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When video game historians look back on their medium’s history, they won’t want to remember 2014. It was a bad year for video games. Not the games themselves, really—there were plenty of fine games released last year. No, it was a bad year for the culture of video games. Last year was, of course, the year of Gamergate. The year when everybody got to see the worst parts of that vast swath of people who call themselves “gamers.” The ones who ruined that word for the rest of us. The “movement’s” rampant misogyny hit the mainstream and hit it hard.Gamergate is still around. The petulant children who threatened female video game developers and personalities for daring to, um, have an opinion are still there. But no one is talking about them. No one cares about them.And it seems that maybe, just maybe, we’re starting to learn from them.There have been more than a few instances where women lamented the lack of female protagonists in video games. The response was invariably something to the effect of, “If you don’t like it, go make your own games,” with some slurs and/or threats thrown in for good measure. And though there are dozens of things wrong with that line of thinking, the most practically obvious is the fact that the games they were asking about weren’t the sort of titles that a few people can just get together and make. They wanted (and want) games with $50+ million budgets that star interesting female characters. And let’s not pretend like this only goes one way. I want that too. I’m sick of playing as muscly men. I think the vast majority of us are.
And though this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) underwhelmed, there was a glimmer of light that maybe, just maybe, people working in the industry are too. It’s the largest gaming event of the year, where the industry’s companies tell the world what to expect from them in the year(s) to come. And more than a half-dozen new games were unveiled with female protagonists or generally playable female characters. The gender gap is still a chasm, to be sure, but these are significant first steps.
There’s a new Tomb Raider game coming out. Lara Croft is undoubtedly the most famous female video game protagonist, what with Angelina Jolie’s portrayal of her in some not-particularly-good film adaptations of the series. But for far too long, Lara Croft has been the exception to the rule. The Metroid series stars a badass female character, Samus, but she’s always suited up and the designs of her out of suit hit the same problematic stereotypes that have always plagued female characters, Lara Croft included. A character like Faith, the free-running protagonist from 2008’s Mirror’s Edge, breaks from that mold, but in this industry, properties can die for any number of reasons, and that one has been in development limbo for years. It wasn’t until this E3 where its sequel, Catalyst, was finally unveiled at EA’s press conference. And it looks awesome.
Two of the most interesting new titles announced at E3 this year were the terribly named Horizon: Zero Dawn, announced at Sony’s conference, and the not-much-better Recore, announced by Microsoft. Horizon, from the developers of the Killzone franchise, is about a tribe of humans struggling to survive long after humanity has been wiped out. It’s the far-flung future with a prehistoric twist (and fittingly features mecha-dinosaurs as enemies). Less is known about Recore, but it follows a woman and her AI dog companion as they fight off hordes of other dangerous AI. Both of these games are brand new properties being backed by major companies, and they star badass women. But not just badass women: badass women who aren’t sexualized.
Of the big games announced, only one, a sequel to the niche game Nier developed by the team behind the highly sexualized Bayonetta series, dressed its female character up in a skimpy outfit designed to get the audience’s imagination going. The rest looked like, well, just people, dressed the way you would expect a person to dress themselves rather than dressed by some third party with poor intentions. Considering that the first thing anyone could notice about Lara Croft in 1996 was how ridiculous her polygonal breasts looked, we had a long way to come. And when Rise of the Tomb Raider was shown off at E3, Croft spent the entire demo in a parka. A sequel to the stealth game Dishonored surprised everyone by featuring a female protagonist. Later, it was revealed that there are actually two main characters—one male and one female—but that Bethesda chose to highlight the female character during the game’s reveal speaks volumes. They also made a point to note that the upcoming Fallout sequel will also allow you to play as a woman, though that isn’t new for the series. But the Dishonored reveal makes a particularly notable counterpoint to the other reveal of a female character in a franchise sequel. If any company had to prove its commitment to equality this year, it was Ubisoft. It’s one of the largest video game publishers out there, but the 2014 entry in its flagship franchise, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, was marred both by technical failings and conceptual ones. The game featured a co-op mode where up to four players could go out assassinating together. But all of the playable options were male. When asked why there were no playable women, the response was jaw-dropping: Ubisoft creative director Alex Amancio said it was simply too much work: “It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets. Especially because we have customizable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work.” And the company’s other big release of the year, Far Cry 4, had the same problem, though that game’s developers at least seemed aware of why people were upset about it. But here’s the thing: What Amancio said wasn’t even really true. Sure, to really build a female playable character from the ground up would require that much work, but to get a decent approximation? Animator Jonathan Cooper took to Twitter to say, “In my educated opinion, I would estimate this to be a day or two’s work. Not a replacement of 8000 animations.” And who’s he to talk? Well, he was the animation director of Assassin’s Creed III. And he also worked with the team that animated Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, a series spinoff that actually featured a female protagonist, using much of the work done for the main series entry. It’s a simple and obvious fact: Characters in games share animations all the time. To pretend as though each new character model requires a fresh start is a blatant lie. So the company had a lot to prove this year. And if you were to only watch their stage, you’d think they’d done it. Their lineup of speakers was by far the most diverse. They had Aisha Tyler as the host again, as they have since 2012, but she was not the only person of color on that stage, nor the only woman. But if you were to just see the games? You’d think nothing had changed. A man with a terrible British accent in Victorian England is Robin Hood or something. So what? It wasn’t until later that evening, when Sony showed off a different trailer, that I was interested. That trailer starred a woman named Evie, apparently the elder twin of that far-less-interesting guy. But Evie shows up and assassinates the hell out of some random guys in some particularly brutal ways. It was pretty awesome... except for the fact that Jacob narrated the trailer, not Evie. Two steps forward, one step back. But it’s progress. Real, tangible progress. And even though there is much more work to be done, we have to acknowledge that we’ve taken some steps forward and celebrate it. And, most crucially, we need to reward it. At the same time that we condemn companies that refuse to diversify their characters, we need to help those that do. We as a culture need to send a very clear message to game companies that this is the sort of thing we’ve been waiting for. If every female-fronted game is a sales flop, publishers will get spooked and we’ll be back to nothing but muscled marines for the next decade. We can’t let that happen. We won’t let it happen. The tides have begun to turn. It’s up to all of us to help make sure they never turn back. |
Blogger Steven Bancarz was born and raised in a Christian household, but started down the "rabbit hole" of New Age when he was in high school.
"What started off as studying turned into practice," Bancarz says. Tarot card reading, meditation, lucid dreaming, astro projection—he ate it up. "Christianity seemed naive and childish, and I used to look down on Christians as being thoughtless and intellectually inferior."
As he progressed, he became one of the more popular New Age figures on social media.
What threw a wrench in his philosophy, though, was how Jesus saved people from the brink of death.
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"In the back of my mind, I was like, 'OK, there's something unique and different and special and pure and holy about Jesus.'"
Yet he pushed forward in the New Age movement, using social media to spread his spirit science message.
Bancarz thought that by teaching New Age doctrine, he was helping humanity. But still, God nagged him.
"I used to think God was the energy of the universe ... ," Bancarz said. "I understood (Jesus) as someone being self-realized, who realized His unity with the divine and that He was calling us to do the same. I thought Jesus was someone who'd ascended to His own inner-god nature."
Greed and materialism fueled his motivations, though he felt unfulfilled.
But as his life began to implode, he began to warm up to Jesus and flicked through the Gospels until he reached a point of utter brokenness.
"I went outside on my back balcony of my stupid house ... and when I did this, I felt the atmosphere around me start to change. And I could feel in the air that there was something holy and pure around me. And it was also personal, and I knew in that moment that I was in the presence of Jesus. And the quality of everything around me changed. The wind felt like it was infused with His presence, and when it hit me, it would hit me and it just completely broke me. And I felt like He was showing me Himself."
Watch the video to see the rest of his incredible testimony.
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Great Resources to help you excel in 2019! #1 John Eckhardt's "Prayers That..." 6-Book Bundle. Prayer helps you overcome anything life throws at you. Get a FREE Bonus with this bundle. #2 Learn to walk in the fullness of your purpose and destiny by living each day with Holy Spirit. Buy a set of Life in the Spirit, get a second set FREE.
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The FBI had a source come in direct contact with Osama Bin Laden who learned of his desire to conduct terrorist attacks in the United States, though it failed to disclose this information to the landmark 9/11 Commission.
According to court documents reviewed by the Washington Times, the information secured by the Al-Qaeda mole helped the United States stop an attack on a Masonic Lodge in Los Angeles, California in the mid 1990s.
The news was confirmed by NBC, whose sources said the mole was a Los Angeles-based “driver and confidante” of the “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman, currently behind bars for helping orchestrate the 1993 World Trade Center attacks in New York.
Surprisingly, the information came to light during a 2010 hearing concerning FBI agent Bassem Youssef, who has filed a discrimination claim against the bureau. Although he is a Coptic Christian, the FBI reportedly mistook Youssef for a Muslim, questioned his loyalties after the September 11 attacks, and passed him over for a promotion as a result.
In court, former FBI official Edward J. Curran testified in favor of Youssef’s skills, and pointed to his successful efforts to gain an inside source within Al-Qaeda.
"It was the only source I know in the bureau where we had a source right in Al-Qaeda, directly involved," Curran said, according to the Times.
“The one source came back, had direct contact with Bin Laden,” Curran testified. He added that when the source returned to the US, he told the Blind Sheik that Bin Laden “had a target picked out for an explosion in the Los Angeles area. I believe it was a Masonic lodge.”
It is unclear what ultimately happened to the source, or whether or not he fed information to the US after 1994.
It is also unknown exactly why the FBI did not disclose this information to the 9/11 Commission or Congressional committees charged with sorting through what federal agencies did and did not know about Al-Qaeda in the lead up to 9/11. Multiple former lawmakers expressed surprise to the Washington Times when told of the news.
“I think it raises a lot of questions about why that information didn’t become public and why the 9/11 Commission or the congressional intelligence committees weren’t told about it,” former Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) said. Hoekstra chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 2004 through 2007.
“This is just one more of these examples that will go into the conspiracy theorists’ notebooks, who say the authorities are not telling us everything,” he added. “That’s bad for the intelligence community. It’s bad for law enforcement and it’s bad for government.”
One former lawmaker who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), also said the FBI never mentioned it had such an inside source into Al-Qaeda. The commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, made a similar statement, though he added it is possible the commission simply did not look that closely at evidence supplied from the mid-1990s, since it did not directly relate to the September 11 attacks.
For its part, the FBI said it was not positive whether or not it detailed this specific incident, though it “shared pertinent documents and knowledgeable personnel in order to present all known information.”
Attorney Stephen Kohn, who represents Youssef, said even he did not know about the mole.
“There was absolutely no reason for that to be kept secret,” he told the Times. “In some respects, it was kind of demeaning for the FBI because they had kept secret one of the most significant triumphs in the war on terror all so they wouldn’t have to give credit to Bassem for the work he had done. As a result, none of the bureau got the credit it was due for what was a spectacular counterterrorism triumph.” |
Creature Designer and Sculptor, Weta
David Meng graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2000, with a Bachelors Degree in Fine Art, and took Dick Smith's Advanced Professional Make-up Course shortly after. Interested in bizarre, funny and grotesque things from a young age, David had a natural leaning towards working as a creature/character designer in the film industry. David started his career working as a designer/sculptor for various effects houses in LA. In 2004 he was invited to join Weta Workshop in New Zealand, just in time to work on King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia. He spent the next few years working on many of Weta's other projects, most notably District 9. On District 9, David served as Lead Creature Designer for the movie's Prawns. Other films David has worked on include: Alien Vs. Predator, Black Sheep, Under The Mountain, and The Hobbit. Most recently David worked as part of the concept team that designed the Kaijus for Pacific Rim. His main contribution to the film was the design of the Leatherback Kaiju. David's work has been published in various art-of books and been exhibited at both CoproGallery and The Hive, as well as the Dowse gallery in New Zealand, and also in Shanghai. His work has been included in the internationally renowned publication Spectrum five times (including this year's upcoming edition), and has so far won two Silver awards and one Gold. |
This post is by Instacart VP Data Science Jeremy Stanley, and technical advisor and former LinkedIn data leader Daniel Tunkelang. Previously, Jeremy wrote the most comprehensive manual we’ve ever seen for hiring data scientists.
It's hard to believe that "data scientist" only became a bona fide job title in 2008. Jeff Hammerbacher at Facebook and DJ Patil at LinkedIn coined the term to capture the emerging need for interdisciplinary skills across analytics, engineering, and product. Today, the demand for data scientists has blossomed, and with it the need to better understand how to grow these teams for success.
The two of us have seen our share of the good, the bad, and the ugly, leading and advising teams at a variety of companies in different industries and at different stages of maturity. We've seen the challenges of not only hiring top data scientists, but making effective use of them and retaining them in a hyper competitive market for talent.
In this article, we've summarized the advice we give to founders who are interested in building data science teams. We explain why data science is so important for many startups, when companies should begin investing in it, where to put data science in their organization and how to build a culture where data science thrives.
First, what are you trying to achieve?
Data science serves two important but distinct sets of goals: improving the products your customers use, and improving the decisions your business makes.
Data products use data science and engineering to improve product performance, typically in the form of better search results, recommendations and automated decisions.
Decision science uses data to analyze business metrics — such as growth, engagement, profitability drivers, and user feedback — to inform strategy and key business decisions.
This distinction may sound straightforward, but it’s an important one to keep in mind as you establish and grow your data science team. Let’s take a closer look at these two areas.
Using Data Science to Build Better Products
Data products leverage data science to improve product performance. They rely on a virtuous cycle where products collect usage data that becomes the fodder for algorithms which in turn offer users a better experience.
What happens before you’ve collected that data? The first version of your product has to address what data science calls the “cold start” problem — it has to provide a "good enough" experience to initiate the virtuous cycle of data collection and data-driven improvement. It’s up to product managers and engineers to implement that good enough solution.
For example, when an Instacart user visits the site, the application shows recently purchased groceries under a “buy it again” header. It’s a feature that delights users, but it hardly requires data science — or much data. The data science kicks in when we want to show recommendations for products they haven’t purchased before. Doing so requires analyzing all users’ purchasing behavior, determining which users are similar to each other, and ultimately recommending items based on what similar users have purchased in the past. That's where data science uses data to create value, enabling customers to easily discover new products they might not have found on their own.
In order to improve products, data scientists must collaborate closely and constantly with engineers. You also need to decide concretely whether data scientists implement product enhancements themselves or partner with engineers who implement them. Either approach can work, but it’s important to formalize it and establish shared expectations across the organization. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to get improvements into production, and you’ll lose talented data scientists who feel unproductive and undervalued.
Using Data Science to Make Better Decisions
Decision science uses data analysis and visualization to inform business and product decisions. The decision-maker may be anywhere in the organization — from a product manager determining how to set priorities on a road map to the executive team making bet-the-company strategic decisions.
Decision science problems span a wide range, but they tend to have several characteristics. They're novel problems that the organization has not needed to solve before. They’re often subjective, requiring data scientists to deal with unknown variables and missing context. They’re complex, with many moving parts that lack clear causal relationships. At the same time, decision science problems are measurable and impactful — the result of making the decision is concrete and significant for the business.
The above may sound a lot like data analytics, and indeed the difference between analytics and decision science isn’t always clear. Still, decision science should do more than produce reports and dashboards. Data scientists shouldn't be doing work that can be delivered using off-the-shelf business intelligence tools.
At LinkedIn, the executive team used decision science to make a critical business decision about the visibility of member profiles in search results. Historically, only paid users could see full profiles for everyone in their extended (third-degree) network. The visibility rules were complex, and LinkedIn wanted to simplify them — but not in a way that would undermine its revenue. The stakes were enormous.
The proposed visibility model was a monthly use limit for unpaid users, with a cut-off based on usage. LinkedIn’s decision scientists simulated the effects of this change, using historical behavior to predict the impact on revenue and engagement. The analysis had to extrapolate past behavior on one model to forecast behavior on a radically different one. Nonetheless, the analysis was sufficient to move forward.
The result was not only positive for the business, but also delighted millions of users and eliminated a source of complexity that had been an albatross for product development. Some people complained about the limits — but those were precisely the people that LinkedIn felt should be paying to use the platform. The project was a success, thanks to the decision science that informed it.
Not all decisions require the big guns of decision science. Some decisions are too small to justify the investment. Other decisions may be important, but the business could lack the data to meaningfully analyze them. In those cases, businesses need to rely on intuition and experimentation. Good decision scientists know their own limitations and recognize when their efforts would be wasteful or counterproductive.
While decision science and data products call for some of the same skills, it’s rare for data scientists to excel at both. Decision science depends on business and product sense, systems thinking, and strong communication skills. Data products require machine learning knowledge and production-level engineering skills. If you have a small data science team, you may need to find the rare superstars who can do both. But you’ll benefit from specialization as you scale your team.
Should you be investing in data science?
Data science isn’t right for everyone. You only want to invest in data science if it'll be critical to your success, but not if it'll just be an expensive distraction.
Before you invest in building a data science team, you should ask yourself these four questions:
1. Are you committed to using data science to either inform strategic decisions or build data products?
If you’re not committed to using data science toward one of these goals, then don’t hire data scientists.
They can help you make strategic decisions, but only if you’re committed to a culture of data-driven decision making. You may not need them on day one, but it takes time for you to hire the right people — and time for them to get to know your data and your business. You’ll need all that to happen before they can apply data science to drive decision making.
Data products can create value and delight users through improved optimization, relevance, etc. If these are on your product roadmap, you should bring data scientists in early to make the design decisions that will set you up for long-term success. Data scientists can make key decisions about product design, data collection, and systems architecture that are critical foundations for building magical-seeming products.
2. Will you be able to collect the data you need and and act on it?
A founding engineer can create an MVP product with a small amount of product and design guidance. Data science requires data, which comes only with measurement and scale. Recommender systems rely on instrumenting your product to track user behavior. Optimizing business decisions depends on fine-grained measures of key activities and outputs.
But collecting data isn’t enough. Data science only matters if data drives action.
Data should inform product changes and drive the organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs).
Instrumentation requires a commitment across the organization to identify what data each product needs to collect and establish the infrastructure and processes for collecting and maintaining that data. To be successful, instrumentation requires collaboration among data scientists, engineers, and product product managers — which in turn requires executive commitment.
Similarly, data-driven decision making requires a top-down commitment. From the CEO down, the organization has to commit to making decisions using data, rather than based on the highest paid person's opinion ( or HiPPO).
3. Will you have enough signal in your data to derive meaningful insights?
Many people equate big data to data science, but size isn’t everything. Data science is about separating the signal in data from the noise.
The available signal depends not only on data volume, but also on the signal-to-noise ratio.
For example, an ad product may collect data from billions of impression events, but the data only carries signal in the rare cases where users interact with the ads. Hence, the large volume of data only yields a small amount of signal. No amount of data science will tease deep insights out of a big data set unless there's a critical mass of signal.
4. Do you need data science to be a core competency, or can you outsource it?
Building a data science team is hard and expensive. If you can get away with outsourcing your data science needs, then you probably should. One option is to make judicious use of consultants. A better one is to use an off-the-shelf solution for your domain that uses APIs to ingest data, build models, automate actions, and report on key analytics. There may not be a solution perfectly tailored for your needs, but it’s often worth compromising to accelerate your business and keep your core team focused on the areas where it can add the most value.
When do you need data science to be a core competency? If data science is solving problems that are critical to your success, then you can’t afford to outsource it. Also, off-the-shelf solutions tend to be rigid. If your business is taking a unique approach to a problem (e.g. collecting new kinds of data or using the results in novel ways), it’s unlikely that an off-the-shelf solution will be flexible enough to adapt to it.
Jeremy Stanley at Instacart HQ in San Francisco.
When should you get started?
Data science requires data to science, and most companies don’t have much data on day one.
Don’t hire a head of data or build a team until you have work for them to do. At the same time, ensure you’re collecting key data early on so that team can have an impact once you’re ready.
If you don't have data yet, then who will answer the questions of what data to acquire and when to acquire it? That person doesn't necessarily have to be a data scientist. But it had better be someone who understands the potential of different data sets and can make tough decisions about your data investment strategy. If you already know that you're going to spend a lot of money and time on data acquisition, then it's probably time for you to make at least a minimal investment in hiring a first data scientist.
It's possible that you need data right away because your business is all about delivering data products. But it's more likely that your minimal viable product (MVP) won't be data-driven. Rather, you'll be betting on an instinct and seeing if the market validates that instinct. In that case, prematurely investing in data acquisition and data science will cost you precious money and time that should go toward bringing your MVP to market.
Once you have (or quickly plan to have) data for data scientists to work with, and are ready to commit significant product, engineering and business resources to support your data science efforts, you should quickly begin building a team.
It’s never too early to instill a culture that values data. Business decisions, from acquisitions to product launches, should be based on data rather than opinion. One of the advantages of introducing data science into an organization sooner rather than later is that doing so helps instill data as a first-class asset.
But don’t rush into hiring just because data science is sexy. Given the buzz around this functional area, many people feel a sense of urgency around building a data science team. Companies with petascale ambition are eager to hire the folks who will derive insight from all that data. But building a team too early is an expensive distraction, will demotivate your talent and possibly have lasting negative cultural implications.
If we were going to throw out one, overarching recommendation, it’s this: After you've validated your MVP, it's time to think about investing in data science.
A successful product launch should generate enough data to learn from, and you'll need to keep up with that data stream by having people on board who can extract value and insight from it.
Where does data science belong in your organization?
Where you introduce data science into your org structure matters a lot — for the team, for your other functions, and for the overall success of your business. There are three common approaches: a standalone team, an embedded model, and integrated teams. Each has trade-offs, so let's walk through a few possibilities.
Going It Alone
In the standalone model, your data science team acts as an autonomous unit parallel to engineering. The head of data science is a key leader and typically reports to the head of product or engineering — or even directly to the CEO.
The advantage of the standalone model is autonomy. This type of data science team is well positioned to tackle whatever problems it deems most valuable. There's also a symbolic advantage to a standalone data science team: It demonstrates that the company sees data as a first-class asset, which will help them attract world-class talent.
The standalone model works particularly well for decision science teams. Even though decision scientists collaborate closely with product teams, their independence helps them to make hard calls, like telling PMs that their product’s metrics aren’t good enough to justify a launch. Decision scientists also benefit a lot from cross-pollination, both to understand how different product metrics depend on one another and to share more general learnings about experimentation and data analysis.
The flip-side of autonomy is the risk of marginalization. As companies grow and organize into product teams, they often prefer to be self-sufficient. Even when they could benefit from collaboration with data scientists, product teams simply don’t want to depend on resources they don't control. Instead, they rely on themselves — even hiring their own data scientists under other names like "research engineers" — to get things done. If product teams refuse to work with the standalone data science team, then that team becomes marginalized and ineffective. Again, that's when you start losing good talent.
The original data science team at LinkedIn was a standalone team, and the team’s autonomy allowed it to make key contributions across LinkedIn’s products, in areas ranging from improving the quality “people you may know” to detecting fraudulent accounts. But as LinkedIn grew, it became increasingly difficult for a standalone team to collaborate effectively with product teams, especially as those teams hired their own engineers with similar skill sets. Eventually LinkedIn decided there was no longer a need for its standalone team. This is a very likely outcome.
The Virtues of Embedding
In an embedded model, the data science team brings in talented people and farms them out to the rest of the company. There’s still a head of data science, but he or she is mostly a hiring manager and coach.
The embedded model is the polar opposite of the standalone model: It gives up autonomy to ensure utility. In the best case, data scientists join the product teams that most need their services, and get to work on a wide variety of problems throughout the organization.
The downside of the embedded model is that not all data scientists are happy giving up autonomy (in fact, many are not good at it at all). Data scientist job descriptions emphasize creativity and initiative, and embedded roles often require them to defer to the leadership of the teams in which they are embedded.
There’s a risk that your data scientists will feel like second-class citizens as embedded team members — their product leads don't feel responsible for their growth and happiness, while their managers won't feel directly vested in their work.
We’ve seen some companies embed data science managers, but this approach only works once you have a fairly large data science team.
At LinkedIn, Daniel experienced the pros and cons of the embedded model. Actually the decision science team there has long thrived with its embedded model. Decision scientists ensure that product teams make decisions — particularly launch decisions — informed by data. At the same time, having a centralized organization facilitates knowledge sharing and career development. But, as mentioned earlier, the standalone data products team was not as successful as the organization scaled. Ultimately, LinkedIn decided to fold product data science into engineering, and Daniel himself moved into an engineering role to lead an integrated team responsible for search quality, an area that requires super tight collaboration between engineers and data scientists.
Full Integration
In an integrated model, there's no separate data science team at all. Instead, product teams hire and manage their own data scientists.
This optimizes for organizational alignment. By making data scientists first-class members of their product teams, it addresses the downsides of the standalone and embedded models. To the extent that data scientists, software engineers, designers, and product managers work on shared product goals, the integrated model instills collective team ownership of those goals. This is how you avoid the breakdowns that can occur when narrowly focused functional teams diverge in their goals and end up mired in dependencies that are too often ignored or delayed.
The downside of the integrated model is that it dilutes the identity of data science. Individual data scientists identify with their associated product teams, rather than a centralized data science team. You also sacrifice the flexibility of the embedded model, since it's harder to move people around based on their skills and interests. Finally, the integrated model can create challenges for scientists’ career growth, since the manager of an integrated team may not be in the best position to value or reward their accomplishments.
At Instacart, data science is fully integrated into product teams. Those teams own their product domain — which could be the real-time order fulfillment engine, the application used by shoppers when picking groceries or the search and recommendation services (there are 15 of these teams).
Each is a mixture of engineers, data scientists, designers and product managers, and the engineers and data scientists both report into a technical lead — who may themselves be an engineer or a data scientist. This structure ensures that the engineers and data scientists collaborate closely — and they are empowered to do whatever's needed to achieve their team’s objectives. As the VP of Data Science, Jeremy is a mentor and coach to the data scientists and their team leads. He brings the team together into a community that spans product teams. And he leads organization wide data science initiatives.
Each of the three models has its pros and cons, and you have to figure out which one is best for your organization — plus how you want it to evolve. Be ready to adapt as your needs change. Sometimes the best approach isn’t a single model but a hybrid. As Andy Grove wrote in High Output Management:
Good management is a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization — a balancing act to get the best combination of responsiveness and leverage.
Daniel Tunkelang at his home office.
How to build a culture where data science thrives
As your organization and ambitions continue to grow, you'll inevitably want to hire even more data scientists (Jeremy wrote another popular article focused purely on this). Build a company culture early that makes it a great place to practice data science, and you’ll reap dividends when they matter most.
Many organizations claim to be data-driven. They collect a lot of data, invest money in data engineering, and frequently reference data rich dashboards. But they fall short.
Actions speak louder than words, and data science will only feel valued in an organization that makes decisions based on data.
Companies must build the backbone and the credibility that they will make decisions based on data even when they run counter to popular wisdom or lead to significant shifts in power in the organization. These are the opportunities where data science can have the greatest impact.
Data scientists, like everyone else, want their work to have recognizable and celebrated impact. Making this happen creates a positive feedback loop where data scientists remain motivated to tackle big problems and ensure that their solutions are measurable.
Recognizing the contributions of data scientists can be difficult — especially when they’re in integrated teams. Your data science leader needs to remain a champion of excellence and impact, and the senior executives at the company should seek to understand and appreciate the impact that data scientists are having on a regular basis. Not just every now and again.
In many ways, data science takes a village — a data scientist in a vacuum can achieve nothing.
Unless they collaborate closely with product managers, engineers and designers, they will not create amazing products, and unless leaders and operators value their insights, their recommendations may never affect change.
When Jeremy first joined as a data leader at Sailthru, its engineering organization had a neutral perception of data science. In order to increase everyone’s buy-in, he spent 30% of his time in his first 2 months creating and teaching a class to the engineering organization on statistical learning.
By making all of his examples use Sailthru data, and engaging the engineers in the process of building data driven products, the class rapidly accelerated the process of turning the organization’s perception of data science around. That investment of time was costly — especially in those formative months. But having engineers who were excited about the potential of data science as collaborators was well worth the investment.
Despite its name, this discipline can be as much an art as a science. Not everything can be measured, and we're limited by our algorithms, our computational resources, and our ingenuity.
Over time, the impact that a data science team has will be far higher if you build a diverse team with extremely different backgrounds, skill-sets, and world views.
This will ensure they think as holistically as possible about their domain, and will encourage creativity and innovation over time.
Finally, focus early on hiring data scientists who reflect your company ideals. To be effective, data scientists must be trusted by their teams, the users of their products, and the decision makers they influence. As you build your team, hire for and reward individuals with integrity — who share the values of your organization. Their impact is tremendous, and, for better or worse, they'll make many decisions that will shape your company’s future. |
Anti-Gay Evangelist Scott Lively Hires a Convicted Sex Offender Frederick Clarkson print page Fri Jan 14, 2011 at 12:31:40 PM EST Notorious anti-gay political activist Rev. Scott Lively recently opened a coffee shop called "Holy Grounds" across the street from a high school in Springfield, Massachusetts. The shop requests a "donation" for coffee and tea, which basically meant it was free to the kids. The purpose was, after all, low key evangelization. But the Springfield Republican newspaper reports on its front page today that the shop manager has been arrested for failing to register as a convicted sex offender. Republican, he gave a false name, calling himself "Michael Free." (He also gave this alias to The Boston Globe when the paper recently In fairness, Lively says he didn't know that Michael J. Frediani had served three years in prison in the late 90s for having "deviate sexual intercourse" with an 11 year old girl in Canandaigua, New York. Nor did he know that his coffee shop manager had been listed in New York as a class 3 offender, considered at high risk of committing new offenses. In Massachusetts, he is listed as a class 2 moderate risk of repeating his crime. On the other hand, Lively didn't run a criminal background check before making him responsible for the care of children. For his part, Frediani says he is a changed man, and a "minister of Jesus." But when approached by the, he gave a false name, calling himself "Michael Free." (He also gave this alias to The Boston Globe when the paper recently profiled Lively.) He pleaded innocent to the charge of failure to register as sex offender. For his part, Scott Lively told The Boston Globe that he too has changed and is now engaged in other things. But he has a long and ugly record to put behind him. Political Research Associates compiled selected quotes from a presentation "exposing the homosexuals' agenda" Lively gave to members the Ugandan Parliament in 2009. These include: "The gay movement is an evil institution that's goal is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity in which there's no restrictions on sexual conduct except the principle of mutual choice." "...That is the gay agenda...it is the recreation of society on a different moral foundation and the problem with that is that moral foundation will lead to social chaos and destruction." The Globe reported: Lively also wrote on his blog that a respected observer of Ugandan society had said his presentation was "like a nuclear bomb against the `gay' agenda in Uganda.'' "I pray that this, and the predictions, are true,'' Lively wrote. A week after the conference, a bill was introduced in the Ugandan Parliament that would allow gays to be executed under certain circumstances. Gay rights and human rights activists said Lively's presentation helped set the stage for the bill, which was condemned by the United States and other governments.
Lively told the Globe that he is toning down the anti-gay rhetoric and doing other "stuff." This, if true, is nice as far as it goes. But one thing we do not hear from Lively and the many others who have spewed hateful words and ideas for a very long time, is any apology for the harm they have done to so many people. (This is something we need to bear in mind as we enter a national period of reflection about the culture and consequences of violent rhetoric, primarily from the political and Religious Right. Even if people back off from their most incendiary rhetoric, that does not mean that their views have changed much if at all.) Lively claims that he was surprised by and does not support the death penalty provision of proposed antigay legislation in Uganda. But what has he done about it? Indeed, while there are grounds for skepticism about his claim not to support the bill it is worth noting that he has not returned to Uganda to apologize or to try to undo the damage he has done. He currently claims, as has been the fashion among conservative evangelical for years, to hate the sin but love the sinner. OK, fine. But where, exactly, is the love?
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The federal government is poised to launch sanctions against BP, Halliburton and Transocean for violations tied to last year’s Gulf oil spill as soon as next week, the nation’s chief offshore drilling regulator said today.
The process will begin when the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement sends the companies initial notices of non-compliance for violating seven offshore drilling regulations in connection with the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The ocean energy bureau is “in the process of developing the proposed notices of violations,” said Michael Bromwich, the agency’s director. They are expected to be issued “as early as next week.”
The action marks the first time federal regulators have moved to sanction contractors for violating offshore regulations, a departure from the government’s traditional focus squarely on the oil and gas companies working on the outer continental shelf.
Although the initial notices may not specify the civil penalties that will be assessed against each of the three firms, fees last year were capped at $35,000 per incident, per day.
In the case of the oil spill, violations may have covered 87 days — the time crude was gushing into the Gulf — or longer, creating a potential tab per incident of $3.05 million. Collectively, the bill for all seven companies could be as high as $39.59 million, based on 87 days of violations.
The civil penalties that will be assessed by the ocean energy bureau for violating offshore regulations are separate from Clean Water Act fines and other penalties facing companies that worked at the Macondo well.
A joint investigation by the Coast Guard and the ocean energy bureau concluded yesterday that the three firms responsible for much of the work at BP’s doomed Macondo well had collectively violated seven regulations, such as failing “to take necessary precautions to keep the well under control at all times.”
Individually, BP was found to have violated seven regulations; Transocean three; and Halliburton (via its subsidiary Sperry Sun) three.
For instance, the panel concluded that the three companies ran afoul of requirements for preventing conditions posing “unreasonable risk to public health, life, property, aquatic life . . . or other uses of the ocean.”
Additionally, BP and Transocean were flagged for bucking a regulation requiring specific inspections of blowout preventers that are a final safeguard against surging oil and gas. (See the full list of violations below).
To keep up with inflation, the Obama administration in June boosted the fee schedule for violating the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act from $35,000 to $40,000 per day. At the same time, the agency boosted the cost of violating provisions in the Oil Pollution Act from $25,000 to $30,000 per day.
But that was as far as the ocean energy bureau could go administratively. Although federal law empowers the government to make the inflation adjustment at least once every three years, bigger changes are largely up to Congress.
Bromwich said the current civil fines are “terribly inadequate” and are “trivial” for many oil companies that may pay $500,000 to $1 million daily to rent drilling rigs.
“The fine structure has got to be increased,” Bromwich added, so that there are “meaningful dollars” attached to violating offshore drilling regulations.
Bromwich declined to give a specific figure, but said “it’s got to start in the six figures, not five figures.” He added:
“It’s in everyone’s interest that you have system of fines and penalties that serves as a deterrent to bad conduct, a specific deterrent so the violator gets smacked and knows that they are at risk of losing a significant amount of money. Other operators see what happens to that one operator and say ‘Gee, this is really serious, we need to take the extra steps that are necessary to avoid being cited ourselves.'”
Traditionally, the ocean energy bureau — previously known as the Minerals Management Service — has focused on oil and gas companies operating offshore, and not the contractors and service companies that may collaborate on projects. When violations occurred, historically the offshore regulators held the primary operator responsible — even if contractors were involved in the incidents.
But under Bromwich, the agency has concluded that its regulatory reach extends to drilling rig owners, service firms and other contractors that work for the operators. That conclusion was affirmed by a legal interpretation made by the solicitor, Bromwich has said.
Last year’s Gulf oil spill has focused attention on the way the entire oil and gas industry is regulated. At the very top of the chain was BP, the primary offshore operator who held the lease on which its failed Macondo well was drilled. But Transocean owned the Deepwater Horizon rig that was working on the well and Halliburton applied cement at the well site.
Below is the list of violations, taken verbatim from the joint investigation team’s report:
The panel found evidence that BP and, in some instances, its contractors violated the following federal regulations: |
Photograph courtesy of Ryan Stang
"This is like the most difficult interview I've ever had. I actually have a lot to say about these!" Bradford Cox, the driving force behind Deerhunter and Atlas Sound is known for his prickly relationship with music journalists, but focusing on some of his favourite albums seems to have been somewhat different - and revealing. He's out walking his dog Faulkner when I call him up, wandering parks in his home city of Atlanta, Georgia. The first thing that's abundantly clear from his list is Cox's affinity with the American South. "There was more of a regionalism when I was growing up," he explains, "the way things are now though, I think that regionalism is a lot more muted - we're all from the same planet now, you know? I was very proud of bands from my hometown, Athens." We go in deep about the influence of Southern Gothic, with the literary leanings of bands like Pylon and R.E.M. clearly looming large over Cox's musical upbringing. However, as a keen follower of Cox's exploits, the revelation of non-ambient Eno's influence on him seems instantly blindingly obvious - from the stream-of-consciousness lyrics of Atlas Sound, to the patchwork sonics of Deerhunter's latest and intensely melodic LP, Fading Frontier, even to Cox's proclivity for wearing the odd frock at gigs.
"I had a top ten list that I'd written somewhere around 21 years of age. I've always kept it… so a lot of the albums on this list are from that list." But for the record, Cox makes it abundantly clear how "this list is bullshit" (which to me more likely meant this list is "not definitive"), and that he's still learning, still discovering albums every day, mostly digging back into the past. "There's still five or six Robert Wyatt albums I've not heard, and probably at least two or three songs on those that will completely obliterate my mind for weeks at a time."
The lead single for Fading Frontier - 'Snakeskin' - is one of Deerhunter's most slickly realised marriages of flawless groove and psychedelic indie pop (with a strangely dark coda finale which really has to be heard). Deeper listens to the full album, though, reveal the group's most concisely beautiful effort yet. It's driven by the broadest range of influences to date and, it would seem, reflects Cox's own colourful record collection more closely than before - far from the divisively headstrong vision of angered lo-fi pop/rock captured on Monomania and their debut Turn It Up Faggot. He remains an intriguing, enigmatic and difficult to understand character (to say the least - some of the diversions he went on during our chat were madly convoluted, and truly wonderful), but his adoration of music's ability to provide us with transcendent experiences is pure, and remains unaltered by the success of both Atlas Sound and Deerhunter. Hence we talked for two solid hours, with Faulkner occasionally requiring some attention from his owner on, what I imagine, what was yet another warm, close and sunny day in Georgia.
Fading Frontier is out on Friday, October 16, on 4AD. Deerhunter begin a West Coast US tour at The Glass House in Pomona, CA, tonight, heading to the UK for a run of dates beginning at All Saints Church in Hove on October 30; for full details and tickets, head here. Click on the image below to begin scrolling through Bradford's choices, which run in no particular order |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Chemicals found in Kalamazoo River “rocks” raise health concerns River still contaminated, report shows December 16, 2013 (Battle Creek, MI) Local residents observed strange “rock” formations in parts of the Kalamazoo River affected when an Enbridge pipeline ruptured in 2010, spilling approximately one million gallons of tar sands oil into the river. Chemical analyses of these “rocks” and water column samples suggest that despite nearly three and a half years of cleanup efforts, the river is still contaminated with chemicals that raise serious human health concerns.
When Craig Ritter found the first “rock” about the size of a pool ball, he remembered thinking, “This is not natural.” The “rocks” crumbled when rubbed together and left an oil sheen on the water surface. Once Ritter found one, he began to see them all over the river bottom. Ritter created a video of the “rock” formations behaving in water that the EPA reviewed, but he did not receive a response from the agency.
Ritter, an engineer and self-described outdoorsman, collaborated with other concerned residents who were impacted by the Enbridge spill to send samples of the “rocks”, water from the Kalamazoo River, and a controlled documented sample from the oil spill, to be analyzed by Analytical Chemistry Testing, Inc. in Mobile, Alabama. The results were reviewed and corroborated by Geolabs Inc. in Massachusetts. The analyses show that the oil extracted from the Kalamazoo River “rocks” is a fingerprint match for the oil that spilled from the Enbridge pipeline in 2010. Moreover, Robert Naman, the lead chemist on the project, found compounds identical to those found in the Gulf of Mexico when Corexit dispersants were mixed with crude oil in response to the BP Deep Water Horizon spill. But according to the EPA and Michigan state officials, no Corexit dispersants or any other products were used during the Enbridge cleanup. This has led the team of concerned residents to consider other possible explanations for the presence of Corexit-like compounds in the rock formations. One explanation could be the diluents themselves. The diluents used to thin tar sands for transportation and the dispersants used to break up oil slicks are petroleum distillates – industrial solvents, which share similar chemicals and have similar properties. According to oil spill expert Dr. Riki Ott, the properties that facilitate the movement of these solvents through oil also make it easier for them to move through skin and into the human body. Ott said, “In effect, solvents act like an oil delivery system into the body. This makes solvent-oil combinations much more toxic than oil alone, as we learned after the BP disaster. With dilbit, the tar sands are already pre-mixed with the solvents.” Solvents are known to be neurotoxins, mutagens, teratogens, carcinogens, and to cause hemolysis, liver and kidney damage, and autoimmune dysfunction. Indeed, major health problems have been reported by residents in Michigan since the spill. The Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH) issued a report six months after the spill that found 61 percent of the residents from the impacted area had reported respiratory problems, headaches, dizziness, nausea and other central nervous system problems, skin lesions and rashes, among other things. These symptoms are known within the medical community to be characteristic of exposure to oil and solvents. However, two years after the Enbridge spill, the MDCH reported there were no long-term health issues. “If we as common residents can see that major health issues are still a problem, why are the officials ignoring this?” asks Michelle Barlond-Smith, who lived on the Kalamazoo River in Battle Creek at the time of the spill. Meanwhile, the EPA has ordered Enbridge to finish its cleanup of the Kalamazoo River by Dec. 31st, 2013. “How could this be?” asks Ritter, knowing the river is far from clean. “The fear is that no one knows the long-term health effects of exposure to tar sands oil. There is no reference book to go to. At this point we really need some answers about why these Corexit-like chemicals are present in the river. Right now it looks like either a dangerous product was used, or we need to start seriously studying the properties of dilbit for their health effects”. Media Contacts: Craig Ritter: 517-230-6394 - [email protected]
Michelle Barlond-Smith: 269-753-2141- [email protected]
Robert Naman, ACT Laboratory, Inc.: 251-454-4582- [email protected]
Riki Ott: 206-853-2855 - [email protected] For general inquiries about this story, contact: [email protected] Press Tele-Conference Wednesday, December 18th, 2013 at 10am EST Dr. Riki Ott, Craig Ritter, Robert Naman, and Michelle Barlond-Smith will be available to answer questions. Dial in: +1 661-673-8605 Participant access code: 650881# Photos available here. Please contact [email protected] for more. Copies of the chemical analyses available upon request. Video summarizing the discovery of the “rock” formations available here. Timeline of events leading up to this release, relevant documents, and questions for the media available here. For more information, see today’s news article by Andrew Nikiforuk in the Tyee . |
For Brits that are feeling woeful about the results of the Brexit vote, the folks at Sam Adams may soon have the perfect beverage to ease their sorrows.
The brewer’s parent company Boston Beer (sam) has filed to trademark the term “Brexit” for a potential hard cider, according to a document filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The Wall Street Journal, which originally reported the story, notes other firms have filed Brexit trademark requests for a variety of goods, including clothing and nutritional supplements.
While Boston Beer isn’t sure how the name would be used just yet, it would likely be for a small batch of cider out of the company’s Angry Orchard research and development orchard in Walden, New York.
Boston Beer already has a hit on its hands with the Angry Orchard cider brand, which commands more than 50% of the growing cider market here in the U.S. That category grew by 14.7% in 2015, according to beverage alcohol research firm IWSR. That growth far exceeds the broader beer business, but is decelerating from 2014’s 64% increase and the 74% jump in 2013. Sam Adams has acknowledged that the overall cider business has slowed of late, citing increased interest in “hard” sodas.
Still, Boston Beer has made impressive inroads with the Angry Orchard brand, which has fended off rival offerings with innovative new flavors and a strong presence at retail outlets and behind bars.
A potential “Brexit” cider would also make sense as especially relevant to the U.K. consumer. Cider is actually a far bigger category in the United Kingdom than it is in the U.S. Hard ciders make up a little over 1% of total beverage alcohol in the U.S., but is closer to 8% in the U.K. |
From now on, I won’t be building any more native apps. All my apps going forward will be progressive web apps. Progressive web apps are web applications which are designed to work even more seamlessly on mobile devices than native mobile apps.
What do I mean by “more seamlessly?” I mean that most web traffic comes from mobile devices, and that users install between 0–3 new apps per month, on average. That means that people aren’t spending a lot of time looking for new apps to try out in the app store, but they are spending lots of time on the web, where they might discover and use your app.
Progressive web applications start out just like any other web app, but when a user returns to the app and demonstrates through usage that they’re interested in using the app more regularly, browsers will invite the user to install the app to their home screens. PWA’s can also benefit from push notifications, like native apps.
This is where it gets interesting. Just like any native app, the progressive web app will have its own home screen icon, and when you click on it, the app will launch without the browser chrome. That means no URL bar and no web navigation UI. Just the phone’s usual status bar and your app in all its almost-full-screen glory.
This has been a long time coming. None of the technology is particularly new — with the notable exception of the emerging cross-platform standard.
Some History
In the early days of the iPhone, there was no app store. Steve Jobs wanted developers to build iPhone apps using standard web technologies.
Sometimes visionaries are spot on, but they’re 10 years ahead of their time. Looking back from 2 years ago, Steve Jobs’ recommendation to build web apps for iPhone was called his “biggest mistake” by Forbes, because native apps became a smashing success.
Looking back today, it seems obvious that he was really onto something — just way ahead of the capabilities of the existing web standards of the day.
A decade later, mobile web standards now support many of the features developers looked for with native apps, and Steve Jobs’ original vision for mobile web applications is now being pursued seriously by the rest of the world. Apple has supported “apple-mobile-web-capable” web apps that you can add to your home screen almost since the beginning using meta tags that help iOS devices find things like suitable icons.
Other vendors followed suit, each creating their own collection of meta tags to declare mobile web app capabilities, but recently, a cross-platform specification was introduced, and now, cross-platform mobile web apps are finally becoming a real thing.
The apps implementing the standard are called progressive web applications, not to be confused with confusingly similar terms like progressive enhancement or responsive apps.
What Are Progressive Web Apps?
Progressive web apps are just web applications designed to be mobile friendly. If the browser sees that the user wants to keep using the app, it may prompt the user to install it to their home screen, dock, etc… In order to qualify though, they have to meet a specific criteria:
Must be HTTPS (see let’s encrypt)
Valid manifest with required properties (Web Manifest Validator)
Must have service worker
Manifest start_url must always load, even offline (using service worker)
must always load, even offline (using service worker) Must supply its own navigation
Should be responsive to different screen sizes and orientations
Of course, using HTTPS and a service worker for offline users is just good practice for any modern app.
What many app builders seem to forget is that if you build a progressive web application, you must be able to navigate the application without the browser chrome and browser navigation gestures. The mobile devices assume that you’ve built your own navigation into the app.
For example, if you have an about page, that page must have a link back to the app UI, or the users will have to close and reopen the app to get back to your main app UI.
Progressive Web Apps How-To
There’s a lot of information about building progressive web applications spread all over the web, but many of them are out of date, and lots of them contain only a fraction of what you need to know to build one. Let’s fix that.
Enable HTTPS
To enable HTTPS, you’re going to need:
A web server (I recommend DigitalOcean)
An SSL certificate
A strong Diffie-Hellman group ( sudo openssl dhparam -out /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem 2048 )
) TLS/SSL config for your web server (instructions for Nginx on Ubuntu)
The Manifest
The manifest file is called manifest.json and it’s pretty simple. It consists of the name ( short_name for the home screen icon, and an optional name for a more complete name), a start url, and a large list of icons so you can support the large range of different icon sizes needed for various platforms. For Android + iOS, you’ll need:
36x36
48x48
60x60 (Apple touch icon iPhone)
72x72
76x76 (Apple touch icon iPad)
96x96
120x120 (Apple touch icon iPhone retina)
152x152 (Apple touch icon iPad retina)
180x180 (Apple touch icon for iOS 8+)
192x192
512x512
I singled out the Apple touch icons because they have the well-known names:
apple-touch-icon-180x180.png
Where 180x180 can be replaced by whatever the specific resolution is. Using the well-known names is not required, but if you forget to include the tags, iOS can still find the icons by searching for them in your web app’s root directory if you use the well-known names.
The iOS icons don’t support transparency.
Sample manifest.json:
There are some features you should know about. The theme_color sets the color of the status bar and the window header bar used when switching between apps on Android.
The background_color sets the color used on the splash screen. On Android, a splash screen will be composed from the name property (the long name), and a large icon on top of the background_color .
Manifest isn’t Everywhere
The first time I built a progressive web application, I was thrilled that it worked as expected on Chrome for Android, but when I looked at it in Safari/iOS, it didn’t seem to work. The reason is that mobile Safari, in spite of supporting these features using custom tags for a decade or so doesn’t yet support the web manifest spec.
So, in addition to the manifest file for supported browsers, you’ll also need special meta tags for iOS, beginning with this one, which will launch the app without the browser chrome:
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">
There are lots of tags to remember, though, and there may be another way to do it. There’s a web manifest polyfill that will read your manifest.json file and add the vendor-specific tags for older mobile browsers, iOS, and even Windows phone and Firefox OS.
Service Worker
Service Worker is a recent web platform specification that allows you to cache resources locally in order to make sure that your app still works, even if the user is not connected to the internet.
It works by hijacking your network requests and serving responses from a local cache when the user is offline. There’s a lot more to it than that, though. It’s a fairly sophisticated low-level API, which allows you to do a lot to optimize your user’s experience whether they’re online or offline.
To get started, I’m going to recommend a very simple higher-level abstraction. A little script called UpUp. Using UpUp is really simple. Here’s an example from the UpUp docs:
The content-url is the URL to load when the user is offline. I just use the app’s root URL for this, and it works fine.
The assets are files that need to be cached locally in order for the app to function properly. Remember to make sure that all your images, icons, CSS, and even default AJAX request responses are included. As you can see, any file type should work.
Eventually, you may want more control over your offline resource caching than UpUp provides. When that day comes, here are some great educational resources to get you started:
Testing
Debugging the physical device with Chrome inspect
Plug your device into a USB cable. Turn on USB debugging on your Android device. See remote debugging instructions. You may need to Google around to figure out how to put your Android phone in developer mode to enable remote debugging.
Once you turn on developer mode, you may see developer options show up in your settings mode. Open that and make sure that USB debugging is turned on.
Visit chrome://inspect#devices . Hit the inspect button and you’ll get the full dev tools for your app.
Verify your service worker
Visit chrome://inspect/#service-workers to verify that your service worker is working properly.
