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On Dec. 4, Italians will head to the polls to vote on a series of changes to the country’s institutional framework, specifically the Senate, the upper house of the Italian Parliament. On paper, it is a referendum on amending the constitution. But there is far more than that at stake, for Italy and the European Union.
The Italian government of Prime Minister Mateo Renzi took office in 2014, tasked with reviving a stagnant economy and streamlining Italy’s bureaucracy. Renzi promised much-needed reforms aimed at making Italy a more governable country by substantially reducing the scope and power of the Senate in favor of empowering the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies. The Senate would be transformed into a “Senate of Regions” with 100 senators—mainly regional councilors and mayors—while large amounts of power would be taken away from Italy’s regions and centralized in Rome. ... |
Fentanyl patches seized in a drug bust. Photo via Ottawa Police Service
Amber Wasson remembers sitting with her brother David, watching his eyes roll back in his head, seeing his chin bob up and down in what she came to know as "the Fentanyl nod." His head would flop down on his chest and then jerk back up, as he tried to stay awake.
Fentanyl, a powerful painkiller that is 100 times stronger than morphine or 40 times stronger than heroin, produces "a feeling of peace and relaxes the whole body," Wasson explains. It was that high her brother sought when he died of an overdose in 2014.
In the "Chemical Valley" city of Sarnia, Ontario—a border town which sits about 100 kilometres north of Detroit—Fentanyl abuse is a serious problem according to police and medical officials. The local death rate is four times the provincial average.
The painkilling patches can be cut-up and sucked, heated on tinfoil and inhaled, or sometimes cooked in a spoon and injected.
But based on her experience watching her brother, Wasson says that abusers of Fentanyl are "playing Russian Roulette with themselves, hoping they'll wake up again."
While fighting for consciousness is what "the nod " is all about, what many users don't realize is that if they do pass out, they may not wake up. Passing out from Fentanyl is not like blacking out drunk; it's actually bringing you staggeringly close to death, according to Dr. Del Donald, an addiction specialist and veteran of the Sarnia ER who has treated numerous Fentanyl overdoses. Opioid pain meds such as Oxycontin and Fentanyl affect the human respiratory system, and the amount of drugs in your system required to render you unconscious is "only slightly below" the level that shuts down your breathing, the doctor explained.
Fentanyl turned up in Sarnia as a recreational drug "out of the blue" a few years ago, according to Donald, who added that it's become the drug of choice for opioid users in the area. After Oxycontin was de-listed from the approved drug list in Ontario in 2012, addicts went searching for a replacement. He expected heroin would become the main replacement as has happened in other places, but the heroin coming into Sarnia was "lousy," and users are "more comfortable when something has a pharmaceutical stamp on it."
The numbers show the city has a major problem with Fentanyl. Five deaths in 2013 may not sound like many, but for a city of 72,000 it's four times the province-wide rate, according to the Ontario coroner's stats. Sarnia police detective Mike Howell explained that, by comparison, London, Ontario, which has more than three times Sarnia's population, had the same number of Fentanyl fatalities that year. The drug appears to have disproportionately affected Ontario's smaller cities.
Sarnia in all its toxic glory. Photo via Perry Quan
There's pretty much no way for an abuser or a dealer to get Fentanyl other than from someone with a genuine prescription, according to to Donald, who is now medical director of the Bluewater Methadone Clinic in Sarnia. (There have, however, been reports of deadly illegally imported Fentanyl making its way to Ontario.) As local police and the medical community are trying to get a handle on the problem, they've decided that, since the plastic backing on the patch is still in place after use by legit patients, it would make sense to require patients to bring the patches back to the pharmacy before getting new ones.
Call it the "Beer Store" solution if you like. But Constable Howell thinks a "patch-for-patch" system may help keep Fentanyl off the streets. Howell, who's been heading up the campaign to bring the plan to the city, hopes the system will be up and running before the fall. If all goes accordingly, doctors will up their efforts to screen possible patients, and prescriptions will be faxed directly to the pharmacy, to avoid tampering with the prescription. (Adding a zero to the number of patches prescribed is a common trick, apparently.) Pharmacists will also give patients a paper to stick their used patches on before they come back for a prescription renewal. The returned patches will be examined carefully for signs of tampering.
According to Wasson, her brother David used to get the drug by abusing legit channels. A friend's father had a prescription, but didn't need it and "basically lied to the doctor," she told VICE. The father gave the patches to his own son to sell. The going rate is anywhere from $150-$400 a patch—and if someone is on social assistance in Ontario their prescription is paid for, so the money they'd get on the black market is "pure profit," according to Wasson. Even the used patches have quite a bit of value, as the residue can amount to more than half the total dosage, according to Howell.
Wasson's brother knew the dangers of Fentanyl and once tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a girlfriend from using it. Watching him come down from the drug was terrible, his sister recalled. He would get very agitated, complain of headaches, constantly scratch himself, and hallucinate. Things could be very quiet, but he'd ask her to identify a sound that never happened. He sometimes even saw the non-existent bugs he could feel crawling on his skin. His death in March 2014 came as a shock to the family as David had been on methadone treatment for quite a while and "seemed fine," she told me. He had just stopped his methadone treatments, but returned one more time to the "old habit." It was truly his last time.
Even though she's not part of the drug culture and hasn't lived full-time in the city for several years, Wasson said she "easily" knows 20 people who are abusing the drug here in Sarnia.
Arriving in Sarnia from the Oshawa area in 2011, Constable Howell was surprised to see how the local drug scene was "all prescription opioids or meth," instead of coke, crack cocaine, or ecstasy. "It's hard to account for, and it doesn't have anything to do with it being a border town either," he said.
Searching local news turns up hit after hit for Fentanyl, and some pretty wild stories, including several from just this month.
July 21, 2015 -- A 33-year-old Sarnia man is handed a six-year penitentiary term for selling prescription painkillers worth $22,000 on the street. Last October, police raided his home and found none of the 42 Fentanyl patches he had obtained on prescription the day before; just empty packages. He had convinced a doctor he needed the patches for pain from an injury and subsequent surgeries.
July 8, 2015 -- Police bust a grow-op in the centre of the city, find spent Fentanyl packs. Again, the prescription had just been filled just the day before. The number of empty packages was "well above" the recommended one-day dose, a police news release said.
The "super expensive" value of the patches on the black market is a temptation that some legit users just can't resist, said Donald, who has 20 years of experience in Sarnia's ER. Experience has shown him that if a patient on a disability pension has a prescription, and if money's tight, he or she may think, "Do I put on the patch, or suffer through this and feed the kids," Donald told VICE. "When you have a script worth 6,000 bucks, it can be hard to resist."
There are high hopes the patch-for-patch system will cut Sarnia's Fentanyl problem, but there are still loopholes and some legit users say the system will just add a hassle to getting needed medicine.
Right now there are just a handful of Ontario cities running the patch-for-patch plan within their own boundaries. Donald thinks the province should be running this across Ontario.
"I don't know why we're waiting for something to be done. It's so obvious. A government agency could do this in a second," he said, his frustration obvious.
Making the system province-wide is the intention of a private member's bill introduced in the Ontario legislature by North Bay Conservative MP Vic Fedeli in October 2014.
While the bill passed second reading this May, it's now languishing in legislative limbo, waiting for the summer break to end.
While pharmacies are getting organized in Sarnia for patch-for-patch to start soon, Amber Wasson wonders if the plan will help prevent more Fentanyl overdoses, such as her brother's. The plan is a step in the right direction, she said, as long as doctors think more carefully before prescribing it.
"They need to be aware of people's addictive potential," she said.
Follow Colin Graf on Twitter. |
HOUSTON - The University of Houston Department of Intercollegiate Athletics unveiled the John O'Quinn Field design for TDECU Stadium on Wednesday. The synthetic turf will feature an alternating dark green/light green pattern every five yards with distinctive Houston-themed end zones on each end and the Houston Athletics logo balancing the layout at midfield.
The stadium's west end zone will feature a silhouette of the downtown Houston skyline overlaid with HOUSTON in the official Houston Athletics font in white with silver trim. The east end zone of TDECU Stadium will feature Houston Athletics' secondary Cougar head logo overlaid by COUGARS in the Houston Athletics font in white with silver trim.
"When we designed TDECU Stadium we wanted a unique look and that carried over to the design of John O'Quinn Field," said Houston Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Mack Rhoades. "With the west end zone, we wanted to match the stadium's view of downtown Houston and remind everyone we are The University of Houston. Our east end zone highlights our secondary athletics Cougar logo while also giving a consistent look with the lanes of Guy V. Lewis Court at Hofheinz Pavilion."
Both 25-yard lines of the field will contain American Athletic Conference logos with the John O'Quinn Field name on the east 20-yard line and TDECU Stadium recognition on the west 25-yard line.
A focus on the ever-evolving digital world will be on John O'Quinn Field with the Houston Athletics website, UHCougars.com, and the Houston Athletics official hashtag, #GoCoogs, displayed just outside sidelines on both sides of the field.
The synthetic surface to be installed at TDECU Stadium is S5-M manufactured by UBU Sports. S5-M, a Speed Series product, is a slit-film turf blade with a sand/rubber combination for infill.
The low maintenance surface is designed to host a multitude of events, including but not limited to, high school football games, concerts, band practice, specific UH intramural events and more.
The first roll of turf for John O'Quinn Field was rolled out July 16, and fans can follow the construction progress of TDECU Stadium with the stadium's live webcam.
2014 FOOTBALL SEASON TICKETS
Houston fans can guarantee a place in history by purchasing season tickets for the first season in the new TDECU Stadium. Season tickets are currently on sale starting at just $140 as are Memorial Hermann Family Plan four-pack season tickets, two adult and two youth, for just $299. Lower-level reserved season tickets start at just $200.
Fans interested in purchasing Houston Football season tickets for as low as $140 for seven games can contact the Ticket Sales department online or by calling 713-GO-COOGS (462-6647).
Houston opens the 2014 season at 8 p.m., Friday, Aug. 29, when it hosts UTSA in the first game in TDECU Stadium.
YOUNG ALUMNI TICKET INFORMATION
University of Houston alumni from the last five years (2010-14) can purchase season tickets for just $125 (upper levels) and $175 (lower level) in specially designated Young Alumni sections with a multiplier of four times donations to Cougar Pride giving levels for the first five years after graduation. Young Alumni can purchase tickets here or by calling 713-GO-COOGS (462-6647).
GROUP TICKET INFORMATION
Single-game group ticket sales for the inaugural season in TDECU Stadium are now on sale via the Houston Athletics Ticket Office. Groups of at least 10 or more can purchase tickets starting at just $21 per person to any of Houston's seven home games, including 2014 Fiesta Bowl champion UCF, by calling the Houston Athletics Ticket Office at 713-GO-COOGS (462-6647) or by clicking here. |
Listen up, Happy Endings fans! We have the second-best news you could ask for (behind a revival, of course). EW has learned exclusively that VH1 has acquired all 57 episodes of the oh-so-lovable sitcom and will be airing them on Wednesdays in 2014.
But first, the cable premiere of Happy Endings will begin with a marathon of all 57 episodes starting on New Year’s Eve — Tuesday, Dec. 31 — at 8 p.m. ET. The marathon will run all the way through New Year’s Day. But don’t worry: If you’ve got plans to be out on the town, the marathon is only the kick-off event. Happy Endings will then settle into its new time slot on Wednesday nights from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. starting Jan. 8.
The episodes will also be available online using VH1’s TV Everywhere platforms and the VH1 app.
So what do you say we jump-start the Happy days, huh? Watch a clip of Penny’s 30th birthday party below: |
"There's a huge story to be told," says Anthony Lappé, "about the actual extent of the U.S. government's involvement in drug trafficking."
And that's exactly the story Lappé and his co-producers Julian Hobbs and Elli Hakami tell in a mesmerizing four-part series that debuted this week on cable TV's History Channel. Through dramatic recreations and in-depth interviews with academic researchers, historians, journalists, former federal agents, and drug dealers, America's War on Drugs (watch full episodes online here) tells true tales of how, for instance, the CIA and Department of Defense helped to introduce LSD to Americans in the 1950s.
"The CIA literally sent over two guys to Sandoz Laboratories where LSD had first been synthesized and bought up the world's supply of LSD and brought it back," Lappé tells Nick Gillespie in a wide-ranging conversation about the longest war the U.S. government has fought. "With that supply they began a [secret mind-control] program called MK Ultra which had all sorts of other drugs involved."
The different episodes cover the history of drug prohibition, the rise of the '60s drug counterculture; heroin epidemics past and present; how drug policy has warped U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia, Central America, Afghanistan, and beyond; the bipartisan politics of prohibition; and much more. America's War on Drugs features exclusive and rarely seen footage and documents how, time and time again, the government was often facilitating trade and use in the very drugs it was trying to stamp out. The show's website adds articles, short videos, and more information in an attempt to produce an "immersive experience" that will change how viewers think and feel about prohibition.
Lappé, who has worked at Vice, Huffington Post, and elsewhere, tells Gillespie that he is particulary excited to see his series air on the History Channel because it's an indicator the drug-policy reform is in the air. Though not a libertarian himself, he says "a great trait of libertarianism...is that knowledge and reason will eventually win out over keeping things in the dark, making things taboo." Even when it veers off into questionable territory (such as the role of the government in creating the crack epidemic of the 1980s), America's War on Drugs performs the invaluable function of furthering a conversation about drug policies and attitudes that have caused far more harm than they have alleviated.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Image: America's War on Drugs, History Channel.
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This is a rush transcript—check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: Hi I'm Nick Gillespie and this is the Reason podcast. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you're there.
Today we're talking with Anthony Lappe who along with Julian Hobbs and Elli Hakami has produced a four part docuseries called America's War on Drugs for the History Channel. You can go to history.com to watch the series and read more about our country's longest war. The series aired this week and it will be in reruns on History Channel, so check it out there.
Anthony, thanks for joining the Reason podcast.
Anthony Lappe: It's great to be here Nick.
Gillespie: Give us the big picture first. Who's your audience for this and what do you hope to bring to people through the docuseries?
Lappe: The exciting thing about this project really is the fact that it's on the History Channel. I honestly didn't believe it was actually going to air until it started airing on Sunday night and I was sitting there watching it because what we do here is actually pretty radical. I don't think anyone has ever really told this story fully on mainstream cable television before. We take a very critical look at the entire history of the war on drugs. In particular, looking at American foreign policy and how the Central Intelligence Agency is not just been involved in a couple of bad apples here and there. In couple rogue operations as a lot of these drug trafficking allegations have been called before.
But actually very directly involved in drug trafficking not only drug trafficking but in the largest drug trafficking stories of our time. Whether that's in the secret tests that introduced LSD to the United States or heroin during the late 60's and early 70's from southeast Asia, to cocaine during the late 70's and early 80's onto opium and heroin coming out of Afghanistan. There's a huge story to be told there about the actual extent of the US government's involvement in drug trafficking.
Gillespie: Let's talk first about the old days of MK Ultra and mind control and the way that the CIA actually helped introduce LSD evolved drugs into America, to American minds. What was going on in the 50's with the CIA and how did they become involved in introducing LSD to Americans?
Lappe: This is a story that a lot of your listeners may have heard about, people have heard about MK Ultra and I had as well, but I never really understood the full origins of the story. They go all the way back to the 1950's. During the 1950's of course, US and the Soviet Union are locked in a battle for hearts and minds around the world and psychoactive drugs were a big part of the Cold War psychological warfare programs on both sides.
The CIA had heard rumors that the Soviet Union was starting to use LSD at this point as a truth serum to see if they could break spies and get them to expose details, admit they were spies et cetera. The CIA literally sent over two guys to Sandoz Laboratories where LSD had first been synthesized and bought up the world's supply of LSD and brought it back. With that supply they began a program called MK Ultra which had all sorts of other drugs involved.
In particular they started doing secret tests around the country. Some of them using in veteran's hospitals and through the military. Others were in mental hospitals, a lot of basic, pretty much a lot of them were unwitting people, mental patients. But one of the incredible stories we found, I never knew this before, is that Ken Kesey, famously the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and really the guy who started the famous acid tests in the San Francisco Bay area, it was really the godfather of acid movement. As a Stanford grad student, or sorry an undergrad, was part of a test at the Menlo Park Veteran's hospital. Loved it so much that he got a job in the lab, stole all the acid, went up to San Francisco and started his acid test. That was the origins of how LSD was introduced into United States. This was also happening in other places around the country. It was just that Ken Kesey was the progenitor of the entire movement. It literally was the CIA.
Gillespie: That is a real challenge to all good thinking Libertarians like myself. Small L Libertarians who say that the government can never do anything right. The manage to strangely change the course, not of, I guess maybe of Cold War history, but certainly of American cultural history through their actions. The first episode of the series, and again check these out on history.com, the History Channel if you have, you can download their app and take a look at it. Plus there's other material there that's well worth delving into.
You look at the prehistory of Richard Nixon's declaration of a war on drugs in the early 70's, what were some of the motivating factors you found behind Nixon declaring war on drugs? Very early in the 70's he talked about, famously used the phrase, declaring a war on drugs, that illegals drugs were the number one enemy facing America. What was going on, things like pot and acid and heroin rose to that level of attention from the federal government?
Lappe: You really had two strains happening. You had the psychedelic movement which was heavily influenced by acid which the CIA itself had introduced, which is just my blowing right. Then you had pot as well which basically increasing numbers of young people were smoking. Nixon declares famously this war on drugs in June 1971. At the same time there was a massive heroin epidemic that really was ravaging mostly the eastern seaboard. What a lot people don't realize is that too in part, you could argue another case of blow back from our own operations.
During the mid 60's to late 60's there was a famous, everyone knows, a war against communist forces in Vietnam but also next door there was a gigantic secret war happening in Laos that officially we were not supposed to be fighting. Both politically it was radioactive for Johnson to declare another front but there were also treaties that said that we couldn't have troops on the ground both with Laos and we had an agreement, a sort of tacit agreement with the Soviet Union they wouldn't put troops on the ground.
There was a massive clandestine CIA operation in Laos running this secret war. People have probably heard of this CIA airline called Air America. Basically we go into business helping a local warlord named Vang Pao. When we started the war in the mid 60's, around 65, Vang Pao was a sort of somewhat populous, anti-communist leader of the Hmong hill people in Laos and was peripherally involved in growing opium because that's really what the cash crop was in that area.
By 1968, 1969 into 1970 Vang Pao was the biggest heroin trafficker on the planet. Some of his partners were the Sicilian mobsters that we had gone into business to put in Havana Cuba and south Florida to try to kill Fidel Castro. Basically we had created this huge network or aided this huge network of international drug trafficking that created a massive heroin epidemic which has only been surpassed by the current opioid crisis and we go into that later.
What happens is, there's all this heroin in the theater of war in southeast Asia, a lot of troops are getting hooked, famously they all start bringing this heroin back and heroin really starts devastating the inner city and there was a legitimate belief by a lot of people that really it was out of control and crime rates were really skyrocketing especially in cities like New York. So Nixon was under a lot of pressure. He had run in 1960 under the banner of law and order and the country was literally falling apart by 1971 in his eyes.
Gillespie: As you were saying, the crime really ratcheted up. It started in the 50's but it really ratcheted up in the 60's, there was the perception that people were leaving cities in droves to avoid crime. You talk, I think, in the first episode, it's something that in 1960 the government figures had something like 50,000 heroin addicts around the country or heroin users and it had crept up to something like 200,000 or 500,000 by about 1970.
Lappe: Yeah.
Gillespie: Part of it Nixon was a law and order guy and there's, you go into this a bit at your site as well as in the show that John Ehrlichman one of Richard Nixon's chief lieutenants in a 1990, 94 interview with Dan Baum who ultimately published a story in Harper's about this, that he said that the war on pot and the war on drugs was really a way to control black people. There was also this sense that the urban American was going to hell in a hand basket as well.
Follow up question for that is, the war on drugs gets birthed out of mixed feeling and Nixon and there's some footage in one of the episodes of Ronald Reagan denouncing the use of acid in the 60's and obviously became drug warrior himself as president. There was a strong bipartisan element to the war on drugs because even people, Jimmy Carter seemed to be okay with the idea of pot legalization or decriminalization until events overtook him and he became a staunch drug warrior. People like Bill Clinton, people like Barack Obama also added to the drug war. What is the, I guess that's a long wind up for a pretty simple question, what is it about the war on drugs that pulls such support from Democrats and Republicans across the board?
Lappe: I think this is pretty deep question because I think it goes to what I found in working on this project which is really one of the most epic projects I've ever worked on in my life in terms of the amount of research we did. I think drugs have always played a scapegoat role in our society where we see other social forces, in particular economic forces and other things that have been pressures on communities and it's very easy to point the finger at drugs. In some ways it's a natural reaction to try to crack down on them in the harshest way. Of course by cracking down on drugs are an inanimate object, there is no such thing as a crack down on drugs. You're cracking down on people. And when you crack down on people, that has a reverberating effect. It also can be used as a tool.
Nixon is probably one of the most cynical politicians in our history but maybe not the worst in my opinion. He saw it purely, in my opinion, as a political move. As a way to take out this, he believed he had all these enemies that were growing around him, all these social movements, you had black nationalism, you had increasingly radicalized hippie movement that had turned from a peacenik movement into a more dangerous, whether underground type of operations. There was a feeling that society was unraveling to some degree. That was in large part because it was because we lived in a oppressive racist society and there was a war that in 1968, everyone knew was at a stalemate or that we had lost but continued going on. People don't realize half the people died, of our soldiers after 1968 when Nixon ran under this completely cynical lie that he had a secret plan to end the war [Editor's note: Journalism historian Joseph W. Campbell has documented that Candidate Nixon never publicly made such a pledge, which continues to be cited frequently.].
There was all these other forces going on in drugs were very easy way to demonize people.
Gillespie: At the website, at history.com, among the various things you have in timelines or whatnot that are worth going back to. The early attempts to link cocaine with black people and if you want to crack down on cocaine because white women may be taking it or something, you crack down on black people. When pot became illegal, under federal law, became effectively illegal in the 1930's, it was identified with Mexicans. Chinese and opium was a problem. It is fascinating in the 60's you have with something like LSD the youth movement and hippies and then again when ecstasy which was made illegal in the 80's thanks in large part to Joe Biden.
The identification of a subculture or subgroup or a particular ethnic group that you can crack down on is one of the really haunting elements, I think, of the drug war and that comes through in this, in this series. Talk a bit about how particularly after 9/11 part of the series, and I think you're absolutely right in looking at it, that what this does in a way that is really fresh and interesting is look at how foreign policy, US foreign policy has been both guided and infected by the drug war. Talk a bit about the post 9/11 era and how have fears of narco-terrorism really changed the way we go about our foreign policy?
Lappe: Narco-terrorism is a term that started, that was introduced after 9/11, shortly after really. We show how in the first Superbowl after 9/11, the Partnership for Drug Free America began running this very eerie infamous ad now where you had a bunch of kids saying, "I supported terrorists, I supported a suicide bomber, I did this." Basically saying because I did drugs I was helping all of these different terrorists groups et cetera. When the incredible irony is that our own government has been knee deep in drug trafficking for decades.
There was a big push though it was completely ironic and what we show in our last episode which is the post 9/11 era, is we actually have an undercover DEA agent. This was a huge theme that we saw throughout our series was the tension between the DEA and the CIA. I'll paint the picture of what was happening in Afghanistan.
In the late 1990's, opium has always been one of or the biggest cash crop in Afghanistan. During the 1990's there was a massive civil war. All sides were using opium to finance themselves. The Taliban comes in to power and starts taxing at first, opium growers but by the late 90's the Taliban is having a huge PR problem. They're chopping off women's heads in stadiums and they're blowing up the Buddhas. They were becoming an international pariah. They pulled this incredible PR coup where they said they were cracking down on opium. When really all they were doing were stockpiling it. Basically they launched this whole fake crackdown that got the UN off their back. The US, we even in 2000, sent them $40 million of aid money to help, quote unquote, crackdown on opium. But really what was happening was they were stockpiling opium and then after 9/11 used those stockpiles to ramp up their war effort.
At the time of 9/11, Afghanistan was about 30% of the world's heroin. Today it's about 90%. What Afghanistan has become is a drug war. People never talk about it in that context but Afghanistan is a giant drug war. The Taliban have, to quote REM, lost their religion. They're really are not much of a religious force any more as they are just any other militant insurgency group that is trying to take down a government. There isn't much, they're not putting a lot of effort into their Sharia program. They basically have become gigantic drug traffickers. But also our allies in Afghanistan. Including in the early days, Hamid Karzai's brother, Wali Karzai was the biggest heroin trafficker and drug lord who controlled all the traffic in Kandahar. Who was completely protected by the CIA.
I talked to soldiers who literally their job was to guard the opium fields of our local warlord allies. This heroin has had a major impact on the world's drug stage. It should be noted a lot of the heroin that comes into the United States is coming from Mexico now but a lot of it is coming from Afghanistan, especially on the east coast and in Canada. It's a really incredible story that no one really talks about. There's a great reporter that is one of our contributors to the show named, Gretchen Peters, wrote a book called, Seeds of Terror. That essentially is her thesis.
We also have great stories about the undercover DEA agents who were fighting to try to take down drug traffickers at the same time the CIA was undermining their efforts.
Gillespie: It's a phenomenal drama that unfolds and it has these dark, rich, historical ironies that abound throughout the series. The odds are good now at least and actually in a story that's up at the website, you guys talk about Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General under Donald Trump. Who has really, he's pledged to really redouble efforts at least domestically, on the war on drugs which you guys point out at least in it's Nixonian phase has been going on for 50 years. It's really more like a 100 years when you go all the way back to things like the Harrison Narcotics Act.
It's failing, it doesn't seem to have much effect on drug usage rates, they seem to be independent of enforcement, there's obviously problems with surgeon opiod use that is it's own tangled web of unintended consequences and weird interventions into markets. At the same time the odds are phenomenal that pot is going to be fully legal in the US within the next decade if not before. During the campaign, weirdly Donald Trump seemed to be at times okay with the idea of different states deciding what kind of marijuana policies, obviously the Sessions factors a big difference from that. Are you optimistic that we're at least entering the beginning of the end of the drug war, to borrow a terrible Vietnam phrase that there's light at the end of the tunnel in terms of American attitudes towards currently illegal drugs, and rethinking the drug war?
Lappe: There's no doubt that things are moving in that direction in the same way there's no doubt that things like gay rights and LGBT rights are moving in a certain direction. Jeff Sessions essentially is a weird outlier, historical blip, as you said, to try to pin Trump down on any one ideology or stance is literally impossible. He said we were going to stop all our foreign wars, yet he's sending 8,000 more troops in Afghanistan. Whatever Trump has said on the war on drugs is sort of irrelevant.
But Sessions is just a weird dinosaur throwback to another era that I think is just going to be, if he survives the next three years. Will just be a blip in the road towards eventually people moving, starting with marijuana towards legalization both for, at least, nationwide to medicinal use if not most states towards recreational use. Because people are seeing that it doesn't really have any negative effects, there isn't really a gigantic increase in use and there's great benefits to society in terms of being able to tax it and make it a normalized thing. I think a big part of the problem with drugs and Dr. Carl Hart at Columbia is one of the most iconoclastic guys on this and he's in our series, he's out on the far fringes of this. But what he really says is, the problem with drugs is not drugs. The problem is drug use and misuse and people being idiots with drugs and not knowing how to use them.
Gillespie: But it's hard to know how to use them if you're not allowed to freely and openly discuss the facts, your experiences, your parents, we have enough problems with alcohol abuse and that's fully legal. When you start talking about these other drugs it's hard to get good information.
Lappe: Right. It's the same thing with these abstinence programs. You see wherever there's abstinence programs there's more STD's, there's more pregnancies because people are ignorant. I think that's a great trait of libertarianism even though I don't believe in everything you guys believe in. Is that knowledge and reason will eventually win out over keeping things in the dark, making things taboo. I think that people are rational and when it comes ... There's always going to be people who are going to abuse something, just the same way people abuse alcohol or any substance. I think there is a general consensus that we're moving in a particular direction and I think that ultimately it's going to be better for society.
Gillespie: I hope so and think that your series that was on History Channel will being rerun there as well as it's available on history.com along with a lot of other articles and timelines, does a really good job of helping to start that discussion which has been waiting to happen for decades now.
We have been talking with Anthony Lappe who along with Julian Hobbs and Elli Hakami has produced a great four part series for History Channel called, America's War on Drugs. It's available online and look for it on your basic cable package.
Anthony, thanks so much for talking to the Reason podcast today.
Lappe: Thanks a lot, it was a lot of fun.
Gillespie: This has been the Reason podcast, I'm Nick Gillespie, thanks for listening. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you're there. Thanks so much. |
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Radamel Falcao has spoken of his admiration for former Manchester United striker Ruud van Nistelrooy.
Van Nistelrooy, a £19m British record signing from PSV Eindhoven in 2001, scored 150 goals in 219 games for United during a five-year period.
The Dutchman collected a Premier League, FA Cup and League Cup winners' medals before he joined Real Madrid in 2006, and he is regarded by many as the greatest goalscorer Sir Alex Ferguson had at Old Trafford.
"I always admired Ruud van Nistelrooy in my position," Falcao told Inside United. "He was a star attraction for me."
Falcao, unsurprisingly, has plenty of respect for several of Van Nistelrooy's teammates - as well as another revered Reds striker.
"Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes too, for their style of play," the Colombian added. "It is much admired by players from all over the world.
"David Beckham, of course. I couldn’t fail to mention him, as he has opened up the routes between continents as a footballer. They are legends who press all the right hero buttons.
"Eric Cantona as well – he was a very exciting and entertaining player to watch." |
A woman "sacrificed" her daughter to Allah to "exorcise evil spirits", the Old Bailey has heard.
Shayma Ali, 36, who was suffering from psychosis, stabbed the four-year-old up to 40 times and took out her liver.
The girl's body was found at her east London flat on the Chatsworth Estate, Clapton, east London, in December.
Ali pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. She was sent to a mental hospital indefinitely.
When police arrived at their east London home, the woman was chanting: "I seek refuge in God from the curse of Satan".
The Old Bailey heard Ali had sunk "suddenly and deeply into mental illness" and was convinced the spirits or jinn had entered the bodies of members of her family.
Koranic verses
Her daughter had remained at the flat in December because she had been ill and was not allowed to go to nursery.
After her arrest, Ali told her husband: "Suddenly it came into my mind that I should correct my behaviour towards Allah.
"Then a voice told me 'if you love Allah you should sacrifice your daughter."'
She told a doctor she strangled the child and when she was unconscious, she carried her on to the kitchen table where she used the knife to ensure the spirits were exorcised.
As she stabbed the girl, Koranic verses were played in the background on an electronic device, the court heard.
Judge Anthony Morris told Ali: "One of the horrifying aspects of this case is how quickly you lost control of yourself."
Gary Dolby, head of London's Crown Prosecution Service Homicide Unit, said: "Family members and police officers encountered appalling scenes when they entered the house.
"This is clearly a very sad case and our thoughts go to the family at this difficult time." |
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U.S. Unemployment Over Time (1990-2016)
When we are talking about the unemployment rate as a barometer for the health of the economy, it’s most commonly the national figure that gets referenced.
Historically, on a national level, an unemployment rate in the 4-6% range is generally considered “good”, while higher rates that fall within the 8-10% range are “bad”. Higher rates are usually only seen during times of recessions or crisis, when people around the country are struggling to find work.
But, as you’ll see in today’s animated map, unemployment rates at the regional level are a very different thing. Today’s map, which comes to us from FlowingData, shows the disparity of unemployment rates in the U.S. based on county estimates, and how they have their own ebbs and flows.
The Impact of a Crisis
The most noticeable element of the animation is the “spread” of unemployment as a crisis hits.
For reference, here’s the map during 1999 – which is around when income peaked for most Americans.
Now here’s a map of the country during the height of the Financial Crisis in 2009. The “spread” of unemployment catches up to people in even the most economically isolated states.
It goes to show that even people in largely rural counties couldn’t stay isolated from a crisis that originated on Wall Street. While it doesn’t affect them immediately, eventually the “creep” of unemployment hits their counties as well.
One interesting exception to note here is North Dakota. With discoveries in the Bakken, and the fracking boom in full flight at the time, the state recorded the lowest rates of unemployment during the crisis.
Today, while the oil boom has slowed because of a lower price environment, it’s true that unemployment is still relatively low at 2.8% in the state. |
Armed civilians listen as Helena Rodriguez, right, of Reading, speaks with them near a demonstration area at Gettysburg National Military Park on July 1, 2017. (Photo11: Dan Rainville, The Evening Sun)
HANOVER, Pa. — A 23-year-old Pennsylvania man participating in a free speech rally at Gettysburg National Military Park accidentally shot himself in the left leg with a revolver Saturday, officials said.
The incident occurred just before 1 p.m. near the General George Meade Equestrian Monument. U.S. Park Police were nearby and able to quickly apply a tourniquet to the man's leg, according to Katie Lawhon, a spokeswoman for Gettysburg National Military Park.
Lawhon identified the man as Benjamin Hornberger of Shippenburg. The bullet struck him in the thigh.
Lawhon did not know if Hornberger was with a particular group, only that he was participating in the "First Amendment protests" that were taking place at the park Saturday. Federal law permits firearms in national parks.
Read more:
Hornberger was in an area open to park visitors, but he was outside a fenced area where some groups had received permits for protests, Lawhon said.
Hornberger was taken to a local hospital by ambulance.
"It looks like he'll be OK," said Sgt. Anna Rose, a U.S. Park Police spokeswoman.
The gun accidentally discharged a second time as a law enforcement officer was attempting to get ammunition out of the gun, according to Lawhon. There was no damage or injuries from that second shot.
"It was apparently an old gun, not in good working order," Lawhon said.
Lawhon and Rose said they were unaware of any criminal charges being pursued.
The groups participating in First Amendment activities were supporting the Confederate flag and planning to protest against the political activist group Antifa.
While Central PA Antifa leaders denied rumors that the group was planning a rally in Gettysburg this weekend, members of the opposition groups there remained unconvinced that they wouldn’t show up. No members of Antifa showed up at the park by the middle of the afternoon.
Outside of the shooting, the first day of the annual anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg went smoothly. While it rained later in the afternoon, a battle re-enactment still took place in the morning. More re-enactments and events are schedule to take place Sunday.
Contributing: Gordon Rago of the York Daily Record
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2ubTYk8 |
“How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?” Sarah Palin asked American voters in a taunting 2010 speech. The answer: Not so well. We avoided a full-blown depression, but the job market remains deeply sick, and it’s become quite mainstream to talk about the U.S. economy having fallen into structural stagnation (though the rich are thriving). Barack Obama has, if anything, seemed more secretive than George W. Bush. He kills alleged terrorists whom his predecessor would merely have tortured. The climate crisis gets worse, and the political capacity even to talk about it, much less do anything about it, is completely absent. These aren’t the complaints Palin would make, of course. But people who voted for Obama in 2008 were imagining a more peaceful, more egalitarian world, and they haven’t gotten it.
Be of good cheer, though. Many savants — and not all of them Democrats — have a solution for 2016. That would be putting Hillary Clinton in the White House.
What is the case for Hillary (whose quasi-official website identifies her, in bold blue letters, by her first name only, as do millions upon millions of voters)? It boils down to this: She has experience, she’s a woman, and it’s her turn. It’s hard to find any substantive political argument in her favor. She has, in the past, been associated with women’s issues, with children’s issues — but she also encouraged her husband to sign the 1996 bill that put an end to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC), which had been in effect since 1935. Indeed, longtime Clinton adviser Dick Morris, who has now morphed into a right-wing pundit, credits Hillary for backing both of Bill’s most important moves to the center: the balanced budget and welfare reform.1 And during her subsequent career as New York’s junior senator and as secretary of state, she has scarcely budged from the centrist sweet spot, and has become increasingly hawkish on foreign policy.
1 Morris’s ties to the Clinton machine go back nearly four decades. That said, his pronouncements on both Bill and Hillary should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. Their mutual-admiration society collapsed in 1996, when media reports about Morris’s frolics with prostitutes caused his expulsion from Bill’s reelection campaign. Since then, the uber-consultant has turned on his old patrons, flaying them in such books as Rewriting History (2004) and Because He Could (2004), and founding, in September 2013, a PAC called Just Say No to Hillary. On the subject of Morris, Hillary has for years kept conspicuously mum. On the subject of Hillary, Morris was typically dismissive when we spoke in July. “She’s a trial lawyer who fights for a position,” he told me. “But she’s not creative and she’s not a broad strategic-policy thinker.” The gun-for-hire accusation was particularly poignant coming from Morris, who has worked for figures as diverse as Jesse Helms and Howard Metzenbaum, Trent Lott and Kenyan presidential contender Raila Odinga — and who, indeed, was advising House Republicans at the same time he was rescuing Bill’s imperiled presidency after the 1994 midterms.
What Hillary will deliver, then, is more of the same. And that shouldn’t surprise us. As wacky as it sometimes appears on the surface, American politics has an amazing stability and continuity about it. Obama, widely viewed as a populist action hero during the 2008 campaign, made no bones about his admiration for Ronald Reagan. The Gipper, he said,
changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt [that] with all the excesses of the Sixties and the Seventies, government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.
Now, the “excesses of the Sixties and the Seventies” included things like feminism, gay liberation, the antiwar movement, a militant civil rights movement — all good things, in my view, but I know that many people disagree. In any case, coming into office with something like a mandate, Obama never tried to make a sharp political break with the past, as Reagan did from the moment of his first inaugural address. Reagan dismissed the postwar Keynesian consensus — the idea that government had a responsibility to soften the sharpest edges of capitalism by fighting recession and providing some sort of basic safety net. Appropriating some of the language of the left about revolution and the promise of the future, he unleashed what he liked to call the magic of the marketplace: cutting taxes for the rich, eliminating regulations, and whittling away at social spending.
What Reagan created, with his embrace of the nutty Laffer curve and his smiling war on organized labor, was a strange, unequally distributed boom that lasted through the early 1990s. After the caretaker George H. W. Bush administration evaporated, Bill Clinton took over and, with a few minor adjustments, kept the party going for another decade. Profits skyrocketed, as did the financial markets.
But there was a contradiction under it all: a system dependent on high levels of mass consumption for both economic dynamism and political legitimacy has a problem when mass purchasing power is squeezed. For a few decades, consumers borrowed to make up for what their paychecks were lacking. But that model broke down once and for all with the crisis of 2008. Today we desperately need a new political economy — one that features a more equal distribution of income, investment in our rotting social and physical infrastructure, and a more humane ethic. We also need a judicious foreign policy, and a commander-in-chief who will resist the instant gratification of air strikes and rhetorical bluster.
Is Hillary Clinton the answer to these prayers? It’s hard to think so, despite the widespread liberal fantasy of her as a progressive paragon, who will follow through exactly as Barack Obama did not. In fact, a close look at her life and career is perhaps the best antidote to all these great expectations.
The historical record, such as it is, may also be the only antidote, since most progressives are unwilling to discuss Hillary in anything but the most general, flattering terms. Pundits who have written about her in the past dismissed my queries in rude and patronizing ways. Strangely, though, I was contacted out of nowhere by a representative of something called American Bridge, who wanted to make my acquaintance. At first I thought it was a new think tank — but I soon found out it was a pro-Hillary lobbying group formed by the G.O.P. apostate David Brock. I can’t prove it, of course, but it sure felt like the Hillary machine was subtly attempting to spin this piece. Brock himself declined to speak with me, as did a diplomat who had worked for Hillary at the State Department. Apparently you have to take a loyalty oath to get an interview. |
I just released a new version of code-d, it now supports projects without any dub.json file which some people probably will like. This is really useful for standalone projects with a custom build system like writing an OS/Kernel or other projects that don't want to use dub. Additionally some bugs like the dcd-server staying open got fixed. But probably the biggest news for this update is the improved support for DlangUI markup language. It's is now completing enums for enum fields and true/false. Also it knows about the relations between the Widget classes so it will also complete all inherited children. If you want to give it a try just install the most recent workspace-d build using the workspace-d CLI installer: https:// github.com/ Pure-D/ workspace-d- installer Once you have workspace-d installed and added the binaries to your path you can simply install the latest stable release of code-d in vscode using 'ext install code-d' If you have any suggestions/ideas/feedback don't forget to post it as reply to this post. Project github: https:// github.com/ Pure-D/code-d PS: If you need a debugger frontend (currently GDB and LLDB) for vscode, try my debugging extension. It supports most features and D is working like a charm in there: https:// github.com/ WebFreak001/ code-debug (install using 'ext install gdb') |
Late last week, according to the Austin American- Statesman, the newly elected sheriff of Travis County, Texas, Sally Hernandez, vowed to limit cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials saying that she would only honor immigration holds for suspects booked into the Travis County Jail on charges of capital murder, aggravated sexual assault and "continuous smuggling of persons".
Traditionally, the county has honored nearly all requests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold a suspect booked into jail when agents have wanted to investigate their status further. However, effective Feb. 1, sheriff's officials will honor so-called immigration holds or "detainers" placed by federal authorities only when a suspect is booked into the Travis County Jail on charges of capital murder, aggravated sexual assault and "continuous smuggling of persons." Otherwise, federal agents must have a court order or arrest warrant signed by a judge for the jail to continue housing a person whose immigration status is in question, according to Hernandez's policy, which she released Friday. "The public must be confident that local law enforcement is focused on local public safety, not on federal immigration enforcement. Our jail cannot be perceived as a holding tank for ICE or that Travis County deputies are ICE officers," Hernandez said in a video announcement.
Of course, the declaration from Hernandez drew an immediate reaction from Texas Governor Greg Abbott who promptly promised to cut state funding for the rogue Travis County and take steps to enact "stiffer penalties" as well.
The Governor's Office will cut funding for Travis County adopting sanctuary policies. Stiffer penalties coming. https://t.co/yYxeXql3xL — Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) January 20, 2017
According to Vocativ, the Travis County Police Department receives $1.8 million in annual grants from the state of Texas. That said, at roughly 1% of their overall police budget, we suspect the the funding shortfall won't be a sufficient deterrent for Travis County's defiant new Sheriff.
Abbott, a Republican, has threatened to withhold nearly $1.8 million in state law-enforcement grants following Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez’s decision to buck state law and no longer honor all jail detainers sought by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A detainer is a request to state and local jails to notify federal agents when they are about to release an undocumented immigrant from custody. “This is not a pronouncement of sound public policy; it is a dangerous game of political Russian roulette — with the lives of Texans at stake,” Abbott wrote in a letter to Hernandez on Monday. “Unless you reverse your policy… your unilateral decision will cost the people of Travis County money that was meant to be used to protect them.”
Of course, Trump also repeatedly vowed during his campaign to cut federal funding for sanctuary cities, a move that he is expected to officially confirm later today, along with a series of other national security initiatives, during a visit to the Department of Homeland Security.
Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
With that, it seems the time has come for many of America's liberal cities to: (a) get used to policing their streets with smaller budgets or (b) actually start enforcing laws. |
Eight months ago, Jeff Gattis stood on the stage in Barcelona at the Mobile World Conference and introduced us to the HTC Vive, a VR headset he was confident would “set the new industry standard” and would ship to consumers by the end of the year. Now he stands in the Magic Leap offices in South Florida, six hours into his first day as the company’s Head of Product Marketing, while the HTC Vive’s consumer headset remains shrouded in mystery.
Gattis joined HTC in July of 2014 as the company’s Executive Director of Global Marketing for the connected products division and headed up a number of projects for the company, the most important of which being the HTC Vive. Since then he has been instrumental in building the Vive’s brand, championing it on its world tour over the past six months. So why would he leave the company right before the launch he promised eight months prior? If you ask him, the decision was “pretty easy.”
In an exclusive interview with UploadVR, Gattis said that his decision came down to two things, the technology’s potential and how close that potential was to being realized.
“I think what struck me so much about Magic Leap was the quality of the technology and seeing how far along it was. I knew there was a great vision but I didn’t know how far along the technology was and how close it is to becoming real and commercial,” he says. “That was the biggest takeaway for me, how it advanced and how quickly it has gotten to the point it is at now.”
One of the things that makes Gattis’ hire as the Director of Product Marketing so interesting is it suggests the company may be getting close to finally pulling back the veil on what they have been working on. Recently, Magic Leap began speaking a little bit more about its technology now that it has moved out of the R&D phase and into the “transitional stage for presenting a new product.” At the WSJD conference in October, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz said the company is preparing “to ship millions of things,” suggesting that the technology is getting close to productization. Adding further fuel to that fire, reports have surfaced that Magic Leap may be close to closing an additional $1 billion in funding to help bring its technology to market.
“That was the biggest takeaway for me, how it advanced and how quickly it has gotten to the point it is at now.”
HTC on the other hand still claims they are releasing a consumer product in the next six weeks, despite not showcasing the consumer version of its headset publically. The company has been under a fair amount of fire recently for declining smartphone sales and a falling stock price, which have lead to a 15% reduction in HTC’s workforce. Gattis says his decision to leave has “nothing to do with the situation at HTC” and assured us that HTC’s “commitment to VR is very strong” and “they’ve actually pushed more of their eggs into the VR basket.”
Still, the timing of Gattis’ departure raises eyebrows. Gattis, however, isn’t worried about the HTC Vive’s potential, saying “I think they can be successful” with its launch. “I love what they’re doing,” he says, “I love what Oculus is doing for that matter. But I think [Magic Leap] is different and the potential for some of the use casing is broader.”
Gattis believes VR could potentially transform or create “great new forms of entertainment and potentially other markets,” but with Magic Leap’s technology “you start to talk about doing things on a bigger scale.”
“[Magic Leap] is actually going to impact lives and it’s something that we could have with us all the time as we move throughout the world. They talk about replacing screens. This is just from a business standpoint, we’re talking about a huge potential market, and then the application scenarios under that are almost infinite. Again, I’m just talking about the breadth of the potential for Magic Leap. That’s what excites me. It’s not just about creating a great gaming device, but actually doing something that could potentially change the world.”
Despite an apparent preference for the potential of AR over VR, Gattis sees the two co-existing in the future. Things like gaming and entertainment where users want to “shut [themselves] off from the real world” will carve a place in the market for VR he says, but AR will be a part of your every day life like your smartphone is today. “I think the market for a mixed reality Magic Leap type solution is very broad, potentially everyone.”
“VR is great,” he says, “and I think VR has a lot of different applications but I think when you start to incorporate the real world and the environment around us, it should exponentially increase the potential for the product… this is not just going to change the way people are entertained, this is going to change the way people live and interact with technology.”
So far the only thing the company has shown publically are two videos, one older video that showcased the technology’s potential, and another the company says was shot “directly through Magic Leap technology,” with “no special effects or compositing.”
From my understanding Magic Leap’s technology works like this: a pocket sized computer powers a micro light field projector that mimics the way your eyes see real objects. Breaking this down a bit, when you look at any object what you are seeing isn’t the actual object itself, but rather the various rays of light bouncing off of it creating what is called a light field. Magic Leap’s technology digitally recreates that light field and projects it directly into your eye in a way that is so convincing that people who have tried it have a difficulty resolving what is real and what is artificial. This methodology, the company says, produces a far more comfortable experience compared to other VR and AR displays, while also allowing for a true sense of depth, as opposed to tricking your eyes into seeing depth with stereoscopic rendering.
Other than that the only public accounts of the technology come from MIT Technology Review Editor Rachel Metz, as well as a few hyperbolic compliments from those who have tried it under NDA. In Metz’s review she described an early prototype of the technology as being “what looks like metal scaffolding that towers over my head and contains a bunch of electronics and lenses.” Metz also tried a version of the device with a smaller form factor that “includes a projector, built into a black wire, that’s smaller than a grain of rice and channels light toward a single see-through lens.”
In order for Magic Leap to have poached Gattis, the version of their technology he saw when he first visited Magic Leap six weeks ago likely has advanced beyond what Metz was shown and seems to be a lot closer to commercialization. That alone is an extremely exciting prospect.
Tagged with: ar, augmented reality, exclusive, htc, htc vive, Magic Leap, mixed reality |
Update 20 Apr 2016: Check out the paper on arXiv (PDF)
Summary
Word-RNN (LSTM) on Keras with wordified text representations of Metallica’s drumming midi files, which came from midiatabase.com.
Midi files of Metallica track comes from midiatabase.com.
LSTM model comes from Keras.
Read Midi files with python-midi.
Convert them to a text file (corpus) by my rules, which are (Temporal) Quantisation Simplification/Omitting some notes ‘Word’ with binary numbers
Learn an LSTM model with the corpus and generate by prediction of words.
Words in a text file → midi according to the rules I used above.
Listen!
A Quick look on things (copied-and-pasted from my previous post)
LSTM
LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) is a type of RNN. It is known to be able to learn a sequence effectively.
RNN
RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) is a type of deep learning neural network. See this post by WildML for further understanding.
Keras
Keras is a deep learning framework based on Theano and Tensorflow. I used Theano as backend but this shouldn’t affect the output.
Another quick look on things
Metallica
Metallica is an American heavy metal band formed in Los Angeles, California. Metallica was formed in 1981 when vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield responded to an advertisement posted by drummer Lars Ulrich in a local newspaper. Wikipedia
Why Metallica?
Because I found quite enough number of midi track of Metallica – more than any other artists so far. Also the drum tracks in Metallica are relatively consistent. The simplification in the preprocess would also make sense for Metallica drum tracks according to…… my brain.
Preprocess – How to Model a rhythm representation into a text?
LSTM models are basically about time-series modelling, i.e. 1-D data. In my previous work, it was straightforward how to model a chord progression as a text (so that I didn’t even mentioned about ‘modelling’). I converted the midi tracks into a symbolic, 1-D data to deal with it as a text.
