other plans are out their right now. Remember people, the "Undiebomber" was successful, the bomb was on the plane and ignited - the only reason why those people didn't die was because of luck that the bomb was a dud. Everyone needs to waken up, especially the far left (such as those here on the wonderful CNN – Communist News Network) and realize - these people will not wither and will not waiver, they want to kill us and they will keep trying. We need to question these people not give them attorneys and 5th amendment rights to silence! It just seems more and more like they will not waiver, but we will in this country.
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Tell me more ×
I am learning functionnal programming with Haskell, and I try to grab concepts by first understanding why do I need them.
I would like to know the goal of arrows in functional programming languages. What problem do they solve? I checked and All I understand is that they are used to describe graphs for computations, and that they allow easier point free style coding.
The article assume that point free style is generally easier to understand and to write. This seems quite subjective to me. In another article (, a hangman game is implemented, but I cannot see how arrows makes this implementation natural.
I could find a lot of papers describing the concept, but nothing about the motivation.
What I am missing?
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5 Answers
up vote 17 down vote accepted
I realize I'm coming late to the party, but you've had two theoretical answers here, and I wanted to provide a practical alternative to chew over. I'm coming at this as a relative Haskell noob who nonetheless has been recently force-marched through the subject of Arrows for a project I'm currently working on.
First, you can productively solve most problems in Haskell without reaching for Arrows. Some notable Haskellers genuinely do not like and do not use them (see here, here, and here for more on this). So if you're saying to yourself "Hey, I don't need these," understand that you may genuinely be correct.
What I found most frustrating about Arrows when I first learned them was how the tutorials on the subject inevitably reached for the analogy of circuitry. If you look at Arrow code -- the sugared variety, at least -- it resembles nothing so much as a Hardware Defnition Language. Your inputs line up on the right, your outputs on the left, and if you fail to wire them all up properly they simply fail to fire. I thought to myself: Really? Is this where we've ended up? Have we created a language so completely high-level that it once again consists of copper wires and solder?
The correct answer to this, as far as I've been able to determine, is: Actually, yes. The killer use case right now for Arrows is FRP (think Yampa, games, music, and reactive systems in general). The problem facing FRP is largely the same problem facing all other synchronous messaging systems: how to wire a continuous stream of inputs into a continuous stream of outputs without dropping relevant information or springing leaks. You can model the streams as lists -- several recent FRP systems use this approach -- but when you have a lot of inputs lists become almost impossible to manage. You need to insulate yourself from the current.
What Arrows allow in FRP systems is the composition of functions into a network while at the same time entirely abstracting away any reference at all to the underlying values being passed by those functions. If you're new to FP, this can be confusing at first, and then mind-blowing when you've absorbed the implications of it. You've only recently absorbed the idea that functions can be abstracted, and how to understand a list like [(*), (+), (-)] as being of type [(a -> a -> a)]. With Arrows, you can push the abstraction one layer further.
This additional ability to abstract carries with it its own dangers. For one thing, it can push GHC into corner cases where it doesn't know what to make of your type assumptions. You'll have to be prepared to think at the type level -- this is an excellent opportunity to learn about kinds and RankNTypes and other such topics.
There are also a number of examples of what I'd call "Stupid Arrow Stunts" where the coder reaches for some Arrow combinator just because he or she wants to show off a neat trick with tuples. (Here's my own trivial contribution to the madness.) Feel free to ignore such hot-dogging when you come across it in the wild.
NOTE: As I mentioned above, I'm a relative noob. If I've promulgated any misconceptions above, please feel free to correct me.
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I am happy that I had not accepted anything yet. Thank you for providing this answer. It is more focused on users. The exemples are great. The subjective parts are clearly defined and balanced. I hope that people who have upvoted this question will come back and see this. – Simon Nov 10 '11 at 11:26
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This is kind of a "soft" answer, and I'm not sure if any reference actually states it in this manner, but this is how I've come to think of arrows:
An arrow type A b c is basically a function b -> c but with more structure in the same way that a monadic value M a has more structure than a plain old a.
Now what that extra structure happens to be depends on the particular arrow instance you're talking about. Just as with monads IO a and Maybe a each have different additional structure.
The thing that you get with monads is an inability to go from an M a to an a. Now this may seem like a limitation, but it's actually a feature: the type system is protecting you from turning a monadic value into a plain old value. You can only make use of the value by participating in the monad via >>= or the primitive operations of the particular monad instance.
Likewise the thing that you get from A b c is an inability to construct a new b-consuming c-producing "function". The arrow is protecting you from consuming the b and creating a c except by participating in the various arrow combinators or by using the primitive operations of the particular arrow instance.
For example the signal functions in Yampa are roughly (Time -> a) -> (Time -> b), but additionally they have to obey a certain causality restriction: the output at time t is determined by the past values of the input signal: you can't look into the future. So what they do is instead of programming with (Time -> a) -> (Time -> b), you program with SF a b and you build your signal functions out of primitives. It so happens that since SF a b behaves a lot like a function, so that common structure is what's called an "arrow".
share|improve this answer
+1 for the yampa example. – Simon Oct 18 '11 at 12:01
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I like to think of Arrows, like Monads and Functors, as allowing the programmer to do exotic compositions of functions.
Without Monads or Arrows (and Functors), composition of functions in a functional language is limited to applying one function to the result of another function. With monads and functors, you can define two functions, and then write separate reusable code which specify how those functions, in the context of the particular monad, interact with each other and with the data which is passed into them. This code is placed within the bind code of the Monad. So a monad is one one view, just a container for reusuable bind code. Functions compose differently within the context of one monad from another monad.
A simple example is the Maybe monad, where there is code in the bind function such that if a function A is composed with a function B within a Maybe monad, and B produces a Nothing, then the bind code will ensure that the composition of the two functions outputs a Nothing, without bothering to apply A to the Nothing value coming out from B. If there were no monad, the programmer would have to write code into A to test for a Nothing input.
Monads also mean that the programmer does not need to explicitly type the parameters which each function requires into the source code - the bind function handles parameter passing. So using monads, the source code can begin to look more like a static chain of function names, rather than looking as though function A "calls" function B with parameters C and D - the code starts to feel more like an electronic circuit than a moving machine - more functional than imperative.
Arrows also connect functions together with a bind function, providing reusable functionality and hiding parameters. But Arrows can themselves be connected together and composed, and can optionally route data to other Arrows at runtime. Now you can apply data to two paths of Arrows, which "do different things" to the data, and reassemble the result. Or you can select which branch of Arrows to pass the data to, depending on some value in the data. The resulting code is even more like an electronic circuit, with switches, delays, integration etc. The program looks very static, and you should not be able to see much manipulation of data going on. There are fewer and fewer parameters to think about, and less need to think about what values parameters may or may not take.
Writing an Arrowized program mostly involves selecting off the shelf Arrows such as splitters, switches, delays and integrators, lifting functions into those Arrows, and connecting the Arrows together to form bigger Arrows. In Arrowized Functional Reactive Programming, the Arrows form a loop, with input from the world being combined with output from the last iteration of the program, so that the output reacts to real world input.
One of the real world values is time. In Yampa, the Signal Function Arrow invisibly threads the time parameter through the computer program - you never access the time value, but if you connect an integrator arrow into the program, it will output values integrated over time which you can then use to pass to other arrows.
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but this sounds like an applicative functor (some wrapper around a function, that provides helper functions, in some specific context, for reusing already existing functions for the wrapped-types). i definitely need to read more to understand, but maybe you can help, by pointing out what i am missing – Belun May 14 at 9:35
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The reason for arrows is as follows:
1. In category theory there is a concept called arrows. This is slightly similar to functions, but a lot more flexible.
2. Haskell supports functions by default, but needs separate implementation for the arrows.
3. Arrows in haskell tries to implement the category theory concept of arrows.
4. The syntax for arrows is slightly more complicated than normal use of functions in haskell. This is both because of flexibility and because it prevents newbies to shoot themselves to the foot with category theory.
5. Arrows and functors are the next level after you've learned functional programming using normal functions.
6. Arrows are "easier" to understand once you understand the category theory concept. This however is not easy to archieve.
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sorry but phrases like "In category theory there is a concept called arrows. This is slightly similar to functions, but a lot more flexible." makes things even more complicated, honestly. This is not answer at all. – shabunc Oct 17 '11 at 16:04
If you don't have big problems with the flexibility of existing haskell functions, then functions are probably better solution than arrows. Arrows are more complicated, and for a good reason. – tp1 Oct 17 '11 at 16:27
I'm not the author of thee question, but as far as I understand the question is "could one provide practical examples of using arrows". And you actually answer "arrows are more powerful versions of functions with slightly more complicated syntax". Honestly, not very inspiring answer. – shabunc Oct 17 '11 at 16:40
well, both the syntax and complexity of arrows is actually necessary. It's the same thing as a tree is more complicated than an array. Or graph is more complex than tree. Monad is more complicated than graph. And Arrows are more complicated than monads. It's just one step in the path of learning fundamental data structures used in programming. – tp1 Oct 17 '11 at 16:49
@tp1: Looking at your posts on Haskell, I can tell that you have no deep understanding of anything but try to appear "knowledgable" by hand-waving statements. Please refrain from that.[haskell] – Phil Jun 7 at 8:08
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Just an addition to the other answers: Personally it helps me a lot to understand what such a concept is (mathematically) and how it relates to other concepts I know.
In the case of arrows, I found the following paper helpful - it compares monads, applicative functors (idioms) and arrows: Idioms are oblivious, arrows are meticulous, monads are promiscuous by Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler and Jeremy Yallop.
Also I believe nobody mentioned this link which may provide you some ideas and literature on the subject.
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Tell me more ×
For my contracted project, I finished all the agreed on work-items.
They then asked for more. I agreed and put a price tag on it. (Programmers gotta eat too...)
Is it scope creep?
Or, is it only considered scope creep when additions come without price tags?
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It doesn't look like there is a problem here, but maybe I'm missing it. Are you just concerned with your definition of the term scope creep? Or are you worries about the direction of this project. – Eric Wilson Dec 2 '11 at 21:45
Why does it matter? What are you really asking? – JGWeissman Dec 2 '11 at 22:09
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closed as not constructive by Jim G., Eric Wilson, kevin cline, Yannis Rizos, ChrisF Dec 5 '11 at 14:25
4 Answers
up vote 9 down vote accepted
I guess you could call it scope creep, but that doesn't seem like it really fits since by requesting more money you are following some sort of change control process. It sounds more like you had a contract extension or they contracted additional work from you or you are renegotiating your contract. Stating they requested enhancements could also fit if the additional work was directly related to your initial work.
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First, I do not have much experience in writing out contracts myself but I often get into doing contracted work. I would only consider some additional feature scope creep if the client wants to implement it within the original terms of the contract/proposal. Since you are charging an additional amount for this new feature, you have changed the contract. In fact, you should be glad in a way if the client is willing to invest more money for your work.
If this is expected to continue, I suggest having an additional contract retainer that recurs periodically, to guarantee payment on your extra services.
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Scope creep is often considered bad because the (often unevaluated) costs (in time, complexity, maitainability, etc.) exceeds the benefits or the resources actually budgeted, or delay the project outside of a successful schedule.
If you've priced and scheduled the additions appropriately, none of those apply.
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Sounds more like you've followed up a successful sale with another successful sale. I'd call that "success in business," not "scope creep".
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Psych Central
UCLA study points to evolutionary roots of altruism, moral outrage
If you've ever been tempted to drop a friend who tended to freeload, then you have experienced a key to one of the biggest mysteries facing social scientists, suggests a study by UCLA anthropologists.
"If the help and support of a community significantly affects the well-being of its members, then the threat of withdrawing that support can keep people in line and maintain social order," said Karthik Panchanathan, a UCLA graduate student whose study appears in Nature. "Our study offers an explanation of why people tend to contribute to the public good, like keeping the streets clean. Those who play by the rules and contribute to the public good will be included and outcompete freeloaders."
This finding -- at least in part -- may help explain the evolutionary roots of altruism and human anger in the face of uncooperative behavior, both of which have long puzzled economists and evolutionary biologists, he said.
"If you put two dogs together, and one dog does something inappropriate, the other dog doesn't care, so long as it doesn't get hurt," Panchanathan said. "It certainly wouldn't react with moralistic outrage. Likewise, it wouldn't experience elation if it saw one dog help out another dog. But humans are very different; we're the only animals that display these traits."
The study, which uses evolutionary game theory to model human behavior in small social groups, is the first to show that cooperation in the context of the public good can be sustained when freeloaders are punished through social exclusion, said co-author Robert Boyd, a UCLA professor of anthropology and fellow associate in UCLA's Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture.
"Up to this point, social scientists interested in the evolutionary roots of cooperative behavior have been hard-pressed to explain why any single individual would stick his neck out to punish those who fail to pull their weight in society," Boyd said. "But without individuals willing to mete out punishment, we have a hard time explaining how societies develop and sustain cooperative behavior. Our model shows that as long as it is socially permissible, withholding help from a deadbeat actually proves to be in an individual's self-interest."
With funding from the National Science Foundation, Panchanathan set out to recreate mathematically a small community in which people participate in a public good, such as an annual clearing of a mosquito-infested swamp, which takes time from their day but which saves the entire community time down the line because the work prevents them from getting sick. He assumed that individuals in the close-knit community frequently swap favors, like helping neighbors repair their homes after a storm. He also assumed that no single individual or agency was being paid to keep individuals in line. Community members had to do it themselves, much as our evolutionary ancestors would have done.
In his mathematical model, Panchanathan pitted three types of society members:
• "Cooperators," or people who always contribute to the public good and who always assist individual community members in the group with the favors that are asked of them.
• "Defectors," who never contribute to the public good nor assist other community members who ask for help.
• "Shunners," or hard-nosed types who contribute to the public good, but only lend aid to those individuals with a reputation for contributing to the public good and helping other good community members who ask for help. For members in bad standing, shunners withhold individual assistance.
During the course of the game, both cooperators and shunners helped to clear the swamp. The benefits from the mosquito-free swamp, however, flowed to the whole community, including defectors. When the researcher took only this behavior into account, the defectors come out on top because they enjoyed the same benefits the other types, but they paid no costs for the benefits.
But when it came to getting help in home repair, the defectors didn't always do so well. The cooperators helped anyone who asked, but the shunners were selective; they only help those with a reputation for clearing the swamp and helping good community members in home repair. By not helping defectors when they ask for help, shunners were able to save time and resources, thus improving their score. If the loss that defectors experienced from not being helped by shunners was greater than the cost they would have paid to clear the swamp, then defectors lost out.
After these social interactions went on for a period of time that might approximate a generation, individuals were allowed to reproduce based on accumulated scores, so that those with more "fitness points" had more children. Those children were assumed to have adopted their parents' strategy.
Eventually, Panchanathan found that communities end up with either all defectors or all shunners.
"Both of those end points represent 'evolutionarily stable equilibriums'; no matter how much time passes, the make-up of the population does not change," Panchanathan said.
In a community with just cooperators and defectors, defectors -- not surprisingly -- always won. Also when shunners were matched against cooperators, shunners won.
"The cooperators were too nice; they died out," Panchanathan said. "In order to survive, they had to be discriminate about the help they gave."
But when shunners were matched against defectors, the outcome was either shunners or defectors. The outcome depended on the initial frequency of shunners. If enough shunners were present at the beginning of the exercise, then shunners prevailed. Otherwise, defectors prevailed, potentially pointing to the precarious nature of cooperative society.
"We know that people pay their taxes and engage in all kinds of other cooperative behaviors in modern society because they're afraid they'll get punished," Panchanathan said. "The problem for the social scientist becomes how did the propensity to punish get started? Why do I get angry if someone doesn't contribute? Isn't it just better to say, 'It's their business,' and let everybody else in the group get angry? After all, punishing someone else will take time and energy away from activities that are more directly important to me and I may get hurt."
"By withdrawing my support from a freeloader, I benefit because every time I do something nice for someone, it costs me something," Panchanathan said. "By withdrawing that support, I'm spared the energy, time or whatever costs are entailed. I retain my contribution, but the deadbeat is punished."
In practice, however, cooperative societies hold defectors in line through a series of measures, Panchanathan said. "The first level is disapproval: you say, 'That wasn't cool' or you give a funny look," he said. "Then you withdraw social support. Finally, you lower the boom and either physically hurt the defector or run him out of town."
Ultimately, he admits, this model is "a very simple and crude approximation" of the real world. "For example, in my model, only defectors or shunners can persist. They cannot coexist," he said. "But we know that some people are generally cooperative, playing by society's rules, while others are not. This type of modeling doesn't explain everything. Instead, it boils down a complex social world and tries to understand one small piece. In this case, we found that cooperation can persist if people need to maintain a good reputation in their community."
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PLoS One. 2011; 6(12): e28943.
Published online 2011 December 22. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0028943
PMCID: PMC3245235
Identification of New Alleles and the Determination of Alleles and Genotypes Frequencies at the CYP2D6 Gene in Emiratis
Rula Y. Qumsieh,1 Bassam R. Ali,2 Yousef M. Abdulrazzaq,3 Ossama Osman,4 Nadia A. Akawi,2 and Salim M. A. Bastaki1*
1Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates
2Department of Pathology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates
4Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates
Ulrich M. Zanger, Editor
Dr. Margarete Fischer-Bosch Institute of Clinical Pharmacology, Germany
* E-mail: sbastaki/at/
Conceived and designed the experiments: SMAB BRA YMA OO. Performed the experiments: RYQ NAA OO. Analyzed the data: SMAB BRA YMA RYQ NAA. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: RYQ OO. Wrote the paper: SMAB BRA YMA NAA RYQ. Designed the software used in the analysis: BRA NAA.
Received June 26, 2011; Accepted November 17, 2011.
CYP2D6 belongs to the cytochrome P450 superfamily of enzymes and plays an important role in the metabolism of 20–25% of clinically used drugs including antidepressants. It displays inter-individual and inter-ethnic variability in activity ranging from complete absence to excessive activity which causes adverse drug reactions and toxicity or therapy failure even at normal drug doses. This variability is due to genetic polymorphisms which form poor, intermediate, extensive or ultrarapid metaboliser phenotypes. This study aimed to determine CYP2D6 alleles and their frequencies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) local population. CYP2D6 alleles and genotypes were determined by direct DNA sequencing in 151 Emiratis with the majority being psychiatric patients on antidepressants. Several new alleles have been identified and in total we identified seventeen alleles and 49 genotypes. CYP2D6*1 (wild type) and CYP2D6*2 alleles (extensive metaboliser phenotype) were found with frequencies of 39.1% and 12.2%, respectively. CYP2D6*41 (intermediate metaboliser) occurred in 15.2%. Homozygous CYP2D6*4 allele (poor metaboliser) was found with a frequency of 2% while homozygous and heterozygous CYP2D6*4 occurred with a frequency of 9%. CYP2D6*2xn, caused by gene duplication (ultrarapid metaboliser) had a frequency of 4.3%. CYP2D6 gene duplication/multiduplication occurred in 16% but only 11.2% who carried more than 2 active functional alleles were considered ultrarapid metabolisers. CYP2D6 gene deletion in one copy occurred in 7.5% of the study group. In conclusion, CYP2D6 gene locus is heterogeneous in the UAE national population and no significant differences have been identified between the psychiatric patients and controls.
Interethnic variation in the capacity to metabolize drugs is mainly due to genetic constitution [1]. Recent advances in pharmacogenomics elucidated that some variations in DNA sequences recognized as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) may explain some of the variability in drug metabolizing enzyme activities. These contribute to drug-induced adverse reactions, toxicity, and therapeutic responses in different ethnic groups [2]. The best characterized genetically determined variations in antidepressant drug metabolism are those associated with the polymorphic N-acetyltransferase, NAT2, and two polymorphic cytochrome P450s involved with oxidation reactions, CYP2D6 and CYP2C19, all of which show marked interethnic differences in catalytic activity and allele distribution [3]. Whereas the clinical significance of the CYP2C19 polymorphism is uncertain, the clinical consequences of the CYP2D6 polymorphism are well established [4], [5].
The potential importance of interethnic differences in CYP2D6 gene structure and expression lies in the large number of drugs whose elimination is catalysed by CYP2D6. These include tricyclic antidepressants and antipsychotics [6]. The CYP2D6 locus is highly polymorphic and currently more than 120 variant CYP2D6 alleles have been described ( These alleles can be divided into; 1) alleles resulting in no functional product (poor metabolizers, PMs); 2) alleles causing a reduced rate of metabolism (intermediate metabolizers, IMs); 3) alleles causing ultrarapid metabolism (ultra-rapid metabolizers, UMs); and 4) alleles with no important functional consequences (extensive metabolizers, EMs) [7] Given the relatively wide spread use of CYP2D6-metabolised medications, including antidepressants, and limited availability of data regarding the alleles and genotypes in Emiratis, this study was undertaken to determine CYP2D6 alleles and their frequencies, using direct DNA sequencing of the full coding regions and large parts of the intronic sequences, in this population.
Identification of new CYP2D6 alleles
The DNA sequence analysis of all the coding regions, the splice sites and large parts of the intronic regions was carried out for 151 subjects from the UAE local population. This included 50 healthy controls and 101 subjects on antidepressants. Eight out of 151 subjects had new alleles and new genotypes (Table 1 and and2).2). CYP2D6*105 was the only new homozygous genotype where we found a novel mutation c.1097T>C (g.3268T>C) which causes p.F366S change in the corresponding protein. This mutation is accompanied by the two common SNPs, namely p.R296C and p.S486T ( in a homozygous state. The other new alleles were unique in their combinations. Five patients were carrying unreported combinations of known SNPs with some unknowns (Table 2). Both new SNPs g.1783 A>C and g.4028C>A were intronic thus their effect on the enzyme function is not clear. The ascertained haplotypes in these subjects were undetermined due to the heterozygosity of some of their SNPs. Parents were not included in this study and therefore it was not possible to assign the alleles.
Table 1
Table 1
New alleles found in CYP2D6 among our UAE study group.
Table 2
Table 2
New genotypes found in CYP2D6 among our UAE study group.
CYP2D6 allele frequencies among 151 Emiratis
Within our sequenced study group (n = 151, 302 alleles) 17 different alleles were identified in which CYP2D6*1 occurred in the highest frequency of 39.1% (n = 118) (Table 3). This was followed by CYP2D6*41 with a frequency of 15.2% (n = 46), while CYP2D6*2, CYP2D6*4, CYP2D6*2xn, CYP2D6*39 and CYP2D6*10 had frequencies of 12.2%, 9%, 4.3%, 4% and 3.3%, respectively.
Table 3
Table 3
CYP2D6 allele frequencies among 151 (302 alleles) UAE nationals.
Frequencies of CYP2D6 functional alleles among 151 UAE individuals
As shown in table 4 there were only 3 (2%) individuals out of 151 who carried no functional alleles at all. Of the 151 subjects, 27 (17.9%) had only one active allele. The majority carried two active alleles with a frequency of 68.9%, whereas 17 (11.3%) individuals were carrying more than two active alleles.
Table 4
Table 4
The number of active alleles in the sample studied (n = 151).
Frequency of CYP2D6 Genotypes and their predicted phenotypes
CYP2D6*1, CYP2D6*2 and CYP2D6*39 encode for EMs phenotype in both homozygous and heterozygous forms. CYP2D6*10 and CYP2D6*41 encode for IMs phenotype but only in the homozygous form or when it is combined with one of the poor metaboliser alleles such as CYP2D6*4 which only encode for a PM phenotype in the homozygous form [8][10]. CYP2D6*2xn which indicates the presence of gene duplication encode for a UMs phenotype [11].
In addition to the new genotypes described in table 2, we found 44 different already known genotypes among our study group (Table 5). Twenty three out of the 44 genotypes were assigned under EMs phenotype (homozygous or heterozygous). Twelve out of the 44 were genotypes associated with duplication or multiduplication in one of their alleles and they were assigned under UMs phenotype. Eight out of 44 genotypes were assigned as IMs phenotype. One genotype was predicted to have PM phenotype.
Table 5
Table 5
The observed distribution of CYP2D6 known genotypes and their predicted phenotypes in the recruited individuals (n = 151).
In the subjects studied (n = 151) the following CYP2D6 genotypes were identified with the highest occurrence:*1/*1(n = 31),*1/*2 (n = 17),*1/*41(n = 14),*1/*4(n = 8), *41/*41(n = 8), *4/*41 (n = 6), *2/*39 (n = 4) and *1/*2xn (n = 5) (Table 5). Out of the 151 study group 2% (n = 3) were poor metabolizers carrying the *4/*4 genotype.
The impact of CYP2D6 polymorphisms on the clinical outcome of psychoactive drugs has been extensively described in the literature [12]. CYP2D6 has more than 120 allelic variants resulting from point mutations, rearrangements, additions, deletions and duplications. Several studies have shown that the frequencies of the alternative CYP2D6 phenotypes vary significantly among different ethnic groups [2], [13], [14]. Examples of these ethnically specific markers are CYP2D6*17, found in Africans, and CYP2D6*10, found in Asians. Both result in slower metabolism of CYP2D6 substrates (such as risperidone and paroxetine), which result in higher plasma concentrations thereby needing lower doses for therapeutic effect [8], [12], [15], [16].
Duplications or multiplications of the CYP2D6 gene occurs in 1% of Swedes, 5% of Spanish, 29% of Ethiopians and 19% of Arabs results in an increased number of enzymes available for metabolic processes [3], [7], [17]. This is called ultrarapid metabolization. Patients with these mutations will require higher doses of medications to achieve the therapeutic response. UMs were previously regarded as “noncompliant” because they did not respond to the standard medication doses administered [18]. CYP2D6 genotypic frequency information had been determined for most populations around the world [12]. They displayed significant interethnic differences in CYP2D6 allele frequencies [1] resulting in variable percentages of PMs, IMs, EMs and UMs in a given population. This is the first study to genotype CYP2D6 gene in UAE local population. However, the incidence of different CYP2D6 polymorphisms in the UAE population holds a great challenge to be characterized because of the huge ethnic diversity that exists in the country.
The novel variant p.F366S found in this population has not been reported elsewhere and its clinical impact is unknown, but theoretically and based on bioinformatics tools it could be clinically significant. It changed phenylalanine which is a hydrophobic large amino acid into serine which is a polar uncharged small amino acid. The phenyl ring on the phenylalanine probably interacts with the beta sheet and changes it into small hydrophilic molecule thus disrupting the reaction and the structure (Figure 1). Moreover, this amino acid substitution is predicted to probably be protein damaging based on analysis using PolyPhen program for prediction of functional effect of human SNPs ( Unfortunately, no plasma was available for the homozygous subject, thus we were unable to determine his metabolic ratio (MR).
Figure 1
Figure 1
CYP2D6 protein showing position 366 where there is a substitution from phenylalanine to serine amino acid.
CYP2D6 allele frequencies in our UAE study group were compared with frequencies seen in other ethnic populations. According to Toscano et al. [19] 1,*2 and*41 are the three most frequent CYP2D6 functional alleles. This is similar to our findings as the said alleles occurred in the highest frequencies namely: *1 (39.1%), *41 (15.2%) and *2 (12.2%). Unlike other populations [19], CYP2D6*41 occurred more frequently than CYP2D6*2 in UAE. In the Croatian population the frequencies of polymorphic CYP2D6*2,*3, *4,* 5, and * 6 alleles were 4%, 2.8%, 14%, 1%, and 1.5%, respectively. The most frequently observed null allele was CYP2D6*4, which accounted for 72% of all null alleles. Among the Croatian population studied, 60% of the subjects had EM genotype, 33% were IMs, and 3% exhibited the PM genotype. Four percent exhibited the UM genotype due to amplified CYP2D6 gene (CYP2D6*2 allele) [20]. The allele frequency of CYP2D6*4; the most common defective allele among Caucasians (25%); was 14% in Croatians [20] and only 3.5% in the Saudi population [21] and 2% in the UAE population. Two other alleles, CYP2D6*10 (47–70% in Asians) and CYP2D6*17 (25–40% in blacks), are common in certain populations resulting in diminished enzyme activity. Both were found only at low frequencies of 3.0% each in the Saudi Arabian population [21] and 3.3% and 2.5% respectively, in the UAE population.
PMs alleles (e.g.*3,*4,*4xn,*5,*6,*7,*8,*11 or *45) cause absent enzymatic activity and, possibly, an increased risk of adverse drug reactions even with routine therapy with CYP2D6 substrates. CYP2D6*3,*4,*5,*6 form 93–97% of the PM phenotypes in Caucasians while other inactivating alleles form less than 1% [22], [23]. CYP2D6*4 is the most common defective allele in Caucasians with a frequency of 20–25% in both heterozygous and homozygous forms but only homozygous CYP2D6*4 is associated with the PM phenotype [24]. Heterozygous and homozygous CYP2D6*4 were found with a frequency of 9% in the Emirati population which is similar to the Palestinians (7.8%) [25] and a bit lower than the Croatians (14%) [20] but not as high as what was reported in other Caucasians [12], [24]. Three individuals (2%) were homozygous for CYP2D6*4 and were categorized as being PMs. Other defective alleles such as (*3,*5 and*6) could not be detected perhaps due to the small sample size (n = 151) we used for genotyping. Because of the fact that patients with CYP2D6*4 are PMs they are more than likely to develop side effects with normal doses of CYP2D*6-dependent antidepressants, particularly because most of these drugs have narrow therapeutic windows. Therefore drugs like tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), which have a narrow therapeutic window and venalaxine are going to pose problems in these patients. Therefore lower doses to approximately half the therapeutic doses of TCA are recommended [26], [27]. The opposite is true of UMs who need higher doses of CYP2D6-dependent drugs to reach therapeutic levels.
Individuals were considered as IMs if they had one CYP2D6 allele with a decreased enzyme activity (*9,*10,*17,*29 or *41) together with a non-functional allele (e.g. *3,*4,*4xn,*5,*6,*7,*8 or *11) [23] or if they had two partially functional alleles. Among the 17 variant CYP2D6 alleles that were found in the UAE population, CYP2D6*41 allele had a high frequency of 15.2% which is higher than what was reported in other Caucasians (8.5%) [1], while closer to what was reported in Palestinians (12.7%) [25]. CYP2D6*41 occurs in 22% of Ethiopians [28]. In Asia (1%) and Africa (1–2%), it occurs in a lower frequency than in Caucasians (10%) [26]. CYP2D6*41/*null form nearly 50–70% of all Caucasian IMs [29]. In this study group 4.6% had CYP2D6*41/*null (*41/*4) genotype while 8.6% had CYP2D6*IM/*IM (e.g.*41/*41, *10/*10,*10/*41 and *17/*17). CYP2D6*10 and *17 cause a decrease in the enzyme activity. The frequency of CYP2D6*10 is relatively high in Asia (51%) and therefore nearly 25% of Asians are classified as IMs [12]. Black Africans and African-Americans have high frequencies of CYP2D6*17 allele (up to 35%) and that is the reason why the majority of them are IMs [16]. On the other hand, null alleles are much rarer in Asia and Africa than in Caucasians [1]. CYP2D6*10 and CYP2D6*17 were found in UAE at a low frequencies of 3.3% and 2% respectively, and this was expected as they occurred in even lower frequencies in some other Caucasians.
UMs are characterized by faster rate of drug metabolism caused by the presence of multiple active functional CYP2D6 genes (at least 3 copies) on one individual allele. Consequently these subjects do not reach the therapeutic plasma levels even at normal drug doses. Alleles with multiple gene copies were found in high frequencies only in some regions such as Saudi Arabia (21%) [21] and Ethiopia (29%) [28], while in the rest of the world the frequencies do not exceed 10% [26], [30]. In UAE, the most common duplicated alleles are *1 and *2 where CYP2D6*2xn occurred in 4.3% which is close to Palestinian's frequency (4.9%) [25] and to other Caucasians (1–5%), while higher than Asians and Africans (0–2%) but still lower than Saudi Arabians and African Ethiopians (10–16%) [7]. CYP2D6*1xn occurred only in 1.6% of the Emiratis while it reached 3.7% in some Middle Eastern regions [25].
Kouhi et al. [30] determined the frequency of four CYP2D6 alleles in Iran. He found that CYP2D6*2 that encode for an EM phenotype occurred in a frequency of 32% which when compared to what we found in UAE (12.2%) is considered high. CYP2D6*4 occurred in 12.5% of Iranians and this is somehow close to the frequency in UAE (9%). CYP2D6*10 occurred more frequently in Iran (9%) than in UAE (3.3%) while CYP2D6*17 was completely absent in Iran with a 2% frequency in UAE nationals. In addition, Iran has more PMs (4%) than UAE (2%), while they were 8% in Palestinians, 17% in Jews of Russian origin, and 0% in Jews of Yemeni and Ethiopian extraction [31].
In conclusion, CYP2D6 gene can be considered a challenge for genotyping because its polymorphisms are numerous including not only SNPs but also gene duplication and deletion. However, our approach of direct DNA sequencing of all the coding regions and most of the intronic noncoding regions provided us with the opportunity to capture most of the variants. Our study showed that CYP2D6 is polymorphic in the UAE population with a different distribution compared with other populations but there were some similarities especially with Palestinians. New SNPs, New alleles and atypical genotypes were observed in the UAE study group (Table 1 and and2).2). Expanding the number of participants and further studies are anticipated to enrich the CYP2D6 nomenclature database and increase our knowledge of CYP2D6 among Emiratis. In addition, we believe that family based studies would be helpful in determining the full haplotypes in this population. MRs especially for the new alleles should be measured to verify the corresponding phenotype.
Subjects blood sampling
Ethics Statement
This study was approved by Al-Ain District Human Research Ethics and the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, UAE University Committee (07/148) and informed consent was obtained from all subjects.
Blood samples were collected from 151 Emiratis: 101 of them were unrelated UAE nationals who suffered from endogenous depression and were being treated with antidepressants at Al Ain Hospital inpatient and outpatient psychiatry clinics as well as Tawam Hospital outpatient clinic. The other 50 individuals were blood donors randomly selected from healthy population.
Extraction of DNA
DNA was extracted from peripheral leukocytes using a whole-blood Qiagen extraction kit (Flexigene DNA isolation kit). The isolated genomic DNA samples were kept in sterile plastic vials at 4°C until analysis or stored at −20°.
PCR amplification of the CYP2D gene and DNA sequencing
Primer design and PCR amplification was achieved under standard conditions described by Masimirembwa et al. (1996) [8]. The oligonucleotides used for PCR are listed in table S1. DNA was sequenced using the BigDye Terminator kit v3.1with a 3130x/genetic analyzer system (Applied Biosystems) following ExoSAP-IT® (USB Corporation) treatment of the PCR products. Cycle sequencing was performed under standard conditions recommended by the manufacturers (Applied Biosystems Inc.). Oligonucleotides used for sequencing are listed in table S2.
