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Warning: Spoilers Ahead
My fiance asked me recently if I thought my test result would be Divergent were I to undergo the faction test from Veronica Roth’s book.
“Of course I would! Everyone would,” I said, “No one is as simplistic as the faction system makes them out to be.”
And that’s exactly the point of the book, in my opinion. When I saw the movie it resonated with me deeply, making me wonder what it was that kept me coming back for more. I’ve watched the movie three times, and read the first book for the first time, over the course of two weeks and this is what I’ve concluded:
Divergent‘s factions are built upon supposed innate differences between people. Yet as the narrative unfolds we see that things are not as neat and tidy as they seem. The organization of people into factions shows how society can exacerbate supposed “innate differences” between individuals to disastrous ends. We gradually unravel the weaknesses of the faction system and watch as it implodes upon itself.
If gender conflict or oppression exists in Veronica Roth’s world, I did not find it – at least not in book one or movie one! I found it incredibly refreshing to read a story that does not default itself to the same-old same-old sexist society (because it’s historically accurate! /s/) yet still addresses the fundamental problem of stereotypes. By creating a new brand of “stereotypical culture roles” using the faction system, it is easier for the message of how bad they are to come across. Much easier than trying to address the actual “stereotypical gender roles” insisted upon in our society. With a skilled hand, Veronica Roth has introduced the idea of socially constructed roles, and how detrimental they are, in a way that is entertaining.
Beatrice, or Tris, “fails” the faction test because she does not fall clearly into one of the categories. Instead she falls into several of them to varying degrees. In the beginning of the book Tris is still living in the Abnegation faction where she was born and raised. In Abnegation the forgetting of the self is of the utmost importance. Selflessness, humility, nonaggression, vegetarianism, and compassion are the ideals by which Abnegation faction members live. In other words, Abnegation by another name is our stereotypical understanding of the nature of femininity. And it chafes Beatrice as it chafes so many women in American society, past and present. Beatrice isn’t as selfless as she’s supposed to be. She doesn’t want to have to take care of everyone else all of the time. She’s selfish. And that’s actually a pretty healthy thing to be sometimes.
Instead of staying in Abnegation like she is told to do by her tester, Beatrice chooses the Dauntless faction. Dauntless are brave, strong, courageous, loud, fast, allowed to eat meat, and even considered dangerous. Dauntless by another name is our stereotypical understanding of the nature of masculinity. You could as easily say “Dauntless will be Dauntless” as say “boys will be boys.” And it fascinates Beatrice because it represents the opposite of everything she has been raised to be.
She wants to be heard. She wants to move her body and to exert power in the physical social sphere. She wants to be brave. She wants to be selfish! She wants to have fun! And in the world of Veronica Roth it is only a matter of which faction you are in that dictates whether you inhabit the “feminine” or “masculine” spaces. Faction association trumps everything else, including family, and including biological sex.
Tris is who we all want to be, we Millennials who are so revolutionary. We want to be the linchpin for change. We want to buck tradition. Yet when we enter the adult working world our surroundings are not so accommodating. We still win or lose by rules that previous generations wrote, much like the Divergent are hunted down in Tris’s world since they are deemed dangerous. The persecution of the nonconforming is a tale as old as time, yet still rings true to readers today.
Tris dares to be both Abnegation and Dauntless, going so far as to have the Abnegation symbol tattooed on her back covertly. A good part of the Tris’s character development revolves around how she comes to understand what Abnegation means to her, and how it is still a a part of her identity. She realizes that Dauntless and Abnegation don’t have to contradict one another, and that they can be complimentary and both reside within one person. To take the message further, “masculinity” and “femininity” are complimentary and can reside within one person without contradiction.
The character of Four takes this idea further. He purposefully and intentionally embraces all the factions and wants to be the best of each of them. He recognizes that as humans we limit ourselves by assigning labels for the sake of social order. Moreover, Four’s development throughout the story goes against the common themes we see in other young adult movies. He is a young man that provides support to Tris, but not once does his presence in the story undermine Tris’s agency and strength.
Yes, he is a love interest, but the love story is not the driving force behind the film. Yes, he does rescue her from being thrown over a cliff’s edge, but Tris is not a damsel in distress. And what’s more, he is vulnerable. He shows his fears AND he shows them willingly. His trust and openness with Tris gives readers a great example of how vulnerability can be a sign of strength, not weakness.
By the end of the story, it is clear that Tris and Four are neither wholly Abnegation nor wholly Dauntless. They are neither wholly feminine or wholly masculine. They are a mix of both, just like all of us are.
We are all Divergent.
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Mr Olmert has previously said he will not step down Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak has called on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to take a leave of absence or resign as he battles allegations of corruption. Mr Barak said he would take his Labour Party out of Mr Olmert's governing coalition if he did not step down. "The prime minister needs to disconnect himself from the day-to-day management of the government," Mr Barak said. Mr Olmert denies claims that he took up to $500,000 (£250,000) in bribes or illegal campaign donations. Mr Olmert, the head of the Kadima party, admits accepting funds before he became prime minister in 2006. But he insists they were legal contributions towards his campaigns for re-election as Jerusalem mayor and for the leadership of the Likud party. I do not think the prime minister can simultaneously run the government and deal with his own personal affair
Ehud Barak
Israeli Defence Minister He has previously said he had no plans to step aside unless he is charged. Kadima has just 29 MPs out of a total of 120 seats in the Knesset, and relies on the Labour Party's 19 MPs as key allies in its governing coalition. Mr Barak's resignation call is a very damaging blow to Mr Olmert, the BBC's Tim Franks in Jerusalem says. Most seasoned political analysts in Israel believe it spells his certain demise as prime minister, our Middle East correspondent says. Barak's warning Mr Barak was speaking a day after the US businessman at the centre of the allegations told investigators that he gave Mr Olmert envelopes full of cash. ISRAELI KNESSET Kadima: 29 MPs Labour: 19 MPs Shas: 12 MPs Likud: 12 MPs Yisrael Beiteinu: 11 MPs Others: 37 MPs Morris Talansky was questioned by investigators, and is due to be cross-examined by Mr Olmert's defence team in July. At a press conference on Wednesday, Mr Barak said he did not think the prime minister could run the government and deal with the fall-out from the allegations at the same time. "He can do this in any of the ways open to him - suspension, vacation or resignation or declaring himself incapacitated. We will not be the ones to determine this," he said. But he warned that if Mr Olmert did not leave, "we will act towards setting an agreed and early date for elections". However, our correspondent notes that Mr Barak did not issue an ultimatum with a precise deadline attached. Italian holiday Testifying in an Israeli court on Tuesday, Mr Talansky said he handed over about $150,000 of his own money to Mr Olmert, directly and through aides, over a 15-year period. Mr Talansky said the money was often handed over in cash-stuffed envelopes The rest of the money came from fundraising. He said he did not know how the money had been spent, adding: "I only know he loved expensive cigars. I know he loved pens, watches." Mr Talansky said that Mr Olmert also asked him for a personal loan of $25,000-$30,000 for a holiday in Italy. In another case, he said, he walked to a bank to withdraw $15,000 in cash for a loan as Mr Olmert waited in a luxury hotel. Mr Talansky said he thought Mr Olmert's "word was gold", but that Mr Olmert never repaid either loan.
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This has been one of my favourite smoothies for a long time and I just realised there isn’t a recipe for it on the blog! Well, I had to fix that.
Blueberries with cinnamon and dates give a delicious flavour that reminds me of blueberry muffins – hence the name of this smoothie.
Chia seeds help thicken (and add nutrition) without the need for bananas, which I cannot eat raw.
Plus, I always found banana to be quite a strong flavour and can be overpowering in a smoothie when you don’t want something that tastes like banana.
No Bananas!
I’ve had problems with bananas for a while, although I am perfectly fine to eat them cooked. Recipes such as banana bread is no problem, strangely enough.
But in their raw state, they make me so ill and it took me a while to figure out why.
Turns out it’s not so uncommon to have this problem with bananas and the culprits are most likely either a latex-fruit allergy or pollen-allergy syndrome.
I happen to have both which means that quite a few raw fruits and nuts eaten in their natural state can give me an allergic reaction.
Although, most of the time if blend them or cook them, I get no reaction because it breaks down the protein that causes the reaction.
Weird, huh?
If you think you might have a banana allergy, there is some useful information here.
Look at that colour. Purple is my favourite colour (next to green) so not only does the taste of this smoothie make me happy but just looking at it brings me joy!
This smoothie is:
Raw & vegan
Gluten-free, grain-free and paleo-friendly
Banana-free
High in fibre
High in omega 3s and heart-healthy fats
Full of vitamins & minerals
Raw Blueberry Muffin Smoothie Yield: 1 glass Prep Time: 2 minutes Total Time: 2 minutes My all-time favourite smoothie recipe. Full of nutritious ingredients that result in a drink that tastes of blueberry muffins! Print Ingredients 1/2 cup frozen blueberries*
360 ml / 1 1/2 cups almond milk
1 tbsp chia seeds
2 dates, or more, depending on how sweet you want it
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp cinnamon Instructions Simply blend all the ingredients together until smooth. Pour into a large glass and serve immediately. Enjoy! Notes *This recipe doesn't work as well with non-frozen blueberries. Nutrition Information: Yield: 1
Amount Per Serving: Calories: 270 Carbohydrates: 50g Fiber: 11g Protein: 5g
More banana-free smoothies: |
how I failed as a dog parent (and still have the greatest dog in the world)
I feel like so many people try to cover up their struggles with their dogs, because EVERYONE on the internet will be like – OMG YOU ARE THE WORST HUMAN EVER. I figure it’s time for some real talk.
Pudge is not crate trained.
Pudge and loose leash walking on a flat collar is a joke.
Pudge is leash reactive (we’ve made huge progress).
Pudge doesn’t really do fetch.
Pudge has absolutely zero drive, which is unusual for a corgi.
Pudge really doesn’t have dog friends, he tolerates their existence.
But Pudge has no separation anxiety, he calmly remains in the kitchen quarantine when we leave and sleeps. He makes really cool noises and vocalizations. He really loves humans and human affection, and even adores tiny sticky humans. Pudge really enjoys naps and nap time. He greets you with trills and ridiculous cries of joy. He takes less than 1 minute to go out and pee, no funny business. He pees and poops on command. He is patient during bath time and fluff trimming. He recalls like a boss. He’s never bitten anyone or anything, not even the vet or vet tech (he just cries like a big baby). He is too big and stumpy to really ever climb on things (plus he’s afraid of heights). He doesn’t destroy things, he doesn’t pee in the house, but he will bark. Oh does he bark. He’s smarter than the average dog, but by no means the smartest. He plops his butt down at every intersection waiting for his release command. He waits until we are up before he starts his morning boofs for pees/food, and he can be patient for walkies on the weekends.
So he doesn’t do some doggie things. And he’s totally not a perfectly behaved dog, he’s got some issues. But he’s a fantastic companion.
HE IS THE GREATEST DOG. The sweetest most snorgliest pile of fluff. Straight up chill.
I love this dog. No regrets. |
After President Trump was elected despite his famously misogynistic words and actions, many Americans worried that the country was going backward on gender issues. And since Trump has promised to appoint Supreme Court judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, reproductive health specifically seems under attack.
But according to a new poll conducted by PerryUndem, a nonpartisan public opinion research firm in Washington, DC, the American public still holds remarkably progressive views on gender and health policy. (The poll was fielded March 2 through 6 and surveyed a representative sample of 1,094 registered voters nationwide.)
Eighty percent of voters believe that a woman should be able to have sex for pleasure without worrying about pregnancy. That’s about the same proportion of voters, 76 percent, who said men should be able to have sex for pleasure without worrying about pregnancy.
Strong majorities of voters say that access to affordable birth control is important for women’s rights, equality, and economic stability.
And majorities also oppose some of the Republican Party’s biggest priorities on women’s health — including defunding Planned Parenthood, restricting access to abortion, and banning federal tax dollars from paying for abortion.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has refused to promise that he wouldn’t roll back women’s health gains like the no-cost birth control benefit. But two-thirds of Americans want to keep that benefit in place.
This point is worth pausing on. One of America’s two major political parties is ideologically committed to policies on women’s health that most Americans don’t agree with at all.
And the effect of these policies will be to reduce access to women’s health care by making it either more expensive or less widely available.
Most voters say affordable birth control is important to women’s rights, and to the economy as a whole
Hormonal birth control has unquestionably had huge impacts on society since it was first marketed in 1960. It allowed women to delay marriage and childbearing and enter the workforce in larger numbers. That meant women had more choices about what to do with their lives, and it boosted the nation’s GDP in the process.
But the key word for the current debate on birth control is “affordable.”
Many Republicans and conservatives staunchly opposed the birth control benefit, which covers all 18 FDA-approved methods of birth control at no additional cost to women who have insurance.
Some had moral objections to birth control, or balked at the idea that they should have to ”pay for” a woman’s choice to have sex. Others worried about the effects of such a government mandate on the private market. And others — including Price — rejected the idea that women really need the benefit at all.
According to the new poll, however, most Americans see a wide range of benefits to women’s ability to access affordable birth control — for women, for their families, and for the economy as a whole.
Black and Latino voters were somewhat more likely than non-Hispanic whites to make these connections: 71 percent of Latino voters and 67 percent of black voters, compared with 59 percent of white voters, said that birth control affects women’s opportunities to be financially stable. And while 65 percent of voters overall and 61 percent of white voters said birth control affects “women’s rights and freedoms as individuals,” 79 percent of Latino voters and 76 percent of black voters said the same.
However, only 37 percent of men said they had personally benefited from a partner’s access to affordable birth control.
One in three women say they can’t afford to pay more than $10 a month for birth control
This is the other reason “affordable” is the key word in the birth control debate: Theoretical “access” to contraception doesn’t mean much if women can’t actually afford it.
One-third of women of reproductive age told pollsters that if they or a loved one needed birth control today, they could pay no more than $10 for it out of pocket. Fourteen percent said they couldn’t afford to pay anything at all.
This is a similar result to a 2010 survey conducted by Planned Parenthood, which found that a third of women struggled to afford their copays for birth control. Those copays ranged from $15 to $50.
This suggests that even more women would have trouble affording an IUD or implant, which can cost up to $1,000 upfront. But these longer-term methods are the most effective at preventing pregnancy — and drastically reduce teen pregnancy rates when they’re made affordable.
Price, then a representative, said in 2012 that “not one” woman actually had trouble affording birth control. The evidence suggests he’s very wrong about this — yet he’s the public official with the most power over what happens to the birth control mandate in the future.
Large majorities of voters oppose policies that restrict access to women’s health care or make it more expensive
One of America’s two major political parties is ideologically committed to policies like defunding Planned Parenthood, banning abortion entirely, slashing Medicaid benefits, and repealing a health care law that has significantly expanded health benefits for women.
Most voters don’t agree with any of these priorities.
Three-quarters of Americans oppose defunding Planned Parenthood. Two-thirds want to keep the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit in place. Well over 80 percent want to keep the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, no-cost women’s preventive care, and the ban on charging women more for insurance.
What’s more, voters seem to associate these policy priorities with gender discrimination. When asked a hypothetical question about what would happen if men were the sex that could get pregnant instead of women, 75 percent of voters said they thought men in the new administration and in Congress would want to keep the birth control benefit instead of eliminate it.
Even the supposedly controversial issue of “taxpayer-funded abortions,” which Republicans have used to justify defunding Planned Parenthood, isn’t actually that controversial. A majority of voters (55 percent) oppose banning Medicaid from covering abortions at all — even though Medicaid has been banned from covering most abortions for 40 years due to the Hyde Amendment.
These findings from the PerryUndem poll track pretty closely with a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll on public attitudes toward women’s health care and Planned Parenthood.
It seems clear that the American public has much more progressive views on women’s health issues than does the Republican Party — or at least the policies that the party has chosen to make a priority these days. |
A Steubenville High School wrestling coach will perform community service and attend training on the problem of sexual violence as part of a plea deal after he was indicted for failing to report child abuse or neglect.
A grand jury in November indicted Seth Fluharty and four other school officials in the fallout from the Steubenville High rape case, in which two football stars raped a semi-conscious teenage girl in 2012.
Fluharty must serve 20 community service hours at the ALIVE shelter or another approved facility in the Steubenville area. He must attend a training session for Steubenville City Schools provided by the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence, state Attorney General Mike DeWine announced on Friday.
If Fluharty completes the terms of the agreement, misdemeanor charges against him will be dismissed, DeWine said.
The Steubenville school board in November suspended Fluharty, Superintendent Michael McVey, Pugilese West Elementary School Principal Lynnett Gorman, volunteer assistant football coach Matthew Belardine and technology director William Rhinaman after they were indicted.
The board issued a statement on Friday saying Gorman and Fluharty returned to their positions in December. McVey is on paid administrative leave. Belardine and Rhinaman no longer work in the district, board officials said.
Belardine and Rhinaman have court appearances scheduled for April 22.
A juvenile court judge in March 2013 found Trent Mays, 18, and Malik Richmond, 17, delinquent on rape charges, the equivalent of a guilty verdict in adult court.
The victim, who was 16 at the time and who lives across the Ohio River in Weirton, W.Va., was highly intoxicated and did not remember the boys assaulting her — once in the back of a car while a friend recorded video and once on the floor of a basement while other teens watched and took photos that they sent by text message to one another.
The case grabbed national headlines when the “hacktivist” group Anonymous published leaked and hacked evidence on the case, including a photo of the suspects carrying the girl by her ankles and wrists and a 12-minute video of a teen crudely joking about the attackers raping the girl and urinating on her.
Chris Togneri is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-380-5632 or [email protected]. |
Mr. K.P. had gone to the Holy Mountain, and was shown hospitality by the fathers of the Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopedi. On October 26th 2014, he asked the fathers there if he could go to confession. The fathers told him that the next day, which was Monday morning, he could go.On October 27th, 2014, at 4AM, the Orthros service began, and he went down to the Church, and having venerated the icons, went and sat down. The church had many people in it, and at the stall where he went, he sat next to one man, but the other side was empty.He waited patiently, but the time was passing, and the monk had not appeared who would have led him to the confessor. Around 4:20AM, he turns around, and sees next to him, in the formerly empty stall, a nun! The nun approached him and said: "Wait, everything will go well, you will confess. Don't worry, just wait a little."He thought that most likely, the large monasteries had some nun there to help in the church. A short time passed, and the inpatient man thought that he would leave to find someone to take him to confession. It was around 4:45AM when he planned to leave. He took a step, and again he saw the nun approach him, grab him by the shoulder, and lightly turn him back towards his stall. And she told him: "I told you to be patient and wait...Now the Six Psalms are finishing, and the monk will come to take you to the confessor for you to confess."In reality, after two minutes, the monk came to lead him to the confessor. K.P. did not say anything to that monk because he was suspicious. In reality, when he reached the confessor, having spoken a bit, K.P. told him:"It's good that you had that nun there to strengthen me to be patient and wait...""What nun are you talking about, blessed one? There are no nuns here. This is the Holy Mountain, women and nuns aren't allowed!""But, I spoke with her twice!"The spiritual father replied: "You spoke with our Panagia, but you didn't realize it, my child!"Then the confessor asked him to describe her. K.P. said: "She was tall, around 30-35 years of age, and very beautiful!" |
Director James Toback, who stands accused of various forms of sexual harassment and assault by some 300 women, spoke with Rolling Stone and belligerently denied each and every one of the accusations against him.
Toback started off with a broad denial of his reported M.O., which involves decades of allegations that he approaches young women on street, promises them stardom, and basically manipulates them with this promise until he can get them alone.
Once alone, he is accused of trying to pressure some of these women into removing their clothes, masturbating in front of them, and even menacing them until they agree to touch him or let him rub up against their leg until he orgasms. Obviously, the promised movie role never materializes.
To this, Toback says, “The idea that I would offer a part to anyone for any other reason than that he or she was gonna be the best of anyone I could find is so disgusting to me. And anyone who says it is a lying cocksucker or cunt or both.”
Toback went on to deny specific allegations from women who came forward. He even denies trying to pick up women with the claim that he is a film director.
Toback: No, I’ve never said ‘I’ll get you a film role’ to anybody ever. Me: Anything to that effect? Toback: Anything like that is nauseating and disgusting. And I would never say anything like ‘I’ll get you a film role.’ It’s too stupid to dignify. It’s pathetic lies. It’s just too fucking embarrassing and idiotic. And if I were you, I wouldn’t go repeating it, unless you really knew it were true, because it isn’t. So that’s all I have to say. This is not worth wasting another second on.
Listen to the audio of Toback’s interview below:
During the interview, Toback also plugged his new movie.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here. |
Earlier this week, Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, said that he would drop his threat of a filibuster and allow an up-or-down vote on Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. This is welcome news, not just for the agency but for the planet. More than any other federal official, Ms. McCarthy will be responsible for carrying out Mr. Obama’s promise to confront the threat of climate change.
Her main weapon will be her authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions from power plants, which account for about 40 percent of America’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. The agency has aggressively sought to control ground-level pollutants like mercury, but regulating atmospheric pollutants from power plants and other stationary sources is uncharted territory. Devising an effective program will require negotiations with industry and state governments, which will be largely responsible for figuring out how to meet the emissions standards she imposes.
Ms. McCarthy, who has spent the last few years in charge of the E.P.A.’s clean air programs, would seem ideally suited to this task. A first-class negotiator, she has occupied important state-level policy jobs under Republican governors in Connecticut and Massachusetts (including Mitt Romney, in his environmentally progressive phase). She has allies in the business community, and even Mr. Vitter did not object to her personally. His complaint was with the agency and what he said was its past failure to provide data to support its regulatory decisions.
Ms. McCarthy must also enforce other contentious laws, including the Clean Water Act. The job has a history of exhausting its occupants, whatever their party. But the chances seem good that with White House backing — always an issue in this job — she will carry it off. |
Gaze upon a lover's picture, and pain won't seem so sharp: It's a poetic truth, and a scientific one too.
But is it simply because that image provokes a tiny, on-demand burst of pleasure? Or does even the mere thought of a loved one serve as a shield, a buffer against hurt? The latter appears to be the case. Love is safety.
"From our prior work, we knew that viewing a picture of a loved person leads to reductions in pain," said psychologist Naomi Eisenberger of the University of California, Los Angeles. "The interesting question is, how does that happen?"
In a study published June 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Eisenberger's team used an fMRI machine to scan the brains of 17 women as they received brief, stinging shocks while looking at photographs of long-term romantic partners, strangers or objects. The women were then asked to rate their pain's intensity.
Just as Eisenberger expected, pain didn't feel so bad when women looked at their lovers. Earlier research has described that phenomenon. But unlike earlier research, Eisenberger could look directly at test subjects' brains as this happened.
She found that decreases in pain appeared related to activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain linked to feelings of safety and reassurance.
The observation supports Eisenberger's hypothesis that a loved one's presence diminishes pain by producing such feelings, rather than simply stimulating neural award systems, as is seen among euphoric couples in the early stages of relationships.
According to Eisenberger, this ameliorative effect may be the diametrical opposite of a phenomenon in which seeing a picture of spiders or snakes makes pain feel worse.
"In the literature, people talk about prepared fear stimuli – snakes, spiders, things that we're innately prepared to be afraid of. These things have been threatening to our survival over evolutionary history. This is adaptive," said Eisenberger. "Loved ones, attachment figures, may act as prepared safety signals, as individuals who over evolutionary history have favored our survival."
Though the new study did not test men, Eisenberger said there's no reason to think their reactions would be any different. "People might speculate that women would be more sensitive, but these processes are just as critical to men," she said.
Image: Neys Fadzil/Flickr
See Also:
Citation: "Attachment figures activate a safety signal-related neural region and reduce pain experience." By Naomi I. Eisenberger, Sarah L. Master, Tristen K. Inagaki, Shelley E. Taylor, David Shirinyan, Matthew D. Liebermana, and Bruce D. Naliboff. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 108 No. 26, June 28, 2011. |
About two years ago, Tokyo Dark was successfully funded through Kickstarter. It is a dark point-and-click adventure game from Cherrymochi, a small Japanese studio founded by Maho Williams, who is from Japan, and her husband Jon, who was born in England. The couple’s cultural blending is strongly reflected in their debut game, which deliberately mixes western and Asian elements. The result is a visual novel-style adventure with an intriguing psychological story, several key decision points, multiple endings (some much better than others) and puzzles that can be solved more than one way, though it’s light on challenge and doesn’t develop its stat-based roleplaying elements as fully as it could.
In Tokyo Dark, we follow the path of Detective Ayami Itō. At the beginning, she is trying to find her missing partner in a dark alley of Shinjuku in Tokyo. Their partnership is not just on a professional level, which makes things even harder on her, especially since his disappearance soon turns out to be a matter of life and death. During the course of the investigation, events become increasingly surreal. Early clues suggest an impossible connection to an older case, one that is linked to a traumatic memory. To get closer to the truth, Itō will have to confront her own past – no matter how close that leads her to insanity. And she'll have to decide how far she is willing to go for the people she cares for.
Itō stands out as an interesting main character with a clear inner struggle. How likable she is, though, depends on our choices. Do we want her to be caring about the needs of others, or perhaps more reckless and only focusing on her own goals? It is also possible to get to know the antagonist of this story a lot better and understand where she is coming from. Several recurring side characters appear too, who may not be as memorable but have their own problems going on. For instance, the owner of a shabby restaurant, who isn't sure if he should continue to follow his dream of becoming a cook. It is possible to help him make up his mind.
This mysterious investigation leads us to various real-world places in and around Tokyo, such as Kamakura and Asakusa, where we get a small glimpse of Japanese culture and even learn a bit about a well-known myth from this region. Overall, the story is serious, with horror and supernatural elements here and there, such as inexplicable fog appearing out of nowhere, creating a nauseating atmosphere, or a dead person trying to make the detective feel guilty. Situations like these embody what the detective is going through, depicting the things that scare her.
Despite the generally dark tone, however, as with other Japanese visual novels there are a lot of bizarre moments, weird encounters and cuteness along the way, which will probably not appeal to everyone. For example, in a strange cat café, the waitress greets you in a cat outfit and calls you “Mistress”. You'll actually see quite a few cats in your investigation, including the option to deal with a strange case of cat poisoning (if you want to).
Tokyo Dark is a side-scrolling adventure where the player character is only able to walk left and right. This is comparable to The Cat Lady, but mouse control is possible and the game plays like you would expect from a point-and-click adventure. Objects that can be interacted with are highlighted as soon as the protagonist is nearby. When the mouse cursor is pointed at one of these objects, a small square pops up, telling you what actions are possible. Given that this is an investigative game, you can also talk to other characters and ask questions. These inquiries will sometimes give you clues where to look next and what other questions to ask.
Although the hand-drawn art style is reminiscent of other visual novels and there are many dialogues and monologues to read (there are no English voice-overs, just text), the gameplay is a bit closer than most to the familiar western approach. There is actually a lot to explore and there are decisions to make that can change, for example, how NPCs and colleagues perceive you. Do you want to try to get an answer from a witness by force, or use charm? Do you steal without caring who might see, or take precautions? |
Researchers believe technology could be used to determine a computer typist's age, sex and culture within 10 keystrokes by monitoring their speed and rhythm.
The murder of Ashleigh Hall, a teenager from Darlington, last year by a predator she met on Facebook has raised fresh calls for extra security to protect young people on the internet.
Professor Roy Maxion, associate professor at Newcastle University, has been carrying out the research in America.
Former Northumbria Police detective chief inspector Phil Butler believes the technology could be useful in tracking down online fraudsters and paedophiles.
Mr Butler, who heads Newcastle University's Cybercrime and Computer Security department, said: ''Roy's research has the potential to be a fantastic tool to aid intelligence gathering for crime fighting agencies, in particular serious and organised crime and for those tracking down paedophiles.
''If children are talking to each other on Windows Live or MSN Messenger, we are looking at ways of providing the chat room moderators with the technology to be able to see whether an adult is on there by the way they type.''
Mr Butler said the technology could also be used to prevent convicted sex offenders committing further crimes.
He said: ''As part of a sexual offences prevention order, courts currently have the power to ban a sex offender from using a computer."
''With this technology the courts could force the offender to provide an example of their typing as a way of ensuring they don't use a computer."
Mr Butler said the university was planning to submit a proposal to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to fund further research. He said the technology could also be used to prevent fraud at devices such as cash machines.
He said: ''We'd like to look at various adaptations of the research for use in law enforcement, forensics and for companies trying to avoid fraud."
''We have also had interest from the private sector who are keen to see whether this technology can be used as an additional tool for identity verification, such as in online banking.'' |
It’s the stuff of bridal nightmares. Less than an hour before her wedding, as she laced up her dress and put the final touches on her makeup, Nancy Rogers was informed by her wedding planner that the main lodge where she was supposed to be getting married was on fire.
“It was completely engulfed and everything was up in flames,” said Nancy Rogers, posing here with husband Mike as White Point Beach Resort's main lodge burns in the background. “We lost all of that stuff, but that’s not important to us. We got the most important things.” ( Nicholas Augustus / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
The 32-year-old bride stood in shock as the planner who told her the news hurried off. Although black smoke could be seen for several kilometres outside, Nancy and her fiancé, Michael Rogers chose to plow ahead with the ceremony she had been planning for months. “We decided that the most important thing was that we wanted to get married, and we were only an hour late,” she said.
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Rogers, who had rushed back to the resort from his parent’s cottage across the lake, made it happen with help from staff at the White Point Beach Resort. Staff at the popular seaside resort on Nova Scotia’s South Shore moved the wedding to another building as firefighters from more than 10 departments battled the blaze. Though the road to the main lodge was blocked by fire trucks, the bride, her maids and about 45 guests were able to weave past the trucks, around the other side of the burning building to the new location. “At this point there was a lot of smoke coming from the lodge,” said Rogers. There were chairs set up and a musician brought in at the last moment to replace Michael’s father, who was evacuated from the main building while practicing on the piano for the bride’s march.
The only low point was when Michael’s 7-year-old daughter, Grace, found out her flowers had gone up in flames with all the other things in the main lodge, including the cake and decorations. “How am I supposed to be a flower girl without my flowers?” she asked. They found a way. During the ceremony they could here sirens and trucks going by on the road. But Michael’s strongest memory of the day was the first moment he saw his bride. He teared up.
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While they were getting married resort staff were coming to terms with the inevitable loss of the lodge and having to close the resort temporarily. “We came out and the place was in flames. It was indescribable really,” said the groom. RCMP Staff Sgt. Jeff Wells said early indications suggest the fire may have started in the basement of the 83-year-old hotel. The couple expected they’d have to order pizza to feed their guests, but the resort staff arranged for a reception at a local inn. “They now have their own special memory,” said resort manager Danny Morton, who helped with the last-minute plans. The local community, devastated by the fire, showed their support on the resort’s Facebook page. Owner, Robert Risley, said it’s “far too important a part of the fabric of Nova Scotia to not rebuild.” “It’s just a building that burned down,” added Morton, the memories formed there remain. Morton said despite the fire and closure, the White Point Beach resort will be there another 80 years. But it may not ever have another wedding quite like the Rogers wedding. With files from The Canadian Press
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We’ve been working on a slew of updates for Heroes of the Storm’s in-game UI, and we’re very excited to announce that everything we’re unveiling today will come to the game in our next patch! Read on as we break everything down.
Keep Your Friends Close...
If you’ve ever watched one of your replays, or tuned in to any Heroes Global Championship broadcasts, then our new Party Frames UI may feel familiar already. We like how our observer interface communicates the status of individual players during replays, and feel that bringing this aspect of the interface into live Heroes matches will help players more easily read the current state of a game at any given moment.
A quick glance at the top of the screen is all you’ll need to immediately see which players are alive or dead on either team, how much time is left before a player respawns, and even which Heroic Abilities each player has picked.
Better yet, Party Frames offer a ton of real-time information about your allies:
As you can see above, Party Frames display each teammate’s current health and mana, animate whenever an ally is channeling Hearthstone, and display cooldown timers for their Heroic Abilities. Ideally, you’ll always have the right info when it comes time to decide whether to pick a fight with the enemy team or spend more time in lanes soaking up that sweet XP.
You may notice that we’ve condensed the center area of the interface that displays team levels, XP, and the game timer. While these elements are now more compact, they’ll communicate even more information than before:
We’ve added an indicator next to each XP bar that will blink as teams approach their next talent tier. Additionally, if either team gains a talent tier over the other, their team level will be engulfed in flames to better signify that they have a talent advantage.
Don’t Stop Now, You’re On FIRE!
If you’ve been a Heroes of the Storm player for a long time, you may remember killstreak flames. Players who scored lots of takedowns would see their heroes’ nameplates erupt in flames and sparks to indicate that they were “on fire”.
We eventually removed killstreak flames, due in part to the visual clutter they brought to the game space, but we liked how they gave us another way to celebrate high-performing players. However, we also felt that there was much more to individual achievement than takedowns alone. With these things in mind, we completely overhauled the system and will be bringing it back in a different form:
Rather than place fiery effects on nameplates, we’ve moved them to three different locations:
Party Frame hero portraits at the top of the screen
The stats tab on the in-game score screen
Your hero portrait in the bottom-left (so long as you are on fire, of course)
With the prior system, players could only tell who had earned flames when those players were on screen. Now, you can always see who the top performing players are at any given time by checking Party Frames, or the Stats screen.
Players are granted “On Fire” status by demonstrating an outstanding performance in several game stat categories. Takedowns, hero damage, siege damage, XP contribution, as well as role-specific stats for Supports and Warriors can all contribute to On Fire. To find more detailed information on why a player’s On Fire, check out the Stats page of the Score Screen. On Fire players will have their relevant stats highlighted, indicating the areas in which an On Fire player is outperforming their competition.
Up to three of the ten players in a game can be “On Fire” at any one time, and the better they perform compared to everyone else, the more intensely the flames around their portraits will glow. Don’t get discouraged if you’re not one of the first players to earn “On Fire” during a match, though! The game is constantly re-evaluating everyone’s performance, and just a few great plays can help you quickly snatch some fire for yourself. However, a single death will immediately snuff out your fiery highlights, so stay sharp once you’ve claimed your flames.
Show ‘Em How It’s Done
With our upcoming patch, we’ve revamped the way killstreaks and hero takedowns are called out in-game. Once in-game, you’ll find that we’ve added a new element to the left side of the screen that will give you even more opportunity to show off your battlefield prowess: The Kill Feed.
Any time a player on either team scores a takedown, a notification will pop up in the kill feed on the left side of the screen. These notifications stack on top of one another, and have team-colored visual effects, so it’s easy to see exactly what went down during your last team fight.
Your hero portrait will appear on the left side of kill feed notifications when you score takedowns, and the heroes who were killed will appear on the right. As before, killing an enemy hero kicks off a killstreak timer. The more takedowns you participate in while the timer is active, the more enemy portraits will be added across from yours in the kill feed, and the more intense your on-screen killstreak callouts will become.
The Finer Things
Since we were already working on all of the elements mentioned above, we also decided that the time was right to give the rest of the in-game UI a bit of a tune up. In our next patch, we’ve updated ability hotbars, the hero portrait, as well as health, mana, and buff bars to make them all a bit slimmer and sleeker. Additionally, we’ve polished up the stats and talents tabs on the in-game score screen, and completely updated the look and feel of the death recap tab.
We can’t wait to bring you all of this and more with our next Heroes of the Storm patch, which will hit the Public Test Realm next week. Check back on the official Heroes website in the next few days for more information about the upcoming patch, and be sure let us know what you think of all the new goodies after you’ve had the chance to try them out on the PTR.
Until next time, we'll see you in the Nexus! |
Just because Attorney General Pam Bondi has aggressively fought in court against opponents of Florida's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, don't assume it has anything to do with her own views.
"I have many, many gay friends," the Tampa Republican said in a Political Connections interview airing today on Bay News 9 at 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. She noted that she took pictures during the baptism of a gay friend's adopted daughter.
"I put my hand on a Bible. I raised my other hand, and I swore to uphold the Constitution of the state of Florida. The voters by over 60 percent six years ago put this in our Constitution," Bondi said, when asked about the nine other attorneys general who have declined to defend their state's bans on gay marriage.
She did appear to acknowledge that some of her office's legal briefs that offended gay Floridians could have been worded better.
"I can tell you now I'm reading every word of every brief that's being written," said Bondi, who is being challenged by Democrat George Sheldon.
Tweet of the week
"William Winston Weatherford has arrived! 7lbs 8 ounces. Mommy is healthy and happy. God is good! #dadlife pic.twitter.com/crX8c40Q8O."
Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, on Friday announcing the birth of his and wife Courtney's fourth child.
Incumbent's misstep
U.S. Rep. Steve Southerland, R-Panama City, already faces a tough re-election challenge from Democrat Gwen Graham of Tallahassee, daughter of former Sen. Bob Graham. It didn't help the incumbent when BuzzFeed last week reported that in March Southerland held a men-only fundraiser.
The invite instructed attendees to "tell the misses not to wait up" because "the after dinner whiskey and cigars will be smooth & the issues to discuss are many … Good men sitting around discussing & solving political & social problems over fine food & drink date back to the 12th Century with King Arthur's Round Table."
Race for governor
Buzz checked out a Q&A session last week with the executive directors of the Florida Republican and Democratic parties, Juston Johnson and Scott Arceneaux, respectively, at a Florida Association of Professional Lobbyists conference in Tampa. Quick takeaways:
• One word. Johnson swears that the GOP's focus groups consistently show the most common word that comes to mind when asked about Rick Scott is "Jobs." For Charlie Crist? "Tan."
• The stoner vote. Both men dismissed the notion that the Amendment 2 medical marijuana initiative will drive up turnout among young voters who could help Crist. Said Arceneaux: "Somebody's got to put real money behind Amendment 2 to communicate with real voters. … I don't know if that's going to happen or not."
• Recent polling trends. Johnson noted that eight of the last nine public polls have shown Scott leading and tied with Crist, and ballots are going to start being cast in a few weeks so the recent trends "make us feel even better about where we are."
• Turnout, turnout, turnout: "If I were sitting in Scott's shoes I would be terrified about the turnout," Johnson said, and Arceneaux pretty much agreed. The Democrat noted that Broward turnout has been lousy in recent years. "Broward keeps me up at night," he said.
• Running mates. Both executive directors agreed that the nominees for lieutenant governor have almost no bearing on who wins. "Maybe on the margins," Johnson said, but "nobody knows who either one of them are."
Arceneaux said people pick their running mate for a variety of reasons. "There are things like money. … There are things like interest groups, there are all kinds of reasons. But they are not a big vote-driver."
• Pinellas County and Tampa Bay. Asked about Crist coattails helping Democratic candidates in Pinellas, Johnson dismissed the notion and suggested that Crist is spending too much time in South Florida: "I think Charlie may be taking his home area for granted a little bit."
Arceneaux predicted that Crist would do better than Alex Sink did in the area.
Jeb headlining event
For the many Jeb Bush fans hoping he runs for president in 2016, here's a hint pointing in that direction. Bush is scheduled to headline a Sept. 23 fundraiser in Tampa that could raise $1 million for Republican U.S. Senate candidates who could prove helpful to any future presidential contender: Cory Gardner in Colorado, Joni Ernst in Iowa, Monica Wehby in Oregon, Tom Cotton in Arkansas and Dan Sullivan in Alaska. |
Image copyright AP Image caption Israel bombed the remote desert site of the alleged reactor in September 2007
The UN nuclear watchdog is to report Syria to the Security Council over its alleged covert nuclear programme.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voted to rebuke Syria on claims of an undeclared nuclear reactor.