Verify install to homepage
If you want to skip the user engagement checks and always get the install to homepage option, turn on “Bypass user engagement checks” in Chrome flags:
chrome://flags/
To test on desktop, you should also flip “Enable add to shelf”.
Native Apps are Not Dead Yet
Progressive Web Apps now have most of the capabilities of native apps, the install friction promises to be lower than native apps, you’ll no longer need to worry about the app store gatekeepers, and you won’t have to pay anybody 30% tax on app sales for the privilege of being in an app store.
But native apps still have a few capabilities that mobile web apps will not have for a potentially long time.
Notably, most of the sensor and hardware integration specs have limited or no support in most browsers, and even basic features like the device orientation API have undergone breaking changes, with multiple versions of the spec live in various browsers, requiring some tricky logic or polyfills to use safely.
Ironically, even though Apple pioneered many of the progressive web application technologies, iOS seems to be the only major obstacle to progressive web app adoption. They don’t currently support service workers, but they are in development.
Thankfully, there’s a Cordova plugin that adds service worker support to hybrid apps on iOS.
That said, I don’t trust all web browser vendors to implement install prompts in a particularly user-friendly way. Using the spec today, users may or may not be prompted to install your app, and if they go searching for it in the app store, they won’t find it unless you also publish a hybrid app through the traditional app store process.
For the short-term, we may be stuck using Cordova or something like it to fill the gaps on iOS devices, but good support for the spec is quickly rolling out on Android devices. If you have a recent Android phone running Chrome, there’s a good chance your app will work without resorting to a Cordova build.
If you think the lack of Apple support should hold you back, remember that Android is now 86% of the global mobile OS market. It may be worth the effort to build a PWA even if you have to polyfill iOS with Cordova in order to take advantage of lower install friction for 86% of the world.
Conclusion
In the short term, you may still want to produce a hybrid app that can take advantage of some device APIs that are still not available using web standards.
After building my first progressive web application, I’m hopeful for the future, but I’m also conscious that it isn’t perfect. Getting everything to work smoothly across all the device platforms does take a while. You also have to remember that you’ll miss out on the discoverability features and well-known installation procedures that users are familiar with in the app stores.
Hopefully browser vendors will catch up with the vision, and eventually there will be a much better install experience for progressive web applications than there is for native apps. It looks like things are going that way.
Certainly, native apps will survive for a while longer, but if you’re busy learning Swift or Java so you can build native apps, you may want to consider learning JavaScript, instead.
Want to give some progressive web apps a try? Check out pwa.rocks.
Edit: The Web Platform Rocks
If you’re about to jump into the comments to tell me how it’s impossible to build a serious app with the web platform:
This is 2016, not 2004. The web platform has come a long way. Read “10 Must See Web Apps and Games” to see what other people have been building for the web platform.
Still not convinced? Read “Why Native Apps Really are Doomed: Native Apps are Doomed pt 2”.
This article has been edited to update iOS status for service workers. It originally said that Apple had hinted at an intent to implement. The status has changed to “In Development”. |
Hope that a work stoppage at Canada Post could be avoided for at least one more month faded Friday as a proposed truce fell apart over what the union called a "poison pill" from the Crown corporation.
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers, facing a lockout by their employer on Monday, and Canada Post were both ready to agree to a 30-day cooling-off period that would keep packages and mail moving under the old contract and let negotiations continue without the threat of a work stoppage.
But Canada Post said it was willing to continue bargaining for another month only if the union agreed to binding arbitration in the event a deal could not be reached — a proposition CUPW had previously rejected.
The union's executive couldn't agree to the Canada Post proposal, saying binding arbitration would be giving up their right to negotiate a deal.
CUPW national president Mike Palecek said in a statement that nothing in Canada Post's proposal forced the Crown corporation to bargain with the union.
"We want to have meaningful discussions with management, but getting a guaranteed bailout from an arbitrator at the end of it isn't the incentive they need to stop playing these games with the public," Palecek said in the statement.
"Our bosses at Canada Post could just sit there for 30 days, refuse to discuss our proposals, as they have been doing for months, and then wait things out in the legal system for years."
Canada Post spokesman Jon Hamilton said the Crown corporation had no comment beyond its earlier statement Friday. In that statement, the postal service said binding arbitration would eliminate uncertainty for workers and for customers, who are already moving business to private couriers.
"What Canada Post has put forward is a reasonable approach that will end the uncertainty immediately and allow for meaningful discussions at the bargaining tables," the statement said.
The union rejected binding arbitration earlier this week after Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk floated the idea.
Without a truce or deal, Canada Post would be in a legal position to lock out the 50,000 unionized employees starting Monday at 12:01 a.m. ET, after pushing back a Friday threat.
The postal service would stop accepting any new packages in the event of a work stoppage, and any parcels or mail in the system would be stuck there for the duration of a work stoppage.
However, government benefit cheques like Old Age Security and Canada Pension Plan payments would still be delivered on the 20th of the month, but not items like municipal hydro and water bills.
The two sides are far apart on two major issues — wages and pensions — after seven months of negotiations, including 60 days of conciliation talks and more than 30 days with federal mediators.
The union wants rural and suburban mail carriers to be paid by the hour, like urban letter carriers, rather than by how many packages they deliver.
Canada Post wants to change the pension scheme for new hires, moving them to a defined contribution plan instead of a defined benefit plan. Many private sector companies have moved to defined contribution plans because they reduce costs for companies and shift the risk for future payouts onto employees, who are no longer guaranteed a set return in retirement.
The pension proposal is one other public sector unions are watching closely. If Canada Post's proposal is adopted, it could signal the direction the government wants to take in future talks with other unions.
"We are watching this very closely. This is the first — and by the way, only — Crown corporation that has come to the table with this approach in the federal government," said Hassan Yussuff, president of the Canadian Labour Congress.
"I've made it very clear the union has our full support to resist any attempt to do that and I think there are other ways for the corporation to try and work with the union." |
Note: this article contains TV show plot spoilers up to the start of series five of Game of Thrones. It also features detail from the books (though no plot spoilers).
It’s that time of year when everyone and their dog takes a view on the most important political question of our times: who will sit the Iron Throne of Westeros?
Recently, journalist Paul Mason used Marxism to explain the game, and others have looked at George R R Martin’s work through all kinds of lenses. But funnily enough, given the title of the series, none of them uses game theory.
That’s a bit weird as right now, in a fictitious continent we’ll call Europe, a former game theory professor is running Greece’s negotiations over its debt. Given the parallels with the Iron Throne’s negotiation with the Iron Bank of Braavos (the IMF of Essos) and that bank’s willingness to commit to regime change as an enforcement strategy, you would have thought someone would link the two together.
The prisoner’s dilemma
So let’s do that now by looking at the games theory of Game of Thrones. For the uninitiated, game theory is a branch of maths that looks at problems of competition and co-operation. It assumes basic rationality and then looks at what each of the parties will achieve in a situation, conditional on other parties wanting to do their best also.
The most famous model, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, imagines a setting where police have arrested two criminals who cannot communicate with each other. The cops make them an offer over whether to betray the other or co-operate with them (another HBO show, The Wire, featured detectives who were master game theorists).
Although co-operating with each other would be a better strategy collectively, since neither party can trust the other you get an equilibrium situation where both will betray the other. This is called a Nash Equilibrium – the best that each party can get, conditional on the other trying to get the best they can also.
It’s more complicated than that
The problem when looking at Westeros is that at any point there are multiple games going on.
The race for the Iron Throne is one. Another is the relationship between the Iron Bank and the Crown. Another involves playing for the position that enables playing the Game of Thrones in the first place – think Roose Bolton trying to supplant the Starks in the North. Yet another involves whatever it is that Danaerys is doing in Meereen. And finally there is the game that few even know they are playing, where the enemy appears to be the mysterious White Walkers.
Sky Atlantic
This set-up mirrors the multiple sets of incentives on politicians and institutions in real-world statecraft, and makes it devilishly difficult to model the whole system.
Zoom in
Instead, you can think about some of the subgames, which are a little more clear cut in their outcomes. Game theory doesn’t look at behaviour so much as it looks at outcomes, assuming that people will choose the highest payoff if they can.
Martin even helps on a couple of occasions by spelling out those payoffs. Advising Joffrey, the fearsome Tywin Lannister gives a great example of what to do in a repeated game:
Joffrey, when your enemies defy you, you must serve them steel and fire. When they go to their knees, however, you must help them back to their feet. Elsewise no man will ever bend the knee to you.
This is a pretty good distillation of a what game theorists call tit-for-tat. If you start off with equal participants in a repeated game, the best overall strategies combine punishing transgression with forgiveness; there are variants, but all of them get better results than “all or nothing” punishment strategies such as the grim trigger.
Tywin’s strategy works in this case because it assumes a capability for punishment. In advising Joffrey, he’s not telling him how to gain the Iron Throne but how to hang on to it. The equilibrium stays stable as long as the Throne can dominate all of the potential competitors, as Aegon I could with his dragons. Then, rebellion is easily put down, and whatever the consequence to the smallfolk of Westeros, at least they don’t get the kind of devastation inflicted on the Riverlands by the War of the Five Kings.
HBO
Interestingly, this is often the case in situations where it seems desirable to get rid of a tyrant. If the presence of the tyrant is the only thing that keeps a stable equilibrium, then getting rid of the tyrant just disrupts the equilibrium and leads to all out conflict. You could draw on examples like Iraq after Saddam Hussain, or Yugoslavia after Tito, but it also applies to some situations with non-state actors like organised crime syndicates – and indeed company succession after a dominating figure retires.
Better the devil you know?
But once the tyrant is out of place, a different, more fluid and more dangerous situation takes place, which is why binding the great houses together through marriage pacts would be so important. Historians of Westeros would, I’m sure, have in-universe arguments over whether deposing “mad king” Aerys was a case in point.
The marriage pact between the Lannister and Baratheon houses has held for 14 years by the time the series starts, but it is fragile, and many of the houses have reasons to want to get involved. The death of king Robert Baratheon in series one starts off the War of the Five Kings.
Of course if one party has a weapon of mass destruction, then this equilibrium is supported. Danaerys Targaryen has those weapons, but she is not playing in this game yet as she’s halfway around the globe from the action in Westeros. However, she is also learning the limits of dragons as a credible threat – using them to keep the peace in Westeros is one thing, but being cooped up in a city with your rivals takes dragons out of play as you can’t burninate the city without burning yourself too.
The threat is non-credible in game theoretic terms because you would not choose the payoffs that come from playing the threatened strategy – in this case probably destroying your own territory, but probably not destroying your enemy. The characters in Game of Thrones even have an in-universe example to guide them here: Aegon’s failure to conquer Dorne, in southern Westeros.
Theory can’t tell us everything
But Game of Thrones also points to some of the limits of game theory. When the UK’s foreign office issues advice on a regime undergoing uprising and doesn’t quite know the likely outcomes, it always uses that wonderful adjective “fluid”. The situation in Westeros remains fluid as long as some of the players are not rational; the master of statecraft Tywin is one thing, but playing against Cersei?
The payoffs are uncertain too: it’s not necessarily the case that someone winning the Iron Throne – without dragons – would be able to hold it at all now. And there are some potential players who haven’t yet revealed their hands. We have some idea about Littlefinger, but what is Varys’ game? Westerosi politicians have to cope with something a bit more complex than a prisoner’s dilemma.
That brings it all back to one of the problems with using game theory or any type of model to try to analyse a situation as complex as the one George Martin created. When payoffs are computable in some way, then game theory works really well. But politics is often about unexpected turns.
Sky Atlantic
In the 1970s, political scientist Giovanni Sartori described a certain kind of political alignment that tended to produce big regime downfalls such as Weimar Germany or Salvador Allende’s Chile or the French Fourth Republic. The next predicted upheaval would have been Italy, and indeed Italy might indeed have come close to collapse. But what he didn’t expect was that the Italian communists would turn round and do a deal with their rivals to preserve the state. They did just that – the Historic Compromise – and Italy limped on.
In Game of Thrones, the in-universe board game of cyvasse is used to explore these situations. Like chess, it seems to be finite, and therefore fully complete under game theoretic classifications. But politics is like playing without knowing how many boards there are, how many players there are and with a board that changes size and shape all the time. While Game of Thrones is full of strategy, and full of situations that you could look at with game theory, the overall game points to its limitations in application.
Read this next: Why hasn’t Westeros had an industrial revolution? |
Prisons house convicts, who are subjected to forced labor, but the worst human rights abuses occur in political prison camps.
Detention centers are similar to police holding cells, but holding facilities and indoctrination camps are clandestine operations that have been used to hold repatriated defectors without trial since the early years of the millennium.
Based on testimony of about 13,000 North Korean defectors, North Korean Human Rights Archives said the regime operates 210 detention centers and 210 labor camps, 23 prisons, 5 indoctrination camps, 27 holding facilities, and 6 political prison camps including in Yodok, Pukchang and Hoeryong.
At least 480 prisons and detention facilities are scattered around North Korea, an NGO claimed Tuesday.
A defector who was detained at a prison in Hamhung in the late 1990s said security forces "took about 500 people to a barren wilderness, where they threw shovels at them and told them to dig tunnels to live. Many died later."
Almost no detention facilities provide inmates with foods, but they eke out a meager existence by tending vegetable gardens. In some facilities, guards turned livestock sheds into detention cells.
"They built walls around pigsties and used them as holding pens," said another defector who was held in a camp in the late 2000s. "More than 100 inmates were put into a cell that can accommodate only about 30."
The State Security Department routinely used violence in interrogations. A female defector testified, "I was raped by a guard at a holding center, and was forced to have an abortion later."
The regime has either hidden the concentration camps from the outside world or given out false information about them, NKHRA said. It officially admitted the existence of only three of the 23 prisons, using Sariwon Prison in North Hwanghae Province and Chonnae Prison in Gangwon Province as display showcases.
"The North is operating numerous detention facilities across the country," said Yoon Yeo-sang of NKHRA. "It seems the regime significantly increased the number of facilities to tighten controls on the people when the economic situation worsened after the 1990s." |
By default, Eloquent uses an auto-incrementing integer as the primary key for its tables. While most of the time this is totally acceptable, sometimes there is a need for primary keys to be less predictable.
Example: Table Reservations
You are writing an application for table reservations at a restaurant. You would likely have a database table that holds those reservations and ties them to a physical table and user account.
CREATE TABLE `reservations` ( `id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `user_id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL, `table_id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL, `reservation_at` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `created_at` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `updated_at` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `user_id` (`user_id`), KEY `table_id` (`table_id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
If you were to create a way to display existing reservations at a given URL, say http://acmereservations.com/reservation/15 where 15 refers to the `reservations`.`id` field, you can see how it would be very easy to simply bump that number up to 16 and see someone else’s reservation and perhaps even cancel it. For the sake of simplicity we’ll ignore the fact that some authentication and access control can prevent this from happening.
Why UUID?
UUID is a uniquely generated 36 character string and looks something like: 22beb489-2ba9-44c8-b189-5855e1d4d1ad. While I say that the UUID is unique, that’s not entirely true. Let’s just say the likelihood of duplicates is extremely small. Along with being unique, it’s also very unpredictable. You can see how it would be much harder to guess other reservation IDs given a URL of http://acmereservations.com/reservation/22beb489-2ba9-44c8-b189-5855e1d4d1ad.
Secondarily, UUIDs allow site owners to mask the number of records in their database tables. If your registration ID is 15 you could assume there are only 14 other reservations and maybe this isn’t the best place to eat. A UUID will mask the number of records in a table with the generated string.
So how do we use UUIDs with Eloquent?
It turns out it’s not overly difficult. I would suggest the best way is for all Eloquent models needing a UUID to extend a base model that implements the following functionality:
<?php /** * This is a great UUID generator package available on Composer * but you can generate your UUID however you see fit. */ use Rhumsaa\Uuid\Uuid; class UuidModel extends Eloquent { /** * Indicates if the IDs are auto-incrementing. * * @var bool */ public $incrementing = false; /** * The "booting" method of the model. * * @return void */ protected static function boot() { parent::boot(); /** * Attach to the 'creating' Model Event to provide a UUID * for the `id` field (provided by $model->getKeyName()) */ static::creating(function ($model) { $model->{$model->getKeyName()} = (string)$model->generateNewId(); }); } /** * Get a new version 4 (random) UUID. * * @return \Rhumsaa\Uuid\Uuid */ public function generateNewId() { return Uuid::uuid4(); } }
Now, all you have to do is extend the UuidModel class for your models and the UUID will be set automatically on the primary key before creation.
It’s worth noting that you will need to change your database schema to accommodate the UUID. For our `reservations` table, we would revise it like so:
CREATE TABLE `reservations` ( `id` char(36) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', `user_id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL, `table_id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL, `reservation_at` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `created_at` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `updated_at` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `user_id` (`user_id`), KEY `table_id` (`table_id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
And, that’s actually it! Thanks to r15ch13 for the vast majority of the code involved. If you have any thoughts or a different way to approach this, let me know in the comments below.
Update [1/16/2014]:
It’s worth updating here that I did have some issues when running tests with PHPUnit. The first test would always work as expected, however, the second test wouldn’t add in the UUID on the primary key. I don’t know what is going on here, but it seems to have something to do with PHPUnit since it worked fine when run inside of Laravel. To get around the issue I pulled the event declarations out of the UuidModel and put them into a dedicated events.php file like so:
<?php $models = ['Reservation', 'User', 'Table']; foreach ($models as $model) { $model::creating(function ($model) { $model->{$model->getKeyName()} = (string)Uuid::uuid4(); }); }
I then revised the UuidModel as follows:
<?php class UuidModel extends \Eloquent { /** * Indicates if the IDs are auto-incrementing. * * @var bool */ public $incrementing = false; }
Update [11/25/2015]:
As was suggested in the comments below, a Trait is a perfect solution to clean up our models and consolidate our code.
<?php namespace App; use Ramsey\Uuid\Uuid; trait UuidForKey { /** * Boot the Uuid trait for the model. * * @return void */ public static function bootUuidForKey() { static::creating(function ($model) { $model->incrementing = false; $model->{$model->getKeyName()} = (string)Uuid::uuid4(); }); } /** * Get the casts array. * * @return array */ public function getCasts() { return $this->casts; } }
I then revised the UuidModel as follows: |
NRA News aired a special on the AR-15 military-style semi-automatic assault weapon -- ubiquitous for its use in recent mass shootings -- that provided false information about the power of the weapon and downplayed its dangerous features. The October 7 edition of NRA News' Cam & Company on the Sportsman Channel featured a trip to the National Rifle Association's gun range where host Cam Edwards and National Review Online writer Charles C.W. Cooke fired a custom AR-15 assault weapon, .308 bolt-action rifle, .45 caliber semi-automatic handgun, and .357 caliber revolver. At the beginning of the segment, Edwards noted the weapons were provided by gun manufacturer and NRA corporate donor Ruger. After firing the weapons, Edwards and Cooke advanced the notion that the AR-15 was less powerful than a handgun because the semi-automatic handgun produced larger holes in a paper target than the AR-15 assault weapon: EDWARDS: Having shot now an AR[-15 assault weapon], what would you tell people who say, "Charles, it's too high-powered, it's too this, it's too that?" COOKE: Well, I think I'd say what, sort of what you were pointing out. If you look at the targets and you asked people which is the scary AR, they wouldn't say -- much smaller holes, it's quieter, it's much more comfortable to hold, there's less recoil, you wouldn't presume -- in fact that gun is the easiest probably to shoot of all of them, and it's certainly the least scary really, it's just black. But using bullet hole size as a proxy for wounding power is highly misleading, because assault weapons fire the round at a much higher velocity than a handgun. According to a 2011 report by doctors who had performed autopsies on soldiers killed by gunfire in Iraq, "The velocity of the missile as it strikes the target is the main determinant of the wounding capacity" and "[t]he greater energy of the missile at the moment of impact the greater is the tissue destruction." Indeed, the study found that rounds with a velocity exceeding 2,500 feet per second cause a shockwave to pass through the body upon impact that caused catastrophic injuries even in areas remote to the direct wound. Using popular ammunition brand Hornady as a comparison point, the ammunition available for the .45 caliber handgun fires at a muzzle velocity of no more than 1,055 feet per second. The .223 ammunition most often used by the AR-15 assault weapon, however, can achieve a velocity of 4,000 feet per second. Some AR-15s are designed to accept 5.56 NATO ammunition; a similar round to the .223 that has a velocity of up to 3,130 feet per second.
The NRA previously employed bullet hole size as a false indication of wounding capability. On a January 18 Fox News special at the NRA's shooting range, host Sean Hannity and world champion shooter Jessie Duff compared the bullet hole size created by the AR-15 to a handgun to downplay the dangerousness of assault weapons.
Edwards also downplayed the speed which with rounds can be fired with a semi-automatic assault weapon compared to a bolt-action rifle that would not be prohibited by an assault weapons ban.
Assault weapons employ a semi-automatic firing mechanism where pulling the trigger not only causes a round to be fired, but also sets in motion a process that places the next round to be fired into the chamber. The result is that every time the trigger is pulled a new round is fired, until the magazine that holds the rounds is exhausted. In a bolt-action rifle, the operator must manually chamber the next round to be fired by operating the bolt with his or her hand. Many bolt-action rifles also use an internal magazine, which typically will take longer to reload compared to the detachable magazine found on an assault weapon.
Still, Edwards claimed that, "So you look at the bolt-action, and then you shoot the semi-auto. The anti-gun folks say bolt-action is fine, semi-auto is not. Someone who is good, someone who is right-handed and good with a bolt-action can shoot that rifle very fast."
As a practical matter, a semi-automatic weapon can be fired faster than a bolt-action weapon simply because each round fired with a bolt-action weapon requires the extra step of chambering the next round. In upholding the District of Columbia's assault weapons ban in 2011, a federal appeals court found that a 30-round magazine could be fired from a semi-automatic gun in five seconds, a rate unachievable by a bolt-action firearm. Furthermore, semi-automatic assault weapons can be legally equipped with a Slide Fire stock that allows the firearm to be fired at a rate equal to an automatic weapon. ("[S]lightly less than two seconds" for 30 rounds according to the appeals court.)
Cooke also attacked bans on the high-capacity ammunition magazines often used in conjunction with assault rifles. According to Cooke, "anyone who knows how to switch out a magazine can do it in a second, second in a half, two seconds at the most. And yet there is this pretense if you limit magazine size, for example, people won't be able to reload."
In fact, the claim that reducing magazine size -- and thus forcing a mass shooter to reload more times -- would have no effect on mass shootings is disproven by the circumstances of both the Tucson and Newtown mass shootings.
During the January 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, that killed six and gravely wounded then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords among others, the shooter was only stopped when he was tackled as he paused to reload. Parents of some of the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012 were told by authorities that a number of children were able to escape the shooter when he paused to reload. At a press conference in support of a Connecticut proposal to ban high-capacity magazines in that state, Mark Barden, whose son was killed in the mass shooting, explained, "The more times you have to reload the more opportunities there are to escape and to stop the shooting. In the amount of time -- it was somewhere around four minutes -- he was able to fire 154 rounds. I think that speaks volumes about reducing the size [of magazines]."
Beyond those two high-profile shootings, it has generally been proven that assault weapons -- which use a semi-automatic firing mechanism to shoot high-velocity rounds, often out of high-capacity magazines -- produce more casualties during mass shootings compared to when other guns are used. According to a report from Mayors Against Illegal Guns on mass shootings that occurred between January 2009 and September 2013, shootings involving assault weapons or high-capacity magazines are characterized by a significantly higher death and injury rate: |
London, United Kingdom, October 22nd - The Ethereum Foundation is pleased to announce the Keynote Speaker of Ethereum’s annual conference DΞVCON1, Nick Szabo. Nick’s keynote will focus on the history of the blockchain, smart contracts and assets on the blockchain.
Nick is a computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer known for his research on digital contracts and digital currency. The phrase and concept of “smart contracts” was developed by Szabo with the intent of merging contract law into programming protocols on the Internet.
Recently, Szabo contrasted the use of smart contracts on Ethereum in relation to the Bitcoin blockchain, “If you want to have a flexible general purpose programming environment like programmers have been used to since the 1950s at least, then you’re going to want to use Ethereum because it’s got a Turing complete language and a large state. I sometimes make the comparison of a pocket calculator [Bitcoin] versus, say, a general purpose computer [Ethereum].”
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin noted, “we are thrilled to welcome Nick to DΞVCON1. His pioneering work on smart contracts and the evolution of blockchain technology will add a tremendously valuable perspective to the conference”.
DΞVCON1 will be held from November 9th-13th at Gibson Hall in London, UK. It will feature five days of technical presentations and events on research and core protocols, decentralised application (dApp) development, and industry and social implications.
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain protocol that executes smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.
Ethereum is how the Internet was supposed to work.
### |
ONLY in Australia can you see a grand final soccer game interrupted by an 'offside' koala.
Soccer fans on Queensland's Sunshine Coast were left in stitches after a koala invaded the pitch seeking his (or her) moment of glory on Friday night.
The cuddly creature made a late night appearance in Noosa during what was apparently one fiercely competitive game, according to Maneena Roberts.
"Only in Australia!! Micah's soccer grand final and a koala runs on the pitch! Some light relief in a very intense game! Hilarious!,'' the bemused mum posted on social media.
The video shows the Australian mascot having to be escorted off the field by a very patient number 4 Kawana "Banana Army" Force player who kept running behind it it to move it along.
The crowd can be heard laughing at the unfolding scene.
"How cool is that,'' one says on the video.
"He's going to get a goal,'' another says as the koala is escorted past the nets.
Apparently unhappy of being robbed of his time in the floodlights, the koala stops several times before the player gives it a gentle pat on the backside to hurry it along.
"That's crazy - so was the koala the secret weapon… How many goals did he score!,'' one wrote on the post.
The koala behind the fence in Noosa. Photo: Noosa Lions Football Club
Maneena told the Sunshine Coast Daily there were plenty of Woombye fans hoping the koala might kick a goal.
"Just give the guy a ball because he was heading for our goal.''
The attention seeking koala in Noosa. Photo via Noosa Lions Football Club Facebook page.
Even after being escorted off the field, the koala kept trying to come back, making it hard to focus on the game rather than what the furry field invader was up to.
At one stage, the bear was within a metre of the action before having to be put over the fence.
"Everybody had their cameras out,'' Maneena said of the spectacle.
She joked: "He was offside according to the crowd, he kept coming back, they had to put an official on guard, was really funny!."
"Attention seeker - was trying to get his moment or moments of glory! :)," a friend responded.
The koala pitch invasion occurred at about 10.30pm at the Girraween Sports complex at Eenie Creek during the encounter between the Woombye Snakes and Kawana Force sides in the division three men's grand final.
Woombye, which is a much smaller club and has eight sides in the grand final this year, had managed to keep Kawana to just one goal at half time before levelling the score at full time.
The game, which did not finish until about 11.20pm, went into extra time before Kawana won in the penalty shootout.
'That's why the drop bears started coming out!,'' Maneena joked.
Perhaps there should be even more late night games. Or a koala league. |
The sun had set on the northwest side of Omaha, and the Christmas lights had come on when a carload of young political canvassers pulled up in front of a brick house in the tony neighborhood known as Champions Run. The activists, some of them still in high school, checked the app that picked their specific political targets and hustled to the front door to make their pitch for GOP Representative Don Bacon. Their talking points focused on Bacon’s service as an Air Force brigadier general and wing commander at nearby Offutt Air Force Base, and his support of the Republicans’ tax-cut package.”Did you vote for him last time?” one of the super PAC’s volunteers cheerfully asked the voter, who greeted the visitors on his front steps. It was 341 days before the 2018 midterm elections.
Welcome to the campaign to keep Congress in Republican hands. The effort to save Bacon’s seat started all the way back in March. While it may seem early for canvassers to be knocking on doors, House Republican leaders believe control of the chamber will come down to the battle to win over a small number of key voters in about 30 districts. And so they have entrusted the $100 million effort to protect the party’s majority to a hard-charging 35-year-old strategist with a brusque manner and a knack for winning tough races. “There are more of us than them,” Corry Bliss explains about Bacon’s district as he rides back from the door-knocking outing to the offices of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC he runs with the blessing of House Speaker Paul Ryan. “We have to make sure they vote next year.”
History suggests he’s right to worry. Over the past 100 years, first-term Presidents’ parties have lost ground in the House in every midterm election but two, dropping an average of 35 seats in those bad years. Democrats need just 24 seats to retake control and, for now, all the momentum is on the left. The scale of the task is one reason that Bliss’ operation is already active in 21 of the tightest races, from Modesto, Calif., to Key West, Fla. Bliss is betting a targeted early start, combined with out-of-the-box thinking, military discipline and a different political playbook, can keep Republicans in power.
Many in the GOP are banking on Bliss, who has earned a reputation in some GOP circles as the party’s top campaign mind–and perhaps its next Karl Rove. “If anyone could build a breakwall [against a Democratic wave], it’s Corry,” says Mark Isakowitz, a Bliss pal who recruited him to manage Senator Rob Portman’s 2016 campaign. But Bliss’ strategy of going into districts so early with person-to-person persuasion has met more than a few skeptics, including from his own party. “When we announced at the beginning of the year that we were going to do this, the reaction was strong,” Bliss recalls of his plans to start knocking on doors 18 months before voters tuned in: “‘That’s stupid. That’s a waste of money.’” Bliss pauses. “These are also the same people who said Donald Trump wouldn’t be President.” But even he says the odds are against him.
Volunteers making phone calls at the field office for Don Bacon in Omaha, Nebraska, Nov. 30, 2017. Walker Pickering for TIME
Two weeks before his trip to Omaha, Bliss was perched in his corner office on Pennsylvania Avenue, which has views of the White House complex. As he spoke, he tapped the floor with a baseball bat etched with Wonderboy, a souvenir he picked up at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and a nod to the 1984 film The Natural. “History says we have no chance,” Bliss says of the GOP’s midterm prospects. “It’s our job to defy history.”
Bliss has always been good at calculating his chances. He was born into an upstate–New York horse-racing family–his father is a breeder; his mother and sister are accomplished riders–and he grew up going to the famous track in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He treats politics like a day at the races: he works the numbers, studies the field and then goes with his gut. “There’s a lot of luck in horse racing [and] a lot of luck in campaigns,” Bliss says. A lot of times, he says, “You’d rather be lucky than good.”
As a political-science major at Boston University, Bliss cared more about the winner’s circle at Suffolk Downs than any campaign. He only caught the politics bug for good as a law student at the City University of New York. “I went to a very liberal law school,” he told a group of young volunteers inside the Congressional Leadership Fund’s Omaha office. “Dealing with a liberal administration drove me nuts, and it made me very conservative.”
Bliss cut his teeth in state legislature fights in Virginia and a governor’s contest in Vermont. Then came Senate races in Connecticut and Georgia. In 2014, Bliss was with his in-laws in Williamsburg, Va., when his phone rang with a request: go to Kansas and take control of the flagging re-election campaign of incumbent Senator Pat Roberts, who was on the outs with voters, in part because of revelations that Roberts no longer lived in the state. No one in Kansas, including the Senator, was impressed when Bliss arrived in a place where he’d never set foot, summoned the Roberts family and shared with them the reality: the third-term Senator was in trouble. “No one likes your father,” Bliss told Roberts’ children, who didn’t take kindly to it. “The good news is even fewer people like [then Senate Democratic leader] Harry Reid.”
Bliss is nothing if not blunt. “Corry has no bedside manner, but you don’t really care if you need CPR,” says a Bliss ally with close ties to Republican leadership. “Corry is the guy we send in when it’s all falling apart.” During a session to prepare Roberts for a debate that first weekend, Bliss asked to see the Senator’s prep book. The strategist took one look, shook his head and tossed it into the garbage. Then Bliss, who had been on the ground less than a day, walked into the office reception area, found a computer that was not password-protected and typed out a one-page cheat sheet: at every opportunity, Roberts should refer to his opponent, a former Democrat who was running as an independent, as either a Reid sycophant, a Barack Obama yes-man or a Democratic Party stooge. Roberts eked out a win by less than 92,000 votes.
This is another page in the Bliss playbook: find a bogeyman and make the race a referendum on that person. Earlier this year, with Democrats on the verge of winning a special election for a House seat in the conservative Atlanta suburbs, Bliss was again dispatched to work his magic. He arrived with $7 million in hand and proceeded to turn the Democratic nominee, a telegenic 30-year-old named Jon Ossoff, into a proxy for Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who is loathed by many Republicans. “I don’t know what I’d do without her. She’s central to next year,” Bliss says of Pelosi. “You can have Speaker Ryan or you can have Speaker Pelosi. It’s chicken or steak. Fish is not on the menu.”
This approach–and everything Bliss does, really–drives his political opponents bananas. To Democrats, the fact that Republicans had to scramble to save a Georgia seat that had been in Republican hands for almost four decades says more about their own rising fortunes than the GOP’s defensive abilities. “They’re trying to salvage some of these incumbent seats, but the reality is they can’t and they won’t,” says Charlie Kelly, Bliss’ counterpart at the super PAC backed by Pelosi and her lieutenants, House Majority PAC. “They want to talk about Nancy Pelosi, but it won’t be effective because Paul Ryan is the single most unpopular politician in the country.” Consider the Nebraska district where Bliss is working to protect Bacon. A recent survey by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, found Ryan with a 62% disapproval rating among voters there, higher than Trump’s 54% disapproval numbers.
For Bliss, none of this matters so far out from next year’s elections. What counts are the relationships his troops are building at voters’ front doors. Unlike many super-PAC bosses, who often get a cut of the advertising spending, Bliss has little use for pricey media campaigns at this point in the fight. Instead of lining his own pockets by airing commercials, he plans to spend his cash reaching out directly to voters, who are weary of ads. “Super PACs are a legalized Ponzi scheme for consultants to build beach houses,” Bliss says. “We’re going to focus on winning.”
Tapped to run Portman’s 2016 re-election campaign when the Senator was nine points down, Bliss recruited tens of thousands of high schoolers and college students to knock on doors and make phone calls to help Portman–more than a year before voting began. Historically, the Republican National Committee takes charge of that task, albeit much later. But Bliss didn’t have much confidence in the RNC’s will or capacity. So he built his own data, technology and get-out-the-vote machine. He also advised Portman to ignore Trump. “Everyone wanted to talk about the drama and soap opera of the presidential campaign,” says Isakowitz, who has been Portman’s chief of staff since 2014. “We talked about what Rob had done for Lake Erie, for the opioid crisis.” When Trump accepted the party’s nomination in Cleveland, Portman scheduled a counter-convention focused on Ohio voters and veterans. In the end, Portman carried Ohio by 21 points, outperforming Trump by 13.
Bliss visits his super PAC’s field office in the Omaha district of Representative Don Bacon to ensure volunteers are connecting with voters. Unlike other outside groups, Bliss has focused on the ground game instead of airing attack ads Walker Pickering for TIME
Not everyone inside the GOP is a fan of Bliss’s methods. When Ryan wanted to tap Bliss to run House Republican leadership’s super PAC and affiliated think tank, he met resistance from high-ranking members of the GOP establishment, including Reince Priebus, the former RNC chairman and Trump’s first White House chief of staff. Ryan, who raises cash for this project, ignored the objections. Since Bliss–and many of his Portman deputies–took over the super PAC, there has been a 100% staff turnover and a new approach that focuses on doors, not ads. “He understands how to win races,” says Representative Mimi Walters of California, a Bliss friend who has helped him raise cash.
Bliss’s take-no-prisoners style can make enemies too. He has little tolerance for Republicans who aren’t team players. When GOP Representative David Young of Iowa wavered on supporting Ryan’s plan to scrap Obamacare earlier this year, Bliss shut down an already-leased office to help Young’s re-election bid, the group’s second in the country. “We will never spend a dollar attacking a Republican. However, there’s a bias in this organization toward friends and family,” Bliss says. “If he didn’t support the Speaker and the President, we couldn’t support him.”
And some question whether his approach can scale to the national level. It’s one thing to burrow into a single race and turn it around. It’s another when the entire country is your map, the goal is to secure 218 Republican seats in the House and you can’t speak directly to the candidates about the nitty-gritty of the campaign because of campaign-finance laws. “You have a super PAC that is trying to talk to voters with high school kids, and is funded by a guy who is incredibly unpopular,” says Dan Sena, who runs House Democrats’ official campaign arm. Already, the Democrats are planning to contest 91 races, putting Bliss on defense.
But so far in this election cycle, Bliss’s approach, with his in-house team of data nerds, researchers and lawyers, has drawn raves in places like Bacon’s Omaha district. “I’ve never seen something as organized as this,” says Jon Tucker, chairman of Nebraska’s Douglas County Republican Party. “All of these contacts are going to show up at the polls and vote for other Republicans.”
At the same time, Bliss isn’t above some of the more traditional approaches to political warfare. His super PAC’s partner, a nonprofit think tank that he also runs, the American Action Network, is providing $30 million in TV ads to push the GOP tax cuts. And Bliss’s super PAC itself will eventually get into the ad game next year. Bliss is already amassing a trove of research about his Democratic opponents for use in those air wars.
The 2017 campaign of Democrat Rob Quist was a vivid illustration of how brutal Bliss can be when he unearths a damaging nugget. Last summer Quist, a folk singer turned upstart political candidate, was mounting a surprisingly strong bid in a special election for Montana’s sole U.S. House seat. Bliss’ research team uncovered Quist’s 1994 testimony in a medical-malpractice lawsuit, which revealed Quist had contracted herpes. Bliss says he leaked the testimony to conservative media outlets, which posted stories that took Quist off the campaign trail at a critical moment. “The point is to win,” Bliss says. “Politics is like sports for adults … I live for the fight.”
Last year, as he was sketching out the groundwork for the GOP’s midterm firewall, Bliss took a rare break. He rented a house in Saratoga Springs and bet on every race for a week. He struck out on the last contest–a costly loss in an otherwise winning week. He shrugged it off, lit a cigar and walked the mile and a half back to his rented home. He still left the track with more money in his pocket than he arrived with. If Bliss can beat the 2018 odds and deliver a similar string of wins next fall, it will have been the young oddsmaker’s talents–and a bit of good luck–that saved Paul Ryan’s grip on the Speaker’s gavel.
Write to Philip Elliott at [email protected].
This appears in the December 25, 2017 issue of TIME. |
NCSoft is planning on having a small beta test for Lineage Eternal starting next month according to South Korean Inven Gaming News. The game was also supposed to have a Global Closed Beta around the 2nd Half of 2015, but it might be delayed seeing as I haven't heard much new information from the company or development team lately.
Not much information has been revealed just yet. If I had to guess, the upcoming small test is mostly like going to be FGT (Focus Group Test) which usually means a private LAN party only in South Korea. I'm hoping it's an online test, so that I might be able to participate in it! Perhaps this is the first step in their preparation for a large CBT later this year and hopefully followed by the Global CBT.
Source: Inven
Developer: Team Eternal | http://kr.ncsoft.com/
Publisher: NCSoft Korea | http://kr.plaync.com/
Game Site: Coming Soon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vQDbfnBf70 |
While Samsung pushes its newest flagship, the Galaxy S III, out all over the world, a few markets have been rumored to get a version with modified guts. Rumors previously circulated that the Japanese variant of the device would include twice the RAM of its global counterpart, and now we're hearing straight from Samsung that the Canadian variant will, in fact, come with 2GB of RAM. Additional internal changes include a 1.5GHz S4 processor (sorry, no quad-core Exynos in the Great White North), and LTE.
While the rumors of a Japanese variant including 2GB of RAM were not yet officially confirmed, this certainly lends a huge amount of credence to the story. It might also mean that the US variants will have similar specs. The S4 processor seems to be included in any market that needs LTE radios, so with most major US carriers planning or possessing an LTE network, the likelihood that the US versions will include the S4, and by extension the 2GB of RAM, is pretty high.
Speculation aside, Canada, at least, is confirmed to get these beastly specs. The device will launch on June 20th, less than a month after the initial global launch. It looks like Samsung is even getting better about releasing phones more quickly. Color us pleased.
The Samsung GALAXY S III provides Canadians with a more human smartphone experience Designed for humans and inspired by nature, the Samsung GALAXY S III brings the best combination of power and performance to the Canadian marketplace MISSISSAUGA, ON, May 30, 2012 /CNW/ - Samsung Electronics Canada, today announces the models details and availability date of the much-anticipated GALAXY S III. Beginning June 20th, the Samsung GALAXY S III will be available through leading Canadian wireless carriers and authorized national retailers. "We are very excited to bring the highly anticipated GALAXY S III to Canadians so they can experience firsthand, the power, performance and passion that Samsung is known for," said Paul Brannen, Vice President, Enterprise Business Group, Samsung Canada. "This next generation of the GALAXY S series is sleek and stylish, and offers users features that promote sharing, and are intuitive and powerful, allowing Canadians to enjoy a more human experience with their smartphone." Natural Interaction Smart enough to detect face, voice and motions, the GALAXY S III adapts to the user, providing users an interface that is convenient and natural. With the innovative 'Smart stay' feature, the GALAXY S III recognizes how the user is using their device such as, reading an e-book or browsing the web. By having the front camera identify eye motion the phone maintains a bright display for continued viewing pleasure.
feature, the GALAXY S III recognizes how the user is using their device such as, reading an e-book or browsing the web. By having the front camera identify eye motion the phone maintains a bright display for continued viewing pleasure. The GALAXY S III features 'S Voice,' an advanced natural language user interface, to listen and respond to user commands. S Voice presents powerful functions in regards to device control and commands, such as allowing the user to play a favorite song, turn the volume up or down, send text messages and emails, organize schedules, or automatically launch the camera and capture a photo.
an advanced natural language user interface, to listen and respond to user commands. S Voice presents powerful functions in regards to device control and commands, such as allowing the user to play a favorite song, turn the volume up or down, send text messages and emails, organize schedules, or automatically launch the camera and capture a photo. With 'Smart alert' the GALAXY S III will alert the user by catching any missed messages or calls with a vibration to notify missed statuses when picked up after being idle. If the user is messaging someone but decide to call them instead, they can simply lift phone to their ear and 'Direct call' will dial their number. Easy and Instant Sharing The Samsung GALAXY S III is more than a personal device that can be enjoyed by one user - it wants to share and experience smartphone benefits with family and friends, regardless of location with the following features: With the new 'S Beam,' the GALAXY S III expands upon Android™ Beam™, allowing a 1GB movie file to be shared within three minutes and a 10MB music file within two seconds by simply touching another GALAXY S III phone, even without a Wi-Fi or cellular signal.
the GALAXY S III expands upon Android™ Beam™, allowing a 1GB movie file to be shared within three minutes and a 10MB music file within two seconds by simply touching another GALAXY S III phone, even without a Wi-Fi or cellular signal. The 'Buddy photo share' function also allows photos to be easily and simultaneously shared with all friends pictured in an image directly from the camera or the photo gallery.
function also allows photos to be easily and simultaneously shared with all friends pictured in an image directly from the camera or the photo gallery. 'AllShare Play' can be used to instantly share any forms of files between GALAXY S III and tablet, PC, and televisions that are DLNA enabled, regardless of the distance between the devices.
can be used to instantly share any forms of files between GALAXY S III and tablet, PC, and televisions that are DLNA enabled, regardless of the distance between the devices. The 'Group Cast' feature that allows users to share their screen among multiple friends on the same Wi-Fi network; users can comment and draw changes at the same time as co-workers- witnessing real-time sharing on individual devices. The preloaded ' Dropbox' application provides an even more convenient sharing experience, supplying 50GB of free storage for two years for not just image and music files, but now also for video content. With the GALAXY S III files can also be instantly uploaded through data networks without requiring WiFi access.
feature that allows users to share their screen among multiple friends on the same Wi-Fi network; users can comment and draw changes at the same time as co-workers- witnessing real-time sharing on individual devices. Uncompromised Performance With a 4.8" HD Super AMOLED display, the GALAXY S III offers a large and vivid viewing experience. Samsung Mobile's heritage Super AMOLED display even enhances to HD and 16:9 wider viewing angles. To ensure faster content sharing and connectivity, the GALAXY S III offers Wi-Fi Channel Bonding which doubles the Wi-Fi bandwidth. The GALAXY S III not only presents features with enhanced usability, but also provides an ergonomic and comfortable experience through its human-centric design. Its comfortable grip, gentle curves, and organic form deliver a rich human-centric feel and design. Available in Pebble Blue and Marble White at launch, Samsung will introduce a variety of additional color options. The GALAXY S III also sports a range of additional features that boost performance and the overall user experience in entirely new ways, with features such as: 'Pop up play,' users can play a video anywhere on their screen while simultaneously running other tasks, eliminating the need to close and restart videos when checking new emails or surfing the Web.
users can play a video anywhere on their screen while simultaneously running other tasks, eliminating the need to close and restart videos when checking new emails or surfing the Web. An 8MP camera features a zero-lag shutter speed that lets users capture moving objects easily without delay, with the 'Burst shot' function that instantly captures twenty continuous shots, and the 'Best photo' feature that selects the best of eight photographs, the GALAXY S III ensures users a more enhanced and memorable camera experience.
function that instantly captures twenty continuous shots, and the feature that selects the best of eight photographs, the GALAXY S III ensures users a more enhanced and memorable camera experience. HD video can be recorded even with the 1.9MP front-facing camera, which users can use to capture a video of themselves. An improved backside illumination sensor further helps to eliminate blur in photos that result from shaking, even under low light conditions.
With Samsung Hubs, users can continually refresh phone content through the 'Game Hub,' which provides access to numerous social games, while Video Hub, a new service offering to the Canadian marketplace, brings users high quality TV and movies for rent . Furthermore, Samsung Music Hub will offer a personal music streaming service. The GALAXY S III will be available for purchase in Canada starting on June 20, 2012. Samsung is pleased to be working with all of the leading wireless providers in Canada, to give our customers a choice of service provider. The SGH-i747 variation of the GALAXY S III will be available from Bell Mobility, Virgin Mobile, SaskTel, TELUS and Rogers Wireless. The SGH-iT999 model will be available from Videotron, Wind and Mobilicity. Additional Features Include: Processor: Snapdragon S4 Dual Core 1.5 GHz Qualcomm MSM8960 Chipset
OS (Shipping): ICS 4.0.4
Data: LTE (SGH-i747 variation) and HSPA+ 42 (SGH-iT999 variation)
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Dimensions: 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm
Weight: 133g
Memory: 16/32GB internal memory (SGH-i747)/ 16GB internal memory (SGH-iT999) Expandable microSD up to 32GB
Display: 4.8 HD Super AMOLED 1280x720 (306ppi)
Connectivity: NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, DLNA, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n, MHL Video Out
Camera: 8MP Rear-facing, 1.9MP Front-facing
Battery: 2100 mAh
Other: TouchWiz with Motion UX S Beam AllShare Play enhance functionality MP3/ACC+/WAV audio player DivX/Xvid/MP4/WMV/H.263/ H.264 Video Player
For pre-orders, specific pricing and details, please visit your nearest carrier or retailer. For multimedia content and more detailed information, please visit www.samsungmobilepress.com. In addition, you can find a product introduction video at http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxys3/media.html. * All functionality, features, specifications and other product information provided in this document including, but not limited to, the benefits, design, pricing, components, performance, availability, and capabilities of the product are subject to change without notice or obligation. ＊Android, Google, Android Beam, Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Latitude, Google Play, Google Plus, YouTube, Google Talk, Google Places, Google Navigation, Google Downloads are trademarks of Google Inc.
Source: Canada Newswire |
In this paper we revisit a topic originally discussed in 1955, namely the lack of direct evidence that muscle hypertrophy from exercise plays an important role in increasing strength. To this day, long-term adaptations in strength are thought to be primarily contingent on changes in muscle size. Given this assumption, there has been considerable attention placed on programs designed to allow for maximization of both muscle size and strength. However, the conclusion that a change in muscle size affects a change in strength is surprisingly based on little evidence. We suggest that these changes may be completely separate phenomena based on: (1) the weak correlation between the change in muscle size and the change in muscle strength after training; (2) the loss of muscle mass with detraining, yet a maintenance of muscle strength; and (3) the similar muscle growth between low-load and high-load resistance training, yet divergent results in strength. Muscle Nerve 54: 1012-1014, 2016.
© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. |
10-1/2 in. Angle Broom is rated 4.3 out of 5 by 269 .
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March 3, 2017, 9:56 PM GMT / Updated March 3, 2017, 9:59 PM GMT By Kalhan Rosenblatt
A Florida judge has ruled that Miami-Dade’s policy of holding undocumented immigrants in jail at the request of the federal government is unconstitutional.
Eleventh Judicial Circuit Judge Milton Hirsch on Friday called the policy a violation of the Tenth Amendment five weeks after Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez decided the city would no longer be considered a “sanctuary” for undocumented immigrants.
James Lacroix — a Haitian national who pleaded guilty to a felony charge of habitually driving on a suspended license in Miami-Dade — and his attorney, Philip Reizenstein, brought the case before Hirsch earlier this week. Lacroix was supposed to be released on time served, but remained in custody at the request of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In his ruling, Hirsch said the county has neither a reason nor a basis in law to keep him in prison. Hirsch added that the federal government is constitutionally prohibited from forcing the county to make Lacroix a prisoner, and the county is prohibited from complying with that demand.
James Lacroix, of Miami-Dade, Florida, plead guilty to a felony charge of driving on a suspended license, but wasn't released from jail despite being scheduled for release on time served. Miami-Dade Police Department
“This isn’t an immigration issue. It’s a detention issue,” Reizenstein told NBC News after the ruling was announced. He said the federal government has taken Lacroix into custody, and that they could deport him faster as retribution for the case.
“This doesn’t help [Lacroix] — he’s probably going to be deported, but this will help everyone else. [The ruling] is a direct blow to the president and his executive order,” Reizenstein said. “It’s a courageous blow by this judge.”
Reizenstein said he took on Lacroix’s case pro bono after he went to court on Tuesday for a different matter and saw the man plead guilty to a crime for which he had already served his sentence and not be released.
Gimenez agreed to drop Miami-Dade’s sanctuary status on Jan. 26, after President Donald Trump issued an executive order eliminating most federal funding for cities with sanctuary policies in place.
Related: Mayor’s Switch on Immigration Detention Protested in Miami-Dade
In compliance with the president’s order, Gimenez agreed to allow county jails to hold immigrants for the federal government who could potentially be deported. Miami-Dade County had not been complying with the federal government on these orders since 2013, according to Hirsch’s ruling.