Drum track is not a 1-D
No it isn’t as you see above. This is so called a piano-roll view. Y-axis is pitch, x-axis is time, and each note represents different part of drum. Here, blue:kick, green:snare, yellow-or-olive-or-whatever:(opened) hi-hats, and red:crash cymbals. Yes, this is a piano-roll view of the drum track of Master of Puppet – from 0:28 in this live:
It is not 1-D as drummers are using their arms and legs simultaneously.
First, Quantisation and Simplification
Quantisation is to put the notes at certain timings, and only at certain timings. Nice explanation from mididrumfiles.com. It’s just a rounding function in time axis. So I quantised the midi files by 16th notes, assuming Lars Ulrich is not playing otherwise – it introduces some errors, especially there are triplets.
Further simplification I did is to limit the types of notes: a kick, a snare, open hi-hats, closed hi-hats, three tom-toms, a crash, and a ride: 9 notes in total. Using the General-MIDI drum map it is expressed as below:
allowed_pitch = [36, 38, 42, 46, 41, 45, 48, 51, 49] # 46: open HH drum_conversion = {35:36, # acoustic bass drum -> bass drum (36) 37:38, 40:38, # 37:side stick, 38: acou snare, 40: electric snare 43:41, # 41 low floor tom, 43 ghigh floor tom 47:45, # 45 low tom, 47 low-mid tom 50:48, # 50 high tom, 48 hi mid tom 44:42, # 42 closed HH, 44 pedal HH 57:49, # 57 Crash 2, 49 Crash 1 59:51, 53:51, 55:51, # 59 Ride 2, 51 Ride 1, 53 Ride bell, 55 Splash 52:49 # 52: China cymbal }
My encoding scheme (midi→text)
The basic idea is to represent the information of all True or False (played or not played) of every notes at a time with a single word. The words are rather self-explanatory:
‘000000000’ : nothing played
‘100000000’ : kick is played
‘1000000001’ : kick and crash played
‘0101000000’ : snare and open-HH played
Obviously 1 is True and 0 is False, at their dedicated places with a rule of:
with ‘Bar’ added for the segmentation of measures.
Corpus looks like this:
0b010000000 0b010000000 0b000000000 0b010000000 0b010000000 0b000001000 0b000000000 0b000001000 0b010000000 0b010000000 0b000000000 0b010000000 0b010000000 0b000001000 0b000000000 0b000001000 BAR 0b010000000 0b010000000 0b000000000 0b010000000 0b010000000 0b000001000 0b000000000 0b000001000 0b010000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000001000 0b000000000 0b000001000 0b000001000 0b000000000 BAR 0b100000001 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b010000001 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b100000001 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b010000001 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 BAR …
where a prefix 0b is added to specify it’s kind of a binary number.
LSTM Structure
I applied word-RNN here. Some numbers are..
60 songs for training data
Number of words: 2,141,692 (including ‘BAR’ in every 16 words)
Total number of words: 119 119 out of 2**9==512 possibilities.
The code is the same as I used for LSTM Realbook:
model = Sequential() model.add(LSTM(512, return_sequences=True, input_shape=(maxlen, num_chars))) model.add(Dropout(0.2)) model.add(LSTM(512, return_sequences=True)) model.add(Dropout(0.2)) model.add(LSTM(512, return_sequences=False)) model.add(Dropout(0.2)) model.add(Dense(num_chars)) model.add(Activation('softmax')) model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam')
The results
It didn’t end up learning the structure of bars and 16-notes after the first iteration.
0b000000000 0b010100000 0b100000000 0b100010011 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b100001010 0b100000000 0b000000000 0b010000000 0b000000000 0b101000000 0b000011000 0b000000000 0b001001101 BAR
0b000000000 0b000000000 0b001000000 0b100000000 0b100000001 0b010000000 0b000100000 0b000000000 0b000001100 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b101000000 0b000000000 0b011000000 0b001000000 0b000000000 BAR
0b100000000 0b000000000 0b000001000 BAR
0b000000000 0b100100000 0b010100000 0b100100000 0b010100000 0b101000000 BAR
0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b100000010 0b000000000 0b010100000 0b000000000 0b101000000 0b000000000 0b101000000 0b000100000 0b011000000 0b100000001 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b100100000 0b011000000 0b000000000 0b001000000 0b101000000 0b000000000 0b010000001 0b010000000 0b101000000 0b100100000 0b100000000 0b100000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b101000000 0b010010000 0b000000000 0b101000000 0b101000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b101000000 0b000000000 0b000011000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b100100000 0b000010000 0b100100000 0b000000000 0b100000000 0b001000000 0b000000000 0b101000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 BAR
0b000000000 0b101000000 0b100000001 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000100000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 BAR 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b000000000 0b100000000 BAR
After 45 iterations it looks more structured. (I added
for better understanding)
After 60 iterations it became bit more structured.
Okay, it’s boring, let’s listen to the rhythm.
First, I add a score for this track:
It looks like a proper drum score. You can listen to it below:
I ran 60 iterations with diversity parameters of [0.5, 0.8, 1.0, 1.25, 1.5]. I’ll present 10 tracks – with all the diversity parameters x [30th, 60th] iteration result.
With the diversity value of 1.50 and 1.25 the track sounds bit too virtuosic. Track 3, 8, 9, 10 are boring but probably more makes sense.
Track 8 and 9 are interesting, to some extent is has regular patterns with kick, snare, hi-hats + crash cymbals.
Do they sounds like Lars Ulrich?… Perhaps not yet.
Discussion
Looks like I have to fine tune the diversity parameter to get more reasonable drum tracks.
The proposed encoding scheme – based on nine binary digits – seems making sense.
Probably learning with different segment would lead a whole, complete track with a proper beginning and ending.
I don’t think it is deeply understanding the structure – the regular patterns of kick, snare, hi-hats, and the meaning (except track 8 and 9). At least it didn’t come to me that easily.
It would be also cool if I had more data with other bands to have some pun fun. E.g. Rage Against the long short Term Memory.
What I wanted to do is to do it with jazz drum tracks so that I could combine them with LSTM Realbook. Is there any good (and hopefully free) resources for it?
Code & dataset
Dataset is now shared in my repo. Will share the code soon.
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Quote CWR2 PR :
This is Cold War Rearmed² v1.5 - the result of me working on this giant modification alone because not many of the original team was left, and me tired of waiting for people doing what they have promised to do and then just disappearing without a word.
I’m not trying to badmouth anyone - just before anyone gets some ideas! I just reached a point where I decided that working on my own will progress faster than spending time with waiting and discussions.
Being part of the CWR Mod team, and in the end leading the project to where we are now was great fun, I met many very talented and skilled people. It was a honor to work with them for so many years.
This version was actually planned for the 15th anniversary of OFP back in June (hence 1.5). I then realized that not even the Bohemians are coming up with something special and so I thought by myself “what the eff” and spent the summer outside and forgot about BI, ArmA and even CWR². :-)
One day, when asked if there will be a new version I said "at my current speed, maybe Christmas", and shortly after I thought "why not". And so here we are.
But this is definitely the last release. I spent 10 years on this Modification now and even more time and money on BI games. Only to be slapped in the face and kicked in the ass in return. But that's another idiotic story. Enough is enough, and since I haven’t played ArmA or CWR² since a long time anyway, it's time for me to go.
There's not much new content, but there are a lot of little details I changed either because I didn’t liked them or people reported in the past. Some more units have been added (Russian and US soldiers in Desert variants). The AK rifles from RobertHammer have been removed again and replaced by the old ones because they were too modern for the 80’s. The Resistance has a new machine gun (UK-59). The retarded "beep beep" sound after each radio message has been replaced with something more suitable. The Resistance, Soviet Spetsnaz and some civilian units now featuring random textures, something I wanted to have since years but never figured how to get it done. Now finally the Resistance looks like real partisans and not like some Army running around in all the same Swiss camo pattern. The crappy PMC and ACR Expansions are no more required for the Modification and its Expansions. However, BAF (lite) is still required for the UK and some other Expansions.
I'm pretty sure you all like what you find. A more or less complete changelog can be found here.
Merry Christmas, stay safe and enjoy this fine Modification as long as possible.
Cold War Rearmed² v1.5
Arma 2 Arma 2
released version 1.5 of theon the Armaholic forums Available optional content: |
Alejandro G. Inarritu’s “The Revenant” came up trumps at the 69th British Academy Film Awards on Sunday night, nabbing five prizes including best film, director and leading actor.
George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” left the field with four BAFTAs – all in the more technical fields – including costume design, production design, make up and hair and editing.
“The Martian,” “The Danish Girl,” “Carol” and “Ex-Machina” all left empty-handed this year.
This year’s ceremony was a marked change for Inarritu compared to last year’s awards: in 2015, his pic “Birdman,” was up for 10 nominations but only came away with one win for best cinematography, given to Emmanuel Lubezki.
The glitterati were in full force at London’s Royal Opera House on Valentine’s Day: Tom Cruise awarded “The Revenant” with the best film prize while Leonardo DiCaprio’s win for best actor in the film was met with a resounding cheer in the audience. It marked the thesp’s first BAFTA win after four noms (he was previously nominated for work on Martin Scorsese pics “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “The Departed” and “The Aviator”).
DiCaprio personally thanked co-star Tom Hardy for his “fierce loyalty not only as a collaborator but as a friend. I could not have done this journey without you.” He also thanked his mother in a moving speech, crediting her for supporting his acting career from the beginning.
Helmer Inarritu won best director, after being nominated in the category three times (he was previously nominated for “Birdman” and “Babel”).
Lubezki nabbed the best cinematography award again for his work on “The Revenant,” a win that was widely predicted amongst the biz. This marks his fourth BAFTA win (in addition to “Birdman,” he also nabbed statuettes for “Gravity” and “Children of Men”). The pic also picked up best sound, for Lon Bender, Chris Duesterdiek, Martin Hernandez, Frank A. Montano, Jon Taylor, Randy Thom.
Brie Larson snatched up best actress for her role in “Room.” The thesp was not there to pick up the award, due to filming commitments in Australia, but helmer Lenny Abrahamson was on hand to accept the prize on her behalf and described the actress, who is also nominated for an Oscar this year, as “one of the best actors of her generation.”
Mark Rylance picked up best supporting actor for “Bridge of Spies,” his first win and first BAFTA film nomination. Rylance also wasn’t in London to collect the awards, as he is currently preforming on Broadway, but helmer Steven Spielberg collected the award for the actor.
Idris Elba and Kate Winslet at Saturday’s BAFTA Awards in London (Photo by Jonathan Hordle/REX/Shutterstock)
Kate Winslet won her third BAFTA this year for Best Supporting Actress for “Steve Jobs.” Amongst the list of people she thanked, she credited co-star Michael Fassbender for his role in the film. “You led us through this,” she said. “I don’t know how you did this. I could watch you every day and be completely blown away.”
Outstanding British Film, the first award of the evening went to “Brooklyn,” directed by John Crowley. The 1950s Irish immigrant tale stars Saorise Ronan.
“The Big Short” was awarded best adapted screenplay for scribes Adam McKay, Charles Randolph, its only award of the evening.
“Spotlight” picked up one award for best original screenplay, for Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer. McCarthy took to the stage and thanked “the courageous survivors who came forward and shared their stories with us.”
Best animation went to Disney/Pixar toon “Inside Out” and helmer Pete Docter accepted the award and called on young people in secondary school who were struggling and trying to figure things out to “express themselves.” He said: “Sing, write, draw. The world will be a better place for it.”
George Miller received a lot of love on stage on Sunday evening as his pic “Mad Max: Fury Road,” picked up four statues for costume design (Jenny Beavan), makeup and hair (Lesley Vanderwalt, Damian Martin), editing (Margaret Sixel) and production design (Colin Gibson, Lisa Thompson).
Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer went to Jordanian pic “Theeb,” directed by Naji Abu Nowar, beating out the more well-known “Ex Machina,” helmed by Alex Garland. “Theeb” is up for an Oscar for best foreign language film.
“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” snapped up best special visual effects for Chris Corbould, Roger Guyett, Paul Kavanagh and Neal Scanlan while the EE Rising Star BAFTA award, the only award voted for by the public, went to “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Attack the Block” Brit star John Boyega, who remarked he wanted to “share this award with all the young dreamers.” The thesp beat out Brie Larson, Dakota Johnson, Taron Egerton and Bel Powley for the award.
Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to receive a best actor Oscar for his role in 1963’s “Lilies of the Field,” was honored with a BAFTA Fellowship, the highest accolade, for his outstanding and exceptional contribution to the business. The Bahamas-born thesp, who has been nominated for six BAFTAs in his career (compared to two Academy Award nominations), nabbing one win in 1959 for “Edge of the City,” was unable to attend the ceremony to pick up his award due to “ill health.”
But he thanked BAFTA for the award saying “I’m sorry I’m unable to be there for you in London for this special occasion but I hold a very special place in my heart for your great city” and added “thank you for your warm embrace.”
“Sidney Poitier is the greatest example of what it means to live your life with integrity, power and grace. I just love this man,” said Oprah Winfrey in a video message. “He became a symbol of what was possible for an African-American in the United States.”
Alan Rickman, Omar Sharif, David Bowie, Wes Craven, Sir Christopher Lee and composer James Horner were remembered in a moving in memoriam reel during the ceremony.
Renowned costume supplier Angels Costumes was lauded with the Outstanding British Contribution to cinema, which was presented by Cate Blanchett.
And Best short film went to “Operator,” a pic funded by Kickstarter and helmed by Caroline Bartleet while best short animation went to “Edmond.”
FULL WINNERS LIST:
BEST FILM
“The Revenant,” Steve Golin, Alejandro G. Inarritu, Arnon Milchan, Mary Parent, Keith Redmon
DIRECTOR
“The Revenant,” Alejandro G. Inarritu
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
“Spotlight,” Tom McCarthy, Josh Singer
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
“The Big Short,” Adam McKay, Charles Randolph
LEADING ACTOR
Leonardo DiCaprio, “The Revenant”
LEADING ACTRESS
Brie Larson, “Room”
SUPPORTING ACTOR
Mark Rylance, “Bridge of Spies”
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Kate Winslet, “Steve Jobs”
ORIGINAL MUSIC
“The Hateful Eight,” Ennio Morricone
CINEMATOGRAPHY
“The Revenant,” Emmanuel Lubezki
EDITING
“Mad Max: Fury Road,” Margaret Sixel
PRODUCTION DESIGN
“Mad Max: Fury Road,” Colin Gibson, Lisa Thompson
COSTUME DESIGN
“Mad Max: Fury Road,” Jenny Beavan
MAKEUP & HAIR
“Mad Max: Fury Road,” Lesley Vanderwalt, Damian Martin
SOUND
“The Revenant,” Lon Bender, Chris Duesterdiek, Martin Hernandez, Frank A. Montano, Jon Taylor, Randy Thom
SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS
“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” Chris Corbould, Roger Guyett, Paul Kavanagh, Neal Scanlan
FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
“Wild Tales,” Damian Szifron
DOCUMENTARY
“Amy,” Asif Kapadia, James Gay-Rees
ANIMATED FILM
“Inside Out,” Pete Docter
OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM
“Brooklyn,” John Crowley, Finola Dwyer, Amanda Posey, Nick Hornby
OUTSTANDING DEBUT BY A BRITISH WRITER, DIRECTOR OR PRODUCER
Naji Abu Nowar (Writer/Director) Rupert Lloyd (Producer) “Theeb”
BRITISH SHORT ANIMATION
“Edmond,” Nina Gantz, Emilie Jouffroy
BRITISH SHORT FILM
“Operator,” Caroline Bartleet, Rebecca Morgan
THE EE RISING STAR AWARD (VOTED FOR BY THE PUBLIC)
John Boyega |
A store display in the Shufersal Deal store in Gilo, a settlement in the occupied West Bank, on 2 February, stated that a promotion by the Israeli supermarket chain is a “partnership with the Embassy of France.”
The French government is giving high-profile backing to an Israeli company that profits from settlements built on occupied Palestinian and Syrian land in violation of international law.
This month, Israel’s biggest supermarket chain Shufersal is sponsoring So French So Food, which it bills as a “Festival of scents and flavors from France.”
The event is co-organized by the Institut Français, the French government’s cultural arm, and Shufersal. It is also sponsored by the city of Toulouse.
During the month, Shufersal is heavily promoting French products in its stores.
Shufersal’s marketing materials and store displays for So French So Food state that the campaign is a partnership with the French embassy.
The Electronic Intifada has confirmed that these displays are being used in Shufersal stores in West Bank settlements.
The promotion will also bring more than two dozen French chefs and artisans to Israel. It aims to help French companies, whose executives will travel to Israel as part of the event, to export their goods.
But by backing this initiative, the French government will also help boost the profits of a company that operates extensively in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights.
Settlement profiteer
On its website, Shufersal lists store locations in the West Bank settlements of Ariel, Maaleh Adumim, Gilo and in the Gush Etzion bloc.
A banner posted on Facebook by Shufersal, an Israeli supermarket chain with extensive business in settlements, advertising the So French So Food festival “in partnership with the Embassy of France.”
According to the research group Who Profits, one of Shufersal’s convenience store chains, Yesh, has branches in a number of other settlements.
Shufersal also distributes products manufactured in West Bank settlements under its own brand. These include goods from the settlements of Imanuel, Mishor Adumim and the Barkan Industrial Zone.
In May 2015, Shufersal launched its own line of branded dairy products manufactured in a settlement in Syria’s Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, according to Who Profits.
Photos taken by an Israeli citizen this week and provided to The Electronic Intifada, prove that the France-backed promotion is taking place inside West Bank settlements built in violation of international law.
The images show store displays in the Shufersal Deal store at 17 Tsviya ve Yitzhak Street in Gilo that explicitly state that the promotion is a “partnership with the Embassy of France.”
Contradicting French policy
A French diplomatic source told The Electronic Intifada that the “partnership between the French embassy in Israel and Shufersal exclusively concerns the promotion, in Israel, of French products and of our gastronomy, on the occasion of the French gastronomy week.”
“It certainly does not constitute a support of colonization, a subject on which the French position is clear and constant,” the source added.
The fact is, however, that the promotion is taking place inside West Bank settlements, which France does not consider to be “in Israel.”
France was one of the leading forces behind the recently announced European Union requirement that settlement goods no longer be labeled “Made in Israel.”
And while the French government’s rhetoric says one thing, its promotion of a major settlement profiteer would appear to violate its own longstanding policies, as well as constituting an endorsement of Israel’s gross violations of Palestinian rights.
In 2014, France warned its citizens and companies against doing business with Israeli settlements in occupied territories. The government said that firms could face legal action tied to “land, water, mineral and other natural resources” as well as “reputational risks.”
Indeed, the French companies that are participating in the So French So Food promotion might find that their reputations suffer as well – but as a result of the French government’s actions.
They include advertising firm JCDecaux, French vodka brand Grey Goose and Toulouse chocolatiers Bello & Angeli, among others.
“Profiting from Israel’s theft”
In a landmark report last month, Human Rights Watch called on all corporations to completely end their business activities in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem.
“Settlement businesses unavoidably contribute to Israeli policies that dispossess and harshly discriminate against Palestinians, while profiting from Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and other resources,” Arvind Ganesan, the director of the business and human rights division at the New York-based group, said. “The only way for businesses to comply with their own human rights responsibilities is to stop working with and in Israeli settlements.”
According to Human Rights Watch, companies like Shufersal are fundamental to the settlement enterprise: they make the settlements more viable by providing jobs, paying taxes to settlement municipalities and by providing services and infrastructure to settlers.
Over the last two years, a number of international pension funds have divested completely from five major Israeli banks, because of their activities supporting Israeli settlements.
These decisions are significant because they establish the precedent that the banks’ settlement-related business cannot be separated from their other activities.
The same case can be made regarding Shufersal, which operates a network and supply chain that fully integrates its settlement-based retail and manufacturing activities. Therefore, by promoting and partnering with Shufersal, the French government is complicit in the settlements it claims to oppose.
In its report, Human Rights Watch also called for government sanctions on Israel over the settlements.
But the French government appears to be heading in the other direction.
While smearing, threatening and repressing its own citizens who advocate for Palestinian rights, France is embracing a major settlement profiteer in the name of the French people. |
Update on references
As you can see in the comments, Christie Boxer, the lead author of the journal article behind the Coontz Opinionator piece has contacted me to let us all know that the article is currently in revise and resubmit phase but will be published in Journal of Family Issues shortly.
What works
The graphic is more legible than the chart from which the data originated. I’m guessing the Journal of Family Issues would not allow such a “fancy” series of graphics in the final published piece so I don’t mean this as a critique of the article’s authors. Just pointing out that there is good reason for journals and other publishers to reconsider their policies about how data can most usefully be presented.
I happen to have created a few graphics in this style myself and tend to favor it over the chart (e.g. this one about agricultural subsidies) in the past and think they work well for displaying changes in attitudes over time.
What needs work
The article from which this news story is drawn clearly provides information on both what women want and what men want in greater detail than what’s seen here. Why did the news story choose to run with less than half the data?
The chart clearly contains information on what men want in a mate AS WELL AS what women want in a mate. I see no reason for going (less than) halfway on this story. In fact, what I find most interesting is the convergence on some things – nobody cares much about chastity in a mate any more – and divergence on other traits – women rank men’s desire for home and children much higher than men rates women’s desire for home and children. That’s a puzzler worthy of thought in a way that a story that reflects only what men want is…well…just not all that interesting. Pair bonding takes two, as I’m sure Coontz knows because she’s been researching marriage for years. It’s unclear if the Times pressured her to come up with a more attention grabbing headline “The M.R.S. and the PhD” or if she chose that on her own or if it was a combination of factors.
I’m glad to see that, at least as far as I can tell from what is available to scholars other than Coontz (who might have an early full-length, unreleased draft of the Boxer, Noonan, Whelan paper), the scholars whose data led to the graphic were not so singly concerned with what men want in a mate. They were looking at how mate selection characteristics have been adjusted over time for both men and women and I hope that their article looks at the consonance and dissonance between the two genders’ mate selection ideals.
I would have preferred more attention paid to the graphic – like, say, the inclusion of what women want or an integrated graphic that displayed the overlaps and distances between what men and women want – and less time put into the accompanying illustrations which I have included to the left. I welcome regular readers of Sociological Images (and others) to comment on the messages coming out of the illustrations.
References
Coontz, Stephanie. (2012) “The M. R. S. and the PhD”. The New York Times, Sunday Review, Opinionator. [Information graphic by Bill Marsh/The New York Times]
Boxer, Christie; Noonan, Mary; and Whelan, Christine. (forthcoming) “Measuring Mate Preferences: A Replication and Extension” Journal of Family Issues. [Table drawn from Christine Whelan’s research webpage] |
Beitske Visser has secured a seat with Teo Martin Motorsport for the coming Formula V8 3.5 season.
After two seasons racing in the category for the AVF team, Visser was announced in a deal with Pons Racing for 2016 before the team quit the series.
She tested for Strakka Racing at Barcelona last month, but with the British squad putting its programme on hold, then teamed up with Teo Martin’s team at Aragon last weekend and will race alongside Yu Kanamru this season.
“I’m very happy to race with Teo Martin Motorsport this year,” said Visser.
“I feel very confident after the test last week. It’s working well together with the team and I think that we can make some very good results together. I would like to thank my sponsors Gecrio and Extra for giving me this chance.” |
Mike Wolfe won the 2011 The North Face Endurance Challenge 50 Mile Championships after tremendous duel with Dakota Jones (and a losing battle with an overhanging branch). We caught up with him for his take on the race, his head wound, and his plans for 2012.
[Since this among our first video interviews with transcription, we thought we’d point out that some sweet pics are inserted into the text portion of this post.]
Mike Wolfe 2011 TNF 50 Mile Men’s Champion Interview Transcript
[Ps. Best of luck to Mike in his first ever hearing before a circuit court this week!]
iRunFar: I’m with the winner of The North Face 50 Mile Championship, Mike Wolfe. How’s that feel, Mike?
Mike Wolfe: Oh, it’s great! It probably hasn’t totally sunk in yet. Certainly I didn’t really think about the… it’s a nice perk to get the cash purse but yeah, it’s great! It’s good to get to run against that field and feel good.
iRF: Would you say this is the biggest career win? I mean, you got second at the UTMB shortened version last year…
Wolfe: This and Western States 100 were good races for me this year. Yeah, I don’t know, I feel like I had a good season overall, but this was a nice cherry on top.
iRF: We talked just yesterday about how your training went, so tell me how today went.
Wolfe: Today was great overall. I never had the low points that slow you down or anything. I mean, you just know going into this race that if you’re going to be up there, you really just have to go for it from the start and hang on and hope you can. And I was able to. There were so many fast guys running this race today. The first 20-30 miles there was like a peloton of guys. It broke up a little bit but all the way to the turn around there was a pack of six to nine of us up there running together.
iRF: Who was up there?
Wolfe: Goeff Roes, Dakota [Jones], I think Rickey Gates was in there with us, Michael Wardian. There were a couple of the faster marathon guys that I don’t know who they are.
iRF: I was looking up numbers myself.
Wolfe: They were running with us. Oh, there was some guy named Alex from Colorado.
iRF: Alex Nichols who’s paced [Anton Krupicka] at a couple races. Chris Kollar, I have no idea who he is.
Wolfe: He’s from Missoula, Montana. He lives there; he’s not from there. I haven’t even met the guy. So there was all these fast guys, a lot of the marathoner guys. There was kind of like a peloton of guys and then the two Salomon guys from France just went out insanely fast. We lost them in the dark. I didn’t even know who was up there. I just knew someone was three-to-four minutes ahead of us early. But none of us, I certainly wasn’t worried. I didn’t think they would hold onto that pace. Sure enough about the turn-around we caught them and passed them. I think they both dropped. [iRF: They didn’t finish in the top 25 anyway, so that’s a safe assumption.] They just looked like they were having a rough go at that point.
And, so, at that point, Dakota took the lead. It was Dakota and Geoff and myself and Alex, the guy from Colorado. [We] took off and Alex was actually in front of Dakota and I. Then on the descent down into Stinson [Beach], I heard someone yell, and it turned out on one of those switchbacks [Alex] rolled his ankle real bad and so Dakota and I stopped and, actually, we got on either side of him and he put his arms over our shoulders and we helped him hobble down. Then he ended up being able to walk and run, so we took off. So anyway, it looked like he’d rolled his ankle pretty bad though.
iRF: I think he dropped at the next aid station. He said he was done. He was pretty frustrated.
Wolfe: It’s too bad because he was running strong. But then at that point, from there out, it was just Dakota and I, alone. [iRF: Alone together.] It was really exciting. It was tough. Dakota and I are friends, so it was awesome to run together and we were having a good time.
iRF: Did you actually even say anything ever?
Wolfe: Yeah, little bits here and there, but we were pushing hard enough that both of us were right on that edge where we weren’t doing much talking. Neither of us were going to back off. It was just so cat and mouse. One of us would take the lead for awhile and step up the pace and somehow flop. It was intense. It was anybody’s game. On the climb out of Muir Beach, I believe, on that steep climb, Dakota said, “Man it’s been great running with you all day, no matter what happens.” And I was like, “Yeah, definitely.” And you know, we’re just good friends.
iRF: And you mean that, it was sincere!
Wolfe: Yeah, definitely. And at that point, on those steeper climbs, I was climbing faster than him and then he would catch me on the downhills. So after Tennessee Valley, that last major aid station, on that long gradual climb, I knew that if I was going to make a move…
iRF: Someone called that the $10,000 Hill.
Wolfe: So I just hammered that as hard as I could and was able to put a gap on him and then as soon as I crested I knew I just had to let my legs go. But I didn’t know. I couldn’t see how much I’d put on him. That whole last downhill I was looking over my shoulder thinking he might have been coming. But I had the adrenaline going at that point. I know I was running really fast. So I was able to hold on.
iRF: Prior to pulling away at Tennessee Valley, were you trying to make any moves? Was he? Were you ever trying to break each other or were you just running hard?
Wolfe: I think we were trying to break each other. It was one of those things where we knew one of us was going to break at some point. You just know it. Something has to happen because it was just too neck and neck. It was just like “OHHHH, this is painful!” But Dakota ran an awesome race. It’s his 21st birthday Monday; this is the coolest 21st birthday ever!
iRF: I might have to save a six-pack for him.
Wolfe: I’ll buy him a beer tonight. [iRF: Whoa, whoa, whoa, Monday night!] Right, Monday night.
iRF: Turn your head the other way. You took the shirt off. You cleaned up yourself well, but what’s with the blood?
Wolfe: So, on the out and back section when you’re passing runners, because it’s been so windy, there are a bunch of downed trees over the trail. At one point I was crossing paths with someone and I wasn’t paying attention to the tree and I just cracked the top of my skull on a tree. It didn’t really hurt that bad but as I was running it just started spraying blood. My shirt was just drenched with blood but it wasn’t that bad, it just looked bad. I was kind of worried for a minute that if it was going to keep bleeding that I might get dizzy or something because I was working so hard, but it stopped. I think I just scraped the top of my head but you know your head just bleeds so much when you get a cut on it.
iRF: So you had that scrape up but your energy was good all day, any other physical problems or did you just hold up well all day?
Wolfe: Yeah, I held up well, I ate well, I drank a lot. The only thing that was really tough was that I was borderline crampy the second half. [iRF: You have a nice salt raccoon eyes.] Yeah, I don’t know whether it’s coming from the colder climate already. I mean, it’s not even, it’s 60-65 degrees maybe. It’s not hot, but I was just sweating like a pig. Both Dakota and I were eating handfuls of salt at aid stations because it was the only way to get salt.
iRF: You see a lot of things at ultras, but that’s pretty disgusting.
Wolfe: It was. Dakota threw up at one point, but we knew we had to get salt. The last 1/4 mile both of my legs were fully cramping. I was doing the hobble in. So that was the only thing that was edgy for me, the cramping.
iRF: So when did you know had him?
Wolfe: You know, honestly, I didn’t, I was still worried until the last one to one-and-a-half miles where I got down on the flats and could look way back up and I couldn’t see him. So I knew at that point, I had him.
iRF: So, I know it’s the end of the season and you’ve wrapped that up. I’m not going to ask you your full schedule, but is there anything you’re leaning towards next year? You finished second at Western States. Do you want to go back? UTMB? Any big draws?
Wolfe: I don’t have my full season planned out but I got my spot at Western States again, so at this point I’ll probably go back to Western. I also put in for Hardrock 100. So if I get into Hardrock, I probably won’t do both. I’d like to focus on Hardrock if I get in, I think. I don’t know about UTMB. I’ve been over there three years, not three years in a row, but three years now. I’d like to go back and have a good race there. If I got into Hardrock I don’t know that I’d go over, but I haven’t decided. We’ll see. There are so many new races to try out.
iRF: Well you tried this one out and you crushed it so congratulations! Good luck in the 9th circuit this week!
Wolfe: Yeah, thanks! |
About
Are you tired of the same game being built over and over again by different companies, with each new generation just having prettier graphics. VoxelVerse is a new kind of game, its a game that is created by users, changed by users, evolved by users.
VoxelVerse is not an just idea, its real! Give VoxelVerse a try by clicking on this link! You will need Flash 11.3
VoxelVerse is a revolutionary new kind of game. A game where anything and everything can be created, moved, modified, and destroyed. A game where everything you find can be used in crafting, and what you craft actually makes you, your vehicles, and your fortress stronger, faster, and more powerful. VoxelVerse ties together exploration, adventure, building, crafting, and socialization in a way that has only been imagined up until now. And of course it's all free to play in a web browser on PCs and Macs (and eventually on handhelds).
So what makes VoxelVerse different then other Voxel games?
First off VoxelVerse uses a next generation Voxel Engine, which I call an Oxel Engine. Oxels are a combination of Voxels and Oct-Trees. What does this mean for the user? It means that users are no longer limited to one size block. Now blocks have a huge ranges of sizes. They can be as large as the moon, or as small as grains of sand. This gives users the ability to create models of anything they can imagine.
VoxelVerse utilizes and encourages users to create Independent Voxel Models (IVM). For example IVMs are the islands, ships, and creatures. IVMs can be linked together to form groups of objects, so your zeppelin can add cannons, engines, and accessories. IVMs can be items that have been crafted by user, or just a convenient groups of oxels in the shape of an arch or statue. IVMs allow users to create their own unique vehicles like zeppelin's, which can fly around the VoxelVerse. IVMs allow users to create and share anything they can imagine.
Crafting - VoxelVerse has a totally new approach to crafting. In VoxelVerse you will find a wide variety of metals, woods, and others items. Each material has attributes which contribute to the items stats. A sword made of copper and oak will have basic attributes such as speed, weight, damage. Whereas a sword made of titanium, elder wood, with a gem in the hilt will be faster, and do more damage. Items that have been crafted can be re-crafted, for example to upgrade the blade, or add a gem. Also engines, cannons, boilers, and rudders are all crafted. You will find things that make your engines faster, guns more powerful, and rudder turn faster.
IVM's can have scripts attached to them. For example a door has an open script, this allows users to create their own kinds of doors. For content creators, think of this as Second Life meets Minecraft.
No downloadable client, no local content, so you can play anywhere! Sharing the world you have created is as easy as sharing a URL.
This is an ambituous goal indeed. And if there is one thing I have learned after designing, creating, and delivering commercial MMO's for 12 years it's to proceed in baby steps. So I am splitting VoxelVerse into three phases.
Phase 1 - Massively single player. A story driven game where users can explore, build, and fight. And with a simple click of a mouse, you will be able to visit the worlds created by your friends and by other users. Think of phase 1 as a mashup of Minecraft/Second Life/Skyrim.
Phase 2 - Massively multiplayer. Multiplayer will bring many new aspects to the game: Cooperative building, selling of minerals and IVMs in the auction house. PvP combat, fights over control of key mineral assets, multi-user first person combat on user built/crafted ships. Raids on fortresses. Add in aspects of Eve Online and LoL to the mix in this phase. But in this combat, you design the ship, craft the guns, engines, boilers. You can watch your opponent's ship get obliterated, and watch him desperately trying to repair it in combat. I am dying to see the first full scale model of the death star.
Phase 3 - User generated missions, make the game within the game. Since VoxelVerse is free to play and all the content is server based, all your friends can come try out your adventure. No more downloading and installing mod's. VoxelVerse has been designed from the start to be all about user generated content.
Phase 1 is what I am going to talk about in the rest of this story. I have been working on phase 1 for 10 months now. The Oxel Engine is ready for alpha content creators. Ready to put into hands of users.
There is a game too? I have seen thousands of people come into Sandbox worlds and the first thing they ask is "What’s there to do?". Story is a critical element that adds context and purpose to every starting players experience. The story behind VoxelVerse is that your colony ship that escaped from the dying embers of Earth but was destroyed just before reaching its destination. You escaped in a 1 person life pod, but the crew and passengers were scattered across the VoxelVerse. Your job is to survive long enough to reunite with the other colonists and start a new civilization! a.k.a Phase 2.
Why use Kickstarter? Crowdfunding is the future of indie game development, but you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know that already. Users know what they enjoy and have shown an amazing willingness support it. Early on in this project I spent a few month trying to get VCs, angel investors and game publishers to understand why a next generation Voxel Engine like VoxelVerse could unlock a whole new type of gameplay, a whole new generation of user generated content. But after hearing “Why use Voxels” for the 10th time, I realized this was a losing battle. So I decided to self fund the project for as long as I could.Raising money is a full time job, and when I do it, I don’t get to design or code. I have raised millions of dollars in the past, I have the business plan, the pro forma, and market studies. But when it comes down to it, I love to create, and make tools for others to create with. Spending months and months of my time raising money, might have been a better long term strategy, but I had an idea that wanted to burst out of me like the creature in Alien. So I decided to do it on my own dime. To be beholden to no one but the users. Well, that dime and my wife’s patience have worn a very thin, so my choice is raise some money, or make this project a part time project. The result of this effort is the basis for what you see in the demo. It still needs work on some major area’s like lighting, but the overall result is just what I imagined. I think you will find VoxelVerse is on the path to becoming the ultimate Voxel game and creation tool. What you see in the demo is just a tiny glimpse of what VoxelVerse will ultimately deliver.
What will I do with the money that I raise? Any money earned through kickstarter will be used to make VoxelVerse even more awesome. These funds will give me the freedom to finish VoxelVerse, to bring up the server on AWS and be able to pay for the artwork VoxelVerse needs, rather than asking for favors. To be able to add the sounds and music that VoxelVerse needs. For the past year I have been in designing, planning, and coding VoxelVerse. VoxelVerse is the fifth generation of virtual worlds platforms I have designed and architected. What it took to make VoxelVerse happen was a new type of 3D graphics engine on a new platform Flash Stage3D. And, after working on this for 10 months I am just starting to unlock the power that it holds. I love working on this project and I want to keep working on this project full time. What happens if I don't raise the money? Then VoxelVerse will turn into a nights and weekends project and take longer to finish. But it will get finished regardless. One thing I hope to gain from Kickstarter are some passionate content developers who want something more then current Voxel Engines can deliver. So please support VoxelVerse if you can. And even if you can't afford it, come explore the power of Oxels, IVMs, and User Generated Content. I hope to get to know many of you well over the coming months and I look forward to collaborating with you on this exciting project.. |
There are some programming books that I’ve read from cover to cover repeatedly; there are others that I have dipped into many times, reading a chapter or so at a time. Jon Bentley’s 1986 classic Programming Pearls is a rare case where both of these are true, as the scuffs at the bottom of my copy’s cover attest:
(I have the First Edition [amazon.com, amazon.co.uk], so that’s what I scanned for the cover image above, but it would probably make more sense to get the newer and cheaper Second Edition [amazon.com, amazon.co.uk] which apparently has three additional chapters.)
I’ll review this book properly in a forthcoming article (as I did for Coders at Work, The Elements of Programming Style, Programming the Commodore 64 and The C Programming Language), but for now I want to look at just one passage from the book, and consider what it means. One astounding passage.
Only 10% of programmers can write a binary search
Every single time I read Programming Pearls, this passage brings me up short:
Binary search solves the problem [of searching within a pre-sorted array] by keeping track of a range within the array in which T [i.e. the sought value] must be if it is anywhere in the array. Initially, the range is the entire array. The range is shrunk by comparing its middle element to T and discarding half the range. The process continues until T is discovered in the array, or until the range in which it must lie is known to be empty. In an N-element table, the search uses roughly log(2) N comparisons. Most programmers think that with the above description in hand, writing the code is easy; they’re wrong. The only way you’ll believe this is by putting down this column right now and writing the code yourself. Try it. I’ve assigned this problem in courses at Bell Labs and IBM. Professional programmers had a couple of hours to convert the above description into a program in the language of their choice; a high-level pseudocode was fine. At the end of the specified time, almost all the programmers reported that they had correct code for the task. We would then take thirty minutes to examine their code, which the programmers did with test cases. In several classes and with over a hundred programmers, the results varied little: ninety percent of the programmers found bugs in their programs (and I wasn’t always convinced of the correctness of the code in which no bugs were found). I was amazed: given ample time, only about ten percent of professional programmers were able to get this small program right. But they aren’t the only ones to find this task difficult: in the history in Section 6.2.1 of his Sorting and Searching, Knuth points out that while the first binary search was published in 1946, the first published binary search without bugs did not appear until 1962. — Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls (1st edition), pp. 35-36.
Several hours! Ninety percent! Dude, SRSLY! Isn’t that terrifying?
One of the reasons I’d like to see a copy of the Second Edition is to see whether this passage has changed — whether the numbers improved between 1986 and the Second-Edition date of 1999. My gut tells me that the numbers must have improved, that things can’t be that bad; yet logic tells me that in an age when programmers spend more time plugging libraries together than writing actual code, core algorithmic skills are likely if anything to have declined. And remember, these were not doofus programmers that Bentley was working with: they were professionals at Bell Labs and IBM. You’d expect them to be well ahead of the curve.
And so, the Great Binary Search Experiment
I would like you, if you would, to go away and do the exercise right now. (Well, not right now. Finish reading this article first!) I am confident that nearly everyone who reads this blog is already familiar with the binary search algorithm, but for those of you who are not, Bentley’s description above should suffice. Please fire up an editor buffer, and write a binary search routine. When you’ve decided it’s correct, commit to that version. Then test it, and tell me in the comments below whether you got it right first time. Surely — surely — we can beat Bentley’s 10% hit-rate?
Here are the rules:
Use whatever programming language you like. No cutting, pasting or otherwise copying code. Don’t even look at other binary search code until you’re done. I need hardly say, no calling bsearch() , or otherwise cheating :-) Take as long as you like — you might finish, and feel confident in your code, after five minutes; or you’re welcome to take eight hours if you want (if you have the time to spare). You’re allowed to use your compiler to shake out mechanical bugs such as syntax errors or failure to initialise variables, but … NO TESTING until after you’ve decided your program is correct. Finally, the most important one: if you decide to begin this exercise, then you must report — either to say that you succeeded, failed or abandoned the attempt. Otherwise the figures will be skewed towards success.
(For the purposes of this exercise, the possibility of numeric overflow in index calculations can be ignored. That condition is described here but DO NOT FOLLOW THAT LINK until after writing your program, if you’re participating, because the article contains a correct binary search implementation that you don’t want to see before working on your clean-room implementation.)
If your code does turn out to be correct, and if you wish, you’re welcome to paste that code into your comment … But if you do, and if a subsequent commenter points out a bug in it, you need to be prepared to deal with the public shame :-)
For extra credit: those of you who are really confident in your programming chops may write the program, publish it in a comment here and then test it. If you do that, you’ll probably want to mention the fact in your comment, so we cut you extra slack when we find your bugs.
I will of course summarise the results of this exercise — let’s say, in one week’s time.
Let’s go!
Update (an hour and a half later)
Thanks for the many posted entries already! I should have warned you that the WordPress comment system interprets HTML, and so eats code fragments like
if a[mid] < value
The best way to avoid this is to wrap your source code in {source}…{/source} tags, but using square brackets rather than curly. (The first time I tried to tell you all this, I used literal square brackets, and my markup-circumvention instructions were themselves marked up — D’oh!). Do not manually escape < and > as < and > — the {source} wrapper deals with these. Doing it this way also has the benefit of preserving indentation, which no other method seems to do.
And an apology for WordPress: I really, really wish that this platform allowed commenters to preview their comments and/or edit them after posting, so that all the screwed-up source code could have been avoided. I’ve tried to go and fix some of them myself, but — arrgh! — it turns out that WordPress not only displays code with < symbols wrongly, it actually throws away what follows, so there’s nothing for me to restore.
Update 2 (four hours after the initial post)
Wow, you guys are amazing. Four hours, and this post already has more comments than the previous record holder (Whatever Happened to Programming, 206 comments at the time of writing.)
For anyone who’d like to see more discussion, there are some good comments at Hacker News and perhaps some slightly less insightful comments at Reddit, where actually writing code is seen as “elitism”.
Update 3: links to this whole series
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Nintendo
Nintendo's stock is on fire. The company is having by far its best year since the great recession due to Nintendo Switch and its hit games Mario Run, Pokemon Go, and Zelda Breath of the Wild.
The stock is up 87% over the last year.
On top of all this, Nintendo just released another smash hit Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
Jefferies equity analyst Atul Goyal has been closely following the progress of the new Nintendo Switch console and its games. In a note circulated to clients May 5, Goyal reiterated his "Buy" rating and ¥39.200 price target, implying massive upside potential of 38% for the stock.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe had a record release day with 459,000 units sold in the US. That's the highest for any Mario Kart game since the franchise began in 1992. The previous record holder was Mario Kart Wii, and this game beat that record by 13%. Here's Goyal on the enormity of the success:
"No, this is not just any ordinary success. The scale of this success is many times bigger than what is visible with "MK8D sales of 459K units exceeded MKWii sales of 405K". Analyzing the scale, we realize that like-for-like, MK8D is mega-hit on a different scale altogether (maybe 5-10x better). On the launch day in the US, MK8D sold c. 459K units. By 31Mar’17, Switch had an installed base of c. 1.2m in ‘The Americas’ (and probably 1.5m by Apr-end). The earlier launch day record was earlier held by Mario Kart Wii (launched in Apr 2008). Recall that MK-Wii was launched 17 months after Wii launch (Nov-2006). My 31Mar’08, Wii had a global installed base of 24.45m (Switch was at c. 2.74m by ’17 Mar-end) and its installed base in The Americas was 10.6m (Switch was 1.2m)."
Wall Street did not expect the new Mario Kart game to be such a huge sensation as all of its focus has been on Zelda Breath of the Wild, which is now the highest ranked game on Metacritic with a rating of 97 points. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is tied for second place with PS4's Persona 5.
Goyal noted that Wall Street started out with a very negative view of Nintendo, sending the stock down 10-15% on two separate occasions, but that was a huge mistake and that the "market may need to make a 180-degree change in view."
Goyal believes Switch and its games could result in 2018 operating profit that is "well beyond the company’s conservative guidance."
Click here for a real time Nintendo chart.
Markets Insider |
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Please contact our customer service team for all warranty questions:
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Maurizio Sarri is a former statistics student and current Napoli coach whose quotes make him easy to pull for. Last year at Empoli he had his tiny team playing like big boys. In a cluster analysis I ran Empoli showed up alongside Manchester United, Roma, Spurs, Juventus, PSG, and other teams one of the poorest teams in Europe had zero business being among. He and Eduardo Berizzo (Celta Vigo) became two managers I greatly respected simply from computer scouting. Watching their teams certainly confirmed that opinion. Sarri the stats-man has also helpfully provided the checklist he looks for when he analyzes his team (he also has mentioned deep touches as a stat he looks to judge performance on in his post-game interviews). We start with Napoli in our look at the early going in what should be a fascinating and enthralling season in Serie A.
Vertical passes played from midfield to forward
When it comes to chances created originating in midfield, Napoli is running away from the pack. They have 40 and 2nd place has just 30.
For this we can give Sarri and Napoli a check.
This doesn’t mean Napoli rely solely on midfielders playing long passes to forwards to create something, no team plays a shorter average pass to enter the final 30 yards. This implies if the quick long strike isn’t available, Napoli get players forward and play short passes to attack. To show how they do use long vertical balls to create chances here is a map of every chance created by Napoli (blue) vs Juventus (black) where a pass got the team 10+ yards closer to goal. The difference is pretty stark.
High defensive line
Napoli’s opponents average pass is played further from goal than any other team in Serie A, up from 4th last year.
3. Defenders get the ball to their playmaker
The midfielder Jorginho leads Serie A in passes/90 with 107. Last year he averaged 77.5 per 90.
Now this is nice and reflects very well on Sarri getting the players to fit his ideas but doesn’t tell us if his checklist is actually leading to performance and wins. They are a very good team but haven’t made a huge leap from last season. They are getting the ball in front of goal and keeping opponents from getting in front of goal at similar rates to last season. Shots and shot quality are reasonably similar. The ends have been similar despite means changing. A few more examples of means changing: the high completion % allowed in the final 30 yards.
Last year under Rafa Benitez, no team was tougher to complete passes against than Napoli, this year they are easier than league average. Maybe this is just a transition period to Sarri’s eyes-on-ball approach, but it’s more likely a feature of his system to not have stiflingly low rates close to goal as Empoli’s main weakness was also how easy it was to complete deep passes against them (partially why they linked up with PSG and Manchester United in the cluster analysis). Napoli press much higher than they did last season which unless you are Bayer Leverkusen or Bayern, makes it tough to totally shut down the opposition close to your own goal. There are always tradeoffs in tactics.
The effectiveness with which Sarri has changed the teams style to reach his stated goals make me confident he is more likely to take this team to a higher performance level as the season goes along. Right now they are probably still a step behind Roma and Juventus but it’s not too far. It will be exciting to see how they evolve.
Juventus, still the best?
Short version: probably yes.
Long version, showing my work: Juventus are taking the most shots, spending nearly the most time in front of goal (“Red Zone” in my Americanized lingo), and taking the most shots from inside 10 yards. They allow the 2nd fewest shots and the 2nd fewest Red Zone completions. They still have the strongest claim to be the best team in Italy right now. Things are not completely fine: they have slipped a bit in terms of shot quality. In 13/14 and 14/15 Juve forced the longest average shot in Serie A, now they are just 15th.
The passes that get their attack reaching dangerous positions are coming from crosses a bit too often as well. The teams crossing more than Juve are Atalanta, Carpi, Chievo, Palermo, Udinese, and Verona. Not great company for a title contender. These aren’t crippling slips but Juve is already 10 points behind and the the margin last season was much finer between Juve and the rest of the league than the table portrayed. Their shot and territory numbers were never near Bayern/PSG levels and the preseason title odds of around 60% reflected the fact this wasn’t a true runaway league.
This similarity in top teams talent combined with the early season dropped points from Juve is the reason Italy is set up for the best title race in recent years. I’d guess that no league in recent times has had 5 teams at above 10% odds at this point in the season and that no league has had a “favorite” at just 31% to win the league.
Just look at that. The normal European soccer complaint that you know the teams that will win the title is totally out the window here. It feels open like an NBA season, not a soccer season.
Current Favorite
The current favorite is not Juventus. Leaders Fiorentina are not favorites either. It is 4th place Roma who the bookies tip by a hair to win the title. Roma have cranked up their offense significantly from last season. They are way out in front of the pack with 7.1 shots on target per game after taking just 4.6 last season. This is not because of an unsustainable touch-to-shot conversion rate, it’s mainly fueled by simply spending way more time in front of goal.
This is an enormous change. A chunk of it comes from a single game where they completely dominated territory against hapless Sampdoria (and lost in the final seconds) but there would still be a 6 completion per game rise without that 55-completion game. Last year they didn’t have any games with at least 50 completions in the final 30 yards.