The structure, which Syria has maintained was a non-nuclear military site, was destroyed by Israel in 2007.
The IAEA's move comes as international pressure mounts on the UN Security Council to censure Syria over its lethal crackdown on protests.
European nations on Wednesday presented a separate draft resolution to the Council condemning Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.
Desert site
At the IAEA meeting at its headquarters in Vienna, 17 countries voted for and six against, including Russia and China.
Diplomats said that overall 11 countries of the 35-member board of governors abstained and one country was absent from the vote.
Israel bombed the desert site of the alleged reactor - near Deir Alzour in the country's remote north-east - in September 2007.
The reactor there was built for the express purpose of producing plutonium for possible use in nuclear weapons Glyn Davies, US Ambassador to IAEA
The IAEA began investigating the allegations in June 2008, but Syria has refused to co-operate and, with the exception of a one-off visit, has not allowed UN inspectors to Deir Alzour or related sites to verify the US claims.
Thursday's motion was proposed by the US and its Western allies who had asked the IAEA's governing body to find Syria in "non-compliance" with its international obligations.
"Syria's apparent attempt at constructing a covert, undeclared plutonium production reactor, a reactor with no credible peaceful purpose, represents one of the most serious safeguards violations possible," said US Ambassador Glyn Davies.
He said the intentions of the structure at Deir Alzour were clear and that a resolution was the only responsible course of action.
"The reactor there was built for the express purpose of producing plutonium for possible use in nuclear weapons."
'Regrettable'
Syria's ambassador to the IAEA called the agency's move "regrettable" but pledged that the country would honour its obligations.
Analysis So what has changed to bring the Syrian issue to a vote? When the new IAEA director general was elected he was determined to resolve the Syrian issue one way or another. Yukiya Amano set out what nuclear analyst Mark Hibbs called "a cautious but deliberate twin-track strategy". One track was to avoid a rush to judgement, to keep asking questions, giving the Syrians sufficient time to co-operate with the agency. At the same time, he sought to get more intelligence information from member states. The US, says Mr Hibbs, eventually provided a large body of material to underpin the US/Israeli allegations, a lot of it highly sensitive intelligence. Syria's long path to the Security Council
"I think Syria has always been committed to its obligations and to its duties and I think we will continue to do so," Bassam Al-Sabbagh said after the meeting.
Syria is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which gives it the right to enrich its own fuel for civil nuclear power, under inspection from the IAEA.
But it has also signed a safeguards agreement with the IAEA under which it is obliged to notify the UN's nuclear watchdog of any plans to construct a new nuclear facility.
The last country the IAEA referred to the Security Council was Iran, in February 2006.
The Security Council has the power to impose sanctions, a move it has taken in the case of Iran no less than four times.
However, diplomats are not convinced that this will happen in Syria's case due to opposition from both Russia and China.
The diplomatic move at the IAEA came a day after Britain, France, Germany and Portugal proposed a draft resolution condemning Syria's crackdown on protesters to the Security Council, despite the risk of a Russian veto. |
It's over. Christophe Le Mevel (34 years old) rode his last race at the Tour of Spain. He finished in 22nd place in mid-September. Despite a proposal from a foreign team, the Cofirdis rider has decided to hang up the bike, according to Le Télégramme.
Christophe Le Mevel feels perfectly well in his new role as an ex-rider. When he finished the race on September 14, he was unaware but the Tour of Spain was the last race of his pro career, started in 2001 with Crédit Agricole.
"Already, it was important to finish with a three week race and not a small race. And it is a reasoned decision even if it sounds funny when you tell me that now I'm a former rider (laughs). But I will come back. I have a specific project to stay in touch with my former colleagues. But for now, it's secret."
Now, he is looking to the future but does not prevent him from taking a look in the mirror. "My greatest regret? Passing close to the pink jersey in the Giro 2011. My worst memory? Tour de France 2013. My best memory? My stage win in the 2005 Giro d'Italia where I met Laura (his wife)." |
We don't have Mr. DNA. We don't have a trans-island transport system. We don't even have "auto-erotica". But we do have our very own special tour guide to help you decipher the brand-new trailer for upcoming dinosaur epic Jurassic World: director Colin Trevorrow. He took time out from his busy post-production schedule on the movie to talk Empire through the perils and pitfalls of the deadliest theme park in movie history.
"I'll admit, I was dreading it," says Trevorrow of the build-up to the launch of the trailer. "We hold our storytellers to very high standards these days, and we should."
Frankly, it wouldn't be a Jurassic Park adventure without a couple of kids oohing / aahing / running / screaming their way through the middle of it. And so, in the first of many nods to the original movie, here are Zack (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins), Jurassic World’s Lex-and-Tim equivalent, being seen off by their parents from snowy Wisconsin on the trip of a (possibly soon-to-be-cut short) lifetime.
"Trailers are tough, you have to satisfy people who are looking for a reason to watch a new Jurassic Park movie, and younger people who didn't grow up on it," says Trevorrow of the decision to start the first Jurassic Park trailer in 13 years with characters rather than spectacle. "This movie has a lot of elements working together; it's not just sci-fi terror. It's not purely action-adventure. It's not just funny or sad or romantic. It's all of those things at once. Communicating that in two-and-a-half-minutes isn't easy."
And has the director been pleased with the reaction? "I've had people send me pictures and videos of their kids watching it. I see the look in their eyes, and I had that look once. I'd have to be pretty cynical to not be pleased with that."
A soon-to-be-rued joke from their mum, aka Judy Greer (Arrested Development/ Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes), who says her role is "small but poignant". Better advice would be, "If something chases you, hide behind the nearest lawyer. Unless he’s cowering on the toilet.”
22 years on from the events of the original Jurassic Park (and 17 years on from the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and 14 years on from the events of Jurassic Park III), Jurassic World is now open for business. And instead of helicoptering thousands of people in each day, tourists arrive by luxury boat. As the words on the side of this schooner suggest, we're headed back to Islar Nublar, aka Site A, aka the island which housed the original Jurassic Park. It's looking as rugged, verdant and mildly terrifying as ever.
"It opened in 2005," says Trevorrow of the fully-operational theme park. And InGen are out of the picture. "Masrani Global, owned by Irrfan Khan's character, bought InGen after John Hammond's passing with a very earnest mission to realise his dream. We have a website that details all that backstory. It will get more interesting as we get closer to June."
What have they got in there — King Kong? No, probably dinosaurs. This is the Jurassic World trailer, after all. It's nice to see the old gates are still in action, albeit with a monorail running through it and some small adjustments. The park sign is now blue, not red, and the torches are positioned lower on the beams (fire safety in the workplace and all that; you can't be too careful). Some fans have complained that the gates are CGI, to which director Colin Trevorrow replied on Twitter: "The gate is practical, the environment isn't. That shot was made specially for the trailer. The film will be different."
A glimpse at the heart of the park: Main Street. Clearly ticket sales are going well, with tourists elbow to elbow all the way down the thoroughfare, which leads to the new Visitor's Centre. Note the French and Japanese banners - this is a cosmopolitan crowd - and if you look closely you can see a sign for "Winston's", a nod to the late Stan Winston, the FX genius responsible for the animatronic dinos on the previous movies, back and to the left.
And here's our first peek at one of the park's real attractions: the humble gallimimus, part ostrich, part Labrador, no part meatasaurus. An obvious riff on an iconic scene from the original film, except here the visitors aren't running for their lives, but cruising along in an armoured truck. Slackers. But it's another examples of the futuristic trappings Trevorrow is bringing to the movie - even if it isn't actually set in the future.
"We set it in present day, but we've taken some scientific concepts that are in the theoretical stage now and made them real. Kind of like the first movie - we couldn't clone dinosaurs in 1993, and we still can't. It's just a more fantastic version of now."
Tourists happily kayak down a placid river, as herbivores graze on the banks. Looks lovely, but then again this is pretty much how the Jurassic Park ride starts at Universal Studios, and that ends with a TERRIFYING DROP. Fun fact: Chris Pratt went on that ride just before Jurassic World shooting began.
So far in the trailer we've seen gallimimuses, stegosauruses and brachiosaurs, with raptors popping up later. But as yet there's no sign of our old Jurassic Park chum, the T-rex. So, will we see one in Jurassic World? Trevorrow's response is short and to the point. "You bet your ass you will."
Excellent.
One of the funkiest features of Jurassic World is the gyrosphere, in essence a high-tech hamster ball that allows visitors to get up close without becoming dino din-dins. It doesn't look very safe to us, but what do we know? Rumours suggest that Jimmy Fallon may lend his voice as tour guide, much like Richard Kiley did in Jurassic Park.
"Steven loves theme park rides," says Trevorrow of the origin of the gyroscope. "He wanted to create a way for people to get up close and personal with the animals, to make it a self-driving, free-roaming experience. It loads on a track, but once you're out there, you actually get to navigate around the valley."
But, as we see later in the trailer, it would seem that the gyrospheres aren't entirely dinosaur-proof. "I'm not sure what you're suggesting," laughs Trevorrow. "I see no way any of that could go wrong."
And here, in the trailer's biggest 'wow' moment, we get to meet a brand-new dinosaur, the mosasaurus. How badass is this leviathan creature of the deep? Well, it devours the carcasses of Great White sharks in a single bite. Jaws, you have been shown the door. Trevorrow, however, insists this wasn't a tip of the hat to his producer, Mr. Steven Spielberg.
"It wasn't intended that way, however obvious it seems. The idea came out in one of our first meetings - I didn't know if Steven and Frank [Marshall, producer on all the Jurassic Park movies] had considered an underwater reptile, so I pitched the mosasaurus and went off on the idea. I thought it would be cool if we had this massive animal and the park used one of our most fearsome modern predators as food. There could be a whole other facility where they used shark DNA to mass-produce them to feed the bigger beast. Steven gave me this look like, 'You know I get it, right?' And I sunk a little lower in my chair. And then he said, 'Let's do it'.
"It's a bonkers idea, but I'm comfortable going to Crazytown, because I used to live there when I was a kid. Children have a creative fearlessness that I envy. If you've seen my first movie [sci-fi dramedy, Safety Not Guaranteed], you can see that I don't mind embarrassing myself sometimes. As a result, my working relationship with Steven can feel like that Saturday Night Live sketch, Laser Cats. I walk in with so much confidence, then I look in the mirror and I'm wearing a tinfoil helmet. Half the time I feel like an amateur, and half the time he says, 'No, wear the helmet. The helmet works.'"
All this magic has, once again, been made possible by genetics. And specifically by the high priest of helix, Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong, the only cast member from the original film returning). The Jurassic World lab is seriously big and seriously high-tech.
Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is Zack and Gray's aunt, although she's dressed all in white, just like John Hammond. She's also a Jurassic World head honcho, dedicated to keeping attendance figures sky-high. How's she planning to do that? Well, she's gone all Dr. Catheter from Gremlins 2. "We have our first genetically modified hybrid," she announces. Cue big, bassy, sinister note on the soundtrack!
There has been some controversy about the addition of a new dinosaur to the franchise, with some criticising the need to make up a new species when there are plenty of actual dinos to choose from. Trevorrow, though, is ready to head the critics off at the pass.
"There is no shortage of awesome dinosaurs," he agrees. "We could have populated this entire story with new species that haven't been in any of these movies. But this new creation is what gave me a reason to tell another Jurassic Park story. We have the most awe-inspiring creatures to ever walk the earth right in front of us, but for some reason that's not enough. We're not entertained. We're always hungry for the next thing, and those who profit from it are always looking to feed that hunger. The focus groups want something bigger than a T-Rex. And that's what they get."
Meet Owen (Chris Pratt), the voice of reason and harbinger of toothy doom. He's doing a very serious face because he suspects that creating a mutant dinosaur might not work out so well. And judging by those claw-marks in the next shot, he might just be right. Not much is known yet about the lab-baked beast, which internet whispers say is called "Dominus Rex" or the "D-Rex", but a recently leaked photo of a Lego toy suggests it has red eyes, chameleonic skin and a downright irresponsible attitude.
"Obviously I'd love to hold back as much as possible," says Trevorrow. "But Universal has to introduce this movie to people all around the world, and in an era where we're contending with superheroes and space epics, marketing has its own set of needs. We're introducing a relatively new idea. No one under 25 has a memory of seeing the original Jurassic Park in a theatre. The last instalment was 14 years ago. We may see little pieces of her as we get closer - in fact, we already have - but I'm confident that we can keep much of that animal under wraps. She's not the only danger. Far from it."
The new-look control room (or should it be the you-never-had-control-room?) is seriously glam and 100% Nedry-free (yes, we checked the vending machines). We doubt that will prevent it from rapidly turning into a panic room beset by flashing lights and error messages, but at least it'll all happen in HD. The million-dollar question: is it still running on Unix? "That would be every bit as effective as the gyrospheres having interactive CD-ROMs," says Trevorrow.
Rather than entrusting the security of the park to a single sturdy Brit in shorts (RIP Muldoon), Jurassic World's owners have installed a small army on the island. They are the ACU (Animal Control Unit? Anti-Carnivore Army? Army Combat Uniform) and this is Hamada (Brian Tee), looking up at something big and scary. Note the nifty Aliens-style tracker device on his wrist.
This Evil Dead-style POV shot sees someone being dragged backwards to their presumed doom. Most of the trailer scenes are in broad daylight, but this and the final shots suggest that there's a big chunk of the film that's still being concealed.
Owen runs for his life. Could the monstrous behemoth on his heels be our old friend the T-Rex? The foot looks a little too large and clawy, so there's a good chance this is the little piece of the D-Rex (if that's what it's called) that Trevorrow was referring to. Whatever the case, we're disappointed Pratt's not challenging it to a dance-off.
Chaos! Anarchy! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria! Yes, the park is now in full breakdown mode, and with more dino-fodder here than in all the previous films put together, the stakes are high. Let's pause to give credit to Michael Giacchino, whose inspired reworking of the John Williams musical theme is a very effective counterpoint to all the amped-up action in the trailer. Fun fact 2: Giacchino's very first job as composer was on the Lost World videogame.
Another overt riff on the original film, this shot of Gray echoes the bit where Tim and Lex spot an advancing raptor while sat in front of a mosaic of one. No jelly here, though.
And for the finale, the big reveal that Owen and the raptors are, if not pals, then at least working together in perfect harmony. It would appear that he's managed to train the deadliest villains of the first movie and turn them into allies. But to do what? Will they stay tame? And what on Earth could be so terrifying that you need to release raptors to deal with it? On all these matters, Trevorrow is keeping relatively schtum.
"I like that people aren't sure what the hell they're looking at," he says. "I was concerned about putting this image in an early trailer, but I love that people are as excited about it as they are. It just reinforces that we all want to see something fresh. Those familiar homage shots in our trailer kind of mask how different this movie is from the others, and I'm relieved that people are embracing the new ideas."
Still, the question remains: how can Owen be riding with raptors? "To not dodge the question entirely," says Trevorrow carefully, "Owen's relationship with the raptors is complicated. They aren't friends. These animals are nasty and dangerous and they'll bite your head off if you make the wrong move. But there are men and women out there today who have forged tenuous connections with dangerous predators. That's interesting territory to me."
And here we see Owen, resplendent in the most divisive garment this side of the Liverpool away kit: a leather waistcoat that has been hailed as the coolest movie garment since Han Solo by some, and the dorkiest thing since Napoleon Dynamite by others.
"Our costume designer, Daniel Orlandi, found the vest," says Trevorrow. "I like characters with distinct looks. Bryce's dress was also a very specific choice. She starts out with this snow white pristine outfit, then it all just gets completely torn apart. You see it in the trailer – that's later the same day. I just want these people to have an unmistakeable identity. If there aren't a bunch of kids walking around with leather vests next Halloween, I've failed."
Here, we see Owen and Claire, the Alan Grant and Ellie Satler for a new generation, looking worried. As you might expect. "They have a kind of old school combative chemistry," says Trevorrow of his leads. "We haven't really seen what those two people are like yet, the trailer sticks to moments when they're at their most ominous and concerned. Owen and Claire are real people, and their relationship is a big part of this story. I'm not ashamed of putting a little sexual tension into my dinosaur movie." Isle Nude-blar, anyone? Anyone? |
At the end of August, the U.S. stepped up sanctions on Venezuela, prohibiting dealings in new debt or equity issued by state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) or the government. A couple of weeks later Venezuela responded to what it called an “economic blockade” by suspending trade in U.S. dollars and publishing Venezuelan oil basket prices in Chinese yuan.
Analysts believe that although it has close strategic ties to China, Venezuela would mostly just harm itself with the move to “free the nation from the oppression of the dollar,” as Nicolas Maduro put it.
Venezuela told oil traders it will no longer accept or offer U.S. dollars in payment for crude oil and fuels, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, citing sources familiar with the developments. As a result, traders have started converting dollars into euros, and PDVSA’s foreign partners operating in the country may have to switch to euros as well.
Two days later, on September 15, Venezuela started publishing its oil prices in yuan. The move went against earlier reports that Maduro would favor the euro. As it is unlikely that China would ever join the U.S. on its quest to force Maduro to end his campaign to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution in what many see as a step in bringing the downtrodden country closer to dictatorship, the choice of yuan seems a safe one, if nothing else, compared to the European currency.
The European Union refused to recognize the outcome of the Venezuelan vote, but has so far stopped short of imposing sanctions. However, earlier this month, the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel didn’t rule out EU sanctions on Venezuela.
Related: The EV Boom Is Dead Without Proper Support
Venezuela also started trading its oil and oil products in a basket of currencies.
Maduro’s move to “liberate the country from the dollar” baffled some analysts, who reminded us that this is the currency of Venezuela’s largest trading partner, and exports of oil, including to the U.S., represent some 95 percent of Venezuela’s cash currency earnings.
Nomura debt analyst Siobhan Morden warns, “You can say whatever you want for your domestic propaganda and make it look like you’re retaliating against the U.S. This political posturing will only be to their detriment.”
The “liberation from the dollar” will only complicate dealings and incur more transaction and exchange rate conversion costs to an economy in such a bad state that every penny counts, or should count, in theory.
“You’re imposing self-harm with no practical purpose,” says Morden.
The U.S. sanctions on Venezuela make some exceptions to allow for transactions that would otherwise be prohibited, such as financing for most commercial trade, including the export and import of petroleum; transactions only involving Citgo; dealings in select existing Venezuelan debts; and the financing for humanitarian goods to Venezuela.
U.S. imports of Venezuelan crude oil have been around 700,000 bpd in recent months, but June’s imports—the latest available EIA data—were 616,000 bpd.
Oil production in Venezuela has dropped this year, down to 1.918 million bpd in August, according to OPEC’s secondary sources. Venezuela is below its 1.972-million-bpd ceiling under the cartel’s production cut deal, surely not because it is obediently overcomplying with the cuts. Its economy is in disarray, and its refineries run at less than 50 percent of the available capacity because the state company can’t afford proper maintenance. Related: What Happens If Trump Trashes The Iran Nuclear Deal?
The nation sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves is forced to import gasoline, which many of its people can’t afford to buy due to an estimated 360 percent inflation in 2016, and expected over 600 percent inflation this year.
At the end of August, Fitch Ratings downgraded Venezuela’s sovereign credit rating to reflect its view that “a default is probable given the further reduction in financing options for the government of Venezuela following the imposition of additional sanctions.”
According to the rating agency, gross international reserves have dropped to $9.8 billion as of August.
“Venezuela’s economic recovery is likely to be further constrained by the prospect of continued tight FX financing/liquidity conditions aggravated by the sanctions, declines in oil production and political uncertainty,” Fitch notes.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: |
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Bonobos, a close cousin of the more widely known chimpanzee, are willing to do just about anything in the sexual realm if it helps them climb the social ladder. "And, boy, do they like sex," says Jennifer Welsh at LiveScience. Here, a guide to these "promiscuous primates":
Bonobos have a lot of sex?
They sure do. Think of the bonobo as the "lovemaking cousin of the warrior chimp," says Welsh. The animals engage in sexual activity with "virtually all partner combinations in a variety of positions." For them, sexual activity alleviates conflict, demonstrates affection, reduces stress, and — as demonstrated in a new study — helps the primates communicate social status.
How do they use sex to climb the social ladder?
A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports observed primates in three enclosures at the Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary in the Congo. Researchers found that low-ranking females made distinctive sounds — called "copulation calls" — during sex with high-ranking females in order to brag to other top females around them. "Using vocalizations, females only advertise sexual contacts with important group members," says study author Dr. Zanna Clay. "It's all about climbing up the social ladder for female bonobos."
Do all bonobos brag about sex?
No. A high-ranking bonobo typically doesn't brag when having sex with an inferior female — it's only the low-ranking females who call out. And if a group's "alpha" female is within earshot, the inferior female is far more likely to kiss and tell. "They are very aware of the alpha female, who is the most relevant group member," Clay says. "When she's around, they are much more likely to advertise these sexual friendships."
Why are bonobos so concerned with social climbing?
Females leave their original groups as juveniles and join new groups upon adulthood. If a female bonobo can climb to the top of her new social circle by proving her cred with other females, it gives her a much better chance of scoring with the desirable male of her choosing, researchers say.
Sources: BBC News, Global Post, LiveScience, PhysOrg |
The most distant galaxy ever seen in the universe has just been discovered by researchers. The discovery was made by using NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, aided by natural gravitational lenses.
From our point of view the galaxy appears as only a speck, a tiny fraction of the size of the Milky Way galaxy. But it’s valuable, because it’s essentially a window back in time, giving a view of what the universe looked like when it was only 3 percent of the age that it is now, 13.7 billion years old. The light from the newly discovered galaxy has spent the last 13.3 billion years traveling to the Earth, giving a window back to when the universe is thought to have been only 420 million years old.
“This find is the latest discovery from a program that uses natural zoom lenses to reveal distant galaxies in the early universe. The Cluster Lensing And Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH), an international group led by Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., is using massive galaxy clusters as cosmic telescopes to magnify distant galaxies behind them. This effect is called gravitational lensing.”
“Along the way, 8 billion years into its journey, light from MACS0647-JD took a detour along multiple paths around the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0647+7015. Without the cluster’s magnification powers, astronomers would not have seen this remote galaxy. Because of gravitational lensing, the CLASH research team was able to observe three magnified images of MACS0647-JD with the Hubble telescope. The cluster’s gravity boosted the light from the faraway galaxy, making the images appear about eight, seven, and two times brighter than they otherwise would that enabled astronomers to detect the galaxy more efficiently and with greater confidence.”
“This cluster does what no manmade telescope can do,” said Postman. “Without the magnification, it would require a Herculean effort to observe this galaxy.”
According to the researchers, the galaxy is less than 600 light-years wide, and appears to have been in the first steps of transforming into a larger galaxy. “Based on observations of somewhat closer galaxies, astronomers estimate that a typical galaxy of a similar age should be about 2,000 light-years wide. For comparison, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy companion to the Milky Way, is 14,000 light-years wide. Our Milky Way is 150,000 light-years across.”
“This object may be one of many building blocks of a galaxy,” said the study’s lead author, Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute. “Over the next 13 billion years, it may have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of merging events with other galaxies and galaxy fragments.”
The researchers observed the galaxy through 17 different filters, ranging from the near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared wavelengths.
“Coe, a CLASH team member, discovered the galaxy in February while poring over a catalogue of thousands of gravitationally lensed objects found in Hubble observations of 17 clusters in the CLASH survey. But the galaxy appeared only in the two reddest filters.”
“So either MACS0647-JD is a very red object, only shining at red wavelengths, or it is extremely distant and its light has been ‘redshifted’ to these wavelengths, or some combination of the two,” Coe said. “We considered this full range of possibilities.”
“The CLASH team identified multiple images of eight galaxies lensed by the galaxy cluster. Their positions allowed the team to produce a map of the cluster’s mass, which is primarily composed of dark matter. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that makes up the bulk of the universe’s mass.”
“It’s like a big puzzle,” said Coe. “We have to arrange the mass in the cluster so that it deflects the light of each galaxy to the positions observed.”
The researcher’s analysis showed that “the cluster’s mass distribution produced three lensed images of MACS0647-JD at the positions and relative brightness observed in the Hubble image.”
The researchers then spent the next few months one-by-one ruling out all of the alternative explanations for what the object could be. Anything from red stars, to brown dwarfs, to dusty galaxies, to red old galaxies at ‘intermediate’ distances from the Earth. After a systematic comparison, the researchers concluded that it was a very distant galaxy.
“Redshift is a consequence of the expansion of space over cosmic time. Astronomers study the distant universe in near-infrared light because the expansion of space stretches ultraviolet and visible light from galaxies into infrared wavelengths. Coe estimates MACS0647-JD has a redshift of 11, the highest yet observed.”
“Images of the galaxy at longer wavelengths obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope played a key role in the analysis. If the object were intrinsically red, it would appear bright in the Spitzer images. Instead, the galaxy barely was detected, if at all, indicating its great distance. The research team plans to use Spitzer to obtain deeper observations of the galaxy, which should yield confident detections as well as estimates of the object’s age and dust content.”
“MACS0647-JD galaxy, however, may be too far away for any current telescope to confirm the distance based on spectroscopy, which spreads out an object’s light into thousands of colors. Nevertheless, Coe is confident the fledgling galaxy is the new distance champion based on its unique colors and the research team’s extensive analysis.”
“All three of the lensed galaxy images match fairly well and are in positions you would expect for a galaxy at that remote distance when you look at the predictions from our best lens models for this cluster,” Coe said.
“The new distance champion is the second remote galaxy uncovered in the CLASH survey, a multi-wavelength census of 25 hefty galaxy clusters with Hubble’s ACS and WFC3. Earlier this year, the CLASH team announced the discovery of a galaxy that existed when the universe was 490 million years old, 70 million years later than the new record-breaking galaxy. So far, the survey has completed observations for 20 of the 25 clusters.”
The researchers are hoping to use the Hubble telescope to discover more dwarf galaxies at this early period in the universe’s history. “If these infant galaxies are numerous, then they could have provided the energy to burn off the fog of hydrogen that blanketed the universe, a process called re-ionization. Re-ionization ultimately made the universe transparent to light.”
The research paper is expected to be published in the December 20th issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
Source: Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
Image Credits: NASA, ESA, M. Postman and D. Coe (STScI), and the CLASH Team |
Torpedoed. A legendary NRA lobbyist declared war on Florida officials who tried to stop a gun range from raining metal shot on a public park. A trove of emails and text messages reveals why it was never a fair fight.
This article was published in partnership with the Tampa Bay Times . It is part of an ongoing series, The Gunfighters , which examines the NRA's influence on state policy and politics.
For nearly 60 years, visitors to the Skyway Trap & Skeet Club in St. Petersburg fired at targets using shells filled with lead pellets. Often, their ammunition traveled into neighboring Sawgrass Lake Park, a public wetland. Over the decades, it accumulated there in prodigious quantities.
Lead shot is toxic, and can leach into water and soil. From when the range opened in 1945 through the early 2000s, an estimated one million pounds of the hazardous stuff fell on the property, polluting a lake that feeds into Tampa Bay, a fragile marine estuary.
Elsewhere in Florida, cleanups around gun ranges have proceeded without much controversy. That would not be the case at Sawgrass Lake. The range eventually required shooters to switch over to steel shot, but balked at implementing expensive environmental fixes demanded by the Southwest Florida Water Management District (commonly known as Swiftmud), the entity that oversees water quality in the region. The fight drew the notice of Marion Hammer, the National Rifle Association’s most prominent and effective lobbyist.
Under a legal deal struck in 2004, Swiftmud agreed to pay for removing the lead from the park, and Skyway said it would build a barrier to stop spent ammunition from falling on state property. That wall never went up. So last year, the water management agency sued the gun range.
Skyway tried to get the case thrown out, arguing that it violated a decade-old law, championed by Hammer, that gives gun ranges broad immunity from environmental lawsuits from entities like Swiftmud. But in December, a judge ruled that the case could continue.
Then, this February, Swiftmud abruptly dropped the lawsuit without explanation.
The question of why Swiftmud walked away when it was winning puzzled Florida’s political class. But emails and text messages obtained by The Trace may solve the mystery. Hammer, who had attacked the lawsuit, wanted the case to go away. So she enlisted a prominent Florida Republican lawmaker to make that happen.
Representative Ben Albritton is the head of a natural resources appropriations subcommittee that holds partial power over Swiftmud’s budget. One day before Swiftmud dropped the case, Albritton’s legislative aide sent an email to the water agency’s head of public affairs, Colleen Thayer. Attached to that email was a document spelling out the terms of the lawsuit’s dismissal — written as if Swiftmud had already agreed to it.
“Colleen,” the note stated, “Rep. Albritton wanted me to forward this to you. He said he wants thoughts sooner rather than later.”
Thayer then forwarded the message to Swiftmud’s executive director and chief of staff. To the former, she wrote, “I have no words … But now high blood pressure.” To the latter, she said, “don’t wet yourself.”
The legislative aide’s email does not reveal who crafted the dismissal. But its metadata, a sort of digital signature, reveals the first name of the source: “Marion.”
Hammer has patrolled the hallways of Florida’s state capitol for more than 35 years, pushing for legislation that shaped the gun debate nationwide. Hammer had brutalized Swiftmud in the press for trying to force Skyway to build the barrier, calling it “a malignant state agency” that was engaged in “an evil attempt to … destroy a small private business.”
Hammer made those remarks in a press release on February 9. The next day she began to privately text Representative Albritton. Their exchanges, which played out over the course of a week, offer a rare glimpse into how the NRA works with elected officials to get what it wants. In a series of messages, Hammer and Albritton discussed a legal “agreement,” which Hammer said was drawn up “at NRA’s direction by the attorney representing us.”
Albritton later replied that he had shared the agreement — the lawsuit dismissal, written as if Swiftmud had already agreed to it — with Representative James Grant, whose district, like Albritton’s, falls within Swiftmud’s territory. Eight days after the text chain began, the legal document was forwarded to Swiftmud, prompting the alarmed reaction from the water district’s public affairs chief.
In an interview, Hammer acknowledges that an NRA lawyer wrote the document that spelled out the terms of the lawsuit dismissal. She says that in addition to Albritton and Grant, she had also sent it to the office of Governor Rick Scott, who must approve Swiftmud’s budget.
“But I don’t know what they did with it,” she says. “I do not know whether or not they were communicating with Swiftmud, and if they were, it was not on my behalf or the NRA’s behalf.”
That claim is contradicted by a text message exchange that shows Albritton and Hammer discussing the transmission of the dismissal document to the water management agency.
“SWFWMD [Swiftmud] has the agreement,” Albritton texted on February 18. “I’m going to give them a couple of days to digest it and then call them. I’ll update you right after.”
Hammer responded: “Did you and representative Grant make any changes to the draft agreement before you gave it to them?”
“No Mam,” Albritton said. “Sent it as is. Feel it is the appropriate starting point.”
Albritton and Liebert declined repeated requests for comment. The governor’s office declined to comment, too. According to an aide, Grant was “out of state and unavailable.”
Swiftmud also did not respond to repeated requests for comment, nor did its outside legal counsel.
“The fact that Albritton sent the agreement to Swiftmud is on him,” Hammer says during a follow-up call with The Trace. “That was his choice. I did not ask him to do that.”
Sixteen years ago, in 2000, a Swiftmud environmental scientist was walking near the edge of Sawgrass Lake Park when lead shot began to fall onto his head. After taking cover, the scientist reported the incident to Swiftmud’s volunteer governing board, a 13-member body appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Florida Senate.
Around the same time, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection excavated a groundwater well on a parcel of parkland near Skyway’s property. A water sample revealed “unacceptable levels of lead,” according to a complaint filed by Swiftmud against Skyway, prompting further investigation.
The water resources Swiftmud oversees are spread out over a 16-county region of 4.7 million people. The lead from the old ammunition leaching into Sawgrass Lake concerned the agency. Water from the park flows through a canal and into Tampa Bay. Officials feared that the lead could harm fish and wildlife, and potentially people.
Swiftmud sued the gun range soon after the water test, in April 2000. The water agency asked a judge to bar Skyway’s shooters from firing into the park. The club contended this was impossible because of the way its facility was configured.
Hammer got involved around 2003. She condemned Swiftmud’s case as “backdoor gun control” and called its officials “drunk with power.” She also claimed there was no evidence that lead shot posed a health risk, even though the NRA had helped produce a safety manual that warned ranges about the potential environmental hazards posed by lead pellets and casings.
Hammer is less than five feet tall, with short hair and blue eyes. She carries a Smith & Wesson .38 Special in her purse and is known to hold a grudge. After the president of the Audubon of Florida criticized a policy she backed, Hammer made it her mission to defeat the group’s proposal for an official state bird of Florida. The pick was a species called the scrub jay. Hammer charged that the endangered creature groveled for food and was the embodiment of the “welfare mentality.”
As the architect of the infamous “Stand Your Ground” law that first passed in Florida before spreading around the country, Hammer holds legendary status among firearms activists. Among those who’ve seen her work up close, her presence at a legislative hearing or vote is a fearsome thing.
“For Marion Hammer, it’s about maximizing the power of gun owners,” says Juan-Carlos Planas, a Republican who held a seat in the Florida House for eight years. “It’s about coming up with policies that allow them to get their way.”
Nan Rich, a former Democratic state senator, remembers Hammer’s frequent appearances in the legislative chamber. “When a bill that concerned her would come up,” says Rich, “she would sit in the gallery as if she were watching over her flock. If a Republican strayed, they knew they’d be getting a primary challenge.”
In 2004, then-Governor Jeb Bush ordered Skyway and Swiftmud to Tallahassee to hash out a deal and end their feud. Under the agreement that resulted, Swiftmud said it would finance the clean-up in the park, which eventually cost $25 million in taxpayer money. The water agency also agreed to construct a giant earthen berm on the edge of the property.
When a bill that concerned her would come up, she would sit in the gallery as if she were watching over her flock. If a Republican strayed, they knew they’d be getting a primary challenge.” Nan Rich Former Democratic state senator
As its part of the deal, Skyway pledged to build a barrier atop the new berm in a further effort to stop ammunition from landing in the lake. Then the gun club would pay to maintain both new structures.
In May 2004, soon after the agreement was reached, Bush signed a bill that was drafted at Hammer’s urging. The law made it a crime for any agency but the Department of Environmental Protection to sue a gun range over pollution — a measure clearly directed at Swiftmud.
Swiftmud finished cleaning up Sawgrass Lake in 2014. The berm, which is 1,100 feet long and 25 feet tall, was completed in February of the following year.
In August 2015, Swiftmud sued to force Skyway to finally erect the wall that the range had promised but never delivered on.
Hammer re-entered the fray this winter. On February 9, she put out a press release calling on Governor Scott to “abolish” Swiftmud. She demanded that the attorney general investigate the agency for “criminal conduct” and “prosecute those responsible for unlawful actions.”
Her text message exchanges with Representative Albritton begin the next day. As part of that week-long conversation, Hammer told the lawmaker that Skyway had “no prior knowledge” that she was having the dismissal drafted “until yesterday afternoon.” She added, “I felt that Skyway was too emotionally beat down and broke from all of this that is was best not tell them (sic) at this point.”
“Understood,” Albritton said. “I have read the draft agreement in full. I feel like it is a great starting place, as we discussed. I have also forwarded it to Jamie Grant and am awaiting his comments after her reads it.”
Albritton had also discussed the draft with another Republican lawmaker, Representative Matt Caldwell.
“He came by my office,” Caldwell tells The Trace. “I don’t recall reading the agreement, but Representative Albritton described what had transpired.”
Caldwell adds, “I decided to put the issue in the ‘he’s handling this’ mental category.”
The legal agreement the NRA drafted is much longer than what Swiftmud eventually filed in court. In its unabridged version, it provides a thorough articulation of Hammer’s worldview.
“We don’t represent Skyway, per se,” she explains in an interview. “We represent the people.”
One provision in the NRA’s draft said that Swiftmud “recognizes” that its lawsuit is “prohibited” by the gun range immunity legislation that Hammer had helped pass — even though a state court judge had recently ruled that the law did not apply to the case. Another part said that the water agency would pay Skyway $350,000 to cover court costs plus $100,000 a month for 20 years to cover staff training and management of “shooting activities.” A third provision said that Swiftmud would take full responsibility for the berm and shot barrier. “Skyway shall pay zero.”
Swiftmud would also issue “a public apology,” the NRA document said.
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“It is the most audacious document I’ve ever seen,” says a Florida lawyer who worked for the state government for 40 years and did not want to be named.
The document Swiftmud filed in court on February 19 did not include the demands written into the original. It was a simple memo, informing the court that it was withdrawing its lawsuit against Skyway.
For more than a decade, Swiftmud had tried to compel Skyway to keep shooters’ ammo from falling on public parkland. But now it was yielding to a more powerful foe.
Amy Wells Brennan, Swiftmud’s deputy general counsel, forwarded the “notice of voluntary dismissal” to another attorney in the office along with a note. “Here you go,” she wrote. “It’s as much as I can muster.”
[Featured photo: David Albers for The Trace] |
The European anti-trust action against Google uses a silly rubric to get at a serious underlying problem.
The nominal issue is that Google preferentially directed comparison shoppers to its own e-commerce sites even when they weren’t the cheapest option. This would be sleazy if true. What’s certainly true is that Google’s shopping site has always sucked, is barely used, and is the least worrisome competition question raised by Google’s online dominance. Busting Google for sleazy e-commerce search results is like taking down Al Capone for tax-evasion.
The 21st-century has a competition problem. As we lurch toward the Piketty-complete apocalypse, every industry grows more winner-takes-all, dominated by titans with unthinkable market power, whose transgressions are largely unpunishable, because every one of them ends up being too big to fail.
The internet is no exception, though it might be. Other industries have intensive capital needs. Once a firm has globalised and amassed its war-chest of billions, an upstart doesn’t stand a chance. The thing that made the internet such a harbinger of disruption was the relatively small capital demands needed to start a service that competes with those behemoths. When you can start a payment processor, online marketplace or publisher without a fortune in furnished offices, manufacturing apparatus or mass-scale advertising, the fact that the incumbents needed to pay for all these things worked to your advantage. When you could show an ad and take an order from anywhere in the world as cheaply as you could serve a customer next door, the fact that yesterday’s colossuses had gone to the expense of opening offices on five continents give you the superior financial picture.
As the internet giants grew, so did states’ interest in their business practices. YouTube was started by three people with a garage, a pile of hard-drives and an unhealthy interest in video. In the years that followed, YouTube has acquiesced to a mounting compliance regime – spending hundreds of millions on its Content ID system for automated copyright enforcement, filling buildings with expensive lawyers and specialists to police obscenity, libel and other potential sources of liability, working out how to comply with the complex legal requirements of different jurisdictions, from the Thai royal family’s insistence on the right to remove videos that criticised the monarchy to the UK government’s insistence on the right to police videos advocating anything it unilaterally characterises as violent Islamism.
Starting up as a competitor to YouTube today is a daunting prospect. With more than 128 hours of new video every minute, it’s hard to imagine how you’d amass a competing catalogue. But of course, plenty of people chafe at YouTube’s strictures and its business model, and of course, when YouTube kicked off, it was hard to imagine how it could ever compete with cable TV.
One thing is certain: three people in a garage with a pile of hard drives could not disrupt YouTube anymore,. Anything hoping to compete with YouTube would have to find the money to replicate all those compliance systems. Today it takes more than a pile of hard drives. It takes a pile of hard drives, a building full of lawyers, and hundreds of millions worth of Content ID.