“This case should appeal to conservatives all over country, but they’re not conservative. They’re anti-immigrant, and in this case the president of the United States blackmailed the county, and the mayor buckled,” Reizenstein said.
Lacroix, 45, legally entered the United States under emergency status given to Haitian nationals following the 2010 earthquake, according to Reizenstein. He was arrested several times for driving on a suspended license. His most recent arrest happened in early January.
Lacroix was also previously charged with battery and aggravated assault, but those charges were dropped, according to the Miami-Dade Clerk of Courts.
The federal government made the request for the county to hold Lacroix two days after Gimenez changed the city's sanctuary status, according to the Miami Herald.
Judge Milton Hirsch speaks at a hearing on March 3, 2017, where he ruled on the legality of the country's decision to cooperate with immigration agents seeking to deport people who have been in jail. Roberto Koltun / The Miami Herald
Just before the ruling in his favor, Lacroix was taken into federal custody, Reizenstein said.
“Miami is not, and has never been, a sanctuary city,” Hirsch wrote in his ruling. “But America is, and has always been, a sanctuary country.”
The mayor’s office tweeted a statement via spokesman Mike Hernandez that "immigration is a federal issue which should be handled in federal court. Miami-Dade County is planning an immediate appeal to the Third District Court of Appeal."
Related: 'Sanctuary Cities' Vow to Resist Trump Order Despite Funding Threat
It’s unclear what effect Hirsch's ruling will have on the city or Trump’s order. Reizenstein says he hopes it will give other lawyers in the county a guide to get their unconstitutionally imprisoned clients out as well.
“Were going to publish this order so other lawyers will have a blueprint to get their clients released,” Reizenstein said. “We hope other judges will be as courageous.” |
The rising practice of chemsex has welcomed new stigmas around sex parties and drug use. Often thought to be an act of freedom, fun, or rebellion, a French study printed in the latest issue of Contemporary Drug Problems suggests that many young men who have chemsex are on a deep search for love and emotional bonding with other men.
Based on an immersion of two gay dating sites and 25 in-depth interviews with gay guys who use drugs in Paris and Lyon, researchers saw several recurring themes among those who practice chemsex — mainly the absence or present search for love.
“The suffering and loneliness that follow romantic breakups can trigger uncontrolled drug use while feelings of ‘love fusion’ between ‘slammers’ can encourage further risk-taking,” lead researcher Romain Amaro explained. “But romantic relationships can also provide crucial symbolic and material support to place limits on drug use in ways that reduce harm.”
Gay couples who slammed (or injected drugs) often did it together, according to research. Contrastingly, single gay men who practicied chemsex were usually introduced to it following a breakup or at the beginning of an aggressive relationship with a drug-using partner.
For those who had suffered from a serious breakup prior to their drug use, many claimed drugs were a way to “free” themselves sexually from their monogamous relationship.
Much like Amaro, playwright Peter Darney also interviewed gay men on Grindr and other sites about chemsex, which was the springboard for his play 5 Guys Chillin’.
As Plus reported, 5 Guys Chillin’ centered around five guys at a sex party in London, each with their own hang ups around sex and drug addiction. The play was inspired by interviews and nearly 50 hours of material.
Unsurprisingly, the storylines of the play mirrored the experiences of men in Amaro’s study.
The men in the study were between the ages of 23 and 30, and while 14 of them were involved in slamming, the other 11 engaged in other aspects of the chemsex scene, Aids Map reports. Several of them were also HIV-positive.
One man, 28-year old Gaspard, had two periods where he went through heavy drug use: one after he discovered he was HIV-positive, and another immediately following an intense breakup. Another man, 23-year old Jules, described a “romantic fusion,” Aids Map reports, during a drug session.
“I met my ex, with whom I stayed almost six months,” Jules shared. “I was 21 years old, almost 22. We met during a slamming session. And mephedrone helped. You’re in love with everybody, it may have eased the beginning of our story as a couple, maybe a bit too much? In the beginning, it was my boyfriend who injected me.”
Some men also described their drug use as a way to cope with loneliness and boredom. One stated that because he had a lot of time to spare, hooking up and drug use, were a way to pass the time.
But why the association between romance or searching for love and drug use? According to Amaro, it’s quite complicated: “By examining the subjective, emotional, and relational rationales that underlie slamming,” he explains in the study, “I show how young gay men navigate between caring for their health and their emotional ties with other men.” |
A long time ago, in a conference out west….
Star Wars on a basketball site? “How are these two even related?” you might ask. Well reader, they aren’t really (minus a few odd things here and there.) However, we here at Beale Street Bears were able to draw some parallels between Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and the upcoming NBA season (particularly, the Memphis Grizzlies). Besides, it’s October and who doesn’t love to see some ridiculous Halloween-esque photoshop!?
For those of you who have lived under a rock since 1977, I’ll briefly go over the basic plot of A New Hope, which at the time of it’s release, was simply titled ‘Star Wars’.
Spoiler alert, I guess?
A while back, in a distant galaxy, an empire controls everything. A band of rag tag rebels have joined together to battle The Empire. The Empire has a new shiny toy, the Death Star, which the Rebels have stolen the plans to. Some stuff goes down and a young farm boy, Luke Skywalker, is thrust into the role of a hero and must rescue Princess Leia and deliver the plans for the Death Star to the Rebellion. Along the way, he meets new friends: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Han Solo and Chewbacca. The four of them, along with C-3PO and R2-D2 manage to save the princess, escape the Death Star (minus Obi-Wan) and meet up with the Rebels. Luke then pilots an X-Wing and destroys the Death Star. The galaxy is safe and there’s even a medal ceremony.
So, now that we’ve covered that, I’ll tell you just how the 2016 Memphis Grizzlies can be like the group of Rebels. |
Nicholas Edward Cave AO (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian musician, singer-songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor, best known as the frontman of the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Cave's music is generally characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences, and lyrical obsessions with death, religion, love and violence.[3]
Born and raised in rural Victoria, Cave studied art before turning to music in the 1970s. As frontman of the Boys Next Door (later renamed the Birthday Party), he became a central figure in Melbourne's burgeoning post-punk scene. The band relocated to London in 1980, but, disillusioned by life there, evolved towards a darker, more challenging sound, and acquired a reputation as "the most violent live band in the world".[4] The Birthday Party is regarded as a major influence on gothic rock, and Cave, with his shock of black hair, baritone singing voice and pale, emaciated look, was described in the media as a poster boy for the genre.
After the break-up of the Birthday Party in 1983, Cave formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Much of the band's early material was set in a mythic American Deep South, drawing on spirituals and Delta blues, while Cave's preoccupation with Old Testament notions of good versus evil culminated in what has been called his signature song, "The Mercy Seat" (1988). The 1996 album Murder Ballads features "Where the Wild Roses Grow", a duet with Kylie Minogue, Cave's most commercially successful single to date. The band has released 16 studio albums, the most recent being 2016's Skeleton Tree. Cave formed the garage rock group Grinderman in 2006, which has since released two albums.
Cave co-wrote, scored and starred in the 1988 Australian prison film Ghosts... of the Civil Dead (1988), directed by John Hillcoat. He also wrote the screenplay for Hillcoat's bushranger film The Proposition (2005), and composed the soundtrack with frequent collaborator Warren Ellis. The pair's film score credits include The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), The Road (2009), Lawless (2012), and Hell or High Water (2016). Cave is the subject of several films, including the semi-fictional "day in the life" 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), and the documentary One More Time with Feeling (2016). Cave has also released two novels: And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) and The Death of Bunny Munro (2009).
Cave's songs have been covered by a wide range of artists, including Johnny Cash, Metallica and Arctic Monkeys. He was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2007.[5]
Youth, education and family [ edit ]
Cave was born on 22 September 1957 in Warracknabeal, a small country town in the state of Victoria, Australia, to Dawn Cave (née Treadwell) and Colin Frank Cave.[6][7] As a child, he lived in Warracknabeal and then Wangaratta in rural Victoria. His father taught English and mathematics at the local technical school; his mother was a librarian at the high school that Nick attended.[8] Cave's father introduced him to literary classics from an early age, such as Crime and Punishment and Lolita,[9] and also organised the first symposium on the Australian bushranger and outlaw Ned Kelly,[10] with whom Nick was enamoured as a child.[11]
When Cave was 9 he joined the choir of Wangaratta's Holy Trinity Cathedral.[6] At 13 he was expelled from Wangaratta High School.[9] In 1970, having moved with his family to the Melbourne suburb of Murrumbeena, he became a boarder and later day student at Caulfield Grammar School.[8] He was 19 when his father was killed in a car collision; his mother told him of his father's death while she was bailing him out of a St Kilda police station where he was being held on a charge of burglary. He would later recall that his father "died at a point in my life when I was most confused" and that "the loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose".[9]
After his secondary schooling, Cave studied painting at the Caulfield Institute of Technology in 1976, but dropped out the following year to pursue music.[12] He also began using heroin around the time that he left art school.[13]
Cave attended his first music concert at Melbourne's Festival Hall. The bill consisted of Manfred Mann, Deep Purple and Free. Cave recalled: "I remember sitting there and feeling physically the sound going through me."[12]
Music career [ edit ]
Early years and the Birthday Party (1973–83) [ edit ]
In 1973, Cave met Mick Harvey (guitar), Phill Calvert (drums), John Cochivera (guitar), Brett Purcell (bass), and Chris Coyne (saxophone); fellow students at Caulfield Grammar. They founded a band with Cave as singer. Their repertoire consisted of proto-punk cover versions of songs by Lou Reed, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music and Alex Harvey, among others. Later, the line-up slimmed down to four members including Cave's friend Tracy Pew on bass. In 1977, after leaving school, they adopted the name The Boys Next Door and began playing predominantly original material. Guitarist and songwriter Rowland S. Howard joined the band in 1978.
They were a leader of Melbourne's post-punk scene in the late 1970s, playing hundreds of live shows in Australia before changing their name to the Birthday Party in 1980 and moving to London, then West Berlin. Cave's Australian girlfriend and muse Anita Lane accompanied them to London. The band were notorious for their provocative live performances which featured Cave shrieking, bellowing and throwing himself about the stage, backed up by harsh pounding rock music laced with guitar feedback. Cave utilised Old Testament imagery with lyrics about sin, debauchery and damnation.[1] Cave's droll sense of humour and penchant for parody is evident in many of the band's songs, including "Nick the Stripper" and "King Ink". "Release the Bats", one of the band's most famous songs, was intended as an over-the-top "piss-take" on gothic rock, and a "direct attack" on the "stock gothic associations that less informed critics were wont to make". Ironically, it became highly influential on the genre, giving rise to a new generation of bands.[14]
After establishing a cult following in Europe and Australia, the Birthday Party disbanded in 1984.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1984–present) [ edit ]
Cave performing in Belgium, 1986
The band with Cave as their leader and frontman has released sixteen studio albums. Pitchfork Media calls the group one of rock's "most enduring, redoubtable" bands, with an accomplished discography.[15] Though their sound tends to change considerably from one album to another, the one constant of the band is an unpolished blending of disparate genres, and song structures which provide a vehicle for Cave's virtuosic, frequently histrionic theatrics. Critics Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Steve Huey wrote: "With the Bad Seeds, Cave continued to explore his obsessions with religion, death, love, America, and violence with a bizarre, sometimes self-consciously eclectic hybrid of blues, gospel, rock, and arty post-punk."[3]
Hamburg/Germany July 2001
Reviewing 2008's Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! album, NME used the phrase "gothic psycho-sexual apocalypse" to describe the "menace" present in the lyrics of the title track.[16] Their most recent work, Skeleton Tree, was released in September 2016.[17]
In mid-August 2013, Cave was a 'First Longlist' finalist for the 9th Coopers AMP, alongside artists such as Kevin Mitchell and the Drones. The Australian music prize is worth A$30,000.[18] The prize ultimately went to Big Scary.[19]
In September 2013 interview, Cave explained that he returned to using a typewriter for songwriting after his experience with the Nocturama album, as he "could walk in on a bad day and hit 'delete' and that was the end of it". Cave believes that he lost valuable work due to a "bad day".[12]
Solo work [ edit ]
In addition to his performances with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave has, since the 1990s, performed live 'solo' tours with himself on piano/vocals, Warren Ellis on violin/accordion and various others on bass and drums.
Grinderman [ edit ]
In 2006 Cave formed Grinderman – himself on vocals, guitar, organ & piano, Warren Ellis (tenor guitar, electric mandolin, violin, viola, guitar, backing vocals), Martyn P. Casey (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Jim Sclavunos (drums, percussion, backing vocals).
The alternative rock outfit was formed as "a way to escape the weight of The Bad Seeds."[20] The band's name was inspired by a Memphis Slim song, "Grinder Man Blues," which Cave is noted to have started singing during one of the band's early rehearsal sessions. The band's eponymous debut studio album, Grinderman, was released in 2007 to extremely positive reviews and the band's second and final studio album, Grinderman 2, was released in 2010 to a similar reception.
Grinderman's first public performance was at All Tomorrow's Parties in April 2007 where Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream accompanied Grinderman on backing vocals and percussion.
In December 2011, after performing at Meredith Music Festival, Cave announced that Grinderman was over.[21]
Music in film and television drama [ edit ]
Cave's work was featured in a scene in the 1986 film, Dogs in Space by Richard Lowenstein.[22] Cave performed parts of the Boys Next Door song "Shivers" twice during the film, once on video and once live.
Another early fan of Cave's was German director Wim Wenders, who lists Cave, along with Lou Reed and Portishead, as among his favorites.[23] Two of Cave's songs were featured in his 1987 film Wings of Desire.[24] Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds also make a cameo appearance in this film. Two more songs were included in Wenders' 1993 sequel Faraway, So Close!, including the title track. The soundtrack for Wenders' 1991 film Until the End of the World features Cave's "(I'll Love You) Till the End of the World." His most recent production, Palermo Shooting, also contains a Nick Cave song, as does his 2003 documentary The Soul of a Man.[25]
Cave's songs have also appeared in a number of Hollywood blockbusters – "There is a Light" appears on the 1995 soundtrack for Batman Forever, and "Red Right Hand" appeared in a number of films including The X-Files, Dumb & Dumber; Scream, its sequels Scream 2 and 3, and Hellboy (performed by Pete Yorn). In Scream 3, the song was given a reworking with Cave writing new lyrics and adding an orchestra to the arrangement of the track. "People Ain't No Good" was featured in the animated movie Shrek 2 and the song "O Children" was featured in the 2010 movie of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1.
In 2000 Andrew Dominik used "Release the Bats" in his film Chopper. Numerous other movies use Cave's songs including Box of Moonlight (1996), Mr In-Between (2001), Romance & Cigarettes (2005), Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009), The Freshman, Gas Food Lodging, Kevin & Perry Go Large, About Time
His works also appear in a number of major TV programs among them Trauma, The L Word, Traveler, The Unit, I Love the '70s, Outpatient, The Others, Nip/Tuck, and Californication. Most recently his work has appeared in the BBC series Peaky Blinders and the Australian series Jack Irish. "Red Right Hand" is the theme song for Peaky Blinders and renditions of the track can be heard throughout the series, including the cover by the alternative-rock band Arctic Monkeys.
Collaborations [ edit ]
Cave played with Shane MacGowan on cover versions of Bob Dylan's "Death is Not the End" and Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World". Cave also performed "What a Wonderful World" live with the Flaming Lips. Cave recorded a cover version of the Pogues song "Rainy Night in Soho", written by MacGowan.
Nick Cave at a solo concert in Mainz , Germany on 11 November 2006.
MacGowan also sings a version of "Lucy", released on B-Sides and Rarities. On 3 May 2008, during the Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! tour, MacGowan joined Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on stage to perform "Lucy" at Dublin Castle in Ireland. Pulp's single "Bad Cover Version" includes on its B-side a cover version by Cave of that band's song "Disco 2000". On the Deluxe Edition of Pulp's Different Class another take of this cover can be found.
In 2000, one of Cave's heroes, Johnny Cash, covered Cave's "The Mercy Seat" on the album American III: Solitary Man, seemingly repaying Cave for the compliment he paid by covering Cash's "The Singer" (originally "The Folk Singer") on his Kicking Against the Pricks album. Cave was then invited to be one of many rock and country artists to contribute to the liner notes of the retrospective The Essential Johnny Cash CD, released to coincide with Cash's 70th birthday. Subsequently, Cave recorded a duet with Cash on a version of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" for Cash's American IV: The Man Comes Around album (2002). A similar duet, the American folk song "Cindy", was released posthumously on the "Johnny Cash: Unearthed" boxset. Cave's song "Let the Bells Ring" is a posthumous tribute to Cash. Cave has also covered the song "Wanted Man" which is best known as performed by Johnny Cash but is a Bob Dylan composition.
In 2004, Cave gave a hand to Marianne Faithfull on the album, Before the Poison. He co-wrote and produced three songs ("Crazy Love", "There is a Ghost" and "Desperanto"), and the Bad Seeds are featured on all of them. He is also featured on "The Crane Wife" (originally by the Decemberists), on Faithfull's 2008 album, Easy Come, Easy Go.
Cave collaborated with the band Current 93 on their album All the Pretty Little Horses, where he sings the title track, a lullaby. For his 1996 album Murder Ballads, Cave recorded "Where the Wild Roses Grow" with Kylie Minogue, and "Henry Lee" with PJ Harvey.
Cave also took part in the "X-Files" compilation CD with some other artists, where he reads parts from the Bible combined with own texts, like "Time Jesum ...", he outed himself as a fan of the series some years ago, but since he does not watch much TV, it was one of the only things he watched. He collaborated on the 2003 single "Bring It On", with Chris Bailey, formerly of the Australian punk group, The Saints. Cave contributed vocals to the song "Sweet Rosyanne", on the 2006 album Catch That Train! from Dan Zanes & Friends, a children's music group.
In 2010 Nick Cave began a series of duets with Debbie Harry for The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project.[26][27][28]
In 2011, Cave recorded a cover of the Zombies' "She's Not There" with Neko Case, which was used at the end of the first episode of the fourth season of True Blood.
In 2014, Cave wrote the libretto for the opera Shell Shock (opera) by Nicholas Lens. The opera premiered at the Royal Opera House La Monnaie in Brussels on 24 October 2014.[29][30][31][32]
Film scores and theatre music [ edit ]
In 2001, Cave recorded a cover of the Beatles' "Let It Be" for the film I Am Sam,[33] and co-wrote and recorded the song "To Be By Your Side," for the soundtrack of the 2001 French documentary Le Peuple Migrateur (called Winged Migration in the US).[34]
Cave creates original film scores with fellow Bad Seeds band member Warren Ellis—they first teamed up in 2005 to work on The Proposition, for which Cave also wrote the screenplay.[35]
In 2006, Cave and Ellis composed the music for Andrew Dominik's adaptation of Ron Hansen's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.[36] By the time Dominik's film was released, Hillcoat was preparing his next project, The Road, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel about a father and son struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Cave and Ellis wrote and recorded the score for the film, which was released in 2009.[37]
In early 2011, Cave and Ellis composed the music for the Mexican film Dias de Gracias.[38] Later in 2011, they reunited with Hillcoat to score his latest picture, Lawless. Cave also authored this screenplay based on the novel by Matt Bondurant. Set in Depression-era Franklin County, Virginia, the film was released in August 2012 (US) and September 2012 (UK).[39]
Cave and Ellis also have documentary-score composition experience. In 2007, the pair composed the score for Geoffrey Smith's film, The English Surgeon, which traces Dr. Henry Marsh's struggle to bring modern neurosurgery to the confusion of post-Soviet Ukraine. They also wrote the score for The Girls of Phnom Penh, Matthew Watson's 2009 film exploring Cambodia's "virginity trade".[40]
Cave's novel The Death of Bunny Munro, published in 2009, was released as an audiobook and Cave worked with Ellis, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard on the soundtrack. Forsyth and Pollard referred to the soundtrack as a 3D experience and stated: "We've not heard anything like this before – the result sits somewhere between a film soundtrack, a radio play and an hallucination."[41]
Cave and Ellis created music for the Vesturport productions Woyzeck, The Metamorphosis and Faust.[42]
Writing [ edit ]
Cave released his first book, King Ink, in 1988. It is a collection of lyrics and plays, including collaborations with Lydia Lunch. In 1997, he followed up with King Ink II, containing lyrics, poems, and the transcript of a radio essay he did for the BBC in July 1996, "The Flesh Made Word," discussing in biographical format his relationship with Christianity.
While he was based in West Berlin, Cave started working on what was to become his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). Significant crossover is evident between the themes in the book and the lyrics Cave wrote in the late stages of the Birthday Party and the early stage of his solo career. "Swampland", from Mutiny, in particular, uses the same linguistic stylings ('mah' for 'my', for instance) and some of the same themes (the narrator being haunted by the memory of a girl called Lucy, being hunted like an animal, approaching death and execution). On 21 January 2008, a special edition of Cave's novel And the Ass Saw the Angel was released.[43] Cave's second novel The Death of Bunny Munro was published on 8 September 2009 by Harper Collins books.[44][45] Telling the story of a sex-addicted salesman, it was also released as a binaural audio-book produced by British Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and an iPhone app.[46] The book originally started as a screenplay Cave was going to write for John Hillcoat.[47]
Aside from movie soundtracks, Cave also wrote the screenplays for Hillcoat's The Proposition in 2005, and Lawless (based on the novel by Matt Bondurant) in 2011.
As proof of his interest in scripture, so evident in his lyrics and his prose writing, Cave wrote the foreword to a Canongate publication of the Gospel according to Mark, published in the UK in 1998. The American edition of the same book (published by Grove Press) contains a foreword by the noted American writer Barry Hannah.
Cave is a contributor to a 2009 rock biography of the Triffids, Vagabond Holes: David McComb and the Triffids, edited by Australian academics Niall Lucy and Chris Coughran.[48]
Acting [ edit ]
Cave's first film appearance was in Wim Wenders' 1987 film Wings of Desire, in which he and the Bad Seeds are shown performing at a concert in Berlin.
Cave has made occasional appearances as an actor. He appears alongside Blixa Bargeld in the 1988 Peter Sempel film Dandy, playing dice, singing and speaking from his Berlin apartment. He is most prominently featured in the 1989 film Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, written and directed by John Hillcoat, and in the 1991 film Johnny Suede with Brad Pitt.
Cave appeared in the 2005 homage to Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, in which he performed "I'm Your Man" solo, and "Suzanne" with Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla. He also appeared in the 2007 film adaptation of Ron Hansen's novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, where he sings the ballad "Jesse James". Cave and Warren Ellis are credited for the film's soundtrack. Nick Cave and his son Luke performed one of the songs on the soundtrack together. Luke played the triangle.[49]
His interest in the work of Edward Gorey led to his participation in the BBC Radio 3 programme Guest + Host = Ghost, featuring Peter Blegvad and the radiophonic sound of the Langham Research Centre.[50]
Cave has also lent his voice in narrating the animated film The Cat Piano. It was directed by Eddie White and Ari Gibson (of the People's Republic of Animation), produced by Jessica Brentnall and features music by Benjamin Speed.[51]
Screenwriting [ edit ]
Cave wrote the screenplay for The Proposition, a film about bushrangers in the Australian outback during the late 19th century. Directed by John Hillcoat and filmed in Queensland in 2004, it premiered in October 2005 and was later released worldwide to critical acclaim.[52] Cave explained his personal background in relation to writing the film's screenplay in a 2013 interview:
I had written long-form before but it is pure story-telling in script writing and that goes back as far as I can remember for me, not just with my father but with myself. I slept in the same bedroom as my sister for many years, until it became indecent to do so and I would tell her stories every night—that is how she would get to sleep. She would say "tell me a story" so I would tell her a story. So that ability, I very much had that from the start and I used to enjoy that at school so actually to write a script—it suddenly felt like I was just making up a big story.[12]
The film critic for British newspaper The Independent called The Proposition "peerless," "a star-studded and uncompromisingly violent outlaw film."[53] The generally ambient soundtrack was recorded by Cave and Warren Ellis.
In 2006 it was revealed that, at the request of his friend Russell Crowe, Cave wrote a script for a proposed sequel to Gladiator which was rejected by the studio.[54]
An announcement in February 2010 stated that Andy Serkis and Cave would collaborate on a motion-capture movie of the Brecht and Weill musical The Threepenny Opera. As of September 2012, the project has not been realised.[55]
Cave wrote a screenplay titled The Wettest County in the World,[56] which was used for the 2012 film Lawless, directed again by John Hillcoat, starring Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf. The film opened in theaters on 29 August 2012.[57]
Personal life [ edit ]
Cave left Australia in 1980 and lived with his family in Brighton, England, United Kingdom. A film about Cave's life, titled 20,000 Days on Earth and directed by artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, was released in mid-2014, shortly before his 57th birthday.[58]
In 2017, Cave told GQ magazine that he and his family were moving from Brighton to Los Angeles as, after the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur, Cave described that his family "just find it too difficult to live here." [59]
Partners and children [ edit ]
Cave dated Anita Lane from the late 1970s to mid-1980s.[60] Cave and Lane recorded together on a few occasions. Their most notable collaborations include Lane's 'cameo' verse on Cave's Bob Dylan cover "Death Is Not The End" from the album Murder Ballads, and a cover of the Serge Gainsbourg/Jane Birkin song "Je t'aime... moi non plus/ I love you ... me neither".[61] Lane co-wrote the lyrics to the title track for Cave's 1984 LP, From Her to Eternity, as well as the lyrics of the song "Stranger Than Kindness" from Your Funeral, My Trial.[62] Cave, Lydia Lunch and Lane wrote a comic book together, entitled AS-FIX-E-8, in the style of the old "Pussy Galore"/Russ Meyer movies.
Cave then moved to São Paulo, Brazil in 1990, where he met and married his first wife, Brazilian journalist Viviane Carneiro. She gave birth to their son Luke in 1991. Nick and Viviane were married for 6 years and divorced in 1996.[63]
Cave's second son, Jethro, was also born in 1991 and grew up with his mother, Beau Lazenby, in Melbourne, Australia. Cave and Jethro did not meet one another until Jethro was about seven or eight.[64][65]
Cave briefly dated PJ Harvey during the mid-1990s.
In 1997, Cave met British model Susie Bick. Bick was the cover model on the Damned's 1985 album Phantasmagoria and a Vivienne Westwood model. Bick is also the model on the cover of the album Push the Sky Away.[66] She gave up her job when they married in 1999. Bick's and Cave's twin sons, Arthur and Earl, were born in Brighton in 2000.[67][68]
Cave's son Arthur, 15, fell from a cliff at Ovingdean, near Brighton, England, and died from his injuries on 14 July 2015. Cave's family released a statement on the death, saying, "Our son Arthur died on Tuesday evening. He was our beautiful, happy loving boy. We ask that we be given the privacy our family needs to grieve at this difficult time."[69][70][71] The effect of Arthur's death on Cave and his family was explored in the 2016 documentary film One More Time with Feeling and on the 2016 album Skeleton Tree.
Cave is the godfather to Michael Hutchence's daughter Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily.[72] Cave performed "Into My Arms" at the televised funeral of Michael Hutchence, but insisted that the cameras cease rolling during his performance.
Religion [ edit ]
In the past, Cave identified as a Christian. In his recorded lectures on music and songwriting, he has claimed that any true love song is a song for God and has ascribed the mellowing of his music to a shift in focus from the Old to the New Testaments. He does not belong to a particular denomination and has distanced himself from "religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked".[73] He said in a Los Angeles Times article:
"I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god. It's kind of defending the indefensible, though; I'm critical of what religions are becoming, the more destructive they're becoming. But I think as an artist, particularly, it's a necessary part of what I do, that there is some divine element going on within my songs."[74]
When asked in 2009 about whether he believed in a personal God, Cave's reply was: "No".[75] When interviewed by Jarvis Cocker on 12 September 2010, for his BBC Radio 6 show "Jarvis Cocker's Sunday Service", Cave stated: "I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it."[76]
Discography [ edit ]
Cave performing in 2008
Studio albums [ edit ]
2007 : Grinderman
2010 : Grinderman 2
Notable contributions and appearances [ edit ]
Spoken-word lectures [ edit ]
"The Secret Life of the Love Song & the Flesh Made Word: Two Lectures" (2000)
Live albums [ edit ]
Singles [ edit ]
2001: "As I Sat Sadly by Her Side"
2001: "Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow"
Bibliography [ edit ]
Publications by Cave [ edit ]
Publications with contributions by Cave [ edit ]
The Gospel According to Mark. Pocket Canons: Series 1. Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate, 1998. ISBN 0-86241-796-1. UK edition. With an introduction by Cave to the Gospel of Mark.
Awards and honours [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ] |
Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer-winning conservative columnist hired by The New York Times in April, is joining NBC News and MSNBC as a contributor, a network spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday.
As Mic reported, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace announced the hire Wednesday, when Stephens appeared as a guest on her program.
Stephens’ hire shows that the cable news network, best known for progressive stars like Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, is moving to broaden its left-wing reputation. The network also has signed conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt to host a Saturday morning show, and hired Greta van Susteren away from Fox News. (NBC News has also hired Megyn Kelly, another former Fox anchor).
Not all of the network’s recent hires, however, fit the conservative mold. The news organization recently signed Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, former Hillary Clinton adviser Maya Harris, and former Obama administration official Wendy Sherman as contributors.
Stephens will appear “across various NBC News and MSNBC programs and platforms,” the NBC spokeswoman said. He will remain a columnist for The New York Times, which hired him away from The Wall Street Journal this year.
Stephens’ tenure at the Times has been controversial since its start. His first column, a widely criticized piece that doubted climate science, prompted some Times readers to cancel subscriptions.
Stephens stood by his column, and said it wasn’t an effort to “deny facts about climate that have been agreed by the scientific community,” but instead was intended to “say that there is a risk in any predictive science of hubris.”
“I think that’s a distinction that I’m afraid was lost in some of more intemperate criticism,” he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in May. |
NOTE: This is the eleventh monthly update with our new Version 6.0 dataset. Differences versus the old Version 5.6 dataset are discussed here. Note we are now at “beta5” for Version 6 (hopefully the last beta before submission of the methodology for publication), discussed more below.
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for February, 2016 is +0.83 deg. C, up almost 0.3 deg C from the January value of +0.54 deg. C (click for full size version), which is a new record for the warmest monthly anomaly since satellite monitoring began in late 1978. (If clicking on the image leads to an error, this is due to “caching issues” according to my new website hosting company…I don’t know how to fix it.)
The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 14 months are:
YR MO GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2015 01 +0.30 +0.44 +0.15 +0.13
2015 02 +0.19 +0.34 +0.04 -0.07
2015 03 +0.18 +0.28 +0.07 +0.04
2015 04 +0.09 +0.19 -0.01 +0.08
2015 05 +0.27 +0.34 +0.20 +0.27
2015 06 +0.31 +0.38 +0.25 +0.46
2015 07 +0.16 +0.29 +0.03 +0.48
2015 08 +0.25 +0.20 +0.30 +0.53
2015 09 +0.23 +0.30 +0.16 +0.55
2015 10 +0.41 +0.63 +0.20 +0.53
2015 11 +0.33 +0.44 +0.22 +0.52
2015 12 +0.45 +0.53 +0.37 +0.61
2016 01 +0.54 +0.69 +0.39 +0.85
2016 02 +0.83 +1.17 +0.50 +0.99
Further Analysis of the Record February Warmth
The 1-month increase of +0.29 C in global average temperature from January to February is not unprecedented…for example, during the last El Nino (2009-10) there was +0.38 C warming from December to January.
The February warmth is likely being dominated by the warm El Nino conditions, which tends to have peak warmth in the troposphere close to February…but it appears that isn’t the whole story, since the tropical anomaly for February 2016 (+0.99 C) is still about 0.3 C below the February 1998 value during the super-El Nino of that year. In addition to the expected tropical warmth, scattered regional warmth outside the tropics led to a record warm value for extratropical Northern Hemispheric land areas, with a whopping +1.46 C anomaly in February…fully 0.5 deg. C above any previous monthly anomaly (!):
As a sanity check on the latest data, I compared our monthly anomalies to the 2m surface temperatures analysed from the NCEP CFSv2 by Ryan Maue at WeatherBell.com. His calculated global average anomalies (from the 1981-2010 mean) for January and February 2016 were +0.51 and +0.70 C, respectively, which is close to our +0.54 and +0.83 C values (some amplification of tropospheric anomalies vs. surface is always seen during El Nino). Here are the regional temperature anomaly patterns for February in the two datasets:
Even though the CFSv2 surface temperature analysis in the above plot is not “official”, I think it is a pretty good representation of what really happened last month, since it includes all sources of data in a physically consistent way within the daily weather forecast model framework. Note that on a monthly time scale we do not expect perfect correspondence between surface temperature and deep-tropospheric temperature anomaly patterns…especially in the deep tropics; the agreement in regional patterns seen above is about as good as it gets.
The “official” UAH global image for February, 2016 should be available in the next several days here.
The new Version 6 files (use the ones labeled “beta5”) should be updated soon, and are located here:
Lower Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tlt
Mid-Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tmt
Tropopause: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/ttp
Lower Stratosphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tls |
Last Word on Sports is proud to present their hockey podcast, On the Powerplay with Ben and Dave. Join Ben Kerr and Dave Gove each week as they take a look around the Hockey World focusing on the big issues of the NHL and elsewhere.
Dave and Ben go on the Powerplay, and this week they look at the various NHL award Nominees. Will the NHL Awards be the coronation of Carey Price, or can John Tavares or Alex Ovechkin challenge him for the Hart? P.K. Subban won their second round series, but will Erik Karlsson get Norris hardware, or does Drew Doughty beat them both? Can anyone touch Patrice Bergeron for the Selke? Does Anze Kopitar, Jiri Hudler or Pavel Datsyuk walk away with the Lady Byng? Is it Kris Letang and Pekka Rinne for the Masterton? Who wins rookie of the year, Mark Stone, Johnny Gaudreau, or Aaron Ekblad?
The boys then look ahead to the Stanley Cup Playoffs Second Round
Will the Anaheim Ducks crush Canadian hearts again, and take out the Calgary Flames, or can Jonas Hiller defeat his old team, or will the man who stole his job, Frederik Andersson shine in the Ducks crease? Can the Flames match Anaheim’s depth?
Have the Chicago Blackhawks solved their goalie issues, or will the hot play of Devan Dubnyk carry the Minnesota Wild through another round? Who is the better defenceman, Duncan Keith or Ryan Suter?
The New York Rangers meet the Washington Capitals for what feels like the 6000th time. What is different about the two teams since they last met? Who holds the edge this time around? How will Rick Nash and Alex Ovechkin fair in this intriguing matchup of snipers?
The Montreal Canadiens swept the Tampa Bay Lightning out of the playoffs one year ago. The Lightning swept the regular season matchup between the two clubs. Now with the series about to start, does it matter? Will Steven Stamkos be able to find the scoresheet after not scoring against Detroit? Ben Bishop has been a Habs killer, but can he outduel Carey Price?
All this and more as we go On the Powerplay.
On The Powerplay – Stanley Cup Playoffs Second Round and NHL Award Nominees
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"I think evangelicals, Christians will love my pick and will be represented very fairly,” President Donald Trump said. | Getty Trump says he wants Supreme Court nominee ‘who’s going to get approved’
President Donald Trump said Friday that one of his top factors in filling the current Supreme Court vacancy is “who’s going to get approved” — a remark that represents a bad sign for 11th Circuit Judge Bill Pryor, one of the finalists whose chances are widely seen as fading in the selection process.
Pryor only narrowly received Senate confirmation to the appeals court a decade ago, by a 53-45 vote.
The two other leading finalists, 3rd Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman and 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch, were approved 95-0 and in a voice vote, respectively, by the Senate.
POLITICO reported earlier this week that those three judges were Trump’s finalists, with Hardiman and Gorsuch as the leading contenders, and that Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry of the 3rd Circuit, had weighed in on Hardiman’s behalf.
On Friday, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network asked Trump, “What’s the bottom-line factor when deciding?”
Trump began by discussing the ease of confirmation. “Well, it’s also who’s going to get approved,” he said. “We have to go through a process after I pick the person that I’m going to be picking who I think I know but I’m not 100 percent. I can’t guarantee it. We’re doing some further checking. The vetting — they call it the vetting process and the vetting process is very, very strong.”
Trump predicted his selection would be praised by the evangelical community, as well.
“I think that the person that I pick will be a big, big — I think people are going to love it. I think evangelicals, Christians will love my pick and will be represented very fairly,” he said.
Trump has said he will announce his selection next Thursday. |
"What do you do for recreation?"
"Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback." – The Big Lebowski
Alamo Drafthouse kingpin Tim League has big balls. We mean huge, swirly 12-pounders. And he can't wait to show them to you. But you already knew that, didn't you? No? Okay. We'll back up, lest you get the wrong idea ...
Several tantalizing rumors have been running rampant on a number of fronts regarding various Alamo doings of late, but as our recent powwow with League revealed, not all of them have their basis in actual facts. Here's the skinny thus far:
Rumor: The Alamo Drafthouse is opening a new location on the site of the old Concordia University campus.
Fact: "We have spoken to the owners of the property," admits League, "but at this point, that's just a rumor and nothing more."
Rumor: League and his wife, Alamo co-founder Karrie League, are engaged in a lawsuit against Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas Ltd., the company that purchased the Alamo brand name several years ago with the intent of creating a chain of Alamo Drafthouses across the nation.
Fact: "Here comes the judge!" as Laugh-In would put it. It's true, the Leagues are suing ADC Ltd.'s president and CEO, John Martin, in what is essentially, from the Leagues' point of view, a case of fraud.
"Almost five years ago," Tim explains, "[Karrie and I] ostensibly sold the company and then licensed back to ourselves the name and kept the original locations, meaning the Village, the Lake Creek, the South Lamar, and the Ritz. So there are essentially two Alamo Drafthouse companies. There's been some maneuvering to edge Karrie and I out of the picture, and then on top of that, they haven't really done what they promised they were going to do, which was open more Alamo Drafthouses while maintaining the strength of the brand. That never materialized, and the relationship has become strained. We really don't care for the direction that they're taking the company in." Hence the lawsuit, which is ongoing.
Rumor: In addition to badass cinema, Tim League also loves bowling, karaoke, and cocktails and plans to make you love them, too, and damn the economy.
Fact: Too true, and too cool. Dig this:
You know times are tough when the Salvation Army retreats. But William Booth's loss is Austin's gain: The former Salvation Army thrift store at 1142 S. Lamar, all 14,000 square feet of it, has been leased to its neighbor, the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Construction is under way on what Tim is tentatively calling "the Palace," to be open this fall.
Incorporating a bowling alley, with the actual Fifties-era lanes bought from legendary New Orleans bowler nirvana Rock 'n' Bowl, private karaoke rooms, a cafe, a bar, and oh so much more, the Palace, overseen by longtime Alamo architect Richard Weiss, with interior design by Joel Mozersky (Uchi, the Belmont), is a natural, fittingly organic outgrowth of both the Alamo brand and the Drafthouse's South Lamar location, specifically. And if you've been to just about any Friday or Saturday evening screenings there lately, then you've most likely already experienced the serpentine waiting lines that were the first inspiration for an expanded Alamo South Austin.
"After the Salvation Army closed," explains League, sitting in the Alamo's newly refurbished offices, "we did four or five little makeshift parties in that space, and we thought: 'You know, it's kind of a nice place to have available. Maybe we can make something more of it.' The thing was, one of the problems with this center is that there's very few uses for a 14,000-square-foot space that we could park appropriately. But something like a bowling alley, which is kind of a space-hog – the lanes themselves take up half the square footage – isn't so much of an impact on the already slightly crowded parking.
"As for the lanes themselves, there's this company that specializes in vintage bowling equipment in New Orleans, and, apparently, Rock 'n' Bowl had just moved locations and upgraded their equipment, which was a stroke of luck for us. We bought their old, classic-style lanes. ... This is equipment that was originally installed in 1950, actually.
"It's not just a bowling alley," League emphasizes. "It's multiuse. Moviegoers from the Drafthouse will be able to hang out here, grab a cocktail, and then we'll do Southwest Airlines-style boarding for the films. 'Now seating group one for Up.' We're going to try and get rid of these film lines altogether. And then it's going to also be a stand-alone space where people can come to bowl, grab a cocktail, maybe play Skee-Ball, or go for late-night karaoke.
"[Alamo Creative Director] Henri Mazza and I are both absolutely obsessed with karaoke, and I promise you we are going to have the most badass private karaoke rooms in town. Each of the rooms will be themed to a different style of music, so there'll be a punk room, a metal room, what have you, all of them with a superhuge song selection. So depending on what you're feeling like ..."
Is the ever-stylish Tim League a karaoke master?
"I'm not very good," he deadpans, "but I do it with vigor."
And as for the bowling? Better than Bedrock Barney, as the Dickies would say?
"Ah, I'm not a very good bowler, either, but I am looking forward to having 24/7 access to bowling lanes." |
Recent Surveys and Studies from Javelin Strategy & Research, Better Business Bureau, Identity Theft Resource Center, Federal Trade Commission, Gartner, and Privacy & American Business
Javelin Strategy & Research Survey - February 2007
In February 2007, Javelin Strategy and Research released its 2007 Identity Fraud Survey Report. The report is issued as a longitudinal update to previous Javelin Identity Fraud Survey reports and the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) 2003 Identity Theft Survey Report.
Survey findings Include:
The number of US adult victims of identity fraud decreased from 10.1 million in 2003 and 9.3 million in 2005 to 8.4 million in 2007.
Total one year fraud amount decreased from $55.7 billion in 2006 to $49.3 billion in 2007.
The mean fraud amount per fraud victim decreased from $6,278 in 2006 to $5,720 in 2007.
The mean resolution time was at a high of 40 hours per victim in 2006 and was reduced in 2007 to 25 hours per victim. The median resolution time has remained the same for each Survey year at 5 hours per victim.
Javelin/Better Business Bureau Survey - January 2006 (no charge for Consumer Version)
In January 2006, Javelin Strategy and Research co-released its 2006 Identity Fraud Survey Report with the Better Business Bureau. The report is issued as a longitudinal update to the Javelin 2005 Identity Fraud Survey Report and the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) 2003 Identity Theft Survey Report. The Consumer Version of the survey is available at no cost.
Survey findings Include:
The number of US adult victims of identity fraud decreased from 10.1 million in 2003 and 9.3 million in 2005 to 8.9 million in 2006.
Total one year fraud amount rose from $53.2 billion in 2003 and $54.4 billion in 2005 to $56.6 billion in 2006.
The mean fraud amount per fraud victim rose from $5,316 in 2003 and $5,993 in 2005 to $6,278 in 2006.
The mean resolution time is at a high of 40 hours per victim in 2006 compared to 28 hours in 2005 and 33 hours in 2003.
Javelin/Better Business Bureau Survey - January 2005
On January 26, 2005, the Better Business Bureau in conjunction with Javelin Strategy and Research released its Identity Theft survey as an update to the Federal Trade Commission's 2003 Identity Theft Survey Report. The full report is available online at http://www.javelinstrategy.com/reports/2005IdentityFraudSurveyReport.html.
Survey findings include:
Within the last twelve months, 9.3 million Americans were victims of identity theft.
The total U.S. annual identity fraud cost remains essentially unchanged since [the FTC's] 2003 [results], at $52.6 Billion, an increase of 2.3% from the 2003 inflation-adjusted level of $51.4 Billion.
Most thieves still obtain personal information through traditional rather than electronic channels. In the cases where the method was known, 68.2% of information was obtained off-line versus only 11.6% obtained online.
Conventional methods such as through lost or stolen wallets, misappropriation by family and friends, and theft of paper mail are among the most common ways thieves gain access to information.
Recommendations for consumers include:
Cancel your paper bills and statements wherever possible and instead check your statements and pay bills online. Monitor your account balances and activity electronically (at least once per week).
If you do not have access to online accounts, review paper bank and credit card statements monthly and monitor your billing cycles for missing bills or statements.
Use emailbased account “alerts” to monitor transfers, payments, low balances and withdrawals and review your credit report (now available for free annual review).
Identity Theft Resource Center - September 2003
On September 23, 2003, the Identity Theft Resource Center (www.idtheftcenter.org) released its survey of the impact of identity theft on 173 known victims. To read the full survey, see:
www.idtheftcenter.org/idaftermath.pdf
Survey findings include:
Nearly 85% of all victims find out about their identity theft case in a negative manner. Only 15% of victims find out due to a proactive action taken by a business.
The average time spent by victims is about 600 hours, an increase of more than 300% over previous studies.
While victims are finding out about their cases earlier, it is taking far longer now than before to eliminate negative information from credit reports.
A large majority of respondents indicates the opening of a credit card (73%) or takeover of a card account (27%) to be among crimes committed.
The emotional impact of identity theft has been found to parallel that of victims of violent crime.
The responsiveness toward victims by the various entities with which they must interact continues to be lacking in sensitivity in most cases and has not improved since studies released in 2000 (Nowhere to Turn).
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation - December 2004
On December 14, 2004, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) released a study on phishing and account-takeover including information about fraudulent automated clearing house (ACH) payments. A complete copy of the FDIC's study is available online at:
www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/idtheftstudy/identity_theft.pdf.
Key findings include:
While precise statistics on the prevalence of account hijacking are difficult to obtain, recent studies indicate that unauthorized access to checking accounts is the fastest growing form of identity theft.
Another recent study has estimated that almost 2 million U.S. adult Internet users experienced this fraud during the 12 months ending April 2004. Of those, 70 percent do their banking or pay their bills online and over half believed they received a phishing e-mail.
Consumers are attributing risk to their use of the Internet to conduct financial transactions, and many experts believe that electronic fraud, especially account hijacking, will have the effect of slowing the growth of online banking and commerce.
Up to 5 percent of the recipients of spoofed e-mails respond to them.
An estimated 19 percent of “those attacked” have clicked on the link in a phishing e-mail. Most, if not all, large financial institutions and electronic bill-paying services (such as PayPal) have been hit with phishing attacks.
Because many phishing attacks originate overseas and because the average life span of a phishing Web site is 2.25 days, the sites are hard to shut down.
Federal Trade Commission Survey - September 2003
On September 3, 2003, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a survey on identity theft. The survey was conducted in March and April of 2003 with a random sample of over 4,000 households. To read the survey, go to http://www.ftc.gov/os/2003/09/synovatereport.pdf
Key findings include:
How Many Consumers Are Victims of Identity Theft?
27.3 million Americans have been victims of identity theft in the last five years, including 9.91 million people or 4.6% of the population in the last year alone.
In the past 12 months, 3.23 million consumers or 1.5% of the population discovered that new accounts had been opened, and other frauds such as renting an apartment or home, obtaining medical care or employment, had been committed in their name. 6.6 million experienced their existing accounts compromised by an identity theft. A total of almost 10 million individuals were victims of identity theft.
52% of all ID theft victims, approximately 5 million people in the last year, discovered that they were victims of identity theft by monitoring their accounts.
Misuse of Personal Information
On average, 49% of victims did not know how their information was obtained.
Another 26% - approximately 2.5 million people - reported that they were alerted to suspicious account activity by companies such as credit card issuers or banks.
8% reported that they first learned when they applied for credit and were turned down.
15% of all victims - almost 1.5 million people in the last year - reported that their personal information was misused in nonfinancial ways, to obtain government documents, for example, or on tax forms.
67% of identity theft victims - more than 6.5 million victims in the last year - report that existing credit card accounts were misused.
19% reported that checking or savings accounts were misused.
Nearly one-quarter of all victims - roughly 2.5 million people in the last year - said their information was lost or stolen, including lost or stolen credit cards, checkbooks or social security cards.
Stolen mail was the source of information for identity thieves in 4 percent of all victims - 400,000 in the last year.
Costs to Businesses and Consumers
Last year's identity theft losses to businesses and financial institutions totaled $47.6 billion and consumer victims reported $5 billion in out-of-pocket expenses.
In those cases, the loss to businesses and financial institutions was $10,200 per victim totaling $32.9 billion. Individual victims lost an average of $1,180 for a total of $3.8 billion.
Where the thieves solely used a victim's established accounts, the loss to businesses was $2,100 per victim totaling $14.0 billion. For all forms of identity theft, the loss to business was $4,800 and the loss to consumers was $500, on average.
Gartner Survey - July 2003
On July 21, 2003, Gartner (www.gartner.com) released the results of a survey of 2,445 households regarding identity theft. To read the press release, go to:
http://www.gartner.com/5_about/press_releases/pr21july2003a.jsp
The survey found the following:
Identity theft is up nearly 80 percent from last year.
7 million U.S. adults or 3.4 percent of U.S. consumers were identity theft victims in the past 12 months.
Because this crime is often misclassified, the thieves have just a one in 700 chance of being caught by the federal authorities.
Privacy & American Business Survey - July 2003
A July 30, 2003, Privacy & American Business survey found the following. To read the press release, go to http://www.pandab.org/id_theftpr.html.
How Many Consumers Are Victims of Identity Theft?
33.4 million Americans were victims of identity theft since 1990.
Over 13 million Americans have become victims of identity theft since January 2001.
Consumer out-of-pocket expenses have totaled $1.5 billion annually since January 2001.
34% say someone obtained their credit card information, forged a credit card in their name, and used it to make purchases.
12% say someone stole or obtained improperly a paper or computer record with their personal information on it and used that to forge their identity.
11% say someone stole their wallet or purse and used their identity.
10% say someone opened charge accounts in stores in their name and made purchases as them.
7% say someone opened a bank account in their name or forged checks and obtained money from their account.
7% say someone got to their mail or mailbox and used information there to steal their identity.
5% say they lost their wallet or purse and someone used their identity.
4% say someone went to a public record and used information there to steal their identity.
3% say someone created false IDs and posed as them to get government benefits or payments.
16% say it was a friend, relative or co-worker who stole their identity.
The seven million victims the survey identified in 2002 represent an 81% rise over victims in 2001.
Identity theft incidents reported so far in 2003 suggest a major rise over 2002. The victims level and upward trend parallel findings of a Gartner survey released last week.
What Are Victims' Out of Pocket Expenses? |
Yet another headache for U.S. oil producers: Union officials are calling for a strike.
The United Steelworkers union asked union workers at nine U.S. refineries to stop working after a national contract covering dozens of oil facilities expired at midnight Sunday.
Negotiations between the union and major producers, like Shell (RDSA) and ExxonMobil (XOM), are apparently stalled. The union said it had rejected the oil companies' fifth offer.