Analysis of sequencing data
For each patient the produced sequences were aligned with the original CYP2D6 sequence (NM_000106.4) using ClustalW2 ( to detect the presence of SNPs or mutations as well as to define each patient's genotype. Expasy Translate tool ( was used to translate DNA sequences into their protein sequences to examine the influence of the DNA changes at the protein level and thus the enzymatic activity.
CYP2D6 gene copy number was determined using TaqMan® real-time quantitative PCR (ABI 7900 Fast Real-Time PCR system; Applied Biosystems). Real time data were collected by the SDS 2.1 software, and data were analyzed using the relative quantification (ΔΔCT) method. Three calibrators (containing one, two or three CYP2D6 gene copies DNA samples from Coriell Inc., were included in each run for the accuracy of the results and each sample was normalized to RNaseP to produce ΔCT. All samples were then normalized to the calibrator (NA17120) sample to determine ΔΔCT. Relative quantity (RQ) values were then calculated and multiplied by 2 to produce CYP2D6 gene copy number.
Statistical analysis
The statistical analysis was conducted by SPSS 17.0 (for windows) to calculate frequencies. The level of significant of P value was set at less than 0.05.
Supporting Information
Table S1
Primers for PCR amplification of CYP2D6 gene (exons 1–9).
Table S2
Primers for CYP2D6 sequencing.
We thank the subjects and clinicians involved in this study.
Funding: This research has been funded by UAE University through grant no. 02-04-8-11/08. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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Actors: What, Why, and How (#161)
Actors: What, Why and How
Presented by Donovan Preston
Since the dawn of concurrency research, there have been two camps: shared everything, and shared nothing. Most modern applications use threads for concurrency, a shared everything architecture.
Actors, however, use a shared nothing architecture where lightweight processes communicate with each other using message passing. Actors can change their state, create a new Actor, send a message to any Actor it has the Address of, and wait for a specific kind of message to arrive in it's mailbox.
We will discuss the benefits of using the Actor architecture and strategies for implementing an Actor system in Python.
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American 100 History facts-10
Created by Chapin13
10 terms · 10th set of 10 finally done....
8th amendment
prevents cruel or unusual punishments or excessive bails and fines
9th amendment
states people have other rights other than stated in the constitution
10th amendment
powers not given to the government belong to the states
13th amendment
abolished slavery
14th amendment
guarantees citizenship and rights to all people born in the US
15th amendment
guarantees right to vote regardless of race
Marbury vs Madison
court case that gave the supreme court the right to determine if a law violates the constitution
Dred Scott vs Sanford
supreme court decision that said slaves were property and not citizens
Cotton Gin
invented by Eli Whitney, it speed ed the cleaning of cotton fibers
invented by Robert Fulton, revolutionized transportation and trade in the US
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Sunday, 27 January 2013
The Rising Cost of Healthcare
The BBC has an interesting article drawing on the discussions at the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Its main thrust is that healthcare costs are driving the current economic downturn in the West. It claims that healthcare costs in the US amount to 20% of all government spending, whilst most European countries are spending around half of that treating the sick, elderly and infirm.
There should be little that is surprising in the article, healthcare costs are high because of social and government failures in keeping the population well. Never more has the old axiom 'an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure' been more appropriate than today. More so when Government austerity measures are all but designed to increase the healthcare burden through their social impact.
The greatest part of healthcare spending goes to treating chronic care conditions - and many of those conditions are preventable, most at next to no cost, some at minimal cost. Take three of the more common non-congenital chronic conditions: COPD, Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) and Asthma. The first two are almost exclusively a result of poor lifestyle choices - smoking, lack of exercise, poor diet - whilst the third is usually a result of poor environment. Already its become apparent that the UK's ban on smoking indoors has had a positive effect on child asthma. Its likely that future COPD rates will also be reduced by the same change. More so if measures were extended to all public places. Better, integrated transport systems would further improve the future diagnosis of Asthma.
Its entirely possible that T2D could be significantly reduced in the long term by making changes in school life. As little as 30 minutes activity a day and a better diet at school ages could reduced the number of children and young adults being diagnosed with what used to be called late onset diabetes - an old persons disease.
However, the government's austerity budget has meant that school meals are being provided at cheaper and cheaper rates (and lower and lower quality) by local councils, there's no money for more playgrounds and out of school activities to encourage a healthy lifestyle and the results are being seen in more and more morbidly obese children.
The answer being proposed for the UK is more insurance based healthcare - which clearly hasn't had a positive effect in the US. Its the wrong answer, especially when the costs of all this prevention are minimal compared with the cost of paying the long term cost of treating a patient.
Perhaps because the payback is so far into the future no British government - so focused on the short term - would risk its implementation. Storing up more and more trouble for the future...
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Portrait, Bill Moyers. (photo: Robin Holland)
Portrait, Bill Moyers. (photo: Robin Holland)
Our Pro-Corporate Supreme Court
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company
16 September 12
ILL MOYERS: Welcome. When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed corporations and the super-rich the right to overwhelm our elections with tsunamis of cash, they moved America further from representative government toward outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to protecting wealth.
We saw it first in the mid-term elections of 2010, and we’re seeing it in spades in this year’s elections – organized money, much of it dark money, given secretly So it can’t be traced, enveloping the campaign for president, Congressional campaigns, and state legislative and judicial races. There’s never been anything like it in our history – not on this scale, and not this sinister. We’ll take a look at this radical threat to democracy in our next two broadcasts – how it’s happening, and what can be done about it.
We’ll begin with this current issue of "The Nation" magazine, “The One Percent Court,” devoted entirely to the United States Supreme Court. It’s one you’ll not want to miss – and not because it opens with an article jointly written by me and the historian Bernard Weisberger. Our mission was simply to remind the reader of what’s obvious: that because of the partisan gridlock paralyzing both president and Congress, more than ever the court has become the most powerful branch of government, and the center of a controversy which may shape the fate of democracy for generations to come.
With me to talk about this is "The Nation" magazine’s editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel. She’s a frequent presence on the talk news shows and a familiar byline in major publications. She has been one of those out in front, calling the president to task for orphaning his values and promises, as can be seen in her most recent book, "The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in the Age of Obama."
The prolific Jamie Raskin also joins us. One of the country's leading scholars on constitutional law, he teaches at American University and is a Maryland State Senator, where in his first legislative session alone he managed to see more than a dozen of his bills pass into law. He's been described as “one of the nation’s most talented state legislators.” His many writings include a centerpiece article in this special issue of "The Nation."
Welcome to you both.
JAMIE RASKIN: Thanks so much.
BILL MOYERS: Okay, let’s play the numbers. What comes to mind when I call out 79, 76, 75, and 73?
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: The age of the four oldest justices on the court. And one of the reasons we did this issue is that as we enter this election season, this election could determine not only the future of the court for generations to come but the shape of our democracy for generations to come.
BILL MOYERS: You've devoted whole editions of the magazine, in the past, to the Supreme Court. What makes this one different?
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I think we're at a moment, Bill, where we are witnessing the unprecedented concentration of power, wealth, and income. It is reminiscent not just of The Gilded Age, but of the New Deal period, when you had a Supreme Court which wanted to invalidate and dismantle the New Deal legislation that President Roosevelt was putting forward.
There's always been a threat. The court has always been important. But now we've seen a spate of 5-4 cases, 5-4, 5-4, 5-4, on the core issues that this magazine grapples with. The A.C.A. health care decision, in my mind, Jamie I'm sure has--
BILL MOYERS: Obamacare decision?
BILL MOYERS: Judge Roberts voting with the majority?
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I think at that point partly because Citizens United has awakened Americans to the understanding that this court favors corporate interests. It's burgeoning. It's latent, but it's there. And I think Judge Roberts decided to be an institutionalist and wanted to save the court to come back to a next session and perhaps do some damage on voting rights, affirmative action, and other issues.
BILL MOYERS: You could have chosen any subject to write for Katrina, in this issue. But you chose Citizens United. Why?
JAMIE RASKIN: The way I look at it is, we'd had a decade of right-wing derailment of the Supreme Court and the politics of the country. In Bush vs. Gore in 2000, we had a 5-4 decision which took victory away from Vice President Gore, who had more than a half million votes more than Bush did and gave it to George W. Bush by intervening to stop the counting of ballots, for the first time in American history. And the history all of us know with the Iraq War and Afghan War and the corruption and so on.
That was the last decade. Now in 2010, a decade later a 5-4 coalition on the court, the right-wing block gets together and says, "Corporations, for the first time in American history, are declared to have the political free speech rights of the people, such that they can take money directly out of the corporate treasury and put it into politics."
Well, that threatens a total capsizing of democratic relationships that we've known before. And it completely upends what the Supreme Court has always said about what a corporation is. Because you can go back to Chief Justice John Marshall in the Dartmouth College case who said, "A corporation is an artificial entity. It's an instrument set up by the state legislatures for economic purposes." He said, "It's invisible. It's intangible. It exists only in contemplation of law. And it has all of these rights and benefits conferred upon it. But it must remain under the control of the government, essentially."
And that has been standard conservative doctrine on the Supreme Court all the way through Chief Justice Rehnquist. Justice White who said, "We give them limited liability. We give them perpetual life. But in return, we ask them to stay out of politics." And there's a beautiful sentence from Justice White dissenting in a case called First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti, where he said, "The state need not permit its own creature to consume it." And yet, this court is saying that, "We must permit the creation of the state legislatures to consume our politics." And so to me, the Citizens United case is the emblem for the whole era we're in. We're living in the Citizens United Era, I think.
BILL MOYERS: But before Citizens United, wealthy people were funneling money into politics, corporations were forming political action committees. And CEOs of those corporations were lavishing money on selected favored political candidates.
JAMIE RASKIN: Absolutely right, the corporate voice was never missing. And that's something, you know, Justice Stevens has pointed out. He said, "There were many faults to American politics. But nobody thought that a lack or a dearth of corporate voices was among the vices." But there was still a radical change effectuated by the majority--
BILL MOYERS: How so? Radical?
JAMIE RASKIN: --in Citizens United.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
JAMIE RASKIN: Because before corporations could have issue ads. They could take out an ad in the New York Times on something. Before the CEOs and executives, as you say, could put their own money into campaigns. They could spend to the heavens of their own money. And they could contribute directly to candidates. But the one thing that couldn't happen was the CEOs could not take money directly out of the treasury and funnel it into campaigns
ExxonMobil for example. I mean, in 2008, ExxonMobil had a political action committee. And that was money that was given directly by executives. People wrote checks for it. And they raised about a million dollars, which is not chump change. And they were able to spread it around.
But if ExxonMobil had been able to take money directly out of the corporate treasury, their profits in that year were $45 billion. If they had taken a modest 10 percent of their profits to spend in politics, it would have been more than the Obama campaign, the McCain campaign, the DNC, and the RNC, and every congressional campaign in the country. One corporation in the Fortune 500.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: What Jamie is describing is the reason we have unprecedented inequality today and why we don't hear people's voices. We're hearing the voices of money. Money is the realm, the coin of power in this country. But, you know, one of the reasons we did this issue was because of the trajectory of this court. Because it is true that this is a radical shift. But we could see more dismantling of the frail structures of campaign finance reform that remain.
BILL MOYERS: There's hardly anything--
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: There's hardly anything left. But it has been a terrible downward spiral. But the clean money legislation in states like Arizona, the ban on corporate spending in Montana. These are other steps that this court could take if it moved to not a 5-4, but if you had more right-wing justices on this court. But it--
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: There's no question that the arc, as Jamie said, from Bush v. Gore, which in so many ways was a right-wing coup. When you talk to people outside this country, they saw it as that. I mean, you had the brother of the governor overseeing the decision and the justices shutting down democratic votes to this decision.
BILL MOYERS: Do you agree with Jamie that Citizens United is a game changer?
JAMIE RASKIN: But it's also emblematic of what's going on in the court. If you look at the 2011, last year's Supreme Court term, the court wiped out a very important class action suit brought by women in the Wal-Mart stores. A million and a half women brought a class action, again, a 5-4 decision saying that they didn't have enough in common with each other. They had not alleged a sufficiently common element to their complaint. The sex discrimination wasn't enough. They didn't have the same supervisor, for example.
Of course, they were all over the country. We saw another major blowout decision against consumers in-- AT&T Mobile versus Concepcion, where a family responded to an ad saying, "Get a free phone." And then after they got a free phone, they got a bill for $30, which was to go for taxes. They brought a suit. It was consolidated with a class-action suit. And AT&T said, "Well, you've signed our boilerplate adhesion contract which says you've got to go to independent arbitration."
That was appealed. And the Ninth Circuit said that you can't do that to people. This is unconscionable to steer them away from the ability to get judicial relief. Well, 5-4 decision reverses that in AT&T versus Concepcion. And the court said it was preempted by the Federal Arbitration Act.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: And also the court siding with management against labor. Basically invalidating the National Labor Relations Act. And we saw in this decision which was underreported, because it was just on the eve of the Obamacare health care decision, Knox vs. S.E.I.U., Service Employee International Union.
Some called that the Scott Walker decision, because it placed such an undue burden on public employees that it has made collective bargaining more difficult. Dahlia Lithwick, has a piece in the issue, builds on what Jamie was saying, which is that in some ways the move to arbitration has closed off the possibilities of class action. Which has been an avenue for ordinary citizens to challenge corporate power, corporations, their malfeasance. And that is a trend which I believe we need to bring more attention to. It may seem dry, but again, it affects everyday lives.
BILL MOYERS: You open your article with a quote from the announcer in The Hunger Games. "And may the odds be ever in your favor." What are you trying to tell us?
JAMIE RASKIN: Well, in the Citizens United era, we're moving dangerously close into a kind of corporate state mentality, where the corporations operate with impunity in the Supreme Court. And they're now endowed not with personhood rights, as some people think, but super personhood rights. Because they have all kinds of protections that ordinary human beings don't have, like limited liability and perpetual life. And they continue to, you know, accrue wealth through the generations.
But now they're given political free speech rights that people theoretically have. But of course, most American citizens don't have millions of dollars to spend in politics. But the corporations do. And it’s, you know, a matter of chump change for them to put several million dollars into a campaign that could, you know, very much affect the direction of public policy.
BILL MOYERS: You live in New York, Katrina, if you were explaining to another straphanger on a moving subway the impact on that person's life of Citizens United, what would you tell her before the next stop?
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: What's misunderstood is that money is not an abstraction. Money will decide how people live, how their children are raised and treated, and how you're treated by corporations. I mean, if you're defrauded by AT&T and you don't have access to a fair legal system, you're not living in a fair democracy.
JAMIE RASKIN: And it's a fundamental distortion of a fair market, too. That's the other thing. It's not just an offense to Thomas Jefferson. It's an offense to Adam Smith.
BILL MOYERS: And by the way, this is why some conservatives I've talked to are distressed by Citizens United. They do not see it as a boon to--
JAMIE RASKIN: Corporations should compete based on the ingenuity of their engineers, their ability to come up with better products, not based on an army of lobbyists that they send to Washington or the amount of money they can put into politics to get their guy elected to office.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: You know, what I really dislike about the current campaign is this idea if you raise a question of corporate power that you're antibusiness.
We're not antibusiness. We're simply saying that you need to have labor. You need to have organized citizens given the same rights as corporations are now being given. The rights of free association are being limited while the rights of corporations are being enhanced. So that countervailing power, which was at the heart of an American politics and system, is being diminished and dismantled.
So the fact that the federal district and appellate courts are deciding so much, and those have been so seriously already reshaped by Bush, by the right. It's a long game that the right has played. And that it's not too late but it's almost too late--
BILL MOYERS: You've been publishing about this. You've been writing about this for some time now. You both have seen this coming. You've written about how the court has been taking the side of corporations against regulators. And as you said a moment ago, the corporations against citizens. So wasn't Citizens United the logical next step to this trend that has--
JAMIE RASKIN: Oh, it absolutely was. I mean, Justice Powell was a key figure here. He wrote this memorandum as a private lawyer for the Chamber of Commerce in 1971 saying, "We need a counter-attack against the environmentalists and the labor unions and so on." And developed a whole strategy for kind of a corporate takeover of the judiciary and politic.
BILL MOYERS: By the way, you said something very important. Justice Lewis Powell, then a lawyer in Virginia, wrote this for the Chamber of Commerce, later became appointed by Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court.
JAMIE RASKIN: Just several months later.
BILL MOYERS: Many people look at the Powell Memo as the charter--
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: The foundational, the foundational document.
JAMIE RASKIN: And the first big case in this direction was the First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti case, which he wrote the decision on. And what it said was corporations -- the identity of the speaker is irrelevant, which becomes the key--
BILL MOYERS: What does that mean?
JAMIE RASKIN: What it means is you can't tell corporations that they can't put their money into politics just because they're a corporation. Which has, I guess, a surface plausibility to it. But then would you say that, for example, the City of New York can put money into an election--
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: That could be the next step.
JAMIE RASKIN: --to tell people how to vote?
BILL MOYERS: If we had any money. City of New York is broke.
JAMIE RASKIN: Can churches put their money in? I mean, if the identity of the speaker is really irrelevant. And even the court itself has not gone with that notion, because the next step was the right-wing lawyers who are pushing this today like James Bopp said, "Well, then we should have a right to give money directly to campaigns." Corporate contributions are next. And the court, at least at this point, is unwilling to go that far. So it doesn't totally buy the rhetoric of the identity of the speaker is irrelevant. But the First Amendment is being used today the way that the Lochner Court in the attack on the New Deal used due process.
BILL MOYERS: Back in the '30s.
JAMIE RASKIN: Which is you get everything through the First Amendment. For example, this outrageous case from 2011 from Vermont, Sorrell's decision, which struck down a patient and physician confidentiality law, which said that pharmacies and insurance companies could not sell-- information about patients being prescribed particular drugs by doctors directly to pharmaceutical companies. And the Supreme Court struck that down as a violation of the First Amendment, which is incredible that the data that's being collected by physicians somehow is free speech. And the pharmaceuticals have a right to it.
BILL MOYERS: So you could tell the straphanger on the subway that the data she gives her physician about her health could be sold by him to some corporate cause--
JAMIE RASKIN: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: --to some corporate subscriber.
JAMIE RASKIN: Now her name wouldn't be in it, at least in this variation.
BILL MOYERS: But it does change the relationship.
JAMIE RASKIN: It changes the relationship. And the point is that the First Amendment is being used by corporations to get everything that they want, including the right, basically, to own campaigns.
BILL MOYERS: Is your position that corporations do not have quote "free speech" under the First Amendment?
JAMIE RASKIN: They have commercial speech rights. And this is a point that Justice Breyer makes very effectively in the Vermont decision. He says, "What's happening is the majority is confusing the political speech, free speech rights of the citizenry with the commercial speech rights of businesses."
And those rights are constricted. For example, we say that states can punish businesses for lying and defrauding people. But we don't say that in politics. Politicians get up and say almost anything. And you can't sue them for fraud, basically. But commercial speech is a much lesser notion, because corporations are instrumentalities of the state. And they're endowed with all of these great rights and privileges that have made them fantastic accumulators of wealth and investors of money. But everybody from Chief Justice Marshall to Rehnquist to Justice White said, "You don't let them convert their economic power into political power."
And that is the fateful step that's been taken by the Roberts Court.
BILL MOYERS: Justice Scalia would disagree with you. I want to show you Justice Scalia earlier this summer on CNN.
PIERS MORGAN: At that moment, under your interpretation, I believe, of the Constitution, you should be allowed to raise money for a political party. The problem, as I see it and many critics see it, is that it has no limitation to it. So what you've now got are these super PACS funded by billionaires effectively trying to buy elections. And that cannot be what the Founding Fathers intended. Thomas Jefferson didn't sit there constructing something which was going to be abused in that kind of way. And I do think it's been abused, don't you?
PIERS MORGAN: But it's not speech when it's...
ANTONIN SCALIA: The first...
PIERS MORGAN: -- it's ultimately about money to back up the speech.
ANTONIN SCALIA: You can't separate speech from the money that facilitates the speech.
PIERS MORGAN: Can't you?
ANTONIN SCALIA: It's utterly impossible.
Could you tell newspaper publishers you can only spend so much money in the publication of your newspaper? Would they not say this is abridging my speech?
PIERS MORGAN: Yes, but newspaper publishers aren't buying elections. I mean to -- you know, the election of a president, as you know better than anybody else, you've served under many of them...
PIERS MORGAN: -- is an incredibly important thing.
ANTONIN SCALIA: Newspapers...
PIERS MORGAN: And it shouldn't be susceptible to the highest bidder, should it?
ANTONIN SCALIA: Newspapers endorse political candidates all the time. What do you mean -- they're almost in the business of doing that.
ANTONIN SCALIA: And are you going to limit the amount of money they can spend on it?
PIERS MORGAN: Do you think the...
PIERS MORGAN: Do you think, perhaps, they should be?
ANTONIN SCALIA: Oh, I certainly think not. I think, as I think the framers thought, that the more speech, the better.
JAMIE RASKIN: Well first of all, the freedom of the press is just an irrelevant distraction from this. And that's an easy question, not that difficult a question. The good justice betrays either an ignorance of what Thomas Jefferson's position was or a willful defiance of it. Because Jefferson wrote several times about how afraid he was about an encroaching corporate tyranny and corporations who already, with their charters would bid fair to the laws of the land, in attempt to go off in their own direction.
BILL MOYERS: You actually quote Jefferson on the rise of a quote "single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and incorporations." He said they would ride and rule over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry. The ordinary citizen, right?
JAMIE RASKIN: Well, look, our founders understood power. And one thing that Jefferson really believed in, he invented the phrase "the wall of separation between Church and State," was dividing power up. And one way we've divided power up over the last century is building a kind of wall of separation between corporate treasury, wealth, and public elections.
That wall has been bulldozed by the Roberts Court. And now they're letting the corporate money flow in. And everybody knows, I think, across the country, what that means, from Montana to Florida. You know, what that means to have corporations directly involved in politics. And look, we should want corporations out competing and prospering and thriving and profiting. But we shouldn't want corporations to govern, because that inverts the proper democratic relationship.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Part of what Scalia and these originalist judges have done, and the right, is appropriate the language, is take the language. And we haven't found a narrative and a language to explain the importance of the court. They use terms like "freedom" and "liberty" and "activist judges.” And the importance of talking about the fairness and the balance and how these kinds of decisions infringe on the individual liberty of people.
It seems to me an important mission, as well as working with those in Congress to hold accountable State Senators, to hold accountable a president, to appoint and deepen the bench of those who understand the fairness and balance. And the values of freedom, of opportunity, of equality, that are at the core of our country's purpose and constitution.
BILL MOYERS: You include in here some very specific, concrete examples. I was especially taken with a particular case that you make in your centerpiece, where you say that the 2010 election should have been framed by three major events. They were?
JAMIE RASKIN: Corporate catastrophes.
BILL MOYERS: They were?
JAMIE RASKIN: The BP oil spill, which destroyed an entire ecosystem and created billions of dollars worth of damage. The Massey Corporation's collapsing coal mines, which caused the deaths of 29 people and--
BILL MOYERS: In West Virginia.
JAMIE RASKIN: --suffering in West Virginia. And then, of course, the biggest of them all, which was the subprime mortgage meltdown, which destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth for the American people, in terms of people's retirement incomes, their home values, and so on. That should have been what the campaign was about.
BILL MOYERS: But they weren't--
BILL MOYERS: --what the campaign was about, because?
JAMIE RASKIN: Well, we saw, because of Citizens United and an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars, an unprecedented amount of corporate money coming in, not just through Super PACs, but as The Nation pointed out, through 501c4's and c6's, what we saw was a complete reframing of the issue to the big culprit being regulation. And so the theme of the campaign was corporate deregulation being the solution to all of our problems. It was like a parallel universe.
BILL MOYERS: And it worked because the Republicans, funded by many of these corporations and billionaires, took control of the House. Sixty-three votes, I think they won then. And fulfilled the wishes of their funders for deregulation.
JAMIE RASKIN: And the corporate-funded Tea Party caucus in the Republican Party, in the House has basically been driving the train of government, which is why we've had near, you know, financial collapses again through these various debt controversies that have been taking place.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: But let me broaden it. I agree with Jamie that those are the three disasters which should have been at the focus of our attention. But it is the case that across the board, at the moment, the idea that we need austerity in this country, that jobs aren't the great crisis of our-- you know, the joblessness isn't the great crisis of our time, but debt and deficits. That's also a function of the .01 percent who are the big players, who have the money, Democrat and Republican, who are funding these elections.
Because if it wasn't that kind of money in our system, you would hear more of the people's voices and those who lost their wealth through the terrible subprime mortgage disaster, those who are seeking jobs, 26 million people in this country either underemployed or unemployed. Those voices aren't heard, because of the din of money in the system. You know the story, what is it, seven lobbyists for every representative. It may be ten, at this stage.
And one thing that isn't paid as much attention to. You have the lobbyists. But this National Chamber Litigation Center, the N.C.L.C., started by the Chamber of Commerce, again an outgrowth of the Powell Memo. Its record is better than the solicitor general. And if you want to track the court--
BILL MOYERS: They've won more cases before the court.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: They've won more cases before the court. And a nonpartisan group, The Constitutional Accountability Center documented this. And in the last, I think it was 2010-2011, their record was unblemished, meaning they won all the cases brought before the court. And this is the Chamber's specialized litigation bar. Now there are good environmental consumer civil rights, civil liberties groups working.
But you don’t have that coherence. And you certainly don't have foundations and individuals in this country supporting those groups in the way that the right has supported the Chamber of Commerce and this kind of bar. That distorts justice. It's about money. And what's always shocking, and not to diminish the amount of this money in the system, is for some of these people this is chump change that they're putting into the system, in terms of investment on return, because they will buy the deregulation, the low taxes, the ability to pollute, the ability literally to kill, as was the case in the Massey mine disaster, 29 miners killed because of the deregulation and the lax oversight. Why is that? Partly because of the starving of government, but also because the money in the system gives them the power.
JAMIE RASKIN: Well, and the Massey Company's exactly what Thomas Jefferson was talking about, a company that defied the law, had hundreds of violations written up--
JAMIE RASKIN: --against it. Constantly litigated and gone against the government. Put millions of dollars into politics, in order to have its way, and continues to be a major political actor, despite its being essentially a criminal corporation, in terms of its disregard of human life and its defiance of the law.
BILL MOYERS: I talked to a well-known, a leading, and a very thoughtful conservative yesterday about the magazine. And he said, "Katrina is hyperbolic about this. We've only taken a small step to the right, trying to reverse the pendulum that swung so far, not only under Roosevelt, but under Lyndon Johnson and that period of the '60s when the conservatives had to grit their teeth and the only thing they could do was say, 'Let's impeach Earl Warren,' because all of what he called the social liberal causes that the court was trying to push down our throats." He says, "We're just correcting history." That was what he said.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: No, first of all, what's interesting about this issue in my mind is we're not dealing with some of the important cultural issues, which often rile up the right and rile up so many. Abortion--
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: The schools, guns.
BILL MOYERS: Guns. Gay rights.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: The whole-- but I think on the corporate front, this is an extremist court. A court that has shifted so far to the right that it is beyond just the backlash to the Warren and Berger courts, and moving in a direction that has very little check on it. And I don't believe it's hyperbolic.
In fact, you know, very sober commentators in commenting on the Roberts Court on the eve of the health care decision, noted how extremist, how radical the four or five-- I won't call them conservative, the right-wing justices on the court were in terms of literally-- one thing Jamie hasn't talked about is Citizens United, and he will express this far better than I do, they literally called back the case in order to open a jurisprudence--
JAMIE RASKIN: You talk about judicial activists.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Activism, that's right.
JAMIE RASKIN: Well, judicial-- I mean, for one thing, the masterpiece of judicial activism was, of course, Bush vs. Gore, where the Supreme Court intervened in democratic politics to stop the counting of ballots. Then a decade later, we get Citizens United, where the court says, "You know, we don't like the questions presented, even by this conservative group, Citizens United."
All they were saying was, "Don't treat our made for TV pay-per-view movie like a TV ad." And I think anybody could have gone along with that. They said, "That's not quite sweeping enough for us. We want to know, does every corporation in America have political free speech rights, such that they can take money out of the treasury and put it into politics. Go brief that." They briefed it. They came back. They reargued it. And what do you know, five justices say, "Yeah, they've got that right."
BILL MOYERS: Alito and Roberts both come out of a corporate background, either serving corporations as lawyers or teaching corporate law.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Well, this is an-- I mean, in the issue, there's a piece by Sherrilyn Ifill which is interesting, because on the face of it, the court looks diverse. But when you look at their actual professional backgrounds, I believe that eight come out of the appellate court system. Elena Kagan, solicitor general. But you don't have a Thurgood Marshall, who had experience in civil rights or practical--
BILL MOYERS: Real life experience.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: --experience and real life experience that could connect to ordinary citizens. And so I think that diversity is something we've lost and has been an--
JAMIE RASKIN: And what's interesting--
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: --important part of the court.
JAMIE RASKIN: --is that it's not a partisan question that Katrina is raising here. I mean, my two favorite justices were Republican appointees, Justice Souter and Justice Stevens. They were incredible. They were evenhanded. They were serious and sober. They never would have gone along with this and didn't go along with this idea that somehow corporations should be treated like citizens for the purposes of political free speech--
BILL MOYERS: So what's happened?
JAMIE RASKIN: Well, part of it is this story of the extremism of the Republican Party today. Because after Justice Souter was named to the court, the slogan, the mantra within the Republican Party was "No more Souters." They really are imposing a very strict litmus test, not just on the right to privacy and abortion but also on these corporate questions.
They want to see that you’re going to be, down the line, just voting with corporate, you know, big corporations regardless of what it is that they're saying. And that's not justice. We don't want justices who are pro-corporate or anti-corporate. We want people who are going to--
JAMIE RASKIN: --enforce the rule of law.
JAMIE RASKIN: And here, what we've got is a complete derailment of the rule of law, just like we have a derailment of democracy. Because we have one part of society that's gotten too much power. And, you know, the economists, conservative economists talk about the difference between societies where the economy is closed and you have extractive industries that are taking money for themselves. And they end up closing politics at the same time. Versus societies that are open, that have open free markets and open politics. And we're moving to a closed kind of economy and a closed kind of society.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: And I would say, you know, Jamie talks about the extremism of the Republican Party, yes. But go back 40 years, because it was the revolt of the plutocrats, which was part of the Powell Memo and the reason for the Powell Memo. And that revolt is winning now. It was class war waged from the top down. And I think we're seeing the culmination of the Powell doctrine so to speak, which is that corporations should not be checked, should not be fettered, and that they have free reign of the land. And that--
BILL MOYERS: What puzzles me, Katrina, is that that's not a conservative position necessarily.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: No, it's an extremist. I don't-- I believe in conservatism. I believe that there is a role for conservatives. I believe that there's a role for a conservative Republican Party in this country. And we can talk about Edmund Burke and all of that. But at the moment, we're witnessing an extremist Republican Party willing to ravage and savage the freedoms and liberties in the name of-- they want to say greater good, but it essentially is a corporate good.
And I would argue that we're now going to witness a court next session, and Jamie follows this more closely that there is a well-funded, right-wing intellectual and corporate campaign now to try and really gut the Voting Rights Act, which I see linked to this, because I think more voices, more diversity in our political system can counter some of this corporate power. And if that's gutted, we are at great risk of a monotone political system.
JAMIE RASKIN: And that's why I invoke The Hunger Games. Because I think it doesn't have anything to do with conservatism. It has to do with corporatism. And that's a completely different philosophy of government.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Or Jamie has this great term, "jurist corporatists."
JAMIE RASKIN: Jurist corporatists.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Jurist corporatists. Jurist corporatists.
BILL MOYERS: So The Hunger Games announcer is, in effect, speaking for the corporate state, right?
JAMIE RASKIN: Yeah, I mean, she's basically saying, "May the odds be ever in your favor," wink, wink. "But everything is stacked against you once you arrive here."
BILL MOYERS: And are the odds now in the favor of corporations on the Supreme Court?
JAMIE RASKIN: You know, if you check out the People for the American Way website, where I follow the Supreme Court decisions, you will see case after case, where the court is throwing out tort verdicts against large corporations, jury verdicts for plaintiffs, throwing them out, because it's preempted by this federal law or that federal law or "You messed up the class-action mechanism below." There's always a reason why the little guy's got to lose.
BILL MOYERS: Well, you have written that over history the people have turned against the court and amended the Constitution 16-17 times when the enemies of democracy were slaveholders or people trying to prevent a minimum wage or stop women from voting and right on down. Is it feasible to expect that another amendment could reverse Citizens United?
JAMIE RASKIN: You know, we've had 17 amendments since the Bill of Rights. Most of them have been suffrage expanding, democracy enlarging amendments, where in a number of cases the people had to confront the court. So the court says in the Dred Scott decision that African Americans can never be citizens and persons within the meaning of the Constitution.
And it took a civil war and a whole bunch of constitutional amendments to reverse that. The Supreme Court said, "Women don't have the right to vote." In Minor vs. Happersett, despite the 14th Amendment. That got reversed by the 19th Amendment. The Supreme Court upheld poll taxes and that got reversed by the 24th Amendment.
So there are a whole bunch of cases where the people have said, "You know what? The court is a fundamentally conservative institution, often times reactionary. And we've got to confront their power and tell them what the Constitution really means. Because the first three words of the Constitution are 'We the people,' not 'We the court' not 'We the corporations' but the people."
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I mean, the struggle in the country today is between "of, by, and for the people" and "of, by, and for the one percent," speaking about the corporate powers. And I think the importance of framing the debate about the future of the court, as this issue tries to do, between those who would roll back the civilizing advances of this country, economically, politically, socially against those who want to build a more just, fair, and diverse country.
And in the future of this country, the demographic shifts, for example, I do think the right looks out at this country, doesn't like what it sees, which is why you see the influx of money and the voting right suppression. And those two fused may give them a last hurrah, but there is a struggle moving forward in a different country that they may not be able to win.
BILL MOYERS: One of my colleagues asked me to tweet to her the essence of your magazine. Would this be an accurate expression of the essence of what you've done here? "The Supreme Court is now a corporate court that by giving big business the advantage is shrinking access to justice for everyday citizens."
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Most beautiful 140 characters I've heard.
BILL MOYERS: Right out of your magazine, too. Jamie Raskin, Katrina vanden Heuvel, thank you very much for being with me.