The big individual riser in the shot category comes up front where Dzeko has taken 4.6 per 90, 3.2 inside the penalty area. Last season no one took more total shots than Totti’s 2.7 and Ljajic’s 1.6 per 90 was the teams leader inside the box. As you’d expect with such a rise in shots, there are lots more players chalking up >1.5 in-box shots per 90 and >2 key passes/90.
This year 27% of Roma’s passes come within 45 yards of goal, last year it was just 19%. This can partially be explained by their increased pressing, they break up opposition-half passes right near the top of the league this year, leading to better field position to start their attack. When you don’t have to make 3 or 4 passes to bring the ball up the pitch, it’s easier to get into dangerous positions. That’s not the whole explanation and there are other telling signs (both more aggressive passing and more accurate passing moving into the final 45 yards) but a more thorough analysis certainly beckons if Roma continue to play like this.
Opposites in Milan
Last year the two Milan teams finished close to each other in the mid-table but played nothing alike. Inter played like some of the best teams in Europe in many categories, while Milan often played like legitimate relegation candidates.
The fact they had similar odds in preseason was one of the rare total misses you’ll see in the betting markets. Inter now have the 4th best title odds, just barely behind Napoli. They are pressing high, getting the ball deep, keeping teams from seeing much of goal and pretty much doing everything they did last year, just seeing better results points-wise. They have a similar look as far as territory dominance to Napoli but haven’t been quite as impressive when you look at the nitty-gritty.
Inter get nearly twice as many of their deep completions via cross while Napoli are less reliant on the least effective attacking tool there is. I’d say this is the one place where the bookies might be wrong, Napoli should be valued a bit more highly than Inter. I say this hesitantly, knowing that in general you should look to the bookies when rating teams. Most of us stat guys are not millionaires yet from beating the lines, always remember that.
Milan, poor Milan. At least they have improved slightly. Last year they had the 19th most deep completions, now they are up to 16th. They have the 16th fewest shots from inside 20 yards (only 2 ahead of 19th) and they still can’t get the ball to the center of the pitch at all. They aren’t even a league-average side.
The league leaders
Fiorentina lead the league and have the best SOT rate. They have the 5th best title odds right now, around 10%. How do those two things make sense? A lot of it is their early season schedule has been very soft, with games against Carpi, Bologna, Milan, and Atalanta. They also haven’t put up stunning shot totals against those teams: 6th most total and 10th in shots inside 20 yards. They’ve been great at stopping opponents from coming upfield and taking shots, but defense is much more opponent-dependent than offense. Without an overpowering offense and with a defense yet to come through the fire, I can’t sign off on Fiorentina being any better than the bookies skeptical take.
Other Bits
Torino have started really well with their patented mix of passing backwards in their own half a lot (27% backwards pass rate there is 3 standard deviations above league average), and heavy central focus (2nd in league, actually a bit down from last year). A 6th place finish certainly seems feasible if a bigger team in front falters…
Sampdoria were in Europa League qualifiers this year after last years 7th place finish and got crushed 4-0 at home by Serbian side Vojvodina. Things haven’t got better in the league. Sampdoria have allowed 27 completions inside 15 yards from open play. The next highest is 16. Their attack is near the bottom when it comes to deep completions as well. They’ve taken the 18th most shots and allowed the 2nd most. They are currently playing like a team who deserves to be relegated. Last year says they probably won’t keep doing this but it’s ugly right now.
One factor that might explain some of their underlying numbers is the fact they have bunkered their way to good results against top teams. Napoli, Inter, and Roma all completed 40+ passes inside 30 yards against Sampdoria (a feat which has only happened in 2 other games in the entire league) but Sampdoria got 5 points from those matches. Maybe they are just fooling the underlying numbers by West Hamming it and trying to concede 85% of the pitch but stop high quality shots? At least they have that bad-ass logo…
Frosinone are playing like relegation favorites but they have that Burnley-esque attacking verve plus openness at the back that is nice to see. Games involving Frosinone see a staggering 36.7 shots per game. League average is just a hair above 26…
Lazio are basically a poor man’s Fiorentina at this point. They have less impressive numbers boosted by a weak schedule but got hammered by Napoli in their one big game. You’d back them to finish top 6 but not compete at the top.
Bonus Sarri love is this great set piece goal (goal #3) that uses an off-ball screen to free up Mertens for an open shot.
Related
Article by Dustin Ward |
While I don’t disguise my enjoyment of Star Wars: The Old Republic, I have to honestly admit the PvP gear buying system is complex. Hell, it’s downright confusing. No matter the game, I’m a huge fan of PvP (Warlord in vanilla WoW). While I may not have PvPed my way to 50 in SWTOR, I enjoyed a fair share of it on the way up. Once I got there, with my hands full with Warzone Commendations, I stared at the 18 different PvP venders in sheer bewilderment.
Eighteen venders is not an exaggeration, there are in fact 18 PvP related venders for each faction. Where do you even start? What do Warzone Commendations even do? What’s a Mercenary Commendation and why don’t I have any? Why does all the level 50 purple gear require these Mercenary Commendations yet I have zero of them? Why is Battle Master gear so awesome? Are these daily / weekly quests worth doing? The purpose of this guide is to answer all these questions, with pictures!
***Skip to end for SparkNotes/condensed version***
Basics:
It all starts with Warzones and Valor. Warzones are PvP instances that you can queue from anywhere in the SWTOR universe from the bottom right of your mini map. The red box in the picture shows the location. For Republic players, the icon will be the Republic symbol instead of the Imperial symbol. You can queue solo or with a group. There are currently three different Warzones, even though it seems like Hutt Ball happens every time (39% according to BioWare).
In these Warzones you acquire Valor points and Warzone Commendations. You can think of Valor as your PvP rank – maxing out at 100. Valor is gained though Warzones, world PvP, and through PvP quests on Ilum. Titles can also be unlocked through your Valor rank. Warzone Commendations are gained though completing Warzone matches. They max out at 1000, so they need to be spent often. Spending them is pretty easy though. The picture below shows the end of a Warzone match; you can see how much Valor and Warzone Commendations are gained.
***EDIT: it was pointed out to me by Michael Irigoven on our site and Reddit user "Quagmire_" that the Valor cap is 100 and not 60. This is confirmed so I changed it in the guide. Valor 60 is still the minimum level to use Battle Master Gear though. Thank you.***
There are three tiers of level 50 purple level PvP gear. The order is Centurion < Champion < Battle Master. Why do you want level 50 PvP Gear? The answer is expertise. Expertise is the PvP specific stat that makes you better in PvP situations. This one stat makes you do more damage, have better heals, and take less damage – in PvP. Not to mention the stats on this gear, especially the Battle Master Tier, is top end.
Spending Warzone Commendations:
On your faction’s fleet, in the “Combat Training” area there are the 18 PvP vendors. While 18 vendors can be intimidating, only 6 of them pertain to you. There are 4 class-specific vendors in this area, 1 item vendor, and 1 weapon vendor. All these vendors are in somewhat close proximity, you just need to talk with them to learn which is for your class. The vendors look like members of your class – Jedi Knight vendors look like Jedi and Smuggler vendors look like Smugglers etc. The 40’s PvP gear can be bought form one of these vendors with Warzone Commendations.
For now, let’s ignore the 4 class-specific vendors. The vendor to focus on right now is the item vendor I mentioned. His official title is <PvP Items>, for the Empire his name is Jensen. The <PvP Items> vendor is on your faction’s fleet Combat Training section standing next to the PvP daily quest drop box. The picture below shows the <PvP Item> vendor and the drop box next to him. While this picture is of the Imperial Fleet, the vender and drop box will be in the same location for the Republic Fleet’s Combat Training section.
The fastest way to dump your Warzone Commendations is to convert them to Mercenary Commendations. Why? Mercenary Commendations are used in conjunction with Warzone Commendations to buy Champion Gear Bags. Whoa, yea, I’ll break that down more.
Mercenary Commendations are bought at the <PvP Items> vender with Warzone Commendations. The conversion rate is 10 Mercenary Commendations for 30 Warzone Commendations. So dump your Warzone Commendations into Mercenary Commendations to make sure you don’t go above the 1000 commendation limit. You are going to need a lot of them.
Now to the more confusing aspects of this PvP gear system. Champion Gear Bags are bought from the same <PvP Items> vendor for 200 Mercenary Commendations and 200 Warzone Commendations (800 Warzone Commendations in total). These bags are unique, so you can only carry one at a time. This isn’t a big deal because you can just open them as soon as you get them – granted that you are level 50. These bags are how you get Champion and Centurion Level PvP gear.
Champion Gear Bags have a random chance to have an “Unassembled Champion" item. Think of Unassembled Champion items as tokens that you trade into <Champion PvP Gear> vendors, for your specific class, for wearable versions of that item. You will only ever receive tokens for your class, but you can get duplicates of an item – it is totally random.
Let me explain with an example. The picture below shows the “Unassembled Champion Master Force Boots” item in my inventory. I received this from a Champion Gear Bag. I take this item to the <Champion PvP Gear> vendor for Sith Inquisitors and trade it into wearable boots. The reason you trade this token in is because there is a choice of three boots for my class. In a nut shell – there are Sorcerer boots, DPS Assassin boots, and Assassin tank boots.
Remember, the Champion Gear Bags do not always have Unassembled Champion tokens in them. From what I’ve read and experienced, the drop rate is only about 10% — though I cannot confirm this. When there is an item, you get 1 Centurion Commendation, while bags without items have 3 Centurion Commendations in them. A Centurion Commendation is used to buy Centurion Level PvP gear. If you get unlucky with Champion Gear and never get a part of the armor you don’t have, you can buy the lower tier specific item with Centurion Commendations. The picture below shows sets of duplicates of Champion Level gear. You can see that an item can be bought for 1 “Unassembled Champion” token or for ~67 Champion Commendations (these commendations come from Battle Master Bags – covered later).
Champion Gear Bags can also be gained though the daily and weekly PvP quests. Each daily quest will get you 1 Champion Gear Bag, and each weekly quest will get you 3 bags – so completing them is very worth it. There are 4 PvP quests at 50 (currently). There is a daily quest to win three Warzones and a weekly quest to win 9 Warzones. Also, there is a daily quest to ‘Help the War Effort’ 5 times on Ilum and a weekly quest to ‘Help the War Effort’ 15 times on Ilum. PvP armor also has ‘set piece’ bonuses.
Battle Master gear is the top tier PvP armor. Bags for Battle Master armor can only be achieved through completing the daily and weekly quests. These bags work just like the Champion Gear bags and are also unique. These bags can only be opened once you’re level 50 and have maxed level 60 Valor. A Battle Master Bag will have an “Unassembled Battle Master” token in it or Champion Commendations. This is the same exact system as the lower tier items, except the ONLY way to receive Battle Master armor is though the tokens from the bags received from doing the quests. To me, the SWTOR PvP system seems to guarantee you Champion Level Gear if you’re dedicated and have valor 60. Battle Master Gear seems like a bonus.
So, that is the process of obtaining PvP armor sets. It's confusing but there is a method to it. I hope this guide helps you whether you wield a lightsaber or blaster riffle, are a casual or hard core PvPer, or if you’re Republic or Empire. I’m going to end this guide with all the information in one bullet chart. Happy hunting.
Recap (Spark Notes): |
Ruka Ski Resort in late Oct. 2016. (Photo by Evgeny Pavlov/Ponchikz Photoz)
How do you open a ski resort in October, before the first snow and without the help of snow guns? Save it all from the last season, stockpile it under a tarp, and hope it doesn’t melt.
That is exactly what Ruka Ski Resort in Finland did. They opened on Oct. 10, as advertised.
Last winter Ruka made 30,000 cubic meters of snow and piled it into three huge mounds, half of which melted over the Arctic summer. What remained was spread over a slope almost a quarter mile long. The base is a solid three feet thick and skiers can swoosh comfortably back and forth 65 feet from side to side.
At first glance, opening on the 10th hour of the 10th day of the 10th month of the year appears to be a marketing gimmick but there may also be a link to climate change.
In a video posted on Ruka’s website Enni Rukajarvi, a professional snowboarder, says “it seems like winter begins later each year. That’s why Ruka has developed a method of storing snow over the summer.”
The predictability now of when the season will start allows Rukajarvi to train early in the season in her homeland instead of having to travel to glaciers in the Alps.
A spokesperson for Ruka says that snow storage is also good for the environment. According to Ruka’s Operational Director Matti Parviainen, that’s because it’s more energy efficient to make snow in the middle of the winter when temperatures are very cold than in the fall when temperatures are warmer. Do they factor in the amount of diesel fuel it takes for the snowcats to spread it all around? Don’t know — but they plan on storing more snow this winter and opening even earlier for the 2017 season. |
Ladies and Gentlemen, LOOK at Captain Marvel.
And take a moment to realize what a tremendous opportunity we have here.
Here is our chance to get in the forefront of the public consciousness– a strong, confident and capable woman with the power, flash, and style to capture the imagination of moviegoers everywhere. I’m talking nothing less than the next heroic icon! But… how? What’s her story, exactly?
What’s that? An Avenger in Space. No? It’s more complicated than that? Well, explain it to me like I’m, I dunno, eight.
…
Really.
Well, it’s a fact, and perhaps a sad one, that comicbook movies and comicbook comics are, yes, quite different, and we’ll have to make a slightly different story than … whatever you call THAT explanation.
But, hey, one thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe does well is take a superhero genre and blend it with another convention. Captain America as a period piece? Done. As a 70s political conspiracy film? Done. And I think I’m not alone here when I say it’s obvious what will be the best blend with Captain Marvel’s story…
Suspense. An alien invasion story. Start with X-Files, end up with Captain Marvel. “Our Hero Is Out There.”
To start with– Carol Danvers is already a hero, thanks to a high-octane Air Force adventure where Carol led her squad, the Warbirds, to save the world from terrorists. Roll credits, complete with press junket, fan reactions.
But all doesn’t sit well with Carol. Her reward is to be shunted to a largely ceremonial desk job, and what’s worse, there are some things about her previous adventure that doesn’t add up. She starts to investigate, running into dead ends, and worse. She finds a fellow solider is running down leads, too, but Walter Lawson seems to have his own agenda. All things add up to “It Came From Outer Space” (50s style) and come crashing together, forcing Carol and Lawson to escape from super-secret Air Force base, and in the ultimate battle over something called a Psyche-Magnetron, Lawson is revealed to be the alien Mar-Vell, he dies a spectacular but mysterious death, and Carol’s body is changed, charged with alien energy and capable of absorbing the power of stars!
And that’s just the second act! Realizing the need for both secrecy and exposing the conspiracy, she fashions a mask and dons the identity of Captain Marvel!
The Captain now begins to root out the influence of alien Kree among us, battling dangers as real as Sentry robots and Kree Purifiers, and as intangible as panic and xenophobia. Which, of course, was the Supreme Intelligence’s plan all along, since it wants to use Earth as its case study in emotions and petri dish of human experiments. Still, Cap’n M has accelerated the timetable. It is time to use the Psyche-Magnetron to destroy humanity, and only Captain Marvel, with help of her Warbirds, can expose and take down the Kree threat once and for all.
End credits? This caption: “Captain Marvel will return in Avengers 3: The Kang Dynatsy”
And thousands of little girls want to dress as Captain Marvel for Halloween that year. |
It has been two months since the last update, and we’ve spent that time working on some significant improvements to the server and also quality of life changes for players. Building on the BSP tree addition to the server in August’s update, monsters will now use this method for determining where they can move which will allow them to move anywhere a player can. The system save time has been reduced to under half a second, and general performance improvements to the server will allow the game to support several times more players than it can now.
The client preferences menu has had some more options added to make setting in-game options much easier, and the “double safety off” bug has been fixed in the process of reworking the preferences. Players can also set the particle density with a slider, allowing less powerful computers to display (hardware renderer) particle effects.
This update brings seasons to the Meridian world, complete with rainstorms and snow in winter. A new vault has been added in Jasper (linked to Barloque) and there is a new spell for players to try out (Unholy Touch, level 1 Qor).
There will be an escaped convict event held on Saturday 17th October at 8pm US Central time/9pm Eastern time in celebration of the update.
General Changes
Another lore book has been added to monster drops, detailing some of Meridian’s lost history.
Living Statues will now regenerate lost body parts when healing, and their description lists the max HP players can gain by killing them.
Added IPv6 support to the server.
Bone Priestess will now perform stat changes if given an ancient trinket.
Frenzies have been automated and can run without admin intervention.
Parrin will now give the insignia quest, so herald shields can be dedicated to Jala.
Training points can now go over the 1000 point cap, if the player is awarded TP that will take them over 1000. This does not apply to the logon bonus TP.
Added a fireworks particle effect.
Lupogg King removed from survival arena. Yeti moved from miniboss to boss category, rat king moved from boss to miniboss, kriipa removed and replaced with giant rat soldier.
Players can now choose which map to start a solo or guild survival arena on, by adding the map name after the join command (this already works for public survival).
Updated spell descriptions for brittle, vampiric drain, animate and defile.
Add the names of previous developers to a list of names that can’t be picked at character selection (or with the name change system).
Added pear and orange food types, and pear/orange trees in Marion which can have fruit picked from them.
Added a cookie food type which can be given out by admins.
Added more statistics tracking; player deaths, suicides, guild disbanding and several other things are now tracked (more info to come).
Added a closing mechanism for Konima’s guild hall chest screen. This will now close after a minute of staying open, or can be manually closed by saying the password again.
Conveyance can no longer be cast from guild halls.
Sweep can no longer sweep items inside a guild hall from the foyer (and vice versa).
Removed rose and book as cargo items in several quests (rose was in Parrin’s instrument quest). Books can now be obtained from completing the bar restock or apothecary quests. Rose can still be obtained from completing the hypochondriac quest.
Significantly increased server performance (most noticeable in faster system saves).
Weather System
Added randomized weather effects throughout the game world. The world is divided into regions (each town is a separate region as are areas such as CV) and each region can have different effects (such as raining or snowing).
Added seasons, which cycle every 20 real life days. Most areas will snow in winter, however Ko’catan will not.
Added sound for rain.
Jasper Vaults
Added a new vault outlet in West Jasper, next to the tavern and bank.
Jasper vaults are linked to the Barloque vaults.
Client Changes
NOTE: due to the changes to the safety and other flags, all users have had all preferences (safety, tempsafe, grouping, autoloot, autocombine, reagent bag use and spellpower display) set to ON.
Client preferences menu now contains options to flip reagent bag use, autolooting, autocombining of spell items and spellpower display (for spells you cast yourself) on and off.
Bugs with safety showing the incorrect value on the client have been fixed. The safety displayed by the client should always reflect the true value.
Added a slider bar for particle density on particle effects (snow, sandstorm, rain and fireworks).
Client audio has been upgraded. Lag caused on some systems by having the music on has been removed (most noticeable on room change) and directional sound (5.1 surround) has been added.
Character creation now contains a link in the statistics section which sends the user to the suggested stats page on the wiki.
Added a “time” command in the original client. Users can type “time” or “Zeit” (without the quotes) into the chat box and will be told what time of day it is in Meridian, in addition to the day and year.
Added a sound when a player receives a tell or group/guild send.
Spell Rebalancing
If a player cannot obtain the new level of a spell that changes level, they will be awarded the equivalent value of the spell in training points (i.e. spell % * TP per %).
Truth moved from Jala level 1 to level 4.
Spellbane moved from Jala level 3 to level 5.
Jala song range increased for most Jala spells. Warp Time range slightly decreased.
Unholy Resolve moved from Qor level 1 to Qor level 3, to match the level of Holy Resolve and provide an easier to work spell at that level.
Added Unholy Touch spell to Qor level 1. Does low unholy damage, slightly increased damage against good targets (player and monster). Sold by the elder in Raza and Qor priestess. Requires 1 fairy wing to cast.
Kara’hol’s Curse hold effect halved in duration and reversed – hold will last 2 seconds at high spellpower, and 8 seconds at low spellpower.
Added Spectate spell for DMs, to apply the survival arena spectator effect to themselves or to players.
Wands, scrolls and potions are now affected by AmA, dement and mana convergence if the owner of the item is affected.
Monsters/PvE
Added “monster patrols” for skeletons in CV main room and trolls in Ukgoth. Monsters will patrol the screen, walking around while looking for a target.
Added a reputation system – killing monsters of a given group/faction will increase your reputation with their enemies, and decrease it with that monster’s faction and allies. Reputation is being tracked but is not currently used for anything.
Convert monster movement from grid based to using the room’s BSP tree. Monsters can now move wherever players can move.
Monsters can now move past changing sectors, e.g. doors that can move up and down such as the entrance to Kraanan Temple.
Added four new xeochicatl types: acid, holy, unholy and illusion. These drop new heartstones, which will be required to place a personal chest in a room. All xeos can spawn at node attacks.
Added Princess and Duke faction troop mages. Mages wear leather armor or disciple robe, a mace and have a chance of wearing a circlet (all of which can be dropped) in addition to the faction shield. Princess mages cast lightning bolt, Duke mages cast splash of acid.
Bug Fixes
Tokens dropped by players can no longer end up inside walls.
Reagent costs listed in touch spell descriptions now match the actual reagent cost.
Faction troop NPCs now able to spawn with all available facial features.
Spellpower from necklace of Jala will now stack with spellpower from lutes.
Removed ~500ms lag caused on changing rooms with music activated.
Fix issues with a cancelled radius enchantment leaving the caster with the light effect after ending.
Fix lighting bugs caused by switching between glow weapons, torches and light from radius enchantments.
Fix radius enchantments not applying when switching between two rooms with ‘old-style’ radius enchantments active (i.e. winds, AmA, sandstorm and truce).
Fixed quest description display errors with fade and disciple robe quests.
Fixed players spawning multiple revenants when switching between rooms quickly.
Temporary HPs over natural max due to soldier shield are no longer removed when changing stats with the stat reset system.
Yeti node can no longer be obtained without killing the yeti first (fix for Ogre client 3rd person mode).
Fix issues with zoning from Ports of Barloque to North Barloque.
Fixed invalid coordinates in the foyer checks in several guild halls that were incorrectly preventing players from moving around near a hall entrance/exit.
Fix German names for illusionary firewall and illusionary wounds.
Fix loadout to work correctly with light disciple robes.
For Developers
Solution now builds in VS 2015.
BOF version incremented to 6.
Added JSON handling C library jansson.lib.
New admin command “reset highest” which resets the highest timed message in show status.
ChaosNight and Qormas now part of the Event System.
Added built-in singleton objects for Settings, RealTime and GameEventEngine classes, which work in the same way as the System object. Constants are SETTINGS_OBJECT (1), REALTIME_OBJECT (2) and EVENTENGINE_OBJECT (3).
Added a .gitattributes file to force line endings for kod, lkod, c and h files to LF.
Finish the existing KOD hash tables implementation, with TAG_TABLE tag. CreateTable() now accepts an integer size parameter for initial table size, and tables will resize if the number of entries is more than half the size of the table. Tables are GCed and saved in the same manner as lists.
Save games are now versioned. Pre-update servers cannot load versioned save games, but the versioning will allow future backwards compatibility.
Refactored save game code to write as much as possible to a memory buffer before performing a single write to file.
Garbage collection now handles cleaning up KOD tables. Object, string and timer GC modified to perform some tasks simultaneously.
Add new log file (admin.txt) which logs the output of aprintf.
Add AdminChangeUserName message in System to validate and change a player’s name. Add a warning to the admin “create resource” command, directing the to use AdminChangeUserName instead.
Added SpawnTestMobs message to Admin to spawn a number of monsters at the position of the admin.
All local vars in KOD messages are auto-initiated to $.
Removed the TAG_INVALID tag and debug system (no longer needed, all properties/locals init to $).
Add * operator to set the value of a local var in a C call by passing the var by reference as *var.
Added an admin command to delete unused (i.e. never logged on) accounts (delete unused). This command will kick off all users if run, will delete any accounts that have never been used and then compact the account numbers.
* Refactored class message code, message/parameter name lookup, roomdata storage and several other areas of the server for significant performance gains.
Monster movement now handled mostly in C, and using the BSP tree for movement checks.
Many more KOD list operations (list copying, obtaining an element of a list by match or by class) can be performed with a single C call. |
Water cooler I read an article this week headlined: "The latest Kaby Lake, Zen chips will support only Windows 10." It claimed Intel and AMD's new processors are "officially supported only by Microsoft’s Windows 10." This can't be true? What about Linux?
Journalists, right? The short answer is Intel's Kaby Lake aka its seventh-generation Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, and AMD's Zen-based chips, are not locked down to Windows 10: they'll boot Linux, the BSDs, Chrome OS, home-brew kernels, OS X, whatever software supports them.
So if you want to use Linux or some other non-Windows OS on your new CPUs, you'll be fine. It's OK, we checked.
Sweet. What about Windows 7? Or Windows 8.1? Or any Windows pre-10?
Yeah... nah. Shad Larsen, Microsoft's director of Windows business planning, blogged earlier this month:
Future silicon platforms including Intel's upcoming 7th Gen Intel Core (Kaby Lake) processor family and AMD’s 7th generation processors (e.g. Bristol Ridge) will only be supported on Windows 10, and all future silicon releases will require the latest release of Windows 10.
It's easy to misread that, which I suspect was intended, but Microsoft is just talking about Windows here. If you have a computer powered by a seventh-gen Intel chip or an AMD Zen CPU and you want to use Windows, Windows 10 is your only supported option.
Intel spokesman Scott Massey told us, "per Microsoft's support policy, they made the decision that Windows 10 would be the only Windows OS supported on 7th-gen Intel Core" processors. He added: "The Microsoft support change obviously doesn't impact other operating systems."
One example of Microsoft holding back support is the xHCI USB controller in sixth-generation Skylake and seventh-generation Kaby Lake: Windows 7 doesn't support that USB hardware, so installing the operating system from a USB stick using those chips is tricky. Intel provides xHCI drivers for Windows 7 once it's up and running.
Why is Microsoft doing this?
Windows 10 must succeed at all costs. It's Windows 10 or bust. If you're buying a flash new machine, what a superb way for Microsoft to shoehorn its latest operating system onto it; that'll really help inflate its usage numbers. And it'll make life easier for its engineers: there's less hardware to test and support, less code, fewer bugs, fewer problems for everyone.
Yeah?
Yeah, I'm sure that was mentioned, oh, at least maybe once or twice internally in a meeting, that's a ballpark figure. A Microsoft spokesperson told us:
As new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support. This enables us to focus on deep integration between Windows and the silicon, while maintaining maximum reliability and compatibility with previous generations of platform and silicon. Windows 10 will be the only supported Windows platform on Intel’s upcoming 7th Gen Intel Core (Kaby Lake) silicon.
Don't forget, though, Microsoft's repeatedly changed its mind on this sort of thing before.
What, when?
In January, Microsoft said it would only offer "security, reliability, and compatibility" fixes for Windows 7 and 8.1 on Intel Skylake processors until July 2017. After that cutoff point, only critical security updates would be made available – and only if they weren't a chore for Microsoft to develop and release.
After some not-so-gentle persuasion by normal folks and IT buyers, Microsoft had a rethink: it extended the release of security, reliability and compatibility updates until July 2018. Then, for its commercial customers, it changed its mind again, and pushed that date back to January 14, 2020 for Windows 7 and January 10, 2023 for Windows 8.1, when all extended support for the two operating system releases ends.
Microsoft could make similar concessions for Windows 7 and 8.1 on Kaby Lake and Zen at some point.
And Intel and AMD are cool with all of this Windows 10-only stuff?
Yeah, weirdly, seems so. You'd think they'd want their chips used on the widest possible range of operating systems to maximize sales. On the other hand, if Microsoft is pulling the plug on Windows 7 and 8.1, perhaps the chipmakers can't be bothered updating and maintaining drivers for dead-end operating systems. Perhaps they want people to stockpile today's chips.
A lot of this stuff tends to be backwards compatible, anyway. Just look at the ridiculous legacy-tangled mess that's the x86 boot process. No doubt people will find and document ways to run Windows 7 and 8.1 on the latest silicon from Intel and AMD, albeit with varying degrees of reliability. It's doable. They could port over drivers from Linux, for instance.
Microsoft loves Linux! Right?
Right.
It really will hinge on how deeply Windows 7 and 8.1 depend on particular features within Intel and AMD's CPUs. Terry Myerson, executive vice president of Microsoft's Windows and Devices Group, hinted earlier that Redmond's code in Win7, for instance, expects interrupts, power control and other hardware to be provided in ways that may differ in the latest chips:
For Windows 7 to run on any modern silicon, device drivers and firmware need to emulate Windows 7’s expectations for interrupt processing, bus support, and power states – which is challenging for Wi-Fi, graphics, security, and more. As partners make customizations to legacy device drivers, services, and firmware settings, customers are likely to see regressions with Windows 7 ongoing servicing.
How convenient?
Yeah. You'd have to crack out the huge Intel and AMD reference manuals to compare the generations to see if anything really has fundamentally changed that much from, say, Skylake to Kaby Lake – and no doubt people will. I probably should.
Usually what happens is you flip a bit in a control register to enable a new mode in a feature, say, a new way of delivering an interrupt to a driver. In this example, Microsoft is trying to argue that, on the latest chips, Windows 7 can't handle this new interrupt mode, and the processor won't support the old mode, so it'll have to be emulated by the firmware or some other low-level code, which is a chore. It's a plausible excuse and also extremely convenient for Microsoft in this instance.
Basically, for now, don't buy an Intel seventh-generation Core nor an AMD Zen CPU if you want to keep running Windows 7 or 8.1. Shame. ® |
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Dr. John McDougall is a giant in the plant-based nutrition community, but his approach is surprisingly different from that of many of his colleagues.
Instead of focusing on micronutrient-rich whole foods, he looks to the humble starch as the key to a healthy diet. As Dr. McDougall says in our interview,
“All large, successful populations of civilized people have obtained the bulk of their calories from starch.”
For that reason, according to McDougall, it’s not leafy greens or fruits that should make up most of our meal, but potatoes, rice, and other starches.
In today’s episode, we chat with Dr. McDougall about his approach to nutrition, his new book, The Healthiest Diet on the Planet, and how in his opinion, the Paleo Diet got it wrong.
Here’s what we talk about in this episode:
What percentage of our calories should come form starch?
Why Dr. McDougall says eating micronutrient-rich food is akin to taking supplements
… and why (aside from B12) he doesn’t like supplements
Is the Paleo Diet sexist?
How athletes should adapt his diet
Click the button below to listen now:
Or:
Click here to download the MP3 file (you may need to right-click and “save link as”)
Subscribe to the show on iTunes or Stitcher so you never miss an episode
If you like what we do at NMA Radio, we’d greatly appreciate it if you’d leave us a rating and review on iTunes. Thank you!
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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) — It seemed like peace efforts with all Moro groups will finally proceed after Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) leader Nur Misuari surfaced in Malacañang and agreed to talk with government.
But the euphoria may have been short-lived.
Read: Duterte signs EO for new Bangsamoro Transition Commission
Misuari told CNN Philippines he will not participate in peace negotiations alongside rival group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
A group that later on became the MILF broke off from the MNLF after it rejected Misuari’s signing of the 1976 Tripoli peace agreement with the Marcos regime.
Misuari minced no words on the MILF.
“These are all traitors, that’s why I cannot accept them. I hope the government will dissociate from them, otherwise I can’t forgive them. Why will they associate with traitors? The last thing that will happen I’ll honor them by allowing them to sign (peace agreement). They must be put in prison, they are pure and simple criminals,” he said.
Misuari’s statement comes on the day President Duterte signed an executive order reconstituting the Bangsamoro Transition Commission, which will now have members from both the MILF and MNLF as well as other Moro groups. The commission will draft the Bangasamoro Basic Law.
But this early, Misuari said he informed Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process Jesus Dureza that he will boycott the Transition Commission. He instead gave a list of names to Malacañang — a five-man MNLF panel that will talk separately with government.
MILF vice chairman Ghadzali Jaafar said it is now up to government to decide how peace negotiations would proceed.
Jaafar denied claims MILF members are traitors and criminals.
“Kami ay hindi kailanman nag-renegade o sumuko sa pinaglalaban ng Bangsamoro people. Di kami outlaws, may batas kaming sinusunod. Combatants namin ay organisado, may batas sa pakikidigma,” he said
[Translation: We were never renegades, or gave up on the fight of the Bangsamoro people. We are not outlaws. We follow laws. Our combatants are organized and have rules.”]
Jaafar adds they are willing to talk with any group aspiring to achieve lasting peace in Mindanao, including the MNLF.
“The peace we want to achieve in our homeland is not for MILF alone it is for all Bangsamoro pople, that includes brother Nur Misuari,” he said.
Insofar as Misuari is concerned there is no need for a new law for the Bangsamoro.
He cited the 1976 Tripoli Agreement where the MNLF and the government agreed to give autonomy to 15 provinces and 20 cities, as well as the 1996 Final Peace Agreement that provided mechanisms to carry out the 1976 pact. |
Donnie Corker, better known as Dirtwoman, (December 7, 1951 – September 26, 2017) was a cross-dresser living in Richmond, Virginia known for involvement in Richmond politics, arts, music, and food banks.[1] Corker additionally sold "Dirt-grams" during the holidays where he personally delivered messages and greetings.[2] Also well known as the human floral arrangement of the annual Hamaganza holiday rock n roll charity benefit show that for 20 years (1994) has paired Dirtwoman with a revolving cast of Richmond politicians, luminaries and journalists. He died in his sleep at age 65 on September 26, 2017, falling short of his stated goal to "die at 90, onstage".[3]
Background [ edit ]
Corker grew up in the Oregon Hill neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. He was formerly a streetwalker and became locally known for his participation in Richmond food bank fund raisers such as Ham-a-Ganza.[4] Style Weekly noted that Corker was also known for minor controversies such as supposedly gate crashing the inauguration of then Mayor Douglas Wilder as well as "going to the bathroom in the back of a police car", from which incident his name stems.[5][6] Corker claimed that he had a press pass that he'd obtained from a WANT station manager, but was still escorted off of the property and arrested.[7]
Mayoral candidacy [ edit ]
In May 2008, Corker announced his intentions to run for the office of mayor in Richmond.[8][9] In an interview with Richmond.com, Corker described his reasons for running as "I think we need a change here in Richmond"[5] and stated that he would like to improve city schools and reduce spending.[10] However, Corker was eventually unable to collect the necessary amount of signatures to be included on the ballot and was taken out of the race.[11]
Felony conviction and voting rights [ edit ]
Corker had a previous felony conviction due to a sexual encounter in a public park, from which he lost the right to vote. Shortly after Tim Kaine took office, Corker petitioned Kaine for clemency and the restoration of his right to vote, which was granted after the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth found that he had no repeat offenses or DUI convictions in the time since his felony conviction.[10]
Elliot in the Morning [ edit ]
Dirtwoman and his family (mother and sister) were frequent callers on the Elliot in the Morning show for several years. He appeared as a special guest at station events. He often talked about his love life, political views, and his numerous health issues. The show aired a tribute to his mother, Mae Corker, when she died in 2005. After his death, a memorium tribute also ran on the morning of September 27, 2017 in celebration of Dirt's involvement with the show.
The Dirtwoman Documentary [ edit ]
In 2017. Jerry Williams (AKA TVJerry) started a feature-length documentary on Donnie called "Spider Mites of Jesus." After interviewing more than 70 people and acquiring previously unseen video and photos, he started post-production. He also launched the website http://www.DirtwomanDoc.com to post progress reports. The documentary premiered at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville, VA on November 3, 2018 and the "hometown" premiere will be at the Richmond International Film Festival in April, 2019. |
The brain is probably the most incredible organ in the human body. It has amazed doctors and scientists for ages – how it works, how it develops, and how to keep it in tiptop shape.
We���re all born with roughly 100 billion brain cells. But unlike the cells in other parts of our body that continuously renew, the brain cells we start with have to last us a lifetime. And that is exactly why we need to treat them well – pamper them, nourish them, and exercise them! How? Here are three ways to boost your brainpower:
With Exercise:
One of the many benefits of technology and the ubiquitous smartphone is the proliferation of apps. New brainteaser apps show up every day in mobile app stores with claims to improve memory and enhance other cognitive skills. While no one can say for sure yet whether that���s an accurate assumption, it���s worth giving one of these apps a try. It certainly can���t hurt to engage the brain. Plus, it���s fun!
With a Healthy Lifestyle:
The wholesome lifestyle habits you keep to enhance your physical health can also benefit your brain. Aerobic exercise and mindful activities like meditation and yoga can be particularly useful. That���s because stress increases brain inflammation, which can damage brain cells. So any stress-reducing activity is encouraged and recommended!
Through Diet:
The best way to boost brainpower is to cut out processed foods. Did you know people who eat 400 grams of vegetables and fruits a day perform better on cognitive tests? That���s because unprocessed whole foods like salmon, broccoli, walnuts, celery and blueberries are full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that nourish your brain cells. Watch your intake of refined sugar too. That could lead to insulin resistance in the brain, which has been linked to early Alzheimer’s.
With Medication:
A lot of people are turning to pharmaceuticals to maximize their mental capabilities. Stimulants, like Adderall and Ritalin, are primarily prescribed to people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but both have become popular among college students for their ability to help them focus their attention better and process information. And professionals in highly demanding fields like global technology and banking are turning to Modafinil, a drug created for sleep disorders, for its ability to sharpen��their minds and gain an edge on the competition.
Are any of these a part of your everyday brain boosting routine? What methods to you use to increase your memory and keep your brain sharp?
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Emails sent by Guccifer 2.0 to The Hill show evidence that the hacker used a Russian-language anonymity protection service — a language he has claimed he could not read or even recognize.
The news comes amid mounting reports linking Guccifer 2.0’s hack of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails to Russian intelligence.
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Guccifer 2.0 communicates with journalists using different disposable web-based email accounts each time. With The Hill, he communicated using addresses from ProtonMail and Mail.com.
To further protect his anonymity, he connected to the webmail accounts using a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Users send VPN servers the address of a site they would like to reach, and the VPN accesses it in their stead – masking the users' internet addresses.
Metadata of emails sent from Guccifer 2.0 to The Hill was shared with the cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect. In the interest of protecting Guccifer 2.0’s identity, his account information was not included.
The Mail.com metadata includes the internet address of who is mailing outgoing messages — in Guccifer 2.0’s case, the VPN.
Vocativ reported Tuesday that ThreatConnect had discovered the hacker used a predominantly-Russian-language VPN when he corresponded with them through a French AOL account. ThreatConnect matched that same internet address from the same VPN to the Mail.com email.
VPNs often let users route their traffic through a variety of servers in a variety of countries. Guccifer 2.0 routed his traffic through a French internet address operated by the Elite VPN service.
But that French internet address was not available for public use – it was not one of the French servers Elite VPN allowed its clients to select. Instead, the French server appears to have only been used by a select, criminal clientele in the past, including text message scammers.
Elite VPN’s website is written in Russian, with links to English translations. Parts of the site, including graphics, are only written in Russian, and when ThreatConnect went through the process of signing up for an account, they found the signup process written entirely in Russian.
Guccifer 2.0 has long claimed to be Romanian. In an online chat interview with Motherboard , Guccifer 2.0 claimed not to know how to speak Russian. In it, Motherboard asked a question in Russian, and Guccifer replied "What's this? Is it russian?"
The site then asked if he understood Russian.
"R u kidding?" wrote Guccifer 2.0.
In the same interview, when forced to answered questions in Romanian, he used such clunky grammar and terminology that experts believed he was using an online translator.
The two active payment services for Elite VPN are options that are popular in Russia, including the Moscow-based Web Money. The site also includes a link to a long-defunct Costa Rican payment processor that was seized by law enforcement in 2013.
There are other anonymity services besides VPNs — including Tor — and a large international community of other VPNs both better known and better esteemed than Elite VPN. But the Edward Snowden documents and recent investigations by U.S. law enforcement show a U.S. interest in cracking through the anonymity of these so-called proxy servers.
“They might be making sure they are leveraging proxy infrastructure within their own borders,” said Rich Barger, ThreatConnect director of threat intelligence.
The fact that Guccifer 2.0’s VPN is Russian is not the first indicator that Russia was involved in the attack on the DNC. The email hack leveraged the same tools, methods and command servers seen in other attacks linked to Russian intelligence, including on the German Parliament.
“The noose is tightening around Russia,” said Barger.
Guccifer 2.0 leaked a number of documents to the press, including convention strategies, donor information and opposition research. The first few packages of files were released to the public directly; the last two were first sent to The Hill. Guccifer has also claimed responsibility for leaking emails to WikiLeaks, something WikiLeaks refuses to confirm or deny. |
The official website for 5pb. Games' Steins;Gate 0 project announced on Thursday that Kanako Itou is performing the opening theme song and Zwei is performing the ending theme song.
Kanoko Itou previously performed theme songs for the Steins;Gate television anime and film. Zwei performed the first opening for the Robotics;Notes anime.
The Steins;Gate 0 visual novel for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita is slated to ship on November 19 in Japan. An anime adaptation of Steins;Gate 0 has also been green-lit.
Chiyomaru Shikura is in charge of planning, and provided the original concept for the game. Tatsuya Matsubara will produce the game, huke will once again provide the character designs, and Takeshi Abe will compose the music. Naotaka Hayashi, Toru Yasumoto, Masashi Takimoto, and Tsukasa Tsuchiya are writing the scenario.
The game will include stories from three of the Steins;Gate novels, as well as from some drama CDs.
[Warning: This summary contains spoilers for the Steins;Gate game and anime. Please highlight the white space to read.]
[ The story of the game and the anime take place in the beta world line, where Okabe could not save his precious person, Kurisu, on July 28, and ended up returning alone. However, the trailer for the game notes that Okabe does not know that Kurisu is in fact still there. ]
The original Steins;Gate game released on Xbox 360 in 2009, and the game was later ported to the PC, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita. The game was also released on smartphones. The game inspired a fan disc spin-off titled Steins;Gate Hiyoku Renri no Darling in 2011, which was released on the Xbox 360, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita, as well as on smartphones. JAST USA published the original game in North America for the PC last year, while PQube published the game in Europe for the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita and plans to release the game in North America on August 25.
The original game inspired a television anime in 2011, as well as an original film serving as an epilogue to the TV series in 2013. Funimation Entertainment has licensed both the television series and film.
[Via Otakomu] |
Here's a simple lesson Procter & Gamble (PG) learned the hard way: If the Food and Drug Administration requires a label that says your product "may cause loose stools," just scrap it and move onto something else.
The Cincinnati-based consumer products giant assumed that Americans would risk abdominal cramps to devour its popular salty snacks made with Olestra, which preserved flavor while it eliminated fat. And, really, it wasn't such a surprising gamble to make. Americans are fat. They claim they want to lose weight, but really they want their potato chips and they want them greasy and salty, just like they're supposed to taste. Who could possibly resist a fat-free chip that tastes great?
Most people, as it turned out. Olestra is a fat substitute that Procter & Gamble fought to bring to market for three decades. In 1968, researchers discovered that adding fatty acid to sucrose created fat molecules that aren't broken down by the digestive system. Instead, they just slid right on through you. By the time it finally got FDA approval to use Olestra in certain snacks in 1996, P&G had spent $200 million developing it.
Frito-Lay teamed up with P&G to build a manufacturing facility to produce products with Olestra, which was known by its trade name Olean. The fat substitute appeared in Pringles as well as a new brand from Frito-Lay called Wow, which were Olean versions of Doritos, Lay's, Fritos, and Ruffles. Analysts applauded the launch, and one researcher called Wow the most successful food-product launch of the 1990s, with $58 million in sales during the first eight weeks.
It was sold as a dieter's dream. Although the FDA had only approved it for use in snacks, P&G planned on eventually getting approval for much more. We were going to cook with it, bake it, and keep our fat foods tasty while slimming down our waistlines.
The enthusiasm didn't last long, however. Apparently Americans were willing to ignore the fine print about cramps and loose stools until some pretty horrendous consumer experiences began appearing in the mainstream media. The FDA would eventually receive 20,000 consumer complaints of unpleasant digestive reactions to Olestra, more than the agency received from all other food additives combined. By 1999, sales of Wow chips were down 40%.
There were other troubling side effects as well. It seemed that as Olestra slipped through the digestive tract, it also inhibited the body from absorbing certain vitamins. That eventually led Canadian regulators to ban use of the product altogether in 2000, which left the United States as the only country allowing it.
Once the phrase "anal leakage" became undeniably linked to the product, of course, there was no real chance for Procter & Gamble to repair Olestra's image. It tried mightily, however, even sponsoring its own research study that showed Olestra led to lower cholesterol and didn't cause anymore digestive problems than other products on the market, such as bran fiber.
American's didn't buy it. Sales were so disappointing that P&G sold its Olean manufacturing plant in 2002. Those P&G-sponsored studied on Olestra did eventually convince the folks at the FDA that the product was safe, however, and in 2003 it dropped the label requirement on the abdominal issues. Frito-Lay discontinued the name brand Wow but continued using Olestra in its products re-branded as Lay's Light and Doritos Light.
Procter & Gamble, meanwhile, was determined to find a use for Olestra. And finally it did, but you'll find it in your local hardware store instead of your grocery. Earlier this year, the company launched a new product line called Sefose, made with Olestra, which is marketed as eco-friendly paints and industrial lubricants.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which lobbied hard against Olestra in the late 1990s, is evidently okay with its current use. "As long as you're not lubricating your gastrointestinal tract, it's fine," its executive director told Scientific American.
Wow. |
Bonfire or Fireworks Night is a uniquely British event. It commemorates the successful foiling of a plot to blow up King James I and Parliament by Catholic subversives in 1605. The fireworks are a reminder of the gunpowder that was placed by the plotters under the Houses of Parliament.
In 21st century Britain, Bonfire Night is usually celebrated with a trip to an organised bonfire and firework display, with paid admission and controlled access.
Not so in the 1950s and 1960s. Bonfire Night was a hands-on celebration. Family bonfire parties and get-togethers with neighbours were the thing. And as for health and safety: well, apart from the annual safety lecture on BBC’s ‘Blue Peter’, common sense was the order of the day.
Families started to collect wood for their bonfire at the end of summer. The trees in the garden would be trimmed and the branches piled up ready for the big day. Any old planks of wood, doors or other combustibles would also be added to the heap.
Fireworks appeared in the shops a couple of weeks or so before November 5th. There were selection boxes of fireworks (the most popular brand were Standard Fireworks) or you could buy rockets and larger fireworks one by one. Catherine Wheels and Roman Candles were particularly popular, as were sparklers and bangers.
Bangers were small tubes of gunpowder that after lighting, were thrown on the ground to explode with a loud bang, not unlike a miniature stick of dynamite! These are now banned from sale in the UK, as are Jumping Jacks, another Bonfire Night favourite. Once lit, Jumping Jacks lived up to their name by jumping about erratically. Far too much temptation for naughty boys to frighten unsuspecting girls!
‘Penny for the guy’ was the cry on the streets. The guy, an effigy of Guy Fawkes, would be made from straw and dressed in old clothes, and often displayed in a wheelbarrow to be pushed around the neighbourhood. The money raised by the children would be spent on bangers and other fireworks. (Following new laws in 2004, it is now an offence to supply fireworks to anyone under the age of 18).
A procession of children and a “Guy”, 1864
Neighbours and friends brought food to share at the bonfire parties – treacle toffee, toffee apples and parkin, a kind of gingerbread. Potatoes were roasted in the ashes of the fire and served with butter and salt, and eaten with a teaspoon in gloved hands. Never successfully baked, they always somehow tasted delicious in the cold night air. Mugs of hot soup would warm the audience around the fire.
These were the days of one bath a week for most families – usually a Sunday night – so if Bonfire Night should fall on a Monday or Tuesday, everyone would reek of smoke and fireworks for the rest of the week!
The bonfire was usually in the charge of the men of the house and was quite a competitive thing with the neighbours. A fire had to be a ‘good fire’, preferably larger and brighter than next doors.
The night before Bonfire Night is traditionally known as Mischief Night, particularly in the north of England. In the 1960s this was a night when the local children would play pranks: knock-and-run on neighbour’s front doors, letting down car tyres, tying metal dustbin lids to door knockers – even changing the numbers on gates to confuse the postman! It was also the night when children would pilfer the best wood from rival bonfires unless they were guarded carefully.
On November 5th, as soon as it was dark, the fun would begin. The guy would be placed carefully on top of the wooden pyre before lighting. If it had been raining over the past few days, the wood might be wet and difficult to light. It has been known for paraffin to be used as an aid to lighting – with the resultant fireball taking out the neighbour’s hedge!
The boxes of fireworks would be kept under the careful care of an adult. The glow of a cigarette would be used to light the fuse on the fireworks. A Catherine Wheel would be nailed to a wooden fence or a tree – often a recipe for disaster, as if not nailed securely, they had a habit of launching themselves into the air, still spinning!
Contents of a Standard Fireworks box circa 1950s, © M Makepeace
Each child would be given a sparkler which was great fun to write in the air with until it spluttered and went out. Rockets were launched from glass milk bottles; they went off in any or all directions. The next day the remnants of the rockets – the wooden sticks – were to found in gardens, on the pavements and in the streets and were often collected by children on their way to school. The ashes from the bonfires would smoulder for days afterwards.
