Large Scale Scrum – LeSS

Product Owner

Scaled Product Owner

Prioritization over Clarification

Find a Product Owner Given Your Type of Development

Step 1: Know Your Development Type

  • Product development—For external customers or a market.

Step 2: Finding the right Product Owner

The following figure shows the Product Owner in different organizations:

Who is the Product Owner in Different Types of Development

Step 3: Give Authority and Responsibility to a Real Product Owner

Five Relationships

Product Owner Relationships
  • Product Owner<–>Teams
  • Product Owner<–>Customers
  • Teams<–>Customers
  • Product Owner<–>Higher Management
  • Product Owner<->Scrum Masters

LeSS Meetings

  • Sprint Planning One – 1 hour.
  • Overall Product Backlog Refinement (PBR) – 4 hours
  • Sprint Review – 2 hours.
  • Overall Retrospective – 1.5 hours.

The Product Owner does not attend the team-specific meetings:

Common Mistakes by Development Team

Members of the development team do not belong to the T-shaped group of people

The T-shaped model states that a person specializes in one specific field but has some general knowledge in other areas related to it as well. In other words – they know everything about something and something about everything. One of the key foundations of Scrum is the cross-functionality concept. Make sure that your teams consist of T-shaped people and help them improve their general knowledge by organising all sorts of internal workshops. If the development team, members are not willing to get out of their comfort zones and learn new things. It may be hard for them to work in a truly agile way. They will stick to the waterfall approach and focus on delivering “their” part of work, instead of taking the responsibility for the entire Sprint Backlog.

The team is too small

Small teams don’t have all the competences and skills necessary to deliver a releasable increment at the end of the Sprint which is the absolute foundation of the iterative development process. Finishing Sprints without delivering a fully functional items is not Scrum.

The team is too big

According to the Scrum Guide, the development team can consist of up to 9 members. If there are more people involved in the development process, communication problems may arise and it may be hard to maintain the Scrum events within the specified time frame.

Should be characteristics of a Product Owner

Visionary and Doer

The product owner is a visionary who can envision the final product and communicate the vision. But the product owner is also a doer who sees the vision through to completion. This includes capturing ideas and requirements, closely collaborating with the team, analyzing feedback from stakeholders and users, and steering the project by tracking and forecasting its progress. As an entrepreneur, the product owner facilitates creativity; encourages innovation; and is comfortable with change, ambiguity, debate, conflict, playfulness, experimentation, and informed risk taking.

Leader and Team Player

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion,” says Jack Welch, GE’s former chairman and CEO. The product owner is just such a leader. As the individual responsible for the product’s success, the product owner provides guidance and direction for everyone involved in the development effort and ensures that tough decisions are made. For instance, should the launch date be postponed or should less functionality be delivered? At the same time, the product owner must be a team player who relies on close collaboration with the other Scrum team members, yet has no formal authority over them. You can think of the product owner as primus inter pares, first among peers, regarding the product.

Being a leader and team player can be a hard line to toe. By no means should the product owner dictate decisions, yet at the same time neither should the product owner be indecisive or employ a laissez-faire management style. Instead, the individual should act as a shepherd for the innovation process, guiding the project and seeking team consensus in the decision-making process. Making decisions about the product collaboratively ensures the team’s buy-in, leverages the team’s creativity and knowledge, and results in better decisions. Working this way requires facilitation and patience because team members often have to disagree and argue first before a new solution can be synthesized from the different ideas and perspectives.

Communicator and Negotiator

The product owner must be an effective communicator and negotiator. The individual communicates with and aligns different parties, including customers, users, development and engineering, marketing, sales, service, operations, and management. The product owner is the voice of the customer, communicating customer needs and requirements and bridging the gap between “the suits” and “the techies.” Sometimes this means saying no and other times negotiating a compromise.

Empowered and Committed

The product owner must have enough authority and the right level of management sponsorship to lead the development effort and to align stakeholders. An empowered product owner is essential for leading the effort to bring the product to life. The product owner must have the proper decision-making authority—from finding the right team members to deciding which functionality is delivered as part of the release. The individual must be someone who can be entrusted with a budget and at the same time has the ability to create a work environment that fosters creativity and innovation. Finally, the product owner must be committed to the development effort.

Available and Qualified

The product owner must be available and qualified to do a great job. Being the product owner is usually a full-time job. It is important to give product owners enough time to sustainably carry out their responsibilities. If the individual is overworked, the project’s progress suffers and the resulting product may be suboptimal. Being adequately qualified usually requires an intimate understanding of the customer and the market, being passionate about the user experience, and the ability to communicate needs and describe requirements, to manage a budget, to guide a development project, and to be comfortable working with a cross-functional, self-organizing team.

Nobody is Perfect

Before you now look for the perfect product owner or worry that you might not fit the bill, be aware that product owners usually need time and support to transition into the role and to acquire the necessary skills. And nobody is perfect: Every product owner has some strengths that facilitate playing the role as well as some weaknesses that can make it challenging. A product owner may be very good at envisioning the product, talking to customers, and creating the product roadmap but may not be used to work closely with a bunch of techies or lack the necessary release planning skills, for instance. A common challenge is finding employees with the necessary breadth and depth of knowledge and experience to do the job well.

Project Management Statistics 2018

Stats can mean the difference between a successful project and project failure, with multiple jobs and millions of dollars on the line.

As a project manager, you need to interpret the numbers—budgets, timelines, KPIs—to determine when things are headed in the right direction and when changes need to be made. For example, when is it time to upgrade from free project management software to paid software?

I crawled the internet for up-to-date project management research, and found ten stats to help guide your 2018 strategy.

10 project management statistics for 2018

1. A lack of clear goals is the most common factor (37%) behind project failure, according to executive leaders.
(Source: PMI Pulse of the Profession 2017)

The takeaway:  Avoid project failure by having a project kick-off meeting before doing anything else.

2. Only 37% of teams in the U.K. reported completing projects on time more often than not.
(Source: Wellingtone)
The takeaway:  Delays are inevitable, but that doesn’t mean you should accept that every project will be behind schedule. Use Gantt charts to stay on schedule as much as possible.

3. 73% of U.S. workers think that technology can never replace the human mind.
(Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers)
The takeaway:  Artificial intelligence is already changing project management, but that doesn’t mean that PM jobs will be replaced by robots. In the 21st century, soft skills—like communication and leadership—will be even more important than hard skills, like using spreadsheets and presentation software.

4. As of March 15, 2018, the average project manager salary nationwide is $80,854.
(Source: Glassdoor)
Project management statistics for 2018: Average project manager salary
The takeaway:  Project management can be a lucrative career choice.

5. Between 2015 and 2016, the percentage of organizations using a spreadsheet to manage their Agile projects decreased from 74% to 67%.
(Source: VersionOne)
The takeaway:  A spreadsheet can be great for managing your personal finances, but it’s not designed for managing Agile projects. There are apps for that.

6. 85% of firms have a PMO (project management office), up 5% from 2014. Almost half (45%) of PMO staffers have earned their PMP (Project Management Professional) certification. (Source: The State of the Project Management Office (PMO) 2016\\
The takeaway:  A project management office has become a necessity rather than a luxury at high performing organizations. A PMP certificate, on the other hand, is nice to have, but not required.

7. 90% of companies said that open source software increased efficiency, interoperability, and innovation. Use of open source software increased at 65% of companies in 2016.
(Source: Black Duck Software)

The takeaway:  You don’t have to pay for project management software. You do need to be aware of the risks, though. Free software often has less features than paid software, and open source solutions can require an experienced IT team to run them.

8. Managing project costs (49.5%) was the biggest problem faced by manufacturing project managers in 2017. Hitting deadlines (45.8%) and sharing information across teams (43.9%) weren’t far behind.
(Source: Liquid Planner)
The takeaway:  Time management, budget management, and communication continue to form the foundation of good project management. Get those things right, and success will follow.

9. More than half (56.6%) of manufacturers use a combination of project management methodologies.
(Source: Liquid Planner)

The takeaway:  There’s no magic bullet when it comes to project management methodologies. Rather than rigidly subscribing to Agile or Waterfall, the best project managers continue to study and learn, and use the techniques that work best for their teams, regardless of which school of thought those techniques come from.

10. 59% of U.S. workers say communication is their team’s biggest obstacle to success, followed by accountability (29%).
(Source: Atlassian)

The takeaway:  More than half of all projects fail because of a breakdown in communications. Whether your teams are all in the same location or on separate continents, as the project manager it’s your responsibility to foster communication. Collaboration and web conferencing tools can make this job easier.

Project management is more than just numbers

It’s fun to look at statistics, but the more important thing is what you do with these numbers. These takeaways can help you refocus your strategy. If you enjoyed this piece, share it on social media (bonus points for mentioning me on Twitter, @consultantwww)

To keep up with the latest in project management technology trends, bookmark Think Tank – infoictionary.