JAMIE RASKIN: Thanks for having us.
Remember that making the world better begins with responsible action.
- The RSN Team
+27 # maddave 2012-09-16 21:08
Part #1
The above article is fine, but lets look at the conservatives' election agenda. They claim that they are "only ensuring against voter fraud" when they purge voter polls, cut back on early voting, and pass voter ID laws --- all of which ensure that millions of old, young and poor citizens, predominately liberals, will be disenfranchised . BTW: The instance of voter fraud in our elections is zip-point-shit ... which is a very low number by any standard. (Statistically it's 0.00000001%).
The legal fight is on, and the final decision will certainly be made by the Roberts court. Which way will it come down? The first clue is the Court's Citizens United decision which foolishly opened the financial floodgates to allow US Corporations to slather unlimited, ¿secret? money on the candidates of their choice (more on in another comment below). Further, CITIZENS UNITED does not preclude foreign governments and overseas interests from ALSO buying influence in this massive, ¿secret? American auction-of-legi slators and executives. For example, harbor NO doubts whatsoever that international drug cartels are giving financial support to benighted, clueless US candidates who FAVOR the mindless continuation of our losing (for us) and profitable (for them) war on drugs? And they are surely not alone.
+12 # pbbrodie 2012-09-17 04:07
I wish I could give your comment 1,000 thumbs up!!!
+8 # maddave 2012-09-17 10:05
Thank you, Paul.
This Supreme Court thing is right on par with my fears and trepidations regarding a disastrous war with Iran! (There can be nothing BUT a disastrous war with Iran!) A wrong move in either direction will have grave repercussions for this country. Consequently, comparing Obama's track record* alongside Romney's promises - in these two issues alone - I see no alternative to my voting early and often for Obama!
*(1) Obama appointed two solid Justices to the Supreme Court while Romney hired Robert Bork as his "Judicial Advisor".
(2) Obama & (Mrs) Clinton are actively seeking a peaceful solution to the Iran-Israel confrontation while Romney keeps rattling his empty sabre scabbard.
0 # David Starkey - Dallas, TX 2012-09-22 05:52
I do NOT advocate violence.
If the election is won by the conservatives, by a margin smaller than the number of disenfranchised , I do NOT advocate the taking up of arms to prevent the userpation of the will of the people. I strongly urge that all lebal means be utilized. But I also stronly urge that the overthrow of the government be taken WITH UTMOST SERIOUSNESS.
+22 # maddave 2012-09-16 21:20
Part 2
Finally, with economic globalization now a reality and ---given the easy portability of cash &n assets internationally ---, one doubts that there is ANY major corporation in the USA that remains purely an American entity ( ¿person? ). My question is: If international corporations - GE, Toyota-USA, Exon Mobile; CityCorp; Monsanto; etc. can donate unlimited money to influence domestic elections, then why shouldn't illegal immigrants be allowed to register and vote as well?
+18 # reiverpacific 2012-09-16 21:34
As a commoner not versed in the high wire acts of judicial gymnastics, it sounds to me like the constitution is being increasingly used as the puck or basketball to be manipulated by the most apt at rapid-fire exchange with access to selective justice going to the most nimble.
Ask Leonard Peltier and many others who happened to be on the wrong side thereof at the wrong time, including a dear friend of mine who was jailed for nine days for, as far as I could make out, "Unspecified" charges -he didn't even blow a DUI level of alcohol in the wee bag test-, when he stumbled into a newly cleared ditch walking home from a bar (they wouldn't let me go to court and challenge the judge, who was a former acquaintance of mine, lest I "disrupt" the smoothly-biased wheels of lockup none too gently but armed with facts and arguments based on judicial precedence).
And this is at a county level, so go figure the bloody great club that the detestable Scalia gets to wield -on a whim or at will it seems!
+1 # dyannne 2012-09-16 22:32
The video stops at 22.51 and will not move past that point. Disappointing.
+14 # Erdajean 2012-09-16 22:40
So why are we watching the jackal that is the U.S.Supreme Court slaughter and devour this country without taking some direct and forceful action? Who of us would sit and watch a beast tear one of our loved ones to shreds without taking the creature on with all the strength and courage we can muster?
Why are we not in the streets? (Of course under all the furtively-passe d new laws we'd probably go to prison forever -- but can they jail us ALL?) We need protests by millions -- and where are they? Are we in effect "giving the consent of the governed" to the destruction of life and liberty as we know it?
What a disgrace and a dishonor to all who have died to build and maintain a democracy -- so this generation can abandon it to the scum of the earth. Because we lack the heart and will to offer opposition? If so, we deserve whatever comes to us.
+9 # apollobartender 2012-09-17 03:07
My contention exactly, which ironically I just wrote about over the weekend that I do believe the reason the middle class is where Obama starts with the fix is because that is where we will get everything else fixed. There is so much overwhelmingly wrong with the system and it has been happening through the decades, the people will be able to vocalize once they are unstrapped from homelessness, joblessness etc.
+5 # cordleycoit 2012-09-17 03:12
Face it we are owned, bought sold and bartered,we belong to the corporations.Ev ery need and desire is controlled by advertizing and our money masters control just about every word we read, speak, our accent betray our class our sexual preferences are molded, refined by image makers, psychologists and sociologists. Our diet shaped by DNA arranging scientists and psychologists shaping us more like hogs than humans. That the courts belong to oligarchs is nothing new: look at the Athenian Empire or Rome as it shifted to empire. Soon our children will be playing Cowboys and slaves.
-28 # edge 2012-09-17 04:43
When you start out with the ridiculous notion that the Supreme Court gave the election to Bush you have missed the FACT that they protected the votes of all Floridians and not just a few that were stupid enough to not vote properly!
ALL of Florida's votes were in jeopardy of not being counted if Florida did not certify its vote that day!
Talk about not knowing the laws regarding elections...
+10 # reiverpacific 2012-09-17 12:06
Quoting edge:
Talk about not knowing the laws regarding elections...
For a kickoff, the article didn't "Start off" with Dimwits vs Gore. It began with direct reference to Citizens United, then to the age of the oldest members, then Obamacare and EVENTUALLY to Gore's 500,000 vote majority over Dimwits who was then selected by the Court that stopped the recount (whose Tallahassee volunteers were subject to a planeload of goons flown in on Ken Boy's private jet to threaten and harass the counters). And remember the revealing statement by Ruth Bader Ginsberg that She "hoped to see a Republican in the White House when she retires".
No bias eh?
And Katherine Harris' skullduggery in declaring the election when several counties were still counting. And the purged voter rolls, and blacks being turned away by cops: -shall I continue???
Talk about not knowing your facts or rewriting history into fantasy....!
0 # edge 2012-09-18 05:57
Quoting reiverpacific:
No bias eh?....!
Wow, I suspect you are making that up, not calling you a liar, but why would she want a Republican?
Nominated by Clinton and she wanted a Republican President...I don't think so!
0 # reiverpacific 2012-09-18 12:24
Quoting edge:
Quoting reiverpacific:
No bias eh?....!
Sorry, you are right there. 'Scuse appalling typing skills and a bad finger/memory day to give honorable self red face. It was SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR of course, who made that statement and voted with the Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy majority to halt the Florida vote count. She made no secret of being a Dimwits and Mrs D' admirer at the time and did indeed make that statement I mistakenly ascribed to Ginsberg (I remember it well and noted it at the time). In fact she was made to regret her decision later after her retirement when he turned out to be such a Godawful president (She was an old-fashioned "Country Club" Republican). It apparently haunted her greatly subsequently.
Still, I appreciate you calling me on my error and givin' me the opportunity to correct it. This is all off the top of my occasionally foggy head and proves that I need to proof my posts ever more carefully before hittin' the "Send" button.
+2 # pernsey 2012-09-17 19:02
Quoting edge:
Talk about not knowing the laws regarding elections...
More Fox news spin!
+13 # timmuggs 2012-09-17 07:56
There are already laws in place to prevent non-citizens of the USA from contributing to US elections.
The question is not, "are corporations persons?". The question is: "are corporations citizens?"
The biggest shareholders of CItibank are the Saudi Royal Family. Sovereign wealth funds of China, Russia, Kuwait etc hold huge blocks of US corporations. Any non-US billionaire can buy a front company on the New York Stock Exchange and start influencing elections.
Reframe the question:
Are corporations citizens? Is any corporation listed on a US exchange able to influence US elections?
What is the legality of non-citizens in contributing to elections?
That is the way to address this problem.
+3 # reiverpacific 2012-09-17 18:43
Quoting timmuggs:
Reframe the question:
That is the way to address this problem.
Good statement.
Get rid of the Electoral College system for a start!
It was originated to tilt the vote en masse in the days when white property holders were the only voters.
When they could show 600,000 in a million bodies- a slave representing 2/3rds of a human being then but could not vote themselves, this counted as a bloc-vote at the convenience of the "Mastahs".
It doesn't belong in a 21st century quest for democracy any more than corporate person-hood, which began with a clerk's error in the 1890's and has been used ever since to accommodate the owner-class.
They are tied together and used to work US elections to the point of saying "Well my vote won't count so I won't vote", not realizing that they are part of a bloc of votes, willing or no, that will count more than they can understand.
Trouble is that most US "Citizens" and occasional voters have never heard of the Electoral Colleges; a nice name for "Grassroots bamboozlement" and presently working just fine.
+5 # oakes721 2012-09-17 08:14
Corporations United (C.U.) was speeding down the road, looking over its shoulder, unable to watch where it was going (to avoid the laws so well-designed to protect people from speed demons). So C.U. did what it does best ~ and bought the traffic cop ~ but there was still traffic slowing down it's potential, so it raised the price of gas ~ so they bought smaller cars..,did I mention that C.U. drives a tank? There were still pedestrians who had the nerve to try to get to work. So he fired a lot of people and moved their jobs overseas and installed cameras (I.C.U.s) on the street corners to watch after them like a Big Brother would. After a while, they gave up looking for work, so the streets were pretty empty ~ although full of pot holes from all the tank traffic which they weren't intended for. One day the tank stopped running. It was broke down because a part from overseas that had failed. It was a part that used to be made here and had been tested. The part had been made in the very factory, whose workers had been fired, that now ordered those parts (cheaper) from overseas in order to avoid the regulations that put a wrinkle in their obese bottom line. A phone call (re-routed overseas) found that the local towing business had to close since there were no more work cars needed or workers to buy them. Although now stranded (other dog-eat-dog corporations wouldn't help to save their own playground), C.U. is still looking over its shoulder, still on the run, still at large.
+7 # chrisconnolly 2012-09-17 09:37
Refreshing to hear intellectuals comment on the sell out of our democracy and the potential foreclosure on real person rights. We are losing the battle against big money. Big money has always been able to yell louder through lobbyists activities, but now they are blatantly lying through anonymously and unlimited funded campaign ads. The Robert court is carelessly blinded to the needs and rights of we the people. Will we the people see through this corporate charlatan's slight of hand or will we lose all vestiges of our democracy to smoke and mirrors? The writing is on the wall and this interview is trying to elucidate what's at stake. Hopefully Americans haven't become completely illiterate.
+4 # Bruce Gruber 2012-09-17 10:51
We the DOLLARS ... of the multinational corporations and chamber of commerce flacks, in order to form a more profitable capital model, assure freedom from regulation, minimize the cost of labor, insure control of legal impositions, maximize investment of public monies in 'outsourced' privatization contracts from government, and abolish consideration of human outcomes derived from extraction and exploitation, and insure the Blessings of control and Profit, do invest in, ordain, purchase and establish this newly accomplished Constitution for the United States of America ... in our self-interest as the Deserving and Special People of that experiment in Representative Democracy.
+8 # noitall 2012-09-17 14:10
Excellent report! This should be freely passed around; I shared it on facebook. People sure seem to protect their bliss though and don't like to hear anything that they consider "negative". Unfortunately, today much of the truths that are hidden and ignored by the press and the airwaves are bummers, but to ignore the truth is to only delay (and often to allow the situation to decay to a point where its irreversible) the destructive outcome to our democracy. Without truth, how do we vote? how does a democracy have a chance?
+4 # pernsey 2012-09-17 19:04
The right wing are extremists, great article!
+2 # fhunter 2012-09-20 17:21
Sandra Day O'Connor saw RED FLAGS about the "Hanging ChadsÁ, and she was right! The thing I did not understood that she did not see RED FLAGS about the butterfly ballots; the thousands of voters disenfranchised by Jeb; the hundreds of messed up military ballots,etc. She made a PARTY LINE vote and responsible for the horrors of the W. presidency.
+1 # David Starkey - Dallas, TX 2012-09-22 05:48
There is only ONE Constitutional requirement of a Supreme Court Justice - GOOD BEHAVIOR.
Voting FOR the Bush v Gore decision - BAD behavior.
Refusing to Recuse, when clearly called for - AMORAL behavior.
Stating "I don't see a right to privacy", thus VIOLATING THE NINTH AMENDMENT FROM THE BENCH - INCOMPETENT behavior.
Voting FOR the Citizens United decision - TREASONOUS behavior.
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Dodge Q&A
Ask Your Question
2001 Dodge Grand Caravan Question: Does the struts impair the steering?
Sharon B, Clinton, NC, February 22, 2009, 17:24
Steering would suddenly become difficult. Then return to normal. Replaced the pump 3 times. Was told the rack and pinion was next. Then I saw a consumer complaint about the struts. The Dodges all have trouble with them I understand b/c of the plastic bearings, and mine is clanking, but would the struts cause the steering the become stiff suddenly (especially in cold weather)
1 Answer
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• Answer #1
Johnny Mopar February 22, 2009, 19:07
Your concern involving the steering becoming stiff at times is likely the Rack and Pinion Assembly (Steering gear). If you turn the steering wheel with little or no difficulty , then it suddenly feels like it lost assist or binds, the steering gear is defective. The strut bearings are metal, plastic encased. The are load bearing as the are located between the top of the strut and the body mount. A failing bearing will make a growling or grinding noise when turning the steering wheel left to right, but should not cause any significant binding and a steering gear in good working order has enough force to overcome this. The steering gear failure is not unusual for a 2001 (RS) Caravan.
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Monday, April 12, 2010
To Kill A Mocking bird answer sheet
To Kill a Mockingbird
Study Guide
(Parent Version with answers)
Chapter 1
1. Who is the narrator of this novel?
(Scout) Jean Louis Finch
2. How do we know that the narrator is an older person looking back to her youth?
As the novel opens, she tells her story in the past tense, going back years to the time when her brother was 13 years old.
3. What other information do we get in the first two paragraphs?
Dill came to town that summer and brought with him the idea of getting Boo Radley to come out.
4. What is the setting of the novel?
The story takes place in Maycomb, Alabama sometime during the Great Depression (1933).
5. What is the mood of Maycomb?
It is a slow, easy-going, peaceful town.
6. The fifth character introduced is Calpurnia. Describe her.
Calpurnia is the African-American cook, housekeeper and substitute mother in some ways. She cares for the children and is a warm person.
7. Who are the first four characters mentioned?
Atticus, Jem, Scout, and Dill (Charles Harris)
8. What began the misery of the Radley house?
The youngest son, Arthur (Boo), got in trouble with the police. The father has not let him out of the house since.
Chapter 2
1. What picture of Atticus, as a father, do we get in this chapter?
He loves the children, but he works hard during the day and does not spend much time with them.
2. What do we learn about the Cunningham clan?
They are poor but hard-working farmers who will not take charity; they pay Atticus with food instead of money.
Chapter 3
1. Who are the Ewells, and why are they allowed special privileges?
They are a very poor family that lives next to the town dump. The father drinks and the mother is dead. Because it may be the only food the children get, the town looks the other way when the father hunts out of season; when the children don’t go to school, the authorities don’t try to enforce the truancy regulations, probably because it would do little good.
2. What compromise does Atticus make with Scout?
She will attend school, but they will continue to read at night.
Chapter 4
1. What game do the children make up in this chapter?
They make up a game about the Radley family based on neighborhood gossip.
2. What information does Scout give us at the end of this chapter? Who do you suppose was inside the house and what did Scout hear?
Scout mentions that earlier that morning she rolled up to the Radley house in a tire. When she fell out, she heard someone laughing. At this point we are not sure who was laughing.
Chapter 5
1. When Miss Maudie says, “but sometimes the Bible in the hands of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hands of—oh, of your father.” What person is she criticizing, and what is the point of her criticism?
She is being critical of Boo Radley’s father. Her point is that Mr. Radley’s sense of right and wrong was so rigid that it led him to punish Boo in a cruel and excessive fashion. As a result, Boo has become a recluse.
2. The children view Boo Radley as a strange and frightening figure. How do Miss Maudie and
Atticus view Arthur Radley?
They see him as a shy man who simply wishes to stay inside the house. Miss Maudie blames Arthur’s father for this seclusion.
Chapter 6
1. Describe what the children were doing in the Radley yard and what they saw that made them run away?
They were trying to look in the Radley window when they saw a shadow on the porch.
2. Why is it important to Jem that he go back and get his pants before morning?
He does not want Atticus to find out what they were up to.
3. What line indicates that Jem decided what they did was wrong?
“We shoudn’a done that tonight, Scout.”
4. What might account for Jem’s change of heart?
He is getting more mature.
Chapter 7
1. Jem has been acting odd since he went to get his pants that night. What surprised him that night?
His pants were mended and folded over the fence.
2. Who do you suppose was responsible for the gifts in the knothole and Jem’s pants? Why does he do this?
Boo Radley was probably the one responsible. He likes the children and enjoys the contact, as limited as it is.
3. Why is Jem so upset the knothole is plugged?
He is upset that the contact with Boo Radley has been stopped, blocked.
4. Why is Jem crying at the end of this chapter?
The hole is cemented and we can infer that Jim is feeling sorry for himself and Boo because of this.
Chapter 8
1. Why does Atticus make the children leave the house and stand in front of the Radley house?
There was a chance that the fire would spread.
2. Who put the blanket around Scout’s shoulders and how did the person know she was cold?
Someone in the Radley house must have seen her standing outside shivering.
3. What does Atticus mean when he says, “looks like all of Maycomb was out tonight, in one way or another”?
He assumes that it was Arthur Radley who put the blanket around Scout.
4. Why do they decide not to return the blanket at this time?
Arthur would probably get hollered at for having gone outside.
Chapter 9
1. Why does Atticus think that he can’t win Tom Robinson’s case?
It will become an African-American man’s word against a white woman’s, and there is no question at all who the jury will say is lying —even if the facts prove otherwise.
2. Who calls Scout a coward; why does she walk away?
A child insulted Atticus; in walking away, Scout follows her father’s directions.
3. Why is Atticus worried about Scout learning to “keep her head” in the next few months?
With the trial coming up, it is likely that the children will hear many unkind things said about their father.
4. In the last sentence of this chapter, what does Scout mean?
When she grew older, she realized that her father wanted her to hear what he had said to Uncle Jack that night.
Chapter 10
1. Why is it a sin to kill a mockingbird?
Mockingbirds do not harm anyone or anything, but they do sing for people.
2. Why are the children a little disappointed and a little ashamed when they compare Atticus to other fathers?
He is older than the other fathers and does not seem interested in doing the athletic, brave, masculine things that Jem and Scout see the other fathers do.
3. What does Atticus do that surprises the children and makes them feel proud?
He kills the mad dog with a single shot between the eyes.
4. Why does Jem say that they should not tell anyone at school about the incident?
Atticus is a modest person; Jem understands this and feels that it wouldn’t be right to brag about him.
Chapter 11
1. Describe Mrs. Dubose.
She is an old, cranky woman who shouts at the children while they pass her house.
2. Why does Jem knock the top off her flowers?
His anger has been building up over the past couple of weeks.
3. What does Atticus mean when he says, “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a man’s conscience”?
Your own conscience must tell you what is right or wrong, and it does not matter how many others agree or disagree with you.
4. What is Jem’s punishment for knocking the tops off of Mrs. Dubose flowers? Why is the time period extended each day?
He must go to her house and read aloud to her. The length of time he reads each day is extended in order to help her break her addiction to morphine.
5. What does Atticus say real courage is?
“It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and see it through to the end no matter what.”
Chapter 12
1. At the beginning it is apparent that this is novel which deals with the passage of a youth from innocence to maturity. In what sense is Jem “coming of age”?
We see him leaving childhood, by degrees, behind him.
2. What does Scout mean when she says of Calpurnia, “Again I thought her voice strange: she was talking like the rest of them.”
Among her own people Calpurnia speaks in a African-American dialect.
3. The mature narrator (Scout) seems to be upset by the way both the African-American and white churches regard women. What is it specifically that upsets her about what the churches teach?
Both black and white churches seem to preach about the inherent immorality of women.
4. What is “linin’” and why is it done?
One person speaks the line of a song so the rest of the chorus knows what to sing. It was done at Calpurnia’s church because many of the people in the church could not read, and there weren’t enough hymnals for everyone to have one.
1. thanx for the answers =)
i got the same worksheet
2. Thanks had the same worksheet to 'compare' answers.
3. weird how we all get the same worksheet and all from different schools.
oh ya to "compare" the answers ya right lol :)
4. but for my worksheet it went up to ch31 and not ch 11
5. Hi, I'm a teacher, thanks for posting all of the answers so that students can plagiarize and not do any of the work. Wonderful!
1. Thanks for a base for answers, yea mine goes to 31 too. And BTW "teacher" I've never heard a teacher use "BTW" ;) And obviously they wont "go after" this person, after all, they could be a "teacher" too ;) That ladies and gents, is called "owned" :D
6. BTW, I've reported the copyright violation to the publisher. I hope they go after you. No need to purchase units from a company if they are online for free!
7. I got this same worksheet. I needed help with some answers. I couldn't find some. so Thank you! haha. And to the person who said your students wont do any of the work, well mine goes up to chapter 31. not 12. so its not like i have all the answers here. Calm Down.
8. Thanks for the Answers!!! You just made last minute hw a breeze!!!
9. i got the same worksheet and thanks for the answer my grade improved with this so thanks do u have all the chapters
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Why We Must (Re)claim Feminist History
Do you consider yourself a
feminist? Perhaps you’ve done some research on feminism or some feminist
activism. Maybe you even went so far as to get a university degree in
Women’s Studies. I did. I graduated from the University of Toronto
with a major in Women’s Studies in 2008, and yet I do not have a working
knowledge of feminist history. This is wrong. Communication and storytelling
is essential to the development of any community, and the feminist movement
is no exception.
So who do you find "teaching"
feminist history on a campus like the University of Toronto?
None other than Feminists for
Life (a part of larger student group Students for Life). This group,
which calls itself "pro-woman and pro-life," appropriates the history
of the late 19th century suffragette movement in order to further its
sexist agenda of criminalizing abortion and contraception.
In the preface to Rebecca Walker’s
1995 book "To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of
Feminism," Angela Davis expresses disappointment in the third wave
of feminism. She argues that if the third wave feminists had "the
same kind of nuanced vision of the past that they did of the present"
they would come to understand that feminists of the past had indeed
confronted and challenged identity politics. In her 1997 article "Charting
the Currents of the Third Wave," Catherine Orr notes that many third
wave feminist writers indeed engage with ideas that have been explored
before in feminist theory and "end up fighting ghosts that could be
exorcised (or rendered more complex) by looking at history." Why did
we not study these established critiques along with classic and current
third wave feminist literature? We studied and created so many critiques
that when I thought of this one in the later years of my degree, I immediately
dismissed it as irrelevant simply because we had not encountered it.
If it weren’t for the feminists that came before us, we would not
have several important rights: to vote, to work outside the home, and
to choose if and with whom we will have a relationship, among others.
Do all people, regardless of gender in Canada, have those rights in
2009? No. This does NOT mean that we should throw out feminist history.
As today, the feminists of the past were products of their social location,
and their work and views should be considered within that context.
On their website, Feminists for Life argue that Susan B. Anthony would
take an anti-choice position in the debate on abortion today because
in her time she condemned it as harmful to women and families. To unsuspecting
researchers who happen across this article and are unable to place it
into an informed historical context, it presents a reasonably sound
objection to abortion on "feminist" grounds.
However, historians will note that in Susan B. Anthony’s time and location
(late 19th century in the United States), contraceptive methods were
not readily available and so the results of marital indiscretions could
be much more visible and therefore disastrous. Women would not be considered
citizens until 1920, affording them little or no protection when facing
precarious/abusive living arrangements. Abortion was illegal and was
often the only option for women who were pregnant out of wedlock or
whose partners did not or could not acknowledge the relationship publicly.
From the perspective of many married women, the availability of abortion
in a community encouraged pre- and extramarital intercourse. Thus, privileged
women such as Susan B. Anthony and her early feminist colleagues generally
viewed abortion as a threat, denouncing it in their organizing.
Since the late 19th century, there have been many technological and
social movements that have altered the circumstances under which women
can make autonomous choices about the course of their lives. Winning
the vote, the invention of the Pill, the ability to work outside the
home, and the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade are just a few of
the changes that have taken place in North America in the 100+ years
since Susan B. Anthony’s day. So, Feminists for Life’s claim that
abortion is bad for women and families because Susan B. Anthony said
so in 1889 has little or no relevance in 2009. It must be noted that
it is possible to view Susan B. Anthony as feminist within the context
of her time – in a time when families were larger, labor unions had
yet to organize and women could not earn their own discretionary wages,
it was very important for women to ensure that their husbands were not
spending their wages on the costs associated with extramarital affairs.
When viewed in its proper historical context, her condemnation of abortion
may be considered acceptable on feminist grounds. The feminist movement
has also made a few changes since Anthony’s day in terms of recognizing
how it has neglected the needs of women of colour, queer and differently-abled
women as well as recognizing all genders as potential allies. Much work
remains to be done here, particularly in light of the carnage dealt
to women’s/maternal health globally by the Bush Administration.
Feminists for Life pamphlets have been readily available at most anti-choice
events to take place on the University of Toronto campus throughout
the 2000s. This is only one example of how they have perverted one famous
feminist’s history to attack women’s rights. If women’s studies
students are not taught this history and its relevant feminist/structural
critiques, how will we revise and add to our knowledge without a critical,
nuanced perspective from which to draw without repeating mistakes?
In our ongoing effort not to privilege a feminist critical lens over
others, we sometimes neglect to consider a feminist viewpoint at all.
This causes even more damage in practice than theory: multiple oppressions
and privileges translate very messily into real life interactions with
others. Attempting to sort out one’s varying identities with others
for even a small project can be daunting at best, and damaging at worst.
With so many of the marginalized (which overwhelmingly includes women
and families) suffering during this time, we cannot afford to sell a
seminal feminist figure like Susan B. Anthony to the persistent anti-choice
movement. It is deeply offensive to conflate her hard work with a patriarchal
institution that wishes to subjugate women.
If the misogynistic anti-choice movement can convincingly claim such
figures as Susan B. Anthony as their own, we can re-claim and re-define
them in a historical and critical context that reflects current feminist
and anti-oppressive thought. Each one of us that remains silent while
our history is stolen for an agenda predicated on "traditional"
gender roles is complicit in its abuse.
• http://www.eatgoodbread.com invalid-0
I recommend reading “Motherhood in Bondage” (which is not a german sexsite, but a book by Margaret Sanger). It’s a collection of letters from the early 1900s written by women whose physical and emotional lives are ruined (and I mean Dickens-poor house-cervixes falling out ruined) by lack of access to medical care and birth control.
“Lack of access” is actually an understatement– women were then, just as they are now, purposefully prevented from controlling their own bodies.
Reading these stories will help some people understand why choice and privacy are so valuable– maybe a copy should be sent to Bobby Jindal, who last night said “Health care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not by government bureaucrats.”
I really wish he and the whole anti-choice/anti-privacy crowd would apply that philosophy to personal decision-making, rather than just how medical bills get paid.
• invalid-0
Lisa, I recommend “Five Myths of Socialized Medicine” by John Goodman. I see that you are offended by Jindal’s comment “Health care decisions should be made by doctors and their patients, not by government bureaucrats” and find it “anti choice and anti privacy”. If you really want to know what its like to struggle with choice and privacy in healthcare, consider what’s its like for a Canadian woman to be told that she’ll have to wait anywhere from weeks to months for necessary breast cancer surgery because its only elective. Think it doesn’t happen? All cancer surgery in Canada is considered elective. Usually bypass surgery is too. People who can afford it come to the U.S. for surgery without the wait but it becomes difficult to afford anything when so much of your income is confiscated by the government to support the “universal health care” you’ll wait years to get. I hope anyone who supports this type of system here does some research before lending their enthusiasm.
• amanda-marcotte
I don’t get why people can’t see through Feminists For Life’s obvious lies. They exploit our unwillingness to really define feminism. Which comes from a good place, but is nonetheless being exploited. If you don’t accept, at a baseline, that women are full citizens with every right to bodily autonomy, then how are you a feminist?
• invalid-0
This is the group Femminist’s for life that Palin is a member of. Explains alot!
• invalid-0
cmarie, thanks for your reply, but you misinterpreted my comments about Bobby Jindal. I was actually thrilled when he said “Health care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not by government bureaucrats” because I want that philosophy to be extended to every aspect of medical care, not only how it’s paid for.
…and then once we The Bureaucracy have achieved that, people might be relaxed enough to delve into a good feminist history book while in the waiting room before an accessible and fully private consultation with a doc.
• invalid-0
It is hideously ironic to hear _this_ statement coming from the mouth of one of the most rabidly anti-choice politicians in the country. The context in which he made this statement is as a supposed rebuttal to a NONEXISTENT alleged component of Obama’s health plan that rightie wack-jobs made up claiming that the plan contains provisions telling doctors what procedures they may and may not use to treat patients.
• alexm
Thank you Amanda. This is why I’m fed up with the identity politics that has bogged down the third wave. Feminists for Life are not femininists, and the sooner we accept that the sooner we can work on real feminist-informed reproductive rights reform.
The personal is political.
• alexm
Thank you for this suggestion, Lisa. Margaret Sanger is another early feminist who has been abandoned by what remains of the women’s movement these days. As Susan B. Anthony’s anti-choice views must be considered within the context of their time, so must Sanger’s racist ideas. While not all women have access to the full range of contraception and pregnancy options, the advances made worldwide by Planned Parenthood’s efforts move us ever closer to this goal.
The personal is political.
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Sacred Texts Esoteric Index Previous Next
Buy this Book at Amazon.com
p. 57
Into the Silence, oh, soul, would I walk with thee. Into that chamber whose walls are adorned with the unexpressed ideals of the soul.
Here are thoughts that never yet were given outward expression.
Here are poems excelling in beauty and grandeur those of earth's greatest masters.
Songs sweeter and diviner than the incomparable Wagner ever voiced to an astounded world.
Here are thoughts more creative than those of the great philosophies and religions.
For now we have crossed the threshold of the unexpressed.
In the Silence characters are formed and developed.
p. 58
In the Silence geniuses are born.
Out of the infinite depths of Silence proceeds all that is.
When I walk with thee, oh, soul, into the Silence, awe and reverence abide with me.
For that which is formless, uncreated, ready for the Master fills me with awe.
Stand I thus in the Silence in the presence of Depths abysmal and fronting immeasurable Heights.
The waters from the great Depths surround me. Plunge, oh, soul, beneath the mighty surging waves, and come up out of them purified.
Cleave with thy wings, oh, soul, the ethers that encircle the Heights, and be glorified by the light that glows and plays forever above their summits.
Into the Silence and commune with self; find there thy mission in the world.
p. 59
There let the message come to thee that thou shalt give unto those who have become seekers after the light.
Into the Silence, oh, soul, and there find the glowing pathway of the spirit.
Humble though thy work may be, lowly thy mission in the world, in the Silence thou shalt learn its meaning, and thy soul shall be content to labor and to wait.
In the Silence great truths shall come to thee and thy soul be blessed with the rich increase of celestial knowledge.
In the Silence all perplexities shall vanish, all troubles shall cease, all sorrow be assuaged.
In the Silence the clouds shall lift, and the light that is ineffable encompass thy soul.
In the Silence thy soul shall find its own, and commune with the loved in the voiceless language of the soul.
p. 60
From the Silence, oh, soul, thou shalt return, seeking no longer far and wide thy mission in the world, for the message of thyself in glowing and burning eloquence speaks in thine every act.
Next: XVI
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Developing Intelligence
What cognitive processes make up consciousness? One way of answering this question is to identify conscious processes as those involved in controlled but not in automatic behaviors. For example, if you see a bright dot appear in your field of vision, your eyes will automatically orient to that location in space. In contrast, if I have told you to look away from any bright dots that appear in your field of view, you will be able to do this – but only because you possess consciousness in the form of “cognitive control.” So, what computations support “cognitive control”?
Cognitive control is sometimes argued to involve “inhibition.” Although it’s intuitive to think that you suppress the urge to look towards a bright dot by literally deactivating the neural representations for that eye movement, there are reasons to think this may not actually occur. For one thing, it is metabolically inefficient for the brain to spend energy deactivatingrepresentations; wouldn’t it be better to simply not engage them in the first place?
Another problem with these “directed inhibition” or “selective suppression” accounts is that biological neural networks seem to have very few long-range inhibitory connections. Thus, at a neural level, it seems unlikely that one brain region might send a command like “don’t move!” to another brain region, since it would actually have to send an excitatory signal directly to local inhibitory neurons. Again, this would be a metabolically inefficient architecture.
There are also reasons to suspect that many advocates of directed inhibition are actually committing levels-of-analysis fallacies, as MacLeod et al. describe in their excellent chapter “In Opposition to Inhibition.”
Finally, if I tell you “don’t think of a pink elephant,” it is notoriously difficult to do so. Again, this suggests that you cannot directly inhibit or selectively suppress a specific representation, whether it is “pink elephant” or “look at that dot!” However, you might just suceed by thinking to yourself “blue giraffe.” That is, you can avoid thinking “pink elephant” by strongly activating the mutually exclusive representation for “blue giraffe.”
And this is essentially the theoretical alternative to “directed inhibition” and “selective suppression” accounts of cognitive control. In more scientific terms, representations compete with other representations for dominance in a specific network. This is compatible with known neuroanatomical evidence, and is demonstrably effective, as currently implemented in a variety of successful artificial neural network models.
However, every now and then I come across some data that is difficult to explain without recourse to “directed inhibition” or “active suppression” mechanisms. This kind of data can be found in an in-press article by Wijnen & Ridderinkhof.
In their article, Wijnen & Ridderinkhof ask subjects to perform a relatively simple task. The subject’s job is to watch a display of six grey circles until five of them turn red. Subjects in the “eye movement” condition must then look towards the side of the screen containing the single grey circle (which is considered the “target”). Subjects in the “motor” condition must press either a left or right key, corresponds to the side of the screen with the target.