Nowadays, stricter rules on the sale of fireworks and safety campaigns have persuaded many families that it’s safer to leave it to the experts and attend an organised display – much to the relief of fire and ambulance crews! |
Male toads grasp any female that comes within reach When it comes to choosing a mate, female toads may have more control than previously thought, say scientists. A report in the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal describes how a female cane toad inflates its body to prevent an amorous male from mating with it. This makes it difficult for the male toad to "hold on". Male toads often wrestle with each other in an effort to grasp a mate. By inflating, a female can influence the outcome of such a competition. It is assumed that frogs and toads evolved the ability to inflate their bodies with air as a defence against predators. The team of scientists, from Australia and the Netherlands, described in their report how this deters predators "by increasing the apparent size of the [frog or toad] and by rendering it too large to ingest". Females can actually manipulate the outcome of male-male competition by inflating at the right moment
Dr Benjamin Phillips
University of Sydney But, according to Dr Benjamin Phillips from the University of Sydney, one of the scientists involved in the study, bodily inflation could also be "a widespread mechanism of mate choice" in frogs and toads. Dr Phillips and his team explained in their research paper that male toads will "grasp any female that comes within reach and retain their hold unless displaced by a rival male". In their experiments, the scientists found that male toads were less able to maintain this grip if the female inflated its body. He said that scientists had noticed previously that females inflated their bodies "during male-male wrestling matches". "[But they] assumed that this inflation was just a response to the physical stress of being pushed, prodded and occasionally knocked over by males," he told BBC News. "Our work now shows that females can actually manipulate the outcome of male-male competition by inflating at the right moment." This could help ensure that the female gets to mate the the biggest, strongest male, which is likely to produce the healthiest offspring.
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Science is not just for scientists these days. Going on a scuba-diving holiday this summer? Share the temperature data from your dive computer with researchers eager to plug holes in sparse records for inshore areas. Nervous about possible pollution from a nearby fracking project? Ease your concerns by helping to collect and analyse air samples as part of a monitoring project. Stuck at home as the rain pours down? Log on to the Internet and spend a couple of hours folding proteins and RNA to help university scientists work out how biology does it.
Citizen science has come a long way from the first distributed-computing projects that hoovered up spare processing power on home computers to perform calculations or search for alien signals. And it has progressed further still since the earliest public surveys of wildlife: it was way back in 1900 that the Audubon Society persuaded Americans to exchange their Christmas tradition of shooting birds for a more productive effort to count them instead.
Some professional scientists are sniffy about the role of amateurs, but as an increasing number of academic papers makes clear, the results can be valuable and can help both to generate data and to inform policy.
A paper in Geoderma entitled ‘Can citizen science assist digital soil mapping?’ (D. G. Rossiter et al. Geoderma 259–260, 71–80; 2015) makes the case that, yes, non-specialists can help expert soil scientists to track quality, properties and types of soil. It goes further: these amateur soil researchers should be recruited to help with existing and future national surveys. Civil engineers and construction workers routinely view the subsoil, and digging foundations for buildings and trenches for pipelines offers a unique look at the spatial variability of different layers. An army of geocachers — twenty-first-century treasure hunters — visit harsh terrain and difficult-to-access places, and could collect soil data. And they routinely use satellite navigation to record their journeys.
Technology can make scientists of us all. Data churned out by the rapid spread of consumer gadgets equipped with satellite navigation, cameras and a suite of other sensors, and the ease of sharing the results digitally, are driving the boom in citizen science. Volunteers can already identify whale songs from recordings, report litter and invasive species, and send in the skeletons of fish they have caught and consumed. But there is more to being a scientist, of course, than collecting and sharing data — especially if the results are to be used to help determine policy.
Critics have raised concerns about data quality, and some studies do find that volunteers are less able to identify plant species than are academics and land managers. And there are issues around how to reward and recognize the contribution of volunteers, and around ensuring that data are shared or kept confidential as appropriate. But these problems seem relatively simple to address — not least because they reflect points — from authorship to data quality and access — that the professional scientific community is already wrestling with.
More troubling, perhaps, is the potential for conflicts of interest. One reason that some citizen scientists volunteer is to advance their political objectives. Opponents of fracking, for example, might help to track possible pollution because they want to gather evidence of harmful effects. When Australian scientists asked people who had volunteered to monitor koala populations how the animals should be managed, they found that the citizen scientists had strong views on protection that did not reflect broader public opinion.
Scientists and funders are right to encourage the shift from passive citizen science — number crunching — to more-active roles, including sample collection. But as increased scrutiny falls on the reliability of the work of professional scientists, full transparency about the motives and ambitions of amateurs is essential. |
In many ways, the future as depicted in Pacific Rim movies is President Trump’s nightmare. In the face of annihilation by a nonhuman (Kaiju) threat, the entire globe bonds together to build weaponry with the power to destroy cities. These giant, mechanized “Jaeger” suits are used by the human race to wage a single war against an alien threat. Pacific Rim was a multicultural, globalist-minded film when it premiered in 2013, and its sequel, Pacific Rim: Uprising, appears to double down on those politics in its first trailer, which was released on Friday.
The original film, directed and co-written by Mexican-American filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, follows military operations from San Francisco, San José del Cabo, Sydney, Manila and Hong Kong as leaders pool their resources and strategize as one front. Featuring actors from all over the world, Pacific Rim made history in China and Japan, becoming the rare English-language film to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States while also succeeding abroad. Pacific Rim: Uprising will undoubtedly reach for that same global grasp on the box office. We can deduce from several updates in the trailer, and the film’s promotional website, that its politics will only feel more explicit to Americans under a Trump presidency.
Universal Studios
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Trump’s “America First” slogan appeals to a large voter base in the United States that believes our nation needs stricter border control, fewer immigrants and nationalistic policies in order to thrive. Studies have found that Americans in states with lower numbers of recent immigrants tend to express more intense fear that immigration has a detrimental effect on their ability to get a job, collect benefits and live comfortably. That militant nationalism, based not in any relationships with actual immigrants, is shared by Trump, who often uses racist rhetoric to suggest that “real Americans” (white, Christian, straight, cis-gendered) are under attack from outsiders of all kinds.
Compare that ideology with Pacific Rim’s; the films are filled with actors hailing from many nations, playing characters who also live and work in those nations. Pacific Rim’s science fiction lore values collaboration and compromise over cultural assimilation. Take, for instance, the bond between the Jaeger pilots, who need to be “drift compatible” in order to drive their giant war robots. Their citizenship is irrelevant; they need to connect their brains on a subconscious level, using the Jaeger tech, and that intimacy happens when the pilots are able to share human, relatable moments. We saw it happen between Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) and Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam), and it appears it will happen again between Amara (Cailee Spaeny) and Jake (John Boyega). Pacific Rim controversially avoided making Mako and Raleigh into a romantic couple, though they were the film’s emotional core, and that too is a story choice Trump wouldn’t enjoy. The president, as he tweeted the year Pacific Rim hit theaters, believes introducing women into the military means high rates of sexual assault are to be expected.
Universal Studios
Another globalist update to the Pacific Rim franchise: Jaegers built and piloted by non-Western nations were destroyed in the first film, and we didn’t get to see much from their Japanese, Russian, Canadian and Chinese crews before they were killed off. Pacific Rim: Uprising boasts a handful of new Jaegers from different nations, and they’re pictured as being a part of the central action throughout the trailer. Involving the whole world in a science fiction battle against aliens isn’t new, but giving characters from every nation actual storylines and narrative arcs is an innovation in globalist film. Movies from Independence Day to District 9 to Attack the Block to Close Encounters of the Third Kind always include a little cinematic nod to the fact that the whole world is affected by an alien invasion, but they never give characters outside the film’s nation of origin space to develop and take place in the action. Pacific Rim did that, and from the looks of the trailer, Pacific Rim: Uprising will do it again, but louder this time.
Pacific Rim: Uprising hits theaters around the world March 23, 2018. |
Tough Cup game for the U15’s today against a team from the Division above, but despite starting with only 1 sub, and then playing most of the game with 10 players, I thought we acquitted ourselves very well today.
We created chances all game, and it was never easy for the opposition, and I think we worried them when we scored, with Smiffy getting a good goal. We made them work for their victory, but I think we’ll be better for a game like this come next weekend, when the league season starts.
Well done to the players who ended up playing out of position, and to Brandon for coming back on, even though he was still feeling the knock he got earlier. Very well done to Oli, for some great saves, and some excellent sweeping at the back, great game, but couldn’t prevent us from going down 4-1.
Hope those with injuries recover quickly!!
COYF’s!! |
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Soybeans are the second-largest US crop after corn, covering about a quarter of American farmland. We grow more soybeans than any other country except Brazil. According to the US Department of Agriculture, more than 90 percent of the soybeans churned out on US farms each year are genetically engineered to withstand herbicides, nearly all of them involving one called Roundup. Organic production, by contrast, is marginal—it accounts for less than 1 percent of total American acreage devoted to soy. (The remaining 9 percent or so of soybeans are conventionally grown, but not genetically modified.)
Americans don’t eat much of these lime-green legumes directly, but that doesn’t mean we’re not exposed to them. After harvest, the great bulk of soybeans are crushed and divided into two parts: meal, which mainly goes into feed for animals that become our meat, and fat, most of which ends up being used as cooking oil or in food products. According to the US Soy Board, soy accounts for 61 percent of American’s vegetable oil consumption.
Given soy’s centrality to our food and agriculture systems, the findings of a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Food Chemistry are worth pondering. The authors found that Monsanto’s ubiquitous Roundup Ready soybeans, engineered to withstand its own blockbuster herbicide, contain more herbicide residues than their non-GMO counterparts. The team also found that the GM beans are nutritionally inferior.
In the study, the researchers looked at samples of three kinds of soybeans grown in Iowa: (1) those grown from GM herbicide-tolerant seeds; (2) those grown from non-GM seeds but in a conventional, agrichemical-based farming regime; and (3) organic soybeans, i.e., non-GM and grown without agrichemicals.
They found residues of glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) and aminomethylphosphonic acid, or AMPA, the compound glyphosate breaks down into as it decays, on all 10 of the GM samples—and in none of the non-GM and organic ones.
The researchers found residue levels hovering above a level Monsanto itself has characterized as “extreme.”
The GMO soy had total residues averaging 11.9 parts per million, with a maximum reading of 20.1 ppm; the average is well below the Environmental Protection Agency’s limit of 20 ppm, a limit shared by the European Union. Yet as the authors note, back in 1999, Monsanto itself reported that the maximum recorded reading of glyphosate residue found on Roundup Ready soy was 5.6 ppm—a level it called “extreme” and “far higher than those typically found.”
So, the researchers found residue levels well below the EPA’s limit, but hovering above a level Monsanto itself has characterized as “extreme.” What to make of it?
As the authors note, the science around the effects of glyphosate at relatively low levels is controversial. By setting the residue limit at 20 parts per million, US and European regulators are endorsing a no-harm view. But some independent research, including a 2012 study (my account here) by University of Pittsburgh scientist Rick Relyea, found that Roundup in water at 3 ppm induced morphological changes in frogs. And in a 2012 paper, German researchers subjected various bacterial strains typically found in the guts of poultry to glyphosate at levels of 5 ppm and lower and found that it tended to harm beneficial bacteria like Lactobacillus, while pathogens like Salmonella entritidi tended to be “highly resistant” to it. The results suggest that glyphosate can shift the balance of the gut microbiota—hardly comforting, given the surge in research finding that subtle changes to the bacteria in our bodies have a huge impact on our health.
The study also found small but statistically significant differences in the nutritional quality of the soybean types: The organic soybeans had slightly higher protein levels than the other two, and lower levels of omega-6 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acids showed no significant difference. Both fats are essential in human diets, but research suggests that US eaters tend to consume a higher ratio of omega-6 acids to omega-3 acids than is healthy.
It’s worth noting that food isn’t glyphosate’s only pathway to our bodies. In a 2011 study, researchers for the US Geological Survey “frequently detected” glyphosate in surface waters, rain, and air in the Mississippi River basin. “The consistent occurrence of glyphosate in streams and air indicates its transport from its point of use into the broader environment,” USGS stated in a press release, adding that “we know very little about its long term effects to the environment.”
Charles Benbrook, a Washington State University researcher who documented the rise in glyphosate use that has accompanied Roundup Ready crops, told me that “human dietary exposure to glyphosate is now probably the highest ever for any pesticide used in the US.” When you consider the additional doses we get through water and air, the chemical stands “in a class by itself” in terms of human exposure. “I sure hope EPA is right in its evaluation of the toxicity of glyphosate,” he said.
Thus a plague of herbicide-resistant weeds and a corresponding spike in herbicide use may not be the only black marks against Monsanto’s blockbuster Roundup Ready crops. |
Where do I even begin. First of all yesterday was a momentous day for hip hop and any Tribe heads. Nearly two decades since the last tribe LP! I honestly never ever thought this would happen. I am saddened that phife passed away before the album was released but I am grateful that he was able to record some verses for the album. It has a chilling effect hearing Phife on the album. It's both sad yet oddly uplifting and reassuring. Phifes entrance on the track in "Solid wall of sound" when the beat drops was so trademark and he really brought the song to life. I had to play it back like 5 times the first time I heard it. I also enjoyed how Phife rapped more in his "Trinidad born" style of Patois throughout the album. I see this project as a tribute to Phife, especially from the title of the album and the tracks like "lost somebody." With regards to the production and beats I had no idea what to expect. They didn't go for the traditional beats sampling methods that was prevalent in their earlier albums like low end theory, or at least the sampling was more subtle as evident in "Dis generation" where a line from Musical Youth's introduction to "pass the dutchie" was cleverly used or the black sabbath drums sample used in "We the people". In that regard, I feel the production had more of the feel of Q tips solo albums like "Amplified" and the "Renaissance". However, the production in my opinion still managed to stay largely true to the essence of Tribe, or at least a 2016 version of Tribe. With regards to the features, this was inevitable due to the loss of Phife and it was interesting to see tribe collab with modern artists such as Anderson paak and Kendrick. The Kendrick track was one of my favourites- Conrad Tokyo! It was also a trip back to memory lane hearing Busta rhymes and Consequence tear up the tracks as they have time and time again done with Tribe. Talib Kweli's addition to "the killing season" was breathtaking and even Jarobi came into his own on the mic. I think this album is an important one for rap and i am ecstatic that Tribe and their legacy is still as relevant as it was when they burst onto the scene in the early 90s as it is now in 2016. Indeed Tribe, thank you for your service!!! A fellow Marauder, Dae |
This off season got a jolt when rumors of a potential Richard Sherman trade were confirmed by both Sherman and the front office. The debate around whether to trade the singular corner have been impassioned. Arguments have ranged from the team never winning again until Sherman has been excised from the locker room, to the team never winning again without the Hall of Fame talent roving the defensive secondary. The implications of trading a player of Sherman’s caliber are obviously immense. But this trade is bigger than just the matter of finding suitable talent to replace the hole Sherman would leave. This rumor is one of the four horsemen for Seattle’s first Super Bowl champions.
Twelves have already said goodbye to Marshawn, a paragon of the modern Seahawks. Fans may next be saying goodbye to a founding member of the a Legion of Boom and, with him, the Legion of Boom itself. Even if Earl Thomas and Kam Chancellor still warrant carrying on the moniker, it seems the LoB’s end could be in sight. Kam’s future is no more certain than Sherman’s, with his previous holdout, recent injuries, signs of slowing down on the field. Considering that Kam is entering the final year of his contract, it’s possible we will bid farewell to two members of the LoB over the next 12 months
Other quintessential Carrollhawks may have a foot out the door as well. Michael Bennett just received an extension, so his departure isn’t likely to be imminent, but at 31 years old the odds are that his end is sooner than later. Cliff Avril is 31 as well, and has just two seasons before his current contract expires. Even KJ Wright, still just 27, will need a new contact by the end of 2018.
With Marshawn and his offensive line already gone, the other side of the ball stands to see less turnover. Jermaine Kearse is likely on the thinnest ice. Fans may be itching to see that ice break, but Kearse is undoubtedly etched in the annals of Seahawks history. There’s also Jimmy Graham, who still feels new to the scene but may already be playing out his last season in Seattle.
These impending changes are representative of a transition to a new phase in this regime. Pete and John started at the bottom and have run through nearly every phase of team building you can imagine. They took over a 5 win team, stripped it for parts, and built a young foundation in their image. Next, they married that young foundation with a young franchise quarterback. The pairing was, of course, wildly successful, and the front office next had to find a way to keep it together despite the restrictions of the salary cap.
To this point, Seattle has been focused on creating a team from scratch and then holding onto that team. Now, Seattle must balance existing talent with new talent. Seattle must navigate decisions around which players to let walk, which player’s remaining prime years to trade in return for young talent, and which players to invest in with a 3rd contract. Strategic player attrition is now every bit as important as player acquisition. In that sense, Seattle’s Super Bowl window is closing. But it’s closing for the team as we know it while the window for the next team is just opening.
We can already see some of the building blocks for that team. It’s possible we see Frank Clark surpass Michael Bennett in 2017. Jarran Reed looks like he should be more than capable to be Seattle’s next Brandon Mebane, holding down the interior of the defensive line for 10 years. The backfield has been restocked, and it’s likely one of Rawls, Prosise, or even Eddie Lacy (still just 26), will lead the team in carries for years to come. The start to Germain Ifedi’s career wasn’t ideal, but he is still just 22 years old. There will be hold overs from the previous generation as well. Bobby Wagner, Earl Thomas, and Doug Baldwin shouldn’t be going anywhere, any time soon. And then there is Russell Wilson, the one man who can single-handedly keep Seattle’s Super Bowl window open.
So as we prepare to face some difficult goodbyes, remember: The current core of players may still hold the key to winning today, but the next generations will hold the key to winning forever. |
VANCOUVER — A B.C. group is calling on Transit Police to stop sharing all information about migrants with the Canada Border Services Agency.
Transit Police announced last week that it would no longer arrest migrants for the CBSA unless they were wanted on an outstanding warrant.
The decision followed the December 2013 death of Lucia Vega Jimenez, a Mexican woman who hanged herself in a CBSA holding facility after Transit Police stopped her for fare evasion.
Harsha Walia of Transportation Not Deportation says the recent decision by Transit Police is a step in the right direction, but migrants still don't feel safe using public transit.
She says Transit Police should commit to not calling CBSA tip lines and accept a broader range of identification including birth certificates or photo ID from any country.
Walia was joined by other groups including Mexicans Living in Vancouver and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association to call for changes to how Transit Police deal with migrants.
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(Christian Hansen / Gothamist)
On October 20th, 2015, in a leafy plaza just east of First Avenue, members of a hardline tenants association, wary and callused from years of fighting to maintain the affordability of their homes, broke character and cheered the smart-suited representatives from America’s largest landlord, who had just spent about $5.4 billion to buy the apartments they live in.
The press conference had been organized by Mayor Bill de Blasio to announce the purchase of the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village apartment complex by the Blackstone Group, a real estate investment force which manages some $93 billion worth of hotels, office space, and residential property worldwide, with a growing portfolio of close to 100,000 rentals spread across the country.
Blackstone’s investment partner in the purchase was Ivanhoé Cambridge, the real estate arm of the Canadian pension fund manager Caisse de dépôt et Placement du Québec. Ivanhoé is a frequent Blackstone partner with similarly massive real estate holdings and an affinity for Manhattan property. Not counting their 50% stake in the Stuy Town deal, the Quebeckers have invested close to $4 billion in Manhattan property over the past 5 years, more than local real estate giants like Related and Brookfield Properties.
While it was an odd mix of crowds to catch backslapping, the celebration was not entirely without cause. Stuyvesant Town’s middle-income apartments have historically been a stronghold of truly affordable housing. But over the past decade, a succession of speculative owners had begun dismantling the complex’s long-standing rent stabilization protections.
In 2000, 99% of Stuy Town’s 11,232 apartments were provided the protections of rent stabilization, and the complex proudly housed a thriving, long-term community of middle class New York families.
By early 2015, nearly 50% of the complex’s units had been deregulated and were being rented on the open market, with two-bedroom units easily commanding $4,200 a month. Every year around 300 apartments lost their rent protections. The demographic shift within the complex was obvious.
As sales negotiations between Blackstone and Stuy Town’s current owners CW Capital began, the de Blasio administration stepped in to help negotiate an agreement that would curb that attrition and guarantee twenty years of relatively affordable rents for 5,000 of the complex’s 11,232 units.
The Blackstone purchase was a PR triumph for all parties: embattled current tenants are granted a respite; the Mayor’s office leaps 5,000 units closer to fulfilling its ambitious goal to create and preserve 120,000 units of affordable housing over ten years; and Blackstone is able to secure control of Manhattan’s largest housing complex while positioning itself as an advocate for the public good.
Mayor de Blasio called it “the mother of all preservation deals” and the New York Times' Editorial Board cooed their approval. The Guardian called the deal “a victory beyond numbers” and “proof that affordable housing can still be a municipal priority.”
Susan Steinberg, the president of Stuy Town’s Tenants Association, also endorsed the sale, saying, “I feel that we have saved our community as a middle-class enclave.”
Yet scrutiny of the deal reveals an agreement that prioritizes profitability for Blackstone, a company that, even without the $221 million in financial giveaways the City bundled into the sale, stands to make billions of dollars—hundreds of millions of dollars annually—from Stuy Town.
Buried in the deal’s Terms Sheet and curiously unmentioned during the press conference, is a further promise from the City to “support [Blackstone’s] efforts to transfer unused development rights” from Stuy Town to other “appropriate receiving areas.” A commitment that opens the door for Blackstone to access one million square feet of air rights in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in New York City, air rights that are worth untold millions.
All this financial assistance has been framed as a way for the city to incentivize the preservation of affordable housing, but in reality, the agreement will likely be used to protect fewer units than it promises to.
The deal creates no new affordable apartments, offers no assistance for the thousands of tenants already loaded with market rate leases, and suggests only the slightest consideration of Stuyvesant Town’s future affordability.
How has the city settled into such a low expectation of success in the preservation of affordable housing? How did Stuyvesant Town, which so recently stood as the paragon of affordable, middle class housing in Manhattan, fall so far? In a city that prioritizes affordable housing over every other issue, how is preserving the status quo in exchange for $221 million in taxpayer money and hundreds of millions more in development rights considered a victory?
(Christian Hansen / Gothamist)
Originally created through a public-private partnership between Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Stuyvesant Town, with its sister development Peter Cooper Village, houses 30,000 residents and forms an improbably large complex of 110 red brick apartment buildings stretching for 80 acres along First Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets.
Opened in 1947 to house returning veterans, the complex was created so that “families of moderate means might live in health, comfort and dignity in park-like communities” and symbolized a new municipal and corporate commitment to a middle class city. For decades, MetLife maintained the complex with a kind of laissez-faire benevolence that allowed Stuy Town’s unglamorous high-rises to stand as a stronghold of stable affordability.
The complex became a haven for teachers, firemen, city workers, and nurses and, although it has historically been heavily populated by Irish, Jewish and Italian families, Stuy Town has also absorbed populations of the city’s arriving immigrants: an unlikely and inspiring middle class suburb thriving on lower Manhattan’s eastern flank. It did not, however, welcome black New Yorkers, and subsequent legal battles over the development's racist policies ultimately led to the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed discrimination in housing rentals and sales nationwide.
Stuy Town operated as a reasonably profitable and quiet investment for MetLife—the complex reported a $112 million Net Operating Income in 2006—but the owners’ attitudes began to change in the early 2000s, when MetLife became a publicly traded company and was forced to maximize shareholder returns at the expense of tenants.
In 2000, MetLife quietly closed the waiting list for affordable units and began slowly stripping apartments of their rent protections and moving to lease them on the open market. In 2006, hoping to narrow its institutional scope and further capitalize on Manhattan’s frothy pre-crash real estate market, MetLife arranged an unprecedented $5.4 billion deal to sell the Stuy Town complex to a joint venture formed by the commercial real estate development firm Tishman Speyer and the money management group BlackRock Realty.
Rob Speyer, the lead negotiator of the deal and the heir-apparent to the eponymous real estate empire amassed by his father, Jerry, told the Post "the opportunity to buy 11,000 units in Manhattan is what you live for."
“It was,” Daniel Garodnick, a City Councilman and lifelong Peter Cooper Village resident told Gothamist, “a prescription for disaster.”
Tishman Speyer’s purchase of the complex—both in its execution and in its ideology—set the stage for Stuy Town’s current drama.
(Christian Hansen / Gothamist)
Like so many other heady pre-crash deals, the purchase was financed almost entirely by leveraging debt. Wachovia’s commercial-lending division quickly secured $4 billion in loans for the buyers. Merrill Lynch contributed another $500 million. Nearly all of that debt was securitized, turned around, and sold to secondary and tertiary investors. Tishman Speyer and BlackRock each contributed just $56 million of their own money to the deal, with neither offering up any of their other holdings as collateral.
When the deal closed in November of 2006, Stuy Town’s rental income covered a scant 40% of its new, inflated debt load. Speyer immediately doubled down on MetLife’s earlier deregulation project and set about working to replace the complex’s 8,000 remaining rent-stabilized residents with new, younger and more affluent tenants paying market rates. Tenant harassment became the driving force behind Tishman Speyer’s business model.
Two years later, still up to their armpits in debt and increasingly desperate to convert apartments into market rate earners and speed along profits, Tishman Speyer tasked three law firms and a private investigations group with ferreting out tenants it believed to be unlawfully holding on to stabilized leases. In 2009, they rained down threats of eviction and distributed nonrenewal notices around the complex like takeout menus. Residents organized to challenge the nonrenewals but, faced with intimidation and harassment, hundreds of tenants—both legal and not—vacated their apartments. Ultimately, even those aggressive tactics could not ratchet the number of market rate apartments high enough for the complex to approach profitability.
In October 2009, with the real estate market bottoming out, a decision from the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that Tishman Speyer and Metropolitan Life had wrongly deregulated 4,400 apartments and ordered that they pay compensation, the blow that killed any remaining hopes Speyer held of earning a buck off Stuy Town.
On January 8th, 2010, three short years after they were handed the keys to the development, Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Capital defaulted on $4.4 billion in loans and walked away from the complex. The owning partners had pumped $6.3 billion into their Stuyvesant Town romp but the pair somehow rolled away from the wreckage relatively unharmed. All told, BlackRock and Tishman Speyer lost just their initial combined cash investment of $112 million.
Dozens of companies, banks, countries and state pension funds each lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the blunder. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and by proxy the tax paying public) ended up catching $2 billion of the debt—the majority—but everyone from the government of Singapore to the Church of England was forced to write off their investments and eat the loss when the deal blew up.
Following Tishman Speyer’s default, responsibility for the complex and its debt was transferred to CWCapital Asset Management, a “financial special servicer” essentially tasked with managing the property and shepherding it through the Chutes and Ladders of litigation necessary in untangling the interests and battered investments of the lenders still holding on to Stuy Town.
Residents had been forced into a new routine: paying rent to CW and waiting for outside parties to negotiate the ownership of their homes and deliver some news about the future of their community. All the while watching as neighbors were displaced and the apartments around them were filled with a succession of wealthier, shorter-term replacements.
“It is a terrible shame what has happened,” argues tenants activist and Tenants PAC organizer Michael Mckee, “and the response from the city has been inadequate in every way, and that’s both the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations.”
(Christian Hansen / Gothamist)
As CWCapital and its partners tried to recoup some of their losses, Stuy Town’s value had ballooned over the past four years. The grinding expense of living in New York City accelerated the shift away from homeownership, and steadily climbing rents have helped multifamily rental properties lead the upturn of Manhattan’s wider commercial real estate market and lured new crowds of investors to the field.
In 2014, when prices for multifamily buildings were 33% higher than they were at the previous peak four years earlier, half of Stuy Town’s units were leased at or near market rate. The Times reported that the complex’s net operating income had risen to $177.5 million annually, up 34 percent from 2012 and nearly 60 percent since MetLife put the complex on the market, and expected to continue to climb again in 2015.
The complex’s growing profitability did not go unnoticed. Stuy Town’s fate has been on de Blasio’s radar for years and presents a serious challenge for his administration. During his 2013 mayoral campaign, de Blasio, then the Public Advocate, wrote in a forceful op-ed for the complex’s Town and Village newspaper that “it’s the responsibility of the city to ensure that these homes and other affordable housing are never beyond the reach of middle class New Yorkers.” Losing the complex and its 11,000 apartments to a developer looking to further convert it into a luxury district would be a major setback for de Blasio.
“The tenants and the city were rightfully concerned that this deal could have proceeded without any long-term affordability and without any real community participation,” recalled Garodnick.
As Blackstone emerged as a serious bidder, Deputy Mayor and former Goldman Sachs urban investment executive Alicia Glen, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, Garodnick, and other elected officials, all determined to stave off a repeat of Tishman Speyer’s 2006 recklessness and prevent a speculative buyer from turning it into a wholesale luxury complex, asserted themselves and stepped into the negotiations. The deal came together quickly and quietly during the early weeks of October.
On October 19th, after ten days of talks, Blackstone and Ivanhoé Cambridge signed a contract to buy the Stuyvesant Town complex from CWCapital for $5.4 billion. The final deed was signed December 18th, after months of paperwork. The purchase price pegs the complex’s value at roughly $471,100 per unit.
In contrast to Tishman Speyer’s debt-fueled acquisition—in which Tishman and BlackRock each contributed less than 1% of the winning bid in cash—Blackstone and Ivanhoé Cambridge contributed $1.3 billion in equity to the purchase. The remaining $2.7 billion in financing is being supplied by Wells Fargo’s multifamily division and guaranteed by Fannie Mae.
“Given how few cards the city had to play, they overall did an impressive job of trying to get something good out of a bad situation without getting their pockets picked,” explains Benjamin Dulchin, the director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, an affordable housing advocacy group.
The wins for the city are not immaterial, but they are comically overshadowed when held up alongside the benefits afforded to Blackstone.
(Christian Hansen / Gothamist)
On the most basic level, Blackstone stands to see sizable gains from the rental income generated by Stuyvesant Town’s 11,232 units, more than half of which currently fetch market rates. Residential rents across the boroughs seem to stride to new records every month, with the latest Citi Habitats report putting the average in Manhattan at $3,400, up 25% from 2010 and steadily climbing.
Over just the past few years, betting that demographic shifts and stagnant incomes will continue to fortify the demand for rental apartments, Blackstone has quickly hurled itself into the top ranks of New York City’s landlords and grown its jurisdiction in the larger rental market.
The Stuyvesant Town purchase brings Blackstone’s total multifamily holdings to close to 50,000 apartment units nationally, a presence further expanded by the more than 48,000 single-family rental homes it has bought since the beginning of 2012. This feverish pace of acquisition has allowed Blackstone to come to control a comfortable share of the residential rental market—in the five boroughs and nationally.
Quite simply: A control of supply equates to a certain control of demand.
“Blackstone is not a charity,” Michael McKee, of Tenants PAC, told The Real Deal. “They would not be buying this if they didn’t think they would be making money.”
In exchange for the affordability program Blackstone will extend to 5,000 units, the city agreed to waive the standard mortgage recording taxes the firm would have otherwise paid upon assuming control the property, a loss of some $77 million dollars. That amount would have covered roughly three-quarters of the city’s planned expenditures for homelessness prevention and assistance in 2016 but still represents less than 1.5% of the $5.4 billion overall value Blackstone and Ivanhoe see in Stuyvesant Town.
That $77 million waiver comes in addition to a $144 million loan from the city’s public Housing Development Corporation; a “loan” that is deliberately structured to self-amortize and excuse Blackstone from paying a single dollar in either principal or interest, essentially functioning as an additional cash subsidy from the city.
The $143,718,750 HDC loan, outlined on page nine of the sale agreement's Terms Sheet, “will have a term of 20 years at 0% interest, with the principal amount being forgiven annually at a rate of $7,185,937.50 per annum.”
More plainly, that rate of annual forgiveness will wind down the principle amount owed by Blackstone to nothing by the time payment is due. At 0% interest, Blackstone ends up owing exactly zero dollars and zero cents on a twenty-year, $144 million loan. Nice!
Aside from the subsidies and waived fees the city could bring to the deal, its primary point of entry into the negotiations actually came from New York Senator Charles Schumer.
According to analyses of campaign finance disclosure reports conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics, executives and employees from Blackstone have been the primary financial supporters of Senator Schumer’s re-election efforts, directing $107,800 to his campaigns from 2011 to 2016. In 2014 alone, Schumer received $45,000 from Blackstone affiliated donors, making him the #1 Blackstone-supported politician in New York State and the #4 Blackstone supported politician nationwide.
In 2014, Schumer lobbied the Federal Housing Finance Agency in Washington to ensure that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the two massive, federally backed mortgage providers overseen by the FHFA—would not extend their comparatively low-risk and inexpensive financing support to a Stuy Town buyer that does not have the blessing of the tenants and the city, a valuable bargaining chip considering that bankrolling such a large purchase with riskier private market loans would mean much higher interest payments and significantly more risk exposure for the buyer.
Wiley Norvell, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s office, called Schumer’s pact with the FHFA “a significant point of leverage.”
(Christian Hansen / Gothamist)
But what is very likely the most lucrative dispensation for Blackstone included in the agreement is outlined in a two-sentence clause that went unmentioned during the mayor’s triumphant press conference announcing the deal: The city’s support of Blackstone transferring pieces of Stuy Town’s large cache of unused development rights to properties elsewhere in Manhattan.
Under the city’s zoning regulations, each lot on a block is allocated a set number of development rights, or air rights, that restrict the height of the structures built on top of it. If a building tops out below its allocated maximum vertical allowance, the owners can generally transfer or sell the unused development rights—literally the right to build higher—to an adjacent property on the same block.
The Stuy Town complex includes one-hundred and ten buildings spread across eighty acres, and comes with more than one million square feet of unused, transferable development rights.
When pressed on what exactly city support for a transfer of development rights looks like, Norvell explains that “in this case, ‘support’ equals a willingness to study alternative locations for those air rights, to determine if any appropriate sites exist.”
Blackstone has not yet made public any plans for its new staggering cache of development privileges and there don’t currently appear to be any sites in Stuy Town’s immediate vicinity that could immediately absorb the tranche of development rights.
However, any transfer that resulted in residential use would be subject to mandatory inclusionary zoning, which means at least 25-30 percent affordable housing, and the de Blasio administration has shown itself willing to make concessions on height and density restrictions if the new developments include benefits for affordable housing.
“The air rights themselves are probably worth more than everything else,” says Thomas Angotti, a Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College. “It would definitely be interesting to sit down and calculate.”
It seems far-fetched to imagine that Blackstone hasn’t already begun to parse out where the privileges could be reallocated and what additional political choreography is necessary to get them there. A proposal extending Stuy Town’s 20-year affordability timeline in exchange for wider latitude in the transfer of the complex’s development rights is likely stewing in some Blackstone exec’s brain.
The tenants also have their eye on the future. “Of course the tenants would love to extend that timeline and I think that it is an issue that will be revisited in the coming years,” Susan Steinberg, the president of the Stuy Town Tenants Association told us.
It can be hard to calculate value without a clear sense of where the development rights will end up, but it is reasonably safe to assume that Blackstone stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars through nearly every imaginable outcome, and not just by using the rights to expand their own development projects, or through a straightforward sale of the rights to other developers.
Thinking more broadly, Blackstone can quite easily wring the maximum profit from this opportunity by strategically assigning and selling the rights to developments that will help to buoy the value of any nearby properties they already own. If you anticipate a rising tide, it seems wise to buy a lot of boats.
Over the next 20-odd years, as Manhattan continues to grow more densely developed and sprout higher and higher residential and commercial towers, Stuy Town’s mid-rise buildings, leafy walkways, and self-contained suburban feel, will likely stand in stark contrast to the feel of surrounding blocks.
It is not hard to imagine Stuyvesant Town in 2040, with its rent protections expired and its green, wide-open walkways and once unremarkable buildings now feeling charming in comparison, commanding incredible rents from wealthy families discontented with the behemoth glass and steel alternatives lining the surrounding avenues. What more predictable New York story is there than the once peripheral redoubts of the middle class turning, through the years, into verdant playgrounds for the ultra wealthy?
(Christian Hansen / Gothamist)
The most troubling part of the Stuy Town agreement is not that Blackstone and its partners stand to gain so much, but that the affordability protections negotiated in exchange actually do so little. The structure of the protections for affordable housing and their working definitions of affordability expose just how low our standards of success have fallen.
The loss of affordable apartments to deregulation has been a major issue for Stuyvesant Town, but to say this deal outright preserves 5,000 units of affordable housing on day one is a bit of a stretch.
Today, thanks to the protections of the state’s Rent Stabilization Law, there are just over 5,200 Stuy Town units leased at below market rates. Those 5,200 units are already “preserved” under the state law and won’t fall under the jurisdiction of Blackstone’s affordability program until their current tenants leave and the units shed their existing protections. If—for whatever reason—a rent stabilized unit becomes vacant at some point in the next twenty years, instead of offering the apartment on the open market, Blackstone must replace the outgoing tenants with new, income-qualified renters paying reduced rents.
The new agreement is less a preservation of the complex’s current affordability protections than it is a secondary safety net set up to catch up to 5,000 potential units that could be lost to deregulation during the next twenty years—exactly how many apartments that will be in practice still remains to be seen.
A press release put out by the Mayor’s Office on October 20th announcing the complex’s sale says that “without intervention, the City predicts that all but 1,500 apartments at the entire complex would be converted to luxury units within 20 years,” a prediction that—by the city’s own calculations—would put the total number of below market rate units actually preserved closer 3,500.
“This is about hard and fast guarantees,” countered Norvell in an email last month. “We have a general understanding of the overall rate of slippage from rent regulation, but no one knows which units could potentially turn over in next twenty years. The only way to ensure they ALL remain affordable for this and future generations is lock each and every one into a preservation program.”
One accomplishment of the 5,000 unit affordability program is the way it disincentivizes Blackstone from pursuing the erasure of any existing protections—why push to deregulate a unit renting at below market rates if it will only fall under the jurisdiction of another below market rate agreement—likely a welcome assurance for current tenants with a memory of Tishman’s deregulation campaign.
The actual “affordability” of the units protected under Blackstone’s program is also quite broadly defined. Like many of the city’s housing initiatives, the Blackstone program measures the affordability of its rents against the Area Median Income (AMI), a frustratingly flawed federal formula that is calculated with income data from a wide swath of the metro area—including the wealthy suburbs of Westchester County and Long Island—resulting in a baseline median income that, when compared to the actual take home earnings of many New Yorkers, skews dramatically high.
Because of the vagaries of AMI, only a small percentage of the apartments protected under the Blackstone program will be clearly, recognizably affordable. Ten percent of the protected apartments will be reserved for families earning 80% the Area Median Income, or about $62,000 a year for a family of three. The remaining ninety percent of the protected units will be set aside for households earning no more than 165% of the Area Median Income, which factors out to about $128,000 for a family of three.
“It is an incredible deal for the developer,” says Hunter College professor Thomas Angotti. “Twenty years of affordability at 165% of AMI doesn’t begin to get at the most critical population in need of city subsidies.”
(Christian Hansen / Gothamist)
Pausing the endemic deregulation of rent-stabilized apartments for twenty short years may mean that 5,000 units can be tallied in the city’s Preserved column, but it does little to ensure the the long-term affordability of Stuyvesant Town and even less to correct the course of New York’s real estate market.
“I do not think that City Hall understands neighborhoods. The city understands quantitative goals.” Angotti says with a sigh. “They have set goals for the preservation of affordable housing and they're working to get every unit they can.”
The Mayor’s Office and the politicians involved in the deal’s negotiations have been consistent in pointing out the fate otherwise in store for Stuy Town.
"The status quo in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper would have kept the community on track to lose every single one of its affordable units over time,” said Councilman Garodnick when pressed about ground gained through this deal. “We negotiated a preservation deal of 5,000 units, where the alternative was zero."
New Yorkers deserve a political imagination that looks beyond the horizon of the status quo and works to accomplish its goals in the streets, not just on paper. Calling this a victory involves a certain degree of nihilism. The existence of an affordable housing agreement in-and-of-itself is a victory only to people who see an unaffordable New York as a foregone conclusion.
(Christian Hansen / Gothamist)
The saga of Stuyvesant Town over these past fifteen years—from MetLife’s initial push for deregulation, through the shameful war years of Tishman Speyer’s tenure, and into the resigned present of diluted, straw man affordability—is as good of an example of the appetite that has pushed much of New York’s housing stock beyond any recognizably-accessible territory as I can ask for.
It represents an appetite that flourishes in a market ideology that sees housing primarily as something to be profited from with maximum efficiency and prioritizes the returns of private real estate developers over the housing of citizens.
It is an appetite that is most apparent in the city's blood-pumping housing market but that grows more and more philosophically dominant in its other organs every day. It is a way of thinking that is redefining the understanding of whom the city is for and it is wrapped so thoroughly around our political practice that we sometimes cannot see beyond it. When we let that philosophy change our definition of success we admit defeat.
“The trouble is that we don’t need more luxury housing,” explains Peter Marcuse, professor emeritus of urban planning at Columbia University. “If you make low income housing only a small proportion of the housing that you are fostering, then you are going to increase property values, you are going to increase the cost of rental units throughout the neighborhood, and you’re going to displace people.”
In a city hemorrhaging its core middle-class population at a rate like New York’s, twenty years of watered down protections on 5,000 units is not a triumph, it’s a tourniquet.
Kevin Sweeting is a person on the internet and other places also. |
So Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker enjoyed a ‘broad and constructive exchange’ during their working dinner in Brussels. Last time the Prime Minister broke bread with the President of the European Commission — at Downing Street six months ago — Juncker dubbed her ‘deluded’ and complained about the food.
Despite better mood music, this latest supper summit was hardly positive. European Union negotiators still refuse to discuss trade or end the divisive impasse over citizens’ rights until Britain agrees to pay a stonking ‘divorce bill’ — upwards of £40-£50 billion. All the while, the Article 50 clock is ticking.
The prospect of a ‘no deal’ Brexit has lately loomed into view, and not a moment too soon. That’s because rather than focusing on issues that matter to real people, like commerce and residency, Brussels remains fixated on process. This intransigence highlights why Britain must prepare to operate without an EU free-trade agreement (FTA). The good news is that using World Trade Organisation rules instead is an entirely acceptable outcome, and it would be a strategic error to think otherwise.
Trading under WTO rules is often presented as ‘disastrous’ — which is alarmist and wrong. A ‘bold and ambitious’ FTA, keeping UK-EU trade largely tariff-free, is obviously the UK’s preference. The Prime Minister has made this clear ever since her Lancaster House speech of January 2017. But if we don’t secure an FTA with the EU by March 2019, we then charge reciprocal WTO tariffs, averaging some 2-3 per cent.
This in no way stops UK trade with the EU, as some gloom-mongers claim. All nations have ‘access’ to the single market, provided regulatory standards are met and the generally low tariffs are paid. The US and China conduct hundreds of billions of dollars of EU trade annually with no FTA; Britain can do the same. We’re well placed to trade with the EU on WTO terms, in fact, as we’d start with full regulatory compliance.
If trading under WTO rules is so bad, how does the UK already sell the majority of its exports beyond the EU, largely under such rules? Non-EU trade generates a surplus and is fast-growing, as opposed to our EU trade, which is shrinking and in deep deficit despite the single market. Britain’s existing trade with the US, our largest single country export destination, is under WTO rules. The EU, given the often conflicting needs of numerous member states, has failed to agree a US trade deal despite 60 years of trying.
Commercial logic, in the shape of the EU’s £71 billion trade surplus with Britain, suggests Brussels should want a UK-EU trade agreement. But a desire to ‘punish’ us, or the refusal of some sub-regional EU parliament outpost to ratify any deal, could prevail. On a purely practical level, then, it’s vital to prepare for WTO trade with the EU by making necessary upgrades to both physical infrastructure and staffing of cross-Channel customs clearance.
This makes strategic sense too. Unless the EU sees Britain is not prepared to sign just about any FTA Brussels puts on the table, we’ll be offered only a bad one. Signing a stinker of an FTA out of desperation to ‘get a deal’ would disadvantage UK exporters and consumers for years.
When Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973, existing members changed our entry terms at the very last moment, forcing the UK to give up sovereignty over our fishing waters. Similarly today, the UK will secure an advantageous FTA and ensure it sticks only if we’re willing and able to trade under WTO rules instead.
Once the drama of Brexit is over, beyond March 2019 and any subsequent transition, WTO rules can be used as a ‘platform’ to cut an FTA with the EU under less time pressure, making a better deal more likely. While some UK firms worry that WTO rules will hurt ‘complex supply chains’ across the EU, most manufacturing components are zero-rated so would not attract any tariffs. Our EU deficit also means, under WTO rules, that the UK pays less in export tariffs than it receives, creating several billion pounds in net revenues for the Exchequer each year. The surplus could be used to compensate sectors like cars and agriculture, where tariffs on UK exports are likely to be higher.
‘No deal’ — trading with the EU with no FTA — is an entirely coherent position. It is very different from just ‘walking away’, which means failing to settle administrative issues such as mutual recognition agreements on exports. No one is advocating such an approach. It is unthinkable that existing and uncontroversial EU protocols granted to countless other non-EU members would not apply to Britain. For Brussels to deny such rights would breach WTO and EU treaties, while incensing EU businesses and voters by threatening billions of euros of profit and countless EU jobs.
When it comes to lurid scare stories about planes not flying, Europe’s ‘Open Skies’ agreement applies to many non-EU nations and those outside the single market. The UK boasts a huge aviation industry, with numerous EU-based airlines using our airports. That gives us much leverage.
Politicians will beat their chests, but the commercial imperatives to strike new flight deals are mutual and massive. If the details aren’t finalised by March 2019, memorandums of understanding will surely extend current practice until they are.
No deal, then, really is better than a bad deal, as ministers must keep saying. No deal is not ‘unthinkable’, as Amber Rudd suggested this week. We need to think about it, and soon. A deadline should now be announced — say mid-2018 — after which, if no FTA looks likely in the government’s view, the UK will shift emphasis, focusing instead on preparing for WTO rules. Only then will the EU stop playing games and put a UK-EU trade deal, the real meat of these Article 50 talks, back on the negotiating menu.
‘Clean Brexit‘ by Liam Halligan and Gerard Lyons is published by Biteback |
Opposition likely to abstain from vote on law to prevent government having to pay £130m to jobseekers
Labour is expected to support the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) in speeding a retroactive law through parliament that will overturn the outcome of a court of appeal judgment and ensure the government no longer has to pay £130m in benefit rebates to about a quarter of a million jobseekers.
The law has been hastily drafted by the government in response to last month's ruling from three appeal court judges in favour of science graduate Cait Reilly and unemployed lorry driver Jamieson Wilson.
The court found that Reilly, who had been made to work unpaid in Poundland for weeks; Wilson, who was forced to work unpaid for six months, and up to 231,000 other benefit claimants had been unlawfully punished over the last few years because the government had failed to give them more than a few lines of regulatory information about the schemes they had to take part in.
In a move that has upset campaigners and activists, the parliamentary Labour party said it was likely to abstain from any vote expected on Tuesday and was pushing for concessions – including an independent review of the benefit sanctions regime – in return for allowing the jobseekers (back to work schemes) bill to be rushed through parliament at "lightning speed".
The DWP is keen to see the retroactive bill passed into law in case the supreme court rejects its application for appeal and £130m that was taken away in sanctions has to be paid back to jobseekers.
In explanatory notes to the bill, which lawyers and campaigners described as "repugnant", the government said the legislation to overturn the court's findings was needed to "protect the national economy".
Lawyers acting for Reilly are already preparing to challenge the law as soon as it is given royal assent under article six of the European convention on human rights, which guarantees the right of access to the courts.
In a blogpost on Monday evening, the shadow work and pensions secretary, Liam Byrne, described the department's inability to draft lawful back-to-work scheme regulations for about half a dozen employment schemes as "incompetence on a truly monumental scale".
Byrne said in return for Labour's support on the bill's emergency timetabling, "ministers must launch an independent review of the sanctions regime with an urgent report to parliament".
Labour sources said they also wanted to make sure that the legislation was tightened up so jobseekers' regular rights of appeal, separate to the court of appeal judgment, were not also trampled on by the new law.
Ahead of the supreme court appeal, the government has instructed James Eadie QC, the government's top lawyer – known as the "Treasury devil" – to take charge.
The DWP said regulations had been drafted in a minimal fashion to give job centres and organisations involved in getting the unemployed into work flexibility and latitude for innovation.
Former Green party leader Caroline Lucas said she was working with other MPs to try to get a vote at the bill's second reading, "in order to show our deep opposition to the flawed principles of the bill".
She added: "We are hugely disappointed at the signs coming from the Labour camp which indicate that they will not be joining us.
"A meek call for a review of the regulations in a year's time is frankly no opposition at all.
"If Labour MPs don't join us in voting against this bill, they will be supporting the government in undermining a court of appeal judgment and backing the primary purpose of the bill: to prevent people from rightly claiming back welfare payments that were docked as part of the shambolic workfare scheme that Cait Reilly courageously exposed in the Poundland case."
The union Unite, which also represents unemployed people, is also calling for MPs to strongly oppose the bill and "stand up for the rights of jobseekers".
The union's general secretary, Len McCluskey, said: "This is a cynical move by the Tory-led government to avoid giving rightful compensation to jobseekers who have fallen foul of the incompetence of the Department of Work and Pensions. When will they learn that rushed law is bad law?
"The courts have told Iain Duncan Smith that his approach is unlawful. And the public accounts committee has decried the woeful success rate of his schemes. Given this, the government ought to be going back to the drawing board."
A spokesperson from campaign group Boycott Workfare, which protests against making unpaid work schemes a condition of receiving benefits, said: "It is just as disgusting to hear Liam Byrne say that the social security people are due must be withheld or the entire welfare budget be cut. Everyone knows abstaining is as good as voting for the bill." |
I reckon it’s precisely the average employee’s laziness - the reluctance to engage in physical or mental activity - that lends credibility to the argument for the six-hour working day. This isn’t a lazy argument, but a lazy man’s argument. And I am that lazy man.
So to make the argument for the six-hour workday, I’ll use myself as a prototype. After all, I’m a rather typical employee: hard working at the start of the day, incredibly lazy towards the end. I’ll therefore play the part of homo economicus What's this? What's this? - the economic actor.