Scrum is one of the most popular frameworks for implementing agile. So popular, in fact, that many people think scrum and agile are the same thing. (They’re not.) Many frameworks can be used to implement agile, such as kanban for example, but scrum has a unique flavor because of the commitment to short iterations of work.

What’s so special about scrum?

With scrum, the product is built in a series of fixed-length iterations called sprints that give teams a framework for shipping software on a regular cadence. Milestones–i.e., the end of a sprint–come frequently, bringing with them a feeling of tangible progress with each cycle that focuses and energizes everyone. (“Continuous inspiration” for the win!) Short iterations also reinforce the importance of good estimation and fast feedback from tests–both recurring struggles in waterfall projects.

Scrum calls for four ceremonies that bring structure to each sprint:

  • Sprint planning: A team planning meeting that determines what to complete in the coming sprint.
  • Daily stand-up: Also known as a daily scrum, a 15-minute mini-meeting for the software team to sync.
  • Sprint demo: A sharing meeting where the team shows what they’ve shipped in that sprint.
  • Sprint retrospective: A review of what did and didn’t go well with actions to make the next sprint better.

During a sprint, visual artifacts like task boards and burndown charts, visible to the team and spectators alike, are powerful motivators. They drive a spirit of “we’re doing this!” Having the opportunity to show off new work at the sprint demo is equally motivating, and the consistent, incremental feedback the team gets from stakeholders at each demo creates a powerful way to develop products.

Scrum Burndown chart | Atlassian agile coach

Scrum done well–which is to say, not “waterfall with stand-ups”–can be a massive catalyst for improving team productivity and morale, and the product development process as a whole.

Three essential roles for scrum success

A scrum team has a slightly different composition than a traditional waterfall project, with three specific roles: product owner, scrum master, and the development team. And because scrum teams are cross-functional, “the development team” includes testers, designers, and ops engineers in addition to developers.

The product owner

Product owners are the champions for their product. They are focused on understanding business and market requirements, then prioritizing the work to be done by the engineering team accordingly. Effective product owners:

  • Build and manage the product backlog
  • Give the team clear guidance on which features to deliver next
  • Decide when to ship the product with the predisposition towards more frequent delivery

Keep in mind that a product owner is not a project manager. Product owners are not managing the status of the program. They focus on ensuring the development team delivers the most value to the business. Also, it’s important that the product owner be an individual. No development team wants mixed guidance from multiple product owners.

The scrum master

Scrum masters are the champion for scrum within their team. They coach the team, the product owner, and the business on the scrum process and look for ways to fine-tune their practice of it. An effective scrum master deeply understands the work being done by the team and can help the team optimize their delivery flow. As the facilitator-in-chief, they schedule the needed resources (both human and logistical) for sprint planning, stand-up, sprint review, and the sprint retrospective.

Scrum masters also look to resolve impediments and distractions for the development team, insulating them from external disruptions whenever possible.

Part of the scrum master’s job is to defend against an anti-pattern common among teams new to scrum: changing the sprint’s scope after it has already begun. Product owners will sometimes ask, “Can’t we get this one more super-important little thing into this sprint?” But keeping scope air tight reinforces good estimation and product planning–not to mention fends off a source of disruption to the development team.

Scrum masters are commonly mistaken for project managers, when in fact, project managers don’t really have a place in the scrum methodology. A scrum team controls its own destiny and self-organizes around their work. Agile teams use pull models where the team pulls a certain amount of work off the backlog and commits to completing it that sprint, which is very effective in maintaining quality and ensuring optimum performance of the team over the long-term. Neither scrum masters nor project managers nor product owners push work to the team (which, by contrast, tends to erode both quality and morale).

The scrum team

Strong scrum teams approach their project with a strong “we” attitude.

Scrum teams are the champions for sustainable development practices. The most effective scrum teams are tight-knit, co-located, and usually 5 to 7 members. Team members have differing skill sets, and cross-train each other so no one person becomes a bottleneck in the delivery of work. All members of the team help one another to ensure a successful sprint completion.

But wait: there’s more

Ok: so now you’ve been briefed. But understanding the philosophy of scrum and who is on a scrum team is only half of the equation. Keep reading to learn how scrum team members work together using common agile ceremonies as well as how the team in an agile program delivers work back to the business.

What is agile project management?

How agile methodologies can work for your software team

But what is it, and can it help your software team? Here is everything you need to know to get started, or refine, your agile project management practices.

Stemming from Toyota’s lean manufacturing concept of the 1940s, software development teams have embraced agile methodologies to reduce waste and increase transparency while quickly addressing their customers’ ever-changing needs. A stark change from waterfall project management that focuses on “big bang” launches, agile helps software teams collaborate better and innovate faster than ever before.

Traditional agile project management can be categorized into two frameworks: scrum and kanban. While scrum is focused on fixed-length project iterations, kanban is focused on continuous releases. Upon completion, the team immediately moves on to the next.

How scrum works

It all starts with the backlog, or body of work that needs to be done. In scrum, there are two backlogs: one is the product backlog (owned by the product owner) which is a prioritized list of features, and the other is the sprint backlog which is filled by taking issues from the top of the product backlog until the capacity for the next sprint is reached. Scrum teams have unique roles specific to their stake in the process. Typically there’s a scrum master, or champion of the scrum method for the team; the product owner, who’s the voice of the product; and the scrum team, who are often cross-functional team members in charge of getting a…z done.

The four ceremonies of scrum

Sprint Planning Sprint Demo Daily Standup Retrospective
A team planning meeting that determines what to complete in the coming sprint. A sharing meeting where the team shows what they’ve shipped in that sprint. Also known as a stand-up, a 15-minute mini-meeting for the software team to sync. A review of what did and didn’t go well with actions to make the next sprint better.

Scrum board example | Atlassian agile coach

The scrum board

A scrum board is used to visualize all the work in a given sprint. During the sprint planning meeting, the team moves items from the product backlog into the sprint backlog. Scrum boards can have multiple steps visible in the workflow, like To Do, In Progress, and Done. Scrum boards are the key component for increasing transparency in agile project management.

How kanban works

Kanban is a framework for agile project management that matches the work to the team’s capacity. It’s focused on getting things done as fast as possible, giving teams the ability to react to change even faster than scrum.

Unlike scrum, kanban has no backlogs (usually). Instead, work sits in the To Do column. This enables kanban teams to focus on continuous releases, which can be done at any time. All work is visible, scoped, and ready to execute on so that when something is completed, the team immediately moves on to the next. The amount of work is matched to the team’s capacity through WIP limits, which is a predefined limit of work that can be in a single column at one time (except the To Do column). The kanban framework includes the following four components:

The four components of kanban

List of work
(or stories)
Columns or lanes Work in Progress Limits (WIP) Continuous Releases
List of work, or stories, are defined as issues or tasks that need to get done. Used on a kanban board to distinguish tasks from different workstreams, users, projects, etc. A rule to limit the amount of work to be done based on the team’s capacity. The team works on the amount of stories within the WIP limit and can release at anytime.

The kanban board

A kanban board is used to visualize all the work that’s being done. It’s also used for planning resources allowing project managers to see the work and develop timelines accordingly. A kanban board is structured into columns and lanes that stories pass through on their way to completion. Stories sit in the To Do column until the WIP limit allows for the next task to be worked on. The list of work should be split into relatively small issues and organized by priority. As you can see in this example, lanes can help keep the higher priority items separated from “everything else.”

Estimate, report and plan

Whatever agile framework you choose to support your software development, you’ll need a way to see your team’s progress so you can plan for future work or sprints. Agile project estimating helps both scrum and kanban teams understand their capacity. Agile reports show the team’s progress over time. And backlog grooming helps project managers keep the list of work current and ready for the team to tackle.

Agile project estimating

Project estimating is an extremely important aspect of both kanban and scrum project management. For kanban, many teams set their WIP limit for each state based on their previous experiences and team size. Scrum teams use project estimating to identify how much work can be done in a particular sprint. Many agile teams adopt unique estimating techniques like planning poker, ideal hours, or story points to determine a numeric value for the task at hand. This gives agile teams a point of reference to refer back to during sprint retrospectives, to see how their team performed.

Agile reporting

Project estimations come into play at the beginning and end of each sprint. They help teams determine what they can get done at the beginning of the sprint, but also show how accurate those initial estimates were at the end. Agile reports, such as Burndown charts, show how many “story points” are completed during the sprint. Having data to support your retrospectives is an invaluable way for agile teams to improve.

Backlog management and grooming

A product backlog is a prioritized list of work for the development team to do that comes from product roadmap and its requirements. The development team pulls work from the product backlog for each sprint.

Grooming and maintaining your backlog helps teams achieve their long-term goals by continually adding and removing items based on the team’s long-term capacity and changing business objectives. Jira Software lets teams groom huge backlogs with multi-select ranking and order user stories and bugs by dragging and dropping issues. You can also filter with Jira Software’s flexible search to find a particular user story or bug.

Scrum agile project management

This is your go-to guide on scrum, a popular agile project management framework. You’ll learn scrum terminology, how to use the methodology in software and product development projects, and more.