It wasn't clear Sunday how long the strike would last or how deeply it would affect the U.S. energy industry, which has produced a glut of oil and is feeling the pressure of plunging prices that eat into profits. Shell and other oil producers have slashed spending because of the oil price slide. (Meanwhile, consumers are paying prices at the pump they haven't seen in years.)
Shell will "continue operations in the normal course of business" using a contingency plan, said spokesman Ray Fisher. He said Shell seeks "to resume negotiations as early as possible to get our employees back to work."
ExxonMobil spokesman Todd Spitler said his company "remains actively engaged in good faith negotiations with the union."
Related: Oil boomtown 'could see 20,000 layoffs by June'
The National Oil Bargaining talks, first held 50 years ago, sets a contract that covers workers at at least 65 refineries around the U.S.
The USW said its key demands are annual wage increases, employers covering a larger share of health insurance premiums, reducing the number of non-union contractors working in the facilities, and improving safety by ending "payroll abuses" and understaffing.
At the same time, local union officials negotiate facility-specific issues.
"The problem is that oil companies are too greedy to make a positive change in the workplace and they continue to value production and profit over health and safety, workers and the community," said Tom Conway, a vice president at the union who has been involved in the contract process.
The nine facilities that will see the strike include five in Texas, two in California and one each in Kentucky and Washington.
USW workers at other facilities remain on the job "under a rolling 24-hour contract extension," the union said. But, it said in a note to members and supporters Sunday evening, other facilities "may join (the strike) in the days ahead."
--CNN's Joe Sutton contributed to this report. |
Every Thanksgiving weekend, deep in the heart of the southwest United States, the University of Arizona and Arizona State University take the field and battle for the Territorial Cup.
This rivalry, between two schools separated by one hour and 45 minutes on Interstate 10, began all the way back in 1899, 13 years before Arizona became a state.
In 1899, ASU, then known as the Territorial Normal School at Tempe took the train down to Tucson, where they met up with and they played U of A at Carrillo Gardens Field. TNS, recognized as the Normals, took the first meeting between the two schools, 11-2. The victory gave the Normals the Territorial Championship Cup, the same trophy that the schools battle over to this day.
According to author Shane Dale’s book Territorial, The Territorial Cup was not originally created to go to the winner of the game between U of A and the Normals. It was created to go to the champion of the Arizona Foot Ball League, a league that included U of A, Territorial Normal, Phoenix College and Phoenix Indian School. Normal was presented the trophy because they had defeated all of the schools in the conference. Because of their victory, an inscription reading “Arizona Foot Ball League 1899 Normal” was engraved into the Cup. That is the only inscription on the Cup, as it disappeared very soon after that first game. Thus, the Cup will always belong to Arizona State, even though it has taken a few trips south during its lifetime.
The Normals would learn to savor that victory, as the Normals would only taste victory once more in the next 49 years.
The two schools did not meet again until 1902, and they would meet again in Tucson, but the home team would not let the Normals, whose school had become Tempe Normal School, escape with a victory. This time U of A came out on top 12-0, a victory that began a nine-game win streak that would last 28 years (1902-1930).
The teams then took a 12-year hiatus between meetings. When they did meet on the gridiron again, U of A appeared under the nickname “Wildcats” instead of what it had been called, Varsity. This name came from an article in the Los Angeles Times said that U of A had “showed the fight of wildcats” after a game against Occidental College. Soon after, the nickname became official, and it has stuck to this day.
The next meeting between the Wildcats and the Normals took place in 1914, and Arizona emerged victorious again, and this time, it wasn’t even close. The Wildcats won 34-0.
The two teams met again the next season, with the Wildcats emerging victorious, but it was much closer this time, U of A only won by a score of 7-0. Four years would pass before the next meeting.
In 1919, the teams met again, and it was one-sided once more. Arizona destroyed the Normals, 59-0. The teams would not meet again until 1925, and during the hiatus, in 1922, Tempe Normal had changed its name to the mascot from the Normals to the Bulldogs, and in 1925, changed the name of the school to Tempe State Teachers College. The mascot change did not mean victory for Tempe, and that game resulted in a 13-3 victory for the Wildcats. After the 1925 game, the rivalry became an annual game, with a few exceptions.
In 1926, as has been the theme, the Wildcats won, this time by a score of 35-0. They were inspired by starting quarterback John “Button” Salmon, who after being hit by a car, told head coach James “Pop” McKale, “Tell them… tell the team to bear down.” That has become the school’s unofficial motto and is displayed prominently down the middle of the field at Arizona Stadium today. There was not a game in 1927, and in 1928, Arizona won again, 39-0, the first game in Arizona Stadium. 1929’s game would see a 26-0 Wildcat win over the newly named Arizona State Teachers College, and 1930 would be U of A’s ninth straight win, but it was a very close game 6-0.
The series took it’s first trip up north to Tempe in 1931 and with it came new life for ASTC. The Bulldogs won their first game against the Wildcats in 28 years, 19-6. Arizona would not let this bother them, as they went on to win the next year, 20-6 back in Tucson, and that began an 11-game win streak.
In 1933, the game came back to Tempe, but ASTC would not see the effect that playing in Tempe had in 1931, and U of A won 26-7. 1934 saw a 32-6 Wildcat victory, 1935 was a 26-0 win for U of A, Arizona won 18-0 in ’36 in ASTC’s brand new Goodwin Stadium, 20-6 in ’37, and then the series took a four-year break.
ASTC and U of A resumed playing each other in 1941, and the Wildcats continued their dominance, winning 20-7 in Tempe. ’42 saw a 23-0 Wildcat victory and then there was another hiatus as both schools had many students fight for the Allies in World War II.
The series would resume after the War ended. During the War hiatus, in 1945, ASTC had changed its name to Arizona State College, and in November 1946, the Bulldogs would be no more. Arizona State College decided to change its mascot and a student vote decided that the new mascot would be the Sun Devils. After this was decided, Disney artist Berk Anthony designed the iconic Sparky logo, which has been rumored to be modeled after Walt Disney himself.
In 1946, Arizona absolutely embarrassed ASC, 67-0. ’47 saw a much closer game, with U of A winning 26-13, and the Wildcats would win their 11th straight, 33-21, in ’48.
ASC would get back on the winning track in ’49, beating U of A 34-7. That would be the first of four straight for the Sun Devils. In 1950, ASC would win 47-13, then in ’51, the Devils won 61-14, and in ’52 ASC emerged victorious, 20-18.
Arizona would take the next three (’53-’55) by scores of 35-0, 54-14, and 7-6.
’56-’59 would belong to ASC by scores of 20-0, 47-7, 47-0, and 15-9.
1958 was a very exciting year for ASC. 1958 would see the hiring of one of the greatest coaches in Arizona State history, Frank Kush, the beginning of play in Sun Devil Stadium, and ASC becoming recognized as a university, and it became Arizona State University.
The beginning of the 1960s belonged to the Wildcats, as they opened the decade with three straight wins over ASU, by scores of 35-7, 22-13, and 20-17. ASU took the 1963 meeting 35-6, and U of A took 1964’s battle, 30-6.
In 1965, the Sun Devils would emerge victorious, 14-6, the first of nine straight wins for ASU.
In ’66, ASU won 20-17, ’67 saw a 47-7 Sun Devil victory, in ’68, ASU won 30-7, then in ’69, the Sun Devils won 38-24, in ’70, the score was 10-6 in favor of ASU, ’71 was a 31-0 ASU victory, ’72 saw a 38-21 ASU win, and the Sun Devils won that ninth straight game in ’73, 55-19.
Arizona won 10-0 in 1974 before the Sun Devils went streaking again, winning four straight from 1975-78, by scores of 24-21, 27-10, 23-7, and 18-17.
U of A would grab another win in 1979, 27-24, ASU would then go on to win back to back games in 1980 and 1981, 44-7 and 24-13.
1982 would see the beginning of a time every Wildcat and Wildcat fan looks back on fondly, and every Sun Devil fan would like to forget. From 1982-1990, Arizona State did not win in nine straight years, during a time period known as “The Streak.”
The first two games in 1982 and ’83 saw U of A win 28-18 and 17-15. 1983 would also see the return of a precious relic.
Shortly after it was first presented in 1899, the Territorial Cup disappeared. No one knew what had happened to it until 1983, when it was discovered, according to Territorial, in a closet in the basement of the First Congregational Church of Tempe. After its discovery, the cup was put on display at Arizona State. 18 years later, in 2001, it would start being awarded to the winner of the ASU-U of A football game.
Arizona would win 16-10 in ’84, 16-13 in ’85, and 34-17 in ’86, a year that saw the Sun Devils go on to win the Rose Bowl, 22-15 over Michigan. The series saw its only tie happen in ’87, with a score of 24-24, and many people consider it a Wildcat victory, a la, Harvard-Yale in 1968, because of the improbable way that they Wildcats tied it. ASU was forced to punt with mere seconds left in the game from their own 38-yard-line. Sun Devil punter Mike Schuh fumbled the snap and U of A recovered with 13 seconds to go on the 13-yard-line, and the Wildcats kicked a field goal to end the game in a tie.
Arizona would then win 28-10 in ’89 and 21-17 in ’90, which would be the final year of “The Streak.” ASU ended the streak in 1991 by beating the Wildcats 37-14. The Sun Devils would win again the next year 7-6.
Arizona then won three straight from 1993-’95, 34-20, 28-27, and 31-28. ASU won 56-14 in 1996, before going on to lose to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, 20-17, and then U of A won back to back games, 28-16 and 50-42, in 1997 and 1998.
1999 and 2000 saw two Sun Devil victories, 42-27 and 30-17. Arizona won the initial game in which the Territorial Cup was presented as a traveling trophy, 34-21, in 2001. ASU won back-to-back games again in ’02 and ’03, 34-20 and 28-7.
Arizona upset No. 18 ASU in 2004, 34-27, but ASU would respond with three straight wins, 23-20, 28-14, and 20-17 (while the Sun Devils were ranked No. 13), from ’05-’07. ’08 and ’09 would see back to back Wildcat wins, 31-10 and 20-17. 2010 was a Sun Devil victory, 30-29 in double overtime, 2011 belonged to U of A, 31-27, and last year was a Sun Devil victory, 41-34, over No. 24 Arizona, thanks to a 14-point fourth quarter comeback.
This year’s Duel in the Desert is the largest in years. ASU is ranked No. 12, and will host the Pac-12 title game against No. 8 Stanford if they beat Arizona. Arizona is coming off of an upset over No. 5 Oregon. The game will be played Saturday, Nov. 30, 2013 and will kickoff at 7:30 p.m. MST on the Pac-12 Networks.
Due to it’s national importance this year, many fans will ask why this game is considered “forgotten.” In Territorial, the introduction is titled, “The Best Rivalry No One’s Heard Of.” Continually on television and on the radio, ASU is called Arizona and vice versa. ESPN cannot even get the teams’ match-ups straight. During week three of this season, ASU played Wisconsin, but on College Football Live, ESPN put an Arizona helmet with a Wisconsin helmet when previewing the game. The rivalry is obviously well-known in Arizona, but it seems that if the teams cannot even be kept separate, then it must not mean much nationwide.
Fans have their own reasons for why this rivalry is not known nationwide.
“(The Territorial Cup is not known nationwide) because neither team has been a major or consistent force in college football,” Greg Cravener, Arizona alumnus, class of 1983, said in an email. “They have both had glimmers of hope and short periods of greatness but neither has been able to show the consistency to garner other than regional interest. ASU had a good run under Frank Kush, but this was in the WAC days when very little interest was given to this conference. It takes years of being a force in a major conference to garner much national attention.”
“The rivalry does not get the national recognition of a Notre Dame-USC or an Ohio St.-Michigan simply because neither school is a traditional power house,” ASU sophomore Lucas Robbins said in an email. “The game has little significance outside the state of Arizona because most of the time neither team is very good. Between the two neither school has a national title nor a BCS berth. It’s the no-respect Arizona curse.”
The fact that the teams have not been nationally ranked in many of their games adds on to that, so many of the games have not meant as much, but, both teams are playing much better football as of late, so maybe they will mean more in the future. But, if it teams do happen to go back to being middle of the pack teams, hopefully this fantastic rivalry will not be forgotten.
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An employee inspects a solar panel on the production line at the Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd. facility in Goodyear, Ariz., in June 2012. (Ken James/Bloomberg)
We worry a lot about the problem of climate change. And we try to fix it — again, again and again — by changing how the country uses energy.
What we don’t stop and ponder enough, though, is that the country is changing how it uses energy. It’s certainly not enough to silence all environmental concerns. But nonetheless, the progress, when you sample it, is really impressive.
Such is the takeaway from a new report out by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which has just released its 2015 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook, prepared for the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Looking back over recent years, the report shows that on any number of metrics, progress in clean energy has really been immense.
“There’s a trend already underway where these technologies are making progress and gaining share at the expense of technologies that have been there previously,” explains Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Michel Di Capua.
The proof? Just consider a few pretty impressive findings from the report:
1. The United States overall has seen nearly $ 400 billion in clean energy investment since 2007.
The United States still fell short of China in total clean energy investment last year, but overall investment in this country has been massive. As you can see in the figure above, compared with 2004, investment last year was higher by a factor of five.
2. Economic growth itself is getting cleaner.
The U.S. economy has rebounded strongly from the 2008-2009 economic downturn. And you would expect more growth to lead to more energy use, and more greenhouse gas emissions. And indeed, carbon emissions have started rising again. But overall, energy and economic growth don’t seem to be interacting in the same way they did before.
“With the growing economy, we are still seeing the energy productivity of the U.S. economy improving, and I think that’s extremely significant,” says Lisa Jacobson, president of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy.
The figure above shows a measure of energy productivity: As GDP has increased since 1990, primary energy consumption has not kept pace. Indeed, the new report notes that from 2007 to 2014, electricity demand has actually been flat, despite the economic rebound. And over the same time period, overall carbon emissions coming from the energy sector declined by nine percent.
3. Wind and solar have achieved liftoff.
And the renewable energy story keeps getting better, too.
In 2007, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, renewable energy provided just seven percent of the nation’s total energy. By 2014 it had nearly doubled to 13 percent (estimated).
Much of this has been driven by the two most successful sectors, wind and solar. Those two have “more than tripled in capacity since 2008,” notes the report. And as this has happened, wind and solar have become increasingly cost-competitive.
“Wind energy is the lowest cost option for utilities in some parts of the U.S., and solar energy beats the retail electricity price paid by homeowners in many states,” the report observes. (Other clean energy sectors, such as geothermal and hydropower, haven’t seen the same dramatic growth.)
None of this is to say that there’s nothing more to be done. America still has a long way to go in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. And with policies that set an actual price on carbon, there’s no doubt that the changes would be still more vast.
Meanwhile, another major energy trend highlighted by the report — a 25 percent growth in natural gas production since 2007, propelled by the fracking revolution — is viewed much more ambiguously in environmental circles. There’s a big split over how “clean” this development actually is.
Nevertheless, this much is clear: We live in a vastly different energy world today than we did in 2007. And the changes documented above are too large, too structural, to simply go away. They’re not temporary, and they’re not a fluke.
“This trend is for real, and we’re only going to see more of it,” says Bloomberg’s Michel Di Capua. |
A 15-year-old Homestead High School student was arrested Friday morning for allegedly posting a threatening message that prompted officials to close Homestead High School Friday.
Mequon Police Chief Steve Graff and Mequon-Thiensville School District Demond A. Means held a news conference Friday morning to announce the arrest and explain what happened.
Graff said students and teacher contacted school officials Thursday after seeing a threatening message on an app called Whatsgoodly.
“There was a message being delivered … the final option with a gun, a firearm,” Means said.
Police obtained a search warrant on the student’s home and the teen was arrested Friday morning. He was charged with making a bomb threat and unlawful use of a computer communication system.
The app allows messages to disappear after a certain amount of time, but the students were able to get screenshots.
"This should be a message to students who think they can remain anonymous and hide behind these apps ... you can’t," Means said.
Evening classes at the school will continue as planned, but officials said to expect extra security.
The district put calls and a letter out to parents about the situation Thursday. It also posted the letter on the school's web site telling parents the school would be closed Friday. |
Adelaide woman sells car for $700, slapped with a $786 speeding fine 11 hours later
Updated
When Ashleigh Kay sold her old car to an apparent homeless woman, the last thing she expected was to be slapped with the new owner's $786 speeding fine.
Ms Kay said she felt for the woman — who claimed to be homeless — when she sold her station wagon for $700.
"When she filled out the paperwork she did not write an address because she did not have one," Ms Kay told 891 ABC Adelaide's Breakfast program.
She said she accepted the woman's driver's licence number on the transfer forms as identification.
She obviously had a bit of fun with the car and went over 135kmh up Port Wakefield Road. Car seller Ashleigh Kay
Ms Kay said she even refunded some of the purchase price after the new owner complained about the car.
The homeless woman bought the car at 10pm on a Friday night, and by 9am had incurred more than $750 in driving offences.
"She obviously had a bit of fun with the car and went over 135 kilometres per hour up Port Wakefield Road," Ms Kay said.
Ms Kay said she received the speeding fine in the mail a few days later, and tried to transfer the cost to the new owner.
She submitted a statutory declaration to the South Australian Police Expiation Notice Office, to show she was not the owner when the fines were incurred.
The department said the declaration would not be accepted because Ms Kay did not provide the buyer's address.
While she provided the new owner's mobile phone number, driver's licence number and suburb, Ms Kay said the department would not waive the fines.
She approached the motor vehicle registration office and the South Australian Police for help, but was told the new owner's information could not be released.
"Since the fine we have been ringing her daily and am getting no response," Ms Kay said.
Lawyer says technicality should not cost old owner
Websters Lawyers traffic fines specialist Karen Stanley said the previous owner should not pay the fine.
"The onus is on the prosecution to prove the offence," Ms Stanley said.
"It seems that, in this case, the expiation branch has decided that Ashleigh has to prove her innocence."
Ms Stanley said the courts were the only the only avenue left for Ms Kay.
"The magistrates really are quite pragmatic and sensible about circumstances where the expiation branch has not been of great assistance," Ms Stanley said.
But she warned the emotional and possible financial costs of going to court were a deterrent for most people.
"It is expensive, it is stressful, it is difficult and some people just are not confident speaking up in court," Ms Stanley said.
She said previous owners in similar situations should not ignore the infringements, as they could incur further fines and suspensions.
Listener tells of backpacker joyrides
Talkback caller Glen from Melrose Park told 891 Breakfast he had fallen foul to a similar circumstance a year ago.
After helping to sell his daughter's car to backpackers, Glen said they started to receive a series of fines.
I'm not sure that this is not just a game played by backpackers, where they buy a cheap car and simply go for it 891 ABC Adelaide caller Glen from Melrose Park
"Heaps of speeding offences here, over to Melbourne [and the] same trick, then finished up in New South Wales," he said.
Glen said he received the same response when they contested the fines.
"We cannot establish this person's true address, so you remain the last known owner of this vehicle," he said.
He is yet to settle the affair.
"I'm not sure that this is not just a game played by backpackers, where they buy a cheap car and simply go for it," he said.
Topics: traffic-offences, human-interest, driver-education, road-transport, adelaide-5000
First posted |
It's become readily apparent that the Ottawa Senators media and fanbase have already begun welcoming Mike Brodeur with open arms, and there's a reason for that: the team has been desperately seeking steady goaltending all season since it entered the league. Admittedly, we here at Silver Seven haven't been much help, as we were among the first to anoint him with a nickname ("Not Martin") and have not been hesitant to shower him with praise during his brief time with the Ottawa Senators.
However, there is a huge distinction between praising Not Martin for what he has accomplished and what we hope he accomplishes. It's one thing to say "this rookie has been fantastic for the Senators in goal so far" (he has), it's an entirely different thing to say that he is the goalie this team has been searching for (he isn't). Mike Brodeur simply has not proven himself in this league yet, and Senators fans need to realize this before he inevitably disappoints.
People should remember that many goalies come into this league and do extremely well for a few games, or perhaps even for a season. The obvious names of Andrew Raycroft or Jim Carey pop out, but there are countless examples. It's not just that goaltenders go on hot streaks or get lucky, it's also that a new goaltender has an advantage of being underscouted, and teams are unable to exploit their weaknesses. As an example, a likely reason that Pascal Leclaire had such a stellar 2007-08 campaign is that teams were unable to exploit his weakness of pucks shot from the blueline without any sort of screen.
Mike Brodeur may have a 3-0-0 record, 1.00 GAA, and .970 SV%, but this is after three games. The truth of the matter is that he has never played more than 38 games in a season at the AHL level because he's often been relegated to split time in the AHL and ECHL. His AHL record this year includes a 3.03 GAA and .892 SV%. The man's history indicates that what has happened right now is a guy playing above his head, and it's almost certainly unsustainable. Nevertheless, there are fans asCTV continues to run that poll asking if Brodeur should be named the Senators' number one goalie, and the masses have answered with a fairly resounding yes:
I'm not trying to take away from Not Martin's spectacular start in a Senators uniform, nor do I hope he starts to play poorly. If he goes to Faustian measures to maintain a .970 SV% and perfect win record, I'll be extremely happy for our soulless goaltender. All I'm saying is that if Mike Brodeur happens to break down in net and lose a game or two, let's not act surprised, okay? Because as the old saying goes, even Vesa Toskala gets a shutout once in a while. |
In today’s instalment of Bikes of the Bunch, Hamish Low shares the story of his Team Telekom edition Pinarello Prince LS.
Team Deutsche Telekom has to be one of the most iconic names in recent cycling history. With the likes of Bjarne Riis, Erik Zabel, Jan Ullrich, Andreas Kloden and, of course, Alexander Vinokourov, the team produced many of cycling’s modern day heroes and villains. The image they established was quintessential ‘euro pro’ and to back it up, the team animated races in extraordinary style. Yellow, green and gold (Vuelta) jerseys, wins at San Remo, Amstel, Paris-Nice … they tore it up.
The German powerhouse’s immense power hit an all-time high after ‘Der Kaiser’ won the Tour de France in 1997, prompting a huge rise in Germany’s interest in pro-cycling. In 1998 the Telekom ensemble was a match made in heaven and in the cycling world, they were a big deal. Sporting the signature pink and black colours, they were backed up by Pinarello, Campagnolo and even Adidas.
Love them or loath them, Telekom was one of the most influential teams of the 1990s and early 2000s, and in my eyes they were the coolest. They were the rock stars of cycling — you knew they were up to no good, but it didn’t stop you from putting their posters on your bedroom wall. Of course these weren’t the cleanest years in cycling, but many cycling fans will have some sort of emotional connection to Team Telekom.
So how did I become a fan-boy for a team of European legends and hooligans? Still at high school in 2003, I was a typical schoolboy rower caught in the sports bubble. Looking for a new taste I started to take notice of cycling on SBS. That year, I watched my first and arguably the best edition of the Tour de France. The race was nothing short of epic and unlike anything I’d ever seen. Every stage was so unique with such intense drama — these so-called athletes were insane.
Like many others, it was Ulle with Bianchi who was my favourite rider that year, but it was the German crew Telekom that caught my eye. With Zabel’s classic sprinting and Vino’s relentless aggression in the mountains, I was completely hooked on the Telekom train. Later I would watch the brilliant documentary “Hell on Wheels” through which I would fall in love with the team issue Pinarello the team had been riding. The dream was then set — at some point in time I would have to put this bike together.
The project had always been in the back of my mind and occasionally frames would pop up on eBay but they’d always be far too small or large. One day I stumbled across a forum in ‘Pedal Room’ on a nice Telekom build and soon found myself chatting away with its very interesting owner.
Andre, a Belgian living in Gent, was working freelance for Team Telekom as a mechanic at the service course between 1999 and 2003. The workshop was situated south-west of Gent, at the back of then director sportif Walter Godefroot’s bike shop ‘Fietsen Godefroot’. These days, Andre is the organiser of “Stalen Ros Belgie”, an annual retro/vintage bike fair held in November at the Kuipke Velodrome, best known for the famous Six Days of Gent.
As a gift for his final year of work for the team, Godefroot gave Andre the new bike, which had originally belonged to one of Telekom’s most stylish riders, Danilo Hondo, the 2002 German National champion.
After six months of good cycling banter with Andre, our friendship blossomed and he offered to sell me the frame. A little while later the centrepiece landed in Melbourne and the project began.
Since it was a 2002/2003 frameset, there was no question but to build it up era-correct and to team spec components. Although this would definitely be challenging it would certainly make it more special and was what it fully deserved. Building the bike to just as the team had ridden it meant that almost all of the parts originated from Italy, with Pinarello, Campy Record, Boras and Deda coming together as one.
The process involved some extensive research and a lot of trawling the net for parts. This actually included coming across a whole other Telekom Pinarello in the Netherlands and stripping it for parts (but that’s another story/project). Help came both locally and abroad, but it was Andre who had undoubtedly been the most knowledgeable and also my key resource.
Almost two years of endless searching to source all the right components it had finally come together and was ready for the mechanic.
Anyone who’s done a big project like this will totally understand that finally putting it together is often the hardest part. It sounds ridiculous but you almost don’t want it to happen. But I’d come this far so off to the shop it went.
Dan at Shifter Bikes in Melbourne beautifully put the build together and his work just speaks for itself. His attention to detail is incredible. It felt like Dan was one of the few people who completely understood the time and effort that went into the project, and this respect and recognition brought the bike to life.
In the end it was extremely satisfying to have stuck to the plan and built it 100% to team specs. It’s the details that give it the era-correct look and feel, like the Deda cockpit, the MAX Flite saddle and the iconic and eye-catching magenta pink.
However the stand-out feature would easily have to be the original used Team Telekom, pink-wall Continental tubulars. Not only were they the hardest item to find but also the final piece in the puzzle that makes this bike truly authentic.
So how does it ride? To be honest, the Pinarello has only had one fairly gentle spin since it was built early 2015. That said, the Prince LS frame felt amazing, light and responsive with its Dedacciai alloy and carbon tubing. The size and geometry kept me a little nervous throughout the project but fortunately it ended up spot on, and I was surprised just how incredibly comfortable it was to ride.
The 10-speed Record Titanium gruppo is everything you would expect; absolutely perfect. The shifting is a pleasure — so reliable and clean. The sweetener is definitely the Bora G3s, which just glide and certainly taking the overall look of the bike up a notch and give it that racing edge. Complemented by Dan’s impeccable build contribution, the ride quality of this Italian package felt nothing short of a treat.
Looking back on the project, there isn’t anything at all I would change. Not only was an incredible bike put together but a great friendship formed with Andre that has since seen me visit Gent at his guest. In the end, it feels rewarding to know that no corners were cut and the result was a glorious bike true to its history.
As for Team Telekom, they will always remain my favourite no matter what. They are already the catalyst for another project on the horizon …
The build
Frame – 2002 Pinarello Prince LS (58cm x 57cm)
Fork – Pinarello Vola Carbon
Stem – Deda Newton 31 (130mm)
Headset – Campagnolo Record integrated
Bars – Deda Newton 31.7 (Round Shallow bend)
Brakes – Campagnolo Record
Derailleur – Campagnolo Record Titanium 10s
Bottom Bracket – Campagnolo Record
Shifters – Campagnolo Record 10s
Cassette – Campagnolo Record (11-23)
Cranks – Campagnolo Record 172.5mm (53/39)
Chain – Campagnolo Record 10s
Wheels – Campagnolo Bora G3
Tyres – Continental Competition 22 Tubulars (Team Telekom Issue)
Saddle – Selle Italia MAX Flite (Manganese)
Seat pillar – Pinarello Carbon 31.6mm
Bidon cages – Elite Patao Carbon
Pedals – Speedplay Zero
Bar Plugs – Bespoke anodised alloy (Anthony at Kahl Design & Engineering)
Frame/Race number – Chris at Cyclo Retro
Seat pillar decal – Greg at Cyclomondo |
The Government has suffered a “humiliating climb-down” on their controversial plans to turn all schools into academies, burying their u-turn among election announcements across the country yesterday.
New legislation will no longer impose the policy on all schools but will include stronger powers for the Department of Education to force lower-performing institutions to become academies.
Academies are not subject to oversight by local authorities and do not have to follow the national curriculum. Councils cannot build more academies independently and must seek a sponsor for them.
They were initially introduced by the Blair Government as a measure for making rapid changes to failing schools but were never intended to become the dominant model for education.
George Osborne announced the policy in the Conservatives’ budget in March. It was panned by Labour and teaching unions – as well as Conservative MPs and councillors.
Lucy Powell said the announcement was “welcome news” but called on the Government to rectify the “panic” they had created in the schools system as a result of the initial announcement.
“It is welcome news that the Tory Government has finally listened to Labour and the alliance of head teachers, parents and local government who opposed these plans, and dropped the forced academisation of all schools.
“It is frankly a humiliating climb down for David Cameron and his Education Secretary, who just weeks ago were insisting they would plough on with the policy regardless.
“There remain enormous challenges facing our schools under the Tories, and their fixation with structures has distracted school leaders and created panic in the schools system, at the expense of raising standards.
“Ministers must urgently tackle the serious problems they have created in education, including school budgets falling in real terms for the first time in twenty years, chronic shortages of teachers, not enough good school places, and chaos and confusion in the exams system.”
Nicky Morgan, the Conservative Education Secretary, said she is determined to see the expansion of academies but will now “change the path” to that outcome – leading to speculation from campaigners the Government may try to bring about “academisation by stealth”.
She added in a BBC interview she hopes schools will convert regardless.
“Better to have reforms than have none at all. We absolutely support those strong local authorities where schools are good and outstanding – they can make the choice to convert.
“I hope that they will, because we are convinced that becoming academies does lift standards but they can do the right thing for them and I think that reflects the concerns and the conversations that we have had.” |
1) Syria has no Illuminati controlled banking.
2) Syria has no debt to the IMF.
3) Because Syria owes no money to foreign powers nor is monetarily controlled, she can write her own policies.
4) Syria has no GMO foods and therefore doesn’t control the food supply of her.
5) Syria sees the conspiracies as a reality
6) Syria has plans to build their own gas and oil pipelines. They have abundant resources. The NWO wants the pipeline to go through Israel for control purposes.
7) Syria is one of the last countries left to not recognize Israel’s apartheids, opposing Israel and Zionism
8) Syria is one of the last secular countries left on the globe – “secural” defineds as of or pertaining to worldly things or to things that are not regarded as religious, spiritual, or sacred; temporal:
9) Syria has a strong national and cultural identity, resisting the entrance of foreign companies.
Published on Dec 17, 2012
8 reasons why the NWO hates Syria
No Rothschild central bank, NO IMF debt, No Genetically modified food, Oil and pipelines, Anti-secret societies, Anti-Zionism, Secularism, Nationalism. |
Getting Started with the BlackBerry Mobile Development Platform
BlackBerry devices do not fare well in the media battle, but they may win the market share war. While the iPhone and Android rule technology headlines, BlackBerry phones have thoroughly penetrated large corporations and recently expanded their reach to many consumers. Research In Motion (RIM) has worked hard to enable developers to create compelling applications for their phones, and you may be surprised to learn that these devices can do nearly everything their flashier competitors do, as well as some things they cannot.
This article will walk you through the essential facts of BlackBerry development. You'll learn enough to decide whether and how BlackBerry fits into your mobile product strategy, and be able to start preparing to write awesome BlackBerry apps.
Editor's Note: For complete reviews of all the leading mobile development platforms, see the Internet.com Special Report "Field Guide to the Mobile Development Platform Landscape".
BlackBerry Development Environments
The BlackBerry toolset has drastically improved in recent years. If you haven't touched the platform in a few years, you will be delighted at what it now offers.
The BlackBerry Java Development Environment (JDE), which combines an SDK, an IDE, and a set of simulators, has tortured developers for years. This Swing-based application gets the job done, but it employs a user interface that screams 1994, perplexing debugging, and inconsistent keyboard shortcuts. It does offer the advantage of a single download that contains all you need to develop and debug on the simulator and the device, but using it can be quite painful.
Each JDE version is tied to a particular version of the BlackBerry OS. So, for example, if you wish to target a device running OS 5.0, you would download JDE version 5.0. I will discuss versions more later in this article, but for now, be aware that all BlackBerry Java applications are forward-compatible. An application written using the 4.2 version of the JDE will run on a 5.0 device, but an application written on the 5.0 JDE may not run on a 4.2 device.
Because of the JDE's shortcomings, developers have often turned to their own preferred IDEs, such as NetBeans or IntelliJ IDEA. Because most BlackBerry applications are written in Java, you can use any Java editor to write your application code. However, other IDEs typically do not integrate well with debugging, and they require custom plugins or scripts to build and debug BlackBerry applications.
The BlackBerry landscape changed when RIM announced a custom plugin for Eclipse that combined the features of their custom JDE with the ease-of-use of Eclipse. The latest version of the BlackBerry Java Plugin runs on Eclipse 3.5 and has been embraced by developers. You can read instructions for installing the plugin at blackberry.com.
Finally, if you are primarily interested in developing visual content for the BlackBerry, such as wallpapers or videos, you should check out the BlackBerry Theme Studio (formerly known as the Plazmic Content Developer's Kit).
BlackBerry Simulators
Although you eventually should run your app on an actual BlackBerry device, you will likely perform the majority of your testing on a simulator. The simulator allows you to bypass several tedious loading and permissions steps, as well as simulate devices that you may not physically possess.
When you download the JDE or the JDE Plugin for Eclipse, it will install a basic set of simulators for you automatically. You can -- and should -- download and install additional simulators, which allow you to test the exact model, wireless carrier, and firmware version of your targets. As a bonus when you download a simulator, you will be able to perform on-device debugging for the corresponding device.
The BlackBerry simulators get mixed reviews, however. On a positive note, they tend to be very accurate. The behavior you see on the simulator will usually match what you would see on the device. On the downside, the simulators are painfully slow. To ensure their accuracy, they fully simulate every aspect of the device, including a very lengthy boot-up process. Depending on the speed of your development machine and the particular simulator you use, it easily can take several minutes to start debugging. Also, when you make any changes to your program, you will need to restart the entire process; the simulators do not support hot-swapping code.
BlackBerry Programming Languages
BlackBerry devices use a superset of the Java ME language, which itself is a subset of the Java language. If you have programmed in Java ME before, you will see that all the core Java ME features are available. BlackBerry devices also include many of the most popular JSRs, adding features such as file connections, media recording and playback, wireless messaging, and more.
If you have previously written Java on the desktop or the server, you may be disappointed with BlackBerry Java. Java ME is compatible with Java 1.3, and does not include many of the nicer features added to the language during the past decade, such as generics, enumerations, and regular expressions. It also lacks some features that were present in Java 1.3, such as collections and reflection.
RIM has enhanced the basic Java ME legacy of BlackBerry development with a very rich set of custom APIs. Many offer features specific to mobile devices, including information about cell towers, battery levels, and so on. They also include some very useful features that are in standard Java but not in Java ME. For example, while you won't find java.util.Arrays , there is a net.rim.device.api.util.Arrays class that offers most of the same features.
If you plan to develop Plazmic content for animation, you will ultimately be working with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). However, most of your work can be done directly within the BlackBerry Theme Studio. Alternately, the BlackBerry toolset offers some support for creating a Flash SWF file and importing it to BlackBerry. If you wish to go this route, make a prototype first to make sure you will be happy with the results of this conversion.
Like all modern mobile platforms, BlackBerry also supports web applications. All BlackBerry phones accept standard HTML as well as legacy WAP pages. The BlackBerry Browser offers JavaScript, although different devices have different levels of support.
The next big thing for BlackBerry will be widgets. BlackBerry Widgets are written using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and they provide lightweight applications that can be installed to the device. They can access an extensive JavaScript API for BlackBerry, and you can further enhance them by writing custom JavaScript libraries that access native Java APIs. If you learn to write web apps and Java, you will be in a great position to write BlackBerry Widgets.
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Hello Kickstarter!
We are excited to launch and share our first product - the ODIN - with the Kickstarter community. With your help, we will produce the first Android 'Smart' projector that directly projects online content from a compact, battery-operated device allowing sharing and viewing in unlimited ways.
We are thrilled with ODIN and we think you will be too. We hope you will support our campaign with contributions and by spreading the word to your community!
WHAT CAN I DO WITH ODIN?
ODIN is the ideal product for people who consume most of their entertainment using Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, the web and mobile applications. As we consume more information via the Internet, we need a compact, portable device that gives us a large visual display.
Stream movies from Netflix and Hulu
Access files from Dropbox or Skydrive
Surf the web on a Chrome browser
Use Google Docs and Office 365 to work by connecting a keyboard and mouse
Play Xbox on a big screen
Stream music from your phone to the Bluetooth speakers
Express your creativity in new ways - use as a guide to paint a mural, in an art display, and more
These are just some of the activities you can accomplish with ODIN. We are sure that you will think of thousands of other ways.
Stream and beam Netflix in your living room via ODIN's WiFi. Access to over 1 million apps on the Android ecosystem gives you endless options for online content.
Browse the web or work in Google Docs or Office 365 by connecting a keyboard and mouse (via Bluetooth or USB). Also connect to Dropbox, Google Drive, and other business productivity applications.
Movie night with grandma at the hospital? Easy. Beam Hulu onto a wall and enjoy entertainment in the most unexpected places.
Connect ODIN to an Xbox or/ Playstation and experience game-play in completely new ways.
Create new uses that suit your interests and lifestyle.
DOS OWLS STORY
Sometimes when a problem offers no apparent answers, the only solution is to radically alter the operating parameters.
After being continuously frustrated with paying for cable service I wasn’t using, I decided to make the bold move to cancel my subscription. I was getting all my news and entertainment via the Internet and my mobile phone – watching cable shows on my television was something I rarely did.
Even though my new arrangement was liberating and financially empowering, I soon noticed that I missed the enjoyment of sitting back in my living room and catching a movie on a widescreen television.
I decided to venture out and find a device that would meet my needs. I wanted a product that could handle all my viewing apps (Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, etc.). To my dismay, the only way I could achieve what I desired was hooking up my computer to a bulky projector (prone to inconvenient overheating) and separate, external speakers.
Long story short, that search morphed into the initial idea for the creation of Dos Owls – a multi-functional, portable visual display that solves a slew of A/V problems and opens the door to a limitless universe of content sharing possibilities. It’s battery-powered, wireless (WiFi and Bluetooth), compact and connects effortlessly with the Internet.
Necessity sparked invention and I haven’t looked back since.
- Alex Yoo, Founder
HOW DOES ODIN WORK?
ODIN combines an Android powered PC, state-of-the-art projector, Bluetooth speakers and WiFi in a compact, portable gadget. It is battery operated and can meet the demands of today's digital consumers and creators who value mobility and freedom.
Optical Display
Contains state-of-the-art DMD optical technology that beams powerful LED light and a large screen size.
Place ODIN 1 yard away from the wall, and it displays a 25” screen size
Place it 10 yards away for a 250" screen size.
ODIN's optical lens is so strong, you can see the projected screen with normal indoor lighting at up to 45" screen size, which is bigger than most flat screen TVs.
ANDROID KITKAT OS
Our intuitive user interface allows for simple navigation and organization of all your apps. ODIN uses a quad-core Android microprocessor and KitKat operating system, which provides access to over 1 million Android apps.
Home Page - Preliminary
Settings Page - Preliminary
CONNECTIVITY
ODIN includes array of connection methods. Built in WiFi wirelessly connects to the Internet as well as a phone’s hotspot. Embedded Bluetooth allows for easy communication between external Bluetooth speakers, keyboard, mouse, and other accessories. ODIN has an HDMI port to connect to Xbox or Playstation, two USB drives for a keyboard, mouse, or flash drives, and a headphone plug.
BLUETOOTH SPEAKERS
ODIN has two play modes:
A. Full projector mode using the projector, speakers and access to Android apps
B. Bluetooth speaker mode for streaming music from your phone directly to the two speakers
ODIN sports two 4-watt Bluetooth speakers (to compare, iPhone 5 has one 0.8 watt speaker).
BATTERY
ODIN's battery provides about 2 hours of run-time in portable mode. For extended viewing and charging, just connect ODIN to an outlet with the included power cord.
FUNCTIONAL DESIGN
ODIN is designed with flexibility in mind. Beam onto a wall, or rotate the head 90 degrees and display content on the ceiling for a truly unique viewing experience. (Patent Pending)
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COMPACT SIZE
ODIN is lightweight and similarly sized to a typical paperback book. It can be easily carried in your briefcase, tote bag or jacket pocket for portability. It is 6" long, 4.25" wide, 1.8" thick, and weighs 1.7 pounds.
TODAY'S PROJECTOR SYSTEM
We think pictures do a much better job than any text.
LIVE DEMO
Video below is a live demo during TechCrunch Disrupt.
INSPIRING CREATIVITY
There are many artistic and creative uses for ODIN. For example, use it to create murals and other wall art, as part of an interactive art display, or as a backdrop to a party.
DOS OWLS TEAM
ALEX YOO BIO - FOUNDER
Originally from the suburbs of Chicago and currently residing in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Alex Yoo earned his first professional experience in the fast-paced financial world of Wall Street. For five years, he plied his trade diligently at Houlihan Lokey, Nomura Securities and Tri Artisan Partners.
However, he soon grew restless with the repetitive PowerPoint presentations and Excel sheets, so he decided to make a change. His next venture came about as a matter of necessity. A habitual sharp dresser, he’d always had difficulty finding dress shirts that worked for his body frame. He took a bold risk and launched an online custom shirt company called Alexander West. He poured all his energy and resources into the business, and Alexander West is presently an established player in the NYC custom clothing market.
Alex’s newest project is a tech venture called Dos Owls. The idea stemmed from a desire to enjoy his NetFlix/Hulu content on a more compact, multi-functional device. The first Dos Owls product is called ODIN, and it has several distinct features including an Android processor, portable theater-like viewing, wireless connectivity, exceptional sound output and innovative design.
DOS OWLS TEAM
Brooklyn Creative Team
Alex Yoo, Founder (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn)
Valentin Sidersky, Electrical Engineer (Navy Yard, Brooklyn)
Lance Hazelton, Industrial Design (Bushwick, Brooklyn)
Michael Boswell, Art and Graphic Design (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
Omar McFarlane, Culture + Web (Long Island, NY)
Rob Soucy, Video Director (China Town, Manhattan)
Evelyn Frison, Marketing (Meier Brand, Manhattan)
George Hagan, Copy (Astoria, Queens)
Andrew Zimbelman, Illustrator (Park Slope, Brooklyn)
China Engineering / Production Team
A. Zhang, Technology Lead
W. Chi, Mechanical Engineer
H. Liu, Software
A. Zeng, Software
A. Feng, Hardware
T. Wong, Production
A. Ho, Industrial Design
A. Fong, Hardware
C. Wong, Quality Control
Brooklyn Team Meeting
China Engineering / Production Team Office
ODIN DEVELOPMENT STORY
Alex Yoo:
The initial concept for what is now the Dos Owls ODIN first appeared about two years ago and I started working on developing ODIN in the Spring of 2013. Since I did not come from a technology / engineering background, I had to teach my self the basics of mechanical, industrial, optical, and electrical engineering in addition to design for manufacturing and software development (firmware/OS/application).
First, I attended as many hardware workshops as possible (e.g., Hardware Innovation Workshop by MAKE and Hardware Workshop organized by Marc Barros) and talked to anyone that was in hardware technology development as well as a lot of relevant reading. I also started attending relevant Meetup groups around the NYC area and joined Hack Manhattan hackerspace to hang around technology enthusiasts and makers.
The biggest development hurdle in the beginning was finding skilled and experienced engineers who could develop ODIN in addition to being economically feasible. Due to limited resources, I looked to Asia. With persistence, patience and many trips to Asia, I created connections to talented and experienced Chinese engineers and manufacturers. Shezhen, China has an amazing infrastructure of experienced engineers and electronic production facilities that can't be compared to anywhere in the world.
Our first prototype, based on a dual-core microprocessor, failed to meet our high expectations for performance and user experience. Therefore, we are currently upgrading all of our hardware specifications (to quad-core, more RAM, Bluetooth 4.0, among others) to have robust performance using Andorid 4.4 KitKat operating system.
ODIN Product Specifications
Click to see more pictures.
PLEASE NOTE THAT FINAL SPECIFICATIONS CAN CHANGE. ALL OF OUR REFINEMENTS WILL BE TO IMPROVE THE DEVICE.
GENERAL
4.3" W x 6" L x 1.8" H (at thickest)
~1.7 lbs w/ aluminum base
Black / 10KGold
90 degree adjustable stand
INTERNALS
Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9, 1.6GHz
Android Operating System 4.4 KitKat
2GB DDR RAM
Wi-Fi (B/G/N)
Bluetooth 4.0
16GB Internal Memory
OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY
Display Technology: 0.3" DMD (Direct Micromirror Display)
Light Source: LED (RGB)
Resolution: WVGA (854 x 480)
Contrast Ratio: 1000:1
Throw Ratio: 1.66:1 (meter)
Refresh Rate: 60 Hz
LED Life: 20,000 hours
115 Lumens ANSI
Size: 25" @ 1 yard to Infinity
Manual focus
POWER
Power via DC 5.5mm 12V 3A
Rechargeable Battery 7.4V 3000 mAh
Battery Life: ~ 2 Hours in Portable Mode; ~1 Hr. 15 Min in Full Power Mode
Bluetooth Speaker Mode: ~ 8 Hours
CONNECTIONS
Video: Single HDMI Connection
Audio: 3.5mm TRRS
2 x USB
AUDIO
2 x 4 Watt Bluetooth Speakers
PROTOTYPE AND COMPONENT PICS
Prototype PCB of the Main Android Board
PCB Schematic
DMD Optical Engine - Bottom View. Left is the optics, middle has the micromirrors and right side is the heat sink.
DMD Optical Engine - Top View
Prototype - Ceiling Projection
TIMELINE TO SHIPPING
JUNE
PCBA + SMT Round 2
New Battery Design
New Mouse Pad Design
Prototype #2
Firmware + Android 4.4 Kitkat Development (cont'd)
JULY
Trial Assembly
Thermal Testing
Sound Testing
Windage + Shock Testing
Mold/Tooling Quote
Firmware + Android 4.4 Kitkat Development (cont'd)
AUGUST
Prototype #3
Start Tooling/Molding
HDMI License
UL/CE/FCC Testing
Packaging Design
Carrying Case Design and Fabrication
Firmware + Android 4.4 Kitkat Development (cont'd)
SEPTEMBER
Pilot Run Assembly
Tooling Revision
Battery Certification for Export
Firmware + Android 4.4 Kitkat Development
OCTOBER
Finish First Mass Production Run
Shipment to US
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER
Delay Allowance of 7 weeks
Ship to clients by December 18th
SEEKING PARTNERS
We are currently looking for strategic business partners and financial partners with hardware experience.
Please contact [email protected].
DELIVERABLE
Each ODIN box will include ODIN, power cord and protective carrying case.
PLEDGE GIFTS
$50 MyType Bluetooth Keyboard - Works well with ODIN
MyType Keyboard sucessfully funded on Kickstarter on Augusut 2013. Already backing a different reward? Just add $50 per myType to your existing pledge. Kickstarter Link: http://kck.st/18iA3Sc
Comes in 5 different Colors
$35 Glow in the Dark T-Shirt. Designed by Artist Michael Boswell. Gildan Soft Cotton T-Shirt.
Glowing in the dark. Charge with sunlight and you will GLOW! |
Photo: wisegeek.com
Reading Time: 2 minutes
American Airlines and United Airlines have launched their ‘Basic Economy’ fares, which align it with ultra-low-cost carriers such as Allegiant, Frontier and Spirit, that are rapidly expanding across the USA.
From now on both carriers will sell ‘Basic Economy’ fares, which will entitle travelers only for their seat on the aircraft, and charge extra for amenities such as overhead bin space, baggage check-in and seat selection.
In a statement, American Airlines said that the new product will be available from March 1 in 10 markets only, which are Dallas/Ft. Worth, Philadelphia, Miami and Charlotte, with flights from those markets to several other destinations, including Tampa, New Orleans, Baltimore and Ft. Lauderdale.
“These routes were chosen because they provide a variety of competitive situations. Also, this mix of hubs and other cities is a good fit for preparing our airport operation for Basic Economy,” American Airlines said in a statement.
On the other hand, United has opted to take a more conservative approach, and will first offer the fare in just one market, Minneapolis, to and from domestic hubs before expanding to the rest of the U.S., Caribbean and short-haul Latin America. The Chicago-based carrier will implement the fares for travel by the end of March.
“The launch of our Basic Economy product is transformational – offering customers seeking the most budget-conscious fares United’s comfortable and reliable travel experience across our unmatched network of destinations,” said Scott Kirby, president of United Airlines.
“Basic Economy lets you go where you want to go at our lowest available fare while enjoying United’s Economy cabin and the exceptional inflight service that comes with it.”
The new basic economy fares is the latest of the trends among the US legacy carriers. Initially introduced by Delta Air Lines last year, is now being implemented by American and United. Their decision to establish basic economy on selected routes bring them closer to their ULCC competitors on prices, an effect they desire in the war to lure passengers. |
LOS ANGELES — Keiji Inafune is best known as a game designer who created hit Japanese games such as Mega Man, Onimusha, and Dead Rising. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo this week, he showed off his newest titles, Mighty No. 9, an indie that fans backed on Kickstarter.
He also surprised everyone during the Microsoft press briefing by coming out to talk about ReCore, an exclusive coming next year for Microsoft’s Xbox One. In this game, Inafune’s Comcept USA and Aramture are collaborating to create a new world and intellectual property.
The demo video showed a female lead character, Jewel, on a desert landscape with a robot dog. Enemies attack, and the dog sacrifices itself to save Jewel. She saves the “core” of the dog, and the question becomes whether she can restore that faithful dog to another machine.
I had a translated conversation with Inafune as well as Mark Pacini, development director at Armature, which is building the game with Inafune. It’s expected to come out in 2016.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Image Credit: Microsoft
GamesBeat: Can you tell us what the game is about? How did this get started?
Keiji Inafune: Prior to forming Comcept, back in my Capcom days, we worked on a project with Armature. Even at that time, I knew there was something special about this relationship. We were very much in sync in terms of the ideas being there, being able to collaborate and exchange ideas. We weren’t able to fully realize that project, but since forming Comcept, we’ve been talking to Armature about what we can do next and how we can work out this partnership.
We came to Armature with the initial idea of what is today ReCore. At the same time, Armature was looking to work on some projects with Microsoft. We got together and presented the idea to Microsoft. There was a great reaction from the Microsoft team.