Three years ago, I was a lonely post boy. At the beginning of my shift, I hauled vast sacks of mail up four flights of stairs. For the next few hours, I sifted through thousands of letters and sorted them into piles. After lunch, I printed labels for couriers and used a franking machine to categorise the letters into first and second class. By the seventh hour, I was losing the will to live, so I double-checked random items that probably didn’t need double-checking and triple-checked items that definitely didn’t need triple-checking.
My final (eighth) hour was what I referred to as ‘me-time’. I was too tired to maintain high or even medium levels of productivity, so I just dossed around. I tend to keep this information from future employers.
Explainer Marginal analysis A way to measure the additional benefits of an activity compared to the additional costs of the same activity. Companies use this to help them maximize their profits.
Economists could measure my levels of productivity using what they call marginal analysis. At the start of the day - when I was a productive, but still lonely post boy - the marginal benefit of my employment was high. As the day rolled on, I grew tired and lazy: I sent out fewer parcels, triple-checked unnecessary items, embraced ‘me-time’, which saw my marginal benefit decrease, as my utility fell. The marginal cost at the beginning of the day was low, but increased as the day went on, as I’m apparently not just a lazy worker but an exponentially lazy worker. Again, this is not how I describe myself to potential employers. |
“Dad, are we almost there?” “Mom, how much longer until we are there?” Anyone, who has taken a family driving trip is well acquainted with these questions from the back seat. Those of us familiar with these junior AAA inquiries also know that answering them exactly is no easy task. Do we simply say, “40 more miles” or do we say, “about an hour”? It all depends on the type of road, traffic, weather, driving style, and possible unplanned stops along the way. Figuring out how to answer “how much longer” or “are we halfway there” is not always an exact science.
Finding the midpoint in the Torah is also a matter of considerable debate. Logically, you might think you could simply unroll a Torah scroll, measure it, and divide that number in half. Basically, that should land you somewhere in the Book of Leviticus, the third of five books of the Torah, assuming that each book of the Torah is about the same length. In fact, they are not equal. Genesis is the longest book, Leviticus is the shortest, and Exodus is longer than Deuteronomy. With the Torah weighted toward the first two books, it makes sense that the midpoint should be somewhere toward the front of the middle book. But that is about all tradition can agree upon with respect to the Torah’s centroid. Once you drill down into the details of counting the problem becomes increasingly complicated and finding the middle of the Torah, both mathematically and theologically, is no easy task. It all depends on what you mean exactly by “the middle of the Torah!”
While a tight statistical control of the text of the Torah has been part of Jewish tradition at least since the closing of the Babylonian Talmud over 15 centuries ago, only with the invention of modern printing, and its mathematically informed computation of book size, did a limited consensus develop as to the middle of the Torah. A commentary to the Talmud, Massoret ha-Shas by an Italian Sephardi Rabbi, Joshua Boaz ben Simon Baruch (d. 1557) puts the midpoint of the Torah in this week’s portion, Parashat Tzav, in a section that discusses the clothing of the High Priest (see Lev. 8:7-8). He observed that “in every Chumash and in the reliable tikkunim in Parashat Tzav [at the point where it says], ‘And he put upon him the tunic’ [Leviticus 8:7-8], it is printed in the margin ‘half the Torah in verses,’ which is still the practice to this day.” Of course, not everyone was convinced. A second Italian rabbi from a subsequent generation, Yedidiah Solomon ben Abraham Norzi (d.1626), unable to reconcile earlier determinations of the Torah’s center based not on verses, but on words and letters, essentially gave up and declared that we “must wait for the prophet Elijah to come to sort things out.”
Perhaps the earliest discussion about determining the mathematical center of Torah can be found in the Babylonian Talmud in Kiddushin 30a. Here we read about a group of ancient scholars called the soferim. The Gemara explains that this particular group of soferim, professional ancestors of our current day Torah scribes, counted the letters of the Torah to insure the accuracy of the text as it was hand copied and there was a reasonable risk of error, or what might be called “quality control.”
According to the soferim, the midpoint of the Torah could best be determined in two ways: either by counting by letters or by counting words. Counting by letters only, they determined that the middle letter of the Torah is the vav in the word gachon, “belly,” in Leviticus 11:42. But by counting by words, they determined that the phrase darosh darash, “diligently inquire” (Leviticus 10:16), is the exact center of the Torah. Finally, they determined that Leviticus 13:33 marked the middle of the Torah if one counted by verses, if there are 5,888 verses in the Torah. But then they immediately added that there are multiple traditions for versification even within the Jewish tradition, so the “middle by verse” could not be definitively determined. No wonder Rabbi Norzi gave up!
Of course, tradition was not willing simply to give up and wait for the Messiah to determine the center of the Torah. Thus, a second, essentialist approach to the question of the essential teaching of the Torah or lev haTorah, “heart of the Torah,” was also explored by the Rabbis. In this case, however, the question is not a mathematical challenge but a philosophical one. The discussion is well known. The core passage is found in the Jerusalem Talmud, N’darim 30b: “Rabbi Akiva (second century CE) taught: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18). This is the most important rule in the Torah. But Ben Azzai says: ‘This is the Book of Chronologies of Adam’ (Genesis 5:1).”
Ben Azzai’s challenge to Akiva’s teaching is based on the meaning of the word “neighbor.” In the context of the original passage in Leviticus, neighbor could be understood narrowly as “someone you already know” or “your Jewish neighbor.” Seeking to universalize the commandment, Ben Azzai demonstrates that all people, Jewish and non-Jewish, are all descendants of Adam and, therefore, all neighbors. The (Ashkenazic) haftarah to Leviticus 19 from Amos 9:7 deflects Ben Azzai’s comment by reminding the Jewish people that they, the Jews, and the Ethiopians are all equal in the eyes of God.
It is also possible to discover essentialist meaning in the mathematically determined “hearts” of the Torah. For example, following the word count of the soferim, the word, belly, suggesting gastronomical Judaism, is key for many people. Keeping kosher or eating traditional Jewish holiday food is, for a number of people today, their principle tie to the Jewish tradition. For others, darosh darash, diligently inquire, is the essential principle of Judaism. “The study of Torah,” the ancient Rabbis assure us, leads us to the performance of other mitzvot. Today, we even have a widespread phenomenon in the Reform Movement of people who come regularly to Shabbat morning Torah study, delve deeply into the weekly portion, and then promptly leave before services begin. Darosh darash is their middle of the Torah.
What about “putting on the tunic?” Very often, particularly at occasions at bnei mitzvah services, weddings, and funerals, people who neither keep kosher nor study Torah insist on wearing a kippah or a women’s head covering. It makes them feel connected to the tradition, even authentic. For them, “putting on the tunic” is the middle of the Torah.
Finally, the classic middle or heart of the Torah for a large, if not majority of Jewish people today is to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Particularly in its expanded, more universalistic meaning, this reflects the view that the essence of Judaism is ethics. In this view, the essence of Yiddishkeit is menschlichkeit, that is, the uber principle of Judaism is ethics. The principle seems to work equally well for believers and nonbelievers. And as for our super Jewish patriots or Jewish nationalists, the sociologically narrower view of “love your [Jewish] neighbor” works as the middle point for them as well.
Finding the middle of the Torah is no easy matter and the fact is that the lack of a widely agreed upon central teaching creates numerous challenges for the Jewish people. Very frequently, a sincere Christian will say to me that the heart of their faith is “love” and then ask, “What is the central teaching of Judaism?” How we answer that query says as much about us as it says about Judaism. Reform Judaism itself is not above this challenge. We have our principles and we have our practices, but what is the middle of our Torah? I guess it all depends on what you mean by middle and whether the concept of middle as an essentialist viewpoint is even the right way to conceptualize our tradition.
Rabbi Lance J. Sussman, Ph.D., is the senior rabbi of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, PA. He has written numerous books and articles in the field of American Jewish history and has taught at Princeton University, Binghamton University (SUNY), and Hunter College (CUNY). Rabbi Sussman is currently working on a book on Jews, Judaism, and law in America. |
A depraved former priest was able to carry out a decade-long reign of abuse against three girls and nine boys because he was protected by the Catholic Church, a Sydney judge says.
Loud applause broke out in court on Monday as John Joseph Farrell was led from the dock after being sentenced to 29 years behind bars for his crimes in Moree and Tamworth, in country NSW.
Victims and their loved ones packed into the courtroom at Sydney's Downing Centre District Court to watch the 62-year-old face sentencing for dozens of historical sexual crimes committed against children between 1979 and 1988.
The disgraced ex-priest sat with his eyes closed as Judge Peter Zahra told how he preyed on his victims, grooming the children, cultivating the trust of their parents and exploiting his powerful position as a priest.
"This allowed him to offend whenever and wherever he chose," Judge Zahra said.
"The offender created situations where he was confident he would not be detected even where his sexual abuse was, at times, brazen in the extreme."
Former priest John Joseph Farrell exploited the powerful position he had, a judge said. ()
The judge said that although there was evidence senior members of the Catholic Church were told of Farrell's crimes many years before he was brought to justice, allegations levelled by complainants "appeared to be frustrated either by the failure of those within the church to pursue any investigation or by dissuading further complaint".
"The offender was thereby protected from the authorities by those within the church who chose to move the offender rather than inform the authorities," Judge Zahra said.
Outside court on Monday, one of Farrell's victims described the church's actions as "despicable".
He is one of a number of victims who are expected to seek compensation in civil proceedings.
"They knew it was happening and they didn't do anything about it," the man said.
"They just pushed it under the rug and tried to forget about it, or paid people to forget.
"It won't be forgotten."
After Farrell forced an altar boy to perform oral sex, the boy told an adult in the presbytery what had happened and was told "they would sort it out."
But when the boy next saw Farrell, the priest raped him behind the altar for what "felt like hours" as he whispered threats in his ear.
"The complainant said that he felt excruciating pain," Judge Zahra said.
"The offender whispered that if the complainant told anyone he would kill him or his family."
Another boy who was repeatedly molested admitted to his mother that Farrell had "touched" him. The mother promptly contacted a monsignor who asked Farrell to leave the parish.
But the priest went on to serve in a number of other parishes and was not suspended from public ministry until 1992.
The court heard that although the complainant went on to contact the nation's most senior Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, in 2002 to ask why the church had not responded to his family's allegations, Farrell was not laicised until 2005.
Around the time of the initial disclosure, the victim's mother also sought advice from a nun who told her "the church had a large amount of money to fight such allegations".
Farrell was given an 18-year minimum sentence and, with time already spent in custody, his term will expire in 2044.
(With AAP)
© AAP 2019 |
A man was caught on video appearing to slap protestors at a Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE rally Monday evening, according to multiple news accounts.
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In a video from ABC News, a man can be seen clenching his fists and hitting at protestors being escorted out of the rally in Asheville, N.C.
A woman was recording the man on her cellphone when he reached out and appeared to slap her in the face, according to reporters on the scene.
A Trump supporter just grabbed a protester by the neck, then appeared to punch him. Also tried hitting a second protester. He is still here — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) September 12, 2016 |
Right now, a sheet of paper in a Yokohama-based office is on fire. How do we know this? On this sheet of paper, some Nismo engineers have scrawled a prototype GT-R that will be the fastest Nissan ever.
And it’ll most definitely be on fire because Nissan told TopGear.com that this special Nismo GT-R will lap the Nürburgring in under 7m 18s, comfortably eclipsing the current car’s lap record, and moving it further to the top of the unofficial King of the ‘Ring table. Oh, and that’s quite a bit faster than Porsche’s new GT3, too, a claimed 7m 22s. Woah.
We first got wind of this Super GT-R a few months back, when Nismo - that’s Nissan Motorsport - officially unveiled its global HQ in Yokohama, Japan, making the legendary tuner an integral part of Nissan’s business. And at the time, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn said: “It would be unthinkable for us to develop a range of Nismo road cars without including the GT-R. The GT-R Nismo will be special…”
So on the launch of Nissan’s 370Z Nismo model - which you can read about here - a Nissan spokesman told TG.com how this Super GT-R will be the “hardest GT-R ever”. That’s quite a firework, but then the standard GT-R, if you can call it ‘standard’, is a bombastic piece of kit.
Nissan was, naturally, extremely coy about the details, only telling us that the car is currently in the development phase, but “will be of great value and offer the same concept as other Nismo products: more power, better handling and improved looks.”
When pushed on power gains, there were some nervous smiles, most probably because rocket science is a risky business. The current GT-R comfortably produces 545bhp and 465lb ft of torque, but Nissan told us the Nismo version will probably produce “more than 570bhp”.
Undoubtedly, there will be suspension and aero tweakery too, though we’ll have to wait and see. Stay tuned, as Nissan tells us it will appear in the second half of 2014. That, dear Internet, will be the definitive Nismo product, so expect some thunder…
Sub 7m 18s, in a Nissan. Sheesh.
See more pics of the MY13 Nissan GT-R |
Southampton’s first trip to the Emirates Stadium this year resulted in a heartbreaking—and controversial—2-1 loss. Let’s hand out some grades.
This week’s match will no doubt be an especially bitter pill to swallow for supporters. Though far from perfect, this week’s clash was one of the most complete performances turned in all year.
The end result, though, was frustratingly familiar: a late penalty and a disappointing non-result. The final minutes of the match—an uncalled foul on Shane Long, play continuing during a Laurent Koscielny injury, and a questionable penalty—have already generated their share of press and drama.
But now the dust is settled and the match in the books. And as fans, it is our duty to faithfully armchair-analyse as we count down to next week. Let’s get to it!
Keepers
Fraser Forster got another workout at the hands of North London’s finest this weekend, with 17 shots coming his way. Of those, though, only two hit the target. Looking at the scoreline, we don’t need to tell you what became of those two.
I’m not going to say penalty saves are the easiest thing in the world, but its apparent that PKs are the big man’s Achilles heel. Maybe something to work on in training, along with watching some footage of PK takers from upcoming opponents.
I hate to slate Southampton’s #1 but 0-for-2 on shots-on-target isn’t a pretty picture for a keeper who could’ve played for England this week. Poor day at the office for the man between the sticks.
Grade: 2/10 |
The Palestinian Authority National Security Forces posted a cartoon on its official Facebook page Wednesday depicting an Israeli soldier about to “rape” a woman representing the Dome of the Rock, a media watchdog said.
In the cartoon, a woman wearing a Dome of the Rock hat languishes in a prison cell, while a large-nosed IDF soldier stands outside with his pants unzipped, saying “Come on, sweetheart.”
The caption read “Daily cartoon: Al-Aqsa is being raped,” the Palestinian Media Watch group said, in reference to the Arabic name for the compound.
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The cartoon was posted amid increased tensions at the Temple Mount between Israel and the Palestinians in recent months, with Palestinians frequently clashing with police in protests against Jewish visitors to the compound and Israeli politicians calling for Jews to be allowed to pray there.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for calm and restraint and pledged not to change the status quo at the site, holy to both Jews and Muslims, though Arabs have charged Israeli lawmakers intend to allow Jewish prayer there.
The compound was closed to all visitors on Thursday last week following the attempted murder Wednesday of right-wing activist Yehuda Glick, who campaigns for Jewish prayer at the site, by a Palestinian from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Tor.
Abbas called the closure “a declaration of war.”
Just days before the attempted assassination, Abbas submitted a request for an emergency meeting in the UN Security Council about the situation on the Temple Mount. He had earlier joined Hamas in calling for Palestinians to defend the site.
AFP contributed to this report. |
Q&A: Why space shuttle fleet is retiring, what's next
WASHINGTON As the space shuttle program winds down, questions are flying about what's happening and why. The launch countdown is on for the second-to-last flight on Monday. Some answers about the end of the space shuttle:
Q: Why are the shuttles retiring?
A: The shuttles are aging and expensive, their key task is nearly completed and NASA wants to use the money spent on them to do something new. They've been flying since 1981, hauling up pieces of the International Space Station. The panel that investigated the 2003 Columbia accident concluded: "It is in the nation's interest to replace the Shuttle as soon as possible."
Q: Who decided to stop flying shuttles?
A: President George W. Bush made the decision in 2004. He wanted astronauts to go back to the moon, and eventually to Mars. For NASA to afford to build a new spaceship to reach those goals, it had to stop spending about $4 billion a year on the shuttle program.
But President Barack Obama dropped the moon mission. His plan has NASA building a giant rocket to send astronauts to an asteroid, and eventually Mars, while turning over to private companies the job of carrying cargo and astronauts to the space station.
Q: When does the shuttle program end?
A: There are two flights left. Shuttle Endeavour, set to launch Monday, is carrying a $2 billion science experiment to the space station. Atlantis makes the final shuttle trip this summer with spare parts for the station. The third surviving shuttle — Discovery — made its final voyage earlier this year. Two other shuttles — Challenger and Columbia — were destroyed in accidents that killed a total of 14 astronauts.
Q: What was the shuttle program all about?
A: It was supposed to make getting into space cheap, simple and safe with a launch virtually every week. It didn't accomplish that. But it was the best way to get big items — such as satellites and the Hubble Space Telescope— into orbit and fix them if needed. For the space station, it was a combination moving van and construction crane. What made the shuttle unique was its ability to do all kinds of things.
Q: What happens to the space shuttles?
A: They'll be shipped off to museums. Endeavour goes to the California Science Center in Los Angeles and Atlantis will stay at Kennedy Space Center for its visitor complex. Discovery's new home will be the Smithsonian Institution's hangar near Washington Dulles International Airport. Enterprise, a shuttle prototype used for test flights, goes to New York City's Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.
Q: What about the space station?
A: The life of the space station has been extended to at least 2020 and it could continue on even longer. It's now big enough for six people. They conduct science research, from astronomy to zoology, and help scientists understand what is needed for longer missions in space, such as going to Mars.
Q: What about the astronauts? Do they still have jobs?
A: Some will. More than a dozen astronauts will still go to space and live on the space station. Others will wait around for slots on still-to-be-built spaceships, including the ride to an asteroid. Others will leave the program. The same thing happened after the Apollo program ended nearly 40 years ago.
Q: How will astronauts get to the space station?
A: NASA will continue to buy seats on Russian Soyuz capsules to ferry space station residents. The $56 million price per head will go up to $63 million, which is still cheaper per person than the space shuttle.
Q: Is there any other way to get into space?
A: Not from U.S. soil once the shuttles retire. NASA could eventually use the commercial rockets and capsules being developed by private companies. Two companies predict they could fly astronauts to the space station within three years. NASA is under orders to build a giant rocket to go beyond Earth orbit.
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Online:
NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle
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Margaret Trudeau is sitting in the living room of her Montreal apartment, chatting about the Prime Minister and marijuana. No, the former flower-child chatelaine of 24 Sussex isn’t time-travelling back to her days married to prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the ’70s, smoking spliffs under the noses of her Mountie detail. She’s vibrantly in the here and now as conversation veers to the government’s stance on medical marijuana. “I think Mr. Harper has told us we could grow four [plants],” she says. “I’m tempted to grow four.” She’s joking—or seems to be. Trudeau’s pot-smoking days are behind her—mostly.
Now a mental-health advocate, Trudeau is more interested in the role marijuana use played in her bipolar disorder, a condition she made public in 2006. A little grass gave her focus, she says: “some light and joy and delight.” Too much triggered manic episodes. She still indulges—occasionally. “I fall off now and then, but very, very seldom,” she says. “I’m too cautious now.”
“Cautious” was never a word used to describe Margaret Trudeau, who arrived on the national stage in 1971 as the ravishing 22-year-old bride of a debonair 51-year-old PM. Their unlikely union, which produced Justin, Alexandre (known as Sacha) and Michel, ended in 1977 amidst lurid headlines that the PM’s erratic wife had bolted to photograph the Rolling Stones. Margaret filled in the details in Beyond Reason, her 1979 tell-a-lot, which revealed her “long tunnel of darkness” during her marriage and her affair with an unnamed man later identified as senator Edward Kennedy. In 1982, a second memoir, Consequences, detailed dalliances with the likes of Jack Nicholson and Ryan O’Neal as she flitted between continents seeking her own fame.
Lifestyles of the rich and heedless eventually paled; Trudeau returned to Ottawa where she took a job co-hosting a local TV show. In 1984, she married real estate developer Fried Kemper, with whom she had two children, Kyle and Alicia, and retreated into domesticity. In 1998, she was back in the headlines with news she’d been committed to a psychiatric facility in Vancouver after telling a television interviewer she’d skied with princes William and Harry—a fabrication. Then events took a tragic turn: Michel was killed in an avalanche in B.C. in 1998. The next year, she and Kemper divorced. In 2000, Pierre Trudeau died.
Trudeau spiralled into deep depression before finally finding help—and new purpose. In early 1998, before her Vancouver hospitalization and Michel’s death, a 49-year-old Trudeau told Maclean’s that she believed her “usefulness was finished”: “I believed my job on Earth was to procreate and be a pleasant sexual diversion for hard-working men.’’ Today she says she loves her work criss-crossing the country, sharing her tortuous journey to wellness with packed audiences.
That message also provides impetus for Changing My Mind, Trudeau’s third memoir (out next week). In it, the recklessly naive Maggie T is gone; in her place, a wiser, more discreet Margaret recasting her life story through the lens of late-diagnosed mental illness, and offering advice in a bid to help others. Working on the book was painful, she says, even with two ghostwriters: “It took me away from my wonderful life that I had achieved in therapy and put me back into it—and not in a nice way but as a clear-headed person looking at the horror of mental illness.”
On this sunny, muggy late August afternoon, the 61-year-old Trudeau appears far beyond any horror. Her once dark curls are blond; she’s healthy and tan, boho casual in a white cotton tunic and bare feet. Trudeau’s clearly happy in this cozy, lived-in apartment overlooking Pierre Trudeau’s old art deco house, now inhabited by Sacha, a filmmaker, his wife, Zoë Bedos, and their two children. Justin, a Liberal MP, his wife, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau, and their two children are nearby. So is Alicia, a poli-sci student at Concordia. (Kyle works in tech in Ottawa.)
Trudeau delights in her role as grandma. Toys clog the hallway; a rogue Cheerio on the living room rug appears dropped by a tiny hand. Yet she remains in touch with her inner ’60s hippie. She throws the I Ching, does yoga daily and talks in terms of “magic.” She believes Pierre Trudeau directed her to this place, her “eagle’s nest,” in 2007. His spirit is an eagle now, she maintains; he was named an “eagle chief” and she a “sister of the raven” in a Haida ceremony during their marriage. The asking price was well over her budget, she confides; her lowball offer was accepted because the owner wanted her to have it. “If I’m a Haida sister of the raven, which I am, Pierre would have found me this nest to watch over everyone,” she says.
In conversation, Trudeau is animated and engaging, even through frequent 180 degree turns. One minute, she’s sharing how she dropped 10 lb. by kicking her sugar habit. “I’d find Werther’s wrappers at the foot of my bed and not remember how they got there,” she says with a laugh. Five minutes on, she’s tearfully reciting a heart-rending poem she wrote for Michel a year after he died. “Oh!” she cries out after reading it. “Heartbreaking, eh? You don’t want to live after your son dies. You just don’t. Pierre couldn’t.”
Michel’s and Pierre’s deaths remain raw: “I was so traumatized I didn’t want to live,” she says. Canadians were compassionate: “Such love. Such love. And for Michel . . . ” Her voice cracks. “And then I was left alone.” She shakes her head sadly. “And you can’t be alone.” She holed up in her Ottawa house, stopped eating and lost 30 lb. “I didn’t want to breathe. I had to remind myself to breathe,” she says, tearfully. “I felt I had to go with Michel. I couldn’t see any other way. I couldn’t have him alone.” She pauses. “Maybe I should put it another way: I didn’t want to be alone. In my grief I was so focused on the loss of my boy that I forgot that I had a full life and lots of people who love me very much who are alive and well and here.”
Her family finally staged an intervention in late 2000, calling in psychiatrist Colin Cameron. Trudeau resisted, running into the snow without a coat, then was hospitalized. Cameron, who specializes in trauma disorders, provides a far more harrowing version of events in the book’s appendix. He recalls walking into chaos, pine needles strewn everywhere. Trudeau says her memory of that time is distorted. “I thought everything was normal,” she says, before adding that it wasn’t pine needles on the floor: “It was cedar [chips]. I was deep into Aboriginal healing.”
Her recovery took time. “I finally got courage and I know that courage came from Michel and Pierre—when I realized that their deaths gave me my life,” she says. Her illness manifested itself for decades, but she was in denial, blaming and lashing out at others. In 1974, she was hospitalized in Montreal for “serious emotional stress”; she blamed the pressures of life in a fishbowl—and marital tensions. Her description of being an unhappy political wife in Beyond Reason now seems prescient: “a glass panel was gently lowered into place around me, like a patient in a mental hospital who is no longer considered able to make decisions and who cannot be exposed to a harsh light.”
It took time to find the proper mix of meds that didn’t make her fat and more depressed. Today she’s almost drug-free, and has learned to cope. “I may cry too much and I may laugh too much but I live with it.” She’s lonely sometimes living alone, but has family and “beautiful” friends to rely on. “If it gets too sad, I go to a movie or a drive or call my kids.”
By now, conversation has moved to her bedroom, where Trudeau sits on her bed smoking a cigarette to even her nerves. A print of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus adorns one wall. Over her head, there’s a portrait of her holding Justin as a baby. It’s a vivid reminder of Trudeau’s knack for attracting the spotlight as she shape-shifts with the zeitgeist—from ’60s hippie who snared a PM to ’70s Earth mother to ’80s celeb to post-millennial Mother Courage. And add to that memoirist serving up celebrity and divorce and motherhood and recovery.
Throughout the memoir, Pierre Trudeau provides a framework long after the marriage ends, though there’s no mention of his post-mortal real-estate guidance. The night he took his famous walk in the snow deciding to leave politics in 1984, Margaret and Kemper were in a hot tub conceiving Kyle. The day she married Kemper, Trudeau’s driver arrived with roses from the politician. When Trudeau died, Margaret was with their sons at his bedside. “Just because our marriage ended didn’t mean the love stopped,” she says. Asked how she forged harmonious post-divorce relationships with her husband, Trudeau says it was simple: “The only way was not to ask for any money. Period. The end.” She laughs. “Any money I ever got from Pierre Trudeau was grudgingly handed out. Everybody knows that.”
But he did leave the legacy of his name, which she has reclaimed professionally, though she’s Kemper legally. “But I think I should just be known as Margaret,” she says.
Her children have all read the book. “I told them, speak now or forever hold your peace,” she says with a laugh. Not that there’s much to offend. She treads carefully on how her illness affected their lives. And she downplays the end of her marriage to Kemper: “I was so fat and bored with Fried by the end,” she admits. Some people didn’t make the cut, she says playfully: “I have to apologize to all of the darling men in my life who got no mention.”
The suggestion that Justin’s political aspirations tamped her natural candour is waved away. “He’s so proud of me,” she says: “He says, ‘Oh Mom, you’re going to help so many people.’ ” She frets that words aren’t enough: “Here I am telling all of these people to go out and get help. But where are they finding it?” The Canadian Mental Health Association is a first stop, she says, but more support is needed.
She can’t resist a partisan jab when mentioning former senator Michael Kirby, who’s overseeing a national mental health strategy. “My dream is that when senator Kirby has the report prepared, he hands it to a compassionate government.”
Later, she mentions buying a new jacket for her book tour, one that’s Liberal red. If there’s a fall election, she says mischievously, she’ll be able to send out a subliminal signal. Just watch her. |
Skip the Marais district in Paris. Forget Bond Street in London. When it comes to shopping in Europe, head east to Kiev, where you’ll find covetable vintage and luxury outposts. Yes, that Kiev, the borscht capital of the world. Really! Take it from model Nadiia Shapoval, who scores her eye-catching duds everywhere from a secondhand bazaar—a secret trove for old-school Armani—to concept stores stocking Comme des Garçons and born-and-bred Ukrainian designers alike. Here, Shapoval’s guide to the secretly fashionable city.
Atelier 1
10 Boulevard Shevchenko
“If you are looking for unique pieces from Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, or Issey Miyake, you definitely should go to Atelier 1. It is the first concept store in Ukraine, with a 10-year history. It’s located in the heart of the city, in a basement of an old building with a cool original design and atmosphere. Pro tip: Ask the salesperson to show you vintage pieces—half of the older collections are not shown.”
Lesnoy Flea Market
Brovary Street
“Located at Lesna, the last metro stop, Lesnoy Flea Market is one of the biggest flea markets in Europe. It’s mostly occupied by youngsters who are looking for everything from original cowboy boots to navy bombers. If you are lucky, you’ll definitely find vintage Armani or Chanel pieces. The range of vintage fur and leather can make you a street style star during Fashion Weeks.”
Corner Concept Store
19 Zhukovskogo Street, 4th floor
“If you want to shop Ukrainian fashion, go to the Corner. This boutique has a big selection of local fashion designers. It’s a great place to pick up presents for friends, and it’s located downtown in the Vozdvizhenka district.”
Expo Center’s Antique Market
Metro Livoberezhna
“It is active only 12 times a year, the last Saturday of each month. It’s enormous and full of antiques. If you are looking for a real traditional Ukrainian vyshyvanka or carpets from the 19th century, this is the right place. There are also plenty of Soviet items that can add a lot of fun to your apartment.”
Hello Glasses
9-19 Vozdvizhenka Street
“Located just next to Corner Concept, this is the perfect place to buy glasses. Mykita glasses are of the same caliber as Miu Miu and Prada. In the basement, there is Archive, a shop with a perfumery that carries a wide range of niche scents.”
Prototype
59 Zhilyanskaya Street
“This is a concept store with men’s avant-garde fashion. It has original designs and a strong brand portfolio, which includes Guidi and Haider Ackermann.”
Sanahunt
8/16 Hrushevsky Street
“Sanahunt is the main luxury fashion store in Ukraine. It’s like our Saks, with all of the same European labels, such as Fendi, Lanvin, Balmain, and Givenchy.”
Asthik
7a Lesi Ukrainki Boulevard
“This is a concept shop with contemporary brands and Ukrainian designers. There is a great selection.” |
Laser cleaning of the Alma Mater is under way in the Conservation of Sculpture and Objects Studio at Forest Park, Ill., by staff member Robert Zarycki, who works around the seal located on the back side of the throne. Photo by Mike Helenthal Delete Edit embedded media in the Files Tab and re-insert as needed.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Because deterioration to the Alma Mater sculpture is more extensive than an initial inspection of the exterior indicated, the restoration of the 5-ton bronze statue is going to cost more and take longer.
The 83-year-old campus landmark, which had been at the southeast corner of Green and Wright streets in Urbana, was removed Aug. 7, 2012, and taken to the Conservation of Sculpture and Objects Studio in Forest Park, Ill., to repair years of water damage and corrosion that affected the appearance and structural integrity of the sculpture.
Once experts were able to closely inspect the interior of the 13-foot tall artwork by U. of I. alumnus and artist Lorado Taft, they determined the 30 sections that make up the sculpture had oxidized and corroded. The interior of each piece will be cleaned, repaired, and treated in the same way as the exterior. Lasers are being used to remove the oxidation, returning it to its original bronze color, and then the metal will be sealed with a wax compound, which will be reapplied periodically.
A close-up view of Robert Zarycki using a laser tool to remove years of oxidation damage on the statue. Photo by Mike Helenthal Delete Edit embedded media in the Files Tab and re-insert as needed.
The original cost of the project was $99,962. The new work is expected to bring the total cost to no more than $360,000. The project is being paid for with gifts from alumni and friends to the Chancellor's Fund.
The sculpture originally was scheduled to be returned to campus by May 4, 2013, in time for Commencement and photo opportunities for graduates, friends and families. The sculpture now is slated to be back in place on campus during the 2014 academic year.
Because the sculpture is traditionally the centerpiece of graduation ceremonies each year, the university has come up with several activities that will offer graduating seniors the opportunity to still have the "Alma experience" despite the currently vacant pedestal.
Robin Kaler, the associate chancellor for public affairs, said the university's School of Art and Design is working to create several replicas of the sculpture, which will be placed around campus for unique photo opportunities.
"Each replica will have a little different personality," she said. "We'll post a map of the locations on the Commencement website so students can easily find them and get pictures with one or all of them."
She said there also are plans to place orange and blue bunting in front of Foellinger Auditorium and to add landscaping at the Hallene Gateway to provide graduation photo opportunities in the absence of the Alma Mater statue. |
You are invited to attend:
2-Day Basic and Advanced
SAP VC Modeling Workshops
and IPC Training
after the 2011 North American CWG Conference
Thursday, Oct 6, 2011 thru Friday, Oct 7, 2011 4:00 PM
Basic VC Modeling Workshop
This training is oriented toward the beginner and can be a great way to launch Variant Configurator Training for new people or it can simply be a refresher course for you or introduce your management to the VC. eSpline developed the Basic VC Modeling workshop for a condensed 2 days following the 2011 North American CWG Conference at Marco Island, FL, USA October 6 & 7, 2011. Cost is $500 USD per student for the 2-Day workshop . Registration closes after 10 students, so reserve your space, today.
eSpline delivered a similar two day training workshop following the CWG North American conference at Marco Island in October 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. These take the form of a "crash-course in VC" and are quite intense, including hands-on creation of a variant configuration model from scratch and focusing on generally accepted best practices (use of declarative logic through constraints and variant tables).
These workshops are oriented to the new or novice VC Modeler or someone trying to refresh their skills and have a focused workshop from trainers that have worked on real customer projects.
Payment will be part of your Hilton Hotel portfolio/invoice and entered as a separate line item.
Training curriculum includes the following:
Introduction to master data required to support Variant Configuration
Hands-on creation of a simple variant configuration model from scratch
Best practices in variant table-based reasoning and constraints
Time-saving tools, tips an techniques for mass VC data entry
Advanced VC Modeling Workshop
eSpline developed the Advanced VC Modeling workshop for a condensed 2 days following the 2011 North American CWG Conference at Marco Island, FL, USA October 6 & 7, 2011. Cost is $500 USD per student for the 2-Day workshop . This is a natural follow-on to eSpline's Basic VC Workshop or to the SAP VC training and is complementary to both. It takes the form of examining multiple and using "Advanced VC functions" and is intense, including hands-on creation of a variant configuration model from scratch and focuses on generally accepted best practices.
Payment will be part of your Hilton Hotel portfolio/invoice and entered as a separate line item.
Training curriculum includes but not limited to the following:
1. User Interface Control with Tabs & SCREEN_DEP
2. ALE
3. Performance
4. Variant Costing
5. Basic Variant Functions
6. A dvanced Variant Functions
7. Advanced Variant Tables
8. Domain Restriction Options
9. Updating Sales Order Values with VCSD_Update
10. VC Production Planning Strategies
11. Order BOM
12. ECM
13. Mass Data Load Options
14. VC with Project Systems
IPC Technical Workshop
This IPC training workshop is patterned after our Introductory Technical Workshop and is oriented toward the intermediate user and is a great way to launch IPC Training for new people. Cost is $500 USD per student for the two day workshop.
So, it you only wish to spend (Thursday and Friday) with us and then you can spend time on the weekend visiting historic Vienna with your family. The IPC 5.0 Training Curriculum will provide you with the offering.
This is also for customers who are currently on IPC 4.0 to see what differences 5.0 brings... Registration closes after 10 students, so reserve your space, today. Reserving costs you nothing, just reserves a slot for you to attend.
Payment will be part of your Hilton Hotel portfolio/invoice and entered as a separate line item.
SAP IPC 5.0 Technical Training offered by eSpline
Explanation of what is Internet Pricing & Configurator [IPC 5.0] and in what scenarios is it used. There will be a focused, hands-on use of IPC including creation and use of the knowledge bases pricing and testing. This workshop includes an introduction to best VC modeling practices and discussions of IPC/AP vs. VC differences.
Training curriculum includes but not limited to the following: |
Brad Friedman Byon 11/19/2010, 4:45pm PT
"Our campaign had an undeniable, unmistakable message," he told his supporters during his victory speech on Election Night, "and that message could be summed up in three words, three words which were on every one of our 4 billion highway signs: 'stop voter fraud.'"
"And now that clear message becomes transformed into a clear mandate," Kansas' Secretary of State-elect Kris Kobach (R) told his fans that night, promising "significant reforms" to the state's election system. Answered with cheers in the Topeka ballroom Kobach promised: "We are gonna have Photo ID at the polls."
As he stated himself, Kobach's campaign was almost entirely built on the promise of putting a stop to the state's out-of-control (and also, non-existent, but ssshhh, don't tell anybody) "voter fraud" epidemic. But now that the election's over, he's having trouble identifying any actual instances of the horrible scourge he helped trick Republican voters into believing actually existed.
Talking Points Memo, who has done a bang-up job of keeping tabs on Kobach's duplicity over the past year, caught up with the SoS-elect yesterday after he spoke on a "civil rights" panel at the Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention and asked him how the hunt is going.
He, um, had trouble actually citing any evidence of voter fraud since, as of now, he "hadn't heard of any." "There have been a few cases where I've heard allegations of voter fraud," he says, "but we're just a few weeks out from the election."
No doubt, the evidence will come rolling in soon. The only question is will it come in before or after Kobach and his anti-democracy GOP cronies enact disenfranchising Photo ID restrictions at the polling place, as promised, despite the fact that such laws have been shown time and again to keep millions of legal minority, elderly, and student (read: Democratic-leaning) voters from being able to cast their ballots.
Here's TPM's short video interview with Kobach in which --- just in case you hadn't any doubt about the bankruptcy of his claims --- he also alludes to the long-discredited Rightwing scam-artist/"voter fraud" fraudster John Fund, whose book on "voter fraud" has, itself, been debunked as a fraud over and again...
For the record, Media Matters' Political Correction site has compiled a page indexing many of Kobach's on-the-record, if usually substance-free, claims about "thousands of...fraudulent voters" in the state helping to make the epidemic of "voter fraud" into "the civil rights issue of our time." How's that for Orwellian? Kobach's crusade to deny voters their civil rights through the voter suppression of draconian and unnecessary polling place Photo ID restrictions is, according to Kobach, a matter of "civil rights."
Also, he notes, up is down and black is white.
The Political Correction page absolutely dismantles all of Kobach's claims and his intended remedies for his imaginery epidemic, and even cites, among much other evidence, the fact that, as of July 2010, "according to the [Kansas Sec. of State's] election division, there have been 20 claims of voter fraud --- in the past 10 years," out of some 5 million votes cast in the state since 2000. Also, a spokesperson for former 16-year Republican Sec. of State Ron Thornburgh has stated that "voter fraud is very minimal" and "not widespread at all," while the current Sec. of State Chris Biggs, a Democrat, is on record explaining that "Voter fraud in this state is not a major problem."
Kobach, of course, also believes ACORN is, or was, stealing elections, despite the lack of any evidence that any voter ever improperly registered by one of the organization's workers has ever cast even one illegal vote in any election. That, also despite the fact that it is ACORN themselves who expose such workers when they've been defrauded by them, before seeking prosecution of such individuals.
But what do you expect from a guy who thinks Sen. Al Franken stole the election in Minnesota in 2008, despite the victory coming by way of the most painstaking, detailed, open, transparent, and multi-partisan hand count of paper ballots ever carried out in this country?
Nonetheless, like clockwork every two years, the GOP dupes, hoaxed in full by Republican scoundrels like Fund, Kobach and Fox "News," come back to breathlessly declare the massive epidemic of "DEMOCRATIC VOTER FRAUD!!!" that is "destroying the fabric of democracy" (as Sen. John McCain declared in shameful desperation during his failed 2008 Presidential Election bid), only to disappear shortly after Election Day, with evidence of no such epidemic at all.
See ya in two years, "voter fraud" fighters! And, until then, if you're really concerned about the far more serious problem of election fraud --- wherein a single insider like, say, KS' new Secretary of State Kris Kobach, can defraud an entire election, with little or no possibility of detection, via unverifiable e-voting systems, computer tabulators, or even voter suppression through polling place Photo ID restrictions --- let us know. We'll be here 24/7/365, not just in the days and weeks before an election, working to do something about it, trying to protect everyone's votes. If you actually give a damn about democracy, we'll welcome your support, no matter which party you may represent.
Oh, and good luck, voters of Kansas. You're gonna need it now more than ever.
* * *
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The greatest bowler – arguably – in cricket’s long history was an American. Let that sink in for a moment.
Here’s another fact: cricket was America’s first modern team sport.
These may be strange words to write; even stranger to read them. The United States of America, as recently as the turn of the last century, possessed cricketing talent on par with England, Australia, and other cricket nations.
And then it all ended.
On the eve of the Cricket World Cup final on Saturday, it’s worth exploring just how cricket was all but extinguished in America – and if there’s any route back for the sport in a country where once it reigned supreme.
Cricket’s American roots run deep and gnarled through the soil of American history. In fact, it predates the establishment of the United States by nearly a century, if not more. The first evidence of its existence comes from the secret diaries kept by Virginia planter William Byrd III. Byrd, an infamous bon vivant, was famous for establishing the first major horse race in the New World; something he arranged with other planters he knew. His involvement in American cricket is less well-known, but no less important, because it places it in the historical record.
That said: the cricket played by Byrd and his contemporaries wasn’t cricket as we now know it. It was deeply informal, played four-a-side and – because we’re talking about Byrd, in particular, and Virginia’s Cavalier aristocracy, in general – played for wagers. As far as we know, the only spectators were the friends and families of the players.
That quickly began changing, as cricket took hold across all the British colonies. The New York Weekly Gazette and Post Boy from 29 April 1751 has a report of a match played between New Yorkers and Englishmen. That match report tells us – over 250 years later – that the game was played in line with the “London method”; one supposes that this refers to the earliest written Laws of Cricket, which were first set down in London in 1744.
By the time the American Revolution began, there were already specific cricket clubs in operation – mostly in places like New York and Philadelphia, the leading cities of colonial America, though Richmond, Virginia had one as well. We also know that an American regional variant, wicket, was widely played. In his Military Journal, Ewing mentions that George Washington himself “playd a game at ‘wicket’ with a number of Gent of the Arty” while the Continental Army bivouacked at Valley Forge.
American cricket puttered along. It wasn’t until 1839, when the St George’s Cricket Club in New York City was established, that cricket in America entered a recognizable, “modern” phase. Four years later, the Union Club was established in Philadelphia. Within a decade, around 20 clubs were fielding teams; by the time of the Civil War, historical records show that cricket was played in around 20 states, in towns and cities as divergent as Baltimore, Savannah, Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and even San Francisco, all the way in the far west of America.
In the midst of all that, the first international cricket match was played. On 24 and 26 September 1844, in what is now land occupied by the New York University Medical Center at 31st Street and First Avenue, but was then called Bloomingdale Park, the United States squared off against an all-Canada team. The origins of this match laid in an abortive trip to Toronto by the St George’s Cricket Club; they were meant to play the Toronto Cricket Club, but when the Americans arrived, their opponents had no idea they were supposed to play them.
A scratch game was played; the teams parted in goodwill, enough that a return trip was immediately planned. As events proceeded apace, the match evolved from a club match into a true international contest. American players from clubs in Washington, DC, Boston, and New York City – as well as Philadelphia – were recruited to play; likewise for the Canadians, who attempted to craft a truly national squad.
Canada won, by 23 runs. There were between 10,000 and 20,000 spectators and around $120,000 worth of bets were place – a sum worth around $3.92m in today’s dollars. It was the first international sporting event of any kind, preceding the first international soccer game by nearly 30 years. It continues, intermittently, to this day; the two countries compete for the KA Auty Cup, and the tournament has expanded from the original two-day test match to include a 50-over match and two Twenty20 matches.
Cricket was thriving, but why cricket? An excerpt from the 2 July 1859 edition of the New York Clipper provides a clue, quoting a player from Philadelphia:
Look at the cricketers in their loose fitting, comfortable uniforms, their faces beaming with, good humour and ruddy health, engendered by exercise. Note the eager anxiety of the fielders, their mortification at an overthrow, or a chance for a catch not taken advantage of; see the high ascending ball, and hear the joyous shout of the triumph, as some unfortunate batsman gets permission to retire to the tent, and if you do not leave the ground impressed with the beauty and the utility of the game, why then-you were not cut out for a cricketer.
It was Philadelphia that became the center of American cricket. Why there, and not New York, for instance? That’s a complex question to answer, but in essence, it boils down to the fact that it was in Philadelphia where both the English desire to evangelize the sport and American receptiveness to it met as one. It was at Haverford College, located in a Philadelphia suburb, that the first cricket club exclusively created for Americans was established in 1833. That club was short-lived, but it led to the creation of the aforementioned Union Cricket Club in 1843, the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1854, and the creation of the Germantown and Young America clubs the following year.
That matters, because it meant that the sport was picked up by both immigrants and Americans across multiple levels of society. It also meant that as clubs were created – and just as quickly, vanished – the people who played and followed the sport remained. That situation differed from those in places like New York City, and interestingly, Newark, New Jersey. In New York, British expatriates weren’t keen in attracting Americans, preferring to keep the sport to themselves; in Newark, while English immigrants were happy to play cricket with Americans, the city’s monied class wasn’t especially eager to pick up what they considered a lower-to-middle-class sport.
Even as cricket flourished in Philadelphia, the seeds of its destruction were sown. Up until the Civil War, baseball was considered a children’s game. But as the war raged, and armies demanded recreation, baseball neatly fit the bill. In contrast to cricket, which demanded carefully maintained fields and where matches could last for days, baseball could be played in a simple clearing, and quickly, at that. It quickly shed its reputation as a children’s game, and cricketers quickly picked up the sport while serving in combat.
That continued after the war. Baseball showed no compunction in paying its players, or in encouraging its mass appeal. Cricket club after cricket club crossed over to baseball, leaving cricket behind. It wasn’t just the clubs, either. Cricket players and club administrators abandoned the sport for baseball. The first recognized professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, were instrumental in this. They recruited Harry Wright, a skilled young bowler from St George’s Club to both manage and play for them.
Wright brought all the skills, tactics, and techniques he’d learned as a cricketer to his new team. Playing centerfield, Wright led the 1869 Red Stockings to the only perfect season in baseball history; going 65-0, they were the first team to play on both the East and West Coasts. That team essentially nationalized the sport of baseball, in effect, turning it into “the national pastime”.
Meanwhile, cricket, whether in Philadelphia or elsewhere, was becoming more and more insular, retreating into gentlemanly amateurism. The creation of the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club in 1872 was emblematic of this. The club, which is still in operation, was meant to be based on “the broadest and most liberal interpretation of the terms ‘gentlemen’ and amateur.”. In addition to the creation of clubs like Staten Island, cricket began to be picked up by East Coast colleges and universities outside of Philadelphia, like Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell.
The apex of amateur cricket came in 1897, when the Philadelphian cricket team toured England. This team featured the three greatest American cricket players ever: George Patterson, John Lester, and John Barton King. Although the tour was ambitious, and strictly first-class, the Philadelphians didn’t expect to win many matches, if any. In their tour, the Philadelphians wouldn’t just face off against the top county cricket teams in England, an imposing task by itself; they were also taking on the Marylebone Cricket Club, and the Oxford and Cambridge University teams.
At first, the Americans had a rough go of it. That changed on 17 June, when the Philadelphians played the full Sussex County team in Brighton. John Barton King unleashed the full fury of his majestic talents. In the first innings, he combined with John Lester for a fourth-wicket stand of 107 runs. King then bowled, taking seven wickets for 13 runs as the Philadelphians dismissed Sussex for 46 in less than an hour. King wasn’t done yet; in the second innings, he took took six wickets for 102 runs, and led his team to an eight-wicket victory.
King’s feats were replicated in a second tour by the Philadelphians in 1903. During that tour, the Philadelphians inflicted the worst defeat ever by an American cricket team over an English county team, defeating Gloucestershire by an innnings and 26 runs. King’s efforts on the field led luminaries like Sir Pelham Warner to describe him as “one of the finest bowlers of all time”. Exploits like that brought the inevitable comparisons by English cricket observers to Australian teams, leading American cricket fans to think that the United States was poised to explode onto cricket’s main stage.
It never happened.
That amateur insularity artificially capped interest in the sport, even in Philadelphia, where its decline was scarcely imaginable. Amateur cricket clubs were never just limited to cricket; they often featured sports like tennis and golf, and as they evolved into what we now recognize as country clubs, they left cricket behind. As they did so, the number of matches began to drop drastically, and with it, cricket-specific clubs began disbanding.
The last first-class cricket match in Philadelphia was played in 1913. The Belmont Cricket Club, where John Barton King had first made his mark, sold its grounds and officially disbanded in 1914. That upheaval and decline took its toll in the Philadelphians’ third and final tour of England, in 1908. The only highlight of the tour was, once more, King’s fantastical performance as a bowler; he set the season bowling record at 11.01. That record stood for 50 years, until Derbyshire’s Les Jackson edged it by posting an average of 10.99.
An even more telling blow was the creation of the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 as the governing body for world cricket. That organization – because it was meant for cricketing nations within the British Empire – left the United States frozen out of world cricket, while countries like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa could continue playing.
Like that, American cricket was snuffed out.
Despite fitful starts, it has yet to really recover. In rich irony, the United States of America Cricket Association was admitted to the International Cricket Council as an associate member in 1965. However, it remains a shambolic organization, shackled by lack of funds and ineffective leadership. As a result, it’s been repeatedly suspended by the ICC. Its latest efforts at rehabilitation are being over seen by the West Indies Cricket Board.
Even if it successfully does so, the sport faces daunting challenges in its adoption. There are but a few purpose-built cricket grounds in the United States – in places as random as Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Lauderhill, Florida. Lauderhill, in fact, is home to the only ICC-certified cricket stadium in the country.
Yet, in all that, there are dim signs of life. The Staten Island Cricket Club continues playing; moreover, in 2010, the United States Youth Cricket Association was launched, with the ultimate aim of broadening cricket’s appeal beyond expatriates and their families. The Compton Cricket Club – founded by a homeless rights activist and a Hollywood movie producer – continues its appeal to inner city residents in Los Angeles, and tours cricketing nations regularly; it was the first American cricket club to tour Australia.