The capital requirements for starting a competitor to the internet giants, from Facebook to Google to Apple, are so intense that they effectively only compete with each other. I dearly love the privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo, but the only really big competitor to Google’s search product is Microsoft’s Bing: not a spunky startup, but a blue-chip company that was until recently the most profitable in the history of the world.
It’s not like Facebook, Apple, Google or the other giants conspired to shut out the spunky startups. They didn’t need to. If David Cameron wanted to use Facebook to spy on people, or wanted to dictate how Google presents search results for movies, the parties who would participate in that negotiation are Google, Facebook, the security services and the entertainment industry. The internet companies bargain hard to ensure that the new rules will not destroy their business, and the regulators and spies meet them there – it’s inconceivable that a regulator would tell Google that it must change its search business so fundamentally that it had to go out of business altogether.
Not at the table: spunky startups. A startup, after all, is a series of near-fatal disasters followed by failure (usually) or soaring success (very rarely). To be a spunky startup is to be in a state of perpetual emergency. You can’t hire lawyers to mooch around Number 10 all day trying to make sure that your business model (which might change tomorrow anyway) emerges intact from the negotiations.
Also not at the table: tomorrow’s spunky startups. Firms that don’t even exist yet can’t participate in these negotiations (by definition).
Google and Amazon and Apple don’t actively negotiate to make it impossible to be a spunky startup. They simply don’t negotiate to make it possible. Google wants to make sure that the YouTube of 2015 is viable. They don’t care about the YouTube of 2005. If today’s rules make that YouTube impossible, that’s not their problem any more.
There’s no better example of this than the VATMOSS VAT mess. Amazon, Google, Apple and other e-commerce giants claimed to be headquartered in Luxembourg in order to avoid VAT. This made everything they sold 20% cheaper than the products offered by high-street companies and small startups that couldn’t afford a presence in Luxembourg, which is quite a commercial advantage.
To solve this, the EU passed a regulation saying that anyone who sold goods in the EU would have to figure out who they were selling to, collecting two pieces of non-contradictory information about each purchas and retaining them for 10 years (meaning that every small and medium-sized enterprise [SME] has suddenly become a long-lived reservoir of indifferently secured Europeans’ sensitive financial information), and charge the local rate of VAT on those goods. There’s no minimum amount: if you sell a single 50p item in Bulgaria and collect 1p in VAT, you have to prepare and file a return so that Bulgaria gets its penny.
Amazon, Apple and the other tech giants were at the table when this was negotiated. It’s a pain in the ass for them, but not unbearable. They have whole buildings full of programmers and accountants who will simply update their tax filings to make sense of it.
For SMEs and sole traders, it’s been a disaster. I have a small business selling my own audiobooks through my website. This first VATMOSS quarter, I collected GBP18.76 in VAT from five EU nations. I spent over GBP700 in custom software, accountancy fees, and a new, specialist e-commerce fulfilment service in order to collect and remit this GBP18.76. Everyone I know who sells ebooks or digital audiobooks is in the same position.
Indeed, if you’re trying to sell digital goods in the EU today, there’s really only one cost effective way to do it: use Amazon. Because the rules aimed at weakening Amazon’s unfair market dominance were negotiated with Amazon’s business-case in mind, they can be readily borne by Amazon. Because the rest of us weren’t taken into consideration, we must all now pay rent to Amazon forever, or be bankrupted by the red-tape that it (and only it) can handily dispense with.
I’m not making the case against regulation here. I’m making the case against bad regulation. If we want to weaken the grip of these internet incumbents through competition, our regulations must target them to the exclusion of SMEs, not without regard to them. |
THESE days, when a nursing student at the University of Iowa fields a question about a drug, “the answer is often, ‘I don’t know, but give me a few seconds,’ and she pulls out her phone,” according to Joann Eland, an associate professor there.
In just a few years, technology has revolutionized what it means to go to nursing school, in ways more basic — and less obvious to the patient — than learning how to use the latest medical equipment. Nursing schools use increasingly sophisticated mannequins to provide realistic but risk-free experience; in the online world Second Life, students’ avatars visit digital clinics to assess digital patients. But the most profound recent change is a move away from the profession’s dependence on committing vast amounts of information to memory. It is not that nurses need to know less, educators say, but that the amount of essential data has exploded.
“There are too many drugs now, too many interactions, too many tests, to memorize everything you would need to memorize,” says Ms. Eland, a specialist in uses of technology. “We can’t rely nearly as much as we used to on the staff knowing the right dose or the right timing.”
Five years ago, most American hospital wards still did not have electronic patient records, or Internet connections. Now, many provide that access with computers not just at a central nurse’s station but also at the patient’s bedside. The latest transition is to smartphones and tablet computers, which have become mandatory at some nursing schools.
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“We have a certain set of apps that we want nursing students to have on their handheld devices — a book of lab tests, a database of drugs, even nursing textbooks,” says Helen R. Connors, executive director of the Kansas University Center for Health Informatics. Visiting alumni, she says, are shocked to see students not carrying physical textbooks to class.
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But technology carries risks as well. So much data is available that students can get overwhelmed, and educators say that a growing part of their work is teaching how to retrieve information quickly and separate what is credible, relevant and up-to-date from what is not. (Hint: look for the seal of approval of Health on the Net.) |
President Trump in Phoenix: A reporter's view from the press pen
CLOSE President Donald Trump is blaming the media for the widespread condemnation of his response to a Charlottesville, Virginia, protest organized by white supremacists that led to the killing of a counter-protester. (Aug. 22) AP
At his Tuesday rally in Phoenix, President Trump railed against the press, calling reporters dishonest people who do not want America to succeed. The crowd roared and chanted insults — but once the speech was over, they were happy to talk with reporters, says USA TODAY reporter Eliza Collins.
She joined our Cup of Politics podcast to describe the scene in the raucous rally and what Trump's rhetoric means for his legislative agenda.
Rally coverage: President unloads on enemies at Phoenix rally
Fact check: Trump revises history, exaggerates accomplishments, makes false claims
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2wErc0e |
Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.
Following the news that Nordstrom is dropping the Ivanka Trump line amid poor sales due to an aggressive boycott, it appears as though Neiman Marcus is also feeling the boycott’s effects.
Jewelry from the Ivanka Trump line has disappeared from the luxury department store’s website. A sales associate at the Garden State Plaza location in northern New Jersey confirms the jewelry has been pulled from its store, though it is as yet unconfirmed that the jewelry is missing from all stores. The Neiman Marcus employee did not say when the Ivanka Trump jewelry was pulled.
Shannon Coulter, one of the women behind the #GrabYourWallet boycott, tipped Racked off to Nordstrom dropping the Ivanka Trump line yesterday, and noticed the jewelry was missing from Neiman’s site earlier this morning.
According to Coulter, there were 21 products for sale earlier this week, including a $12,000 diamond bracelet; now, there are none. Additionally, when you search for Ivanka Trump on the site, no results are served. The Ivanka Trump line is also missing from the list of designers on Neiman Marcus’s master list.
Neiman Marcus responded with the following statement, indicating sales are to blame for the brand’s absence:
Neiman Marcus has a very small Ivanka Trump precious jewelry business which is comprised 100 percent of consigned merchandise (merchandise owned by the vendor). Based on productivity we continuously assess whether our brands are carried in stores, on our website, or both.
Update: February 3rd, 2017, 4:15 p.m.
This article has been updated with a statement from Neiman Marcus.
Watch: The #GrabYourWallet Campaign May Be Working |
It is no secret some believe that Al Sharpton has in the past made a profit on the plight of the African American community. However, what would happen if one of those victims decided to call him on it?
Chokehold victim Eric Garner’s 24-year-old daughter, Erica Snipes claimed, while unknowingly being recorded on video, that Sharpton really only cares about money reports the New York Post.
Snipes was recorded by the incredibly controversial James O’Keefe’s group Project Veritas.
A member of the group posed as an activist and Garner supporter during a protest last month in Staten Island.
“You think Al Sharpton is kind of like a crook in a sense?” the investigator asked Snipes
“He’s about this,” Snipes replies, rubbing her fingers together.
“He’s about money with you?” the undercover asks.
“Yeah,” Snipes responds.
Snipes also discussed Cynthia Davis, the director of Sharpton’s National Action Network reprimanding her for handing out fliers about her father’s case with the National Action Network logo on them.
“She started attacking me. ‘Oh, I see that you got this flier out, how come you didn’t add the logo?’ ’’ Snipes told the undercover
The Project Veritas member responded, “They want their logo on your fliers?”
“Instead of me, he wants his face in front,” Snipes says, referring to Sharpton
“But it’s not about them, it’s about your dad,” the undercover says.
“Exactly,” Snipes responds.
“Al Sharpton paid for the funeral. She’s trying to make me feel like I owe them,” she explained.
“No, I didn’t say that I think Al Sharpton is all about the money,” Snipes told the New York Post in an interview on Monday.
She did however stand by her criticisms of Davis, who she went on to say tried to block her from attending a protest at the Staten Island Museum.
In an ironic move, Sharpton actually defended Snipes despite the claims saying that Project Veritas is trying to take advantage of the Garner family.
“They’re splicing and dicing stuff together. It was a distortion. Erica is a sincere victim. She was not trying to infer anything with me,” Sharpton said of the secret recording..
The National Action Network issued a statement Tuesday on behalf of Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, and widow, Esaw Garner.”
“Today’s NY Post front page story is deeply misleading about the relationship between our family, National Action Network, and Rev. Al Sharpton.”
“As the mother and head of the estate of Eric Garner, and the widow of Eric Garner, let us be clear: We reached out and asked for help and assistance from Rev. Al Sharpton and National Action Network in the wake of Eric’s death. National Action Network and Rev. Al Sharpton have honored all of our requests, including covering the expenses of Eric’s funeral. We believe that their involvement is solely based on their commitment for justice for Eric and our family. It is National Action Network’s policy that they do not accept monies or even reimbursement from victim’s families.”
“Erica made it clear in this NY Post article that the way the interview was conducted was extremely deceptive and her comments were taken out of context.”
— Keegan Stephan (@KeeganNYC) February 25, 2015
“We appreciate the work that National Action and Rev. Sharpton has done and continues to do for our family. The best way to continue to seek justice and honor Eric is through peaceful demonstrations, including by attending this Saturday’s rally with Rev. Sharpton at National Action Network.”
This has not been a good week for Reverend Al Sharpton. On Monday the reverend, along with Comcast, was hit with a $20 million dollar civil suit The National Association of African-American Owned Media and the Entertainment Studios Network for allegedly freezing out African American contractors.
In addition that that, the Daily Beast reports that Sharpto |
A Pennsylvania couple who believe in faith healing have been charged with murder after a second of their children died.
Catherine and Herbert Schaible, faith-healing advocates, arrive at police headquarters in Philadelphia to turn themselves in after the second of their children died. (Photo11: David Maialetti, AP) Story Highlights Son of Philadelphia couple who advocate faith healing died in April
Couple also lost a son that died of untreated pneumonia in 2009
Couple's lawyer argues they are neither a flight risk or danger to the community
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — After their 2-year-old son died of untreated pneumonia in 2009, faith-healing advocates Herbert and Catherine Schaible promised a judge they would not let another sick child go without medical care.
But now they've lost an 8-month-old to what a prosecutor called "eerily similar" circumstances. And instead of another involuntary manslaughter charge, they're now charged with third-degree murder.
"We believe in divine healing, that Jesus shed blood for our healing and that he died on the cross to break the devil's power," Herbert Schaible, 44, told Philadelphia homicide detectives after their ninth child, Brandon, died in April. Medicine, he said, "is against our religious beliefs."
The Schaibles were ordered held without bail Friday, two days after their arrest, although defense lawyers argued that they are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community.
"He is incarcerated because of his faith," said lawyer Bobby Hoof, who described client Herbert Schaible's mindset as resolute.
"He's strong willed," Hoof said. "(Yet) he's mourning this son. He's hurting as any dad would."
The only people theoretically at risk are the couple's seven surviving children, who are now in foster care, the lawyers said.
A judge acknowledged that the couple had never missed a court date in the first case but said he worried that might change amid the more serious charges. And he feared they may have supporters who would harbor them.
"Throughout this country … there are churches like the Schaibles' whose members and leaders probably don't think they did anything wrong and might be willing — to paraphrase the Schaibles' pastor — to put their interpretation of God's will above the law," Common Pleas Judge Benjamin Lerner said.
About a dozen children die each year in the U.S. when parents turn to faith healing instead of medicine, typically from highly treatable problems, said Shawn Francis Peters, a University of Wisconsin lecturer who has studied faith-healing deaths.
In Oregon, four couples from a faith-healing church have been prosecuted, the most recent in 2011 when a couple was sentenced to more than six years in prison for manslaughter in the death of their newborn son.
The state legislature that year removed faith healing as a defense to murder charges. Members of the Followers of Christ have consistently refused to speak with journalists.
Defense lawyer Mark Cogan declined to comment Friday on whether the legal actions have changed the practice of any church members. Some testified at the 2011 trial that they do get medical care.
At the Schaibles' sentencing in February 2011 in their son Kent's death, they agreed to follow terms of the 10-year probation, which included an order to get their children regular checkups and sick visits as needed. Catherine Schaible, 43, let her husband speak for her and never addressed the judge.
"It's very clear that the law says that religious freedom is trumped by the safety of a child," Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Engel Temin explained.
But a transcript of a later probation hearing that year shows probation officers were confused by their mandate to oversee the required medical care and felt powerless to carry it out. The family was not being monitored by child-welfare workers, who are more accustomed to dealing with medical compliance.
"I think that we all on the jury thought that it would not happen again, that whatever social and legal institutions needed to be involved in their situation would just take over … and that the mandated visits would be robust enough that they would not be able to do this again," Vincent Bertolini, a former college professor who served as jury foreman at the Schaibles' first trial, said Friday.
That jury convicted the couple of involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment.
Like other cases Peters has studied, the Schaibles belong to a small, insular circle of believers. Both are third-generation members and former teachers at their fundamentalist Christian church, the First Century Gospel Church in northeast Philadelphia.
Their pastor, Nelson Clark, has said the Schaibles lost their sons because of a "spiritual lack" in their lives and insisted they would not seek medical care even if another child appeared near death. He did not return phone messages this month, but he told The Associated Press in 2011 that his church is not a cult, and he faulted officials for trying to force his members into "the flawed medical system," which he blamed for 100,000 deaths a year.
"These are people who have been brought up in these communities; their beliefs are reinforced every day," Peters said. "They're not trained intellectually to question these doctrines, where the rest of us might engage in critical inquiry, weighing the benefits of medicine versus the benefits of prayer."
A handful of families, including one in western Pennsylvania, have lost two children after attempts at faith healing, according to Peters, who wrote "When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children and the Law."
Peters isn't sure that courts have the means to prevent the problem, since such people don't fear legal punishment, only Judgment Day. Some believe death "is a good outcome," given their belief in the afterlife, he said.
"They don't want to harm their children. They're just in this particularly narrow — and very, very dangerous — way misguided about the potential of medical science," he said.
He believes that "empathetic" intervention, through dialogue between church and public health educators, could help some "get to a point where they allow their beliefs and practices to evolve."
But there's a risk that could backfire, and drive these communities further underground, he said.
For the Schaibles, a third-degree murder conviction could bring seven to 14 years in prison or more.
Said Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore: "Somebody is dead now as a result of what they did — or didn't do."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/12Te931 |
Circle customers in Europe and the UK can now link cards from a wide array of countries, many of which can also hold euros in their Circle accounts.
Circle describes itself as “more than a payment app” that has worked hard to make the process of moving money less “archaic.” The company exists to make online payments as simple and convenient as possible, while also enforcing additional safety measures and protecting user privacy.
Circle’s website states:
“Unlike existing systems that are closed and proprietary, we use open internet standards and protocols, including the blockchain (allowing us to offer this service for free). We also foster innovative approaches to risk, including our AI risk engine, which runs on cutting edge algorithms that continuously keep your money safe.”
Now, Circle is adding the euro and European cards to its growing list of supported financial systems, and countries are being added to its list of clientele every day. The platform already hosts major credit card companies such as Mastercard and Visa through accounts stationed in both the United States and abroad.
At the present time, not all Circle accounts can hold both euros and bitcoins simultaneously, although the company is working to change that. Some of the countries that offer Euro card support include Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France and Germany, while those with accounts that can hold euros include Finland, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Slovenia. An entire list of applicable nations can be found here.
Last summer, Circle made headlines when it was announced that its latest bitcoin app had managed to raise over $60 in strategic funding efforts, while also making itself available in China and other select parts of Asia. The company first began working towards European expansion just over a year ago, and was the first bitcoin business to receive a regulatory license by way of New York’s infamous BitLicense. |
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Not to be confused with polydipsia
Dipsomania, an 18th-century woodcarving by Josef Stammel in the library of , an 18th-century woodcarving by Josef Stammel in the library of Admont Abbey
Dipsomania is a historical term describing a medical condition involving an uncontrollable craving for alcohol. In the 19th century, the term dipsomania was used to refer to a variety of alcohol-related problems, most of which are known today as alcoholism. Dipsomania is occasionally still used to describe a particular condition of periodic, compulsive bouts of alcohol intake. The idea of dipsomania is important for its historical role in promoting a disease theory of chronic drunkenness. The word comes from Greek dipso (Greek: "δίψα"= thirst) and mania.
It is still mentioned in the WHO ICD-10 classification as an alternative description for Alcohol Dependence Syndrome, episodic use F10.26
History [ edit ]
The term was coined by the German physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland in 1819, when, in a preface to an influential book by German-Russian doctor C. von Brühl-Cramer,[1] he translated Brühl-Cramer's term "trunksucht" as "dipsomania".[2] [3][4] Brühl-Cramer classified dipsomania in terms of continuous, remittent, intermittent, periodic and mixed forms, and in his book he discussed its cause, pathogenesis, sequelae, and treatment options, all influenced by prevailing ideas about the laws of chemistry and concepts of excitability.[5]
Due to the influence of Brühl-Cramer's pioneering work, dipsomania became popular in medical circles throughout the 19th century.[6] Political scientist Mariana Valverde describes dipsomania as "the most medical" of the many terms used to describe habitual drunkenness in the 19th century.[7] Along with terms such as "inebriety", the idea of dipsomania was used as part of an effort of medical professionals and reformers to change attitudes about habitual drunkenness from being a criminally punishable vice to being a medically treatable disease.[8] As historian Roy MacLeod wrote about this dipsomania reform movement, it "illuminates certain features of the gradual transformation taking place in national attitudes towards the prevention and cure of social illnesses during the last quarter of the 19th century."[8]
Although dipsomania was used in a variety of somewhat contradictory ways by different individuals, by the late 19th century the term was usually used to describe a periodic or acute condition, in contrast to chronic drunkenness.[9] In his 1893 book Clinical Lessons on Mental Diseases: The Mental State of Dipsomania, Magnan characterized dipsomania as a crisis lasting from one day to two weeks, and consisting of a rapid and huge ingestion of alcohol or whatever other strong, excitatory liquid was available.[9] Magnan further described dipsomania as solitary alcohol abuse, with loss of all other interests, and these crises recurred at indeterminate intervals, separated by periods when the subject was generally sober.[9]
Over time, the term dipsomania became less common, replaced by newer ideas and terms concerning chronic and acute drunkenness and alcoholism.[10]
Examples in fiction [ edit ]
Sebastian Flyte, a character from the novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, who sarcastically describes himself as a dipsomaniac
by Evelyn Waugh, who sarcastically describes himself as a dipsomaniac James O. Incandenza, a character in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, described in the novel as having "crippling dipsomania"
by David Foster Wallace, described in the novel as having "crippling dipsomania" Dwight Carson, a talented writer in The Fountainhead , who is turned into a dipsomaniac on the whim of Gail Wynand
, who is turned into a dipsomaniac on the whim of Gail Wynand Charlotte Merriam (actress who plays Mrs. Ritchey in the 1931 movie Night Nurse ) who exclaims that she is a dipsomaniac several times when confronted by Barbara Stanwyck's character (Lora Hart) with the fact that Ritchey's daughter is dying from malnutrition
) who exclaims that she is a dipsomaniac several times when confronted by Barbara Stanwyck's character (Lora Hart) with the fact that Ritchey's daughter is dying from malnutrition Peter Morgan Sr., (played by actor Charles Coburn) in the 1938 movie Vivacious Lady , talks about his nephew Keith Morgan's (played by James Ellison) dipsomania ways.
, talks about his nephew Keith Morgan's (played by James Ellison) dipsomania ways. Richard Gilmore, a character in the TV series Gilmore Girls , refers to a fundraiser speaker as a dipsomaniac in the season one episode "P.S. I Lo..."
, refers to a fundraiser speaker as a dipsomaniac in the season one episode "P.S. I Lo..." Susanna Conolly (alias Lalage Virtue, a talented singer and player), in Shaw's first novel The Irrational Knot
Examples in science [ edit ]
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin writing to George FitzGerald on April 9, 1896:[11] "I have not had a moment's peace or happiness in respect to electromagnetic theory since Nov. 28, 1846 (see vol i. p. 80 M.P.P). "All this time I have been liable to fits of ether dipsomania, kept away at intervals only by rigorous abstention from thought on the subject."
See also [ edit ] |
I'm still not great at selfies... Here you get two for the price of one tho.
The second edition is officially out!
Thanks to everyone involved!
If you've been reading the free online edition and feel like showing your support, then now's the time! There's not a huge amount in it for me financially (I get about a dollar off every sale) but it does add up, and O'Reilly also deserve your support, they've been great.
Reviews, please!
More importantly, I really need some reviews for the book, on Amazon and elsewhere. They make a real difference to sales, and they really help other people to make the decision over whether they will find the book useful. So if you've enjoyed the book at all, do write a review for me online. That would be very, very much appreciated.
Thanks once again, dear readers, for your kind words and encouragement throughout the process. I couldn't do it without you. |
The popular Java EE app server Tomcat has taken their up an incremental notch. Apache Tomcat has announced release 7.0.55 of the open-source application server – available for download here. This marks the 55th minor update to Tomcat 7, which made its stable release premiere in early 2011.
As in recent updates over the past months, most of the changes documented in this release include minor fixes and improvements.
Meanwhile, the Tomcat team is making progress on Tomcat 8, which emerged in its first stable release earlier in June. The new series gathered momentum back in April with a beta release featuring an Eclipse JDT compiler that supports Java 8.
The current stable version (8.0.9) adds fixes for Java 8 support, while adding new features like cross context session replication. The previous version boasted numerous improvements such as support for Java Servlet 3.1 and JavaServer Pages 2.3, as well as enhancements to the resources implementation.
Previous releases have also hinted at several ‘experimental’ new features to appear in the 8th edition, such as HTTP and AJP connectors based on NIO2. At the same time, the Spring Boot framework has also introduced support for the first stable Tomcat 8 release.
Last week, Tomcat was featured in ZeroTurnaround’s RebelLab’s list of ten technologies loved by modern developers. The technology, which first appeared in 1999, has established itself as the leading Java app server, with 50% of developers claiming they prefer it over alternatives like JBoss and Jetty, according to Rebellabs.
Teaser image: Funny male cat asking for a snack via Shutterstock / Copyright: Andrzej Tamawczyk |
Cheetah Girls Booted from Macy's Parade After Racy Photos Leaked
America will have to do without the Cheetah Girls during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this year because they've been uninvited. Macy's officials are citing "scheduling issues" as the reason the girl group won't appear in the parade but according to the New York Daily News, the semi-nude photos of Adrienne Bailon were just too much for the wholesome department store chain.
The pictures featured Bailon in a bra and nothing else. Her publicist, Jonathan Jaxson, first claimed the photos had been stolen at JFK airport a week earlier in a laptop heist. He has since changed his tune and indicates it was all a publicity stunt to try to alter the singer's image to be more adult and less Disney.
The fallout has begun. Says Jaxson: "Adrienne wanted me to plant the story about the laptop. She wanted to distance herself from the Cheetah Girls. She decided, 'Let's spice it up' and say possible nude photos were stolen from her laptop...I've done this before with several stars and we've had great success, but this is the first time it's even bitten me in the rear or a client."
UPDATE: Cheetah Girls Breakup |
Image via YouTube Video
Geckos have been the inspiration for many biomimicry projects, from better glues to velcros. The way the critters are able to stick to surfaces is incredible, and researchers have worked to duplicate this on different levels. Now, researchers from Zhejiang University in China have created a robot powered by water that can scale glass surfaces, moving -- and sticking -- like a gecko. According to IEEE Spectrum, this robot can stick to smooth surfaces like glass, and it uses water pressure to keep climbing. It only needs a small battery pack for the wireless communication that allows a human to direct where it climbs. Thanks to the way it is designed, it can carry twice it's weight and may eventually be used for tasks like firefighting or conducting inspections.
To function, the robot gets connected to a faucet with a loop (a really long loop, if necessary) of hose. As water flows through the hose, its pressure accomplishes several things. First, the water passes through fluidic vacuum generators, which use that same Bernoulli principle that those supersonic jet grippers take advantage of to turn the motion of a fluid into a vacuum. This allows the bot's feet to stick to any smooth surface. Then, the water is routed through a solenoid valve to a piston that's attached to the "spine" of the robot. The inspiration for this design was the gecko, arguably the best wall-climber in existence, and the upshot of it is that the robot can climb relatively quickly (constrained only by the time it takes to establish a solid vacuum) and turn in either direction with just one single spinal actuator. And of course lastly, the water is squirted out at the end of the robot's arm to do the actual washing.
We're not entirely thrilled that it requires water, an already scare resource, to power itself up a wall. However, we do love the biomimicry used in creating its movement. Here is a video of the robot in action:
Follow Jaymi on Twitter for more stories like this
More on Biomomicry and Robots
Robot That Flies and Swims Inspired By Unusual Seabird That Soars in Air and Water
Artificial Bee Eye Helps Mini Flying Robots See Better
Caterpillar Robot Rolls Away at Lightening Speed (Video)
Scientists Look to Cockroaches as Biomimicry Solution for Super Powered Running Robots
Robot Butterfly Means Breakthroughs for Biomimicry in Aviation (Video) |
VANCOUVER—With the ink still wet on a free-trade deal with South Korea, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Canada would be willing to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement for the right price. Harper stopped in Vancouver on his way home from South Korea on Wednesday, wasting no time in selling the new agreement.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper listens while participating in a moderated question-and-answer session with the B.C. Chamber of Commerce in Vancouver on Wednesday. ( DARRYL DYCK / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
In a question-and-answer session at a B.C. Chamber of Commerce gathering, he said his government remains focused on building global trade, “particularly given that some of our traditional trading partners, like the United States, may not have the kind of growth rates that you’re talking about for a very long time to come.” That said, the prime minister made it clear that Canada may be interested in renegotiating NAFTA with the U.S. and Mexico. U.S. President Barack Obama originally vowed to open NAFTA during his first presidential campaign. American officials have again expressed interest in opening the 20-year-old pact, Harper said.
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“We’re interested in that as well,” Harper said during a chummy interview conducted by chamber president John Winter. “We just have to remind our friends that if we’re going to open it, we’re going to open it in a way that benefits both of us, not just the United States. “The United States sometimes expresses the view that NAFTA has certain loopholes. We don’t really see them that way,” he said to laughter from hundreds of people that packed a hotel ballroom for the morning appearance. “We happen to think this was a balanced agreement, but certainly if we can deepen it in areas like labour mobility, access of professional services and government procurement, these are big areas where — if we could open up NAFTA and expand its application— it would be very good for Canadian and American business.” Harper said the more modern agreements, in particular the South Korean deal and another signed with the European Union last year, are more comprehensive.
The agreements cover investment, government procurement, intellectual property, labour mobility and a host of other issues beyond tariffs, he said. Canada’s first such agreement with an Asian country is considered a major step in the Conservative government’s international trade strategy.
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The federal government is pursuing trade talks with India and Thailand, but a Pacific-wide pact is the goal. “We started with some small agreements and have moved to some very big ones,” Harper said. “Obviously, we continue to look for opportunities everywhere, but the big issue is Asia, and the big negotiations really is the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” Closely linked to that is a bilateral agreement with Japan, he said. Until then, the deal with South Korea offers unprecedented access to that market. “There are some very, very big potential wins here in making Canadian goods much more competitive in a market of 50 million people with linkages throughout Asia.” Security was tight as Harper spoke. During the prime minister’s last appearance before a business crowd in Vancouver in January, a pair of climate-change protesters walked onto a stage behind him before being whisked away. “I’m glad we got through this alone on the stage,” Winter said as he wrapped up the question-and-answer session. “I think B.C.’s reputation has been tattered.” “It doesn’t really feel like B.C.,” Harper said with a laugh.
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You may recall that in 2014 we wrote about a strange occurrence having to do with Chase Bank refusing to provide its banking services to Teagan Presley, a rather well known adult film actress. When it became clear that Presley wasn't the only performer to whom this was happening, it initially looked as though banks were engaging in a form of slut-shaming of adult film actors. It turned out, however, that it was the federal government doing the slut-shaming, with the emergence of the Department of Justice's Operation Choke Point. This DOJ policy that was developed to combat financial fraud somehow bled over the stencil lines and became a sort of banking morality police, encouraging banks to cut off services to industries like adult film, fireworks retail stores, and sellers engaged in what the DOJ deemed to be "racist materials." It's worth highlighting that all of these industries and actions, whether you like them or not, are legal, yet the DOJ was essentially attempting to extra-judiciously scuttle them through secretive federal policy. That should have terrified everyone, but didn't, and so the program went on.
Until recently. The justice department recently announced that Operation Choke Point will be ended. |
Alexey "Sharkz" Taranda joins Gambit Esports as a Strategic Coach of our League of Legends roster. Alexey is one of the most experienced coaches in CIS - he spent three seasons as a Head Coach of Vega Squadron and a season as an Assistant Coach of G2 Esports.
Sharkz has been helping our roster in its preparation for LCL Summer playoffs for the past two weeks on a trial basis. The team and Gambit’s management remained satisfied with Alexey’s input in our training process, therefore will continue working with him.
We would like to remind that LCL Summer final will take place this Sunday at 15:00 CEST. Gambit will go up against M19 in a battle for the championship title and an honor to represent our region at 2017 World Championship in China.
Gambit LoL roster:
Aleksandr "PvPStejos" Glazkov – Top
Danil "Diamondprox" Reshetnikov – Jungle
Michael "Kira" Garmash – Mid
Daniel "Blasting" Kudrin – ADC
Edward "EDward" Abgaryan – Support
Dmitry "Invi" Protasov – Head Coach
Alexey "Sharkz" Taranda - Strategic Coach
Anton "Tunes" Boiko - Manager |
The late Renato Bialetti, son of the inventor of the Moka coffee pot, had his ashes buried in a large replica of the octagonal pot in a funeral service on Monday. His children decided to use the urn to honor his life's work that led to 330 million Moka pots being sold worldwide. Photo by Anerix/Shutterstock.com
MONTEBUGLIO, Italy, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- After Renato Bialetti, 93, died last week his children decided to honor his life's work by placing his ashes in a container that symbolized his family's legacy.
During a funeral service in Montebuglio, Italy Bialleti's ashes were buried in a replica of the Moka coffee pot, which his father, Alfonso, invented.
Bialetti's three children Alfonso, Antonella and Alessandra reportedly, came up with the idea to bury their father in the octagonal coffee pot he dedicated his life to popularizing.
Bialetti took the modest sales of his father's company, which had only manufactured 70,000 pots when he gained control in 1947, and used an aggressive marketing campaign to make the pot a staple in coffee-drinking homes, with approximately 330 million sold worldwide.
The unique urn was blessed by a priest at the funeral ceremony attended by about 200 people at a church in Casale Corte Cerro, Piedmont.
When the ceremony ended, the pot was placed in the family tomb next to the remains of Bialetti's wife Elia. |
The author says sexually violent scene introduced to TV adaptation, but not in source novel – which upset many fans – showed behaviour grounded in history
Game of Thrones author George RR Martin has weighed into the debate about the sexual violence in the television version of his epic fantasy series, saying that it would be “fundamentally dishonest” not to show rape as part of war.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the 66-year-old author said: “Rape, unfortunately, is still a part of war today. It’s not a strong testament to the human race, but I don’t think we should pretend it doesn’t exist.”
Martin said: “I want to portray struggle. Drama comes out of conflict. If you portray a utopia, then you probably wrote a pretty boring book.”
The hit HBO series, based on Martin’s long-running fantasy series A Song Of Ice And Fire, is set on the fictional world of Westeros, which has analogies with mediaeval Europe, especially Dark Ages Northumbria.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest George RR Martin: books reflect a patriarchal society based on the Middle Ages. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
However, the TV show has changed some aspects of Martin’s books, most recently portraying the rape of major character Sansa Stark, played by actress Sophie Turner. The scene did not appear in Martin’s book A Dance With Dragons, though there was a rape of a different character. It was almost universally decried by fans, with Vanity Fair publishing a piece headlined: “Game of Thrones absolutely did not need to go there with Sansa Stark”.
Genre website The Mary Sue reacted by announcing that it would no longer cover any aspect of the Game of Thrones TV series. Editor in chief Jill Pantozzi wrote: “After the episode ended, I was gutted. I felt sick to my stomach. And then I was angry. My next thought was, ‘I’m going to have to spend part of the next six months explaining why this was a bad move over and over’.”
Martin told Entertainment Weekly that “the books reflect a patriarchal society based on the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were not a time of sexual egalitarianism. It was very classist, dividing people into three classes. And they had strong ideas about the roles of women. One of the charges against Joan of Arc that got her burned at the stake was that she wore men’s clothing.”
Game of Thrones rape? Care more about real assaults | Barbara Ellen Read more
The author also answered critics who have countered that, since Martin is writing a secondary-world fantasy, he can set his own rules. He said: “Now, there are people who will say to that, ‘Well, he’s not writing history, he’s writing fantasy – he put in dragons, he should have made it an egalitarian society.’ Just because you put in dragons doesn’t mean you can put in anything you want ... I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and show what medieval society was like, and I was also reacting to a lot of fantasy fiction. Most stories depict what I call the Disneyland Middle Ages – there are princes and princesses and knights in shining armour.”
Martin said the controversy had not put off the “millions of women readers who love the books”. He added: “If you’re going to write about war, and you just include all the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and things like that, and you don’t portray [sexual violence], then there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that.” |
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton takes part in the Women for Women International Luncheon in New York City, New York, U.S., May 2, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
(Reuters) - Senior FBI officials who helped probe Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign told a colleague that Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had to win the race to the White House, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Peter Strzok, a senior FBI agent, said Clinton "just has to win" in a text sent to FBI lawyer Lisa Page, the Times reported.
The messages showed concern from Strzok and Page that a Trump presidency could politicize the FBI, the report said, citing texts turned over to Congress and obtained by the newspaper. http://nyti.ms/2AOHylP
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz is investigating the texts in a probe into FBI's handling of its investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server for official correspondence when she was Secretary of State under former President Barack Obama, the report added.
Strzok was removed from working on the Russia probe after media reports earlier this month suggested he had exchanged text messages that disparaged Trump and supported Clinton.
Strzok was involved in both the Clinton email and Russia investigations.
Republicans, including Trump, have in recent weeks ramped up their attacks on the FBI and questioned its integrity.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees are investigating possible links between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia. Russia denies meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections.
The FBI, the Democratic National Committee and the White House did not respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.
Reuters was unable to contact Peter Strzok and Lisa Page for comment.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sunil Nair) |
With F1 switching to wider tyres next year as part of a move to make cars up to five seconds per lap faster, teams are well aware that the aerodynamic influence of the new rubber will have a major effect on their car concepts.
But although Pirelli has already manufactured the first batch of wind tunnel tyres that teams will want to use for development, it is understood that they are unlikely to be given out until the Italian company's final contract with the FIA for its 2017-2019 F1 supply deal has been signed off.
Pirelli motorsport director Paul Hembery confirmed in Australia that the wind tunnel tyres were ready, but suggested that until there was clarity over 2017 contracts, it could not distribute them.
"We physically have them available," he said. "We are just finalising details of contracts with the FIA and then we need to do the teams. Also we need the final regulations to be confirmed."
Without the wind tunnel tyres – which are essential for simulating how the actual rubber will deform under load – then teams are limited to just CFD simulations for their 2017 car concepts.
The computer data – which will be based on an anticipated 405/670/13 rear and 305/670/13 front – will be of limited use however and teams will not want to invest too much effort in case the wind tunnel rubber performs differently.
Contract delay
Although Pirelli's success in winning the F1 supply contract from 2017 to 2019 was announced by Bernie Ecclestone at last year's Russian Grand Prix, its contract with the FIA has not yet been ratified.
The exact reasons for the delay are unclear but it is known that there remain key demands from Pirelli about securing a proper testing programme ahead of 2017.
The idea of using a V8-powered car to kick off its development work over the next few months has been agreed in principle, but there has not yet been an official sign off which chassis it will get nor which teams will be running it.
Furthermore, although F1's 2017 technical regulations have been agreed, there remains scope for changes to be made until the end of April, something that Pirelli is mindful of.
Testing push
The delay in releasing the wind tunnel tyres will put the FIA contractual situation, and the testing matter, in to sharp focus and may well force teams to do more to help resolve remaining uncertainties so they too can get on with their work.
Hembery remains hopeful that a testing solution will be found – both for getting hold of a car and having enough days to run a proper programme.
"We are getting close to getting a car," he said. "We've also had very clear assurances that we will get 12 days, hopefully with two cars but a maximum of three.
"Ideally we would like to get some work done on a previous generation V8, so we can do some of the conceptual work.
"We are changing concepts in terms of compounding and structures, which you can do initially screening on a V8 before you move to a hybrid version of the 2017 car." |
Paris, France (CNN) -- French police believe they've gotten to the bottom of a series of robberies in which teenage girls exposed their breasts to distract men withdrawing money from Paris cash machines.
Two teenagers have been charged with three hold-ups, but they will be prosecuted as juveniles since they are under 18, according to the Paris prosecutor's office.
Police say that on August 7, a man inserted a card into a cash machine in central Paris to withdraw money when two young females approached him and asked for money. The girls waved a newspaper at the man in an attempt to distract him, but the technique didn't work.
So the girls tried another strategy: One of them bared her breasts and put her hand on the man's genitals while the other took the opportunity to withdraw 300 euros, police said.
The two teenagers also are accused of stealing a total of 400 euros in two other Paris ATM robberies on August 17, the prosecutor's office said.