There are so many agile project management frameworks that it can be difficult for newcomers to the field to get a good grasp of each one. Here’s a quick introduction to scrum, which is one of the most popular agile methodologies.

This resource guide is intended to be useful for project managers, business leaders, developers, project and product teams, consultants, stakeholders, and students. We’ll update this primer when new information is available about scrum.

SEE: All of TechRepublic’s smart person’s guides

Executive summary

  • What is scrum agile project management? Scrum is a popular iterative software development framework that is often used to manage product development. It uses short, iterative cycles called sprints to complete work.
  • Why does scrum agile project management matter? This agile framework is highly adaptable due to its simplicity, its flexibility, and the learning opportunities available to leaders and teams, who also benefit from the high degree of customer satisfaction.
  • Who does scrum agile project management affect? Project leaders, teams (made up of a scrum master, a product owner, and a scrum team), developers, stakeholders, end users, the business as a whole, and ultimately clients.
  • When is scrum agile project management happening? Scrum has been applied as a methodology since 2001 and is now one of the most widely used agile frameworks within various companies and industries worldwide.
  • How do I use scrum agile project management? There are numerous online resources, which include the Scrum Alliance founded in 2002 by Ken Schwaber and others; Scrum Guides, which were started by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland; and various organizations, including PMI and, that provide in-depth background information about the framework, as well as training and certification options.

SEE: IT leader’s guide to Agile development (Tech Pro Research)

What is scrum agile project management?

The word scrum originated from a rugby analogy in a 1986 study by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, and is just one of the many agile frameworks used in project management to improve quality and expedite product development and delivery. There are three key roles in scrum: the scrum master, the product owner, and the development team.

  • The scrum master takes on the role of a coach/team leader who is responsible for overseeing and guiding the process and making sure the team meets its goals and deliverables. Although the team is self-organizing, the scrum master works with the team to ensure there is synergy and alignment in their focus.
  • The product owner is, in essence, a project sponsor who develops the wish list of things to be done and prioritizes it. The product owner interacts with the team and the scrum master throughout the project.
  • The Scrum team is a self-organizing collaborative team that is used across functions and brought together because of their relevant and necessary skills for a project. This team of usually 5 – 10 people has the full capabilities and authority to complete the work and determines their tools and techniques as well as the delegation of work.

There are core terms in scrum you should know.

  • Artifacts: Product backlog, sprint backlog, etc.
  • Burndown chart: Displays the work effort that remains over a timeline.
  • Burnup chart: Displays the increase in a measure against time.
  • Definition of done (DoD): A set of expectations defined by the development team that outlines when a product is releasable.
  • Scrum team: A small team of 5 – 10 members that manages and completes the work within each sprint required to release a product to the customer.
  • Product owner: The person who manages and communicates all requirements for a product to maximize value for the customer.
  • Scrum board: The scrum team uses this physical board to diagram information needed to complete work.
  • Scrum master: A coach/team leader who is responsible for overseeing and guiding the process and making sure the team meets its goals and deliverables.
  • Sprint: A 2- to 4-week time frame increment that teams work within to complete the required work. There are usually iterations within a project.
  • Sprint backlog: A high-level view of work to be done to realize a sprint goal.

Additional resources:

Why scrum agile project management matters

Scrum offers project teams and organizations the following benefits.

  • Because scrum has a predetermined set of role, rules, and processes, it provides teams with an easy to implement process for getting work done, measuring success, and gaining higher levels of customer satisfaction.
  • Teams get to continually hone their skills and enhance their knowledge to maintain quality standards, meet stakeholder requirements, and improve collaboration.
  • Quality is mandated and defined within the DoD as a primary requirement before a product can be released. This increases the likelihood of success.
  • Scrum is highly flexible, as sprints do not impact work that was previously done in project phases, and instead executes only the work in the current sprint, offering teams greater focus.
  • Team collaboration and cohesiveness levels tend to be higher, as teams are self-organizing.
  • Costs are usually more contained.

Additional resources:

Who scrum agile project management affects

More for CXOs

The use of scrum benefits all members of a project team, including developers, project and product managers, testers, engineers, system designers, technical writers, and executives. The largest benefit is passed onto the customer through faster debugging, less frequent defects, and quicker turnaround of high-quality products.

Additional resources:

When scrum agile project management is happening

In the Scrum Alliance’s 2015 State of Scrum Report (PDF), 60% of scrum teams adhere to the 7-person team size and 2-week sprints, while 81% hold daily team meetings and 83% plan before each sprint. Further, 90% make use of some form of scrum artifacts, and approximately 56% say artifacts are widely used. Scrum continues to increase in popularity and practice.

Additional resources:

How to use scrum agile project management

During each sprint, the scrum team works together with the development team, which starts by looking at the wish list that was put together and prioritized by the product owner or backlog and plans how to tackle the tasks within a two- to four-week increment.

  1. The team develops tasks and delegates each of the tasks.
  2. The team identifies all deliverables.
  3. The team updates the backlog status.
  4. The team develops a new burndown chart.

You can achieve even greater benefits when using scrum with other frameworks such as Kanban and lean to create a hybrid solution.

Additional resources:


CIM_SettingContext class

The CIM_SettingContext class associates configuration objects with setting objects. For example, a network adapter's settings could change based on the site or network to which its hosting computer system is attached. In which case, the computer system would have two different configuration objects, corresponding to the differences in network configuration for the two network segments. One configuration would aggregate a setting object for the network adapter when operating on one segment; whereas, the other configuration would aggregate a different network adapter setting object, specific to another segment. Note that many computer settings are independent of the network configuration. For example, both configurations would aggregate the same setting object for the computer system's monitor resolution.

The following syntax is simplified from Managed Object Format (MOF) code and includes all of its inherited properties. Properties are listed in alphabetic order, not MOF order.

[Abstract, UUID("{F0B752E8-DB30-11d2-85FC-0000F8102E5F}"), Aggregation, Association, AMENDMENT]
class CIM_SettingContext
  CIM_Configuration REF Context;
  CIM_Setting       REF Setting;

The CIM_SettingContext class has these types of members:

The CIM_SettingContext class has these properties.

Data type: CIM_Configuration

Access type: Read-only

Qualifiers: Aggregate

Reference to the configuration object that aggregates the setting.

Data type: CIM_Setting

Access type: Read-only

Reference to an aggregated setting.

WMI does not implement this class.

This documentation is derived from the CIM class descriptions published by the DMTF. Microsoft may have made changes to correct minor errors, conform to Microsoft SDK documentation standards, or provide more information.

Minimum supported client
Windows Vista
Minimum supported server
Windows Server 2008


Helicopter Parenting: is it a choice?

Anxious parents raise anxious kids

Read more about helicopter mothers

From the Life Coaching Deck: Trust Your Healing Powers

I had no answer.

Read more about how to heal yourself with your mind

Anorexia: Healing through Creativity

SingerCreativity and self-expression are wonderful ways to recover from an eating disorder. Not eating and overeating are ways to control your life. Creativity happens when there is full control and can even be a form of meditation.

When I was young, I had many throat infections. My mom’s solution was always to take me to the doctor and give me antibiotics. This was a major part of my life for about 10 years. I took antibiotics about 6 months every year as a kid. It freaks me out to think about it now. When I grew up and learned more about the connection between physical problems and emotional states, I discovered that my throat infections could have been a result of being unable to express myself. Funnily enough, when I started writing at the age of 14, they disappeared.

I also learned that self-expression can be a cure, so since then, whenever my throat starts playing up and I have that familiar dry tingle threatening to flare, I sing! I turn the music on at full volume, or do it in the car, and sing! It does magic. One day and the infection is gone.

Using art for self-expression is a wonderful way to regain control over your life. You are on your own, creating what is in your mind. No criticism, no expected outcomes, just you and your creative flow, so you can feel how your body obeys your commands.

In any creative form, there is a sense of freedom that anorexic people desperately need. They have the freedom to try new things, the freedom to make mistakes, the freedom to express themselves, the freedom from rules and boundaries – basically, the freedom to be themselves.

Also, immersing ourselves in creative art can work as a great distraction from thinking about the emotional challenges that take over otherwise. Anorexic people continually think about their “distorted body”, about food and about their problems. Keeping busy and doing something creative is like putting a sign on the door saying “time out” from thinking and hopefully those thoughts will never come back.

People are different and find different forms of self-expression, but all of them are wonderful and can help in healing and recovering from anorexia or other eating disorders.

Read more about how to heal yourself from anorexia

My School Horror: Untouchable

Girl looking sadSchool was not one of the best periods in my life. I have become a teacher in hope of making a different in the lives of the many children like I was who are not very good in their studies, have few or no friends and struggle.

It is hard for people to imagine this, but for some kids, school is a big struggle for survival. This struggle is carried with them for years to come, even when those kids become parents themselves. When I talk to my clients about the negative beliefs they have about themselves, I discover that many of them were formed in school, when other kids said nasty things that they had no way of overcoming. I understand this very well, because I was the same. It took me a long time get over it and what really helped me was moving from primary school to middle school.