Typically we hear about the challenges that naturally come with eastern and western developers partnering. But in that sense we feel like we’ve already built a great trust and foundation from when we were working with them before Recore. It’s been a true collaborative process in the best possible way. We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We know where to pick and choose which idea should work in this project. It’s a true collaboration between parties on this project.
GamesBeat: What’s the backstory for the game itself?
Inafune: At a very high level, the image or illustration of the story background—this main character, Jewel, as far as she’s concerned she finds out that she may be one of the last remaining survivors in this world. At the same time, it’s ruled by these robots. She doesn’t know why or how these things happened, but she quickly figures out that this dog, this robotic companion, is someone she can partner with.
Throughout the progression of the game, a lot of the mysteries of the world—If I’m the last remaining human survivor, how is this world going to continue to live on? What’s my purpose here? All that will be unraveled as you progress through the game.
Image Credit: Microsoft
GamesBeat: It’s interesting to see a woman as the main character. That seems like a big trend at E3 this year.
Mark Pacini: Jewel just fit the story we were trying to tell. There wasn’t anything more intentional than that. She fit in the world that we were trying to create and the story we wanted to tell, that struggle for humanity. It made sense for us very early in development to have a woman as the protagonist.
GamesBeat: Was there any particular inspiration that led you to pull this world together, or the character? |
(Note: These rankings are based on players' projected performances in 2016-17. Players are listed at their official NHL position when the rankings were created.)
Here’s the Yahoo Sports ranking of the top 25 defensemen in the NHL for the 2016-17 season. Let us know what you think in the comments section.
1. Erik Karlsson, Ottawa Senators: Just ask anybody, he’s the best defenseman in the league.
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2. Drew Doughty, Los Angeles Kings: Just ask anybody, he’s the best defenseman in the league.
3. Victor Hedman, Tampa Bay Lightning: A beauty and a beast.
4. Duncan Keith, Chicago Blackhawks: He’s logged a lot of miles on a not-real-big body, but who else would you rather have out there when it’s all on the line?
5. Kris Letang, Pittsburgh Penguins: So smooth you take him for granted. Don’t.
Hot dog? P.K. Subban looks good in Nashville's mustard jersey after shocking summertime trade. (AP)
6. P.K. Subban, Nashville Predators: Vive la difference. Right, Montreal?
7. Brent Burns, San Jose Sharks: Wookie of the year (and it wasn’t close).
8. Roman Josi, Nashville Predators: Nothing neutral about Swiss star’s game.
9. Mark Giordano, Calgary Flames: After a couple of Norris Trophy-caliber seasons were derailed by injury, he didn’t quite reach the same level last season. Still one of the best all-around defensemen in the game, though.
10. Shea Weber, Montreal Canadiens: They say he’s on the decline, but we’ve got big expectations for his debut season in Montreal.
11. Alex Pietrangelo, St. Louis Blues: His offense has leveled off the past couple of years, probably because he’s doing so much of everything else.
12. Marc-Edouard Vlasic, San Jose Sharks: He’s not completely unheralded, but he should be much more heralded…if that’s a word. (It is. We looked it up.)
13. John Carlson, Washington Capitals: The best defenseman on the East’s best (regular season) team.
Story continues
14. Anton Stralman, Tampa Bay Lightning: Not real big, just real good.
15. Dustin Byfuglien, Winnipeg Jets: Real big and real good. Did we mention that he’s real big?
He's been great so far and the best is yet to come for 20-year-old Aaron Ekblad. (Getty)
16. Aaron Ekblad, Florida Panthers: He’ll be higher on this list next year, no doubt about it.
17. John Klingberg, Dallas Stars: He’ll be higher on this list next year, no doubt about it.
18. Ryan McDonagh, New York Rangers: The captain is the straw that stirs the Rangers.
19. Jay Bouwmeester, St. Louis Blues: Actions speak louder than words.
20. Ryan Suter, Minnesota Wild: Veteran leader keeps going and going.
21. T.J. Brodie, Calgary Flames: Drives Calgary’s offense from the back seat.
22. Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Arizona Coyotes: Back-to-back 20-plus goal seasons is quite an accomplishment for an NHL defenseman in the 21st century.
23. Rasmus Ristolainen, Buffalo Sabres: Buffalo has a horse.
24. Zdeno Chara, Boston Bruins: Think he’s done? You tell him.
25. Jacob Trouba, Winnipeg Jets: Just getting started.
(The next five: Tyson Barrie, Colorado Avalanche; Brent Seabrook, Chicago Blackhawks; Jake Muzzin, Los Angeles Kings; Shayne Gostisbehere, Philadelphia Flyers; Karl Alzner, Washington Capitals.)
MORE NHL COVERAGE ON YAHOO SPORTS: |
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When it comes to the New York Islanders and their pending unrestricted free agents, the writing appears on the wall for forward Kyle Okposo.
For some time now, it has looked like his time with the Islanders is at an end, and he’ll head to the open market.
However, when it comes to Frans Nielsen, the 32-year-old forward and another pending UFA, there appears to be optimism for the Islanders, with July 1 approaching.
From Newsday:
“We’re just in a situation with the salary cap that you really have to analyze where you are today and where you’re going to be in five years from now. So there’s always tough decisions,” Snow said. “Kyle’s a great person. He’s been a terrific player for this organization. Wish him nothing but the best.”
Snow was not asked about Matt Martin or Frans Nielsen, but sources indicated that Snow and Marc Levine, Nielsen’s agent, have been in contact on a long-term deal in recent days.
Martin, like Okposo, appears headed for a new team once free agency begins on July 1.
Nielsen, at the end of a four-year, $11 million contract, finished third on the Islanders in points with 52 in 81 games during the regular season, behind John Tavares and Okposo. He also scored 20 goals, fourth on the team in that category.
In addition to solid production, Nielsen was also relied on for special teams, averaging 1:59 of ice time per game on the penalty kill and 2:43 of ice time per game on the power play.
(The Islanders had the fourth best PK in the league during the regular season, but the 17th-ranked power play.)
There could also be something else in the works for the Islanders.
Citing anonymous sources, Arthur Staple of Newsday also reported that the Islanders GM would be willing to part with the 19th overall pick in next week’s draft as part of a package to land an “established NHL forward.”
Two developments worth keeping an eye on in the coming days. |
Police have evicted Occupy Boston protesters from Boston’s Dewey Square, where hundreds have camped out since Sept. 30, The Associated Press reported.
Police started clearing away tents at 5 a.m. this morning, according to the AP, and arrested 46 protesters who wouldn’t leave on charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct. The eviction occurred peacefully, Bloomberg Businessweek reported, with a member of Occupy Boston’s media team praising the police for not using pepper spray or excessive force.
Mayor Thomas Menino had ordered the Occupy protesters to leave by midnight on Dec. 8, but the crowd at the park swelled to more than 1,500 people as the deadline loomed, and the police did not take action until today, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. “We wanted to avoid confrontation,” Police Commissioner Edward Davis told Bloomberg Businessweek.
More from GlobalPost: Occupy Boston: Future in doubt
According to the Boston Globe:
Davis said they spent weeks planning and refining their strategy for how they would move in to end the protest, and said that they learned a lot from speaking with police chiefs across the country, especially Philadelphia’s police chief Charles Ramsey.
“They stressed community relations, they stressed transparency, and so it was really going back to our roots as a community policing department and applying the lessons we learned in the neighborhoods in developing relationships with the protestors,” Davis told the Boston Globe.
Boston Police Superintendent William Evans told the Boston Globe he had gotten to know some of Occupy Boston’s core members over the past two months, even giving out his personal cell phone number to them, and that had helped maintain order. “There’s a great group of kids down there at Occupy Boston,” he said. “When we needed help, I called them, they called me, and together we were able to get situations that could have gotten out of control back to normal.”
“You cannot evict an idea whose time has come,” Occupy Boston said in a statement it released today, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. “Boston Occupiers will persist in rejecting a world created by and for the 1 percent. We will continue to challenge Wall Street’s occupation of our government.” |
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday defended herself against allegations that she had disregarded proper email procedures while at the State Department, thus obscuring her activities from public scrutiny.
“Looking back, it would have been better if I’d simply used a second email account,” Clinton said during a press conference after her keynote address at the annual United Nations Women’s Empowerment Principles meeting. “At the time, this didn’t seem like an issue.”
The press conference was Clinton’s attempt to calm a media firestorm stemming from a New York Times report that she did not use or even have a government email account while serving as President Obama‘s first Secretary of State and that her aides had not taken any measures to preserve four years’ worth of emails that were supposed to be archived for public review under federal record-keeping law.
Clinton explained that she decided to use a personal email account “for convenience,” because she “thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.”
This claim struck many on Twitter as odd, given the ease with which modern smartphones allow users to use multiple email accounts or combine multiple email accounts into a single inbox.
True story: I also merged my work and email accounts because it was more convenient. And it was. End of my story. — Jack Mirkinson (@jackmirkinson) March 10, 2015
I have three email addresses on one iphone. — Lizzie O’Leary (@lizzieohreally) March 10, 2015
(Sorry, this embed was not found.)
Clinton also said during the press conference that she deleted 30,000 personal emails—about half of the total message count after her four-year term in office.
After her team had completed the process of selecting work-related emails and sending them to the State Department, “I chose not to keep my private personal emails,” she said.
Asked why she deleted emails she deemed personal if her account was secure, Clinton responded, “They were personal and private, about matters that I believed were in the scope of my personal privacy and that, particularly, of other people.
“I didn’t see any reason to keep them,” she added.
Clinton’s comment that “no one wants their personal emails made public” was met with particular online scorn given that it was her decision to merge work and personal emails in the first place.
Clinton: “No one wants their personal e-mails made public.” She needn’t have worried about that if she hadn’t, um, used her personal email — Brian Fung (@b_fung) March 10, 2015
Clinton said that her aides undertook a “thorough process” to select emails for preservation at the State Department, and she called her decision to let the department release all of those emails an “unprecedented step.”
The State Department has said that it is reviewing the 50,000 emails that Clinton’s team deemed worthy of turning over—in printed form—last week. That process is expected to take several months. When it is complete, a department spokesperson said Tuesday, the government will post Clinton’s emails online, beginning with 900 pages of Benghazi-related emails sent to the House committee investigating the Sept. 11, 2012, attack.
“I went above and beyond what I was requested to do,” Clinton said.
Only Clinton and her aides had access to the account, and thus, no independent party was ever in a position to judge her determinations of messages as either “work” or “personal.”
most important thing here: hrc deleted the account so we’ll never know what else she didn’t hand over to state — Michael S. Schmidt (@nytmike) March 10, 2015
Many lawsuits & investigations hang on whether emails or docs are “relevant” or work-related, often a debatable issue even in good faith. — Ari Melber (@AriMelber) March 10, 2015
Clinton began shaking her head as soon as a reporter started forming a question about whether she or her staff had deleted any work-related emails.
“I have absolute confidence,” Clinton told reporters, “that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department.”
She added later, “I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by.”
Clinton pointed out that other former Secretaries of State had used personal email accounts while in office, but what distinguished her case from those of her predecessors was the fact that her team set up a private email server, further distancing her records from government subpoenas and complicating journalists’ attempts to hold her accountable.
At the press conference, Clinton rebuffed suggestions of an independent analysis of her home server, saying, “The server will remain private.”
She added that there had been “no security breaches” on that server and that she had never sent classified material in an email.
“I thought using one device would be simpler,” Clinton said when asked if she felt she had made a mistake. “Obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way.”
Photo via marcn/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Fernando Alfonso III |
Lucky to be Canadian: Netflix subscribers in the Great White North will be able to stream “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” in 2016, the only territory where the company currently has secured streaming rights for the film.
The reason Netflix will be able to offer the much-anticipated movie in Canada next year — and not in the U.S. or anywhere else — has to do with the timing of when Disney’s pay-TV distribution deals were up for grabs.
In the U.S., premium cable channel Starz has an exclusive output deal with Disney that runs through the end of 2015; Netflix’s pact with the Mouse House commences with 2016 titles. With “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” slated for Dec. 18 theatrical debut, that means Starz will be the pay-TV home for the movie in the U.S.
Fortuitously for Netflix Canada subs, the company’s deal with Disney started with 2015 releases after the previous agreements for the pay-TV window with Corus Entertainment and Bell Canada expired. A Netflix rep confirmed “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is slated to come to the service in the country; under the terms of the deal, that will occur approximately eight months after the movie leaves theaters.
The issue of digital rights arose earlier this week, when Disney revealed plans to launch DisneyLife, a subscription service with movies, TV shows, books and music, in the U.K. and across Europe. While movies from the “Star Wars” franchise and Marvel will not be included at launch, Disney might launch subscription services for each of those brands in the future, according to CEO Bob Iger.
For Netflix, obtaining worldwide rights to acquired and original programming is a big priority, as it expects to launch service in some 200 countries by the end of 2016. The streamer recently cut worldwide rights deals for three TV shows: CW’s “Jane the Virgin,” CBS’s “Zoo” and USA’s upcoming dystopian drama “Colony.”
Meanwhile, although “The Force Awakens” won’t likely hit most Netflix queues anytime soon, older films in the mega-franchise could become available on SVOD.
On Netflix’s third-quarter 2015 earnings call last week, chief content officer Ted Sarandos said the company was in talks with Disney about the possibility of licensing past “Star Wars” movies.
“It’s up to Disney how they want to manage access to those assets before, during or after the release of ‘Star Wars VII.’ So it’s certainly an ongoing discussion,” Sarandos said.
Disney, which bought Lucasfilm in 2012, controls rights to five of the six previous “Star Wars” pictures, while 21st Century Fox owns rights to the original 1977 “Star Wars.”
Last month, Disney and Fox inked deals with China’s Tencent to stream the first six “Star Wars” movies in the world’s most-populous nation. No release date for “The Force Awakens” has been set for China as yet. |
Designer/writer David McCandless combed through 10,000 Facebook status updates looking for breakup trends, then packaged the data into this tidy green graph — a summation of which comes courtesy Mathias Mikkelsen:
-A big peak right before Spring Break
-Most breakups are announced on Mondays
-People like to start the summer being single
-A big peak right before Christmas
-The lowest day throughout the whole year is Christmas Day
A reverse graph showing engagements would also be interesting. Internet, do you have one of those? (It should also be noted that this graph doesn’t take into consideration the calm people who keep their relationships private and thus never have to go through the public spectacle of posting a heart/broken heart. And who are generally out of college/not quite so cut to the core by spring break.) |
Preview: Star Wars: The Old Republic 1.2 “Legacy”
Giuseppe Nelva April 6, 2012 5:45:03 PM EST
Yesterday, a handful of heroes from websites and magazines all over the world got a chance to try the endgame content of the upcoming 1.2 “Legacy” update of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Today, I’m here writing on what a German, two Americans and an Italian can accomplish when faced with a seemingly endless horde of Rakghouls and quite a lot more.
Star Wars: The Old Republic 1.2 is definitely one of the biggest early patches I’ve seen for a MMORPG. Not only does it add a new Operation, a Flashpoint and a Warzone, but it also brings a slew of mechanical changes and improvements that overhaul the game quite radically, and for the better.
The most basic and sweeping change included in the update is doubtlessly the customizable UI. The default one that came at launch wasn’t exactly a prime example of functionality, and the lack of customization options worsened the problem. BioWare’s designers went above and beyond the call of duty to amend that, designing one of the most richly featured UI customization systems I’ve seen in a while, giving the player as much freedom as possible short of letting him actually design the UI by himself with Photoshop and xml spreadsheets.
Every window can be resized, hidden and moved at leisure, but that only scratches the surface of what can be done. Each menu has it’s own unique options that provide a further layer of customization, and everything is very easy, quick and as intuitive to handle as dragging and dropping windows and pulling some sliders back and forth. In the screenshots coming with this preview you can see my own custom UI. You’ll probably notice that it’s very different from the original interface (and much more convenient), and it took me no more than 20 minutes to create.
The ability to save and load multiple setups and to transfer the files between different computers easily turns this feature into one of my favorite additions to the game, together with the option to open as many windows as we want and to move and overlap them at leisure. It honestly makes me wonder what the designers of the original interface were thinking, but trying 1.2 led me to be much more forgiving towards the initial misstep.
The main course of update 1.2 is obviously the implementation of the titular Legacy System. Creating alternate characters is nothing new in MMORPGs, but implementing a system that ties those characters together and unlocks advantages for all of them is definitely an interesting innovation that builds up on the philosophy behind the design of SWTOR: BioWare never aimed to reinvent the core gameplay of the genre, but they brought a lot of fresh ideas to the mechanics around it, creating something that generally plays like your usual MMORPG, but still feels quite different and new.
The Legacy System is a lot of fun to play with. It allows you to decide what ties bind your characters on the same server, whether they are blood ties, familial ties or looser ones like rivalries or alliances. By progressing each of the characters in a legacy advantages can be unlocked for them all, progressively smoothing the leveling process and adding flavor and utility options even for established characters that already reached the endgame.
Getting a quasi-human character to level 50 unlocks its race for use with all the classes, allowing you to create exotic combinations like a Chiss Jedi Knight or a Twi’lek Sith Warrior. If the capped character is human, the advantage is different, providing a +100 bonus to the presence of all characters in the Legacy.
This may seem a marginal advantage, but it really isn’t. Presence boosts the performance of companions across the board, and +100 isn’t a small increment. Unlocking a cyborg will instead make all the class-specific cyber parts available to all classes.
A further layer of unlocks is related to the class of each character. By progressing through the chapters of each story you can unlock special class-related emotes (for instance my Sith Warrior unlocked an ominous dark side aura similar to my out of combat self-heal), the ability to use the group buff specific to that class with the other characters and a special heroic power usable only during Heroic Moments.
That’s an interesting flavor addition, as in the case of my Sith Warrior it will allow all my other characters to use Force Choke. The Heroic Moment requirement is a simple but effective balance check, as it can’t be used without a companion, keeping potentially unbalancing powers out of the way of PvP and endgame raids.
Companion unlocks build over the previous layer, providing sizable stat bonuses the first time a companion belonging to a certain archetype gets his or her affection maxed out, while further unlocks in the same archetype provide a cumulative bonus to Presence which, as I already explained, isn’t exactly unimportant.
More unlocks are bound to the legacy level progression, ranging from a rocket boost to sprint faster for a short while, to several convenience updates for the ship belonging to every character in the legacy, passing by cooldown reductions for the Quick Travel and Fleet Pass features.
A final layer allows to unlock a series of unarmed combat attacks by progressing in the valor ladder, a set of flavor emotes (and quite interesting ones at that, as they include props like binoculars, datapads or welders) by reaching set social levels and two “good and evil” companion-related powers unlocked by reaching the two extremes of the force alignment spectrum.
If you’re interested in this kind of unlocks, i’d advise to start saving your credits, because they don’t come cheap, ranging from the 100,000 of the first stage of fleet pass cooldown reduction to a whopping 2 million for the Rocket Boost.
As a rather interesting icing on the cake the legacy menu also includes a “Coming Soon” section, showing the legacy unlocks that will come with patch 1.3. Here’s a rundown:
Flashpoint Experience Bonus I-V (This and the two following are rather self explanatory)
Space Experience Bonus I-V
Warzone Experience Bonus I-V
Legacy of Altruism I-III (Gifts given to companions grant more affection)
Legacy of Persuasion I-III (Conversation options grant more companion affection)
Legacy of Crafting I-III (Raises the crafting critical chance)
Legacy of Leadership I-II (Companions sell junk faster)
Celerity I-II (An Increase to sprint speed)
Legacy Speeder License (Allows the use of a level 25 speeder at level 10)
Repair Droid (Summons a droid to repair equipment anywhere on the field)
Priority Medevac (Grants more health when respawning at the med center)
Field Respec (Allows to respect one’s talents without returning to the fleet or capital planet)
Portable Mailbox (Summons a mailbox)
Ultimately the Legacy system isn’t only innovative, but also fun to play with and rewarding. I can’t say I’m not eager to check out the advanced unlocks on my characters when the patch will go live.
Those that reached the end game are probably looking forward to the new operation Explosive Conflict, the new flashpoint Lost Island and the new warzone Novare Coast. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to try the warzone, but I got some good hands-on time with Lost Island and Explosive Conflict.
Lost Island is the direct sequel of Kaon Under Siege, prompting players to invade Doctor Lorrick’s secret base in order to put an end to his warped experiments. It provides some nice closure to the mini-storyline and a definitely palatable challenge for those that consider the previous flashpoints a tad on the easy side.
While it features the usual sequence of hordes of trash mobs and bosses, the mechanics are almost always quite complex and very challenging. Even minor trash mobs require precise coordination between party members in order to overcome the tricks they hold up their sleeves, and players that charge in expecting some dull tank and spank will probably find themselves sent back to the med center in a few seconds. It sure happened to us quite a few times.
To give an example, there are groups composed by Security Droids, Guard Droids and smaller Astromech Droids (of which I don’t remember the precise name). The Astromech Droids can grapple a player, progressively slowing him down to a full stun, depending how many droids are in action. The Security droids drop some energy pools that deal a lot of damage on a fixed area of the ground. The two attacks can prove definitely deadly in combination, and only a well coordinated group will be able to kill the droids efficiently enough to avoid their members getting stunned in the middle of an energy pool and slaughtered.
Bosses aren’t less vicious and require no less coordination, in addition to good reflexes for interrupts and the ability to stay constantly mobile. The fight against the LR-5 Sentinel Droid is one of the most fun I tried in a flashpoint, while the bonus boss Transgenic Sample Eleven is simply spectacular, with its ability to drop massive stalactites from the ceiling on players unable to move out of the way quick enough.
Ultimately tension is kept high for little more than a hour (which is more or less the time required to complete the flashpoint) and the quality is at the very least on par with Kaon Under Siege (which is already excellent), if not superior.
While our brave but ragtag band managed to finish Lost Island, Explosive Conflict proved an impossible challenge, partly because coordinating a raid of eight writers that never played with each other and coming with large differences in their equipment and in their raiding experience isn’t exactly an easy task, but mostly because the Operation is really, really hard.
Many hardcore raiders demanded a higher level of challenge for upcoming content, deeming the current Operations too easy, and BioWare definitely moved to make them happy. Trash mobs come in high numbers and deal quite a lot of damage, risking to easily trample over an unprepared group, and the bosses are simply brutal. Even just the first pair will force guilds to really step up their game in order to be overcome, as they require a very precise tank switching (don’t even think to beat them with a single tank), while damage dealers and haelers will have to be really at their best in order to finish before the enrage timer expires with obvious devastating effects.
One of the most impressive elements of Explosive Conflict is its environmental design. Think of Alderaan, but even more charming, creating a stark contrast between the beautiful planet and it’s slightly alien color palette and the devastating conflict threatening to tear it apart.
A less pubblicized endgame addition is the “Black Hole” series of daily quests on Corellia. The story behind it is definitely pleasing (at least on the Imperial side, as I didn’t have a chance to check the Republic side) and some of the quests include very original mechanics that turn them in some of my favorite features of the patch.
For instance in one of the mission the player will be accompanied by an infrared illuminator droid and will have to navigate a maze. The maze is littered by blinking infrared traps that will be evidenced by the droid and will have to be avoided.
Another quest includes a large radioactive pool that can be crossed only using a rapidly expiring stim. Killing some of the droids walking around the pool will net players more of the precious protective stims, forcing them to balance between moving fast and killing enemies to avoid falling to the effects of radiation.
Both mission create little but very pleasant diversion from the usual “kill and fetch” questing mold, and show that the design team at BioWare definitely doesn’t lack imagination. While dailies tend to be a bit of a chore on the long run (no matter how good the content is, you can play it only so much before it becomes stale), I can see myself taking a lot longer to get bored of the ones I just described.
I also got a chance to test the new guild banks: the system is definitely fully featured, letting guild leaders set a wide array of settings like withdraw allowances for both items and credits. It also includes a full log and the ability to use the guild’s money to repair damaged equipment. That option will definitely please many raiders, as they often find rather unfair differences between the expenses each class has to face in order to keep gear in prime condition.
Moving to cosmetics, Star Wars: The Old Republic 1.2 includes a “Unify Colors to Chest” feature, that will certainly please those that hate walking around with mismatched equipment. Thanks to the Customize Appearance menu it’s possible to change the color of each piece of equipment to match the scheme of the chest piece. The most interesting part of this feature is that it applies an actual color scheme that has been devised for each item by BioWare’s artists, instead of randomly painting an item with a single color like most dye systems, creating a really appealing set of looks that, paired with the extended crafting and modding systems coming with the patch will grant players a really broad spectrum of styles to chose from.
The new Texture Atlasing option contributes to the overall eyecandy effect, improving the quality of character textures tenfold during gameplay. If you were worried about it causing losses in framerate, you might want to rest easy. At least on my system not only the framerate didn’t drop with every option (including Texture Atlasing) maxed out, but it actually improved visibly across the board by at least 10-15 frames per second. I’m not sure how BioWare managed to achieve that, but they did, and the smoother framerate is very noticeable.
Ultimately update 1.2 is a definite improvement for Star Wars: The Old Republic, bringing high quality and challenging content to the game, and a whole array of functional and cosmetic improvements that improve the game quite radically. If you want to get a further glimpse on the visuals and on the content of the patch, just check the gallery below, there should be enough screenshots to satisfy your curiosity. |
S2J (an abbreviation for Smoke2Jointz) is a Melee Captain Falcon professional who is considered to be the one of the three best Falcon players in the world, along with Wizzrobe and n0ne. He is currently ranked 4th on the SoCal Melee Power Rankings and 11th on the 2018 MPGR.
Playing style [ edit ]
Even for a player of his caliber, S2J has an excellent neutral game, using a combination of precise wave-dashing and dash-dancing to perfectly space his attacks. He is also one of the best defensive Falcons with good smash DI and mix-ups with Falcon's otherwise poor recovery. His punish game is notorious among smashers for being able to 0-death with just one combo (usually beginning with a grab), which is known as a Johnny Stock. He is also a read-heavy player.
A major weakness of S2J's game is his poor edgeguarding. While it has been recently getting better, he is still known to make poor decisions and sometimes even self-destructing by just attempting to edgeguard like at Apex 2015 against PPMD and at The Big House 5 against Abate. He also admitted that his mental game could get better if not for having a mindblock against Westballz, Lucky, and SFAT, 3 players who he frequently plays against and loses to for the most part. He said that this is the main reason that he hasn't reached the top 10 spots on the SSBMRank, particularly the 6th-10th spots. Due to his read-heavy playstyle, he also relies on the player's habits, meaning he does better against other players he has played before.
Tournament placings [ edit ]
Trivia [ edit ] |
Flickr/IRRI Photos A searing report in The New York Times on Monday revealed that an American trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of today's average American yearly income to publish a review of heart health studies that made sugar look less unhealthy than it really is — and to paint fat as the villain instead.
The review, originally published in 1967, featured a handful of studies The Times says were cherry-picked by the sugar group.
"They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades," Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco who researched the sugar industry's impact on our understanding of health, told The Times.
As an American who recently moved to the UK and grew up at the height of the low-fat diet craze, I find this infuriating. At the same time, I'm not surprised: Dozens of registered dietitians, public-health experts, and obesity researchers I've spoken with in the US over the past few years have repeatedly told me that the sugar in our diets is far worse for us than the fat.
Even though I grew up in California with two health-conscious parents, our kitchen was still subject to the antifat frenzy. Our fridge was always stocked with margarine, not butter; low-fat products (rather than low-sugar or no-sugar-added ones) ruled our pantry. Even today, if I were to take a walk down the "health foods" aisle of my hometown grocery store, I'd most likely find its shelves teeming with low-fat (high-sugar) foods.
Flickr/Stacey Spensley
The good news is that we're finally uncovering the truth.
We now know, for example, that, for most people, cutting fat from our diet not only fails to help us lose weight — it also doesn't slash our risk of heart disease. An eight-year trial involving almost 50,000 women, roughly half of whom went on a low-fat diet, found that those on the low-fat plan didn't lower their risk of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or heart disease. Plus, they didn't lose much weight, if any. Another recent study took a look at what would happen if people swapped the calories they were getting from specific types of fat with calories from simple carbohydrates (sugar) and found that the change had zero observable health benefits.
Excess sugar, on the other hand (especially in the form of soda) has been linked with several negative outcomes, including weight gain and obesity. A systematic review of 50 years of studies published in the American Society for Clinical Nutrition in 2006 found a link between the amount of sugar-sweetened beverages people consumed and weight gain and obesity.
"The science base linking the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages to the risk of chronic diseases is clear," the authors wrote in their paper.
Why sugar is the real culprit when it comes to weight gain
When we eat large amounts of sugar and don't balance these calories with those from protein and fat, which the body breaks down more slowly, it can lead to dramatic rises and drops in blood sugar. These "crashes" can cause "hanger," or what's known as being angry and hungry at the same time.
All carbohydrates — bread, cereal, or potatoes — are ultimately broken down into glucose, which circulates in our blood and gives us energy. Sugars get broken down quickly and tend to raise blood glucose most dramatically. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most of the calories that Americans are getting from sugar are coming from processed foods like cereals, granola bars, breads, and cakes.
Eat more fats — but make sure they're the right kinds
For the paper in which researchers looked at the effects of swapping calories from fat with those from sugar, researchers studied the eating habits of more than 126,000 people who submitted health questionnaires every few years for up to three decades. Next, the authors tested what would happen if those people swapped out 5% of the calories in their diets from saturated fat (the types of fats most often found in meat and dairy products) with one of three other things: A) calories from simple carbohydrates like sugars and refined grains; B) calories from monounsaturated fats, like the kind found in avocados and olive oil; or C) calories from polyunsaturated fats, like the kind found in oily fish and nuts.
Flickr/Jennifer Not surprisingly, the first option — replacing the calories from saturated fats with calories from simple carbs — was not linked with any observable health benefits.
But the second and third options appeared to be connected with several healthy outcomes. Overall, swapping calories from saturated fats with calories from monounsaturated fats, like the kind found in avocados and olive oil, was linked with a 27% decrease in death of any kind as well as lower rates of heart disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative disease.
This is in line with dozens of recent studies supporting the idea that healthy fats, like those from nuts, fish, and avocados, are good for us, so long as we eat them in moderation. So add them back into your diet if you haven't already, and look to cut back on your intake of refined carbs and sugary snack foods instead.
These basics are a good place to start: |
By Nicholas Sciria
Follow @Nick_Sciria
With a series of reality warping dunks during All-Star weekend, Orlando Magic forward Aaron Gordon let fly the imagination. His potential, in that moment, seemed as boundless as his hang time.
Of course, flights still require clear runways. And with a series of moves this offseason, the Magic front office may have unwittingly constrained their top prospect.
In February, after trading Channing Frye to the Cleveland Cavaliers and sending Tobias Harris to the Detroit Pistons, the Magic seemed ready to give Gordon all of the minutes he could handle. The departures of Harris and Frye freed up a significant role in the starting lineup for Gordon, whose playing time increased by 6.1 minutes per game after the All-Star Break.
With the uptick in minutes and a more concrete role as the team’s starting power forward, Gordon began showing flashes of brilliance. Gordon improved as a scorer in his second year, increasing his scoring average by 3.7 points per 100 possessions. He was more efficient as well, increasing his true shooting percentage by 2.4 percent.
Additionally, Gordon also grew more comfortable in creating for others during his sophomore campaign, increasing his assists by 1.3 assists per 100 possessions. At power forward, Gordon was able to take advantage of slower defenders who don’t regularly guard players with Gordon’s athletic ability, despite lacking a tight handle.
At this point in his development, Gordon is most comfortable attacking closeouts against slower defenders. Here, a straight line drive opens up because Jahlil Okafor isn’t quick enough laterally to contain Gordon’s dribble drive:
As the numbers indicate, Gordon grew increasingly comfortable in making plays for himself and his teammates from the power forward position. Despite a bump in usage percentage, his turnovers fell by .6 turnovers per 100 possessions compared to his rookie season.
Despite these improvements, it is still clear that Gordon’s ability to create was aided by the uniqueness of his tools at the power forward position. When comparing his numbers at small forward and power forward, this underlying theme is revealed:
(source: Nylon Calculus)
One important aspect of the above table is rebounding production, which falls by 1.1 rebounds per 36 minutes when playing small forward last season. Plays like the one below are why Gordon needs to be as close to the rim as possible, increasing his chance to grab both offensive and defensive rebounds and make positive plays:
In terms of shooting, Gordon improved from nearly every range on higher frequencies in his sophomore campaign. However, the current shooting percentages do not indicate a player who is ready to take on more shooting responsibilities on the wing.
(source: Basketball-Reference, NBA.com/Stats)
At power forward, Gordon can find open 3-pointers with relative ease by setting a ball screen and popping like here. Big men like Tiago Splitter struggle closing out to players behind the arc after containing the ball handler, which can open up Gordon for an uncontested 3-point attempts.
Despite Gordon’s development, Orlando made several moves this offseason which could supplant Gordon from the role he thrived in last year. First, the Magic acquired Serge Ibaka in an attempt to cover up some of Nikola Vucevic’s deficiencies on the defensive end of the floor. Consequently, Ibaka’s addition will force Aaron Gordon to slide over to the small forward position next season.
After the Ibaka acquisition, it was still possible for the Magic to give Gordon significant minutes at power forward. However, the Magic went on to sign Jeff Green to a one-year, $15 million deal, and he will most likely play minutes at power forward this season as well. Orlando will be Green’s fourth team in three seasons, and at 29 years old, he has very little upside. Additionally, Green’s on-court impact has been questionable at best over the past few seasons, as he hasn’t posted an on-court +/- per 100 possessions better than +.1 points since 2010. Green’s addition only clogs Orlando’s frontcourt, and he will most likely wind up taking away time from Gordon in a vital season in his career.
Along with Green, the Magic also signed Bismack Biyombo in free agency, meaning that Ibaka will play most of his minutes at power forward this upcoming season. This is important to note because Orlando’s best theoretical lineup features Ibaka and Gordon alongside each other, a frontcourt pairing that ESPN’s Zach Lowe recently discussed. In this lineup, Ibaka can protect the rim as the center while Gordon chases power forwards on the perimeter. This scenario assumes that Vucevic would take on a bench role, where his struggles on the defensive end would be less concerning against backup big men. However, the Magic have chosen to change Gordon’s position, limit Ibaka’s dominance as a rim protector, and amplify Vucevic’s lackluster defense.
So now, the Magic will experiment with Gordon at small forward, a risk that has the makings of a potential disaster. For one, Gordon’s limitations from the outside—which were less significant at the power forward position—will become more inescapable at small forward. Beyond his shooting, Gordon’s ability to drive and create plays will turn from a luxury to a necessity as he switches positions. Gordon will likely struggle (at least to start) creating as much as he did from the power forward position. At small forward, there will not be as many straight line drive opportunities, meaning Gordon will need a more advanced handle and an even deeper understanding of playmaking reads to mimic last year’s success.
Ultimately, Orlando’s recent moves signal a lack of awareness and direction in a franchise that once had a hopeful future. The improvements Gordon displayed during his sophomore year should have rewarded him with a bigger role offensively, not an entirely new and foreign position. In the end, it’s fair to say that the Magic can improve upon their 35-win season from last year in the upcoming season, but Orlando’s treatment of Aaron Gordon could compromise their once tangible long-term advantage.
[newsbox style=”nb1″ display=”tag” tag=”staff” title=”More from BBALLBREAKDOWN Staff” number_of_posts=”2″ show_more=”no” nb_excerpt=”0″] |
Mother admits travelling to Raqqa to live under sharia law but denies joining ISIS and encouraging acts of terror
She said following alleged jihadis and extremists on Twitter did not make her a terrorist
Shakil, 26, tells jury she returned 'of her own free will' after change of heart
A mother accused of taking her toddler son to Syria to join ISIS told a court today that she 'made a mistake' going to live under the terror group's rule.
Tareena Shakil, 26, from Birmingham who fled to the self-declared caliphate in October 2014 after telling her family she was going on holiday to Turkey, told a jury she came back of her 'own free will' after a change of heart.
She denies joining ISIS and encouraging acts of terror through Twitter posts, and told Birmingham Crown Court that the fact she followed alleged jihadis and extremist preachers on the social network did not make her a terrorist.
British mother Tareena Shakil (pictured), who accused of taking her toddler son to Syria to join ISIS, told a court today that she 'made a mistake' going to live under the terror group's rule
'I followed Bet 365 bingo [on Twitter] as well, but I've never been on their website,' she said.
Under a second day of cross-examination from Sean Larkin QC, prosecuting, Shakil explained why she fled ISIS territory on January 7 2015.
'I came back of my own free will,' she said. 'You didn't extradite me.
'I came back because I realised I had made a mistake.'
She had already admitted travelling to the so-called Islamic State and living in the defacto capital, Raqqa, in northern Syria, putting this down to a wish to live under the rule of sharia law.
'I was interested in Islamic State as a place, never in jihad or anything like that,' she said.
These selfies were allegedly taken by Shakil while she was living in ISIS's Syrian stronghold in Raqqa. She has already admitted travelling to the so-called Islamic State, putting this down to a wish to live under the rule of sharia law
Shakil was also asked about the social media accounts of those she followed on Twitter.
These included a jihadi fighter, according to the prosecution, whose account stated they were 'harsh towards the kuffar [non-believers]'.
Shakil, a former college student, who used to live in Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire, said she only retweeted images and passages from the Koran that she liked and denied being a terror group member.
'If he says he's harsh towards the kuffar, that's a matter for him,' she said.
Tareena Shakil, 26, pictured in her police interview after being arrested at Heathrow Airport in early 2015
Shakil denies joining ISIS and encouraging acts of terror, and told Birmingham Crown Court that the fact she followed alleged jihadis and extremist preachers on Twitter did not make her a terrorist
'I have not been - half my family are non-believers.'
The former health worker was also questioned about a comment she made in a WhatsApp message, sent back home to loved ones, saying the holy war would never end.
Shakil responded: 'You're trying to suggest they were my sentiments when, just over two weeks later, I escaped.'
Mr Larkin replied: 'If you changed them (your sentiments).'
In a heated exchange with Mr Larkin, Shakil said ISIS minders left her unable to describe the true picture of daily life in Raqqa to friends and family because of the threat of corporal punishment or death.
Earlier in the trial, jurors were told that this Facebook account, which has a pro-ISIS profile picture, was used by Shakil
Shakil, who friends described as 'a perfect mother' to her son, said: 'I was one woman alone in the most dangerous place in the world - 4,000 miles from home - around some of the most dangerous people in the world.
'And I don't want sympathy for that, because it was my decision to go there.
'But there's no police there for me to ring to help.'
She added: 'If you follow the news, you get shot dead even in Turkey.
'I can't be there saying 'Life is so terrible here, life is so awful'.'
Shakil denies being a member of ISIS and encouraging acts of terror. |
Aden, Asharq Al-Awsat—The Yemeni government has not been informed of UN-brokered talks currently being held in the Omani capital Muscat in order to resolve the crisis in Yemen, Foreign Minister Riyadh Yassin said on Sunday.
UN Special Envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, who has been shuttling between Muscat and Sana’a for months in a bid to find a solution to the crisis which has gripped Yemen for almost a year, said on Sunday he would be holding talks this week in Muscat over the crisis.
Yassin told Asharq Al-Awsat the government also does not know who will be participating in the talks with Ould Cheikh Ahmed, though the foreign minister said he suspected the participants would be the “same people the UN envoy usually meets in Yemen and Muscat”—in reference to the Houthi movement.
Ould Cheikh Ahmed has held several meetings with delegations from the group, which currently controls large parts of Yemen, both in Sana’a and in Muscat over the past months.
Yemen’s crisis began in September 2014 when militias belonging to the Iran-backed Houthis overran the Yemeni capital Sana’a. The group then launched a coup in February, deposing the government and internationally recognized President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.
The UN has called for a “political solution” to the crisis, but Yassin said the government could not enter into an agreement with the Houthis after the group has committed human rights violations in Yemen.
International NGOs including Human Rights Watch have accused the Houthis of targeting civilian areas using mortars, rockets, and other heavy weaponry. They have said Houthi leaders and commanders could face trial over human rights crimes committed in the country.
Yassin also called on the Houthis to abide by a UN resolution stipulating their withdrawal from areas under the group’s control and returning all weapons seized back to the government.
“There can be no political solution with such people [the Houthis], who have committed all this violence, murder, and slaughter in Yemen,” he said.
“When the [Houthis] abide by the UN resolution in full, and the legitimate [government] is back in charge of the whole of the country—without any exceptions—then we can start talking about a genuine political solution. One that is [feasible] and accepted by all Yemenis.”
Ambassador’s home
Meanwhile, allegations were made by the Omani government on Saturday that the Saudi-led coalition currently targeting the Houthis in Yemen and seeking to restore the Yemeni government had deliberately bombed the home of the Omani ambassador in Sana’a.
The coalition, which is conducting an air and ground campaign in Yemen, has denied its warplanes targeted the ambassador’s home, insisting it concentrates only on military targets. Speaking to Asharq Al-Awsat on Saturday, coalition spokesman Brig. Gen. Ahmed Asiri accused the Houthis of carrying out the attack and said the coalition welcomed an investigation into the incident.
Yassin meanwhile said he found it “highly unlikely” that the coalition would target the home of the ambassador.
“I assure you that what happened has been fully documented and I believe that the attack on the ambassador’s home . . . was a ground attack—meaning it was conducted by the Houthi militias using rockets. The Houthis time these attacks to coincide with coalition air raids, in order to create controversy in the media.” |
Abstract The HMT3522 progression series of human breast cells have been used to discover how tissue architecture, microenvironment and signaling molecules affect breast cell growth and behaviors. However, much remains to be elucidated about malignant and phenotypic reversion behaviors of the HMT3522-T4-2 cells of this series. We employed a “pan-cell-state” strategy, and analyzed jointly microarray profiles obtained from different state-specific cell populations from this progression and reversion model of the breast cells using a tree-lineage multi-network inference algorithm, Treegl. We found that different breast cell states contain distinct gene networks. The network specific to non-malignant HMT3522-S1 cells is dominated by genes involved in normal processes, whereas the T4-2-specific network is enriched with cancer-related genes. The networks specific to various conditions of the reverted T4-2 cells are enriched with pathways suggestive of compensatory effects, consistent with clinical data showing patient resistance to anticancer drugs. We validated the findings using an external dataset, and showed that aberrant expression values of certain hubs in the identified networks are associated with poor clinical outcomes. Thus, analysis of various reversion conditions (including non-reverted) of HMT3522 cells using Treegl can be a good model system to study drug effects on breast cancer.
Author Summary The HMT3522 isogenic human breast cancer progression series has been used to study the effect of various drugs on the reversion of the breast cancer cells. Despite significant efforts to delineate key signaling events responsible for phenotypic reversion of the malignant HMT3522-T4-2 (T4-2) breast cells in this series, many questions remain. For example, what is involved in the phenotypic reversion of T4-2 cells at the systems level? In order to answer this question, we analyzed gene expression microarray data obtained from these cells using our recently developed tree-evolving network inference algorithm Treegl. We reconstructed cell-state-specific gene networks using Treegl. Our functional analysis results show that we can not only unravel cell-state specific information characteristic of non-malignant HMT3522-S1 (S1) and malignant T4-2 cells in the series, but can also provide insight into the T4-2 cells reverted by various agents. We found that the networks specific to various conditions of the T4-2 reverted cells are all suggestive of compensatory signaling effects, which, however, are mediated by different signaling pathways to antagonize different drug effects in the reverted cells. Our results demonstrate that the HMT3522 system when analyzed with Treegl may potentially become an effective tool for novel drug-target discovery and identification.
Citation: Parikh AP, Curtis RE, Kuhn I, Becker-Weimann S, Bissell M, Xing EP, et al. (2014) Network Analysis of Breast Cancer Progression and Reversal Using a Tree-Evolving Network Algorithm. PLoS Comput Biol 10(7): e1003713. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003713 Editor: Christina Leslie, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, United States of America Received: July 29, 2013; Accepted: April 10, 2014; Published: July 24, 2014 Copyright: © 2014 Parikh et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was made possible by grants NIH R01 GM093156-01 to EPX and WW, NSF DBI-0546594, IIS-0713379, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship to EPX. APP is partly supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (under Grant No. 0750271). MB, IK and SBW are supported by NIH R37 CA064786. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Introduction A major challenge in systems biology is to uncover dynamic changes in cellular pathways that either respond to the changing microenvironment of cells, or drive cellular transformation during various biological processes such as cell cycle, differentiation, and development. These changes may involve rewiring of transcriptional regulatory circuitry or signal transduction pathways that control cellular behaviors. Such information is of particular importance for seeking a deep mechanistic understanding of cellular responses to drug treatments in various diseases, offering a more holistic view of both microscopic and macroscopic changes in the cellular functional machinery than has been available from traditional analyses which usually focus only on finding differential markers or close-up analysis of changes in a handful of molecules constituting parts of some selected pathways of interest. Network-based differential analysis naturally requires the availability of multiple networks each in principle corresponding to a specific biological condition in question, that are then topologically rewired across conditions [1]. However, most existing computational techniques for reconstructing molecular networks based on high-throughput data cannot capture such dynamic aspects of the network topology; instead, they represent the networks as an invariant graph. For example, it is common to infer a single invariant gene network using microarray data obtained from samples collected over time or multiple conditions. More sophisticated methods such as a trace-back algorithm [1] and DREM [2], [3] do emphasize uncovering the dynamic changes of a network over time using time series data, but limitations in these algorithms allow only certain kinds of dynamic behaviors, such as “active path” [1] or bifurcating sequence of transcriptional activations [2]. Moreover, such methods are heuristic in nature and do not offer statistical guarantees on the asymptotic correctness of the inferred “transient” components in the network, making the results difficult to withstand the harsh standard on stability and robustness when sample quality and size become less ideal, as we face in the analysis to be conducted in this paper. Indeed, a number of in-depth investigations of disease models have suggested that over the course of cellular transformation in response to microenvironmental changes due to disease progression or drug-induced reversion, there may exist multiple underlying “themes” that determine each molecule's function and relationship with other molecules [4], [5]. As a result, molecular networks at each cellular stage are context-dependent and can undergo systematic rewiring (Figure 1). For example, strong evidence of alterations of various pathways have been reported in the HMT3522 progression series of breast cells when malignant T4-2 cells were phenotypically reverted by various drugs, albeit only manifested by a small number of well-known signaling molecules as discussed below [6]–[8]. PPT PowerPoint slide
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larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 1. A schematic representation of the relationship of the non-reverted and various conditions of the reverted HMT3522 breast cells. The nonmalignant S1 cell is the root of the tree. It is also the parent of the malignant T4-2 cell since T4-2 cells were derived from S1. The T4-2 cells can be reverted to phenotypically normal-looking structures by treatment with various agents, such as: i) either EGFR or β1-integrin inhibitor, ii) either PI3K or MAPKK inhibitor, or iii) MMP inhibitors, they are thus represented as the parent of the various conditions of the reverted T4-2 cells. Microarray profiles were generated from each cell state represented in the tree, and gene networks specific to each state were reverse engineered using Treegl. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003713.g001 In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study of the structural changes in the gene regulatory networks underlying each cell state in both the non-reverted and the reverted HMT3522 progression series of breast cells. The HMT3522 cells have been shown to be an excellent model system for studying the roles of tissue architecture, microenvironment and signaling molecules involved in the nonmalignant and malignant growth and behaviors of breast cells, including the potential of various factors to cause phenotypic reversion of malignant cells to nonmalignant states. These cells originated from a nonmalignant human breast epithelial sample, HMT3522 [9], [10]. HMT3522-S1_LBNL (S1) cells are from early passages which are nonmalignant and dependent on exogenous epidermal growth factor (EGF) to grow. HMT3522-T4-2_LBNL (T4-2) cells were generated from S1 cells by a multi-step process: 238 passages in medium without EGF followed by transplantation into a mouse which generated a tumor, and T4-2 cells were isolated from the serial passage of this tumor; thus T4-2 cells are malignant and tumorigenic [10]. Interestingly, when cultured in three-dimensional (3D) laminin-rich extracellular matrices (lrECM), S1 cells form polarized acinus structures with a central lumen which resemble the terminal milk-secreting alveolar units in normal breasts [6], [11], whereas T4-2 cells form disorganized structures under the same conditions. Signaling molecules such as EGFR, β1-integrin, PI3K, and MAPK are overexpressed in T4-2 cells relative to their levels in S1. Crosstalk between these molecules plays pivotal roles in defining malignant behaviors of T4-2 cells, and downmodulation of them causes phenotypic reversion of T4-2 cells into growth-arrested, normal-looking cells (also called T4R cells later) which form structures resembling S1 acini but often without the lumen [8]. Other molecules, such as TACE or Rap1, have also been shown to be important for reversion of T4-2 cells [12], [13]. NFkappaB was identified as one of the transcriptional regulators involved in disorganization of T4-2 cells [14]. Despite significant efforts to delineate key signaling events responsible for phenotypic reversion of these malignant breast cells, many questions remain. For example, are T4-2 cells reverted by inhibitors of different molecules intrinsically the same? What is involved in the phenotypic reversion of T4-2 cells at the systems level other than a few genes directly related to the signaling molecules mentioned above? One classical approach to address these questions is to identify genes differentially expressed between different cell states. While this can lead to some information about marginal effects of the genes in a particular stage of cancer progression or reversion, it cannot yield insight into the underlying regulatory mechanisms that govern interaction of genes with one another to carry out complex cellular processes. Instead, we propose a network-based differential analysis, by reverse engineering gene regulatory networks of various conditions of the breast cells to depict a fuller picture of regulatory mechanisms of the cells. Many methods, as reviewed in [15], [16], have been proposed for reconstructing gene networks using gene expression microarray data. Most of them [17]–[19], however, rely on the statistical assumption that the samples in question were independent and identically distributed (i.i.d), and thus they either lead to estimation of a single network by pooling data from all the samples together, or lead to estimation of a network for each cell state independently. Since the breast cells in this study came from non-reverted HMT3522 cells as well as various conditions of the reverted cells, the regulatory mechanisms in different cell states can be significantly different; therefore, pooling data from different cell states together to estimate one single network does not reveal networks in their full depth. On the other hand, reconstructing a network specific to each cell state independently of the other ones can be statistically inaccurate due to a small sample size for each cell state. Recently, time-varying network detection methods have been proposed that allow information sharing across time and can thus recover a sequence of networks even with small sample sizes [20]–[23]. For example, Song et al. proposed a time-varying dynamic Bayesian network method to estimate a chain of evolving networks over time [22]. However, these methods estimate networks that evolve as a chain of networks over time, not as a series of networks shared by the tree-shaped phenotypic relationships as shown in Figure 1. Due to the unique challenges we encountered to reconstruct networks that rewire over the tree-shaped phenotypic relationships, we recently proposed Treegl [24], a network reconstruction algorithm that can effectively and jointly recover rewiring regulatory networks present in multiple related cell states. Our approach can not only recover a distinct network for each cell state and reveal sharp differences among networks for different cell states, but also capture and leverage similarities of the networks in the cell states nearby in the phenotypic tree, thereby leading to more accurate estimation of gene interactions in small sample size scenarios. This new angle of estimating networks can reveal information that has not been mined in traditional analysis. In this paper, we conduct an extensive network analysis of non-reverted HMT3522 cells (normal S1 and malignant T4-2 cells) as well as three different conditions of reverted T4-2 cells using gene expression microarray data obtained from these cells. It is notable that the same set of the gene expression data was first described and used in our previous work published in [24], however, our focus then was to report the novel methodology behind the Treegl algorithm, but not a thorough biological analysis of the HMT3522 series of cells from which the gene expression data was generated. In this current work, we focus more on the biological findings discovered by a more comprehensive network analysis of the data using Treegl and other bioinformatics tools, and aim to provide better biological insights and understandings of the various breast cell states in the HMT3522 series. In particular, we estimated the network specific to each cell state using Treegl. Our results showed that while the S1-specific network contains predominantly nonmalignant pathways, the T4-specific network contains various cancer-related pathways, both findings consistent with biological evidence [4]. Furthermore, we found that the networks specific to various conditions of the T4-2 reverted cells are enriched with pathways suggestive of compensatory effects. In the T4-2 cells reverted by inhibition of either EGFR or β1-integrin, signaling pathways downstream of EGFR or β1-integrin, mainly via the PI3K-AKT-mTOR axis, are upregulated. Similarly, in the T4-2 cells reverted by either PI3K or MAPKK, we observed upregulation of the pathways both upstream and downstream of PI3K. These results are supported by clinical evidence showing patient resistance to the same anti-breast cancer drugs as we used in the study. Moreover, the compensatory signaling is also observed in the differential network of the T4-2 cells reverted by MMPIs, which involves genes participating in protein catabolic processes. Together, our findings suggest a common resistance mechanism employed by breast cancer cells to antagonize drug effects. Finally, in order to identify potential novel drug targets, we also investigated hubs (i.e., genes with high degrees, see details in Materials and Methods) in the differential networks of the breast cells, and characterized specifically three hubs (NEBL, HBEGF, and PAPD7) whose aberrant expression values are linked with the worst survival outcomes in the breast cancer patients to provide insight into their functional significance on the growth and development of breast cancer cells. Our data suggest that Treegl when applied to an effective disease model system, such as the HMT3522 cells, may potentially become an effective tool for elucidating disease mechanism and discovering novel drug targets, and thus help make personalized medicine possible.