CNN's Sarah Goddard contributed to this report |
Dishonourable Mention
Excuses come easy: it was Man City, a key man was missing, there haven't been any signings... But the truth of the matter is, even with those considered and disregarded, Newcastle United should have performed better against Manchester City in last night's season opener. Regardless of context or competition, one shot on target in 90 minutes is a dismal return, and the manner in which City sliced through the Magpies on the break should be as much a matter for concern as it will be a positive for other teams looking to counter-attack in subsequent games. The defeat was not necessarily hard to take for Newcastle fans, who remained in reasonably good spirits after the game - having written the fixture off as something of a foregone conclusion - but as with all games, it is the manner of that defeat that should provoke thought. Once more Newcastle players were employed in positions that looked occasionally alien to them, and the overall shape of the team was not conducive to any agenda - too focused on attacking to protect the defence on the counter, when the attacks invariably failed outside City's box, and too flat and uninspired to take Joe Hart's mind off his Head & Shoulders sponsored haircut. And in amongst the disappointments and the cutting inevitability of the defeat, there were a number of performances that warrant singling out for their impact on the result. Now, I'm not for one second saying that Newcastle would have won if the following were different, but the manner of the performance may well have been different, and less stinging for Toon fans.Though Newcastle strengthened in January (and that business is being called "early summer business,") Newcastle remain a painfully thin squad. There is precious little cover and competition, and even with Loic Remy waiting (slightly hobbled) in the wings, the need for another striker is hugely obvious, and as is the need to sign a left midfielder who will offer some competition to the now injured Jonas Gutierrez. Kinnear was presented with the promise that he could be judged on his signings - which is odd if there are to be none as seems to be the suggestion recently - and while Remy is a huge bonus (provided he is fit and not locked up,) if judgement were welcomed at this stage, Kinnear's appointment could only be deemed a failure by his own qualifications. Had Newcastle had more players to choose from, things might have been different, but that is all just speculation at this point - which is oddly appropriate given the nature of most of Newcastle's "business" this summer so far. So, now on to the real business of this article... |
The World Health Organization confirmed two cases of wild poliovirus type 1 in Cameroon on Thursday, marking the first human cases there since 2009.
The virus was isolated from two patients in the country’s western region who had developed paralysis in October; genetic sequencing indicated the cases are linked to the strain detected in neighboring Chad in 2011. The W.H.O. said an emergency plan to tackle the outbreak, including at least three national immunization days, was being finalized and that a response would also be implemented for Chad and the war-torn Central African Republic.
Earlier this year, Cameroon reported four cases where people in the Far North region had developed paralysis due to circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2, linked to Chad and detected in Nigeria and Niger.
Cameroon is considered at high risk for reinfection due to its long shared border with Nigeria, one of three countries where the virus remains endemic, along with Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Nov. 19, UNICEF announced that Afghanistan’s southern region hadn’t reported a new case of polio in a full year, but that efforts would be focused on the eastern region along the tense border with Pakistan. Of 334 worldwide cases reported so far in 2013, only nine have been in eastern Afghanistan; that figure is one-third of last year’s total.
The virus’ reemergence in Cameroon comes weeks after W.H.O. officials confirmed the debilitating disease had returned to Syria, which had been declared polio-free in 1999.
That strain, confirmed to have originated in Pakistan, has crippled at least a dozen children from 22 suspected cases in Deir al-Zor province. Global public health officials are concerned that Syria’s civil war, especially with the entry of foreign fighters and mass movement of refugees around the region, is pushing the disease further away from eradication. |
Yet not in the States. “There has never been, in the last 40 years, a large scale, coordinated, national—or close to national—student strike,” says Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism and a professor at the City University of New York. He offered two broad reasons why that is the case.
First, Johnston says, many American students aren’t aware of striking as a protest maneuver. That would make it difficult for organizers to orchestrate the huge numbers of participants needed to make it work.
“You need to have an awareness of it as a tactic, because it’s something you can’t just do with a small number of students,” he told me. “If it’s a small number of students, then you just fail your classes, because you’re marked as absent. It needs to be a tactic that can be adopted on a really, really wide scale the first time out.”
The few times it’s been attempted here, that happened. The most prominent postwar student strike in the United States came in the spring of 1970, after National Guardsmen shot and killed four undergraduates at Kent State. Students and faculty around the country—mourning those deaths as well as a similar shooting at Jackson State, and protesting the recent American invasion of Cambodia—struck. They shut down almost 450 campuses and demonstrated on nearly 400 more. A presidential commission from the period estimated that a third of all American campuses were involved somehow.
But even that incident revealed how little American colleges were prepared for strikers. “The reason why, honestly, the shootings happened at Kent State is that the university and the state refuses to shut down the campus when students went on strike,” Johnston says.
But in nations where students strike today, he told me, universities have different protocols: “In Canada, you have a situation where if you get to a certain level of student involvement, you can be confident that in most cases at least the university will be shut down—because that’s the protocol that’s followed.”
This is itself a function of local history and custom. Anglophone students in Canada, especially beyond Quebec, are much less likely to strike than their Francophone counterparts. Some European nations have strong traditions of strikes: Classes in Croatia were shut down as recently as 2009, and planned student boycotts famously helped set off the French civil unrest of May 1968. Yet in Britain, Johnston added by email, “marches and rallies and occupations are far more frequent.” And even in places like Quebec, “student strikes are often quite controversial even among activists.”
But law and history are not the only factors pushing students to avoid striking. Americans don’t strike today, Johnston also believes, in part because they can’t afford to miss class.
“Students in the United States today are living in conditions of economic precarity that didn’t exist in the 1960s,” he said. “As students have gotten poorer on average, tuition has gone up. And so they’re getting squeezed on both sides. They have a lot less ability to withstand the effects of … losing a semester, because if that happens, they’re gonna be screwed.” |
Share. The Crass-Time Caper. The Crass-Time Caper.
This is a spoiler-free review for all 13 new episodes of Hulu's Future Man - which premiered Tuesday, November 14th.
Here's the thing about Hulu's Future Man, which stars The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson as a homebody gamer who gets recruited into an epic quest to save humanity's future: it's good. It has a lot going for it, including the cast, which also features Happy Endings' Eliza Coupe and Preacher's Derek Wilson. The idea of a go-for-broke time travel action comedy is solid and Future Man is nothing if not committed to certain elements of shock and awe laughs.
Where the series falters somewhat (I've watched all of Season 1, which premiered this past Tuesday) is actually in that very commitment. Occasionally the series, which goes all in on gross-out visual humor, becomes its own worst enemy by going overboard with raunch. There's nothing inherently wrong with comedic vulgarity, but in order to make the crass elements funny there also needs to be some restraint. Netflix's Big Mouth ran into these issues recently as well, where all of a sudden creators land on a streaming service and have license to, basically, do and show what ever they want without fear of advertisers, demographics, or decency standards and a certain unmeasurable quantity of "funny" gets lost in their gusto to put absolutely everything out there.
Future Man stumbles in this regard, as moments within the season involving soaring ejaculate, broken fingers, herpes sores, and many other instances of visual ickiness work to undercut the silliness that's already present. Future Man reminds me of when the Farrelly brothers struck oil with Dumb & Dumber and There's Something About Mary and then tried to hit us with Say It Isn't So, which was just a long string of gross gotcha gags stitched together. Yes, when it comes to disgusting sight gags, Future Man sometimes can't get out of its own way.
Exit Theatre Mode
I can't give you an actual example of this without spoiling too much but the fact remains that, often times, characters talking about something gross that's already happened, that we've seen, is way more funny than actually seeing it. Less is usually more with Future Man. as the premise itself, and the story's fun approach to a drawn-out/disaster-filled time travel mission is entertaining on its own. Now, it may also be that we didn't need 13 episodes, and those episodes possibly didn't need to clock in at 30 full minutes (or more) each, but that's just part of the usual package of excess that comes with the streaming model.
Now, here are all the ways Future Man holds up. I mentioned the cast back at the top, but I'll do so again. These are great roles, primarily for the three leads (Hutcherson, Coupe, and Wilson) and there are some really dazzling moments where they're able to truly shine. Coupe is incredible as Tiger, a hardened rebel leader from a ravaged dystopian future who travels back to 2017 because she thinks the video game she created, Biotic Wars, has found her a "savior." Wilson, as Wolf, is Tiger's alpha male right hand and his arc, throughout the season, is a fabulous feast. Both Tiger and Wolf, throughout the mission, discover sensitive sides of themselves that they never could afford to acknowledge in the traumatic (future) time they grew up in.
Exit Theatre Mode
Hutcherson gets to play the straight man of the trio, Josh (yes, Josh), though the role's not without laughs as Josh's constant attempt to thwart a future hellscape in a non-violent, peaceful way possible (clashing with Tiger and Wolf's crazed kill 'em all harshness) usually winds up making everything exponentially worse, and proving his hard-nosed future buddies' ideas about a scorched earth approach correct. There's also the ever-present theme of "no matter what action these three take, good or bad, the future is pretty much f***ed."
Keith David, Haley Joel Osment, Ed Begley Jr., and Glenne Headly (whose character sadly had to become an off-screen one after she died during production last July) round out the capable cast as supporting characters who change and transform with each failed attempt to fix the future by changing the past. After a while (and Future Man does take about three or four episodes to find a decent groove), part of the fun becomes watching how Josh, Tiger, and Wolf have inadvertently changed people in the name of trying to save the world.
Exit Theatre Mode
There's a true comedy of errors/caper quality to Future Man and with that comes, refreshingly, a streaming series that feels like a segmented TV show. Yes, Hulu is releasing all of Season 1 at once for binge purposes, but these episodes actually feel like separate pointedly-themed chapters of a story and not just shapeless parts of one long movie. Each episode, usually, is a specific (ill-fated) mission to course correct something awful and because of that there are natural breaks for viewers. You don't have to chug this series if you don't want to.
Future Man, with its hit or miss quality, leans into some well-worn tropes while also bucking some others quite brilliantly. Executive produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (who also directed the first two episodes), and created by writers Ariel Shaffir and Kyle Hunter (Sausage Party), the series is a strange mix of really cool and inventive ideas and tired toilet humor that lands with a thud. Sometimes too there are odd movie references inserted in (from Midnight Cowboy to Top Gun to Crocodile Dundee) that are apropos of not very much, but then other times the show takes actual mind-bending elements from other sci-fi projects (Back to the Future, The Matrix, etc) and goes a few steps further with them into some twisted, and often funny, territory. |
James Lovelock is an interesting character. He has a medical degree and has successfully designed a number of scientific instruments, but he's probably most famous for some of his big ideas, which range from specific geoengineering proposals to the Gaia concept, which proposes that the planet's geology, biology, and atmosphere interact in a complex, self-regulating system.
In recent years, his attention has turned to climate change and, unfortunately, he's largely decided to skip brushing up on science before making grandiose predictions. After having suggested that the human population on Earth would be whittled down to a handful of survivors this century, he's now backed away from these claims—and has gotten nearly as many things wrong in the process of doing so.
Lovelock's original projections weren't made in a scientific journal; instead, they graced the opinion pages of The Independent. And his views were rather opinionated. "As the century progresses," he wrote, "the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics." The consequence? Massive upheaval, according to Lovelock. "Before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."
What did he base these figures on? It's very hard to tell. At the time, the most recent IPCC report had concluded that the planet would warm by between 1.4 and 5.8°C by the end of the century—well below Lovelock's estimates. And at the time he wrote, the work of preparing the follow-up report was well under way. That narrowed down the uncertainties on those values considerably, with the worst-case emissions scenario indicating a likely warming of about three degrees by the end of the century.
Even if Lovelock's seriously inflated estimates were right, it's not at all clear that the temperature increases he predicts would make the temperate zones completely uninhabitable.
But Lovelock is now working on a new book, and that's caused him to revisit these predictions. In an interview at MSNBC, he correctly recognizes that his earlier predictions were alarmist, but he apparently did not realize why he had gone so wrong. Rather than actually talking to the people who study the climate for a living, he's just decided that, since his own predictions didn't come to pass, nobody must know what's going on. "The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing," Lovelock told MSNBC. "We thought we knew 20 years ago." Later on, he claims that "we were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now."
Except we weren't, at least not according to the best scientific estimates available at the time. And, in fact, we do seem to have some idea what the climate is doing. Most of the last decade has seen relatively stable temperatures, but many similar periods exist in the instrument records, despite the overall upward trend in temperatures. And scientists have also identified many factors that drive short-term variability in the climate. In fact, researchers have published a paper that indicates that, once the major drivers of short-term variation (El Niño, volcanos, and the Sun) are accounted for, the global temperature has continued a general upward trend.
In short, Lovelock's predictions never reflected the scientific consensus and, whatever prompted him to revise them, it didn't seem to involve talking to anyone who actually knows climate science.
For many, the debate over the climate has become a polarized one, with self-labeled skeptics facing off against alarmists. This view isn't very useful, in that it ignores the fact that the vast majority of climate scientists reside somewhere in the middle, and are producing research that suggests both extremes are wrong. But the view is helpful in that it highlights how Lovelock shares so many features with the extreme skeptics, including a misunderstanding of the state of climate research and a willingness to make big pronouncements that are based on little more than their own opinions. |
An Employment Appeal Tribunal has found that a Muslim woman was not discriminated against when told that her jilbab posed a tripping hazard.
A Muslim woman, named only as Ms T Begum, was offered an apprenticeship in a nursery, but was asked by a manager if she could wear a jilbab which did not extend over her feet- as it could pose a tripping hazard for children and staff.
Ms Begum had worn a jilbab during the interview which the manager said would not be suitable for working in the nursery because of its length. Instead she was asked to wear a slightly shorter garment.
Despite not objecting at the time, the claimant said that "she had been insulted" by the request and that the requirement that she wear an ankle-length jilbab, rather than one which covered her feet and touched the floor, was "against her morals and beliefs."
She claimed that she had been "discriminated against" because of her "ethnic/cultural background."
The Judge dismissed the case and noted that the woman in question "was only asked if she might wear a shorter version of the [jilbab] she wore to the interview", and was not told she could not wear the religious garment at all.
According to the ruling, "at no point was she told that she could not wear a jilbab while working at the nursery."
The Judge concluded that the policy was not "indirectly discriminatory to Muslim women" and that the health and safety policy "applied equally to staff of all religions". The Judge noted that even if the policy did "put some Muslim women at a particular disadvantage", it was a proportionate means of "protecting the health and safety of staff and children."
The ruling also pointed out the nursery employed four Muslim women who all wore hijabs, and that they were accommodated by their employer who facilitated time off for Ramadan and for prayers.
An NSS spokesperson commented, "Clearly the health and safety of staff and children is the priority here. There is not an unlimited right to manifest your religion in the workplace. The employer made a very reasonable, practical request, and we are pleased to see the Judge siding with them." |
The secretary-general of the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates accused Hamas on Monday of attempting to prevent the distribution of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip.
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According to Secretary-General Mohamed Ateeq Al-Falahi, the Red Crescent's staff was stationed at a UAE field hospital in the strip during the 2014 Operation Protective Edge when Hamas fighters began provoking Israeli forces by firing rockets from that hospital.
This led Israel to attack the hospital as the launch point for the rockets, thus sabotaging the distribution of the humanitarian aid.
Hamas rockets (Photo: Reuters)
"This shows (Hamas's) wicked intentions and how they scarified us," said Al-Falahi. "They always claim the enemy targets humanitarian envoys, but the betrayal came from them."
When the Red Crescent team was leaving Gaza, Hamas "accused us of being spies, undercover foreign intelligences who were escaping."
When they left the strip through Sinai, Al-Falahi said Hamas had apparently informed "extremist militias in Sinai... that there was a group making their way there, so prepare for jihad against them... as we stopped at a grocery store to buy something to eat, they started shooting at us."
In addition, he said, the Red Crescent team learned those extremist militias had also planted landmines a few kilometers down the road.
"What hurts is that the betrayal came from our own people," Al-Falahi lamented. "Muslims fighting Muslims, who were giving humanitarian aid to Muslims." |
NEW YORK CITY–Alarmed Fox News hosts engaged in a heated discussion over whether the content the network produces might qualify as satire, and therefore open Fox News employees up to attacks by anti-free speech groups, such the radical Islamic group responsible for the recent Charlie Hebdo massacre, and groups of other Fox News employees.
“The definition of satire is very concrete,” said Bill O’Reilly, host of The O’Reilly Factor, “In that it is nearly undefinable. But if what we do at Fox News is satire, you can bet we’re doing it better than anyone else.”
Sean Hannity, host of The Hannity Factor, first raised the question of whether or not the network was engaging in satire soon after learning of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine that has published several pictures of the prophet Muhammad, recently had twelve employees murdered by Muslim extremists.
“Whether or not what we do here qualifies as satire, it’s definitely ‘bring your gun to work week’ at Fox News,” proclaimed Hannity, “If you walk into my studio with a turban, you may want to keep your hands where I can see them.”
Former host of The Beck Factor, Glenn Beck, appeared on The Van Sustern Factor with host Greta Van Sustern to voice his concerns that satire is simply too difficult for the average person to identify.
“I think we should definitely ask ourselves if satire should even be legal to make,” Beck argued, “Did you know that satire is actually banned in 32 countries? So tell me this–if satire is too dangerous for more than two-thirds of the world’s nations, then why are we allowing it here? Your move Obama.” |
Want the TL:DR version?
Get. Up. Earlier.
I’ve gone through a shift over the last two years or so where I’ve focused in on personal development as a method to reaching goals that were once so far out of my grasp that they were more like dreams than actual, attainable statements. Most recently, I’ve been dipping into a period of ‘optimizing’ my current systems to get more out of what I’m doing. I suppose I should start by explaining that I like (read: love) a systems approach to anything. Any task, idea or event can, in my mind, have a system developed to tackle it. Systems let us plan, execute and rewind to debrief and, here’s the best part, change our approach.
You’ve got to be good with change if you’re looking for progress. There’s a lot to be said about trying to improve yourself and your situation, but it’ll be super hard for you if you’re not actually willing to change. Sure, I’m struggling, just like everybody else. I’m still working on my nightly eating routines and controlling my reactions to stress. I use the word struggle here not to compare my day to day against anybody who is ‘actually’ struggling, but more in the meme version of the word.
The struggle is real.
About 2 months ago, I wanted to focus in on my morning routine. The very first thing I did was, on a single lined piece of paper from my notebook, wrote down everything I needed to do in the morning. See, it’s not what I wanted to be able to do – it’s what I need to do. Shower. Eat. Pack Lunch. Get my son ready for daycare. Then, I placed them in an order that makes sense. Another little ‘rule’ I use, stolen directly from the great Joey Diaz, is to never walk around empty handed. If I’m cleaning and tidying, I’ll grab a toy that has to go to my son’s room on my way to the closet where the broom is and drop it in the hallway, ready for when I walk down that hallway to be delivered to his room. On my way back to the kitchen from the closet, I’ll grab a tea mug, placed on the table from when I was bringing laundry upstairs. I’m doing what I need to do while I’m doing what I need to do.
Here, I’ll write out my morning routine so you can see what I mean. It’s kind of convoluted but it’s been trimmed down over about 4 weeks. See if you can keep up to this stream-of-consciousness type schedule;
-Get up at 5am. Just started doing this a few months ago and it has added very valuable time to my day to get shit done. Exit the bedroom WITHOUT my phone, grab the towel off the back of the door and enter the kitchen.
-Get two bowls and one 1/4 cup measuring cup, head downstairs.
-Fill both bowls with 1/4 cup blueberries while shower warms up. Pee.
-Have a shower, wake up. Take bowls upstairs and deposit in kitchen on my way to my room, to get dressed.
-Get dressed, get back to the kitchen. Boil water for oatmeal and tea, arrange books on counter for coursework.
-While water boils, allow for 10-15 minutes of ‘internet time’. When tea kettle is boiled, make tea, get to work on course.
-Cook, eat steel cut oatmeal while working on course. Take dishes to sink when done coursework for the day. Take supplements – Fish Oil, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Magnesium and soon, Nootrobox stuff.
-Make lunch.
-Wake my son up, begin the morning routine with him – cereal, get dressed, get ready to go, pack bag. This is normally when I tie off with my wife about the day ahead and figure out who’s getting my son from daycare that afternoon. If I’ve got time, I’ll start a blog post or work on something else in the creative sphere to get my mind going for the day.
-Out the door by no later than 7:10 to drop off my son at daycare, get to work before anyone else, settle in and get ready for the IT shitstorm that seems to start brewing up about an hour after I get there.
I guess, when it’s all written out like that, it’s really not that crazy. It’s just taken me a little while to get used to something more than a wake up – begin crazy type morning routine. By leaving myself all kinds of time to work, play and plan in the morning, my days have gotten exponentially better. I tried to be one of those ‘workout in the morning’ types, but I get a much better grind in after I’ve been awake for a few hours, while I find my mind firing much quicker in the quiet of the morning, so that’s just the way I run it. Try it. I promise, if you don’t see an immediate gain in your day to day mood, effectiveness and drive, you’ll at least be up early enough to figure out why. |
Johns Hopkins researchers say they have discovered a chemical alteration in a single human gene linked to stress reactions that, if confirmed in larger studies, could give doctors a simple blood test to reliably predict a person's risk of attempting suicide.
The discovery, described online in The American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests that changes in a gene involved in the function of the brain's response to stress hormones plays a significant role in turning what might otherwise be an unremarkable reaction to the strain of everyday life into suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
"Suicide is a major preventable public health problem, but we have been stymied in our prevention efforts because we have no consistent way to predict those who are at increased risk of killing themselves," says study leader Zachary Kaminsky, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "With a test like ours, we may be able to stem suicide rates by identifying those people and intervening early enough to head off a catastrophe."
For his series of experiments, Kaminsky and his colleagues focused on a genetic mutation in a gene known as SKA2. By looking at brain samples from mentally ill and healthy people, the researchers found that in samples from people who had died by suicide, levels of SKA2 were significantly reduced.
Within this common mutation, they then found in some subjects an epigenetic modification that altered the way the SKA2 gene functioned without changing the gene's underlying DNA sequence. The modification added chemicals called methyl groups to the gene. Higher levels of methylation were then found in the same study subjects who had killed themselves. The higher levels of methylation among suicide decedents were then replicated in two independent brain cohorts.
In another part of the study, the researchers tested three different sets of blood samples, the largest one involving 325 participants in the Johns Hopkins Center for Prevention Research Study found similar methylation increases at SKA2 in individuals with suicidal thoughts or attempts. They then designed a model analysis that predicted which of the participants were experiencing suicidal thoughts or had attempted suicide with 80 percent certainty. Those with more severe risk of suicide were predicted with 90 percent accuracy. In the youngest data set, they were able to identify with 96 percent accuracy whether or not a participant had attempted suicide, based on blood test results.
The SKA2 gene is expressed in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is involved in inhibiting negative thoughts and controlling impulsive behavior. SKA2 is specifically responsible for chaperoning stress hormone receptors into cells' nuclei so they can do their job. If there isn't enough SKA2, or it is altered in some way, the stress hormone receptor is unable to suppress the release of cortisol throughout the brain. Previous research has shown that such cortisol release is abnormal in people who attempt or die by suicide.
Kaminsky says a test based on these findings might best be used to predict future suicide attempts in those who are ill, to restrict lethal means or methods among those a risk, or to make decisions regarding the intensity of intervention approaches.
He says that it might make sense for use in the military to test whether members have the gene mutation that makes them more vulnerable. Those at risk could be more closely monitored when they returned home after deployment. A test could also be useful in a psychiatric emergency room, he says, as part of a suicide risk assessment when doctors try to assess level of suicide risk.
The test could be used in all sorts of safety assessment decisions like the need for hospitalization and closeness of monitoring. Kaminsky says another possible use that needs more study could be to inform treatment decisions, such as whether or not to give certain medications that have been linked with suicidal thoughts.
"We have found a gene that we think could be really important for consistently identifying a range of behaviors from suicidal thoughts to attempts to completions," Kaminsky says. "We need to study this in a larger sample but we believe that we might be able to monitor the blood to identify those at risk of suicide."
Along with Kaminsky, other Johns Hopkins researchers involved in the study include Jerry Guintivano; Tori Brown; Alison Newcomer, M.Sc.; Marcus Jones; Olivia Cox; Brion Maher, Ph.D.; William Eaton, Ph.D.; Jennifer Payne, M.D.; and Holly Wilcox, Ph.D.
The research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health (1R21MH094771-01), the Center for Mental Health Initiatives, The James Wah Award for Mood Disorders, and The Solomon R. and Rebecca D. Baker Foundation. |
Kill Switches: Phones Just The Start
Mandatory phone kill switches will hasten the arrival of the Surveillance of Everything. Consider these 11 technologies that come with strings attached.
6 Robots To Inspire Google (Click image for larger view.)
Federal and state lawmakers have proposed to make it mandatory for phone makers to include a kill switch in mobile communications devices so they can be disabled remotely in the event of loss or theft.
Without a doubt, mobile phone theft is a serious problem: Between 30% and 40% of robberies in major cities involve a mobile device, according to the FCC. But mandating built-in anti-theft technology, as opposed to allowing individuals to make their own security choices, raises the risk of misuse and extends the scope of surveillance.
Of course, the Internet already is a surveillance system: Almost all online activity can be (and is) tracked. But apart from bulk and targeted data collected by intelligence agencies, individuals generally have an out. Internet users can erase and block cookies, use ad blocking and script blocking technology, prevent the transmission of specified local data, and even use encryption technology, given enough technical savvy. But as everyday objects become integrated with our networks, opting out is likely to become increasingly difficult.
Mandatory phone kill switches will hasten the arrival of the Surveillance of Everything, an unavoidable consequence of the so-called Internet of Things. Using technology to extend the reach of property rights make as much sense for other objects as it does for phones. But in so doing, individual property rights mingle with social mores and government prerogatives. Nothing is truly yours on someone else's network.
[Think your encrypted network is private? Read NSA Surveillance Can Penetrate VPNs.]
Consider a recent Google patent application, "System and Method for Controlling Mobile Device Operation," which describes research to help in "correcting occasional human error," such as when phones have not been silenced in a movie theater.
The thing about kill switches is that they're a manifestation of digital rights management. In the hands of individuals, perhaps they're a good idea. But they won't remain in the hands of individuals. They will be used by companies, organizations, and governments, too. And even when people believe they have control of their kill switches, authorities and hackers can be expected to prove otherwise.
Beyond mobile phones themselves, here are a few of the technologies that might come with strings attached. Trust us. It's for your own good.
1. Phone networks
In the summer of 2011, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) shut down cellular service because protesters had said they planned to use their mobile phones to coordinate protest activities and BART officials determined this presented a threat to public safety. So they blocked the phones of everyone in the affected BART area. The Electronic Frontier Foundation objected, noting that repressive regimes behave the same way. Communication turns out to be a privilege rather than a right.
2. The Internet
There's a DIY personal Internet kill switch but there's also a secret US government version. Last November, United States District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the Department of Homeland Security's insistence that it was exempt from disclosing details about Standard Operating Procedure 303, a protocol for deactivating communications networks. In January, DHS appealed the ruling. It wants the Internet's kill switch to remain a secret.
3. Cars
Cars are becoming increasingly automated. Google and other companies are developing cars that drive themselves. Expect these cars to record everything, as a matter of diagnostics, liability, and safety. What's more, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is pushing for the implementation of vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology, so cars can pass data to each other about their position and speed, to avoid collisions. These network-aware cars do get stolen on occasion, so why not include a remote shutdown capability? Auto dealers already use a system called On Time to disable cars when the buyer has missed too many payments. And European law enforcement officials are pushing for a car kill switch to prevent dangerous high-speed chases. Movie scriptwriters might want to start focusing on foot pursuits from now on.
4. Video
The video industry has an affinity for kill-switch technology: region-coded DVDs, geo-restrictions on Internet content, and downloadable rentals that expire after a few days all help keep viewers from acting contrary to their wishes. YouTube has its Content ID system to police unauthorized usage of music and video. Apple has a patent, similar to the Google patent mentioned above, for disabling mobile phone video and audio, in case authorities require blackout conditions.
5. Computers
Kill switches for code already exist. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have the ability to disable apps. Computer tracking software such as Undercover lets users covertly locate computers and transmit pictures. Intel, until recently, offered an anti-theft service. Computers often don't need a specific kill switch because there are so many ways to compromise them, disable them, or shut them down from afar. Even so, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded IBM a contract to develop self-destructing computer chips.
6. Bicycles
Remote kill switches for motorcycles have been around for years. Bicycles, being manually powered, can't really be shut down. But they can be tracked, using several existing bike tracking systems, such as those employed by BikeSpike, BitLock, SOBI, and ViaCycle.
7. Everyday stuff
A 2010 academic paper describes AutoWitness, "a system to deter, detect, and track personal property theft, improve historically dismal stolen property recovery rates." GPS tracking of things is commonplace. And what can be made non-functional, through a kill switch, will be. Imagine a chair with DRM. It might be more than an art project one day.
8. Pharmaceuticals
Scientists are working on vaccines for addictive drugs, like cocaine and heroin. A drug called iomazenil is presently in clinical trials to see if it can be used to block or limit the impact of alcohol intoxication. This technology falls somewhere between kill switch and buzzkill.
9. Guns
TriggerSmart, a company based in Limerick, Ireland, has created an RFID-based gun-locking mechanism. The child-safety applications are obvious, but as noted in The Economist last year, governments around the world are considering kill switches on rocket-propelled grenade launchers, landmines, and other military weaponry, to prevent the arms from being used by enemies. Chances are some high-tech military systems already have backdoors and kill switches in place, just in case. Gun enthusiasts, unsurprisingly, tend to be less than enthusiastic about such technology, noting that sooner or later, a smart gun will do something dumb and fail to fire when needed.
10. Planes
Considering the way commercial airliners were turned into guided missiles during the 9/11 terrorist attack, it's not surprising that the Pentagon has expressed interest in a kill switch for airplanes. In fact, planes are already so automated that it's a wonder airlines haven't begun phasing pilots out altogether. In 2011, James Albaugh, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airlines, said that pilotless airlines are inevitable. At least no pilots will die when authorities somewhere decide to detonate a malfunctioning commercial airliner rather than let it slam into a city.
11. Seeds
Monsanto has developed, but has pledged not to deploy, a "terminator" gene that makes plants produce sterile seeds, so customers have to purchase new fertile seed for subsequent plantings. The company's recent legal victory against a farmer who used Monsanto patented soybeans without permission, however, might mean the company doesn't need a biological kill switch to protect its research. Patent lawsuits might prove deadly enough.
Engage with Oracle president Mark Hurd, NFL CIO Michelle McKenna-Doyle, General Motors CIO Randy Mott, Box founder Aaron Levie, UPMC CIO Dan Drawbaugh, GE Power CIO Jim Fowler, and other leaders of the Digital Business movement at the InformationWeek Conference and Elite 100 Awards Ceremony, to be held in conjunction with Interop in Las Vegas, March 31 to April 1, 2014. See the full agenda here.
Thomas Claburn has been writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications such as New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and television, having earned a not particularly useful ... View Full Bio
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HOUSTON - The University of Houston Football program announced three non-conference series Wednesday as it signed a four-year agreement with Texas Tech and two-year agreements with Kansas and Texas State.
Houston will host Texas Tech in its new Houston Football Stadium on Sept. 16, 2017, before returning the favor at Jones AT&T Stadium in Lubbock on Sept. 15, 2018. The second portion of the series will occur on Sept. 18, 2021, (Houston) and Sept. 10, 2022 (Lubbock).
"We are pleased to announce home-and-home agreements with three additional programs in Texas Tech, Kansas and Texas State as we continue to fill future non-conference slots," said Houston Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Mack Rhoades. "As we've said in the past, we are committed to scheduling quality programs in series that reward our fans with those teams traveling to Houston as well. With our passionate fan base and soon-to-be completed stadium, the University of Houston offers an exciting college football atmosphere."
UH and Texas Tech have previously met 30 times with Houston holding 18-11-1 edge. The Cougars are 10-3-1 in Houston and 8-6 in Lubbock while Texas Tech holds a 2-0 lead in neutral-site meetings. The two teams last met in a home-and-home series in 2009 and 2010 with each team claiming a home win as Houston won 29-28 in 2009 and the Red Raiders earned a 35-20 win in 2010.
Houston will first play Kansas its new Houston Football Stadium on Sept. 14, 2019, before traveling to Lawrence, Kan., and Memorial Stadium for the return game on Sept. 12, 2020.
Kansas leads the all-time series with Houston, 3-0. KU defeated the Cougars, 35-13, on Sept. 1, 1994, in Houston. UH came to Lawrence the following season, with KU taking a 20-13 victory over the Cougars on Sept. 23, 1995. The two teams most recently met on Dec. 23, 2005, in the Fort Worth Bowl with the Jayhawks defeating the Cougars, 42-13.
The Cougars will open a two-year series with Texas State in the Houston Football Stadium on Sept. 26, 2015, before returning the game to Bobcat Stadium in San Marcos, Texas, on Sept. 3, 2016.
The two programs have met five times with Texas State owning a 4-1 record in the series. The last two meetings have been split with Houston claiming a 68-28 win in 2010 and Texas State pulling off a 30-13 win in 2012.
Houston had previously announced a two-year series with Arizona to take place in 2017 and 2018 on June 4.
FOOTBALL SEASON TICKETS & MINI-PLAN PACKAGES
Fans can still purchase season tickets covering six games for as low as $160. Families can also enjoy the Memorial Hermann Family Plan for only $319. Under the Memorial Hermann Family Plan, fans will receive two adult and two youth General Admission tickets with additional youth tickets costing only $80 each.
Three-game mini-plan packages are also available for purchase beginning at $95. Fans can purchase a mini plan for a ticket to three of the five following home games - Oct. 12 vs. Memphis, Oct. 19 vs. BYU, Oct. 31 vs. USF, Nov. 23 vs. Cincinnati and Nov. 29 vs. SMU. Packages start at just $95 for a selection from games involving Memphis, USF, Cincinnati and SMU. For packages involving Houston's game vs. BYU, the price is set at $105.
To purchase season tickets, fans can call 713-GO-COOGS (462-6647) or 877-COUGAR-5 (268-4275) or visit the Athletics Ticket Office, located on the first floor of the Athletics/Alumni Center from 8 a.m., to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Fans can also purchase season tickets online by clicking here. |
The advent calendar is going to need a cover to conceal it's contents. The two basic layouts are one large picture over the entire calendar, or a small picture over a day (or group of days). I decided to go for one large picture covering the entire calendar, I tried to make it look very busy with lots going on on or around each day.
Being as this is a winter gift and I live in a mountainous area I chose a ski scene from my favourite classic Windows game, Ski Free. Since the recipient of this calendar grew up programming on old Windows machines, I know he'll appreciate the theme. it's nerdy nostalgia.
I made mine by opening an image editing suite and creating a new canvas. Using the dimensions I took earlier to make the box for the tube matrix the canvas has to be large enough for the front and sides. The first picture a layer superimposed to show face dimension and the cut lines at the corners. I lined up the image with the box underneath by marking the corners with a bare tree, an image seldom used elsewhere in the image. Once the dimensions were set I made a circle the same exterior diameter as the cardboard tubes I used. Then I copied them to recreate the physical matrix I made. Numbers from 1-24 were randomly assigned to each circle. My extra 25th spot was numbered specifically for that location and then decorated with a large Yeti.
I have included a blank version of my Ski Free image, and a sized PDF you are free to download and use. The PDF can also be edited in some image suites (Photoshop, GIMP), this file has all the layers I used in creating my image. |
This article is under the scope of the Episode Cleanup Project and has yet to be cleaned up to a higher standard of quality. It may contain errors, spelling, grammar and structure issues, or inconsistent formats. Reader's discretion is advised until fixing is done.
You can help clean up this page by correcting spelling and grammar, removing factual errors and rewriting sections to ensure they are clear and concise, and moving some elements when appropriate.
"Meteor Moves" is the twenty-eighth episode in Season 4 (and one hundred-seventh episode overall) of Regular Show. It first aired on June 10, 2013.
Contents show]
Synopsis
Mordecai plans to kiss Margaret at a meteor shower.
Plot
The episode begins at the coffee shop, where Mordecai is found telling a joke to Margaret and Rigby about Skips. As the three share a laugh and cool off, Eileen eagerly walks in to remind them of an extremely rare meteor shower that is, as she claims, "once in a lifetime", which is revealed to be at the "Makeout Mountain" site (renamed from "Lookout Mountain"). This is nerve-wracking for Mordecai; to add to his fear, Margaret teasingly asks him if he is going to be scared on the mountain - to which he replies to with a no. As Eileen and Margaret leave, Margaret calls Mordecai "dude", which makes Rigby think Mordecai's been "friend zoned"; Mordecai repeatedly negates continuous claims from Rigby of such. However, soon enough, Mordecai has a flashback to the time Margaret kisses him (see "Picking Up Margaret" for further background) and realizes that he has not moved in himself yet. For this (after being reassured by Rigby that the kiss is, in fact, easy to do), Mordecai swears that he will kiss her that night at the mountain.
The episode moves to nighttime, while Mordecai, Rigby, Eileen, and Margaret are driving to Makeout Mountain (a ride accompanied by raps courtesy of Mordecai and Rigby). Once the four arrive at the mountain and settle down, Eileen begins to talk about her astronomy club and how they name stars (which Mordecai later refers to in thought as "star gibberish"), which of course sets back the chance for Mordecai. However, soon enough, the one-manned conversation begins to deviate into romantic themes, as Eileen begins to reference the fact that "two celestial bodies will collide during the shower... if they [don't collide], they will burn up and die". Mordecai, having had enough of Eileen's talk, quickly creates a diversion by "offering snacks", which really means pulling Rigby to the side and instructing him to go up the mountain with Eileen for "a better view".
Once Mordecai and Margaret find themselves alone, the conversation soon turns serious, with Margaret talking to Mordecai about her future, in which she references her fear of not getting accepted to college. Mordecai assures her that she will be fine, adding, as a counterargument to a claim she brings up, that she surely did not sound dumb in her college interviews. The two then bring out drinks, to which Margaret toasts to their friendship, semi-depressing Mordecai into thinking that they are in the friend zone. However, Margaret then reveals the true reason for not wanting to leave - she is going to miss Mordecai the most. The two then share a romantic gaze, hold hands, and - almost - proceed to kiss; in the second before they actually kiss, the meteor shower hits (Eileen is mesmerized). When finding that Mordecai and Margaret haven't kissed yet, Rigby then begins to continuously yell out "friend zone" from the mountaintop. Mordecai and Rigby then go back and forth about the "friend zone" (with Margaret next to them), and soon Rigby expresses his anger and frustration at the fact that Mordecai has not done anything about it yet. The meteor shower then begins to spiral rapidly, and Mordecai and Margaret disappear and reappear in midair.
The two are locked in the literal "Friend Zone", which is maintained by the Guardian of the Friend Zone, an elderly, moonlike creature. The "Friend Zone" locks them into solid green glass, through which sound cannot escape, ruling out any chance of communication between Mordecai and Margaret. The Guardian, after being asked why he is in the glass, then explains to Mordecai everything about the "Friend Zone", and lectures him about the fact that he has not made any moves and has waited too long to kiss Margaret. Mordecai is extremely doubtful, as he fears that the length of his love for Margaret hinders their chances; however, he swears that he will do it if the two are allowed to physically and verbally communicate - the Guardian then gives him "another chance", allowing him to walk over to Margaret.
Once Mordecai gets to where Margaret is, she fearfully inquires "where they are", to which Mordecai lovingly responds, "Right where I want to be." Margaret, visibly taken aback, is overcome and cannot move. Mordecai then proceeds to move in, and the two passionately kiss. The Guardian, proud of Mordecai, declares the two removed from the Friend Zone and breaks the glass on them as they float to the ground, still kissing. Once sitting on the ground, the two finish kissing and are visited by Rigby who goes "hmm hmm" in a positive and reassuring manner, and are undenyably in love. A mesmerized Eileen soon comes down the mountain praising the meteor showers, and asks Margaret how she liked it, to which Margaret responds, "...amazing" as she looks happily over at Mordecai. Finally, Eileen and a proud Rigby soon begin walking off, talking about what seems to be the event; Mordecai and Margaret proceed to give each other one last look, and then hold hands as they walk to the car and the episode finishes.
Characters
Trivia
The "Friend Zone" glass prison is a reference to the "Phantom Zone" from the 1978 movie, Superman: The Movie and it's 1980 sequel, "Superman 2".