In 1st Grade, I was not a very popular girl. If there was a hierarchy in class, I was at the bottom of it, with 2 other kids that had their own problems. I loved going to school, because my teacher was the angel for me. She was soft and understanding and always treated me nicely, but the other kids never wanted to play with me.

When I did not come to school, it was very hard for my teacher to get one of the kids to come over and give me the homework (although some kids lived in my neighborhood). In the morning, when we had to stand in pairs in front of the classroom door, I was always left at the end and the child that had to give me his hand did this it in disgust. Although my teacher was very kind to me, I was always alone. Every year, until the end of primary school, when the end of year came and my class gave a performance, I stood at the back, holding a sign or something, by myself.

Was I maybe just not a friendly girl?

Read more about my school horror

Anorexia: Love Your Body

One way of healing is learning to love your body.

Read more about loving your body and curing anorexia

Smoking Parents – Smoking Kids

Read more about how to stop your kids from smoking

Anorexia: How to stop worrying

Horribly skinny boyAnorexia is a very debilitating disease. While it looks like there is a physical problem, the real problem is the one we cannot see with our eyes but the one we can see with our heart. As hard as it is to accept, choosing not to eat is a way to deal with difficult emotions.

Most eating disorders are the same. Eating (too much) or not eating (at all) is the solution to worry, to fear, to shame, to confusion, to failure and to guilt, and gradually, the simplest strategy seems to be to shut down the desire for food.

I do not know if you have ever fasted for fun, for health or for weight loss. There is a point when you no longer feel hungry at all. I think it is important for people to feel this point to understand that we can eat or not eat at will. To survive, we really do not need much food, so someone who chooses not to eat, really does not feel hungry, but still has those emotions that he or she tries to keep away. If you want to help a person who has anorexia, remember that focusing on the food is (again) working on the symptom and not the problem.

The best solution to anorexia is increasing the emotional intelligence. The first step is to recognize the feelings and the second step is to manage the feelings.

Today, I will focus on tips to mange worrying.

Worry is a feeling of fear from a possible bad future. People go to the future inside their head and imagine something bad, then come back to the present carrying the fear of this possibility. If it seems to you not to be real, it is because it is not. We all do this in some form, but some people have a problem distinguishing between their imaginary future and the present and those people do not just worry. They have what we call an anxiety attack.

Here are 10 tips to address worry or, in its severe form, anxiety, that may be a trigger to choosing not to eat. These are good for anyone, whether they have anorexia or not, and can help you help another person too.

Read more about how to stop worrying and recover from anorexia

The Value of Community

Homeless person sleeping with dogWhen I was growing up, there was a strong sense of community in everything. The people in my parents’ generation told stories of small places, where they knew everyone and did most things in a group of peers of families. Today, most people live in big cities, many live away from their hometown and family. Many people move every few years. Community is a luxury.

During the Easter break, we watched the movie Canvas with the kids. It tells the story of a family in which the mother has Schizophrenia. The father works as a builder for a rich jerk who buys speedboats and cars, but pays him too little too late, so they do not have enough money for medicine, which their basic health insurance refuses to cover.

The film shows how being poor and sick can have negative effects on your life and spin it out of control so quickly that it is super hard to recover. Because people expect certain behavior from adults, the mother creates a scene, which gets them thrown out of public places, like restaurants. Business owners may empathize with someone who sees imaginary people, but they still have a business to run.

The boy, being young, cannot truly understand what is happening to his mother. Unfortunately, neither can his schoolmates, who bully him for it. Also unfortunately, the father is a simple man who struggles to get by and lacks the emotional tools to help his son relax and cope with the mother’s strangeness and absence, let alone the additional social burden he has to endure.

Read more about the value of community

Anorexia: Exaggerated Perception

Young anorexic manPeople with eating disorders like anorexia often have an exaggerated perception of life. It is as if they see the world through huge magnifying glasses and things that seem minor to others seem huge and overwhelming to them.

If you have anorexia or any other eating disorder, or if you have a child that has it and you want to help, it is important to focus on the thoughts and the mindset and not on the food. Not eating is not the problem. It is the solution that people with a distorted perception find for their problems.

Avoid trying to convince them to eat. It only makes things worse. Anorexic people need control, not a nagger.

Avoid punishing a child who has anorexia. It only increases their helplessness and their desire to control something (ANYTHING) in their life, like what they eat, when they eat and how much they eat.

Generally, anorexic people have a very bad self-image, considering self as useless, not worthy, a failure, stupid, an idiot, etc, and they use every little thing that happens in their life to reinforce it. They use their glasses to look for proof they are worthless and they do not consider single events as temporary or coincidental, but as part of their identity.

Here is a list of thoughts that make big things out of small things and demonstrates the effect of the huge magnifying glasses anorexic people wear. Each one you get rid of will reduce the magnifying effect.

Read more about how to treat anorexia

From the Life Coaching Deck: Art Fights Depression

A couple sculpted in woodGail asked for a relationship coaching session, but said she would come by herself. “My husband won’t come”, she said. No matter what I asked her, her answer was related to the fact her husband was depressed and was unwilling to help himself. He had lost his job years before and that had sucked the life out of him. For 5 years, he had been sucking the life out of Gail and her two wonderful boys.

Having a depressed family member is not easy to handle. Most of the time, the depressed person cannot admit he or she needs help and rejects any help attempt. Those around them feel helpless and drained.

Gail was very creative in her attempts to help her husband. She went to the doctor and talked to him. She tried to make him go to the doctor, without success. She got him some vitamins and he refused to take them. She arranged holidays to make him happy, but he stayed depress.

Eventually, after 5 years of trying, Gail left home.

Read more about how art helps with depression


1-250-514-8459 tamara@posminds.com

Aha Moments

How Do You Know If You Work For a Positive Organization?

A positive work environment is one where employees feel good about coming to work and have motivation that sustains them throughout the workday. What they do matters. And more importantly, it matters that they are the ones doing the work. With the new emphasis on...

Equation2Thrive #What’s Your Equation?

The 2018 World Positive Education Accelerator combined the science of positive education & David Cooperrider's appreciative inquiry methods with a goal of making a quantum leap in the ways positive education impacts academics and well-being around the world. Positive...

Can Binge-Watching Make You Happier?

According to Psychology Today, we are wired to binge-watch television. Humans are social beings and we connect emotionally with the stories and the plights of others on the screen. There's even a new field called neurocinematics which is the study of how television...


Meaning of RADIO in English

[ra.dio] adj [

[2]radio or radio-] (1887) 1: of, relating to, or operated by radiant energy

2: of or relating to electric currents or phenomena (as electromagnetic radiation) of frequencies between about 15,000 and 1E11 hertz 3 a: of, relating to, or used in radio or a radio set b: specializing in radio or associated with the radio industry c (1): transmitted by radio (2): making or participating in radio broadcasts d: controlled or directed by radio

[2]radio n, pl ra.di.os [short for radiotelegraphy] (1903) 1 a: the wireless transmission and reception of electric impulses or signals by means of electromagnetic waves b: the use of these waves for the wireless transmission of electric impulses into which sound is converted

2: a radio message

3: a radio receiving set

4. a: a radio transmitting station b: a radio broadcasting organization c: the radio broadcasting industry d: communication by radio [3]radio vt (1913) 1: to send or communicate by radio

2: to send a radio message to ~ vi: to send or communicate something by radio

Merriam-Webster English vocab.      Английский словарь Merriam Webster.


Thursday, July 21, 2016

A Reintroduction: Hello, My Nom De Guerre Is Arminius, And Why We Are The New Barbarians?

There have been some readers who have asked why Arminius and why New Barbarians. I believe a reintroduction is in order. A little background on Arminius from the Roman historian Tacitus: "Arminius, without doubt Germania's liberator, who challenged the Roman people not in its beginnings like other kings and leaders, but in the peak of its empire; in battles with changing success, undefeated in the war."

Arminius was the Germanic tribal leader who lead the force that defeated the Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9.

Sound familiar? Those that forget their history are doomed to repeat it.

Why New Barbarians? I was inspired by the classical definition of the word "Barbarian." Also, there are some great discussions here and here (Hat tip to Max Velocity's excellent Blog) and here. We are looked down upon by the "elite" of our national culture as the barbarians of our age. I accept that moniker with pride. It only shows their ignorance.

I am a man of faith. I am a husband and father of five incredible children. I am a third generation veteran. I am an American who believes in the Constitution and Liberty.

Who Am I?
I am fascinated by the world and its processes. I believe in God and His Son. I enjoy learning new things and ideas. I look for the good in people, but I see evil in all its forms everywhere. I long for peace, but prepare myself and my family for defend ourselves. I love to learn, but so many of our institutions of higher learning have become nothing more than profit centers enslaving our young and their future. I love vigorous but courteous debate.

