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The young Georgia woman fighting a flesh-eating bacteria underwent a successful skin graft this week as she continues her astounding recovery.
The procedure was performed Monday on a massive wound left open when doctors were forced to remove tissue last month from Aimee Copeland's abdomen, side and hip in an effort to prevent the spread of the bacteria, according to an update posted on her father's blog Friday.
An additional skin graft was scheduled to be performed Friday, her father said, describing it as the "final initial graft procedure to close the open wound."
"I say 'final initial' because I understand that skin surfaces continue to break down over time and that Aimee will need follow-up surgeries to repair those areas in the weeks, months and years ahead," Andy Copeland wrote. "Aimee's wound repair is a lifelong process that will require ongoing attention and medical care, however, the surgery today will bring her one step closer to her biggest challenge yet: rehab."
Earlier this week, Copeland, 24, was upgraded from critical to serious condition at Doctors Hospital of Augusta, where she has been receiving treatment. The young Snellville woman's ordeal began May 1, when she was riding a makeshift zip line across the Little Tallapoosa River, about 50 miles west of Atlanta. The line snapped, and she fell and got a gash in her left calf that took 22 staples to close.
Three days later, still in pain, she went to an emergency room. Doctors eventually determined she had necrotizing fasciitis caused by the flesh-devouring bacterium Aeromonas hydrophila.
In addition to the tissue removed from her abdomen, the bacteria led surgeons to amputate most of her hands, one of her legs and her remaining foot in an effort to stay ahead of the disease.
Copeland late last month began breathing on her own and talking for the first time in weeks, and even cracked jokes, her father said. | <urn:uuid:2459cb4f-63cc-4834-82b7-354d2b658bbe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wyff4.com/news/health/Woman-with-flesh-eating-bacteria-gets-skin-graft/-/9324046/15122964/-/o7424/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975428 | 401 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Parish Universalist Church
790 Washington Street, P. O. Box 284, Stoughton, Massachusetts 02072
Church School: 10:45 AM
Is Harry Potter Evil?
Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, November 14, 2010
In the Halloween classic, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Linus is sitting and writing his annual letter to the Great Pumpkin when Charlie Brown comes along. “Why are you writing the Great Pumpkin?” Charlie Brown asks. “You should be writing to Santa Claus instead.” Linus disagrees, and a brief theological discussion ensues. Finally, Charlie Brown walks away, shaking his head, and saying, “We are obviously separated by denominational differences.”
At Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, they don’t make that distinction. Like us, they celebrate both Halloween and Christmas—and maybe write to both the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus, just in case.
At Hogwarts, a great feast takes place every Halloween. The Great Hall is decorated for the occasion with live bats, and lighted jack o’ lanterns, and real spider webs (complete with real spiders), and there’s a bounteous feast of every kind of goodie you can imagine, all served on golden platters that float through the air. At Christmas, there is another great feast, and the hall is hung with holly and mistletoe and there are twelve sparkling, glittering Christmas trees. The golden platters reappear once again, this time filled with traditional Christmas puddings and sweets.
It seems like a pretty open-minded and inclusive way to approach things, with “denominational differences”—mere differences of theology—never allowed to get in the way of a good meal. It is an approach with which most of us, I would dare say, are quite comfortable.
But, as Professor Dumbledore himself might say: I have disturbing news. You see, not everyone is as open-minded as we are. (I know that must shock you.) Not everyone is as open-minded as the authorities as Hogwarts. No doubt, there are those in our world who would have Hogwarts closed and shuttered (if not burned to the ground).
A little closer to home, in
“A public ‘book-cutting’ took place at which Rev. Douglas Taylor of the
“’It’s no secret I enjoy what I’m doing now,’ said Taylor, who added that he would have preferred to burn the book….The pastor had asked Lewiston officials if he could… but the request was rejected as a ‘toxic emission’ Taylor says…”
I think the most toxic emission being spewed forth in that hotel in
Now, we can rest assured that as the penultimate Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part One) awaits its release next weekend, theological nutcases like Rev. Taylor will be back out in force again over the next few weeks.
But, as Harry’s faithful friend, Hermione Granger might exclaim: “We need to help Harry!” Harry Potter needs to be defended, and that’s why I’m here this morning—especially since Elizabeth and I have just finished watching (again) the first six Harry Potter movies in preparation for the big premier next weekend.
So, what is it between the covers of these seven best-selling books (and in the frames of those six, soon to be eight, box office blockbusters) that makes the Religious Right twitch and harangue and holler—and that makes the rest of us (or at least a good percentage thereof) stand up and applaud and rejoice? First of all, why is the Religious Right so uncomfortable with Harry Potter?
Because, they say, these damnable books further witchcraft, and lure children into the occult. They claim as their proof text the eighteen chapter of the Old Testament book Deuteronomy, which says:
“There shall not be anyone found among you who makes his son or daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For whoever does these things is detestable to the Lord.”
That sounds like just about every member of the faculty at Hogwarts!
The Bible says it. They believe it. That settles it. That’s how the minds (such as they are) of these people work.
But, as we know, the fact of the matter is that the Bible—especially some old and arcane parts of it like the book of Deuteronomy—says a lot of things. It forbids a lot of things; it permits some, too-- things that you’ll get in a heap of trouble for if you try to practice them in modern society. For instance, just a couple of pages down from the verse we just read, the twenty-first chapter of good old Deuteronomy gives us this advice for dealing with a fairly common topic, disobedient children, something with which many of us, no doubt, have had some experience in the course of our lives:
“If a man has a stubborn or rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they chastise him, will not give heed to them, then his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives… Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death… so you shall purge the evil from your midst.”
The Bible says it. That settles it? Let’s do it? Wow! Should we follow this biblical injunction, too? Of course not! As Voltaire put it, God did not create us with reason and common sense so that we should not use them. And so, the rantings of the Lunatic Right are quickly dispersed in the presence of just a modicum of common sense, as far as the real lessons Harry Potter teaches are concerned.
For there are some very important lessons beneath all the trappings of “witchcraft” which these books (supposedly) contain—amidst all the casting of spells and spouting of incantations and making of potions-- amidst all these derivations from the timeless literary genre of fantasy which goes back before J.K. Rowling, before C.S. Lewis, before Tolkien, way back to the works of Milton and Dante, before that to the Arthurian legends and Sir Gawain and the Green Night, before that to the tale of Beowulf, and before that to the ancient Greek epics of Homer and the ancient Indian epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. And we can throw in some of the works of Shakespeare, as well, for good measure. That’s a literary family tree second to none! And Harry Potter holds his place well here, and deservedly.
For there is much wisdom in these seven books, and the values which Harry learns are Hogwarts are values we should all wish for our children, and for this world of ours.
First of all, the Harry Potter books are all about building character, about living our values, and making good decisions based on those values.
In his long journey through childhood into adolescence and beyond, Harry learns to face head on the adversities of his life—and there are plenty of them for him, including the loss of many of the people he holds most dear, including the murder of his parents before his own eyes when he was still an infant. Rowling’s is no sugar-coated view of what life can deal out to us. Barely beyond childhood, he is plunged into struggle with monumental and powerful forces of evil. Through all of this, he is called to live a life based on compassion and resilience—and not on rage and revenge.
Harry learns that although life may hurt us, we are not doomed to be its victim—and that the surest way to live a blest life is to join with all people of goodwill in a common cause.
At Hogwarts and beyond, Harry learns to develop good, strong values (like friendship and hard work and tenacity and courage) and he makes his decisions based on these values. That is the ultimate test of character, after all: how we live out the values we say we affirm. “It is not our abilities which distinguish us,” the wise Headmaster Dumbledore tells him, “but our decisions.” Our decisions are our character—and Harry’s story reminds us that doing the right thing trumps everything—convenience, pleasure, personal gain, power, even our very lives, if it comes to that.
Secondly, the Harry Potter books declare to us that the dark forces in our lives can be overcome. And they can be overcome by every day people who look and talk and act and react like you and I do. They can even be overcome by kids. They can be overcome by all of those who do not give in to the darkness, but let their inner lights shine forth in the world.
In Harry’s world, evil takes many forms. From the evil wizard, Voldemort, who has returned to finish the evil he began a generation before, and seek lordship over all creation. To the stooge of the Ministry of Magic, Delores Umbridge (one of my favorite characters in the whole Harry Potter saga), who is evil with a smiley face, always dressed in pink, always so cheerful—all the while seeking to stamp out Dumbledore’s insistence that Voldemort is back and must be fought. Umbredge is a perfect example of Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the “banality of evil”, and is given to uttering such newspeak nonsense as “Progress for the sake of progress must be discouraged, let us preserve what must be preserved, perfect what can be perfected, and prune practices which ought to be prohibited.” All the while, she is plastering the wall of the school with endless, inane rules and regulations, while the powers of evil grow stronger and stronger.
Then, there is that darkness that lurks within each human soul. “The dividing line between good and evil crosses each human heart,” Rev. Richard Gilbert has said, and Harry, too, must face the darkness that dwells within. During her time as a single parent, Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and says that she even contemplated suicide. From this experience, she drew the characters of the Dementers, soul-destroying creatures who seem to suck out all the happiness in the world.
In Harry’s world, there are all manner of mysterious dangers that beset him, and he attempts to defeat them by whatever means are at his disposal—whether it’s making the right potion, or casting the right spell, or whether it’s just by means of good old-fashioned, this-worldly moral determination and grit. He also learns that he can’t do it all alone, and that he has to work closely with others, especially with the rational Hermoine and the altruistic Ron. He learns that diversity is a blessing and not a curse—and that whether the enemy is evil spiders or a giant snake or any other manifestation of evil (or, in our own world, whether the evil we face is racism, or AIDS, or poverty, or violence, or terrorism), it will take the gifts of all—the insights of all—the tenacity of all—to solve the problem. The stakes are too high, and we can’t afford to shut the door or exclude anyone. “Differences of language or habit are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open,” Dumbledore tells his students. Or, in the words of a great old Unitarian hymn:
Gifts in differing measure,
Hearts of one accord,
Manifold the service,
One the sure reward...
Thirdly, the Harry Power books remind us to listen to the voice within and to rely upon the power within, and upon those greater powers beyond in whom we have our being.
This is blasphemy, I suppose, to those who want to create a God as small as they are, fenced off in a tiny part of celestial real estate somewhere. But we preach a God as great and large as the entire universe, a God who dwells and speaks in each and every inherently worthwhile human soul.
In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, we are told that the wand chooses the wizard and not the other way around. So it is that faith chooses us, and not we it, and faith takes us where it will. Harry Potter learns that the power he needs to overcome evil is already within his soul—waiting to be unlocked and used for the common good. The tools of his trade—charms and potions and chants and incantations—might help him to unlock his power. So, the tools of our faiths—prayers and songs and symbols and rituals—rosaries and prayer rugs and incense and drums and bells and candles—can help us to unlock the power of Goodness that dwells within us.
We each possess an array of spiritual gifts. And the greatest of these is love.
"Your mother died to save you, Harry,” Dumbledore tells him. “If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s love for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign…to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin. That evil person, full of hatred, greed, and ambition, could not touch you for this reason. For him, it was agony to touch a person marked by something so good.”
Love has left its mark on us all. Not necessarily a lightning-shaped scar, but we are all deeply marked, nonetheless. Love demands that it be redeemed in how we live our lives, And love demands, too, that we, human wizards all (in our most-Mugglelike ways) dare to stretch our imaginations-- and cast our spells of music and poetry and laughter and tears and hard work in the face of the evils of our day. For we know that “a mind stretched by new ideas can never go back to its original dimension”. And we know, as Judy Blume has said, that “It is a wondrous thing when a child loves a book.” And we know that men and women and boys and girls of goodwill and sacrificial spirit can—and do-- age after age, usher in that kingdom of magic and mystery, hope and courage, faith and love. | <urn:uuid:5626c27d-d0db-4b44-b0b7-78ac633d3efe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://uustoughtonma.org/Sermons/Archives/2010-11-14-HarryPotter.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957554 | 3,141 | 1.757813 | 2 |
IRS Clarifies Certain Medical Deductions
The Internal Revenue Service has released two revenue rulings that serve to clarify the definition of certain medical expenses that are allowable as an itemized deduction under Internal Revenue Code section 213.
The IRS allows as itemized deductions certain medical expenses that exceed 7.5% of a taxpayer's adjusted gross income. Section 213 prevents the deduction of nonprescription drugs as well as cosmetic surgery. The two rulings provide explanations of certain deductible items that might fall under these categories.
The IRS does not allow a medical deduction for the cost of cosmetic surgery unless that surgery is necessary to correct a deformity. Revenue Ruling 2003-57 clarifies the definition of deformity and specifically includes breast reconstruction surgery and vision correction surgery as being deductible surgical procedures. The ruling also specifically excludes teeth whitening costs from deductible medical expenses.
By way of explanation, the ruling describes breast reconstruction surgery as surgery that corrects a deformity as in the case of corrective surgery following a mastectomy. Laser eye surgery is categorized with deformity-correcting procedures because the surgery corrects a vision dysfunction. Other vision corrective measures, such as eyeglasses and contact lenses, are already allowed as deductions.
The IRS does not recognize teeth whitening procedures as a treatment for a disease, a correction of a deformity, or a correction of a bodily dysfunction, and thus the cost of such measures is not allowed as a medical deduction.
With regard to deductions for nonprescription drugs, the law states that the cost of medicine and drugs taken for medical care is allowed as an itemized deduction only if a doctor prescribes the medicine or drug. An exception to this rule is insulin, which is allowed as an itemized deduction even though it is acquired without a prescription.
Revenue Ruling 2003-58 explains that even if a physician recommends that a patient take a particular medicine or drug, the cost of that item is not allowed as a deduction if the item is acquired without a prescription. The cost of aspirin is cited as an example of a nondeductible medical expense. The ruling goes on to explain that the cost other non-medicinal items recommended by a doctor may be deducted as itemized medical deductions. Examples include bandages and similar supplies, medical equipment such as crutches, and diagnostic devices such as blood sugar test kits.
Unlike changes in the law that require an effective date, clarifications offer explanations of existing law. Thus the clarification is a retroactive event that provides more thorough detail of law that is already in place. As a result, tax returns from previous years (2000 to 2002 are the open years at present) may be amended to take advantage of the explanations set out in these revenue rulings. | <urn:uuid:aa5929a5-44d0-4e35-8e08-580d4c0d17fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.accountingweb.com/topic/tax/irs-clarifies-certain-medical-deductions | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952802 | 553 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Rwanda hits back at DR Congo accusations over mutiny
6/25/2012 11:00:01 PM -
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - Rwanda's foreign minister said Monday that "disingenuous" accusations by neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo over involvement in an anti-government mutiny risked stirring up conflict in the region.
Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo strongly condemned "rumors and reports" about Rwanda's backing for rebels in eastern DR Congo she said had encouraged the kind of "rhetoric" that existed before Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
Mushikawabo is visiting the UN headquarters and Washington this week amid growing controversy and tension over a UN report said to give evidence that Rwandan military officers have helped DR Congo rebels.
DR Congo's Foreign Minister Raymond Tshibanda wrote to the UN Security Council last week saying Rwandan involvement in the strife was "evolving dangerously toward a rupture of the peace" between the neighbors.
The letter called on the council to condemn Rwanda's actions in DR Congo, where government forces are battling a mutiny by former soldiers in the M23 group.
Mushikawabo called the DR Congo letter "regrettable," saying that she was just leaving Kinshasa after talks with Tshibanda when it was sent.
"It is disingenuous, I think, to sit down to call for a meeting and while you are asking to negotiate and to talk, and you are asking your neighbor to come and support, you are sending letters accusing your neighbor," Mushikawabo told reporters at UN headquarters.
"So these are difficulties that we have in our relationships."
She said Rwanda "has never closed its door" to talks with the DRC.
"We need peace... both the DRC and Rwanda inherited a situation we did not make, so we have to continue trying to find solutions together," Mushikawabo added.
"But reports and letters and so forth are not going to solve the problem.
"People need to just calm down and look at this situation, look at the history, look at the context. Otherwise, there is so much conflicting information out there that it risks getting the conflict worse rather than better."
The minister denied her country was supporting armed groups in the region.
"Rwanda would not participate in any destabilizing act in the region and in eastern DRC in particular," she added.
Mushikawabo said the reports had already led to attacks on Rwandans.
Last week, 11 Rwandan men were "beaten, tortured, some of them burned and then dumped at the border post between Rwanda and the DRC," she said.
The Rwandan government was also "very concerned" at "rhetoric" and "bigotry" on websites and some media close to the DR Congo government calling for attacks on Rwandans and ethnic Tutsis.
"This is very reminiscent of the rhetoric right before the genocide in 1994. Certainly Rwanda keeps a very close watch on that kind of pronouncements," said Mushikawabo.
An annex to a UN sanctions committee report on the troubles in DR Congo contains evidence of Rwandan military involvement in the M23 uprising, according to diplomats.
Some diplomats and the Human Rights Watch group have said the United States is leading countries holding up the report. US officials have strongly denied the charge.
"Of course, Rwanda's top army leadership in no way -- and I am very categorical about this -- in no way, would be involved in destroying the peace they have been working very hard to build," the Rwandan minister said. | <urn:uuid:b872b83f-4b4d-4652-b9a1-05bcefc373b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.modernghana.com/news/403201/1/rwanda-hits-back-at-dr-congo-accusations-over-muti.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969617 | 747 | 1.515625 | 2 |
He calls it “WWW” — “what was where.”
Earl Danieley, president emeritus and adjunct chemistry professor at Elon University, offers an unrivaled campus tour full of passion and humor. Danieley has witnessed both prosperity and hardship in his 70 years on Elon’s campus.
As an Alamance County native, he has seen sprawling cornfields become academic buildings and the homes of old friends make way for the classrooms of thousands of students. The result is a campus rooted in tradition, history and a relentless need for growth.
Danieley’s personal walking tour, a marriage of engaging anecdotes and factual accounts, provides a vivid picture of life at Elon. In a way, nothing is as it was when Danieley graduated from Elon College in 1946. In another way, it hasn’t changed at all.
“I’ve had alumni talk with me about their feeling that we’re getting too large,” Danieley said. “My response has been that as long as you have the community spirit, as long as you have small groups, as long as you have living, learning communities, then you’re not too big. It’s not a matter of numbers, it’s a matter of attitude. And I think we still have that knowing people is important to us, being friends with people is important to us.”
He admits that the graduates are not wrong — the campus has grown tremendously. When Elon College was built in 1889, only two buildings christened the campus. The administration building, affectionately called Old Main, and East dormitory were the only two buildings standing when the college opened its doors to 76 students.
Today, the 600-acre campus hosts more than 40 major buildings. But according to Jo Watts Williams, Class of 1955, the growth has improved the university.
“The diversity of the students, it’s almost miraculous the way the institution has emerged,” she said. “I think it’s enhanced (the campus). There were probably 450 on-campus students, maybe 250 commuters. It’s amazing. It’s almost hard for me to remember or believe that that was the case.”
Building a legend, family
When Danieley began teaching at Elon College in 1947, the rural town was quintessentially American, according to Danieley. Although many of the homes he often walked past are no longer there, he can still name each of the families that lived on Haggard Avenue and the surrounding sidestreets, describing their personalities, hobbies and occupations.
Where McMichael Science Building now stands was the home of W.P. Lawrence, English professor and part-time dean. Next door lived Professor Ned Brannock and his two daughters.
“My first two years as a professor here, I rented a room in their house,” Danieley said. “I paid $10 a month rent, and I ate my meals in the dining hall on campus. At the end of those two years, I got a permanent roommate.”
Danieley married Verona Daniels Sept. 1, 1948. She was serving as secretary for President Leon Smith when the two met. Together they purchased the land adjacent to Professor Lawrence, which became the family’s orchard and garden.
“I grew up on the farm, and wherever we lived, I always had to have a garden — except for the one nine-month term where we lived in Baltimore while I was working at Johns Hopkins,” he said. “I needed very much to have that, having grown up with the garden.”
The Danieley family lived in multiple homes in Elon, including six years in an old frame house next to the current Elon Community Church, followed by the former president’s home, now called Holland House. Despite these various locations, Danieley always spent time in his garden.
“In 1963, I built my house next door to (the garden),” he said. “I had plenty of land out back, so I had over 100 rose bushes back there. I had an orchard back there with apples, plums, peaches, nectarines, figs, pears, apricots, grapes and Lord knows what else. I grew lots of things; I would plant so much that I would have to have help. I would hire one of the boys from school to be my helper.”
In the mid ’90s, Danieley sold his home on the orchard to Elon College to make room for a new science building. He now teaches chemistry in the building that sits where his home once stood.
A struggling institution
As Danieley raised his three children, he similarly watched Elon College grow. The campus was accepting more and more students, as it built academic buildings and residence halls. But incredible growth was not the only type of transformation Elon witnessed.
Following the fire of 1923, Alamance, Duke, Mooney, Carlton and Whitley buildings were built, and the college was more than $500,000 in debt.
“There was no way in the world we could raise enough money to pay for the interest, let alone the debt,” Danieley said. “In the spring of 1931, (President Harper) resigned. In December 1931, the college was bankrupt. There were debts we could not pay, we had only 80 students and we lost our accreditation. It was just about as low as an institution could be. You would expect, given those facts, the institution would close down.”
Leon Smith became president in 1931 and successfully restored the institution.
“He took over at that point and saved the college,” Danieley said. “Knowing where we were in 1931, and aware of where we are now, I say this: There is no more remarkable story in the history of American higher education than the story of the growth and development of this institution. I’d put it up against any institution anywhere in the country.”
And Danieley had a lot to do with that growth and development.
If we hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t believe it. But we did it, and it’s been
a great story to see it grow and develop over the years, and it’s not done yet.
-Dr. Danieley, president emeritus
Danieley’s passion for farming brought him closer to his neighbors. The relationship he built with those in town eventually helped bolster the university.
He befriended A.L. Rich who lived in the house now occupied by the Financial Planning Office.
“(It’s) the only one from that era that’s still around,” he said. “Rich worked in the textile mill, and his wife was an Elon graduate. Mr. Rich and I would garden together. He was a master gardener and a great friend.”
According to Williams, Rich’s farm was a major part of the community.
“There was a wonderful grape vine back in the vicinity of Belk Library, where I’d pick grapes,” Williams said. “Mr. Rich lived in that house and he had cows. There was a barn right where Belk Library sits. He delivered milk to the residents of the little village.”
Danieley bought Rich’s property, but included a life estate which allowed the family to live there until they passed away.
The acquisition of Rich’s property marked the beginning of exponential growth for Elon College. It included a large cornfield, where a powerhouse was built in the ’40s. Danieley then converted the space into a parking lot. President Fred Young finally made the space Moseley Center and Young Commons, bringing the hub of student activity from Long Hall to the opposite side of Haggard Avenue.
During his time as president, Danieley oversaw the construction of Hook, Brannock and Barney residence halls, as well as the McEwen Library — now the School of Communications — and Powell building. Students took part in the first study abroad trip, and the first national fraternity and sorority came to campus.
Through his dedication and commitment, Danieley has helped Elon become a home for thousands of men and women. He both contributed to and witnessed the development of a university that has risen from the ashes.
“We have come from nothing to national prominence, and it’s so incredible,” Danieley said. “If we hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t believe it. But we did it, and it’s been a great story to see it grow and develop over the years, and it’s not done yet.” | <urn:uuid:51cbd5b3-9c76-4ac9-acba-48cd0ffb0f45> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.elonpendulum.com/2012/04/lifetime-of-maroon-and-gold/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98231 | 1,866 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Upper Marlboro Group Headed to Pearl Harbor Commemorations
Local unit of Young Marines heads to Hawaii to pay tribute to fateful 1941 attack.
A group of local youngsters will be traveling to Hawaii next week to take part in the ceremonies to commemorate the 71st anniversary of the attacks on Pearl Harbor which launched the United States into World War II.
A unit from the Upper Marlboro chapter of the Young Marines, a youth education and service program for school-age boys and girls, will be joining Young Marines from across the nation to lay a wreath at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific on Thursday, Dec. 6.
“Undoubtedly, the Young Marines will meet some of the survivor of that historic event of 71 years ago,” said Michael Kessler, national executive director of the Young Marines. “Those veterans are, in every sense of the words - living history, and each has a story to tell. It is an honor to attend an event that commemorates a significant turning point in our nation’s history.”
On Friday, Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day, the Young Marines will be leading the Pearl Harbor Memorial Parade through Honolulu, bearing the banners of the 12 big warships which were attacked on a day which then-President Franklin Roosevelt said would "live on in infamy."
Each unit traveling to Hawaii for the commemoration–there are 14 of them, including another from the Hamilton neighborhood in Baltimore–had to raise their own funds to pay for the trip. | <urn:uuid:33ce6c4a-9a3a-40fe-a0b9-6d6a780ccf55> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hyattsville.patch.com/articles/upper-marlboro-group-headed-to-pearl-harbor-commemorations | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938194 | 311 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Editor's note: The Camera is counting down the Top 10 local news stories of 2012 as chosen by newsroom staff. Readers also voted for their top picks.
3. Flagstaff Fire and Colorado's summer of wildfires
10. CU men's basketball team wins Pac-12, breaks into Top 25
9. Boulder County's hot, dry summer
8.CU makes unprecedented efforts to snuff 4/20
7. USA Pro Cycling Challenge wows Boulder
6. CU Buffs fire Jon Embree, hire Mike MacIntyre
5. NIST's David Wineland wins the Nobel Prize in physics
4. President Barack Obama visitts Boulder three times
3. Saga of CU's "Falling Bear"
In 2002, former Gov. Bill Owens once famously said, "All of Colorado is on fire." One can only imagine what he might have said if he took a helicopter ride in 2012.
In one of the driest and hottest summers on record, Colorado saw a rash of large wildfires across the state, including the Flagstaff Fire in Boulder that burned 300 acres and prompted evacuations along Flagstaff Road and warnings in south Boulder.
The fire was first reported on June 26 after a lightning strike near Bison Drive. Local firefighters and a regional team fought the blaze for nine days before the fire was 100 percent contained. During that time 28 homes along Bison Drive and Flagstaff Road were evacuated and pre-evacuation notices were sent out to thousands of homes in south Boulder.
There was also the short-lived Ironing Board Fire on the Third Flatiron and numerous other small fires caused by lightning strikes in that time span that had local firefighters stretched all over the county.
But the Flagstaff Fire turned out to be one of the smaller wildfires that broke out around the state. The High Park Fire in Larimer County burned up almost 90,000 acres and killed a 62-year-old woman, while the Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs torched 18,000 acres and 346 homes en route to becoming the most expensive wildfire in Colorado history with over $350 million in damage.
The state also saw the Lower North Fork Fire in Jefferson County, the Pine Ridge Fire in Mesa County and the Last Chance Fire in Washington County. Even as the state finally is now seeing some snow, the Fern Lake Fire in Rocky Mountain National Park continues to burn and has now consumed almost 4,000 acres.
By the end of the summer, President Barack Obama had visited the state to survey the fire damage and "2012 Colorado wildfires" garnered its own Wikipedia page.
Contact Camera Staff Writer Mitchell Byars at 303-473-1329 or [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:1f568ffe-7438-4933-a83b-28f9fedbb8d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailycamera.com/ci_22275057 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949602 | 552 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Vadim Polikov, president of Astrum Solar, poses next to a solar… (Baltimore Sun photo by Gabe…)
Solar power is not just for large manufacturers and other companies looking to save on energy costs.
Photovoltaic systems increasingly are turning up on rooftops of residential homes. It's a market on which Astrum Solar is betting.
Based in Annapolis Junction, the four-year-old, privately held company markets itself as a full-service provider of solar power focusing exclusively on homeowners. Astrum Solar operates in 10 states and the District of Columbia.
Installing a solar panel system can be expensive, but tax credits and other incentives and falling equipment prices are helping to drive down the costs.
Astrum Solar scored an endorsement from Baltimore's Constellation Energy Group last month in the form of a minority equity investment. The terms of the investment were not disclosed.
The Baltimore Sun spoke recently with Vadim Polikov, Astrum Solar's president, about the company, Constellation's investment and prospects for residential solar.
How does Astrum Solar distinguish itself from competitors?
We make it very easy for customers to go solar. We do all the paperwork … [we] go out [and] search for the best technologies out there, and we'll do the entire process from sales to pulling permits and project management to installation to solar monitoring.
How much has the company grown since 2007?
We started in 2007 with myself and two co-founders, and now we have about 125 employees. We are serving 10 different states and we have five operation centers, which are offices where we have staff members and warehouses and trucks and panels, and that's all across the eastern U.S. …
Last year we did about 500 installations. And we'll probably grow two to three times that much this year.
How will Constellation's equity investment help Astrum Solar?
It's combining the traditional resources of a large Fortune 500 energy company with the speed and understanding of the solar market that we have.
It allows us to further expand our reach. It allows us to serve customers better in the regions we're in. And there are synergies there with the combination of the two companies as well. Procurement synergies, and working with [Constellation's unregulated division] BGE Home to do solar installations. We'll be working together with financing options.
How did the partnership with Constellation start?
We had our connection with BGE Home before the equity partnership was announced. This has been in the works for a while. …
They … wanted to get involved in the residential solar space. They looked at the companies out there and they picked us. …
It shows that residential solar is something … [whose] time has come and it's ready for prime time.
If Constellation Energy is getting into residential solar, it means it's even more exciting and a growing industry — an industry that's ready to take off even further.
How do you sell solar power to consumers who are interested in being more green but worried about the costs and logistics of getting started?
First of all, solar is a pretty good financial deal. The return on investment is fairly high — higher than what you could get from a stock or bond. The return is 8 to 12 percent. … The difficulty is coming up with upfront money.
Typically, this has been taken care of in multiple ways. One of the ways that is popular is leasing. We are launching a leasing program probably in the next week or two, and leasing allows the customer to put up a lot less money, oftentimes very low to potentially even zero. And they put a little bit of money and pay a monthly payment that's usually less than [what they'd pay for] the electricity they're offsetting.
For those folks who can afford the larger amount down, they'll make a good return on investment.
What is the typical upfront cost if you don't take the leasing option?
Upfront costs would be in the region of $25,000 to $35,000, depending on how big of a system you're going to take. That will pay back usually in seven years or so.
There are a lot of incentives that cut back that cost, sometimes half [or] less than half of that.
What factors are making solar power more attractive for residential consumers?