Discussion The problem of estimating rewiring networks simultaneously from multiple cell states in the phenotypic tree, as solved by Treegl, is fundamentally different from either estimating a single “average” network from the samples pooled from all states and subsequently “trace-out” active subnetworks corresponding to each state [1], or estimating multiple networks independently. The latter strategies are common practices in the system biology community, which either directly or indirectly assume the network in question is static, and samples of the nodal states in the phenotypic tree are i.i.d. across (when pooled) or within cell states. In reality, such an assumption is biologically invalid as well as statistically unsubstantiated. The Treegl algorithm elegantly couples all the inference problems pertained to each network in the tree of multiple conditions, and achieves a globally optimal and statistically well behaving solution based on a principled VCVS model and a convex optimization formulation. In our analysis of the HMT3522 breast cancer cell lines, we reverse engineered 5 different gene networks specific to each cell state represented in the phenotypic tree. The S1 differential network contains genes predominantly involved in normal cellular activities, while the T4-2 differential network is enriched with pathways playing active roles in cancers. Interestingly, compensatory signaling appears to be a recurring theme of the T4-2 cells phenotypically reverted by different agents. In the T4-2 cells reverted by inhibition of either EGFR or β1-integrin (i.e., the EGFR/ITGB1-T4R group), despite the absence of the ErbB pathway, signaling events downstream of EGFR or β1-integrin, mainly via the PI3K-AKT-mTOR axis, seem to be upregulated. These results are supported by clinical evidence showing that some breast cancer patients exhibit drug resistance after being treated with EGFR inhibitors. Similarly, in the PI3K/MAPKK-T4R cells, their differential network is enriched with genes closely connected to PI3K, suggesting they are upmodulated to make up for the loss of PI3K signaling, also agreeing with clinical findings showing patient resistance to PI3K inhibitors. Likewise, the compensatory effect is observed in the differential network of the T4-2 cells reverted by MMPIs, which involves genes participating in protein catabolic processes presumably to make up for the loss of the MMP function. The effect of MMPIs for treating breast cancer patients was disappointing in clinical trials, but no conclusive evidence for ineffectiveness has been put forward [38]. Our results suggest that the failure of treating breast cancer patients by MMPIs involves upmodulation of the catabolic processes in the treated patients due to compensatory effect. Together, these results suggest despite phenotypic similarities, T4-2 cells reverted by various drugs are intrinsically different from one another; similar compensatory mechanisms, however, appear to be utilized by the T4-2 cells to antagonize effects of the different drugs. In order to compare our network-based approach with traditional statistical test-based approach, we also analyzed the gene expression data using ANOVA, and identified 1432 genes significantly differentially expressed (FDR p-value<0.05) across different cell states; then we used pairwise t-tests to further identify significant differences between cell states. We found that due to small sample size problems, these traditional approaches are too stringent to reveal interesting signals. For example, we examined the genes differentially expressed between the T4-2 cells reverted by MMP inhibitors (MMP-T4R) and other cell states, in particularly between MMP-T4R and S1, as well as between MMP-T4R and T4. Our results show that there are 473 genes significantly differentially expressed in MMP-T4R, comparing to S1, and the only two GO functional groups significantly enriched (FDR p-value<0.05) among these genes are “mitotic cell cycle” and “sterol biosynthesis process.” Comparing to T4, there are 375 genes differentially expressed in MMP-T4R, and there are no GO groups significantly enriched among these genes. Moreover, we examined genes in the differential network of MMP-T4R which are involved in some of the significantly enriched GO groups, e.g., “proteasome complex” and “cellular catabolic process”, both of which suggest compensatory signaling in the MMP-T4R cells. We found that among 12 genes in the differential network of MMP-T4R (“PSME3, PSMA4, PSMB8, PSMD10, PSMA3, PSMB9, PSME2, PSMD7, PSMA6, PSMC2, PSMA2, PSMD6”) which are involved in “proteasome complex”, only two of them (PSMA3, PSMB9) significantly differ between MMP-T4R and S1 as identified by ANOVA, and two (PSMC2, PSMB9) significantly differ between MMP-T4R and T4. Likewise, among 33 genes in the differential network of MMP-T4R which are involved in “cellular catabolic process”, only 5 genes (“PSMB9, ANAPC5, USP18, IDH1, PSMA3”) significantly differ between MMP-T4R and S1 as identified by ANOVA, and 3 genes (“PSMB9, USP18, IDH1”) differ between MMP-T4R and T4. Furthermore, we looked into the 22 hubs in the differential networks which significantly affect patient survival, and found that only 8 (36%) of them are differentially expressed across 5 cell states as identified by ANOVA and a majority (64%) of them are not differentially expressed. Similarly, among 99 hubs in the differential networks, 43% are differentially expressed, while 57% are not. These results suggest that under small-sample-size scenarios, traditional statistical tests are too stringent to capture interesting signals, while our network-based differential analysis can leverage on similarities among different samples while revealing key differences which set them apart. In order to identify potential novel drug targets, we also investigated hubs in the breast cells whose aberrant expression values are significantly associated with survival outcomes of breast cancer patients. We found that genes in the networks of the breast cells have 2 times higher tendency than those not in the networks to affect patient survival in the cohort we studied. Also, hubs in the breast networks appear more likely to influence patient survival than genes with low degrees. Indeed, the proportion of the hubs with high degrees which are significant survival genes (22% for hubs with degree >5, and 23% for hubs with degree >10 and also for those with degree >20) is not much higher than that (17%) of the genes with low degrees. The reasons for this can be explained as follows. When previous evidence suggests that in yeast networks, a gene with a higher degree is more likely to be an essential gene [46], [47], an essential gene is defined as “the cell is unviable when the gene is knocked off” [47]. However, it is difficult to know/determine which genes are essential in humans. Nevertheless, in light of the definition of ‘essentiality’ in yeast, we think it is plausible to believe that the actual percentage of the hubs (with degree >5) in the differential networks of the breast cells, which can affect patients significantly, is 22%+x%, rather than 22%, and the reasons why we cannot see the phenotypic effect of the x% of the hubs on patient survival may include: i) these hubs are so essential to humans that any abnormality would lead to death, even before breast tumors were formed or diagnosed; and/or ii) there are some redundant genes which can make up for the loss/gain of functions of these essential hubs. Despite the fact that our results suggest that the genes in the breast cell networks are more likely to affect patient survival than those which are not, and also that hubs in the differential networks tend to affect patient survival more than genes with low degrees, our data show that the distributions of the patient survival rates (5-year, 10-year or 15-years) associated with these different groups of genes are not significantly different, suggesting that the patient survival rates are not only affected by degrees of genes in the breast cell networks, but also affected by the functionalities of the genes. We have also characterized the three hubs in the cell-state-specific differential networks whose aberrant expression values are linked with the worst survival outcomes in the breast cancer patients: NEBL in S1 cells, HBEGF in T4-2 cells, and PAPD7 in the MMP-T4R group of the reverted cells. Our results are not only in line with existing information known about these genes, but also provide insight into their functional significance on the growth and development of breast cancer cells. These hubs are promising to serve as potential drug targets for personalized breast cancer therapy. The major challenge of this work is the small sample size of the microarray data we have used for the network inference. The data was from 15 microarrays in total, and the T4-2 cells reverted by different agents had to be pooled together in order to increase the power of the network inference. Even though the sample grouping strategy is biologically justifiable (see details in the Results section), our abilities to find differences between T4-2 cells reverted by different agents are limited due to mixed samples in the EGFR/ITGB1-T4R and PI3K/MAPKK-T4R groups of the reversion cells. For example, it is difficult to dissect which specific pathways are abnormally regulated (compared to S1 cells) in which reversion cell state: T4-2 reverted by EGFR inhibitors or by ITGB1 inhibitors. Likewise, it is also difficult to reveal differences in the T4-2 cells reverted by different agents in the PI3K/MAPKK-T4R group. Moreover, mixed samples can reduce power to detect interesting signals in the data. Despite suggesting compensatory events in the reversion cells, the enriched pathways in the EGFR/ITGB1-T4R and the PI3K/MAPKK-T4R cells are not significant (unadjusted p-values<0.05, but FDR p-values>0.1). However, since our data agree well with clinical evidence, they may facilitate clinicians to identify specific molecules which lead to resistance in the drug-treated breast cancer patients. In order to overcome the limitations of the mixed samples, we also focus on finding similarities of the different T4-2 reversion cells. Our results show that we were able to discover a significant amount of information that agrees with the facts and evidence previously known in the literature. Moreover, we were also able to delineate a mechanistic framework at the systems level that can facilitate further elucidation of the mechanisms underlying different states of the breast cells in the progression and reversion model. Experimental validations are nevertheless needed to further verify our findings. In summary, this work demonstrates our recently developed Treegl algorithm can not only provide a holistic view (i.e., the so-called “pan-cell-state” view that echoes the emerging “pan-cancer” or “pan-disease” approach nowadays to biomedical analysis) of the progression and reversion model of the breast cells worthy of further exploration, but also allows us to gain a deeper and systems-level understanding about the behaviors of nonmalignant and malignant breast cells, which may help novel drug target discovery and make personalized breast cancer therapy possible.
Materials and Methods Cell culture and microarray hybridization HMT3522 S1 and T4-2 cells were grown in 3D lrECM as previously described [6], [48]. The T4-2 cells were reverted using each of the following reverting agents as described previously: an EGFR inhibitor Tyrphostin AG 1478 and a human EGFR-blocking monoclonal antibody mAb225 [7], a β1-integrin inhibitor AIIB2 [6], a MAPK inhibitor PD98059 [7], a PI3K inhibitor LY294002 [8], dominant-negative Rap1 [13]; an MMP inhibitor GM6001 [49], and a broad-range inhibitor of MMPs and ADAMs, TNF protease inhibitor–2 (TAPI-2) [12]. S1, T4-2 and reverted T4-2 cells were isolated from 3D cultures with PBS/EDTA as previously described [50]. Total cellular RNA was extracted using RNeasy Mini Kit with on column DNase digestion (Qiagen). RNA was quantified by measuring optical density at A260 and quality was verified by agarose gel electrophoresis. Purified total cellular RNA was biotin labeled and hybridized to the Affymetrix GeneChip human genome HG-U133A arrays as previously described [51]. Gene expression microarray data and the sample grouping strategy Gene expression microarray data was obtained from 15 total RNA samples prepared from the HMT3522 breast cells grown in 3D lrECM and treated with various reverting agents or vehicle controls as mentioned above. Unfortunately, T4-2 cells reverted by some agents have only one sample per each reversion cell state. Even though our method, Treegl, is designed for small sample size scenarios, having only one sample per state is not enough for network inference — as it is known that it takes at least two samples to measure even a simple quantity like correlation. Thus, in order to increase the power of the network inference, we grouped the arrays into the following five categories with each having 3 samples: (i) S1 cells (3 arrays); (ii) T4-2 cells (3 arrays); (iii) the EGFR/ITGB1-T4R group, which contains two arrays of the T4-2 cells reverted by the EGFR inhibitor Tyrphostin AG 1478 and the human EGFR-blocking monoclonal antibody mAb225, respectively, and one array of the T4-2 cells reverted by a β1-integrin inhibitor AIIB2; vi) the PI3K/MAPKK-T4R group, which contains one array of the T4-2 cells reverted by a MAPK inhibitor PD98059, one array of the T4-2 cells reverted by a PI3K inhibitor LY294002, and one array of the T4-2 cells reverted by dominant-negative Rap1; and (v) the MMP-T4R group, which contains two arrays of the T4-2 cells reverted by an MMP inhibitor GM6001, and one array of the T4-2 cells reverted by a broad-range inhibitor of MMPs and ADAMs, TAPI-2. The biological justification on this grouping strategy is provided in the Results section. In order to identify networks specific to each state of the breast cells, we utilized a phenotypic tree model to represent the relationships of different states of the breast cells (Figure 1). In particular, since the HMT3522 series were originated from S1 cells, we positioned S1 cells as the root of the phenotypic tree. Then we made S1 cells the parent of T4-2 cells, since T4-2 cells were derived from S1 cells. Finally, we made T4-2 cells the parent of the three conditions of the T4-2 cells reverted by various agents (the EGFR/ITGB1-T4R group, the PI3K/MAPKK-T4R group, and the MMP-T4R group). Microarray data preprocessing Raw gene expression data was preprocessed using the following procedure. The data from the perfect match (PM) probes on the Affymetrix arrays was first log2-transformed, and normalized using the CyclicLoess normalization method to minimize unwanted noise in the data [52]. We did not use the difference between the values from the PM probes and those from the mismatch (MM) probes (i.e., PM – MM) to represent values of the probes for each gene, because it has been shown that the MM values can pick up both non-specific and specific signal of the probes, and thus PM-MM values may attenuate real signal values from the PM probes [53]. The normalized PM values were then summarized into gene expression values using the median polish technique [54]. For some transcripts, multiple probes on an array target the same transcript; the values of the probes were combined by taking the median of the values to represent the expression level of the corresponding transcript. There are 12,977 unique genes on the arrays. The complete microarray dataset is available at the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo - GSE42125). To reduce biological noise in the data, we removed genes whose expression values showed low variability across different groups of the breast cells. In particular, for each gene, we calculated its median expression values in five different groups of the breast cell states. If the fold change value of a gene between any of the two groups was larger than 1.3, we included the gene for the downstream analysis. The reasons why we used the fold change of 1.3 as the threshold value to filter genes are as follows: i) based on our previous experience with human lung disease studies [55], we found that a fold change of 1.2–1.3 is enough to elicit significant biological changes in humans; and ii) When using the threshold value of 1.3, 5,440 genes passed the filter, which we consider is a reasonable number for the downstream network analysis by Treegl. Then we applied Treegl to reconstruct gene networks in the five breast cell states using expression values of the qualified genes. A mathematical representation of the gene networks for the cell states in the phenotypic tree We now give a mathematical formulation of representing the gene networks in order to introduce our algorithm. Consider the problem of modeling different gene networks, each corresponding to a unique cell state . Each cell state has i.i.d. microarray replicates. All the arrays in the dataset have the same set of genes. In our case, we have 5 different conditions of the breast cells in the phenotypic tree: S1, T4, EGFR/ITGB1-T4R, PI3K/MAPKK-T4R, and MMP-T4R. As commonly done, we model each gene network as a weighted undirected graph, where the vertices represent genes and the edges represent interactions in the network. Let represent a network in cell state , where denotes the set of genes that is fixed for all cell states and denotes the set of edges specific to the network for cell state . Let where be the vector of expression values of genes on array in cell state . We assume , i.e. that the vector of expression values follows a multivariate Gaussian distribution. We are interested in reconstructing a set of networks that are related by the phenotypic tree as shown in Figure 1. For each cell state , let be the parent of the cell state in the tree; alternatively, we can also view as a descendant of . In our case, , , . We generally let correspond to S1, correspond to T4, and correspond to the EGFR/ITGB1-T4R group, the PI3K/MAPKK-T4R group, and the MMP-T4R group, respectively. Thus, in our formulation, recovering the structures of the gene regulatory networks in different breast cell states corresponds to estimating the network structure for each cell state. Estimating a gene network in a cell state Consider first estimating the edge set of a single network from the data. As described in the Results section, we model the gene network for each cell state as a Gaussian Markov network. Therefore the inverse of the covariance matrix, called the precision matrix, , completely encodes the structure of the Markov network. An edge exists in the Markov network if and only if the corresponding precision matrix element is non-zero. A Gaussian Markov network, encoded via the precision matrix, allows us to model more sophisticated dependencies than a correlation network, which is encoded by the covariance matrix. In particular, the precision matrix elements are related to the partial correlation between and (denoted as , see below for details). Formally, partial correlation between a pair of random variables given a set of controlling variables is defined as follows. Let and denote the residuals from performing linear regression of with and with , respectively. The partial correlation is then defined as the correlation between and . Unlike correlation, which simply measures the association between a pair of random variables, partial correlation intuitively measures the association between a pair of variables with a set of controlling variables removed (where here is all the other genes). The partial correlation, due to its close relationship with the elements of the precision matrix, makes the latter much more suitable than the covariance matrix for distinguishing between indirect and direct relationships as shown in Figure 2. Since our goal is to learn the structure of the Markov network, we are only concerned with estimating which precision matrix elements are zero and which are not (rather than the exact precision matrix values). Therefore it suffices to estimate the partial correlation coefficients, which are proportional to the precision matrix elements by the equation . An estimation algorithm can be constructed by exploiting the relationships between the partial correlation coefficients and a linear regression model [56]. Specifically, consider a linear regression model where gene is treated as the response variable and all the other genes are covariates. The regression coefficient of covariate is then proportional to the partial correlation . The above facts enable us to use regression-based methods to estimate the elements of the precision matrix (up to a proportionality constant), and thus the underlying network structure. In particular, our method is based on an efficient neighborhood selection algorithm [26] based on -norm regularized regression that works well in practice and has strong theoretical guarantees. In this approach, the neighborhood of each gene (the set of edges incident to ) is estimated independently of the neighborhoods of other genes. After estimating each neighborhood, the results are then combined to produce the estimated network. In every neighborhood estimation step, gene is treated as a response variable, and all the other genes are the covariates. An penalized linear regression (also known as the lasso [57]) is performed to give an estimate of the regression coefficients . Then by leveraging the relationship between the regression coefficients and the partial correlation, the estimated gene network is constructed by adding an edge to if either or is non-zero (max-symmetrization). Estimating a tree-shaped genealogy of gene networks in the breast cells Obviously, networks for each cell state can be estimated independently by using the method described above. However, this can lead to very poor estimates of the edge sets, because in common laboratory settings only a few replicates of gene expression data can be obtained. To overcome this limitation, we estimated the networks by assuming that the networks share similarities due to their relationships as suggested by the phenotypic tree, but also have some sharp differences. For example, for S1 and T4-2 cells, we assume they have considerable differences as the former is nonmalignant while the latter is tumorigenic; however, since T4-2 were derived from S1, we also assume that these cells share substantial similarity. This is the motivation behind Treegl, the algorithm that we first presented in [24]. Treegl is unique in that it makes use of a total variation regularizer, which allows information to be shared across different cell states, and thus encourages the resulting networks to be similar while allowing differences in the networks to be revealed. More specifically, Treegl adopts the idea of neighborhood selection and additionally penalizes the differences between the neighborhoods of adjacent states in the breast cell phenotypic tree. This makes Treegl more effective in small-sample-size settings than existing approaches since it can estimate a collection of networks more robustly by leveraging the similarities among them. In summary, Treegl proposes the following optimization problem for jointly recovering the neighborhoods of genes for all the cell states in the phenotypic tree of the breast cells: In the equation above, the first term corresponds to the residual sum of squares as in normal linear regression. indicates the vector of the expression values of all genes except , and similarly, . is defined as . The second term (corresponding to ) is a penalty on the edge weights (similar to [26]), where denotes the norm of vector , which is the sum of the absolute values of the components of . This penalty promotes sparsity in the edge weights by enforcing most of the edge weights to be zero. The assumption of sparsity is biologically justifiable. For example, it is common to find a transcription factor regulating a limited number of genes under specific conditions [31]. The details of the regularization can be seen in [57]. The third term (also called the total variation penalty) associated with enforces sparsity of differences between S1 and T4-2 as well as between T4-2 and each of the T4R groups (as illustrated in the tree structure in Figure 1), but not between T4Rs and S1. This encourages many (but not all) of the elements of to be identical to those of . The fourth term (also associated with ) additionally penalizes the differences between each of the T4R groups and S1, while allowing for sharp differences to be revealed between the two groups. Note that if the fourth term was not used, the T4R networks would be biased to be more similar to the T4-2 network than the S1 network. This would be undesirable, since it is unknown a priori whether each of the T4R states are more similar to T4-2 or S1 cells. and are regularization parameters that control the amount of penalization (see below for details on how we selected these parameters). Because the minimization problem is convex, we solved it using the CVX solver [58], as we described in [24]. In this work, we focus on genes linked by positive edges, because interaction of these genes is easier to interpret. For example, suppose genes X and Y are linked by positive edges, and genes Y and Z are also linked by positive edges. Intuitively, this suggests that genes X and Y are regulated in the same direction, that is, when gene X is up (or down)-regulated, gene Y is also up (or down)-regulated. Same is true for genes Y and Z which are also regulated in the same direction. As a result, we can also decide that genes X and Z are regulated in the same direction. On the other hand, interpreting interaction of genes linked by negative edges is more complicated. For example, suppose genes A and B are linked by a negative edge and genes B and C also linked by a negative edge. This intuitively means that A and B are regulated in the opposite direction, and that B and C are also regulated in the opposite direction; it is, however, unclear what is the relationship of A and C, which may be regulated in either the same or the opposite direction. Due to the reasons stated above, we chose to limit the scope of this work by focusing only on the positive edges to simplify our interpretation of the results. Selecting regularization parameters Choosing the regularization parameters and is a challenging problem in high dimensional statistics. Kolar and Xing proposed to use the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) score to select these parameters [59]. This approach can be useful in low dimensional settings; however, it does not perform well in high dimensional settings [60]. In this work, since we have a good knowledge of the biological properties of the S1 and T4-2 cells in the HTM3522 system, we employed a knowledge-based approach to tune and , namely, we tuned these parameters based on our prior knowledge about S1 and T4-2 cells, which turned out to be highly effective in the high dimensional, small sample size setting as we encountered in this work. Specifically, we first varied and in the set {4, 4.5, 5, 5.5, 6, 6.5, 7} and the set {0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5}, respectively, and generated cell-state-specific networks for each possible pair of and . These sets of and were chosen because the networks can be generated with reasonable sparsity. Then we examined the biological pathways significantly enriched in the differential network of the S1 and T4-2 cells, and found that when and , almost all of the enriched pathways in the T4-2 network make the best biological sense in that they are either well described in previous studies or are known pathways active in cancers. Since we used S1 and T4-2 cells to help tune the regularization parameters, we present and discuss mainly biological findings we made from the networks of the T4-2 reversion cells to avoid circular reasoning. Synthetic network generation and evaluation We describe below how the networks in our simulation experiments were generated. Consider the following artificial collection of 70 networks, related by a tree: A network A with A remains unchanged, and thus, the networks for cell states After B and C. To generate each child network, 25% of the edges are randomly deleted and the same number of the edges are randomly added. This represents a sharp, sparse change in the network. These child networks remain unchanged for another 10 states ( B, C). B and C then branch (similar to step 2) to generate networks D and E from B, and F and G from C. These networks remain unchanged for another 10 states D, E, F, and G. Treegl does not know a priori which networks are identical and which are not. The number ( ) of samples are then generated for each network under the Gaussian Graphical Model assumption. We vary the values of in the simulation experiments, and the results presented in Figures 3 are based on the values indicated in the figure. In each scenario, the number of edges is twice as much as the number of nodes. To evaluate Treegl, we conduct a total of 10 simulation experiments, and plot the precision-recall curves showing the recall for different values of precision based on the networks reconstructed by Treegl. The error bars in the curves indicate the first and third quartiles of the results. Details on how we generated the precision-recall curves and selected the regularization parameters can be found in [24]. Pathway analysis To identify pathways significantly enriched in the gene networks of the 5 breast cell states estimated by Treegl, we performed pathway analysis on the list of the genes involved in each network using the Category Bioconductor package with minor modification (http://www.bioconductor.org). The Category package uses hypergeometric tests to assess overrepresentation of the KEGG pathways among genes of interest. A list of 12,977 unique genes on the Affymetrix GeneChip Human Genome U133A was used as the reference gene list for the pathway analysis. A pathway is considered to be significant if p<0.1 with the FDR controlling procedure of Benjamini & Hochberg [61]. Disease relevance analysis To find out genes significantly associated with certain diseases in the differential networks of the breast cell states, we performed pathway analysis as described above. For each differential network, pathways related to diseases and significantly enriched in the network were singled out; genes in the network that are involved in the enriched disease-related pathways were reported as the genes significantly associated with the diseases in the network. GO analysis To identify functional groups of genes significantly enriched in the gene networks of the breast cells estimated by Treegl, we performed GO analysis on the list of the genes involved in each network using the GOstat program [62]. The GOstat program finds the enriched functional groups using Fisher's exact tests. The GOstat program was also used to identify functional groups of genes enriched among the neighborhoods (or the subnetworks) of the hubs significantly affecting patient survival. A functional group is considered to be significant if p<0.05 with the FDR controlling procedure of Benjamini & Hochberg. A list of 12,977 unique genes on the Affymetrix GeneChip Human Genome U133A was used as the reference gene list for the GOstat program. Survival analysis of hubs We define hubs as genes with positive degree greater than 5 in the differential networks of the breast cell states. Survival analysis was performed using microarray expression values of the hubs extracted from a gene expression microarray data set obtained from 295 primary human breast tumors [39]. For each hub, its expression values across all patients were divided into three groups: lower quartile, interquartile, and upper quartile groups. Kaplan–Meier curves were used to estimate the association of expression values of the hubs in the three groups with patient survival. The log-rank test was used to calculate p-values of the survival curves. A hub was considered as significant if the p value of its associated survival curve <0.05 after controlling for multiple testing using the Bonferroni procedure.
Acknowledgments We thank Dr. Ren Xu for providing us information about the gene expression microarray dataset used in this work.
Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: APP EPX WW. Performed the experiments: APP WW. Analyzed the data: APP WW. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: REC IK SBW MB EPX. Wrote the paper: APP EPX WW. Edited the manuscript: IK SBW MB. |
Robbie Farah has all but been cleared for Origin II after scans revealed he suffered an undisplaced fracture of the cheekbone and broken nose and will only miss two weeks.
Combined with Origin duty, Farah is not expected to play for the Tigers again until round 16.
Tigers doctor Donald Kuah described the results as "almost the best case scenario", with initial fears Farah would miss Origin II on June 26.
"It's relatively good news," Kuah said. "It's not a stress fracture."
Blues skipper Paul Gallen didn't just ruin Nate Myles' face last night, he left Farah sporting significant facial bruising when he left Homebush this morning following last night’s 14-6 win.
The brave rake played most of the game with the injury, topping the NSW tackle count with 53.
Watch Peter Sterling grill Paul Gallen on his stoush with Nate Myles in a special Origin I review on Sterlo, also featuring Greg Inglis, live tonight at 7.30pm (EST) on Fox Sports 1HD.
The Farah incident occurred only moments before Gallen hit Myles with a flurry of punches to ignite the Origin blockbuster.
"I'm not sure how it happened, it might've been in the first half and I think it was actually Gal, who is taking out his own players as well," Farah said.
"It was in a tackle and I got a bit dazed. I'm not sure if it was Gal's hip or ... It was just one of those things.
"It wasn't a big night for myself. I spent the night icing up trying to get right for this week. I have to go for a scan on the face and see the damage. It's not feeling the best at the moment but it's always better after a win."
Blues coach Laurie Daley had originally conceded Farah could miss game two at Suncorp Stadium.
"It's obviously not great," Daley said.
"We'll see how he pulls up over the next couple of days. I thought he was tremendous last night and showed good leadership.
"He did [the injury] early but he stayed out there. Again, that's Origin. You have to dig in, protect your mate, stick up for one another and battle through the tough times. Robbie certainly did that and displayed good leadership qualities." |
The opening ceremony for the 2016 Invictus Games, an international Paralympic style competition for wounded veterans, kicks off in Orlando tonight with more than 500 competitors from 15 nations. The games are the world’s only adaptive sporting event for injured active duty and veteran service members.
Orlando will host an international audience of athletes, celebrities, royals and even First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama when the 2016 Invictus Games get started at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World Resort.
Prince Harry, a veteran of the British Armed Forces, announced Orlando as the location for the second Invictus Games last year citing the area’s great tourism infrastructure and Disney’s outstanding sporting facilities as advantages for hosting the games. The Orlando area also has a large veteran population and is home to the Orlando VA Medical Center, which serves over 90,000 veterans.
“I am absolutely delighted to announce that the United States has taken up the challenge and will host the next Invictus Games near Orlando, Florida,” said Prince Harry. “I can’t wait to see the American public supporting these inspirational men and women at the next Games. And what better place to host such a great family event than Orlando.”
The opening and closing ceremonies will feature live performances by Rachel Platten, Rascal Flatts, Flo Rida, James Blunt and other surprise guests.
The Invictus Games use the power of sport to inspire recovery, support rehabilitation and generate a wider understanding and respect of all those who serve their country as well as their families and caregivers. The Invictus Games will take place May 8th to May 12th. Tickets for the 2016 Invictus Games are on sale. |
If you’re not skeptical about the true state of provincial finances, you should be.
The official balance sheets of provinces across the country mask billions of dollars in debt related to a series of megaproject follies being pursued by provincial governments and government-owned power utilities. While their debt doesn’t officially appear on provincial balance sheets, taxpayers will be left footing the bill when the electricity rates needed to pay them off become so economically crippling and politically unpalatable that they will require a bailout.
A chorus of auditors general and ratings agencies have questioned this trend of masking liabilities, but have seen their warnings ignored by political leaders determined to bury the risk of pet megaprojects.
The province will hide that debt from its own balance sheet
The most recent example of mixing electricity liabilities with taxpayer liabilities comes in Ontario. The province recently passed the Fair Hydro Act
, which will see it issue as much as $26.2 billion in debt over the next decade to finance temporary rebates to electricity customers — all to mask the rate increases caused by a decade-long extravaganza of clean-energy spending.
The province will hide that debt from its own balance sheet through a series of accounting and regulatory maneuvers. In a recent report, Ontario’s auditor general highlighted that the province’s main motivation in moving debt related to the Fair Hydro Act off its balance sheet was to “avoid” any increase in its net debt that would see it post another deficit budget. The AG said the Fair Hydro Act allows the province to “make their own accounting rules” that “obfuscate the impact of their financial decisions.” Ultimately, she concluded, the legislation will make Ontario’s financial statements “unreliable.”
At the same time, the provincially owned power utility, Ontario Power Generation (OPG), is undertaking a $12.8-billion refurbishment of the Darlington nuclear plant, a megaproject so risky that the utility couldn’t do it without the backing of taxpayers. OPG’s own expert admitted the company would “struggle” to issue debt to finance projects like the nuclear refurbishment if it didn’t have the implicit backing of the province’s taxpayers. While that debt isn’t on the province’s balance sheet, any bailout related to it would likely end up there.
In B.C., it is more of the same
In B.C., it’s more of the same, as one ratings agency warned that deteriorating finances at the provincially owned utility, BC Hydro, could result in a taxpayer-financed bailout, which would ultimately wind up on the province’s balance sheet. That risk will only increase in the coming years. The public utility’s spending binge, most notably on the near $9-billion (and counting) Site C megaproject, will see its debt increase to $20 billion, up from $8 billion in 2008.
Worse still, a chunk of BC Hydro’s debt has been issued solely to pay provincially mandated dividends to the tune of billions of dollars. While the province tells the public it’s balancing its books, it’s doing so partly by loading its utility up with debt.
BC Hydro is also hiding expenses by attributing billions of dollars to “deferral” accounts, which help juice its earnings and dividends to the province, a practice B.C.’s auditor general called “unsustainable.”
Utilities across Canada went all in on megaprojects, while being aided by provincial governments
In Newfoundland and Labrador, which has the lowest debt rating in Canada, the province continues to consider its “equity” in the $12.7 billion Muskrat Falls dam — up from the original estimate of $6.6 billion — as an asset. Unfortunately, that equity investment was made largely using borrowed money. Any write-down in the value of the asset will be a loss for taxpayers. Since the utility’s own CEO has repeatedly called the project a boondoggle, a write-down would appear to be a near certainty.
The province’s auditor general also recently warned that any “rate mitigation” enacted by the province to offset the ballooning costs of the Muskrat Falls — in effect transferring the cost from electricity customers to taxpayers — will have to “consider the impact” that such a move will have on the province’s balance sheet. In short, the province’s balance sheet — already in a perilous state — will be the backstop for a megaproject gone wrong, reflecting any bailout needed to mitigate its impact on electricity customers.
While the risk to electricity customers of multi-billion megaprojects has been clear for some time — a number of public utilities have been warning of double or triple-digit rate increases — the risk to provincial balance sheets is now coming into focus. Public utilities across Canada went all in on megaprojects, all the while being aided and abetted by provincial governments. Now that the risk of those projects is getting larger and larger, provincial balance sheets will take the next hit.
Brady Yauch is executive director and economist at Consumer Policy Institute. [email protected] |
Do bluebirds nesting in California’s vineyards help grape growers by eating agricultural pests, or hurt them by eating insects that are beneficial? The researchers behind a new study in The Auk: Ornithological Advances found that bluebirds’ presence is likely a net positive—and they did it by analyzing DNA in bird poop.
Bluebirds are one of several groups of birds that catch insects on the wing, but because they’re constantly on the move and the animals they eat are tiny, it’s difficult to determine exactly what species make up their diet. Julie Jedlicka of Missouri Western State University and her colleagues tackled this question using a new approach called “molecular scatology,” analyzing DNA fragments in the birds’ feces to determine insect species the bluebirds were eating. They found that Western Bluebirds in Napa Valley vineyards mostly ate mosquitos and herbivorous insects, likely having only negligible effects on the predaceous insects that benefit vineyard production by eating pests. Jedlicka hopes that these results encourage more vineyard owners to install bluebird boxes, helping replace natural tree cavities lost when land is cleared.
Jedlicka and her colleagues collected 237 fecal samples from adult and nestling bluebirds living on three vineyards in Napa County, California. “Many people I talk to get a very romantic vision in their minds when they think about how beautiful it must be to do fieldwork in California vineyards, especially in the Napa Valley,” says Jedlicka. “Honestly, the landscape was beautiful, but the fieldwork is very demanding. Temperatures during the summer often rose into the 90s and 100s, and I was lucky to have wonderful help from vineyard farm workers and undergraduate field assistants.”
“This study provides important new insights, both in terms of its findings on bluebird diets in vineyard ecosystems and in its advances in molecular diet analyses,” according to Matthew Johnson of Humboldt State University, an expert on ecosystem services provided by birds who was not involved with the study. “Even though the authors did not find specific pest species in bluebird diets, they did confirm that bluebirds are mainly eating herbivorous insects, including those in the same families as major pests. This suggests bluebirds may contribute to ecosystem functioning in these systems. Their work also illustrates the power of new techniques to reveal bird diets and marks new advances in scatology.”
Molecular scatology and high-throughput sequencing reveal predominately herbivorous insects in the diets of adult and nestling Western Bluebirds (Sialia Mexicana) in California vineyards is available at http://americanornithologypubs.org/doi/full/10.1642/AUK-16-103.1.
About the journal: The Auk: Ornithological Advances is a peer-reviewed, international journal of ornithology that began in 1884 as the official publication of the American Ornithologists’ Union, which merged with the Cooper Ornithological Society in 2016 to become the American Ornithological Society. In 2009, The Auk was honored as one of the 100 most influential journals of biology and medicine over the past 100 years.
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The Associated Press - BOSTON (AP) — Union officials say a group of Verizon employees in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have voted to authorize a strike, if union negotiators determine one is necessary after their contract expires Aug. 1.
Leaders of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers said Friday that Verizon employees in the two states who are in the union voted overwhelming in favor of authorizing a strike. Similar votes are planned over the next 10 days by Verizon workers in the Communication Workers of America union.
The two unions represent nearly 6,000 Verizon workers in the two states.
Negotiations between Verizon and the two unions began June 22. Union leaders say Verizon is proposing changes that would cut jobs and reduce health and retirement benefits.
Verizon released the following statement to 22News:
We believe strike authorization votes are meaningless bargaining ploys that do nothing more than divert attention from the real issues that need to be resolved at the negotiating table. As we have from the beginning, Verizon remains committed to working towards a new contract that represents the needs of our employees, our company and our customers. We hope and expect the union to do the same."
_____
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press |
Jorge Ramos, the amnesty advocate and fierce questioner, took a swim across the Rio Grande river on Friday to follow the journey of Central American children.
Ramos, who is also a Univision anchor and has been praised by Matt Drudge for asking politicians tougher questions than his fellow liberals in the mainstream press, said his stories will air on the Fusion network “soon.”
Spanish-language television has influenced many illegal immigrants who are trekking to America on harrowing journeys.
According to a leaked “elite, law-enforcement sensitive El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) intel report from July 7, 2014” that Breitbart Texas obtained this week, migrants interviewed by federal officials cited Univision as one of the outlets that has helped “shape their perception of U.S. immigration policy.” Out of 230 migrants interviewed, 219 said they came to the United States because they thought they would receive “permisos” that will allow them to remain indefinitely in the United States.
Swimming the Rio Grande, following the journey of Central American children. Soon on @ThisIsFusion pic.twitter.com/kXgDv5OZTP — JORGE RAMOS (@jorgeramosnews) July 19, 2014 |
WASHINGTON — It's official: NASA's next Mars rover has a landing site, and it's a giant crater called Gale.
NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission is slated to launch in late November, and will drop a car-size rover named Curiosity at the Gale crater.
"We are going to the mountain at Gale crater," Michael Watkins, project engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., revealed in a press conference today (July 22). "It exhibits three different kinds of environmental settings, perhaps the trilogy of Mars history. It's a worthy goal, a worthy challenge for such a capable rover."
Gale crater is about 96 miles (154 kilometers) wide and has a mountain at its center that rises higher, from the crater floor up, than Mount Rainer near Seattle. The crater, which is named after Australian astronomer Walter F. Gale, is so large that the U.S. states of Connecticut and Rhode Island could fit inside it, NASA officials said. [Video: Fly Over Gale Crater on Mars]
"Mars is firmly in our sights," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "Curiosity not only will return a wealth of important science data, but it will serve as a precursor mission for human exploration to the Red Planet."
Gale crater is also thought to harbor clues of ancient water activity on the Martian surface, and one of Curiosity's primary tasks will be to root around for evidence that Mars is, or was, capable of supporting microbial life. [Gale Crater FAQ: Mars Landing Spot for Next Rover Explained]
"Scientists identified Gale as their top choice to pursue the ambitious goals of this new rover mission," said Jim Green, director for the planetary science division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement. "The site offers a visually dramatic landscape and also great potential for significant science findings."
The agency revealed the landing site today (July 22) in a briefing hosted by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The announcement coincides with the museum's celebration of Mars Day, which commemorates the 35th anniversary of NASA's Viking 1 Mars landing on July 20, 1976.
The next Mars landing
During a series of worldwide workshops, members of the science community proposed 60 potential landing sites, said John Grant, a geologist at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. [Best (And Worst) Mars Landings in History]
In 2008, four primary candidates were selected, and eventually two finalists were identified: Eberswalde crater and Gale crater.
Eberswalde is largely considered one of the best deltas on Mars, and at some point, the crater was likely filled with water, Grant said. Each of the candidate sites "represent an incredible opportunity for MSL. It was a very difficult decision to arrive at a final one," he said.
Targeted images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the Red Planet since 2006, provided detailed imagery of the potential landing sites that enabled scientists and engineers to evaluate safety concerns and the scientific benefits of each candidate location.
A team of senior NASA officials, principal investigators and co-investigators then conducted a thorough review and unanimously selected Gale crater as the official landing site.
"All four of the final sites were really great candidates," Grant told SPACE.com. "Early on in the process, I had a favorite. I can honestly say that that went away. They're really different. With Gale crater, there're still questions about how this mountain of material is in place. All of them have very attractive attributes and some unknowns, so you really have to say, 'Which one offers us the broadest benefits to the objectives of MSL?'"
Meet Mars' Gale crater
In the end, the program scientists found the broadest benefits in Gale crater's diverse environmental settings.
"The Gale site represents an incredibly rich suite of scientific investigations that we can do," said Dawn Sumner, a geologist at the University of California, Davis.
At the base of the mountain, there are signatures of clays and sulfate salts, which are both known to form in water, and are both key classes of minerals that will reveal clues about the environment on Mars, Sumner said.
By moving toward Gale's mountain, the layering will help scientists understand how the Martian environment changed through time. From these observations, project scientists are hoping to glean information about Mars' potential habitability.
The Curiosity rover will expand on previous Mars exploration with its sophisticated onboard instruments. The rover's science payload has the potential to identify organic carbon and other ingredients and compounds that make up the building blocks of biology.
Scientists are hoping that Curiosity will find minerals in the clay and sulfate-rich layers near the base of Gale crater's mountain.
"Gale gives us attractive possibilities for finding organics, but that is still a long shot," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters. "What adds to Gale's appeal is that, organics or not, the site holds a diversity of features and layers for investigating changing environmental conditions, some of which could inform a broader understanding of habitability on ancient Mars."
And while Curiosity's mission does not include life detection, the rover is expected to unearth clues about the habitability of the environments on the Red Planet, said John Grotzinger, MSL project scientist at JPL.
"This is a very, very difficult challenge that we have for us," Grotzinger said. "We hope to be able to be able to look for organic carbon. What we can promise and deliver with MSL is an understanding of the environmental history of Mars."
NASA revealed the landing site today (July 22) in a briefing hosted by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The announcement coincides with the museum's celebration of Mars Day honoring the 35th anniversary of NASA's Viking 1 Mars landing on July 20, 1976.
NASA's Curiosity rover will be the largest rover ever sent to Mars. After launching from Florida later this year, the rover will spend several months cruising toward Mars for a planned August 2012 landing.
The spacecraft weighs a ton and is roughly comparable in size to a Mini Cooper car. The sophisticated rover is designed to study aspects of the Martian surface in greater detail than ever before, boasting a suite of 10 different science instruments.
•Photos: Curiosity Rover, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory
•Curiosity To Make Unusual Landing On Mars
•6 Hard Facts About NASA's Next Mars Rover
© 2011 TechMediaNetwork.com. All rights reserved. |
HYDERABAD: Over 20 mountaineers from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana were on their way home via Lhasa after Chinese Mountaineering Association (CMA) on Thursday rescued them from Everest base camp , where they had been stranded following the Nepal earthquake Nalgonda resident Shekhar Babu-led climbers planned to scale the world’s highest mountain from dangerous North Col.They had stayed put at the camp as avalanches triggered by the earthquake had blocked the highway connecting Nepal and China.“The team is safe and will be reaching Lhasa on Friday evening,” said a representative from Hyderabad’s Transcend Adventures that had organized the expedition. He said the climbers would be flown from Lhasa to India.As posted on the adventure club’s Facebook wall, Nima Tsering, vice-chairman, CMA, visited the base camp and told the climbers that they will be taken down, much to the relief of team leader Shekhar Babu and his boys.Tsering also carried some good news with him, which brought some cheer and relief to the mountaineers who pay huge sums to plan a trip to Everest. The CMA said the registration fee of the climbers for this year would hold good for the next three years.“We are grateful for this gesture,” said Prithvi Raj, a representative from the adventure club.Anxious family members have been calling the club with queries about their loved ones. “We have informed them and they are relieved that they are safe and are being escorted to safety,” said Raj. The team will return to India in a few days time. |
Buy Photo Predators center Mike Ribeiro finished with 62 points this season, making him Nashville’s second-leading scorer. (Photo: George Walker IV / The Tennessean)Buy Photo
The one-year, $1.05 million contract that Predators general manager David Poile offered center Mike Ribeiro in July was a low-risk move.
A messy divorce from the Coyotes in June — Arizona general manager Don Maloney cited "real behavioral issues we felt we could not tolerate going forward" in buying out Ribeiro's four-year contract — left the continuation of the 35-year-old's career in doubt.
Nashville believed that Ribeiro could overcome his personal issues and still be productive. He was, scoring 62 points as the Predators' first-line center.
"I felt great," Ribeiro said. "I was actually happy to come to work and not be depressed. I think the boys in the room helped, too. They were really supportive. To have a chance like (the Predators) gave me, I think I took it and I didn't want to disappoint them. I have a lot of respect for David and for the coaching staff. I just wanted to do the right thing. I happened to have a good season. Obviously I wanted to go farther, but I think it's a good step."
Ribeiro led Nashville with 47 assists and was the team's best possession player with a 57.07 shot-attempt percentage. The Predators took 343 more shot attempts than the opposition when Ribeiro was on the ice, the fifth-highest total in the NHL and a testament to his ability to facilitate offense.
"I'm just proud of him for everything he's done and battled through both on and off the ice," said Predators forward James Neal, who has played with Ribeiro in Nashville and Dallas. "He really turned everything around and was really good for our team."
Ribeiro and linemate Filip Forsberg were Nashville's first 60-point scorers in six seasons and the first pair of Predators players to reach that mark in seven seasons.
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"It was exactly what the doctor ordered," Poile said. "(He brought) a dimension that I don't think we had. (If) we don't have Mike Ribeiro, it's going to be hard making the playoffs because he generated so much offense. How would have Filip Forsberg done without him? ... I thought he played just terrific for us."
Ribeiro said last week that he "would love to be back" with the Predators next season. His redemptive season puts him in a more beneficial situation than last year, when he basically recruited himself to Nashville hoping that Poile would be convinced to take a chance on him.
Now that the risk has apparently paid off, the two sides will work to extend the relationship.
"I believe he and his family are very happy here," Poile said. "Hopefully it's a marriage that wants to continue here in Nashville." |
Read more: “Forever online: Your digital legacy“
The historians of 2061 will want to study the birth of the world wide web. How on earth will they know where to start?
Today, historians have to piece together the details of their subjects’ lives from tiny scraps of evidence. Their successors are more likely to be overwhelmed: the problem will be making sense of our vast digital legacies. What techniques will they use to make sense of this deluge?
Many of us now generate more data than we can manage – think of all those holiday pictures you’ll never get round to organising into an album. The contents of our hard drives are jumbled messes; the web’s lack of structure, coupled with anonymity and the use of aliases, will make the online world an equally formidable challenge for future historians.
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All the HTML, MP3 and JPEG files that make up today’s web are likely to remain readable for a very long time. But unpicking their original provenance and authenticity will be no mean feat, because data is often duplicated, edited, annotated and modified.
To safeguard our files, we tend to back them up, email documents to ourselves or post pictures online. Files also get passed between people. These actions often change the file, yet most of these changes are minor and usually invisible to a human being.
This is a mixed blessing for internet archaeologists. On one hand, the variations provide valuable insight into how information has spread. On the other, it makes it difficult to establish where it first came from, as anyone who’s ever tried to track down the origins of an internet meme will appreciate.
Fuzzy filter
A brute-force way of sifting through all these files for provenance is “hashing”: a mathematical technique that summarises a large piece of data as a much smaller number – or “hash value” – making it easy to compare files. But because even a tiny change to the original data will result in a completely different hash value, it can be hard to see the relation between copies.
Breaking each file up into segments and creating a separate hash for each segment can reveal when two files are mostly composed of identical segments and are thus likely to be related.
Such “fuzzy hashes” can be used to find near-identical copies, or to identify incomplete or early drafts – information that a biographer might find helpful.
The technique is not perfect, though: its ability to spot similarities is, well, fuzzy, and it works better for some file types than others. Compressing a picture slightly, for example, doesn’t affect its appearance very much, but can change its hash values dramatically.
Write stuff
What about text? The internet is full of anonymous comments, status updates and blog posts. Historians may want to unmask the authors.
One way to do that is look for their characteristic “writeprints“: their vocabulary, the length of the sentences they use, words and punctuation patterns they’re particularly fond of, and even habitual grammatical mistakes.
Normally this requires a substantial chunk of text to work on, but researchers at the National Institute for Computing and Automation Research in Grenoble, France, have designed a system that can link different aliases used by one person, using only the characters that make up their usernames.