I know that change is inevitable, but that it is not always good. Just because we can do it does not mean that we should. I enjoy good stories well told, whether by the fire, on the couch, at the table, or on the stage and screen. Family and friends help form the tribes of our lives, regardless of distance. I believe that government, like fire, can be either a helpful servant or a fearsome master. I may not have much, but I will help you with what I have. I have learned that sometimes it is better to walk than run, to stand when you cannot walk, and to accept the leaning help of a friend when you cannot even stand.

I have been blessed to be loved by three women in my life: my mother who bore and raised me, my wife who is my life long companion and fellow dream sharer, and my daughter who deserves the moon and stars to be laid down at her feet. My wife's and my four sons are like the cardinal points of the compass rose. Each one distinctly different in his own way, yet, they all have the potential to entirely encompass their worlds. I have been mentored by the best of men, and I have called many of them Friend and Brother. But only one have I called Dad, and my debt to him can never truly be totally repaid. I have lost friends, family and Brothers to sickness, war, and the crushing weight of life. They will never be forgotten.

I long for the undiscovered country, the unknown frontiers of old, where wonder and amazement can be found beyond the known horizon. I hope for the future, but keep the rhymes and rhythms of history ever present in mind. I enjoy the thinker, the poet, the singer, the inventor. I may not be rich or famous, but if wealth is measured by the relationships we have, I am truly among the wealthiest in the world. I love to grow and make things that others will enjoy. I have learned to enjoy the sunrise, the sunset, and the stars as they wheel through an incredible night sky. I admire the wizened eyes of the elderly man. I enjoy watching the innocence of a small child experiencing their world. Sometimes the simplest pleasures in life are also the most memorable and best to experience. If you and I disagree on something, it is okay. Let us find what we can agree on and go from there. If you cannot reconcile on that, then peace be unto you and you may go your way. Life is too short to hold grudges.

Yet, there is so much more to learn, love, share, and celebrate. So I face in another direction and step forward...

  1. FULL SPEECH: Donald Trump - Republican National Convention

    ps. Would you consider adding CC to your blogroll?

  2. There is a little interest in a Southern Colorado Patcon. Will keep you updated.


کمال | Cemal Name Meanings in Urdu & English, Baby Names Meanings

Baby name meanings, origin and religion

What does Cemal mean?

Find Other Names by Relevence (Cemal):

Starting with:
Ending with:

Cemal name religion, origin and Cemal name pronunciation:

Arabic Meaning: The name Cemal is an Arabic baby name. In Arabic the meaning of the name Cemal is: Beauty.

Cemal is baby boy name mainly popular in Muslim religion and its main origin is Arabic. Cemal name meanings is Attractive. Cemal is written in Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Bangla as کمال, सेमल, كمال, কেমাল.

Popular personalities with Cemal Name.

Cemal Gursel

Cemal Gursel was a President of Turkey, Prime Minister of Turkey, Commander of the Turkish Army, and List of Commanders of the Turkish Land Forces. He was most prominent from 1960 to 1966. Cemal was born on October 13th, 1895 in Erzurum. He died on September 14th, 1966.

Cemal Azmi

Cemal was born in 1868 in Arapgir. He passed away on April 17th, 1922.

Cemal Hunal

Cemal was born on October 2nd, 1976.

Cemal Kafadar

Cemal was born in 1954.

Cemal Tollu

Cemal was born on April 19th, 1899. He died on July 26th, 1968.

Cemal Mersinli

Cemal Mersinli was a member of parliament and mersin province. Cemal was born in 1875 in Mersin. He passed away on October 7th, 1941.

Hasan Cemal

Hasan was born in 1944 in Istanbul.

Other Personalities with Cemal Name.

Cemal Ercman

Cemal Metin Bulutoglulari

Write Cemal in Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Bangla
(Cemal pronunciation in different languages)

Urdu: کمال
Hindi: सेमल
Arabic: كمال
Bangla: কেমাল

Boy Names with Same Meanings with Cemal

Cemal Name Wallpaper

Cemal beautiful wallper
All Names by Origin


Celsius to Rømer

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Rømer to Celsius (Swap Units)

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Celsius to Rømer formula

°Rø =
℃ * 0.52500
+ 7.50
Show working
Show result in exponential format
More information: Celsius

Although initially defined by the freezing point of water (and later the melting point of ice), the Celsius scale is now officially a derived scale, defined in relation to the Kelvin temperature scale.

Zero on the Celsius scale (0℃) is now defined as the equivalent to 273.15K, with a temperature difference of 1 deg C equivalent to a difference of 1K, meaning the unit size in each scale is the same. This means that 100℃, previously defined as the boiling point of water, is now defined as the equivalent to 373.15K.

The Celsius scale is an interval system but not a ratio system, meaning it follows a relative scale but not an absolute scale. This can be seen because the temperature interval between 20℃ and 30℃ is the same as between 30℃ and 40℃, but 40℃ does not have twice the air heat energy of 20℃.

A temperature difference of 1 deg C is the equivalent of a temperature difference 1.8°F.

Celsius to Rømer formula

°Rø =
℃ * 0.52500
+ 7.50

Rømer is a temperature scale named after the Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Rømer, who proposed it in 1701. In this scale, the zero was initially set using freezing brine. The boiling point of water was defined as 60 degrees. Rømer then saw that the freezing point of pure water was roughly one eighth of the way (about 7.5 degrees) between these two points, so he redefined the lower fixed point to be the freezing point of water at precisely 7.5 degrees. The inventor of the Fahrenheit scale Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit learned of Rømer's work increasing the number of divisions by a factor of four and establishing what is now known as the Fahrenheit scale.

Celsius to Rømer table

Print table
< Smaller Values Larger Values >
Celsius Rømer
0 7.50°Rø
1 8.03°Rø
2 8.55°Rø
3 9.07°Rø
4 9.60°Rø
5 10.12°Rø
6 10.65°Rø
7 11.18°Rø
8 11.70°Rø
9 12.23°Rø
10 12.75°Rø
11 13.28°Rø
12 13.80°Rø
13 14.32°Rø
14 14.85°Rø
15 15.38°Rø
16 15.90°Rø
17 16.43°Rø
18 16.95°Rø
19 17.48°Rø
Celsius Rømer
20 18.00°Rø
21 18.52°Rø
22 19.05°Rø
23 19.58°Rø
24 20.10°Rø
25 20.62°Rø
26 21.15°Rø
27 21.68°Rø
28 22.20°Rø
29 22.73°Rø
30 23.25°Rø
31 23.78°Rø
32 24.30°Rø
33 24.82°Rø
34 25.35°Rø
35 25.88°Rø
36 26.40°Rø
37 26.93°Rø
38 27.45°Rø
39 27.98°Rø
Celsius Rømer
40 28.50°Rø
41 29.03°Rø
42 29.55°Rø
43 30.07°Rø
44 30.60°Rø
45 31.12°Rø
46 31.65°Rø
47 32.17°Rø
48 32.70°Rø
49 33.23°Rø
50 33.75°Rø
51 34.28°Rø
52 34.80°Rø
53 35.33°Rø
54 35.85°Rø
55 36.38°Rø
56 36.90°Rø
57 37.42°Rø
58 37.95°Rø
59 38.48°Rø
Metric Conversion Table iPhone & Android app Temperature Weight Length Area Volume Speed Time Angle Pressure Energy and Power Health and Wellbeing Currency


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Reaching today’s audience isn’t as simple as it used to be. Expectations are higher for more creative, customized messages that target the audience’s specific needs. At ABS, we specialize in implementing complex marketing strategies so you can reach your target audience with a relevant, multi-dimensional approach.


If Lord Krishna was the first counselor who taught the principles of counseling, Lord Ganesha taught us the principles of stress management.

We should worship Lord Ganesha and become like him whenever we face any difficulty or are stressed out.

The elephant head of Lord Ganesha represents that when in difficulty, use your wisdom, intelligence and think differently. It can be equated to the Third Eye of Lord Shiva. Elephant is supposed to be the most intelligent animal in the kingdom.  Hear wisdom implies to think
before speaking. Lord Budha later also has said that don’t speak unless it is necessary and is truthful and kind.

The big elephant ears of Lord Ganesha signify listening to everybody when in difficulty. Elephant ears are known to hear long distances. Elephant eye see a long distance and in terms of mythology, it represents acquiring the quality of foreseeing when in difficulty.

The mouth of Lord Ganesha represents speaking less and hearing and listening more.
The big tummy of Lord Ganesha represents digesting any information gathered by hearing to people in difficulty.

The trunk represents to use your power of discrimination to decide from the retained information. It also indicates to do both smaller and bigger things by yourself. Elephant trunk can pick up needle as well as a tree.

The broken and unbroken teeth of Lord Ganesha represent being in balance in loss and gain. It indicates  that one should not get upset if the task is not accomplished and also not get excited if the task is accomplished. In times of difficulty, Ganesha also teaches us not to lose strength and control one’s attachments, desires and greed.