The homeowner has a very high return even compared to commercial and very large industrial customers. And that's because the system that they could get is specifically tailored to their site, and it's something that they're going to have on their house for a long time. It also increases the property value of their home significantly. …
The incentives in Maryland include a grant from the state of Maryland and the renewable energy credits. Those are an additional way to make money from the solar electricity produced by the solar panels. | <urn:uuid:6fe57d73-b9c5-4349-b8f5-dbe56151806a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-07-22/business/bs-bz-interview-vadim-polikov-20110722_1_solar-power-solar-installations-solar-market | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969257 | 1,007 | 1.6875 | 2 |
my daughter(who will be 2 next month) was diagnosed with epilepsy in April of last year. after two months of testing they told us she is having "complex, partial motor seizures." they put her on pheno-barb, but this did not react well with her, so they switched to Tegretol. My problem is that no matter how many doctors we talk to none can find a reason why she is having the seizures. There is no history of seizures on either side of family. we have changed doctors and hospitals, but still have no answers to any possible reasons/causes. Boo(my daughters nickname), has what we think are headaches/migranes. She will be playing and then out of no where start criing, grabbing her head saying ouch-ouch. She tries to rip her hair right out of her head at times, and has also started hitting her head because it hurts soo bad. This is very difficult for mom and me, because we dont know what to do. If anyone out there has had this happen to them or knows any information about what I have explained, PLEASE let me know. Also, the doctors said that there is a 85% chance that she will outgrow this, IF AND ONLY IF, they can control it with medicine. Unless she is hooked up to the EEG machine how are we or them(the docs) supposed to know whether this med is working? IF THERE IS ANYONE THAT CAN HELP PLEASE!!!???!!! THANK-YOU
My prayers are with you and your family. I too have a two year old, and epilepsy is sort of in my family, I read where a child of somebody with epilepsy has a 90% chance of not having seizures, although somewhat reasuring, I still fear for my son, I watch him when he sleeps any movement that seems unnatural I freak and ask my husban if that's what I do when I have one. He say's that I don't do those things. But I still worry. Your story makes me cry, I can't imagine how she handles those migraines, that's to much.
Your Doctor is right in that some kids do grow out of it. Both my cousins who had seizures as children have not had one in over 10 years. Hopefully that gives you some hope. Good Luck and God Bless!
So sorry to hear about your daughter. I also have been extremely frustrated at not knowing the cause of my daughter's seizures - age 8 temporal lobe partial seizures. The docs don't seem to care about the cause, just treating it. I feel if they'd ask more questions when patients are first diagnosed, then perhaps they'd find a common link. When did your daughter have her MMR vaccine? Seizures are listed as a side effect of this vaccine. However, I only knew about the falling down, jerking (grand mal) type. So, would never have associated what my daughter was doing (her seizures make her feel like she is going to vomit) with seizures. Her seizures started not long after her second MMR, but they told me she has a lesion/tumor. So, don't know if the vaccine could cause that. Believe me, I have agonized over everything. It's a devastating diagnosis. They have told me that with young children such as mine that sometimes there is a malformation of blood vessels which causes seizures. Genetics sometimes play a role. I personally have no one on either side with this. There is a very large comprehensive epilepsy center in NY - I believe it is called Columbia something. The good thing about this site is you will find a lot of older people who have lived with this condition all their life and have very normal lives. That brought me a lot of comfort. Not to mention they are loaded with info and compassion. My prayers are with your family. lazoo
Hi Kassandras dad, As Satman stated, many who have seizures are never sure what caused it. My son is among those who have no real family history. (One great uncle but his was a birth injury and not considered hereditary). Sam was a twitchy baby, but not diagnosed with E until age 7. The tech for his first EEG questioned why we never saw anything, it was so abnormal. We did not because he was having mostly nocturnal seizures then. We only saw the after effects.
My heart goes out to you Dad. Hang in there. You can know if the med works by whether she keeps having seizures. Did you discuss the migraine headaches with doctors or Neuros? They could even be seizures, maybe a different type than the ones they know she has. My son, and others I talk to, can have them start as a violent pain in the stomach, a tooth, or the head. He will yell and grab the area...WHen it stops he acts very confused and post ictal, telling us what happened was a seizure. Hang in there, hope this has helped some.
mom of 2 teens who have battled seiuzres.
Thank You to all who have replied. Reading your stories has given me some comfort. I have discussed the headaches with the Doc's and Neuro's, and so far the only thing that has been done is they send us to check the Tegretol levels. They state that if she is getting either too much or too little this could be the cause. Unfortunately, the levels always come back within the required range. I state unfortunately, because if they were not within the range atleast there would be an answer to why she gets the headaches. Please excuse me as I cannot remember exactely what all of you wrote in your replies, so I will speak in general. BOO's MMR shot was in May, the month following her first series of seizures. The first hospital we went to said they were feberal seizures... the only problem being that she did not have a fever before, during, or after the seizure. So we ruled that out. When she had another seizure, I told the local hospital to immediately tranfer her to Children's Hospital of Buffalo. They did an EEG, Spinal Tap, MRI and several other tests that I cant remember the names(mostly blood work). Since then we have had several more EEG's, another MRI, and numerous, upon numerous blood work done. It wasn't until she was in for long time monitoring that they realized the seizures she was having. We have since changed Hospitals, to Strong Hopital in Rochester, and she is in the Epilepsy Clinic there, but the same as before, no CONCRETE answers. I did read something about the medicine(Tegretol) that headaches may be a side effect. If anyone else knows of different types of medicine that I could ask about your ideas would be helpful. Thank You once again to everyone that has helped. You, and your family are in our prayers, and we thank you for all your prayers. GOD Bless....
Kasnandrasdad.My brother started getting seizures at 16 yrs old.The only way he was diagnosed was that I,his sister,noticed that he would stare in lala land for about 10 seconds and not know what anyone said.It sarted getting worse and worse to the point of gran mal seizures and evetually totalling 7 vehicles including mine that were written off.He's now 23 and has been controlled,as far as I know for 3 months. | <urn:uuid:81ac085d-2f74-4eb4-8eb1-cab9781f9b59> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.healthboards.com/boards/epilepsy/45340-if-anyone-can-help-please.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985871 | 1,524 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Hawkish when it comes to a nuclear Iran and military tribunals for suspected foreign terrorists, U.S. Senate contenders Linda McMahon and Richard Blumenthal don't see eye-to-eye over troop withdrawal deadlines in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S.-Pakistani relations and the future of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
"I think that Gitmo is serving as a very adequate detention prison for those terrorists," McMahon said. "I really don't see any need to close it. The prisoners are being well-cared for. I think it's working well to have it."
Blumenthal, for whom Obama campaigned last month in Connecticut, had to be pressed several times to say outright that he supports the ultimate closure of Gitmo.
"At some point Guantanamo Bay will be closed, but it needs to be done responsibly," Blumenthal said in a recent interview.
Blumenthal said it would be irresponsible to set an arbitrary deadline for the detention camp to close until an adequate substitute facility can be identified domestically. He didn't want to speculate on where suspected terrorists and enemy combatants might be eventually housed, however.
"Some of the most dangerous criminals are safely housed, in effect, in solitary confinement in maximum security prisons that communities accept because states make it worthwhile to them," said Blumenthal, Connecticut's attorney general for the past two decades.
Blumenthal broke with some fellow Democrats on where Gitmo detainees should go to trial, saying that foreign nationals linked to terrorist plots should face military tribunals.
"They should be used for some trials such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who attacked the U.S. and was directed, trained and, in effect, ordered by foreign terrorists," Blumenthal said, referring to the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "A military tribunal is appropriate for his trial."
But American citizens who carry out terror plots such as the Oklahoma City bombing should be tried in U.S. courts, Blumenthal said.
"As a former prosecutor ... I would pick the tribunal or court that provides a conviction as quickly as possible with the maximum punishment as possible," Blumenthal said. "That's how I would make the decision as a prosecutor."
McMahon didn't draw a distinction between the national origin of terrorists held at Gitmo, however.
"The terrorists that are there, I think, should be tried in a military tribunals," McMahon said. "I don't think they should come into the U.S. courts and be accorded the rights and privileges of U.S. citizens."
McMahon and Blumenthal showed further divisions on the war in Iraq, where the Obama administration plans to keep 50,000 U.S. troops on the ground through next year in a non-combat capacity.
Blumenthal opposes extending the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
"We need to avoid open-ended commitments," Blumenthal said. "I would be very wary about extending any commitment of troops or changing present timetables, but we need to protect the military men and women who are there now."
McMahon said that the U.S. cannot allow the situation in Iraq to disintegrate, however.
"If we were to see that we need to hold for a bit then we could," said McMahon, the former CEO of Stamford-based World Wrestling Entertainment.
Blumenthal and McMahon differed even more sharply over what to do in Afghanistan, where the Obama administration tripled the number of troops but is planning to start withdrawal in July 2011.
"We should be very concerned about wavering from that timetable in any sort of open-ended commitment," Blumenthal said. "Between now and then the Afghan military has to achieve the capability to defend the nation against extremists and terrorists."
McMahon questioned the logic of such a timetable, as well as the overall military strategy in Afghanistan, which she said appears to be in conflict with U.S. political strategy.
"I absolutely do not think when we're going into an area of conflict that we state when we're going to begin withdrawal," McMahon said. "As a senator, I would want a full briefing on exactly what the goals and strategies are in Afghanistan."
Both McMahon and Blumenthal kept the military option on the table with respect to Iran.
"Iran is such a rogue nation," McMahon said. "A nuclear Iran is just not something that's acceptable to me or the United States."
McMahon was less committal when asked if she would support military incursions in Pakistan, where that nation's intelligence agency is suspected of tacitly cooperating with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
"My concern is now that Pakistan is not the ally we thought it was," McMahon said. "(But) I'm not going to try to be a military strategist."
Blumenthal was more hawkish on Pakistan.
"If Pakistan knowingly provides safe haven for extremists and safe haven for terrorists who threaten our troops, attacks on those enemies within Pakistan should be an option on the table," Blumenthal said.
Staff writer Neil Vigdor can be reached at [email protected] or at 203-625-4436. | <urn:uuid:25724096-b456-42e3-a6a6-99714b591072> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/McMahon-and-Blumenthal-aligned-on-Iran-military-695950.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973078 | 1,051 | 1.515625 | 2 |
If you’ve heard the term managed services mentioned in relation to a broad range of different services, you could be left wondering what the phrase ‘managed services’ actually means. In simplest terms, managed services are any aspect of your business that you outsource to a third party to manage. This Computerworld Strategy Guide will review outsourcing options available and outline how managed services can help to reduce running costs for different aspects of your business, in turn increasing profitability within your business.
Enterprise IT management technologies are underdoing a major image makeover. Download this Computerworld Strategy Guide and receive a collection including case studies, research, and news on expanding business use of evolving technology. Read on...
Workers are going remote. In some organisations, 85% of the workforce works remotely. It's time to start thinking about how to respond to the challenges of having a highly mobile, highly independent workforce. What are some of the perils and upsides? How can you make more of your workers mobile? Find out now.
Copyright 2013 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited. | <urn:uuid:7deb0c6f-f953-4b04-b7cf-dbe9843581a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techworld.com.au/whitepaper/tag/strategy%20guide/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937326 | 251 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The Bourgeois Mothers' Underground!
Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives.
January 25, 1962, Vol. VII, No. 14
The Bourgeois Mothers' Underground
Beatniks and bar flies are the complete population of Greenwich Village in the popular image. No one writes and no one reads about the solid citizens who raise children, belong to the P.T.A., and live in clean, comfortable middle-class apartments. Mrs. Mary Gandall, who very simply describes herself as "middle-aged" and her background as "Irish-English lower-middle-class West Philadelphian," might still be the unsung respectable Villager if she had not joined "the bourgeois mothers' underground."
Last Week Mrs. Gandall and some 75 other Village women helped fill 20 railroad cars of New York area women. These women invaded Washington armed with balloons, posters, and the strength of their own feelings to tell President John F. Kennedy of their concern about a potential nuclear war...
How had this modest Village housewife become involved in the peace movement? It appeared that she had never had any serious political interests before. As she thought back, she said: "Oh, I remember once when I was in advertising, I belonged to something called 'Men and Women in Advertising for Roosevelt.'"
...By now she has become a committed peacenik: she is a board member of the Greenwich Village Peace Center and heads there what is called (in terminology borrowed from its original sponsors, the American Friends Service Committee) the "Women's Committee of Concern." The next project she and her committee of concern are taking up is how to support the ADA-Sane-Mark Lane march on Albany on February 12 to call for repeal of the State fallout-shelter bill...
[Each weekday morning, we post an excerpt from another issue of the Voice, going in order from our oldest archives. Visit our Clip Job archive page to see excerpts back to 1956.] | <urn:uuid:7b9ee4ed-bdca-43f4-b4e8-29bc2e06056e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2009/01/clip_job_the_bo_1.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962911 | 406 | 1.71875 | 2 |
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NEW YORK--When a championship boxer like Muhammad Ali felt disrespected by another fighter, he might have been expected to do what most boxers would: knock his opponent's lights out. But the icon took a different route when faced with a rival he...
BOSTON (AP) — The angry and grieving mother of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects insists that her sons are innocent and that she's no terrorist. But Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is drawing increased attention after federal officials say Russian...
When Albina Digaeva, a Chechen who was granted political asylum in the United States, first learned that the Boston bombing suspects were from Chechnya, she called the California family who initially put her up when she arrived 15 years ago and...
He still gets up early. He could sleep in. He no longer has a big staff to deploy. No public crises nipping at his mind and time. He lives alone. He gets up at 6 anyway, and sets off to the gym before breakfast. He likes it there, feels safe in the...
This week a young man, having read our website and perhaps the article I wrote for the Pilot two weeks ago, engaged me in conversation. He was very polite, though he tried to question me about my faith, entrap me in the Bible's condemnation and...
Tags: Religion and Belief
Q: Would Joseph's brothers have asked for forgiveness if they were not about to starve to death? — R., Kenosha, Wis., via [email protected] A: Gandhi once famously remarked, "To a starving man, God is bread." His point is that our...
Sociologist Max Weber first advanced the idea of a Protestant work ethic in 1914. A recent study suggests that not only does this ethic exist, it can make the effects of unemployment worse for Protestants than for non-Protestants. The Dutch survey,...
ReligionLink rounds up what's been written about at the link between religion and terrorism after the Boston Marathon bombings: The bombings at the Boston Marathon and the subsequent identification of two ethnic Chechen immigrant brothers as the...
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Rhode Island is on a path to becoming the 10th state to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry after a landmark vote in the state's Senate on Wednesday. The Senate passed gay marriage legislation by a comfortable 26-12...
Tags: Religion and Belief, Voting, Minority Groups, Family, Marriage
God SquadQ: Would Joseph's brothers have asked for forgiveness if they were not about to starve to death? -- R., Kenosha, Wis., via [email protected] A: Gandhi once famously remarked, "To a starving man, God is bread." His point is that our spiritual...
Hero Complex - movies, comics, pop culture - Los Angeles TimesSome video-game makers are motivated to make the most detailed simulation of warfare. Others re-create childhood dreams of monsters in ......
WSBT-TVInvestigators say they believe the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were motivated by a radical version of Islam. It's an important development in the investigation, and also an opportunity for followers of Islam to educate others about a...
Apr 29, 2013 |Story| Los Angeles Times
Apr 29, 2013 |Story| Petoskey News
Apr 28, 2013 |Story| Baltimore Sun
Apr 28, 2013 |Column| Chicago Tribune
Apr 26, 2013 |Story| Daily Pilot
Apr 26, 2013 |Story| Daily Pilot
Apr 26, 2013 |Story| Burbank Leader
Apr 25, 2013 | Orlando Sentinel
Apr 25, 2013 |Story| Petoskey News
Apr 25, 2013 |Story| Tribune Media Services
Mar 22, 2013 | Los Angeles Times
Apr 23, 2013 |Story| WSBT-TV
Original site for Belief and Faith topic gallery. | <urn:uuid:cfbc5a38-8cb9-42de-b629-72c8cf57f9cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ctnow.com/topic/religion-belief/belief-faith/12002000.topic?page=8 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946464 | 831 | 1.539063 | 2 |
DOHA — Conference delegates meeting in the Qatari capital on Friday backed a tightening of the United Nations anti-corruption programme but lobby groups immediately slammed the deal as a lost opportunity.
"The sword of justice just got sharper," Qatar Attorney General Ali al-Marri, the conference chairman, said after countries approved a mechanism to monitor implementation of the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC).
But Christian Aid, Global Witness, and Tearfund said in a joint statement: "China, Russia and Egypt are among governments who have weakened proposals to ensure signatory countries live up to their commitments."
"Shamefully, a handful of countries have rendered UNCAC toothless. This fudged agreement begs the question: what do governments have to hide?" Christian Aid's Adele Poskitt said in the statement.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, insisted: "This agreement will not end corruption, but it will enable us to measure and fight it."
The legally binding convention, launched in 2003, obliges the 142 signatory countries to prevent and criminalise corruption, promote international cooperation, recover stolen assets, and improve technical assistance and information exchange.
Under the new mechanism, all countries will be monitored every five years to see how they are living up to their obligations.
"From now on, states will be judged by the actions that they take against corruption, not the promises they make," Costa said.
The country reports will identify gaps in national anti-corruption laws and practices. Strengths and weaknesses will also be revealed by a self-assessment checklist, he said.
Dimitri Vlassis, head of the corruption and economic crime section in Costa's office, told AFP the agreement was approved by the 121 countries represented in Doha but "some clauses are optional."
For some countries, "It is a question of national sovereignty" and states cannot be forced to accept inspections, which the United States and European Union had advocated.
George Boden of Global Witness said: "A huge opportunity to turn rhetoric into action has been lost due to the irresponsible behaviour of an unlikely coalition of blocking countries."
"Corruption is one of the main reasons that countries remain poor, as government revenues disappear into the pockets of corrupt officials, whilst the poorest are denied access to health care, education and a decent living," said Laura Webster of Tearfund, according to the campaign groups' statement.
Without a strong peer review mechanism, there is no way to enforce compliance with UNCAC's measures to tackle corrupt practices, the critics said.
"This week?s meeting was the opportunity to agree that mechanism. But, in the face of opposition from a number of governments, countries have settled on a weak compromise that does not ensure transparency or accountability," their statement said.
"Even other UNCAC members will not have access to the full findings of the review teams. A weak review mechanism will mean that corruption will continue to blight the lives of people in poverty," the groups said.
Webster said: "This represents a significant setback for UNCAC. The failure to agree to a transparent and inclusive review mechanism will result in a huge loss of momentum for global anti-corruption efforts."
"Without effective anti-corruption safeguards, the funding urgently needed to tackle development issues, such as climate change, may be siphoned off, not reaching those most in need," Poskitt added.
UNCAC signatory countries are not scheduled to meet again until a conference in Morocco in 2011.
Copyright © 2013 AFP. All rights reserved. More » | <urn:uuid:d3286e64-305d-4038-aeab-71dcdd46b9c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iJ5xvMTOa6J7lz9xCXXpqwj38tNg | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947589 | 734 | 1.710938 | 2 |
In June 2007, the iPhone instantly obsoleted all previous smartphones (the BlackBerry and Palm families), finally approaching the promise that carriers and device makers had been making about the mobile future for a decade: Real Web access. A touch UI -- that rotates. Accelerometer and location detection. E-mail and instant messaging. Photos and music. A year later came the App Store and the tens of thousands of apps -- from games to time-wasters to serious business tools -- that also made the iPhone into a computing device.
Since then, there's been an ever-increasing number of competitors, but nothing fundamentally game-changing. Apple continues to refine the iPhone and iPod Touch, adding capabilities such as a compass, Exchange e-mail support, and video capture -- but the last round of devices didn't pioneer anything significant. Both Palm and Google delivered their own iPhone-inspired OSes (WebOS and Android, respectively), but did nothing significant beyond adding (very welcome) support for multiple simultaneous apps to what the iPhone had already brought to the table.
[ Stay up on tech news and reviews from your smartphone at infoworldmobile.com. | Get the best iPhone apps for pros with our business iPhone apps finder. | See which smartphone is right for you with our mobile "deathmatch" calculator. ]
But there's been not much else.
RIM's BlackBerry OS has graduated from being DOS-like to Windows 2.0-like, while the iPhone, Android, and WebOS are in Windows 95-equivalent territory. Microsoft's Windows Mobile has been moribund, with no significant innovations in years and stuck in the mobile equivalent of Windows 3.0 territory. Nokia's Symbian OS has been even more static in a Windows 2.0-like world like the BlackBerry, and now the company says it will phase out Symbian in favor of a Linux-derived OS called Maemo -- but only over the next several years. It's an aging tortoise choosing to race in the mud.
Is there no more innovation to be had in mobile? Has mobile matched the PC in becoming a stable platform where innovation happens slowly and mainly around the edges? After all, what does a PC in 2009 do that a PC in 2000 couldn't do -- even if not as fast -- beyond using different ports?
Refinements: lots more would be welcome
Sure, there's plenty more to be done in terms of refinements. Faster processors, better battery life, and better 3G networks -- especially from AT&T -- are all needed, but these always need improvement. Enterprise-class security should be standard in all of these platforms, as should over-the-air management using standard management tools. (Making these capabilities standard would also enable mobile banking, not just satisfy security-conscious IT people.) Many could use sharper, larger screens, as well as better physical or virtual keyboards.
All should support more wireless capabilities, such as use with Bluetooth keyboards and file syncing and support for wireless-enabled projectors and printers. Voice commands should be integrated across the device's OS and the carrier's phone capabilities; right now, the voice control for dialing can't deal with the smartphone's other apps, making it very hard to use these devices hands-free while driving. | <urn:uuid:c5d3eb08-6a64-45d9-9ed9-3b3c2727f673> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/has-mobile-innovation-come-end-439?source=IFWNLE_nlt_mobilehdwr_2009-12-02 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943178 | 670 | 1.835938 | 2 |
5 Reasons Gay Marriage Losing Streak May Be OverJune 14th, 2012 8:22 am Associated Press
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Opponents of gay marriage have an unblemished track record in U.S. elections, chalking up 32 victories in 32 public votes.
They’ve won in blue states and red ones, among the most heavily religious areas and among the least-churched. North Carolina punctuated the winning streak just last month by comfortably approving a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex unions.
Gay marriage supporters are optimistic that they can end their losing ways this year, with four states voting on the issue in November. They’re particularly encouraged by the prospects in Washington and Maine. Meanwhile opponents have taken steps to maintain their unflawed record and believe their side will be motivated to hold the status quo.
Here are five reasons why same-sex marriage proponents have a decent shot at success in 2012:
WASHINGTON: Officials certified a gay marriage referendum on Tuesday, meaning Washingtonians will decide the issue this fall. Voters upheld an “everything but marriage” law in a similar referendum vote three years ago, approving it by a 53-47 margin. That was the first time that a state’s voters had agreed to extend relationship rights to same-sex couples. It expanded benefits including the right to use sick leave to care for a domestic partner, and rights related to adoption, child custody and child support. Lawmakers comfortably approved gay marriage earlier this year as political leaders such as Gov. Chris Gregoire talked about how their views on the issue had changed. However gay marriage opponents are not conceding anything yet. National groups have promised time and money to fight Washington’s new same-sex marriage law via the referendum, including the Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for Marriage, which was involved in ballot measures that overturned same-sex marriage in California and Maine.
REPUBLICANS: Six Republican lawmakers in Washington voted in favor of the gay marriage legislation, and a leading GOP candidate for attorney general also declared his support. Republican Rep. Maureen Walsh, who represents conservative territory in eastern Washington anchored by Walla Walla, said she believes opinions on the issue are changing even there. “My district is far more receptive to it than they’ve ever been in the past,” she said.
POLLS: A recent poll conducted by consulting firm Strategies 360 found that 54 percent of likely Washington voters think it should be legal for same-sex couples to get married, though the survey didn’t specifically ask them how they’ll vote on Referendum 74. Public support nationally has also been increasing steadily, though both sides of the gay marriage issue have indicated caution with opinion polls on this issue, noting that some may say one thing in surveys but vote another way on an emotionally charged issue. And same-sex marriage opponents point to their many victories at the ballot box in previous elections.
MAINE: Maine voters rejected gay marriage three years ago by a 53-47 margin, and activists have been working over the past two years to change voter opinions. They believe there are positive trends, especially since several of the states that have legal same-sex marriage are New England neighbors — New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Legislature in New Hampshire, now controlled by Republicans, considered repealing that state’s gay marriage law this year but ultimately rejected that effort.
OBAMA: President Barack Obama’s recent declaration of support for gay marriage was celebrated as a key endorsement among gay rights groups. He remains comparatively popular in Washington, with 53 percent approving of his work and 43 percent disapproving, according to the Strategies 360 poll. Obama’s image and statement has been prominently displayed on the website of those trying to sustain the gay marriage law. David Farmer, who is leading efforts to legalize gay marriage in Maine, said Obama’s statement galvanized supporters and also echoed the views of people on the fence. “The way he talked about his evolution is very similar to what we see people talking about when we go to door-to-door,” Farmer said. But foes of gay marriage in Washington think the president’s support could backfire. Joseph Backholm, with Preserve Marriage Washington, has said Obama’s endorsement “will galvanize and energize our folks.”
Associated Press writer Mike Baker can be reached on Facebook: | <urn:uuid:5afd1764-73b7-4bf2-95ee-ef3d275d0558> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nationalmemo.com/5-reasons-gay-marriage-losing-streak-may-be-over/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96324 | 918 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Klein: Inside the Ferry Point Park project
NEW YORK -- The story of Ferry Point Park is one that only this great city could produce. It’s a story that spans decades and is filled with characters worthy of a novel.
It began more than 70 years ago with a man who came to be known simply as “the power broker.” More recently this tale has included a bombastic billionaire tycoon with a serious golf habit. The cast also includes a pair of strong-willed mayors and the greatest golfer in history.
The story line hardly could be more improbable. It revolves around the development of a major championship-quality golf course on the most unlikely of locations – an old garbage dump under a busy expressway on the East River in the gritty south Bronx. It will, in true New York form, be the most expensive municipal golf course ever built. And it’s a project that everyone agrees will lose tens of millions of dollars, in part because of costly union contracts.
This is a Tom Wolfe epic just waiting to be told. Think of it as “Bonfire of the Vanities” meets “On the Waterfront.”
• • •
Ferry Point is a 222-acre parcel under the north side of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, which crosses the East River and connects the Bronx with the borough of Queens. It’s bordered to the east by housing, much of it low-income, and to the north by a cemetery marked by a towering cross. The cross provides the ideal target line for the approach to the 10th green of the course that Jack Nicklaus has designed for the site. The western boundary is lined by the Hutchinson River Parkway, which carries 103,000 cars on and off of the bridge each day, enshrouding the site in a steady, high-decibel thrum.
Grandiose plans have been floated for Ferry Point since the 1930s, when omnipotent parks commissioner Robert Moses – the aforementioned “power broker” – proposed golf, sports fields, a beach and bus terminal.
For two decades after World War II, it was used as a landfill. Plans to cap the site and build a golf course have been floated since at least the mid-1970s. In 2000, a private firm, Ferry Point Partners, undertook to build a Nicklaus-designed course with surrounding park and commercial development. The initial cost estimate was $22.4 million, with the developer paying the city $1.25 million in the first year and $3 million by Year 35. The project had strong backing from then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his successor, current Mayor Michael Bloomberg, both avid golfers.
Ferry Point Partners, however, pulled out in 2006, and city officials moved to turn it into a public project. Meanwhile, the price tag was exploding. The golf course alone now is projected to cost $97 million. At least another $87 million will be required to cap the site and manage two parks adjacent to the course – a 10-acre community facility park and an 18-acre waterfront park. That doesn’t include the cost the city will have to pay to build an access road to the parkway.
The newest player in this drama is Donald Trump, who earlier this month was awarded the contract to manage the course. Trump plans to build a $10 million clubhouse, which he doesn’t have to finish until Year 5, and spend up to $850,000 annually on the grow-in process. The 7,158-yard course is scheduled to open in 2014.
“It’s a spectacular piece of land, a major-championship site literally right next to everything, in the city,” Trump said. “It’s important for golf. Golf has been suffering lately, and it’s a major course in the biggest city in the world.”
For Trump, his first foray into municipal golf was a no-brainer. “My feasibility study is my gut,” he said.
The total budget is by no means fixed. One professional involved in Ferry Point calls it “the most complicated project I’ve ever seen.”
When the city put the course development back out for bidding in 2008, the contract was awarded to the newly constituted team of Nicklaus and John Sanford, who will manage the project and coordinate the army of consultants, engineers, contractors and municipal agencies. Sanford’s credits include Granite Links Golf Club, built on the site of Boston’s “Big Dig.”
Plans are to haul in 220,000 cubic yards of sand, enough to plate the course 1 foot deep for turf cultivation. The sand will be trucked in from eastern Long Island, 60 miles away. At an average load of 27 cubic yards per truck, they’ll need 8,150 truck runs, with drivers earning $98 per hour – half in direct pay, half in benefits.
At rates like that, it’s easy to see how costs can skyrocket. One fellow sits in a truck all day at $100 per hour monitoring the fuel tank on a pump station to make sure it has enough gasoline. The maintenance building and surrounding storage areas will cost $6.8 million. The price tag for a 20-by-30-foot bathroom on the course? A staggering $1.2 million.
• • •
City officials agree that Ferry Point will not pay for itself, let alone make money. The strongest economic argument the city could muster is that the other alternatives are costlier, whereas the golf course would set the city back only $42 million over a projected 35-year period.
According to a 2007 document provided by the Department of Parks & Recreation, closing the landfill would have cost $44 million, with no revenue stream or public utilization; a nature park atop a closed landfill would cost $77 million (that includes $1 million per year in maintenance); and an actively used recreation park would cost $152 million to build and operate (at a cost of $1.2 million for annual maintenance). By contrast, according to the 2007 estimate, the golf course would cost $61 million to build, but would be partially offset by $19 million in revenue over a 35-year period.
“Our goal is to provide a public service, not to seek a return on investment,” said Vickie Karp, a Parks Department spokeswoman.
Geoffrey Croft, president of New York City Parks Advocates, a watchdog group, said the golf course is preferable to an unused, closed landfill. Still, he says, “The whole project is a waste of taxpayer money. The city has so many other needs, for education, police and fire, and for our rundown parks. We’re flushing our money down the drain for a billionaire.”
There is strong demand for golf in New York. Tee sheets for the city’s 13 munis are booked solid. The first Saturday in January, in unseasonably warm weather, Douglaston Park in Queens registered 250 golfers. Lee Finkel, regional director of Northeast operations for American Golf, which operates six city courses, said his courses do 300,000 rounds per year, adding that “we’re making money and the city is making money.” Peak green fees typically are $40.
Trump plans to charge city residents $125 to play Ferry Point; non-residents will pay more. Trump is not required to pay any fees to the city for the first four years; thereafter, he’ll pay $300,000 or 7 percent of annual gross revenue, whichever is greater, with payments escalating to $470,000 by Year 20.