Sometime in between the presentation of the display and when the circles change color a new red circle appears; this distractor is to be ignored. The time at which the distractor appears is parametrically varied in the experiment. Finally, the distractor can appear on the same side of the screen or a different side of the screen as the target.
The results of this experiment showed several interesting trends. First, if the distractor was presented on the same side of the screen as the target, subjects were faster to respond than if the distractor was presented on the other side of the screen. However, this effect was much stronger if the delay between distractor and target was relatively small; if the delay was larger, the benefit of having a distractor on the same side of the screen as the target was significantly lower.
Why might this be the case?
The authors suggest that inhibition is actively directed at the distractor’s location, and that this inhibition grows over time. Therefore, if the target is presented soon after the distractor, there is little inhibition, and so the correct response is much facilitated. On the other hand, if the target is not presented until well after the distractor, this location in space has become more inhibited; in this case the benefit is attentuated because that spatial location is more strongly inhibited.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of subtle problems with this account. First of all, the measurements of reaction time are thrown off by a speed-accuracy tradeoff: sure, people are faster the larger the delay between distractor and target, but they’re also making significantly more errors! The “directed inhibition” account would seem to predict the opposite: responses should actually be more accurate when subjects have more time to deploy their inhibitory cognitive control.
Secondly, although the authors conclude that their similar results for the oculomotor and motor tasks reflect that “directed inhibition” is a unitary process that operates similarly across response modalities, they also note significant differences between them. For example, faster eye movements were associated with a relatively lower congruence effect than slower eye movements, and this pattern was more true the larger the delay between distractor and target. In contrast, the speed of manual responses had little influence on the congruence effect at any delay between distractor and target. Therefore, these results could just as easily contradict the conclusion that inhibition is “unitary”: at least according to these measures, inhibition does not operate similarly across modalities.
This explanation would be fine if it weren’t for the above problems I outlined with “directed inhibition” accounts. So, is there an alternative explanation based on a neuroanatomically-sound theory?
In fact, there is an extremely intuitive explanation for these results. Activity related to the distractor slowly disappates over time, because the location of distractors is not amplified by cognitive control. Therefore, distractors are inherently more distracting when subjects respond extremely quickly – as they tend to do with eye movements. However, for slower eye movements, and for key presses (which are slower than any eye movement by a hundred miliseconds or so), distractor-related activity has dissipated almost completely. Therefore, in these cases, there is less benefit to congruency.
According to this perspective, there is no central “directed inhibition” or “active suppression” control process, merely the slowly dissipating activity of distractors.
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Kamis, 14 April 2011
Modifikasi Honda Vario
Lots of young people today who like to modify the bike but many were only crudely modify it. The difference with this one young child, because the concept modifnya armor, meant to be dismantled pairs. "That is, although extreme, original body is still there," says this young entrepreneur.
However, to make it able to act skutik still need manual labor. This means, for the wind flow to the rear suspension uses such as a regulator of the tap.
Unfortunately, it is less convenient skutik taken for long walks. Deto not dizzy, because Honda Vario was built for the race. otocontes.blogspot.com
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First off, my co-worker says that DNS domain names were about $100 back then, not $20.
Can someone tell me what the DNS name purchase process in that time was like, how much the domain cost, and any other relevant information...
My first purchase of a domain was in 2002, almost 10 years after the first applications were accepted, and when e-commerce was broadly accepted. The experience in the mid-90's must have been completely different.
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Memory... so... hazy. There was a form. You had to explain your use of the domain, and justify .com, .org, or .net. (It was unclear if anyone really cared, but maybe they did.) – mattdm Jan 21 '11 at 18:43
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up vote 2 down vote accepted
During the first Internet bubble^H^H^H^H^Hoom, the Internet Network Information Center (InterNIC) was turned into a private company, Network Solutions.
They were, for a time, the sole registrar for .com .net and .org domain names. Educational institutions used .edu, but I don't recall who was in charge of those registrations. For quite a while, it was $70 for two years, with no option of getting just one year for $35.
Looking at my whois record at and the company's IP range, it looks like we registered our .com in 1993. I can't find any confirmation emails, but I'm sure I paid by credit card.
Other domains were handled differently. Back in the early 90's, the .ca (Canada) domain was run by one guy based at the University of BC. To get a domain name, I sent him an email and asked for it. At the time, he enforced a consensus decision that .ca would be hierarchical: if you had a national company or organization, you could get a .ca If you were only in one province, say, BC, you could only get a name.
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In the early 90's domains were given away for free till a company that would become Network Solutions got the government contract to control the major TLDs.
Once they got control it cost $100 for 2 years. I think there was some giant lawsuit that lead it to be dropped to $70 for 2 years.
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To expand on Mike's answer, you would send a properly (and specifically) formatted email based on a template (unfortunately I don't have any email from that era but someone on here might have a copy of the template...) – voretaq7 Jan 21 '11 at 19:42
I remember a friend complaining about the sudden existence of a price for what was formerly free. – mfinni Jan 21 '11 at 20:08
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I'd like to have postfix relay incoming email to one of 5 possible recipients in a somewhat random - or at least evenly distributed way.
for example, when a message addressed to arrives at the postfix server, i'd like that message to be related to one of :,,,, or
each incoming message would go to one of the adminX addresses and all messages would be load balanced across all 5 evenly(ish).
is that doable?
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No, postfix can't do that by itself. A procmail filter might help, but why not set up a real ticketing system where you can track progress of issues, share them and make sure things proceed when an admin goes on holiday?
OTRS is a decent ticketing system for smaller environments. Atlassian JIRA is good too, but rather expensive. There are other options too of course :)
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Jira is not a troubleticketing system. I'd suggest RT4 for the easiest to use and set up. – adaptr Jan 28 at 9:51
Jira is definitely useful as a ticketing system. Or at least my 170000 tickets think so :) I find RT more an exercise in masochism than a ticketing system, though I've not used RT4 yet. – Dennis Kaarsemaker Jan 28 at 9:56
But it is a bugtracker. It has no sane options to control ticket flows without re-programming the whole damn thing. – adaptr Jan 28 at 10:24
You mean RT4 right? :) – Dennis Kaarsemaker Jan 28 at 10:42
Argh burble urgh – adaptr Jan 28 at 11:34
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You might be able to send to a common address and then program procmail to do something like this.
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If you are interested in commercial solution I can add this feature to MSH Traffic Policy - server side rules for automatic content control and flow administration for Postfix and Sendmail.
Application has big potential, so if you want to try it, let me know.
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I definitely agree with the need to have a real ticket system...if that is what you are trying to do.
That being said, you CAN do this by using a combination of postfix and haproxy. You will need to setup multiple instances of postfix (take a look at the "postmulti" command), one for each user you need to include. You then have each instance send all it's mail to one user (lookup the luser_relay in the Postfix configuration docs.)
Once you have multiple instances setup and running on different posts (all must run on something other than 25), setup haproxy on port 25 and have it load balance between the instances.
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I have a page with 2 web parts.
One of them is a list, where the users can add an item (their personal info).
Once they have entered their personal info, it should show up in the 2nd list (with the option to edit)
So in the end, users should be able to see the info of all the users in the 1st list, but only their own in the 2nd list.
Which approach should I use for this? Should both web parts be lists? On the first list I have a "Created By" column that is automatically set to the user's full name when they enter the info, if that helps.
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This is actually quite easy. Set up a list with your desired columns and create two views. Configure the first view to display all list data according to your preferences, this will be your base view for the first web part.
Then configure a second view that filters the list items using the Created By-column, to do this set a filter option "Created By equals [Me]". Then go to your page, drop this list as a web part two times on the page and configure the web parts with these views.
There you have it, two web part besides each other, one displaying the full list data, the other one only items created by the current user.
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I think you can add audience targeting to the second web part/list. So a user would only be able to see the information belonging to him.
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How would I do this? Do you mean in Edit mode, selecting a specific target or is there another "add audience targeting" option ? – Anonymous Oct 7 '10 at 18:10
you can target the items in the second list to the respective owners (via the list settings->audience targeting). This would automatically trim the UI in the second web part. – Vivek Oct 7 '10 at 18:17
I'm afraid I don't understand. Audience targeting seems to be a global setting that you set to the whole page, but inside I have the webpart and the list. How am I defining that the 2nd web part should be filtereD? – Anonymous Oct 7 '10 at 18:51
I hope you have a second list. You can go to that list and apply audience targeting to the items in there via the list settings. – Vivek Oct 8 '10 at 3:12
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Becoming a Permanent Resident in Singapore
Singapore is a rapidly developing country when it comes to business, and even though the country itself my be small (it's only 274 square miles), it has a significant business presence. As such, many people find themselves being transferred to Singapore for business. A good number of people who move there end up liking it and wanting to say. Someone in this position has the option of applying to become a permanent resident, although there are certain conditions that must be met.
Singapore has a population of over 5 million, and around 40% of these are foreigners (in 2009), and around 400,000 of these people are permanent residents. If someone plans to be there for a while, becoming a permanent resident offers some advantages. Let's take a look at these;
Permanent residents are allowed to live, work and own property in Singapore, although the type of property is restricted to second-hand apartments. Only citizens can buy new apartments. Permanent residents are able to get housing loans from banks for up to 80% of the value of the property. They are also allowed to stay in the country without visa restrictions. For example, if you're in Singapore on a work visa and you lose your job, you only have a limited amount of time to find another job before you won't be allowed to stay anymore, but as a permanent resident you won't have this restriction. You are also entitled to pension contributions from your employer.
The application for this status requires two main criteria to be met: You have to be under 50 years old, and you have to have lived and worked in Singapore for at least 6 months. Priority is given to people who are able to work and contribute to society.
Please visit to learn more about becoming a permanent resident
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Monday, July 29, 2013
Writing fiction
I've been writing for a long time. I was an English major in college, and my current position requires a fair amount of writing. I write and revise curricula. I write resident and medical student evaluations. I peer review for a couple of journals. I've even published a few articles.
One of the things that I had always fantasized about writing, though, was fiction. I am a decent medical writer, I think, and I figured that would translate to fiction writing at least a little bit.
Not so much, it turns out. About a year ago I joined a local writers' group to try my hand at writing non-medical pieces. And, even though I intellectually knew that I was in for quite a challenge, I had no idea just how much. Writing fiction calls for a whole new skill set - developing believable characters, compelling plots, rich settings, and, strong dialogue. I am having a lot of fun learning, though, and the other writers have been patient, honest teachers.
I learned to play the piano before I learned how to sing. When I first started learning how to sing, I knew how to read music from playing the piano, but that didn't help me learn how to hit pitches and use vibrato. Similarly, being a competent medical writer helps me construct sentences, but that hasn't made learning how to write fiction much easier.
For the first time in a while, I am new at something, and that newness is accompanied by nerves and humility. It is, perhaps, not a bad reminder about how all of those new interns feel this month. And though part of me wishes that I could fast-forward through the struggle of learning to write fiction, part of me is also enjoying the process of discovering technique and my own writer's voice.
I hope that I can always find something to be "new" at.
1. Very much alike to my English teacher. Much of her recent work is on commerical speech. Her book on commerical speech became popular online because of it's interesting content.
2. I've missed you at group these last few weeks at group. I hope to be there next week, and hope you can come.
3. Thinking about Chloe after last meeting. The essence of a story is a lead character wanting something. Someone or something stands in the way. The story is the result of the character's striving to overcome the opposition. There is always a dynamic tension between the character and her goal. We don't know what Chloe wants or what the obstacle to achieving it is. So she doesn't progress in a direction, she just floats along and things happen to her. We need to know what she wants and what the obstacle is. -Bob
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Comment: Re:depends on how you classify it (Score 1) 984
by gerardrj (#45604051) Attached to: EV Owner Arrested Over 5 Cents Worth of Electricity From School's Outlet
Forgive me, I was simplistic with my language. You can not store AC mains power for later use. You can convert mains power to DC then to chemical energy and store that in a battery (with resultant efficiency losses) then convert that chemical energy back to DC then invert back to AC to motivate your vehicle (with resistant efficiency losses).
Comment: depends on how you classify it (Score 1) 984
by gerardrj (#45598877) Attached to: EV Owner Arrested Over 5 Cents Worth of Electricity From School's Outlet
In AZ theft of service is a felony regardless of cost. Jump out of a taxi without paying your $2.50 fare and it's still a felony.
So... is electric a service or a product?
Since you can't possess or store it I think the law considers it a service (You start and stop your electric service). If GA, like AZ, considers theft of service a felony then the arrest makes perfect sense.
Comment: POTS... (Score 5, Informative) 578
by gerardrj (#45560931) Attached to: The Dismantling of POTS: Bold Move Or Grave Error?
Isn't as plain or old as you make it out to be. I'm about 2 miles from my CO but my phone line terminates in a climate controlled cabinet about 1,000ft from my house. That's the end of the line for my pair where the line is powered, digitized and bridged to fiber for the haul back to the CO.
Even without that the addition of DSL about 2 decades ago added a lot of complexity to the system with DSLAMs and other digital equipment. Much of that digital stuff was spliced in between the switch and CPE on the CO or line side, but it was still there.
The COs I've been in also don't use the card coded switches you seem to be talking to; they use gigantic digital affairs that are all basically computers and handle not only the line pair for voice, but DST, T and D trunks, interoffice signaling and such.
The reason this stuff is all so resilient is the power supply. Nothing in the CO runs on wall voltage; it's all -48vDC and runs from a battery bank the size of a small house. The batteries are constantly charged from mains at the rate of their depletion by the equipment. In case of power failure where they batteries are being drawn down a generator auto-starts and switches from mains to local power to re-charge the batteries. Note that in this setup the load equipment is never switched from one power source to another (a major single-point of failure).
That said... Im not against reforming or eliminate the last vestiges of POTS.Less that 1/3 of the population HAS it and I'd bet even less than that actually use it. By that I mean that I think less than 1/10th of the US population has a telephone in their house that will work solely from CO power on the line pair without a wall wart.
Comment: Re:re-fueling / re-charging (Score 1) 810
by gerardrj (#45507475) Attached to: Electric Cars: Drivers Love 'Em, So Why Are Sales Still Low?
In a row isn't really the argument that reflects reality. The question is: how often to you drive more than 300 miles without being able to stop for a few hours at an out-of-the-way re-charging station that is compatible with your car. The answer to that (when you look at the slow re-charge rates) for me is: quite often. And that "few hours" could actually be a few days.
I don't know where you get the 300 mile range number, Tesla's own literature states up to 265 miles" EPA Certified", which if anything like EPA MPG then the way most American's drive means more like 200 miles of actual range. When you don't have access to your high current charger at home it takes an hour to get 3 miles of charge from a standard wall outlet. Every time I have a discussion with someone about these cars they produce these great sounding numbers, then you read the actual information and things have a much more grim look to them.
As for your specific question about why I drive 21 miles to the butcher: because I prefer buying locally sourced food whenever possible. The only butcher I know of in the Phoenix area that sells local meats is about 21 miles out of my way between work and home. I also travel out of my way to purchase locally roasted coffee and locally produced milk, eggs, veg. Generally the lower prices of the items I purchase offset the minor amount of diesel I run through my engine getting to those places in a consolidated trip. 21 miles for me is less than 1/2 gallon.
When I go visit my friends in northern AZ, that's a 140 mile one-way trip in mountains and I don't think the Tesla would make it that far on a cargo and there are no exits or services for the majority of the trip.
There are MANY use cases where pure electric just falls flat. So many that I think most people would encounter them fairly regularly or at least fret they would. That means that for most, or at least many, people an electric has to be an additional vehicle they use for specific tasks.
But that aside: why are you condemning someone's life choices just because they don't align with the marketing pitch of an all-electric car?
Comment: Dichotomy (Score 2) 1216
by gerardrj (#45505581) Attached to: Should the US Copy Switzerland and Consider a 'Maximum Wage' Ratio?
There's an interesting dichotomy that pervades this topic and the US in general. Christianity.
Most Americans ascribe to it so I'm told.
The basis of Christianity is to do right by your fellow human. To reject greed. To reject avarice. To be humble. To give away everything you don't need.
How the fuck does a Christian based nation allow a CEO to make enough money each year to buy a jumbo jet while the employees doing the actual work that earns the company the actual profits can't make basic ends meet on their salary?
How to the religious right... the conservatives... argue that capitalism (every man for himself, grab what you can) is an appropriate system when they state they believe the exact opposite?
Comment: Re:Yes. (Score 1) 1216
by gerardrj (#45505569) Attached to: Should the US Copy Switzerland and Consider a 'Maximum Wage' Ratio?
No. We're not talking about limiting what you can make off this business.
We're talking about limiting what you make relative to those who will be doing all the work that earns the company the money you want to keep all for yourself.
Sure the CEO makes all the "big decisions" and guides the corporate system toward a goal, but they don't DO anything. Thousands of people toil 8-12 hours a day doing the actual things that make the "big picture" actually happen. They don't take vacations, they are constantly at risk of being laid off at a moments notice and they work in very crowded conditions.
If a CEO needs half an office floor and $5M a year to do good work, how is it possible that the people who produce the income for the company can do it in 15 square feet of cubicle for $25,000a year? How is thinking that much harder than doing?
That sort of thinking falls flat in every other aspect of reality; it it easier to imagine a tall building, to engineer/design the building or to actually build the thing? The imagining is the easy part but pays the best. The designing/engineering is tougher and pays less. The actual shooting nails, pouring concrete and hammering rivets 800 feet in the air is the hardest part but pays the least.
Fine... the "thinker" had an education and that costs money. Fine, the rivet banger is a high school dropout but puts life and limb literally on the line.
Why does the thinker deserve 200x the pay of the riveter? Without either the building doesn't exist.
We're talking about sharing a reasonable amount of wealth with those who produce the wealth in the first place.
Comment: Fuck dam stupidity ... (Score 1) 1216
by argoff (#45502109) Attached to: Should the US Copy Switzerland and Consider a 'Maximum Wage' Ratio?
The wage gap is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is self entitled democracies, and the fiat money banks created to accommodate populist demands. It'd be like trying to cover up herion convulsions, with seizure medication. It reminds me of the old south. When the plantation masters beat the fuck out of their slaves, they wanted to micro-regulate the treatment of slaves, instead of getting rid of slavery. In retrospect, the people advocated those regulations, were just prolonging the problem, and head so far up their fucking ass, they were beyond stupid.
Today, our fiat/populist systems create all these credit bubbles, housing bubbles, stock bubbles, excessive government debt, high prices, inflated executive pay. And these retards want to go around regulating everything, instead of attacking the problem at the source. Fuck them, just fuck them. Irrelevant worthless idiots who will accomplish nothing anyhow.
Comment: re-fueling / re-charging (Score 1) 810
by gerardrj (#45501047) Attached to: Electric Cars: Drivers Love 'Em, So Why Are Sales Still Low?
Whatever you want to call it, with pure electric vehicles it takes too long. The ratio of charge time to miles driven is off kilter.
I drive a VW Golf TDI. I can run it on #2 diesel, #2 heating oil, soybean oil, used fryer oil, basically any medium oil from any source as long as I can filter it and get in the tank spout.
The longest a re-fill takes me (from 6gal carry tanks) is about 10 minutes. At an average station pump fueling takes about 3 minutes.
On a full tank I can travel 720 miles of regular (non-babying) driving and up to 800 miles if I am very conservative.
That means about 13 hours of driving for every 3 minutes of fueling (assuming 55mph average speed between highway/city)
My car can carry 1000lbs of people or cargo
My car tows 1200lbs on a small trailer (at freeway speeds)
My car has killer air-conditioning so I can tolerate the 120F days here in Phoenix, AZ
When electric cars get an infrastructure that allows me to pull in to a refueling station and get a full charge in less that 5 minutes, I'll consider it. The stations need to be ubiquitous so I don't have to plan special stops or routes.
I don't care if the charging and battery technology improve to meet my charge rate requirements or if the entire battery pack is swapped out by a robot, charged then swapped in to someone else's car later that day.
My next vehicle will be either pure diesel or a diesel/electric hybrid and that will continue to be the case until an all-electric vehicle gets even close to those operational parameters above. And yes, I know my use profile is atypical. EVs make perfect sense for a person who commutes a regular route every day and has no other needs for a car and who has an employer adjacent compatible charging station.
Ring, ring. Hi honey, can you stop by the butcher and pick up some steaks for dinner?
Sorry, the car only has 30 miles of charge left, going to the butcher would take 42 miles to get there and home. We'll have to make another trip.
Get home... charge car for 2 hours, drive to butcher, drive home, charge car for 2 hours.
Yea, none of that sounds appealing to me.
Comment: Re:Why subsidize? (Score 1) 1030
by gerardrj (#45494403) Attached to: A War Over Solar Power Is Raging Within the GOP
Where in the Constitution is there any mention of the number of parties there should be?
We have a two party system in the US because there seems to be an inherent human affection for the "us-them" duopoly style confrontation of a diametrically opposed pair. Funny thing is that in most such cases, the two opponents share more in common that they have differences but we focus and accentuate the differences instead of the commonalities. We like to feel important and better than others (greed, avarice) and so we fight for our arbitrary choices.
Comment: Re:Fucking rednecks (Score 5, Insightful) 1030
by gerardrj (#45494147) Attached to: A War Over Solar Power Is Raging Within the GOP
Solar needs lots of space to produce large amounts of power, sure. But we have lots of wasted space in our urban and suburban centers. Every rooftop that doesn't have solar panels is a target for panels. In a single family home, not only do you generate electricity, the panels shade the structure and keep it cooler in the summer months.
Germany is hardly what anyone would call a bastion of sunshine, but they seem to be making quite a go of solar.
As for the subsidies for solar and other renewables: only fair. The US subsidizes oil with tax breaks, incentives and let's not even get started on the military adventures we've been on to control/protect our oil interests in the middle-east.
Comment: reality check (Score 4, Informative) 382
From their own web site, the "...NSF's FY 2014 budget request is $7.626 billion"
$0,007.6 billon NSF budget. The Federal budget for 2014 is about $3.77 trillion (wikipedia) To put that on the same scale:
$3,770.0 billion total US budget. So the NSF budget is (I think I did the math correctly) 0.2% of the total budget. Less than 1/4 of one percent!
$3 billion is what the Navy is spending on a singe new Zumwalt destroyer (the next 4 in that fleet will cost $2.5B each) to fight nonexistent maritime enemies. That's two NSF budgets for ships that will do nothing but cost money to operate for the next 20 years.
I think this is the religious right pushing to get the US Government to stop funding science that disproves their church teachings and bible scripture.
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Friday, January 14, 2011
having it both ways
Sarah Palin claims that criminal acts must 'stand on their own.' and yet she also claims that America's greatness is due to something shared, something collective among all the people. she cannot logically assert that bad american things belong to individuals but good american things belong to, and come from, everybody.
a cursory look at the events of last saturday show that, while loughner as a deranged individual was ultimately and most fully responsible, his acts were certainly enabled and shaped by the society in which they took place. for one obvious example, the community college's self-protecting action of expelling Loughner but thinking nothing of his possible danger to the wider society is typical of a not-so-great feature of modern american life. the college properly worried about the safety of its own people. but it went no further: as long as my butt is covered, no problem!
another example is the prevalent gun culture in places like arizona. gun evangelists who insist that everyone embrace guns as they do believe that there are two gun cultures -- a good one and a bad one. like Palin with american culture, they would like to pretend that gun culture only includes the good, while the bad is just random bad people doing their own thing. the fact that loughner lived in arizona meant his gun obsession was totally acceptable and even legal. it raised no eyebrows. his madness was fully camouflaged within the mainstream arizona gun culture. it is not likely his obsession would have gotten so far in a place with stricter gun laws and less fascination with guns. so, no, arizona's gun culture did not cause the killings to happen. but the gun culture made it much easier to happen.
Palin and other figures on the Right claim that they are accused of full and direct responsibility for the violence. a 'blood libel,' if you will. that claim is false. what critics assert is something more nuanced, a nuance that Palin is willfully incapable of understanding: that crimes come ultimately from individuals but are nonetheless deeply influenced by society. no one is accusing Palin of killing those people in Tucson.
but all the bad things about modern American culture -- the cover-my-own-rear mentality, the belief that (good) individual violence can stamp out 'bad' violence, the notion that certain ethnic groups are responsible for all social evils, the selfish focus on me and only me (which used to be linked to the hippie left, but now seems more typical of much of the right), the dismantling of social safety nets such as health care, including mental health care (technically there was a system in place, but the fact that the community college didn't know about it doesn't say much for it's effectiveness), the irrational hatred of government (as if we could have a country without a government) -- played a part in loughner's life and actions. and even Palin -- especially Palin -- who pretends to be such a worshiper of America -- has plenty of critical anger regarding America. i just think her anger makes no sense logically.
she is angry chiefly at class discrimination. she is looked down on by elites -- such as me, i presume. but, incoherently, her answer to this situation is not to deal head on and courageously with the economic and political causes (unfettered capitalism with no government regulation) that brought about our high levels of inequality. no, her answer is to menace elites -- presumably, only left-leaning elites, not conservative elites -- with patriotism. and to continue those free market policies which gave the elites such power. go figure.
Palin cannot have her cake and eat it, too. she cannot deliberately invoke gun violence in her political speech and expect people to accept that she is at the same time pure as the driven snow. her repeated use of the word 'reload,' for example, is a clear flirtation with violence. my criticism here is not the oft-repeated call for 'civility.' what does that even mean? holding the door for old ladies? i don't think civility is very important in politics. politics is a tough business. but flirtation with violent, clearly eliminationalist rhetoric -- any metaphors which refer to killing political opponents -- has no place in democratic politics.
Palin's defenders make absurd parodies of the criticism levelled against her, 'wondering' aloud if they can even say things like 'up in arms' anymore. these tactics are too cute by half. plenty of political language derives from physical acts (lash out) or military language (outflank, defeat, trench warfare). but most of these terms have been in long use in politics and are no longer used for their original meaning. we rarely use 'up in arms' anymore to mean people have picked up guns to fight. it is used almost exclusively to refer to widespread anger and condemnation.
'reload' is not one of those widely used metaphorical terms. it is used specifically to refer to putting more ammunition in one's gun. this is precisely why Palin used it so often and so insistently. she liked flirting with the angry crowd, giving them a little of what they wanted. that is certainly her right. but she cannot have it both ways, flirting with violence and avoiding criticism for it. time for her to man up. she said it. she owns it. she used the word for its explicit linkage to violence. and now she denies it, like a dancer who shows her leg and then angrily denies that she was using sex to titillate her audience.
the titillation of violence. it excites extremists on the Right. unfortunately, this titillation with violent speech has percolated upwards, and been appropriated by some leaders on the Right.
and yes, the violent language she and other leaders on the Right have used since Obama came into office did play a part -- however small, however diffuse -- in the political culture within which Loughner decided to act. crazy people are aware, even hyper aware, of the culture around them. to think they are just trapped in their heads without any awareness of what is going on around them is disingenuous and is, as usual with many of the Right's arguments, little linked to reality and how it happens. we are all in society. we are all in our predicament together. we share the good and we share the bad. one can't pretend that we share all good things but bad things are totally and absolutely individual.
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Cold Fission
Liquid semiconductors could yield a better nuclear battery
PHOTO: Lance W. Clayton
GTI’s Francis Tsang at his Idaho office.
What if you could make a miniature, superefficient nuclear power plant that’s simple to build and doesn’t get much hotter than a kitchen oven? That could be the result of an innovation being developed by scientists at Global Technologies, in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
GTI’s president, Francis Tsang, and colleagues are working on a nuclear voltaic cell consisting, basically, of a semiconductor and an amount of radioactive material [see photo, ”Innovator”]. The semiconductor sits between two conductors to form a Schottky diode, and it is bombarded by particles from uranium, plutonium, or some less dangerous radioactive material.
Radiation has essentially the same effect on a semiconductor that light has on a typical solar cell. In a solar cell, the impact of a photon with the semiconductor crystal creates an electron and a positively charged particle called a hole. Because the cell’s semiconductor has been doped with chemical impurities, it has a natural polarization that draws the electron to one electrode and the hole toward the other, thereby producing current.
If a nuclear version of a solar cell sounds like one of the old atomic battery concepts from the 1950s, it is, but with a potentially all-new twist.
Some of those early concepts sought to harvest semiconductor energy from alpha radiation (positively charged helium nuclei) or beta radiation (electrons). Although they offered the hope of efficient batteries that would last for decades, they were limited by what seemed to be insurmountable problems associated with their radiation sources.
”Beta cells are restricted to low-energy beta, and they can’t use alpha,” says Jake Blanchard, a professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who develops MEMS-based radioisotope batteries [see ”The Daintiest Dynamos,” IEEE Spectrum, September 2004]. Alpha particles and other high-energy radiation ”will trash the semiconductor by displacing the atoms,” Blanchard says. That has kept this class of nuclear battery from housing enough radioactive material to produce more than mere milliwatts of power.
Tsang, a former U.S. Energy Department researcher, was well aware of the beta cell’s problems. ”Shoot a bullet into a block of ice, and the ice will shatter and can’t go back into its original form,” Tsang says. ”But if you shoot a bullet into water, the water repairs itself.” So he began experiments replacing solid semiconductors with molten selenium and molten sulfur, both of which become semiconductors in their liquid state and melt at less than 300 °C. Because liquids don’t suffer any structural damage, Tsang’s nuclear battery could run on much more powerful radiation than a beta cell, and therefore generate more electricity.
A liquid nuclear diode could catch energetic alpha and beta particles, gamma rays, and even the new atoms left over from the fission of larger atoms, Tsang says. Fissile fragments could be a particularly good source of energy. In the fission of U-235, for example, the fragments carry 85 percent of the energy released. Because the fragments are heavy, as they plow through the semiconductor they ”make a shower of electron-hole pairs along the path,” he says.
Tsang’s idea is not widely known, and for now, that’s the way he likes it. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office posted GTI’s key patent application only in November. Tsang has not published data in a peer-reviewed journal (though some of the experiments were replicated at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California), and he would reveal no hard numbers for this article.
The University of Wisconsin’s Blanchard, reserving final judgment until he sees published data, thinks the concept of a liquid nuclear battery is a good one. ”It’s a clever idea,” he says. ”It’s not totally crazy.”
At the moment, GTI’s battery is far from useful, not having quite reached 1 percent efficiency. Its development has gone far enough, however, to make an impression at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency gave Tsang’s company funds to support its Liquid Electronics Advanced Power System (LEAPS) program: first, US $1.4 million to prove the concept by producing current in a test cell, with a provision that would have allowed for additional funding of up to $26.6 million for over four and a half years. With submarine power plants in mind, DARPA wanted GTI to run full speed toward proving that a reactor of the 100- to 1000-kilowatt scale could be built.
But in October, Tsang’s group rejected the additional work, figuring that the effort envisioned by DARPA would overwhelm GTI’s resources. Tsang says GTI ultimately will make more progress by going after small-scale power sources first. So for now, nuclear reactors will have to take a backseat to nuclear batteries.
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I have class two ViewModels
//both IViewModel1 and IViewModel2 inherit from IViewModel
public class ViewModel1 : IViewModel1
public class ViewModel2 : IViewModel2
and the view :
public partial class View : UserControl
How can I do to inject one of the ViewModels into the View using Unity container ?
Edit : My issue is on having choice to inject one of the view models from the constructor.
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up vote 0 down vote accepted
If you use Unity to resolve your view and the IViewModel is part of the signature of the constructor then Unity will resolve it for you (provided you have already registered it, for example in the loading of a module):
public View(IViewModel1 vm)
_myViewModel = vm;
Keep in mind that Unity is greedy - it will try to resolve the biggest constructor it can so if you want to select a particular constructor for it to use then you will need to use ParameterOverrides.
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If I understood, I need to have two constructors (one for IViewModel1 and seconde for IViewModel2) and reslove the wanted using ParameterOverrides right ? – HichemCSharp Sep 13 '12 at 14:13
@HichemC If you want to have two constructors the same size just taking different interfaces then yes, you will need to use parameter overrides. – slugster Sep 13 '12 at 20:11
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How do I set up google cloud sql programmatically in python in a way that works both on GAE and the local test environment?
When I setup locally the console always says that
MySQLdb is not installed or loaded. But When I open the terminal and write python and python command line envirement runs. It works fine in the terminal but In GAE is says the following in GAE console.
"The rdbms API is not available because the MySQLdb library could not be loaded."
I am using python 2.7.3 for GAE.
Pelase Help!
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2 Answers
You can refer official help/walk-through at below link.
The important things you need to follow are
1. Make sure MySql is installed locally and you can access it via typing MySQL in your terminal.
2. You'll have to install MySQLdb library in your python path. Follow its INSTALL guide and don't forget to change the mysql_config variable in site.cfg available in the downloaded folder, otherwise it won't install. Run the below command after setting up your site.cfg. Make sure you current directory in terminal is the MySQLdb which you just downloaded from MySQLdb link
sudo /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python install
3. Make a test database in your local MySql or import the live dump in that local database, so that your table structure is same for both local and live environment
4. Below is the simple code from above page which works on local as well as live environment
import os
import MySQLdb
import webapp2
INSTANCE_NAME = 'your-project-id:your-instance-name'
class SQ(webapp2.RequestHandler):
def get(self):
# Display existing guestbook entries and a form to add new entries.
if (os.getenv('SERVER_SOFTWARE') and
db = MySQLdb.connect(unix_socket='/cloudsql/' + INSTANCE_NAME, db='guestbook', user='root')
db = MySQLdb.connect(host='', port=3306, db='guestbook', user='root')
cursor = db.cursor()
cursor.execute('select id,guestName,content from enteries')
for row in cursor.fetchall():
self.response.write("(id) " + str(row[0]) + " | (name) " + str(row[1]) + " | (content) " + str(row[2]) + "</BR>" )
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After reading your question again, it seems like you are saying that you have installed MySQLdb but it is not being discovered by GAE. Assuming the path isn't the issue, are you using the latest version of the SDK? One additional thing to check would be your runtime - are you using python27 as your GAE Python version? Python 3.x is not compatible with AppEngine, so you will either be using python or python27 in the runtime field in app.yaml. Not sure if you are saying that you can import it fine in the shell, but if not, you'll want to make sure it is on your path (Linux: export PYTHONPATH="$PYTHONPATH:/path/to/MySQLdb/").
In order to use Cloud SQL locally, you have to have the MySQLdb library installed. MySQLdb is a library that allows Python to connect with a MySQL database, and when you simulate Cloud SQL locally, what you are doing is setting up a connection to a local MySQL database. Therefore you need to install a library that can handle the Python->MySQL interaction, and MySQLdb is the one required by GAE.