The Guardian of the Friend Zone shows Mordecai flashbacks from past episodes: Camping Can Be Cool, Death Bear and Do or Diaper |
Upcoming MMO, Kingdom Under Fire 2, will look better on PlayStation 4 than on PC when it’s released later this year, according to producer Sang-Yoon Lee.
Speaking to 2P at GDC, game producer Sang-Yoon Lee was asked if he could talk about the graphics difference between both versions. He said, “a little hard to tell you right now because if the PC users know, they will be very angry. PS4 has much better graphics. PS4 graphics quality will be much better and higher than the PC version.”
So there you have it.
The PC version is out later this month, while the PS4 version will be out sometime this year. The studio is said to be in discussion with Microsoft to bring the MMO to Xbox One.
Thanks, Videogamer, Gaming Bolt. |
FOOTBALLERS were stunned after a powerful explosion ripped through a nearby factory as a match was being played.
Television cameras captured the moment the building blew up next to the stadium hosting FC Brasov and CSM Ramnicu Valcea in Romania. Five people were injured in the blast.
DIGI SPORT BLAST: A bread factory explodes near a football stadium
DIGI SPORT SHOCK: The explosion happened yards from footie fans
“We must suspect more people are trapped under the rubble” Romania's deputy interior minister Raed Arafat The incredible footage shows a large fireball rise up into the sky as a free kick is about to be taken. Startled fans standing on the terrace rush over and peer over a wall following the blast. Sirens can be heard in the background before the referee blows the full-time whistle. Romania's deputy interior minister Raed Arafat said: "Five people were taken to the hospital…with burns.
DIGI SPORT EXPLOSION: The blast ripped through the factory as full-time approached
DIGI SPORT WHAT WAS THAT: Fans peer over a wall to find out what happened |
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Photo courtesy of Julianne Waters Julianne Waters Labor Secretary Tom Perez speaks to a gathering at the South Court Auditorium in the White House compound in Washington, Monday, S Assistant U.S. Attorney General Tom Perez announces the formation of a new Justice Department civil rights unit to be based in Bir | Courtesy Nadia Bowman Al Hartmann | The Salt Lake Tribune Charlene Albarran, Democratic nominee in the 2nd Congressional District speaks with the Salt Al Hartmann | The Salt Lake Tribune Charlene Albarran, Democratic nominee in the 2nd Congressional District speaks with the Salt FILE - In this July 25, 2016, file photo, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., speaks during the first day of the Democratic National Conv Al Hartmann | The Salt Lake Tribune Peter Corroon, former Salt Lake County Mayor. Trent Nelson | Tribune file photo Utah Democratic Party Chairman Peter Corroon opposes a plan for runoff elections in primaries |
Two constituencies that President Obama is holding onto about as strongly now as he did four years ago are voters under 30 and Latinos. In what is probably not a coincidence, these two constituencies are the targets for the first two major Mitt Romney Etch A Sketch pivots of the general election. After having repeatedly denounced any need for the federal government to subsidize tuition costs during the primary, Romney has now endorsed Obama’s call for extending lower rates for federally-subsidized loans. Romney says he supports the measures “in part because of the extraordinarily poor conditions in the job market.” Apparently, he has been informed of the poor job market since wrapping up the nomination, when he was still advising graduates concerned about debt to acquire a high-paying job.
On immigration, Romney is making the turn a little more slowly, as you’d expect, given the sensitivities involved in holding together his base. Romney has deputized Marco Rubio to craft “his” own version of the Dream Act, a somewhat more restrictive version of the reform that Republicans in Congress killed and Romney opposed in the primary, when he positioned himself on the party’s right on immigration. Romney is “studying” Rubio’s bill.
Can all this really work? It is certainly remarkable how little ridicule or scrutiny Romney has attracted in his rather brazen reversals. In legal theory there exists something called a “libel-proof plaintiff,” which is a figure of such low repute that he cannot claim any monetary damages for his reputation being smeared, on the premise that his reputation is tainted beyond repair. This seems to be the point Romney has reached on the question of consistency. The entire political world regards him as a pure creature of convenience. His supporters have simply calculated that Romney has boxed himself in to the point where he could not afford to betray them.
This position carries a great deal of costs, which Romney has borne through several election contests. Yet it does seem to have benefits, which Romney is currently enjoying. When your reputation for principled constituency has reached this low a point, you have nothing to lose. You can reverse yourself on pretty much anything as long as your allies are willing to accept it.
On the other hand, there are real limits to what you can accomplish by molding yourself to the preferred issue profile of whatever electorate you happen to be courting at the moment. Romney’s old statements and positions are still out there. Democrats can run ads depicting Romney scolding college students for wanting lower tuition or praising Arizona’s immigration laws. Romney isn’t going to rebut those attacks by insisting he’s completely abandoned those positions. He can simply emphasize his new positions, and create a kind of he said/she said debate, where he runs ads touting his new positions and Democrats run ads highlighting his old ones.
But the problem remains that young voters and Latinos who are leaning Democratic right now are doing so because they have developed an attachment to the party. These attachments dictate how a voter processes information and which candidates they believe. Over the last few election cycles, Democrats have completely given up on the idea of gun control, and have tried to persuade pro-gun voters to trust them. It’s had a limited effect because those voters have grown accustomed over the years to identifying with the Republican Party.
Perhaps this explains why Romney isn’t actually trying to get anybody to trust him, but to support his candidacy in purely transactional terms:
I think young voters in this country have to vote for me if they’re really thinking of what’s in the best interest of the country and what’s in their personal best interest.
You may not believe Mitt Romney, you may not like Mitt Romney, but Mitt Romney is offering to match Obama’s tuition deal and throw in the promise of a better economy. Romney thinks you should take the deal before he changes his mind. |
Reports Says Better Habitat Protection is Required
Environment Canada released a report (six months after it was finalized by scientists, thanks to the Conservative federal government): "The study concludes 29 of the 57 remaining herds of boreal caribou are not self-sustaining. Several are at risk in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, where logging, mining and energy development has been booming in the last decade." Will the government do something? Probably not. It went to the trouble of adding a preface to the 254-page report saying it's not detailed enough to "identify critical habitat" to protect...
From the Ottawa Citizen:
"The inherent risks associated with a small population size warrant a cautious approach when considering potential resilience to any additional disturbance," says the report, that details the health of the different herds. They have already vanished from the Maritimes, southern Quebec and Ontario, and are increasingly threatened in the northern boreal, where an estimated 36,000 of the caribou still live.
Let's not wait until the remaining herds are gone to say "gee, maybe we should've done something." Act now.
Even if it's true that it's hard to identify the critical habitats - which is probably not the case - it would certainly be possible to identify some of them, or find measure to get the ball rolling the in the right direction. Conservation measures don't have to be perfect from the start.
Via Ottawa Citizen
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One More Reason Oil Spills Are Bad: Surface Cleanup can Make it Worse for Fish Below |
The finals of Contenders Season 1 held in Blizzard's new Los Angeles esports arena may have been the highlight of the weekend for competitive Overwatch, but fans who actively checked their Twitter feed may have noticed that amidst the countless highlight clips were a series of tweets revealing that Cloud9 had released most of their North American roster into free agency.
Last Saturday, former Cloud9 Support player Adam Eckel announced he had officially parted ways with Cloud9 after having his contract formally terminated. Similar tweets were also made by his fellow former teammates Randal "Roolf" Stark and Daniel "Gods" Graeser who declared their status as free agents with interest in joining a team in the Overwatch League.
I am now a free agent. Still LFT OWL. Thanks for the years @Cloud9 — Adam Eckel (@adam_overwatch) October 7, 2017
“Yesterday I got confirmation that Cloud9 has released my contract,” wrote Gods. “This means I have no buyout and no strings attached.”
When Cloud9 announced the signing of the Laser Kittenz roster earlier this summer to compete in Contenders Season 1, it was uncertain whether the organization had any plans to continue providing support and make use of their North American squad for the inaugural season of the Overwatch League. Seeing as how Blizzard's ruleset allowed for organizations to register a maximum of twelve players for their OWL team, there was still hope that Cloud9 could use the North American players as a sister team to complement their starting lineup or at least retain a few members as strategic substitutes.
With the signing of the Kongdoo Panthera players to form C9 Kongdoo, the fate of the North American team was brought into question once again as it became clear that the organization planned to use their powerhouse South Korean lineup to compete in the OWL.
In response to concerns on Reddit in the aftermath of the C9 Kongdoo roster, Cloud9 CEO Jack Etienne stated that the organization had initially attempted to construct a robust team with players from around the world, but ran into complications that made signing the Panthera roster as their best option moving forward with a team the OWL.
Initially, we tried out players across three regions in an effort to build the strongest roster for OWL. We ran into various obstacles during that process and in the end we concluded the best option was to acquire Kongdoo Panthera.
As for Lane "Surefour" Roberts, one of the original C9 Overwatch members, it remains to be seen in what capacity he will continue with the organization should he stay. There is the strong possibility that given his large following and talent hitscan player that Surefour has already been signed and is merely withholding information until an official announcement from his new team.
There isn't much time left for the former C9 players to find a spot for themselves on an OWL roster as only a few weeks are remaining before the player signing deadline on Oct. 30 and how most organizations have reportedly already signed members for their starting lineup. |
Why I don’t use the most popular hashtags
Samuel Zeller Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 31, 2015
#love 983,721,906 posts
They’re not meaningful
You’ve probably seen websites like “top-hashtags” claiming to provide a list of the most popular hashtags on Instagram, by copy-pasting them you’ll get tons of likes and new followers! How cool is that?
An example of the “most popular” hashtags according to one of those Top-hashtag website
Truth is, by copy-pasting those into your Instagram posts you’ll get more artificial love, more numbers and more spam. No real growth.
An example
Let’s say you started a page for your local dog shelter, you’re dedicated to posting high-quality photographs and writing a good narrative for them. You’re literally spending a lot of time crafting the ideal Instagram post.
You begin to tag every one of your pictures with words like #love #dogs #puppy #cute #adorable and also #instagood because your best friend told you it’s super used and hype.
Days passes and you’re getting a lot of likes and more followers, but no new clients seem to reach the dog shelter you’re working for.
People like your pictures but they don’t really go further…
The good tags are the ones that real users browse
They are not necessarily the most “used” ones
Become your audience
Think about dog owners on Instagram, learn how they act. Get a puppy, eat their food, catch tennis balls… wait… don’t go that far!
Do you really believe your audience spend their entire days browsing tags like #dogs and #puppy looking at those infinite streams of content where every single minute you have thousands (or even bazillions) of new posts?
Most of them don’t, and probably only a fraction engage with the content.
A solution
Here’s my little technique, my golden rule, it’s a simple command to follow in order to optimize your tags for your audience. It’s not perfect but I like it.
Use 1/3 of popular tags and 2/3 of specific tags
If you’re wondering why the hell I suggest you to still use some of those spam-filled popular hashtags please have a look at the sidenotes here.
To see if a tag is either popular or specific use the Instagram hashtag search function and look at the number of posts using that tag.
Specific tags usually have between 20'000 and 80'000 “medias”.
How does it work?
The likes you will receive by using the 1/3 popular tags will increase your chance to be in the “top post” by bringing you mostly artificial likes.
The other 2/3 will increase your chance of being seen by specific users.
Let’s see the difference between the two approaches:
Pictures by @charcara and @ __vanesa__
On the left you’re trying to get as much likes as possible while on the right you’re actually marketing correctly your dog shelter business.
Go further
Don’t use the maximum of 30 tags it will look horrible, 15 of them is fine.
Always check how much medias are posted in a tag, if it’s more than 200'000 it’s probably already filled with spam.
Take a moment to find the good ones, it’s as important as the picture and the description themselves. Good hashtags = good visibility.
Find hashtags relative to your city and to your country in different languages. I call those location based hashtags, people search for them.
Here’s a group of tags that I use often (since I’m based in Geneva).
#geneva #switzerland #swiss #genève(in french) #genf (in german)
Target specific items like dog breeds, dog food brands, accessories brands, names of other shelters or even competitors names. Be creative!
Check out comparable Instagram accounts and learn their hashtag strategy, find influencers in your niche and email them, remember that one good customer or follower (that engage every week) is worth dozens of ghost users.
Never look at your competitors number of followers, they mean absolutely nothing, it’s just digits not leads. The engagement is all that matters. |
"1856 'O' About Uncirculated, with considerable mint lustre still adhering. Unquestionably one of the finest known. Superior in grade to the Van Roden-Miles coin. One of the rarest Liberty Head Double Eagles; a true rival in rarity to the 1870 'CC' in this sale. Plate"
The 1856-O Liberty double eagle has long been known as the rarest coin from the New Orleans Mint, although recent research indicates it is virtually tied with its 1854-O double eagle counterpart for that distinction. The recorded mintage of 2,250 pieces is the smallest production total of the series and, except for the single SP63 example saved by Superintendent Bienvenue and his descendents, all the coins were placed into circulation at the time of issue. None were saved by contemporary collectors, as there was no numismatic interest in mintmarks or large denomination gold coins at the time. As a result, the survival rate was low and most of the coins we know about today are in XF-AU grades. Doug Winter estimates the surviving population at 20-30 examples in all grades, while NGC and PCGS have combined to certify a total of 26 coins, including an unknown number of resubmissions and crossovers (4/16). We have compiled a roster of the 23 specimens we are aware of and some earlier citations that may or may not represent the coins in the main roster.New Orleans was a hub of economic activity in the 1850s, and the 1856-O double eagles circulated heavily in the regional economy. Some coins were shipped out of the busy port and reached distant destinations. One specimen was found in the Baltimore Hoard, which was buried around 1857 and discovered in 1934 by two boys playing in a cellar. Another seemingly made its way up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to the Kentucky-Ohio border country, where it was stashed away by James Bullock and only discovered by his heirs in 2010. It is possible that a few more examples of this rare issue are waiting to be discovered to delight present-day collectors.The present coin had been off the market for many years until we offered it as lot 4453 in our 2015 ANA signature sale. Prior to that, it appeared in the ANA Convention Auction (Stack's, 8/1971), lot 2424, where the cataloger noted:This coin is certainly an attractive specimen and should fit comfortably in the Condition Census for the date. The pleasing greenish-gold surfaces show a few of the minor contact marks that are always present on this issue, but none are obtrusive or overly distracting. As noted by the Stack's cataloger, this specimen retains much original mint luster and just a touch of high-point wear shows on the well-detailed design elements. The overall presentation is undeniably attractive for this classic Southern gold rarity, and it should find a home in a fine collection or Registry Set. The 1856-O is listed among thePopulation: 5 in 55, 2 finer (4/16).Purchased from the New Orleans Mint at the time of issue by Mint Superintendent Charles Bienvenu; passed to Bienvenu's heirs; purchased by Marc Emory of New England Rare Coin Galleries directly from Bienvenu's family in 1979; sold by James Halperin later that year to Larry Demerer for approximately $215,000; sold to Superior for a reported $312,500 in late 1980/early 1981; The Premier Auction Sale (Superior, 1/1995), lot 1645, realized $203,500; The Eagle Collection (Heritage, 1/2002), lot 4147, realized $310,500; Long Beach Signature (Heritage, 6/2004), lot 6372, realized $542,800, Long Beach Signature Auction (Heritage, 5/2009), lot 1989, realized $1,437,500.Amon Carter Collection (Stack's, 1/1984), lot 847; Public Coin Auction (Stack's, 10/1986), lot 967, realized $33,000; James A. Stack Collection (Stack's, 11/1989), lot 1500; AWA specimen, per Doug Winter.NASC Convention Auction (Paramount, 2/1965), lot 887; William Van Roden Collection (Stack's, 5/1968), lot 916, realized $6,500; James Dines Collection (Stack's, 3/1969), lot 856; Winner F. Delp Collection (Stack's, 11/1972), lot 816; James and Margaret Carter Collection (Stack's, 1/1986), lot 414; ANA Signature Auction (Heritage, 7/1997), lot 7824, realized $80,500; Dallas Signature Auction (Heritage, 10/2008), lot 3018, realized $576,150; Los Angeles Signature Auction (Heritage, 7/2009), lot 1316, realized $460,000.ANA Convention Auction (Stack's, 8/1971), lot 2424, realized $5250; Duquesne Collection (Heritage, 8/2015), lot 4452.Cicero Collection (New Netherlands, 12/1960), lot 10; Jack Klausen; purchased by Harry W. Bass, Jr. on June 19, 1968; Harry W. Bass, Jr. Collection (Bowers and Merena), lot 1711, realized $105,800; New York Signature Auction (Heritage, 7/2002), lot 9472, realized $132,250; San Francisco Signature Auction (Heritage, 7/2005), lot 10399, realized $431,250; Central States Signature (Heritage, 4/2015), lot 5428, realized $387,750.R.L. Miles Collection (Stack's, 10/1968), lot 839; Auction '88 (Akers, 7/1988), lot 975; Auction '90 (David Akers, 8/1990), lot 1951, realized $24,200, Long Beach Signature Auction (Heritage, 2/2001), lot 7091, realized $94,875; Chicago Signature (Heritage, 8/2014), lot 5691, realized $425,937.50. The Winter/Crum plate coin, and the plate coin forby Garrett and Guth.European holding; New York Sale (NERCA, 3/1977), lot 935, realized $23,000; Baltimore Auction (Bowers and Merena, 3/2007), lot 5597, realized $356,500.National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution. AU53 per Garrett and Guth. This coin was discovered in the NNC in 1984 with no record of its provenance. It was not listed in the inventory Comparette compiled in the 1912-1914 era, but it may have been in the collection for some time.Dallas Bank Collection (Sotheby's/Stack's, 10/2001), lot 16, realized $92,000; Denver Signature Auction (Heritage, 8/2006), lot 5601, realized $345,000.Charles Kramer Collection (Stack's/Superior, 12/1988), lot 736; Auction '89 (RARCOA, 7/1989), lot 453; Long Beach Signature Auction (Heritage, 1/2004), lot 7247, realized $143,750.Richmond Collection (David Lawrence, 7/2004), lot 2252, realized $276,000.Louis Eliasberg, Sr.; United States Gold Coin Collection (Bowers and Ruddy, 10/1982), lot 889, realized $49,500; Manfra, Tordella & Brookes.John J. Pittman, purchased from Ed Bell (11/27/1961); John Jay Pittman Collection (David Akers, 10/1997), lot 1134, realized $35,750; FUN Signature Auction (Heritage, 1/2005), lot 8831, realized $138,000; Central States Signature (Heritage, 4/2014), lot 5795, realized $164,500.Atlanta Signature Auction (Heritage, 4/2006), lot 2137, realized $161,000; Chicago Signature (Heritage, 8/2014), lot 5690, realized $164,500.James Bullock before 1923; Bullock's heirs; Long Beach Signature Auction (Heritage, 9/2010), lot 5554, realized $345,000.Pre-Long Beach Sale (Superior, 5/1999), lot 3766, realized $67,850; FUN Signature (Heritage, 1/2014), lot 5518, realized $318,875.FUN Signature Auction (Heritage, 1/2009), lot 4131, realized $276,000; Los Angeles Signature Auction (Heritage, 7/2009), lot 1315, realized $253,000; Pittsburgh Fall ANA Auction (Heritage, 10/2011), lot 5100, realized $276,000.Public Auction Sale (Stack's, 3/1986), lot 534; King of Siam Sale (Bowers and Merena, 10/1987), lot 2017, realized $23,100; Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Collection (Schuyler Rumsey, 2/2012), lot 1216.European collection; ANA Auction Sale (Superior, 8/1975), lot 1601, which realized $37,500; Arrowhead Collection (Sotheby's, 5/1987), lot 352; FUN Signature Auction (Heritage, 1/2011), lot 5249; the Akers plate coin.Public Auction Sale (Stack's, 11/1994), lot 1600, realized $35,200.Lilly Collection until 1968; National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution. XF cleaned, per Garrett and Guth.D.E.A. and U.S. Marshals Service Sale (Heritage, 12/1988), lot 1377.Alex Shuford Collection (Abe Kosoff, 5/1968), lot 2414; Gilhousen sale (Superior, 2/1973), lot 860, realized $7,000; ANA Convention Auction (Paramount, 8/1974), lot 973; Central States Auction (RARCOA, 4/1975), lot 105; Eugene Detmer Collection (Stack's, 2/1983), lot 1084; Charmont Sale (Steve Ivy, 8/1983), lot 4387; Auction '85 (Superior, 7/1985), lot 974, realized $21,850; Century Sale (Superior, 2/1992), lot 2944; January-February Auction (Superior, 1/1993), lot 1477, realized $13,750, Dr. John Kardatzke Collection (Goldberg, 6/2000), lot 1719, realized $21,850; ANA Auction (Stack's Bowers, 8/2011), lot 7753.J.H. Townsend; John Nickerson Collection (Thomas Elder, 12/1933), lot 1126. Fine.A specimen in the Col. Green Collection, sold to King Farouk via Stack's in 1943 for $135, called "Unc. Mint luster," Palace Collections of Egypt (Sotheby's, 2/1954), lot 180, purchased by Abe Kosoff at 180 Egyptian pounds.A specimen in the Baltimore Hoard, Public Auction Sale (Perry Fuller, 5/1935), realized $105 to Samuel Glenn, of Boydton, Virginia (thanks to Len Augsburger for this information).J.F. Bell Collection (Stack's, 12/1944), lot 899, realized $320; possibly the coin in number 12 above, per the Eliasberg catalog. Uncirculated, full mint luster.George H. Hall Collection (Stack's, 5/1945), lot 2243. VF.William Cutler Atwater Collection (Mehl, 6/1946), lot 1338, realized $210; possibly number 12 above, per Eliasberg catalog. Strictly Very Fine, free from any nicks or dents.H.R. Lee Collection (Stack's, 10/1947), lot 1777. Strictly Very Fine.Dr. Charles W. Green Collection (B. Max Mehl, 4/1949), lot 808, realized $180; Strictly Very Fine.Adolphe Menjou Collection (Numismatic Gallery, 6/1950), lot 1957, realized $280. Very Fine.Thomas Melish Collection (Abe Kosoff, 4/1956), lot 888. Very Fine.J.F. Bell Collection (RARCOA, 4/1963), lot 849. XF obverse, AU reverse.Pre-Long Beach Sale (Superior, 5/2001), lot 4170D. AU50 sharpness, Net XF45 due to harsh cleaning on both sides. Described on a tipped-in sheet at the front of the catalog.Two specimens reported as sold at private sale in the 3/1977 New England catalog. One in XF40 with a planchet defect sold in 1976 for $30,000. Another in XF45 sold in 1975 for $65,000.Another specimen referred to in the lot description of the Cicero catalog (number 5 above) "the miserable cleaned coin in one of ourauctions some years ago." Registry values : N10218) (NGC ID# 268Z , PCGS# 8918 33.44 grams90% Gold, 10% Copper |
The Detroit Lions hosted David Akers for a visit on Tuesday, but the veteran kicker left without a contract according to reports.
The 38-year-old Akers was released by the San Francisco 49ers in early March after a disappointing 2012 campaign.
One season after being named an All-Pro, and being selected to his third consecutive Pro Bowl team, Akers missed 13 of his 42 field goal attempts while dealing with the effects of offseason hernia surgery.
The lack of a deal for Akers means the door remains open for the Detroit Lions to re-sign Jason Hanson. The 21-year veteran has announced his interest in playing another season, but he has been unable to work out a contract with the franchise that selected him in the second round of the 1992 NFL draft.
Hanson is coming off one of his best seasons, converting 32 of is 36 field goal attempts. |
While most fans, myself included, accepted that a point was ultimately a decent outcome for a match against Everton at Goodison Park at the fag end of the Christmas period, during the game the divergence of opinion was quite marked.
On the one hand, many fans on social media were thrilled by the intense pressing, quick movement and the attacking intent of Spurs, until the final 20 minutes when the team tired. On Sky Sports, Graeme Souness and Jamie Carragher — hardly Spurs cheerleaders — waxed lyrical about the exciting young team they were seeing.
On the other hand, a few grumpy pants, myself included, were moaning that, for all the promise, Spurs weren’t actually creating many good chances. In Tim Howard and Ramiro Funes Mori, Everton have a clear weakness at the back, relative to the strength of the rest of their team. Despite some pretty play, and hitting the woodwork twice, Spurs only had four shots on target all game.
Michael Caley’s XG map summed up this lack of dangerzone creativity well, even if this map doesn’t quite do justice to what was a hugely entertaining game of football.
xG map for #EFC–#COYS. Spurs dominated early but failed to create many clear chances, same with Everton's comeback. pic.twitter.com/IzpT2d2fur — Michael Caley (@MC_of_A) January 3, 2016
This isn’t the first time in recent matches that we’ve struggled to create “good” chances — the same occurred against Watford, Newcastle, West Brom and Chelsea. Only against Norwich and, to a lesser extent, Southampton did we cut loose.
This period (in which, it should be noted, we’ve kept the points coming in) has coincided with a dip in form by Tottenham’s chief creator, Christian Eriksen.
Aside from taking the corner that Eric Dier nodded home against Newcastle, Eriksen hasn’t had an assist since we played West Ham on November 22. He was dropped for the visit to Watford, but regained his place against Everton.
I’ve pulled together some pass maps from some of the games in which Spurs struggled to create.
First, using the online tools from @footballfactman, it is clear that Eriksen struggled to make key passes against Chelsea, WBA, Newcastle and Watford (he played 45 minutes). That is a very modest contribution from our “number 10” — even if he has generally played from wide due to the strength of the Alli-Dembele combination.
The basic passing information from Squawka shows Eriksen’s struggles quite starkly. Against Chelsea and Newcastle, he barely attempted any passes into the area at all and his passes were coming from relatively deep. Against West Brom and Everton, he made several passes into dangerous areas, and generally from more advanced positions, but none of them came off.
Despite the apparent recent struggles, Eriksen would appear to be having a strong Premier League season statistically. Per Whoscored, he is averaging 3.3 key passes per 90 minutes, up from 2.4 per 90 last season and 3.1 per 90 in his first season with us. He is notching up assists at the same rate as in his first season, 0.4 per 90 minutes — last season was a bit of a statistical fluke as he only managed two all season. He is passing the ball marginally less this season — 52.6 passes per 90 compared with 56.6 per 90 last season.
Eriksen is a classy player. He may not be on the level of Ozil or Silva, in my opinion, but he’s on the second tier in Premier League terms. I’m sure what we are seeing now is just a dip. As I said earlier, Eriksen has predominantly played from the left this season — understandably he may feel he can influence a game less from the left than when he is pulling the strings centrally.
I’d also note that Eriksen’s dip has appeared to coincide with Mousa Dembele’s best form. Perhaps there isn’t enough time on the ball in Poch’s system for both of them to get the touches they need? Eriksen’s performance against Everton, with Dembele out, was his most promising in a while.
But the fact Eriksen was dropped for Watford shows that Mauricio Pochettino is aware the Dane is not firing on all cylinders. Knowing what we know about the head coach, the answer to this problem is going to be even more training rather than a rest — enjoy it, Christian.
Class is permanent, form is temporary. But I’m sure Harry Kane would love to have his primary creator back in a central role and sliding in pass after pass, sooner rather than later.
Please follow me on Twitter for more articles and general Spurs chat.
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Tuesday’s elections could spell doomsday for American democracy. Luckily, the day could also bring sweet relief to millions plunged into existential malaise.
Recreational marijuana stands to become legal for as much as 25 percent of the country’s population after November 8, taking the long-building legalization movement and turning it into an irreversible political force.
In a recent interview with Bill Maher, President Obama noted that — especially if the entire west coast legalizes marijuana — the patchwork of legal and non-legal states will likely prompt a national conversation. “I don’t think legalization is a panacea but I think that we’re going to need to have a more serious conversation about how we’re treating marijuana and our drug laws generally,” he said.
Late polls show that California and Massachusetts voters are poised to approve ballot measures that will make weed legal for adults in those states. Three other states — Arizona, Maine, and Nevada — will also decide whether to enact similar initiatives, though these races remain too close to call. Regardless of the outcome, the stigma is already lifting nationwide: a record 60 percent of Americans now back legal adult use, according to a recent Gallup survey.
Experts say that this surge of support could prove a tipping point for America’s most popular illicit drug, which the feds still classify as a Schedule 1 substance alongside heroin and LSD. Even Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, is casting a ballot for cannabis legalization in her home state of California.
“I will vote for it, but I have not made a public statement about it until right this very second,” Pelosi, who represents the district that serves San Francisco, told the Los Angeles Times last week.
Four states — Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska — as well as the District of Columbia have already legalized the drug for recreational use. Meanwhile, medical marijuana is now legal in 25 states as well as D.C., a figure that could grow as voters in Arkansas, Florida, Montana, and North Dakota eye medical marijuana legalization on Tuesday. A recent analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 7,000 Americans now try weed for the first time every day.
The cultural transformation brought on by relaxed laws and attitudes toward marijuana in the U.S. has already been profound. Sitcom characters smoke weed on network television shows. Hundreds of YouTube channels, blogs, Twitter handles, and Instagram pages celebrate the marijuana and the lifestyle that surrounds it. Even the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written about getting extremely stoned in the paper of record.
More Legal Weed Does Not Wreak Havoc On Schools Or Roads
Legal marijuana has also become the fastest growing market in America, according to ArcView, a market research firm. The $7.2 billion industry for medical and recreational marijuana in the U.S. could hit $23 billion in sales by 2020, the ArcView estimates. Another way to look at ganja’s economic growth spurt? It’s on pace to be a bigger industry than the National Football League within 30 years.
States that have already given the green light to recreational marijuana are beginning to see the results. In Colorado, the industry created 18,000 jobs and generated $2.3 billion in economic activity in 2015 alone, the Denver Post reported last month. The state also collected more than $135 million in taxes and fees from marijuana sales that year.
Imagine what those jobs and a tax revenue figures might look like in California, whose 38.8 million people is more than seven times the size of Colorado’s 5.3 million residents. After Tuesday, you’ll likely not have to wait long. |
It seems that no manufacturer is safe from prying eyes these days and Renault is no different. Having already seen its fair share of prematurely revealed Megane photos, Renault has again been stung, this time by the EU, as 2009 Megane Coupe patent images have found their way online. We've got them right here of course.
Sporting a sultry-smooth profile, the new Megane Coupe is a winner in the styling department. The subtraction of two doors allows the Coupe a far more slender line than its five-door sibling, itself no ugly duckling.
We're still in the dark mechanically until the official reveal, but expect the Megane Coupe to share its engine and drive-train specifications with the five-door. Four petrol engines will be on offer, ranging from 1.6L (74kW) and 2.0L (104kW) aspirated mills to the TCe (turbocharged) 1.4L and 2.0L, producing 97kWs and 134kWs respectively. Diesel lovers are catered for with several dCi units delivering power from 63kWs to 120kWs.
On styling alone, the 2009 Megane Coupe is a winner and we're already salivating at the thought of an all-new Renault Megane R26.R based on the new three-door. There's no official word on special-edition models just yet, but with a platform looking this good, we'd have to think it's on the cards.
[Source:CarScoop] |
Lupus is an autoimmune disease that often impacts the lungs, and research shows pulmonary complications with this disease can lead to pleuritis, pneumonitis and pulmonary hypertension.
When a person has a lung infection it usually affects their airway and lung tissue, but with lupus it seems that it can impact all compartments of the lungs and include pleuritis, which is inflammation of the linings around the lung, as well as pulmonary hypertension (high blood pressure that occurs in the arteries in the lungs). Those with lupus and lung problems can also get pneumonitis, inflammation of the walls of the alveoli in the lungs, normally caused by a virus.
Lung problems that occur in lupus
Lupus and lung involvement are not automatic. In other words, just because you have lupus does not mean that you will have lung problems. Studies suggest that about 50 percent of those with lupus with eventually suffer from some sort of lung disease. Medical researchers think it is important that patients fully understand the complications that could arise so they can be addressed at the first signs – before symptoms get too out of control.
So just how does lupus affect the lungs? Chest pain, cough and shortness of breath are the most common symptoms associated with lupus and lung problems. However, lupus lung pain can be uncomfortable and severe. It could be a sign of a more serious lung issue, such as pleuritis or pneumonitis.
Pleuritis chest pain: this pain takes place in the chest wall and can be diagnosed by a family doctor. The inflammation from pleuritis is normally in the cartilage that connects the rib to the sternum. Although this type of inflammation can occur in people without lupus, it is much more common in those who have the autoimmune disease.
this pain takes place in the chest wall and can be diagnosed by a family doctor. The inflammation from pleuritis is normally in the cartilage that connects the rib to the sternum. Although this type of inflammation can occur in people without lupus, it is much more common in those who have the autoimmune disease. Pneumonitis: in many cases, this is caused by inflammation or a bacterial infection. This is a problem for those with lupus because medications used to treat the disease in fact increase the risk of bacterial infection. Additionally, lupus sufferers can develop inflammation in their lungs that is associated with the disease.
in many cases, this is caused by inflammation or a bacterial infection. This is a problem for those with lupus because medications used to treat the disease in fact increase the risk of bacterial infection. Additionally, lupus sufferers can develop inflammation in their lungs that is associated with the disease. Pulmonary hypertension: if there is any scarring due to disease of the lung, more pressure is needed for the heart to push blood from the right ventricle into the lung. Another way for blood pressure to be impacted is when the disease affects the capillaries in the lung. This can decrease blood flow.
if there is any scarring due to disease of the lung, more pressure is needed for the heart to push blood from the right ventricle into the lung. Another way for blood pressure to be impacted is when the disease affects the capillaries in the lung. This can decrease blood flow. Other lung problems: shrinking lung syndrome, a condition that literally leads to smaller lungs; pulmonary hemorrhage, which is bleeding in the lung, and interstitial lung disease, a chronic inflammation/scarring of the lung tissue are all associated with lupus.
As you can see, lupus effects on lungs can be widespread. Some of the complications associated with lupus will be familiar to those who know little about this autoimmune disorder. For example, upper respiratory tract infections are common among the general population, but did you know that lupus patients are more likely to experience them?
Diagnosis of lung problems in lupus patients
Lupus and lung symptoms should not be ignored. At the first sign of discomfort, a lupus sufferer should see a doctor. Diagnosis of lung problems is not that difficult in most situations.
Chest x-rays are usually the first step if a person is showing signs of lupus lung pain. If no problems are detected then a chest CT scan will likely be ordered. Chest CT’s with intravenous contrasts are often used in people with lupus if they have chest pain and are short of breath. The scan can detect blood clots that have traveled to the lung. As well, a high-resolution chest CT can detect interstitial lung disease.
Pulmonary function tests are used on many patients complaining about lung problems, including lupus sufferers. The most basic test is conducted with what is referred to as a “Spirometry”. This tool measures how much the person is able to breathe in and out, as well as how fast they are able to breathe in and out. It’s simply a matter of exhaling into a mouthpiece connected to a machine. A lung diffusion capacity test is similar to this, but it measures certain gases, such as low concentration of carbon monoxide, which determines the amount of oxygen that passes into the blood from the lungs. The readings of carbon monoxide help doctors determine what surface area of the lung is damaged.
There is also a 6-minute walk test that can help doctors evaluate how well the lung saturates the blood with oxygen. This test is normally conducted when lupus effects on lungs include shortness of breath.
There are some diagnostic tests that are more invasive than the ones outlined above. For example, a bronchoscopy requires anesthetic for a pulmonologists to see into the airways of the lungs to collect samples to be tested. A thoracic surgeon may want to conduct a surgical biopsy to confirm pulmonary hypertension or a right heart catheterization test, which involves guiding a small catheter into the right side of the heart and artery going into the lung.
Steps to take when lupus affects your lungs
Shortness of breath, coughing, wheezing, as well as pain in the chest or pain in the lungs – these are all signs of trouble in people who suffer from lupus. If you have lupus and breathing becomes really difficult, you should get to a hospital immediately.
Once you get to a doctor, the proper tests can be conducted to determine what is going on. Based on the results the doctor may instruct you to stay away from triggers of lupus and lung symptoms, such as smoking, second hand smoke, and exposure to pollutants.
Often times when we aren’t feeling well, we shy away from exercise; however, exercise is important for those who have lupus because it forces them to breathe deeply, which can help keep the lungs strong.
It is also important to note that certain foods can increase the level of inflammation in our bodies so taking a close look at diet can also impact lupus and the pain associated with the disease. If you are a lupus patient, talk to your doctor during your next visit about your risk of lung problems, including how to spot them. |
Many of the newly-arrived Syrians are haunted by the war. They're heartbroken about being separated from family members who are stranded in refugee camps or in conflict zones.
Ali Barsan, a father of three from the city of Aleppo — a UNESCO world heritage site before the war — still remembers what life was like before the conflict began in 2011, while he was working in building construction.
"Things were good, before," he says through a translator. "You'd wake up in the morning, feel a beautiful breeze. You'd hear the sound of your mother cooking breakfast in the background. I lived in a big house, with our whole family. I'd see all my brothers. While going to work, the whole neighbourhood would say hello to me as I walked by. We had a really strong community. And after finishing work, I'd have time to sit with your family and friends, drinking coffee or tea, chatting and catching up."
Today, however, that life is a distant memory. Like Seham, he's consumed with dread for family members who couldn't make it to safety.
"It's been five years since I've seen my parents. My mother and father, as well as my disabled brother, are stranded in Syria and surrounded by IS (Islamic State)," he says. "My other brother reached Turkey, after 15 days of walking, climbing over mountains. He's homeless now, sleeping on the streets in Adana. Also, two brothers — Hassan and Yasser — went to work in Lebanon, and they simply disappeared. There's also my sister, and her child..."
Barsan says he left with his family in 2011, once it became clear he would have to choose sides in a violent civil war. There are a dizzying number of groups in Syria's multi-front war, and he didn't want to join any of them.
"Even though I'd already done my (mandatory) military service, the Syrian (government) army approached me and asked me to join again. But I didn't want to use weapons on my own countrymen. Right after that, the Syria Free Army also approached me to fight on their side. That's why I left."
Asked if he knows friends or neighbours who were forced to join the fight, Barsan covers his eyes and and walks away, excusing himself. Someone comforts him as he stands with his back turned, trying to collect himself. After half a minute, he returns.
"Since this war started, every family has at least one member captured, one killed," he says heavily.
Suddenly, Barsan pulls out printouts of photos from a folder. They're graphic photos of dead toddlers, limp and lifeless, babies covered in dust.
"These were children in Syria, killed during Eid," he says, referencing Eid al-Fitr — one of the most important holidays observed by Muslims, marking the end of Ramadan.
A Canadian resident extends her hand to prevent a nearby Syrian child from catching a glimpse of the photos, but it's soon evident that these images are nothing new for children who escaped the war.
Barsan's son, Hazim, takes one of the photos from the pile and holds it up. Barsan says his three children — two boys and a daughter — have trouble sleeping, and ask him what happened to their uncles. Barsan has worked with a translator to send letters to the Canadian government, pleading for them to approve applications for his siblings to come to Canada.
Like Seham Alomar, they feel fortunate for making it to Canada—they're among a tiny minority of applicants who cleared all the hurdles to get here.
But it is obvious they are only partly present for the celebration in Langley, preoccupied with thoughts of relatives who haven't been as lucky.
After her speech, young Seham looks distraught when asked about her sister.
"I can't describe her, because she's like an angel," she says, her whole body stiffening. "I feel I'm going to go crazy without her here." |
This is your reminder that Pornhub and YouPorn are currently doing more to defend your rights on the free internet than the Federal Communications Commission.