For Croft and other critics, none of the math – the total bill, Trump’s obligations – adds up. But Ferry Point Park’s redevelopment seems destined to proceed. By 2014, Trump says golfers will be beating balls in the shadows of the Whitestone Bridge. At some future date, the irrepressible developer hopes to bring a major championship to the south Bronx.
It’s a scenario that even Tom Wolfe would have difficulty imagining. | <urn:uuid:8870a9d5-8262-4e86-bfdf-82f463dcf874> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://golfweek.com/news/2012/feb/03/klein-inside-ferry-point-park-project/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953612 | 1,701 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Usually, I post well thought-out viewpoints, but today I’m going to express three ideas that I’ve just been mulling over in my head.
The first originated from Nivi’s post in which he conjectures “RSS is the TCP/IP packet of Web 2.0.” He goes on to say,
“You can think of RSS like a TCP/IP packet. A source publishes an RSS feed and the feed worms its way through the Internet to get to you. Things get more interesting when the feed is routed through a bunch of services before it gets to you. The feed can go through services that[:] Insert contextual ads; Strip out boring categories; Splice in other feeds from flickr, del.icio.us, or from other bloggers (see Superblog); Manage the feed (see FeedBurner); Translate RSS to email; Splice in contact and calendar info (see RSSContact and RSSCalendar). When you route a feed through a slew of services, RSS becomes a protocol for Machine to Machine (M2M) communication.”
Hmm… this is a very interesting analogy. Or is it more than an analogy? Is RSS truly the “fundamental building block” for the “Internet Operating System”? I like the idea of the Internet Operating System (IOS) – what does this notion mean and what are the ramifications if you approach thinking about it in this way?
The second idea is one I’ve raised previously. Could we solve the problem of repeatedly registering for and setting up our online social networks with a meta-system that crosses all platforms? It could store extensive commodity connection information (i.e. who is connected to who), facilitating innovation in the services realm without the necessity of gaining critical mass to express value. If there was an open and central repository system for social connection data, social networking companies would be able to tap into the already wealth of information about a person. Steve Shu says that he could see this construct “for Web 3.0, but it may be tougher for Web 2.0 timeframes.” He is probably right, but is it really that forward thinking or pie-in-the-sky? Is there a way to approach this goal incrementally to avoid the huge collective action problem that industry standards require? Could a commercial endeavor march in this direction, or does it require a commercial-agnostic entity? Or perhaps I am wrong – maybe acquiring a community of users provides a required positional advantage for social networking companies which is integral to competitive success.
“Instead of advertisers buying either PPC networks or specific publishers/sites, they simply release their ads to the net, perhaps on specified servers where they can easily be found, or on their own sites, and/or through seed buys on one or two exemplar sites. These ads are tagged with information supplied by the advertiser, for example, who they are attempting to reach, what kind of environments they want to be in (and environments they expressly forbid, like porn sites or affiliate sites), and how much money they are willing to spend on the ad.
Once the ads are let loose, here’s the cool catch – ANYONE who sees those ads can cut and paste them, just like a link, into their own sites (providing their sites conform to the guidelines the ad explicates in its tags). The ads track their own progress, and through feeds they “talk” to their “owner” – the advertiser (or their agent/agency). These feeds report back on who has pasted the ad into what sites, how many clicks that publisher has delivered, and how much juice is left in the ad’s bank account. The ad propagates until it runs out of money, then it… disappears! If the ad is working, the advertiser can fill up the tank with more money and let it ride.”
What does this concept really mean and how could it emerge? Is a company called Zoundry, which allows users to easily drop affiliate product-links directly into their blogs, the next step in this direction after “traditional” affiliate programs? Could we truly ever have sell-side advertising, as advertisers surely want to retain some control over how their products are marketed and sold? Sell-side advertising sounds great in theory, but like a social-network meta-system, I wonder what are the best next tangible incremental steps which would translate an idea into action?
Again, these are my open thoughts and questions; just wondering aloud as I wrap my head around these theoretical and conceptual ideas. | <urn:uuid:8cfac946-470b-479c-a9d2-60a1b6877e03> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://genuinevc.com/archives/2005/07/12/musing-on-three-not-so-fully-baked-ideas.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954933 | 958 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Forget screaming for ice cream. At one shop in Columbia, MO, customers could order a frozen dessert flavor that's worth actually chirping about.
Sparky's Homemade Ice Cream released a half-batch of cicada ice cream on June 1, only to have it sell out immediately. To prepare the treat, the shop's employees collected cicadas in their backyards and, removing the dead bugs' wings, boiled them to cook them and covered the insects in brown sugar and milk chocolate. The candied cicadas were then mixed into a brown sugar- and butter-flavored ice cream base.
"The batch just flew out of here! No pun intended," said Scott Southwick, the establishment's owner. But dreams of a second batch were promptly quashed by the City of Columbia/Boone County Department of Public Health and Human Services. "The food code doesn't directly address cicadas," said environmental health manager Gerry Worley. "We advised against it."
I don't know about you, but I think the ice cream sounds kind of tasty. But then again, that's coming from someone who's willingly sampled dung beetle soup! Would you eat it? | <urn:uuid:e9be1ab8-c033-4393-92ce-f24d60fed1a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yumsugar.com/latest/Cicada-Ice-Cream | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973408 | 247 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Humor Studies Conference Comes to Campus June 17-20Published: June 15, 2009
The 21st International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) Conference will be held at CSULB from Wednesday, June 17, to Saturday, June 20.
The ISHS is a scholarly and professional organization dedicated to the advancement of humor research, explained conference organizer Amy Bippus, a member of Communication Studies since 1999. Many of the society’s members are university and college faculty members in the arts and humanities, biological and social sciences and education. The society also includes professionals in the fields of counseling, management, nursing, journalism and theater and entertainment.
“We’re bringing together scholars and professionals from 17 countries,” said Bippus who attended the ISHS’s previous conference in Spain. On Wednesday, June 17, a pre-conference workshop will be held from 2-5 p.m. on the topic of “Teaching with Humor” with Mary Kay Morrison, author of Using Humor to Maximize Learning. In the evening, there will be a mixer at the Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden, at which time the ISHS presidential address will take place.
On Thursday, June 18, registration will begin again at 8 a.m. The day’s programming will consist of paper, poster and plenary sessions from 8am to 6 pm. At 7 pm in the Nugget, there will be a Comedy Contest, featuring the comic talents of ISHS members and the CSULB community.
On Friday, June 19, paper and plenary sessions will run from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. with the annual member meeting held in the afternoon. On Saturday, June 20, the conference closes with a brunch beginning at 8:30 a.m. featuring guest speaker, Joel Stein, writer for Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times. Brunch will be followed by optional excursion to Southern California attractions including a tour of the J. Paul Getty Museum and a grand tour of Los Angeles. More information is available at the conference’s Web site.
Panel topics will offer an encyclopedic review of all that is humorous –- or not. “One of our best represented topics is gelotophobia, or the fear of being laughed at,” Bippus said. “Other topics will include humor and religion, humor and the workplace, humor as it relates to mental and physical health, how children develop their sense of humor and how humor can help us deal with the impact of illness and mortality. A number of presenters will address how humor works across divisions of race, nationality, sexuality and gender.
“We will have experts who will demonstrate software that develops jokes and a panel of stand-up comedians who will discuss how they develop their routines and hone their timing,” she said. “There will be panels that deal with humor in the recent elections. And there will be ample coverage of humor in pop culture, covering everything from TV series like `The Office’ to `The Colbert Report’ to the films of Alfred Hitchcock.”
Bippus is happy about the level of CSULB student participation. “There’s been a lot of student involvement,” she said. “I’m pleased with the way they have used their participation in a class we’re offering in conference management to organize everything from potential advertisers to the graphic logo for the conference, and we also have students working on the organizing committee, not to mention the students presenting their own work at the conference.”
The range of participants is especially impressive considering the relative youth of the organization. “I’m really excited about the fact that this is truly an international and interdisciplinary conference,” she said. “There’s something here to interest everyone.” The next conference will be held in Hong Kong, June 24-27, 2010, hosted by the City University of Hong Kong. “This is only our 21st conference,” she said, “but being this young also has its advantages. I’m pleased the membership is not 100 percent academic. We bring in members who practice comedy by performing, writing or drawing it. This conference will center on what makes something humorous and the role of humor in all areas of our lives. That is the common thread that spreads out across all the different topics.”
The humor conference’s strength is its universality. “Everyone has an inherent interest in humor,” Bippus said. “If you’re a scholar, you’ll be interested in the scholarship. If you just like to laugh, there will be people who can offer insight into why you laugh. There will be someone with software that can help you write a joke. You can talk with professional comics and take away something that will improve your timing. Anybody who has ever described themselves as having a sense of humor will find something here. And for those who don’t have a sense of humor, come and try to get one.” | <urn:uuid:5c8aa0c0-c390-4dcf-a1b1-92e2b4e061c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.csulb.edu/misc/inside/?p=5165 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960523 | 1,061 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Faculty of Healthcare
The Faculty of Healthcare offers programs that are designed to provide students with comprehensive training in order to prepare them for healthcare careers right after graduation.
With an increasing demand for effectively-trained medical personnel across North America, graduates of any healthcare diploma program offered at Academy of Learning College will be equipped to join an expanding industry.
Possible Healthcare career paths include:
- Dental Administrative Assistant
- Health Unit Coordinator
- Medical Receptionist
- Medical Information Assistant
- Medical Office Assistant
- Personal Support Worker
- Pharmacy Technician
The Healthcare programs offered at Academy of Learning College will allow students to learn essential medical administrative knowledge, including medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, as well as medical office administrative and clinical procedures.
Certain programs will include healthcare courses that focus on training students on a full range of computer and office skills, including current software applications, general office management, accounting, personal and professional development, and customer service.
Browse our program listings by province and discover a Healthcare program that is right for you! | <urn:uuid:262356a4-573c-4fb1-8e68-9c9c53eef636> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.academyoflearning.com/healthcare/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94708 | 215 | 1.59375 | 2 |
How the Budget hit home
How were the mortgage and property sector affected by this year’s Budget proposals? Laverne Hadaway provides a summary
With little room for manoeuvre on the economy for Chancellor George Osborne, there were few surprises in the 2012 Budget. The bad news was for those owning properties valued at more than £2m. As of 22nd March 2012, the purchase of such properties were subject to a new stamp duty land tax rate of 7%, up from 5%. Anyone in the process of buying a £2m property would have seen their bill for stamp duty instantly rise from £100,000 to £140,000.
In addition, residential properties worth over £2m and bought by “non-natural persons” – such as corporate bodies or collective investment schemes – will attract stamp duty of 15%. The Treasury also plans to consult on proposals to make a large annual charge on £2m residential properties that are already owned corporately. This is all designed to catch wealthy property owners who have sought to avoid paying the tax by buying their property through a company. They were also previously able to avoid paying stamp duty by transferring their property into a trust at a nominal sum below the £125,000 stamp duty threshold. That loophole has now been closed and the Chancellor made it clear that he would “move swiftly, without notice and retrospectively” in the event that homeowners found ways to circumvent the new rules.
REITs are being presented as a potential lifesaver to social housing, which is seeing severe cuts in Government grants and shrinking alternative sources of funding
Figures from Land Registry suggest that there are around 45,000 homes in the UK valued above the £2m threshold, with the vast majority located in London. While sales at this end of the residential property market appear to be less sluggish than at the more low cost end, it is not thought that the change will contribute a vast amount to public finances. Osborne’s own figures estimate £150m tax in the next year.
Another change sees the capital gains tax (CGT) regime extended to gains on the disposal of UK residential property by non-resident, non-natural persons ie corporate bodies/companies overseas. However, the British Property Federation (BPF) warns that unless this is handled sensitively the change could reduce the financial attractiveness of investing in UK residential property. Funds and corporate investors use offshore structures to hold their assets and rely on capital growth to generate returns. It suggests that the consultation should ensure that such investment, badly needed by the UK, is not deterred by the CGT change.
Announcements on real estate investment trusts (REITs) were largely welcomed. REITs are a tax-efficient way of investing in commercial property. They are companies, or groups of companies, that manage a portfolio of property with the emphasis on property investment rather than development.
In last year’s Budget statement, the Chancellor abolished the charge that property companies had to pay to convert to a REIT and promised to relax a rule about the need to have diverse institutional investor ownership among other things. These proposals have been through consultation and included in the 2012 Finance Bill. Patrick Clift of the BPF describes the process as working on a relaxed timetable while also ensuring that things are done properly.
More on Mortgage Products
- Precise Mortgages adds to conveyancing panel
- Keystone overhauls mortgage proposition
- A slow recovery as the malady lingers on | <urn:uuid:d6bd291a-2e21-4e5e-be77-a85a320e7c2b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ftadviser.com/2012/04/18/mortgages/mortgage-products/how-the-budget-hit-home-qwI0lmpTca6zpxsEeMD13J/article.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970003 | 711 | 1.671875 | 2 |
About the video
The Creators Project: So, James, how do you define your job? It seems to defy categorization. James Powderly: I guess I’m a designer, somewhere between an artist and an engineer. I’ve had a bunch of jobs over the last ten years but they’ve always been focused on technology in some way. Over the last four years or so I’ve primarily worked on two projects; both of them are engineering projects involving technologies with creative applications.
It sounds like you have a dream gig, but where do you get the funds to realize these types of projects? Evan Roth [another member of the EyeWriter team] and I began working together because we secured an art residency in New York City at a place called Eyebeam. They have a laboratory called Open Lab where you can come and work on your own projects on your own terms. It’s somewhere between mainstream contemporary art, new media art, and MIT. The only caveat is that everything you create must be part of the public domain. Evan and I were at Eyebeam for two years, and after we left we thought, “Wow, this is a good idea. I bet there are more people who are into this type of open-source work than just the seven or eight New Yorkers who scored a residency at Eyebeam.” So in our travels around we’d meet people in various cities who were into open-source work and say, “Hey do you want to maybe play along with us and join this fake group we have called Free Art and Technology [FAT] Lab?” What do you mean by “fake”? Well, we actually don’t have a physical lab in a specific location; we just have the website. And then there are members in 19 countries—Mexico, Sweden, Hong Kong, London, New York, and San Francisco. We’re a group of people all over the world who work on projects that interest us and that play to our research specialties. The only thing that we all have in common is that we all like to freely distribute our work and most of it’s pretty non-serious, pop-culture related stuff. We’ve been around for about two years and have an operating budget of about $250 per year, which covers the cost of the server. How did someone with your skill set choose creating artistic technology instead of making weapons or equally menacing objects? I think it’s safe to say that when you reach a certain amount of technical capability you can make whatever you envision. It’s a choice: whether or not you want to make things that are for the betterment of human beings or for the betterment of a sort of finite group of human beings. Can you briefly explain how the EyeWriter works? Basically there’s a camera pointed at the user’s eye. The user calibrates his or her head with respect to a screen. Then parameters like brightness and contrast must be adjusted in order to isolate the pupil. The camera tracks the motion of the user’s pupil as it moves around looking at the screen, and the drawing surface and the pupil are coordinated together. When the user focuses on a certain position it makes a point and then the user can drag the line in order to create a line and then create shapes. Then the user can create a number of letters, combine them all together to make a word, and then do things like add 3D effects, shading, drop shadows, change colors, and fill in the background. In the final mode of the software you can actually save your drawings and then upload them to our servers. Right now Tony Quan is the only EyeWriter but hopefully we’ll be able to get a few more and add stuff to the network. I think it gets more interesting with more users. The network effect is hard at work here. | <urn:uuid:15d141ac-efc7-4842-b23a-46295b9cf6da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/creators/james-powderly | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959169 | 805 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Time now for Eye on Your Money with Financial Advisor Bryce Matteson of the local Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. office. This week we're talking about ways to use your tax refund. Many Americans do get a tax refund check. And while we may be tempted to go and spend the money right away, you may wish to consider ways to put the money to work for your financial future.
Here are three ideas:
1. Pay off credit card debt if you have it. Let's say you have $2,500 on a card that charges 18.5% interest. If you only paid the minimum monthly payment, it would take you 30 years and $6,500 dollars in interest to pay off the card. It would be a good idea to use your refund to pay down or better yet, eliminate credit card debt and save yourself hundreds or thousands of dollars in interest by doing so. | <urn:uuid:7ffb5d81-5068-4e35-a7f2-9259ab57aa28> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.kwch.com/2007-04-30/tax-refund_24075967 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953372 | 183 | 1.796875 | 2 |
The Cuban crisis is advancing inexorably towards its climax for reasons that are economic, political and social as well as genetic. With each passing day the situation for most citizens — shortages, price rises, low salaries and pensions, lack of opportunity — becomes even more complicated. The “update of the model,” now codified into law, neither casts sufficient light on the tunnel’s darkness nor provides real solutions to the multiplicity of problems.
Faced with this impending reality, people from a variety of opposition camps have come together to discuss what might be the best way to achieve this necessary transition. Some feel the best way is through dialog with the government in order to achieve a greater degree of openness, which might be expanded over time. Others reject any sort of dialog in favor of direct public pressure. Still others are looking for a middle ground that might satisfy both parties and avoid violence. There might be other approaches as well. To say which is best poses a great risk, one I feel we need not take since doing so would only add fuel to the debate’s fire and complicate the current contradictions.
Perhaps it would be more convenient and intelligent to try to determine a set of demands to present to the authorities which are premised on bringing about real change. If there is a desire to seriously resolve the nation’s issues, there must be a basic shared platform on which all factions can agree in order to begin to take firm and effective steps forward.
Therefore, it is clear that the different factions must be recognized as negotiating partners, something that up till now has not happened due to the intransigence of the authorities, who consider themselves to be the country and the nation’sonly trustees, imbuing it with their ideology. Only when faced with a united opposition — one united in diversity, not in unanimity; one without fractures — will the government feel tempted to have a dialog without worrying about losing what little credibility it has left with certain sectors of the population.
The level of opposition is not reflected in the figures for election turnout or in the numbers of people who show up for mass demonstrations, which are simply by-products of an entrenched double standard, but rather in the silent voice of the majority of outraged citizens as it filters through our cities and towns. Experience over many years has shown that a fragmented opposition garners no attention.
The last approach of the government with highest leadership of the Cuban Catholic church, as the only interlocutor accepted for some very immediate problems demonstrates this. All of the initiatives should be well received and not just criticized, despite their limited reach, because they can serve to enlarge the spectrum of participation, demanding that the spaces be open to all equally. Nobody, by his own decision, should proclaim himself representative of all the citizens of the nation and pretend to be the only voice to listen to, rather it would be more intelligent to make oneself a bridge or a collection point for different views.
To aspire to a truly democratic country, the road to the transition should also be profoundly democratic. If it is not, we risk the danger of repeating the costly errors of the past, and in losing ourselves once again in the entanglement of the autocracy, intolerance and exclusion, something that none of the opposing viewpoints want, much less so, the majority of Cubans both within the country and beyond.
Translated by: Stephen Clark, Alex Vizcarra, Norman Valenzuela, and Carlos Maristany
September 26 2012 | <urn:uuid:dd929056-8d2d-410c-9f81-344a2684203c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://translatingcuba.com/category/ztranslators/translator-alex-vizcarra/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954398 | 710 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Sen. Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, a teacher, said Thursday that a bill to overhaul Kansas’ charter school system wasn’t necessary.
Speaking after a hearing about Senate Bill 196, which would allow charter schools to be independent of school districts, Hensley, a special education teacher for Topeka Unified School District 501, said he was satisfied with current law.
“I think we have checks and balances under the current system,” said Hensley, the ranking minority member on the Senate Education Committee.
The bill would free charter schools of many state laws and regulations, from Kansas State Board of Education standards to wage laws and the Professional Negotiations Act, which proponents argue will allow for greater innovation.
Under current law, charter schools can apply for waivers of state board regulations, but they aren’t automatic. Charter schools can’t seek waivers of state law.
Hensley said he was concerned that charter schools wouldn’t have the same responsibilities to serve students with special needs that school districts have.
“We’re allowing them to pick and choose which students they serve,” he said.
He also expressed concern about the costs of the bill. A fiscal note prepared by the director of the budget says if 28,000 taxpayers donated $5,000 each to charter schools in 2013, the resulting tax credits could reduce state general fund revenues by $93.8 million in fiscal year 2014. But the note also says the Department of Revenue couldn’t provide a reliable estimate of potential contributions to charter schools.
The testimony Thursday was short and sweet, with no questions from lawmakers for the speakers. Proponents of the bill included the Kansas Policy Institute and Darlene Cornfield from the Northfield School of the Liberal Arts, a private Christian school in Wichita. The Kansas Association of School Boards testified against the bill.
Cornfield said charter schools offered a complement to regular public schools.
She rejected key arguments against the bill, including that it would allow charter schools to avoid serving students with special needs.
“We pick kids because they want to learn,” Cornfield said. “We want to help kids.”
In terms of professional bargaining rights, Cornfield said teachers are adults and can choose where they want to work.
James Franko of the Kansas Policy Institute said there was no “silver bullet” to education, but that independent charter schools might better serve some students.
Mark Tallman of the Kansas Association of School Boards said the bill was unconstitutional, because the state Constitution says public schools are developed and operated by locally elected school boards.
He also questioned the effectiveness of charter schools.
“States like Kansas that don’t have very many charter schools tend to be the higher performing states,” Tallman said.
The Kansas National Education Association, the state’s main teachers union, didn’t testify. However, lobbyist Mark Desetti said after the hearing that the bill was part of a larger agenda to dismantle and privatize education and attack teachers unions.
“If we’re looking for innovation,” Desetti said, “why don’t you just let teachers teach?”
Nationwide, the vast majority of charter schools aren’t unionized. | <urn:uuid:7078e268-5840-4cad-b7f6-bb10b08f2dfb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cjonline.com/news/2013-03-07/hensley-charter-school-bill-unnecessary | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965388 | 687 | 1.765625 | 2 |
It’s being called a ‘triple whammy’ for the UK nuclear industry. And with what’s on the horizon - it’s beginning to look more like a quadruple or quintuple whammy.
First, local representatives in Cumbria in the north of the country rejected plans to build a deep geological storage facility for nuclear waste on the doorstep of the beautiful Lake District national park. There are no other candidate sites, putting plans for the long-term storage of highly dangerous nuclear waste in the UK into disarray.
Then it was announced that the cost of decommissioning and clean up at the Sellafield nuclear facility – also in Cumbria – is currently running at 67.5 billion pounds. That’s not the final figure. The bill is growing fast and nobody has any idea what the size of the final bill will be. As with anything nuclear, don’t believe any estimates from the industry itself.
This was swiftly followed by the news that Centrica, the last major UK company involved in plans to build new nuclear reactors in the country, was pulling out because "the anticipated project costs in new nuclear have increased and the construction timetable has extended by a number of years."
But that’s not the end of the trouble. More dark clouds are gathering. Further whammies lie ahead.
Whammy #4: Largely unnoticed, a few weeks ago the chief executive of French nuclear giant EdF, Vincent de Rivaz, told a committee of UK politicians that if EdF builds new nuclear reactors in the UK, it wants to be paid whether the electricity is used or not. "If a power station is available to generate electricity, its operator should not suffer financially because a policy or system decision is made that its electricity is not needed," he said.
"It is right not only for investors," said Mr de Rivaz, "but for consumers as well."
But why charging consumers for a product they don’t need is 'right' is extremely hard to understand. Here at Greenpeace we’ve been trying to think of another industry that could get away with such barefaced cheek. How would you feel if a baker knocked at your door demanding money even though you didn’t want the bread he’s made?
Whammy #5: On top of that, EdF wants a guaranteed price for the electricity its new reactors would produce. Indeed, the company says it will pull out all together unless it is guaranteed profits.
It is currently in secret talks with the UK government trying to agree to a figure. Estimates say this will be close to 95-99 pounds per MWh. Basically they want to force UK consumers to pay double the current price for electricity for the next 25 years. That’s more than wind power costs right now.
Does that sound like value for money for UK taxpayers? Is it ‘right’ for consumers, Mr de Rivaz?
Where does this leave us? In a speech this week, UK Prime Minister David Cameron said "countries that prioritise green energy will secure the biggest share of jobs and growth in a global low-carbon sector set to be worth US$4 trillion by 2015" and that the UK should be "a global showcase for green innovation and energy efficiency."
With its waste of time, taxpayer and consumer money and vital resources, its toxic legacy, its incompetence, blackmail and broken promises and its way of frightening investors, nuclear power just doesn’t fit anywhere in Mr Cameron’s vision.
Greenpeace is calling for the UK to abandon its nuclear plans and turn the prime minister’s words into reality.
(Photograph of the UK's Sellafield nuclear plant © Greenpeace / Nick Cobbing) | <urn:uuid:b1b778a1-8858-4b5d-b614-6e3400757918> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/the-uks-nuclear-triple-whammy-is-worse-than-y/blog/43887/?entryid=43887&commentlistpage=3&expandid=b94936 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94833 | 777 | 1.710938 | 2 |
The creation of MAD would have been enough to cement Harvey Kurtzman’s
reputation as one of the titans of American comics, but Kurtzman also created
two other comics landmarks: the scrupulously-researched and superbly-crafted
war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. Here were finally war comics
without heroic, cigar-chomping sergeants, wisecracking privates from Brooklyn, or cartoon Nazis and “Japs” to be mowed down by the Yank heroes, but
an unflinching look at the horror and madness of combat throughout history.
Kurtzman employed some of the finest of the EC artists including Jack Davis,
John Severin, and Wallace Wood, but his vision came through clearest in the
dozen or so stories he both wrote and drew himself, in his uniquely bold, slashing, cartoony-but-dead-serious style
(“Stonewall Jackson,” “Iwo Jima,” “Rubble,” “Big ‘If ’,” and Kurtzman’s own favorite, “Air Burst”) — as well as his vividly
colored, narratively-dense covers, all 23 of which are reproduced here in full color in a special portfolio.
Corpse on the Imjin! is rounded off with a dozen or so stories written and laid out by Kurtzman and drawn by
“short-timers,” i.e. cartoonists whose contributions to his war books only comprised a story or two — including such
giants as designer extraordinaire Alex Toth, Marvel comics stalwart Gene Colan, and a pre-Sgt. Rock Joe Kubert... and
such unexpected guests as “The Lighter Side of...” MAD artist Dave Berg and DC comics veteran Ric Estrada — as well
as a rarity: a story by EC regular John Severin inked by Kurtzman.
Like every book in the Fantagraphics EC line, Corpse on the Imjin! features extensive essays and notes on these
classic stories by EC experts — but Kurtzman’s stories, as vital, powerful, affecting, and even, yes, modern today as when
they were created 60 years ago, are what makes this collection a must-have for any comics reader. | <urn:uuid:7c172d03-25f6-4306-a01b-ff51de5d38f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fantagraphics.com/browse-shop/corpse-on-the-imjin-and-other-stories-the-ec-comics-library-sept.-2012-6.html?vmcchk=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948495 | 501 | 1.539063 | 2 |
For Compassion-sponsored children in Bolivia, one of the most special days at the child development center is Letter Day. While not every development center in Bolivia designates a specific day for children to write letters, each center decides how letters are written and has two weeks to get them done and returned to the country office.
The Pucara Grande Student Center has a Letter Day when the children get together to write thank-you letters after they receive something from their sponsor.
“The process of how we respond to letters depends of the type of letters the children are writing. If they are letters that every child needs to write, then we distribute them to all of the classes. Tutors help the children by checking the letters and passing them on to me. I check the letters again, organize them by sponsor countries, and send them to the main Compassion office.
“When the children have a new sponsor and they have to write their first letter, an email letter or a thank-you letter, they write them with me. I take the children who receive letters out of the class quietly because if I read the list out loud, other children get very sad because they have not received a letter,” explains Delicia, one of the staff at Pucara Grande.
However, it doesn’t matter how the letter-writing process takes place. Whatever the sponsor sends paints a giant smile on our children’s faces. Receiving a letter makes the children feel cared for and reminds them they have a person in another country who loves them. Our children like to share how much their sponsor letters mean to them.
“My sponsor is Nancy. She writes to me often, she sends me stickers and letters, and I feel very happy when she writes to me. She tells me that she loves me as a son and I tell her that she is like my second family.” — David
“My sponsor is from Washington. He writes to me often. When I write to him I tell him everything that happens to me and I feel happy. It is special for me that he writes to me because I also get to know about him and what he does. He encourages me to keep studying and he advises me.” — Laura
“My sponsor is Cristina and she writes to me often. I feel happy because my sponsor writes to me. Some children don’t even have a sponsor and I feel happy to have one. I thank God for that. When I write to Cristina I tell her about school, church, my family, the development center and about my friends.” — Reina
Children love to write back and tell the sponsors about themselves, their families, their schools and friends, their house duties, their activities, and everything they consider important about their lives.
“My sponsor is Elmer. He is from the U.S. and he writes to me often. He asks me how I am, how I am doing at school and when it’s my birthday he asks me about that. I like it when Elmer writes to me and I love to write to him. I tell him that I am doing well at school, what I did for my birthday and about when I lost a tooth. But I have many mates that never receive letters and they feel sad.” — Lorena
“My sponsors write to me often. I feel happy to receive letters and I like to write to them. I ask them how they are; I tell them that I am fine here.” — Josue
“My sponsors write to me only occasionally. Sometimes I feel bad because I see how my mates receive letters. However there are some children that never receive letters and they also feel bad. I like to write my sponsors and tell them how I am regarding my health, about my school and the things I did, how my family is, or about the activities I do at the development center.” — Leidy
If the child who receives a letter is young and can’t write back on his/her own, a relative will come to the development center to write the reply letter. If the parent can’t write, a sibling or a cousin can do it; however, if that’s not possible one of the tutors at the center will write it. If the tutor writes the letter, the family member and child have to be present and the child will draw a picture on the letter.
“Alejandra receives letters often; her sponsor is from the USA. I feel happy that my daughter receives letters. We are praying for her sponsor and she is also praying for my daughter. She sends us pictures and now we know her by her picture and what she looks like.” –Julia, mother of Alejandra
“I write letters for my sister and I like to write them. I am telling Nayelly’s sponsor that she likes to play, who her best friends are and that she likes to play with my cat.” — Janeth, sister of Nayelly
However, as mentioned earlier, it is very sad for the children when they don’t receive letters from their sponsors because they would love to be part of the special Letter Day.