If you're on Linux, run sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb. If you're on something else (or even Linux), you can find the library here.
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I am suing Mac os x. And google app engine is now supported python 2.x – user1799469 Nov 15 '12 at 7:52
@user1799469 Do you have python27 or python as your runtime variable in app.yaml? My best guess is that this has to do with either the version of the SDK or the runtime you are using. – RocketDonkey Nov 15 '12 at 14:51
I have python27 as a runtime environment. – user1799469 Nov 16 '12 at 4:41
@user1799469 And you are able to use MySQLdb outside of GAE? – RocketDonkey Nov 16 '12 at 4:47
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while going through the exercise on Railstutorial(chapter 10), i have used Jquery to count remaining characters in Textarea. It actually works but only, when i refresh my page for atleast one time per signin. that means query is not executing until the page is refreshed for one time after every signin and there after it is working perfectly. I have used css for .countdown method.
So, my question is..why it is required me to refresh page to see remaining chars on the page and also, is there are some better methods.Can Some one suggest me what is happening here??
Css code
.countdown {
display: inline;
padding-left: 10px;
color: #338333;
Here is the code for
updateCountdown = ->
remaining = 140 - jQuery("#micropost_content").val().length
jQuery(".countdown").text remaining + " characters remaining"
jQuery ->
$("#micropost_content").change updateCountdown
$("#micropost_content").keyup updateCountdown
here is the content of _micropost_form.html.erb
<%= form_for(@micropost) do |f| %>
<div class="field">
<%= f.text_area :content, placeholder: "Maximum characters: 140" %>
<span class="countdown"></span>
<% end %>
Here is the image when i login and go to Home Page (without refreshing the page)
view of Page without-refresh
and Here is the image when i login,go to Home Page and refresh the page
enter image description here
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Have you done any debugging yourself so far? – CBroe Oct 17 at 6:47
What kind of debugging you are asking me to do?.. – AKS Oct 17 at 12:01
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up vote 0 down vote accepted
Finally got my answer after seeing so many posts on Jqurey and Add a JavaScript on Home Page jquery-micropost char counter Here character-countdown-like-twitter ... but None has worked for Rails 4.0 as its the issue with turbolinks.
Thanks to "Lan" (user:288863)..his solution did the trick...
Actually we can solve this issue simply by removing " //= require turbolinks " in app/asset/javascript/application.js file.and Done.
Another method is to use "jquery.turbolinks" , I found some issue with this gem so, i would suggest to go by removing turbolinks line and further more you can see this post where the answer to the same question has been explained.Answer By User Lan You Just need to restart after following each and every step on that post.
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I am building a site that requires a lot of MySQL inserts and lookups from different tables in a (hopefully) secure part of the site. I want to use an abstraction layer for the whole process. Should I use a PHP framework (like Zend or CakePHP) for this, or just use a simple library (like Crystal or Doctrine)?
I would also like to make sure that the DB inserts are done in a relatively secure part of the site (though not SSL). Currently, I am using the method outlined here (MD5 encryption and random challenge string), but maybe some of the frameworks come with similar functionality that would simplify the process?
What I'm trying to implement: a table of forms filled out with DB values. If you change a value or add a new row, pressing "save" will update or insert DB rows. I'm sure this has been done before, so I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel.
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4 Answers
Most PHP backends have secure access to a private database. Normally, there's little difficulty to keeping the database secure, mostly by not making it reachable directly. That way the security of access depends on the inability for anyone to tamper with the PHP code, and not any software security scheme.
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I understand, but if somebody gains access to someone's login information, they can tamper with that user's private data, no? – jibby Sep 22 '10 at 19:07
Sure, that's why everyone needs to keep their credentials private. You can make it a little easier on users by providing mechanisms for undoing transactions (to correct mistakes or undo vandalism), and by educating them to take security seriously. – wallyk Sep 22 '10 at 19:13
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I would recomend Symfony Framework for this. There is a great online tutorial on this at Practical Symfony.The Framework's Form class handles most of the security for you. It also has a nice login plugin to make the application secure.
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Unless by Data Abstraction you mean an implementation of a Data Access Patterns like ActiveRecord or Table Data Gateway or something ORMish (in both cases you should update your question accordingly then), you don't need a framework, because PHP has a DB abstraction layer with PDO.
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It sounds like you are really asking two different questions. One being should I use a framework (Zend, Symfony, Cake, etc) for the development of a website? The other being whether or not to use something along the lines of an ORM (Doctrine, Propel, etc)?
The answer to the first one is a resounding "yes". Frameworks are designed to keep you from having to reinvent the wheel for common/basic functionality. The time you spend learning how to (correctly) use a framework will payoff greatly in the long run. You'll eventually be much more productive that "rolling your own". Not to mention you'll gain a community of people who have likely been through similar situations and overcome issues similar to what you will face (that in and of itself could be the best reason to use a framework). I'm not going to suggest a particular framework since they all have strengths and weaknesses and is another topic in and of itself (however, I do use and prefer Zend Framework but don't let that influence your decision).
Concerning whether or not to use an ORM is a slightly more difficult question. I've recently began to work with them more and in general I would recommend them but it all boils down to using the right tool for the right job. They solve some specific problems very well, others not so much. However, since you specifically mention security I'll quickly address that. I don't think that a ORM inherently "increases security", however it can force you into making better decisions. That said, bad coding and bad coding practices will result in security issues no matter what technology/framework you are using.
Hope that helps!
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Don't many frameworks bundle their own ORM implementing the Active Record pattern? – jibby Sep 22 '10 at 23:26
Some (maybe most) do, but depending on the framework you aren't always tied to a particular ORM implementation. – jsuggs Sep 23 '10 at 5:45
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I have got quite a long way with this. I want a WCF service hosted in azure that uses client certificate authentication.
Everything works with the client cert requirement turned off and server cert on; ie
<transport clientCredentialType="None" />
but when I change to
<transport clientCredentialType="Certificate" />
I get
The SSL settings for the service 'SslRequireCert' does not match those of the IIS 'None'.
This seems to suggest that I need to change my IIS configuration. But I am running inside azure emulator, not IIS.
I tried adding
<access sslFlags="ssl">
but the web server did not like that at all; says this is a locked configuration option
All help gratefully received
answer: unlock the iis config file with appcmd
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1 Answer
up vote 1 down vote accepted
unlock the iis config file with appcmd
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How can I get the value of a style defined in a CSS class?
The markup has:
CssClass="grdTextBox" Text="aaaaaaaabbbbbbbccccccc"
The CSS style is:
.grdTextBox {FONT-SIZE: 12px; FONT-FAMILY: verdana; }
The .cs file has:
string cssClass = txtComments.CssClass;
Response.Write(" cssClass is : " + cssClass);
How can I find the value for font size or font family from code behind?
I can find them if they are in a style tag or if they are attributes of the text box. But how can you find the values if they are defined in a CSS class?
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4 Answers
You don't. For lack of a real explanation, CSS is a client side technology. The styles in the .css file aren't directly associated with the html element until the browser renders it.
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You cannot do it.
The styles you declare in ASPX are merged to the output but it is not visible in code behind as far as I know.
Only if you add another styles to the collection like MyControl.Style.Add ("font-size", "12px") then you will have it there.
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Me.Menu.Style("margin-top") = "170px"
You can change it if you want to use inline style otherwise you can write your own CSS type object to manipulate CSS.
Actually you can build a library like that so that people can download and contribute,just saying.
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I'm facing the same problem, and i think there can be a kind of solution by opening the .css file and searching manually for the style requested, returning its content.
It would require manual parsing, and perhaps you have more than one .css file, or complex styles that make this solution a bit horrible, but i think it's better than "not possible".
I would love to hear for a more elegant solution.
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The story so far:
CHAPTER FOUR by Storm42
The colonel looked at the admiral, "Sir, how do you feel you can manage that when we've already lost a Green Beret unit out there? You REALLY feel your SEALs are THAT much more skilled? I seriously doubt it admiral...with due respect to your men. Let's face it, this project is not like any other admiral and you are as aware of this as we are."
The admiral glances to the captain as he cocks his head back and sighs...sliding hands into his pockets and listening to the colonel spill his two cents worth.
"Admiral, the hybrid project alone was created to outsmart such elite style teams the enemy might have. To be able to single handedly take out entire armies. How sir...respectfully speaking admiral...can you feel that your SEALs are any different than Berets? We've sent men into the thickest jungles of Vietnam to face the vietcong just as your branch has done so with the SEAL teams of past. They BOTH have served in some of the most dangerous of places of wartime admiral. It's not like we sent in a bunch of boyscouts."
The admiral interrupted the colonel. "All this...is chatter colonel, I said I needed answers. You have one hour."
Captain Peterson left with the admiral as Colonel Kotter shook his head and returned to sit down, using the glove again to pull up the program that connected him with the created machine that was out of control. The army's newest secret project design of AI robotics.
One of the team of SEALs signals quickly to the Lieutenant that one of their men is now missing. The others on the team pick up the message as 1st Class Conners signals with a red light flashing code from about 100 yards away from LT. "MAN DOWN, MAN DOWN PHELPS IS MISSING." Was the message.
LT signals quickly as the men of the team follow his lead, also using his red light.
The men pan the shore as the raft rests half on the beach and half in the water. Slowly it begins to float out as if it has a mind of its own. LT frowns... watching this and looks to his chief as he signals to look at the raft. Chief shakes his head no, not sure why the raft is moving backwards as if on its own power. LT finally signals for Chief to send someone. Chief looks at Conners, signaling for him to move to the raft asap!
Conner runs while panning all around him, the others of the team watching his movements closely as suddenly Conners stops. Chief and LT can't believe it either as they all now see the raft suddenly bend in the center, pop and gush air as it is sucked under as if it was a toy!
"God BLESS! D'you just see that!" whispered one of the men on the team to the left of chief. It was Erickson.
Conners turned and with eyes wide as he drops to his stomach in the middle of the beach under the moon light. He signals to the others as he backs up slowly on his stomach, moving through the sand, his eyes not leaving the shore as the entire team that is left...watch as their ten man IBS boat and motor and any gear left in it...quickly are sucked under the surface of the shore. Nothing else is seen, no sign of any shark or large fish or tentacles even...nothing! Whatever it was...it was powerful! And whatever it was...it was working now within the water. And was right near the shore line!
LT HAD to get a message to the ship about this. They've already lost one man. Just as he was about to do a search, now this? Just WHAT the heck was really out there? They didn't know. IT stumped him and he was still in a trance, looking to the shore where their boat USE TO BE.
"I KNEW I had a bad feeling about this place," LT whispered again to himself. The chief looked over...hearing LT.
Conners looked back at LT as he signaled quickly to Conners who was still on his stomach. "GET UP! MOVE BACK!" was the signal LT gave with his gloved hand. Conners quickly shooting sand with his feet, ran back to his position and dropped. He landed this time next to chief...whispering..."Chief! Did you SEE THAT!"
The chief slowly looked at Conners and nodded yes as if he had seen a ghost, his eyes still wide. He then said, "This isn't good. No, this is NOT good at ALL."
Conners suddenly turns, hearing now some bushes moving behind them in the dark jungle. "What tha!" HE aims, rolling on his stomach to behind a tree, dropping down NVGs as they let off a high pitch sound. The jungle now is illuminated in neon green. Conners sees something moving. Something he's never seen before in his years of being on the teams. He almost can't move. Is it real? He wasn't certain...but whatever it was...it was now coming towards their entire team.
Conners couldn't move and he felt electrified by a current of some sort. He was shaking...and couldn't stop. His image was in blue, orange, yellow and red colors from what was now targeting him.
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'CHAPTER FOUR' statistics: (click to read)
Date created: May 26, 2008
Date published: May 26, 2008
Comments: 0
Word Count: 1044
Times Read: 163
Story Length: 2
Children Rank: 3.1/5.0 (1 votes)
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Tuesday, Dec 10, 2013
Brandon News
Henderson: Tom Lee adjusts to speedier senate during second go-round
Tom Lee suspected things might be different when he returned to the state Senate this year for the first time since leaving the Legislature in 2006 after a 10-year run.
He was right.
For one thing, it was a lot quieter at night, thanks in part to lobbying reforms he helped push through then that cut down on the number of parties and socials.
That's not all.
"Technology has certainly impacted the process from the first time I was up there," he said. "With the ability to stay in constant contact with people whether by text message, cell phone or email, lobbyists now can indirectly ask questions during debate on the floor.
"You would see discussions going on and all these text messages were flying back and forth - 'Hey, ask him this.' Or maybe, 'Hey bring this up.'"
It happens fast. One day, the appropriations committee dealt with 66 bills. These bills can run dozens of pages with hidden consequences throughout.
"There is no way (for a legislator) to assimilate that much information," he said. "The pace is much faster now, dangerously faster. Anyone who tells you they're able to read everything they're voting on is lying."
The session capped a whirlwind few months for Lee, a Brandon businessman known for speaking exactly what's on his mind even if it makes party bosses cringe.
It started in May 2012 with a surprise phone call from Ronda Storms, with news she was giving up her state Senate seat and he should think about running. In short order, party leaders were calling to urge the same thing.
"By the end of the day I was a candidate again," he said.
He won the August primary comfortably over Rachel Burgin for the Republican nomination - essentially assuring overall victory in the heavily conservative district - but there wasn't much time to celebrate.
He had to get up early the next morning with his wife, Laurel, as she gave birth to their daughter, Faith. A few months later, Lee left for Tallahassee and the 60-day legislative session.
"My family has been managing a lot of change over the last few years," Lee said. "One thing is that we were adjusting to having an infant in the house while running a general election. Then I'm trying to hire staff for here and Tallahassee, then I have to leave to go up there."
In Tallahassee, he had nine committee assignments and was chair of the judiciary committee.
There was one bonus: Regan, his daughter by his first marriage, got to serve as his page in Tallahassee over part of her spring break from Bloomingdale High School. And he did get home to see basketball games with her and his youngest son, Brandon.
Oh, and after the session ended, his wife was appointed a Hillsborough Circuit Court judge by Gov. Rick Scott.
He might even be positioned before he leaves Tallahassee for good to become senate president for a second time. That would be rare.
It will also be typical of this household - to have a member of the state Senate, a Circuit Court judge, and active family all on the go at the same time.
"I guess we'll stay busy," Lee said, "but that's all right."
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New at Streets.mn: Traffic Calming on Park and Portland is a Good Start Toward Overcoming Jurisdictional Complexity
[A Chicago-style cycletrack is an ideal design for Minneapolis.]
I've got a new post up over at Streets.mn today about the good news from the city on the Park and Portland Avenue re-design.
Here's a highlight:
There are few key lessons we can learn from the Park and Portland examples. First, that it's really important to have open and frequent communication between jurisdictions. So many streets are actually run and operated by different government bodies -- the city, the county, the state, and the federal government. Just when you think you've made some progress with one jurisdiction, along comes a street that lies in the purview of a totally different organization with a totally different traffic engineer. That's one challenge.
The second is simply communication. It's really hard to keep track of what each level of government is doing all the time. I think the Minneapolis Bicycle Advisory Committee is a great example of how to overcome some of these challenges.
One of the other hurdles is who difficult it is to be the 'first' to try out a new infrastructure design. The cycle track idea for Park and Portland faced an uphill battle simply because it was something we haven't seen much of around here. People don't know what it is, and so they're either against it or lukewarm about the idea. But once you build a few of them, people start to appreeciate them and the process becomes much easier. (Bicycle boulevards in St Paul are much the same story.)
Maybe someday down the road, if we can find a suitable pot of money from either the city or from a public health agency, we can take the next step and turn Park adn Portland into a bona fide cycle track. Until then, this plan is a big improvement. I'd like to see the same things done on Minneapolis's other one-way street pairs (e.g. 26th and 28th, Univeristy and 4th).
If you're going to have one-way streets thorugh neighborhoods, you might as well get something out of it. Cycle tracks are traffic calming PLUS bike infrastructure all in one easy package, and that's why they're such a great investment.
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Alicia Keys 'incredibly excited' to perform National Anthem at the Super Bowl
By Kristen Porricelli,
Alicia Keys is excited to start the Super Bowl off by performing the National Anthem at the game on February 3.
"I'm very excited to perform at the Super Bowl. It's really gonna set the game off. I feel really excited about doing that, and it's my first time really doing that -- the national anthem that really starts the whole game off so I'm incredibly excited," Keys told The Hollywood Reporter.
"I have to rehearse it totally, as if it's a brand new song, because it is actually a brand new song in the style that I'll deliver it. I'm actually rehearsing it like a maniac," she also said, according to Billboard.
Keys will be joining the list of previous National Anthem performers that include Kelly Clarkson, Billy Joel, Diana Ross and Whitney Houston.
The Grammy Award-winning singer also debuted her first film on Thursday, January 17 at the Sundance Film Festival. The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete, directed by George Tillman Jr., is about two young boys who survive the streets of Brooklyn on their own and stars Anthony Mackie, Jennifer Hudson and Jordin Sparks.
"It's great because I love being part of bringing stories that you wouldn't often hear to the world. The fact that it was in my hometown - New York - that felt really good. The most important thing for me is that it looked and was so authentic," Keys said about the film.
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the codist - programmerthink
My First Programming Job in 1981, and How It Shaped My Career
Published: 03/04/2013
A little more than 31 years ago I got my first programming job at a defense contractor, General Dynamics, in an IT division that supported the F-16 division (now Lockheed). I had no work experience and no education in programming.
Unlike today, it was possible to get a programming job despite a circumstance that wouldn't even get me a phone screen today. I had been programming since I was 16, at least when I had access to a computer, but I had no job experience and never had a single programming class in college. I spent 6 years working on first a BS in Chemistry and then almost an MS in Chemistry. But without a PhD I was a beaker monkey; although TCU had accepted me as a PhD student I decided it wasn't for me.
So I had no job for a few months until a friend mentioned GD was hiring. Apparently the head of the IT division liked to lay off people at the end of the year to look good and then desperately hire back afterwards. I applied and somehow got an interview with my future manager. Why? I have no clue. He asked a lot of general questions and one programming puzzle and apparently I impressed him. Like I said today this would be science fiction.
On my first day of work in October, 1981 I wore a new suit, got a migraine at noon and went home early. Not an auspicious start.
The first couple of weeks I learned JCL and the IBM mainframe. There were two old guys who worked there, my age today I imagine, and they worked on 6 batch applications simultaneously, making a single compile/run cycle per day for each. Even today I can't imagine how. We thought of them as a pair of Yodas (of course not the real Yoda, he didn't exist yet). They starting programming when computers were coded with wires.
Soon I was moved to a group that worked on a super-mini computer which need more bodies and got my first real assignment. The F16 computers were soon to be coded in Jovial-J73 since Ada was still just a thought. The various levels of managers (GD had at the time 18 layers of management) wanted the code to be formatted perfectly so I was supposed to write a pretty printer - in Fortran of course! Someone told me I need a recursive descent parser, and I had no idea what the hell that was. So I went to a library, since Google's founders were still in elementary school! I went to dozens of meetings with boring managers, all of whom wore suits, each with a different opinion.
Yet I learned something interesting. I never wore a suit after than first day and then even ditched the tie which made me an oddball, yet I found that if I spoke confidently and had a clue I got more respect from the suited managers than I should have had. I guess they assumed I could get away with my lousy clothes because I must be really good!
After six months I delivered the new tool and got an amazing reception. Actually, no one ever used it. Another lesson, just because customers are insistent on what they want, they may actually need something else or maybe nothing.
We had paid for a new Jovial compiler/assembler and I was on the team to test it. I tested the assembler for the first time and got a nasty phone call from the mainframe operator - apparently the assembler had hammered the mainframe and filled his console with hundreds of errors. So I had to figure out what was wrong without a rerun, or risk having a console shoved up my, well you know. It turned out it was a bad hash algorithm, which I had never heard of before, which had a nearly endless loop in it. My lesson here was that every project teaches you something new, and that being able to analyze code "on paper" was a valuable skill.
Later I wrote a trigonometric runtime package for the new Jovial compiler. The new Mil Std 1750A processor we were going to use on the F16 had no support for sines, cosines, etc. So I got some books (yeah the paper kind!) from the library and tried to figure out how to calculate them. My biggest fear afterwards was that I would read a newspaper headline someday "F16 Pilot Killed In Dogfight After Missile Fails To Launch Due To Slow Sine Function". But it was really complex coding and I discovered I could do things I didn't understand at the start and still succeed. No clue if my code ever flew though.
During my second year I got friendly with the two guys in the group next door - the Microcomputer Lab. I desperately wanted in but my manager kept saying no. Then a miracle happened. The President of GD asked three VPs to get someone to build him something that would allow him to read email at home on his son's Apple II+ with its 40 column screen.
They ignored him for months. Bad idea. One day he asked for the software and they told him it would be ready by the following Saturday. Of course they hadn't done anything. Now a global panic search started to find someone who could write 6502 assembler for an Apple II, and do it in a week. My buddies in the ML asked me if I could do it and of course I said yes (I knew a little but never more than short bits of assembly). So I jumped into the lab where the VP's had procured an Apple III and some sample code from Apple on doing serial IO. All of the VPs and a bunch of other random people from all over the company were in the room - to watch me code. Talk about extreme programming. I had to write a VT-100 emulator in a week in assembly I had to learn with all these anxious people watching. Yikes!
So after an incredibly long week we got to Saturday and I was able to demo it successfully and they took a floppy with the app on it and apparently the President loved it so much he wanted everyone to get a copy. Of course he could have bought a commercial one for about 60 bucks but when you are a defense contractor, who cares about savings! Now my manager wanted me back, but I used the magical power of 3 VPs to convince him otherwise.
The first lesson I learned from this was that volunteering to do the impossible has many benefits. The biggest lesson was that I could actually do the impossible under pressure.
My old manager did ask for a final report on whatever I was working on so I used a magical device that sat on my new desk - an Apple Lisa we had on loan. My first experience with a mouse and bitmapped display made me a believer.
GD was just getting into IBM PC's and I was sent to a training class on setting them up and upgrading them so I could become a resource. Today that all seems quaint. But once I got back I memorized every single catalog and tech note, and wound up being a resource for not only GD but also the entire local IBM sales force as I knew more about the subject than anyone else they knew. The lesson here was knowledge is power, and being helpful to everyone makes you far more valuable.
I wrote a bunch of new custom Apple II email reader versions. One day I got sick of how much money GD was wasting on this and decided to call the President of GD and tell him he was a moron. Needless to say I was gang tackled by everyone in the room!
The biggest project at the F16 plant was a new receiving inspection system. The F16 plant is a mile long and raw materials and parts come in one end, and planes out the other (basically we ate metal and pooped Falcons). All the incoming stuff had to be tested. They were going to spend $10Mil on building a system running on IBM Cobol on an IBM PC/XT (the first PC with a hard drive), talking with an IBM Series 1 that then talked to the IBM Mainframe. The only missing piece was a communications system that would handle the Cobol app and talk to the Series 1.
I had just gone to the West Coast Computer Faire, where I bought a copy of the new Turbo Pascal which Philipe Kahn was selling out of a 10x10 booth filled with boxes. This was my first IDE, and I haven't been without one since. I built a memory resident module that run underneath the Cobol app. First I discovered that the hard drive driver stopped all interrupts when it accessed the drive, which dropped a high speed serial connection. So they actually sent me to IBM to work with the driver engineers to figure out a system where a notification happened right before it did anything, giving a serial handler time to tell the target to stop sending. Man, this sounds so lame today, but this was uncharted territory then.
In the midst of this a crisis developed. Apparently a manager levels above me decided he wanted a computer on his desk to impress his peers. The next thing I knew the intermediate managers were packing up my PC/XT to give to him! I had to yell at them that the $10Mil project hinged on the work I was doing and without a computer I could do nothing. Now being a friend to all those sales people at IBM paid off, and we got some fancy plasma 4 mainframe session "computer" to put on the guys desk, which of course he had no use for, but it was orange and glowed!
After completing this project I decided to go off and do a startup in late 1984, which at the time was bizarre to everyone there. But that's another story, one that got me on this page.
A year later a group of guys from the ML group came by and wondered if I had kept a copy of the source code to my serial module. Apparently they had lost both the computer and my documented and archived disks!
So after my first 3 years (and now 10%) of my career, the lessons I learned still affect me today.
1. If you speak confidently and know your subject people may actually respect you, even if you're not much more than a kid.
2. Every project good or bad has lessons for you. You can never stop learning.
3. People may insist on telling you what they want, but often it is not what they need.
4. Knowing how to read and understand source code is a valuable skill.
5. Doing the impossible can be a lot of fun, either you succeed and be the hero, or if you fail, well, it's impossible.
6. Knowledge is power, and being willing to share it and be helpful gains you a lot of friends.
7. Sometimes you have to fight for what is best for the project or even the company.
8. The biggest lesson might have been that with every new technology comes new opportunities and it behooves you to keep up as you never know where your career might take you.
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Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Specter has questions on the Patriot Act, where are the Democrats?
"This closed-door briefing was for specifics," Mr. Specter said after emerging from the session on Tuesday. "They didn't have specifics."
That's from Eric Lichtblau's "Specter Voices Frustration Over Briefing on Patriot Act." Opposition to the Patriot Act is not a partisan issue. That said, one has to wonder where the Democrats are? Is Lichtblau ignoring them or was this another issue they decided to take a passon yesterday?
If it's the latter, exactly what does it take to make them stand up and speak out? If Democrats want to be leaders they need to start acting like leaders. We didn't see a great deal of leadership yesterday (as reported by the Times).
From the article:
Mr. Specter's blunt displeasure could mean political complications for the Bush administration in seeking to extend parts of the antiterrorism law that expire at the end of the year. The White House has made the renewal of the law a top legislative priority, but an unusual coalition of liberal civil rights groups, conservative libertarians, privacy advocates, library officials and gun rights supporters has emerged in urging Congress to consider narrowing some of the powers.
Are Democrats waiting to see which way the wind blows on this one? (If they are, as Specter notes in the article, the public is voicing doubts and concerns.)
We'll end discussion of this morning's Times by noting this item from "World Briefing" that Kara wanted noted:
The spokesman for the country's judiciary said the judges had rejected a demand by Canada to return the remains of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who died while in detention in Tehran in 2003, for an autopsy. "Even though she had Canadian citizenship, an Iranian court will investigate her case because she was an Iranian citizen," he said. An Iranian doctor, Shahram Azam, who is in exile in Canada, said this month that he had examined Ms. Kazemi in Tehran and had seen signs that she had been tortured and raped while in custody. Iran's position is that Ms. Kazemi, 54, died after falling and hitting her head. In Canada, a spokesman for Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew, denounced Iran's decision, saying it was consistent with its "pattern of cover-up and lies." Nazila Fathi (NYT)
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Can you believe what a disaster the launch of the badly misnamed Affordable Care Act is turning out to be? It seems that the reality is even worse than many critics predicted.
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In Front of Your Nose
Many recent statements in the press have declared that it is almost, if not quite, impossible for us to mine as much coal as we need for home and export purposes, because of the impossibility of inducing a sufficient number of miners to remain in the pits. One set of figures which I saw last week estimated the annual ‘wastage’ of mine workers at 60,000 and the annual intake of new workers at 10,000. Simultaneously with this — and sometimes in the same column of the same paper — there have been statements that it would be undesirable to make use of Poles or Germans because this might lead to unemployment in the coal industry. The two utterances do not always come from the same sources, but there must certainly be many people who are capable of holding these totally contradictory ideas in their heads at a single moment.
This is merely one example of a habit of mind which is extremely widespread, and perhaps always has been. Bernard Shaw, in the preface to Androcles and the Lion, cites as another example the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, which starts off by establishing the descent of Joseph, father of Jesus, from Abraham. In the first verse, Jesus is described as ‘the son of David, the son of Abraham,’ and the genealogy is then followed up through fifteen verses: then, in the next verse but one, it is explained that as a matter of fact Jesus was not descended from Abraham, since he was not the son of Joseph. This, says Shaw, presents no difficulty to a religious believer, and he names as a parallel case the rioting in the East End of London by the partisans of the Tichborne Claimant, who declared that a British working man was being done out of his rights.[1]
Medically, I believe, this manner thinking is called schizophrenia: at any rate, it is the power of holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out. Closely allied to it is the power of ignoring facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later. It is especially in our political thinking that these vices flourish. Let me take a few sample subjects out of the hat. They have no organic connexion with each other: they are merely cased, taken almost at random, of plain, unmistakable facts being shirked by people who in another part of their mind are aware to those facts.
Hong Kong. For years before the war everyone with knowledge of Far Eastern conditions knew that our position in Hong Kong was untenable and that we should lose it as soon as a major war started. This knowledge, however, was intolerable, and government after government continued to cling to Hong Kong instead of giving it back to the Chinese. Fresh troops were even pushed into it, with the certainty that they would be uselessly taken prisoner, a few weeks before the Japanese attack began. The war came, and Hong Kong promptly fell — as everyone had known all along that it would do.
Conscription. For years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective. I know very well the arguments that are put forward in defence of this attitude; some of them are justified, but in the main they are simply forensic excuses. As late as 1939, the Labour Party voted against conscription, a step which probably played its part in bringing about the Russo-German Pact and certainly had a disastrous effect on morale in France. Then came 1940 and we nearly perished for lack of a large, efficient army, which we could only have had if we had introduced conscription at least three years earlier.
The Birthrate. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, contraception and enlightenment were held to be almost synonymous. To this day, the majority of people argue — the argument is variously expressed, but always boils down to more or less the same thing — that large families are impossible for economic reasons. At the same time, it is widely known that the birthrate is highest among the low-standard nations, and, in our population, highest among the worst-paid groups. It is also argued that a smaller population would mean less unemployment and more comfort for everybody, while on the other hand it is well established that a dwindling and ageing population is faced with calamitous and perhaps insoluble economic problems. Necessarily the figures are uncertain, but it is quite possible that in only seventy years our population will amount to about eleven millions, over half of whom will be Old Age Pensioners. Since, for complex reasons, most people don’t want large families, the frightening facts can exist some where or other in their consciousness, simultaneously known and not known.
U.N.O. In order to have any efficacy whatever, a world organization must be able to override big states as well as small ones. It must have power to inspect and limit armaments, which means that its officials must have access to every square inch of every country. It must also have at its disposal an armed force bigger than any other armed force and responsible only to the organization itself. The two or three great states that really matter have never even pretended to agree to any of these conditions, and they have so arranged the constitution of U.N.O. that their own actions cannot even be discussed. In other words, U.N.O.’s usefulness as an instrument of world peace is nil. This was just as obvious before it began functioning as it is now. Yet only a few months ago millions of well-informed people believed that it was going to be a success.
[1] Roger Charles Tichborne (1829-1854), heir to a large estate in Hampshire, was lost at sea in 1854. His mother refused to accept that her son was dead and, when she learned that a butcher working in Wagga Wagga, Australia, claimed to be the heir, she recognised his claim. This led to a trial in 1871-72, marked by conflicting evidence, which resulted in his being declared an impostor. His true identity was said to be Arthur Orton, of Wapping (a dockland area of London). In 1874 he was found guilty of perjury and imprisoned. He was released in 1884 and died a pauper in 1898. At first he won great popular support, but eventually became, literally, a ‘music-hall joke’. Harry Relph (1867-1928), a music-hall comedian, was required to change his stage name and called himself ‘Little Tich’, a nickname he had been given as a child owing to his facial likeness to Orton, but being diminutive in size, this led to the word ‘tich’, for a small person, being introduced into the language. Peter Davison
Tribune, 22 March 1946.
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In Which It's Not Gay Unless The Boobs Touch
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by Molly Lambert
Just because The L Word is over doesn't mean you're at a loss for hot same-sex television pairings. Forget the endless seduction wankfest that is Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf, it's all about the tender loving care made manifest by Blair and Serena.
If you're in the dark about "shipping" and what it means for a Big Love fan to "ship" Barb and Margene, you can learn up at Fan Secrets. Unless you'd rather just not know about the dark underbelly of the internet. It's a strange and deviant world.
Blair: "sorry Chuck. I love you but I've chosen dykeness."
Kanye And The Real Girl
power lesbians Amber Rose and Pink planning a business lunch
Kanye's girl got a (ex) girlfriend
Pretty sure Amber Rose's ex girl could take Kanye in a fight.
Perpetual belle of twitter John Mayer has a man-boner for Kanye, likes sex and he's good at it.
More pictures of Kanye and new girlfriend Amber Rose
channeling Lady Gaga and Archie Andrews
Beyonce and Bey-Z, the ultimate in being a diva
Keri Hilson and a still mulleted Kanye reenact the androgynous Andrew McCarthy and Ally Sheedy sex scene from St. Elmo's Fire which we wrote about recently.
Kelly Clarkson's new single "I Do Not Hook Up" is about eschewing casual sex in favor of a longer lasting emotional connection. It was written by Katy Perry, of last year's bisexual crossover hit "I Kissed A Girl."
I'm a ninth wave feminist. What does that mean? You'll find out when you get here. Get on my level, womyn.
Other Gay Couples We Like:
Steve Buscemi and Paul Rudd (kute!!!)
Jason Segel and Alex Carnevale's favorite actor Jack McBrayer
Jason Segel and Paul Rudd do "Dracula's Lament"
Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording
I Do Not Hook Up - Kelly Clarkson: (mp3)
Don't Let Me Stop You - Kelly Clarkson: (mp3)
Long Shot - Kelly Clarkson: (mp3)
Scarlett Johansson ♥s Natalie Portman
The 9 Year Old Pickup Artist
Blair And Chuck And Devin The Dude 4 Eva
This Recording Is A Boston Marriage Between Equals
In Which We Have Had It With Those Little Versions of Ourselves
from an issue of Granta magazine in the mid-1990s
The Case Against Babies
Babies, babies, babies. There's a plague of babies. Too many rabbits or elephants or mustangs or swans brings out the myxomatosis, the culling guns, the sterility drugs, the scientific brigade of egg smashers. Other species can 'strain their environments' or 'overrun their range' or clash with their human 'neighbours', but human babies are always welcome at life's banquet. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome--Live Long and Consume! You can't draw the line when it comes to babies because . . . where are you going to draw the line?
Consider having none or one and be sure to stop after two the organization Zero Population Growth suggests politely. Can barely hear them what with all the babies squalling. Hundreds of them popping out every minute. Ninety-seven million of them each year. While legions of other biological life forms go extinct (or, in the creepy phrase of ecologists, 'wink out'), human life bustles self-importantly on. Those babies just keep coming! They've gone way beyond being 'God's gift'; they've become entitlements. Everyone's having babies, even women who can't have babies, particularly women who can't have babies--they're the ones who sweep fashionably along the corridors of consumerism with their double-wide strollers, stuffed with twins and triplets. (Women push those things with the effrontery of someone piloting a bulldozer, which strollers uncannily bring to mind.)