The four arms of Lord Ganesha represent strength. Ropes in two hands indicate attachment, Laddu or Sweet in one hand represent desires and mouse represents greed. Riding over the mouse indicates controlling one’s greed.

Lord Ganeshais worshiped either when one’s task is not getting accomplished or when a new work is initiated. IN these two situations, these principles of Lord Ganesha need to be inculcated in one’s habits.

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Paper Title
Advanced Communication Systems for Controlling and Monitoring of the Smart Grid

In the smart grid, it is possible to supply and consume energy efficiently. The SG is integrating the data communications network with the power grid, which enables grid operators to collect and analyze data about power generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption in real time. In SG network, the traditional electrical network is automated using sensors and control algorithms. There are serious issues of faults on high voltage transmission lines in power system. So Instant isolation of fault is necessary to maintain the system stability. Protective relay utilizes the current and voltage signals to detect, classify, and locate the fault in transmission line. A trip signal is required to be triggered by the relay to a circuit breaker for disconnecting the faulted line from the rest of the system in order to maintain the stability of the remaining system. It is important to develop communication network for intelligent fault detection, fault classification, fault location, fault phase selection, and fault direction discrimination. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is considered to be the heart of SG. Lack of security in AMI systems can expose the electrical distribution and affect the reliability. Power industries are now facing unprecedented new security challenges in AMI. If these challenges are not addressed then it could open AMI to attacks that could prove catastrophic to the economy and public safety. Controlled information is flowing in a communication network to the control center in AMI. The control information is delay sensitive so it require a reliable communication. Hence, it is necessary to opt for the best communication technology to cater the highest quality of Service for control information. Among various challenges in a smart grid network, it is necessary to control non-technical losses like electrical theft. Two-way flow of information between suppliers and consumer, encourage users’ participation in energy savings and cooperation through the demand-response mechanism. This emphasizes the need to manage DR to reduce peak electricity load and price. Keywords - (Demand Response(DR), Quality of Service (QoS), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), Global Positioning Systems (GPS), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) ,Communication-based Train Control (CBTC).


Venom in Dinosaurs (S/F)

Disambiguation Links – Venom in Dinosaurs (C/N)

As a result of the cloning process and splicing with different animals to complete their genetic code, a number of dinosaurs cloned by InGen have venomous traits; specifically, Dilophosaurus and Troodon. The dilophosaurs use their venom to actively hunt and defend themselves, spitting it at short distances to blind enemies or potential prey, eventually causing paralysis. Dennis Nedry learned the effects of this venom first-hand; notably, Miles Chadwick survived his first encounter with a dilophosaur because of his glasses but was later killed by several of them anyway.

TheTroodon’s venom, arguably, has much more horrific effects. Their venom is secreted in their mouths, and is thus transmitted through bite. A single member of the pack would rush in and bite a prey animal, and the rest of the packmembers would linger back, waiting for the effects of the poison to set in: hallucinations, mass sensations of pain, high fevers, paralysis, and eventually brain death.


Why princeton engineering essay

Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Why princeton engineering essay regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.

Is the Western Wall Judaism’s Holiest Site? Iraqi Lt-General Sultan Hashim Ahmed salute each other following the formal surrender of Iraq to U. Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers. Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a three-decades-long war against the Kurds.

The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990 Kuwait war was mediocre. And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the military confrontations with Israel. There are many factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force. It is a truism of military life that an army fights as it trains, and so I draw on my many years of firsthand observation of Arabs in training to draw conclusions about the ways in which they go into combat.

The following impressions derive from personal experience with Arab military establishments in the capacity of U. Including culture in strategic assessments has a poor legacy, for it has often been spun from an ugly brew of ignorance, wishful thinking, and mythology. 1930s evaluated the Japanese national character as lacking originality and drew the unwarranted conclusion that the country would be permanently disadvantaged in technology. America’s entry into the war.

As these examples suggest, when culture is considered in calculating the relative strengths and weaknesses of opposing forces, it tends to lead to wild distortions, especially when it is a matter of understanding why states unprepared for war enter into combat flushed with confidence. The temptation is to impute cultural attributes to the enemy state that negate its superior numbers or weaponry. Or the opposite: to view the potential enemy through the prism of one’s own cultural norms. American strategists assumed that the pain threshold of the North Vietnamese approximated their own and that the air bombardment of the North would bring it to its knees. It is particularly dangerous to make facile assumptions about abilities in warfare based on past performance, for societies evolve and so does the military subculture with it. The dismal French performance in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war led the German high command to an overly optimistic assessment prior to World War I. The tenacity and courage of French soldiers in World War I led everyone from Winston Churchill to the German high command vastly to overestimate the French army’s fighting abilities.

Israeli generals underestimated the Egyptian army of 1973 based on Egypt’s hapless performance in the 1967 war. Culture is difficult to pin down. It is not synonymous with an individual’s race nor ethnic identity. The history of warfare makes a mockery of attempts to assign rigid cultural attributes to individuals—as the military histories of the Ottoman and Roman empires illustrate. In both cases it was training, discipline, esprit, and élan which made the difference, not the individual soldiers’ origin.

Christians forcibly recruited as boys from the Balkans. These problems notwithstanding, culture does need to be taken into account. Indeed, awareness of prior mistakes should make it possible to assess the role of cultural factors in warfare. John Keegan, the eminent historian of warfare, argues that culture is a prime determinant of the nature of warfare. In contrast to the usual manner of European warfare which he terms “face to face,” Keegan depicts the early Arab armies in the Islamic era as masters of evasion, delay, and indirection. Lawrence termed “winning wars without battles. Even the much-lauded Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973 at its core entailed a masterful deception plan.

University of North Carolina Press; then you are assuming some form of consequentialism and are also open to a rebuttal involving the legion of evidence which shows that science has benefited humankind in numerous ways, then I hope you have the chance to experience even more than I did. Some commentators found it strange that the Chinese minority, but having a family while establishing a career as a doctor or a lawyer isn’t exactly easy either, physics offers no criteria for such decisions. If you used creativity to solve a problem — science and engineering is always passed on to those who follow and the growth in knowledge is exponential. Urry laughed at my own stories of how inept I had been in lab, the Standard Model is the current leading theory that describes the mechanisms that you seem to be interested in. Life experiences you’ve had; moreover calculations are not discourse. Original and innovative thinking, and I find this quite amusing.

It may well be that these seemingly permanent attributes result from a culture that engenders subtlety, indirection, and dissimulation in personal relationships. Along these lines, Kenneth Pollack concludes his exhaustive study of Arab military effectiveness by noting that “certain patterns of behavior fostered by the dominant Arab culture were the most important factors contributing to the limited military effectiveness of Arab armies and air forces from 1945 to 1991. These attributes included over-centralization, discouraging initiative, lack of flexibility, manipulation of information, and the discouragement of leadership at the junior officer level. But how does one integrate the study of culture into military training? At present, it has hardly any role. Belbutowski, a scholar and former member of the U. Delta Force, succinctly stated a deficiency in our own military education system: “Culture, comprised of all that is vague and intangible, is not generally integrated into strategic planning except at the most superficial level.

And yet it is precisely “all that is vague and intangible” which defines low-intensity conflicts. The Vietnamese communists did not fight the war the United States had trained for, nor did the Chechens and Afghans fight the war the Russians prepared for. This entails far more than simply retooling weaponry and retraining soldiers. It requires an understanding of the enemy’s cultural mythology, history, attitude toward time, etc. Mindful of walking through a minefield of past errors and present cultural sensibilities, I offer some assessments of the role of culture in the military training of Arabic-speaking officers. I confine myself principally to training for two reasons. Secondly, armies fight as they train.

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The FMCG market is lucrative and dynamic. With increasing economic pressure, how can brands protect brand preference in 2017?

Less disposable income means consumers taking items out of their basket.

Brands are hardest hit by the economic squeeze, while sales of private label products tend to hold up. Non-leader brands tend to feel the effects more, making brand preference more important than ever.