“My sponsors don’t write to me and I feel sad. I would like to receive letters so I could answer.” — Jazmin
“My sponsor is Jack. When he writes to me I feel happy because he is my only sponsor. When my friends don’t receive letters they feel sad.” — Jose
“My sponsor doesn’t write to me very much. Sometimes I feel sad when I don’t receive a letter, but I feel very happy when he writes to me. I would like him to write to me more. I want to tell him about my family, how I am doing at the development center and how I am doing at school.” — Carla
There are some children at the Pucara Grande Student Center who don’t have a sponsor yet so they don’t get the opportunity to write letters. They are constantly asking if they have a sponsor because they would love to write to them.
One boy often asks if he has received a letter. We tell him that he should pray about getting a letter, but this child feels that God doesn’t listen to him because he doesn’t receive letters. This case is sad for us.
There is another boy who doesn’t want to come to the development center because he has never received a letter and he feels that his sponsor doesn’t love him. This boy writes letters and asks his sponsor questions but he has never received an answer.
Sadly, he is not the only one; there are many.
For the children who don’t usually have the opportunity to tell someone how they are doing or about their personal lives, Letter Day gives them the chance to share and express what they are feeling.
Some of these children have never had anyone tell them that they are special, loved and being prayed for. So receiving a wonderful treasure, a letter from their sponsor, is what makes Letter Day so special. | <urn:uuid:e9f3a005-40fb-41c8-ad5e-d3732572ef52> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.compassion.com/importance-of-letters/quote-comment-27363/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981121 | 1,498 | 1.796875 | 2 |
A Palestinian bid for indirect U.N. recognition of statehood received vows of support from more than a dozen European nations as of Wednesday, and diplomats said this backing may deter Israel from harsh retaliation against the Palestinian Authority for seeking to upgrade its U.N. status.
Pictured: Reuters/Reuters - Palestinians wave flags during a rally in support of President Mahmoud Abbas' efforts to secure a diplomatic upgrade at the United Nations, in the West Bank city of Ramallah November 25, 2012.
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A Palestinian resolution on Thursday that would change its U.N. observer status from an "entity" to a "non-member state," implicitly recognizing the sovereign state of Palestine, is expected to pass easily in the 193-nation U.N. General Assembly. But Israel, the United States and a handful of other members of are expected to vote against it.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been leading the campaign to win support for the resolution, and some European governments have offered him their support after an eight-day conflict this month between Israel and Islamists in the Gaza Strip, who are pledged to Israel's destruction and oppose his efforts towards a negotiated peace.
The U.S. State Department said Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and U.S. Mideast peace envoy David Hale traveled to New York on Wednesday in a last-ditch effort to get Abbas to reconsider.
"We've been clear, we've been consistent with the Palestinians, that we oppose observer state status in the General Assembly and this resolution," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.
She repeated U.S. warnings that the move could hit U.S. economic support for the Palestinians. The Israelis have also warned that they might take deductions out of monthly transfers of duties that Israel collects on the Palestinians' behalf.
The United States and Israel say the only genuine route to statehood is at the negotiating table, through a peace accord hammered out in direct talks with Israel.
Granting Palestinians the title of "non-member observer state" falls short of full U.N. membership - something the Palestinians tried but failed to achieve last year. But it would allow them access to the International Criminal Court and some other international bodies, should they choose to join them. The Vatican numbers among the U.N.'s non-member states.
Hanan Ashrawi, a top Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) official, told a news conference in Ramallah that "the Palestinians can't be blackmailed all the time with money."
"Some rights aren't for sale," Ashrawi said. "If Israel wants to destabilize the whole region, it can. We are talking to the Arab World about their support if Israel responds with financial measures, and the EU has indicated they will not stop their support to us."
ISRAELI RETALIATION MIGHT BE MODERATE
As there is little doubt about how the United States will vote when the Palestinian resolution to upgrade its U.N. status is put to a vote sometime after 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) on Thursday, the Palestinian Authority has been concentrating its efforts on lobbying wealthy European states, diplomats say.
With strong support from the developing world that make up the majority of U.N. members, the Palestinian resolution is virtually assured of securing more than the requisite simple majority. But Abbas has been trying to amass as many European yes votes as possible.
"A strong showing in Europe will emphasize to Israel and the United States that the Palestinian Authority is widely seen legitimate," a Western envoy said on condition of anonymity. "It may also give Israel second thoughts about trying to bankrupt the Palestinians for something that is really symbolic."
One senior Western diplomat predicted that at least 120-130 countries would vote for the Palestinian resolution.
As of Wednesday afternoon Austria, Denmark, Norway, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland had all pledged to support the Palestinian resolution. Britain said it was prepared to vote yes, but only if the Palestinians fulfilled certain conditions.
Ashrawi said the positive responses from European states were encouraging and sent a message of hope to all Palestinians.
"This constitutes a historical turning point and opportunity for the world to rectify a grave historical injustice that the Palestinians have undergone since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948," she said.
A strong backing from European nations could make it awkward for Israel to implement harsh retaliatory measures. Diplomats say that Israel seems hesitant to take strong action against Abbas as it would antagonize Western European countries.
But Israel's reaction might not be so measured if the Palestinians seek ICC action against Israel on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity or other crimes the court would have jurisdiction over.
It also seems wary of weakening the Western-backed Abbas, especially after the political boost rival Hamas received from recent solidarity visits to Gaza by top officials from Egypt, Qatar and Tunisia.
Hamas militants, who control Gaza and have had icy relations with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, unexpectedly offered Abbas their support earlier this week.
STALLED PEACE TALKS
No European nations announced they would vote against the non-member state move, though several U.N. diplomats said privately that the Czech Republic and Netherlands might be among those that cast no votes. Neither has announced an official position.
Germany said it could not support the Palestinian move though it was not clear if it would abstain, like Estonia and Lithuania, or vote against it.
Europe's undecided countries included European Union members Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Sweden. Several EU members said they were hoping the 27-nation EU would reach a common position on the Palestinian move, though U.N. diplomats said that EU unity was an impossibility.
Peace talks have been stalled for two years, mainly over the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which have expanded despite being deemed illegal by most of the world.
In their draft resolution, the Palestinians have pledged to relaunch the peace process immediately following the U.N. vote.
Britain said it would be willing to support the Palestinian move on Thursday if two conditions were met.
"The first is that the Palestinian Authority should indicate a clear commitment to return immediately to negotiations without preconditions," Foreign Seretary William Hague told parliament.
"The second assurance relates to membership of other specialized U.N. agencies and action in the International Criminal Court," he added.
Rights groups said that stance contradicted Britain's stated commitment to accountability for serious crimes.
Israel and the United States have mooted withholding aid and tax revenue that the Palestinian government in the West Bank needs to survive. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has also viewed options that include bringing down Abbas.
SOURCE: Louis Charbonneau | <urn:uuid:7a0b55fe-f09e-45be-8e6d-9d41b68f46d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.blackchristiannews.com/news/2012/11/palestinians-gain-more-european-support-for-statehood-move.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9637 | 1,410 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Subcommittees Examine Carcinogen Classification Process and Small Business
Apr 25, 2012 -
The House Small Business Subcommittee on Healthcare and Technology today joined the Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight in holding a hearing to examine how the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Toxicology Program Report on Carcinogen classification process affects small businesses.
The Report on Carcinogens (RoC) is a Congressionally mandated, science-based, public health report that identifies substances that may pose a risk to people in the United States. The National Toxicology Program published the 12th RoC last year and is embarking on preparations for the 13th RoC.
“While the National Toxicology Program is preparing the 13th Report on Carcinogens, it is important that we have an open conversation about how the process could negatively affect small businesses,” said Small Business Subcommittee on Healthcare and Technology Chairwoman Renee Ellmers (R-NC). “When the government publishes scientific information that could have widespread negative consequence on small business owners, the government has the responsibility to ensure that the information is determined with a scientifically sound process. It is extremely important that we protect Americans from harmful substances, but this can be done while also protecting our nation’s primary job creators from premature backlash and unnecessary burdens.”
“As a legislator, I am very concerned with protecting public health and safety,” said Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Paul Broun, M.D. (R-GA). “As a physician, I take this responsibility even more seriously. When substances are found to be harmful, we should make every effort to minimize the public’s exposure. We also have a responsibility to ensure that these determinations are appropriate, are not arbitrary or capricious, and are communicated correctly.”
For related hearing documents, click here.
Notable Witness Quotes:
John E. Barker, Corporate Manager of Environmental Affairs, Safety and Loss Prevention at the Strongwell Corporation in Bristol, VA said, “…we are very concerned about the potential regulatory burden that could be placed on our operations should the RoC listing form the basis of regulatory changes. Changes to the regulations already in effect by OSHA and EPA could cause the cost of compliance to increase substantially. Further, focusing on a matter that should be of no concern will make it harder for employees to give full attention to the safety issues that are important.”
Richard B. Belzer, Ph.D., President of Regulatory Checkbook in Mount Vernon, VA said, “For the RoC to ever produce useful information about human carcinogens, the authorizing statute will have to be changed. Legalese will have to be replaced with the language of science. The NTP must be directed to stick to science, and its incentives to practice bureaucratic self-aggrandizement must be eliminated. Only then will it be possible for the RoC have any practical value for informing decisions.”
James S. Bus, Ph.D., D.A.B.T., A.T.S., Director of External Technology, Toxicology and Environmental Research and Consulting at The Dow Chemical Company in Midland, MI said, “…the RoC process is almost entirely ad hoc and lacks explicit criteria needed to assure consistency and transparency. Second, the RoC process lacks adequate checks and balances, including peer review and addressing outside/conflicting data. Finally, the RoC fails to employ scientific best practices, relies on outdated approaches and has not adopted recent NAS recommendations.
“In summary, the current RoC process falls well short of producing evidence‐based listing decisions. I urge Congress to oversee a thorough assessment of the RoC – ideally through an NAS review – to ensure that any future RoC listings are evidence‐based, provide accurate public health information and reflect the highest scientific standards in its processes, and to begin to determine the RoC's fundamental relevancy going forward. This will increase the public’s and industry’s confidence in the RoC’s listings and their application to science‐informed decision‐making.”
Bonnie Webster, Vice President of Monroe Industries, Inc. in Avon, NY said, “The RoC has hidden in the shadows, pretending only to be harmless input to public health agencies. It has been largely unsupervised by the Congress, unreachable by the courts, and not even carefully supervised by the senior officials in their respective agencies. Yet, its actions have every bit as much an impact as regulations, which in contrast are subject to the Administrative Procedure Act, are held accountable for responding to public comments, are scrutinized by the Congress, and can be challenged appropriately in Court.” | <urn:uuid:62774280-ee9c-4d2b-830f-0c4b9cfdf2a0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://smallbusiness.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=292548 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94247 | 978 | 1.53125 | 2 |
'This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: I am about to turn1 against you the weapons of war that are in your hands, which you are using to fight the king of Babylon and the Babyloniansa who are outside the wall besieging2 you. And I will gather them inside this city.
I myself will fight3 against you with an outstretched hand4 and a mighty arm5 in anger and fury and great wrath.
I will strike6 down those who live in this city--both men and animals--and they will die of a terrible plague.77
After that, declares the LORD, I will hand over Zedekiah8 king of Judah, his officials and the people in this city who survive the plague,9 sword and famine, to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon10 and to their enemies11 who seek their lives.12 He will put them to the sword;13 he will show them no mercy or pity or compassion.'148
"Furthermore, tell the people, 'This is what the LORD says: See, I am setting before you the way of life15 and the way of death.
Whoever stays in this city will die by the sword, famine or plague.16 But whoever goes out and surrenders17 to the Babylonians who are besieging you will live; he will escape with his life.1810
I have determined to do this city harm19 and not good, declares the LORD. It will be given into the hands20 of the king of Babylon, and he will destroy it with fire.'2111
"Moreover, say to the royal house22 of Judah, 'Hear the word of the LORD;
O house of David, this is what the LORD says: " 'Administer justice23 every morning; rescue from the hand of his oppressor24 the one who has been robbed, or my wrath will break out and burn like fire25 because of the evil26 you have done-- burn with no one to quench27 it.
I am against28 you, [ Jerusalem,] you who live above this valley29 on the rocky plateau, declares the LORD-- you who say, "Who can come against us? Who can enter our refuge?"3014
I will punish you as your deeds31 deserve, declares the LORD. I will kindle a fire32 in your forests33 that will consume everything around you.' " | <urn:uuid:59e285d8-e94c-4e07-bd12-7b497c3e6bec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.biblestudytools.com/jeremiah/passage.aspx?q=jeremiah+21:4-14 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935288 | 495 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Censorship comes naturally to the Congress — since they have a lot of conceal and hide. It would be too damaging to their fortunes if Indians got to know the truth. The Indian motto reads, “Satyam Eva Jayate” (Truth Alone Prevails). The Congress have persistently tried to see that “Asatyam Eva Jayate” (Lies Alone Prevail). It did work in the past, and to some extent it continues to work. But times are a changin’ and it will not be long before Indians wake up to satya.
For some, it’s been a lonely trek so far. They have persevered for years trying to shine some light on the lies. Dr Subramaniam Swamy, National President of the Janata Party, has been tireless in his efforts to reveal the truth. “Do you know your Sonia?” asks Dr Swamy and then goes on to expose, among other things, Three Lies about Edvige Antonia Albina Maino aka “Sonia Gandhi”.
But them internets (or interwebs, if you like) is an awesomely mighty weapon against lies. Too many Indians are getting access to the internets and it is getting rather hard for the Congress to keep things under wraps. Just as an aside, the Congress will try its best to retard the growth of the web in India.
Anyway, the Congress is once again up and about trying to censor a book by a Madrid-based writer, Javier Moro, titled “El Sari Rojo” (The Red Sari). MSN News reports that “Cong targets Sonia’s ‘Red Sari’“:
First published in October 2008, the book has already been translated into Italian, French and Dutch, and an English translation by Peter Hearn is ready for publication.
. . .
In an email, Moro, 55, said that Sonia’s lawyers, including Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi, “have just written to my Italian and Spanish publishers to demand the withdrawal of the book from the stores. Nobody understands very well why, but that’s what they are up to”.
Moro thinks that the Congress leaders “did not like the recreation of her life in Italy as told in my book”.
. . .
The novel mentions Christian von Stieglitz as “the friend who introduced her to Rajiv when they were students”, describes Congressmen persuading a reluctant Sonia to accept the presidency of the party, and then, in flashback, goes to the “village of Lusiana in the Asiago mountains in the foothills of the Alps”.
There, “in accordance with tradition the neighbours tied pink ribbons to the bars on the windows and doors” when Sonia was born in December 1946, a post-war child. Writes Moro, “A few days later, she was christened by the Lusiana parish priest and given the name of Edvige Antonia Albina Maino.” But her father Stefano called her Sonia. “In this way, he kept the promise he made to himself after getting away from the Russian front with his life.”
According to Moro’s book, Stefano was part of Mussolini’s army that was defeated by the Russians. “There were thousands of prisoners, among them Stefano, who managed to escape together with other survivors. They succeeded in taking shelter in a farmhouse on the Russian steppes, where they lived for weeks under the protection of a peasant family…. As a tribute to the family that had saved his life, he decided to given his daughters Russian names.”
You will not find the above very surprising if you have been following what Dr Swamy has been saying for years. It is not news that Antonia Maino’s father was a soldier in a fascist (in the original sense of the word) army. The Congress cannot afford that that becomes common knowledge.
Although just because her father was a fascist need not imply that Antonia Maino is a fascist. What is worrisome is that a foreign-born person wields so much power in India. Naturalized citizens are all good and fine but they should not be allowed to be in positions of high power. The US recognizes this and does not allow non-native born citizens to become the president of the US.
It is undeniable that humans have loyalty to their place and nation of birth. Only psychopaths and severely mentally handicapped people can totally sever the ties to their motherland. To the average human, loyalty to one’s faith, one’s place of birth and one’s family comes naturally. So claims that she does not have loyalty to her nation of birth are either false or she is a psychopath.
Indians take great pride in the achievements of not just of Indians abroad but even those whose ancestors were Indians. This is a two-way street: Indians or people of Indian origin care about India and feel a deep connection with it. This is all natural and good — and expected.
I speak from personal experience. More than half my adult life was spent in the US. I voluntarily got myself an American passport. I love living in the US, most of my friends and acquaintances live in the US, and I miss living there. Both India and the US are home to me. But my feelings for India are most certainly deeper than my feelings for the US. Every time I arrive in India from abroad, I get goosebumps recalling Sir Walter Scott’s poem:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
What does Antoina Maino feel when she steps on her native land? Does her heart within her burn with feelings of coming home? Which side will she be on if there’s a conflict between Italy and India?
I cannot imagine her not putting her own children’s interest ahead of any adopted children. It is natural and commendable. I cannot imagine her not putting her native land’s interests ahead of her adopted land.
Indians need to understand this. | <urn:uuid:d24d8dd4-bd09-4bcb-b331-5c9a79d6445f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.deeshaa.org/2010/06/02/edvige-antonia-albina-maino-aka-sonia-gandhi/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974069 | 1,342 | 1.632813 | 2 |
By Emily Greenhalgh
PBN Web Editor
PROVIDENCE – Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras and Cranston Mayor Allan Fung announced a $2 million program designed to provide summer employment to more than 1,300 Rhode Island youth.
The program, which was announced Friday, will use state and federal funding to provide employment to Rhode Island youth ages 14 to 24.
The Governor’s Workforce Board is providing $1 million from the state Job Development Fund and the R.I. Department of Human Services is providing the additional $1 million in federal funding from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
Families must meet federal income guidelines to qualify for the 600 TANF-funded job opportunities, but there are no such limitations for the 750 state-funded opportunities.
“This provides not only an economic boost for many of the participants’ families, but it also teaches young people marketable skills that will help them in their future careers,” said Chafee in the release announcing the program.
“It is particularly gratifying that we are able to make federal and state dollars work together to create employment opportunities for young Rhode Islanders,” added Chafee.
According to data from the R.I. Department of Labor and Training, the average unemployment rate for Rhode Island youth aged 16 to 19 was 29 percent in 2011.
Comparatively, the average unemployment rate across the state as a whole was 11.3 percent during the same period.
“Any time we are able to stand together and offer the youth of this city and state a chance at summer employment, it is a great day,” said Taveras in prepared remarks.
Beginning in July, community-based organizations throughout Rhode Island will offer a combination of work experience and work readiness training.
All participants will be required to complete a workplace certification such as occupational safety or customer service training.
Most programs are slated to run for 20 hours each week for six weeks, with the youth earning minimum wage.
The programs are overseen by the Workforce Partnership of Greater Rhode Island and Workforce Solutions of Providence/Cranston.
This is a list of summer youth employment programs funded by the initiative. | <urn:uuid:5c01b213-6df6-4d54-8908-56f158dfeaf1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pbn.com/Chafee-mayors-announce-2M-for-youth-employment-program,68039?category_id=31&list_type=most_commented&sub_type=stories,packages | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94026 | 464 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Accent-studded prose. Pigeon English. Yea or Nay?
If inclusion or eschewing comes down to a debate, on which side do you stand?
As usual, I boldly straddle the center line of my own question. For me, most of the time, accents and pigeon English in prose are like Mark Twain’s clarinet, the “ill woodwind that nobody blows good.” Or almost nobody.
I find accents in written form disruptive. Clunky. Pushes against the graceful flow.
Other paths to the end: not so much of a challenge for me. An odd sentence form that represents, say, a non-English speaker’s accent or a British cadence…or slang…these are acceptable to my reader-eye—especially once the device establishes itself as a character’s signature. They can be persuasive; even charming. Like any device, I suppose, the proof is in the skill with which it is executed.
But what other avenues are open to us?
Take an example from my own work. A character in progress. A street artist, Real Deal. The jazz-musician riffs and rhythms of his speech are indications that he is, as his reputation proclaims, “batshit crazy.” His circlings and repetitions and Tourette’s-like exclamations are the evidences of the unhinged nature of his mind.
Without relying on the trite executions of accents—especially in Deal’s case as an African American—we come away from the page in possession of something more and better. A seeding of a greater notion in the plot.
We realize as time goes on, that craziness is the carefully-cultivated front for what Deal calls “persona.” The device becomes even more useful and appealing when we realize that he is much saner than he lets on—in fact, saner, steadier and wiser than most of his other companions. The artful shedding of his riff-man guise reveals the truth of him under his personal veil. A subtlety even more impactful than if he had been slathered in an overwrought urban accent.
Eccentricity in dialog is, for me, far more useful and effective than the labored, open-to-personal-interpretation of accents.
And I now pass the question along to you: How do you feel about accents baked into prose? How to you deal with them? How do you exert mastery over them? To writers as we are, the questions are as interesting as the answers. | <urn:uuid:069b1fe8-2276-417c-9487-c1bca2869edf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://skydiaries.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/ill-woodwinds/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963603 | 543 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Did you hear the news? Apparently the 2012 election isn't going to be about the economy after all. Instead, in the words of an AP headline, "Social Issues Retake U.S. Politics, 2012 Elections." NBC's First Read confirmed the meme: "You know the economy must be improving when cultural and social issues come roaring back into the national spotlight." And a Business Insider headline informs us that we can "Forget Jobs: The 2012 Election Is About The Culture War."
The catalyst for this reorientation of the election was the rule announced by the Obama administration that employers must provide free coverage in their health insurance plans for contraception. The rule was later amended so that the insurer, not the employer, would pay for the coverage.
This, we're told by NPR, provoked a "firestorm" across the political landscape, as pundits across the ideological spectrum gravely warned the White House of pending disaster if it continued to pursue such a divisive, controversial, and incendiary path. President Obama's entire reelection effort was now in jeopardy -- if not already hopelessly lost -- due to Birth Contracalypse 2012.
To which I say, borrowing from Seth Myers and Amy Poehler: Really?!
This supposed "culture war" has captured the fevered imagination of the press corps -- though not the electorate. That the media want to change the subject is not that surprising. They love narrative changes, and economic issues are harder -- though not that hard -- to present in a compelling way.
But birth control? In 2012? Seriously? This isn't abortion, it's birth control -- an issue that for the vast majority of Americans hasn't been controversial for decades.
Of course, it's probably not a coincidence that this new culture war, or, more accurately, this new culture war trial balloon, was floated just after the January jobs numbers showed unemployment dropping from 8.5 percent to 8.3 percent. This was greeted by the media as incredibly good news, even though part of the drop was due to the large numbers of people giving up looking for work. And even though unemployment among young people is 23.2 percent, unemployment among African Americans is 13.6 percent, and the number of long-term unemployed -- those jobless for over six months, who account for 42.9 percent of the unemployed -- barely budged, at 5.5 million. Not to mention the 4 million homeowners who have been foreclosed on, and the ongoing housing crisis, despite the too-late and too-little mortgage settlement just announced. Behind those numbers are millions and millions of Americans who are likely not very fired up about the remaining seven months of the election being dominated by a national conversation about birth control.
According to Gallup, when asked what the most important problem facing the U.S. was, economic issues were cited by 71 percent of respondents. Culture war issues totaled just 5 percent. So much for the new culture war overtaking the economy.
These results show that the president is still quite vulnerable on the economy. Even if the Republicans lack any real economic solutions beyond claiming that the president is a European socialist and pointing out that Staples has a lot of employees.
Instead, we have Mitt Romney claiming that Obama is waging an "assault on religion," Newt Gingrich claiming the White House had "declared war on the Catholic Church," and Rick Santorum claiming the administration was "trying to shutter faith" and "crushing it." Oddly enough, at this past weekend's CPAC convention, it was Sarah Palin who highlighted the "8.5-percent unemployment and 13 million Americans who can't find work," concluding that "it's not a failure of the American people, it is not a failure of America itself -- it is the failure of our leadership." I may not agree with Sarah Palin about a lot, but I agree with her about where our focus should be -- not on a supposed war on the Catholic Church.
But when these bogus claims were made, instead of challenging them, the media just went along. "All of a sudden," according to the AP, "abortion, contraception and gay marriage are at the center of American political discourse, with the struggling -- though improving -- economy pushed to the background." In fairness to the AP, the same piece did note that "the economy still tops the list of voters' concerns and probably will still shape this presidential election," but also concluded that, "for now, at least, the culture wars of the 1990s are back."
In fact, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, 58 percent of Catholics agree with the statement: "All employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost." The only group surveyed that disagreed was white evangelicals, who never were going to vote for Obama in large numbers anyway. And according to a poll done by Lake Research, 84 percent of Americans regard family planning services like birth control to be a basic part of health care -- not a left-right political issue.
The biggest number giving lie to the idea that this will be a decisive political issue? Ninety-eight. That is the percentage of sexually active Catholic women who say they have used birth control, according to a Guttmacher Institute study released in April 2011.
What's more, some version of this not-so-new rule has been in effect for years in 28 states, only eight of which offer any exemptions for religious hospitals. And as Michelle Goldberg wrote in the Daily Beast, Mitt Romney didn't seem to have a problem with the rule in Massachusetts while he was governor. But now, in an op-ed in the Washington Examiner, he proclaims "such rules don't belong in the America that I believe in." And as Goldberg notes, the nation's fifth largest health care system, Dignity Health (formerly Catholic Healthcare West), provides contraceptive coverage, as do the Catholic universities Georgetown, Fordham, and DePaul.
Indeed, trying to impose the mirror opposite of the rule would present far more problems, because, as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in 2000, when an employer provides prescription coverage that doesn't include contraceptives, it's treating men and women unequally, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That 2000 ruling, by the way, was never challenged by the Bush administration in the eight years it had the chance to do so.
To the Catholic bishops, however, all of a sudden this is an "unprecedented threat to religious freedom." But while the bishops have been busy trying to politicize what is actually a nearly universally supported public health issue, the media have been asleep at the wheel. How much more interesting it would have been if, instead of breathlessly going along with the phony culture war narrative, reporters had asked the bishops what it means for a church when 98 percent of its adherents routinely flout a rule it considers so fundamental.
In fact, the real issue of the 2012 election is one that is at the heart of the Catholic religion. "I may not be as theologically sophisticated as American bishops," writes Nicholas Kristof, "but I had thought that Jesus talked more about helping the poor than about banning contraceptives."
I have no doubt that the plight of the poor and America's struggling middle class will be much more on the minds of voters in November than birth control. And I hope that the media will quickly tire of this latest Balloon Boy-esque distraction. If not, this new "culture war" will be a big loser both for the GOP and for the media.
Add your voice to the conversation on Twitter: twitter.com/ariannahuff | <urn:uuid:c70f2595-f097-4914-8b77-1581b725bb5a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/balloon-boy-politics-the-_b_1274892.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971648 | 1,553 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Chrome vs. the World
For the first time in history, a declaration of war came in the form of a comic book. On Monday, a comic by legendary cartoonist/explainer Scott McCloud leaked onto the Web, confirming a rumor so old that many folks had forgotten about it: Google was about to release a Web browser. (For additional coverage, see "Google Chrome Web Browser"--our product review--and "Google's Chrome: 7 Reasons for It and 7 Reasons Against It.")
It's tempting to assume that Google's entry into any new market will be world-changing. It's also dangerous: For every Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Calendar, we've seen several services from the Googleplex that didn't change anything at all, such as Google Base, Google Product Search (née Froogle), Google Web Accelerator, Google Page Creator, and Google Blog Search. The company has a tendency to launch interesting stuff and then lose interest in it; unless Google works very hard to improve and promote Chrome, the program might not amount to anything more than an also-ran in the browser race.
Then again, it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if Chrome did turn out to be a great big deal. What would that mean to other companies that make browsers or otherwise compete with Google? Let's consider the contenders one by one, starting with the rival that has the most to lose.
Microsoft: The timing of the Chrome announcement sure spoiled the coming-out party for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2; its release last week now seems like ancient history. And if Steve Ballmer and company care about whether Internet Explorer's declining market share dwindles even further, Chrome must be unnerving. Firefox's success has shown that a bunch of volunteers with a good browser can hammer away at a Microsoft monopoly that had seemed permanent. When the biggest Web company in the world comes along with a good browser, it might do far more damage.
Ultimately, though, Microsoft is surely less concerned about Chrome's potential impact on IE, a product it gives away for free, than on Windows, the one that's responsible for billions of dollars of Redmondian profit each year. As many applications continue to migrate from desktop PCs onto the Web, plenty of buzz is advancing the idea that the center of gravity in software platforms is shifting from operating systems to browsers. And Google has openly stated that it aims to make Chrome into a great foundation for sophisticated Web applications that compete with desktop programs.
Chrome won't spell tangible trouble for Windows in the next few months, or maybe even the next year. Could it evolve into a serious threat to Microsoft's operating system over time? I don't discount that scenario--and neither, I'll bet, does Microsoft.
Mozilla: For four years now, Mozilla's Firefox has reigned as Internet Explorer's most serious rival. Actually, that's an understatement--Firefox was the browser that proved that competing with IE wasn't a pipe dream. If Firefox had never existed, it's entirely possible that Google never would have thought developing a browser was worth the effort.
At this early stage in Chrome's history, it would be premature to make any predictions about its chances of chipping away at Firefox's market share, which by most accounts consists of a bit less than 20 percent of all browser users. But given the power of the Google name and distribution pipeline, Chrome is the first browser that stands a chance of displacing Firefox as the highest-profile alternative browser.
At the moment, Firefox has multiple advantages over Chrome, including legions of loyal users and the richest collection of extensions of any browser, which give it much of its power and appeal. (Chrome can't even run the Google Toolbar.) If I were Mozilla, I'd be less concerned about Chrome stealing current Firefox fans and more worried about future IE defectors' being more likely to adopt Chrome than Firefox--especially since the energy that Google has put into promoting Firefox will presumably now go into drumming up interest in Chrome. A Firefox whose marketshare stalled would be a much less compelling open-source project than one that continued to grow.
Opera: The venerable Norwegian browser remains a worthy product, and an influential one--the thumbnails of recently browsed sites in Chrome look like they were borrowed from Opera's Speed Dial feature, for instance. In market share, though, Opera is stuck at less than 1 percent. Today the company is focused on mobile Web browsing, and I'll bet it's far less curious about Chrome than it is about the potential impact of the browser in Google's Android phone OS.
Yahoo, Ask, etc.: On the Web, imitation is the sincerest form of competition. And if Google successfully uses Chrome to make its bonds with millions of Web users even stronger, Google rivals such as Yahoo might suddenly develop the urge to release browsers of their own. It's hard to imagine, though, that many companies would be able to throw as many resources at browser development as Google can. Other companies might simply reskin Firefox and add a few new features via extensions. That wouldn't be wildly ambitious, but it might be enough to compete.
Apple: Steve Jobs's company is, among many other things, a browser developer. In fact, Chrome has some Cupertino in its DNA, since it uses the Webkit rendering engine, which is the open-source version of the one Apple developed for its Safari browser. Apple released a Windows version of Safari in June 2007, but it seems to be a quirky side project rather than a key part of the company's overarching Internet strategy.