When you see twins or triplets do you think awahhh or owhoo or that's sort of cool, that's unusual, or do you think that woman dropped a wad on in vitro fertilization, twenty-five, thirty thousand dollars at least . . . ?
While much effort has been expended in Third World countries educating women into a range of options which does not limit their role merely to bearing children, well-off, educated and indulged American women are clamouring for babies, babies, BABIES to complete their status. They've had it all and now they want a baby. And women over thirty-five want them NOW. They're the ones who opt for the aggressive fertility route, they're impatient, they're sick of being laissez-faire about this. Sex seems such a laborious way to go about it. At this point they don't want to endure all that intercourse over and over and maybe get no baby. What a waste of time! And time's awasting. A life with no child would be a life perfecting hedonism a forty-something infertile woman said, now the proud owner of pricey twins. Even women who have the grace to submit to fate can sound wistful. It's not so much that I wish that I had children now, a travel writer said, but that I wish I had had them. I hate to fail at anything. Women are supposed to wish and want and not fail. (Lesbians want to have babies too and when lesbians have babies watch out! They lay names on them like Wolf.)
The eighties were a decade when it was kind of unusual to have a baby. Oh, the lower classes still had them with more or less gusto, but professionals did not. Having a baby was indeed so quaintly rebellious and remarkable that a publishing niche was developed for men writing about babies, their baby, their baby's first year in which every single day was recorded (he slept through the night . . . he didn't sleep through the night . . . ). The writers would marvel over the size of their infant's scrotum; give advice on how to tip the obstetrician (not a case of booze, a clock from Tiffany's is nicer); and bemusedly admit that their baby exhibited intelligent behaviour like rolling over, laughing and showing fascination with the TV screen far earlier than normal children. Aside from the talk about the poopie and the rashes and the cat's psychological decline, these books frequently contained a passage, an overheard bit of Mommy-to-Baby monologue along these lines: I love you so much I don't ever want you to have teeth or stand up or walk or go on dates or get married. I want you to stay right here with me and be my baby . . . Babies are one thing. Human beings are another. We have way too many human beings. Almost everyone knows this.
Adoption was an eighties thing. People flying to Chile, all over the globe, God knows where, returning triumphantly with their BABY. It was difficult, adventurous, expensive and generous. It was trendy then. People were into adopting bunches of babies in all different flavours and colours (Korean, Chinese, part-Indian--part-Indian was very popular; Guatemalan--Guatemalan babies are way cute). Adoption was a fad, just like the Cabbage Patch dolls which fed the fad to tens of thousands of pre-pubescent girl consumers.
There are several rooms at Babyland General. One of them is devoted to the premies (all snug in their little gowns, each in its own spiffy incubator) and another is devoted to the cabbage patch itself, a suggestive mound with a fake tree on it from which several times a day comes the announcement CABBAGE IN LABOUR! A few demented moments later, a woman in full nurse regalia appears from a door in the tree holding a brand-new Cabbage Patch Kid by the feet and giving it a little whack on the bottom. All around her in the fertile patch are happy little soft heads among the cabbages. Each one of these things costs $175, and you have to sign papers promising to care for it and treasure it forever. There are some cheesy dolls in boxes that you wouldn't have to adopt, but children don't want those--they want to sign on the line, want the documentation, the papers. The dolls are all supposed to be different but they certainly look identical. They've got tiny ears, big eyes, a pinched rictus of a mouth and lumpy little arms and legs. The colours of the cloth vary for racial verisimilitude, but their expressions are the same. They're glad to be here and they expect everything.
baby ashton
Adoptive parents must feel a little out of it these days, so dreadfully dated in the nineties. Adoption--how foolishly sweet. It's so Benetton, so kind of naive. With adopted babies, you just don't know, it's too much of a crap shoot. Oh, they told you that the father was an English major at Yale and that the mother was a brilliant mathematician and harpsichordist who was just not quite ready to juggle career and child, but what are you going to think when the baby turns into a kid who rather than showing any talent whatsoever is trying to drown the dog and set national parks on fire? Adoptive parents do their best, of course, at least as far as their liberal genes allow; they look into the baby's background, they don't want just any old baby (even going to the dog and cat pound you'd want to pick and choose, right?); they want a pleasant, healthy one, someone who will appreciate the benefits of a nice environment and respond to a nurturing and attentive home. They steer away (I mean, one has to be realistic, one can't save the world) from the crack and smack babies, the physically and mentally handicapped babies, the HIV and foetal-alcoholic syndrome babies.
Genes matter, more and more, and adoption is just too . . . where's the connection? Not a single DNA strand to call your own. Adoption signifies you didn't do everything you could; you were too cheap or shy or lacked the imagination to go the energetic fertility route which, when successful, would come with the assurance that some part of the Baby or Babies would be a continuation of you, or at the very least your companion, loved one, partner, whatever.
baby oprah
There was a terrible fright among humankind recently when some scientists suggested that an abundance of synthetic chemicals was causing lower sperm counts in human males--awful, awful, awful--but this proves not to be the case; sperm counts are holding steady and are even on the rise in New York. Los Angeles males don't fare as well (do they drink more water than beer?), nor do the Chinese who, to add insult to insult, are further found to have smaller testicles, a finding which will undoubtedly result in even more wildlife mutilation in the quest for aphrodisiacs. Synthetic chemicals do 'adversely affect' the reproductive capabilities of non-human animals (fish, birds), but this is considered relatively unimportant. It's human sperm that's held in high regard and in this overpopulated age it's become more valuable--good sperm that is, from intelligent, athletic men who don't smoke, drink, do drugs, have AIDS or a history of homicide--because this overpopulated age is also the donor age. Donor sperm, donor womb, donor eggs. Think of all the eggs that are lost to menstruation every month.
Baby's lineage can be a little complicated in this one big worldwebby family. With the help of drugs like Clomid and Perganol there are an awful lot of eggs out there these days-all being harvested by those rich and clever, clever doctors in a 'simple procedure' and nailed with bull's-eye accuracy by a spermatozoon. One then gets to 'choose' among the resulting cell clumps (or the doctor gets to choose, he's the one who knows about these things), and a number of them (for optimum success) are inserted into the womb, sometimes the mother's womb and sometimes not. These fertilized eggs, unsurprisingly, often result in multiple possibilities, which can be decreased by 'selective reduction'. They're not calendar babies yet, they're embryos, and it is at this point, the multiple possibility point, that the mother-to-be often gets a little overly ecstatic, even greedy, thinking ahead perhaps to the day when they're not babies any longer, the day when they'll be able to amuse themselves by themselves like a litter of kittens or something--if there's a bunch of them all at once there'll be no need to go through that harrowing process of finding appropriate playmates for them. She starts to think Nannies probably don't charge that much more for three than for two or heaven knows we've got enough money or we wouldn't have gotten into all this in the first place. And many women at the multiple-possibility point, after having gone through pretty much all the meddling and hubris that biomedical technology has come up with, say demurely, I don't want to play God (I DON'T WANT TO PLAY GOD?) or It would be grotesque to snuff one out to improve the odds for the others or Whatever will be will be.
So triplets happen, and even quads and quints (network television is still interested in quints). And as soon as the multiples, or even the less prestigious single baby, are old enough to toddle into daycare, they're responsibly taught the importance of their one and only Earth, taught the 3Rs--Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Too many people (which is frequently considered undesirable--gimme my space!) is caused by too many people (it's only logical) but it's mean to blame the babies, you can't blame the babies, they're innocent. Those poor bean counters at the United Nations Population Fund say that at current growth rates, the world will double its population in forty years. Overpopulation poses the greatest threat to all life on earth, but most organizations concerned with this problem don't like to limit their suggestions to the most obvious one--DON'T HAVE A BABY!--because it sounds so negative. Instead, they provide additional, more positive tips for easing the pressures on our reeling environment such as car pooling or tree planting. (A portion of the proceeds from that adorable bestselling BABIES calendar goes to the Arbor Day Foundation for the planting of trees.)
Some would have it that not having a baby is disallowing a human life, horribly inappropriate in this world of rights. Everyone has rights; the unborn have rights; it follows that the unconceived have rights. (Think of all those babies pissed off at the fact that they haven't even been thought of yet.) Women have the right to have babies (we've fought so hard for this), and women who can't have babies have an even bigger right to have them. These rights should be independent of marital or economic status, or age. (Fifty- and sixty-something moms tend to name their babies after the gynaecologist.) The reproduction industry wants fertility treatments to be available to anyone and says that it wouldn't all be so expensive if those recalcitrant insurance companies and government agencies like Medicare and Medicaid weren't so cost-conscious and discriminatory and would just cough up the money.
It's not as though you have to take out a permit to have a baby, be licensed or anything. What about the rights of a poor, elderly, feminist cancer patient who is handicapped in some way (her car has one of those stickers . . . ) who wants to assert her right to independent motherhood and feels entitled to both artificial insemination into a gestational 'hostess' and the right to sex selection as a basis for abortion should the foetus turn out to be male when she wants a female? Huh? What about her? Or what about the fifteen-year-old of the near future who kind of wants to have her baby even though it means she'll be stuck with a kid all through high school and won't be able to go out with her friends any more who discovers through the wonders of amniocentesis and DNA analysis that the baby is going to turn out fat, and the fifteen-year-old just can't deal with fat and shouldn't have to . . . ? Out goes the baby with the bathwater.
But these scenarios are involved merely with messy political or ethical issues, the problematical, somewhat gross by-products of technological and marketing advances. Let the philosophers and professional ethicists drone on and let the baby business boom. Let the courts figure it out. Each day brings another more pressing problem. Implanted with their weak-cervixed daughter's eggs and their son-in-law's sperm, women become pregnant with their own grandchildren; frozen embryos are inadvertently thawed; eggs are pirated; eggs are harvested from aborted foetuses; divorced couples battle over the fate of cryopreserved material. 'We have to have better regulation of the genetic product--eggs, sperm and embryos--so we can legally determine who owns what,' a professor of law and medicine at a California university says plaintively. (Physicians tend to oppose more regulation however, claiming that it would 'impede research'.)
While high-tech nations are refining their options eugenically and quibbling litigiously, the inhabitants of low-tech countries are just having babies. The fastest growth in human numbers in all history is going to take place in a single generation, an increase of almost five billion people (all of whom started out as babies). Ninety-seven per cent of the surge is going to take place in developing countries, with Africa alone accounting for thirty-five per cent of it (the poorer the country, the higher the birth rate, that's just the way it is). These babies are begotten in more 'traditional', doubtless less desperate ways, and although they are not considered as fashion statements, they're probably loved just as much as upper-class western babies (or that singular one-per-family Chinese boy baby) and are even considered productive assets when they get a little older and can labour for the common good of their large families by exploiting more and more, scarcer and scarcer resources.
Yet we burble along, procreating, and in the process suffocating thousands of other species with our selfishness. We're in a baby glut, yet it's as if we've just discovered babies, or invented them. Reproduction is sexy. Assisted reproduction is cool. The announcement that a movie star is going to have a baby is met with breathless wonder. A BABY! Old men on their third marriage regard their new babies with 'awe' and crow about the 'ultimate experience' of parenting. Bruce Springsteen found 'salvation' with the birth of his son. When in doubt, have a baby. When you've tried it all, champagne, cocaine, try a baby. Pop icons who trudged through a decade of adulation and high living confess upon motherhood, This Baby Saved My Life. Bill Gates, zillionaire founder of Microsoft, is going to have (this is so wonderful) a BABY. News commentators are already speculating: will fatherhood take away his edge, his drive; will it diminish his will to succeed, to succeed, to succeed? National Public Radio recently interviewed other high-powered CEO dads as to that ghastly possibility.
baby bjork
"Tony Hart's Revenge Theme" - Halves (mp3)
"Burial on a Windfarm" - Halves (mp3)
"Take Exact Revenge" - Halves (mp3)
Celebrity Couples Presage The Apocalypse
We Remake Every Movie Using Nicholas Cage As The Lead
Herbie: The Car That Fucked A Girl
BB Winston Churchill Reads TR
In Which We Enter The Box
Feeling Elbows, Rubbing Queasy
by Molly Young
Through a couple of flukes (acquaintances, a cousin involved in the ownership) I've ended up at The Box twice in one week. The Box is a club in downtown Manhattan. It has a live burlesque show and a drinks list featuring $13,000 champagne (did I read that correctly?)
As with many such places, The Box adheres to a mystical door policy. On Visit #1 I was told to say "SUGAR RAY" as a password. On Visit #2 I was not allowed inside until my cousin poked his head out the door and identified me like a perp in a police lineup. Casual humiliation: a staple of the nightlife.
On both visits the atmosphere inside reminded me of an Edith Wharton novel. It is moneyed, socially complex, and devoted to elaborate carousing. The club is full of thoughtful details: paper bags of popcorn, servers in old-tymey costume, live music and a red velvet curtain. There are bottles of Grey Goose the size of rain sticks. It is the kind of thing that sends a ticker tape of WHOA! through your mind.
Whenever I find myself in an elevated position, I always look for something to throw at the people below me. Peanuts, popcorn, coupons.
It is a bizarre place to be - a spectacle with all the theoretical implications of that word. "Fellini-esque circus" works too. Like any cultural Petri dish, The Box felt emblematic and puzzling all at once. Worthy of a witness, certainly, and some documentation. I'll give a little overview of the show we saw on Visit #2 (it was mostly the same show as Visit #1, but shuffled around.) Analysis will follow.
The first act (though it changes from night to night) had a Persian theme. There was a naked blonde babe wriggling on a chaise while a sultan tickled her with a pink feather. Throughout the room men leaned toward their friends and said, "Check it out."
Oh, a brief interruption. On the first night we'd been seated in a balcony booth. The second night we were on a sofa directly in front of the stage. From the balcony, the performers had appeared perfect. From up close the show was less magical. You could see backstage, for one thing, and you could tally the natural flaws of the performers' bodies: stray zits, heavy makeup, pubic stubble.
I hope that crop is made of licorice!
After the Persian act a contortionist came onstage and balanced his entire body on a strap-on penis attached to his assistant. Cool. Then there was a medley featuring a comic midget and some vaudeville renditions of Billy Idol and Rolling Stones songs.
The best acts were the ones with some sort of intellectual component. A girl dressed as Hitler performed a skillful striptease that felt like antique political satire. One routine had a dancer in traditional costume emerge from a Matryoshka doll to perform a Russian dance. At one point she lifted her dress, squatted over a pedestal, and ejected a mini doll from her vagina. (Cue hooting.) More traditional dance. As a finale, she squatted again over the ejected doll and hoovered it back up. The final routine that I can remember was incest-oriented. Details elided here.
Now, let me ask you a question. Do you have a switch in your head that you can flick in order to extinguish moral judgments? Like for when you go see stand-up comedy or a Wayans brothers movie, or when you listen to George Carlin on headphones? There are certain things you can't enjoy, I mean, without suppressing your moral responses. Turning off the switch is the equivalent of playing a game: you acknowledge that it is a temporary situation in which certain rules need to apply in order to have fun.
Shoes on the bed: uncouth.
Well, The Box presents quite a challenge to this switch. There is so much to delight in: the naked girls, the atmosphere, the drinks, the show. And yet, there is so much to panic over! One thing that is apparent from the start is that There Are No Rules For the Rich. Inside the club you can smoke cigarettes and ash them on the floor, straddle your boyfriend amid 300 strangers, laughingly refer to the financial straits of third-world countries and do drugs. No one is held accountable for their bad behavior. Outsiders like us will always find such an atmosphere uncomfortable. At some moments it felt sinister.
"Decadent" might be the exact word for The Box. I should clarify, though, because "decadent" is so often misused as an adjective. Molten chocolate cake, for instance, is not decadent (though it is tasty.) For something to count as decadent, it has to have a strong element of waste and disregard. A touch of pre-apocalypse. Images that recurred to me at The Box: sinking of the Titanic, court of Louis XVI, Tsar Nicholas II.
Allegory alert!
With the economy dissolving into paste, the bar for decadence is falling. Things that used to seem like standard elements of celebrity glamour (private jets, $30,000 handbags) are quickly becoming distasteful. What was glitzy is now gauche. I wonder how Kanye West will adapt.
And what about The Box? Hard to say. When we took the J back to Bushwick at 4 AM (sprinting from the subway stop all the way home because it was the first chilly night of the season), I had that metaphysical hangover you get when you've snooped through someone's journal or eaten your roommate's peanut butter straight from the jar. Bad feelings, both.
Molly Young is the contributing editor to This Recording. Here is her website.
Get that dog out of frame, pls.
"We Have To Respect Each Other" - Department of Eagles (mp3)
"Forty Dollar Rug" - Department of Eagles (mp3)
"Family Romance" - Department of Eagles (mp3)
Danny on the double feature.
Danish burned Malibu to the ground.
Barely safe links for work.
In Which We Look Back Through the Internet, Darkly
by Georgia Hardstark
"The Flood" - Simon Bookish (mp3)
"Alsatian Dog" - Simon Bookish (mp3)
The hair makes the man in No Country for Old Men.
Venus and Serena remind us of the future.
John C. Reilly’s beautiful singing voice.
In Which We Pay It Backward
A Test
by Julia McCloy
I could stay in bed.
Like my momma said don't just do something.
Sit around instead.
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Harvard’s Segregated Gym. The U.S. is not far behind you, Brit’s. It’s called Appeasement. Which means, ‘they’ win.
On February 4, 2008, in an act of segregation disguised as “collaboration,” Harvard University set the clock back fifty years by agreeing to ban men from a popular university gym for six hours each week to appease Muslim women. Harvard University spokesman Robert Mitchell stated to me that this was done at the behest of a group of women “whose religion does not allow them to remove their burqas and/or hijab in the presence of men.”
“A group of Muslim women made a request, we thought it was reasonable,” Harvard athletics spokesman Matt Lavoie told me in an interview. “It’s a religious issue, that’s all.”
Pajamas Media
They have the gall, to call Harvard an Institution of “Higher Learning’? Keep genuflecting Harvard…Easier to behead that way.
9 Responses to “Harvard’s Segregated Gym. The U.S. is not far behind you, Brit’s. It’s called Appeasement. Which means, ‘they’ win.”
1. yojimbo Says:
I’m somewhat confused( no shock there!) by one aspect of this whole process. I just thought of it. Some of these women must be single. How many stories have we seen over the recent years about single women being beaten, or worse, over being in the company of men without an escort by their brother or whatever. So these women are bipping around Harvard and mingling with single men (in classes,etc.) in full dress?
There is probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this but I just find this somewhat wierd after all of the stories we have seen over the recent years. Maybe someone has a better grasp on this. Does this juxtapositon seem wierd to anyone else here?
2. tizona Says:
There is (and please good friend, do not take this in the wrong manner) NO “grasp” to and of this. Caving at one time, had an entirely different meaning.
Pisser to come to the realiztaion that the ones in caves are in actuallity us, not these “religious Islamists”.
3. yojimbo Says:
I know we caved. Why would you be surprised.
My point is that I find it hard to believe that these same women are bipping around Harvard for the other X hours of the week. Is there an actual victims group here or is it more of a powerplay by some CAIR type of group to flex its muscle on campus? What were they doing before this ruling came down, flunking PE or something?
4. Angus Dei Says:
See, if the ACLU weren’t just a bunch of self-loathing Jewish shysters, they would have already filed a lawsuit over this.
5. yojimbo Says:
Just a few more “thoughts” and then I’ll shut my yap.
These are Buraq people, meaning they are heavy hitters. The people who don’t want their women educated AT ALL are going to send them to a NON-COMPULSORY form of higher education.
So Muckmoud the tyrant sez to his darling little daughter “Sure,go ahead and mingle with all those single white guys on campus just don’t boink them on the first date. Just watchout for that gym class and the Canadian bacon on that pizza but as for the rest of it-just go for it. Try women’s studies while your there, I here it’s great.
I just question the authenticity of the victim’s group in the first place. Now I’ll go away.
6. yojimbo Says:
*burqa* even!
7. tizona Says:
There isn’t a time that I can ever conceive, that I nor anyone else here, would want the Yo’man to “shut A yap”.
8. bingbingloveshisblingbling Says:
Still haven’t worked out which is the greater threat to the West. The Left or Islam?
A moot point, probably.
9. nilk Says:
The Left.
If we didn’t have to fight the Leftards, our society wouldn’t be so weak that we’d need to fight the jihadis.
Well, SAY something...
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Staying Mindful in a Connected World
August 1, 2013. 96-minute dharma talk given by Thich Nhat Hanh from Lower Hamlet of Plum Village during the 2013 Summer Opening. This is the fifteenth talk of the summer and it is a session of questions and answers.
1. What can I do so my brother and I don’t argue anymore?
2. What can I do to not be stressed in school about time?
3. Why did you choose to make Plum Village?
4. How can get myself to sleep quickly when I have to get up early?
5. If there is an to the world, is there an end to everything?
Teens and Adults
1. How do you feel when you are deep in meditation?
2. Have you developed theories of the universe?
3. What does it mean to be a more mindful student and what are their responsibilities to the teacher?
4. A Japanese priest asks a question related to smiling and Japanese culture and Rinzai School. How do I combine smiling and austere Japanese culture?
5. How can the teachings help the people of Spain where unemployment is very high and we have a political crisis?
6. Can a person be mindful and still be “connected” to smartphones and social media?
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Belcrest Cemetery (Croisan Scenic Way Trail), Salem
Directions: Take I-5 to Kuebler exit, head West on Kuebler to Liberty, turn north on Liberty. Take Liberty all the way to Browning (Past Roths Sunnyslope) Turn West on Browning, Drive for about 1/2 mile until you see trees and sign shaped like a book, that says Belcrest Cemetary... Start running!
Another way to enter trail... Take Browning all the way to end, don't turn on the cloudview, but keep straight into dead end, you'll see a steep downhill path done by a tractor, run down and you can take a left or a right. (Go to trail map)
Trail Information: Although I don't know who keeps up trails, they are rather nice, not too loose. Trails are right behind cemetery and then some, Take about an hour to explore. You can run for about a 40 minute jog.
Miscellaneous Information: There's a landmark we call the "lost road" It seems like the surrounding neighborhoods were going to expand, but decided not to, leaving a road in the middle of the woods with no outlet, If you find it, you're in the middle of the trail, you can head either left or right and run for about 20 minutes
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AOL Travel
Petralia Soprana, Palermo
Petralia Soprana - Palermo, Italy
Petralia Soprana
Piazza del Popolo, Petralia Soprana, Italy 90026Map
+39 0921 684111
Neighborhood: Outside the City
The mountain village Petralia (also known as Petra) was named after the rocks ("pietra") that form the majority of the town's houses. It was inhabited by the Romans, and then the Normans, who built the fortification that still surrounds the town today. It is the highest village in the Madonie, the mountain region of Palermo.
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XAML—Code-Behind Class
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Visual C# Tutorials
.NET Framework Tutorials
© 2007 Matthew MacDonald
The Code-Behind Class
XAML allows you to construct a user interface, but in order to make a functioning application you need a way to connect the event handlers that have your application code. XAML makes this easy using the Class attribute that’s shown here:
1 <Window x:Class="WindowsApplication1.Window1"
The x namespace prefix places the Class attribute in the XAML namespace, which means this is a more general part of the XAML language. In fact, the Class attribute tells the XAML parser to generate a new class with the specified name. That class derives from the class that’s named by the XML element. In other words, this example creates a new class named WindowsApplication1.Window1, which derives from the base Window class.
The Window1 class is generated automatically at compile time. But here’s where things get interesting. You can supply a piece of the Window1 class that will be merged into the automatically generated portion. The piece you specify is the perfect container for your event handling code.
Note This magic happens through the C# feature known as partial classes. Partial classes allow you to split a class into two or more separate pieces for development and fuse them together in the compiled assembly. Partial classes can be used in a variety of code management scenarios, but they’re most useful in situations like these, where your code needs to be merged with a designer-generated file.
Visual Studio helps you out by automatically creating a partial class where you can place your event handling code. For example, if you create an application named WindowsApplication1, which contains a window named Window1 (as in the previous example), Visual Studio will start you out with this basic skeleton of a class:
namespace WindowsApplication1
/// <summary>
/// Interaction logic for Window1.xaml
/// </summary>
public partial class Window1 : Window
public Window1()
When you compile your application, the XAML that defines your user interface (such as Window1.xaml) is translated into CLR type declaration that is merged with the logic in your code-behind class file (such as Window1.xaml.cs) to form one single unit.
Currently, the Window1 class code doesn’t include any real functionality. However, it does include one important detail—the default constructor, which calls InitializeComponent() when you create an instance of the class.
Note The InitializeComponent() method plays a key role in WPF applications. For that reason, you should never delete the InitializeComponent() call in your window’s constructor. Similarly, if you add another constructor, make sure it also calls InitializeComponent().
The InitializeComponent() method isn’t visible in your source code because it’s generated when you compile your application. Essentially, all InitializeComponent() does is call the LoadComponent() method of the System.Windows.Application class. The LoadComponent() method extracts the BAML (the compiled XAML) from your assembly and uses it to build your user interface. As it parses the BAML, it creates each control, sets its properties, and attaches any event handlers.
Note If you can’t stand the suspense, jump ahead to the end of the chapter. You’ll see the code for the automatically generated InitializeComponent() method in the section "Code and Compiled XAML".
There’s one more detail to consider. In your code-behind class, you’ll often want to manipulate controls programmatically. For example, you might want to read or change properties or attach and detach event handlers on the fly. To make this possible, the control must include a XAML Name attribute. In the previous example, the Grid control does not include a Name attribute, so you won’t be able to manipulate it in your code-behind file.
Here’s how you can attach a name to the Grid:
6 <Grid x:Name="grid1">
7 </Grid>
You can make this change by hand in the XAML document, or you can select the grid in the Visual Studio designer and set the Name property using the Properties window.
Either way, the Name attribute tells the XAML parser to add a field like this to the automatically generated portion of the Window1 class:
private System.Windows.Controls.Grid grid1;
Now you can interact with the grid in your Window1 class code by using the name grid1:
MessageBox.Show(String.Format("The grid is {0}x{1} units in size.",
grid1.ActualWidth, grid1.ActualHeight));
This technique doesn’t add much for the simple grid example, but it becomes much more important when you need to read values in input controls such as text boxes and list boxes.
The Name property shown previously is part of the XAML language, and it’s used to help integrate your code-behind class. Somewhat confusingly, many classes define their own Name property. (One example is the base FrameworkElement class from which all WPF elements derive.) XAML parsers have a clever way of handling this. You can set either the XAML Name property (using the x: prefix) or the Name property that belongs to the actual element (by leaving out the prefix). Either way, the result is the same—the name you specify is used in the automatically generated code file and it’s used to set the Name property.
That means this markup is equivalent to what you’ve already seen:
<Grid Name="grid1">
This bit of magic only works if the class that includes the Name property decorates itself with the RuntimeNameProperty attribute. The RuntimeNameProperty indicates which property should be treated as the name for instances of that type. (Obviously, it’s usually the property that’s named Name.) The FrameworkElement class includes the RuntimeNameProperty attribute, so there’s no problem.
Tip In a traditional Windows Forms application, every control has a name. In a WPF application, the only elements that have names are ones that you want to manipulate programmatically. This simplifies your markup, and allows you to easily distinguish between fixed and dynamic portions of your user interface.
By now, you should have a basic understanding of how to interpret a XAML document that defines a window and how that XAML document is converted into a final compiled class (with the addition of any code you’ve written). In the next section, you’ll look at the property syntax in more detail and learn to wire up event handlers.
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Okla. authorities find 5 bodies in 2 cars in lake (12)
Salon.com 2013.09.18 06:13
By Associated Press Topics: From the Wires, 4 News, News ELK CITY, Okla. (AP) - Authorities in Oklahoma on Tuesday recovered two vehicles from a lake that contain the bodies of five people who may have been missing for decades. The cars recovered from Foss Lake in western Oklahoma may solve cold cases from the late 1950s and 1970.
CHEVROLET, LAKE, ELK, OKLAHOMA, CAR, DIVA, Rios, Johnson, Allen, Michael, Chevrolet, USA
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Making your own UML RPMs
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Making your own UML RPMs
Here is an easy way of making your User Mode Linux RPMs. Two reasons why you may want to do this:
• you want to try UML versions inbetween or more recent than those on the normal rpm release cycle - for example if an important bug is fixed for you
• you want a tailored configuration - for example particular file systems compiled in, or not as modules
You need to download uml-custom.spec (last modified 7th December 2003). You can edit the file to request any version of UML (2.4.x, 2.5.x and 2.6 based releases).
Your system needs to be able to build rpms and C programs. This generally means you need to have the rpm-build and gcc packages already installed.
You need to have the developer libraries available that UML depends on to compile. This is currently readline-devel.
First time setup
You should do your building as a non-root user. You will need to tell rpm where to do stuff. In this example I am going to use a subdirectory of my home directory - /home/rogerb/rpm
Create $HOME/.rpmmacros like the following, replacing the directory with where you want the output files to appear, and putting your own details in as the packager.
%_topdir /home/rogerb/rpm
%packager Roger Binns <>
Now create the rpm directory structure:
$ cd /home/rogerb
$ mkdir rpm
$ cd rpm
Building the RPM
You need to decide how you want your UML kernel configured. In particular, options need to be chosen for what filesystems are included, if they are built as modules, some networking configuration etc. Use this table to decide:
To do this Use this option
Default configuration No options
Copy the configuration from a file CONFIGFILE=filename
Copy the configuration from your currently installed UML (requires UML 2.4.18-16um or greater - uses linux --showconfig to obtain the configuration) CONFIGCOPY=yes
Interactively define the configuration yourself CONFIG=xconfig - this will give you a gui configuration. You can use menuconfig instead if you don't have X running.
Note: These options can be combined. For example if you would like to copy your existing UML configuration, but also edit it, you can use CONFIGCOPY=yes CONFIG=xconfig.
You can now build the rpm. Using the above example, you can build your rpm like this:
$ CONFIGCOPY=yes CONFIG=xconfig rpmbuild -ba uml-custom.spec
Installing it
When the rpm is fully built, it will appear below $HOME/rpm/RPMS or whatever directory you defined in $HOME/.rpmmacros.
If you already have a standard UML rpm installed, it must be uninstalled first as root.
# rpm -e user_mode_linux
You can now install your new UML rpm as root.
# rpm -i /home/rogerb/RPMS/i386/UML-2.4.18.custom.23um-1.i586.rpm
The last part of the filename will match the versioning information in the uml-custom.spec file.
Making changes and updates
If you want to produce another RPM with configuration changes, you should increment release in the spec file. This will then change the number on the end of the rpm version (for example the above one will become UML-2.4.18.custom.23um-2.i586.rpm
If you don't increment the release number, then rpm will refuse to upgrade. You can force rpm to install a new rpm even if it has the same release number, or even if it is a downgrade by supplying the --force flag. For example:
# rpm -U --force rpm
I recommend you change host filesystem (hostfs) configuration setting to be yes or no, not a module (module is the default setting for some UML versions).
You may wish to change the configuration control settings in the spec file instead of supplying environment variables.
This spec file will automatically download the kernel and required sources files if they are not already in the sources directory. The kernel source is 25MB so it will take a long time over a modem.
When newer versions of UML come out, simply change the version numbers as appropriate in the .spec file.
You should change the customname setting in the spec file to be your login or similar name. This is so you can distinguish who made that particular RPM or UML (or why it was made). The value of the setting becomes part of the RPM filename, as well as the kernel version. You can see the kernel version by running linux --version on the host or uname -r inside a UML session.
A source rpm is also produced and will be below .../rpm/SRPMS. If you want to rebuild it using the exact same settings, use
$ rpmbuild --rebuild UML-2.4.18.custom.23um-1.src.rpm
You can't do two concurrent builds of the same rpm (even different if they are different versions) as they will use the same build directory and stomp on each other.
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Jacksonville, FL 72° H 82°, L 52°
Higher Education Costs
Tuition could be going up for some students but not others if the findings from the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Higher Education are enacted.
Commissioned by Gov. Rick Scott, the task force was created to create strategies for improving the state’s public university system. The task force’s key findings include performance based funding, tuition variances to entice students, and expanding the role of the Board of Governors to include fund distribution and university president appointment.
Specific ways to accomplish this were not indicated in the 38-page report released last month, which Gov. Scott commissioned to address the rising cost of tuition for Florida students.
Excerpt from the Blue Ribbon Task Force’s official report published online at http://www.flhighered.org
Task force member and UNF President John Delaney said the money has to come from somewhere.
Delaney said when he became the president of the university the state subsidized around 70 percent of the cost of higher education, and students picked up the remaining 30 percent. The split now is closer to 50/50.
Students have not been quiet in the process. In an effort to keep that divide from widening further, the Florida Student Association has organized the Aim Higher Program. The program organizes rallies and letter writing campaigns to encourage the state legislators to increase funding for higher education.
Formerly if a full-time course load costs a university $100 dollars, the state legislature paid for $70 dollars of it, and the student paid the remaining $30 dollars as tuition fees. Now a student’s contribution is equal to the amount coming from the state, thus increasing the burden on the student.
Florida spends 30-40 percent less on each student on average when compared to other states, Delaney said.
“If tuition isn’t going to go up then state support is going to have to go up,” Delaney said.
One task force initiative is to freeze tuition for in demand science, technology, engineering and math majors, essentially altering the price of obtaining certain degrees. Currently the legal limit for increasing tuition is 15 percent, but if tuition for certain majors are frozen, other majors could quickly become more expensive.
According to a poll released by Quinnipiac University, approximately three-quarters of Florida voters are against the task force’s recommendations.
Sixty-six percent of voters oppose charging different tuition for different majors and 73 percent of voters oppose allowing certain high profile colleges to charge more in tuition than other state universities.
Delaney said that the state is hurt in the long run if higher education isn’t invested in.
Those sentiments were echoed by Student Body President Carlo Fassi who said education is an investment for the state and not simply an expenditure.
Fassi said UNF’s Student Government would be keeping an eye on how these initiatives would be put into action to ensure they are fair to students.
“We need to make sure that all our students, whatever degree they choose to pursue are being fairly subsidized by the state,” Fassi said.
Email Catherine Byerly at enterprise@unfspinnaker.com.