Finally, American sports juggernaut ESPN is investing heavily in cricket. They broadcast the final of the 2014 ICC World Twenty20 competition, but their coverage has extended to the Indian Premier League, English County Championship matches, and international test cricket on its online broadcasting platform, ESPN3. And this year, they’ve made live coverage of the Cricket World Cup available to anyone through purchase of a package containing all the matches.
All that means that American cricket might yet enjoy a third renaissance; that the game’s ancient American roots might yet bear flower once more, as they did in Virginia, Valley Forge, and Philadelphia. And in due time, John Barton King might yet be surpassed by another, greater American. |
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STEVEN PIENAAR has spoken of his nine-year Everton career coming to an end, but not in the way he had envisaged.
The South African midfielder has only started two matches all season – the last at Carlisle in January - and says it is “unreasonable” to have to wait until the end of the season to discover whether his contract will be extended.
Pienaar, 34, spoke to kick-off.com and said: “Waiting until the end of the season to hear whether or not Everton wish to extend my contract is unreasonable, I feel. It’s not the way I envisaged ending my career at a club that has been such a major part of my life.
“My representatives have tried a number of times, unsuccessfully, to get hold of the club to talk about my future and get some indication, so I remain in the dark.
“Obviously I need to keep my options open because I would still like to keep playing for another couple of seasons at least.
“I have always been up for a challenge and if the environment is right then I would love to give something new a go.
“I am really just looking for game-time at this stage of my career so in my current situation I wouldn’t mind dropping down to the Championship to help a club there until the end of the season. That would be a great challenge.
“I still feel like I have got a lot to offer and at this stage of my career, what’s most important for me is playing games.”
Pienaar has made 228 Everton appearances in two separate spells at the club.
He returned to the starting line up after a long injury absence, against Dagenham in January.
Four successive appearances from the subs bench were followed by that start at Carlisle, then after three unused substitute appearances he hasn’t figured in the squad at all.
Pienaar added: “I’m 100 percent fit and felt in good form when I played some games in January.
“I haven’t been in the squad for the last six weeks, I don’t know why, and obviously this is a concern for me. But that is the coach’s decision and I must respect that.” |
The Atlanta Falcons only have three defensive tackles, which is apparently more than enough. We saw a ton of waiver claims and movement around the league, but none of it happened with Atlanta.
In total, 44 players were claimed off of waivers today. A busy NFL weekend. — Field Yates (@FieldYates) September 3, 2017
There’s not much to say here. The Falcons still have to setup their practice squad, and that news should start coming in today. The team was either blocked by other teams with higher priority, or saw no one they thought would improve the team.
Two former Falcons got picked up and added to some active rosters. In fact, it was two players we thought might make the roster.
Odom looked really impressive and was given a ton of snaps this preseason. I had him penciled into the final 53.
#Browns claimed 5 players. WR Reggie Davis from #Falcons, DB Michael Jordan from #Rams, DL T.Y. McGill, WR Kasen Williams, QB Josh Woodrum. — Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) September 3, 2017
Reggie Davis was raw, but had way more upside than WR6 Nick Williams. It felt like either Davis or Hall could have beat out Williams. Neither did. |
This past week, Emily Wax-Thibodeux's excellent essay, "Why I don't breastfeed, if you must know" went viral. As it should have. It's a cutting, heartfelt expose of just how ridiculous the pressure to breastfeed has become, made all the more powerful by the author's recounting of her double mastectomy.
Unfortunately, even breast cancer didn't stop the parenting police.
"95% of the time people don't breastfeed for reasons other than terminal illness. This is a red herring argument. She shouldn't feel bad for having a legitimate reason for not breastfeeding and if she does then its really a personal problem [sic]," said one comment on a Today.com Facebook thread.
"We all understand should and can are different. A mother who cannot breast feed is different than a mother who can but chooses not to...Breast milk is better for an infant than formula, I don't think there is a doctor, nurse or midwife who would say that formula is better...Shame people would criticize this mother who CANNOT breastfeed like it was her choice [sic]," wrote another (who happened to be male).
And then there was the reader who insisted that,
"(t)here is absolutely zero systematic or general judgment against infant formula or bottle feeding. It is the absolute expected norm by the majority of adults and parents in our culture. No one cares if you feed your baby infant formula or use a bottle...Most children start on the breast. Most children are weaned. Most children are given formula and fed with bottles. There is no public backlash against infant formula or bottle feeding. But here's an article that pretends 'infant formula shaming' is some actual thing. No. It isn't. Not in the real world of critical thought and evidence. The data doesn't support this notion at all."
(To this last comment, I submit this simple argument: if there were indeed no "infant formula shaming," my inbox wouldn't be inundated daily with desperate, painfully raw emails from mothers who've questioned their ability or "right" to parent due to their lack of lactation. Breastfeeding mothers get their fair share of public and private shame, there's no question; but just because one group is downtrodden by a certain segment of society doesn't mean that a completely separate segment of society is down-treading on another. There's more than enough mom-shaming to go around, unfortunately.)
In the community of formula-feeding parents I work for, there was tremendous support for Wax-Gibodeux's piece, but an underlying concern about the title -- because why must we know why she isn't breastfeeding? Is shaming more acceptable for some mothers than others? What is the litmus test that rewards us with a breastfeeding "pass"? If a double mastectomy doesn't quite cut it, I don't know what will.
So maybe we should stop giving reasons altogether.
For those who fear formula as a product, no reason in the world is sufficient for a baby to be given anything other human milk. It doesn't matter if the baby has to be wet nursed by someone with an unknown medical history -- that is still better than formula.
For those who like to shame mothers -- because that's what it really is about, enjoying the act of shaming, of making yourself feel superior, or feel better about your choices by questioning those of others -- no reason in the world will make a mother above reproach. She could always have done more -- after all, breastfeeding is 90 percent determination and only 10 percent milk production, as a recent meme proudly stated. Best case scenario, she might get pity -- but pity carries its own heavy scent, similar to the sour stench of shame.
Giving a reason for why you didn't breastfeed is pointless.
That doesn't mean telling your story isn't important, because our narratives matter; they help those floundering in their own messy journeys make sense of what's happening and find community with those who've been there. But there's a difference between telling your story and owning it, and telling it to defend yourself. One gives you power, the other takes it away.
We are at a turning point, I hope. Jessica Martin-Weber, creator of The Leaky Boob website, has taken a stand against romanticizing the reality of breastfeeding, and is helping those in the breastfeeding community feel comfortable with bottle (and formula) use. When one of the leading voices in breastfeeding advocacy speaks out against a culture of fear and rigidity, that means something. Wax-Thibodeux's piece has brought many powerful voices out of the woodwork, allowing women who've swallowed their shame to regurgitate it, and make the uninitiated understand just how sour it tastes.
Now is the time to draw a line in the sand. This conversation has moved beyond breastfeeding and formula feeding and whether one party is more marginalized than the other, or how superior one product is nutritionally to the other. We've been there, done that, and nothing has really changed. We're all still hurting. We're all still feeling unsupported, unseen, and resentful, like a 3-year-old with a colicky new sibling. Now, we need to stand up, collectively, and say it doesn't matter why I am feeding the way I am. It is not up to anyone else to deem my reason appropriate or "understandable." I'm going to stand up for anyone who has felt shamed about how she's feeding, instead of just people who've had identical experiences to me, or those who I feel tried hard enough.
A breastfeeding advocate shouldn't be afraid to admit she questions aspects of the WHO Code. A breast cancer survivor shouldn't have to have awkward conversations about why she's bottle feeding. A woman who chooses not to breastfeed for her own personal reasons should not have to lay those reasons out in front of a jury of her peers. |
DETROIT -- Artists, entrepreneurs and small business owners can apply to set up shop in a seasonal market to be set up in Downtown Detroit this winter.
The newly-created Downtown Detroit Markets, driven by Quicken Loans and its affiliated companies, aims to encourage entrepreneurship and diversify retail offerings downtown.
Indoor and outdoor booths will be set up along Woodward Avenue, Capitol Park and Cadillac Square from Nov. 17 through Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018 and rented for between $500 and $1,000.
"Detroit is like no other city; our downtown is a strong mix of national retailers and local businesses. Downtown Detroit Markets give local artists, makers and small businesses an unmatched opportunity to expose their brand to millions of shoppers in a dynamic retail environment," said James Chapman, director of entrepreneurship for Quicken Loans, in a news release.
"The entrepreneurial scene in Detroit is at an exciting inflection point. One of our top priorities is to create a positive, motivational and energy-filled environment that fosters the creation and growth of numerous entrepreneurial startups and small businesses that will thrive and play a major part in the growth of Detroit."
Applications are open through Monday, Oct. 23 online.
"We are looking to assemble a strong mix of retailers, food and beverage vendors for the Downtown Detroit Markets. We will have a little bit of everything, from street activations to live entertainment and family attractions. This will be more than shopping. It will be an experience where there will be a reason for everyone to come downtown," said Francesca George, director of tenant relations at Bedrock, in a news release. |
Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Kentucky) attack ad. YouTube Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) is taking his criticism of GOP presidential rival Donald Trump to the next level.
Paul's campaign released an online attack ad against Trump on Wednesday that blasts him for past statements praising Democrats and left-leaning policies.
"In many cases I probably identify more as a Democrat," Trump says in a clip from a 2004 interview featured in Paul's ad. "I've been around for a long time and it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans."
In another part of the ad, Trump declares that now-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is a "terrific woman."
"I'm a little biased because I've known her for years. I live in New York, she lives in New York, and I've known her and her husband for years. And I really like them both a lot," Trump says in the clip.
Paul's campaign said the ad is online-only and "will run through the weekend in Iowa and New Hampshire."
Asked about the ad during CNN interview later in the day, Trump defended his record.
He insisted he needed to praise — and give contributions to — Democrats like Clinton in order to win government favors. Trump suggested, however, that the political system is corrupt and businessmen like him shouldn't be able to influence politicians that way.
"If you look at Hillary Clinton, I contributed to everybody. I was a businessman — a world-class businessman. I built a net worth of much more than $10 billion," he said. "Everybody understands that. ... I don't think it's a great thing for the United States. I'm not sure that the system should work that way. But as a businessman, I did what other businessmen did and I contributed to everybody. Everybody liked me."
Trump dismissed Paul's other attacks as "old stuff" and then trashed his opponent.
"You look at a guy like Rand Paul: He's failing in the polls, he's weak on the military — he's pathetic on military," he said, offering a backhanded compliment to Paul's work as an ophthalmologist. "I actually think he's a far better doctor than he is a senator."
He also pointed to last week's indictment against pro-Paul political operatives working for a super PAC supporting his campaign. The indictment was related to their 2012 work on the campaign of Paul's father, Ron.
"Rand's campaign is failing. Hasn't his whole team been indicted?" Trump asked. "So he's a mess — there's no question about it."
View Paul's ad below: |
Nowadays, digital products must be able to exist across any and all devices, screen sizes, and mediums at the same time:
So why the hell are we still designing our products by “page” or by screen?!
Instead, we should be creating beautiful and easy access to content, regardless of device, screen size or context.
By keeping this in mind and by being inspired by Modular Design, Brad Frost formulated the method of Atomic Design, in which everything begins with the smallest element of the interface: the atom. This metaphor allows us to understand what we are creating and especially how we are going to create it.
I was convinced by this approach which finally allowed us to think about the part and the whole at the same time, have a global vision of a product or a brand, and also get closer to the way developers are working.
So I thought to myself:
“Of course, that’s it! We need to work like this!”
But honestly, I didn’t have a clue about how to do this…
It took me several months and some concrete projects before gaining an idea of what “designing in atomic” really meant and what that was going to change in my everyday life as a designer.
In this article, I’ll go over a bit of what I’ve learned and what to keep in mind when designing systems of components with Atomic Design.
For what kind of project ?
For me, every project, big or small can be designed with atomic in mind.
It gathers teams around a shared vision. The components are easy to reuse, edit and combine together so that the evolutions of the product will be simpler. And as for smaller projects… Well, every small project could one day become a big project, no?
I also think that, contrary to popular belief, the Atomic Design methodology is not just for web projects … Quite the opposite in fact! I was able to introduce Atomic Design into a personal project (an iOS app for cleaning your address book named TouchUp) and the developer with whom I worked really appreciated this approach. It saved us a lot of time when we wanted to quickly develop and iterate the product.
And for those who wonder if it’s possible to build a system of components while still remaining creative, I recommend reading this article: “Atomic Design & creativity”
How is this different than before?
People often ask me: “But how is this different than the way we worked before?”
I see Atomic Design as a slightly different approach to interface design but one which can make a great impact in the end.
The part shapes the whole and the whole shapes the part
Until recently, we designed all the screens of a product, and then we cut it into small components to make specifications or UI Kits:
One of the problem was that the components created in this way were not generic and they weren’t dependent on each other. The reuse of components was thus very limited: our design system was restrictive.
Today, the idea of Atomic Design is to begin with common raw material (atoms) with which we can build the rest of the project:
We have thus not only an “air de famille” between all the screens, but also a system which offers infinite design possibilities!
Everything start with brand identity
Now you might be wondering:
“Where do we begin if we want to design in an atomic way?”
To which I answer, rather logically: with atoms ;)
Thus the first thing which we are going to do is to create a unique visual language for our product that will be our starting point. This is what is going to define our atoms, our raw material and it is obviously very close from the brand identity.
This visual language must be strong, easy to build upon, and free itself from the medium on which it is going to be displayed; it has to be able to work everywhere!
The Gretel agency, for example, made some remarkable work on the Netflix identity:
And thanks to a strong identity, we feel that we have all the material to release our first atoms: colors, typographic choices, forms, shadows, spaces, rhythms, animations principles…
It is thus essential to spend time designing this identity, thinking about what makes the difference, the uniqueness of a brand or a product.
Let’s continue with the components
Now that we have this raw material (still very abstract for the moment), we can now create our first components according to the objectives of the product and the initial user flow which we’ll have already identified.
Begin with key features
What really frightens designers who begin creating a system of components is to have to make components which are connected to nothing … Obviously, we aren’t going to create a shopping basket component if there is no purchase element in our product! That wouldn’t make any sense!
The first components are going to be closely linked to the product or the brand objectives.
And once more, to get rid of this notion of “page”, I insist on the fact that we are going to focus on features or user flow, not screens…
We are going to focus on the action which we want our user to do and on the components that are needed to accomplish this action. The number of screens will then vary, according to the context: maybe we’ll need half of the screen on desktop to display this component versus 3 consecutive screens on smartphone…
Enrich the system
Next, in order to enrich the system, we are going to make round trips between the already existing components and new features:
The first components will help to create the first screens, and the first screens will help to create new components in the system or to change the existing ones.
Think generic
When we design with atomic, we always have to keep in mind that the same component is going to be declined and reused in very different contexts.
We are thus going to make a real distinction between the structure of an element and its contents.
For example, if I create a specific component that is a “contacts list,” I’m very quickly going to transform it into a generic component that will simply be a “list” item.
And I am then going to think about some possible variations of this component: What if I add or remove an element? And if the text runs onto 2 lines? What will be the responsive behavior of this component?
Having anticipated these variations is going to allow me then to use this component to create other ones:
This work is necessary if we want our system to be both reusable and rich at the same time.
Think fluid
We still tend to think of responsive design as a reorganization of blocks on specific breakpoints.
Yet it’s the components themselves which have to have their own breakpoints and their own fluid behavior.
And thanks to software like Sketch, we can finally test the various responsive behavior of our components and define what we want to be fluid or what has to remain fixed:
We can also imagine that a component can be totally different in a context or in another.
For example, a button with round corner on desktop may become a simple circle with an icon on a smartwatch.
The part and the whole
One of the really interesting things building a system of components with Atomic Design is that we are conscious of creating a set of elements that depend on each other.
We then constantly zoom-in and zoom-out of our work. We are going to spend time on a detail, a micro-interaction, or the refining of a component, before we take a step back to verify what it looks like in context, before taking yet another step back to see what that makes as a whole.
This is the way we’ll refine the brand identity, develop components and verify that the system works.
Mutualize the work
All of our components are linked to our atoms. And as everything is connected, we are going to be able to easily make modifications on a part of the system and verify the repercussion on the rest of the system!
We’re so lucky today as designers: we finally have tools which are adapted to create lively and evolving systems.
Of course, there are programs like Sketch or Figma which allow us to create shared styles and to mutualize the similar components but I’m sure that we are going to see a lot more in the next few years.
We can at last, just like developers, have our own style guides and build entire systems around these style guides. A modification to an atom of our system will automatically reverberate across all the components which use this atom:
We realize very quickly how the modification of a component can affect the whole system.
By interlinking all of our components to each other, we also realize that if we create a new component, it’s the heart of the system that is going to be impacted, not just an isolated screen.
Share the system
Sharing of the system is essential to keeping consistency between various products.
We all know that we can very quickly lose this consistency, when we work alone on a project, but it’s even more difficult when we work with other designers, which is happening more and more often.
Here again, we now have tools which allow us to really work in a team around a common system.
There are shared libraries like Craft for Sketch or those of Adobe for example, which allow us to have a single source of truth, accessible by all and always up to date:
Shared libraries allow several designers to start with the same base to begin their designs.
They also allow us to streamline the work because if we update a component in the shared library, the modification will automatically take place across all the files of all the designers which used this component:
I have to admit that for the moment, of the various shared libraries I’ve tested, I have not yet found one which is totally adapted to work with Atomic Design… Still missing is this strong interdependence between atoms and components which allows us to create a lively and evolving system.
Another issue is that we still have two different libraries: the designers’ library and the developers’ library… It is thus necessary to maintain both in parallel, which causes errors and requires a lot of additional work.
My vision of the perfect shared library would be the following; a single library which would feed the designers and the developers at the same time:
It’s when I see a plugin like React Sketch app (recently launched by Airbnb) which promises coded components directly usable in our Sketch files, that I tell myself that maybe this future isn’t so distant after all…
Last words
I think you get it: I’m convinced that we need to design our interfaces using components, thinking about lively and evolving systems, and I think that the Atomic Design methodology will help us do it effectively. |
CLOSE Jason Isbell talks about how he's evolved as an artist since his 2007 solo debut, 'Sirens of the Ditch.'
Buy Photo Jason Isbell performs during the “The Songs of John Prine” tribute concert at The Basement East in Nashville, Tenn., Thursday, July 27, 2017. (Photo: Andrew Nelles / The Tennessean)Buy Photo
Jason Isbell has been named the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s 2017 Artist-in-Residence.
The program honors “a musical master who can be credited with contributing a large and significant body of work to the canon of American popular music.”
As artist-in-residence, Isbell will perform in the museum’s CMA Theater at 7 p.m. on Dec. 5, 12 and 19. Tickets ($49.50-$89.50) go on sale at 10 a.m. Oct. 27 via countrymusichalloffame.org/air-2017.
Isbell, 38, joined Southern rockers The Drive-By Truckers in the early 2000s; while with the Truckers, he wrote songs like “Outfit” and the title track of the critically-acclaimed record “Decoration Day.”
He released his debut solo album, “Sirens of the Ditch,” in 2007. His 2015 record “Something More Than Free” won Best Americana Album Grammy Award; that night, Isbell also took home the Best American Roots Song Grammy for “24 Frames.” His most recent album, “The Nashville Sound,” is currently up for the Country Music Association’s Album of the Year Award. He's also featured in the museum's exhibit "American Currents: The Music of 2016."
More: Jason Isbell channels anger and anxiety into 'Nashville Sound'
“Jason is a tremendously accomplished performer whose songwriting skills have set him on a path to join the lofty ranks of writing legends like (Kris) Kristofferson and (John) Prine,” said museum CEO Kyle Young in a statement. “He will be our fourteenth artist-in-residence, and also our youngest, but the stellar work that he has done already in his career proves that he belongs in such august company.”
Isbell joins an elite group that includes previous honorees Kristofferson, Cowboy Jack Clement, Earl Scruggs, Tom T. Hall, Guy Clark, Jerry Douglas, Vince Gill, Buddy Miller, Connie Smith, Kenny Rogers, Ricky Skaggs, Alan Jackson and Rosanne Cash.
More: Jason Isbell kicks off six-night Ryman run, pays tribute to Tom Petty
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Since the Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself and the Arab world aflame in December 2010, young men all over the Middle East have tried to imitate him. In no country have they done so more often than in Morocco, where some twenty men, with many of the same economic grievances, are reported to have self-immolated. Five succeeded in killing themselves, but none in sparking a revolution.
It is not for want of causes. Morocco’s vital statistics are worse than Tunisia’s. Its population earns half as much on average as its smaller North African counterpart. One of every two youth are unemployed, and the number is rising: failed rains have cut the country’s wheat harvest in half and have compounded a mounting budget deficit hiked by rising fuel prices and a downturn in tourism and exports to Europe, Morocco’s beleaguered main trading partner. In late May, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Casablanca to protest the government’s failure to tackle the country’s social ills.
Meanwhile, widely circulated accounts by veteran Moroccan and French journalists describe the cronyism clawing through the palaces. The personal assets of King Mohammed VI—based on his control of the country’s phosphate mines, it is reported —have quintupled to $2.5 billion over the past decade. This makes the monarch of the impoverished realm more wealthy—according to Forbes—than Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
But whereas Ben Ali, Tunisia’s policeman, pigheadedly sought to keep power when the streets erupted in late 2010, Morocco’s po-faced but retiring King has kept one step ahead by offering to share it. On March 9, 2011—just weeks after Ben Ali’s exile—King Mohammed unveiled a new constitution that gave up his claim to divine rights as sovereign, but left him as Commander of the Faithful, much—said palace advisers—as Britain’s Queen remains head of the Anglican Church. And while other Arab monarchs, like Jordan’s, dithered about whether to risk parliamentary elections, Mohammed held them quickly and fairly last November; when an Islamist party won the most seats, the King declared its leader, Abdelilah Benkirane, the prime minister.
I first met Benkirane 13 years ago, in 1999, when he was standing for election in the shanties of Sale, a squalid adjunct to Morocco’s serene capital, Rabat, from which it is separated by the picturesque Bouregreg estuary. Unable to deliver running water to his constituents, he ranted against a beauty pageant that the kingdom’s elite were staging in the Rabat Hilton. His core demand was that female contestants replace their swimsuits with kaftans, the hooded woolen tunics that turn hour-glass figures into dumplings. Benkirane won both the campaign and the ballot.
At the time, Benkirane’s claim that he would be running the country within two elections was met with guffaws. Andre Azoulay, the King’s debonair Jewish adviser, summoned me for a reprimand after I reported his prediction on the BBC. “Bullshit,” he pronounced, horrified that an Islamist might ever sully the makzhen, Morocco’s royal establishment. Benkirane was wrong—but only by an election, and he now holds more power than any previous prime minister. At his investiture, he hurriedly pecked His Majesty on the shoulder, dispensing with the tradition of kissing the hand of a man nine years his junior.
One day this spring, I met Benkirane again, by knocking on his front door in Les Orangers, an ordinary middle class neighborhood just beyond Rabat’s medieval walls—he has until now declined to leave his aging town house for the stately home that comes with his office. Unlike the more high-falutin’ Arabic of traditional courtiers, Benkirane—who is popularly known as Benky—speaks in a language Moroccans understand, a dialect called derija, which mixes the various cultures that have swept through its mountains: Tifinagh, the Berber tongue, French, and Spanish.
In a kingdom often depicted as feudal, the prime minister’s common touch has made him unusually popular. The taxi driver who drove me to his front door voted for him despite his general disdain for Islamist busybodies, because he was “a man of the people.” His ministers arrange meetings in station cafes, wear duffle coats, and insist on paying their own bills. Almost unique among Arab leaders, when I called Benkirane with a follow-up question, he answered his mobile phone. When he was busy, he said he would call back, and did.
Career dissidents seem confused about how to respond. Although the large opposition rally in Casablanca in late May revealed the extent to which the country’s economic problems have gone untended, it did not draw the level of support of last year’s protests, when, sparked by the fall of Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, people took to the streets in some eighty Moroccan towns. Many of those initial protesters have melted away, with the various opposition groups that supported them prone to fighting among themselves. Islamists with republican sympathies have quarreled with members of the secularist opposition after the latter prevented them from holding prayer-protests (a hallmark of the demonstrations in Egypt’s Tahrir Square that brought down Mubarak). Arab nationalists, meanwhile, wrangle with Berbers, who deride Arabism as a colonial implant.
But while Benkirane’s government has for the time being stayed any prospect of a broader upheaval, Morocco is not yet out of the woods. The carping, which Benkirane’s election initially silenced, has returned with renewed vigor as Moroccans ask themselves whether their new constitution was merely cosmetic. Most recently, this view has been confirmed in a battle over who gets to make senior government appointments. Unsurprisingly, the King seems to have won.
“I appoint five hundred of the country’s most senior positions,” Benkirane had insisted to me in March. “The king appoints only thirty-seven.” But those thirty-seven are the most important. King Mohammed remains head of the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Security Council, and the Ulama Council, which runs the mosques. He runs the military, the security forces, and the intelligence. The targets of the February 20 protests—including the interior minister at the time, Ali al-Himma—are firmly ensconced as advisers in the King’s shadow government. Tellingly, when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to the kingdom in March she met the King’s foreign affairs adviser ahead of the foreign minister. “The King returns to Morocco, business resumes,” ran the headline in the official newspaper, Le Soir, on June 13, after the King returned from an absence of several weeks in Europe. It was clear who it thought called the shots.
It is hard to ignore the royal court’s smugness at how they co-opted the Islamists to revive the monarchy’s legitimacy at its weakest hour. On the one-year anniversary of the King’s “historic” March 9 speech ceding powers to a prime minister, the Moroccan state press, which usually commemorates royal anniversaries with religious attention, carefully avoided covering the event. “M6 [as the King is commonly known] was shaken to the core, and gave the biggest speech of his career pledging to open a new page,” says Karim Tazi, a politically-active businessman who initially backed the protestors. “The way he changed his mind when the February 20 movement began to lose its way is shocking.”
Benkirane insists he has to “work gradually” to assert his new power and counter corruption, but there are increasing demands that he show it now. All but eleven of the government’s thirty-one ministers come from non-Islamist parties, and several served in the previous government, which Benkirane hitherto decried as corrupt. Aziz Akhennouch, a businessman whose wife recently opened the country’s largest and swankiest mall—replete with Africa’s first Galeriés Lafayette—is his agriculture minister, with powers to distribute state lands. An editor of an opposition Islamist newspaper, whom I knew a decade ago as one of the makhzen’s more judicious critics, is now the information minister, dutifully banning foreign newspapers deemed to disparage the king.
The legislature is similarly subservient. Under Article 41 of the new constitution, their laws can be overruled by royal dahir, or decree. Moreover, despite his gruff reputation, Benkirane’s justice minister has pledged that the government will not tamper with royal prerogative over religious affairs such as the Sharia. Scripting the Friday sermons, he insists, remains the prerogative of the Commander of the Faithful. Even Benkirane seems belabored with doubts, alternately referring to his election by the people, and his appointment by the King.
While Egypt’s election of an Islamist president has given Benkirane’s followers a recent boost, attempts by old regime security apparati to stage comebacks and harness elected representatives across the Arab world have also emboldened the makhzen. The old forces have resorted to their old ways, censoring and incarcerating critics. Hind Zerrouq, an Islamist activist, disappeared on June 13 minutes after calling her husband to tell him she was held in the basement of a state security cell. (Islamist websites said she had formed a support-group for the relatives of detained members of the banned but non-violent Islamist movement, Justice and Charity.) The same week, a court sentenced a blogger who criticized the King to two years in jail for possessing cannabis, a Moroccan cash crop. Meanwhile, dissident Islamists, fearing waning public interest and further state pummeling, have suspended public protests, though they continue to agitate for change more quietly.
But the King has not been able to resolve Morocco’s economic troubles. In his thirteen years on the throne, he has removed many of the shackles his father placed on modernization. Child mortality has fallen 30 percent in five years, and literacy is sharply up from previous appalling lows. Yet development projects seem mostly aimed at the country’s upper crust and at foreigners, who are feted by hoteliers in Marrakesh. Moroccan trains run on time, the streets are spotless, and motorways are being built across the country, while everyday life for many is staggeringly squalid.
The government’s commitment to purchase a high-speed train network from France has become a symbol of the social disparities. At a cost of $2.8 billion, it is supposed to send TGV locomotives darting through countryside that peasants still plow with oxen. The sum equates to 10 percent of the annual budget, or ten times the government’s Agriculture fund for farmers, who comprise 40 percent of the workforce. The Islamist budget minister, attributing the decision to the previous government and to anxious follow-up visits from the French president and prime minister, told me the decision could not be reversed. “We can’t demolish what has already been built,” he said.
But that is precisely what the authorities have done when it comes to unregulated housing for the poor. After a year in which the makhzen stopped enforcing planning permits lest they provoke a Tunisia-scale uprising, the security forces now feel sufficiently emboldened by the stability of the Benkirane government to strike back. In March, riot police armed with sledgehammers began flattening the first batch of what officials say are 44,000 homes built illegally since the start of the Arab Awakening a year ago. A broken trail of rubble stretches from Tangiers in the north via the hillsides of Benkirane’s Sale constituency to El-Jedida, an old Portuguese fortress town a two-and-a-half hour train ride down the Atlantic.
On the edge of nearby Jorf Lasfar, a fenced industrial zone containing a petrochemical and phosphates hub and a port which has pretensions to be the most modernized on Africa’s Atlantic coast, sheep pick through the detritus of nine cinder-block shacks scavenging for edibles smashed by police. The air is acrid with the exhaust of chimney stacks making money for German and American firms and Managem, the mining consortium which forms part of the royal portfolio. “The authorities told us we were squatting in an industrial zone,” says Shakaroun, a jobless thirty-five-year-old, whose family lived in one of the nine. “They erected factories on our land without compensation, and then destroyed our homes.”
The primary school in Shakaroun’s village, meanwhile, is a picture of Dickensian neglect. Its doors hang from their hinges, chairs are missing their seats, flattened cardboard boxes cover holes in the roof, and the playground is a scrap of scrub. And it is just one of more than 15,000 primary schools the local press say lack drinking water and toilets. “Knowledge is the peak of happiness,” reads the Orwellian slogan on the wall beneath the vacant windows of Classroom 3. And it is mockingly called Ibn Battuta, after Morocco’s fabled medieval traveler and man of letters.
No one can remember when politicians from the capital last paid them a visit. Turning their backs on mainstream politics and marches, Shakaroun and his villagers call for direct action to recover their homes, such as picketing the plant, though no one seems to notice. Some suggest violence might work. In the neighboring town of Moulay Abdullah in March, youths with stones confronted riot policemen arriving to demolish their shacks, and torched the governor’s car. In southern Marrakech, protesters attacked a jail; while in a string of towns nestled between the Rif Mountains and the Mediterranean coast, demonstrators clashed with police, and, in a more radical rejection of the government, raised the Berber, or Amazigh, flag.
“The revolt of the little towns is new,” says Lachcen Oulhaj, the dean of Rabat University’s law school. “They are demanding jobs not democracy, but their actions suggest they have little confidence in state institutions.” Worryingly, plummeting revenues and rising deficits mean that this government has fewer resources than the last to raise subsidies and salaries, and buy social peace.
After facilitating elections and introducing a series of constitutional amendments, King Mohammed might have expected a grace period while the country’s newly elected politicians took the flak. But detractors and government officials alike have been quick to lay responsibility for the security forces and the economic disparities at his door.
Ali Anouzla launched a popular news service, Lakome.com, on the Internet in the hope of bypassing state the censors, but the authorities simply frightened off his advertisers. Sitting almost alone in his office in Rabat, surrounded by banks of black computer monitors, even the coffee he sips makes him angry. Every time he adds a spoonful of sugar or drop of milk to his coffee, he says, he is boosting the profits of Société Nationale d’Investissement (SNI), the investment holding firm controlled by the king and his family. State subsidies on fuel, wheat and sugar all help the royal business. So too does a state road-building program, which uses royal cement. “King Hassan, his father, liked the symbolism of calling himself the first peasant, the first sportsmen, and the first artist,” he says. “But with this king it’s real. He really is the country’s biggest banker, biggest farmer, biggest insurer and hotelier.”
Anouzla is not quite a lone voice. At the height of the demonstrations, protestors brandished placards reading “SNI clear off.” And as the government struggles to govern, its frustrations with the makhzen too are growing. Unveiling a 20 percent hike in fuel prices, Benkirane accused the current subsidy scheme of taking money from the poor to give to the rich, not least the King, who has a penchant for luxury cars. “The poor [currently] benefit from fuel subsidies six times less than the wealthy,” he said in an interview on state television on June 6. “The [subsidy] fund has to benefit those who need it the most to restore some social balance.” More directly, at a gathering of party faithful in Rabat in late April he blamed fickle royal advisers for hampering reform, and warned of a possible backlash. “The Arab Spring is not over yet,” Morocco’s press reported him as saying. “It is still wandering about, and may feel like coming back.”
As he drove home from work the night I saw him, he passed scores of graduates nursing their wounds after gendarmes had violently dispersed their protest for government jobs. He stopped, rolled down his window, and apologized. “I’m not one who is beating you,” he told me he said. And then, he called me back to add that no one should blame the King. |
For other people with the same name, see John Moss (disambiguation)
Johnny Moss (May 14, 1907 – December 16, 1995)[1] was a gambler and professional poker player. He was the first winner of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event, at the time a cash game event in which he was awarded the title by the vote of his peers in 1970. He also twice won the current tournament format of the WSOP Main Event in 1971 and 1974. He was one of the charter inductees into the Poker Hall of Fame in 1979.[2]
Early years [ edit ]
Moss was born on May 14, 1907 in Marshall, Texas and grew up in Dallas, Texas, which was where he learned how to gamble as a young boy. A group of cheaters taught him how to cheat in games, but Moss put this knowledge to good use. As a teenager, he was hired by a local saloon to watch over games and make sure they were played fairly. While he was keeping games safe from cheaters, he was learning the strategy behind playing poker.
Gambling career [ edit ]
Two years later, Moss became a rounder and traveled the country looking for gambling action.[3] In the 1950s, Moss moved to Odessa, Texas to be a part of the oil boom and gambling action. Moss and his fellow gamblers were part of one of the biggest poker games in Texas for many years.[4]
Heads-up marathon with Nick The Greek [ edit ]
In 1949, Moss played with Nick the Greek in a five-month-long "heads up" poker marathon set up by mob boss Benny Binion, winning between $2 and $4 million.[5] At the conclusion of the game, Nick the Greek uttered what has become one of the most famous poker quotes ever: "Mr. Moss, I have to let you go."[6] This game is often cited as the inspiration behind the WSOP.[6][7][8] This game became the foundation for Al Alvarez's book The Biggest Game in Town and is one of the best known stories in poker. Despite being one of the best-known poker stories, a soon to be released book, Showgirl Stories, by Steve Fischer claims the game never took place.[9] According to Fischer, there were no stories or reports of this tournament until six years after Nick's death. Binion never spoke of the game even when providing a detailed history of Las Vegas and avoided answering questions about the game by saying, "Well, my memory ain't what it used to be."[9] While Nick the Greek was often covered by the national media, there are no news reports in any local or national source. Fischer says that nearly every version of the story is virtually identical to the version first told by Moss beginning circa 1971. The story is consistently said to have taken place in 1949 at the Horseshoe Casino, a casino that did not exist for another year and a half. Fischer also points out that during the time that Binion supposedly set up the game, he was fighting off a request from Texas to have him extradited. Because of his past, Binion lost his license to run a gambling establishment in 1948 and did not regain it until April 13, 1950. He was not granted a license to open the Horseshoe Casino until December 5, 1952. Fischer believes that the notion of Binion sponsoring a poker game, in front of a window, of a casino that had not opened, while fighting extradition is "absurd."[9]
In reaction to a 2017 pokernews.com article on the topic, Jack Binion, at the time 80 years old, attempted to clarify. To address the heart of the matter first, Binion explained that Johnny Moss and Nick Dandolos did play a poker match in 1949, although it was not at the Horseshoe at all. Nor was it the months-long spectacle open to spectators many have suggested the match to have been.
"It took place at the Flamingo," Binion explained. Also, it was "not in public." This, he noted, was a quote from Dandolos himself.
Meanwhile, a few years later there was another poker game involving Moss, this time at the Horseshoe.
"There was a big game at the Horseshoe in the early '50s," Binion explained, "but Nick didn't participate." The game featured "multiple players" including Moss, who came and went as the game continued around the clock. Unlike the game at the Flamingo in 1949, the later one "was held in public."
The confusion, Binion surmised, likely stemmed from Moss having participated in both games. However, there was never one between him and Dandolos at the Horseshoe, and the pair never did have a high-stakes heads-up battle in public. Binion also clarified that the inspiration for the WSOP was the previously held Texas Gamblers Reunion and not any Moss/Dandolos match.[10][11]
World Series of Poker [ edit ]
Moss won the 1970, 1971, and 1974 World Series of Poker Main Events.[12][13] For the 1970 Main Event, Moss was actually elected champion by his peers and received a silver cup as his prize. A (possibly apocryphal) story about that election which has appeared in print several times has every one of the six players voting for himself as the best player, and that it was only when the players were asked to vote for the second best player that Moss emerged.[14] He played at every WSOP from 1970 through 1995, and during his career, he won nine WSOP bracelets, placing him in fifth place all-time, behind Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson, and Phil Ivey (10 each), and Phil Hellmuth (15). Moss had at least a share of the lifetime WSOP bracelet lead up until the 2005 World Series of Poker, which is where Johnny Chan won his tenth career bracelet. During Moss's career, he won $834,422 in WSOP tournament play.[15]
World Series of Poker bracelets [ edit ]
Year Tournament Prize (US$) 1970 World Series of Poker World Championship* 1971 Limit Ace to 5 Draw $10,000 1971 $5,000 No Limit Hold'em World Championship $30,000 1974 $10,000 No Limit Hold'em World Championship $160,000 1975 $1,000 Seven Card Stud $44,000 1976 $500 Seven Card Stud $13,000 1979 $5,000 Seven Card Stud $48,000 1981 $1,000 Seven Card Stud Hi-Lo $33,500 1988 $1,500 Ace to Five Draw** $116,400
*In 1970, Moss was voted champion by his peers and was awarded a silver cup.[16]
**Moss set the record for the oldest bracelet winner in WSOP history, which still stands as of the end of the 2017 World Series of Poker.[17]
Personal life and legacy [ edit ]
Moss's wife was Virgie, who was from West Texas.[18]
One of Moss's strategies for tournament poker was survival in the early stages. As the tournament goes on and blinds increase, his strategy was to test opponents with aggression and bigger pots.[19]
Fellow professional Doyle Brunson put Moss on his Mount Rushmore of poker players, along with Puggy Pearson, Sailor Roberts, and Chip Reese.[20]
An authorized autobiography on Moss, which is called Champion of Champions, was written by Don Jenkins.[21] |
EXCLUSIVE ROLLOUT: THE FIRST TEMP CONTROL MOD FOR ANY COIL?
iJoy approached me and said.. Vaporjoe – send this to the masses! So here we are!
Apparently iJoy is coming out with a new mod that’s going to be able to control the temperature of any coil called the Asolo.
I don’t think it works the same way as the YIHI CHIP but I do see some similarities. There is no doubt that the unpredictability of heated Kanthal will require the temperature control to work different.
How this is SUPPOSED to work is you set your wattage level and when it gets to your sweet spot – you set it into memory. Once there you can control the temperature in percentages. There is also dry coil indication – telling you when your wick needs more juice.
This is also a 200 watt box mod that takes two 18650 batteries if you want to just use it for that.
Is this TRUE temp control for any coil? This is their claim. I need to use it to know for sure.
I will have a working model in a few weeks to test out. I will keep you all updated.
Either way – innovation is a good thing. |
In the Parmenides, Plato did what he knew would be done by someone else anyway: he refuted a central plank of his own philosophy, the Theory of Forms. When Aristotle came along to do what Plato had already foreseen and further the refutation, the argument was already old hat. Nevertheless, Aristotle had chosen a far better example to illustrate the point, an example which also lent itself to a snappy title by which the argument is now known: the Third Man argument.
The Third Man argument is a nifty delight that is often confusingly expounded. I reckon I can do better, so here now I explicate either triumphantly or to no avail.
The Simple Part
There’s a single Form for each recognisable object or quality in the real world, all of which are the imprecise and inferior copies of their respective ideal Forms. Thus, we can recognise all real-life rectangles as rectangles, for instance, because we have the Form or essence of rectangles in our heads. So when presented with soccer pitches, books and rulers, we can assign them to the group headed by the ideal rectangle that we have a mental picture of and dub them all rectangles.
The Confusing Part
Soccer pitches, books and rulers are very distinct yet are nevertheless rectangles. If these rectangles are so distinct from each other, the one ideal rectangle must be just as distinct from the variety of rectangles in the real world as the real-world rectangles are all distinct from each other. Thus, how can the one ideal rectangle be of use in categorising all real-world rectangles as rectangles? Alternatively put, if the one ideal rectangle is itself a rectangle that heads the group that includes soccer pitches, books and rulers, how is the ideal rectangle itself recognised as a rectangle let alone as the ideal rectangle?
The ideal rectangle must itself be recognised as an ideal rectangle just as a real-world rectangle is recognised as a real-world rectangle. A real-world rectangle is recognised as a real-world rectangle via the ideal rectangle. Thus, if we want to identify the ideal rectangle as the ideal rectangle, we can do so only via the ideal of the ideal rectangle.
The Easy Part Once You’ve Understood the Confusing Part
Of course, we’ve now got ourselves a reductio ad infinitum or an infinite regress: if the ideal of the ideal rectangle is needed to identify the ideal rectangle, then the ideal of the ideal of the ideal rectangle will be needed to identify the ideal of the ideal rectangle and so on to infinity. And if we’ve got an infinite regress, than the Theory of Forms doesn’t explain much at all.
The Third Man Argument in But Three of its Forms
Substitue man for rectangle in the explanation above and you have Aristotle’s Third Man argument (the first man is the real-world man, the second the ideal man, the third the ideal of the ideal man). Substitute large for rectangle in the explanation above and you have Plato’s own refutation of his Theory of Forms. (Large, though, is a confusing example because it’s so difficult to imagine an ideal of something that is a relative quality. Cold is the absence of heat, so small can be considered the absence of large, nevertheless it’s still difficult to conceive of the ideal of large). Leave rectangle as rectangle in the example above and you have my own somewhat simplified version of the Third Man argument. |
Windows RT continues to nibble at the tablet market, with Microsoft applying the cut-down operating system to its much-improved latest generation of Surface tablets. (Those even found some approval from Ars Microsoft Editor Peter Bright.) Nokia—whose shareholders just approved the sale of its devices division to Microsoft—has just issued its own Windows RT tablet, the Lumia 2520, and it takes a tangential approach to Microsoft's OEM Surface devices.
The 10.1" Lumia 2520 has the same 1920x1080 resolution as the Surface 2, though it uses a "ClearBlack" IPS LCD panel (as does its baby brother Windows Phone 8 device, the Lumia 1520). Physically, the Lumia 2520 is smaller in two of its dimensions than the Surface 2 (267mm tall by 168mm wide by 8.9mm thick, versus the Surface 2 at 274mm tall by 172mm wide by about the same 8.9mm thickness). The Lumia appears thinner, though, because it's slimmer at its edges than in its middle, while the Surface has a flat back. The Lumia also manages to be much lighter, coming in at 614g against the Surface's 676g.
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The 2520 has an all-plastic back, using the same smooth, glossy polycarbonate shell as other devices in the Lumia line. The one that Nokia sent is an eye-watering Ferrari red, with the Verizon logo printed on the back just below the Nokia logo. That Verizon logo actually speaks to one of the biggest advantages the cheaper-feeling Nokia has over the Surface—it might not be made of a vapor-deposited magnesium casing, but it's got 4G LTE connectivity built-in.
There are two small slots just below the screen's black bezel for the 2520's stereo speakers, which at max volume weren't terribly loud. If you're going to be listening to audio on the device, you'll likely be using headphones—and therein is the biggest complaint I have so far with the 2520. The headphone jack is situated on the left edge along with the charging port... and they look the same. They both appear to be stereo audio mini plugs, and there's no labeling or external indication of which is which. I found myself having to consult the stencils on the removable plastic the Lumia came wrapped in to tell one from the other.
Big red data
That LTE connectivity comes courtesy of the other big thing the 2520 has going for it: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800. This quad-core SoC, with its Adreno 330 GPU, is considerably more powerful than the SoC in the majority of current Windows RT devices. In fact, speaking last month at the Lumia's unveiling in Abu Dhabi, a Qualcomm senior vice president was quoted as saying that comparing the 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 to the Surface 2's 1.7GHz Nvidia Tegra 4 is "not even really a contest."
In the days we were able to spend with the device for our hands-on, we found Windows RT on the Lumia 2520 to be snappy and responsive throughout. Full benchmarks are coming in our review, but as a "second screen" on my desk with e-mail and music playing, the 2520 worked great. Adding a half-dozen browser windows to the mix didn't slow it down at all, nor did opening the supplied Windows RT version of Word to take notes. Pairing the tablet form factor up with LTE is also smart, since Wi-Fi is not available everywhere. Plus, the Lumia's relatively small 32GB internal storage means that it's really only able to fully function when it has access to all of its various cloud services.
Picture taking
The rear-facing 6.7MP camera, with its conspicuous Zeiss branding, produced perfectly adequate pictures outdoors in overcast light, though its low-light performance was bad enough that I wouldn't consider ever using it except outdoors during the day. However, with enough light, it looked perfectly fine. The camera's specs say that it will shoot with an aperture of f/1.9, though the bokeh produced at that aperture isn't particularly pleasing.
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More to come
Peter Bright is busily working to produce our full review of the device, which we'll be bringing you in the coming days. Our first impression, though, is a favorable one, and we've saved one final data point to the end: it's $50 cheaper than the Surface 2, coming in at $399—if you don't mind a new two-year contract with Verizon or AT&T. Otherwise, the price is $499. The Verizon version of the tablet goes on sale starting today, November 21. AT&T's model will be available to purchase tomorrow, November 22.
The 2520 may not have a kickstand, but it's cheaper (if subsidized), lighter, potentially faster, and has built-in LTE. We'll know more after our review, but right now, it's looking pretty hard to beat.
Listing image by Lee Hutchinson |
The expanding options for communicating over the Internet and the increasing adoption of encryption technologies could leave law enforcement agents “in the dark” and unable to collect evidence against criminals, the Director of the FBI said in a speech on Thursday.
In a post-Snowden plea for a policy more permissive of spying, FBI Director James B. Comey raised the specters of child predators, violent criminals, and crafty terrorists to argue that companies should build surveillance capabilities into the design of their products and allow lawful interception of communications. In his speech given at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC, Comey listed four cases where having access to a mobile phone or laptop proved crucial to an investigation and another case where such access was critical to exonerating wrongly accused teens.
All of that will go away, or at least become much harder, if the current trend continues, he argued.
“Those charged with protecting our people aren’t always able to access the evidence we need to prosecute crime and prevent terrorism even with lawful authority,” Comey said in the published speech. “We have the legal authority to intercept and access communications and information pursuant to court order, but we often lack the technical ability to do so.”
Following the leak of classified documents by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the public has become increasingly wary of overreaching surveillance by government agencies. Anti-spy technology has become much more popular — gaining popular support on Kickstarter, for example — and recently Apple and Google both announced that encryption would be the default for their mobile operating systems.
Both law enforcement and intelligence agencies have complained that such technology will curtail their ability to do their job. In essence, US law enforcement and national security agencies want citizens to accept spying as a possibility and to rely on policy, rather than on technology, to make sure that it’s lawful.
Civil-rights supporters argue that law enforcement will be able to do their job, and any assertions that they cannot are disingenuous.
“Whether the FBI calls it a front door or a backdoor, any effort by the FBI to weaken encryption leaves our highly personal information and our business information vulnerable to hacking by foreign governments and criminals,” Laura W. Murphy, director of the Washington Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Comey targeted recent moves by Apple and Google to encrypt user data on their devices, saying that while much of the data is backed up to the cloud — and thus accessible by law enforcement with a search warrant — other data is not, creating a “black hole for law enforcement.”
“Both companies are run by good people, responding to what they perceive is a market demand,” he said. “But the place they are leading us is one we shouldn’t go to without careful thought and debate as a country.”
Reacting to consumer sentiment, Apple announced in September that its latest iOS 8 operating system would enable encryption by default, making it impossible for law enforcement — or even the iPhone maker — to decrypt user data. Google followed suit a day later, pledging to turn on encryption by default in the next version of its Android operating system.
To a public increasingly sensitive to privacy issues, these are positive steps.
“We applaud tech leaders like Apple and Google that are unwilling to weaken security for everyone to allow the government yet another tool in its already vast surveillance arsenal,” ACLU’s Murphy argued. “We hope that others in the tech industry follow their lead and realize that customers put a high value on privacy, security and free speech.”
Google stressed that encryption is similar to older practice of putting documents in a vault or safe.
“People previously used safes and combination locks to keep their information secure—now they use encryption,” the company said in a statement sent to Ars Technica. “It’s why we have worked hard to provide this added security for our users.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Comey stressed that neither he, nor the FBI, has the answer to these thorny issues. Yet the public needs to resolve the questions, he said. In addition, the pendulum of public opinion — which had swung far to the side of security following 9/11 — has now swung too far in the opposite direction, he said.
“My goal today isn’t to tell people what to do,” he said. “My goal is to urge our fellow citizens to participate in a conversation as a country about where we are, and where we want to be, with respect to the authority of law enforcement.”