On the other hand, Google says a version of Chrome for OS X is on the way. How would Apple feel about that, especially if Chrome were to steal a meaningful number of users from Safari? It'll never tell us. But even on OS X, Safari seems to exist primarily to ensure that Macs have a solid default browser. And given the close ties between the two companies--Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits on the Apple board--Google probably wouldn't choose to wage all-out war on Safari. Bottom line: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers might well coexist peaceably on the Mac.
In the Windows world, though, peace isn't a word that comes to mind when considering Chrome. If the new browser ends up mattering at all, it will be explosive--and absolutely nobody, Google included, can predict exactly how things will shake out.
Former PC World Editor in Chief Harry McCracken now blogs at his own site, Technologizer . | <urn:uuid:da44fa45-1d28-4115-b8dc-e218b43bc564> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcworld.com/article/150586/chrome_vs_world.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953053 | 1,339 | 1.820313 | 2 |
It is the right thing to do and emotionally uplifting in senior years, (anyone over fifty) to open our hearts, expand our minds, and not allow prejudices, taboos, and negative traditions to hold us captive.
Blacks who have never trusted or socially intermingled with persons of other races have missed a chance to confirm God’s humanity of the human race. The home of whites that has never had a person of color, particularly Blacks, as social guests has missed an opportunity to grow. The man who refuses to work with a woman as an equal, or beneath a woman as a supervisor, and/or refuses to worship in a church where a female is pastor, has deprived himself of the other half of the world. Many seniors ostensibly spiritual, kind, and sensible have never served food in a charitable mission, or given a sandwich, from hand-tohand, to a homeless person because they feel so removed from that lowly environment, which put makes them a snob in their final years of life.
Among us in our communities, families, and churches are seniors that have subtle taboos that prevent them from being a whole well rounded wise person, and worse, they often pass their negative traits on to younger family and community members.
We not only should take time to smell the roses but take the time to listen with interest to what a child has to say. Seniorhood is the last cycle of life that people have the opportunity to widen their horizon. Being set in antiquated ways is not worthy of social inheritance or a noteworthy epitaph. When it comes to intimate relationships, many choose to sit alone at home rather than break the old taboo of becoming romantically involved and/or traveling with a person of interest because he/she is of another race or culture. Life is too short to cling to prejudice taboos, which obstruct the basic tenets of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
When someone comes into our life or crosses our path that is different than we are, God wants us to imagine it an opportunity to add to our awareness of the world, to show us another way to think and be and live beyond our own small way of thinking. Change and openness are the doors through which insight journeys and deeper thought begins. It is the judgment or test, from which we learn that the world is much bigger, much broader than ourselves, that there is truth out there that is different from our own. The voice of God we hear is not the only voice of God. Change and becoming “open” is the liberal abandonment of the mind to new ideas, to new possibilities.
Without an essential posture of openness, contemplation is not possible. God comes in every voice, behind every face, in every memory, deep in every struggle. To close off any of them is to close off the possibility of becoming new again ourselves and render us obsolete and expendable.
|< Prev||Next >| | <urn:uuid:b09a1c9a-eff5-421b-b9a7-a02e24995328> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.blackvoicenews.com/columnists/richard-o-jones/44627-breaking-old-taboos.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969057 | 599 | 1.796875 | 2 |
National chair praises Minn. support for artsby Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The chair of the National Endowment for the Arts today praised Minnesota's support for the arts during a visit.
Rocco Landesman said Minnesota serves as a national example with the Legacy Amendment to support the arts, and the highest rates of arts engagement in the country.
Landesman toured St. Paul's History Theater with U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum and met with staff to discuss the challenges facing arts organizations in the state.
NEA funding comes before Congress next week. McCollum serves on the congressional committee which will take up that discussion. Landesman does not expect the debate to be as controversial as it has been in the past and is confident the package will go through.
"I think they have bigger fish to fry, or something. I think people accept the arts are important, they are an important part of people's daily lives," Landesman said. "I don't sense the hostility toward the arts, per se. I think there is a hostility towards spending money on anything. But I don't sense we are being targeted in the way we were sometimes in the past."
Minnesota has a great deal to teach the rest of the nation, Landesman said.
"The Twin Cities are poster children for what the arts need to be in every city across the country, with this kind of support and this kind of commitment," he said. "It really is a special place for the theater which is my field, and the arts generally." | <urn:uuid:1de8d01a-7fdd-456c-abf4-01354179001b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/06/15/arts/rocco-landesman-nea | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97489 | 332 | 1.625 | 2 |
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Today in class, we're studying Chinese literature. I was giving a little background on China, and the Great Wall came up.
Me: The Great Wall was used to keep out invaders from the north. What invaders were coming into China?
Kid: The Mongolians!
Me: Exactly! What's a famous Mongolian invader who attacked China?
Kid: Chaka Khan! | <urn:uuid:ebe7e4ef-a870-431b-bd8e-22d7dac303fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bethrevis.blogspot.com/2010/04/today-in-class-invaders.html?showComment=1271303240236 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950505 | 87 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Inoculated blog has details.
[S]omeone was bringing in vanloads of non-English-speaking Mexicans with no identification to one of the Nashville early voting locations. Along with the non-English speaking individuals came a bilingual woman to act as their interpreter. She informed the election personnel that she would accompany the voters into the booth, read the ballot for them, and insure that their vote was cast for the candidates of their choice.There's more, so read the whole thing. Now consider this excerpt from the official Democrat party platform:
The Davidson County Election Commission, including its Democrat members, decided that the individuals would not be allowed to vote on the grounds that since they were unable to speak, understand, or read English, they could not possibly be citizens, and therefore were not qualified to vote. In addition, Mr. Greer mentioned that these people were unable even to request the assistance of a translator themselves. Accordingly, Ray Barrett, Davidson County Administrator of Elections, instructed his employees to refuse to allow any of these individuals to vote.
However, someone prevailed upon Mr. Barrett to call the state in order to verify the Commission's decision. Brook Thompson, the Tennessee State Election Coordinator, then ordered Mr. Barrett and the Davidson County Election Commission to allow these non-English-speaking individuals to vote through their bilingual interpreter despite their lack of any sort of identification and total unfamiliarity with the English language.
we oppose laws that require identification in order to vote or register to voteThat's on page number 56 of the plaform document, at the linked site it is p. 58 of the total document because the first two pages are not numbered.
I don't need a calculator to add two and two here. | <urn:uuid:d328ec29-9609-414b-b9f4-81c568a75bba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2008/10/voting-fraud-in-nashville.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970179 | 351 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Optimist of the Day: George Bush
We're beginning to see the signs that the stimulus may be working.
The stimulus to which Bush referred of course is the checks in the mail to taxpayers from the Treasury Department, which should help consumers make one last credit card payment. It's the economic equivalent of Bush's surge in Iraq and sure to be as successful.
As Bush was sharing his optimism with the nation, investors were seeing other signs. Here are some lede paragraphs from the major business journals that were being prepared as Bush spoke.
Jeremy Lerner reported for the Financial
Wall street stocks fell the most since February on Friday after oil prices spiked and the unemployment rate jumped by the most in 22 years in May, reviving fears that the economy is heading for a recession."
The jobs data, rocketing oil prices and more bad news from financials dragged all 10 leading industry groups on the S&P 500 into the red.
Neil King, Jr. weighed in for the Wall Street
Crude oil notched its largest price jump ever on Friday, leaping nearly $11 to more than $138 a barrel, on news of a weakening dollar and continued jitters over the reliability of world supplies.
The surge, coming just as many analysts thought oil prices were set to fall, sent stocks plunging amid fears that the U.S. economy could be in for a combined bout of inflation and slow growth. The skyrocketing price of oil, now up more than 44% so far this year, is battering the airline and auto industries and causing consumers to cut back on driving and nonessential spending.
And Peter Goodman summed it up for the NY Times Business section
The unemployment rate surged to 5.5 percent in May from 5 percent — the sharpest monthly spike in 22 years — as the economy lost 49,000 jobs, registering a fifth consecutive month of decline, the Labor Department reported Friday.
The weak jobs report, coupled with a staggering rise in the price of oil — up a record $10.75 a barrel to more than $138 — unleashed a feverish sell-off on Wall Street, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down nearly 400 points. The dollar plunged against several major currencies.
Investors’ recent hopes that the United States might yet skirt a recession sank swiftly in the face of gloomy indications that the economy is gripped by a slowdown and pressured by record fuel prices.
I am continually astonished by how well the stock market has held up. Do investors not read? Or is it the case, as Grandma Fuse used to say, that they have more dollars than sense? | <urn:uuid:7f9deb3c-03cd-45c7-97d3-c8c01eb76f93> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://simplyappalling.blogspot.com/2008/06/optimist-of-day-george-bush.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964224 | 541 | 1.695313 | 2 |
A few articles about ebooks I’ve recently read have sparked my imagination about what libraries can co. This one from Tidbits and this one from the Wall Street Journal show how annoying it is to check out library ebooks via Overdrive, and since Overdrive is what a lot of public libraries are using, they show how annoying publishers are making it for libraries to transition to ebooks.
The latest hostile move of HarperCollins trying to sell libraries self-destructing ebooks just makes the affront to libraries even worse, and also means librarians would be idiots to “buy” ebooks from HarperCollins. Maybe they should stop buying all books from them.
It all makes this article about Kindle ebook piracy make piracy much more attractive than going to the library, or even to Amazon. The article mentions an easily downloadable Torrent file with 2,500 Kindle books on it. This quote shows what both libraries and publishers have to deal with:
What a surprising number of people have told me is that they pirate stuff for the same reason that a lot of people like the Kindle: it’s all about instant gratification.
As one friend put it, “You want something, you click a button, you get it.” He has a Netflix account and knows he can get a particular movie within 36 hours delivered to his door, yet he he says sometimes uses Bit Torrent to get the movie so he can watch it faster.
Ease of access is a major motivation that librarians have long understood. Save the time of the reader, Ranganathan suggested, and now that has expanded to Save the time of the reader, viewer, or listener.
The more steps someone has to go through to check out an ebook, the less likely they’ll actually check out the book, and that’s just the way ebook publishers think they want it, because they think people check out library books they would ordinarily buy.
However, there are a lot of readers out there who want both ease of use and low cost, and they’re going to get it.
The music industry went through the same process, and their piracy problem was worse when they weren’t making digital music easily available and cheap. As iTunes has discovered, people will buy songs if they’re cheap and easy to download.
Musicians can still make money touring. Authors won’t get thousands of fans around the country to pay for author readings. So how are books to make money?
As obvious in the Amazon/Macmillan spat last year, publishers think they can make money by raising prices above the $9.99 bargain level. That might be a way to make money, but only if they make copies easily available from libraries. Some will buy the more expensive books. Some will check out library copies.
If they raise prices too much, and refuse to make affordable versions available from libraries, then piracy is only going to increase. It’s absurdly easy now to get copies of some popular books. Out of curiosity, I Googled the following: “da vinci code” pdf. I didn’t even have to bother with a Torrent file. When I tried it, there was a PDF copy openly available for download on the Internet.
Where should libraries stand on this? Obviously, librarians can’t just download illegally shared books and link them from their catalogs, though that would be pretty funny until the lawsuits started.
Nor can they advocate that library patrons engage in illegally filesharing copyrighted material. That would be wrong. Very wrong. So don’t even think about it.
However, not all filesharing is illegal. BitTorrent is a perfectly legal means to share and download all sorts of free and legal content. Perhaps libraries should make a concerted effort to teach everyone in the country how to use BitTorrent and other services. We could call it Filesharing Literacy, thus giving it a catchy title that some HOT librarians could hang a manifesto on. The ALA could start up a committee on it and make up cute posters.
Between school and public and academic librarians, we could cover a large swath of the population. The incentive to popularizing Filesharing Literacy would be the same as for regular literacy, or “information literacy,” or this new “transliteracy” mumbo-jumbo.
Libraries want to connect people with information, and there’s a lot of information buried in BitTorrent and other peer to peer filesharing networks. If someone is searching the Internet for information, they should know about peer to peer filesharing, and librarians are the perfect people to teach them about it. (And teenagers, and computer geeks, and several other groups, but they’re not as organized as librarians.)
Once people know about it, it’s only a matter of time before they’re not just downloading, but contributing content. DRM-stripped ebooks will be zipping around the Internet by the thousands. What a shame.
Publishers would scream bloody murder, of course, but who cares. Ebook publishers and Amazon and the rest have been playing the ebook game as if libraries don’t or shouldn’t exist. They want to make an enemy of librarians, so what they think isn’t important.
Libraries can get their own back by making it incredibly easy for everyone from grandma to the toddler next door to download every ebook on the planet for free, without of course advocating that they do that or showing them precisely how to download illegal content. That would be illegal. Just show them how to download the legal content, and they’ll figure out the rest by themselves.
Or librarians could offer a deal to ebook publishers and vendors. Start treating libraries like serious players in the ebook game, and stop making it so bloody annoying to check out or read your ebooks, and we’ll abandon any plans for a national Filesharing Literacy movement. It’s your choice, because the way things are going libraries don’t have much to lose. Maybe we can all go down together. | <urn:uuid:b374827d-1a8f-4971-ba34-d56089c95263> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/2011/02/28/filesharing-literacy-your-library/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954863 | 1,290 | 1.789063 | 2 |
The US President Barack Obama on Saturday asked the Congress to act to avoid a series of harmful and automatic spending cuts, called sequester, by finding a balanced mix of cuts and tax reforms.
“Right now, if Congress doesn’t act by March 1st, a series of harmful, automatic cuts to job-creating investments and defence spending — also known as sequester — are scheduled to take effect.
“And the result could be a huge blow to middle-class families and our economy as a whole,” Obama said in his weekly address to the nation.
Noting that over the last few years, Democrats and Republicans have come together and cut deficit by more than $2.5 trillion through a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher tax rates for the wealthiest Americans, Obama said that’s more than halfway towards the $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists and elected officials from both parties say they need to stabilise the debt.
“I believe we can finish the job the same way we’ve started it — with a balanced mix of more spending cuts and more tax reform. And the overwhelming majority of the American people agree — both Democrats and Republicans,” he said.
Obama said his preference — and the preference of many Members of Congress — is to do that in a balanced, comprehensive way, by making sensible changes to entitlement programmes and reforming tax code.
According to Obama, if the sequester is allowed to go forward, it would have devastating impact on the US economy including the military readiness.
“Already, the threat of deep cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf. As our military leaders have made clear, changes like this affect our ability to respond to threats in an unstable part of the world. And we will be forced to make even more tough decisions in the weeks ahead if Congress fails to act,” he said.
Obama further said: “Over the last few years, we’ve made good progress towards reducing our deficit in a balanced way. There’s no reason we can’t keep chipping away at this problem”.
“And there’s certainly no reason that middle-class families and small businesses should suffer just because Washington couldn’t come together and eliminate a few special interest tax loopholes, or government programmes that just don’t work.”
He said that at a time when economists and business leaders from across the spectrum have said that our economy is poised for progress, “we shouldn’t allow self-inflicted wounds to put that progress in jeopardy”. | <urn:uuid:cdf7a7ef-3bff-4fc2-9cb6-682a1b27c65c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/international/obama-calls-for-balanced-mix-of-spending-cuts-tax-reforms/article4397130.ece | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968314 | 548 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Narrated Jabir bin 'Abdullah:The Prophet said, "I have been given five things which were not given to any one else before me.
1. Allah made me victorious by awe, (by His frightening my enemies) for a distance of one month's journey.
2. The earth has been made for me (and for my followers) a place for praying and a thing to perform Tayammum, therefore anyone of my followers can pray wherever the time of a prayer is due.
3. The booty has been made Halal (lawful) for me yet it was not lawful for anyone else before me.
4. I have been given the right of intercession (on the Day of Resurrection).
5. Every Prophet used to be sent to his nation only but I have been sent to all mankind. | <urn:uuid:ff217da7-8af9-4f43-9994-f6702ccbf94d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/bukhari/bh1/bh1_331.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981805 | 171 | 1.585938 | 2 |
|In Memoriam: Dr. John Durant, CCC Founding Director|
The UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center mourns the loss of John R. Durant, M.D., who died peacefully at his home on Sunday, October 28, 2012.
Dr. Durant was the Founding Director of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. His vision and ability to create a transdisciplinary team of clinicians and basic scientists led to UAB's cancer program being one of the first eight institutions to be designated as a "comprehensive cancer center" by the National Cancer Act in 1971. Following 14 years as the Director of the UAB CCC, Dr. Durant was named President and CEO of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, serving in that capacity from 1983-1988.
In 1988, Dr. Durant returned to UAB as Senior Vice-President for Health Affairs, and in 1995, he became the first Executive Vice-President for the American Society for Clinical Oncology. Dr. Durant made a major impact on each of these organizations in addition to being one of the “pioneers” in medical oncology and the use of combination chemotherapy.
Dr. Durant will be deeply missed by all who were touched by his remarkable life and contributions to the cancer scientific community. In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that donations be made to the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. | <urn:uuid:eded7897-85fd-4d6a-9f2a-bfe5d5dcb8da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www3.ccc.uab.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=568%3Ain-memoriam-dr-john-durant-ccc-founding-director&catid=45%3Anewsroom&Itemid=143 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96959 | 281 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge is as follows:
1) List your matrilineal line - your mother, her mother, etc. back to the first identifiable mother. Note: this line is how your mitochondrial DNA was passed to you!
2) Tell us if you have had your mitochondrial DNA tested, and if so, which Haplogroup you are in.
3) Post your responses on your own blog post, in Comments to this blog post, or in a Status line on Facebook or in your Stream at Google Plus.
4) If you have done this before, please do your father's matrilineal line, or your grandfather's matrilineal line, or your spouse's matrilineal line.
5) Does this list spur you to find distant cousins that might share one of your matrilineal lines?
My husband's matrilineal line is as follows:
a) his mother, still living
b) Rose Levitt (1902, NJ - 1995, NJ) married Morris Goldstein
c) Golda Segal (about 1869, Russia - 1952, PA) married Max Levitt
d) unknown (d. before the 1891 immigration of her husband and children) married Simche Siegel
My husband has not had his mitochondrial DNA tested. It might be interesting to confirm that his mother's maternal line originated in what is now known as Ukraine. Simche and his children immigrated from Shytomir, Russia (now Ukraine) in December 1891.
Note that both men and women receive mitochondrial DNA from their mothers; only women pass it along to their children. A relatively concise summary of genetic genealogy (a huge and complex topic) can be found at The Genetic Genealogist blog. | <urn:uuid:137eae8f-5c80-4537-a40b-061519bbda76> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jewishgenealogyjourney.blogspot.com/2012/09/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-your.html?showComment=1348963122857 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961825 | 370 | 1.648438 | 2 |
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - The USS Olympia, berthed at Penn’s Landing, has a new suitor a continent away, but the venerable warship needs money whether it’s to stay or go.
The Independence Seaport Museum has already put more than $5 million into the Olympia, a unique Spanish-American War vessel that was Admiral Dewey’s flagship in Manilla Bay and carried the body of the World War I unknown soldier home in 1921.
Dennis Kelly, project manager for the Navy Yard Association in California, says it’s take $20 to 30 million to fix up the Olympia enough to tow it back to the Bay Area where it was made.
The price tag would be a little less to keep it here.
“We were able as a country to somehow come up with the $7 million it took to raise the turret of the Monitor and put it on display,” Kelly said. “It just seems we need to be able to come up with the money to save her.”
Even here, he admits save first, location second.
Reported by John Ostapkovich, KYW Newsradio | <urn:uuid:fadd041e-e7fa-4647-9327-e092337aa8ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2011/01/19/uss-olympia-has-suitor-on-west-coast/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960791 | 249 | 1.640625 | 2 |
CAIRO - Addressing the newly empowered senate, Egyptian president Mohamed Mursi appealed to Egyptians on Saturday, December 29, to work together to rebuild the country, insisted that a new constitution that fuelled protests guaranteed equality.
"I say to all, both at home and abroad, the state of financial institutions is not what some are trying to picture," Mursi said, adding that foreign reserves increased by $1.1 billion from July to $15.5 billion in November, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported.
"We cannot even consider this satisfactory. In June 2010 it was $35 billion. But in July 2012 it was $14.4 billion.
"But with Egypt now approaching stability, and with a sense of responsibility, we will do our utmost to double it (reserves) in future," he said.
In his address to the senate (shura council), which the constitution invests with legislative powers until a new parliament is elected in two months, Mursi insisted there had been gains as well as losses in the battered economy.
"Unfortunately, if it were not for events in which some people violated the peacefulness of politics, this noticeable rise (in tourism) would have continued," he said of protests over the past month.
Mursi said the country would not go bankrupt and said the economy had grown in the most recent quarter.
He added that the number of tourists over the past four months had doubled compared with a six-month period last year.
He also said the Suez Canal recorded two billion dollars in revenue between July and October 2012 -- "the largest percentage in a long time."
"By virtue of the constitution the transitional period has now ended," the Egyptian President added.
Two years of political turmoil has hammered Egypt's economy.
Many creditors, investors and tourists have abandoned Egypt because of the volatility that has prevailed since Mubarak's fall.
The International Monetary Fund this month put on hold a $4.8 billion loan Cairo needs to prevent a looming currency collapse.
The rating agency Standard and Poor's has downgraded Egypt's long-term credit rating one notch to 'B-' because the "elevated" political tensions show no sign of abating.
Yet, in the year to end-June, gross domestic product grew by 2.2 percent, up from 1.8 percent in the 2010/11 financial year, according to statistics published by the Finance Ministry.
The Egyptian President noted that his country supported the Syrian revolution and that President Bashar al-Asasd's administration had no place in Syria's future.
"All of that while preserving the unity of Syria," Mursi said, Reuters reported.
"There is no place for the current regime in the future of Syria."
Assad has been losing ground to rebels waging a 21-month-old uprising.
More than 38,000 people have been killed and many tens of thousands more displaced in a 19-month uprising against Assad's regime.
The revolt against Assad began as peaceful protests calling for democracy and greater rights, but gradually turned to an armed struggle, pitting the Sunni majority against the president and his minority Alawite sect.
"The revolution of the Syrian people, which we support, will go forward, God willing, to realize its goals of freedom, dignity and social justice," Mursi added.
Reproduced with permission from OnIslam.net | <urn:uuid:e24de9b1-7527-42eb-aa07-f94e2f8fd3e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.islamonline.com/news/articles/2/Egypts-Mursi-Promises-Economic-Recovery.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977346 | 699 | 1.507813 | 2 |
With the growth of the city, the demands on top officials have increased sharply. City Council members represent many more residents today and deal with vastly more complex issues than the Tucson city charter ever envisioned when it was written in 1929.
It is unrealistic to continue to treat the jobs of mayor and council members as being part-time. Since the mayor and city council members already feel obligated to spend full-time on their jobs, the city charter needs to acknowledge this change, and their salaries need to be increased to reflect the demands of the jobs. The current annual salaries for the mayor ($42,000) and the city council members ($24,000) are a burden to office holders. Equally important, they severely limit the number of qualified people who are willing to run for the offices.
Index mayor and council salaries to the economy or to the salaries of other office holders whose salaries are set in an objective manner. One option: Index their salaries to the Pima County Board of Supervisors, whose salaries are set by state law. The additional cost easily could be offset by asking council members to reduce their staffs by one aide each. | <urn:uuid:3e2e2998-f4d2-4ccb-9447-9b8399187cfe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tucsoncharterchange.org/charter_changes/recommendation_2.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974742 | 230 | 1.742188 | 2 |
If you have never watched the BBC classic television program “Dad’s Army,” do.
The stories center on a group of British home guard soldiers unfit for regular service, but perfect for comedy. Mr. Hitler never invaded the British Isles, but these lads were ready, or at least willing, if he tried.
My favorite character was an aged Edwardian trooper who had seen service in the colonies. When things went wrong, and only Lucille Ball ever had things go worse more frequently, he was given to shouting “Don’t! Panic!” while dashing about in panic.
Americans just now seem given to panic. We suspect more demons exist than Sam and Dean (see “Supernatural”) could handle. We are right. Elections don’t go our way and we know that the culture is rebooting to moral values we dislike. We are right. The fight is long and hard in our personal lives to become a person of integrity and often the battle seems hopeless. We are (mostly) right.
We are doomed.
Death faces us all. Nothing built by humankind will last and these are not the best of times.
Normally at this point I would point out other truths: Dad’s Army faced Hitler and his panzers, we face some Arab street teenagers with automatics. Dad’s Army lived through the Great Depression, we are on our iPhones whining about the Great Recession.
But forget that: times really are bad. Read Romans 1 and trace the degeneration of a culture. The poor have more food and material goods than ever, but the culture in which they live is uglier than at any time. Our leaders are a depressing lot: it is hard to spot a Churchill on the horizon. We have spread our noxious adverts demanding more consumption around the world. There is no place to escape the shadow of our mobile towers and the endless twittering.
“Don’t panic,” I say as my innards flip and my soul wonders if at long last the doom of the West is (once again upon us). I feel like embracing conspiracy theories to provide simple answers to my fears. Perhaps some political figure on a white horse will come and save us? Maybe if I buy the new iPhone it will solve all my problems?
Consumers consume in a panic. We party, because tomorrow we will die, but forget that after death comes the judgment.
But then God’s voice sounds: I Am. That is all God needs to say: His name. He is. He does not sleep. He does not rush about winning small fights, losing sight of the soul of an individual man. He acts deliberately, but never slowly. His are the actions of power and will unchecked by lack of any kinds.
Heaven has never panicked, not even at the Cross.
Suddenly, I am at rest. These are the best of times, look at the opportunities at HBU, and the worst of times, look at my soul, but they are still God’s times. It makes me feel like carrying on.
God’s word, the King’s word, to panicky me: “Be calm and carry on!” | <urn:uuid:6327dc06-4e92-42ad-8c70-0a8b599beecc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.civitate.org/2012/09/dont-panic/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962834 | 675 | 1.757813 | 2 |
The Nashville City Council has either already passed or will soon pass a law forbidding stores from selling spray paint or paint markers to those under the age of 18. The last I heard about it was that the measure was delayed, but things may have changed since then. At any rate, I'm sure it will pass. Obviously, I'm a fan of graffiti art - the style wars picture is here for a reason you know - I have an opinion on this law. I think the law is misguided and doesn't address the issue properly. It just means more kids will steal spray paint instead of buying it. It's practically a code of honor for most kids to steal their paint anyways. The outlaw nature of graffiti is a big part of the appeal. The biggest deterrent to it is extreme vigilance - there's a reason most graffiti is done in abandoned industrial areas. You're not finding graffiti in Belle Meade, although I'd be willing to bet some of the perpetrators are from there. The end result if the measure passes is less sales and more theft for the paint stores and no less graffiti on the streets of Nashville. I will admit that the majority of graffiti I've seen is pretty bad. The city might be better off if they started having mandatory art classes for those that get caught.
Soulfish Stew disclaimer: Wally has never done graffiti, unless you count the chalk drawn picture of Electric Jesus he drew on a lightpole at a Burger King in Murfreesboro around the year 1990. The sad fact is that Wally can't draw for crap, hence the appreciation for graffiti artists who really know how to burn. | <urn:uuid:ce24a47c-e429-431a-83e1-3c81f07cc9ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wallybangs.blogspot.com/2005/03/nashville-anti-graffiti.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966935 | 328 | 1.59375 | 2 |
It seems only yesterday when the only people working from home are small business owners who allotted a portion of their property as office space where to receive clients and do business. Well, that was decades ago. With modern life wired to the World Wide Web, transactions and information are now handed out more easily and ever more accessibly with just a few mouse clicks.
Even jobs that were traditionally confined to an office setting are now feasibly workable from homes, making homes not just a place to retire to after a long work day but a place where anyone can do work and build a career!
True enough, such jobs as freelance writer jobs have successfully thrived in a home-office setting using only a computer and an exclusive place for working. Freelance writers who need to work remotely (e.g. mothers tending to a small child, single parents, students, and entrepreneurs, to name a few) can now have a chance to pursue their careers right in their own homes.
Flexibility in many aspects
Apart from this obvious benefit, though, is the fact that people sometimes earn more as freelancers than their counterparts in the office whose income are fixed to a monthly salary. Depending on your needs, the flexibility to increase or decrease your income rests in your hands. Additionally, even with a full-time commitment, most freelancers can still opt to choose a working schedule that fits their day-to-day routine.
As part-time freelancer, students, particularly, don’t have to put too much physical effort for work which makes for more study time and unprecedented flexibility. As a student, you can work from the dorm, at home, even in coffee shops or wherever is more comfortable; these, as opposed to working in a fixed schedule, wiping tables, taking orders, or washing dishes.
Not only that, the experience and skills you learn as you go along are invaluable for future job applications and employment. This is also true if you’re building a career but can’t focus entirely on it yet. A work-from-home job fills in a lull in your employment history. Overall, working remotely has become a norm of today and has much potential in itself. | <urn:uuid:faf4f4a5-3ff9-4348-b6f7-dd957fdd0fa8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mysoutex.com/pages/full_story_landing/push?blog-entry-There%E2%80%99s+No+Place+Like+Home-+Working+%20&id=9713336 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980265 | 449 | 1.757813 | 2 |
If you know anything at all about Sylvia Plath, then I guess you'll know basically two things about her: depression and suicide. Both of these do come into prominence in this novel, but, even in a book about a woman's breakdown and suicide attempt, these aren't the things that strike me as most important about the novel. It is intriguing to me that I feel this way, because when I first read this when I was about 15, full of teenage angst, these did strike me as the most important things, and made me wonder if I was also on a slippery slope down into depression (I really wasn't- these feelings faded about five minutes after I finished the book!) This time around, I was struck more by the things that lead up to her eventual breakdown- pushing herself too hard, trying to achieve too much, and then suddenly stalling and not being able to get started again. In a sense, she wants to do and be everything, and it is this that is her downfall- on being unable to decide on any one path, seeing only the things that will be closed off to her if she does, she finds herself stalled, back with her mother, and unable to think of doing anything at all.
I should probably stop myself here before I give anything away. But I definitely think that the way I read it this time is indicative of where I'm at in my life (not long finished intensive learning, don't really know what to do next, back at home with my mother...) and trying to avoid falling into a similar kind of funk to Esther, the protagonist. I have not been entirely successful in this, and I definitely am feeling a loss of direction that often leads to despair right now. So I guess you could say that I felt closer to this book than ever before on this reading, because, unlike my 15 year old self, I do know, at least to a certain extent, what Esther is going through.