UNF Spinnaker © 2013
Official Media Source for the University of North Florida
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The Second Wedding of Doctor Geneva Song, by Robert N. Friedland – Review
Have you ever felt like you have slipped into someone else’s perverse dream? Not the nice kind, but the type where you feel as though you have been plunged into a bubbling, sticky mess of shallow characters, and the details of their sex lives? You don’t? Well, try reading Robert N. Friedland’s latest book The Second Wedding of Doctor Geneva Song to get the full experience.
The book is about a prominent, young Chinese doctor, Geneva Song, who marries Sam Victor, a Jewish lawyer 30 years her senior. She is very well off, thanks to her work and father’s shady business practices, though gives most of her money to the local Buddhist temple, where her “Spirit Sister”, Sister Deri, resides as a nun. Geneva has a blessed life, with a successful practice, and twin sons, conceived almost immediately into her and Sam’s relationship. Her life as she knows it is destroyed when her life long friend, Matthew, betrays her trust and rapes her, leaving her broken and leading to an ultimate betrayal of her values.
The novel is an easy read with the chapters broken up into bite-sized pieces. It’s set locally in Richmond and Vancouver, which was enjoyable, as I always find it fun when I recognize the settings in books. In all honesty, the book started out promising, and I fully expected to enjoy the story. Friedland sets the mood for a tale steeped in spiritualism and mysticism. Early on, he points out Sam’s borderline magical prediction of the conception of Geneva’s twin boys, Geneva’s family’s superstitious naming conventions and the existence of Geneva’s ‘Spirit Sister’, with whom she shares the same figure ‘8’ birth mark. However, any hope of an interesting fusion of mysticism and realism is soon snuffed out. Friedland attributes nothing more than lip service to this notion before unceremoniously dumping the baby with the bathwater and focusing instead on the sexual indiscretions and tedious secrets of a web of characters. The book quickly becomes dull and pointless with no driving force behind the storyline.
In addition to the weak storyline, the major problem lies in Friedland’s character development. He fails to create realistic characters, and I had no reason to care about any of the people in his book. A brief history is given for everyone, but outside of this I couldn’t identify any of their other traits that were not related to their occupation or sexual interests. Presumably in order to give the story some life, sex is deeply entrenched in the plot, and from my reading, is really the only reason for the inclusion of female characters. The three main women in Friedland’s novel, all of whom are of Chinese descent, are used as little more than sexual props. Although Friedland tries to mask this as his characters’ sexual awakening and insists in his writing that they are ‘dominant’ women, this is never actually demonstrated. The novel fulfills nothing more than a reaffirmation of Orientalist stereotypes of Asian women as submissive, sex objects. Two ridiculous examples of this (there are many more) include: 1) Geneva’s insistence that her new husband, Sam, take Sister Deri the Buddhist nun, as his concubine and 2) the scene describing Geneva’s rape. Geneva’s rape is particularly disturbing due to its violent, yet arousing description. Geneva submits to her creepy and insane friend Matthew, because she decides “…she had to let it happen to her…”, and didn’t have the strength to fight. Her rape is a lazy, and as such, inappropriate, plot tool, that serves as the catalyst for Geneva’s moral decline. However, this fails to make the story any more compelling since I had no reason to care about Geneva, who has all the personality of a blowup doll. The various plot twists simply feel like contrived set ups for erotic scenarios with ‘exotic’ women.
Overall, this book was an extreme disappointment. Avoid, as you would the plague.
• Laverne Adams
I agree, Michaela! Friedland also needs to learn the rules of punctuation, especially commas. This novel is a mess.
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May 28, 2013
From 19 offers down to five possibilities in a flash.
No. 1-ranked pro-style quarterback Kyle Allen took a knife to his list of potential suitors on Tuesday afternoon. Still standing when all was said and done were Oklahoma State, Ohio State, Notre Dame, UCLA and Texas A&M.
Following his announcement, which was made via Twitter, Allen spoke with Rivals.com and outlined his thought process. The four-star prospect also touched on a few other items of interest.
Q: First of all, congrats on the final five. The only one I didn't guess was Oklahoma State, so let's start there. Why did the Cowboys make the cut?
A: Really what put them in the top five is my visit. I went out there and I really, really loved the offensive coordinator. I loved the entire coaching staff. And, obviously, the facilities down there. The coaching staff was the big thing, though. That and the opportunity to play there. Wes Lunt just left, and they didn't take a quarterback last year. The opportunity to play there is amazing. The offense fits me really well, too.
Q: You have a visit to Notre Dame set up for the near future, but you haven't been there yet. What was it that put Notre Dame in the group?
A: Just Notre Dame as a school. Obviously, I know a lot about them through my research. They way the compete and I talk to Coach Martin a lot. He's a great guy. They're a national power. It's an unbelievable opportunity. Mark [Andrews] told me all about his visit up there, and he loved it so much. He said the people are just wonderful there, so I put them in the top five.
Q: You've been to UCLA and Oklahoma State and A&M already.
A: Yeah, I've been to all the schools that made it except for Notre Dame.
Q: So what put A&M in there? I know your dad loved it down there. He and I have talked extensively about your visits to A&M and Ohio State.
A: The coaching staff at A&M. I'm really liking that coaching staff. There are great people there. Obviously they have great facilities. That's a program on the rise. The first year in the SEC, they go 9-3? That's amazing. There is a lot behind them there. They have a lot of good support staff and support from the city. It's a great town and a great school. I really liked it a lot.
Q: This question is a little tougher. Be honest with me here. Everybody thinks UCLA is your leader. Obviously, everyone knew they would be on this list. Do they hold some sort of edge? Is that accurate to say?
A: To be completely honest with you, there is no edge at all from any of the schools. I honestly sat down at first and thought, maybe I should rank these five schools out but I couldn't find and order or put one school over another.
Q: You've been close with the staff over at UCLA for a long time, though. Was it the relationships that put them on the final list or something else?
A: It's easy to go over there. I've been there two or three times. They offered me a year ago now, so we have been in contact for a long time. I known coach [Noel] Mazzone for a long time now. Then I created a relationship with Taylor [Mazzone], who is an awesome dude. I started talking to Coach Mora and have a great relationship there, too.
Q: Did you just call coaches at the five schools that made it or did you break the bad news to the coaching staffs that you cut?
A: I called a couple coaches and told them, and it was hard. It felt like I was firing someone to be honest with you. I mean, all of these coaches have been really awesome to me. I felt bad doing it but I had to do it. They were all great guys. They just weren't the right fit for me.
Q: I'm sure some of them might have actually appreciated it to some extent so it could free them to recruit other quarterbacks. Did you hear any of that?
A: I didn't hear any of that. I mean, obviously, in the long run, it is better for them. But it's not like they were like, 'OK, at least you told me that.' They are still thinking how can I get in with those other schools, you know? Obviously, you saw that [Arizona State] offered Manny [Wilkins] yesterday. I had actually called Coach [Mike] Norvell at ASU yesterday and had a long talk with him about it. He is one of my favorite offensive coordinators. He's an amazing guy -- a more-than-amazing guy. ASU is just not right for me. I want to get out and start my own life and do my own thing outside of Arizona.
Q: Anything else you want to add? If you want to include anything at all, anything I haven't asked you about, here's your chance.
A: I mean, just how amazing these relationships I have created have been. I mean, talking to all these guys and getting to know them have been great. All these people are just unbelievably nice. It's been an awesome experience to get to know all of them. If you could put this in there, I just want to thank them all properly. It has meant a lot to me.
Q: Are you ready for the Rivals Five-Star Challenge
A: Oh yeah. I'm excited. I'm real excited. That should be fun.
Q: Congrats on narrowing everything down. Maybe it won't be as hectic for you anymore.
A: Yeah, let's hope.
Q: Hey, I forgot to ask you about Ohio State. What put them on the list?
A: Ohio State is Ohio State. It's a great campus and it has awesome alumni. The coaching staff is great, too. That's the biggest thing. Up there, there's lots of support from everyone around the university. Going there gives you a great chance to go to the NFL. You can see that with Coach Meyer's track record with quarterbacks.
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Holidays are Filled with Tempting Treats that Can Spike Blood Sugar
October 01, 2013
Washington Hospital Seminar Offers Tips for Seasonal Success
The holidays can be a difficult time for people with diabetes. The next three months will be filled with food minefields. Soon it will seem like candy, baked goods, and other high-carb foods are everywhere for the taking. But just like the rest of the year, people with diabetes have to be diligent about keeping their blood sugar levels under control despite the temptations.
"For so many people, the holidays are all about eating," said Anna Mazzei, a registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator at Washington Hospital. "Food is everywhere, and that can be a problem for people with diabetes. But if you have diabetes, there are some steps you can take that will increase your chances of surviving the holidays without putting your health at risk."
Mazzei will offer tips for keeping your diabetes under control when she presents 'Seasonal Success for Diabetes Meal Planning' on Thursday, October 3, from 7 to 8 p.m. The seminar is part of Washington Hospital's free monthly Diabetes Matters education series and will be held at the Conrad E. Anderson, M.D. Auditorium, 2500 Mowry Avenue (Washington West), in Fremont.
What You Eat Matters
"Everyone with diabetes knows that what you eat impacts blood sugar levels," she said. "That's why proper meal planning and portion control are so important."
Mazzei said it's important to plan the meals and snacks you eat all year long. But with so many temptations during the holidays, it becomes much more critical.
"Don't use the holidays as an excuse to overeat," she added. "Set up your home and work environments so they support your efforts. Don't keep tempting treats around, and have healthy snacks on hand so you have an alternative to the high-carb, high calorie foods that are available during the holidays."
One way to avoid overeating at parties and other holiday gatherings is to eat something before you head out. If you arrive hungry, you are more likely to overeat, she said.
"Don't hang out around the buffet table," Mazzei added. "It's also a very bad idea to skip meals so can overdo it later. That will wreak havoc on blood sugar."
She recommended checking blood sugar levels more often during the holidays, particularly if you are eating foods you don't normally eat. That way you can monitor how the extra eating is affecting your diabetes and determine what you can and can't get away with.
If you do plan to indulge, step up your physical activity to help keep blood sugar under control, she added. Find ways to incorporate physical activity into your holiday plans.
Focus on What is Important
Another important theme of Mazzei's talk is the need to focus on what is important during the holidays, whether it's a particular food that is a special treat or managing expectations to keep stress levels down.
"The holidays can be a stressful time, which often leads to overindulging in food and alcohol." she said. "Evaluate what you want to accomplish during the holidays and be reasonable about what is really possible. Manage expectations. You can't do it all."
When making food choices during the holidays, only eat the special treats that are important to you. Don't eat food you could get any other time of the year.
"Don't eat it just because it's there," Mazzei added. "Spend your carbs wisely. Stick to the special holiday foods you really enjoy."
She will also talk about recipe modifications that can help you avoid overindulging. For example, you can reduce the amount of sugar in some recipes by using dried fruit or other sweeteners. Substituting low-fat dairy products can help cut calories and fat from many recipes.
"The holidays should not undo all your good efforts during the rest of the year," she said. "You can enjoy the holidays and still not overdo it. Eat a few treats you enjoy, but be selective. Stay focused on spending quality time with family and friends. Take a hike together or go ice-skating rather than just sitting around eating all the time."
Health and Wellness Catalog
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Famous Quotes by Nuno Filipe Miranda
Nuno Filipe Miranda created this wonderfully simple set of famous inspirational quotes. From Benjamin Franklin to Steve Jobs, there's a quote here for everyone. Nuno takes photos of the author, fades them into the background, and let's the quote speak for itself. Overall, a great set to keep you inspired. If you like these, you might also like the series by Julian Bialowas.
Average: 3 (1 vote)
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What Is A Proxy Server And How Does It Work?
The truth about proxies, anonymity and security :
The Internet may be the most free open media of them all, but even in it there are ways to censor content. If you’re lucky enough to be born and raised in a country that doesn’t censor as many things, and values personal information, you probably won’t have such a strong necessity for a proxy. However, in certain countries, governments black list so much sites, proxies become the only way you can get valuable information or protect your anonymity. There are many other uses for proxies as well, but we’ll list them below, after we discuss some of the other basics.
what is proxy-server
How do proxies work ?
When you load a website into your browser, there are things that happen “behind the scenes” – your browser sends a request to the site’s server, to provide the page you’re loading and its contents. HTML code and pictures , as well as other sorts of data are procured by the browser downloading them from the server, after a request. Your browser (as well as your computer in general) identifies itself with an IP address.
So here’s where the proxy comes into action. When you use a proxy, your browser doesn’t load anything from the website’s server. Instead, it provides the URL to the proxy, and it downloads it and then sends it to you. This way, you remain hidden from the website’s server, it only sees the IP address of the proxy you’re using. The uses for proxies are numerous, and they will be explained in the paragraph below.
Practical uses of proxies :
What makes proxies so practical that they’re used by SEOs, regular users and hackers alike? It can be boiled down to the necessity to use a different IP address to identify to the world. That way, to any system you’re using, you’re not showing yourself , but your proxy. So where is that used ?
• Proxies are used to avoid geo-IP based lockdowns. The most practical example of this can be seen if you want to load certain songs on Youtube’s VEVO, and it says “Sorry , this video isn’t available in your country”. The site uses your IP to determine which country you’re in, and limits your rights based on it. Now what if you were to use a proxy located in a country, which is allowed to see that video ? It would work perfectly.
• It’s more secure to use a proxy, if you’re sure you’re being tracked. There is malicious content everywhere and proxies can be set to cache the content and have it scanned before it’s sent to you. That way even the most harmful things cannot reach you.
• Proxy sites used to unblock Facebook, Gmail, YouTube or any other sites.
• If your country has blacklisted nearly all of the biggest sites on the Internet, it’s good to use a proxy from an external location. That way you’ll see what the proxy can see, and you’ll have the access to lots of resources which would normally be blocked for you.
As crude an example as it may be, think of your proxy as a fake ID card. It can represent you to third parties who don’t have an idea who you are, and to them , you’re whatever’s on the ID.
How do I use a proxy?
It depends on the program you want to use it for. Is it your web browser ? Is it your chat client program? Nearly any well-made program that uses the Internet has an option included for proxies. However , you’d have to set up the proxy you’re going to use by yourself.
As for the financial side of it, there are free proxies and paid proxies. And sadly , it’s very difficult to find a responsive and fast free proxy, so if you seriously need to use a proxy for more than loading just one page, you might consider paying for it. Prices vary, but for just one single proxy, it might be stunningly cheap, unless of course you want it to be in a particular city of a particular country, where it gets really expensive.
All in all , usage of proxies is guaranteed to make your life easier, should you need more security and anonymity. That is what proxies are all about.
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The Team Dimensions Profile
August 4, 2009 -- Sal Silvester
By Kathy Brohm
Being part of a team seems to infiltrate so many parts of our lives, whether it be as a family member, an athlete, or a project team member. Working as a team and within a team provides us with a sense of accomplishment when we successfully reach our goals and allows us to share that achievement with our teammates. More importantly, being part of a team allows us to explore our strengths and tap into areas that may not be tapped when working independently.
Take members of a soccer team as an example. One player may be skilled at dribbling the ball down field in scoring position, but may not have the skill and accuracy to make the score, whereas a different player may be a strong and accurate scorer, but may not possess the speed and skill to get the ball in scoring position. Separately, these 2 players have strengths that work well for them as individuals. However these talents working independently may not benefit the team as a whole. Now put these strengths together on a team, and these skills will complement each other, lead to success on the scoreboard, and create a formidable team. A winning combination that refines independent strengths.
But how do we know what our strengths are when working in a team environment? How do we identify those strengths, tap into them, and utilize them to benefit the team?
At 5.12 Solutions we offer a unique tool called the Team Dimensions Profile that provides information specific to our roles within a team: how we contribute, our talents, and even the challenges we may face when working on a team. The Team Dimensions Profile helps team members understand where they thrive, how they can better contribute their talents to the team, and how to overcome challenges. The Team Dimensions Profile explores 5 key roles that members perform, their preferences, and how teams work effectively. As a team member, you will gain valuable insight into your talents and how you best contribute in a team environment. As a team leader, understanding your team members' individual strengths, preferred roles and natural talents will help you create a balanced and efficient team.
Creating effective and efficient teams can be overwhelming at times, but by using the Team Dimensions Profile, your teams can perform more cohesively to obtain results. For more information about the Team Dimensions Profile, give us a buzz at 303-579-5829 or email us at
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ICAEW Cloud conference - missed opportunity?
I was unable to make it to Moorgate on Friday for the IT Faculty's Cloud computing conference, but a great many members of this discussion group were there. To help the wider community absorb the themes raised, would those of you who attended be able to add your thoughts here?
Richard Messik got the ball rolling in his Internet Accountant blog, but was disappointed with the overall content.
But he did comment: "The one bright spot was the break out session I attended which consisted of an excellent presentation by Matt Holmes of Liquid Accounts who gave a first class presentation on the Cloud and the relevant issues which was followed by a panel session of 4 practicing accountants who gave short presentations on why they had moved tto the cloud and their experiences in so doing. This is what the conference should have been built around."
How does this gel with your experience of the event?
garyturner's picture
garyturner | | Permalink
I attended the event (disclosure - I sit on the IT Faculty's Technical Committee whose baby this was, but I do not speak on their or the event's behalf).
A year or eighteen months ago, the prospect of the ICAEW hosting a Cloud Computing event of any kind would have been remote and therefore in that context I think it should be applauded (even by early adopters who have been on this bandwagon for years) for picking up this nascent and controversial emerging aspect of professional life and giving it a right good shake. For a first go it passed off well and will have obtained some good critical feedback about where to take the next one in terms of content.
An opportunity missed? I think that's a little binary and more a measure of the gulf between Richard's passion for the subject and the collective stage at which the profession is at, albeit moving in his direction.
However, upon reflection as both a delegate and a cloud vendor, one aspect in which I do think the event struggled is a common problem with most events of this kind, and that is the blanket ban on sales pitches and, by associated guilt, software demonstrations.
I can only imagine that at some past mythological event, a evil vendor presentation took such an unsightly form of unwelcome, silicon snake oil bonanza and overt selling and was so unspeakably bad that it screwed the pooch for every event thereafter.
The resulting default group-think that remains universally among event organisers is that sales pitch laden presentations and flashy demos are completely taboo and verboten.
Thus an unfortunate victim of this censorship is the sometimes truth that technology can be truly revolutionary and transformative, only you'll never discover that through the medium of an affected professorial delivery style and a faux-academic presentation deck.
Take a bunch of passionate technologists who spend 10 hours a day doing what they do best; evangelizing about their products and then ask them to pretend to be all sober and literal for 20 minutes through the medium of 14 point font and some bad clip art.
No prizes for guessing what results.
It's also remarkably patronising to an audience to assume that they don't know when they're being pitched and when they're not.
A good, short and insightful software demonstration is unbeatable for conveying the real value of a solution, no doubt about it.
I'd recommend that all event organisers get some perspective about this silly demo ban thing - and at the least stitch in a handful of 5 minute demo slots during each event. Clearly signposted to the audience, clearly constrained in time and let the vendors do what they do best.
Had that happened on Friday, I suspect that many more people would have gone away with not only the grit about online accounting, but also a few more enlightening epiphanies about the state of the art as it is today.
With hindsight, I'm sure it would have radically changed the complexion of the event.
Gary Turner,
UK Managing Director, Xero.
Adrian Pearson's picture
+1 for demos
Adrian Pearson | | Permalink
I did not attend because I fall into the category of those who prefer hands-on practical information as opposed to technical, academic and sanitised bullet point presentations. So, I agree with Gary's views.
It's much easier for most people to "get" a new concept when they can see it being demonstrated in front of them. And, as Richard Messik said in the blog post referred to by John above, most users just need to know what new technology does - not necessarily how it does it.
A mixture of demos/polite pitches in amongst the "serious" stuff would enhance a future conference in my opinion.
daveforbes's picture
All demonstrations are perceived to be sales pitches.
daveforbes | | Permalink
Clearly the answer would have been to get Duane to demonstrate the benefits of cloud using Xero and Gary do the same using KashFlow.
David Forbes
dahowlett's picture
dahowlett | | Permalink
@gary - I've commented separately on Richard's post but to repeat and for @adrian as well: yes, demos are a decent thing when done right but too often I see them gamed. I've seen that in SaaS shoot outs so let's not kid ourselves here.
As for a missed opportunity - well - vendors don't always get things their own way and neither should they. I understand the general feedback was pretty favourable though I've not seen any analysis.
And let's not forget the agenda has been out there in the public domain for months. If there was any major problem with it then how did ICAEW get 100+ people to tip up? And as an aside, unlike Larry Ellison's (CEO ORacle) closing keynote, attendees remained to the end. At Larry's gig, by the time he'd finished boring everyone about the Exalogic machine, even the sound engineers had disappeared.
If there was a missed opportunity then it comes form the vendors inability to explain the differentiated value proposition they offer. You all know this is one of my favourite topics so don't shoot the organizers, look to your own efforts.
garyturner's picture
You must have missed..
garyturner | | Permalink
You must have missed when I said above "should be applauded", " For a first go it passed off well..", "An opportunity missed? I think that's a little binary...".
My point about demos pertains to _all_ events like this, not specifically the ICAEW event.
The fact that Friday followed this predictable course is a chronic symptom of a long standing issue event organisers have with people pitching, even more acutely when delegates pay for the privilege of attending.
All I'm saying is get some perspective. I think it's a myth and worth dismantling to prove that, or otherwise.
Or maybe I'm being too idealistic.
It's not for nothing that Xero chose not to participate as sponsor on Friday. Having sponsored a number of initiatives with other bodies I wholeheartedly support the purpose of endeavours like this, but as sponsors who get effectively gagged (maybe too strong, let's say creatively curtailed) there are more commercially fruitful ways of expending one's limited marketing budget where you own the agenda, decide what gets said and stand or fall on your own merits or otherwise.
Happy to live and let live.
mkcdavies's picture
The ICAEW needs to think more clearly about how it manages vendo
mkcdavies | | Permalink
I agree with Gary that it was good to see the Institute putting this event on, but I strongly agree with Richard - the Institute missed an opportunity to give members real insights into the opportunities of cloud computing. Instead, we heard generic presentations that raked over the same old coals. I've no doubt that the presenters were experts in their fields, but they made almost no connection between what they were saying and the role of an accountant. The short break-out sessions were more successful in this respect, but the main agenda failed badly. There should have been a much greater emphasis on examples of cloud computing that have been successfully deployed by accountants.
Accrding to John Oates (who chaired the conference), the Institute was highly delighted to have so many sponsors for the event. No surprise given that there are many vendors chasing a limited number of opportunities to connect with accountants. Having a good number of sponsors may help bring funding into the Institute, but I suspect that too much focus went towards meeting the commercial business case for running the event and too little on ensuring that the event content would help members understand what cloud computing can do for them.
For instance, the conference started with a presentation from Microsoft that sought to define the term "Cloud Computing". A long presentation with some crazy slides. Couldn't this have been summed up in one sentence?... It's just a name (like "The Internet") for receiving and consuming IT services from remote locations via the worldwide web.
Then we heard about so-called legal issues. What this actually amounted to was a list of areas that should be included in a risk analysis when outsourcing an IT function. These "risks" have already been addressed by establshed vendors of cloud computing solutions long ago (otherwise, they wouldn't have built such large customer bases).
All these presentations did was raise issues of terminology definition and risk analysis, they did nothing to show how cloud computing is actually being used in practice. If anyone is pleased with the event, maybe it's the Luddites who like to argue that cloud computing is an ill-defined and immature technology full of pitfalls and best steered clear of.
Whereas folk who have businesses that benefit from cloud computing every day are left fuming about the missed opportunity.
dahowlett's picture
I didn't miss it but...
dahowlett | | Permalink
@gary - yes I saw what you said. You raise several fundamental points:
1. vendors want bang for buck - i.e. sales leads. Nothing wrong with that.
2. vendors want to pitch. OK - but as I have said,when it's done right then I don't have an issue but it is naive in the extreme to believe that all players play well at this game. They don't and any organization that puts on this type of show needs to be really clear about what it's getting into.
I don't think you're being naive at all but I am wary of demos for all the reasons we both know about.
dahowlett's picture
Did you miss?
dahowlett | | Permalink
@mark - I think you caught my presso where I talked a LOT about benefits for accountants but equally talked about fake clouds and issues that some vendors have had? Is there something wrong in applying that balance? The presso is here.
It's a pity I ran out of time as there is an embedded video that talks to benefit across multiple dimensions. FYI - it's been viewed 379 times as of today. Someone somewhere must be interested...
One of the vendor sponsors
bryanrichter | | Permalink
As one of the vendor sponsors of the event, I actually thought the ICAEW got it about right. The purpose of the event as I understood it was to educate the members. Anything objective and independent that gives the accountancy community confidence in the subject and gets them to investigate in more detail is good as far as I am concerned.
My one concern would be that some of the content strayed into areas more relevant to large enterprises who are establishing straegies for the adoption of Cloud computing. I suspect this would not have been so relevant to many of the accountants who would have been representing smaller practices and who have largely SME clients. But ICAEW will have known the profile of the attendees and will no doubt have taken this into account.
Unfortunately, the software industry has created a bad reputation for itself by overhyping and overselling their latest shiny toys and that doesn't mix well with a community known for conservatism and fear of change. ICAEW can perform an important role in bridging that confidence gap.
I actually think it's a bit of a shame that the attendees had barely left the auditorium before there is already talk of a missed opportunity. The event was held by the technology faculty for their members. Surely the success of the event should be determined by the 100+ members who attended, and as Dennis points out, actually stayed the course.
richardanning's picture
Feedback from the attendees
richardanning | | Permalink
In answer to John’s original question, ‘How does this gel with your experience of the event?’, you may be interested to know that, based on feedback forms submitted, delgates rated the event 83% overall. @mark, careful what you say about luddites, these are your future customers.
Feedback on the plenary sessions was very positive (3 out of 4 presented by non-sponsors), with particularly high feedback for the legal session (82%) and the first session defining the cloud (79%). Similarly, feedback for the panel sessions (the majority of which were not sponsored) was excellent. (The agenda for the event was confirmed by our Technical Committee well before we went anywhere near potential sponsors.)
I think vendors need to realise that accountants are risk averse – it’s in their DNA. Accountants have a perceived issue with security, availability and loss of control; these perceptions need addressing, however perverse they may seem. Hence the (well-received) sessions on legal issues and risk and return.
Our final interactive question asked ‘Do you think the finance department has been one of the laggards of cloud computing adoption?’ 48% of attendees admitted this is the case (and 21% had no view).
I hope this gives you a better view of how the event was perceived by attendees.
challisc's picture
challisc | | Permalink
Interesting that delegates on Friday acknowledged that "the finance department has been one of the laggards of cloud computing adoption". Conversely apps such as CRM (customer relationship management) have blossomed. In the case of CRM, a centralised system that the salesforce can update from virtually anywhere on the move is clearly attractive. Add that cloud CRM systems are typically more secure and recoverable than whatever systems people had been using, the switch to SaaS becomes compelling for that app.
These factors are typically not as strong for accounting, either in industry or practice. This is because the existing systems are typically more robust. Nonetheless areas such as better recoverability, and a system shared between practitioner and client, makes SaaS attractive. But there are also very real concerns. As the industry body Intellect say in their recent whitepaper "While the SaaS model offers significant advantages over on-premise, it does carry potential risks that must also be considered"
Having experienced the pain of some of these first hand, caution is certainly warranted. The better SaaS providers are fine. It's the rest that are of concern. One FD needed encouragement from me recently to take a look at SaaS solutions when he wouldn't otherwise have done so. Should he be criticised? He has a thousand and one other things to think about, and caution is both sensible and professional.
The IT Faculty's approach of balance betwen pros and cons therefore seems entirely appropriate.
mkcdavies's picture
@Dennis, @Richard
mkcdavies | | Permalink
Dennis - yes, I was present during your presentation and I agree that it was one (actually, the only one) of the plenary presentations that directly linked the conference topic directly to accountants' needs.
Richard - useful feedback from the results of the event questionnaire, thanks. Of course accountants tend to be conservative, not just in relation to the adoption of new technology. The reason for that is obvious and, I hope, respected by all software vendors. When I used the term "Luddite" it was not done in a disrespectful way, but in case there is a danger of it being perceived so, let me be clear: Calling someone a luddite is just shorthand to describe the attutude or feeling of opposition that some people have towards innovation. Dictionary.com defines a luddite as "any opponent of industrial change or innovation". It does not imply that their views are wrong!
This conference was a step in the right direction, what next? The Institute has the power to make vendors and consultants provide better information that will help members assess whether cloud computing is useful to them. I'm sure that accountants would welcome any initiative that enables them to make an earlier decision about something that has the potetial to deliver value to their practice or employer.
John Stokdyk's picture
Thanks everyone!
John Stokdyk | | Permalink
You've provided a brilliant collective critique of the IT Faculty event - more than I ever bargained for. I think the IT Faculty is to be applauded for bringing together the interested members and speakers, and while Richard may have felt "here we go again", the feedback suggests that accountants will want to worry about the risk factors too.
My attitude (based on member feedback) is that finance departments and their advisers are moving towards the Cloud, but they do need to see real benefits for the potential disruption to their current work and technology habits.
For wider consumption, I've asked Julian Shaw to collect together some material and observations drawn from the event itself that we'll publish in IT Zone later in the week.
dahowlett's picture
Pinch the presso and videos
dahowlett | | Permalink
@john - you can take any of my presentation/videos and publish them - they're all under creative commons. The videos definitely provide a flavour of end user interests and concerns but speak loudly to benefit.
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Thread: HID Lights
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Old 02-10-2008, 01:12 PM #4 OP
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Joined: Feb 2008
Location: Canada
Oddometer: 426
Well for starters on HID conversions, most people simply use a re-based bulb to upgrade their halogen reflector headlights. There are many different types of halogens bulbs used in auto's/bikes, eg. H1, H3 H4, H6, H7, H8, H9, H10, H11, H13, 9003, 9004, 9005, 9006, 9007, 9008 (some of these are the same bulb). in bikes, a majority of them use a 9003/H4 bulb. They can also use others types as well like a H7 etc...
Doing a simple upgrade like this consists of a HID capsule, HID ballast, cable(s) to hook up, and some hardware for mounting. The upgrade can take anywhere from 15 minutes to hours to complete depending how hard it is get at your bulbs, and finding a suitable place to mount the ballast.
Each bulb requires its own ballast to fire up the HID capsule. When the lights are turned on, the ballast ignites the gases inside the bulb using over 20,000V. High-intensity discharge lamps are similar to fluorescents in that an arc is generated between two electrodes. The arc in a HID bulb is shorter, yet it generates much more light, heat, and pressure within the capsule.
There are several advantages to HID sources:
• relatively long life (3000+ hrs) halogens typically last around 300-500 hours
• high lumen output per watt. Halogens are around 900 lumens for a low beam, whereas a HID bulb provides about 3200 lumens(4300K)
• lower power requiements compared to halogen bulbs (35W compared to 55/65W)
• less heat generated than stock bulbs
However, the following operating limitations must also be considered. First, HID lamps require time to warm up. The average warm-up time is 4 to 6 seconds. So when used in high beam applications, they do not work well for flashing due to the warm up time. If that's not an issue for you then it's irrellavent.
Doing a conversion from a halogen can offer mixed results depending on a variety of factors. First, and most importanly the design of the reflector largely determines how the HID bulb will react when installed. Since the reflector is designed for halogens, the HID bulb's pattern will never be exactly the same. Second is the design of the HID capsule. Not all HID's are created equal. Quality on aftermarket bulbs is all over the place. If the arc is not exactly in the same position where the halogen filament was, the light can be very scattered and throw off tons of glare to oncoming traffic. A high quality HID bulb can give you very good results, and not scatter the light beam.
If you get lured into buying a 'cheap' HID kit off eBay, don't expect to get very good results or to get a long service life out of the components. You do get what you pay for in most cases.
The best HID light source uses a projector lens that is designed for HID light as seen in many new luxury vehicles. There are aftermarket projector lens you can use to do your own retrofit, but you must know what your doing when attempting this type of upgrade. If done right it can be just as good as an OEM set-up, but keep in mind this is still not DOT compliant light souce, so it is still considered illegal for on-road use.
(Don't let anyone tell you anything different)
Here's what they can look like:
For bikes that use a 7" round sealed beam:
Color options for HID are:
3000K - Yellow (good for fog applications)
4300K - Pure white (this is what OEM's use)
6000K - touch of blue
8000K - blue
10,000K - deep blue
12,000K - deep purple
Other colors can be offered as well, pink, green, extreme blue's purple, etc...
The higher you go in Kelvin(K) temperature, the less light output you get.
4300K & 6000K are highly recommended, as they provide the most amount of light, and offer a more natural light color.
Not sure if this is the type of information you are looking for, but it should get things started here.
Bruno@ - 888-LED-HID-1
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You are about to explore some of the finest herbal, nutritional, flower essence and aromatherapy wellness products found anywhere in the world. Nature's Sunshine's world-class products undergo up to 600 quality control tests before they come to market and they set the standard for excellence in the wellness industry. Quality = Efficacy. Efficacy = Results. Using the highest quality products means you may use less to achieve more...up to 10 times less than some inferior brands.
Nature's Sunshine Products is North America's oldest and largest herb manufacturer and devotes much thought and research time to each and every product they present. You will appreciate the many educational and scientific references that accompany these product information articles.
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The Forbidden City
Based on a traditional Chinese Folk Song / arr. Michael Story
Item: 00-39544S
UPC: 038081458526
PRICE: $9.00
Series: Belwin Beginning Band
Category: Concert Band
Format: Conductor Score
Instrument: Concert Band
Level: 1 (Very Easy)
Inspired by the ornate palace in Beijing, China, this arrangement is focused around the Chinese folk song "Jasmine Flower." The music is presented from the perspective of a person traveling towards the palace, with the grandeur, beauty, and spectacle gradually increasing with each step taken. The arrangement uses a variety of percussion instruments to reinforce the enchanting effects that build throughout. (2:15)
This title is available in SmartMusic.
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Athletes and Altitude
VO2max is the body's maximal ability to extract oxygen from the air and deliver it to the tissues. Above 5000 feet the maximum work a person can do decreases by 3% for every 1,000 feet. This means your body's ability to utilize oxygen diminishes with increasing altitude. Even after acclimatization, this only improves a little bit and a person can never perform as well at altitude as they can at sea level. With increasing altitude, you need to take more air into your lungs, contributing to the breathless feeling that many athletes experience when first coming to altitude, and especially if trying to perform at the same intensity as at sea level. One of the processes in acclimatization important for athletes is the production of a hormone called EPO or erythropoietin. This hormone acts on the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells. These cells carry oxygen from the lungs to the tissues. Increasing these cells effectively increases the 'oxygen carrying capacity' in your blood. However, this process takes weeks. EPO is a big topic among competitive endurance athletes.