The pornography industry has been one of net neutrality’s staunchest defenders, going so far as to have a day of loading icons to protest potential rollback in June. Even earlier, in March, several sites switched to HTTPS encryption so as to hide your peculiar browsing habits from the ISPs. At the time, the FCC was voting to roll back restrictions preventing ISPs from selling your browser history.
So that’s the state of the union as of the last gasp of 2017 rings out: PornHub and YouPorn care more about your interests than the FCC does.
Obviously TNW is pro-net neutrality. If you need a primer on what we think of the FCC’s latest decision, my colleague Abhimanyu Ghoshal has written a treatise on the flaws in the FCC’s logic.
ISPs, the ones who stand to benefit from the coming system, have been quick to defend themselves, and it’s AT&T’s defense that rings out most clearly to me at this moment:
Make no doubt, the circulation of this order will bring the ‘sky is falling’ crowd to the fore, and they will foretell a day when websites will be blocked, content censored and internet access controlled by ISP overlords.
We’ll take our place among the “sky is falling” crowd, because nothing about the coming rule changes look good to us. I don’t see how we stand to benefit from the paradigm shift we’re most likely going to get after the vote in December.
At least Pornhub has our back.
Read next: Facebook teaches AI to seek out suicidal users |
Russia is to found its own human rights monitoring group in the former Soviet bloc, the Izvestia newspaper reported Thursday.
The proposed Eurasian Human Rights Group will be styled on organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW), while being less "politically engaged," Izvestia reported.
International human rights organizations have not shied away from criticizing Russia in recent years.
HRW, in its 2016 World Report, wrote that "the Kremlin’s crackdown on civil society, media and the Internet took a more sinister turn in 2015 as the government further intensified harassment and persecution of independent critics."
A further report published this week claimed that free speech was under threat in the Russian republic of Chechnya, with "local residents being intimidated into silence.”
Human rights ratings for Central Asia have been more damning, with Amnesty International writing that torture was "rampant" in some Central Asian states.
According to Yana Lantratova, the executive secretary of Russia’s State Human Rights Council. The new organization will be tasked with monitoring civic freedoms, as well as creating a presence in areas where human rights violations are taking place, she said, adding that the organization would also collect and distribute humanitarian aid.
“What we are striving for is openness and freedom, the power to provide an objective analysis of events and respond in the best way possible," Lantratova said, adding that human rights groups already working in the region will be invited to take part.
The new organization also intends to gain official recognition and accreditation from the United Nations, the Commonwealth of Independent (Former Soviet) States (SNG) and the Eurasian Economic Union, Izvestia reported.
Speaking to The Moscow Times, a senior researcher for HRW, Tanya Lokshina, said that an international coalition of rights organizations could do very useful work, sighting the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) as a successful example.
However, Lokshina found the comparison with HRW inaccurate as the proposed Eurasian group has humanitarian work at its core.
Humanitarian work is a very different undertaking from human rights documentation and defense, she said. |
Gottfrid Warg, the co-founder of notorious file-sharing site Pirate Bay, has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for hacking offences.
Warg and his co-defendant were charged with illegally accessing computers owned by technology firm CSC and downloading police and social security files.
Read more: Illegal downloaders to receive email warnings, as Pirate Bay traffic doubles
According to the BBC, prosecutors described the trial as the "largest hacking case to date."
Warg's accomplice received a six-month prison sentence, but was free to leave court having already spent 17 months in pre-trial detention. Representatives for Mr Warg have confirmed that the Pirate Bay founder will be lodging an appeal.
The alleged hack took place back in February 2012, but lawyers for the defence have claimed that, although the attacks were carried out using Warg's computer, he was not responsible. Instead, they maintain that another unnamed hacker was responsible.
The judge and jury, however, have dismissed this line of argument as "unlikely."
It is also not the first time that Warg has got into difficulties with the law. In September 2013, he was deported from Cambodia to his native Sweden to face sentencing for copyright theft relating to his involvement with the Pirate Bay.
In a separate case that year, Warg was also sentenced to two years imprisonment for hacking into a bank's computer, before seeing the sentence reduced to one year.
Read more: Kim Dotcom's extradition hearing delayed until next year
It wasn't until late November 2013 that he was deported to Denmark to face charges relating to the CSC hacking case. |
Calgary police say a former officer has been charged with kidnapping, break and enter, and fraudulently using police databases while he was a member of the service.
Denis McHugh, 35, resigned from the service and now lives out of province.
The criminal charges — 11 of them, in total — were announced Tuesday after police concluded an investigation into McHugh's alleged harassment of a Calgary woman and her boyfriend.
Acting deputy chief Ray Robitaille said there's no evidence of any sexual contact between the officer and the woman.
"There's no suggestion it's a case of stalking," he added.
The police commission had little to say given the matter is before the courts but Commissioner Howard Shikaze did issue a written statement.
"The Calgary Police Commission shares the community's concern about any police officer who faces criminal charges, or any activity that threatens to erode public confidence and trust in Calgary's police service."
McHugh's lawyer Alain Hepner says the full story will come out in court.
"I've interviewed him, I'm familiar with the case and there is a lot more to this story," he said.
Incident began with traffic stop
The case started in January, when the Calgary couple contacted police with complaints against the officer.
The woman alleged that on July 9, 2015, she was stopped by the officer and was issued tickets for driving without a licence and driving without insurance. Her vehicle was towed.
She alleged that the officer then offered to drive her to her home in northeast Calgary, but the trip took three and a half hours, during which time she was locked in the back of the marked police vehicle and unable to get out.
The couple further alleged that, on Jan. 15, 2016, the officer approached them outside the woman's home and then followed her inside her home, entering the residence without permission.
Police said their investigation later revealed the officer had been accessing police computer databases to obtain information about the same man and woman between July 2015 and January 2016.
No known relationship
Acting deputy chief Ray Robitaille said investigators are not aware of any relationship between the woman and the officer prior to the traffic stop.
It's not unusual for an officer to offer a ride home to a person whose vehicle has been impounded, Robitaille said, noting it's a decision to be made at the officer's discretion depending on the specifics of a given situation.
He wouldn't elaborate, however, on why the officer allegedly kept the woman confined to the police vehicle for so long.
"Those are matters that are going to be presented at court as part of the trial."
The following charges were laid against the former officer, who had served for eight years with the CPS: |
Juha sez, "The New Zealand Green Party says the country's Parliament could face fines and even have its Internet access disconnected, after it passed the draconian copyright law that comes into effect on August 11. Speaker of the House refused to comment on the law, and the Minister in charge of enacting it, Simon Power, claims to not have heard of Netflix or legal file sharing."
"Like Parliament, schools, libraries and universities run the risk of fines or disconnection. Unitec in Auckland has even said they might cease providing internet services for students due to possible copyright liability," said Mr Hughes.
"The Government has a responsibility to ensure that public institutions can navigate around the new law and not run the risk of fines or disconnection.
"By not providing information or advice and relying on InternetNZ, Internet Service Providers, and the media, Mr Power has left schools and universities in a legal grey area."
The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act was passed through Parliament under urgency earlier this year. Only the Green Party opposed the passage of the law. |
In 2000, I became the first person in my family to finish college. I soon landed a job at a major management consulting firm. I was working on big-time projects at multinational companies like ExxonMobil and British Petroleum, pulling a competitive salary, and jet-setting all over the world in business class. My parents thought I had won the occupational lottery. So did I—at first.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. I just wasn’t passionate about the tasks I had to perform every day. And I couldn’t see how my work was contributing to any meaningful purpose in the world. In short, I wasn’t intrinsically motivated. So after two years, I quit.
“It was a great job,” I explained to my parents. “It just wasn’t right for me.”
Mom and Dad were dumbfounded. They stared at me with a cock-eyed look of disbelief that I hadn’t seen since that night back in high school when I told them how my car had suspiciously driven itself into a ditch.
As an organizational psychologist, I’ve spent the last 17 years thinking that my parents simply had an outdated understanding of work. They didn’t know that a fulfilling career is about a lot more than the number of zeroes on your paycheck. Most people, I thought, only feel truly motivated when a job aligns with their core values, and offers them the opportunity to express their strengths and passions.
But according to a new study published in the Academy of Management Journal , I was wrong. It turns out that some people can feel strongly motivated at work for a reason that has nothing to do with either fancy perks or personal growth.
Psychologist Jochen Menges at the WHY-Otto Beisheim School of Management, along with his colleagues at the University of Bonn and University of Pennsylvania, wanted to find out what high-performing employees do when their company’s leadership can’t, or won’t, motivate them with either extrinsic factors (like the chance to earn a big bonus) or intrinsic factors (like personal fulfillment.) They tracked 151 employees at a Mexican maquiladora, or factory, over a two-week period.
Every day, each employee has to process coupons in exactly the same way as they did the day before, which provides virtually no opportunity to develop new skills, express creativity, or make the world a better place. It’s almost as if the company’s leadership studied a list of best practices for fostering intrinsic motivation, and then went down the list one-by-one designing a job that would do the exact opposite. On top of that, the employees have to do this work for the same pay and the same benefits as the person sitting next to them regardless of their performance, and with no realistic opportunities for advancement. Which basically rules out extrinsic motivation as well.
But some workers possessed a third kind of motivation—what the researchers call “family motivation.” Workers who agreed more with statements like “I care about supporting my family” and “it is important for me to do good for my family” felt more energized and performed better day after day, even though they were offered no financial incentive and they did not find their work interesting, engaging, or enjoyable. It wasn’t only parents who experienced family motivation. It also applied to unmarried and childless workers who defined their family as brothers, sisters, parents, and other relatives.
Here’s what makes family motivation so special: It doesn’t depend on the details of your job, your boss, or your company.
That isn’t entirely true for intrinsic motivation—which still depends largely on external factors. Your degree of autonomy, mastery, and sense of purpose is directly related to how much of each factor your organization chooses to provide (or withhold). For example, autonomy by definition doesn’t happen unless your boss chooses to leave you alone. So as long as you demand intrinsic motivation as prerequisites for contentment and satisfaction at work, you will always be at the mercy of your boss and your company. You are handing someone else the keys to your happiness and fulfillment.
My parents discovered this truth long before I did. At the age of 19, newly married and penniless, they moved to the city of Omaha, hundreds of miles from the tiny rural hamlet in the cornfields of Iowa where they had been born and raised. My dad woke up at 5 am every morning to catch the bus that took him to the county hospital, where he scrubbed toilets and mopped floors all day. Ten hours later, he caught the bus back to their apartment. He’d shovel a few bites of reheated food down his throat, then spend the night combing the streets selling smoke detectors door-to-door. Meanwhile, my pregnant mom caught the bus to a local steakhouse, where she waited tables for $1.10 an hour.
My parents will be the first to admit that their jobs sucked back then. Eventually my dad worked his way into more lucrative sales and management positions, which allowed my mom to devote her energy to raising my brothers and my sister and me. They continued working hard so that we wouldn’t have to start our adult lives as wage slaves. But those early experiences working overtime at menial jobs just to heat their dinky apartment and put a bag of groceries in the refrigerator gave them a very different understanding of what a person really needs from a job.
As my parents discovered, the act of work itself can be meaningful. For my parents and the high-performing maquiladora workers, motivation to do good work doesn’t need to be directly linked to the pursuit of fortune, nor to lofty visions of changing the world. This is not to say that all is well for the millions of people trapped in low-wage jobs. But every job—whether you’re washing dishes or performing kidney surgery—provides us with the opportunity to affirm our identities as capable, respectable individuals, upon whom the most important people in our lives can rely.
This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers. |
There is the variety of pre-installed equipment, whether service is being conducted under warranty or out of warranty, the budget available to the owner or operator for service, and even what theories about O&M and appetite for risk to which an owner prescribes.
Click image to download full size version
Some wind plant owners spend every available penny upgrading to sophisticated condition monitoring systems hoping to predict and plan for component repairs. Others minimise service costs, reacting to repairs as they happen.
A wind plant's location can also have a big impact on service. Turbines located in dusty, sandy environments may need different attention than ones in more hospitable grassland. Wind plants operating in the windiest sites will take more strain than those at calmer sites, or sites with less air turbulence or wake effects from other turbines.
Marco Zvanik, vice president of sales for Energy Maintenance Services (EMS), the second-largest wind plant O&M service company in the US, picks out a range of standard services, right, that most O&M companies offer. And, below, he indicates a few of the additional services that are often available.
For example, when blade damages exceed up-tower repair capabilities or a serial design defect is found in a number of blades, many of today's O&M providers can offer down-tower service and repair. The rotor or blades are dropped on site, repaired and re-installed.
Some companies offer gearbox remanufacturing and reconditioning to improve housing and gear ratio. Experienced firms with specialised tooling can perform a range of up-tower changes without using cranes.
To automate some of the day-to-day servicing, gearbox oil auto-lube installation systems, offline oil-filtration systems and upgraded pumps can be installed.
Mechanical gearing in pitch control and yaw control motors are lubricated with grease. Some O&M companies install after-market automated grease application devices.
At some point in a wind turbine's life, it is expected to require some sort of major corrective. This could be the replacement or repair of one of the rotor blades, the gearbox, the main shaft, generator or bearings. Any of these critical components will likely render the turbine inoperable for some considerable time. Some O&M companies can offer comprehensive solutions that integrate the removal, transportation, repair and re-installation of most of the major components, to get the turbine back up and running as soon as possible.
For more see Windpower Monthly's Operations & Maintenance Special Report |
The Saxo-Tinkoff chef checks in and talks about how she fuels a group of nine hungry riders every day at the Tour
AVIGNON, France (VN) — Hers is not the title that first comes to mind when you think about a cycling team — not sport director or soigneur or mechanic — but head chef Hannah Grant has become a crucial cog in the machinery that keeps Saxo-Tinkoff moving.
Since joining the team three years ago, Grant has been gaining recognition for her role in fueling Saxo for major races and grand tours, all from a kitchen on wheels. She has a new cookbook, The Grand Tour Cookbook, in Danish, that tells the story of the food that powered Saxo during the 2012 Tour de France.
The Danish chef gave VeloNews an inside look at her kitchen, cooking philosophy, and life as a grand tour chef at the Saxo team hotel on the Tour’s second rest day.
VeloNews: Your career hasn’t really followed the traditional trajectory for a chef. Can you tell us how you ended up cooking for a cycling team?
Hannah Grant: How did I end up in the truck with a professional kitchen? I’m a trained chef from Denmark. In Denmark it’s a four-year education, so I took the whole thing, thinking I was going to be the next big Michelin star chef, but apparently it shouldn’t be like that.
Long story short, after I graduated, I worked a lot of different places. I worked in Noma in Copenhagen, and I was actually thinking about going back to school to study food science at the University of Copenhagen, but I kind of needed to work on the side of that. So I asked my colleague, my sous chef, “Do you have any contacts for a job where I could work a lot when I work, and be off a lot when I’m off?” I was more thinking banquets and maybe working on the weekends and being off weekdays. So he said he would ask around and then calls me and says, “You need to call this guy, he’s from a cycling team.”
I thought it sounded intriguing. I have a basic education in health and nutrition, so I had the basics down for that, and he said, “This could be really interesting for you.”
And I spoke to the guys here at the team — they had lined up three other guys up for the job, but they wanted to try something new and so they hired a female chef. And basically that was it. That was the weird road that led me here. And so I got hired and got thrown straight into a training camp, 30 riders, alone, the hardest 14 days of my life, but I earned my spot here.
VN: Did you follow cycling before you took the job, or is cycling something you have learned about since you started?
HG: I knew only Bjarne Riis in the cycling world before I started here. Now I know a lot.
VN: Would you say you’re a cycling fan now?
HG: For sure. I’m obsessed with the sport. When you’re in it, you can’t resist it. I look the guys in the eyes every day, and feel their pain, and can see how much they’re suffering. If you don’t start loving cycling from that, I don’t know. It’s so real. I love it.
VN: The job is cooking, but it’s very different from working in a restaurant. Can you talk about some of the differences?
HG: First of all, I set the menu. I mean, they can request stuff, the riders, if they want. I’ll note it and I’ll do it if it’s possible. But, obviously, then there’s rules to how to assemble the menu. Today’s a rest day, so we do a low-carb lunch for them. They’re not going so far, they just want to keep their legs going, so we don’t want to fill them up too much. And we don’t want to go too hard on the carbs so they don’t gain weight.
Then we have a philosophy of using lots of vegetables, proteins, and cold-pressed fats, and then we use a lot of gluten-free alternatives. So we try to encourage the riders to try other things than just pasta and bread. I do gluten-free breads as well.
It’s all to minimize all the little things that can stop you from performing 100 percent, that promote injuries, stomach problems, all those things. So that’s a big difference (from cooking in a restaurant), because I have to follow all those rules. I can’t just cook whatever I think is amazing. It has to be within those guidelines.
Then I take it as my personal job to take these guidelines and then make an incredible product from it, so they don’t feel like they’re missing out on things. It shouldn’t be a punishment to travel with a kitchen truck and a chef who cooks you food that’s good for you.
VN: What about the logistics, is that difficult? You’re constantly moving, your kitchen is in a truck! How do you source ingredients?
HG: It takes a little bit of getting used to. This is my third season, so now I’m in the routine and I know how to do it, so it’s easier. I source from wherever I can. Sometimes I order through the hotels, sometimes there’s a market, sometimes I go to (the supermarket). In France, it’s great, they have lots of biodynamic things in the market. We go very much organic and biodynamic whenever we can.
So it’s basically whatever is available, but because we have the big truck and the big fridges, I can fill up for four or five days in a row. So I know now that when we’re going to the Alps, I can’t get anything on Alpe d’Huez, so it’s important for me to load up and be ready for that.
So it’s just thinking ahead, knowing when it’s going to be hard to get stuff and when it’s easy to get stuff.
VN: Is it stressful? If you run a kitchen in a restaurant, obviously you don’t want to make a mistake and have someone get sick, but here, there’s no margin for error. If you get sick and have a bad day you can lose the Tour.
HG: I never serve anything — if I have even the slightest doubt that something’s good, I throw it out. I never serve shellfish for the same reason, never any mussels or anything. Never anything that could have even a one in 1,000 chance of not being good. Even if it smells fresh, I never serve it. That’s a priority. I take no chances.
It’s a big responsibility. I know that if the doctor says, hey, someone has a big problem with their stomach, I ask, “How? Why?” But usually it’s because they have so much sugar in on the bikes, and they sit curled up, there are many other things that come into it. But the biggest thing I can do is make sure the meals are hygienically clean and all right, and the product is as fresh as possible so they get the best possible product.
VN: Do you feel personally invested in the riders’ success? You’re providing them the fuel to make it up the mountains, after all.
HG: I even get nervous — you know, like (Sunday) on Mont Ventoux — two years ago Alberto (Contador) didn’t eat enough on one stage, so he couldn’t go up, and I was like, “You finish off your dinner!”
I try to pump them up with fuel, because the first thing they look at is whether there was not enough food. There’s always enough food, but I can’t force the riders to eat enough, to eat the right fats and to have enough energy to go up. So when they do well, even on Twitter everybody says, “I’m sure it was the stuff you served last night!”
VN: Do the riders have a favorite meal, for example?
HG: Last time, before the rest day, they looked through my cookbook and saw the burger and immediately said, “We want that!” They always want a burger all the time, but they can only have it the day before the rest day. They love lamb. They love variations, that it changes, that it’s not just the same grilled chicken breast every day. Sometimes it’s different riders, different cultures, and you can’t make everyone equally happy every day. So you change it up a bit, and sometimes you hit the spot with something.
VN: Do you have any riders who are very old school, who only want to eat lots of pasta and that’s all?
HG: In the beginning when I got the job, then yes. But now I’ve opened their eyes to a different way of eating. It’s tough getting into the sport as a chef with guidelines and ideas of how to do things differently because cycling is a sport where they say, “It’s like this, it’s always like this, and that’s the way we do it.”
So there have been many tough days. It’s not so much because of the riders, but the staff. For them, it’s like, this is still a new thing, even though there have been chefs with the teams for 10 years.
VN: One unique thing about working on a grand tour is that don’t get to go home every night like a normal person. Is it hard to be out here on the road every day for three weeks, away from your family and from home?
HG: You kind of get into the mindset of it. When I leave my house to go to the airport for a big tour like this, I have in my mind that I’m away for a month. And then it’s just every day a routine.
It’s not so bad. The first year was hard, because I didn’t know how to source my energies out. Now I know, I keep my conversations short with my husband (so I can stay focused on my work). This is also a learning process in a relationship. But for sure, I love being out, and it’s nice coming home. But it’s a lot about getting used to being out here.
VN: Can you tell us a little bit about your new book?
HG: It’s based on the Tour from last year. 21 race days, two rest days, four or five dinner recipes every night. We focus on vegetables, proteins, good fats. Underneath the recipes it’ll say serve with brown rice, potatoes.
It also has symbols to show gluten-free, dairy-free, and nut-free, so it’s easy to find out if you have a specific diet, if you want to follow something, to go through it and see what you can’t eat and go for the right symbol and then you’re fine.
If you can’t source what’s in the recipe, we talk about alternatives. And everything is cooked from the bottom and it has bread recipes, vinaigrettes, desserts too.
We’re working on an English version of the book. When it comes out, I can’t say. But there’s the Tour de France start in London, so I don’t know if they’ll push it fast or keep it. But for sure we’re working on it.
Editor’s note: Hannah Grant Tweets as @dailystews and blogs at dailystews.com. |
This Is What Ellie From The Last Of Us Looks Like Grown Up
In the past, a lot of fans have imagined how Ellie from The Last of Us would look like now through fan art but no one had done so much research as this guy.
A 3D character artist named Ray Thuc Le out of his curiousness to know how the little girl from The Last of Us would look all grown up decided to gather a lot of references and analyse her face.
He has even prepared a detailed tutorial about his project where he mentions that the face is the main aspect. He even took help from Ellie’s creator on the game, Ashley Johnson and Ellen Page, who has a strong resemblance to Ellie in the project.
At first he took the detailed notes of Ellie’s face and then used a time lapse video which showed a girl aging up to 6.5 years. This helped him to understand how a young girl grows physically.
This was followed by sculpting and modelling the figure and then moving to rendering, creating hair and clothes.
The result that Ray received is pretty impressive and you can gave a look at the full tutorial here.
In case, Naughty Dog plans to have an older Ellie in the future, they should definitely take cues from this artist’s work as it really is amazing and is as close to showing Eli as a grown up as possible. |
This post is a continuation from the previous one about the significance of dynamic intelligence in teaching children with autism to learn by themselves. Click here to read the previous post.
I watched this beautiful mother intently as she told me about her 17 year old son.
“I was shocked with the autism diagnosis but I never gave up. I tried everything that the speech therapist and occupational therapist asked me to do. And my son improved. It was the happiest day of my life when he got into a normal school.”
“Everything is good, right?” I asked. Apparently, it wasn’t.
“Why can’t he have a decent conversation without being prompted?”
“Why does he always need prompting to give even the right answer appropriately?”
“How come he learns by rote easily but doesn’t understand concepts?”
“Why isn’t he confident?”
“Why does he get bullied at school?”
I knew how she felt, but continued to probe.
“What are you looking for? What do you want your son to achieve?”
“I want him to solve problems independently. I want him to have at least one friend. It breaks my heart to see him being bullied. He doesn’t understand when others are being sarcastic or making fun of him.”
I saw her eyes shining with unshed tears. She continued with a tremor in her voice, “I’m not getting any younger. How long will I be around to support him?”
“You’re a wonderful mother,” I said. “You did your best. You did what you were told to do. What you built is known as Static Intelligence. What you should be building though, is Dynamic Intelligence.”
She looks at me disbelievingly. “What are you talking about? I’ve never heard these terms.”
I get this question frequently.
Are you aware of static and dynamic intelligence?
Your eyes are set on your youngster being independent. You want him to be like the ‘other kids.’ You want him to understand the subtleties of language.
You know that he has potential. But somehow, neither you nor the therapist are able to tap into it.
Remember this image?
Yes, static intelligence is that shiny object that you wanted to achieve. It was easy for your child to pick the right answers in a question. The best part – it’s measurable.
Here’s the problem:
Even after building static intelligence your child does not have friends, is not flexible and cannot solve problems independently. Does he keep looking at you for approval even though his answers are right? Does he still heavily rely on prompts?
Are you looking for answers in the wrong place?
Whether your child is 6 years old or 16, whether he attends a regular school or a special education center, your answer lies in the realm of dynamic intelligence.
Dynamic intelligence is the ability to solve problems in everyday life. It is the ability to make good decisions when we don’t have the answers and need to find them.
Did you notice the difference?
Static focuses on one question and one answer to that question. It is either right or wrong.
Dynamic focuses on problem solving, thinking, flexibility, where there are several solutions to a single problem.
We need both, static and dynamic intelligence, to get through life, like the wheels of a car.
Most people with ASD do not have a problem with static thinking. In fact many of them are good with it. But all people on the Spectrum have problems with dynamic intelligence.
Dynamic thinking is subconsciously ingrained in neurotypical people. But because of different wiring, it doesn’t develop in individuals and children with autism.
Yes, each child with autism is unique, but the core deficits are the same across the condition. And they can be addressed (steadily) through dynamic intelligence. As promised in my last article, here are a few steps that you can take today to develop dynamic intelligence in your child.
1. Don’t take anything for granted
Over the years you painstakingly built up static skills like naming objects, colors, writing numbers, reading letters, words and sentences.
You thought that generalization, problem solving, flexible thinking would develop on their own alongside.
But they didn’t.
Look at parents interacting with their typical child. It’s a miracle. The interaction, generalization, understanding context and other concepts take off without ‘teaching’. This is because dynamic intelligence is in place.
The foundations for dynamic intelligence are laid between 0-2 years.
But the brain of a child with autism is wired differently. He learns differently. Dynamic intelligence does not develop naturally. It has to be systematically built. Be aware of this.
And be aware that you, the parent, can (and must) start building it in your child. Being mentally prepared is the first step.
2. Reopen your communication lines
I see something in all my assessments. It was strange earlier, but not anymore.
Children don’t look at parents naturally. But parents don’t look or connect with their children either!
I’m not blaming parents. In fact, I did this with Mohit too.
If you put in effort to maintain an interaction, but don’t get feedback, it’s natural to shut down, isn’t it?
But dynamic intelligence can only be built in a child if you reopen communication with him.
Take a deep breath and think about what communication really is. It goes beyond words and reaches deep down to the space of connection.
So go beyond words. Be close to your child without expecting a response. Share something with your child. Enjoy an icecream or relish a gulab jamun together.
Don’t ask, “what’s this?” or “what are you eating?” Just be in the zone of sharing together. Share your emotions – through gestures and facial expressions – without pressure. Your child will look at you to share his experience.
Eye gaze is the first step to meaningful communication. Would you gaze into the eyes of someone who keeps instructing you every few seconds? Your child feels the same. Emotional sharing and communication is the first step to meaningful eye gaze.
3. Build togetherness
In typical development, Dynamic intelligence takes off in the first couple years of the child’s life. Watch how a 2 year old typically developing child integrates a parent in her play activity, shares emotions, observes every little thing around her and studies new situations.
Unfortunately, children on the autism spectrum miss out on this.
Your child may display hyperactivity, not be interested in what you say, and not give you eye contact. It’s disheartening.
But you have a second chance. That chance is now.
Here is how you can reestablish the connection with your child:
Hold your child’s hand and walk with him. This works brilliantly for young children. While walking together, use a chant to regulate your child – “Walk, walk, walk, tap.” When you say “tap”, make him touch the wall. Here is a video to shed light on it better.
Establish the pattern by walking back and forth several times. You will ‘feel’ it once the pattern is established. Your child will take the lead and initiative. Then introduce a slight difference in the pattern. Walk in a different direction, or stop walking while holding his hand. Don’t say or do anything. Just look at him. Your child will perceive the change slowly and gaze in your eyes. Any activity you conduct after this will be completed in half the time it usually takes.
Alternatively, try simple back and forth games, drumming, and other frameworks.
For elder children – adolescents, teenagers and even young adults – try ball activities like the ones in the video below. Notice how no words, only gestures, are being used to communicate what I want. Words are used along with emotions to make the young adult understand the context of what they mean.
You must be thinking, what will happen with simple ‘walking’ or ‘ball play’ activities?
These are not just activities, dear friend. They are processes. They silently create different neural pathways in your child’s mind, enabling him to accept and adjust to divergent situations.
Your child will develop competence. Over time, you will see your child tackling problems – rather than running from them. You will see a resilient and confident child.
Let me say this again. It doesn’t matter what age you start at – YOU, the parent ARE the guide and architect of your child’s development.
4. Be Consistent
Like in all areas of live, consistency and persistence hold the key. Many parents ask me if they can continue with the existing therapies. Yes, you can. Please continue with what you’re doing.
In addition, practice these activities for 30 minutes daily. Do them consistently for 21 days.
Again, don’t get carried away by the activity. It’s much more than teaching a child to walk, drum or play ball. It’s what the activity does for the brain.
The ‘emotional bond’ missing between your child and you will develop. In my experience, the success rate of these activities are one hundred percent.
It happened between Mohit and me, when he was 17! You have time.
About 10 years ago, at a parent training program, I listed the static skills that children needed. The list ran into pages. I told the parents sitting there, “I know it looks like a daunting task to think that we have to teach every single skill. But I’m ready to do this every single day of my life. I’ll do it forever if it teaches my child to be independent.”
Little did I know that my own words would come back to haunt me.
The truth is that you and I cannot do this forever.As your child grows older, you grow older too. You will burn out and feel low on energy soon.
Working on dynamic intelligence is like a gear system. You do not have to work on every visible skill. You work on the foundations and several invisible aspects fall into place by themselves.
I have witnessed language develop naturally, without being taught! I have seen students be motivated by themselves and solve problems in uncertain situations, without any help.
My dear friend, imagine yourself swimming with the tide rather than against it. Imagine yourself smiling because your child is independent. Take a deep breath and feel the relief. Yes, that feeling is what you can experience.
I am not holding out a false problem. I say this because I have seen this work in the lives of families that I work with.
When you held your new born child in your arms for the first time, you promised to give him the best life possible. It’s time to revive that promise. Because your child heard you, and is waiting for you to fulfill it. You may not believe me, but he waits. Don’t make him wait too long.
Work on these tips and go after your dreams and your child’s dreams too. All the best, dear friend.
Do leave a comment or drop me an email on for any questions about Dynamic Intelligence on [email protected]. I promise to respond quickly. |
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As we've previously covered in the Node.js v6.9.0 Release Brief, the Node.js v6 release line went into LTS this week. This is a major step for both Node.js and its users. The release brings a slew of feature additions to a Long Term Service release line.
With that, you may be wondering what some of the best features added to the newly minted v6 LTS are when compared to the Node.js v4 LTS release line. Luckily, we've compiled a list of 10 of the most useful and interesting new features below - including some highlights like the DevTools Inspector, unhandled Promise rejection warnings, and the Process Warnings API!
Last year, the Chromium team approached the Node core team and enquired whether there was any interest in re-using the DevTools debugger that was bundled with Blink as a way of interacting with Node.js. The Node.js debugger has not been well cared for over the years and even though it’s functional, JavaScript debuggers in modern browsers have advanced well beyond what Node can offer natively.
In Node.js v6.3.0, Google’s v8_inspector protocol was extracted from Blink and shipped with Node. This functionality is still considered “experimental” by the Node core team, meaning it is not yet extensively documented and may still be removed in a future version of Node without going through a deprecation cycle. However, given the popularity and power of this tool, and the this is unlikely to happen. A more likely outcome would be for the old debugger to eventually be removed and completely replaced by this new feature.
When Node.js is run with the --inspect command-line argument (with optional port number argument), a chrome-devtools:// URL is printed to the console. Entering this URL in a Chrome web browser will launch a remote debugging connection directly into the process. Add the additional --debug-brk command line argument to break on the first line of your application so you have time to work with the debugger. You can use Chrome’s DevTools to debug a Node application with similar power with which you can debug frontend JavaScript, including features such as live code editing and full asynchronous call stacks. Read Paul Irish’s post for more details on the kinds of features available right now in Node.js v6 LTS.
Source: Paul Irish's article, Debugging Node.js with Chrome DevTools
Far from being exclusive to Chrome, this new protocol is a WebSockets JSON protocol that is well documented and is already implemented in a number of clients and servers. Already the Visual Studio Code editor announced support for this experimental feature and you can even use it from command line interfaces.
2. Capture Names of Listeners on an EventEmitter
The eventNames() method - added in Node.js 6.0.0 - will return an array with the names of all the events that are being listened to by user callbacks on a given EventEmitter object. This kind of functionality wasn’t previously available unless you were using the internal _events property.
Finding the names of events being listened to can be useful for detecting when an event _isn’t being listened to—which allows for attaching listeners to handle events that aren’t being handled, or to ignore work that’s specific to some events that may not be needed otherwise.
3. Overhauled Buffers Constructor APIs
The Buffer Constructor API was overhauled, deprecating the old new Buffer(...) and adding Buffer.from() and Buffer.alloc() as the preferred replacements. The APIs were added to Node core in v5.10.0, and allow two different uses: Buffer.from() creates a Buffer from an Array-like (such as an Array, String, or another Buffer), and Buffer.alloc() creates a zero-filled Buffer of a specified size.
Additionally, a the --zero-fill-buffers CLI flag was added in v5.10.0 to automatically force zero-filling of all newly created Buffers in a Node application.
The new Buffer constructor feature set provides a clearer interface in order to make it less likely that an application does not accidentally leak old memory space by improper Buffer creation.
Use of the plain Buffer() constructor is deprecated in the Node.js documentation which explains why the new API should be used. In a future version of Node.js, a warning will be printed to standard error when a Buffer is created using the old constructor as well.
4. Unhandled Promise rejection warnings
One of the criticisms often made against Promises is the ease with which errors can be swallowed and ignored. Since io.js and Node.js v5, the ’unhandledRejection’ and ’rejectionHandled’ events, emitted on the process object, have been available to provide some insight into Promise rejections that are not handled. Due to the semantics of Promise error handling, it’s not as clear as an uncaughtException since a rejection could potentially be stored and handled at a later time. In fact, one of the early candidates for the ’unhandledRejection’ event name was ’possiblyUnhandledRejection’ . Modern idiomatic Promise usage, however, suggests that this is an anti-pattern and that rejection handlers should be placed on a promise near to its creation, either directly on construction or straight afterward.
Since Node.js v6.6.0, the ’unhandledRejection’ event now also causes a warning to be printed to standard error.
$ node > new Promise((resolve, reject) => { setTimeout(() => { reject(new Error('Whoa!')) }, 100) }) Promise { <pending> } > (node:35449) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection (rejection id: 1): Error: Whoa!
This behavior can be turned off (at your peril!) with the --no-warnings command line argument or made more verbose to include stack traces with the --trace-warnings command line argument so you can track down the location of the errant code.
$ node $ node --trace-warnings > new Promise((resolve, reject) => { setTimeout(() => { reject(new Error('Whoa!')) }, 100) }) Promise { <pending> } > (node:35484) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection (rejection id: 1): Error: Whoa! at emitPendingUnhandledRejections (internal/process/promises.js:57:27) at runMicrotasksCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:61:9) at <i>combinedTickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:67:7) at process._tickDomainCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:122:9)
Since a rejection handler could still be handled after Promise creation, via the catch() method, the warning is not emitted or printed until after the next tick of the event loop after the rejection.
$ node > function resolver (resolve, reject) { setTimeout(() => { reject(new Error('Whoa!')) }, 100) } undefined > // rejection handler attached on same tick: > p = new Promise(resolver); p.catch((err) => { console.error(err) }); Promise { <pending> } > Error: Whoa! at Timeout.setTimeout (repl:1:81) at ontimeout (timers.js:365:14) at tryOnTimeout (timers.js:237:5) at Timer.listOnTimeout (timers.js:207:5) > // rejection handler added on a later tick, causing an additional ‘rejectionHandled’ event > p = new Promise(resolver) Promise { <pending> } > (node:35560) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection (rejection id: 1): Error: Whoa! > p.catch((err) => { console.error(err) }); Promise { <pending> } > (node:35560) PromiseRejectionHandledWarning: Promise rejection was handled asynchronously (rejection id: 1) Error: Whoa! at Timeout.setTimeout (repl:1:81) at ontimeout (timers.js:365:14) at tryOnTimeout (timers.js:237:5) at Timer.listOnTimeout (timers.js:207:5)
5. Quick and Safe Temporary Directory Creation
The fs.mkdtemp() API was added to Node core in v5.10.0 to provide a guaranteed way to create a unique temporary directory. The API generates six random characters to be appended behind a required directory prefix argument. This functionality was previously possible with user-created modules like unique-temp-dir although JavaScript implementations of this functionality all suffer from performance problems compared to using native system calls and not all are guaranteed safe.
This API allows you to integrate with system default temporary directories, to absolutely ensure that there won’t be directory conflicts. Having this as a standardized feature in Node.js is a guarantee that the API will be consistent for any module or application that needs to use temporary directories.
6. Timing Attack Prevention
The crypto.timingSafeEqual() API was added to Node core in v6.6.0 to help avoid timing attacks.
The API allows comparison without leaking timing information about the comparison, which could lead to a malicious party being able to infer values being compared. With the addition of this API to the crypto module allows it to be used outside of assert . As a rule of thumb, use this API if you need to compare values, where one is derived from user-input and another is a secret (or derived from a secret).
7. Process Warnings API
The new (Process Warning)(https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v6.x/docs/api/process.html#process_event_warning) API was added in v6.0.0 and adds the ability to listen to process warnings emitted by Node.js, and provides an API to override the default handler, to be used in custom logging system for instance. For example, if you are using a custom JSON logger you can now catch Node core warnings and also have them logged as JSON.
The API can also be used by non-core code to emit non-fatal warnings as appropriate. e.g. process.emitWarning('Something Happened!', 'CustomWarning'); or process.emitWarning('This API is deprecated', 'DeprecationWarning'); .
Currently, Node core emits:
* ’DeprecationWarning’ s when “runtime deprecated” core APIs are used. * ’PromiseRejectionHandledWarning’ when a Promise is rejected but there is not rejection handler attached to receive it. * ’MaxListenersExceededWarning’ when an EventListener has more listeners added than the maxListeners count (10 by default). This is normally an indication of a possible memory leak, where listeners are added but not properly removed when no longer needed.
Warnings are still printed to standard error, but so are custom userland errors:
$ node -e 'process.emitWarning("Something Happened!", "CustomWarning");' (node:33526) CustomWarning: Something Happened!
Note that the warning output also now contains the process ID.