But, enough about me. Let's get to the writing. It is deceptively simple, but also, I think expresses universal feelings. This is apparent in how many people I have known and blog posts I have read that feel like they can really relate to the novel, and I'm sure hardly any of them have experienced actual depression. While taken to extremes, Plath manages to express wholly universal feelings- the yearning to be the very best we can, the boredom of living in the suburbs, the desire to just change entirely who you are and to just do something better with your life. More than anything, Esther is one of the most real characters that I have had the opportunity to spend time with. You are there with her through every state of mind, and through her complete and consuming depression. Perhaps the best thing about her though, is that she isn't perfect- she can be petty and a little bit harsh on those who don't come up to her standards, but that just serves to make her more real, and a character who really haunts you long after you've finished reading.
THIS PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
One of the most bittersweet moments of the novel, and one that sort of haunts me, is the fact that Esther, following her recovery, is never really allowed to completely relax, because:
"How did I know that someday-at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere- the bell jar with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?"This is a sort of disturbing thought, and it is an upsetting one too when you consider Plath's own suicide at such a young age. It must be so frightening, living with essentially the worst experience in your life (and, in a way, experience of your life) on your back all the time- out of the bell jar, but with it barely behind you at all times, a part of your mind always wondering if and when it might descend again. It's a horrifying thing to have to worry about, and, as Plath says, you still always remember the way you felt whilst in the bell jar, and so the thought of it coming back is an almost unbearable one. Fortunately, aside from this, the novel does end on a relatively positive note, and makes me hopeful to think that Esther is still fine, living the life that Plath herself deserved to have.
The Bell Jar is still stunning to me, even after reading it so many times. It is a work of art, and almost makes me uncomfortable to enjoy, in considering that another person's complete debilitating pain led to its creation. Nonetheless, it is still a book that I feel everyone should read, depressed or not, female or not, for its complete and utter painful beauty. | <urn:uuid:8d5da5e3-8c4f-4d22-9d8a-ad168008805b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://devouringtexts.blogspot.com/2011/05/revisiting-books-bell-jar-by-sylvia.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982405 | 970 | 1.695313 | 2 |
At LAB5 Fitness on Seattle's Capitol Hill, people are literally going head over heels for the latest fitness craze: aerial conditioning.
Instructor Melina Ritche explained, "Palates, yoga, and weight training is mostly what we've implemented into the class. The aerial, of course, is because of the apparatuses."
In Ritche's class, participants use hanging silk fabric or hammocks to support their body weight and suspend them above the floor.
Ritche described the workout this way: "When you're navigating the air, you're navigating all around your body, as opposed to working on the floor you're simple navigating where you are. Having the huge range of motion really challenges students."
Student Sarah Krieg thinks it's a new twist for old exercises.
"These silks are just like you see in Cirque du Soleil or any other place," Krieg said. "The hammock refers to the fact that they are tied into a loop."
As the class progresses, the fabric is raised higher for more challenging moves. It reportedly strengthens core muscles, posture and gets participants into shape as well.
As far as falling is concerned, Ritche said, "I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it's hard to fall."
If you're not afraid of a little hard work, or of defying gravity, hanging around this class is guaranteed to turn your life upside down. | <urn:uuid:4bf9ba24-1c45-440a-9739-0bd6baa6cafc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.king5.com/on-tv/evening-magazine/Yoga-class-turns-lives-upside-down--187365861.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956305 | 299 | 1.695313 | 2 |
I was recently asked which supplements will boost metabolism and aid in weight loss. I feel like I’m wading into murky water on this one. Supplementation is a tricky subject because there are so many products on the market that claim to ‘torch calories’, ‘melt fat’ and ‘rev up your metabolism’ it’s incredibly hard to separate fact from fiction.
Most of these claims are exaggerated or downright false. If there was a miracle pill that could give us energy, increase our metabolism, and keep us at our ideal weight, most of us would be taking it.
Still, there are some supplements that may help you with energy metabolism, increased exercise endurance and a boost to your immune system which are all important when you’re trying to stick to a healthy lifestyle. These supplements won’t actually torch calories, but they may very well enhance your mood or give you the energy to do that extra 15 minutes on the treadmill which is what most of us are looking for.
Four Supplements That Can Give You The Boost You Need
Vitamin B 12 – Vitamin B 12 and the other B vitamins are some of the most controversial in the discussion on whether or not supplementation will provide energy and boost metabolism. B vitamins have been promoted for years as energy boosters that will increase energy and reduce fatigue. I remember as a child when my mother would get tired she would go to the doctor to get her B12 shot. They did indeed seem to help her because she had a B12 deficit.
The problem is there is no clear scientific evidence to support the claims that suggest that B12 can help anyone feel more energetic except those that are B12 deficient.
The primary function of vitamin B12 is to support nerve and energy functions. It is a critical vitamin that helps to form myelin, a fatty cover that insulates your nerves, and helps produce energy from fat and proteins. It also aids in the production of hemoglobin which is a component of the red blood cells that carry oxygen to the body. Vitamin B12 regulates the growth, maintenance and reproduction of each and every cell. | <urn:uuid:c45bd617-c326-44d4-8648-0608ea5e7cce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://projectputthatcookiedownnow.com/category/weight-loss-gimmicks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967038 | 436 | 1.65625 | 2 |
How To Buy A Tent for Camping? It goes without saying, you can’t camp without a tent. That is unless you camp with an RV or some other vehicle. But camping is a lot of fun with a tent and something everyone should try once. If you want to buy a tent, there are several things to keep in mind so you get the exact tent you want so you can enjoy it for years to come.
How Big Should the Tent Be?
Unless you are canoeing or backpacking with the tent, the size and weight of it really don’t matter. The tent’s capacity is determined by square footage and how many standard size sleeping bags will fit in it. That means if you buy a two person tent for two people, there will be very little room for anything but two sleeping bags. A four person tent would accommodate two people, their gear and a little elbow room.
If you have a large family or plan on camping for an extended period of time, you may want to check out the multi-room tents. This affords some privacy as there are two rooms separated by an inside tent wall with a zippered door. They also make three room tents, too.
The rainfly acts as the tent’s umbrella. They are waterproof. Tent walls are only water repellant. The bigger the rainfly is, the better. Find a rainfly that comes down the sides of the tent instead of just across the top.
Adequate Guy Lines
Guy lines are loops sewn into tent walls near the middle. Sometimes rainflies have them, too. These are used to attach guy lines that pull the walls out so they are taught. This keeps the tent walls from flapping in the wind and making the tent become unstable.
Folded Seams and Double Stitching
It’s important to buy a tent that is well constructed. If you can pull the material up on either side of the seam and see any light through the stitches, the tent will most certainly leak. Also, be sure to use seam sealer on all seams to ensure that all water is kept outside.
One Piece Tub Floor
A big concern when you have a tent is water leakage through the floor. That’s why it’s important to get a tent with a floor made of waterproof material. It should also come a few inches up the side before it is sewn into the tent walls. There shouldn’t be a seam in the floor so there is absolutely no place for water to seep in.
There are a number of things to keep in mind when buying a tent. Everything from the size of the tent, the size of the rainfly to keep water off the tent, and the type of stitching the tent has is a consideration. In the end, a quality tent will lend to a much better camping experience. | <urn:uuid:3cfe8af9-0eed-49c4-9670-cfd99ab58a2e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://health-individual.com/how-to-buy-a-tent-for-camping | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958602 | 593 | 1.5 | 2 |
Dear Member, Attached is a movement for solo Piano in C Minor.It is in Sonata form and runs for about 7 minutes.Tried closing the movement with an exciting Coda.Please listen and comment!Thanks in advance! See More
"Haha well yes in pieces for solo voice LOL, but I've definitely encountered double trills in choral music. They can be found in the choral scores of both the B Minor Mass and the Messiah I believe. I just got done performing both works about a…"
Double trills are more and more found in Beethoven's Piano music. In voice, it is generaly a single Trill, right? In Piano, we can have double trills played. I was wondering the rules of Consecutives apply here.
"Interesting ideas...I wonder, what of neighbor groups then. Could you have changing tones a 5th apart based on the same notion that its purely decoration? Also, I would think that the trill would have originated in the voice and progressed over…"
"Thanks for listening and your comments Tyler. I know that the left hand part is considerably difficult only an accomplished player can achieve. However, as I said before, it is a left hand accompaniment to an already composed melody. The Melody…"
So your violin concerto is a huge step forward. I too try to make some improvement with every effort. If you have 15 minutes and some strong pain killers you may wish to listen to the newly posted version of Essay for Orchestra on y home page.I would appreciate your thoughts and comments.
Listening to your Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra - interesting melange of styles. Neo classical but it is informed by more modern rhythmn by the syncopations in your material. The transition material needs work - the ideas are good but the execution needs work. Why? Well, you seem to repeat exactly the same material in a few places as your transition and the material itself is more a part of a larger texture or idea. As you move one in the piece less of this happens. Seems you get a better secure footing as you proceed. Also the stylistic synthesis is more complete - that is it doesn't sound as if you are jumping from idea to another.
Yet if this is your intention to present several ideas in a somewhat fractured way and they become more synthesized then this is successful - though you could do it even better.
Overall I like your incipient style and your ideas for orchestration. Think you just need more time to compose and practice writing long forms. Writing cohesive engaging music over 3-4 minutes is challenging for any composer
I've spent some time now reading the fugue for four voices. I did have some questions, but it'd be more productive I think for us to chat live with the score open at both ends. This post-response system is just too slow for an analytical conversation. I'll look for you online, or try to contact me when you're disposed.
I listened to your 2nd track, it is beautiful music, hope you'll post some of your works with more instruments,
Your 3rd track now is much better in the new sounds, try to have orchestral sounds, you'll get better result.
Why you don't use the Indian Ragas in building your music as I do?
Have a nice time,
Hello friend. I just listened to your three mp3's. My first impression of your D maj 1st mov, was that it sounded like the style of music I composed when I was your age, when the dugster was a youngster. So, I found it stark, bold, adventurous, and rough around the edges. I agree with Per-Erik, your recordings/performances need a greater range of dynamics.
Your C min 4th mov, is my favorite, so far. It comes across as even more adventurous and more consistently well-balanced. I hope you will soon post work with a variety of instruments. I'm looking forward to hearing more!
I enjoyed so much in listening to the music songs in your blog, they are so nice and modern Indian style mixed between the the Western and the Indian styles.
Have a nice weekend, | <urn:uuid:a057f584-1053-4baa-a1d0-1dccb0b4d71a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://composersforum.ning.com/profile/NalinikanthJosyabhatla | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967973 | 867 | 1.710938 | 2 |
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told...– Martin Luther King, Jr. (via socialuprooting) A passage from one of his greatest speeches, delivered at the Riverside Church in Harlem in 1967, exactly one year before he was killed. This is the Dr. King white folks want buried and forgotten, the Dr. King who did not condemn violent resistance, in...
Mitt Romney calls for these things that are...
inothernews: “We have to make sure that people who want to keep their current insurance will be able to do so.” “We also have to assure that we do our very best to help each state in their effort to assure (sic) that every American has access to affordable healthcare.” “We’ve gotta make sure that those people who have pre-existing conditions know that they will be able to be insured.”
I need someone else to tell me what they think...
getwititorgetlostbuddy: I was walking out of whole foods around 4:30 today…proceeded to walk to the bus stop to go home. This white man mid twenties, tattoos everywhere just to give you a visual picture approached me and asked if he could talk to me about something. Again waiting for the bus, I say sure why not. He says he is trying to start a movement to humanize negative derogatory terms...
Dear men who tell "women in the kitchen jokes,"
frankiefatale: I think you’ve forgotten there are knives in the kitchen.
If you're a feminist who understands the...
A popular exercise among High School creative writing teachers in America is to...– David Graeber, “Beyond Power/Knowledge: An Exploration of Power, Ignorance and Stupidity” (pdf) He also says much the same thing in “Revolutions in Reverse,” an essay included in the book Revolutions in Reverse (which can be read in Scribd at the link). I’d been meaning to post a quote from the...
Because when Kony 2012 came out, that was a big deal. But when Inuit children...– littleojibwe throwing down some hard truths. (via marrymejasonsegel)
Yesterday at work, my coworker (i’m a bartender) was telling a story about how a new member made the assistant manager feel creeped out because he rubbed his arm and asked if he had a wife and kids. Everyone was talking about it. Oh, Mr. — is so creepy, he was totally hitting on the assistant manager the other day! Pardon me, but fuck the fuck off. Everyday at that place somebody...
Don’t Consent to a Search!
If the cops say: "Do you mind if I look in your purse, bag, home, or car"?
You say: "I do not consent to a search"
If the cops say: "Why not? Are you hiding something?"
You say: "I believe in my Constitutional right to privacy and I do not consent to a search."
Queerness, to me, is about far more than homosexual attraction. It’s about a...– What Queerness Means To Me « Tranarchism (via docasaur)
Me: Omg why am I still single? I need a boyfriend!
Friend: Well, you know, good things come to those who wait.
Me: I DID MY WAITING! TWELVE YEARS OF IT! IN AZKABAN!!!
Friend: THAT. That is why you're single.
getwititorgetlostbuddy: After spending a week in Boston where I was overfed: Breakfast Buffets including eggs, oatmeal, donuts, cereal, pancakes, etc. Sandwich buffets with over 100 combinations even for a vegetarian! Carrot cake, cheesecake, cupcakes, tiramisu, red velvet cake, chocolate cake, cannolis, cream puffs, peach/cherry/apple cobbler with fresh made whipped cream AND churros Tacos...
When I was a teenager, I felt like everyone—doctors, teachers, politicians,...– The Pervocracy: Not just for kids anymore. (via sunnn-child)
I seldom raised my voice in protest [while my friends sexually harassed women]...– DR. L’HEUREUX LEWIS (via msandrogynous)
We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year...– Courtney Martin (via ceedling)
221cbakerstreet: my favorite game is called “how many episodes can I watch in one night” I love the bonus round where you try to convince yourself that you can watch a 45 minute episode in like 20 minutes
I’ve seen a ton on the facebooks about “thanking veterans for their service.” As...– An anti-capitalist veteran (via elitc) Well heres a take on it not often uttered or shared (via threezerooo)
I can simultaneously be angry with white supremacy and love white people. I can...– thisiswhiteprivilege (via sunnn-child)
getwititorgetlostbuddy: peaceloveandbadwords: looking up the #kitten tag on tumblr while drunk was not a good idea. currently crying because: 1. my perfect cat is dead and; 2. there will never be anything in this world as cute as my fucking kitten. soulfriend I am on my way to comfort you! i need cuddles!!
looking up the #kitten tag on tumblr while drunk was not a good idea. currently crying because: 1. my perfect cat is dead and; 2. there will never be anything in this world as cute as my fucking kitten.
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are...– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (via showslow)
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to...– Aaron Freeman “You Want A Physicist To Speak at your Funeral” (via loveyourchaos)
Lawmaker Barred After Vagina Comment →
bitchesguidetoetiquette: dorkasaurusrexatron: File under: this would be funny if it weren’t so fucking sad. Michigan House Republicans prohibited state Rep. Lisa Brown (D) from speaking on the floor after she ended a speech against a bill restricting abortions by referencing her female anatomy, the Detroit News reports. Said Brown: “Finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so... | <urn:uuid:ee4ac662-e8aa-4e22-8b54-faee4bdfdc90> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://peaceloveandbadwords.tumblr.com/archive/2012/6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938199 | 1,410 | 1.625 | 2 |
Was U.S. Government's Stuxnet Brag A Mistake?
Some lawmakers accuse Obama administration of failing to manage its secrets, but Stuxnet now stands as a warning of America's cyber-warfare capabilities.
That's the playground-taunt version of what anonymous sources in the Obama administration last week essentially said to Iran, after they confirmed that the U.S. government developed and launched Stuxnet, in a bid to delay Iran's nuclear weapons program.
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The Stuxnet credit-taking--if not warning to Iran--has prompted both Republican and Democratic lawmakers to accuse the Obama administration of failing to manage its secrets, as well as divulging crucial capabilities about the nation's offensive capabilities.
"This is the most highly classified information and has now been leaked by the administration at the highest levels of the White House. That's not acceptable," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, on CBS news. McCain, who was Obama's opponent in the 2008 presidential election, also accused the White House of having leaked the information--including details of the drone-strike program--simply to make the president look good.
[Will Google warn about attacks by the U.S. government? Read Google Issues Warnings For State-Sponsored Attacks.]
As a result, "our enemies now know much more than they even did the day before they came out about important aspects of the nation's unconventional offensive capability and how we use them," he recently said on the Senate floor.
Similarly, the top members of both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Select Committee on Intelligence decried that information relating to Stuxnet and drone strikes had become public. "In recent weeks, we have become increasingly concerned at the continued leaks regarding sensitive intelligence programs and activities including specific details of sources and methods," reads a joint statement issued by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), respectively the chair and ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and C.A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger (D-Md.), respectively the chair and ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
"The accelerating pace of such disclosures, the sensitivity of the matters in question, and the harm caused to our national security interests is alarming and unacceptable," reads their statement. "Each disclosure puts American lives at risk, makes it more difficult to recruit assets, strains the trust of our partners, and threatens imminent and irreparable damage to our national security in the face of urgent and rapidly adapting threats worldwide."
But did the "leaks" really put lives at risk or are lawmakers' statements merely an attempt at flexing political muscle after not being consulted over the disclosures? "Keeping these programs secret may have a value," Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served as a Justice Department official in the Bush administration, told The New York Times. "But there's another value that has to be considered, too--the benefit of transparency, accountability, and public discussion."
In the interests of open discussion, let's acknowledge that the identities of Stuxnet's creators were an open secret. After an extensive teardown of the malware, multiple researchers concluded that it had been built by the United States, as well as by Israel. Whether either government would confirm the finding, and whether or not the program was classified, was academic: everyone knew.
Technologically speaking, Stuxnet was also a marvel. Facing stiff competition from Anonymous (for its HBGary Federal Hack), as well as LulzSec (not least for its wit), Stuxnet even bagged the "Epic 0wnage" award at the Black Hat 2011 Pwnie awards ceremony in Las Vegas.
Of course, it's best to not fetishize any type of weapon, but does Stuxnet even qualify as such? Pwnie judge Mark Dowd memorably described the malware as "a non-violent protest against the Iranian nuclear program, allegedly done by a government with some pretty advanced intelligence capabilities." The malware apparently hurt no one, but did send a clear political signal, not least about the extent to which the United States would go to compromise Iran's nuclear program--preferably through non-violent means.
What are the negatives of Stuxnet, or taking credit for it? One line of Stuxnet thinking has been that Stuxnet changed the malware rules, by setting a precedent that other governments will be free to follow. And there's ample room for debate about whether any entity--governments, organized crime syndicates, anti-Anonymous hacktivists--should be lobbing malware at anyone. But did taking credit for Stuxnet cause "irreparable damage to our national security," as lawmakers have asserted?
In response to McCain's criticism, notably, White House press secretary Jay Carney Wednesday said: "This administration takes all appropriate and necessary steps to prevent leaks of classified information or sensitive information that could risk ongoing counterterrorism or intelligence operations." The "ongoing operations" caveat is key, because from a malware standpoint, security experts agree that the Stuxnet malware is played out. At this point, taking credit for it arguably strengthens national security, by serving as a further deterrent.
More than 900 IT and security professionals responded to InformationWeek’s 2012 Strategic Security Survey. Our results cover a variety of areas critical to information risk management, including cloud, mobility, and software development. Download the 2012 Strategic Security report now. (Free registration required.) | <urn:uuid:e2468827-07fa-4a10-bf3d-62f44a563ba9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.informationweek.co.uk/security/attacks/was-us-governments-stuxnet-brag-a-mistak/240001596?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Security_government&itc=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Security_government | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95382 | 1,201 | 1.570313 | 2 |
ST. LOUIS, Nov. 28, 2006 -- Boeing [NYSE: BA] today delivered to the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) its first C-17 Globemaster III during a ceremony at the company's Long Beach, Calif., C-17 manufacturing facility. Senior RAAF officials joined more than 1,000 C-17 employees for the delivery celebration.
"I am very pleased our team was able to provide world-class airlift capability to our customer in record time," said Dave Bowman, C-17 program vice president. "This is a great day for Boeing and demonstrates our commitment to design, build, deliver and support the world's greatest airlifter."
Air Vice-Marshal John Quaife, Air Commander Australia for the RAAF also noted the speed and ease of the acquisition and Boeing's role in supporting the plane's successful introduction to Australia. "We are very pleased to acquire this new, Responsive Global Airlift capability in Australia," Quaife said. "The C-17s will dramatically increase our ability to support worldwide operations of the Australian Defence Force as well as humanitarian relief in the Asia Pacific region."
The newly delivered aircraft features the "Block 17" configuration -- the most modern variant of C-17s built by Boeing, with upgraded software and avionics. The RAAF C-17 also has unique markings, differentiating it from U.S. Air Force C-17s. A black stallion on the C-17's tail identifies the airplane as part of the RAAF's No. 36 Squadron, an airlift unit that will be based in Amberley, west of Brisbane. A kangaroo on the aircraft's fuselage is part of the RAAF roundel, a distinctive emblem painted on military aircraft to indicate its nation of origin.
The Australian aircraft is the first international C-17 delivery since the United Kingdom's Royal Air Force received its fourth C-17 in August 2001. After a Dec. 4 welcome ceremony in Canberra, Australia's capital city, the RAAF's first C-17 will arrive at RAAF Base Amberley on Dec. 6.
The second Australian C-17 is scheduled for delivery in 2007, and the final two aircraft will be delivered in 2008.
The C-17 is the world's only tactical airlift aircraft with strategic capabilities. Capable of flying between continents and landing on short, austere runways, the C-17 is used worldwide for both military and humanitarian missions.
Boeing Global Mobility Systems | <urn:uuid:8527cb9a-7619-4d9a-8312-494b901a3d37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2006/q4/061128b_nr.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948199 | 516 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Wagner : Tristan e IsoldaBayreuth, 1952 (Audio)
Director: Herbert von Karajan
Archivos para descarga:
The young Vinay was encouraged by his mother to learn to sing. He commenced his opera career as a baritone in Mexico in 1938. He later switched to tenor, making a second debut in 1943 and forging a successful international career after World War II . Vinay eventually returned to the baritone fold in 1962 and retired from the stage in 1969.
Even as a tenor, however, his vocal timbre retained its dark, baritonal colouration.
Son of Jean Vinay Robert and Rosa Sepúlveda. Born in Chillán, Chile, Vinay earned particular renown throughout the operatic world for his interpretation of the role of Otello. For a time, he made the part his own. Perhaps his most significant appearance as Otello occurred in 1947, in a radio broadcast of the opera under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. His colleagues on this occasion were Herva Nelli, Giuseppe Valdengo and Nan Merriman, together with the NBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. This performance was subsequently issued by RCA Victor on both LP and CD. In recent years, it has appeared on CDs issued by other companies, notably on the Guild label. Many critics consider it the best complete Otello ever recorded.
A fine actor, Vinay was also the first tenor to sing the role of Otello on television. That was in 1948, in the initial telecast of an entire opera from the Met. He also sang Otello at La Scala, in Salzburg and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In all, he performed it hundreds of times. He is said to be the only opera singer to have sung both Otello and Iago (the baritone villain) in Verdi's tragic masterpiece during the course of a career.
Vinay's overall tenor repertoire was comparatively ample. It also embraced heavy Wagnerian roles (he sang at the Bayreuth Festival in 1952-57), as well as Canio in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, Don José in Bizet's Carmen and Samson in Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila. Apart from Iago, the baritone parts which he performed included Telramund, Bartolo, Falstaff and Scarpia.
He died in Mexico, aged 84.
Herbert von Karajan | <urn:uuid:50e267ca-2c51-4e98-89d6-385c919065b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.todoperaweb.com.ar/musica/opera/wagner-tristan-e-isolda-id-3963.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957787 | 525 | 1.601563 | 2 |
I’ve noticed a lot of the same kind of questions being asked about the upcoming release of “mesh” in Second Life. There is a bit of confusion about it, how it works, and how it will impact on SL. I’ve compiled some of the questions and answers here in a huge braindump! Feel free to ask questions in comments and I will add them to my list and do my best to answer them, or find answers to them. Also if I have gotten anything wrong or missed anything here, let me know
There is a wiki here about mesh specifically in SL that will provide much more information.
Q: What is a mesh?
A: A “mesh” a collection of points, edges and faces used to define the shape of a 3 dimensional object in virtual space (wikipedia) It is built in polygons (quads are 4 sided polygons, tri’s are 3 sided polygons, ngons are 5 sided polygons) in a program like Maya, 3DS Max, Zbrush, Blender (there are several other options, but those are the most used)
Sculpties are technically meshes. The ground you walk on in SL is a mesh, your SL avatar is a mesh. The template used to paint SL clothing on is the “UV layout” of the SL avatar mesh. Your World of Warcraft or (insert other game here) character is a mesh.
Q: Why do I need it?
A: technically you don’t. But fair warning, after August, your SL world might start looking a little strange as people start to incorporate meshes into their builds and products. Meshes viewed on an incompatible viewer rez as little planes, or little pyramids (like unrezzed sculpties appear as spheres).
Q: How does a mesh differ from a sculpty?
A: A “mesh” is an industry standard method of building 3d models. A sculpty is a SL specific workaround and extremely limited. A sculpty uses the RGB map (sculpty map) to tell the SL engine where to calculate the surface of the shape in 3d space. Sculpties are limited to 1024 faces, and cannot be cut, extruded, merged or anything else that changes the shape geometry. Meshes do not have this restriction.
Q: will meshes make my entire SL inventory (clothes and skins etc) obsolete?
A: not unless you want it to. Nothing is going away, we are being given a whole new toolkit to work with instead of simple SL prims and sculpties. Meshes open up a new world of possibilities from houses, to horses, to hair to replacement avatars. But the most important point is that if you don’t want your skins collection to become redundant, don’t buy a replacement avatar mesh. I am positive there will be quite a number available from various SL designers, that is a choice only you can make, and while we don’t have all the information, it’s impossible to make a call.
Q: will meshes mean I have to leave my beloved 1.23 viewer?
A: I’m afraid it will, mesh is not supported in 1.23, and I doubt it ever will be. This is the cost of progress. There are a number of great viewers out there that will support mesh, from the Official SL viewer (my viewer of choice), to Kirstens, to Cool VL Viewer, to Firestorm, Astra Viewer and Exodus Viewer. Phoenix will be updated but is not currently supported.
Q: Is mesh going to make my computer crash and burn?
A: This depends on your computer specs, how old it is etc, but it shouldn’t. There are still graphics preferences in SL that you can turn down, you don’t have to run on ultra settings to see meshes. The LOD setting (advanced, debug, rendervolumeLODfactor set to 4) works to display meshes nicely just as it does to display sculpties now. Meshes built and textured properly, with efficiency in mind, will be MORE efficient and easier on your computer than sculpties which can sometimes require your PC to render tens of thousands of faces for a single hairstyle.
Q: can I edit meshes in SL?
A: this answer has 2 parts:
1: is the mesh worn/skinned?
If the mesh is skinned to the avatar skeleton, provided you have mod permission, or the mesh is scripted to respond to certain commands, you have limited mod abilities. You can change the colour and texture of skinned meshes (caveat – your texture needs to exactly match the UV layout of the mesh or you will get strange distortions and seams), but you cannot change the size, position or orientation of the actual mesh when it is worn, other than by editing the avatar shape via the appearance menu sliders. If you rez the mesh on the floor, and resize or rotate it, it will snap back to the default position when you wear it again. The size, position and orientation is determined by the creator when he/she attaches it to the SL skeleton before it’s uploaded. This gives the added advantage of not having to use specific attachment points for specific articles of clothing. Eg: a corset, skinned to the skeleton, could use your upper leg attachment point, keeping your spine and chest free for jewellery. Skinned boot meshes could be attached to your ear attachment point, leaving your lower leg available for sculpty jean cuffs.
Examples of skinned meshes may be clothing items like jeans, jackets, avatar replacement models, hairstyles, shoes, dresses, animal or fantasy avatars.
2: is the mesh static?
If the mesh is NOT skinned to the SL skeleton – say in the case of a mesh belt that is just worn as a normal attachment, then provided you have mod permissions, and depending on how the belt was created, you can move it around, resize it just like any other prim attachment – eg: a sculpty belt now. The only difference I can see (and again this depends on whether said belt is created as a complete mesh, or a linkset in SL) is that you may not have to “edit linked parts” to resize the mesh on only one axis.
Other examples of static meshes may be sculptures, buildings, caves, doors and windows, furniture.
Q: How do you make a mesh move with the avatar?
A: this is a process called “skinning” which the creator does in their 3d program of choice. It involves taking the SL skeleton or “rig” and importing their mesh “skin” over the top. Then they use a series of steps to attach the skin to the rig. Once it’s attached, they will probably edit the “bone weights” which is the amount of influence each bone in the rig will have over the mesh. Standard SL avatar bone weighting is very rough, this is what causes the stretching texture at the groin of your jeans! Well made meshes will hopefully be able to work around these issues and give us nice smooth clothing!
Q: What about fitting a skinned mesh to my avatar? Must I lose my curvy booty?
A: this depends on you, and the designer who made the thing you are interested in. My hope is that designers will offer several size options and perhaps even a custom fitting service with their mesh clothing designs. The SL skeleton bones will influence the meshes in some aspects, but not others.
The things you can change using the appearance sliders are: Head size, height, body width, arm length, hip width, leg length and I think foot size.
The things you definitely can’t change using the appearance sliders at time of publication are: Breast, belly and butt size. Body fat, body musculature and anything related to the shape of the face and features.
This is simply because no bones exist in the SL avatar rig to attach a mesh to, it’s all done in SL with morphs. If at some point we gain the ability to add extra bones to the default skeleton, then these things may become possible. What this means is that you will have to utilise alpha layers, wear different sizes, change your shape, or possibly get a custom fitting. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I plan to offer the custom fitting option, although I haven’t worked out the details yet.
Q: Does mesh mean we will finally have real fingers and toes that move and wiggle naturally?
A: unfortunately no, for the reason stated above. The default SL rig has no bones in the fingers or toes, beyond the most rudimentary bone to move the hand and foot. Enterprising designers may come up with workarounds to this problem
Q: If I do buy a custom avatar replacement, can I still use my texture clothing layers?
A: in a short answer – no. A custom avatar replacement will mean you are hiding your SL body from view with an alpha layer, and wearing whatever the creator of the custom avatar has provided. You can probably still wear mesh clothing, and full prim sculpty clothing, but again, you may have fitting issues with a custom avatar.
Q: I want to make my own mesh for SL. How do I do that?