Listing image by FBI |
Investigators have disclosed that a diverted Air Canada Boeing 787-9's crew had to declare a Mayday four times over a low-fuel situation before being given approach clearance to Hyderabad.
The aircraft had originally been bound for Mumbai but was shuttled between alternate airports owing to capacity problems.
Transportation Safety Board of Canada states in a bulletin that it is "in contact" with India's accident investigation authority over the 19 September incident.
The aircraft (C-FGEI), which departed Toronto on 18 September, had been operating AC46 to Mumbai with 177 passengers and 14 crew members.
But Mumbai air traffic controllers cancelled the approach after a runway excursion involving another aircraft. The bulletin does not specifically identify this incident, but a SpiceJet Boeing 737-800 suffered an excursion shortly before the 787's arrival.
The Canadian bulletin says the 787 entered a hold for 1h but its crew then opted to divert to their alternate.
It does not identify the alternate but states that air traffic control informed the crew that they could not be accommodated owing to reaching maximum capacity.
The crew then chose to divert a second time to Hyderabad, after consulting with the carrier's operations centre, only to be informed by air traffic control en route that Hyderabad had already reached maximum capacity and could not handle the flight.
According to the bulletin Air Canada informed investigators that air traffic control "continued trying to divert the flight or attempted to place it in another hold", adding that the crew had to declare a Mayday over the aircraft's low-fuel situation four times before being cleared for a straight-in approach to Hyderabad's runway 09L.
Flight AC46, which has a scheduled duration of around 14h 30min, had been operating for around 17h at the time of arrival. The aircraft landed safely. |
The Penn State running back has found himself in the Heisman conversation thanks to his electric play. (0:57)
Perhaps the least controversial statement in college football, four weeks into this season, escaped the lips of Penn State Nittany Lions offensive tackle Ryan Bates in the wake of Saquon Barkley's monster effort Saturday night as the fourth-ranked Nittany Lions beat Iowa 21-19.
"He can do everything," Bates said.
Barkley, the junior running back, a 5-foot-11, 230-pound mix of power, speed and quickness who already owns the freshman and sophomore rushing records at PSU, is good enough now to be known nationally simply by his first name.
"He can make people miss. He can run people over. He jumps over people," Bates said. "He can catch the ball. He can run the ball. He can block."
Of course, he can. What's stunning, though, as Barkley ascends to the top of ESPN's Heisman Trophy watch list in the waning days of September, is that he found a way last week to display all of his talents at once.
Well, not on one play. That would be too much to expect for even Barkley. But during the course of Penn State's Big Ten opener in Iowa City, Barkley showcased his complete arsenal, registering likely his best performance at PSU as he broke Curt Warner's 36-year-old school record for all-purpose yards with 358 on 40 offensive touches and three kickoff returns.
"I cannot imagine that there's a better player in all of college football," Penn State coach James Franklin said. "I've been doing this for 23 years. The guy is special."
Jeffrey Becker/USA TODAY Sports
Barkley's teammates and coaches watched him rush for a league-leading 1,496 yards and score 22 touchdowns last year. They saw him gain 1,076 yards as a true freshman in 2015.
He still left them in awe Saturday.
"There was a play where he was surrounded by four guys on the sideline," Penn State quarterback Trace McSorley said. "He almost didn't even make a move and squirted out of it. I think, at that point, I kind of caught myself going, 'Oh, my God, what was that?'
"There are times where you see it, react to it and real quick, you've gotta move on to the next play."
McSorley refers to a third-quarter Barkley run of 44 yards immediately after Penn State's Grant Haley recovered a fumble by Iowa running back Akrum Wadley. Barkley ran left toward the PSU sideline, through multiple attempts to bring him down, then came to a stop and danced past linebacker Josey Jewell, who typically tackles everything in sight.
"We work on that," Barkley said. "We kinda call it a dead leg."
Others work on it, too. That doesn't make them any more similar to Barkley, who took a third-down screen pass from McSorley early in the fourth quarter, hurdled cornerback Josh Jackson and absorbed a hit from safety Amani Hooker while still in the air before landing on his feet to gain 10 yards.
"Most of that's just instinct," Barkley said. "That was third-and-6. Gotta make a play. Gotta find a way. It was a critical moment in the game. We needed a first down. We needed to start establishing drives. Your body just takes over. You let go."
Speaking of critical moments, how about the reception that Barkley took 4 yards behind the line of scrimmage, at Iowa's 28-yard line with 24 seconds left in the game and Penn State trailing by four points, and raced to the 10? The Nittany Lions' win probability percentage, according to ESPN, jumped 28.8 points to 51 percent on that play alone.
"Every time he touched the football," Franklin said, "it was special."
Four plays later, on fourth-and-goal from the 7, Barkley found himself as the lone man between McSorley and a blitzing Jewell. Barkley made his block as the QB delivered the winning throw to Juwan Johnson in the end zone.
ESPN
Barkley said he was most proud of the Nittany Lions' two-minute drive at the end.
"People who appreciate football," he said, "that was a clinic."
Maybe so, but he put on a clinic all night -- and against a defense as solid as Penn State will face this year ahead of an Oct. 21 showdown with Michigan at Beaver Stadium.
Barkley finished with 211 rushing yards on 28 carries and a career-best 12 catches for 94 yards.
"I can't take credit for the performance I had," Barkley said. "It's an 11-man sport. It's a team sport. Especially as a running back, you can't do it by yourself."
His humility could get annoying if Barkley wasn't so genuine. He could take more credit. And whatever Barkley gets, he deserves more.
Meanwhile, the Nittany Lions know better than to grow accustomed to his creativity and array of skills. They know what the nation has begun to recognize -- don't look away from Saquon for even a moment.
"He's going to end up bringing up some other new way [to make a play] that no one's ever seen before," McSorley said. "It's going to make us all go, 'Whoa.' So you've just kind of gotta let him do what he does."
Yes, most everyone who saw him up close at Iowa, it seems, understood they were in the presence of something rare.
Something that may end with Barkley standing on a New York stage in December. |
“I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.”
— U.S. President Barack Obama
I am the epitome of the contemporary privileged liberal: a 23-year-old straight, white, male university student from a middle-class family of teachers who plays golf.
I follow Bernie Sanders on Facebook (#feelthebern) and, despite being straight, I have a bit of a crush on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I sympathize with indigenous people, support affirmative action, criticize nationalism, I’m critical of the monarchy, an avid “Movember” participant, skeptical of pipelines, youthful to the point of naive and, to top it all off, a feminist. How could it be possible that I feel uncomfortable expressing my views on a liberal, middle class campus like the University of Victoria?
The answer: if a privileged individual like myself accidentally offends someone who is “coddled and protected from different points of view,” then I am seen as insensitive, irresponsible and borderline bigoted.
This was not a pipeline, a mine or a sweeping change to the Indian Act. This was a conference.
For example, I helped organize a political science conference titled, Discourses on Sovereignty: Land, Bodies and Borders. We applied for $6,000 from the University of Victoria Student Society (UVSS) to put a down payment on the hotel we were planning to use. The deal appeared done. All that was left was approval from the UVSS board. The only obstacle was the Native Student Union (NSU), which had qualms about the title and wanted to hear from a representative of our conference. Our representative made a presentation the next day and, according to UVic’s student-run newspaper, the NSU “could not condone funding a conference on sovereignty when nobody involved in the planning reached out to indigenous groups on campus for their consent.”
The rest of the board folded like a house of cards and voted unanimously to revoke the funding. There was no precedent for this. No conference or event that received UVSS funding had ever had to consult First Nations. Did this mean that all future events must have the consent of First Nations? This was not a pipeline, a mine or a sweeping change to the Indian Act. This was a conference.
Given the apparent influence of the NSU on the board’s vote, the native students had effectively gained a veto on funding allocation. They could claim to be “harmed” and risk no backlash because of the UVSS’s religious dedication to not offending the “coddled and protected” students my university is creating with actions like this.
At UVic, there is no such thing as a Christmas party, only a holiday party. When advertising pub crawls in classrooms, we must not reference alcohol in any way and we must refer to our events as “functions” (admittedly this gave rise to the great phrase, “I functioned so hard last night”). I was told to put away shirts that depicted King Henry VIII with the caption, “It’s all in the execution,” because there were complaints that they “perpetuated the patriarchy and promoted colonialism.”
The UVSS received criticism because it showed the Robin Williams classic about the cross-dressing Mrs. Doubtfire in its campus cinema, as it apparently offended representatives from UVic Pride. At a UVic abortion debate, radical feminist protesters came in and disrupted the exchange for 20 minutes in an attempt to end the debate. After that was quelled, the pro-choice advocate, an eminent ethics professor, proceeded to thoroughly rout the person arguing the pro-life perspective.
At universities around the world, conservative speakers are denied the opportunity to speak due to their views being unpalatable to those with political views like my own. Sadly, my political kin seek to silence oppositional voices rather than come to a resolution with them.
In short, my peers are so inclusive that they’ve become exclusive. We’ve become so insulated to offence and harm that the space for critical thinking and the intellectual meeting of minds is occupied increasingly by “safe spaces.”
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As a white, straight, middle-class male, I feel that I cannot contribute to the conversation that clearly needs to happen. If I do, it must to be with the utmost political tact. The very act of writing this will probably condemn me to the annals of bigotry, largely because of the privileged nature of my existence.
I suspect there are many skeptics, so please try this exercise: Imagine that I had identified as an indigenous student instead of the privileged picture I described in the first paragraph. Would you read this differently? Now pretend I had identified as a black woman at the beginning. Would you read this differently? Picture a transgendered man as the author of this. Would you read this differently?
I suspect you would. Leading to the conclusion: I am too privileged to be liberal.
National Post |
Michigan State defensive coordinator Pat Narduzzi is expected to become the Pittsburgh head coach by the end of the week as both sides continue to work out a deal, a source told ESPN.com on Tuesday.
Narduzzi views Pittsburgh as a destination position, which is critical to the school after having been through massive turnover in recent years.
Spartans defensive coordinator Pat Narduzzi has emerged as a candidate to replace Paul Chryst as Pittsburgh head coach, according to a source. AP Photo/Al Goldis
He has coached some of the nation's most productive, physical, blue-collar defenses over the past eight seasons under Spartans head coach Mark Dantonio.
The Spartans ranked first in the Big Ten and in the top 10 of FBS in total defense and rushing defense for three consecutive seasons under the 48-year-old Narduzzi, who won the Broyles Award in 2013 as the nation's top assistant coach.
Michigan State has also consistently led or been among the nation's leaders in turnover margin under Narduzzi's watch.
Narduzzi had a shared interest with Colorado State but he viewed the Pitt position as a more ideal fit.
Steelers running back Le'Veon Bell, who played collegiately at Michigan State, said Panthers players are "going to love him."
"I was an offensive player, so I always went against him in college. But when I watched him react to his defense, I know that our players loved him. They just loved playing for him. He's an overall great guy, a player's coach," he said.
Bell said he's happy Narduzzi will be coaching in the same city as him.
"So, it's crazy that he's going to be right across the street [hallway] from me. I'm just glad I'll be able to reunite with him, so I can support him and he'll support me again," he said.
Pitt is attempting to replace Paul Chryst, who left for the Wisconsin job earlier this month.
ESPN.com Steelers reporter Scott Brown contributed to this report. |
A well-known sociological experiments concerning racism was conducted by a Grade 3 teacher, Jane Elliott, in Iowa in the late 1960s. To demonstrate the negative effects of prejudice, Elliott divided her class according to eye colour. Those with blue eyes were given special privileges and praise while those with brown eyes were treated as inferiors.
As may be expected, the children internalized the message their teacher was sending. The blue-eyed group came to see themselves as entitled to their privileges and spoke harshly of their brown-eyed classmates. The brown-eyed kids lost their passion and drive.
Elliott’s experiment is criticized today. It would never pass a university research ethics review. How ironic it is, then, that universities are conducting a similar experiment — day in, and day out — as professors proselytize their students in the doctrine of white privilege.
There are many nuances to the concept of white privilege. Its most problematic incarnation promotes the notion that one group — whites — for various reasons are deserving of reduced status and opportunity in society while other groups — people of colour — are deserving of preferential treatment.
We know the consequences of Elliott’s experiment. If there was any question as to what could happen on a university campus should students internalize the message of white privilege, we now have the answer.
Protests began at Evergreen State College in the state of Washington about two weeks ago. Biology professor Bret Weinstein drew the ire of campus inquisitors for his refusal to participate in an event that called for Caucasian students and faculty to remain off campus for a day.
Writing to the organizer of the segregation exercise, Weinstein called it “an act of oppression.”
His letter became public and his class was shut down by a student mob that viewed his remarks as racist. A video shows Weinstein attempting to respond to his critics outside his room but one of his accusers shouts him down saying, “We are not speaking on terms — on terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion.”
Advised by campus police that his safety could not be guaranteed, Weinstein has been teaching in a park since then.
Following Weinstein, the “offended” mob of students turned their attention to college president, George Bridges.
If Weinstein is a heretic when it comes to white privilege, the words and actions of Bridges show he is a true believer.
A YouTube video shot shortly after the shutdown of Weinstein’s class shows Bridges at the front of a large room full of angry students, most non-whites.
He nods as one attendee, apparently angered at his hesitation to fire Weinstein outright, yells, “That’s how whiteness works! Whiteness is the most violent f–ing system to ever breathe!”
We also see Bridges listen thoughtfully as one student refers to professors as “white-ass faculty members” and as another suggests Bridges’ own racial background (he’s white) is inferior saying, “You’re speaking to your ancestor, all right? We’ve been here before you. We built these cities, we had civilization way before you ever had … coming out your caves.”
As the suggested topic of discussion was racism, one might think Bridges would have asked the protesters to refrain from making bigoted statements themselves. But as other protesters reminded him, as a white male, it was not his place to speak on matters of race.
Later in a public response Bridges praised the rabble for their “passion” and “courage” while conceding to most of their demands and promising no repercussions.
At one time, universities, fighting claims of institutionalized racism, embraced the notion that people should be judged individually on the content of their character and not as a group based on the colour of their skin.
Now, under the guise of white privilege, institutionalized racism is back with a vengeance.
Sadly, for every radical movement there is its radical inversion. On Thursday, state troopers were called to Evergreen State and the campus was locked down because an unidentified person, potentially a white supremacist, called in a gun threat.
Those at universities who think promoting one group over another can ever work out well would be wise to remember the lessons from a Grade 3 class in Iowa.
David Millard Haskell is Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University |
Information commissioner warns encryption ‘is vital’ for personal security, and attempts to weaken it should not be in new investigatory powers bill
The information commissioner’s office has heavily criticised the draft Investigatory Powers bill for attacking individuals’ privacy, particularly in relation to the apparent requirement on communication providers to weaken or break their data encryption at the government’s request.
The privacy watchdog also told the parliamentary committee responsible for scrutinising the bill that “little justification” was given for one of the most controversial aspects of the proposed legislation: a new requirement on communications providers to store comms data for 12 months.
Weighing in on the long-running debate over security services’ desire to render encrypted communications amenable to interception, it said encryption “is vital to help ensure the security of personal data generally”.
The effect of the IP bill, also known as the “snooper’s charter”, on encryption has been muddled since it was first proposed. In October, government sources said that despite David Cameron’s public statements to the contrary, the bill would not seek to ban encryption. Theresa May, the home secretary, told the BBC shortly before the contents bill was revealed that “encryption is important for people to be able to keep themselves safe when they are dealing with these modern communications in the digital age”.
But she added that the bill reinforced the government’s position, which enabled “the authorities with proper authorisation to issue warrants” requiring companies to break encryption to provide them with the contents of the encrypted communications.
For the most secure types of communication, known as “end to end” encryption, the communications provider cannot read encrypted messages even if they are served with a government warrant. Messaging providers including Apple, Facebook and Telegram all use this sort of encryption, but the draft IP bill suggests they could be forced by a government warrant to change to a weaker standard.
Apple has already called on the UK government to scale back the bill, writing: “The creation of backdoors and intercept capabilities would weaken the protections built into Apple products and endanger all our customers. A key left under the doormat would not just be there for the good guys. The bad guys would find it too.”
The ICO has expressed similar concerns. The clause allowing the government to mandate removal of encryption could, it warns, have “detrimental consequences to the security of data and safeguards which are essential to the public’s continued confidence in the handling and use of their personal information”.
The bill talks only about the removal of “electronic safeguards”, barely mentioning encryption, but the ICO warns that if those clauses do include “the weakening or circumvention of encryption then this is matter of real concern”.
“The information commissioner has stressed the importance of encryption to guard against the compromise of personal information,” it adds. “Weakening encryption can have significant consequences for individuals. The constant stream of security breaches only serves to highlight how important encryption is towards safeguarding personal information. Weakened encryption safeguards could be exploited by hackers and nation states intent on harming the UK’s interests.”
The British government is not alone in moving against consumer use of encryption, however. In early January, an amendment was introduced into the French national assembly which sought to enforce similar requirements on equipment manufacturers to ensure that any information can be given to the police with a judicial warrant.
Encryption, the amendment says, is good at protecting personal data, but leads to a disadvantage when faced with the needs of state security. “France must take the lead by requiring equipment manufacturers to consider the need of police access,” it adds. The amendment was supported by 18 assembly members.
And China introduced its own snooper’s charter in December, with a bill requiring tech companies to decrypt messages at the government’s request. |
Jewish-American scholar and activist Noam Chomsky reportedly called for an end to Israel's siege of Gaza, on his first ever visit to the Hamas-ruled enclave on Thursday.
Chomsky, who was in the Gaza Strip for a conference at the Islamic University, called "to end the Israeli siege on Gaza," a member of Gaza's legislative council and head of the university's administrative board, Jamal al-Khudari, told AFP.
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"The Palestinian people have a right to live peacefully and in freedom," Khudari also quoted Chomsky as saying.
"Our trip to Gaza was very difficult, but we arrived here and I saw several things which I hoped before to see," Chomsky said in remarks broadcast on Palestinian television from the university on Thursday evening.
In May 2010, Israel barred Chomsky from entering the West Bank, where he was to deliver a lecture. He finally broadcast his speech by video link from Jordan.
On Saturday, Chomsky was to deliver a speech on the Arab Spring and the future of foreign policy in the region. He will also meet with NGOs, especially human rights groups, Khudari said.
"We organized a program for him to tour refugee camps."
The Palestinian lawmaker noted Chomsky, travelling with an academic delegation, coordinated his entry to Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egyptian authorities.
Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a prominent critic of American foreign policy. He has frequently spoken out against Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories.
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"Buzzbomb" redirects here. For the song by the Dead Kennedys, see Buzzbomb (song) . For other uses, see V1 (disambiguation)
The V-1 flying bomb (German: Vergeltungswaffe 1 "Vengeance Weapon 1"[a])—also known to the Allies as the buzz bomb, or doodlebug,[b] and in Germany as Kirschkern (cherrystone) or Maikäfer (maybug)[5]—was an early cruise missile and the only production aircraft to use a pulsejet for power.
The V-1 was the first of the so-called "Vengeance weapons" (V-weapons or Vergeltungswaffen) series designed for terror bombing of London. It was developed at Peenemünde Army Research Center in 1939 by the Nazi German Luftwaffe during the Second World War. During initial development it was known by the codename "Cherry Stone". Because of its limited range, the thousands of V-1 missiles launched into England were fired from launch facilities along the French (Pas-de-Calais) and Dutch coasts. The first V-1 was launched at London on 13 June 1944,[6] one week after (and prompted by) the successful Allied landings in Europe. At peak, more than one hundred V-1s a day were fired at south-east England, 9,521 in total, decreasing in number as sites were overrun until October 1944, when the last V-1 site in range of Britain was overrun by Allied forces. After this, the V-1s were directed at the port of Antwerp and other targets in Belgium, with 2,448 V-1s being launched. The attacks stopped only a month before the war in Europe ended, when the last launch site in the Low Countries was overrun on 29 March 1945.
The British operated an arrangement of air defences, including anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft, to intercept the bombs before they reached their targets as part of Operation Crossbow, while the launch sites and underground V-1 storage depots were targets of strategic bombing.[7]
Design and development [ edit ]
In late 1936, while employed by the Argus Motoren company, Fritz Gosslau began work on the further development of remote-controlled aircraft; Argus had already developed a remote-controlled surveillance aircraft, the AS 292 (military designation FZG 43).
On 9 November 1939, a proposal for a remote-controlled aircraft carrying a payload of 1,000 kg (2,200 lb) over a distance of 500 km (310 mi) was forwarded to the RLM (German Air Ministry). Argus worked in cooperation with Lorentz AG and Arado Flugzeugwerke to develop the project as a private venture, and in April 1940, Gosslau presented an improved study of Project "Fernfeuer" to the RLM, as Project P 35 "Erfurt".
On 31 May, Rudolf Bree of the RLM commented that he saw no chance that the projectile could be deployed in combat conditions, as the proposed remote-control system was seen as a design weakness. Heinrich Koppenberg, the director of Argus, met with Ernst Udet on 6 January 1941 to try to convince him that the development should be continued, but Udet decided to cancel it.
Despite this, Gosslau was convinced that the basic idea was sound and proceeded to simplify the design. As an aircraft engine manufacturer, Argus lacked the capability to produce a fuselage for the project and Koppenberg sought the assistance of Robert Lusser, chief designer and technical director at Heinkel. On 22 January 1942, Lusser took up a position with the Fieseler aircraft company. He met Koppenberg on 27 February and was informed of Gosslau's project. Gosslau's design used two pulsejet engines; Lusser improved the design to use a single engine.
A final proposal for the project was submitted to the Technical Office of the RLM on 5 June and the project was renamed Fi 103, as Fieseler was to be the chief contractor. On 19 June, Generalfeldmarschall Erhard Milch gave Fi 103 production high priority, and development was undertaken at the Luftwaffe's Erprobungsstelle coastal test centre at Karlshagen, part of the Peenemünde-West facility.
By 30 August, Fieseler had completed the first fuselage, and the first flight of the Fi 103 V7 took place on 10 December 1942, when it was airdropped by a Fw 200.
The V-1 was named by The Reich journalist Hans Schwarz Van Berkl in June 1944 with Hitler's approval.[9]
Description [ edit ]
V-1 cutaway
The V-1 was designed under the codename Kirschkern (cherry stone) by Lusser and Gosslau, with a fuselage constructed mainly of welded sheet steel and wings built of plywood. The simple, Argus-built pulsejet engine pulsed 50 times per second, and the characteristic buzzing sound gave rise to the colloquial names "buzz bomb" or "doodlebug" (a common name for a wide variety of flying insects). It was known briefly in Germany (on Hitler's orders) as Maikäfer (May bug) and Krähe (crow).
Power plant [ edit ]
Ignition of the Argus pulsejet was accomplished using an automotive type spark plug located about 76 cm (2 ft 6 in) behind the intake shutters, with current supplied from a portable starting unit. Three air nozzles in the front of the pulsejet were at the same time connected to an external high-pressure air source that was used to start the engine. Acetylene gas was typically used for starting the engine, and very often a panel of wood or similar material was held across the end of the tailpipe to prevent the fuel from diffusing and escaping before ignition. The V-1 was fuelled by 625 litres (165 US gallons) of 75 octane gasoline.
Once the engine had been started and the temperature had risen to the minimum operating level, the external air hose and connectors were removed and the engine's resonant design kept it firing without any further need for the electrical ignition system, which was used only to ignite the engine when starting.
Rear view of V-1 in IWM Duxford showing launch ramp section
The Argus As 014 (also known as a resonant jet) could operate at zero airspeed because of the nature of its intake shutters and its acoustically tuned resonant combustion chamber. However, because of the low static thrust of the pulse jet engine and the very high stall speed of the small wings, the V-1 could not take off under its own power in a practically short distance, and thus needed to be ground-launched by aircraft catapult or air-launched from a modified bomber aircraft such as a Heinkel He 111.
Beginning in January 1941, the V-1's pulsejet engine was also tested on a variety of craft, including automobiles and an experimental attack boat known as the "Tornado". The unsuccessful prototype was a version of a Sprengboot, in which a boat loaded with explosives was steered towards a target ship and the pilot would leap out of the back at the last moment. The Tornado was assembled from surplus seaplane hulls connected in catamaran fashion with a small pilot cabin on the crossbeams. The Tornado prototype was a noisy underperformer and was abandoned in favour of more conventional piston engined craft.
The engine made its first flight aboard a Gotha Go 145 on 30 April 1941.
Guidance system [ edit ]
The V-1 guidance system used a simple autopilot developed by Askania in Berlin to regulate altitude and airspeed. The RLM at first planned to use a radio control system with the V-1 for precision attacks, but the government decided instead to use the missile against London.[13] A weighted pendulum system provided fore-and-aft attitude measurement to control pitch, damped by a gyrocompass which also stabilized it. Operating power for the gyroscope platform and the flight-control actuators was provided by two large spherical compressed air tanks that also pressurized the fuel tank. These air tanks were charged to 150 atm (2,200 psi) before launch. With the counter determining how far the missile would fly, it was only necessary to launch the V-1 with the ramp pointing in the approximate direction, and the autopilot controlled the flight.
There was a more sophisticated interaction between yaw, roll and other sensors: a gyrocompass (set by swinging in a hangar before launch) gave feedback to control the dynamics of pitch and roll, but it was angled away from the horizontal so that controlling these degrees of freedom interacted: the gyroscope remained true on the basis of feedback received from a magnetic compass,[citation needed] and from the fore and aft pendulum. This interaction meant that rudder control was sufficient for steering and no banking mechanism was needed. In a V-1 that landed without detonating between Tilburg and Goirle in March 1945, several rolled up issues of the German wartime propaganda magazine Signal were found inserted into the left wing's tubular steel spar, used for weight to preset the missile's static equilibrium before launching. Several of the earliest V-1s to be launched were provided with a small radio transmitter (using a triode valve marked 'S3' but equivalent to a then-current power valve, type RL 2,4T1) to check the general direction of flight related to the launching place's and the target's grid coordinates by radio bearing (navigation).
An odometer driven by a vane anemometer on the nose determined when the target area had been reached, accurately enough for area bombing. Before launch, the counter was set to a value that would reach zero upon arrival at the target in the prevailing wind conditions. As the missile flew, the airflow turned the propeller, and every 30 rotations of the propeller counted down one number on the counter. This counter triggered the arming of the warhead after about 60 km (37 mi). When the count reached zero, two detonating bolts were fired. Two spoilers on the elevator were released, the linkage between the elevator and servo was jammed and a guillotine device cut off the control hoses to the rudder servo, setting the rudder in neutral. These actions put the V-1 into a steep dive.[15][16] While this was originally intended to be a power dive, in practice the dive caused the fuel flow to cease, which stopped the engine. The sudden silence after the buzzing alerted listeners of the impending impact. The fuel problem was quickly fixed, and when the last V-1s fell, the majority hit with power.
Initially, V-1s landed within a circle 19 miles (31 kilometres) in diameter, but by the end of the war, accuracy had been improved to about 7 miles, which was comparable to the V-2 rocket.[17]
Warhead [ edit ]
The warhead was 1,000 kg of Amatol-39, later the aluminised explosive Trialen was used, as used for filling other Luftwaffe 1,000 kg bombs. Trialen fillings were identified by the warhead being painted red, although the assembled missiles were painted green or grey over this.
Fuzing was by a triple fuze system. The main fuzes were an electrical impact fuze and a mechanical backup impact fuze. These were immediate action fuzes, the intention being to detonate the warhead on the first impact with the surface, rather than allowing itself to become buried first. This was a major difference from the V-2, and a reason for the high lethality of the V-1. Although they did not demolish buildings or deep structures as effectively as the air-dropped bombs, or the deep-burying V-2, their blast effects were almost all released at the surface and caused many casualties. The electrical fuze, ZLPM 76, was mounted at the front, immediately behind the compass and the air speed propeller. It connected to a central exploder tube through the warhead, containing the gaine and boosters. Two transverse fuze pockets, in typical German fashion, were placed in the upper surface of the warhead for the secondary fuzes, also connecting to this same tube.
To avoid the risk of this secret weapon being examined by the British, there was a third time delay fuze. This was too short to be any sort of booby trap, just to destroy the weapon if a soft landing had not triggered the impact fuzes. These fuzing systems were very reliable and there were almost no dud V-1s recovered.[18][19]
Launch ramp [ edit ]
Ground-launched V-1s were typically propelled up an inclined launch ramp by an apparatus known as a Dampferzeuger ("steam generator"), which reacted stabilized hydrogen peroxide and potassium permanganate (T-Stoff and Z-Stoff), the same combination of chemicals used as propellants for the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet rocket plane, and the Walter HWK 109-500 Starthilfe RATO rocket booster unit. Ramp-launch velocity for an operational V-1 was 580 km/h (360 mph) as it left the end of the launch ramp.
The original design for launch sites included a number of hangars or storage garages as well as preparation and command buildings, as well as the launch ramp, all of which were easily identifiable from aerial photographs resulting in bombing attacks on the sites. Launching needed a steam generator.
100 litres (22 imp gal; 26 US gal) of hydrogen peroxide and potassium permanganate was later used in place of steam, whereby the V-1 was thrown into the air using a system similar to that used on an aircraft carrier to launch planes.
A light design utilising a small (7.5 m or 25 ft) preparation building, a small firing control room and the 36-metre (39 yd) launch ramp which was supplied in kit form, with legs resting in concrete recesses.[21]
Operation and effectiveness [ edit ]
The first complete V-1 airframe was delivered on 30 August 1942, and after the first complete As.109-014 was delivered in September, the first glide test flight was on 28 October 1942 at Peenemünde, from under a Focke-Wulf Fw 200. The first powered trial was on 10 December, launched from beneath an He 111.
The LXV Armeekorps z.b.V. formed during the last days of November 1943 in France commanded by General der Artillerie z.V. Erich Heinemann was responsible for the operational use of V-1.[22]
The conventional launch sites could theoretically launch about 15 V-1s per day, but this rate was difficult to achieve on a consistent basis; the maximum rate achieved was 18. Overall, only about 25 per cent of the V-1s hit their targets, the majority being lost because of a combination of defensive measures, mechanical unreliability or guidance errors. With the capture or destruction of the launch facilities used to attack England, the V-1s were employed in attacks against strategic points in Belgium, primarily the port of Antwerp.
Launches against Britain were met by a variety of countermeasures, including barrage balloons and aircraft including the Hawker Tempest and Gloster Meteor. These measures were so successful that by August 1944 about 80 per cent of V-1s were being destroyed[23] (the Meteors, although fast enough to catch the V-1s, suffered frequent cannon failures, and accounted for only 13).[24] In all, about 1,000 V-1s were destroyed by aircraft.[24]
The intended operational altitude was originally set at 2,750 m (9,000 ft). However, repeated failures of a barometric fuel-pressure regulator led to it being changed in May 1944, halving the operational height, thereby bringing V-1s into range of the Bofors guns commonly used by Allied AA units.
Luftwaffe Heinkel He 111 H-22. This version could carry FZG 76 (V1) flying bombs, but only a few aircraft were produced in 1944. Some were used by bomb wing KG 3. A GermanHeinkel He 111 H-22. This version could carry FZG 76 (V1) flying bombs, but only a few aircraft were produced in 1944. Some were used by bomb wing KG 3.
The trial versions of the V-1 were air-launched. Most operational V-1s were launched from static sites on land, but from July 1944 to January 1945, the Luftwaffe launched approximately 1,176 from modified Heinkel He 111 H-22s of the Luftwaffe's Kampfgeschwader 3 (3rd Bomber Wing, the so-called "Blitz Wing") flying over the North Sea. Apart from the obvious motive of permitting the bombardment campaign to continue after static ground sites on the French coast were lost, air-launching gave the Luftwaffe the opportunity to outflank the increasingly effective ground and air defences put up by the British against the missile. To minimise the associated risks (primarily radar detection), the aircrews developed a tactic called "lo-hi-lo": the He 111s would, upon leaving their airbases and crossing the coast, descend to an exceptionally low altitude. When the launch point was neared, the bombers would swiftly ascend, fire their V-1s, and then rapidly descend again to the previous "wave-top" level for the return flight. Research after the war estimated a 40 per cent failure rate of air-launched V-1s, and the He 111s used in this role were vulnerable to night-fighter attack, as the launch lit up the area around the aircraft for several seconds. The combat potential of air-launched V-1s dwindled as 1944 progressed at about the same rate as that of the ground-launched missiles, as the British gradually took the measure of the weapon and developed increasingly effective defence tactics.
Experimental and long-range variants [ edit ]
A German crew rolls out a V-1.
V-1 (Fieseler Fi 103) in flight
Late in the war, several air-launched piloted V-1s, known as Reichenbergs, were built, but these were never used in combat. Hanna Reitsch made some flights in the modified V-1 Fieseler Reichenberg when she was asked to find out why test pilots were unable to land it and had died as a result. She discovered, after simulated landing attempts at high altitude where there was air space to recover, that the craft had an extremely high stall speed and the previous pilots with little high-speed experience had attempted their approaches much too slowly. Her recommendation of much higher landing speeds was then introduced in training new Reichenberg volunteer pilots. The Reichenbergs were air-launched rather than fired from a catapult ramp as erroneously portrayed in the film Operation Crossbow.[citation needed]
There were plans, not put into practice, to use the Arado Ar 234 jet bomber to launch V-1s either by towing them aloft or by launching them from a "piggy back" position (in the manner of the Mistel, but in reverse) atop the aircraft. In the latter configuration, a pilot-controlled, hydraulically operated dorsal trapeze mechanism would elevate the missile on the trapeze's launch cradle some eight feet clear of the 234's upper fuselage. This was necessary to avoid damaging the mother craft's fuselage and tail surfaces when the pulsejet ignited, as well as to ensure a "clean" airflow for the Argus motor's intake. A somewhat less ambitious project undertaken was the adaptation of the missile as a "flying fuel tank" (Deichselschlepp) for the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, which was initially test-towed behind an [[Heinkel He 177|He 177A Greif]] bomber. The pulsejet, internal systems and warhead of the missile were removed, leaving only the wings and basic fuselage, now containing a single large fuel tank. A small cylindrical module, similar in shape to a finless dart, was placed atop the vertical stabilizer at the rear of the tank, acting as a centre of gravity balance and attachment point for a variety of equipment sets. A rigid tow-bar with a pitch pivot at the forward end connected the flying tank to the Me 262. The operational procedure for this unusual configuration saw the tank resting on a wheeled trolley for take-off. The trolley was dropped once the combination was airborne, and explosive bolts separated the towbar from the fighter upon exhaustion of the tank's fuel supply. A number of test flights were conducted in 1944 with this set-up, but inflight "porpoising" of the tank, with the instability transferred to the fighter, meant the system was too unreliable to be used. An identical utilisation of the V-1 flying tank for the Ar 234 bomber was also investigated, with the same conclusions reached. Some of the "flying fuel tanks" used in trials utilised a cumbersome fixed and spatted undercarriage arrangement, which (along with being pointless) merely increased the drag and stability problems already inherent in the design.[citation needed]
One variant of the basic Fi 103 design did see operational use. The progressive loss of French launch sites as 1944 proceeded and the area of territory under German control shrank meant that soon the V-1 would lack the range to hit targets in England. Air-launching was one alternative utilised, but the most obvious solution was to extend the missile's range. Thus the F-1 version developed. The weapon's fuel tank was increased in size, with a corresponding reduction in the capacity of the warhead. Additionally, the nose-cones and wings of the F-1 models were made of wood, affording a considerable weight saving. With these modifications, the V-1 could be fired at London and nearby urban centres from prospective ground sites in the Netherlands. Frantic efforts were made to construct a sufficient number of F-1s in order to allow a large-scale bombardment campaign to coincide with the Ardennes Offensive, but numerous factors (bombing of the factories producing the missiles, shortages of steel and rail transport, the chaotic tactical situation Germany was facing at this point in the war, etc.) delayed the delivery of these long-range V-1s until February/March 1945. Beginning on 2 March 1945, slightly more than three weeks before the V-1 campaign finally ended, several hundred F-1s were launched at Britain from Dutch sites under Operation "Zeppelin". Frustrated by increasing Allied dominance in the air, Germany also employed V1s to attack the RAF's forward airfields, such as Volkel, in the Netherlands.[25]
There was also a turbojet-propelled upgraded variant proposed,[26] meant to use the Porsche 109-005 low-cost turbojet engine[27] of some 500 kgf (1,100 lbf) thrust.
Almost 30,000 V-1s were made; by March 1944, they were each produced in 350 hours (including 120 for the autopilot), at a cost of just 4 per cent of a V-2, which delivered a comparable payload. Approximately 10,000 were fired at England; 2,419 reached London, killing about 6,184 people and injuring 17,981.[28] The greatest density of hits were received by Croydon, on the south-east fringe of London. Antwerp, Belgium was hit by 2,448 V-1s from October 1944 to March 1945.[29][30]
Intelligence reports [ edit ]
For Allied intelligence activities and German counterintelligence regarding the flying bomb, see V-1 and V-2 Intelligence
The codename "Flakzielgerät 76"—"Flak target apparatus" helped to hide the nature of the device, and some time passed before references to FZG 76 were linked to the V-83 pilotless aircraft (an experimental V-1) that had crashed on Bornholm in the Baltic and to reports from agents of a flying bomb capable of being used against London. Importantly, the Polish Home Army intelligence contributed information on V-1 construction and a place of development (Peenemünde). Initially, British experts were sceptical of the V-1 because they had considered only solid fuel rockets, which could not attain the stated range of 1,000 kg (2,200 lb): 130 miles (210 kilometres). However, they later considered other types of engine, and by the time German scientists had achieved the needed accuracy to deploy the V-1 as a weapon, British intelligence had a very accurate assessment of it.[31]
Countermeasures in England [ edit ]
Anti-aircraft guns [ edit ]
A battery of static QF 3.7-inch guns on railway-sleeper platforms at Hastings on the south coast of England, July 1944
The British defence against the German long-range weapons was Operation Crossbow. Anti-aircraft guns of the Royal Artillery and RAF Regiment redeployed in several movements: first in mid-June 1944 from positions on the North Downs to the south coast of England, then a cordon closing the Thames Estuary to attacks from the east. In September 1944, a new linear defence line was formed on the coast of East Anglia, and finally in December there was a further layout along the Lincolnshire–Yorkshire coast. The deployments were prompted by changes to the approach tracks of the V-1 as launch sites were overrun by the Allies' advance.
On the first night of sustained bombardment, the anti-aircraft crews around Croydon were jubilant – suddenly they were downing unprecedented numbers of German bombers; most of their targets burst into flames and fell when their engines cut out. There was great disappointment when the truth was announced. Anti-aircraft gunners soon found that such small fast-moving targets were, in fact, very difficult to hit. The cruising altitude of the V-1, between 600 to 900 m (2,000 to 3,000 ft), was just above the effective range of light anti-aircraft guns, and just below the optimum engagement height of heavier guns.
The altitude and speed were more than the rate of traverse of the standard British QF 3.7-inch mobile gun could cope with. The static version of the QF 3.7-inch, designed for use on a permanent, concrete platform, had a faster traverse. The cost and delay of installing new permanent platforms for the guns was fortunately found to be unnecessary - a temporary platform built devised by the REME and made from railway sleepers and rails was found to be adequate for the static guns, making them considerably easier to re-deploy as the V-1 threat changed.[32][c]
The development of the proximity fuze and of centimetric, 3 gigahertz frequency gun-laying radars based on the cavity magnetron helped to counter the V-1's high speed and small size. In 1944, Bell Labs started delivery of an anti-aircraft predictor fire-control system based on an analogue computer, just in time for the Allied invasion of Europe.
These electronic aids arrived in quantity from June 1944, just as the guns reached their firing positions on the coast. Seventeen per cent of all flying bombs entering the coastal "gun belt" were destroyed by guns in their first week on the coast. This rose to 60 per cent by 23 August and 74 per cent in the last week of the month, when on one day 82 per cent were shot down. The rate improved from one V-1 destroyed for every 2,500 shells fired initially, to one for every 100. This still did not end the threat, and V-1 attacks continued until all launch sites were captured by ground forces.
Barrage balloons [ edit ]
Eventually some 2,000 barrage balloons were deployed, in the hope that V-1s would be destroyed when they struck the balloons' tethering cables. The leading edges of the V-1's wings were fitted with cable cutters, and fewer than 300 V-1s are known to have been brought down by barrage balloons.[33]
Interceptors [ edit ]
The Defence Committee expressed some doubt as to the ability of the Royal Observer Corps to adequately deal with the new threat, but the ROC's Commandant Air Commodore Finlay Crerar assured the committee that the ROC could again rise to the occasion and prove its alertness and flexibility. He oversaw plans for handling the new threat, codenamed by the RAF and ROC as "Operation Totter".
Observers at the coast post of Dymchurch identified the very first of these weapons and within seconds of their report the anti-aircraft defences were in action. This new weapon gave the ROC much additional work both at posts and operations rooms. Eventually RAF controllers actually took their radio equipment to the two closest ROC operations rooms at Horsham and Maidstone, and vectored fighters direct from the ROC's plotting tables. The critics who had said that the Corps would be unable to handle the fast-flying jet aircraft were answered when these aircraft on their first operation were actually controlled entirely by using ROC information both on the coast and at inland.
The average speed of V-1s was 550 km/h (340 mph) and their average altitude was 1,000 m (3,300 ft) to 1,200 m (3,900 ft). Fighter aircraft required excellent low altitude performance to intercept them and enough firepower to ensure that they were destroyed in the air rather than crashing to earth and detonating. Most aircraft were too slow to catch a V-1 unless they had a height advantage, allowing them to gain speed by diving on their target.
When V-1 attacks began in mid-June 1944, the only aircraft with the low-altitude speed to be effective against it was the Hawker Tempest. Fewer than 30 Tempests were available. They were assigned to No. 150 Wing RAF. Early attempts to intercept and destroy V-1s often failed, but improved techniques soon emerged. These included using the airflow over an interceptor's wing to raise one wing of the V-1, by sliding the wingtip to within 6 in (15 cm) of the lower surface of the V-1's wing. If properly executed, this manoeuvre would tip the V-1's wing up, overriding the gyro and sending the V-1 into an out-of-control dive. At least sixteen V-1s were destroyed this way (the first by a P-51 piloted by Major R. E. Turner of 356th Fighter Squadron on 18 June).[34] It could be seen that the aerodynamic flip method was actually effective when V-1s could be seen over southern parts of the Netherlands headed due eastwards at low altitude, the engine quenched. In early 1945 such a missile soared below clouds over Tilburg to gently alight eastwards of the city in open fields.
The Tempest fleet was built up to over 100 aircraft by September. Specially modified P-47M Thunderbolts (half their fuel tanks, half their 0.5in {12.7 mm} machine guns, boosted engines (2800 hp), all external fittings, and all their armour plate removed) were also pressed into service against the V-1s. In addition, North American P-51 Mustangs and Griffon-engined Supermarine Spitfire Mk XIVs were tuned to make them fast enough, and during the short summer nights the Tempests shared defensive duty with de Havilland Mosquitos. There was no need for airborne radar; at night the V-1's engine could be heard from 10 mi (16 km) away or more, and the exhaust plume was visible from a long distance. Wing Commander Roland Beamont had the 20 mm cannon on his Tempest adjusted to converge at 300 yd (270 m) ahead. This was so successful that all other aircraft in 150 Wing were thus modified.
The anti-V-1 sorties by fighters were known as "Diver patrols" (after "Diver", the codename used by the Royal Observer Corps for V-1 sightings). Attacking a V-1 was dangerous: machine guns had little effect on the V-1's sheet steel structure, and if a cannon shell detonated the warhead, the explosion could destroy the attacker.
A Spitfire using its wingtip to "topple" a V-1 flying bomb
In daylight, V-1 chases were chaotic and often unsuccessful until a special defence zone was declared between London and the coast, in which only the fastest fighters were permitted. The first interception of a V-1 was by F/L J. G. Musgrave with a No. 605 Squadron RAF Mosquito night fighter on the night of 14/15 June 1944. As daylight grew stronger after the night attack, a Spitfire was seen to follow closely behind a V-1 over Chislehurst and Lewisham. Between June and 5 September 1944, a handful of 150 Wing Tempests shot down 638 flying bombs,[35] with No. 3 Squadron RAF alone claiming 305. One Tempest pilot, Squadron Leader Joseph Berry (RAF officer) (501 Squadron), shot down 59 V-1s, the Belgian ace Squadron Leader Remy Van Lierde (164 Squadron) destroyed 44 (with a further nine shared) and W/C Roland Beamont (see above) destroyed 31.
The next most successful interceptors were the Mosquito (623 victories), Spitfire XIV (303),[37] and Mustang (232). All other types combined added 158. Even though it was not fully operational, the jet-powered Gloster Meteor was rushed into service with No. 616 Squadron RAF to fight the V-1s. It had ample speed but its cannons were prone to jamming, and it shot down only 13 V-1s.
In late 1944 a radar-equipped Vickers Wellington bomber was modified for use by the RAF's Fighter Interception Unit as an Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft. Flying at an altitude of 4,000 feet (1,200 m) over the North Sea, it directed Mosquito fighters charged with intercepting He 111s from Dutch airbases that sought to launch V-1s from the air.
Disposal [ edit ]
The first bomb disposal officer to defuse an unexploded V-1 was John Pilkington Hudson in 1944.
Deception [ edit ]
To adjust and correct settings in the V-1 guidance system, the Germans needed to know where the V-1s were impacting. Therefore, German intelligence was requested to obtain this impact data from their agents in Britain. However, all German agents in Britain had been turned, and were acting as double agents under British control.
Aftermath of a V-1 bombing, London, 1944
On 16 June 1944, British double agent Garbo (Juan Pujol) was requested by his German controllers to give information on the sites and times of V-1 impacts, with similar requests made to the other German agents in Britain, Brutus (Roman Czerniawski) and Tate (Wulf Schmidt). If given this data, the Germans would be able to adjust their aim and correct any shortfall. However, there was no plausible reason why the double agents could not supply accurate data; the impacts would be common knowledge amongst Londoners and very likely reported in the press, which the Germans had ready access to through the neutral nations. In addition, as John Cecil Masterman, chairman of the Twenty Committee, commented, "If, for example, St Paul's Cathedral were hit, it was useless and harmful to report that the bomb had descended upon a cinema in Islington, since the truth would inevitably get through to Germany ..."
While the British decided how to react, Pujol played for time. On 18 June it was decided that the double agents would report the damage caused by V-1s fairly accurately and minimise the effect they had on civilian morale. It was also decided that Pujol should avoid giving the times of impacts, and should mostly report on those which occurred in the north west of London, to give the impression to the Germans that they were overshooting the target area.
While Pujol downplayed the extent of V-1 damage, trouble came from Ostro, an Abwehr agent in Lisbon who pretended to have agents reporting from London. He told the Germans that London had been devastated and had been mostly evacuated as a result of enormous casualties. The Germans could not perform aerial reconnaissance of London, and believed his damage reports in preference to Pujol's. They thought that the Allies would make every effort to destroy the V-1 launch sites in France. They also accepted Ostro's impact reports. Due to Ultra, however, the Allies read his messages and adjusted for them.
Max Wachtel
A certain number of the V-1s fired had been fitted with radio transmitters, which had clearly demonstrated a tendency for the V-1 to fall short. Oberst Max Wachtel, commander of Flak Regiment 155 (W), which was responsible for the V-1 offensive, compared the data gathered by the transmitters with the reports obtained through the double agents. He concluded, when faced with the discrepancy between the two sets of data, that there must be a fault with the radio transmitters, as he had been assured that the agents were completely reliable. It was later calculated that if Wachtel had disregarded the agents' reports and relied on the radio data, he would have made the correct adjustments to the V-1's guidance, and casualties might have increased by 50 per cent or more.
The policy of diverting V-1 impacts away from central London was initially controversial. The War Cabinet refused to authorise a measure that would increase casualties in any area, even if it reduced casualties elsewhere by greater amounts. It was thought that Churchill would reverse this decision later (he was then away at a conference); but the delay in starting the reports to Germans might be fatal to the deception. So Sir Findlater Stewart of Home Defence Executive took responsibility for starting the deception programme immediately, and his action was approved by Churchill when he returned.
End of the V-1 attacks against England [ edit ]
By September 1944, the V-1 threat to England was temporarily halted when the launch sites on the French coast were overrun by the advancing Allied armies. 4,261 V-1s had been destroyed by fighters, anti-aircraft fire and barrage balloons. The last enemy action of any kind on British soil occurred on 29 March 1945, when a V-1 struck Datchworth in Hertfordshire.
Assessment [ edit ]
Unlike the V-2, the V-1 was a cost-effective weapon for the Germans as it forced the Allies to spend heavily on defensive measures and divert bombers from other targets. More than 25 per cent of Combined Bomber Offensive's bombs in July and August 1944 were used against V-weapon sites, often ineffectively.[13] In early December 1944, American General Clayton Bissell wrote a paper that argued strongly in favour of the V-1 when compared with conventional bombers.
The following is a table he produced:
Blitz (12 months) vs V-1 flying bombs (2¾ months) Blitz V-1 1. Cost to Germany Sorties 90,000 8,025 Weight of bombs tons 61,149 14,600 Fuel consumed tons 71,700 4,681 Aircraft lost 3,075 0 Personnel lost 7,690 0 2. Results Structures damaged/destroyed 1,150,000 1,127,000 Casualties 92,566 22,892 Rate casualties/bombs tons 1.6 1.6 3. Allied air effort Sorties 86,800 44,770 Aircraft lost 1,260 351 Personnel lost 2,233 805
The statistics of this report, however, have been the subject of some dispute. The V-1 missiles launched from bombers were often prone to exploding prematurely, occasionally resulting in the loss of the aircraft to which they were attached. The Luftwaffe lost 77 aircraft in 1,200 of these sorties.[48]
Wright Field technical personnel reverse-engineered the V-1 from the remains of one that had failed to detonate in Britain. The result was the creation of the JB-2 Loon. General Hap Arnold of the United States Army Air Forces was concerned that this weapon could be built of steel and wood, in 2000 man hours and approximate cost of US$600 (in 1943).[49] To put this figure in perspective, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress cost ~1000x more, and still ~100x more when taking into account its 10x higher payload (20,000 lb Vs 850 kg for V1) -- payload, which cost has to be added (while it is included in V1 cost) --, with the additional drawback of requiring (and putting in danger) 11 flying crew members.