Sponsorship, contextual targeting and tactical reactions are just 3 ways that we’ve helped brands increase preference.
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CHIANTI is a name that resounds in restaurants all over the world where good wines are served. The place name is given to a piece of land characterised by a harmonious landscape whose hills veil and unveil evocative places, where peace reigns supreme.
The ORIGIN of the word “Chianti” is up for discussion. It can be attributed to the Etruscan term “clante” common name given to a person in that language, or to the Latin verb “clango”, sound the trumpets and play the horns, probably referring to the beginning of the hunt. It’s also quite difficult to reconstruct the HISTORY of this region. For documents that can be found are fragmentary, what follows therefore is an attempt to explain its history to those who already known the region and to those who would like to know
In medieval times, Chianti endured conquests by Florence and Siena. Today , it suffers another kind of conquest that one of the tourists foreign and not, who come here in pursuit of that something extra offered by Chianti as it done over the centuries.
This region is from time immemorial well-loved and populated region. The most ancient testimony of the man’s presence can be found in Poggio La Croce, near Radda in Chianti, around the second century BC. In this same place, there can also be found testimonies to the transhuman shepherds presence during the 11th century BC and of the ETRUSCANS during the 3rd century BC. Due to its favourable climate, its position and its soil’s richness Etruscans decided to settle in the region, taking advantage of its soil and establishing settlements. Their presence has been proved not only by many archaeological finds but also by the evident etymology of the Chianti place names such as Rosennano, Avane, Nusenna and by the local toponymy of family names which end in –na, such as Olena and Ruffenna.
The ROMANS also settled in the Chianti, but we have only a few testimonies of their presence. The ruins of an Etruscan necropolis between the 2nd-3rd century A.C. (near Cacchiano), prove that after the Etruscans came the Romans. We know for example that the Romans divided the region into the municipia of Faesulae and of Arretium (also later of Saena Julia). The toponymy help to confirm, what we have already said, the name of many places
ending with –ano or –ana are typical of the imperial age, when the public treasury gave the place the name of the owner, consequently turned into an adjective (Bibbiano, Panzano, Cacchiano). Also if the documents are few, we can affirm with R. Flower that “in the hills and valleys of Chianti, (…) the country life went on as it always had done, but in the place of the fine Roman country house, with their well cultivated estates, the watch-towers and castles of the Lombard barons sprang up at strategic defensive points (…). The landscape of Chianti was surely then characterised (…) by a perennial freshness, a perpetual springtime (…). For if the period between 400 and 700 A.D. was one of the waste and depopulation, it was also a time of self-sufficiency.
And it is not difficult to believe that the air of remote rusticity (…) was always present.”
The next information we have about this region is from the 715 relates to a boundaries’ dispute between Arezzo and Siena. The decision of the Lombards’ King Liutprando to give some areas to the bishop of Arezzo was changed later because of the Sienese, until 500 years later Arezzo’s supremacy was recognized in this area.
MARCA DI TUSCIA” (Marquises of Tuscany), a new territorial identity that took the place of the old organisation. The marquises were formally faithful to the Emperor or to the King of Italy, but the Tuscia became an independent state and in this period is interesting to note the diffusion of viticulture in the religious Orders. To note that the region’s economy was florid as can be evidence proven by the various commercial contracts stipulated. The origin of the long war between Florence and Siena can be found in the special status of Florence, which comprised not one but two dioceses. As the Chianti region was under the spiritual guidance of Fiesole’s diocese, the Florentines thought that their sovereign right was extended over the borders with Siena’s and Fiesole’s dioceses. The Sienese were naturally worried about this situation, because the enemies were very close to the city’s gates. The first battle was in 1082, when the Florentines accused the Sienese of having collaborating with the Emperor Henry IV during the Florence’s siege. The first treaty between Florence and Siena was stupid, but as we known, in the 1103 the


Nothing does not exist

Nothing does not exist.
There is always something.
And if this something was nothing,
then nothing is something.

The nothing would be the idealized state of “something, that doesn’t exist”.

I am convinced, that we will later return to a notion of something what conformes to the aether (αἰθήρ).

The door thither are all these ‘particles without weight’ (Photon, Higgs, ..), which interact with other particles, what cannot be.

Once adopted

Let us simply assume, that time stands orthogonal on the euclidean space, and gravity stands orthogonal to this space-time.

This could solve many problems.

Every physical thing has an extension in space, time and gravity. It has a width, a height, a depth, exists from now to then, and it has a weight. A 100 meter lane extends 100 meter in space. What lasts for a year, extends a year in time. What weights 1 kilogramm, extends 1 Kg in gravity.

Width, height and depth stand orthogonal on each other. Same with both of the others. When time passes, then the entire space moves in one direction throught time, without getting changed by that. We are still able to imagine this picture quite well. This is expressed by the word ‘orthogonal’.

Space, time and gravity on their own are endless. There is no place in the universe, where they are not there.

Gravity appears to us and works on us like an attracting force. The reason is, that we can perceive the euclidean space only, but not any further. And what we can see from this perspective, is just a projection of the higher dimensional gravity, thrown at our 3-dimensional space. We only see the shadow.

We cannot inverse gravity, so that it works to the other direction as a repelling force. For this reason it is the only force that cannot be shielded. Because it’s not a force at all. It just looks this way from this perspective.

Projections can be quite confusing. You generally cannot conclude from a projection back to the whole. And for that, we can’t understand gravity from our perspective.

(Dedicated to my favorite mathematician Henri Poincaré)


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              Advocacy & Research for Unlimited Lifespans

Bioethicists Consider the Search for a Treatment for Aging

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Posted 11 January 2018 - 12:02 PM

This press release from a UK bioethics organization announces a recently published and comparatively innocuous short PDF primer for policy makers on the present state of research into the treatment of aging as a medical condition. Innocuous or not, it still contains a fair dose of utter nonsense mixed in with its view of the field, as is fairly standard for this sort of thing. Professional bioethics, it has to be said, has done little to make itself useful in the past generation in my view, and in fact has used regulation to slow progress in those areas where bioethicists have attracted the most attention. It is a corruption of the older, actually useful field of medical ethics, which had the merits of being simple, valuable, and requiring little upkeep. Bioethics, on the other hand, has become a cancerous political institution, ever growing, and its practitioners ever incentivized to justify their budgets by making up obstacles where none actually exist.

Geroscience, also called biogerontology, is a field of research that is exploring the biological processes that underlie ageing. Researchers working in this field believe that intervening in these processes could be a more efficient way of increasing health span - the number of years we are healthy - than tackling each condition individually. Recent advances in the tools of research are likely to accelerate our understanding of ageing processes in the near future.

Compressing the period of poor health experienced by many in old age could have a transformative effect on the lives of older people and is widely considered to be the primary goal of geroscience research. Biomedical interventions, along with environmental, social and lifestyle modifications, have already contributed to the extension of human lifespan. Depending on other factors that could affect lifespan, ageing interventions could lead to a further delaying of death. Some suggest that a realistic target of geroscience research is to delay all ageing-related disorders by about seven years. Other commentators believe that scientific advances will lead to much more radical effects on ageing and human lifespan in the near future.

There are differences of opinion about the value and morality of extending lifespan, even moderately. Some philosophers believe that we think of our lives as having a certain shape, which underpins how long we think people should work and how long it is appropriate to be old. Increased longevity therefore might threaten the shape we envisage for our lives and our sense of personal identity. The benefits of experiencing the pleasures of life over a longer time period are used by some to justify life extension; others argue it is quality not quantity of years that matters. Some equate extending life with saving lives, and suggest there is a strong moral imperative to pursue treatment for disease, even if the side effect is an increase in lifespan.

A common concern of lifespan extension is that it would accelerate population growth, and that this would have a range of adverse consequences, particularly for the environment. However, one study suggests that population changes would be surprisingly slow in response to even a dramatic extension of lifespan and would not necessarily lead to overpopulation. It has also been argued that using finite resources in a nonsustainable manner is a problem that needs to be solved independently of how long people live.

Estimations of the impact of increasing health span on the economy are generally positive. For example, one analysis suggests increasing human health span would reduce healthcare spending and lead to significant economic savings. Another suggests that delayed ageing could mean increases in social benefit and public healthcare costs, but that these would be far outweighed by economic gains as a result of a healthier workforce who remain employed for longer and are given more time to save for retirement. These effects would depend on the relative increases in health span and lifespan that could be achieved by ageing interventions, which currently are highly uncertain.

Ageing interventions are likely to be available only through the private sector initially. As with any paid for therapy, it is probable that access to ageing interventions will be unequal, leading to an exacerbation of existing health inequalities according to income, socioeconomic status, and geography. In addition, personal choices about uptake of ageing interventions could have implications for entitlement to state care and health insurance. There are calls for government policies to ensure unequal access to ageing interventions is avoided. Global health inequalities present particular challenges in this context, given that the citizens of some countries still have low life expectancies owing to poor sanitation, nutrition, and healthcare provision. The duties of developed countries to put efforts into addressing these problems, in relation to the efforts put into research on ageing interventions, require consideration.

Some argue that the focus on finding medical treatments for ageing is unhelpful, in that it suggests ageing is a problem that requires fixing and reinforces negative views of ageing. There are parallels with how the medical community view frailty. Frailty is commonly regarded as a state of overall poor health, weakness and vulnerability, but diagnosing people with frailty may serve to marginalise them from society and unfairly label people as being destined to decline. There is also concern that other important elements of successful ageing, such as personal relationships, social position, physical environment and independence, are side-lined by geroscientists.

An important question for geroscience research is whether potential interventions should be tested in younger people, before biological ageing has started, or in older adults already experiencing symptoms of ageing. In the past, involving older adults in research was thought to be difficult and of no benefit to them. This view has broadly changed. The challenges of research have been found to be much the same whatever the age of the participant, and medical interventions in people aged over 80 can have beneficial effects on their health. In addition, 'older adults' are a diverse group and generalisations about people's ability and willingness to take part in research should be avoided.