A: there is no easy answer to this, mesh isn’t SL specific like sculpties, and there are not a lot of tutorials around making meshes for SL *yet*. This will change as the mesh project is released and people start making content. In the meantime, I recommend you find a modelling package that works for you and is in your budget. Blender is free, fairly easy to use once you get used to the rather odd interface (though Blender 2.5 is better from all accounts) and will help you produce very satisfactory results. It has all the tools you need to make meshes for SL. Maya and 3dsMax are both very good programs, but also expensive, and may be overkill for an SL hobbyist or small business. They are more for the serious career modeller, as is blender, but blender has a lower barrier of entry due to it’s price. Zbrush is a completely different kettle of fish, a totally different method of modelling. It may or may not suit you, all you can do is get the trial and play with it.
Key things you should be looking at learning are:
- basic box and polygon modelling
- Uv unwrapping
- texturing in your program of choice
- skinning and rigging processes
- how to created decimated or low polygon meshes for your LOD uploads
- how to actually upload and use the mesh in SL (you need to connect to the Aditi grid using the latest SL mesh beta viewer)
Tutorials for meshes exist at Machinimatrix and Gaia is working on a whole range of SL specific mesh tutorials. Aside from that, once you have picked your software of choice, type it’s name into youtube and go nuts
Q: I feel like I am going to get left behind in content creation without mesh
A: there’s no easy answer to this either. You need to get in and learn it, just like you learned how to paint on the template, or make sculpties. Once you get the basics, it has a snowball effect and you will find it gets easier. The first steps are the hardest, but there are people willing to share what they’ve learned.
Q: I found a mesh on (Turbosquid/Gnomology/Renderosity) and I want to upload that and sell it in SL, can I do that?
A: Yes but ONLY if the licence of the model you are using specifies that you can use it for that purpose. Otherwise you are breaching the licence agreement laid out by the creator, and may open yourself up to legal issues, not to mention that people in SL may recognise that model as someone else’s and dob you in! For the amount of work you may have to put into a mesh to make it work and be fairly efficient in SL, you may as well make it yourself.
Q: Will meshes cost more to upload than textures or animations?
A: Yes. Though I don’t know the exact price, I do know it varies depending on the size and complexity of the mesh, and whether you have specified LOD and physics shapes.
Q: What is stopping professional modellers from coming into SL and taking over all the content creation?
A: nothing at all, except the limitations of SL, and the relatively small market. They can probably make more money selling their models on Turbosquid or working for hire than they could in SL. It’s not something I’m especially worried about.
Q: what is stopping people from copybotting my meshes?
A: not much. If it can be seen on someone’s screen, then there are probably ways they can get the mesh downloaded. The upside to this is that they will then have to reupload it themselves, they (currently) can’t just make a copy in SL. This means that they have to pay for it. This isn’t much deterrant, but it’s at least something. The same DMCA process applies to mesh as applies to any other content hosted by LL. And by the same token, if you see someone infringing the copyright or trademark of a third party eg: Blizzard, then you may want to report that infringement to the copyright owner so they can take care of it.
This is a simple pair of mesh jeans I made for testing on Aditi. Pretty swish, no?
And that is about all I can think of in the initial post! If you have questions pop them in the comments section and I will answer what I can
Q: Mesh clothing will be completely modelled?
A: currently yes, until someone develops a tool to make SL prims into meshes the way that Sculpt Studio and it’s counterparts work for sculpties, meshes are made externally to SL. | <urn:uuid:1ce4b2b5-2005-4050-9cdb-5abd0e33b875> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://slinkstyle.com/what-is-mesh-and-how-will-it-affect-sl-some-faq-ive-seen-and-can-answer-here/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943407 | 2,976 | 1.5625 | 2 |
The young people of QueerToday.com are happy to learn from PFLAG that the Tennessee Department of Public Health has shut down the Love In Action camp because they were illegally providing services to youth. The camp's purpose was to convert gay youth into straight youth - a practice proven ineffective and condemned by the American Pediatric association, American Medical Association, American Counseling Association, American Psychological Association, & American Psychiatric association.
There is NO debate within the mainstream scientific community. Conversion/reparative therapy is junk science.
Focus On The Family regularly refers youth to Love In Action and Exodus International.
On October 29th Focus On The Family will be holding a large anti-gay conference in Boston with the purpose of informing the public about "curing" and "preventing" homosexuality.
Protest Focus On The Family! | <urn:uuid:f2ebf692-e4b3-475e-8498-a8b08bad5b22> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://queertoday.blogspot.jp/2005/09/love-in-action-shut-down_20.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941454 | 169 | 1.625 | 2 |
-St. John 13: 3
1st Fact- Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands— had given Him authority over everything. What can possibly stop one that has been given authority over everything? Everything is everything and nothing is excluded! When we “know and believe” that God has before-hand prepared us by giving us His authority over what ever the gates of hell will attempt to prevail or conquer us with, then we can go forward in assurance, knowing that our defeat will not be so! This applies to all things in our minds, our ministries, on our jobs, in our homes, our health, our finances, relationships, IN EVERYTHING WHICH CONCERNS US!! Our challenge is choosing to believe and to walk in that authority!
2nd Fact- Jesus knew where He came from, who He belonged to. No matter what the response would be to His question in Matthew 16:13-”Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Jesus knew who He was, whose He was, and where He had come from. He knew that He did not just evolve from within His own self and appear. He wasn’t a piece of clay lumped together and thrown into orbit to become whatever form and being would manifest. He was not an after thought in God’s mind. He didn’t force Himself into existence. No, He had a beginning, an origin. He came from God. He was in the mind of God, all alone. Neither have we been just thrown together, for we are told in Genesis 1:26- Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” NLT- Then God said, “Let us make people in our image, to be like ourselves. They will be masters over all life-the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the livestock, wild animals, and small animals.” Psalm 139:16- I will praise thee; for I am fearfully [and] wonderfully made: marvelous [are] thy works; and [that] my soul knoweth right well. Psalm 100:3-KJ-Know ye that the LORD he [is] God: [it is] he [that] hath made us, and not we ourselves; [we are] his people, and the sheep of his pasture. NLT- Acknowledge that the Lord is God! He made us, and we are his. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Ephesians 1:6- To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved. NLT- So we praise God for the wonderful kindness he has poured out on us because we belong to his dearly loved Son.
3rd Fact- Jesus would return back to God after He completed His mission. No, He would not be a cast away or would rot in a grave or be left in the hands of those who would rise up against Him and even “kill” Him. Jesus knew that just as God had preserved Him to come to earth with a mission, so would God preserve Him to return to Him after completing His mission. As Christians, we have been sent to earth with a mission. What we may endure through satisfying and completing our mission may greatly cost us including even our lives. But if we know that whether we live or die, that God is in charge of our lives; then just as these facts contributed to Jesus’ successfully living and completing His Mission; so will be the conclusion of our lives and missions.
Embracing these truths gave Jesus the courage, assurance and faith to know that even in death, He would have authority over everything- for even death would not be able to hold His body down and separate Him from God. Jesus knew that in the end, that after He completed His mission on earth that He would go and be with God! If that is not an incentive for us to complete our purpose and mission here on earth, nothing will motivate us!!!
True authority, true faith, true courage is when you can boldly look in the face, those challenges, whatever they are which seems to have the greater power over you. Those challenges which really could destroy you, if not, “But God” intervening, if not, “But God” already equipping us for the fight, if not, “But God” being the greater power in our lives rather than Satan.
Bless you and I love you,
Dr. Tonya Lewis Web site: www.onefaithfellowship.org Email: | <urn:uuid:3e75efb7-21b5-428d-89d1-d5d6b3a32a7d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lasentinel.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7514:three-survival-facts-all-christians-must-know&catid=97:religion&Itemid=187 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973943 | 1,001 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Joy is mixed with worry these days in Joel Linden’s lab at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology & Allergy. He’s developing a promising drug to fight sickle cell anemia. But the grant money paying for his research is in jeopardy because of an epic budget brawl that’s expected to play out in Congress.
Starting in January, the federal budget will be cut by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, an across-the-board amount required by the 2011 Budget Control Act after a bipartisan congressional committee failed to reach a deal to slash the deficit.
Half the cuts will come from the military budget, which could threaten 30,000 defense-related jobs in San Diego County over time. The rest will come from domestic programs, including the National Institutes of Health, the largest public underwriter of medical research.
Economists say the automatic cuts, known as “sequestration,” could slam NIH, eliminating up to 3,100 life-science jobs in San Diego. An additional 1,400 industry support workers could lose jobs.
“This is frightening. NIH funding is already at historically low levels,” said Linden. “I can’t run deficits in my lab. I’d have to let workers go if we get big cuts.”
The local threat was quantified last week by John Reed, chief executive at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla. Reed, one of the nation’s top cancer scientists, did an analysis that says NIH could be forced to cut its budget by 17 percent, costing San Diego about $290 million in funding, or the equivalent of 3,000 jobs.
“That size cut is approaching 10 percent of the entire San Diego life-sciences workforce,” said Reed, referring to the 42,000 people who work locally in science and biotech.
Lynn Reaser, an economist at Point Loma Nazarene University, reviewed the data and said the direct science job loss could reach 3,100, with an additional loss of 1,400 support jobs, bringing the total to 4,500.
The cuts could affect everything from efforts to develop drugs for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease to finding better ways to monitor people with diabetes, to using genetics to spot disease in children.
“We’ve never had job losses this large in the science sector of the county, and it is a very important sector,” Reaser said.
By comparison, the local science community lost 1,100 jobs in 2010, the height of the recession for that industry. Through August of this year, science had gained 500 jobs and was expected to add an additional 100 to 200 by late December.
“The county is expected to gain 25,000 jobs in 2013, so the loss of 3,000 science positions would have an impact, especially since many of those are high-paying jobs,” said Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego. “The science industry supports a lot more jobs, so the actual loss could be 6,000.
“When you combine that with jobs expected to be lost in the military, it could really slow things down next year.”
It’s possible that Congress and the president will reach a political compromise to delay or reduce budget cuts. But Mitchell Kronenberg, president of the La Jolla Institute, isn’t waiting to see what happens. | <urn:uuid:fbd71568-7239-4de2-b141-167798f65a4f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/sep/30/budget-trouble-imperils-science-funding/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952675 | 724 | 1.8125 | 2 |
By Art Turner
All of us dream about starting our own business. The kind of business we start should be compatible with our abilities and personality. If you have a passion for cooking, a head for planning and can keep your cool under pressure, consider starting a catering business.
You don't need a big initial investment to start a catering business. You can keep your costs low at first by renting needed equipment. Most of your spending can wait until you get your first contract.
Catering is not affected by downturns in the economy. In good times or in bad, there always seems to be a market for catering: catered parties for rich clients, business lunches and meetings, birthday parties, wedding receptions and more.
If you're not sure about starting a catering business, test the waters first. Ask your friends or your office to let you "pretend" cater a dinner party or lunch meeting. They pay you for the groceries and you do the work for free. Experience first-hand the challenges of planning and running a catered event.
When you start a catering business, you'll need to check state and local laws. Zoning laws could affect where you do your cooking and how much of your catering business you can actually handle from home. The city you live in may require a permit. It won't be fun or easy getting everything set up legally, but when it's the law, you don't have a choice. Starting a catering business illegally is a bad idea.
Decide on a name and then create your identity. The entire process of naming your catering business and creating an identity is known as "branding." Don't rush through this important step. If your catering business really takes off, you can brand things like spice mixes, sauces, baked goods and other food items. Sell these from your website or give them away as gifts to clients. The point is to keep your name in front of your potential customers as much as possible.
You probably won't need to set up a separate office when you first start your catering business (unless you want to). But you will need to make sure you have some basic office supplies around so you can look professional.
If you're serious about succeeding, start working on a business plan for your catering business. A business plan is a blueprint for a successful business start-up. Good plans are the result of careful study and hard work. Your business plan explains how your catering business will operate, how it will be structured and managed, how it will be financed, and how much profit it will make. If you need cash to start your catering business, your business plan is what investors and lenders will use to make their decision.
The children's TV character Aardvark Arthur Read wisely pointed out that "the catering business is tough when you only know how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches." But if you enjoy working with people, have good intuition about what they like, and have the planning and cooking skills to make it happen, starting a catering business may be your dream come true.
Get a free, well-done catering business start-up guide stuffed with essential info and helpful links. It's ready for you at http://selfemploymentstation.com/cater.html.
Art Turner has been self-employed for over 23 years, working in marketing, market research and strategic planning. He is also the creator of http://selfemploymentstation.com, a destination filled with info on business startups, freelancing, consulting, working from home and self-employment.
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Ex-cop's second life inspired by Liberace
Bob Nye and his hero, Liberace, seemed like very different men.
Nye was a burly ex-cop with a short fuse, a tough guy with plenty of war stories from his days patrolling Reading's streets.
Liberace was one of the world's richest entertainers, a flamboyant pianist and singer famous for his glitz and excess.
But the two had a lot in common.
So much so that Nye saw Liberace as a kindred spirit.
Both were showmen, and both larger than life.
"He was a Liberace wannabe," said Nye's daughter Sherry Schaeffer-McNabb of her dad. "He loved everything about him."
Nye of Reading began admiring Liberace while watching his 1950s television show. He thought of him as his piano teacher because he learned his technique from those black-and-white episodes.
Nye loved music so much that he got into the piano and organ business, eventually owning two stores in the city and another in Pottstown. He'd do anything to close a deal, and if you didn't have enough money he'd accept a trade. At various times he was paid with a Capuchin monkey, a skunk, jewelry, a rifle, a cemetery plot, a goat, a lamb and a pig.
That was just one of his careers, though.
He served 10 years as a city police officer, a tumultuous career in which he saved a man from a burning Glenside home, served as a point man on the riot squad, was fired for fighting with fellow patrolmen and was rehired before resigning in 1969.
From there he tried many entrepreneurial ventures, being a fearless man with endless ideas. Some failed, but others worked well, allowing him to emulate his idol's big-living ways.
Nye collected cars, including a Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce he drove in local parades.
He flew his own plane, captained his own boat, bought a magazine and managed more than 100 apartment units.
He ran a Reading dinner theater, where he'd play his 1927 Wurlitzer theater pipe organ and Steinway concert grand piano.
He recorded albums and played keyboards around the world.
He set a Guinness World Record for building the world's largest and loudest electronic touring theater organ, the thunderous 200-speaker, 10,000-watt Golden Spirit of America.
He bought one of Liberace's fur coats, a full-length, Norwegian silver fox creation, and one of his big pianos. And he got to show off his Liberace memorabilia on David Letterman's show, with Dave trying on the big coat.
He even got to meet Liberace twice and was his bodyguard when he came to Reading in 1964.
Dementia eventually slowed Nye down, but he told his wife of 27 years, Kathleen, that he didn't fear dying.
"He felt he'd already lived three lives," she said.
He made everything an event, even a trip to the bank. He'd ride his motorcycle and take along his monkey, Cheeta, who'd hang around his neck, a lollipop in its mouth.
As always, Nye was the center of attention.
Just like his hero.
In Not Forgotten, reporter Mike Urban highlights some of the interesting lives of Berks Countians who have recently died, but whose memory lives on through their families. Contact Urban at 610-371-5023 or [email protected]
(Image by: Courtesy of the Nye family) | <urn:uuid:374c3213-1931-4145-bd5c-ddc40ebae551> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://readingeagle.com/mobile/article.aspx?id=420429 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988064 | 759 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Church v.2020 – Ten Changes:
#7 More About Questions – Less About Answers
When compared with the American church of 2012, the future church (v.2020) will be a community that is more open to questions and less about providing black and white answers. This change in philosophy will be evidenced in many ways, including:
- Increased focus on both the content and style of Jesus’ teaching with a particular emphasis on parable. When teaching with parables Jesus invited his followers to enter into the story, and expected them to continue to actively struggle with it long after he stopped talking. In his latest book (The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus - 2012), Dominic Crossan suggests that challenge parables, Jesus’ preferred style of parable, invite listeners to “permanent questioning” rather than easy or immediate answers (p. 111).
- Increased acceptance of “both/and” rather than “either/or” thinking, especially through embracing the many great paradoxes of the Christian faith. This type of thinking continually generates new questions even as it clarifies other quests for understanding.
- Teachers will move away from being the sage on the stage toward becoming a guide on the side. For many faith communities this will prove a rather radical change. While this should initially impact educational contexts it will necessarily move beyond them into all of congregational life. The old model presumes the teacher is the one who has knowledge and students sit and passively receive it, often through a lecture or formal presentation by the teacher. The new model that embraces shared approaches to active learning facilitated by the teacher that leverage the students’ prior knowledge and experiences in order to construct or reconstruct knowledge.
- Is valuing questions over answers a part of your congregation’s DNA? If so, explain what this looks like in various ministries within your congregation. If not, explore how you might implement such a systemic change and how it might change your congregation’s identity.
- When reviewing Jesus’ teaching as found in the four Gospels, how often does he teach through parable? Why do you think he relied so heavily on this type of teaching? What does Jesus’ example mean for your congregation, especially in its many educational endeavors? | <urn:uuid:b80afa0f-9b0e-483d-8b9b-95b9358a28a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sowhatfaith.com/2012/04/16/more-questions/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945814 | 468 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Faith: A Product of Temporal and Geographical Happenstance?
Have you ever considered that a person s religious beliefs are a product of temporal and geographical circumstance? By that, I mean, one s religious affiliation is the result of where and when they were born.
If one is born to a middle class family in the US, more than likely they will be raised as a Christian. If one is born in Israel, they will be raised Jewish. If one were to be born in Thailand, chances are they would be raised Buddhist. Throughout the entire history of man, and throughout the thousands of gods worshipped by him, this has been the primary way that humans have come to their belief system.
My philosophical problem with this is that, in spite of all efforts made by believers to convert people to what they believe is the only way to eternal salvation, there will always be people not exposed to that particular belief system. For example, even though all Christians are to follow Jesus directive to spread the word (Matthew 28:16-20), there will have been people who have not heard the message of Christianity. One could have been born in Meso-America or China in the year 500 and not had exposure to the information about Jesus. And those people will not have been saved , thus not allowed entry into heaven after their deaths. Am I correct in stating this?
And every religion throughout time has been engaged in this zero-sum game – only the believers will attain salvation, all others won t.
How do you reconcile the idea that people who were never given the opportunity to accept or reject what you believe to be the only way to salvation be destined to an eternity in hell? I can t. I cannot say that, because I was lucky enough to be born in Christian America and accepted that belief system, I am entitled to heaven. This seems to be a very fortunate accident for me and an incredible misfortune for those not.
“If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.” Richard Dawkins
A person’s beliefs are certainly formed, in part, by their upbringing. Certainly there are other factors, and some people change their view as they grow and learn.
Christians differ on whether or not those who have not heard of Jesus are eligible to go to Heaven. For example, in general (and this is a broad generalization), Protestants believe that Jesus is required, but Catholics do not. Your statement that every religion thinks that only believers will attain salvation is not accurate. Some religions believe that good people who are not of their religion can still attain salvation, some believe that non-believers can attain salvation but that believers can attain a higher level of salvation, and some religions do not believe in salvation at all.
Responding to the Dawkins quote — I agree in general with what he says. However, I would point out that beliefs being formed by circumstance does not imply that those beliefs are false. It’s certainly a good reason to examine such beliefs carefully, though. | <urn:uuid:968b2474-5aff-425c-8c6e-9b7f442f6546> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iamanatheist.com/blog/2007/11/05/682/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977646 | 698 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Charles Philips (1708-1747)
Artist associated with 18 portraits
Charles Philips was a successful portrait painter who was popular with the nobility and counted among his patrons Frederick, Prince of Wales, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset.
by John Faber Jr, after Charles Philips
mezzotint, engraved 1758
All paintings by this artist on the BBC Your Paintings website | <urn:uuid:4f912b53-c13d-4298-9728-3e9f68e26cb7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?LinkID=mp07422&role=art | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958346 | 93 | 1.710938 | 2 |
“Tevye!” he boomed.
All of the students looked up. The clamor of their learning turned to a hush. Hevedke rushed over to Tevye, grasped him in a bear hug, and lifted him off of his feet. “Tevye,” he said. “Reb Tevye!”
When Hevedke returned him back to the floor, Tevye stared into a strange, unfamiliar face. Hevedke’s smooth, angular jaw was now bearded. A yarmulka covered his head. But the very great difference lay in his eyes. Tevye couldn’t explain it, but they were not the same eyes he remembered. A beautiful light shone within them, as if a candle had been lit from inside. The face of Hevedke, the Russian, had vanished. Confronting Tevye was the face of a Jew.
“How is Hava?” he asked. “You must tell me, please. I am dying to know.”
The other students continued to stare at them.
“Come outside,” Hevedke said. “We are interrupting their studies. How long are you here for? Is Hava with you? Is everything all right?”
Tevye assured him that everyone, thank God, was fine. For the moment, they were living in Zichron Yaacov. Hava had completed a course in nursing and was now working in the infirmary.
“Did Hava ask you to give me a message?” he asked. The youth spoke with such genuine hope that Tevye himself was disarmed.
“She asked me to send you her greetings.”
Hevedke beamed as if Tevye had handed him a bagful of rubels. His eyes shone with delight.
“You can tell her that I am enjoying my studies more than I have enjoyed anything else in my life.”
A forced, crooked smile formed on Tevye’s lips. “Oy vay,” he thought. “He likes learning Torah!”
“Better yet,” Hevedke said. “I will write her a letter. How I have longed to know where you were living. You have another few minutes, I trust, my kindly Reb Tevye?”
Kindly Reb Tevye? After all the trials which Tevye had forced this daughter-robber to bear, he addressed him as “kindly” Reb Tevye? When had Tevye ever been kind to him? Either Hevedke was still a glib talker, or else a miraculous transformation was indeed taking place inside the youth’s soul.
Hevedke hurried back into the study hall of the yeshiva and grabbed a piece of paper. Excitedly, he sat down and started to write. He scribbled at a furious pace, looking up now and then to make sure that Tevye was still waiting. The other students in the room kept on with their studies. The vibrant sound of debate filled the air. Study partners, or hevrutas, as Tevye remembered they were called from his days in Talmud Torah, sat facing one another, entangled in lively Halachic discourse.
When it seemed that Hevedke was never going to finish the long Megilla he had started to write, Tevye sat down at a table. Absently, he flipped open the book of Psalms before him, and placed his finger on some random verse, knowing that the Lord’s Providence watched over every movement in the world, from the movement of clouds in the sky to the path of a leaf falling to earth. His fingernail landed on a verse from the Hallel prayer: “He raises up the poor out of the dust, and lifts the needy out of the ash heap; to sit him with the nobles, with the nobles of his people.”
Tevye looked around at the study hall. These impoverished students of Torah, who labored day and night to master the intricacies of the Biblical texts, these were the true Jewish nobles. The Torah scholars were the true barons and guardians of Am Yisrael, the nation of Israel. It was they who had kept the nation intact for thousands of years. Foreign armies and rulers had swept over the Holy Land, boasting of their might and their glory. The pages of history were filled with their sound and their fury. Each succeeding conqueror had declared the final defeat of the Jews. And yet, long after these emperors and empires had collapsed, long after their temples and palaces had all turned to rubble, the Jews had returned to their homeland. The Jews had survived because of these very same scholars who had clung, through persecution and plague, to the sacred code of law which God had given to their forefathers thousands of years before.
About the Author: Tzvi Fishman was awarded the Israel Ministry of Education Prize for Creativity and Jewish Culture for his novel "Tevye in the Promised Land." For the past several years, he has written a popular and controversial blog at Arutz 7. A wide selection of his books are available at Amazon. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Jewish Press
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This year's meeting was held September 16–19 in Hangzhou, the capital and largest city in China's Zhejiang Province. Zhejiang University, one of China's oldest institutions of higher education, having been founded in 1897, played host to this year's meeting. Over 43,000 students attend Zhejiang University, more than 7,000 of which are doctoral candidates.
The "AIP Afternoon" was chaired by Wang Dingsheng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and featured an agenda of distinguished speakers. The session was designed to bring together Western scientists along with scientists based in China and tailored to the graduate student population. Giving research talks were Xie Xincheng of Peking University, who spoke about his work in spintronics, and Xue Qikun of Tsinghua University, who stressed the importance of using ultrapure materials in the superconductor industry.
Another goal for this event was to de-mystify the journal publishing process. To that end we welcomed two editors, Jim Viccaro, editor of Journal of Applied Physics, and Richard Haase, physics editor for Edanz Group, a language-editing service and partner of AIP, to give presentations. They spoke about what editors look for in an article, what editors expect from authors, and gave details about the peer review process. We followed the session with an "AIP Tea Time," where students or authors could interact with Viccaro and AIP journal publisher Mark Cassar and discuss with them the obstacles they face in the publishing process.
The popularity of the session is probably best gauged by participation. Similar to last year, the speakers addressed a packed house with standing room only. Xingtao Ai, AIP's chief representative in China, reported one enthusiastic student's remarks:
"During last year's event at Nankai University, I could not find a seat. So this year I arrived very early to get a good seat and enjoy the talks. Though the classroom was air conditioned, the many people crowded in the room made it very hot. Regardless, I stayed until the last moment because the talks were really interesting. I think the AIP Afternoon was perfect!"The AIP booth in the exhibit hall was popular among the 20 exhibitors. Ai and her assistant, Linlin Wang, presented gifts to booth visitors and administered a survey for Chinese authors who contribute to our journals. By learning more about their needs, we aim to provide them better service and more targeted practical help.
Since we opened our China office in Beijing last June, we have welcomed visitors from OSA, APS, and AVS and are pleased to host visits from any of our Member Societies who are planning visits or events in China.
We are already committed to hold another sponsored session at the 2012 Chinese Physical Society Fall Meeting. We hope to reinforce our commitment to the Chinese physics community to help bring their science forward to the rest of the world.
PDF cover pages were first launched September 27 for Review of Scientific Instruments and AIP Advances. The practice has recently been extended to Applied Physics Letters and Journal of Applied Physics. Soon all AIP journals, conference proceedings, and Physics Today magazine articles that are downloaded as PDFs will be complemented with a similar cover page.
Sunday–Thursday, October 16–20
Tuesday, October 18
Wednesday, October 19 | <urn:uuid:c1c2211e-5184-4cbf-8232-a21038ce3a86> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://aip.org/aip/aipmatters/archive/2011/10_17_11.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966761 | 692 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Just three weeks into the new school year, administrators in one Colorado school have taken rosary beads away from a high school junior – twice!
Surely, he must have been swinging them around, hitting teachers and fellow students in the face, one might mistakenly assume. On the contrary, officials decided to take this action because of fears the strand of Catholic prayer beads are symbols of the student’s gang activity.
As the student’s mother reports, this student wears the beads to help cope with the recent murder of a close family member. This apparently makes no difference to school officials who are facing mounting pressure to battle gang activity, whether real or imagined.
The school’s principal said certain gangs use rosaries as a way to identify other affiliated members. Though I don’t dispute that information, I can’t rationalize taking a genuine spiritual comforter because it had been hijacked by a few thugs somewhere.
Just as one can appreciate a stunning rainbow without being immediately identified as a homosexual, symbols used by certain groups should not be used to stigmatize everyone else for whom they represent something altogether different.
The only reason given for why either set of beads was confiscated was that the strand contained 13 beads, which authorities know is sometimes used by the Surenos to identify one another. Authorities might have known it, but the teen who had his beads taken said he did not. Further research showed only one of the two confiscated strands contained 13 beads; the other had 10.
Officials later commented on the matter, saying they gave the student the option to tuck the beads in his shirt. The student denied it, saying he would have gladly tucked the beads as a compromise.
Several of his classmates spoke out in his defense and, by all accounts, he was a good student. Using common sense, any school administrator could tell whether a student is a stealth gangster wearing his thugged-out rosary or a good kid who lost a family member to violence and clings to the beads because, as he said, “I feel safe when I have them on.”
Sadly, school administrators have many shortcomings and, in many instances, common sense is very high on the list.
B. Christopher Agee founded The Informed Conservative in 2011. Like his Facebook page for engaging, relevant conservative content daily.
Photo credit: miqul (Creative Commons)
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Whipping up batches of cookies and cupcakes is more than a hobby for Larkspur resident Melissa Bain. Her apartment kitchen was recently dubbed the first permitted residential kitchen in Marin, thanks to a new state law that took effect Jan. 1.
Within the past two weeks, Bain has set up shop in her kitchen with the intent to bake treats for the wholesale and retail markets. Selling her goods would've been illegal prior to the passage of Assembly Bill 1616, which allows Californians to make and sell certain foods from their kitchens.
Bill supporters say it will allow people who don't have access to a commercial kitchen or can't afford one to sell their home-baked goods.
Supporters such as Whole Foods of Northern California, the California State Grange and the California Food and Justice Coalition say it'll promote the movement to buy local.
Opponents claim the new law presents enforcement and public health challenges. The Health Officers Association of California, the California Retail Food Safety Coalition and the Southern California-based Jackie's Jams were among the opponents.
Bain, 39, said she had learned about the new law in December after deciding that her work as a database programmer wasn't enough to keep her busy. She made some confections for her friends and asked them whether she should go into business.
"I got so much positive feedback from it," Bain said.
She said she was surprised to learn she's the first one in the county to get one of the permits.
"I truly thought other people would be jumping on the bandwagon," Bain said.
She said the process has been fairly straightforward, but involved filling out a large packet of paperwork for the county's environmental health services department. This included determining how much each product costs to make and what to sell it for.
"It's a perfect exercise for individuals to figure out if they really want to do it," Bain said.
Under the law, residential kitchens can make baked goods without cream, custard or meat fillings. Candy, dried pasta, honey, popcorn, granola and waffle cones are some of the items listed as fair game.
Bain is focusing on cupcake flavors like white chocolate coconut and carrot cake. Some of her favorite cookie flavors include ginger molasses, rose water cardamom, chocolate peanut butter and oatmeal raisin.
"I try to keep
Dave Smail, supervising registered environmental health specialist, said Marin officials have been busy reviewing the new law and developing guidelines. He said it will be interesting to see how many people are waiting in the wings to get a permit and start their own businesses.
"The goal of this law was to bolster micro-economies," Smail said.
He said an official inspection list has been developed to make sure local kitchens are compliant with state requirements. Workers are required to wear gloves, sanitize themselves and their equipment, not smoke in the home and have adequate storage.
Smail said there are specific food labeling requirements, too.
"The product needs to be labeled as made in a home kitchen and have the operator's name on it," Smail said, adding that the ingredients and permit number must be listed.
Under the law, home kitchen owners are allowed to make as much as $35,000 in gross sales this year, $45,000 in gross sales in 2014 and $50,000 in gross sales in 2015 and beyond. The law assumes large operations would need to move into a commercial kitchen space with multiple employees.
Bain said she'll be happy when she makes her first official sale.
In the meantime, she's been busy baking cookie donations for WildCare, a wildlife rehabilitation center in San Rafael, where she volunteers once a week.