You can try a simple version of this approach on the website I Write Like, which tells you which famous writer’s output your own deathless prose most resembles. But I Write Like also illustrates some of the difficulties of this approach, notoriously failing to identify some of the writers it actually uses as references.
More sophisticated approaches would undoubtedly do better, but changes in our writeprints over time again make it hard to be definitive about the author of a work. (Then again, such changes can be illuminating for literary sleuths: analysis of Agatha Christie’s later works have been used to support suspicions that she suffered from dementia.)
Finding meaning
Writeprints confine themselves to the structure of text, but semantic analysis tools go further – trying to identify relevant information in the meaning of the text. That could help future researchers work out what you were like without having to trawl through every one of your status updates.
Defuse, a system under development by Aaron Zinman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, represents individual commenters on a website as coloured blocks, based on the kind of language they use and how closely they conform to community norms. It’s an attempt to create a kind of “digital body”, he says – a pixel portrait that mimics our ability to size someone up at a glance in the physical world.
But Zinman cautions against interpreting the output of such systems too literally. “It’s important to understand how complex humans are,” he says. “A biography of someone important may be hundreds of pages long, but it’s still a condensed account of their life, written through a particular lens and with a particular objective. There are a million ways you can slice the data about a person, and they will look different in each one.”
That’s a point made more explicitly by Zinman’s earlier project, Personas, which purports to reveal how the web sees you by searching for “meaningful” statements.
Real messiness
When I tried Personas myself, it came up with “management, education, news”, which I’d say is more like a blurry telephoto picture of me than a finely detailed portrait. That’s the point: Zinman intended it to illustrate how poorly today’s machine learning captures the messiness of real people.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK also strikes a cautionary note. “Digital memory only captures digital artefacts,” he says. “The more we depend on it, the more tempted we are to attribute qualities to it that it doesn’t actually have, like authenticity and comprehensiveness.”
So even if the tools of the trade improve immeasurably over the next half-century, they’ll still be limited by the records we leave behind us. While those records are becoming ever richer, with our locations and even our heartbeats now being recorded, the historians of 2061 may still get only a glimpse of what we were really like – or at least, who we considered ourselves to be.
Read more: “Forever online: Your digital legacy“ |
I am not completely sure about this but I would like to share my opinion. Through my travels to this wonderful nation, I had the opportunity to visit cities like Xian, Tianjin, Beijing, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Shanghai and Harbin.
A common observation that stood out in these visits was that the Chinese women were generally more interested and engaged in continuing a conversation. The young women also seemed to show interest in knowing more about my background, where I was from and what made me come to China. It was probably because it was rare for them to see an Indian national in cities like Xian and Tianjin.
Also, I noticed that most occupations which involved speaking and other customer service related jobs were primarily held by women. Every local restaurant I visited, the orders were always taken by the women while the men were involved with the cleaning, setting up tables and other tasks.
Based on these experiences, I feel Chinese women are culturally more outgoing and more comfortable with speaking to people from different backgrounds. Additionally, during my graduate study at Northwestern, all the male students from Mainland China were much more reserved than the female graduate students.
There were would be several other dynamics and factors involved, but I agree with the question and feel it might be easier for women from Mainland China to adapt quicker. This might vary between individuals and may not be true for older Chinese people (the dynamics may be reversed for higher age groups). |
Nicholas Allbrook (Pond, Tame Impala) brings together a cast of illustrious raconteurs in this musical tribute to Fremantle’s storied underbelly. Evoking the untamed and sometimes seedy origins of the Port City, Songs Of Disgrace – presented in two acts – will traverse both the sublime and ridiculous through song, visuals and spoken word: a fitting salvo to what Allbrook describes as: “a place on the edge of the world, blessed and forsaken by solitude.”
Featuring an eclectic orchestra of reprobates – amongst them WA’s beloved songman Peter Bibby – Songs Of Disgrace pays homage to the maligned souls of yesterday and today: a disparate global cast that has decorated the city and its streets, docks, footy fields, prisons, asylums and bars. More a blurred vision skirting between memory and fantasy than a gospel retelling of history, Songs Of Disgrace is a half-remembered dream as crude and curious and strangely beautiful as Walyalup itself, the port city of Fremantle. |
7:51 p.m.
Hey, here we are again. While I am waiting for Survivor to start tonight, I’m thinking about Survivor and online dating. If this does not interest you at all then just proceed to the 8 p.m. portion of this blog, but I’ve got ten minutes to kill until the show starts. Hopefully Rob doesn’t actually read this.
Recently, I’ve been taking my bachelor lifestyle to the world of online dating, which only seems 40 percent less horrifying than it did five years ago…right? What I tell myself is that it’s basically the new blind-dating of the 2014 world. I mean, it worked for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You Got Mail.
It’s still a little weird, and if you’ll allow me to steal the thoughts from Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers, basically how I feel about online dating is this: It’s forcing yourself to go on a forced, awkward situation where you meet at a public place and do the ass-out hug when you greet each other; where I’m not really interested in her, but I pretend to be interested in her, so then I start getting interested in her, and all the while I’m thinking –Are we going to get hopped up enough here to make some bad decisions… maybe play a little game of “just the tip,” just to see how it feels?
So far, I’ve met the full gamut of women: the nice ones (usually really shy, though), the recently divorced and not looking to get into anything serious ones (pretty cool actually, just really frustrating and could be awkward down the road), and the I was the shy girl in high school and now I’m trying to overcompensate by being overly forward ones (usually need a tetanus shot afterwards).Basically, online dating is like Survivor in that you’re forced to play a game and try to make an alliance with someone normally you maybe wouldn’t, and together you try and navigate.….OK…OK, that’s a little bit of a stretch…..
I am just trying to kill time waiting for the show to start, so sue me. You learned a little bit about my sick mind…Hey look, it’s 8 p.m.!!
8 p.m.
Previously on Survivor (Probst’s voice)… Two cops made a deal to stick together, which was only thirty seconds of Episode 1 that has had no meaning, nor meant anything since then, but for some reason I’m talking about it now. Tony maniacally shouts “Top 5, baby!”, but everybody is too scared of him to ask him what in the hell that means. Kass and I have a secret forbidden love relationship going on, which may lead to my first Survivor love-child.
Black-and-white Survivor starts us off with Spencer hoping for a merge. Spencer’s hair looks longer every episode… like suspiciously longer. Let’s all agree to keep an eye on this development. Spencer also doesn’t appear to have any facial hair, which is a shame because I think a mustache would do wonders for his game, or at the very least, give him the sex appeal his game has been lacking.
Sarah calls an impromptu meeting with her fellow tribemates, telling them if the merge happens that they’re all going to stick together. Kass is skeptical and already seems like she is ready to jump ship faster than Kim Kardashian jumped from Kris Humphries to Kanye West.
Kass and Sarah have a conversation that can best be described as icy. Sarah is carrying herself as if she holds all the power. Kass seems like she is itching to make a big move tonight…hmmmmmmmmm. Sleeping with Probst is paying off as maybe he is slipping her the secret intel files on what’s going on with each player. How great would that be if it were true?
Commercial- So the girl from Father of the Bride is still alive? Apparently she is guest-starring on Two and A Half Men…good for her. Apparently she also married a country music singer. Do you think she hired Martin Short as her wedding coordinator?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9Q2aMfUI3s
He seems available right now…unless he’s making the Three Amigos sequel I’ve been waiting for since I was eight.
Woo is trying to shoehorn in Tony as his new Cliff BFF. It seems…too soon……too soon, Woo.
Tony shares that he’s having fun now for the first time in this game. Does that mean he’s not actively planning a 12-person homicide now? Did his former tribe feel like crap after hearing that Tony wasn’t having fun with them? Seemed like a cheap shot from Tony.
We get a shot of L.J., who is about two weeks’ worth of beard growth away from looking like Forrest Gump when he just felt like running.
We next get a pretty cool shot of L.J. and Tony separately digging up their idols in a Treasure of the Sierra Madre-type of way (For you 80 and older fans out there, don’t think I forgot about you!)
Apparently movie trailers in the 1940’s didn’t leave a lot to the imagination when it came to spelling out the whole plot of a movie. Anti-smoking ads should just show Humphrey Bogart in each one because he always looked 30 years older than he really was. Nobody pulled off the gaunt look like Bogie.
Morgan’s dressed like she’s about to go on a Young Mothers of Suburbia walk to Starbucks as she’s reading some scroll the producers made for some reason. I mean, are scrolls associated with island life? Why not a highly produced shot of a message in a bottle floating up to the shore?
Tasha is dressed in the suit that the Wizard of Oz wore in the movie for some reason today; all that’s missing is his hat and hot air balloon.
We get a dramatic shot of the rowboat carrying the other tribe over for the new merge. A lot of awkward hugs are exchanged. Another scroll is read by Morgan. Was she voted the Reader of the Scrolls? Was it a close vote? Did the person who came in second get pissed? These are the things I was wondering.
Spencer is looking vagabondy as he comments how he might be able to run this game soon. Take it easy, Spencer… one day at a time, buddy. You’re also looking like Bubbles’ friend from The Wire that also got ahead of himself to his detriment.
8:15 p.m.
We get a Yoga class taught by Trish, as Tony is thinking about whom he can get to flip; he’s banking on his fellow cop pal, Sarah…
Tony and Sarah convene. Sarah is not willing to swear on her badge. This seems like it’s not the smartest move. What happens if you swear on your badge and you break your word? Do they take you out back and shoot you? Do they perform some ceremony where you are stripped of your badge and get exiled to become a bicycle cop?
Sarah’s having a board meeting with Jeremiah and Kass, telling them whom she wants to vote out, which I guess is Woo. Privately Sarah threatens Kass and anybody else not to pick a fight with her. She seems a little too cocky…This seems bad if you’re a Sarah fan; she’s basically tempting the Survivor gods to Julius Caesar her.
Kass is privately sharing that she is not happy with Sarah…This smells like Kass is going to make a big, treacherous move!
The claws are out with Sarah and Kass at the campfire, and Trish looks on in delight. Do they not notice Trish looking on like Solazzo when he noticed Sonny wanted in on the drug trade
Tasha tries to play mediator with Kass and Sarah. Kass frets that Tasha is playing favorites with Sarah. I will say that Kass seems a little paranoid….like she just smoked pot for the first time and is bugging out big time. I get that you can’t really trust anybody, but she seems a little extra on edge tonight.
8:30 p.m.
The Immunity Challenge tonight is a balance competition. I would do horribly in this comp with my size 14 shoes…Jeff smugly taunts everybody as he does the play by play, but nobody seems amused.
Tony lets us know that this is not a fun challenge: “There’s nothing fun about this, Jeff.”…It’s like even when he says normal sentences, he still sounds a little off…Am I crazy in thinking that?
It’s a massacre out there as they’re dropping like flies as all but three fall into the water right away. It’s like the Titanic out there! Somebody save Morgan, please! I would totally Leo DiCaprio-out and give her a piece of wood to float on, while I freeze to death…granted the water here looks a little warmer than the waters the night the Titanic went down.
What..??? Somehow Tony is still up…It’s Woo and Tony left. I would have bet my life this comp would have been won by one of the yoga gurus.
Props to Tony on this one; I didn’t know he had the balance. He even gives Woo a playful salute as he jumps off.
Woo wins immunity! This should make for a really interesting tribal council tonight. The stage is set for Kass to shank somebody tonight, or maybe she will be the one to be shanked. Either way, this feels like a pivotal, choose-your-own-adventure moment where there are very different destinies that will unfold because of this choice tonight (more so than every other tribal). I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, I always had a kamikaze, suicidal attitude when it came to choose-your-own-adventure books. I would always make the most reckless choices with those books……cool story, right?
OMG Elisabeth Shue is on CSI? Why did none of you tell me??!!! I’m so glad she was able to turn her life around after the prostitution stint in Las Vegas with Nick Cage that almost killed her.
Sarah tells us that she is going to stay with her current tribe, the “weaker” tribe as she described them. She self-proclaims herself as the president. Seriously, her Survivor death is all but certain now…it’s like a horror movie… You know it’s coming, and you know it’s not going to be pretty.
El Presidente Vitalicio and the weakettes meet in the water. I love the meetings that take place in four feet of water. Do you think anybody is peeing as the meeting is going on? What’s the over/under on the amount of people peeing as that meeting is going on? I would say 2.5 and I would take the over.
The “strong” tribe meets as the pee party of the “weak” tribe is taking place. Tony is foolishly thinking Sarah is with them, but Trish is not buying it. Trish is really a better player than I thought, as she rightly identifies Kass as the one they need to flip. This is feeling like The Departed and Sarah could be Martin Sheen if she is not careful.
The Sarah tribe decides to vote out Tony. Kass is out for blood with Sarah, claiming that she will do a pre-emptive strike first! Even though I like big moves, it would seem like Kass would be higher up the food chain on her current tribe than if she flips to the other tribe, right? At the same time, Sarah is begging for something bad to happen.
8:45 p.m.
Trish fills Kass’ head with even more propaganda to flip. It looks like Sarah is getting the Martin Sheen treatment later tonight. I think anytime you claim to be the president in Survivor like Sarah has tonight, you deserve to go home.
Tribal Council starts with L.J. randomly presenting as really emo…Maybe an Ethan Hawke Reality Bites homage is in order?
Cheer up, L.J.; it’s going to work out. Somebody give him a cigarette or something.
Tony inexplicably or brilliantly reveals that he has an idol. I got a little nervous when Spencer than told him to “pull it out” because Tony looked a little frenzied and god knows what he would have “pulled out”.
Everybody on #TeamSarah is talking to one another, so Jeff just decrees that they go straight to the vote! What the hell… I don’t think I’ve seen him go to the vote so quickly like this…
Tony pulls out and asks Jeff to inspect his Idol… smart move because there was a recent story in the Survivor Tribune about counterfeit idols being in the market. You can never be too careful these days with hidden immunity idols.
Tony is laughing…everybody looks afraid again. I imagine this if you were to laugh around Tony:
In a surprise move, L.J. plays his idol… I might add, also a stupid move by him. Why would L.J. do that? Are L.J. and Tony in a bromance? I mean, you’re playing Survivor. Why give away any edge you have in this game? I am really confused by that. Granted it was cool of L.J. and very honorable, but he could have had a serious ace up his sleeve for down the road that could have potentially saved his Survivor life.
The votes are in and Jefra is the target of the Sarah administration and she is already starting to cry. So to summarize, two precious idols were played and neither of them were needed. This is why the terrorists hate us…just wasting idols like this.
Sarah, seeing her name being called out, has a look like she’s sitting in a doctor’s office while the doctor tells her she’s pregnant with Corey Feldman’s child. Sorry, Sarah, but you tempted fate.
…And Sarah is gone. She takes it pretty well, I must say. I guess for her goodbye song, we will go with this:
Seriously, is that not the most depressing video of all-time? I’ve been in an early/mid 90’s kick all week, but seriously, why would they make a video like this? This time period was like the heyday of really weird, depressing, grunge music videos. Remember the Pearl Jam video Jeremy?
What a great episode. Kass made her choice and now we will see if it was the correct move. In my mind, if Kass makes it to the final four, you can say it was a good move on her part. It seems to me, that the biggest cut-throat players in the game (Tony, Trish) are whom Kass has aligned herself with. Will that come back to haunt her? It’s my opinion at this moment in the game that the best player is Trish. She seems to have a very good instinctual Survivor mind and seems to have the respect of the people she needs to advance. It should be noted that I really don’t know anything because two weeks ago, I thought Sarah was in the best place in this game, and now she’s gone. Like I keep on saying, this season is wide open, not like the past couple of seasons where we had clear favorites and could easily predict what was going to happen. I think Trish is in the best place, but I could easily be talked into L.J. or really anybody else. Let me know who you think are likely to be the final three below in the comment section. Thanks for reading and I will see you next week! |
Oakdale attorney James Arthur Fonda, whose disbarment is pending, was arrested Wednesday morning and charged with stealing up to $210,000 of a client’s money.
Fonda, 70, wrote 163 checks to himself from the client’s account from 2009 to 2012, cashed them and used the money on groceries, gas, rental payments and business payroll, an arrest warrant affidavit says. The client suspects Fonda also bought a Jaguar and paid for a trip to Paris for his wife and gave a Christmas bonus to his secretary, the document says.
“The only explanation I can make as to why I did it,” Fonda reportedly said under oath in a California State Bar deposition, “is those (moral) principles and that knowledge didn’t outweigh the ego of not wanting to admit that I couldn’t meet my bills and expenses.”
$194,440Total from 163 checks James Fonda wrote to himself from his client’s money, according to California State Bar investigation
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Fonda admitted fault in the bar investigation and agreed to repay the client $184,100, according to a bar enforcement document. A State Bar Court judge on July 24 said Fonda should be disbarred and the recommendation is on its way to the California Supreme Court.
It is clear that (Fonda) is unwilling or unable to conform to ethical responsibilities. Therefore, disbarment is warranted. California State Bar Court stipulation, acknowledged by Fonda’s signature on June 24
The arrest warrant affidavit suggests that the Stanislaus County District Attorney’s Office is basing its prosecution on the State Bar investigation.
Fonda’s client had inherited two San Jose homes and lost them in foreclosure but realized $486,706 in equity proceeds at public auction, the bar investigator found. The client was going through a divorce, and Fonda persuaded him to put the money in a trust account controlled by Fonda to keep the man’s wife from getting it, the affidavit says.
(The client) is financially unsophisticated and stated he trusted attorney James Fonda to make the right financial decisions for him. Arrest warrant affidavit issued Tuesday
The client is disabled and has cancer, and Fonda’s actions caused him significant harm, the bar enforcement document says.
The checks to Fonda were marked for “advance fees,” but he ultimately admitted to the State Bar that he did nothing to earn them, the affidavit says. The bar investigator shared her findings with the District Attorney’s Office in June and fraud investigator Glenn Gulley interviewed Fonda’s client and his caretaker in July, leading to Fonda’s arrest.
Fonda had been privately reproved in 2003 for abandoning two family law clients and committing a trust account violation, and was publicly reproved in 2009 for taking a woman’s divorce case but failing to perform, enforcement documents say.
Fonda faces a felony grand theft charge with an enhancement of engaging in a pattern of fraud resulting in a loss of more than $100,000. He was arrested Wednesday morning in Oakdale and remained at the Stanislaus County jail in the late afternoon. Bail was set at $20,000. |
In a landmark judgment, the Himachal Pradesh High Court Thursday cleared the decks for stopping the sale of potato chips, wafers and all junk food items packaged in plastic and non-biodegradable material from January 26.
The court vacated its stay on a notification issued by the Department of Science, Technology and Environment on June 26, 2013, imposing a ban on sale, storage, entry, supply and manufacture of these items in the state. It directed the government to strictly enforce the ban on non-essential food items. The ban will not cover plastic drinking water bottles.
A division bench comprising Justice Rajiv Sharma and Justice V K Sharma also directed the government to ensure that edible oils/fats are packed in tin containers and not plastic bottles or pouches.
From March 31, as per the court order, milk and milk products, edible oils/fats, fruits, vegetables and meat products will be manufactured, transported, sold, packaged and distributed as per the Food Safety & Standards (Packaging & Labelling) Regulation, 2011.
While directing the state to appoint a Food Commissioner within four weeks, the court asked the government to ensure that no person is permitted to start or continue any food business without obtaining the required licence.
The court order on Thursday came after hearing a plea filed by dealers and manufacturers of packaged food items, challenging the government's notification.
The bench rejected the petitioners' argument that the court encroached the area of legislation by issuing such orders. "Courts do not legislate by pronouncing judgments and issuing necessary directions. Courts only recognise and enforce fundamental, constitutional and legal rights of the parties. The orders were passed by the court after hearing the parties and weighing pros and cons to safeguard health of citizens and natural environment of the State," the judgment reads.
The court directed the state to lay down norms as per Section 3A of the HP Non-biodegradable Garbage (Control) Act, 1995, within 12 weeks and implement Section 7 of the said Act in order to determine new non-essential food items, which are required to be manufactured, transported, sold, packaged and distributed in biodegradable material by constituting a committee comprising officers not below the rank of the Principal Secretary.
... contd.
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After weeks of speculation about her future, Burlington College President Jane O’Meara Sanders resigned Monday after reaching a settlement with the Board of Trustees. A press release from the small college, which purchased buildings and property previously owned by the Catholic Diocese for $10 million less than a year ago, said Sanders will step down on Oct. 14 but gave no reason for the change.
According to Sanders, her decision to leave is the result of differences with the trustees over the college’s direction and future. During her seven years as president, new academic majors and an institutional aid fund for students have been developed. However, the recent property purchase, combined with rising tuition and difficulties expanding enrollment, has intensified financial, management and academic pressures.
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Until recently, Sanders, wife of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, hoped to continue as president for another four years. But negotiations over a new contract stalled as doubts emerged about her plans and fundraising. In August, the board voted to negotiate an early exit package.
Last week, after a VTDigger.org story described the challenges facing the school, the agenda for a special Board of Trustees meeting, held at the Sheraton Hotel on Monday, was leaked. The agenda revealed that the trustees would be discussing the “removal of the president.” Lawyers for Sanders and the college have since reached a settlement that includes her resignation effective in three weeks, the title of President Emeritus and a year-long-paid sabbatical.
Purchase of the 200-student college’s new campus has created opportunities to “significantly grow the student body and fully realize the expansion of academic programs,” according to the announcement of Sanders’ departure. But her goal of doubling enrollment before the end of the decade could be tough to achieve, and millions of dollars more need to be raised to complete the new campus renovations.
After Sanders became college president in 2004, Burlington College initially experienced a decline in enrollment and, after a few years, faculty discontent. In an open letter to the trustees released on Sept. 21, former faculty member Genese Grill described the atmosphere in harsh terms. Staff, faculty and students “have been reduced to silence and fear of retribution by what can only be described as a pattern of intimidation, spying, and targeting of critical voices,” she wrote.
Grill described a closed and hostile environment, claiming that Sanders frequently yelled at staff and managed to eliminate anyone who voiced criticism. In the letter, Grill claims that “many concerned voices were forced out by continual abuse and by eventually being offered humiliating and unfair contracts in which they were demoted below people who were, in many cases, less qualified for their positions.”
In the last six years, about 40 people have left the school, Grill estimates, “most (if not all) deeply disillusioned with the institution and its processes, most harboring bitterness and deep regret.”
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Since word began to circulate that Sanders might be leaving, both bitterness and hope have resurfaced in emails and website comments about the school. Grill believes that it will be “a good deal easier for the devoted and well-qualified instructors and staff at Burlington College to do their good work without Jane Sanders’ obstructions.”
The Board of Trustees has consistently declined to comment, in part due to confidentiality rules. But its official announcement says that Sanders will “consult with the college” on fundraising and other issues as the board develops “an interim leadership plan” and looks for a new president.
Despite her abrupt departure as president, Sanders promises to remain “involved with the college forever.” |
In the hours following a big win, NBA players often hit the town and kick back with a celebratory dinner — and perhaps a cocktail or two.
But after a recent day’s worth of sweat and floor burns, Dwyane Wade was anything but a man on the town. He spent the evening with his eldest son, Zaire, hitting the books.
“I came over to his house and found them in the kitchen, doing homework,” said Wade’s mother, Jolinda. “Watching the interaction, with Dwyane putting it in a way where his son could understand. Once he got it, they high-fived and hugged.”
Here’s a little secret: Of all the names Wade goes by — D-Wade, Flash, MV3 — there’s one he holds most dear: Dad.
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Wade — who will spend Father’s Day 2012 on sports’ center stage as his Heat hosts the Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA Finals’ pivotal Game 3 — regularly uses his Twitter account as an open love letter to his two boys, Zaire and Zion. He also maintains a blog on parenting issues in partnership with Pepperidge Farm.
While every proud musing and family photo he posts is seen by his 3.3 million Twitter followers, here’s something his army of loyal fans might not know: Wade has penned a book on fatherhood that’s due to hit stores in September.
It’s self-evidently entitled A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball.
Wade may be passionately devoted to his sport, but he calls fatherhood “the single most significant undertaking of my life, and the job I take most seriously.”
During a break in Saturday’s practice at Miami’s AmericanAirlines Arena, he elaborated: “Anyone who’s a father, you know it’s one of the most special things … and one of the purest relationships that you have in life. I enjoy being one of the guys with my boys, but I also enjoy being a leader and being able to lead them and help mold the way that they think.”
This time last year, three months after winning full custody of his two sons after a bruising custody battle with ex-wife Siohvaughn Funches, Wade authored a piece for Newsweek magazine on life as a single dad. Wade wrote then how the stresses of being a key player on pro sports’ most polarizing team wash away every morning when he wakes his kids for school.
Wade’s bitter, public divorce had limited his time with his boys, and the resulting emptiness convinced him he wanted to be a full-time dad in addition to a full-time star. Around the same time Wade was winning custody of Zaire and Zion, President Barack Obama asked him to be part of a national parenting program intended to persuade fathers to become more involved in their kids’ lives.
Now, Wade’s putting the finishing touches on the book, his first. While the publisher, William Morrow, has not made advance copies or excerpts available, company publicists chose Father’s Day week as the best time to begin generating buzz for the work, due out Sept. 4.
They promised never-before-heard accounts of Wade growing up in a broken family in the town of Robbins, a hard-luck suburb of Chicago, and insight into his explosive break-up with Funches, his high-school sweetheart. The book will include personal accounts of Jolinda Wade’s past drug addiction, how moving in with his father Dwyane Sr. as a boy helped salvage his life, and the ways in which the constant media attention has affected his own boys.
But mostly, it’s a celebration of fatherhood, and his sons. In addition to bringing up Zaire and Zion, Wade is helping raise his nephew Dahveon Morris, who lives full-time at Wade’s La Gorce Island home. Wade owns a necklace with the bejeweled letters ZZD, which he says is his way of “[carrying] my three boys close to my heart at all times.”
Tracy Mourning, wife of retired Heat great Alonzo, is intimately familiar with the push and pull of parenting and professional sports. Mourning has watched Wade grow as a father from the early days and was a guest at the baby shower for his youngest, Zion, she added.
“What really makes a man stand out to me are his faith and his interaction with his children,” Mourning said. “Dwyane is strong in both. He’s a great example of what it means to be a father.”
Ruthlessly intense on the court, Wade is easygoing and happy off it — and no more so than when he’s around Zaire, who’s 10, and Zion, Mourning said. On the same day the Heat opened its closer-than-expected Eastern Conference Finals series against the Boston Celtics, Wade threw a Lion King-themed fifth birthday party for Zion, posting pictures on Twitter of a personalized cake and wishing a happy birthday to his “mini me.”
“He absolutely adores and loves his kids,’’ said teammate and friend Udonis Haslem. “You know ever since he went through his divorce and everything’s been finalized it’s just been like a breath of fresh air for him. He’s a lot more happy. We have stories and jokes to tell about our kids all the time, [about] how fast they’re growing and how old we’re getting.”
Wade is caring and, at times, downright silly when he’s around his kids, Jolinda said — but he’s no pushover. He doesn’t often let the boys come to night Heat games, especially during the school year, because they end way past the kids’ bedtime.
Wade isn’t just a dad, Dwyane’s mom added. He’s their Daddy, the guy who consoles them when they’re “crying and all snotted up.” And while Wade is famously low-key, his demeanor turns fiercely protective the instant he feels like his kids have been wronged.
“He just loves watching them grow as little men, watching the ‘mini me’s’ grow,” Jolinda said. “He’s having a part of directing their lives.”
And in no small way, they of his. |
CLASSIC video game characters Pac Man, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario and the Angry Birds are set to descend on the National Museum of Scotland later this year in an exhibition that will see the venue transformed into a giant arcade.
The Game Masters exhibition will feature over 100 playable games covering a period which has seen video games evolve from a niche interest to a massively popular leisure activity, international cultural art form and a global commercial entertainment industry.
And as well as playing the games, visitors will discover more about game design and development through rare original game artwork, 2D objects and interviews with game designers.
The exhibition is split up into strands, with Arcade Heroes focussing on the seminal arcade games of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the work of pioneering designers such as Shigeru Miyamoto (Donkey Kong), Tomohiro Nishikado (Space Invaders), Ed Logg (Asteroids), and Toru Iwatani (Pac-Man).
Therer will also be a look at the games console revolution which brough video games into every home, and the exhibition will look at the work of several key designers including Yuji Naka and the team behind Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros creators Nintendo, and Blizzard Entertainment, the dcompany behind World of Warcraft.
And there will be a section exploring smaller independent deisgners and the hit games such as Angry Birds, by Rovio, Minecraft, by Markus Perrson, and Fruit Ninja, by Halfbrick.
Cherie McNair, Head of Exhibitions and Design at National Museums Scotland said: “We’re delighted to be the only European venue for this major exhibition which promises to be both hugely entertaining as well as giving context to the evolution of the design and creativity behind some of the world’s favourite games. Game Masters received a really positive reaction in Australia, and we believe it will be big draw here in Edinburgh, especially over the Christmas and Easter holidays.”
The exhibition is set to open on Friday, December 5. |
In August, the Fedora Project held its first Flock conference, a replacement for the North American and European FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) events. Flock was a four-day, planned conference with talks, workshops, and hackfests, in contrast to FUDCon's barcamp model. In the interest of reaching beyond the community and reminding everyone that Fedora is so much broader than just a Linux project, the invited keynote speakers were from open source areas outside of the Fedora Project. One of those keynotes was by Dave Crossland, creator of the open font Cantarell and an active part of the free font movement.
Crossland's story began at his high school in England where he read Hard Drive, a biography of Bill Gates. "One of the interesting things that stuck in my mind was that Bill Gates was already a millionaire when he was a kid, from his parents," said Crossland. "He didn't need Microsoft." Around the same time, he read Stephen Levy's Hackers and became interested in Richard Stallman's ideas, featured in the last chapter of that book. Those and other reading, including John Taylor Gatto's critiques of American education, led him into the open source culture and free software.
On the origins of free fonts
"I worked for a big, Dilbert-style IT company and decided that wasn't what I wanted to do," Crossland said. He switched out of studying math and science and into graphic design at Ravensbourne in London, "a small school where a single student could have an impact." There, a group he was involved in invited Stallman to give a lecture called "Copyright vs Community" where he lays out the differences among functional works (e.g., software or encyclopedias), artistic works (e.g. music or books), and works of opinion. The idea of treating these types of works differently is what inspired the creation of the Creative Commons licenses. It also inspired Crossland to continue his graphics work in free software.
He attended the first Libre Graphics Meeting (2006) in France. "There was a lot of good energy, and libre graphics stuff was improving rapidly," he said. "It was going to be the 'year of the free graphics desktop.'... That didn't really pan out." What he concluded there was that one of the missing pieces was fonts. He met with people from SIL International (Nicolas Spalinger and Victor Gaultney) who had been remaking fonts for all the world's writing systems, even those used by very small number of people, as free software is especially important for communities that aren't big enough for a proprietary software vendor.
Crossland moved on to The University of Reading's department of typography and its program for a master's degree in typeface design. Gaultney was a third-year student in that program who created the Gentium font and published it as a free software font. However, unsatisfied with the free software licenses, he created the Open Font License (SIL Open Font License).
During his own course of study, Crossland created Cantarell in 2009 using only free software, specifically FontForge, which was created by George Williams. Cantarell is now the default font in GNOME (and one of the official Fedora fonts). Williams started the FontForge project when QT and GDK didn't support Unicode.
At the same time, he began work on the Open Font Library, a spinoff of the openclipart site, which came from the Inkscape community. Today the OFL is open to anyone who wants to upload a free font and share it. When HTML5 became an option, they added the feature to link to a font from your CSS to use that font in your webpage. Google ended up doing something similar with the webfonts API. It became popular, and when they decided to expand the collection, they reached out to Crossland for help.
"I was extremely fortunate about this, and we've been able to publish hundreds of fonts," he said. "It's one of those exponential things—629 font families in Google Fonts now. I've been lucky to travel around the world and commission these fonts across industry and the free software community across the world."
The growth of this service is phenomenal, with more than 700 billion font views now. The most popular fonts have been seen tens of billions of times. (Assorted stats are available.) The data is especially interesting when you look at who's creating what—it's just not just the professionals getting traction. MedievalSharp, for example is not a font professional designers would say is any good, but it's quite popular and was created by a hobbyist.
"I'm very satisfied [with this] because it shows that if you give people access to tools and let them publish them, it leads to a genuinely free culture where people can respond to things that aren't being filtered by the normal capitalist market process," Crossland said. "Someone's been able to do this and make it widely available, and it's become useful to people even though professional people would say nobody would want it." Another effect is the option for remixes to emerge, such as Tienne, which is the combination of Artifka and Droid Serif.
Three things necessary for the future of free fonts
The tools
A brief history of typography software: The first was Ikarus, which debuted in the 1970s. Then when the the Mac came out, an intern at Apple ported it and called it IkarusM, which was later shelved to protect the market. James R. Von Ehr created Fontographer, which became the industry standard for font design. Next came FontLab (fontlab.com), a Windows editor that was then ported to Mac. Users weren't very happy with it. This user base of people who wanted Python scripting (already available in Fontographer) got FontLab to add that. They developed a Python library called RoboFab, which is a Python object model for font sources. They wrote their own object model and essentially used FontLab as a GUI and compiler.
They also developed the UFO format, which is XML markup that lets you easily interchange font source data between applications. With this Python basis, they started to write proprietary applications based on free libraries, like Superpolator, which lets you draw a regular and bold store and interpolate different weights between them.
"Finally they made RoboFont, 'the missing UFO editor,'" Crossland said, "A well-designed piece of software similar to emacs in that it's all Python, so you can customize it to be exactly the tool you want. This is sad for me because I want to be using free software, and some of this is, but people like freedom for themselves but don't necessarily care about passing on that freedom."
Williams has since quit working on FontForge, but Crossland has been devoting some time to it. One of the new features is real-time collaboration, which lets two people work on the same font at the same time. He has also started working on bringing the interface out to the web.
Knowledge of how to use the tools
"I've been fortunate that Google has been funding the development of free fonts, but developing a font editor has always been considered out of scope," Crossland said. In order to fund development on FontForge, he's been teaching evening and weekend workshops on font design. He uses FontForge for the workshops, noting that the user interface is iffy, but that it's also great to see beginners with no point of reference in font design able to jump in and start creating fonts. (Learn more about these workshops at craftintype.com.)
There's a famous essay about learnable programming, using visual language to understand what's happening. "An implementation of these ideas is Light Table, which had a successful Kickstarter last year, and it's now a real thing," Crossland said. He referenced node-webkit and said what he'd like to see is a transition for FontForge from being an old-style X Window app into a web technology application.
A business model for paying people full time to create
"This lucky experience I had with Google is like finding a rich uncle but that's not a business model other people can apply," he explained. "Get lucky isn't a plan." Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have become well-known for helping creative projects get off the ground. Within the Google Web Fonts project, Crossland has been experimenting with those and other ways of funding things. He first tried Kickstarter as a method for funding libre fonts, with mixed success. "The Montserrat project raised nearly double the amount [of the goal]," he said, attributing the success to a good pitch video and beautiful story around the font, which led Kickstarter to put it on their front page, boosting traffic. Other font projects on Kickstarter, however, either scraped by and barely met their goals, or failed.
Crossland found better success with a site called Pledgie and a project called ttfautohint, which raised $40,000 with its campaign. One of the problems free type faced was Apple's patent on hinting, a method of adjusting a font's outline to show clearer text, particularly at low resolutions. Free type developers created ttfautohint, an autohinting sytem to better display fonts. They were able to raise more than $40,000 with their Pledgie campaign.
Fund I/O is another new model for things that are freely distributable. On that service, you have an initial crowdfunding period, during which people pledge what they'd be willing to pay. At the end of that period, the amount is averaged, and that's what people pay, meaning those who pledge more actually end up paying less. If you can reach a set minimum, it's released as a fully free work.
Learn more about free fonts |
Not to be confused with web monkey, a derogatory term for an amateurish web designer
Webmonkey was an online tutorial website composed of various articles on building webpages from backend to frontend. The site covered many aspects of developing on the web like programming, database, multimedia, and setting up web storefronts. The content presented was much like Wired magazine but for learning to design web content. Webmonkey had content applicable to both advanced users and newer internet users interested in the underlying technologies of the web.
History [ edit ]
Webmonkey was launched in August 1996.[1]
In 1999, Webmonkey introduced Webmonkey Kids, a web design tutorial site for children.[2]
Webmonkey was shut down in February 2004 following a round of layoffs in the U.S. division of its parent company, Lycos.[1] It was reopened in February 2006, and mothballed again later in 2006.[3]
In May 2008, Webmonkey was acquired by Condé Nast Publications, the company that publishes Wired magazine. It was originally reported that it would be relaunched as a wiki,[4] but it appears that this did not happen. Instead, the Webmonkey website was regularly updated with new articles by Scott Gilbertson until May 2013, when it was decided to stop producing content for it.[5] The webmonkey URL was redirected to wired.com. |
Getty Images/Flickr Select / Getty Images/Flickr Select
The latest research shows that even the taste of beer is sufficient to activate the brain‘s pleasure circuits.
“It’s the first drink that gets you drunk,” Alcoholics Anonymous warns its members, reminding alcoholics that even a sip can set off cravings. Now the latest research offers support for this effect, providing evidence that a tiny taste of beer raises dopamine levels in desire-related brain regions, especially in people with a family history of alcoholism.
The study, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, involved 49 male beer drinkers with an average age of 25; , seven were alcoholics and the remainder were either social or heavy drinkers. Twelve had a parent or sibling who had alcoholism.
MORE: A New Way to Curb Drinking? Planting False (Bad) Memories of a Bender
For the experiment, led by David Kareken, director of neuropsychology at Indiana University School of Medicine, the participants first received a small dose of a radioactively-labelled compound that occupies dopamine receptors, which are activated by alcohol and can produce feelings of desire and pleasure, depending on their location. The agent allowed researchers to track changes in dopamine levels and locate where dopamine was more or less plentiful as the volunteers reacted to various tastes. While the participants had PET images taken of their brains, they received small spritzes of water, Gatorade or their favorite brand of beer on their tongues. They then rated the taste of the spray on its intensity and pleasantness.
Because the amount of beer consumed was so small, any changes in dopamine levels were not likely due to the alcohol content in the sprays — any variations in the brain chemical could be attributed to expectations and associations linked to the taste of the beverage. Prior research in both humans and animals showed that dopamine tends to be released from a brain region called the ventral striatum when pleasure is anticipated or expected— so dopamine is often released from this part of the brain before a drug is taken or during sexual desire.
MORE: More Sex Partners Linked to Higher Risk of Addiction, Alcoholism
The research confirmed these findings, showing that simply tasting beer raised dopamine levels in the right side of the ventral striatum.
And not surprisingly, family history made a difference: people with a family history of alcoholism had a four fold greater dopamine response compared to those without such a history. “[T]hose individuals who had close family members diagnosed for alcoholism showed dopamine increases in response to beer taste, raising the question whether a heightened conditioning, or an unusual ability of conditioned rewards to increase dopamine activity, underlies the development of alcohol (and perhaps other drug) abuse,” said Dai Stephens, professor of psychology at the University of Sussex, in a statement released by the Britain’s Science Media Foundation. Stephens was not associated with the research.
Interestingly, the alcoholic participants did not show any heightened dopamine response compared to those with a family history of alcoholism. But because the volunteers were only in their 20s, it’s possible that any changes in the sensitivity of the dopamine response due to chronic heavy drinking might not have developed yet— or the number of participants might have been too small to show such changes.
MORE: Diet Soda Mixers Can Lead to Quicker Intoxication
The findings also don’t establish whether this increased dopamine activation is responsible for generating addictive behavior. “There is a debate as to whether more or less dopamine release corresponds with addiction risk,” the authors write. Some research suggests, for example, that some people may have a reduced response to the pharmacological effects of alcohol, and can drink without suffering the physiological effects that alcohol can have on decision-making and inhibitions.
What the results do suggest, however, is that people with a family history of alcoholism have a greater dopamine response and therefore may harbor a greater desire for alcohol. That may not necessarily lead to problem drinking, and more research will be needed to clarify how dopamine activation and alcoholism are related. |
politics Spotted: OFFICIAL NOTICE
SPOTTED BY: Martin Reis
WHERE: Bay and College streets
WHEN: September 30
WHAT: Newspapers? Pfffft. Websites? Who needs ’em. Someone decided an Old West–style notice was the best way to keep the people of Toronto posted on the happenings in their city, and who can argue? It certainly doesn’t mince words:
OFFICIAL NOTICE
The deep cuts to city services have been
POSTPONED until after the election.
Proceeding with the cuts now would harm the prospect
of electing a Hudak Conservative government.
R & D FORD, MAYORS
BE ASSURED THAT THE CUTS TO JOBS AND SERVICES WILL BE BACK ON
THE CITY AGENDA BEFORE THE END OF NOVEMBER.
GUARANTEED
REMINDER: Election day is this Thursday, October 6.
Spotted features interesting things our readers discover in their journeys across Toronto. If you spot something interesting, send a photo and pertinent details to [email protected]. |
"It's about heritage, not hate."
As a kid growing up in Virginia, that's the answer I always received when I questioned a Confederate flag hanging on the side of a shed or the statues of Confederate generals lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, our state capital. These weren't symbols of intolerance, racism, or white supremacy. No, these were to honor the lives lost in a lost cause: a war that divided our country in two, a series of battles in which the Southern man bravely defended his homeland and tragically lost.
We Southerners have a strong sense of pride for our history and culture. We're very good at lying to ourselves to fit the narrative we want to believe.
A statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, standing on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia Hank Walker Getty Images
I grew up in Montross, Virginia, a tiny little town about an hour from Richmond. There's not much to say about it, but our bragging rights come from the fact that Montross is the seat of Westmoreland County, where two of America's most famous generals were born: George Washington and Robert E. Lee. Both of them moved away when they were children, but the symbolism is still there: Two men who played major roles in fundamental moments of our nation's history had their origins in our tiny part of the world.
Robert E. Lee, I'll admit, always cast a darker shadow over that part of Virginia than his Revolutionary War counterpart. I grew up being fed the tall tales of his devotion to his home state, his compassion and integrity; he sided not with the South, but with Virginia, and that is why he led the Confederate army against a tyrannical Union. It's bullshit, of course, but again: Southerners like their legends, and we like to present beautiful odes to our heroes even when the acts they committed were hardly heroic—but were, in fact, treasonous.
I have never looked up to the men whose effigies stand tall in various parts of the South. I never thought they were heroes, simply because of the fact that they were fighting for a destructive, evil cause. We can have an endless debate over "states' rights" as the root of the Civil War; I find it pointless, because it is nothing more than a convenient narrative to avoid the truth. These men were fighting against the notion that all men and women—not just the white men in power, and the women who stood beside them—deserve the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for which our forefathers fought in the late 18th century. They wanted to continue the practice of enslaving black men and women, of protecting whiteness. I will never see a Confederate flag or monument and separate it from a history of white supremacy, no matter how often I was instructed by our biased history lessons to ignore it.
I will never see a Confederate flag or monument and separate it from a history of white supremacy.
Last night in Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacists descended upon the town—and upon the grounds of the University of Virginia—to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park. (Emancipation Park, to be exact; Southerners often turn a blind eye to irony.) Brandishing tiki torches, racist and homophobic slogans, and Nazi salutes, the group began to clash with Black Lives Matter activists and other groups protesting the planned "Unite the Right" rally. Those clashes continued on Saturday morning, when Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency.
Chip Somodevilla Getty Images
To my fellow Virginians and Southerners who have stood so steadfast in their refusal to see our Confederate monuments for what they are, I ask you: What does this say about our heritage? These men and women are not protesting the elimination of Southern culture and history, but rather reacting to their own deluded notions that white people are losing control of our country. When a group of men and women shout out "Jew will not replace us" in front of a statue of Robert E. Lee, what does that say about your symbol of Southern heritage? When these people brandish Nazi symbols and scream "fuck you faggots" in front of your idol, what does it say about a historical figure who supposedly stood up against a tyrannical government to protect his land?
The South lost the war. Over a century later, we're still fighting one—but it has nothing to do with states' rights or Southern pride. It is about racism, intolerance, and hatred. And at the center of it all are symbols that, despite the well-intended Southern narratives that have failed to reframe them as anything else, are the strongest representation of racism in our country's history.
It is time the Confederate monuments come down for good, as they are now forever linked with an intolerance that extends beyond the borders of the Southern states. It's not about Southern heritage anymore, but rather America's heritage of propagating white supremacy as we comfort ourselves with slogans that suggest otherwise. |
David S. Holloway/Getty Images
It was a couple of days after Christmas when Ben Rothwell was six years old that he woke up in the morning and couldn't see anything at all. He'd gone suddenly and terrifyingly blind.
He woke up his brother and told him he couldn't see anything. His brother took him into the bathroom, sat Ben down on the toilet and called their mother. She was on her way to work but turned around immediately and headed back to the house.
Ben was scared. His mother rushed into the house and down the hall into the bathroom and was horrified at what she saw.
"She said I looked like I was dying, right there in front of her," Ben says, and he didn't just look like it, because he actually was.
That's when the fear first came.
Larry Marano/Getty Images
They rushed to the hospital. Ben had spinal meningitis. He slipped into a coma that lasted 11 days. His doctor cautioned his family that the survival rate for spinal meningitis was not very high; there was a better chance of holding the winning lottery ticket in those days.
Ben stayed in that hospital bed, his body eating itself from the inside, while the medical staff did everything they could to save him, and his parents wondered: Was this it? Was their young son destined to die in this hospital bed?
But Ben got his winning lottery ticket. He slowly recovered from the illness, but it took a toll. He kept losing weight after leaving the hospital, and his worried grandmother compensated by overfeeding him. He couldn't do the kinds of athletic things he'd done before the illness, and that inability made him lazy.
Before long, Ben was obese. Other kids made fun of him. He stopped participating in athletics and withdrew into himself, letting the fear hover over him like a black cloud.
The fear became his constant companion. He was a teenager before he started losing the weight and started doing athletic things again.
By that point, the damage was done. Rothwell's attitude had soured. People noticed all the weight he'd lost and stopped making fun of him, started giving him the props he deserved. But instead of being grateful, he became arrogant and spiteful.
"I didn't handle it well," he says. "I acted like an assh--e. I was a bully."
And then the fear choked out the sun.
In 1999, when Rothwell was 17 years old, he was driving home from a church function with his friend Gerald. By his recollection, it was a beautiful day. The church was just two miles from his home, a nice, easy and peaceful drive with the windows down and the fresh air blowing against his face. Not a care in the world. Three weeks earlier, he'd scored a win in his first amateur MMA tournament. He'd discovered that mixed martial arts was what he wanted to do with his life.
Ben and Gerald made it to his parents' house, and Ben turned left to ease his Hyundai Elantra into his parents' driveway. And then, in Ben's memory, he is waking up in the hospital.
Gerald is dying in the next room, they tell him.
A drunk driver in a Ford F-250 had smashed into Ben and Gerald as they made that left turn. The truck was traveling in excess of 110 mph, according to the police report, and knocked over a tree in Ben's front yard before fleeing the scene. Ben was knocked into a coma by the accident. There was a Life Flight ride to the hospital that he has no recollection of. Four hours are missing, much like the 11 days the spinal meningitis took from him.
David S. Holloway/Getty Images
They let Ben out of the hospital after a couple of days. He had awful contusions on his head and 11 broken ribs. Things would be painful for a while, but he would make it.
Gerald did not make it.
The death of a friend is the thing that can change a person for the worse. And at first, Ben had a difficult time. He was in a daze of sorts, walking around like a zombie as he returned to school. He smiled and laughed at things that weren't at all funny. It took six months before he began to feel somewhat normal again.
Nine months after the crash, with the court case stemming from the accident now resolved, Ben asked to see the destroyed car. He just had to see it. He was taken to the junkyard. It was there, seeing what had become of the vehicle that he was traveling in before everything went dark, that something changed inside him.
"That moment when I saw the car, my life changed," he says. "There is no reason I should be alive. I started appreciating that I could walk around, that I had fingers and toes. I realized how lucky I was."
He'd survived and knew there had to be a reason why. He was determined to discover exactly what that reason was. It was a moment of clarity, a time where everything changed for him and set him on a new path. Friends and family could see the difference; they could see he was still on this earth for a purpose.
It was time for him to discover exactly what that purpose was.
Rothwell renewed his dedication to MMA and began to fight professionally. He was still a teenager, often competing against grown men a decade or more older, and he was beating them. He'd grown to a large stature—6'4" and 280 pounds—and he was incredibly quick for his size.
But a pattern began to develop. He'd win a bunch of fights in a row, climb up whatever rankings there were to climb and earn fights against tougher opponents, like the future UFC heavyweight champion Tim Sylvia. It was in those moments, with big opportunities on the line, that Rothwell would retreat into himself. He would give in to the fear and lose the fight.
He had a mental block somewhere in there. Maybe it went back to his days as an obese kid who was constantly made fun of in elementary school. Maybe it was the car wreck. Whatever the reason, the fear was there, lodging itself deeper into Rothwell's spirit like an unwanted friend.
"I've always been afraid of being successful," he says. "For some reason, I like to shoot myself in the foot. I held myself back. I've always been my own worst enemy."
The pattern continued throughout his career, even as it took him into the UFC, where he alternated wins and losses from the moment he stepped in the Octagon.
"When I got to the higher end, in the IFL (International Fight League) or the [Andrei] Arlovski fight in Affliction, it was just like I was being held back. I can't even explain it," he says. "There could be a lot to it. Every fighter struggles with it, with being as good as they are in the training room."
And then came a fight against Brandon Vera on August 31, 2013.
Critics will remember that Rothwell was flagged for elevated testosterone levels after the fight. What they don't know is that his endocrinologist told him after the car wreck that his body's natural ability to produce testosterone was "destroyed."
Ben had been cleared to undergo testosterone replacement therapy and was one of the very few active fighters with a real need for it, but the UFC decided to put him on the sidelines for nine months after his levels were higher than they should've been.
Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images
But what Rothwell remembers—and this seems far more important than the price he paid for failing the drug test—was a moment in the third round when he finally came to grips with the fear that had trailed him since childhood.
"Something inside of me opened up in that round, the first minute," he says. "You can see it."
And sure enough, you can see it, if you watch the tape with an idea of what you are looking for. It looks as though a weight has been lifted from Rothwell's shoulders, which makes sense, because that is exactly what happened.