Link: http://nuffieldbioet...l-briefing-note

View the full article at FightAging

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Our Approach in Immuno-Oncology

Macrophage Pharma’s primary goal is to develop a new generation of powerful small-molecule immuno-oncology drugs which inhibit the ability of tumour polarised macrophages to release immunosuppressive cytokines. This in turn is expected to lead to an increase in anti-tumour T-cell numbers and function. This “re-programming” of the tumour immune system is necessary to enhance the activity of both cytotoxic and immuno-oncology therapies such as the checkpoint antibodies. The company therefore intends to pursue development programmes aimed at blocking the activity of macrophage derived immunosuppressive cytokines such as IL-10 and restoring levels of stimulatory molecules such as IL-12 and IFN-γ.

Our lead programme involves utilisation of Esterase Sensitive Motif technology to provide macrophage targeted inhibition of p38 MAP kinase. Extended activation of p38 MAP kinase in tumour macrophages indicates this is a key regulatory mechanism in the tumour microenvironment contributing to T-cell “exhaustion”. p38 MAP kinase has been extensively characterised as a master regulator of cytokine production such as IL-10 in macrophages leading to tumour mediated immunosuppression and impaired immunosurveillance. Inhibition of p38 MAPK reverses this immunosuppression and restores anti-tumour T-cell function by restoring levels of IL-12. In addition, p38 MAPK is an important signalling element in suppressing tumour dendritic cells and impairing antigen presentation. Because the p38 MAPK pathway is important in key anti-tumour immune cells such as effector T-cells and NK cells selective delivery to the macrophage is crucial to ensure the maximum benefit of target inhibition.

approach immune oncology

Through focussing on additional elements of the immune system by targeting the macrophage the company expects to be able to address a wider range of tumour types (e.g. where T cells are not anti-PD-1 responsive due to macrophage repression mechanisms) and broader patient populations. Macrophage Pharma’s drug discovery and development efforts will thus focus outside checkpoint inhibition on mechanisms that enable cancer cells to escape detection and eradication by the immune system. Macrophage Pharma’s molecules are also expected to improve the effectiveness of antigen presentation and block the activity of suppressor cells in the tumour microenvironment. The company is advancing a focused pipeline based on these approaches and anticipates identifying a first lead candidate for clinical development during 2017.


The oceans movement by bryant koedding

This theme of art work features natures movement. We have explored less than 5% of the ocean, the rest is still untouched. Waves create energy, color, and movement. They perform artistic movements, and show mother natures beauty. This theme represent color, movement, and nature. These displays of waves are art that is created by nature for us to enjoy.

The Ninth Wave represents movement, nature, and color . The movement and power of the wave is seen through the white water colliding with each other, and the sun in the distance. The green water represents color, and shows the character of the ocean.
The breaking waves represents movement and nature. A breaking wave is mother natures art. It shows color, movement and is natural. This piece of artwork recreates that movement, and makes the artwork seem like it's moving in real life.
The black wave represents a full barrel. A barrel is a surfers dream and is created by mother nature. This piece uses movement, and texture. The texture of the painting makes the wave looks dense, and mean. The movement looks strong, and makes the wave look ready to crash.
These waves represent movement in a darker way. The color of the photo represents the ocean darkness, and the choppy conditions. The artist also adds movement to the white water as it crashes onto the beach.
This photo represents movement, texture and color. The wave is forming into a left, and crashing into a set of rocks. The artist recreated the wave by mixing colors and giving it texture, making the look hollow and realistic.
These waves represent movement, color and texture. The artist creates a set of waves breaking into a mountain of rocks. The movement of the waves are coming in, and the texture of the paint creates a rough like effect. The color of the sky creates the time of day.
This piece represents, movement and texture. The waves look like they are coming into the beach, but not breaking. The texture of the painting shows all the white water, and choppy surf.
This piece represents the theme the most. The movement of the wave about to crash down on the beach, and the display of dark colors making the ocean alive. The texture of the wave makes it look powerful and unforgiving.
This historic and famous piece is represents color, and movement. The steep incline, and wooden boats show how strong and powerful the wave is. The mixing of dark and light blue create a dark, and powerful look towards the wave.
This piece represents movement and color. The movement shows a steep, and tall waves ready to break. The energy is seen in the top of the wave with the breaking white water. The colors blend into the wave creating a blue, light wave.
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Red list

show/hide words to know

Threatened: having an uncertain chance of survival.

What is an Endangered Species?

Extinction is a natural fact, and a lot of species have gone extinct in the past. You don’t see dinosaurs walking down your street today because they went extinct about 65 million years ago. Extinction is a natural process. But it is sometimes considered unnatural when humans cause extinction. Perhaps a species is overhunted like the dodo. Or maybe the forest that a certain kind of bird lives in is cut down and turned into farmland. If a species starts to decrease in number because of human action, some people get concerned. If their numbers get too low they might be considered to be in danger of extinction. When this happens the species is called an endangered species. If enough scientists agree, it is put on the endangered species list. To protect species on the endangered species list the government might make it illegal to hunt it, or turn a portion of the forest the species lives in into a national park to prevent it from being cut down.

Getting Off the Endangered List

Once a species is put on the endangered species list there are three ways for it to be removed from the list, or to be delisted. One way is for new information to be discovered which reveals that the species was never actually endangered to begin with. The second way is for the species to increase in numbers enough to be considered recovered, as was the case with the American bald eagle. Lastly, the species can be delisted because it's become extinct. The dusky seaside sparrow was not so lucky as the bald eagle. It was delisted when protection efforts failed and it became extinct. Since the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, the federal government has delisted 47 species.

Alert levels for endangered species.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, keeps the most complete list of endangered species in the world.  The IUCN list is called the Red List instead of the Red Book.  It uses the chart above to tell how serious the threat of extinction is to each species on the list.  The chart below tells how many of each kind of species are on the Red List.

IUCN alert status for some species.

View Citation

Bibliographic details:

  • Article: What is an Endangered Species?
  • Author(s): Dr. Biology
  • Site name: ASU - Ask A Biologist
  • Date published: January 28, 2011
  • Date accessed: July 23, 2018
  • Link:

APA Style

Dr. Biology. (2011, January 28). What is an Endangered Species?. ASU - Ask A Biologist. Retrieved July 23, 2018 from

American Psychological Association. For more info, see

Chicago Manual of Style

Dr. Biology. "What is an Endangered Species?". ASU - Ask A Biologist. 28 January, 2011.

MLA 2017 Style

Dr. Biology. "What is an Endangered Species?". ASU - Ask A Biologist. 28 Jan 2011. ASU - Ask A Biologist, Web. 23 Jul 2018.

Modern Language Association, 7th Ed. For more info, see
Dusky seaside sparrow

The Dusky Seaside Sparrow went extinct in 1987.

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Why HR an underperformer in SME’s?

All companies realise “human talent” is the primary differentiator and driver of growth. Disadvantaged by their size and ability to attract and retain the right talent, SME face major challenges. Many SME find the “groom the fresher strategy” of recruiting newbies and training them does not augur them well as they end as training grounds for large companies hunting for talent. Many HR professionals in SME spend most of their time on Payroll and administration, and there is a considerable gap in what their management expects and what is delivered. CEOs are mostly disappointed to see the HR drowning itself with repetitive payroll activities by end of month and once pay is made address the employee concerns on deductions till mid of next month and then the cycle starts for the current month’s salary preparation. HR professionals are caught in only “transactional” activities and are unable to bring strategic value to their employers. In some companies due to high employee attrition the HR organization is mostly caught with recruitment only and has little time for anything else.

Another major challenge is the documentation of the complete HR process is weak. The HR process itself is not comprehensively integrated, some like employee engagement or training are farce and do not add any long term value. Employees are sent to training that has little relevance to their career growth or of any economic value to their company. Some SME spend what few rupees they have on fancy programs that have little direct impact on productivity or performance of the firm. Most HR managers are by training lean towards developing rules and procedures. They seldom strategize and execute creation of an organization culture within the limitations of resource and financial constraints of an SME.  Some HR managers attempt to replicate fancy programs practiced by large organizations without realizing their relevance and purpose for their organization. CEO’s are majorly disappointed in HR mangers as they lack in vision to create activities and process within the means of an SME. Their MBA education seldom prepares them to visualize happy ownership driven organization without much fancy fare.

The way forward is three fold: Focus, deliberation and liberty. To ensure the HR focus on value adding activities, SME owners must engage outside partners to complement their HR team on salary and other transactions. On the process front, Invest in right tools and technologies to optimize the selection, hiring, training and retaining of employees, so that documentation and analysis are possible.  Hire HR managers not for their prestigious alma mater but their individual ability and passion to create sustainable culture. Hire them for their passion and intensity of pushing through the activities. HR managers need a strong sense of deliberation to continue to weed out unwanted operations and keep focusing on the right stuff. Finally, SME owners must support HR managers to come out with appropriate HR activities. Given them the freedom and liberty to own and drive employee engagement, knowledge management and process improvement that can provide long term sustainable advantage to their employer.