Competing at Altitude
For those athletes doing aerobic events over 5000 feet, 10-20 days of acclimatization at the performing altitude is ideal. Athletes participating in events over 12,000 feet must have acclimatization at an intermediate altitude prior to performance. Performing without acclimatization at this altitude could cause altitude sickness. Those participating in anaerobic sports (short intense events lasting less than 2 minutes, such as sprinting) at altitude do not require extended acclimatization, and may perform better because of lower air density.
Training at Altitude for Sea Level Events
Other considerations of training at altitude
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School news roundup
'Keep pupils in to stop them eating junk food' - Telegraph
Children should be banned from leaving school at lunchtime so they cannot gorge themselves on junk food, a Government body says today.
Teachers to get search powers - Telegraph
From The Barrel of a Gun - Hey, Teacher, Leave Them Kids Alone! It's not just teachers that need to leave them alone, so do these assholes. Every ounce of freedom has already been sucked out of schools themselves, but still those pesky kids won't just sit down and do as their told like good little zombies. No, what needs to be done is to extend the rules of the womb-prison indoctrination camps out to cover areas beyond its own boundaries.
Sometimes I think the answer may lie elsewhere:
Houston Chronicle
Now that is the way to treat the piss-poor whining underperforming jokes who infest the staff room.
Firstly, it is illegal, under the current law, to stop a child leaving the premises, or indeed making them stay anywhere by force (working on the obvious premise that they won't stop simply because a law change happens). It's false imprisonment.
Secondly, no teacher will search children, it is a one-stop flight to an accusation of molestation.
Children at my school were searched on numerous occasions. Neither were you allowed to leave the site. Obviously teachers didn't go and rugby tackle every student they caught sneaking off, but some sort of action would be taken after the fact. Of course, the only people got caught were the idiots who couldn't sneak out of a morgue unnoticed...
I'm not sure about not being able to keep children anywhere by force though. I've seen children picked up by police and brought to school for playing truant?
Confucius he say: the Principal who threatens his science teachers had better hire a good food-taster.
Ed "so what" Balls is a new labour fuckin' idiot. Methinks that kids will say "oh don't touch me there" and various other things. Of couse the lawyers will love it. Is Mr Balls a lawyer by any chance?
Here is an example of Ed Balls arrogance
In David Cameron's Budget reply, he said (I paraphrase):
"Under Labour, Britain is more taxed than at any point in its history".
On the front bench, Ed Balls - The Man Who Would Be King (part II) heckled:
"So what?'
This astounding statement was met with hoots of shock and disdain from the Tory benches and surprised Cameron sufficiently for him to come back: "So what, says the minister for children. I know he wants to be Chancellor so badly it hurts. I have to tell him another Budget like the one we have just heard and he won't have to wait very long."
So there you have it, ladies and gentleman. Taxed up to the eyeballs? Labour says "So what."
re you an NHS nurse who now pays 20% instead of 10%? Labour says "So what". (Brown sneered without reply when Cameron raised the tax con abolition of the 10p rate).
Are you fed up with stealth taxes and council tax rises because the government won't fund your town, just as it won't fund Corby? Labour says "So what."
Are you one of the thousands of girls forced into a marriage that Labour won't stop because it cosies up to 'community leaders'? Labour says "So what".
Are you a small business trying to create jobs hit with a swingeing tax rise? Labour says "So what."
Brown treated the people "like fools" . Now Balls treats them with utter contempt from the front bench. Call an election Gordon. We'll show you, and Ed Balls, 'so what'.
What needs to be done, as far as unruly schoolkids go, is for PEOPLE IN RESPONSIBLE POSITIONS to start acting responsibly, i.e. set an example that kids can follow! Look at Ed Balls behaviour. What about the supposedly unbiased speaker of the house of commons behaviour? What about football players behaviour? What about all the smut on tv?
Of course, to achieve this we need to eradicate political correctness. This the evil doctrine that is ruining our society.
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Letter: The Levittown Budget: A Student’s Perspective
As a junior, I am about to start applying to college at a time when more people then ever in our nation’s history are going to college. The competition is fierce, especially for SUNY schools. If the budget is voted down, there will be no extracurricular activities next year. That means no sports, theater productions, model congress, key club, science/math Olympiads, etc. These activities are a very important part of our résumé as we apply to college, and often provide opportunities for scholarships. With a failed budget it will all be gone. While the loss of these activities impacts our ability to get into competitive colleges, an even greater issue is that these organized, structured and supervised events help keep us going on the right path in our lives. They provide positive opportunities for us to make good choices in our lives.
I know that people are angry about taxes, and they want to send that message by voting down the budget. But there must be a better way to send that message. In the end, the people that really get hurt when a budget fails are the students. Please send a message to the students of Levittown that you value and support our education by voting yes for the budget on May 18.
Evan Gardner
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"He" is one of the most iconic computers in all of history, the cinematic villain of a space odyssey gone awry. HAL 9000 has remained forever a symbol of all that we hope computers aspire to be, yet also the sum of our fears. And now he can be part of your own household...
Above is about $84 in parts required to create the HAL 9000 replica. But before you get started, note the geek factor and DIY skills required to see this project through is a bit higher than the typical "craft" project, since this one comes with a warning from its creator, Phillip Burgess, as HAL 9000 requires not only the right components, but also the tools for "laser cutting, spray painting, inkjet printing, sanding, soldering (if adding the voice feature) as well as patience, well-stocked junk drawer, and a willingness to improvise."
In other words, this might be a DIY project where your finalized version doesn't look exactly the same as Phillip's exemplary version. For example, instead of laser-cut acrylic, one could improvise and work with hand cut/scored cardboard casing. Not many of us have access to a Xyron sticker machine, but an inkjet sticker making sheet could fill-in acceptably.
If you're still up for the challenge, Phillip lays out all the components required with step-by-step instructions, with the inclusion of a video showcasing the final product:
(Images: Phillip Burgess)
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Thomson’s gazelle (Eudorcas thomsonii)
Synonyms: Gazella thomsonii
GenusEudorcas (1)
SizeHead-body length: 80 - 120 cm (2)
Male weight: 20 - 35 kg (2)
Female weight: 15 - 25 kg (2)
Despite its limited distribution this is by far Africa’s most abundant gazelle (3). The ‘tommy’, as it is locally known (3), has a distinct black band running along the side of the body that divides the yellowish-fawn to reddish-fawn upperparts from the clean white underparts (2). The white buttocks are edged with black (2), extending to the short, black tail which is constantly flicking (3). Both sexes of the Thomson’s gazelle have long, strongly ringed horns that grow fairly close together, although those of the ewe are generally shorter, thinner, and frequently deformed (3). The face is boldly marked with white, fawn, dark brown and black, and varies between individuals (2). Thomson’s gazelle has sometimes been regarded as a subspecies of the red-fronted gazelle, Eudorcas rufifrons.
Thomson’s gazelle occurs in central and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania (2) (3).
Thomson’s gazelle inhabits acacia savanna and short grasslands, preferring heavily grazed, trampled or burnt grasslands. It is relatively tolerant to drought and can stay on dry pastures long after other large herbivores have moved to moister habitats (2).
Thomson’s gazelles form small herds but are socially very flexible (2) (3). Herds of females overlap with other herds, and movement between herds is common. Within their shared home range the females rest, move between pastures and visit waters (2). Males are a little less flexible and mature males fight to obtain and defend territories within the female’s favourite pastures (2). They denote the boundaries of their territory with dung and by marking grass stems and twigs with secretion from the scent glands beneath their eyes (2). Territoriality in males peaks during mating periods when frequent fights and stand-offs occur between neighbouring males, and males attempt to mate with any receptive female that enters their area (2) (3).
Lambs may be born at any time of the year, but birthing often occurs towards the end of the rainy season (3). Females are pregnant for 188 days, after which a single lamb weighing two to three kilograms is born (3). Thomson’s gazelles feed on fresh green grass whenever possible, but during the dry season, feeding on seeds and the foliage of shrubs is necessary (2). Thomson’s gazelles need to drink water every day or two, and in its dry grassland habitat this sometimes requires making round trips of ten miles or more (4).
The Thomson’s gazelle was once widespread throughout its range, but numbers have declined steeply (2). This is likely to be due to the encroachment of man onto their habitat (5), and hunting (1).
Whilst in many areas Thomson’s gazelles have declined, in some areas the species remains common, particularly in protected areas, such as the Serengeti National Park and Masai-Mara Nature Reserve (2). The continued protection and management of such areas is likely to be vital for the conservation of Thomson’s gazelle.
To learn more about Thomson’s gazelle and the conservation of African wildlife see:
Authenticated (29/03/10) by Dr. David Mallon, Co-Chair, IUCN/SSC Antelope Specialist Group.
1. IUCN Red List (September, 2009)
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General FAQ
How do practitioners contract with ASH?
How long has specialty health care been around?
How many practitioners contract with ASH?
Is specialty health care a big industry in the United States?
Is specialty health care included in most health benefit plans?
What are ASH’s key milestones?
What companies make up the ASH organization?
What evidence exists to show that specialty health care therapies are effective?
What is American Specialty Health Insurance Company (ASH Insurance)?
What is Healthyroads?
What is specialty health care, and how is it different from alternative medicine?
What services does ASH provide?
What were ASH’s revenues in 2011?
Where is ASH headquartered? How many employees does ASH have?
Who founded ASH and when?
Who is a “typical” consumer of specialty health care services?
Who is American Specialty Health?
ASH Companies Healthyroads Silver & Fit
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December 10, 2013
Could I have anxiety?
Dear Ask The Doctor: Recently (over the past two years or so), I've been quite nervous or scared to do certain things like, shower when no one's home, leave my room when it's dark. I'm fourteen and I've had four episodes that seem like panic attacks - all lasting around 20-30 minutes. Sometimes, I'll get very nervous or scared, I'll have symptoms of these episodes, but it doesn't get as bad as the four times I had those episodes. It usually starts with getting dizzy and shaky, then a racing heartbeat and from that it just turns into a full blown episode. I looked online as to why I salivate so much and one of the reasons were anxiety - I know not to fully trust that, but it's been concerning me since the first episode I had a month after I was thirteen. I'm terribly sorry if this is all hard to understand, I'm not best at describing something like this to someone. Could this be anxiety or am I just making it up in my head and it's really no big deal?
Dear Eden: Please check back here frequently for a response to your question. Our team of physicians at Ask The Doctor will try and have a response to your question within the next 7-10 days. In the meantime please use our search bar at the top of the page to see if there is questions similar to yours already answered. You can also keep checking back here at the bottom of this page to see if members of the Ask The Doctor community have given advice in the comment section.
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'He's in a rhythm': Auburn's Tre Mason knows the way
Sept. 12, 2013
Vincent Mason and his running back son Tre (Photo via War Eagle Reader)
By Charles Goldberg
AUBURN, Ala. — Tre Mason's dad has performed all over the world, sold more than 20 million albums, is a member of the hip-hop group De La Soul.
He's been in the music spotlight for 25 years, and he knows something about center stage. But the first time he saw his son on it, Tre Mason's dad was no longer hip-hop's Maseo or P.A. Pasemaster Mase or music producer, he was Vincent Mason, dad.
Tre Mason's 97-yard kickoff return for an Auburn touchown in his first college game in 2011 brought out the emotions.
"I cried like a baby," Vincent Mason said.
Oh, he was trying to be hip-hop tough.
"I'm trying to hold back, but I'm thinking, 'Wow, that's my boy. Whoa, whoa, whoa.' At halftime, I see all of his friends and they're all crying, and I started bawling. It was his dreams coming true."
The elder Mason knows about dreams. He followed them into music, helping form De La Soul in 1987. The group is still going strong. Tours are booked. Another album is on the way. Mason said he learned something along the way, something his son followed.
"Maybe doing what I do was a bonus for him, seeing that I was able to live my dream. Since I was a teenager, I've been following my dreams by putting in hard work."
Tre Mason has put in his hard work in athletics, first at Park Vista High School in Lake Worth, Fla., and then at Auburn, now for three years. He rushed for a 1,000 yards last season; returned a kickoff for 100 yards in the first game this season. He's shared the tailback spot with Corey Grant and Cameron Artis-Payne in the first two games, and is fine doing it.
"My son has watched me in a group his whole life, so I think he has a concept of being a team player," the elder Mason said. "I think he likes the idea of a team, of being a team effort. That's a natural conversation with him. He sees it as a friendly competition in a very competitive sport. That's one thing I've noticed in him since he was young. I'm overwhelmed because that's naturally him.
"I call it a gift and a curse. When it comes to music, not everybody is on the same page at the same time. But we all have the same type of goal to win. That's what you have to stand by."
Football is his game
Tre Mason says he wants to lead Auburn back from last year's disappointing season, and the next stop for that is Saturday's game against Mississippi State.
"As leaders on the team we try to remind everyone of the feeling we had last year," Mason said this week. "We’re trying to have a big turnaround this year. We know what that feeling was like and it’s not a good feeling. We’re trying to have a better feeling than last year, just have a lot of wins and hopefully be undefeated."
Tre Mason wasn't always going to be a football standout. In fact, he didn't play football his freshman year in high school. He wasn't a big guy, but he wanted to be a basketball star.
That changed when Park Vista football coach Brian Dodds saw Mason in a drill that featured his leaping ability.
"My speed guy said, 'Coach, you've got to come over and see this kid.' I went over that and they were calling him Superman because every plyo box he was leaping over them with ease," Dodds said. "I said, 'Who is this young man?' They said he was a basketball player."
Dodds didn't see it that way.
"He was short and a little wiry, but you could see where he could get bigger. At spring football that year, we put him at tailback and the very, very first play that he touched the ball there was no doubt. He went through the hole and it was all natural. You look at the coach, and you're, 'Yep, he's the one.'"
Things quickly changed.
"We had another kid who was going to be a junior that year who was a really good tailback, but by the end of spring football he transferred because he knew also. There were no doubts what Tre's abilities were."
His reputation grew. Mason rushed for 1,643 yards and 24 touchdowns as a senior. College recruiters had been calling. He signed with Auburn.
"He's just a tremendous talent," Dodds said. "As he got older, he got better, better and more mature physically. We knew he was a special football player. And he's one of those kids who is a special person. He worked really, really hard.
Tre Mason leaves the music to his dad. But his dad sees some of the same traits on the football field.
"He's in a rhythm," Vincent Mason said. "He's something of an elder statesman at Auburn now. He's happy with the coach. He's just overwhelmed by his decision. He said, 'Daddy, more and more I'm glad I came to Auburn.'"
The message is in the music
De La Soul has been described as psychedelic sugar and spice, not hard-core rap. Rolling Stone described one of their albums as a "triumphant coming of age of middle-class, black suburban children of the Seventies." Another review said the group's "thoughtful lyrics, challenged the rap status quo." Vincent Mason still performs with Kelvin Mercer and David Jude Jolicoeur.
They have one platinum and two gold records and have won a Grammy.
Mason said his son was only on the fringes of the music. But Tre Mason and his brother, Chauncey, did get to see the importance of De La Soul up close at a Hip Hop Honors.
"They got to meet a lot of their favorite artists. And what was amazing to them was their favorite artists pretty much loved me," Vincent Mason laughed. "At that point they realized the impact I've had on the hip-hop culture... and that the artists showed a lot of respect for me. I think that was inspiring. What I do has kept me away from home a significant amount of time, but by bringing them to festivities, they saw what hard work brings."
Tre Mason was devoting his energies to athletics as he headed to high school.
"I knew he was a good football player when he didn't want to play anymore," his dad said. "I think it was the eighth or ninth grade. He was an all-out athlete who enjoyed playing all sports. He didn't play football because he said he wanted to perfect his game of basketball."
But then Dodds called.
"He said, 'The way he plays, you can't even coach that,'" his dad said.
"We sat down with Tre and said we don't want to force you to do something you don't want to do, but something is telling us to have this conversation with you. God has blessed you to have a certain genius and you need to go with it.
"From the seventh grade on, we'd ask these questions all of the time: 'What do you see? How do get down that field? There looks like there's so much chaos going on, and one point it looks like they've stopped you, and then you come popping out the hole. What's going on?' He said, 'Daddy, I don't know. I just see it. I just see it.' When everybody does their job, I just get there.
"Those are very simple, humble words. I said if you see it like that, you need to pursue it.
"I think it was his sophomore year, he started to really do well. He became an overachiever, especially when it came to working out. He became obsessed with it.
"Also, in your teenage years, you feel the feedback of girls, and that gives you the inspiration to keep going."
Dodds said through it all Mason has "always been very humble. He's always done what he's been asked to do. He's matured, not only physically, but mentally. He's going to do what's best for the team."
Dodds is now coaching Chauncey Mason, a receiver and defensive back.
"And he's the same way: Very upbeat and works hard; everything is full speed, and tough. They're both tough young men."
Dodds first saw that with Tre Mason.
"His mom and dad have done an outstanding job raising him with the qualities that he's able to work with people, do the right things and work hard. I think that's why he's successful now," Dodds said.
Vincent Mason talks of the times he's been away from home performing. But there was always their mother, Tina.
"His mom is tough on him and she's tough on Chauncey," Dodds said. "She's just one of those moms that knows the right things to do, and she wants her sons to be really good men, not only on the football field but off the field. She's right there with them. I think she's had a great influence on them. Their dad, too. Those kids are confident and know they can be successful."
Tre Mason reached one of those memorable college milestones when he rushed for 1,000 yards last season. He got it on the very last play of the very last game.
"That was one of his goals," his dad said. "When he got close, he wasn't sure he was going to accomplish it."
But Auburn, in the midst of a troubling season, got one last play on the way against Alabama, and Gene Chizik turned to Mason.
"Coach Chizik could have taken a knee on the last play, but I think it was his commitment to Tre to give him a chance to get those yards. That's something about his character as a coach and a man," Vincent Mason said.
Mason is a junior, an Auburn guy first. His dad says his son wants to play in the NFL.
"That's definitely a goal and a dream of his, but the big thing right now is to get through college," his dad said. "His focus is on his college years. If that opportunity presents itself, he'll deal with when that time comes. Right now, he's focusing on his teammates."
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BMW markets new 6-series with celebrity 'Alter Egos' film series
bmw film kevin bacon.
BMW will promote the restyled 6-series with short films that focus on actors such as Kevin Bacon.
By: Julie Alvin on 7/28/2011
Carmakers have long used celebrity spokespeople to help sell cars, and BMW is taking this concept a step further with its "Alter Egos" film series, starring Donna Karan, Ed Norton and Kevin Bacon, among others.
The series marks the launch of the redesigned BMW 6-series.
Distributed on the Plum Television and Online network and shown at the Hampton Film Festival, the films tell the stories of the celebrities and the dichotomy of their public and private personas, showing that there is more to them than meets the eye. This message also applies to the 6-series, in that below its stylish exterior is an abundance of power and advanced technology.
The new 6-series is based on the same underpinnings as the latest 5-series and has a long list of tech features, such as rear-wheel steering and damper control.
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From the December 2013 Issue
The ATP, Going Cheap
As you may know, Congress recently demanded and the FAA implemented changes to rules on the training and experience required before someone can become an airline transport pilot. The new rules go into effect August 1, 2014, and perhaps have created an unintended side effect: Since they impose additional requirements for the knowledge (written) test, if you ever wanted it, now’s a good time to knock out the ATP.
Current Issue
Twin Troubles, II
I think it should be every light twin pilot’s responsibility to be current and proficient enough to safely handle an engine failure no matter where they occur. On takeoff, this can only be done safely with enough runway for an accelerate-stop distance computed for load and density altitude. Furthermore, compute single-engine climb performance for the conditions at hand.
Dissecting The PIO
We see it happen here all too often. The Franklin County Airport in Sewanee, Tenn., sits at the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau. During cooler months, northwest winds are thrust up the side of the plateau and swirl back down toward the airport. Tall trees surround the runway and make the airport difficult to see throughout the approach. Pilots in the pattern are greeted by updrafts followed by downdrafts that can make landing on our 50-by-3700-foot runway a challenge.
Pitot-Static Systems
No matter how much automation we fly behind, no matter how many air-data computers are installed and no matter how simple it is, it’s likely a pitot-static system—pretty much like the one Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic—is what generates airspeed and some other basic flight information aboard the aircraft we fly. These systems are relatively simple, consisting of basic sensors, some plumbing and sensitive instrumentation. The difference in air pressure does all the work.
Departure Difficulties
Too often, instrument training can focus only on approaches, those procedures at the end of a flight allowing us to find a runway and land on it. But well before we’re cleared for an approach, we have to take off, climb to altitude and get through the en route system to someplace close to our destination. Sure, approaches are sexy, but other portions of an instrument flight are just as important. Take initial climb and departure, for instance, something at which pilots routinely fail.
Embracing Risk
It’s often difficult to compare the risks imposed by different activities, but it’s reasonable to state flying a certified single-engine airplane for an hour on a severe-clear day isn’t as risky as spending that same time performing low-level aerobatics in an Experimental airplane. At the same time, and according to John King of King Schools, “you’re more likely to have a fatality in a GA airplane than in a car” when traveling the same distance. If the added risk exposure we get from flying didn’t provide some benefit—more efficient transportation, for example, or pure enjoyment—we might not do it at all. But the simple enjoyment of boring holes in the sky and other benefits outweighs that risk for many of us.
Ground Ops
Before we can fly, we probably have to taxi. At sleepy, non-towered facilities, getting from the ramp to the runway and vice versa usually isn’t much of a challenge unless the surface’s condition poses one. Meanwhile, towered facilities and larger airports bring their own challenges.
Do Not Apply
When you think about it, the rules applying to non-commercial, Part 91 flying are very lenient. We can take off when we want, go pretty much where we want, and don’t need to talk to anyone unless the weather or the location demands it. Still, that’s not enough for some pilots, who perhaps think their skill, experience or immediate needs outweigh the need to comply with even minimal requirements.
NTSB Reports December 2013: Recent general aviation and air carrier accidents
At 1820 Pacific time, the airplane veered off the right side of a runway and collided with a hangar. The private pilot and three passengers were fatally injured, and the airplane was destroyed by a post-crash fire. Visual conditions prevailed; an IFR flight plan had been in effect.
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Preview: Game #53, Diamondbacks @ Rangers [Take 2]
Rick Yeatts
Let's try this again, shall we?
Brandon McCarthy
RHP, 2-3, 4.36
Justin Grimm
RHP, 4-3, 4.05
Diamondbacks Line-up
1. Gerardo Parra, RF
2. Didi Gregorius, SS
3. Paul Goldschmidt, 1B
4. Eric Chavez, 3B
5. Martin Prado, 2B
6. Miguel Montero, C
7. Jason Kubel, DH
8. Cody Ross, LF
9. A.J. Pollock, CF
+ Brandon McCarthy, P
Couple of changes to the line-up from yesterday's rain-out, even though it's the same starting pitchers as yesterday. The main cause is the renewed availability of Martin Prado, who has recovered from fouling the ball off his knee: yesterday's postponement allowed him to keep the current tie with Goldschmidt and Parra, all three men having missed only one game this season. He replaces Cliff Pennington today, and slots in higher up the order, at #5. Ross is dropped down a couple of spots to keep the whole leftie-rightie order acceptably mixed-up for Cap'n Kirk. Otherwise, though: same as it was.
Even though the Diamondbacks didn't play yesterday, it was still a good day, as only the Padres won in the NL West. With the Giants losing to the A's, and the Rockies to the (snigger!) Astros, we extended our lead in the division to 2.5 games over both of them. There could have been a double-header today - I believe the Rangers could have opted for that - but probably fortunate they didn't, as the Diamondbacks have to head to Chicago and get ready for another day-game tomorrow, so wouldn't want to hang around Arlington too long. Instead, Thursday August 15 might work: both teams are off, and we would be heading from Phoenix towards Pittsburgh, with Texas between home series.
Berthiaume is not a meteorologist, nor does he play one on TV, but with actual humidity in Arlington at 63% this morning, it's definitely going to be a shock to the system for our players, and probably a test of stamina for McCarthy. The prognosis for today is better, but there's still about a 20% chance of rain this afternoon, and according to the forecast, it's the kind of rain shown below. The bad news is, the forecast for Chicago on Friday and Saturday afternoons is not good, with a 70% chance of rain, similarly high humidity and a predicted thunderstorm for tomorrow. So enjoy today's game while you ca... Oh, never mind: it's not on TV, is it? :(
And might as well, repost yesterday's preview, or at least the chunks which are still relevant. This will be the 28th time we've played the Rangers in franchise history, which will actually be the most of any American League club. The overall record hasn't been good: even after the Memorial Day sweep, Arizona are still only 10-17 against them, with our only previous series victory coming all the way back in June 1998. This begins a long stretch for the Diamondbacks: 15 14 games in 15 14 days, with only three of those at home, and nine against teams above .500. If we're still in first by the next off-day on June 13, I'll be more than satisfied.
McCarthy starts for the Diamondbacks, and is attempting to go through the whole month of May without tasting defeat. That would be "something of an improvement", to say the least, considering he went through the whole month of April without enjoying a victory. So far in his five May starts, McCarthy is 2-0 with a 1.98 ERA, and a K:BB ratio of 21:6 in 36.1 innings. He has been even better than that over his last three appearances, going 2-0 with an 0.38 ERA, having allowed precisely one run over those 24 innings. Admittedly, the BABIP of .217 has been helpful, especially considering a line-drive rate of 23%, but it's about time he enjoyed a bit of good luck.
Grimm is going to be an almost unknown quantity for the Diamondbacks, with a grand total of two PAs against him, across the entire roster. Cliff Pennington is responsible for both: he is 0-for-2, and thanks to Prado's return, isn't even in the line-up. Kubel gets the start at DH, making his first appearance of the year at the position - our last road series, against the Yankees, the position was occupied by Eric Hinske, Chavez, and Alfredo Marte starting one game. Goes to show how much things have changed: this will be Chaxez's 16th start in 26 May games, compared to only 12 in 27 April ones.
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Babble Voices
Kelly Wickham
Connect with Kelly
Explaining White Privilege
By Kelly Wickham |
Every time we have bad weather and there is a chance that we might experience a tornado, I ask The Cuban the same question while watching the news report on dangerous areas: “What’s the difference between a Tornado Watch and a Tornado Warning again?” Then, he explains it to me, I nod my head because, yeah, I forgot and now that makes sense. The problem is that I do it every single time. For the life of me, it just doesn’t stick in my head. Tornado season for us in the Midwest where we live starts in March and goes until it warms up enough for the threat to lessen. It makes sense for me to be able to differentiate so that I don’t run to the basement and grab the radio on the way down. In the off chance that you’re as dense as I am on the issue, let me clear it up: a Tornado Watch means that conditions are favorable for a tornado to occur. There’s large hail, damaging winds, and a tornado is possible. A Tornado Warning means that it’s touched the ground and there’s a tornado happening right now. (Now that I’ve written that all down, maybe I can remember it. We’ll see come next March.)
I bring up the issue of something that always confuses me because I’ve been participating in a lot of conversations about what White Privilege is. There are three categories of conversations I’m having:
1. What is it anyway? What does White Privilege look like?
2. There’s no such thing. Stop lying.
3. White Privilege is a horrible thing and we need to own it because it happens.
Let’s be honest: when I see version #2 happening I back out when there’s no hope of actually having a discussion of it. But versions #1 and #3 are where all the great discussion is happening anyway and it leads to discussion of Civil Rights laws and the meritocracy mythology and what’s it’s like to live in the skin of a Black or Brown person in the United States. More than anything, I’ve been referring back to and sharing the article (written first as a Facebook post) by the drummer of The Roots, Questlove. What he presents in his essay is a great picture of how fear manifests itself in racism and the hurt that follows such encounters. It also proves, to some newly informed and aware of American racism, that many people experience America differently and the worlds in which they live haven’t collided this hard since I can remember.
White Privilege works like that and very much resembles a destructive tornado. It comes out of nowhere when there appears to be safe blue skies right beforehand. It means you have to take cover and protect yourself. It shows us how some people take shelter while others run right out to find it. It’s not helpful to simply make an analogous parallel, so I’m going to give three things that are not helpful in the conversation assuming you want to have one about White Privilege.
1. Stop saying you’re colorblind. If anything, this video about the controversy surrounding the Cheerios commercial that shows how kids reacted when learning there was a controversy has been helpful in aiding the discussion. Here’s the thing: no, you’re not colorblind. Plus, people of color are fine with you seeing that color. There are some physical differences and that’s never more apparent when I’m with someone pointing out a person in a crowd to me who uses color as a qualifier. If it’s a White Person they might say, “The guy in the striped blue-and-white shirt and cargo shorts.” but if it’s a Black Person I usually hear, “There. The Black lady over there.” Personally, the best place to see this in action for me is in the drugstore aisle. There are “natural” shades that White women can easily access, but colors that fit my skin tone are harder to come by and sometimes entirely absent. When you look at bandages sold in the store do you never stop to consider that “flesh-colored” only fits one group of people?
2. Discussing White Privilege based on the meritocracy system. Many people who are successful in their career or who have attained a degree or even live in a gorgeous house will tell you that they worked hard to get what they have. That’s fine, and I’m not denying that at all. However, when a system has been put in place with legislation and laws and bias we have to give that credit, too. Two things have happened in the United States that lead us here and they are de jure segregation and de facto segregation. The first kind, de jure segregation was sanctioned by laws that kept segregation alive in housing and education issues like Brown v. Board of Education. It took the Supreme Court to strike these unfair laws down. De facto segregation means “in fact” and is the practice of following the letter of the law but not the spirit. Charging some people more money for services, refusing access to things like grocery stores or health services by virtue of making them far away from certain neighborhoods, and things like redlining (discriminatory practices of mortgage discrimination) are often discussed as things that happen as “fact” because many people and corporations still do it. If practices are put in place, whether lawful or not, they prevent people from getting careers, obtaining degrees, or living where they want. So what you have may have been worked hard for, but not everyone even had the chance to start working for it. Meritocracy is a myth we’ve been sold that prevents us from having the deeper conversations that lead to the historical events that brought us here. Know your history or repeat it, right?
3. Making everything a comparison. Just because you don’t see White Privilege doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Discussing things in terms of what Black Americans have GAINED over the time that they’ve been in this country (which began as a kidnapping) and pointing to all the successful examples of Black people doesn’t negate that it’s been a struggle to get where we are. Pointing out to someone that your Black neighbor went to college on a scholarship and is now a medical doctor even though you only went to a state school to become an office manager isn’t the answer to all of these problems. Taking one situation with which you’re familiar and using it as the measuring stick for all the rest of them just shows how basic your understanding is of the issues of White Privilege as a whole.
Until we see White Privilege as a real and true thing then we’re living in a world full of Tornado Watches. Conditions are favorable, but we all can’t see the twister from where we are. A White Privilege Tornado Watch means “it’s happening somewhere, but I can’t see it, so I’m safe”. The problem with living like that is that there’s a large portion of the population living in Tornado Warnings where it’s happening and NOW and it’s dangerous.
Photo credit to Vincent Villamón
Read more from Kelly at her personal blog, Mocha Momma Untold Stories Are Sometimes Secrets
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Kelly Wickham
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One thought on “Explaining White Privilege
1. Deb Roby says:
I have a friend who regularly tells the story about trying to point out a teacher in a group. The teacher is the only black woman in the room, yet my friend never says that. “I just don’t see her as black anymore! She’s just Karen.”
She doesn’t get that saying that isn’t a good thing. That it denies part of Karen’s identity. (that, in a way, it’s as if Karen is white). And I have yet to come up with a tactful way of explaining it to her.
Thank you putting it under the White Privilege mantel!
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October 06, 2006
Q: How/why are banks using VOIP and related IP telephony solutions?
Jeff Van Houten, Parish National Bank: Primarily, PNB has chosen VOIP as a cost-savings measure. As the bank expanded, we recognized a need for a telephony technology that would give us low up-front costs [and] low maintenance costs, and allow us to spend our recurring telecom budget productively. By using VOIP we gained efficiency in our WAN lines, freeing up needed bandwidth for other technologies, such as videoconferencing and remote security monitoring. If your telecom budget is more or less fixed, you might as well transport higher-value-added services over those lines, as opposed to leaving large blocks of bandwidth strictly for voice calls.
Martyn Roetter, Arthur D. Little: Savings from IP telephony can include reductions in charges for circuits and conference calls; lower expenditures on moves, adds and changes, and on voice and data systems maintenance; plus improvements in areas such as call center productivity and disaster recovery capability. However, these benefits do not come automatically. Careful planning is required to avoid some pitfalls unknown in traditional telephony.
Jim Bright, Cisco Systems: While cost savings is almost always the starting point for banks, most are experiencing better employee productivity and flexibility, which very often translate into better customer service.
Q: What are the risks and/or security concerns for banks implementing VOIP?
Van Houten, Parish National Bank: You need to distinguish between VOIP as a technology and VOIP as a popular press term when addressing security concerns. VOIP in the popular press refers to two distinct technologies: the transport of phone calls via packet-based IP and the use of Internet-based carriers to connect callers. Internally, VOIP can be made more secure than traditional hardwired technologies through advanced techniques such as encryption. If using an Internet-based carrier, there are some legitimate concerns, however. But I would expect most bank deployments to use traditional carriers as a gateway to external callers; therefore, inadequate security shouldn't be a deterrent to adoption.
Roetter, Arthur D. Little: Some risks, such as network unreliability, can be managed by applying existing well-established engineering practices for IP networks, while for others - including security risks - comprehensive best practices are still being developed. Networks can be designed with prioritization or even separation of voice and data traffic so that delay-sensitive voice is not blocked by data traffic during periods of network congestion.
However, although the security of VOIP has not yet become a major threat, it is a legitimate concern for banks. Customer voice mails could overflow with spam audio files sent to millions of IP phone addresses. Banks should build in security from the beginning with, for example, special firewalls to restrict VOIP network access and detect intrusions. Nevertheless, the greatest risks to security still may lie with people, not technology - if laptops or flash drives containing account information are lost or stolen through carelessness, or a bank hires a criminal hacker, for example.
Brian L. Buffington, AT&T: VOIP has to be treated in the same way a firm would treat its data - it needs to be highly secure, particularly for financial services organizations. When VOIP is introduced, the security requirements for voice applications become much more stringent than with traditional telephony. Security must be inherent to a bank's network, and banks must have clear governance policies. Businesses should perform a security audit to make sure all the pieces are in place before launching a VOIP solution.
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