In addition, this API also brings some new command line arguments to adjust warning output:
--no-warnings to disable printing to standard error (the internal ’warning’ event will still fire)
to disable printing to standard error (the internal event will still fire) --no-deprecation to disable printing deprecation warnings (only) to standard error (the internal ’warning’ event will still fire)
to disable printing deprecation warnings (only) to standard error (the internal event will still fire) --trace-warnings to have the stack trace printed to standard error, mirroring error output, useful for finding _where a deprecated API is being used from in your own code or a dependency
to have the stack trace printed to standard error, mirroring error output, useful for finding _where a deprecated API is being used from in your own code or a dependency --trace-deprecation for stack traces just for deprecation warnings
for stack traces for deprecation warnings --throw-deprecation to treat a deprecation warning as a thrown error
$ node -e 'require("sys")' (node:33668) DeprecationWarning: sys is deprecated. Use util instead. $ node --no-deprecation -e 'require("sys")' $ node --trace-deprecation -e 'require("sys")' (node:33681) DeprecationWarning: sys is deprecated. Use util instead. at sys.js:10:6 at NativeModule.compile (bootstrap_node.js:497:7) at Function.NativeModule.require (bootstrap_node.js:438:18) at Function.Module.<i>load (module.js:426:25) at Module.require (module.js:497:17) at require (internal/module.js:20:19) at [eval]:1:1 at ContextifyScript.Script.runInThisContext (vm.js:25:33) at Object.exports.runInThisContext (vm.js:77:17) at Object.<anonymous> ([eval]-wrapper:6:22) $ node --throw-deprecation -e 'require("sys")' internal/process/warning.js:45 throw warning; ^ DeprecationWarning: sys is deprecated. Use util instead. at sys.js:10:6 at NativeModule.compile (bootstrap_node.js:497:7) at Function.NativeModule.require (bootstrap_node.js:438:18) at Function.Module._load (module.js:426:25) at Module.require (module.js:497:17) at require (internal/module.js:20:19) at [eval]:1:1 at ContextifyScript.Script.runInThisContext (vm.js:25:33) at Object.exports.runInThisContext (vm.js:77:17) at Object.<anonymous> ([eval]-wrapper:6:22)
8. Symlink Preservation
Instructs the module loader to preserve symbolic links when resolving and caching modules. When turned on, module paths are _preserved when setting <i>_dirname and __filename and also when using the location to resolve paths to other modules using require() instead of using the “realpath” of the linked file.
The original discussion for this feature used the following example of behavior that doesn’t work when symbolic links aren’t preserved:
Resolves properly:
app index.js //require("dep1") node_modules dep1 index.js //require("dep2") dep2 index.js //console.log('fun!'):
Does not resolve, where the user expectation may be that it should since the link is in an appropriate location.
app index.js //require("dep1") node_modules dep1 -> ../../dep1 dep2 index.js dep1 index.js //require("dep2")
This kind of behavior is sought when developing using peer dependencies that could be linked together rather than manually copied.
Preserving symbolic links was enabled as the default behavior in Node.js v6.0.0, under a mistaken belief that the impact to the ecosystem would be mostly positive. Unfortunately a number of use-cases were discovered via bug reports where the new functionality was breaking applications or causing poor performance because of assumptions made based on how Node previously worked. You can read more about the problem in the original thread which became very active after v6.0.0 was launched and was the focal point of discussion regarding how to approach the problems being reported.
The --preserve-symlinks command line argument was finally added and the default behavior restored in v6.2.0. While the core team have suggested that --preserve-symlinks is only a temporary solution until a better one can be found, so far there have not been proposals for a way forward.
9. V8 Performance Profiling Directly Through Node.js
The new --prof-process command line argument, added in Node.js v5.2.0, runs the built-in formatter for V8 performance profiles. These profiles have been possible with Node.js for some time by using the --prof command line argument that is passed straight to V8.
When an application is run with --prof , a file with a name such as isolate-0x102004c00-v8.log (where the octal number changes with each run) is created for each “isolate” (an isolated V8 VM instance with its own heap) within the application (child processes or use of the vm module may cause an application to use more than a single isolate).
Unfortunately, these profiling log output files are mostly not human-readable and are very verbose:
$ node --prof ./map-bench.js $ wc isolate-0x*.log 3375 4571 419868 isolate-0x102004c00-v8.log 3801 4968 514577 isolate-0x102801000-v8.log 4319 5493 628883 isolate-0x103800a00-v8.log 11495 15032 1563328 total
V8 also ships with what it calls a “tick processor” that is able to parse these files and produce human-readable and useful output. Formerly you would have to install this from npm, such as tick, but the problem for authors and users is that the tick processor needs to be kept up to date with each version of V8 in order to produce helpful output from the log files it produces. Shipping a tick processor within Node.js removes this need and also make a helpful code profiling tool easily accessible for users.
$ node --prof-process isolate-0x103800a00-v8.log Statistical profiling result from isolate-0x103800a00-v8.log, (2819 ticks, 201 unaccounted, 0 excluded). [Shared libraries]: ticks total nonlib name 17 0.6% /usr/lib/system/libsystem_platform.dylib 6 0.2% /usr/lib/system/libsystem_c.dylib [JavaScript]: ticks total nonlib name 112 4.0% 4.0% Stub: StringAddStub_CheckNone_NotTenured 47 1.7% 1.7% Stub: CEntryStub 43 1.5% 1.5% LazyCompile: *runFakeMap /home/rvagg/node/benchmark/es/map-bench.js:49:20 … [C++]: ticks total nonlib name 276 9.8% 9.9% v8::internal::NameDictionaryBase<v8::internal::NameDictionary, v8::internal::NameDictionaryShape>::FindEntry(v8::internal::Handle<v8::internal::Name>) 239 8.5% 8.5% v8::internal::StringTable::LookupKey(v8::internal::Isolate*, v8::internal::HashTableKey*) 127 4.5% 4.5% v8::internal::HashTable<v8::internal::NameDictionary, v8::internal::NameDictionaryShape, v8::internal::Handle<v8::internal::Name> >::Rehash(v8::internal::Handle<v8::int … [Summary]: ticks total nonlib name 372 13.2% 13.3% JavaScript 2223 78.9% 79.5% C++ 43 1.5% 1.5% GC 23 0.8% Shared libraries 201 7.1% Unaccounted …
(Output heavily trimmed to show only some highlights)
Not only can you use the output to see which parts of your code are taking up most of the VMs time and where they are being called from but you also get some insight into how the VM is treating your code. For instance, the * next to JavaScript function names indicates that the code was optimized by V8. More information on how to read this data can be found on the V8 wiki.
Of course, if you would like _live profiling of applications while they run in production, you should try NodeSource’s N|Solid to view similar data in graphical format.
10. Process CPU usage
The process.cpuUsage() API was added to Node core in v6.1.0, and returns an object that contains both user and system CPU time of the current process in microseconds.
The API allows inference of how much time that the CPU was active by checking the total time difference in between two calls of the API, with some additional legwork. |
I don't believe in anything
Interview With Krishnamurti BY CATHERINE INGRAM AND LEONARD JACOBS - East West Journal, July 1983. KRISHNAMURTI. The name has a certain magic about it. Some people have even suggested that it is from the name itself that the man achieves his power and mastery . Y et for me, this magic implied a type of mysticism and had kept me from getting interested in the man. Since first hearing his name and the many adulatory comments about his teaching, I had gained a definite skepticism about Krishnamurti and his message. He had seemed to be yet another Indian "guru" who had the usual criticisms of Westerners. .. which was of little interest to me. So, in spite of the many encouragements to see Krishnamurti and to read his books, I had escaped the enchantment. I had maintained my distance. Nevertheless, when the second volume of his biography arrived in our office, I thought that it was time to finally discover something about this quiet and reclusive man who for over seventy years had influenced so many thousands of people. And after reading this book, Krishnamurti: The Y ears Of Fulfillment by Mary Lutyens (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New Y ork). I realized that this man was not the usual spiritual teacher from the East; he is hardly the guru which his name seems to imply. In fact Krishnamurti is a very simple and humble man who has a brilliance and perceptiveness shared by few others. My next step in discovering more about Krishnamurti came when staff member Catherine Ingram contacted his secretary in anticipation of his upcoming talk in New Y ork City. Not knowing that he rarely grants personal interviews nor cares much for the media, she asked for an interview with him for East West Journal. He agreed to meet with Cathy and me at his hotel room in New Y ork, and my curiosity became even more intense. In preparation for the meeting, I read through a number of Krishnamurti's writings and discovered a most unusual teacher. He deals with the common as pects of human problems. The themes of his talks, many of which have been transcribed and published in book form, are: the limitations of the hum an experience, the constant chattering of our mind, the ongoing experience of fear, and the rarity of true love. These could be the topics of a clergyman, philosopher, or sage—they are also very real concerns for all sensitive human beings. His most consistent message has been that there is no path to truth: "Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest, or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique." And his approach to discovering truth is through the dissolution of concepts and images putting no thought between the |
This post was published in Android Weekly #282 issue
In the previous article I wrote introduction to the Room persistence library from Android Architecture Components:
Today I’d like to introduce you into creating relationships in database with Room. Let’s start!
Introduction
In SQLite databases we’re allowed to specify relationships between objects, so we can bind one or many objects with one or many others objects. It’s called one-to-many and many-to-many relationships.
For example, we can have user in database. Single user can have many repositories. This is one (user) to many (repositories) relation. But on the other hand, every repository can have also it’s own users-contributors, so for every user we can have many repositories, and every repository can have many users. In this case this is called many-to-many relation.
One-to-many relation
Let’s use the example from the previous post and assume that we have User having many Repositories. In this scenario, we’ll have entity for User and Repo. Firstly, we need to create connection between User and Repo, and then we’ll be able to get proper data from the database.
In the first step, we need to create single entity for the User:
import android.arch.persistence.room.Entity;
import android.arch.persistence.room.PrimaryKey;
@Entity
public class User {
@PrimaryKey public final int id;
public final String login;
public final String avatarUrl;
public User(int id, String login, String avatarUrl) {
this.id = id;
this.login = login;
this.avatarUrl = avatarUrl;
}
}
If you’re not sure what @Entity and @PrimaryKey annotations are for, you can check my previous post.
For Repository model, we’ll reuse the Repo class from the previous post with a single, but significant, change:
import android.arch.persistence.room.Entity;
import android.arch.persistence.room.ForeignKey;
import android.arch.persistence.room.PrimaryKey;
import static android.arch.persistence.room.ForeignKey.CASCADE;
@Entity(foreignKeys = @ForeignKey(entity = User.class,
parentColumns = "id",
childColumns = "userId",
onDelete = CASCADE))
public class Repo {
@PrimaryKey public final int id;
public final String name;
public final String url;
public final int userId;
public Repo(final int id, String name, String url,
final int userId) {
this.id = id;
this.name = name;
this.url = url;
this.userId = userId;
}
}
If you compare this Repo model with the one from the previous post, you’ll notice two differences:
foreignKeys parameter in the @Entity annotation
parameter in the @Entity annotation additional field for userId
Adding foreignKeys means we create connection between this entity and some other class. In this parameter we declare parentColumns, which is name of the id column from User class and childColumns, which is the name of the user id column in Repo class.
Creating this connection is not necessary for having relation, but helps you to define what should happen with the Repo row in database in case of User row delete or update. That’s what is the last parameter for: onDelete = CASCADE . We tell specifically that if user row will be deleted, we’d like to delete also all of it repositories. You can also define similar solution with onUpdate = CASCADE parameter. You can read about other possible solutions in ForeignKey documentation.
Now, after we have our models prepared, we need to create proper SQL query to select repositories for specific user.
SQL query
DAOs are the best place to create our SQL statements. Our RepoDao may look like this:
import android.arch.persistence.room.Dao;
import android.arch.persistence.room.Delete;
import android.arch.persistence.room.Insert;
import android.arch.persistence.room.Query;
import android.arch.persistence.room.Update;
import java.util.List;
@Dao
public interface RepoDao {
@Insert
void insert(Repo repo);
@Update
void update(Repo... repos);
@Delete
void delete(Repo... repos);
@Query("SELECT * FROM repo")
List<Repo> getAllRepos();
@Query("SELECT * FROM repo WHERE userId=:userId")
List<Repo> findRepositoriesForUser(final int userId);
}
From the top, we have three methods to insert, update and delete Repo (you can read more about them in my previous post) and two methods for getting data — first one for getting all repositories, and the second for what we actually want — getting repositories for the specific user.
We’ll also need complementary UserDao with methods for insert, update and remove:
import android.arch.persistence.room.Dao;
import android.arch.persistence.room.Delete;
import android.arch.persistence.room.Insert;
import android.arch.persistence.room.Update;
@Dao
public interface UserDao {
@Insert
void insert(User... user);
@Update
void update(User... user);
@Delete
void delete(User... user);
}
Our database class, RepoDatabase, also needs to be updated with proper model classes in @Database annotation and additional abstract method for getting UserDao:
@Database(entities = { Repo.class, User.class },
version = 1)
public abstract class RepoDatabase extends RoomDatabase {
...
public abstract RepoDao getRepoDao();
public abstract UserDao getUserDao();
}
And that’s it! Now we can use database to insert users and repositories:
RepoDao repoDao = RepoDatabase
.getInstance(context)
.getRepoDao();
UserDao userDao = RepoDatabase
.getInstance(context)
.getUserDao();
userDao.insert(new User(1,
"Jake Wharton",
"https://avatars0.githubusercontent.com/u/66577"));
repoDao.insert(new Repo(1,
"square/retrofit",
"https://github.com/square/retrofit",
1));
List<Repo> repositoriesForUser = repoDao.
findRepositoriesForUser(1);
Many-to-many relation
In SQL many-to-many (or M:N) relation requires having a join table with foreign keys back to the other entities. We can change example from the previous section, so now not only every user can have many repositories, but also every repository can belong to many users!
To do this, we’ll go back to the simplest versions of our models:
import android.arch.persistence.room.Entity;
import android.arch.persistence.room.PrimaryKey;
@Entity
public class User {
@PrimaryKey
public final int id;
public final String login;
public final String avatarUrl;
public User(int id, String login, String avatarUrl) {
this.id = id;
this.login = login;
this.avatarUrl = avatarUrl;
}
}
And the same for Repo model:
import android.arch.persistence.room.Entity;
import android.arch.persistence.room.PrimaryKey;
@Entity
public class Repo {
@PrimaryKey
public final int id;
public final String name;
public final String url;
public Repo(int id, String name, String url) {
this.id = id;
this.name = name;
this.url = url;
}
}
In the next step we’ll create our join table — UserRepoJoin class
import android.arch.persistence.room.Entity;
import android.arch.persistence.room.ForeignKey;
@Entity(tableName = "user_repo_join",
primaryKeys = { "userId", "repoId" },
foreignKeys = {
@ForeignKey(entity = User.class,
parentColumns = "id",
childColumns = "userId"),
@ForeignKey(entity = Repo.class,
parentColumns = "id",
childColumns = "repoId")
})
public class UserRepoJoin {
public final int userId;
public final int repoId;
public UserRepoJoin(final int userId, final int repoId) {
this.userId = userId;
this.repoId = repoId;
}
}
At first glance it may look horrible, but give it a second chance 🙏
What do we have here?
tableName parameter for giving our table some specific name
parameter for giving our table some specific name primaryKeys parameter for having many primary keys — in SQL we can have not only a single primary key, but also set of primary keys! It’s called composite primary key and it’s used for declaring that every row in our join table should be unique for every pair of userId and repoId
parameter for having many primary keys — in SQL we can have not only a single primary key, but also set of primary keys! It’s called and it’s used for declaring that every row in our join table should be unique for every of and foreignKey parameter is for declaring an array of foreign keys to the other tables. Here we say that userId from our join table is the child id for User class and similarly for Repo model
Now, when we declared foreign keys, we’re ready to prepare SQL statement for inner join:
import android.arch.persistence.room.Dao;
import android.arch.persistence.room.Insert;
import android.arch.persistence.room.Query;
import java.util.List;
@Dao
public interface UserRepoJoinDao {
@Insert
void insert(UserRepoJoin userRepoJoin);
@Query("SELECT * FROM user INNER JOIN user_repo_join ON
user.id=user_repo_join.userId WHERE
user_repo_join.repoId=:repoId")
List<User> getUsersForRepository(final int repoId);
@Query("SELECT * FROM repo INNER JOIN user_repo_join ON
repo.id=user_repo_join.repoId WHERE
user_repo_join.userId=:userId")
List<Repo> getRepositoriesForUsers(final int userId);
}
This way we can get both users for repository, and repositories for user. The last step is to change our RepoDatabase:
@Database(entities = { Repo.class, User.class, UserRepoJoin.class },
version = 1)
public abstract class RepoDatabase extends RoomDatabase {
...
public abstract RepoDao getRepoDao();
public abstract UserDao getUserDao();
public abstract UserRepoJoinDao getUserRepoJoinDao();
}
And now we can insert users and repositories into database:
RepoDao repoDao = RepoDatabase
.getInstance(context)
.getRepoDao();
UserDao userDao = RepoDatabase
.getInstance(context)
.getUserDao();
UserRepoJoinDao userRepoJoinDao = RepoDatabase
.getInstance(context)
.getUserRepoJoinDao();
userDao.insert(new User(1,
"Jake Wharton",
"https://avatars0.githubusercontent.com/u/66577"));
repoDao.insert(new Repo(1,
"square/retrofit",
"https://github.com/square/retrofit"));
userRepoJoinDao.insert(new UserRepoJoin(1, 1));
Using @Relation annotation
There’s also another way of providing relationships using Room — with a @Relation annotation. You can declare such a relation only inside non-entity class. Let’s look at the example:
@Entity
public class User {
@PrimaryKey public final int id;
public final String login;
public final String avatarUrl;
public User(int id, String login, String avatarUrl) {
this.id = id;
this.login = login;
this.avatarUrl = avatarUrl;
}
}
@Entity
public class Repo {
@PrimaryKey public final int id;
public final String name;
public final String url;
public final int userId;
public Repo(int id, String name, String url, int userId) {
this.id = id;
this.name = name;
this.url = url;
this.userId = userId;
}
}
Above we have simply our model classes — User and Repo with userId field. Now we need to create our non-entity model class:
public class UserWithRepos {
@Embedded public User user;
@Relation(parentColumn = "id",
entityColumn = "userId") public List<Repo> repoList;
}
Here we have two new annotations:
@Embedded is for having nested fields — this way we’ll have our User class embedded into our UserWithRepos class
@Relation is for having relation with other model class. Those two parameters say that parentColumn name from User class is id and entityColumn name from Repo class is userId.
This way we can use proper SQL statement in our DAO to select users with all their repositories:
@Dao
public interface UserWithReposDao {
@Query("SELECT * from user")
public List<UserWithRepos> getUsersWithRepos();
}
This is the easiest way, however, you can’t set action upon deleting or updating parents as it was with @ForeignKey annotation.
Conclusion
That’s all! I hope after this post you gained some valuable knowledge about creating object relationships in Room. If you have any suggestion, feel free to comment.
And if you really liked this post and want to make me feel happy, don’t forget to 👏!
In this series there are also:
Android Architecture Components: Room — Introduction
Android Architecture Components: Room — Custom Types
Android Architecture Components: Room — Migration
Android Architecture Components: ViewModel
Android Architecture Components: LiveData
Android Architecture Components: How to use LiveData with Data Binding? |
William J. Burns hasn’t quite finished what he started. But if President Barack Obama cuts a deal with Iran in the coming weeks to curtail its nuclear program, the soft-spoken Burns will—deservedly—get no small share of the credit for getting the negotiations started after years of stalemate. Burns, along with Jake Sullivan, a close adviser to Hillary Clinton, began the secret talks with the Iranians in Oman, talks that never became public until late 2013, when the months of maneuvering yielded an agreement to begin negotiating in earnest. It was a fitting capstone to a career that had Burns rise to the No. 2 post in the State Department, only the second career Foreign Service officer ever to do so; he retired to much insider fanfare last fall, hailed as a “diplomat’s diplomat” who had served in just about every sensitive posting in Washington, as well as ambassador to Russia as Vladimir Putin went from tough to tougher and U.S. envoy to Jordan in the midst of Middle East tumult. Politico editor Susan Glasser met recently with Burns, now head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to talk about the heated politics of the Iran talks, Putin and what he learned from all those secretaries of state.
William J. Burns William J. Burns is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously served as U.S. deputy secretary of state. More >
Susan Glasser: So you have worked with—so how many Secretaries of State, 10? And how would you compare them?
Bill Burns: Jim Baker was as good a negotiator as I’ve seen in a secretary of state. He’s so methodical and thorough and well prepared. And you saw that with German reunification, and a number of other issues, that really have born his stamp. Hillary Clinton, you see some of that same focus on preparation, much like Baker; the two of them, when they walked into a room, were almost always as well prepared as anybody else in the room. You know, the ability to think strategically at least, look over the horizon a little bit. And John Kerry has energy and drive and persistence as a negotiator, which is essential, and Baker demonstrated that as well. Colin Powell’s a wonderful leader. I had worked for him at the NSC staff first, and then later when he was secretary. He invested a lot in the State Department as an institution, people remember very positively to this day, and I learned a lot just about the basic qualities of good leadership from him too.
SG: All of them have this shared challenge of how to get the White House to pay attention to them. What were the different approaches there? There have been periods of clearly much more conflict; during the Baker years, they were much closer to the White House. Under Powell and Rice, clearly there was a lot more conflict embedded in the relationship. You were one of the authors of this famous memo—the “Perfect Storm Memo” —about Iraq.
WJB: Yes, this was an issue where Powell was trying to be thorough and thoughtful about—in the run-up to the war in 2003—about thinking through the second- and third-order consequences of that kind of action, and had asked us at one point to try to think through everything that could go wrong—hence the title, “Perfect Storm.” A couple of the other guys I worked with—Ryan Crocker and David Pearce—did more of the work than I did. But collectively, I think, I read it a couple of years ago, we got it about half right.
SG: What was the half that you had right?
WJB: In broad terms, that once you took the lid off of a terribly repressive political system in Iraq, which Saddam Hussein had run by brute force, all the kinds of sectarian passions that could flow out of that. That’s not rocket science to anticipate that, but I think the depth of the problem is not something that was well appreciated in Washington beforehand. I’m not trying to pretend that we got it entirely right, but we were trying—at least it was an honest effort to anticipate some of those challenges.
SG: Thinking about the continuity of some Washington debates, the cycles of debate—Russia is probably the greatest example of that really, in the last two decades. First of all, like, where do you think things are headed at this point? With the assassination of Boris Nemtsov it almost suggests that it’s become much more unpredictable. The future may always be unpredictable in Russia—but that really, we don’t even know what trajectory it’s on.
WJB: There’s a lot of truth to that. Boris Nemtsov’s murder is a pretty cruel reminder of how dark the political atmosphere has become in Russia. It’s not the first of those kind of murders. When I was an ambassador to Russia, I remember speaking at [reporter] Anna Politkovskaya’s funeral. And I remember being struck by the fact that we had two or three thousand mourners, and not a single senior Russian government official. But Nemtsov is clearly the most prominent figure to be murdered. And I think what it says about Russia in a sense is, you had President Putin in his first two terms as president, including when I was ambassador from ’05 to ‘08, who had established a kind of rough social contract, where the deal was: I’ll ensure that economic growth picks up and standards of living rise if everyone else stays out of politics. I think that began to slow down, and then stagnate, as a result of everything from falling oil prices to corruption, to the sanctions that were produced by aggression in Ukraine. And so, in his third term he’s looked for a different way to mobilize people and nationalism was the answer. But not just any kind of nationalism, a chauvinism which is very much us against them, which has just gotten more and more aggravated and sharpened as a result of the war in Ukraine. And so you create an atmosphere, in which I don’t know who was responsible for Nemtsov’s murder, but where that kind of unpredictability and violence becomes more and more common. And that’s a dangerous thing for Russia, both internally, but it’s also dangerous I think in terms of foreign policy, too.
SG: Here in Washington, did we fundamentally misread Putin? Or has he shifted?
WJB: No, I mean I think hindsight is always a more perfect guide. There’s this kind of steady accumulation of grievance, the sense that history in the last 20 years, not just for Putin, but for lots of thoughtful Russians, is a story of the West taking advantage of Russian’s moment of historic weakness; the West treating Russia as less than a first-class citizen globally; of the West trying to deny Russia its entitlement, as lots of Russians see it, to a sphere of influence, in its own region. You can agree or disagree, I’m not arguing you accept or indulge that kind of point of view, but, understanding it is important, and I think that is a trend line that you can see going back seven, eight, nine years. Now that’s not an argument against the effort [to reset relations] in the first couple of years of the Obama administration.
Even to this day, you look at the Iran nuclear issue, or a few other ones, arguably on counterterrorism, potentially at some point in the future on Syria or other issues, there could be some room to work together. And, the reality with managing a relationship with a very complicated, unpredictable country like Russia, is that you don’t have the luxury of ignoring it, either.
SG: So Iran is a good example—this process of negotiating with the Iranians has continued in the exact same time period that the bottom has fallen out of our direct relationship with Russia, the Russians have invaded and taken over Crimea, they have effectively invaded Eastern Ukraine, and by the way, would you say that’s a fair characterization? What is your characterization of Russian military activity in Ukraine?
WJB: Well, it’s obvious aggression, I mean, that the Russians have mounted first in Crimea and now in a wider swath of Southeastern Ukraine, I don’t think there’s any question about that, about direct Russian involvement. People have been pretty direct about this being aggression, and a violation of sovereignty. And a lot of norms that matter in the 21st century.
SG: So why haven’t they tried to blow up the Iran talks then? Or are they waiting?
WJB: Well, I mean, I think Russians are capable of looking at their interests, and they don’t have an interest in a nuclear-armed Iran. That’s not to say that they share our interests exactly with regard to this Iranian leadership or this Iranian regime. But I think on that score there’s a fair amount of common ground. And I think they’ve been constructive, as partners in that effort, along with the Europeans and the Chinese. So we’ll see. There’s still a lot of ground to be covered in the negotiations, but so far the Russians have played a constructive role. One example: their willingness if this is ever worked out in an agreement, to take a significant part of the current Iranian stockpile. Which would be a big contribution to reaching an agreement.
SG: If they wanted to be unconstructive, what would they do? Would they resurrect the S-300 sale?
WJB: Yes, that’s one thing that could be done. Sanctions busting of one kind or another is another example.
SG: So, you have had the chance to engage more directly with the Iranians in the last couple of years than we thought was possible. Has there been anything that surprised you in those dealings with them? Were some of our assumptions wrong? What have you learned from dealing directly face to face with them, as opposed to through intermediaries.
WJB: Well, the Iranian government leadership is a big complicated operation with lots of points of view. And the Supreme Leader himself is clearly very suspicious of dealing with the United States, in part because it’s a whole system that’s been animated by suspicion of the U.S. over the years. But Iranians with whom we dealt in the form of secret bilateral negotiations, and then those that I’ve been involved in since then, are tough professionals, they have a feel for the world outside Iran, and they’re committed obviously to try to get the best deal possible for Iran. But also in the run-up to the interim agreement, the Joint Plan of Action, which we concluded at the end of 2013, it was clear that they were committed to trying to take a concrete step toward a comprehensive solution. And so, you know, after 35 years without sustained direct diplomatic engagement, it relatively quickly become clear that you could produce tangible results. Now whether we can take the bigger leap—whether the administration can take the bigger leap—to a comprehensive agreement still remains to be seen.
SG: So what’s your current sense of the chances, and will we really—do you think we’ll figure it out one way or the other this month?
WJB: Yes, both the president and Secretary Kerry have been pretty clear there’s a sense of urgency here in terms of the timetable, and I think the Iranians seem to understand that too. There’s a lot of ground that has to be covered, on some very important issues. And so, you know we’ll just have to see.
SG: Do you—I know we haven’t figured out what the actual contours of the deal are—but in terms of the negotiations that we’ve had up to this point, where their positions is, where our position is, has there been anything surprising? A lot of people talked about what the basis of a deal would be, really for a number of years. That’s kind of what we’re talking about, right?
WJB: It is. Some of the contours have been debated for a long time. First, if you take a step back, it really is important to continue to embed how we deal with the nuclear issue on a wider strategy toward Iran. The reality is, Iranian behavior is likely to be threatening, whether it’s in support of Hezbollah or it’s Syria or Yemen or elsewhere, for some time to come. And so it’s very important for us to continue to work with partners in the region, in the Gulf, and elsewhere, to reassure them and to make clear that we’re clear-eyed about all those threats, and on the nuclear issue, the further reality is that a nuclear-armed Iran is just going to multiply exponentially all of those other dangers. And a strong negotiated agreement, I really do believe, is the best of the available alternatives on the nuclear issue.
The ingredients for that are obviously easier to describe than they are to achieve, but it’s first to sharply constrain an Iranian civil nuclear program over a long duration. Second, to have very tight monitoring and verification and inspection procedures. Third, is to phase sanctions relief in such a way that you also have kind of snap-back provisions, so that if there’s a violation, you’re able to reapply sanctions. And then fourth, is to be able to cut off the potential pathways to a bomb, whether it’s through uranium or plutonium production, and to ensure as has been discussed a lot, a one-year breakout time. Current breakout is probably two or three months, and this is again one-year breakout, if Iran decided to produce enough fissile material for a single weapon.
Listen, I understand the argument for no enrichment capacity at all. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have any domestic enrichment program, and the United States has argued in lots of other circumstances that people ought not to do domestic enrichment, because it’s not commercially sensible. The reality is that the Iranians have developed over the course of the last decade or more the know-how to enrich, they know their way around basic enrichment technology, and you can’t wish that away, you can’t dismantle it away, you can’t bomb it away. And so the reality is that if you want to get a negotiated agreement, the question is how to constrain it, verify it over a long duration, so that you have strong confidence that they’re not going to break out and try to develop a weapon. And so that they’re deterred in thinking abut that prospect in the future. So I understand the argument for no enrichment, but I just think that train left the station.
SG: Do you think that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and the political uproar here in Washington meaningfully, in any way, impacts the prospects for a deal?
WJB: I don’t know, I mean the only thing I would say is a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship is obviously very much in the interests of Americans and Israelis, especially at a moment of such uncertainty in the region as a whole. Historically, that relationship has not been partisan and I think the way in which the speech to Congress was orchestrated and the timing of it was really unfortunate. Certainly if an agreement is reached, I’m sure the administration will work very closely with Congress to make its case. But there’s a lot of ground that has to be covered between here and actually getting to an agreement.
The other thing, too, is to keep a sense of perspective. Even when you think back to the end of 2012, and we finished the interim agreement, there was huge criticism at the time, including from Prime Minister Netanyahu, that this was the deal of the century for the Iranians. The reality is that turned out to be a pretty solid agreement. It froze and rolled back in some significant ways the Iranian program; it gave us intrusive verification measures we didn’t have before which provided a good foundation on which to build some of those measures for a comprehensive agreement. And in return for relatively modest sanctions relief that did not, as many of the critics suggested, would cause the overall edifice of sanctions to collapse. And so, I think people need to keep a sense of perspective as they look at all the early criticism of an agreement that’s not done yet, and compare it to what the atmosphere was like in November of 2013.
This interview originally appeared in POLITICO. |
Woodlands woman uses home to distribute diabetes supplies during Harvey
T1 Team Texas, a grassroots effort that began in The Woodlands, collected and donated supplies to families who did not have access to insulin or other items because of Hurricane Harvey. T1 Team Texas, a grassroots effort that began in The Woodlands, collected and donated supplies to families who did not have access to insulin or other items because of Hurricane Harvey. Photo: Submitted Photo: Submitted Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Woodlands woman uses home to distribute diabetes supplies during Harvey 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
When Hurricane Harvey hit Southeast Texas last month, thousands of diabetics lost access to insulin and other supplies they needed simply to survive.
Just like other Texans who had suffered terrible losses during the worst storm to hit the Texas coast in years, many of them were stranded and unable to leave their homes. The clock was ticking because without insulin, they faced life-threatening challenges.
But a Woodlands nurse and a Cypress diabetes advocate saw the need and immediately started coordinating efforts through social media to connect supplies, such as pumps, glucose test strips and insulin, to those affected.
"We were like a group of people where literally a text message can change your life," said Anne Imber, a diabetes advocate, who took on the role of accessing supplies and needs.
Imber and Kelley Champ Crumpler, a Woodlands-area nurse who specializes in Type 1 diabetes in adolescents, teamed up with Dr. Stephen Ponder, an endocrinologist from Temple, to form T1 Team Texas, a grassroots project to get insulin and diabetes supplies to areas along the Gulf Coast where they were unavailable.
Crumpler, who lives in Cochran's Crossing, started collecting donated supplies inside her Woodlands home, "easily $1.5 million" worth, including more than 110 pounds of insulin donated by Insulin for Life, a nonprofit organization that assists diabetics.
"In the very beginning, there was really no mobility other than in their own community," said Crumpler, noting that many areas of Houston were underwater. "We were just coordinating chaos."
In many cases, pharmacies and doctors' offices were either closed or didn't have the items.
T1 Team Texas began connecting people who had supplies with people who needed them in their own communities. Imber created a spreadsheet and collected contact information.
Eventually, the group had a team of "runners" who'd brave the flooded streets to deliver supplies all over Houston or to Port Arthur, Cleveland, Katy, Pearland and anywhere else there was a need.
In one case, Crumpler, a type 1 diabetic herself, found a mother in Spring whose son did not have enough insulin to make it through the weekend.
"My fiancé and I got some from my supply," Crumpler said. "It took us two hours to drive 11 miles. So we were able to get it to them. The mom was like, 'now I can sleep …'"
The group, with dozens of volunteers, were nonstop.
"I slept maybe four hours a night," Imber said.
For five days after the storm, Crumpler couldn't send or receive mail, but that didn't mean people weren't trying to send the group supplies.
Shipments of insulin and other diabetic supplies – some of it highly specialized items that required prescriptions – from Australia, United Kingdom and all over the country – began arriving at the College Station clinic she works in with her ex-husband.
Volunteers would drive the shipments from the area and bring them to her "distribution center" in The Woodlands, one of three the group established to help direct supplies.
About 2.8 million people in Texas live with diabetes, said Michelle Kirkwood, American Diabetes Association communications director.
The ADA stepped in and donated more than 100,000 syringes and five palettes of insulin. But when the delivery trailer got stuck in floodwaters on Interstate 10 about 200 miles away of Houston, Crumpler and her group sent runners to collect the supplies, Kirkwood said.
There was some debate in the diabetes community that T1 Team Texas should have waited and gone through official channels to distribute the much needed supplies, so that patients in need could get prescriptions from physicians.
But "official channels" didn't start to arrive until eight days after the storm.
"Those of us with medical licenses were saying, 'These people have no other choice,'" Crumpler said. "It's a very desperate situation. Had we not stepped in, people literally would have died. Children would have died."
Crumpler has since started her own nonprofit and plans to continue helping diabetics.
The experience has humbled them, said Imber and Crumpler. They don't regret it.
"This was a literally a life or death situation," Crumpler said. "I felt compelled to help." |
Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)
- Formed in the 1990s to fight Algeria's secular government
- Wants to rid North Africa of western influence and impose sharia
- Estimated to have amassed $100 million in kidnapping ransoms
- Most members are from outside Mali
Abdelhamid Abou Zeid Abdelhamid Abou Zeid
- Also known as Abid Hammadou
- A top leader of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb
- Designated a terrorist by U.S. and U.N.
- Blamed for several kidnappings for ransom of tourists in the Sahel
- Believe to be behind execution of a British and French hostage
- Led attack on Mauritanian military outpost in 2005
- Established AQIM camp in Mali to train terrorists
French and Chadian forces battling Islamist militants in Mali's remote northeastern mountains are believed to have killed a top al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb commander known as Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, though the fate of at least four French hostages that Abou Zeid was thought to be holding nearby remains unknown.Chad's president says Abou Zeid and another al-Qaida commander were among those killed in ongoing military operations in the area. French authorities are not confirming the reports.The Algerian-born jihadist, if his death is confirmed, could be a significant blow in the ongoing war against the al-Qaida-linked rebels who seized control of northern Mali last April.Zeid has been described as inflexible, cruel, violent, audacious, intelligent, radical and without pity. He was born in Algeria and commands a southern battalion of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, known as AQIM. His command is known to be one of AQIM's most radical factions.A smuggler by trade, Abou Zeid fought in a succession of armed Algerian Islamist movements in the 1990s. He headed south to Mali about a decade ago as part of the Algerian-led Salafist movement that would ultimately rebrand itself as AQIM in 2006.Mauritanian journalist and AQIM expert Isselmou Ould Moustapha said in killing Abou Zeid, the French and allied forces in Mali would be knocking out a formidable enemy.He says Abou Zeid is one of the "most daring and determined" commanders that coalition forces currently face in Mali, even though Abou Zeid does not currently hold the post of "emir of the Sahara," or the chief of AQIM southern operations.Moustapha says over the past decade, Abou Zeid has taken on the Mauritanian, Nigerien and Malian armies and made a name for himself engineering kidnappings in 2008, 2009 and 2010. He characterizes Abou Zeid as a powerful field commander who could mobilize fighters as determined as him.He rose to international infamy for his involvement in kidnapping dozens of European hostages in the Sahel, beginning in 2003.The operations took in millions of dollars in ransoms, money that analysts say was key to funding AQIM, while all the while being known as a tough negotiator.Abou Zeid is believed to be behind the executions of two hostages: British tourist Edwin Dyer in 2009 and French aid worker Michel Germaneau in 2010. |
The biggest problem many bands face is the uphill battle of trying to get people to attend their shows. One of the most important ways to get actual humans into a venue watching your band is by transforming your show into an event. A show is something that happens at three different venues five nights a week. An event is worth clearing your schedule for. Such an event occurred on Thursday, Jan. 30th at Mud and Water. The two bands, Speakeasy and Cafe Au Lait, gave Baton Rouge an event not only worth attending but worth remembering as well.
The funny thing about building an event is that it rests almost entirely on the shoulders of the bands and their team. As an Internet generation we have become to dependent on social media as our sole source of advertising. Advertising needs to be more than just a Facebook event. Radio, print, and posters are tools that should be utilized to create the proper buzz that a successful event requires. For this event the bands recruited my favorite local taste makers at Jive Flamingo to sponsor the evening. Cafe Au Lait and Speakeasy came together and set up an early sound check with Mud and Water, showed up on time, and were ready to put on a show well before the audience started to meander into the venue.
The night started early with MC Luke St. John warming up the crowd, setting the mood with engaging slam poetry. He then announced Cafe Au Lait. The band promptly took the stage with a simple line up, guitar, bass, keyboard, drums and two lead singers. They filled the room with their anything but simple signature smooth soul; baby making music to say the least. Both singers are right on point. Both bands identify as Neo Soul. I find Neo Soul to be an odd label for a band like this. This “new” soul sounds a lot like the best of a long history of soul, and Cafe Au Lait reaches deep into this rich past. The history is not used as a crutch and the music maintains a freshness that doesn’t ignore the energy R&B and Hip Hop have given us in the past thirty years. A great artist steals from many different sources and Cafe Au Lait has robbed every bank in town. Soul, Funk, R&B, Hip Hop, Jazz, and Rock are all a part of their pallet. Several guest musicians joined in the festivities for a tune or two including members of Baton Rouge’s very own Captain Green.
After a fat hour and a half set the members of Speakeasy joined Cafe Au Lait on stage as if appearing magically from the depths of the night’s mist. The two groups jammed together for several tunes, then Cafe Au Lait disappeared as magically as Speakeasy appeared. This allowed the audience to move seamlessly into the second act of the night without even the slightest break in the music.
Speakeasy is a little louder and more ruckus. The smooth, sultry jams of Cafe Au Lait melted flawlessly into a big brassy R&B groove. This was music to dance to. Speakeasy is another Neo Soul band doing a similar impossible trick of borrowing old and reinventing new. AM, Speakeasy’s singer, is a power house of infectious energy. The basic band line-up includes a trombone and, get this, a vibraphone (I had to be told what it was.) The thing Speakeasy seems to represent so effortlessly is the Neo Soul genre’s ability to pull from the most complex rhythmic sources (jazz/ funk) and distil it down to a completely digestible, unpretentious groove that you just can’t help to move to. Speakeasy played another extended set, and the event concluded with all the members of both bands and Luke St. John taking the stage together for a huge finale. The music never stopped.