The fear that took root deep down inside him when he was six years old, lying in the hospital, afraid that he was going to die there and never have the chance to leave that white room and white bed with the clicking and whirring machinery pumping all manner of God knows what into him. The fear that turned him mean. The fear that turned a gorgeous sunny drive down a country road into a hell that stole the life of his best friend.
The fear was gone.
It was a realization on multiple levels: that he could be successful, and that it was OK for him to do so. That he didn't have to fit into the mold others tried to squeeze him into. That he was free to be himself, no matter what everyone else thought, and that he could compete with the best in the world.
"I've never been the same since," he says.
Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images
After that came Rothwell's most famous victory, a knockout of the hulking striker Alistair Overeem. After that, he submitted Matt Mitrione and then gave a now-famous post-fight interview to Jon Anik. You know the one. Rothwell assumed something that resembled the spirit of a long-ago professional wrestler mixed with a stereotypical movie villain, emitting a "muah ha ha" laugh that immediately morphed him from a fighter on the fringe into someone fans were genuinely interested in.
It was no gimmick, he says. He was just being himself.
Sure, it looked and sounded pretty weird, but it was real, and it all went back to that moment in the third round of the Vera fight when the dual fear of success and failure was banished to the sidelines and Rothwell became, finally, at peace with himself.
"I realized I can be who I am. I don't have to be afraid anymore," he says. "That's why you heard the laugh and saw me with the cloak. People were like, what is this? But it's real. I've decided that I can be as badass as I want to be."
Ben Rothwell faces Josh Barnett this Saturday at UFC on Fox 18. Jeremy Botter covers mixed martial arts for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter. |
I'm speechless, Actually, factually speechless. I... ok, you can't see it, but my mouth is silently gaping up and down, like the koi on the shirt I received from my tshirt Santa.
I'd given up on ever getting a gift from my original Book Santa, and I was ok with that. Things happen. NBD. I didn't even know I'd been rematched, til the postman just banged on the door (scaring the crap out of me, I was halfway into getting ready for roller derby practice!) and dropped off the package from Amazon.
The note on the package didn't even make sense - "books on here"? Do you want to trade me for books off of my wishlist or something? IDGI.
Then I noticed that the package had a particular... slant... to it. (No pictures of that, sorry. I got excited and promptly tore off the giftwrap like an 8 year old on their birthday.)
It wasn't. There's no way. I never get uber-Santa gifts.
OH HOLY CRAP IT TOTALLY IS NO WAY NO WAY NO WAY.
My rematch Santa got me a Kindle.
MY REMATCH SANTA GOT ME A KINDLE.
::dies::
I seriously don't have words, brewtality. I am speechless and thankful and amazed and SO FREAKING EXCITED TO READ ALL THE THINGS IN ALL THE PLACES.
I'd actually just been talking with my best friend, not even 3 hours ago, about how one of the (many) short stories I want to read was available for free on Kindle today. I downloaded it, to save for a rainy day (sure, I could read it on my Kindle app on my phone, but I never do that), just in case I ever had the cash burning a hole in my pocket to pick up a Kindle, but not really, y'know, banking on it.
Then this. And y'know what? IT IS ACTUALLY RAINING. IN COLORADO. (Colorado gets 300+ days of sunshine a year, and when liquid precipitation falls out of the sky, everyone gets confused and scared. Seriously.)
TODAY IS MY RAINY DAY.
Today I plug my Kindle in to charge, go to roller derby practice, then come home, take a shower, EAT A PIZZA (passover ends at sunset - everything's coming up Milhouse!), and DOWNLOAD THINGS TO MY KINDLE AND READ FOREVER. FOREVER, I SAY.
ETA: OMFG and then I plugged it in and it's a PAPERWHITE, not just the regular Kindle. I AM TRYING NOT TO SHOUT BUT IT IS REALLY REALLY HARD.
ETA2: I was so excited to play with it that I almost forgot to put on pants when I went to leave for practice.
ETA3: I just realized that now I can buy e-subscriptions to all the tiny scifi lit mags I could never afford paper subscriptions to. And I did a little happy dance all over again.
ETA4: A few days later, I opened my email to find 5 shiny ebooks for my new kindle. Santa, you have spoiled me. I promise I'll try to be as good to my future giftees as you've been to me. |
In its first study on author income since 2009, the Authors Guild delivers some jarring, if unsurprising, data. The survey, which will be released next week, indicates, among other things, that the majority of authors would be living below the Federal Poverty Level if they relied solely on income from their writing.
Mary Rasenberger, executive director at the Guild, acknowledged that the findings paint a grim picture. “When it comes to income there is no good news to report,” she said. Citing a swirl of factors, from online piracy to publisher consolidation to the rise of Amazon (and the shuttering of brick and mortar bookstores), Rasenberger said the takeaway from the survey is that authors should be receiving higher royalties from publishers. “Authors need to be cut in more equitably on the profits their publishers see, or we’ll stop seeing the quality of work the industry was built on.”
The survey, conducted this spring by the Codex Group, is based on responses from 1,674 Guild members, 1,406 of whom identified either as a full-time author, or a part-time one. The majority of respondents also lean older—89% are over the age of 50—and toward the traditionally published end (64%).
So what does that Federal Poverty Level statistic mean? Given that a single person earning less than $11,670 annually sits below the poverty line, 56% of respondents would qualify, if they relied solely on income from their writing. The survey also indicated that not only are many authors earning little, they are, since 2009, also earning less. Overall, the median writing-related income among respondents dropped from $10,500 in 2009 to $8,000 2014 in 2014, a decline of 24%. The decline came for both full-time and part-time authors with full-time authors reporting a 30% drop in income to $17,500 and part-time authors seeing a 38% decrease, to $4,500.
The 2015 survey, Rasenberger explained, was intended to gauge how digital innovation has affected authors; in 2009, when the Guild did its first income survey, e-books had not been significantly adopted by readers. Given this, Rasenberger said, the results are not without bright spots. “We’re on the other side of a storm, and in many ways it wasn’t as bad as some predicted," she noted. "But that’s not to say it’s been easy to weather.”
One thing the survey indicates is that more authors are taking a hybrid approach to their careers. While only 4% of respondents said they have only self-published, 33% reported having self-published at least one book. To Rasenberger, this stat shows authors are recognizing opportunities that self-publishing offers. She said the Guild suspects authors “are starting to see self-publishing as an outlet for projects that haven’t been supported by traditional publishing houses.”
While Rasenberger feels the rise in hybrid authorship “is an exciting development,” she drove home the point that the survey ultimately shows that authors are not getting the financial rewards they are due. Noting that both “copyright law and policy” need to be “tailored to put authors’ concerns at the forefront,” Rasenberger said the Guild hopes the survey will allow it to "more effectively advocate for working authors.” |
A few weeks back, I was in the doctor’s office waiting room with one of my children. I heard a father talking to his young daughter. She was teary-eyed because he had told her she had to get a shot. “It won’t hurt at all,” he told her. “You won’t even feel it.”
I wasn’t sure what kind of shot she was getting but I remember thinking to myself, “Bullshit!! Shots hurt.” Especially for a kid.
I get what dad was doing. The shot was a necessary evil and he was consoling her so she would stop crying.
I remember getting shots as a kid. I don’t remember crying in the waiting room in anticipation, however. And it is not because I am tough. I still hate needles. Instead of telling me it wouldn’t hurt, I clearly remember my mother telling four-year-old me it WAS going to hurt, maybe a lot. She said though that we had to do it anyways. I remember trying to “get tough” in my head so I was ready for it.
I remember my mom asking me after the shot what I thought. I told her it hurt, but not as bad as I thought it would. I had teared up, but no full on bawling.
I wondered how that little girl reacted when she got stuck.
****
Several years ago, Jeremiah and I were coaching the Roseville High School wrestling team. One of our athletes, DJ, was a good wrestler. He had previously qualified for the state tournament. He was in a pretty tough weight class, however, and his return to the state tournament was not a certainty. He would first have to defeat another previous state qualifier. Skill, talent and conditioning-wise it was a draw at best. Privately, I was concerned that the other kid was better.
I had watched DJ’s opponent wrestle before, He came out very aggressive in the first period and overwhelmed his opponents.
Our kid had grit and, while I figured we could out work him in the long run, I was pretty sure we would lose the takedown battle, get down early, and have to come from behind to win in the third period.
For those who are unfamiliar, wrestling is really dominated by takedowns. I am not sure of the exact statistic, but the kid that gets the first takedown wins the match like 80 percent of the time. In high school wrestling, you get two points for a takedown and one point for an escape. Do the math, if you can consistently take down your opponent, you can take them down and let them up, and run up a good lead.
And there is something psychologically devastating about being behind in wrestling. It is tough to come back.
I was worried. I was pretty sure DJ was going to get taken down several times in the first round. I didn’t want him to break before he had the chance to grit it out. So I told him, “The first round probably won’t be pretty. He may get a few takedowns, we could come out of it down by six or eight points.”
A coach standing on the mat nearby looked at me like I was crazy.
“But that’s ok,” I told him. “He is probably better on his feet but he will tire during the second period and you’ll be able to grind out a win late in the match. Don’t worry about the takedowns if they happen, stick with him.”
DJ took the mat with the confidence that comes from knowing what lies ahead and that you have a plan. And he quickly got taken down, several times. At the end of the first round, we were down 6-1. That is a big gap in the semi-finals of a Sectional tournament. Most wrestlers would have gotten discouraged and given up. But at the beginning of the second period, DJ looked as calm and confident as when the match began. The match was going according to plan.
During the second period, his opponent started to tire, and DJ was able to stabilize. At the end of round 2 we were down 7-3.
In the third round DJ, repeatedly took him down and let him up, closing the gap each time. A last second takedown gave him the victory 11-10. His arms raised in victory, he came off the mat smiling.
DJ was very clear on the obstacles he’d face in that match – a better takedown wrestler and the discouragement of being behind at the end of the first period.
Typically, a five-point deficit at the end of the first period is enough to get most athletes to give up. But DJ was ready for it, and he had a plan.
****
Many people fail because they fail to recognize the obstacles they will have to overcome along the way.
The mantra of the highly motivated, “failure is not an option,” is simply untrue. Failure is always an option, especially if you don’t plan for it. Too many people avoid talking about obstacles because they think that saying them out loud would make them real. Obstacles are real, whether we plan for them or not.
Recognizing and planning for the obstacles you face is just as important as having clear goals to begin with. Because booster shots really do hurt, and the wrestler who gets the first takedown does usually win. But, if you understand what you are up against, you can be ready and beat the odds.
Failure is always an option. Plan accordingly.
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As you know, the end of the year means various lists and awards start popping up, but none matter more in the world of Ring of Honor than the ROHbot Year End Awards where the best of the best in ROH are honored. Now, lets see our award recipients.
Breakout Star of the Year:
Marty Scurll
Event of the Year:
“15th Anniversary”
Match of the Year:
Ladder Match: The Young Bucks vs. The Hardys (“Supercard of Honor XI”; April 1st, 2017)
Feud of the Year:
Silas Young vs. Jay Lethal
Biggest Story of the Year:
Attendance on the Rise
Tag Team of the Year:
The Young Bucks
And here we are, the biggest award of them all for a single Ring of Honor wrestler. It’s amazing to think this history this man has made when less than a couple of years ago he was thought of nothing more than a joke character. Ladies and gentlemen, the ROH Wrestler of the Year goes to…
Wrestler of the Year:
Cody
Britt Baker vs. Deonna Purrazzo
Dalton Castle vs. Jushin Liger
Till Then. |
Across the United States, thousands of kids are kicked out of their homes each year for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT ). In some cases, homophobic families dump them on the streets like litter. In other homes, kids run away in fear of retribution or as a result of ridicule.
They have nowhere to go. And the problem grows worse as American youth are “coming out” at increasingly early ages.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 575,000 to 1.6 million homeless and runaway youth are living on the streets from New York City to Los Angeles. Of these, between 20 and 40 percent are LGBT , according to the 2007 seminal study, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth: An Epidemic of Homelessness” by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF).
The study highlights a particularly dismal fact: Given that between 3 percent and 5 percent of the U.S. population identifies as lesbian, gay or bisexual, it is clear that LGBT youth experience homelessness at a hugely disproportionate rate. LGBT youth homelessness is a hidden reality of 21st-century America. The stories of despair, high HIV rates and street murders continue to be under-reported and unaddressed. I wanted to know who these kids were and how they survived in New York City. That is what took me to Sylvia’s Place.
BELOW-GROUND HAVEN
Nestled in the heart of Chelsea is a small safe haven on Eighth Avenue. A rusty iron gate closed behind me as I stepped into Sylvia’s Place on a recent Monday evening. Located in the basement of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, the space was filled with clutter: old mail, hand-me-down clothes, boxes of donated food and cold metal chairs. There were no windows, but harsh lights kept it bright. A single bathroom provided a semblance of privacy. Brazil, a young transgender woman, saw me eyeing it. “If you go in there, don’t sit down,” she said. The shelter is named for Sylvia Rivera, the legendary transgender woman said to have thrown the high heel that sparked the Stonewall riots 40 years ago.
Sylvia’s Place is one of three organizations in New York City that provides overnight shelter exclusively for LGBT homeless youth. Twenty-five to 30 kids sleep on the cold cement floor at Sylvia’s Place every night, packed together and exposed to roaches. Still, it is better than shelters for straight kids, where LGBT youth often face verbal and physical abuse. It is better than the street.
Hip-hop music blared from the speakers. A few volunteers were cooking dinner in a makeshift kitchen. Diggy, from the Bronx, danced flamboyantly in the middle of the floor, belting out song lyrics. A chubby teenager with bright purple hair was drunk and sobbing in the corner. “I want to get clean,” he cried softly, as his friend stood out on the sidewalk, calling to him through the front door, pressuring him to take another swig. Aqua Starr, the newest kid to take up residence at the shelter, was stoned and eating cold turkey stuffing and pizza by himself, leaning on a row of cabinets and eyeing me from a distance.
I sat down next to Chris Collazo, the 25- year-old drop-in coordinator at Sylvia’s.
“If you want the kids to open up, show empathy,” Collazo told me. “Then you won’t be able to get them to stop talking.”
Across the room Damien Corallo slouched in a chair, looking grim. Somebody had stolen his iPod. “Things are always getting stolen here,” he said. I sat down next to him and, just as Collazo had said, once I got him talking, he did not want to stop. When he was a kid, his father was sent to jail and his mother sent him and his two siblings from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York City to live with his aunt. His brother was gay and Damien, who is transgender, had been dressing like a boy as long as he could remember.
“One day our aunt told us she didn’t want any faggots in the house. And we figured out that she had given our rights over to the state. So we left,” Corallo said. “I’ve lived in 32 group homes or foster homes. I’ve lived in shelters, halfway houses, safety houses. I’ve been into lock-up, stuck in residentials. I have been in every kind of home. I went to juvie for drugs. I used to inject drugs and snort coke. I was in for about a year. It was not friendly. It was a Missouri state jail and then I went to rehab.”
Corallo said he stayed in a group home on Long Island. Three years ago he moved to Sylvia’s, where he’s been ever since. On three occasions, he’s been beaten in what he described as “gay bashings.” He’s been called a faggot and a freak more times than he would like to remember. Somewhere along the line he contracted HIV, which has since turned into AIDS. He has attempted suicide more than once, and he relapsed, too — he’s got track marks up and down his arms and a chronic twitch. He is using crystal methamphetamines and heroin again. He said he wants to break the habit, but “I could never stay clean in this situation.” Corallo is 18 years old.
My first evening at Sylvia’s ended with a speech from T.T. Wilson, a 23 year old with purple hair who had just been suspended from the shelter for three days because she had been in a street fight outside. “At the end of the day, y’all can go home to y’all’s motherfuckin’ houses and y’all can sleep in your own fuckin’ bed regardless if y’all strugglin’ with your bills or not!” she screamed at the staff. “Y’all have a fuckin’ home. I don’t. I don’t have anywhere to go. So what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?!”
A REFUGE ON THE RIVER
Pier 45, at the west end of Christopher Street, is the epicenter of LGBT youth life, especially for kids of color who travel from neighborhoods around the city. Tucked in the Hudson River Park on the edge of New York’s expensive and trendy Greenwich Village, it is where many youth gather during the day to pass the time, meet friends and organize around issues of gentrification, youth and LGBT rights. It is something like a home.
“This is a place that folks come to feel safe. You can meet other people and start to feel comfortable in your own skin,” said Desire Marshall, a 25-year-old organizer with FIERCE , a group that advocates for LGBT youth of color. “There are few places you can go when you’re young and there are even fewer places you can go when you’re queer.” The pier is one of them, but it too is threatened.
In 2001, the Hudson River Park Trust — a public-private partnership that governs the park — closed Pier 45 for renovation. The LGBT youth that use the pier were not consulted about the plans and many feared that they would have no place to congregate on a revamped, gentrified pier.
Their fears were well founded. When the pier was re-opened in 2003, it had changed dramatically.
“For two years they had nowhere to go,” said Marshall. “Now they reopen it with a curfew that wasn’t here before, with a police presence that wasn’t here, with park enforcement patrol that wasn’t here, and food that LGBTQ youth and low-income people cannot afford. They are pushing out a huge part of the community that utilizes this space.” FIERCE’s fight to protect Pier 45 from exclusionary development continues today as the Hudson River Park fishes around for more proposals to improve what it calls “quality of life” along the river.
THE RIVERSIDE STROLL
While Pier 45 is safe during the day, at night it turns into something entirely different: a center of commerce where sex workers and drug dealers, many of them homeless and queer, come to make money, to “get coin.” They call it “the stroll.”
One afternoon Wilson invited me to come with her to see the stroll. She’d been back from her suspension for at least a week and we’d already spent a good deal of time together at Sylvia’s Place. She told me that she grew up in a well-off conservative community in North Carolina. When she came out to her family about her transgender identity, however, a conflict developed with her mother. Eventually, she left North Carolina for New York City two years ago.
“I know my mommy likes me, I know she loves me, but I was never peaceful,” Wilson said. “My family don’t accept me for being gay. They don’t accept gay people period.”
When Wilson came to New York, she found a new family — four trusted friends. As the oldest among them, she called them her children and they called her their mother. LGBT homeless youth frequently piece together families for protection and support on the streets. Corallo had one as well. “Me and my friends developed a kind of homeless runaway family,” he said. “When we didn’t have a place to go we would all sleep together at Union Square at night.”
I joined Wilson and her family on the pier one late rainy Saturday night to watch the stroll. Teenagers slowly walked up and down the sidewalks, strutting, making fleeting eye contact to draw in potential customers. Many of them were transgender, most were youth of color.
The occasional catcall and rowdy laughter blended in with the rain spattering the sidewalk and the buzz of cars on the West Side Highway. “If you watch closely, you’ll start to see people disappearing into the bathrooms,” Wilson said. To our left, a drug dealer in a baggy purple shirt stood on a corner with two others, hollering at people and peddling dime bags and joints for dollars.
Wilson explained that survival sex fuels the stroll. Many of the kids do it to eat or because they need a place to stay for the night and a stranger’s bed is better than a cold, wet bench at Union Square. Others do it because they are saving up for a sex change operation or to feed a drug habit. According to the 2007 NGLTF report, LGBT homeless youth are three times more likely to engage in survival sex than their heterosexual homeless peers.
ON THE FRONTLINES
Sylvia’s youth live on the frontlines of the battle against homophobia, gender discrimination, racism, class — and they have the scars to prove it.
Carl Siciliano knows the depths of these wounds. As the executive director of the Ali Forney Center (AFC), an organization that provides emergency and transitional housing to LGBT homeless youth in New York City, he is a witness to this struggle.
“I don’t think there is any other situation where so much oppression and persecution and cruelty is happening to people because they’re gay,” Siciliano said as we drove to Brooklyn to see a pair of AFC apartments. “These kids are bearing the brunt of homophobia in our society.” Siciliano has been working with LGTB youth since the mid-1990s. “Every couple of months one of our kids would get murdered on the streets,” Siciliano said. “They were just in this ground zero of danger.” Ali Forney, a gay and transgender youth and the namesake of Siciliano’s organization, was killed in 1997. He was found on Harlem’s 135th early one winter morning with a bullet in his head.
With the help of a committed staff, Siciliano has turned a project that began in 2002 into the largest organization of its kind in the nation. His program offers counseling and mentoring services as well as a network of eight apartments that house 48 youth on any given night.
And it works. Every year his organization weans a new cohort of kids off drugs and sends a handful to college. And they receive a little more funding. But the waiting list is long. The program is successful, but it is simply not enough.
As Siciliano himself admits, the gay rights movement and its allies are failing to address the problem. “I don’t think there are 200 beds in the country for gay youth,” he says. “If there are more than 1,000 gay youth on the streets in New York, there has got to be at least 20,000 in the country. And that is a conservative estimate. So 200 beds for 20,000 kids? Obviously we are not stepping up to the plate.”
Siciliano and politicians like New York City Councilmember Lewis Fidler (D-Brooklyn) — who have spearheaded the effort to get city funding for programs that serve LGBT homeless youth — have ideas on how to solve the crisis. They propose two broad solutions: First, combat homophobia. Second, while homophobia still exists, generate the political will to care for kids who fall prey to it.
A study cited in the NGLTF report found that 50 percent of young gay males experienced a negative reaction from their parents when they came out and 26 percent were told to leave home. In addition, one third of all LGBT youth are assaulted by a parent or another family member after disclosing their sexual orientation.
Along with homophobia, class and poverty are part of the problem. “People from affluent backgrounds have more options and resources,” Sicilian said. “They face the same rejection, but when half of your extended family is already living under one roof with you, so close to the street anyway, there is a lot less of a buffer zone.”
The confluence of homophobia and poverty puts kids on the streets and keeps them there.
“I have stood on the steps and declared war on homelessness. I have done as much as I can to raise awareness,” Fidler said. “And still, Brittany [Spears] can climb into a cab without underwear and get three pages in the paper, but I can’t get three columns on kids who are couch surfing, who are selling their bodies to survive, who are exposed to unspeakable horrors.”
Fidler believes the only way to truly address the issue is through a mass social movement. “My belief is that if people knew that on the streets of this city in this day there are children by the hundreds who are sleeping on the streets, if this problem were known, then the public would create the political will to solve it.”
Meanwhile, however, young people like Damien Corallo will remain on the margins. “A lot of us feel rejected, like there is no place for us,” Corallo said. “We’re the bottom of the barrel.” |
Last month, Community Board 1 approved a $750,000 installation by Tom Otterness for a public library in lower Manhattan: lion sculptures, paid for by a private donor, in a public space. Now, a cry has gone round the neighborhood to reject the work.
You may not recognize his name, but you've probably seen Otterness' cartoonish bronze men and animals throughout New York. Largely thanks to public art funds, he often places his sculptures near schools, playgrounds, parks and libraries.
His little guys can be seen throughout the 14th St. subway station at Eighth Ave., hiding in nooks and crannies (pictured). He has made pieces for Europe and Asia and even designed a float for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. With a seemingly inoffensive cast of characters, Otterness has proven irresistible to art world bureaucrats, who continue to give him commissions.
But now, Otterness is being exposed as a killer. In 1977, he made a film in which he "rescued" a dog from a shelter, tied it up and, as the animal wagged its tail, shot it dead. The movie, which Otterness called "Shot Dog Film," repeatedly shows the brutal execution.
Otterness has been apologizing for his despicable act ever since it came to light a few years ago and began to threaten his lucrative public support. In 2008, he said, "Thirty years ago, when I was 25 years old, I made a film in which I shot a dog. It was an indefensible act that I am deeply sorry for. Many of us have experienced profound emotional turmoil and despair. Few have made the mistake I made. I hope people can find it in their hearts to forgive me."
We were all young once, but most of us didn't shoot dogs and call it art. Through news reports and an online petition, enough people learned of Otterness' past to question the members of Community Board 1, which nevertheless voted to support the new downtown installation.
Many observers have been wondering why Otterness has yet to make a significant public donation to animal welfare to atone for his misdeeds. Meanwhile, the New York Public Library has, for its part, disowned any involvement in the project, claiming that the Battery Park City Authority has sole jurisdiction. "We in no way solicited this project, and are learning much of the detail in public meetings," the NYPL said in a statement.
Otterness' supporters may think that his cuddly sculptures are a lifetime apart from his violent past. In fact, his critics are right to expose his more recent work to closer scrutiny.
Otterness' sculptures might seem sweet, but they are meant to leave you with a bitter political aftertaste, because Otterness continues to be the angry artist who once executed a defenseless creature. His work remains a meanspirited comment on the "evils" of capitalism.
For example, at the 14th St. station, the little figures of "Life Underground" (2004) really make up a diorama of class struggle. Fat cats with bags of money roll over smaller worker-men. A mean-faced cop leers over a sleeping bag lady. A rat chews on a penny. A triumphant woman reads a book over a dead Monopoly Man, with coins spilling out beneath him.
Otterness has owned up to his radical politics. "I just want to be somebody who is talking straight-up in a public forum about sex or class or race," he said in 2006.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority spilled a lot of pennies - $200,000 - to pay for "Life Underground." The fact that Otterness now uses public venues and funds to preach his angry politics is not a vindication of his past, but just another example of his depravity.
Panero is the managing editor of The New Criterion. |
While it may be mostly Pagans who celebrate the Yule holiday today, nearly all cultures and faiths have held some sort of winter solstice celebration or festival. Because of the theme of endless birth, life, death, and rebirth, the time of the solstice is often associated with deity and other legendary figures. No matter which path you follow, chances are good that one of your gods or goddesses has a winter solstice connection.
Alcyone (Greek)
Alcyone is the Kingfisher goddess. She nests every winter for two weeks, and while she does, the wild seas become calm and peaceful. Alcyone was one of the seven sisters of the Pleiades.
Ameratasu (Japan)
In feudal Japan, worshipers celebrated the return of Ameratasu, the sun goddess, who slept in a cold, remote cave. When the other gods woke her with a loud celebration, she looked out of the cave and saw an image of herself in a mirror. The other gods convinced her to emerge from her seclusion and return sunlight to the universe. According to Mark Cartwright at Ancient History Encyclopedia,
"[S]he blocked herself in a cave following an argument with Susanoo when he surprised the goddess with a monstrous flayed horse when she was quietly weaving in her palace with her younger sister Waka-hiru-me. As a consequence of Amaterasu’s disappearance the world was cast in total darkness and evil spirits ran riot over the earth. The gods tried all manner of ways to persuade the peeved goddess to leave the cave. On the advice of Omohi-Kane, cocks were set outside the cave in the hope their crows would make the goddess think that dawn had come."
The Norse pagans had a tradition of calling a truce beneath mistletoe. Danita Delimont / Gallo Images / Getty Images
Baldur (Norse)
Baldur is associated with the legend of the mistletoe. His mother, Frigga, honored Baldur and asked all of nature to promise not to harm him. Unfortunately, in her haste, Frigga overlooked the mistletoe plant, so Loki - the resident trickster - took advantage of the opportunity and fooled Baldur's blind twin, Hodr, into killing him with a spear made of mistletoe. Baldur was later restored to life.
Bona Dea (Roman)
This fertility goddess was worshiped in a secret temple on the Aventine hill in Rome, and only women were permitted to attend her rites. Her annual festival was held early in December. High-ranking women would gather at the house of Rome's most prominent magistrates, the Pontifex Maximus. While there, the magistrate's wife led secret rituals at which men were forbidden. It was even prohibited to discuss men or anything masculine at the ritual.
n Scotland, she is also called Beira, the Queen of Winter. She is the hag aspect of the Triple Goddess, and rules the dark days between Samhain and Beltaine. She appears in the late fall, as the earth is dying, and is known as a bringer of storms. She is typically portrayed as a one-eyed old woman with bad teeth and matted hair. Mythologist Joseph Campbell says that in Scotland, she is known as Cailleach Bheur, while along the Irish coast she appears as Cailleach Beare.
Demeter (Greek)
Through her daughter, Persephone, Demeter is linked strongly to the changing of the seasons and is often connected to the image of the Dark Mother in winter. When Persephone was abducted by Hades, Demeter's grief caused the earth to die for six months, until her daughter's return.
Dionysus (Greek)
A festival called Brumalia was held every December in honor of Dionysus and his fermented grape wine. The event proved so popular that the Romans adopted it as well in their celebrations of Bacchus.
Frau Holle appears in many different forms in Scandinavian mythology and legend. She is associated with both the evergreen plants of the Yule season, and with snowfall, which is said to be Frau Holle shaking out her feathery mattresses.
Frigga (Norse)
Frigga honored her son, Baldur, by asking all of nature not to harm him, but in her haste overlooked the mistletoe plant. Loki fooled Baldur's blind twin, Hodr, into killing him with a spear made of mistletoe but Odin later restored him to life. As thanks, Frigga declared that mistletoe must be regarded as a plant of love, rather than death.
Hodr, sometimes called Hod, was the twin brother of Baldur, and the Norse god of darkness and winter. He also happened to be blind, and appears a few times in the Norse Skaldic poetry. When he kills his brother, Hodr sets in motion the string of events leading to Ragnarok, the end of the world.
The Holly King is a figure found in British tales and folklore. He is similar to the Green Man, the archetype of the forest. In modern Pagan religion, the Holly King battles the Oak King for supremacy throughout the year. At the winter solstice, the Holly King is defeated.
Horus (Egyptian)
Horus was one of the solar deities of the ancient Egyptians. He rose and set every day, and is often associated with Nut, the sky god. Horus later became connected with another sun god, Ra.
Witch puppets at the Christmas Fair on the Piazza Navona, Rome. Jonathan Smith / Lonely Planet / Getty Images
This character from Italian folklore is similar to St. Nicholas, in that she flies around delivering candy to well-behaved children in early January. She is depicted as an old woman on a broomstick, wearing a black shawl.
Lord of Misrule (British)
The custom of appointing a Lord of Misrule to preside over winter holiday festivities actually has its roots in antiquity, during the Roman week of Saturnalia. Typically, the Lord of Misrule was someone of a lower social status than the homeowner and his guests, which made it acceptable for them to poke fun at him during drunken revelries. In some parts of England, this custom overlapped with the Feast of Fools – with the Lord of Misrule being the Fool. There was often a great deal of feasting and drinking going on, and in many areas, there was a complete reversal of traditional social roles, albeit a temporary one.
Mithras (Roman)
Mithras was celebrated as part of a mystery religion in ancient Rome. He was a god of the sun, who was born around the time of the winter solstice and then experienced a resurrection around the spring equinox.
In some legends, Odin bestowed gifts at Yuletide upon his people, riding a magical flying horse across the sky. This legend may have combined with that of St. Nicholas to create the modern Santa Claus.
Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
Saturn (Roman)
Every December, the Romans threw a week-long celebration of debauchery and fun, called Saturnalia in honor of their agricultural god, Saturn. Roles were reversed, and slaves became the masters, at least temporarily. This is where the tradition of the Lord of Misrule originated.
Spider Woman (Hopi) |
Paul Stoffregen was kind enough to send my a free Teensy 2.0 sample board to analyze the Arduino serial latency issue – and this board is shocking small:
We wrote a very simple firmware to perform some basic benchmarks – Paul wrote a simple c tool to measure the native latency, I wrote a simple tool in Java using rxtx lib to measure the latency in Java.
Long story short, here are the results:
Hint: These results are made on my MacBook (Model 5,1), Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GHz, uname output: “Darwin xxx 10.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.7.0: Sat Jan 29 15:17:16 PST 2011; root:xnu-1504.9.37~1/RELEASE_I386 i386″
Conclusion:
Java latency is at least 20ms
The Arduino UNO may be slower than the Arduino 2009 if small a amount of serial bytes (<12b) are transferred
The Teensy 2.0 board may be up to 18 times faster than an Arduino board
So this 20ms latency using the rxtx library looks quite promising… hmm take a look at this code snipped from the file SerialImp.c:
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void report_serial_events( struct event_info_struct *eis )
{
/* JK00: work around for Multi IO cards without TIOCSERGETLSR */
<...>
usleep(20000);
#if !defined(__sun__)
/* FIXME: No time to test on all OS's for production */
usleep(20000);
#endif /* !__sun__ */
return;
}
report("report_serial_events: sending DATA_AVAILABLE
");
if(!send_event( eis, SPE_DATA_AVAILABLE, 1 ))
{
/* select wont block */
/* FIXME: No time to test on all OS's for production */
/* REMOVE goes around usleep */
#if !defined(__sun__)
#endif /* !__sun__ */
}
usleep(20000);
}
}
Replace this 20’000ms delay with a shorter (I used 2000ms), recompile and enjoy decreased latency!
Files used for this article:
- Performance test files
- RXTX TEST library, only 64b Mac OSX!
The rxtx lib is not very well tested (not at all!) – so leave a feedback if the lib is working fine for you!
Anyway, here are the results on OSX with the patched rxtx library:
Update 16.05.2011:
Paul did some more native performance tests, here are the results: |
Ever heard of symphysiotomy? Probably not; my spell check doesn't even know what it is. But it's a painful surgical procedure which involves breaking a woman's pelvis during childbirth that sounds like an ancient torture method but was once an alternative to Caesareans used in maternity hospitals across Ireland in the 20th century.
When members of the Survivors of Symphysiotomy (SOS) met in Dublin yesterday, they were able to recognize each other thanks to the "signature limp" survivors have. (Other less visible related problems include chronic back pain and incontinence.) Group members, many of whom are in their 70s and 80s, say that the operations were carried out without the women's consent "mainly for religious reasons, by obstetricians who were opposed to family planning." Huh; sounds horrifingly familiar.
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The survivors met to see the first screening of a documentary about the practice, which compares it to methods used in Kenyan hospitals today. But based on Savita Halappanavar's tragic story — she was denied a medical termination in an Irish hospital even though she was miscarrying and in severe pain, and later died — it's not like things have gotten all that much better for modern-day Irish women, either.
The TheJournal.ie's account of the documentary is sickening:
On screen, former midwife Laura Mann explains that when she was working in Dublin hospitals in the 1950s and 1960s, "the big thing was to have children even if you dropped dead." She discussed Catholic Church influence, and even interference, in maternity hospitals. Survivor Micheline Gilroy remembers being "held down" and a strange man looking annoyed at the end of her bed. "I thought this was the way," she said. It was her first and only labour. Even though they now know they underwent symphysiotomies, there is still mystery and unanswered questions around the childbirth experiences of these women. "‘I'm going to give you a symphysiotomy'," Marie Cowly's doctor told her. "Sure I didn't know what it was," she says. "He could have danced a jig at the end of the bed. I'd never heard of it. I still have no explanation." The nurses looked sick, some even got physically sick, begins Nora Clarke. "I saw the hacksaw, I know what hacksaws are. He started cutting my bone and my blood spurted up like a fountain." She remembers how the doctor looked annoyed that he had gotten her blood on his glasses. Until she spoke to her son Wayne about it many years later, Nora believed she had gone through a C-Section. "You'll never get rid of [the pain] until you're not living anymore," she says during the film.
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Hopefully the documentary will help educate more people about what the survivors of symphysiotomy went through, but also put more pressure on Ireland to fully legalize abortion ASAP before more women suffer and die.
[thejournal.ie] |
Pastor Mark Brewer of Crosspoint Wesleyan Church in Fredericton, New Brunswick had to deal with a potential crisis this past week.
One of the finest members of his church, 20-year-old Colin Briggs, had been a camp counselor and church volunteer for a couple of years. He even went on a mission trip to Haiti in 2011.
But he’s gay. And there was a chance that some of the older members of the congregation wouldn’t take that news very well if they ever found out.
So Brewer met with Briggs a few days ago to let him know that, if the church members ever bothered him about his sexuality, Brewer would offer his support and defend Briggs’ character. That’s what their church’s mission was all about, after all: becoming “fully devoted followers of Jesus.”
I’m just kidding. Of course I’m kidding. You know I’m kidding.
Pastor Mark Brewer asked Briggs to stop by the church on September 18 for a meeting. The youth pastor, Nathalie Estey, was also present. To his shock, they asked Briggs to stop his volunteer activities. They said he was welcome to continue attending church services. “We felt it would be in the best interest of him and the church if he stopped serving,” said Brewer. This would “avoid any potential uproar that may be caused if families were to find out an openly gay male was working in the children’s ministry.”
He hesitated, then said, “Having an openly gay male working in the children’s ministry may cause some parents to feel uncomfortable.”
And what would be so wrong if people in the church found out he was gay, anyway?
Ah. There we go. Brewer’s concern is that some people in the church might ignorantly link homosexuality with pedophilia… and, instead of correcting their false assumptions, he decided the best option would be to just tell Briggs he couldn’t volunteer at the church anymore.
It’s kind of like when Jesus told the tax collectors and prostitutes, “Get out of here before you make me look bad!”
It’s like that Christian saying: Love the sinner, hate the sin, and then start over and make the sinner feel like shit.
I can’t believe the pastor has no desire at all to correct his congregations’ bigoted thinking. His immediate solution is to make sure no gay person ever represents his church in public. Briggs is still welcome to attend the church, Brewer added.
Because, you know, if Briggs wants to keep tithing, they’ll be glad to have him.
The church hasn’t responded to this article yet, but readers are letting them have it on their Facebook page. |
Tunnels are used to smuggle weapons as well as more everyday items
Israeli jets have attacked parts of southern Gaza, after Palestinian militants fired a mortar at Israel.
Israel's military said the strikes targeted seven smuggling tunnels from Egypt into Gaza and a Hamas security post in Khan Younis.
There were no reports of casualties from Wednesday's pre-dawn raids.
There have been sporadic rocket fire and Israeli raids since unilateral ceasefires last month ended a 22-day assault by Israel on the Gaza Strip.
Around 1,300 Palestinians, including 400 children, and 13 Israelis were killed in the fighting.
Israel's offensive targeted the Islamist Hamas group which controls the Gaza Strip, and was also intended to limit the number of militant rockets fired into southern Israel by destroying weapons smuggling tunnels along Egypt's border.
Hamas wants Israel to lift its blockade of the coastal enclave, and Egyptian mediators are negotiating talks between the two sides, which include an extended ceasefire, the opening of Gaza's border crossings and a possible prisoner swap.
On Tuesday, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reiterated that the blockade would only be lifted if Gilad Shalit - an Israeli soldier captured by Gaza militants in 2006 - was released, a condition that Hamas has previously rejected.
Israel's cabinet is expected to discuss the mooted deal later on Wednesday. |
Let me describe a scenario that I think we've all been in. You pick up a game like Gears of War 3 or Starcraft II or the deck-building iOS game Ascension.
You jam through the single-player campaign or do a little comp'-stomping in skirmish mode -- maybe even on the second-to-hardest difficulty 'cause you're totally hardcore like that. And you're better at the game than anyone on your friends list, judging by the local leaderboards and the way nobody will play with you anymore. You've got this game figured out, man, and you think you're pretty good.
So you decide to venture online and try your hand at ranked ladder matches, a tournament, or maybe even just some pickup games via online matchmaking. You get creamed. Murdered. Owned.
At the end of the match, your competition has left you with a kill/death ratio in a realm of negative numbers so low that mathematicians hadn't even bothered to think about it yet because they figured nobody would ever use them. This baffles you, because by all previous accounts you're totally awesome at this game.
Congratulations, you've encountered what psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Named after the authors of a 1999 paper by Cornell University professor of psychology David Dunning and his then graduate student Justin Kruger, the effect describes how those who really aren't very good at something overestimate their skill while those who are experts tend to sell themselves short.
The reason is that the more skilled you are in some complicated task (the effect is more prominent for difficult, complex tasks), the more you understand that there's stuff you don't understand. Or that you haven't mastered.
Really good guitar players, for example, understand everything the instrument is capable of better than someone who has only now figured out how to bang out the beginning of that one Blink-182 song. Similarly, those of us who are really bad and inexperienced at a game often lack a true understanding of what's even possible.
You can't accurately reflect about your own opinion of yourself because you're not good enough. And you're not good enough because you can't accurately reflect on your own opinion of yourself.
In their initial research, Kruger and Dunning gave students tests of logic, grammar, and humor (really, he had them evaluate the LOL potential of jokes from the likes of Woody Allen and Al Franken). When the researchers asked the subjects to guess at their performance on these tests, they consistently found that poorest performers overestimated themselves.
Someone in the 12th percentile, for example, would guess that they were in the 62nd percentile. Further investigation showed that the poorer performing subjects overestimated their ability simply because they weren't good enough to know how difficult the tasks were. And they didn't know it.
I think I see this come up in video games a lot, especially ones with competitive multiplayer or even just those with challenges that let you compare your performance against others via leaderboards. It's exacerbated by the fact that the single player versions of games often allow you to be incompetent in the pursuit of fun.
You can soak up bullets in Gears of War 3 instead of using cover effectively or choosing the right weapon for the situation. You can brute force your way through a campaign scenario in Starcraft II using just Marines instead of appropriately countering the enemy's army build. You can kite mobs around in World of Warcraft instead of using teamwork and assembling a set of equipment or list of perks with the optimal resistances.
In each case, you're frankly quite incompetent, but the limited feedback you're getting doesn't allow you to know it because you're simply not that good at the game.
Think of it in terms of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. I may not know the melting point of Beryllium or the cooldown on an enemy mage's frost bolt spell, but I know I don't know that. But there's also stuff I don't know that I don't even know exists or is a factor. Like what implications that enemy sniper's loadout has on my ability to sneak up and backstab him in Team Fortress 2.
The latter is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. The great player sees every misstep and every missed opportunity for perfect play, and beats himself up over it. The novice bumbles along missing all that but getting the occasional headshot, and thinks he's doing all right for himself.
Some games are learning to address this fact by forcing novice players to learn the true scope of the game. Starcraft II, despite the fact that I've been using it to illustrate the Dunning-Kruger effect, actually tries to address it by inviting players to complete multiplayer-oriented challenges where they learn things like unit counters, defending against rushes, and other advanced tactics.This kind of thing helps, as well as curating of community guides and videos illustrating everything a game has to offer.
So next time you find your ladder rankings of your K/D ratio not living up to your expectations, take a second to reflect about all the things you don't know and how your experiences so far may have been designed to make you feel more competent than you really are. Then go pick up some tips from those totally awesome hardcore players who know how totally awesome they really aren't.
REFERENCES
Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Leads to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77 1121-1134. |
The Samsung Gear S2 Classic in Rose Gold and Platinum will hit US stores starting tomorrow, February 12, for $449.99, according to Samsung. The companies announced US availability this morning, stating that you’ll be able to buy each from retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy, Macy’s, and Samsung.com.
This higher-end version of the S2 Classic was originally announced at CES, where we gave you a quick photo tour. It then launched in China a few weeks later and is now ready for the US.
As a recap, the Gear S2 Classic is every bit a member of the Gear S2 family, except that it carries a more traditional timepiece aesthetic, hence the “Classic” moniker. These two new models are finished in either 18K rose gold or platinum, which is why you are paying a $100 premium over the original Gear S2 Classic.
These devices also feature Samsung’s fun-to-use and quite innovative rotating bezel, Tizen operating system, and beautiful 1.2-inch circular Super AMOLED display. They include 1.0GHz dual-core processors, 512MB RAM, 4GB internal storage, IP68 dust and water resistance, WiFi, NFC (for mobile payments at some point), wireless charging, and a 250mAh battery that can last a good two days. |
Trump-Hating FBI Agent Fired From Mueller Probe is Key Figure in Fusion GPS Dossier Scandal
In yet another blow to Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the special counsel was forced to fire a top FBI agent after possible anti-Trump text messages were discovered.
New York Times reports:
The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, removed a top F.B.I. agent from his investigation into Russian election meddling after the Justice Department’s inspector general began examining whether the agent had sent text messages that expressed anti-Trump political views, according to three people briefed on the matter. The agent, Peter Strzok, is considered one of the most experienced and trusted F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators. He helped lead the investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information on her private email account, and then played a major role in the investigation into links between President Trump’s campaign and Russia. But Mr. Strzok was reassigned this summer from
In August, ABC News reported that Strzok quit Team Mueller for unknown reasons. “It’s unclear why Strzok stepped away from Mueller’s team of nearly two dozen lawyers, investigators and administrative staff. Strzok, who has spent much of his law enforcement career working counterintelligence cases and has been unanimously praised by government officials who spoke with ABC News, is now working for the FBI’s human resources division,” reported Mike Levine.
Late Saturday night, we learn the Department of Justice has launched a review of Peter Stzrok’s role in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
Fox News reports:
Two senior Justice Department officials have confirmed to Fox News that the department’s Office of Inspector General is reviewing the role played in the Hillary Clinton email investigation by Peter Stzrok, a former deputy director for counterintelligence at the FBI who was removed from the staff of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III earlier this year, after Mueller learned that Strzok had exchanged anti-Trump texts with a colleague.
Reacting to Strzok’s ‘anti-Trump,’ texts, House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) said, “We now know why Strzok was dismissed, why the FBI and DOJ refused to provide us this explanation, and at least one reason why they previously refused to make [FBI] Deputy Director [Andrew] McCabe available to the Committee for an interview.”
Strzok played a key role in analyzing the infamous ‘Trump dossier,’ supplied by shady research firm Fusion GPS. The now disgraced FBI agent used disproven elements of the dossier to spy on members of the Trump campaign.
Fox News report:
House investigators told Fox News they have long regarded Strzok as a key figure in the chain of events when the bureau, in 2016, received the infamous anti-Trump “dossier” and launched a counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the election that ultimately came to encompass FISA surveillance of a Trump campaign associate. The “dossier” was a compendium of salacious and largely unverified allegations about then-candidate Trump and others around him that was compiled by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The firm’s bank records, obtained by House investigators, revealed that the project was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. […] Strzok himself briefed the committee on Dec. 5, 2016, the sources said, but within months of that session House Intelligence Committee investigators were contacted by an informant suggesting that there was “documentary evidence” that Strzok was purportedly obstructing the House probe into the dossier.
Fox News’ James Rosen also reveals Strzok played a key role in agreeing to pay ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele $50,000 to find evidence to further support the dossier’s explosive claims. FBI officials were uncomfortable with the validity of Steele’s findings, yet they moved forward with FISA surveillance anyways. |
A judge in New Zealand fed up with parents bestowing bizarre names on their offspring has given a girl named Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii the chance to change hers.
Judge Rob Murfitt has ruled that the girl, 9, become a ward of the court so her name can be changed. The girl was involved in a custody battle between her separated parents.
In his ruling made public Thursday, Murfitt expressed concern at the "very poor judgment" shown by the parents in selecting the moniker.
"It makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap, unnecessarily," said Murfitt.
The court heard that the girl was so embarrassed by her name that she never even told her friends.
Instead, she told people to call her K, her lawyer told the family court in the port city of New Plymouth, located on the west coast of the North Island.
The ruling was made in February, but became public Thursday when it was published in law reports. The girl's new name will not be made public in order to protect her identity.
In his ruling, Murfitt cited a list of strange names given to children in New Zealand.
He said names blocked by registration officials included Yeah Detroit, Keenan Got Lucy and Sex Fruit, while Number 16 Bus Shelter and Violence were allowed.
New Zealand law does not allow names that would cause offence to a reasonable person, among other conditions, said Brian Clarke, the registrar general of births, deaths and marriages.
Clarke said officials usually talked to parents who proposed unusual names to convince them of the potential embarrassment for the child. |
Former Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer is auctioning off 16 game-day experiences to fund a series of studies on cannabinoid treatments for traumatic brain injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
The “Game Day with the Snake” packages will include time with Plummer and “surprise VIP guests” from the Broncos; a ticket and pregame field pass to the Broncos’ regular-season finale against the Oakland Raiders on Jan. 1; an invitation to a private tailgate party; transportation to and from the game; a “swag bag” with Broncos gear; and an autographed football from a Broncos player.
For fans already planning to attend the game, Plummer is also offering a limited number of tailgate packages for purchase that will include access to the private tailgate party and time with Plummer and his Broncos guests, among other things.
Plummer has been at the forefront of an ongoing push for cannabidiol (CBD) allowance and research for NFL players. In partnership with the Colorado-based Realm of Caring, he has raised awareness and funds through the “When the Bright Lights Fade” campaign for two studies on CBD’s potential benefits to both active and retired NFL players.
The NFL Players Association recently formed a pain management committee to study, among other issues, the viability of cannabis as an alternative and potentially safer treatment for pain than opioids. The NFL currently prohibits players from consuming more than 35 nanograms of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana) per milliliter of urine. CBD from hemp extract has only trace levels of THC, but any amount poses a risk to NFL players.
Although the NFLPA has begun to take notice of the potential benefits of CBD and cannabis, any change to the substance-abuse policy — be it to raise the THC threshold, eliminate testing for marijuana altogether, or allow for therapeutic use exemptions for cannabis — must be collectively bargained with the league. The current collective bargaining agreement runs through the 2020 season, but the substance-abuse policy was updated as recently as 2014 and can be altered again, with the approval of both sides, before the CBA expires.
Bids for Plummer’s tailgate packages can be made through the ROC’s website, at www.theroc.us/gameday. |
We have seen lots and lots of questions about how crafting is going to work in Shards Online. We sat down with lead systems designer Bruce Bonnick to discuss some of the details. [4:10]
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We had a blast this past Saturday during our first annual Shards Online Turkey Hunt. Congratulations to Trok, Dermott and Ness for collecting the most meat. If you missed the event, you can watch the the highlight video [12:15]. Jump to 8:00 for some crazy giant turkey madness. Next weekend at the usual time (Saturday 2pm EST) and the usual place (Shards Online twitch channel) we will have our final pre-alpha stream for the campaign and we will be PvPing!
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We also wanted to thank everyone again for helping spread the word about this project and our campaign. We put together a really short (38 second) video that shows off the best parts of our Kickstarter video. It's perfect for sharing with all your friends who have short attention spans.
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We also wanted to throw in some shameless plugs for some of our friends in the indie game development world. Us indie devs need to stick together!
Devil's Bluff is a project by a former coworker of Supreem's from waaay back when he was just a game development newb. It's a super cool concept of a new type of survival horror game where every character you encounter is another player - and one of them is a killer. Check it out and support them!
We just met the guys from Das Tal when we saw that they were backers of our project. It's great to see other indies going after the sandbox mmo genre. Das Tal is a fast-paced Sandbox MMORPG that focuses on player interaction. Full Loot and Open PvP create a game of ‘risk vs. reward’ where you weigh up your options before engaging others. Check it out and sign up for alpha on their page! |
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