Belgian attacks [ edit ]
The attacks on Antwerp and Brussels began in October 1944, with the last V-1 launched against Antwerp on 30 March 1945.[50]:31
Antwerp was recognised by both the German and Allied high command as a very important port, essential to the further progression of Allied armies into Germany.[50] The shorter range improved the accuracy of the V-1 which was six miles deviation per hundred miles of flight, the flight level was also reduced to around 3,000 ft.[50]:9
Countermeasures at Antwerp [ edit ]
Both British (80 AA Brigade) and US Army anti-aircraft batteries (30th AAA Group) were sent to Antwerp together with a searchlight regiment. The zone of command under the 21st Army Group was called "Antwerp-X" and given the object of protecting an area with a radius of 7,000 yards covering the city and dock area.[50]:34 Initially attacks came from the south-east, accordingly a screen of observers and searchlights was deployed along the attack azimuth, behind which were three rows of batteries with additional searchlights.[50]:36
US units deployed SCR-584 radar units controlling four 90mm guns per battery using an M9 director to electrically control the battery guns.[50]:40 Backup for the American guns was automatic 40mm batteries, which were not effective against V-1s.
British gun batteries were each equipped with eight QF 3.7-inch AA gun and two radar units, preferably the US SCR-584 with M9 director as it was more accurate than the British system.[50]:45 Backup for the British guns was also automatic 40mm batteries.
The radar was effective from 28,000 yards, the M9 director predicted the target location position based on course, height and speed which combined with the gun, shell and fuse characteristics predicted an impact position, adjusted each gun and fired the shell.[50]:51
In November attacks began from the north-east and additional batteries were deployed along the new azimuths, including the 184th AAA Battalion (United States) brought from Paris. Additional radar units and observers were deployed up to 40 miles from Antwerp to give early warning of V-1 bombs approaching.[50]:53 The introduction of the VT fuse in January 1945 improved the effectiveness of the guns and reduced ammunition consumption.[50]:68
From October 1944 to March 1945 4,883 V-1's were detected. Of these, only 4.5% fell into the designated protected area.[50]:54 The effectiveness of the anti aircraft defence meant that only 211 got through the defences, however those that fell within the area caused damage and loss of life.
Japanese developments [ edit ]
In 1943, an Argus pulsejet engine was shipped to Japan by German submarine. The Aeronautical Institute of Tokyo Imperial University and the Kawanishi Aircraft Company conducted a joint study of the feasibility of mounting a similar engine on a piloted plane. The resulting design was named Baika ("plum blossom") but bore no more than a superficial resemblance to the Fi 103. Baika never left the design stage but technical drawings and notes suggest that several versions were considered: an air-launched version with the engine under the fuselage, a ground-launched version that could take off without a ramp and a submarine launched version with the engine moved forwards.
After the war, the armed forces of France, the Soviet Union and the United States experimented with the V-1.
France [ edit ]
After reverse-engineering captured V-1s in 1946, the French began producing copies for use as target drones, starting in 1951. These were called the ARSAERO CT 10 and were smaller than the V-1. The CT 10 could be ground-launched using solid rocket boosters or air-launched from a LeO 45 bomber. More than 400 were produced, some of which were exported to the UK, Sweden, and Italy.[51]
Soviet Union [ edit ]
The Soviet Union captured V-1s when they overran the Blizna test range in Poland, as well as from the Mittelwerk.[52] The 10Kh was their copy of the V-1, later called Izdeliye 10.[53] Initial tests began in March 1945 at a test range in Tashkent,[53] with further launches from ground sites and from aircraft of improved versions continuing into the late 1940s. The inaccuracy of the guidance system when compared with new methods such as beam-riding and TV guidance saw development end in the early 1950s.
The Soviets also worked on a piloted attack aircraft based on the Argus pulsejet engine of the V-1, which began as a German project, the Junkers EF 126 Lilli,[54] in the latter stages of the war. The Soviet development of the Lilli ended in 1946 after a crash that killed the test pilot.[53]
United States [ edit ]
The United States reverse-engineered the V-1 in 1944 from salvaged parts recovered in England during June. By 8 September, the first of thirteen complete prototype Republic-Ford JB-2 Loons, was assembled at Republic Aviation. The United States JB-2 was different from the German V-1 in only the smallest of dimensions. The wing span was only 2.5 in (6.4 cm) wider and the length was extended less than 2 ft (0.61 m). The difference gave the JB-2 60.7 square feet (5.64 m2) of wing area versus 55 square feet (5.1 m2) for the V-1.[page needed]
A navalized version, designated KGW-1, was developed to be launched from LSTs as well as escort carriers (CVEs) and long-range 4-engine reconnaissance aircraft. Waterproof carriers for the KGW-1 were developed for launches of the missile from surfaced submarines. Both the USAAF JB-2 and Navy KGW-1 were put into production and were planned to be used in the Allied invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall). However, the surrender of Japan obviated the need for its use.[page needed] After the end of the war, the JB-2/KGW-1 played a significant role in the development of more advanced surface-to-surface tactical missile systems such as the MGM-1 Matador and later MGM-13 Mace.
Operators [ edit ]
Surviving examples [ edit ]
War Memorial in Greencastle, Indiana
Australia
Belgium
The Stampe et Vertongen Museum [1] at Antwerp International Airport has 2 V1's on display: 1 complete (serial 256978) that was used as didactical material by the Germans, and 1 partial which got shot down, but did not explode. One of the two V1 Flying Bombs on display at the Stampe & Vertongen Museum, Antwerp Airport, Belgium
Canada
Denmark
The Danish Defence Museum Tøjhusmuseet.
France
Germany
The Netherlands
Overloon War Museum in Overloon.
Museum Vliegbasis Deelen in Schaarsbergen.
New Zealand
Sweden
A V-1 in the Arboga Missile museum.
V-1 launch ramp recreated at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford
Switzerland
A restored original V-1 on display as well as one of only six worldwide remaining original Reichenberg (Re 4-27) at the Swiss Military Museum in Full.
United Kingdom
United States
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes
^ Vergeltungswaffe "vengeance weapon 1" (Vergeltungs can also be translated as "retribution", "reprisal" or "retaliation"), also Fieseler Fi 103 by the "vengeance weapon 1" (can also be translated as "retribution", "reprisal" or "retaliation"), alsoby the RLM's 8-103 airframe number ^ In contemporary accounts it is also referred to as a robot bomb. ^ Pyle platform, after the head of Anti-Aircraft Command, General This was known as a, after the head of Anti-Aircraft Command, General Frederick Alfred Pile
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading [ edit ] |
About a month ago we featured a wild wine barrel hot rod and now we have this over-the-top telephone booth dragster! This crazy creation came out of the same collection in Germany. It was built in the 70s and was deputed at the Canadian International Car Show just like the other car, so I assume it’s the work of the same builder. This one has some unique features though that make it worth checking out. If bidding doesn’t get much higher, it might even be worth picking up just for kicks and giggles!
The seller has gotten the engine running, but after 30 years of storage it is still going to need some work before driving… or calling? The seller mentions that the engine sounds impressive. Video please! Apparently, the throttle is controlled by the phone dial inside the booth. I’m not sure how you’re going to steer or stop, but someone is going to have fun figuring that out. If you want to be the one, the car is located in Großnaundorf, Germany and is listed here on eBay. This bring a new meaning to the phrase “mobile phone”… |
Donald Trump demanded an investigation Monday after revelations that Hillary Clinton’s allies invested heavily in the state Senate campaign of a Democrat at a time when her husband oversaw part of the FBI’s investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s secret email account.
Mr. Trump said the revelations about now-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his wife, Jill McCabe, a Democrat whose campaign collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from organizations overseen by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, are the latest example of corruption that pervades the nation’s capital.
“Hillary knew this money was being paid, and she has to be held accountable for this,” Mr. Trump said at a campaign rally in Florida.” She has to be held accountable because she knew that money, $675,000-plus, was being paid. So how is she allowed to continue to run for president?”
Down in the polls with two weeks to go before Election Day, Mr. Trump is struggling to recapture the attention of voters who have tuned him out over the past month.
He has delved more deeply into policy, laid out an agenda for his first days in office and increased his attacks on Mrs. Clinton and the “rigged” system he says is thwarting his campaign.
The McCabe revelations, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, gave him a new hook.
Mr. McAuliffe is a close friend, financier and political ally of the Clintons, and his 2013 governor’s campaign was seen as a test run for Mrs. Clinton’s own presidential bid.
His political action committee ponied up $467,500 to Mrs. McCabe’s campaign, and the state Democratic Party gave more than $200,000 at a time when Mr. McCabe headed the FBI’s Washington field office.
That field office provided the manpower for the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s secret email system. Mr. McCabe would later be promoted to the third-ranking post at the FBI, and then named deputy.
Mrs. McCabe was running to unseat state Sen. Dick Black, a Republican, and ousting him would have swung control of the Virginia state Senate to Democrats.
Mr. Black, who won the race, said Mr. McCabe should resign from his post.
He also told The Washington Times that Mr. McAuliffe irked local Democrats last year by handpicking Mrs. McCabe to run for the seat. The senator said he wondered whether the money influenced the FBI’s investigation.
“It is kind of hard to imagine that a huge contribution of that magnitude to his wife would not consciously or subconsciously influence how he would decide the case,” Mr. Black said.
“Now I can’t say for certain, but this is the reason that the ethical standards say you should avoid even the appearance of impropriety because ordinary people looking at the facts would say this really stinks and this really, really smells of government corruption,” he said.
Brian Coy, a spokesman for Mr. McAuliffe, dismissed the idea that the governor engaged in questionable dealings, saying Mrs. McCabe was a “highly qualified candidate” and other candidates were the recipients of bigger donations.
“He had one face-to-face meeting with [Mr. McCabe], which occurred on March 7, 2015, before her decision to run,” Mr. Coy said in an email. “As the story itself states, Mr. McCabe was not in any position to influence the FBI investigation until AFTER the campaign concluded.
“The Governor had positively no connection to the email issue, he supported Dr. McCabe solely because she shared his vision for Virginia and any insinuation otherwise is ridiculous at best, reckless at worst,” he said.
The governor’s PAC, Common Good VA, gave 13 percent of its contributions to her campaign. Two other state Senate candidates received more money from the PAC, as did the state Democratic Party.
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign sent a memo accusing Mr. Trump of spinning conspiracy theories to keep his campaign afloat.
The Democratic presidential nominee campaigned in New Hampshire and, increasingly confident of victory, turned her attention to down-ticket races, appearing with Gov. Maggie Hassan, who is challenging Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte.
Also appearing on the stage was Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who attacked Mr. Trump over the lewd remarks he made about women in a 2005 video recording and adopted his description of Mrs. Clinton as a campaign mantra.
“Nasty women have really had it with guys like you. Yeah, get this, Donald: Nasty women are tough. Nasty women are smart. And nasty women vote,” she said. “And on Nov. 8, we nasty women are going to march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever.”
Mrs. Clinton leads in New Hampshire by 8 percentage points and Florida by almost 4 percentage points, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls. Nationally, her lead is five points.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. |
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Vanessa-Mae has added another string to her bow - skiing at the Winter Olympics .
The classical violinist, a British citizen, finished 67th in the women’s giant slalom – the last of the finishers to compete two runs down the rain-hit course.
Mae, 35, said: “With my limited experience at my age – I only started training six months ago – I’m just glad I made it down.
“The experience of being here is amazing.
“You’ve got the elite skiers of the world and then you’ve got some mad old woman like me trying to make it down.”
Finishing more than 50 seconds adrift of Slovenian winner Tina Maze, she almost crashed several times and got lost down the course.
Mae said: “It was rock and roll at times – I nearly crashed out three times – but I’m happy.
"I grew up in London so I’m afraid I brought the weather with me.
“It was cool. I was just happy I didn’t get lost, because this was my first two-gates and I thought I was going to go the wrong side.
"But I made it down.”
Asked about the possibility of injuring her arms, she replied: “You can insure yourself up to your eyeballs, but if you don’t take risks, what’s the point?
(Image: Getty)
"You have to enjoy life.”
Vanessa-Mae has sold more than 10m records worldwide and is worth about £30m.
The 35-year-old, who was born in Singapore to a Chinese mother and Thai father, was brought up in England but now lives in the Swiss Alpine resort of Zermatt.
She competed for Thailand, only the third person to do so in the 90-year history of the Winter Games.
The world-famous musician has been skiing since she was four years old but was the lowest-ranked racer in the field – at 2,253rd – having just scraped through qualifying a month ago.
She has trained with the Russian team in Australia over the past year, flying to as many competitions as possible to secure the necessary qualifying points.
She said: “This is the Olympic spirit and to be just a small part of it for a few days is special.
“I am shy and I sort of shuffle around the canteen looking at all these amazing skiers and they are really friendly.
"They sidle up to you and say ‘hi’ and we talk about music and sport.
“There is no pressure, only really good spirit. If you do everything when you’re young you leave no fun until the end.”
Vanessa-Mae was taught to ski thanks to private lessons paid for by her mother Pamela but once she showed her talent in music, she was banned from hitting the slopes in case of injury.
She says that her estranged mum and former manager did not bother to contact her when she qualified for the Sochi Games.
On the eve of the Games, said: “There are moments, such as Olympic moments, when you bury your differences.
"But that hasn’t happened to us.”
Instead, she appeared on the official start sheets as Vanessa Vanakorn – competing under her father’s surname.
She said: “I have many, many different cultures in my life but one that I have never kind of celebrated before was my Thai side.
“Vanakorn is my name when skiing.
"It’s really fun because I celebrated the British side, I was born in Singapore but it’s the first time I get to enjoy the Thai side here.” |
The plan back in January was to raise $100 million in just three months, terrifying would-be candidates like Rubio and Walker into sitting out the race and clearing the field for Jeb in the party’s center. It didn’t work out that way. They couldn’t hit the magic number by March, and Jeb’s early weakness — bad answers to easy questions, poor polling despite his supposed frontrunner status — enticed Rubio et al. to take a chance by challenging him. But don’t sweat the details. Bush’s numbers have been rising after his early rough patch and they ended up hitting the magic number after all — a cool $114 million raised through the first two quarters of the year, $11 million by Jeb’s campaign and an astounding $103 million by his Super PAC. To put that in perspective, Marco Rubio’s Super PAC raised just $16 million. Jeb’s haul is more than twice with the next best fundraiser, Ted Cruz, pulled in. According to one lefty analyst, adjusting for inflation over 15 years, Jeb’s raised right around what Al Gore and the DNC spent in the course of the entire 2000 campaign. The GOP establishment: Membership has its advantages.
Alternate headline: “Man buys nomination.”
It appears Bush raised even more than what was disclosed on Thursday. That mammoth figure still doesn’t include a third political committee in Bush’s orbit, the Right to Rise PAC Inc. When Bush first announced last December that he was “actively” exploring a presidential run, he said he was forming a PAC to help promote “leaders, ideas and policies.” Neither the super PAC nor campaign responded to an inquiry about the other PAC’s fundraising figures in 2015… Bush formally declared his candidacy in Miami on June 15 and raised an average of $710,000 per day for the rest of the month. To put his $11.4 million haul in perspective, it would require Bush to have raised the maximum donation of $2,700 in primary dollars from more than 4,200 donors—in 16 days. His super PAC, Right to Rise USA, run by one of Bush’s longtime confidantes, is not constrained by contribution limits. Bush had roughly 500 donors contribute more than $25,000, according to figures released by his super PAC Thursday. Of the $103 million raised, the super PAC said that it had more than $98 million cash on hand.
“I’ve taken dumps worth more than $114 million,” Trump will undoubtedly say in his next interview. As for Jeb, who’s the biggest loser from this fundraising bonanza? Gotta be Rubio, right? The whole field’s going to struggle trying to compete with the Bush ad barrage, but that hurts more in some places than others. It might not sink Walker in Iowa, just because he’s more regionally and ideologically in tune with the electorate there than Jeb is. It might not cinch New Hampshire for Bush either, as that state often prefers underdogs like McCain to juggernauts. The early state where the numbers will matter most, I assume, is Florida, where advertising time is expensive due to the sheer size of the population and the rates for airtime in major media markets like Miami. For everyone in the field save one man, that’s not a big deal: Bush is expected to win Florida anyway so there’s no great pressure on Walker or Rand Paul to pour in millions there in hopes of a longshot upset. The one guy who must compete, though, is Rubio; unless he pulls off a win in one of the early states, losing his home state to Bush will probably sink him. Even if he does win another state, losing Florida badly to Bush might sink him anyway. And now, with this kind of financial advantage for Jeb, he’s badly outgunned. Maybe the next time Scott Walker jokes about having Rubio as his VP, Rubio should take the deal.
Personally, the only thing that could make me more excited about nominating another Bush is knowing that the nomination was purchased for him by rich amnesty shills with bottomless pockets, so here’s to the highest conservative turnout evah in November 2016.
Update: Did I speak too soon about Rubio? Maybe he’s not as badly outgunned as we thought. |
October 18, 2013 14:43 IST
The change needed to prevent violence against women in India -- and across the world -- must be systemic, cultural change, not reciprocal violence to individual acts of barbarism, says Mallika Dutt.
On September 13, a New Delhi judge -- based on a guilty verdict days earlier -- sentenced to death the four men convicted of the December gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old girl.
Crowds cheered as the collective cry from the majority of the public to 'hang the rapists' was answered. The girl's mother remarked that her daughter's dying wish was to see her attackers hanged.
Others had insisted on a public execution to reinforce the preventative motive of the sentence. The death penalty may quench, for some, a thirst for a particular -- and highly limited -- type of justice. The Delhi rape and murder rightly sowed rage, and I can understand the impulse for such retribution, especially on the part of her parents.
But the death of the perpetrators will do little to change the 'lives' of women in India, today or tomorrow. The fact is, addressing and responding to violence with more violence is not only wrong, but it is ineffective in preventing violent crime. There is much conclusive -- if limited -- scholarship on the death penalty's role as a crime deterrent.
A majority of criminologists and police chiefs say the death penalty is much more a symbolic political tool than an actual deterrent (external link). Law enforcement overwhelmingly agreed that a 'better economy and more jobs' are a stronger deterrent of violent crime than 'expanded use of the death penalty'.
Indeed, the change needed to prevent violence against women in India -- and across the world -- must be systemic, cultural change, not reciprocal violence to individual acts of barbarism.
Indian litigator Karuna Nundy, quoted in The New York Times, echoed this sentiment well, saying, 'I think a lot of people were hugging each other because they thought this evil is localised, and it will be wiped out, and that is not the case. The sad truth is that it is not a deterrent.'
Real deterrents include appropriate policing, accountable government, and effective implementation of laws. But more than that, the best deterrent to rape is culture change: Bold, steady, and persistent challenges to the norms and biases that enable and excuse violence against women.
We need to make violence and discrimination against women socially and culturally unacceptable, in India and beyond -- not just in the spectacular cases, but in our everyday lives, homes, and interactions.
To hang these men does not even begin to address the scale of the problem. If we gave the death penalty to every perpetrator of sexual violence, we would inevitably be hanging people we know -- members of our communities.
Media reports indicate that victims knew their offenders in over 94 percent of reported rape cases in India. They were husbands, parents, husbands, neighbours. To bring about a more equitable and safe world for women and girls, we must change hearts and minds in our communities, in our homes.
We cannot make the degradation of women and girls unacceptable simply by 'weeding out' the bad apples. So yes, we should be taking to the streets, but not to call for more death. Instead, we should be demanding change from a culture that treats women and girls as less than.
The groundswell of attention and action pouring out onto the streets of Delhi and beyond in the wake of the gang-rape gave -- and continues to give me -- hope. We have spoken to dozens of young men on the streets of Delhi who have not only spoken out against acts of violence against women, but the inequitable conditions that they know cause them.
This greater involvement of men in the protests has signalled a tipping point in the ways in which all genders are standing up to demand that no single person be denied their human rights. That means the right to live in a society without fear of violence -- whether you are a young woman riding the bus home or one of four young men on trial for rape and murder.
And it is not just the type of violence right in front of us, or the kind that may get the media attention of the Delhi gang-rape and murder, or any of the subsequent highly publicised acts of sexual violence against women. We also need to dismantle the biases that send girls into dangerous early marriages, that prevent girls from being born -- leaving some communities in India with so few girls that they must be trafficked in for men to marry.
Men need to stand shoulder to shoulder with women to demand and make that change, too. We need more fathers like the one in Jharkhand -- who took his daughter back from her marriage at 13 when he found out she was being abused -- to become the norm. Now he publicly stands against early marriage, talking his relatives out of following the practice.
That is the kind of sustainable change we really need -- where human rights begin and live in every home and all people are able to reach their full potential.
Making behaviour punishable by death is not a deterrent. Making behaviour absolutely unconscionable is -- and that starts with changing how India as a society -- indeed, how all of us -- views and treats women and girls.
And as long as the meaningful, lasting dialogue sparked last December continues, whatever the fates of her attackers, I don't think the Delhi girl's death will be in vain. Or as journalist Nilanjana S Roy succinctly put it (external link): 'The rapes might not stop; but this conversation isn't stopping either.'
Mallika Dutt is the Founder, President and CEO of Breakthrough, a global human rights organisation that 'uses the power of media, pop culture, and community mobilisation to promote human rights values.' |
From Warcraft to Overwatch, Starcraft to Diablo, there’s no shortage of Blizzard games yearning for a VR makeover. But while Blizzard has its eye on virtual reality gaming, we can exclusively reveal that it’s not happening any time soon.
A senior Blizzard Entertainment executive has confirmed to TrustedReviews that the company is “looking at” launching some of its franchises in virtual reality, but has no immediate plans to do so. During an interview at BlizzCon 2016, we asked Gio Hunt, EVP of Corporate Operations, why Blizzard hasn’t publicly shown its commitment to the platform.
He told us:
“We have talked a little bit about it. We’re big believers in what virtual reality or augmented reality might one day become , and certainly we have a bunch of really smart engineers and technologists in the company, and we’re always evaluating and looking at those emerging technologies and emerging platforms.”
There are a couple of reasons why Blizzard isn’t keen to jump on the virtual reality bandwagon just yet, according to Hunt.
One concern was that there isn’t a significant number of gamers with VR setups, so Blizzard would need to see that playerbase grow “before [they would] start to develop content specifically for that.”
Related: World of Warcraft: Legion review
Launched earlier this year, shooter Overwatch is Blizzard’s newest franchise – but it’s probably not coming to the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive any time soon
Hunt also bemoaned the fragmented VR ecosystem, explaining how Blizzard isn’t convinced that a standard for virtual reality or augmented reality exists yet:
“ There is no one VR platform today; there are actually several, and they’re all competing with one another . So there’s not even a standard for what VR or AR means, to be honest. So we’d need to see that technology mature a little bit more and solidify in terms of a specific platform, and we’d need to see some additional audience accumulate around that platform.”
That said, Hunt still seemed convinced that Blizzard is destined to build games for virtual reality somewhere down the line, once the VR ecosystem starts to take shape:
“You can just imagine once that occurs, what we could do with some of our universes, in an augmented or virtual reality way. So we’re absolutely looking at all of that, and once we see a substantial opportunity there, you can imagine we’ll be there.”
The Blizzard exec went on to explain how he believes all of Blizzard’s four main franchises could potentially work well in virtual reality, saying:
“I think they could all do great, actually. All our universes are robust, deep, and I think depending on what the technology was and how we would go about doing it – I mean it’s hard to even imagine what it would look like exactly – but I think all of the universes could work well on those types of platforms.”
We also asked Matt Goss, a Lead Game Designer on World of Warcraft, one of Blizzard’s most popular franchises, about whether we’d ever see Azeroth in virtual reality, to which he replied: “It’s not something we talk about, but again, I would never say never. But it’s not something we’re currently talking about.”
Related: Diablo 4 – everything you need to know
Watch: Overwatch gameplay
Which Blizzard game would most like to see in virtual reality or augmented reality? Let us know in the comments below. |
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Su Marte si trova veramente di tutto, anche le Cascate del Niagara. Certamente, la NASA ha trovato molti segni della presenza di acqua antica sul pianeta rosso nel corso degli anni. Ma sembra giunto il momento di focalizzare ora l’attenzione su qualcosa di notevolmente interessante: la lava marziana fusa.
L’impresa si deve questa volta non al rover Curiosity, bensì al Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) della NASA. Questo ha scattato fotografie di una parte del pianeta rosso che una volta ospitava enormi cascate multilivello di lava che si gettavano in un cratere. Le immagini mostrano persino il flusso circolare (ora asciutto) della lava alla base delle cascate, dove la roccia fusa si estendeva verso l’esterno sul pavimento del cratere.
“I flussi di lava e le cascate sono diversi, in quanto sono più ruvide delle caratteristiche originali, lisce e morbide“, ha spiegato in una dichiarazione la NASA, riferendosi alle caratteristiche della superficie diverse da quelle che sono state definite come le “Cascate del Niagara di Marte”. “In un’immagine ravvicinata, il flusso di lava approssimativamente strutturato a nord ha violato la parete del cratere in un punto stretto, dove poi la cascata si proietta verso il basso, esplodendo e drappeggiando le pendici più profonde della parete nel processo” di erosione.
Questa non è la prima prova della presenza di lava su Marte. I ricercatori hanno anche teorizzato di aver trovato canali di lava sul pianeta rosso, e anche tubi lavici che ne hanno modellato la sua geologia. MRO, in tutto questo tempo, ha scattato migliaia di immagini di Marte nel corso degli anni, rivelando caratteristiche sulla superficie del pianeta rosso come mai prima. L’orbiter ha anche intercettato altri robot e rover intenti ad esplorare il mondo sottostante.
La NASA e altre agenzie spaziali sono particolarmente interessate a studiare Marte perché potrebbero avere la possibilità di trovare i segni della presenza di vita passata nel nostro sistema solare al di fuori della Terra. Studiando il passato di Marte, infatti, possiamo imparare un po’ di più riguardo il posto che occupiamo in questo quartiere cosmico. |
While the first autonomous vehicles with at least modest self-driving capabilities are expected to reach dealers’ showrooms by decade’s end, overcoming motorists’ innate distrust of the concept could prove to be the biggest challenge ahead for automakers.
According to a survey of 1,000 adults conducted by ORC International for the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, only 18 percent of consumers queried said they’d purchase an autonomous vehicle. Why? Two-thirds admitted they wouldn’t feel safe being a driver in name only, while only 22 percent would feel confident allowing their loved ones to ride in a self-piloted car.
Obviously the notion of autonomous vehicles being inherently safer than human-piloted modes of transportation seems to be lost on the average motorist, who’s clearly nervous about the prospect of taking their hands off the wheel. Over 30,000 people are killed annually in crashes, with the overwhelming majority of them due to driver error. Unlike a human motorist, a self-driving car wouldn’t be temped to take unnecessary risks on the road and is unable of becoming lost in thought or otherwise dangerously distracted during a boring commute.
Nevertheless, Chubb's findings seem to validate our earlier hypothesis that leading-edge companies like Tesla and Google might be better able to lure affluent and tech-savvy early adopters to their own self-driving models more confidently than established upscale automakers such as Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz with conservative clientele, and mainstream makes like Nissan who’s customers might be both reluctant of the technology and too price sensitive to consider it.
Ironically, the Chubb report found that the same consumers would be overwhelmingly willing to spend the extra bucks on their next new-vehicle purchases to obtain what are essentially the building blocks engineers are assembling to create driverless cars.
For example, 88 percent of those surveyed said they’d pay extra for lane departure warning systems that signal a driver when the vehicle is inadvertently crossing highway lane markers (with some cars further having the ability to either “nudge” the car back into place via selective braking). Meanwhile, 77 percent said they’d be willing to spend extra for a forward collision warning system that can automatically apply the brakes to avoid or at least minimize the effects of a crash, with nearly 70 percent considering adaptive cruise control that maintains both a set speed and distance from the traffic ahead on their next car or truck.
What’s more, 33 percent of respondents said they’d buy a car with a self-parking system that automatically steers the vehicle into a spot with the driver only having to shift the transmission into reverse and modulate the brake pedal.
"Our survey results demonstrate that, even during an economic recovery period, consumers would pay for additional safety features in their next car, especially those that help protect themselves, loved one and pets by minimizing the potential for an accident," according to Chubb personal insurance worldwide auto manager Ray Crisci.
Perhaps one statistic that portends well for a future filled with autonomous vehicles is that only 13 percent of those surveyed said they’d be willing to take a nap while sitting behind the wheel of a self-driving car.
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A letter written by the future Edward VIII that exposes him as racist and sexist has come to light.
The Prince of Wales, who later abdicated to marry an American divorcee, wrote to his then mistress, Freda Dudley Ward, while he was on a Caribbean cruise.
He visited Barbados in 1920, aged 25, but wrote that he found the “coloured population” to be “revolting”.
He also wrote of dancing with women, all of whem his insisted were young and vetted by his friend, Louis Mountbatten, and described one lady as an “American bit”.
The Prince, whose name before he was King was David, included the diatribe in a love letter to his then mistress, Freda Dudley Ward, in which he complained about how much he was missing her.
The married socialite was the future King's lover between 1918 to 1923.
They remained close until 1936 when he met American divorcee Wallis Simpson, who he gave up the thrown for later that year.
Over 22 pages, The Prince wrote of his travels on HMS Renown from March 21 to March 29, 1920.
In the letter, he wrote of how much he missed his mistress, telling her "how I want you tonight to tell you and show you how madly I love you."
He added: "Oh! My darling darling precious beloved little Freddie, life is absolute hell & torture for you're your little David without YOU."
The Prince of Wales then went on to daily document his hatred of the trip which came at a time when Britain was heading into an economic depression after the First World War.
He moaned: "I can't and shan't be able to raise the least enthusiasm about anything on this trip.
"It looks a proper bum island this Barbados. It's a unique sort of scenery very ugly & I don't take much to the coloured population who are revolting.
"I'm sorry for the colonial office people who have to live there tho (sic)."
The 25-year-old Prince then complained about have to dance with different women at formal functions.
He said: "Never have I felt less like all that or setting eyes on any woman but you darling angel; the idea absolutely revolts me.
"We gave an official dinner to 20 notables of the island including the governor & his wife which was followed by a reception.
"I've appointed Dickie [Mountbatten] my "procurer" of partners & only take on a "young woman" that he has vetted as being possible!!
"But Christ! They were the absolute limit tonight & I can't remember what the 3 women I danced with look like as I hardly looked at them!!
"I danced quite a lot sweetheart: Dickie found me a little American bit who wasn't such a bad mover but the rest of the women were impossible."
The letter is now being sold by a private collector at auction in London on Saturday with a pre-sale estimate of £1,200.
Richard Davie, of International Autograph Auctions, said: "This is a letter of quite remarkable content that reflects Edward VIII's character.
"He was one of the most colourful members of the Royal family who showed his emotions.
"I'm sure in March 1920 many British people would have gladly swapped places with him in Barbados and the Caribbean.
"He was in a very fortunate position but the tone of this letter written over the course of a week is one of ungratefulness.
"After he abdicated, Edward went on to become the governor of the Bahamas. Hopefully his attitude had changed by then and he was more diplomatic." |
2013 seems to be the year of high profile rape cases that end up fizzling out with the rapist getting very little to no punishment, and in some cases (*cough* Steubenville *cough*) even the sympathy of the general public and mainstream media. Well, this trend doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon, because we have another one coming out of Montana.
The case of Cherice Moralez's rape started in 2008, when she was 14. The rapist was her 49-year-old high school teacher. So, why is this in the news now? Because the prompt for the court to look another at Cherice's case after 3 years of pointless bureaucracy was the news of her suicide.
Cherice Moralez's rapist (whose name I refuse to use in this article; if you really want to know who this pervert is, you can look him up yourself) was originally convicted of 3 counts of rape, but not sentenced to any time in prison and instead was forced into a rehabilitation program for sex offenders. He later violated the rules of the program that stated he couldn't be around children by attending a family gathering where children were present and was taken back into court and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Sounds pretty standard. But then the judge, District Judge G. Todd Baugh, decides that he's just going to suspend all but 31 days of this man's sentence plus a one-day credit for spending a day in jail. Because Cherice "seemed older than her chronological age," claiming she was, "as much in control of the situation" as her rapist.
That's a 30-day prison sentence for the rape of a minor. Because she was busty. Ex-fucking-cuse me?
Let's take a look-see at Montana's sex crime laws. Just a little gander, shall we?
"If the victim [of sexual intercourse without consent] is less than 16 years old and the offender is 4 or more years older than the victim or if the offender inflicts bodily injury upon anyone in the course of committing sexual intercourse without consent, the offender shall be punished by life imprisonment or by imprisonment in the state prison for a term of not less than 4 years or more than 100 years and may be fined not more than $50,000."
Huh. That's funny. I seem to see "life imprisonment" as the first suggestion. Not "rehabilitation". Life. Weird.
So, how is it that a 14-year-old student was raped three times by her 49-year-old teacher and the guy's only given THIRTY DAYS IN PRISON? The answer is simple: rape culture.
(not only women/girls are raped; not only men are rapists)
The same rape culture that made the media praise the group of teenage boys who raped an unconscious girl at a party in Steubenville and only got one and three years in juvie even with mountains of evidence stacked up against them.
The same rape culture that made it take almost an entire year for the boys who sexually assaulted and gang raped an unconscious Rehtaeh Parsons in Halifax to be arrested. After her suicide.
The same rape culture that makes it so cops are more likely to believe that a woman is lying about her assault in order to put a man in prison for some superfluous reason than to believe that that man stuck his dick inside her without her consent. The same rape culture that views the victims and the survivors as the instigators of their own assaults. The same rape culture that leaves the majority of rape cases unreported and uninvestigated. The same rape culture that refers to the victims as "the girl" and rockets the names of the rapists to celebrity status.
No. Stop. I am not okay with this and no one else in their right mind should be either. A person who rapes with intent is no longer a person. They are, from that point on, a rapist. An inhuman, disgusting creature whose existence boils down to one event: the moment they ripped away the basic human rights of their victim, violating them in order to satisfy themselves. Period. And anyone who facilitates the freedom of one of these rapists is just as vile and deplorable as the rapists themselves.
Montana citizens are calling for Judge Baugh to resign. Frankly, I don't think resignation is enough. He skirted the law based on his own personal perceptions of the case, not on the evidence. The man should be ashamed of himself beyond the scope of his half-assed apology to Moralez's mother and the enraged protestors. He should face legal repercussions.
photo credits: nydailynews.com (2), cogentcomment.com, heavy.com, globalnews.ca
If you would like to help remove Judge Baugh from the bench, there is a petition you can sign here. |
Leading Australian BMX rider Dane Searls has died from injuries he sustained after trying to jump from a balcony into a pool at a local pub, the Gold Coast Bulletin reported Friday.
Article continues below ...
Searls, 23, had been hospitalized since late Sunday at the Gold Coast Hospital with severe head and back injuries. His death Friday morning was confirmed by police.
Witnesses said he was trying to jump from a balcony into the pool at nightspot Billy’s Beach House on Sunday, but misjudged the distance.
Searls was the mastermind behind the "Giants of Dirt" project, a series of long-range dirt jumps that rivaled the biggest in the world, ESPN reported. It was popular on YouTube and placed Searls in the global BMX spotlight.
The incident came just two days after Searls set a world record for dirt jumping on a BMX, clearing a series of gaps up to 60 feet (18m).
Paul Everest, the director of Unit Clothing that sponsored Searls, said the extreme sport star was celebrating the record-breaking feat when he jumped off the balcony.
Unit Clothing placed a tribute to Searls on its website titled "High Flight," which was linked to his profile.
Police will prepare a report for the state coroner, who will officially determine the cause of death. |
ANN ARBOR -- Michigan president Mark Schlissel will hold a 1:30 p.m. news conference Friday afternoon, and Dave Brandon will reportedly be the topic. A Michigan spokesman told MLive that Schlissell will in fact hold a news conference Friday, but would not discuss the nature of the event itself.
, though, that Brandon -- Michigan's athletic director -- will resign from his position at the school. Brandon has been under fire for more than a month now after the athletic department's public relations meltdown in the aftermath of
, as well as public outcry over ticket prices, poor football performance and an overall "corporate" feel within the department. Earlier this month at a Board of Regents meeting in Flint, Schlissel
over the way Brandon and his department handled the Morris situation, and said there were a number of other issues he needed to look into before making any decision on where to go from here. Michigan Regent Mark Bernstein called the Morris incident a "spark in a very, very dry forest," explaining that Brandon's department has lost goodwill with the public after several questionable incidents in recent months and years.
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It is widely perceived that commercial forms of nuclear fusion are currently ~30 years away (and always will be) - but the truth is that such widespread excessive pessimism about fusion is not justified.
The rarely mentioned practical reality is that fusion will always be 50+ years ago (not 50 years away).
The timeline to achieve viable commercial nuclear fusion is three years from the date that mankind realizes that it is currently in possession of a practical fusion technology and makes the choice to develop and use its practical form of fusion.
Mankind came into possession of a practical way of generating energy from fusion over 50 years ago with the fission/fusion Ivy-Mike nuclear test of 1952 that produced exawatt levels of fusion power with some help from a fission based experimental nuclear device to produce fusion conditions in a sample of pure Deuterium via DD fusion.
In years subsequent to Ivy-Mike, LANL and LLNL field test succeeded in producing practical fission-fusion devices that produced 95% of their total energy from fusion (and 5% of less of the total energy from the device from nuclear fission). This happened in the Red Wing-Navajo thermonuclear test shot of 1956. Red Wing-Navajo test shot was a intrinsically cleaner and a less waste producing form of nuclear fission-fusion energy than any form of fission based nuclear reactor ever operating on planet earth.
There is today in existence a practical pure fusion technology that efficiently produces large industrially significant amounts of fusion energy on demand - we just do not choose to take the small steps required to finish developing it for small efficient yields appropriate for ultra-clean commercial power generation (not weapons blast effects) and then commercially use it.
The energy needed to ignite an inertially confined thermonuclear fusion reaction in liquid (or solid) deuterium-tritium (DT) is not that large; it is on the order of not more than 10 MJ or about the same amount of chemical energy stored in about 1.25 cups of automotive gasoline.
The problem is that this energy must be compressed in space (focused down to an area less than a 2 mm) and in time (to less than 3 nanoseconds).
Inertial confinement fusion is the only form of fusion that has actually already been proven to work in actual field experiments (not just in computer simulations or models). In the final few years of underground nuclear testing, both LANL and LLNL designed a series of test shots called Halite-Centurion. Halite-Centurion series shots were fusion related add on shots piggy-backed onto DOE-DOD shots already on the schedule. These shots were designed to utilize a small portion of the X-rays produced from the primary of an experimental device through a line of sight to ignite a remote fusion experiment housed some distance away in the underground experimental test canister.
Once classified Halite-Centurion test shots experimentally proved that small DT filled spheres could be ignited and brought to full fusion ignition using an intense beam of X-rays generated from the primary explosion of an experimental fission based device.
Since during the last decade of the cold war, ICF fusion was experimentally PROVEN to work by both LANL and LLNL field test divisions: if fusion drivers are designed that sufficiently resemble the characteristics and performance of X-ray driver used in Halite-Centurion experiments, there is NO QUESTION that full pure fusion ignition with fusion energy gain will be practically achieved.
We all tend to trust energy systems we have personally participated in building, fielding, and testing. As a member of LLL Engineering/Field Test Division - I can assure you that Fission-Fusion works (first-time every-time) and is both reliable and trustworthy.
It is the belief of responsible nuclear designers (including LLNL's Dr. Ralph Moir), that small Fission-Fusion devices optimized for ultraclean nuclear power generation can be built that produce over 99% of their energy from fusion (and only 1% or less of their energy from fission). Such devices dramatically reduce the amount of high level long half-life Minor Actinide nuclear waste produced while generating nuclear power, by a factor of 100 times over the best LFTR molten salt reactor or IFR sodium cooled fast reactor or any other form of fission reactor.
Dr. Ralph Moir - Practical Fusion Reactor - Pacer - Molten Salt Reactors - Ralph Moir
In the 1970s, when LANL and LLNL looked at producing energy in Fission-Fusion reactors, only military technology was available and as a result of the limitations of the fission primary for minimum size forced excessively large reactors (~ 8 GWe of average continuous power) with the military derived fission-fusion devices if that day tended to be too large to consider in making cost effective power plants.
Today, modern fission-fusion designs that use as little as 0.25 grams of U233, U235, or Pu239 and only on the order of about 8 grams of Deuterium can be used to produce a series of fission-fusion bursts of convenient and safe small practical size around 250 GJ of fusion energy yield (approximately the energy produced from efficiently burning 1900 gallons of gasoline); about optimum size for cost effective and ultra-clean fusion nuclear power generation. Such devices engineered for ultra-clean thermonuclear power generation are 1750 times smaller in energy yield than the smallest thermonuclear military devices ever held in the US arsenal.
"A Third Way Towards the Controlled Release of Nuclear Energy by Fission and Fusion" by F. Winterberg
http://www.degruyter.com/dg/view...
It is widely suggested that here are two types of fusion —
fusion producing smooth controlled burn (GOOD)
and uncontrolled explosive fusion (BAD) –
but is this really true?
Are there in reality two types of fusion?
It has been demonstrated that in uncontrolled nuclear fusion, vast amount of energy is released in an uncontrolled manner that so far mankind has mostly used for causing destruction — the hydrogen bomb is an example. Thus uncontrolled nuclear fusion is not viewed as something of use for constructive purpose.
It is widely perceived that in controlled nuclear fusion, the vast energy of fusion reactions is released steadily so it can be used for peaceful purposes, say, in nuclear fusion reactors to produce commercial electricity.
But is there really a difference (or is it just a difference in perception?)
Is it perhaps true that there is really only one type of fusion and depending on the technology, magnetic confinement versus inertial confinement and the amount of fuel you use, you get a more or less rapid release of fusion energy.
Even in thermonuclear weapons, fusion actually produces a rapid thermonuclear burn of plasma versus a neutron driven exponentially increasing chain reaction as in the case of a super-critical nuclear fission explosion.
While the density of the plasmas and the smoothness and the time of release of energy from fusion may be different, the fusion reactions (Deuterium Tritium or Deuterium-Deuterium) are all the same and the waste products produced (helium and neutrons) are all the same for all types of fusion devices. Inertial Confinement Fusion produces fusion power in a series of discrete small controlled bursts of fusion energy. Magnetic Confinement fusion devices like tokamaks attempt to produce smooth controlled thermonuclear burns of plasma, but in reality, no tokamak device has operated producing near to engineered power for more than about five seconds before the plasma containment is lost and the fusion device has to be shut down. Today’s tokamaks employ an electrical transformer to produce an intense plasma current that heats the experimental plasma to fusion conditions. Use of such a transformer drive for plasma heating limits the operation of smooth burning tokamaks to periods of no more than a few hundred seconds or less - best case, per run.
So while the marketing spin is that Inertial Confinement Fusion experiments that produce fusion power in a series of short intense controlled burst cycles of about 40 total nanoseconds per shot are BAD (explosive - nasty-dangerous), the reality is that ICF fusion can be just as safe and is in practice actually much more reliable than smooth burning MCF fusion experiments that in reality actually produce power in pulses of not more than a few hundred seconds in length (best case) per run. It is far easier to repeatedly reliably create fusion conditions with an appropriately sized fusion driver of 10 MJ of total delivered energy (or more) than to try to start and then maintain fusion conditions in a tokamak or stellarator magnetic fusion device for spans of time from a few hundred seconds to indeterminate.
Fission-fusion is not unicorns, science fiction, or BS (but is today’s practical working fusion technology available for short term commercialization and application successfully attacking the major combined problems of climate and worldwide energy scarcity).
Specific forms of fission-fusion and pure inertial confinement fusion are today’s overlooked practical fusion technologies, that with the help of LANL and LLNL nuclear designers, could be developed and field tested to demonstrate ultra-clean commercial devices and safe and economical fusion power plants in less than three years.
Today, there are smaller pure fusion devices (not fission-fusion devices) designed to make clean energy (not blast effects) from two-stage pure DT-DD fusion of fusion fuels while producing most of the fusion energy of the device purely and sustainably from the fusion of the Deuterium fuel separated from sea water. One such design is called mini-Mike, which produces a small predictable controlled energy yield of 250 GJ.
Note: Deuterium separated from sea water is totally non-radioactive and fusion of this fuel produces only totally non-radioactive nuclear waste (helium).
The following is a conceptual drawing of a two-stage DT-DD device called “mini-Mike” where the ignition of a pure fusion DT primary initiated by a fusion driver of around 10 MJ total delivered energy produces a thermonuclear shock detonation wave in a slightly tapered cylinder of pure deuterium cryo-liquid.
NY Times article published at the time of the once classified Halite-Centurion field tests - Secret Advance in Nuclear Fusion Spurs a Dispute Among Scientists |
SAN JOSE, Calif. – The San Jose Earthquakes announced today that the club has hired Bruno Costa as the team’s head of scouting. Costa joins the Quakes with extensive scouting experience, spending almost two decades in the Brazilian top flight (Série A) and with the Brazilian Football Confederation.
During his time with the confederation, Costa helped scout and recruit some of the biggest names in modern soccer, including Neymar Jr. (Barcelona), Philippe Coutinho (Liverpool), Gabriel Jesus (Manchester City) and Willian (Chelsea) to the Brazilian Youth National Teams.
“Bruno is a fantastic addition to our organization, having worked in the competitive Série A and with the most successful national team in international soccer,” said Earthquakes general manager Jesse Fioranelli. “Our goal was to hire an experienced scout that knows the U.S. and the international talent markets. As we develop a comprehensive player scouting and development program across Quakes teams, Bruno will focus on prospects in the Bay Area as much as he will cover U.S. and select markets in Europe and Latin America. He brings a tremendous amount of experience in identifying talent to the Quakes, and we are fortunate to have him as part of our team.”
Costa joined the Brazilian Football Confederation, BFC, in 2001 as the team manager for the Brazilian Youth National Teams where he assisted in scouting efforts. During his time there, the Brazilian Youth National Teams won 14 trophies, including the 2003 FIFA World Youth Championship (U-20) and the 2003 FIFA U-17 World Championship, making Brazil the first and only nation to win both tournaments in the same year. The U-17s were also the runners up in the 2005 U-17 FIFA World Cup. Additionally, Costa served as the general manager for the 2008 Beijing Olympics qualifying squad.
Following his first stint with the BFC, Costa went to Fluminense Football Club of Série A in 2007 where he remained until 2011 as the general manager of the youth academy and assistant general manager for the first team. During his time with Fluminense, the club won more than 30 trophies, including the 2007 Brazilian Cup for the first time in club history and the 2010 Brazilian National Championship. Fluminense were also the runners up in the 2008 Copa Libertadores.
Costa then spent a year as the general manager of the youth academy and assistant general manager for the first team at Figueirense Football Club, also of Série A, helping the youth squads win six trophies before he returned to the BFC in 2012.
In his second stint with the BFC, Costa served as the head scout for the Brazilian Men’s Youth National Teams and as a scout for the Men’s National Team. During this time, he worked extensively in scouting and recruiting players for the 2016 Olympic squad that went on to win Brazil’s first gold medal in the sport.
In 2015, Costa decided to return to the United States, where he attended high school and played soccer at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida and later played Division I soccer at Florida International University. Costa served as the assistant general manager and head of scouting for the NASL’s Fort Lauderdale Strikers from December 2015 until joining the Quakes. With Costa on staff in 2016, Fort Lauderdale progressed to the Round of 8 in the U.S. Open Cup for the first time in club history, the only non-MLS team to make it to the final rounds of the tournament. |
This article is over 3 years old
Police in Kingston upon Thames discover marijuana plants growing in area the size of a football pitch
A cannabis “forest” has been discovered by police officers in a leafy borough of south-west London.
About 150 marijuana plants surrounded by native plant life were found by police officers from Kingston upon Thames who posted images of the discovery on social media.
Kingston Police (@MPSKingston) Kingston Police called to a few cannabis plants. We found a forest! #CannabisTrees #TheseArentXmasTrees #WeedKiller pic.twitter.com/TfNyFZF9Ft
At around 1.5 metres (5ft), some of the plants appeared taller than one of the officers from the Grove Safer Neighbourhood team seen in the images, which were tweeted with the hashtags #TheseAren’tXmasTrees and #saynotodrugs.
MPS Grove SNT (@MPSGroveSNT) An interesting find on Grove ward. We're going on a bear hunt!!!!#saynotodrugs #Grove pic.twitter.com/bzZZULcq4H
PC Sarah Henderson, of Kingston, said: “The area these plants were growing on was the size of a football pitch, it looked like a small forest of Christmas trees and was complete with a gazebo.
“Whoever set this up used a really remote spot. The only way to get there was a 20-minute walk through wasteland. But all their time, trouble and gardening skills will go unrewarded, as the whole lot will now be destroyed by police.”
Police were alerted to the plantation on Thursday by a call from a member of the public who found the plants growing on disused private land on Lower Marsh Lane, a few streets from a university halls of residence, a sixth-form college, fitness centre and Berrylands train station.
Officers secured the scene and were making arrangements for the plants to be removed for disposal.
No arrests had been made and inquires were continuing to find those responsible for cultivating the plants. |
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