This was a treat. This was a joy. This was an event. Andrew from Cafe Au Lait described an event as, “A conscience effort to put forth a unified intention.” Simple, concise, and beautiful. These bands didn’t just play a show. They got together, put forth a little extra effort, and delivered, as a unit, one singular idea. It showed respect for the audience that paid their good money to come out and hear music. Really, the last, and most important thing, needed to turn a show into an event is for the bands to be great. These bands had greatness coming out of their ears, and into mine.
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KABUL, Afghanistan — The American military claimed responsibility and expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday.
The attack, which took place Friday night, was first revealed by the governor of Helmand Province, Muhammad Gulab Mangal, on Monday. His spokesman, Dawoud Ahmadi, said that after an investigation they had determined that a family home in the Sangin district had been attacked by mistake in the American airstrike, which was called in to respond to a Taliban attack.
Mr. Mangal summoned the American regional commander, Maj. Gen. Charles M. Gurganus of the Marines, to complain, and General Gurganus apologized, Mr. Ahmadi said.
A spokesman for the United States military in Helmand, Lt. Col. Stewart Upton, said, “We don’t have any issues with the governor’s statement.” He said American officials had been aware of the deaths and had immediately started an investigation.
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“We expressed regret over the incident, and we’re investigating to determine how this happened,” Colonel Upton said. |
The biggest news this week has got to be that Wicked Weed Brewing is coming to Texas. Now, Wicked Weed’s distribution, up to this point, has been fairly limited outside of their state (and very few states even get it). So, this is a big “get” for Texas. Along with Wicked Weed, Anthem Brewing (OKC) also received brewery approval.
On to the beer labels, Last Stand is starting to get their bottles approved. You should expect to see their two bombers on our local shelves soon. They are also hosting their first anniversary party this Saturday. As of this week, they have moved their taproom into their adjacent building so that they have more space and can run the brewery while having the taproom open. I still think they are a brewery that has a lot of potential going forward.
Then you will notice Montucky Cold Snack. It is made by a brewery that donates 8% of all of their profits to charity and you will find them mainly in the Pacific Northwest. It is not meant to compete with all of the IPAs of the world, but it is taking aim at the PBR drinkers. Flood Distributing has supposedly picked this beer up and you should see it on the shelves in the near future. It will be a good alternative and should be around the same price point as many of the other macro beers at your local dive bar.
This week’s TABC Label Approvals:
K = Keg
B = Large format bottle
bb = 16oz format bottle
b = Small format bottle
c = Small format (12oz) can
cc = 16oz format can
C = Larger format can
Associated Brewing – Montucky Cold Snack (c, cc)
Audacity – Checkered Past (c, K)
Audacity – Spring Break (c, K)
B52 – Berliner (K)
Bayou Teche – Ragin Cajuns Genuine Louisiana (b, K)
Big Sky – Shake A Day IPA (b, K)
Blackwater – Mulligan (c, K)
Blackwater – Border Town (c, K)
Boston Beer Company – Samuel Adams Ella Blanc IPL (b, K)
Breckenridge – Kolsch (b, K)
Brooklyn – Improved Old Fashioned (B)
Circle – Devil’s Night Irish Stout (b, K)
Dej Buh Stesti – Bohemian Stare Pivo (B, BB)
Friends & Allies – Urban Chicken Belgian Table Beer (K)
Hops & Grain – Volumes of Oak Porter Aged in Barrels with Raspberries (K)
Hops & Grain – Dry Irish Stout (K)
Hops & Grain – Dry Hopped Saison (K)
Huff Brewing – French Oak Pale Ale (K)
Huff Brewing – Orange Blossom Saison (K)
Karbach – Bourbon Barrel Hellfighter with Chocolate (K)
Kona – Lavaman Red (b, K)
Last Stand – Belgian Style Pale Ale (B)
Last Stand – Coffee Porter (B)
Lazy Magnolia – Jeez Louise Pepper Pale Ale (b, K)
Microcerveceria Calavera – Mjolnir Breakfast IPA (b, K)
Microcerveceria Calavera – Morning Star Breakfast IPA (b, K)
New Republic – Whipsaw Double IPA (K)
New Republic – Kadigan (K)
New Republic – Dammit Jim Amber (K)
New Republic – Russian Imperial Stout (K)
New Republic – Coffee Porter (K)
New Republic – Marlinspike Porter (K)
No Label – Peanut Butter Chocolate Time Imperial Stout (B, K)
North Coast – Old Stock 2014 Collar Reserve (K)
Peticolas – The Governor English Style Strong Ale (K)
Peticolas – Adopted Arrogant Bastard American Strong Ale (K)
Peticolas – Turn Out The Lights Russian Imperial Stout (K)
Redhook – KCCO Gold Lager (K)
Redhook – American Pale Ale (b, K)
Redhook – Long Hammer (b, cc, B, K)
Saint Arnold – 5 O’Clock Pils (c, K)
Ska – Bump N’ Grind Cream Stout (K)
Brewery Approvals:
Note: I have only been putting new brewery approvals here – anything that is just getting reapproved, I do not list. Along with this, any macro brewery that is approved, I do not put. An example of this would be things like a South Korean macro brewery.
(For TX breweries: B = Brewery, BP = Brewpub)
Wicked Weed Brewing – NC
Urban Farmhouse Brewing (aka Anthem Brewing) – OKC
The Bruery (2nd address for brewing, so nothing new) – CA
Heller-Brau Trum – Germany
Select Labels:
TABC Label and Brewery Approvals March 4 2016 |
'Early School Leavers' Face Dismal Social And Economic Prospects
Enlarge this image toggle caption Lynne Sladky/AP Lynne Sladky/AP
Add to the list of worrisome economic trends what economists call "NEETs" — young people who are Not in Education, Employment or Training.
Their numbers are growing, now 40 million in the 35 member countries of the OECD — the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. And two-thirds of them are not actively looking for work.
The figures come from the biennial OECD report, Society at a Glance 2016.
In the United States, 14.4 percent of young people age 15-29 are NEETs, according to the OECD.
This report follows others that illustrate how the Great Recession disproportionately affected young people. It says one in 10 jobs held by workers under 30 have disappeared. And the OECD says the trend could affect economic mobility, as well as national and economic security for years to come.
In particular, the report highlights the dismal prospects of "early school leavers," young people who do not complete secondary school.
Imara Jones, an economist who looks at race and gender, says for as many as one in seven young people, "that means that they're totally outside of the economic lifestyle of the country, any kind of life of the country."
The OECD gives a snapshot of the report.
The high number of NEETs also represents a major economic cost, estimated at between USD 360 billion and USD 605 billion, equivalent to between 0.9% and 1.5% of OECD GDP. Young people who finished school at 16, without completing upper secondary education, make up over 30% of NEETs. Foreign-born youth are on average 1.5 times more likely to be NEET than native youth and 2-2.25 times more likely in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Norway. "It is getting harder and harder for young people with low skills to find a job, let alone a steady job in today's workplace," said Stefano Scarpetta, OECD Director of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs. "Unless more is done to improve opportunities in education and training for everyone, there is a growing risk of an increasingly divided society." Fighting early school leaving is essential, says the OECD. Governments must ensure that young people obtain at least an upper-secondary qualification so they can continue in education or gain vocational skills. Despite progress, one in six 25-34 year olds in OECD countries left school before upper secondary. Women are 1.4 times more likely to become NEET than men on average. For many of them, this is because they are looking after small children and the high cost of childcare is a major barrier to employment: in the US, Ireland, United Kingdom and New Zealand, childcare costs for a lone parent can account for between one-third and a half of net income.
Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says, "Obviously this is not just an economics number, it actually has real implications on other things as well," such as national security.
"All these young people, they have got nothing else to do and they are sitting in the basement surfing on the Internet," Kirkegaard says. "And all of a sudden they get sucked into some radical ideology of some kind."
"There is no doubt," Kirkegaard adds, regardless of the country, "these numbers are materially worse for minority youth."
Both economists worry that in many ways the problem is greater here in the U.S.
"The problem in Europe is more of a cyclical nature," says Kirkegaard. "That's because workers there are more likely to have training and be looking for work."
In the U.S. he regards the problem as structural, because so many young people in the U.S. have given up on the economy. He warns that without gaining an economic foothold early on, the risk that this group "basically remains high school drop-outs for their life is much higher. And that basically is a structural problem."
Economist Jones sees in this report an explanation for many of today's social problems. Jones says countries that are key to global economic growth "have a structural problem of future growth where they have millions and millions of young people who are not consuming, nor are they investing in themselves through education." It's one of the reasons Jones postulates why economic growth remains slow. |
Matt Groening is looking to jump back into the animation business. The creator of “The Simpsons” is in talks with Netflix to develop an animated series.
Details of the project are being kept under wraps. Netflix is understood to be considering a two-season order of 10 episode apiece. That could be prompted by the long lead time needed for animation production. A larger episode order upfront would allow Netflix to better amortize the production costs. It’s unclear if an outside production entity is involved with the project.
Netflix declined comment. A rep for Groening could not immediately be reached for comment.
Groening has not been too active in TV since “Futurama” wrapped its 15-year run, spread across Fox and Comedy Central, in 2013.
“The Simpsons” has become a cultural institution since the characters premiered in 1987 as interstitials on Fox’s “The Tracey Ullman Show.” The series bowed in 1989 and was recently renewed through its 28th season in 2017, making it one of TV’s longest-running entertainment programs.
In 2012, Groening donated $500,000 to UCLA to establish the Groening Chair in Animation at university’s School of Theater, Film and Television. He also committed to a yearly $50,000 donation to help students produce socially conscious short films. |
Almost four years ago, I documented a really cool vSAN capability here and here, which demonstrates how to bootstrap a vSAN datastore onto a single ESXi host. This powerful capability, which was by design, enables customers to easily standup new infrastructure including the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) in a pure greenfield environment where you only had bare-metal hardware to start with and no existing vCenter Server.
As you can probably guess, I am a huge advocate for this capability and I think it enables some really interesting use cases for being able to quickly and easily stand up a complete vSphere environment without having to rely on an external storage array or playing games with Storage vMotion'ing the VCSA between local VMFS and the vSAN datastore for initial provisioning.
Over time, this vSAN capability has gone mainstream not only from a customer standpoint but also internal to VMware. In fact, the use of this feature has made its way into several VMware implementations including but not limited to VMware Validated Designs (VVD), VxRail, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and even in the upcoming VMware Cloud on AWS. This really goes to show how useful and critical of a feature this has become for standing up brand new VMware infrastructure which runs on top of vSAN. Huge thanks goes out to the original vSAN Architects who had envisioned such use cases and designed vSAN to include this functionality natively within the product and not have to rely or depend on vCenter Server.
So what has changed in the with the new release of vSAN 6.6 (vSphere 6.5d) For starters, this functionality continues to exists, but the Engineers and specifically I would like to call out Christian Dickmann who was the lead architect for what I am about to talk about reached out to me and asked, could we make this even better? For those of you who have walked through the vSAN bootstrap process, although pretty straight forward it still does require quite a few steps to accomplish. Even with Automation, the overall user experience could still be improved and today, this bootstrap process is only available using the CLI or calling into several different remote APIs.
In vSAN 6.6, the vSAN bootstrap process is now natively integrated into the VCSA UI Installer which is referred to as the vSAN Easy Install feature. This means, as part of selecting an ESXi host to deploy the VCSA (for a pure greenfield deployment), you will now also be able to configure the vSAN datastore directly on the ESXi host with just a few clicks. Another benefit of this direct integration into the VCSA UI Installer means that all existing VCSA/PSC deployment types such as an External PSC or vCenter Server Appliance w/External PSC is not only possible but also fully supported. However, the Engineers are not just stopping there, they have also thought about how else could they simplify the overall workflow for customers when standing up a new greenfield environment beyond just the initial vSAN Datastore. In addition, customers you will also have the option of specifying the vSphere Datacenter and Cluster configuration so that when the new vCenter Server is up and running, it will automatically configure it and add the ESXi host that it had just been provisioned into the new vSphere Cluster that a customer had just defined! How cool is that!?
Here is a screenshot of the new option that is included in the VCSA Installer if you wish to setup vSAN datastore when deploying to an ESXi host:
Once selected, you can specify the name of the vSphere Datacenter and Cluster which will automatically be provision onto the newly created vCenter Server.
The last thing you need to do is verify the disk claiming for vSAN. You can either accept or modify the selection as this will be be unique to each environment. You also have the option of enabling vSAN dedupe/compression feature and this will automatically be configured for you in the vSAN Cluster once vCenter Server is up and running.
The rest of the VCSA UI Installer is exactly the same and once the deployment starts, you will notice the first thing it performs when connecting to the ESXi host is to bootstrap the vSAN datastore before starting the VCSA deployment. You will be able to see these new tasks before it starts the OVA deploy as shown in the screenshot below.
Providing this functionality natively within the VCSA UI Installer is going to make this feature even more accessible, especially for customers who may not feel comfortable using the CLI or APIs. But wait, there is more! 😀
As much as I love a good UI, nothing beats some good ol' Automation. Just like like any other vSAN feature, you will be able to automate this using public APIs and this functionality will be available as part of the update vSAN 6.6 Management APIs which will be consumable through various SDKs such as C#, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby and even PowerCLI with the upcoming 6.5R2 release. I will quickly introduce the new VCSA bootstrap APIs here but stay tuned for a future blog post which will demonstrate on how to exercise these new vSAN Management APIs.
A new Managed Object called VsanVcsaDeployerSystem will now be available both when connecting to a standalone ESXi host as well as a vCenter Server. It contains the following three methods:
VsanPrepareVsanForVcsa() - Used to bootstrap the vSAN datastore on the ESXi host
VsanPostConfigForVcsa() - Used to setup the vCenter Server once it is deployed
VsanVcsaGetBootstrapProgress() - Used to retrieve progress from the two methods above |
Never underestimate the capacity of modern history’s neo-cyberpunk oddity to reach the place you thought you were heading ahead of time, and in a way that doesn’t seem … quite right. Glenn Beck has set his heart (and checkbook) on a version of neoreactionary secessionism, based on a restoration of the House of Disney. Once you see the plan, it’s immediately obvious that nothing in the reactosphere will ever be the same again:
While Independence is very much a dream at this point, the proposed city-theme park hybrid would bring several of Glenn’s seemingly disconnected projects into one place. Media, live events, small business stores, educational projects, charity, entertainment, news, information, and technology R&D – all of these things would have a home in Independence. With the rest of the country and the world going away from the values of freedom, responsibility and truth, Independence would be a place built on the very foundation of those principles. A retreat from the world where entrepreneurs, artists, and creators could come to put their ideas to work. A place for families to bring their children to be inspired. […] The ambitious project, projected to cost over two billion dollars, has been heavily influenced by Walt Disney. As Glenn has been explaining throughout the week, Disneyland was originally intended to be a place where people would find happiness, inspiration, courage and hope. Over time, Walt Disney’s original vision has been lost. While hundreds of thousands still flock to the town, it’s become commercialized and the big dreams and the heart have been compromised. […] Glenn believes that he can bring the heart and the spirit of Walt’s early Disneyland ideas into reality. Independence, USA wouldn’t be about rides and merchandise, but would be about community and freedom. The Marketplace would be a place where craftmen and artisan could open and run real small businesses and stores. The owners and tradesmen could hold apprenticeships and teach young people the skills and entrepreneurial spirit that has been lost in today’s entitlement state. […] There would also be an Media Center, where Glenn’s production company would film television, movies, documentaries, and more. Glenn hoped to include scripted television that would challenge viewers without resorting to a loss of human decency. He also said it would be a place where aspiring journalists would learn how to be great reporters. […] Across the lake, there would be a church modelled after The Alamo which would act as a multi-denominational mission center. The town will also have a working ranch where visitors can learn how to farm and work the land.
Gnon giveth in overwhelming abundance, and also takes away.
“Neoreaction? Wasn’t that some kind of precursor to the Glenn Beck thing?” |
He's one of the most influential men in music, spanning underground scenes and chart toppers. And with Major Lazer, he's still on a mission in search of the perfect beat
If one thing can be said of Diplo, it's that he puts himself out there. Midway through Major Lazer's set at the Corona Capital festival in Mexico City, he is zipped up into a giant plastic bubble that is then propelled out and over a sea of hands, scrabbling to stay upright, and failing; later, shirt off, he elects for a more straightforward stage-dive, and is lucky to escape unbloodied.
It doesn't matter that the hamster-ball trick isn't his own, but borrowed from the Flaming Lips. Key to the creation of the Diplo brand has always been the fearless magpie fashion in which he has grabbed ideas from everywhere. The band Major Lazer was conceived as a dancehall reggae group, but for the Mexican crowd they mix up soca bangers such as JW and Blaze's ridiculous Palance with "mad, random shit" like a version of The Boy in the Bubble by Paul Simon.
The other two members – Jillionaire and Walshy Fire – hype the crowd, and their dancers teach a hapless male member of the audience about the Jamaican dance style of daggering. Guns spray confetti everywhere. It was fun, and little wonder Diplo says, in the tour van afterwards, "if I had to go out there and play Avicii and dubstep remixes every day I'd go insane".
Diplo is the Kevin Bacon figure who has joined the dots between characters as disparate as pop hearthrob Bruno Mars (the pair visited a Paris strip club in search of inspiration for Mars's new album) and contemporary composer Nico Mulhy (who arranged the strings on Usher's Climax, one of the year's biggest songs, and which Diplo co-wrote and produced). He has made records with superstars such as Justin Bieber, produced the new No Doubt album and is working with Snoop Dogg, but has also involved himself with Sheffield mathcore exponents Rolo Tomassi.
He can count himself among the new wave of superstar DJs, like his friend Skrillex; he even has a residency at the new club epicentre that is Las Vegas. But the latter, he insists, is "mostly just a way of paying the bills".
Instead, the reason that brands – whether BlackBerry, with a role for him in an advert, or Beyoncé, who enlisted him for work on her last album – hunt him out is that this 34-year-old "random ass white dude" (his description) from Florida knows better than anyone where to find the next thing. If anyone is a conduit to underground club culture around the world – in a way that wouldn't have been possible even five years ago – it's Wesley Pentz.
Vanity Fair even featured his book: 128 Beats Per Minute: Diplo's Guide to Music, Culture and Everything In Between.
When I first track him down, it is the night before the festival in Mexico, and just gone midnight when he appears at the hotel bar, in spectacles and a chunky jumper, complaining that his ex-girlfriend, Mexican, a model, has got him terribly stoned.
"I'm not good at doing anything else," he says. "Just making music and having ideas, and putting people together."
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, he grew up mostly in south Florida, where his father ran a bait shop; at university in Philadelphia, he studied film and anthropology but also started a series of parties, mixing the hip-hop of David Banner with world music, house and (he remembers particularly) Soft Cell's Tainted Love. "In Florida there was such a mix: you had the ghetto stuff happening, and then you had the Miami bass and freestyle, and then the white people liked electro and disco – you had to rock everything in Florida. It was a real melting pot.
"You had the Cubans, the Haitians, the black kids, the white kids, redneck kids ... you had everyone down there."In 2003, he released his debut album, titled Florida, under the name Diplo (because, he said, his favourite dinosaur is a diplodocus). But in search of an even more perfect beat, he visited Brazil the following year, and disovered the baile funk scene. Mixtapes such as Favela on Blast (2004) followed and he signed the band Bonde do Role to his own Mad Decent imprint.
"With my label, we always want to put out new shit that we're excited about, but it is hard to give it longevity," Diplo says – and it's possible the fad for baile funk has now faded. But through his Brazilian adventures, he discovered a talent for unearthing different musics from around the world – and since then has championed acts including South African rave-rap duo Die Antwoord, kuduro outfit Buraka Som Sistema and exponents such as Dave Nada of that US hybrid of house and reggaeton, moombathon. All are strains or representatives of what is sometimes called the tropical bass (or global bass or global ghettotech) movement.
There has also been his genre-busting work with MIA, whose breakthrough hit Paper Planes he co-wrote and co-produced. The pair also dated, before a public falling out: Diplo accused her of "glamorising terrorism" on her album Maya and called her out for playing the Super Bowl with Madonna ("it was kind of stupid").
Criticism of his own "venture capitalist imperialist ass" is familiar: he's had beef with critics such as the New York Times's Jon Caramanica, who questioned the element of "cultural appropriation" at work in an early Major Lazer show, and earlier this year Diplo debated these issues with Sierra Leonean-US writer and "cultural activist" Chief Boima.
"It's not the same world they had when they made Nanook of the North," he said then, making the point that globalisation has meant that kids in Cambodia and Indonesia can make records on an increasingly equal footing with his peers now. "Everywhere I go, there's not this world of exoticism that you guys think exist."
It is a point he reiterates now when I mention a conversation I had recently with the veteran Ry Cooder, who worries that local cultures are heading the way of the dodo.
"Well, when I go to South Africa, for instance," he says, "and go to a ghetto party, the kids there love Masters at Work and they'll be playing house music, but the music they're making is still definitely African as fuck. You can't take that out of the people. The world is becoming more homogeneous because there's just one YouTube, but kids everywhere are hyper-aware and they have so much access to different cultures now. For me, it's exciting."
Sometimes his travels have resulted in records of his own, such as this year's Express Yourself, the ass-shuddering result of his anthropological research into New Orleans bounce music and artists such as Sissy Nobby and Big Freedia. The record has also inspired a piece of marketing that could win awards: Diplo's Twitter feed has been inundated with several thousand pictures from fans emulating the dancers' signature move in its video. Recently, one girl hit him up with a shot of herself, head down, legs in the air, on the Great Wall of China.
Kassie Deng (@kassie_deng) @diplo #expressyourself on the Great Wall of China with a_cuan@ The Great Wall Of China instagr.am/p/SdQUGzKyDl/
By now, we are at Mexico City's latest club opening, where Diplo deejays for a couple of hours to a crowd of Mexican hipsters. He introduces me to a dreadlocked figure hanging backstage who turns out to be Toy Selectah, a key figure in another of these emerging underground sounds, "tribal" (or even "3bal")."Tribal is total bastard Mexican music from the 21st century," Selectah explains, citing his work with the group 3Ball MTY as an example. "It's made by kids in the suburbs of Mexico City and in the north who grew up listening to mainstream electronica, but also regional Mexican and tropical music like cumbia and pre-Hispanic sounds."
Recently, he and Erick Rincón were guests on Diplo's own weekly late night show for Radio 1, Diplo and Friends. Is tribal authenticallly Mexican? "Of course it is!" he says.
The following afternoon at the Corona festival, though, the world does feel flatter. It's an impeccably organised affair staged at a race track on the city's fringes, with the Black Keys, New Order and Florence and the Machine headlining, and just a handful of Mexican indie acts propping up the bill.
Before Major Lazer's set, the three group members change into dark suits, at which point Diplo decides that for a group shot, they should scale a derelict building backstage. "I've already got so many rips in my pants," he says, hauling himself up. "Top Man do an elasticated pair," says Jilllionaire, "or we could get jeggings …"
The group originally comprised Diplo and UK producer Switch, who recorded debut album Guns Don't Kill People … Lazers Do at Tuff Gong studios in Jamaica. Guests included Santigold, Vybz Kartel, Amanda Blank and Mr Vegas.
Switch quit last year, citing "creative differences", but the mission remains: to bring dancehall music to a wider audience – and with the live shows, "to take some of the theatrical atmosphere of carnival music into the dance scene," in Jillionaire's phrase.
"The first Major Lazer was just jumbled together with Switch – he was my mentor – but now we're a group, and it's also more about the songwriting," says Diplo. "I'm bringing the level of seriousness I apply when I produce other people's records."
Jillionaire interjects: "The first record was ahead of its time, though, because now that style is de rigueur. Everyone is making tropical inspired records ..." (Cited is the example of Cheryl Cole, who sampled Major Lazer's Hold the Line on Make You Go.)
Jillionaire was born in Trinidad, while Walshy Fire comes from Jamaica, the younger brother of cricket legend Courtney Walsh. ("English people always freak out when they hear that ..." Diplo notes. "I don't know why.")
Diplo says the project means so much to him because the Caribbean has always represented all he loves best about music, that anything-goes attitude. "If you go to a Jamaican party, they'll mix funk into ska ..."
"They'll play some Whitney Houston." Walshy interrupts. "And some Kenny Loggins!"
"When I go there," Diplo continues. "I learn so much ... LA is so much on schedule, and splits in the budget and all that shit, and you lose the energy. Music is just so stagnant there."
It's true that he has ridden the coat-tails of the dance music explosion in the US – dubstep producer Flux Pavilion is all over the new Major Lazer single – but he's also deeply suspicious of it. "We played Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas – the biggest festival, 300,000 people, and we mashed the place up – but they didn't want to book us to begin with," he explains, adding entertainingly: "They thought we were too weird. Too black.
"The kids there, though, just see the same DJs, playing the same records. In England you have a culture of all different styles of dance music but in America it's just EDM [electronic dance music] – which the festivals love because it's easier to market and bring in sponsors ... it's easier to homogenise it."
Diplo surfs the crowd at the Corona Capital festival. Photograph: Adriana Zehbrauskas/Polaris
What follows is their show – a coals to Newcastle affair, if Mexico is supposed to be the country of the fiesta. The group switch from their own hits, like Pon De Floor, to a novel take on Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. "Every time a big techno DJ sees us play, they're just so confused ... 'how do you get away with playing whatever you want?'" Diplo says later, en route back to his hotel.
None the less, he insists – to my surprise – that on a Spinal Tap-style scale, "tonight we were, like, on volume five. When we play a techno party, we go on, like, volume 20. We want to set shit on fire, we want to get naked ... we want to ruin people's perspective of what a DJ can do," he continues.
Back at the hotel bar, former LCD Soundsystem figurehead James Murphy wanders by. "There's my homie. Hey, James!" Murphy is DJing at the festival the following afternoon, and Diplo says something about what a pain it is to lug vinyl around the world. "Is that a real complaint?" Murphy asks. "I used to be in bands ... we used to have to carry bass amps! Now I either want to carry my records or I want to get off the plane in flip flops and a pair of Speedos and my passport with my credit card in it and one USB stick ... and that's it."
There is, Diplo concludes, just a touch glibly, only one job that's easier in the world: "videogame testing ... I mean, we do actually have to leave the house ..."
Jillionaire, Walshy Fire and Diplo - aka Major Lazer - backstage at the Corona Capital festival in Mexico City. Photograph: Adriana Zehbrauskas/Polaris
The new Major Lazer album is due in early 2013, and guests include everyone from Dirty Projectors' Amber Coffman (on recent single Get Free) to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig, Wyclef Jean, Shaggy, Bruno Mars and more. (But nothing from Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li, even though she was flown to Jamaica to record with the group: "I hate her so much now, she's the worst artist in the world," is Diplo's take on the subject.)
But then there's also a Snoop Lion album in the works – Snoop Dogg, as was – a reggae record produced by Major Lazer. "I'm writing for this project hard," says Diplo, "because the records are amazing, and Snoop can bring reggae to people like nobody else – he's someone my mother knows about."
The search for the next new thing also continues. So where's it happening now? "Indonesia, I'd say. Kids there are creating crazy shit ... there's this Dutch house scene, but then they have this real ghetto attitude towards it."
"It's about the democratisation of technology," Walshy says.
"Back in the day," Diplo adds, "you had to find a couple of kids you liked and who wanted to be in a band and you had to practise and then find the time to write together, and then maybe borrow some money to get into a studio ... and then work forever to record one record, and then maybe promote it, find someone to release it ... and in two years' time you might have a song that people like. Now you can download Fruity Loops [software] for free, watch a video on YouTube which tells you how to make something, you make it, you put it on YouTube the next day, you get signed ... within two months you're opening for Madonna."
"There's this Afghani kid in Stockholm called Phat Deuce who's started sending us his music and he's amazing," Jillionaire says.
It is this native media appreciation of the hyper-accelerated world in which we live that so unsettles Diplo's critics: is he really just a cool-hunter, concerned first and foremost with his own brand? I asked Toy Selectah about working with his friend of eight years, and he said: "I've never believed that he takes advantage of what we been doing – our great relationship is based on respect for what we do.
"He's met some interesting people from the Latin world through me, like Calle 13, and I've met lot of people through him – his support has been crucial to me as a producer and as A&R man, and with my work with the likes of 3BallMTY."
Listening to Diplo, in the bar, talk on into the night about how he wants to help other dancehall artists, too, like Konshens and Popcaan, it's pretty hard to doubt his sincerity. (and there's also his not-for-profit organisation Heaps Decent, set up to encourage hip-hop artists in underprivileged communities in Australia). So – what if it can be hard to keep up with him?
There is talk of a festival after-party, with maybe James Murphy deejaying. But instead he leaves for his room , perhaps to work on a remix he says he owes another friend, Cat Power. In the morning, it is back to LA (where he's mostly resident) in time for his son's second birthday party.
Another parent might think to hire a clown for the occasion. Instead, Diplo has booked Skrillex to deejay. "How crazy is that?" he laughs.
• The single Jah No Partial is released on Mad Decent on 3 December. Caspar Llewellyn Smith travelled to Mexico courtesy of the Corona Capital festival.
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Big cities tend to get all the love. We here at Livability know that there are great stories to be told in smaller places, too. Our ranking of the 2014 top 100 best places to live focuses on small to mid-sized cities and what makes them great places to live and work. We worked with trusted partners, stellar advisors, and the best public and private data sources to develop our ranking. The cities on the list excelled in our criteria. These towns are places where residents are able to take full advantage of a wide variety of amenities and offerings - everything from parks and museums to different commuting options to hospitals. Spend some time getting to know them and when it comes time for your next move, maybe you'll think small. |
Sega announced at Tokyo Game Show 2012 on Thursday that it will release Hatsune Miku Live Stage Producer , an Autumn 2012 iOS/Android game in which the player raises the Vocaloid idol Hatsune Miku and trains her to be a star. In the raising simulation game, the player assumes the role of a concert venue manager.
The player can select the set lists, stage design, and character design modules for Miku's special live concerts, roughly similar to Namco Bandai Games' The [email protected] franchise. The player can also train Miku to build up her singing, dancing, and even her onstage chatting. When Miku wins contests, she can receive new character design modules and accessory items.
The single-player game will be free to download, although there will be items with fees.
Source: AppBank via Hachima Kikō
Image © SEGA / © SEGA Networks / © Crypton Future Media, Inc. |
Secaucus, New Jersey – The North Jersey Nutnfancy fan club got a shock last Saturday at their monthly meet up when an armed assailant stole their gear.
Monthly Gathering
The group meets monthly at the Secaucus Buffalo Wild Wings to discuss the latest installment of the Mosin Nagant series that their hero NutN has been working on for the past several years. The first two hours of every meeting is dedicated to watching part of the new Nutn video, followed by various discussions and comparisons of the one piece of gear from the video.
Part of the group’s tradition is to conduct a POCKET DUMP! and show off the EVERYDAY CARRY (EDC) gear that they have with them that particular day. Leatherman tools, pocket knives, multipurpose keychains, and ultrathin wallets are in vogue with the group. Each member tries to outdo the other with the coolest and latest in EDC gear. This fashion show usually concludes with a group photo session, during which the dumped gear is posed and photographed stylistically for publication in Instagram.
Pocket Dump
Apparently during this pocket dump photo shoot, the sneaky thief casually pocketed each item after it was photographed, since everyone else was consumed by the posing and lighting of the next photo. Speculating that their assailant may have seen them do this before and had planned the attack in advance, the group’s leader Vincent “Vinnie” Pompino says that “We’re gonna find him and we’re gonna make em pay! Does he have any idea about my uncle Sal? My uncle Sal had connections!”
Member Louis “Louie” Citranello said that he lost a Gerber Center-Drive multitool, a Benchmade knife, two Spyderco knives, a Swiss Army knife, his car keys, his house keys, a SOF Tactical Tourniquet, 400′ of paracord bracelet and anklets, and his Ridge Carbon Fiber cash strap / money clip along with several hundred dollars of gold jewelry. He described his pocket dump as a “modest loss compared to some other guys.”
No Leads
Police have no leads or description of the thief as the group hit the floor when their assailant pulled out “a pretty big gun, maybe a 50 caliber,” according to one witness. Nunfancy fan club recording secretary Maria Scrangraletti says she thinks it was probably “some moolie from Irvington – I seen him get into an Escalade with gold rims when I tactically peaked up as he left.” Security footage at the restaurant recorded a blue Miata leaving the parking lot at the time.
Changes?
Vinnie had this to say as we were wrapping up – “I’m talkin to you Governor Christie, you fat mamaluke [sic]. You gotta allow us to concealed carry our pieces wit us at these things. You know – maybe not everybody, but for us – for us goodfellas – it just makes sense.” |
Image copyright AFP
Think of a Japanese tech giant, a truly global player made in Japan - there's a good chance Sony will come to mind. Well, think again. Or rather - think Nintendo instead.
After the unprecedented rally in Nintendo's share price since the release of Pokemon Go, the gaming company has soared past Sony in terms of market value.
It's a juicy headline - but what does it actually mean? Is Nintendo now bigger than Sony? And does it even make sense to compare the two?
On Tuesday, Nintendo shares finished trading another 14% higher, meaning they have doubled in value since the launch of Pokemon Go on 6 July.
This puts Nintendo's overall market value at 4.36tn yen ($38bn; £28.8bn), topping Sony by 300bn yen.
And all this before Pokemon Go's even hit the streets in Nintendo's home market.
So, is the company's increased valuation justified?
"The very easy answer is yes," says Gerhard Fasol of Eurotechnology in Tokyo. "If the market thinks that's what a company is worth, then yes, it is justified."
After all, it is market value we're talking about.
'Huge potential'
But you have to go one step further, Fasol cautions, and ask whether these companies are actually comparable.
"Pokemon still has huge potential - just think of the intellectual property rights to the characters for instance," he explains. "A massive potential waiting to be harvested."
It is a key characteristic of the gaming industry that the success and performance of a game is extremely hard to predict and foresee.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Chris Foxx took to the streets to explore some of the app's highs and lows
And any surge of the kind that Nintendo has seen warrants caution, analysts warn.
"We're in bubble territory now - the stock's vertiginous rally may not last," says Neil Wilson of ETX Capital. "It's broken so far clear of any support levels that a fall could be nasty for those who bought into the rally."
The phenomenal success of Pokemon Go has surprised even seasoned market players. Nintendo certainly was hoping for a hit, but even it must have been somewhat caught off guard by the frenzy its little virtual creatures have created around the globe.
It's a surprise success but one that if sustained can have a transforming impact on the fortunes of the company.
What's a Walkman?
What does a firm like Sony have that could compete in terms of market impact? It's known mostly as a hardware company and a very successful and solid one.
"The last time that Sony had a hit that could maybe be compared to Pokemon was probably the Walkman," Fasol points out.
The Walkman may seem like just yesterday to some, but to most Pokemon players you'd probably have to explain that it was a portable cassette player in the 1980s. And then you'd have to explain to them what a cassette was.
Image caption A Walkman (for those too young to remember)
So Nintendo certainly has an edge with its current success.
A spike or a trend?
The success of Pokemon Go is shared in part with the developers - Google spin-off Niantic - and we can expect to see similar games from other companies soon.
Yet Nintendo has a head start. "The soaring stock price reflects the sentiment that Nintendo has hit upon a success case in mobile and augmented reality," David Corbin of industry website Tech in Asia told the BBC from Tokyo.
"And it can be applied to other characters from its IP library - like Super Mario Brothers or Legend of Zelda."
Image copyright EPA Image caption Pokemon Go has rolled out in most markets but has yet to launch in Japan
Between 2006 and 2012, Nintendo profits soared on the back of its console success. During those years, the company's profits easily topped that of the established technology giants.
While that peak lasted a few years, it didn't last forever and more recently there was in fact concern that Nintendo was moving into mobile gaming way too late to still have an impact.
Pokemon Go may have silenced those concerns but whether Nintendo can ride that wave in the long term is - like much of the fortune in the gaming industry - unpredictable. |
ESPN's Danny Kanell joins Mike & Mike and says that it's too early for Texas to think about letting go of coach Charlie Strong. (1:17)
Despite a 1-4 start to the season and a 7-11 record since taking over at Texas, coach Charlie Strong has ongoing support from school officials and key boosters, according to several Texas sources.
"Charlie has a lot of breathing room," one source said Monday. "There is nowhere near the pressure to remove him at this time that there was with Steve Patterson or even Mack Brown."
Patterson was removed as athletic director after a brief tenure, during which he hired Strong.
But sources insist the departure of Patterson does not hurt Strong. In fact it may help him. The task of school president Greg Fenves and interim athletic director Mike Perrin has been to pull a splintered athletic department together, not destabilize the climate further.
"Charlie has the support of the people he needs to be supported by right now," another Texas source said Sunday. "The last thing they want to do is make a change."
Fenves and Perrin have publicly and privately stated their belief in Strong's approach. They have complimented his values, how he treats people and his commitment to discipline and academics.
Charlie Strong, after going 37-15 at Louisville, has won only seven of 18 games at Texas and is off to a 1-4 start in 2015. Tom Pennington/Getty Images
Strong said he held a team meeting Saturday night after the Longhorns landed back in Austin and they had another on Sunday in an effort to "get some things straight."
"I have so much belief that we're going to get it turned," Strong said Monday during his weekly news conference. "Yeah, it does look gloomy because of what happened when you go close [loss], close [loss] and then blown out. But I didn't think that was our team. I think we can play much better and coach much better.
"[The TCU loss] is on me. It's all about doing a better job in preparation and focus."
Of course, Strong must win.
Sources indicated that a humiliating loss to rival Oklahoma on Saturday or a disastrous finish to the season could lead to a discussion about Strong's removal after only two years.
Red River Respite? Though Texas is unranked heading into its rivalry game against No. 10 Oklahoma, the Longhorns might have the Sooners right where they want them. Since 1989, unranked UT squads are 5-2 against ranked Oklahoma teams. OU rank Winner 2014 11th Okla. 31-26 2013 12th Texas 36-20 1993 10th Okla. 38-17 1992 16th Texas 34-24 1991 6th Texas 10-7 1990 4th Texas 14-13 1989 15th Texas 28-24 -- ESPN Stats & Info
"The boosters are supportive," one source said. "Of course, they have a push point."
When asked Monday if he's worried that he won't get a third year at Texas, Strong chuckled.
"Every day is a battle," Strong said. "Every day I come in knowing it's my job to come in and make sure this program is representing the right way, doing the right things, going to win football games and developing young men."
The Longhorns were the subject of a pair of social media embarrassments during their 50-7 loss to TCU on Saturday. The Texas Rangers' Twitter account accidentally posted a "Fire Charlie" tweet, and Longhorns cornerback Kris Boyd had to apologize after he retweeted a fan's transfer pitch at halftime.
Strong said in a news conference Monday that Boyd would play Saturday against the Sooners.
Money would not be a critical factor to dismissing Strong, even though he would be owed more than $15 million not to coach.
Strong is frustrated by the Longhorns' slow start, but the people who hold his fate understand that he has had only one true recruiting class, that the best players on the team are freshmen and that there is a player leadership vacuum.
Multiple sources connected to the program said the most important element for Strong's future is just to show some progress.
"They'll hang tight with him," a source said. "He is safe for now."
"They understand there are growing pains," another source said. "Barring something catastrophic, he is on solid ground to return next season."
Information from ESPN.com's Max Olson contributed to this report. |
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