"I'm trying to keep myself entertained," Bain said.
If all goes as planned, Bain will soon have a long list of clients and her own booths at multiple farmer's markets. She said baking gives her a chance to exercise different skills than those used in her information technology job.
"I wanted to tap into the creative energies a bit," Bain said. | <urn:uuid:1ccf72b7-f893-4c62-a69d-26df0d315151> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marinij.com/larkspurcortemadera/ci_22468545/larkspur-woman-opens-first-permitted-residential-kitchen-marin?source=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977648 | 837 | 1.804688 | 2 |
[SDL] Developing Network Games with SDL Net
ahwayakchih at neoni.net
Mon Dec 27 14:13:40 PST 2004
> Hope you've having a nice Christmas (and for those that don't celebrate
> it, hope you're having a nice break!).
THX, and You too :)
> Is it possible to develop a game with SDL Net and have the server and
> client running on the same machine? Unless I'm going about it the wrong
> way I assume that both the client and server must be able to both send a
> receive messages.
I didn't develop anything SDL_net based yet, but i know it is possible
because i had Wesnoth server and Wesnoth game running at the same time
here (on BeOS). I connected fine and could play it (though i didn't play
it for long, just tested quickly).
So unless that's something platform-specific, or maybe it's a "long run"
bug, it works :)
Maybe those lockups You had were because socket was not set to
non-blocking mode (it should be, but maybe on Your platform something
doesn't work right)?
Anyway look into Wesnoth sources, or if it's too big try SDL_net chat demo
- IIRC it could also be run on the same machine.
More information about the SDL | <urn:uuid:541b16c7-48f1-4fd0-b356-5bfb87039798> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl.org/2004-December/047809.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968762 | 294 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Better Rest Solutions’ New Product, SoClean™ Utilizes Ozone to Sanitize CPAP Equipment, but is it Safe?
Ozone can kill any virus or bacteria known to man.
Uxbridge, MA (PRWEB) January 23, 2013
Better Rest Solutions’ new product,SoClean™ utilizes ozone to sanitize CPAP Equipment. Discussions have been rising on the safety of home-use of ozone for sanitization. Activated oxygen or “ozone” is a natural molecule that is formed when a third atom of oxygen is introduced into the common two-atom molecule that makes up the air we breathe. This molecule becomes “super-charged” and has the ability to oxidize, or destroy many other molecules found in nature. As powerful as it is, this molecule is self-limiting, in that shortly after it is formed it reverts back into normal oxygen.
The average person equates the word “ozone” with smog. While ozone can at times be a component of smog, smog primarily consists of toxic hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds.
Some people feel that ozone should not be used by the average homeowner and that it should only be handled by professionals because of how powerful a sanitizer it is. Yet many make daily use of such a powerful product—bleach. Chlorine bleach is incredibly powerful and can be dangerous—even lethal. Yet homeowners are perfectly comfortable using bleach because they understand that it can be handled in a safe way. The effectiveness of the product makes it worth following the necessary precautions. Ozone reacts 3,000 times faster than chlorine and can kill any virus or bacteria known to man.
Now enters the product SoClean and its innovative use of ozone to sanitize CPAP equipment. Ozone is used extensively for municipal water purification and is also used by hospitals, food handlers, and within the hotel industry. Though its use may go unnoticed, ozone continues to be the method of choice when it comes to safe, effective sanitizing.
Some products that have been put out on the market, such as certain air purifiers, have been cited as being a health concern because of their use of ozone. These products discharge ozone into the surrounding air, and expose any humans present to potentially unsafe levels of ozone. What separates the SoClean from such devices is that it never releases ozone into the outside environment. It generates ozone and sanitizes CPAP equipment within a closed-loop system. Any gas that escapes this process passes through a special filter that converts it back into breathable oxygen first. Residual ozone that remains in the system naturally reverts back into the air we breathe in about two hours time.
With CPAP therapy comes the challenge of keeping the equipment properly sanitized, so as to minimize any potential exposure to MRSA and other pathogens that may be present. It is important to sanitize the mask and equipment because the end-user wears the mask daily. In order to keep the mask clean, typically the end-user has to take apart the mask, hose, and humidifier reservoir, clean them, and then reassemble them.
Better Rest Solutions’ innovative technology automatically completes this daily chore of sanitizing a CPAP mask, hose, and reservoir without any disassembly. It uses this activated oxygen to eliminate any mold, bacteria, and viruses it comes in contact with—safely and effectively.
As the SoClean unit generates activated oxygen, it is pumped directly into the humidifier reservoir, and then migrates through the hose into the chamber where the mask rests. Everything that is exposed to activated oxygen is immediately sanitized. All activated oxygen generated by the cleaning process is safely contained within a closed system. Neither the outside environment, nor the CPAP’s delicate electronics are exposed.
“Our goal here at Better Rest Solutions is to enhance and improve the sleep experience and overall health of those with sleep disorders and the partners that are compliant to their therapy as well. If that requires innovation, we are up for the task,” said Michael Schmidt, President of Better Rest Solutions.
Moreover, he adds, “One thing I can say is that we have enjoyed hearing from our customers that there is a side benefit to using the SoClean—their improved health. We designed the device to make a tedious task safe and easy in hopes that if people kept their equipment sanitized, they would see good results and improve their health along with it. It is exciting to hear from so many that this is the case.”
To order the SoClean, order directly from Better Rest Solutions at http://www.betterrestsolutions.com. Or contact CareFusion by phone at 800.582.7458 or by email at tiarasales(at)carefusion(dot)com.
About Better Rest Solutions:
Many of the employees at Better Rest Solutions either have, or have a close family member who has obstructive sleep apnea. Their personal insight into this condition is part of the foundation that they have built their company on. They are dedicated to providing relief for OSA sufferers and are proud to be offering the SoClean as a way to get the most out of CPAP therapy. Besides the health benefits connected with using germ-free equipment, there is a peace of mind that comes from knowing that the end-user’s CPAP equipment is as safe as can be.
For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2013/1/prweb10348350.htm | <urn:uuid:a2ca2c6e-fe8e-467f-b707-2ac74d4b6586> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1112769705/better-rest-solutions-new-product-soclean-utilizes-ozone-to-sanitize/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954601 | 1,162 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Washington, D.C. – Congressman Dave Loebsack released the following statement today marking the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War. Loebsack is the only member from the Iowa delegation to serve on the Armed Services Committee and has traveled to Iraq three times. During his visits, Loebsack met with troops and commanders on the ground and brought a touch of home to the troops by presenting them with care packages made by Iowa students.
“As we reflect on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War we thank the men and women who served for their bravery and selflessness. We must also remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our country and honor their memory. We must pay tribute to the families of the more than one million troops who served in Iraq. Though the war has ended, we still have a great responsibility here at home. We must ensure that our servicemembers, who served with such dedication and honor, receive nothing but the best medical care and support, and that those looking for civilian jobs are able to find them.”
“After ten years, 4,475 lives lost, more than 32,000 injured and more than a trillion dollars spent, there are many lessons that we as a nation must take away from the war. But none is as important as making sure our troops have the tools necessary to stay safe on the battlefield and those who have returned have access to the services they need when they come home. As a member of the Armed Services Committee and a military parent, I work every day to ensure our men and women who volunteer to defend our country are taken care of, whether here at home or when they are overseas.” | <urn:uuid:79f61a66-dc78-4a20-b4d5-055cd0e9b6d9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kilj.com/2013/03/news/loebsack-statement-on-the-tenth-anniversary-of-the-iraq-war/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97856 | 343 | 1.59375 | 2 |
UnNews:President Bush announces new heating cost savings plan
From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia
28 April 2007
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Washington, DC. - President Bush announced today a new plan to reduce office and home heating costs following the recent Iranian oil pricing problems in the Middle East. Hot on the heels of the tremendously successful daylight savings time changes, the White House today announced the adjustment of seasons to reduce fuel costs. The administration's previous daylight savings time plan slashed the heating costs of corporations by millions of dollars a year; adjusting office work hours to those in the warmer daytime, leaving the much colder night times for those returning home.
In the administration's radical new plan, President Bush has announced the elimination of the winter season. The White House quoted statistics that over 90% of home and office heating costs were accumulated during the winter months. By removing winter, and extending fall and spring to fill the gap, the administration hopes to slash heating costs significantly.
OPEC per barrel crude pricing fell 3.45% on the news. | <urn:uuid:c1ef0ad4-9ba7-4bf0-a6a5-9741e8d1f03c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/UnNews:President_Bush_announces_new_heating_cost_savings_plan | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93013 | 225 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Yes, you read that headline correctly. Of course, you’ll need a separate night vision device to make it all work, but with some fancy attachments for your iPhone can use your mobile device’s camera to capture photographs in the dark like never before.
By purchasing a special adaptor, the iPhone’s camera can focus directly into the lens of a compatible night vision device to combine the capabilities of both. Still images, recorded video, sharing capabilities; all become possible with the adaptor.
If cost effective espionage is something you’ve got in your near future, this could be a great way to go about getting started. Obviously some extra battery juice would help too if you find yourself on some kind of lengthy stakeout.
With this attachment, it leaves one to wonder just how far down the line it will actually be until cell phone cameras come with night vision technology built into them. | <urn:uuid:cc50fac0-e861-43f4-9145-b03cb7807f14> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.batteryheads.com/?p=69 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938555 | 186 | 1.679688 | 2 |
It is quite depressing to read through the twenty thousand words of debate which filled three hours in the House of Lords yesterday, as their noble Lordships debated and then voted against provisions which would legalise adoption by unmarried or gay or lesbian couples. But amidst the dross, two contributions stood out: the speech of Waheed Alli was widely reported; that of Conrad Russell less so, and it is reproduced in full below.
Earl Russell: My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, will not misunderstand me if I join her in deeply regretting that we will not have the opportunity to hear Lady Young today. Lady Young was a parliamentarian to her fingertips. She was as devoted to the procedures by which we reach our decision as she was to her own principles. And that is saying something.I want to put two questions to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain. First, will she concede that those of us who oppose the amendments today are quite as devoted to the interests of children as those who propose them? We merely see the interests of children in very different ways�in many more different ways than time will allow me to expound today.
Secondly, will she concede that as regards Members on these Benches and, as far as I know, everyone else, this is nothing to do with political correctness or social engineering. Those are things I despise. People, not the state, are generally the best judges of their own interests. That is a fundamental principle behind the philosophy of these Benches. Were I am not convinced on those grounds, I would not be saying what I am saying now.
Parliamentary measures tend to get shorthand nicknames. There was a Bill that constantly occupied another place, in the 1580s, which became known as the Bill Against Wednesdays. I know that today is a Wednesday, but I have nothing against that. However, these amendments should be known as the amendments against couples. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, explained very clearly, it is perfectly legal for a single homosexual to adopt or for a single member of a cohabiting couple to adopt, but not for the two of them to do it together. That can only cause confusion.
I remember, when I was about 10, being struck down by appendicitis. The doctors decided that it was necessary to operate that night. They flashed a message on the screen at the nearest cinema�which, being in north Wales, was 40 miles away�to fetch the surgeon. The operation took place at midnight. I was assured the next morning that I would have been dead by then had the operation not been carried out. Medical people are rather careful about falling into legal traps. Had there been any doubt whether either of the people in charge of me was entitled to sign a medical consent form, I might not be addressing your Lordships now.
It is, I know, possible for the partner of an adoptive parent to apply for a parental responsibility order under Section 8 of the Children Act. However, that is a temporary order that may be withdrawn. Moreover, parental responsibility is governed by case law, which means that it is subject to change at any time. It is, I think, very much better to have two people in charge who are both clearly in a legal position of authority. Otherwise, we may find someone saying, “I’m sorry, darling, you know I cannot sign it, and Mummy is on the Front Bench”. That is going to cause a good many problems.
I was interested in an article in this Sunday’s Observer by Maureen Freely. She remarks:
“In 1974, when I left university, it still raised eyebrows to live with someone before marriage. Now it’s the norm, and the norm most people accept”.
She further said:
“If marriage is not the all-defining and confining institution it once was, it’s not just because a generation of Seventies upstarts decided to change the rules. It’s also because the legal and economic underpinning have changed beyond recognition. When marriage ceases to be the only way a woman can find her way in a world, when men no longer can or wish to treat women and children as chattel, when the penalties of divorce are no longer as cruel and inhumane as they used to be, relationships become defined by the degree and the quality of the personal commitment”.
I heard what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester had to say about the ecosystem. I think that the ecosystem was changing before the changes in the habit of cohabitation came in. I think that contraception changed sexual relations as permanently and as inevitably as nuclear weapons changed the nature of war. I think that there is no going back on that.When I talk to my female pupils, I realise that there is nothing in the world harder to understand than the time just before the time when one was born. I simply cannot bring them to conceive of a world in which women have the sort of total economic dependence on a man that used to be normal even when I was young. This means that there must be an element of choice in marriage which was often not there before. It also means that there must be, as Maureen Freely remarks, a concern about quality. That is why I make no apology to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for using anecdotal evidence�because one cannot measure quality by quantitative evidence.
I entirely agree with what the noble Earl, Lord Howe, had to say about the virtue of permanence: it is very great. However, it is not the only virtue. According to John Chamberlain�the Matthew Parris of the 17th century�James I and his wife lived together “as well as a couple who do not converse can do”. They gave their children permanence; it did not seem to do Charles I very much good. As well as permanence, we need love and we need peace; not only love for the child, but also the example of love between the parents. Where those things are absent, the child is losing something which is in my view quite as precious as permanence.
Many statistics have been produced by the noble Earl, Lord Howe. I think that the question between those who marry and those who cohabit is whether we think it better to have a bad marriage or none at all. That is a question on which there may be two opinions, but I do not see a research method of testing them. How is one to collect the sample of bad marriages on which to do one’s research? Who is going to admit to belonging to it? I grant that people brought up in happy households are likely to do better than people brought up in unhappy households, but I do not understand how one brings that to bear on the evidence on whether the ceremony of marriage is in the interests of children.
The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, alleged that there was no research at all on the effect on children of homosexual couples. That is not in fact the case; there is a fairly considerable body of research. It was reported by Professor Gottman in 1999:
“Studies on children of lesbian mothers and gay fathers report no negative effects on children relative to their parents’ sexual orientation. Children did not appear deviant in gender identity, sexual orientation and social adjustment”.
Being gay is not contagious. The fact that, by definition, all gay children are children of straight parents would seem to me to be evidence to support that point of view. In so far as there is trouble, it is the result of stigma. Those who complain of the effect of stigma and use it as an argument against change are showing the inability of the unanalytic mind to recognise its own handiwork. I except the noble Earl, Lord Howe, from that�he has not used that argument today; but others have. It seems to me that it is inevitably a disadvantage to have a type of loving relationship that one cannot avow proudly and in public. If one thinks that children brought up by homosexuals are at a disadvantage, the way to remedy it would be to allow their parents to avow their love proudly and in public.We have had opinion polls quoted. I do not believe that I am the only person in this Chamber who was brought up on Burke’s address to the electors of Bristol. He said that a Member is not a delegate but a representative and that he owes his constituents not only his attendance but his judgment. If that is true in another place, of which Burke was speaking, then a fortiori it must be true here.
Finally, children need to be brought up by somebody or something that can hear them. There are two cases, at least one of them fictional, of children brought up by wolves: Mowgli in The Jungle Book and Romulus in Rome. We are not proposing anything as shocking as that.
To read through the list of peers who supported this shameful amendment is also to be reminded just how much human waste-product still sits and votes in the House of Lords — the Normans Lamont and Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher, David Waddington, and many others, hiding behind their stupid feudal titles — none of whom should have the slightest role to play in British public life. | <urn:uuid:917bd2de-3e84-4036-acef-ce18e8d62edc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://virtualstoa.net/2002/10/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9832 | 1,947 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Google has begun work on the first step of rebuilding Chrome from the inside out on a more secure foundation called Native Client, CNET has learned.
That first step is the built-in Chrome module used to let Google's browser read PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Linus Upson, vice president of engineering for the Chrome team, revealed the plan in May at the Google I/O conference, and now evidence is emerging that the first step is under way.
References to the Native Client version of the PDF extension have begun cropping up on the Native Client's bug-tracking database. Programmers are encountering problems with scrollbar rendering, Gmail integration, loading PDF files, and displaying URLs when the mouse pointer hovers over a link
Some are tagged with a Chrome 14 completion schedule. That's not a commitment that the bugs will be fixed in time for the current version of Chrome under development, but it does indicate that the work is for a near-term project, not a distant idea.
Google initially pitched Native Client as a way to accelerate Web applications to native-app speeds. It demonstrated its use in processor-intensive operations such as photo manipulation and playing the game Quake. At Google I/O this year, though, CNET learned that Google plans to rebuild Chrome itself as a NaCl package. That would add an extra layer of security to the software and make it that much harder for someone to exploit the browser--or the Chrome OS operating system--as a vector for an attack.
For now, Native Client is a plug-in built into Chrome rather than the other way around. It uses a plug-in interface called Pepper. Note that NaCl is the chemical abbreviation for sodium chloride, better known as salt.
It's not clear exactly how long it will take to rebuild all of Chrome atop NaCl. Native Client itself isn't finished; for the present it's off by default, though people can experiment with it by enabling it by typing "about:flags" into the address bar.
The company is proceeding cautiously.
First, "we have to make sure Native Client proves its way," Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, said in a May interview.
"I'd say it's a dream more than a plan right now," added Brian Rakowski, director of product management, speaking of the effort to rebuild Chrome on NaCl.
Nevertheless, it shows the extent to which Google wants to make security a selling point for Chrome and Chrome OS. With Chrome, Google led the charge to auto-updated software that silently replaces itself with new versions. That means Chrome--or built-in components such as Adobe's Flash Player--can rapidly be replaced to shut down a newly discovered vulnerability.
Of course, it also means software can change without its users getting a say-so, but Google believes the tradeoff is worth it. That's especially the case with Chrome OS, which functions as an operating system, not merely a Web browser.
"In the Windows ecosystem, you assume the user is taking care of all of this," Pichai said. Google believes online software distribution can put the responsibility back where it belongs, with the software's maker.
The company stands to directly benefit from greater browser security. For example, Gmail users were the target of at least two serious hacking attempts the company said originated in China, and an Iranian attack could have granted a malicious third party an ability to create fake encryption certificates for Google.
So now, Google is modifying Chrome so Gmail can only be used over a secure connection and so secure Google sites require an encryption certificate from a short list of trusted providers.
New security risks?
One of the big factors for Native Client is that it potentially opens new security vulnerabilities. It is, after all, a new interface for executing software that isn't available today.
Native Client has passed one security exam, though. And Google got a modest endorsement from none other than John Carmack, the iD Software programmer who created Quake and Doom.
Carmack compared Native Client to WebGL, a new standard for building hardware-accelerated 3D graphics into the Web. WebGL has come under security scrutiny by Microsoft and others. | <urn:uuid:560286dd-be09-4c60-9457-2fc4eb279226> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20072846-264/chromes-security-overhaul-begins-with-pdf-plug-in/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932946 | 862 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Hi. Something strange happened a few years ago, when I moved to a rural area and was telling my nephew how much I loved frogs. My nephew took it upon himself to catch a large one in a net to show me, and foolishly I did not stop him. The frog (I think it was a bull frog) got it's toe caught in the net, and it let out the most extraordinary wail--just like a large wounded mammal or person--not at all like a frog. It was a very loud, resonant, rich, sustained cry, and I immediately felt dreadful that I had not stopped my nephew from bothering the poor creature. It sounded for all the world like there was a person or big cat inside that frog. I can see how the frog-to-prince fairy tale might have gotten started. Ever since then, when I see a large frog, I cannot help but think that there must be another creature or person inside of it. | <urn:uuid:dda8c3ed-4b7d-4c16-a00d-80fbef018498> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.druidry.org/board/dhp/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=41641 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985668 | 197 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Jay Caspian Kang
Hogarth: 272 pp, $25
Jay Caspian Kang's debut novel, "The Dead Do Not Improve," demands to be accepted on its own terms. Moving past the era in which understanding Korean culture was accomplished through "a collection of Buddhas, zenny poems … [t]igers, weird pickles and creative spins on rice," Korean American journalist Kang (an editor at Grantland) has penned a darkly comic novel about Philip Kim, a late Gen-X MFA from Columbia who lives in modern-day San Francisco, where he's influenced as much by hip-hop culture and the Internet he regularly surfs as by Albert Camus' "L'Etranger," Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and John Fante's "Ask the Dust."
After realizing "the thriftily-coiffed girls of the publishing industry were just not that into" the morose, nameless, raceless narrators of his fiction, Philip moves from New York to San Francisco. There he lives among the Mexican gang members, eccentrics and bloggers of his gentrifying Mission District neighborhood, occasionally works on a novel and makes ends meet as "Phil Davis," an Internet personal breakup coach for the male clientele of Getoverit.com.
Assigned a self-obliterating "slave master's name" in the belief that "nobody trusts an Oriental with love advice," Phil's work and life are going along as well as can be expected until his aging hippie neighbor, Dolores Stone, is murdered.
While acknowledging a moment of vague sadness over Stone's death, Phil harbors a more dangerous emotion beneath his passive demeanor. It's anger — about whites' perception of his "Koreaness," about the death of his mother from stomach cancer before he was 16, about a professor at Columbia who assumes Phil's Korean-born father could never understand "the proper musical context" of an icon like Bob Dylan because he didn't live in America in the '60s. So angry at the time at his professor for the subtly racist slight, Phil had considered killing him. Years later, he still weighs the option of hurting someone at least once a week, and bemoans not being able to find a more creative outlet.
"I used to think I could turn that violence into fiction," Phil explains, "…but fiction requires a steadier logic of who and why, good and bad, absurd and real."
"The Dead Do Not Improve" gives voice to the casual racism experienced by a younger generation of Korean Americans and the anger it engenders. The duality of Philip's life — as seen by whites who judge and dismiss him as well as through the prism of his own internal concerns — harks back to W.E.B. Du Bois, who more than a century before wrote in "The Souls of Black Folks" of double consciousness — "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."
Kang has said that he originally set out to write a novel about Seung-hui Cho, the real-life Korean American shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre. Phil, too, is preoccupied with Cho's violent act and his plays "Richard McBeef" and "Mr. Brownstone" (both accessible online). But will Cho's story, the rage Phil and his fellow Korean American classmates once felt toward their professors and the current indignities he faces in San Francisco become the impetus for his own act of violence?
A series of bizarre events — including odd email from a Getoverit.com client named after Cho's McBeef and a violent encounter with possible Mexican gang members he suspects of Stone's murder— sends Kim underground, not unlike Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. But instead of heading down into the sewers, Kim and a sexy neighbor hole up in a single-room-occupancy hotel while Kang shifts the novel's point of view to the tale of Siddhartha "Sid" Finch, a San Francisco-born "trustafarian," homicide detective and wave rider.
Working the Dolores Stone case with partner Jim Kim, an older Korean with his own caustic views of his culture and the effect of the Virginia Tech massacre, Finch's investigation exposes a different San Francisco — one of aging pornographers, wacky liberal fringe groups and Ocean Beach surfing.
Finch treats readers in the process to some trenchant observations about San Francisco surf culture, including a cameo appearance by Ocean Beach singer-songwriter and surfer Chris Isaak — one of many real-life figures who populate this richly observed novel, including the authors of a Mission District blog and Frank Chu, arguably San Francisco's favorite placard-waving eccentric.
Ultimately, "The Dead Do Not Improve" is not a mystery novel, despite its genre-based plotting and allusions to crime fiction. Instead, it uses (and sometimes abuses) the genre's conventions to present a metafictional mash-up of hip-hop, hipsters, hippies and more that marks Philip Kim as an antihero for our time and flags Jay Caspian Kang as an author worth watching.
Woods has written four mysteries in the Charlotte Justice series and has edited several anthologies. | <urn:uuid:4cbf6065-3b92-4d0b-8a51-dbedc0460e84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-jay-caspiankang-20121028,0,1108348.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9669 | 1,103 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Early voting in NC on track to break records
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RALEIGH -- Early voting is in full swing in North Carolina.
The state Board of Elections office said more people are voting early this cycle than they did in 2008, which is keeping workers busy and there have been requests to all counties to try and ease the wait times.
For Mary Horn, voting early was the right way to go this election.
“I can get it done on my schedule and not have to wait on anyone else's schedule,” she said.
Horn waited for about 20 minutes in Wake County but others have had to wait for hours.
“We're monitoring everything, fielding a lot of calls, trying to provide voter information,” said State Board of Elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett
Bartlett adds that the number of people voting early has exceeded their expectations.
“The chances are great that more people will vote before election day, in fact we think we're going to break a record,” he said.
With 13 days until election day, more than 817,000 people have voted early. At this time in 2008, that number was more than 647,000.
Bartlett said times have changed since then,
“We have grown in population and we have probably a little more than 400, 000 more new registrations," he said.
Because the number of polling sites are already set, there are no plans to open others. Bartlett said counties are extending their hours to reduce wait times.
“A couple of hours a day at each site what we currently have will go a long way in helping the voter have a better voting experience and not have to wait in long lines,” Bartlett said.
While there have been glitches with touch screen voting machines, bartlett says no voter has complained that their choice was not accurate.
Bartlett said all voters need to review their ballot thoroughly before submitting their decision.
“Once they vote, it's a final act,” he said.
Early voting ends Nov. 3. | <urn:uuid:de235904-7cb1-4608-bd74-f8d188156a01> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://charlotte.news14.com/content/top_stories/667051/early-voting-in-nc-on-track-to-break-records | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974367 | 460 | 1.828125 | 2 |
or “Let's move our databases to the cloud.”
For years, tens of thousands of genealogists have kept their databases on personal computers. Each database has been an island; these local databases don't communicate with any other databases. To be sure, an invention called GEDCOM does allow for copying data from one database to another, albeit with some difficulties, but for most genealogists that is a one-time operation. Very few of us use databases that communicate back and forth continuously, and very few of us use central databases as our primary record keeping tool.
In this island mode, I may have data in my computer that partially overlaps data in your computer. Perhaps you have data that I need or vice versa. Yet most of today's genealogy programs do not allow us to easily share our research efforts. Several people duplicating the exact same records is a waste of resources, time, and money. Why not work together in a collaborative environment?
Another issue is the maintenance of genealogy software in your computer. If you purchased a genealogy program last year, why should you need to purchase its upgrade this year? Why do you have to install each upgrade? Shouldn't the upgrades be issued and installed automatically, such as a subscription service?
Indeed, the old-fashioned methods that most of us have been using are now going the way of buggy whips.
I suspect that, in a few years, very few of us will use the “old fashioned” databases that are isolated on the hard drives of our personal computers. In fact, I think the next few years are going to be exciting times for genealogy software companies.
The remainder of this article is for Plus Edition subscribers only.
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For more information about subscribing to the Plus Edition of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, visit http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/plusedition.html. | <urn:uuid:4c68c738-af54-4782-9381-7641d035038d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/10/genealogy-softw.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944317 | 535 | 1.695313 | 2 |
The answer to the Syrian tragedy isn’t complicated: It’s a political transition, starting now, from the regime of President Bashar al-Assad to a government of national unity that includes the opposition but also retains the basic structure of the Syrian state.
The entire world, outside Assad’s ruiling clique, supports this process. Even Russia, which is supposedly the Syrian dictator’s last friend, seems to be pulling away. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday that while Syrians should decide the transition, “Russia is not tied to Assad’s staying in power.”
So why doesn’t it happen? The answer is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing a cynical game of power politics, delaying the transition that he nominally supports. He gives lip service to U.N. diplomacy as an alternative to war, but does nothing to advance it.
So the question shouldn’t be how to turn up the heat on Assad, but rather, how to turn up the heat on Putin. Washington needs to be more persuasive with Moscow, but the heavy lifting here will be done by America’s partners in the region—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India—whose friendship or, at least, tolerance is important to Putin’s vision of Russian restoration.
Breast-beating about the President Obama’s decision not to intervene militarily misses the point that this is Russia’s failure, not America’s. Even Syria’s embattled Sunnis don’t want to see another American-led war in the region.
After Friday’s massacre of more than 100 civilians in the village of Houla, the Syrian regime is playing by “Houla rules,” to paraphrase my colleague Tom Friedman’s description of the “Hama rules” that Assad’s father Hafez used to obliterate Sunni resistance 30 years ago in another blood-soaked town in central Syria.
But the international community is still playing by “Kofi Annan rules,” as in the former U.N. secretary-general’s peace plan, which translates to waiting and hoping.
So let’s say it again: The right answer in Syria is clear. There must be a political transition that begins with the departure of the Assad-Maklouf family mafia, and moves to a broad-based government that includes the opposition (if it can get its act together) plus acceptable respresentatives of all the Syrian political factions and communities. Parliamentary elections would be set, and international peacekeepers would help restrain the score-settling and bloodletting that will surely follow Assad’s departure.
This process of change could begin tomorrow, if Russia would get serious. Putin can sponsor the talks, sign the peace deal, take a victory lap in Damascus, win a prize. But he has to get started now, or the Syrian mayhem will get worse, fast. And if he fails to act, the blood of future massacres will be on Putin’s hands. | <urn:uuid:d0dfd1d5-563e-4827-90b7-cf406556e63d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/syria-the-blood-of-future-massacres-is-on-russias-hands/2012/05/29/gJQAPrWB0U_blog.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946508 | 649 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Entire refrigerators and their contents remain abandoned on the side of Tram Road in Beaumont on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005. Following Hurricane Rita, many residents chose to discard refrigerators and freezers rather than trying to clean and repair the water damaged appliances.
Photos by Mark M. Hancock / © The Beaumont Enterprise
The smell of rotting meat and sour milk has become familiar to all area PJs. We lovingly refer to the aroma as "meat juice." Although by itself the term leaves a lingering impression, when the word "spew" is added to the sentence, it paints vivid mental images.
Jennifer said, "I was trapped behind a garbage truck, and it started spewing meat juice onto my car." This small sentence affects all the senses and emotions for any who have had the pleasure of experiencing "meat juice." | <urn:uuid:5edb9f88-d3fc-4d6a-9360-f94982c1bacf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://markhancock.blogspot.com/2005/10/meat-juice.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961043 | 174 | 1.601563 | 2 |
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
... I ... I know another aspect of last night's speeches very important one of the economy ... in the real meaning of ... investments ... Potomac watch columnist Kim straw soul is joining me now from Washington ... I can't what is the present mainly talks about all of these investments that he wants to make in our economy ... lead author that he's got us the look ... that is the presents were for more spending in the most notable aspect of last night's ... speech in that and he began by talking about ... the economy and deficits in these enormous challenges we face in terms of overspending ... and then proceeded to go on and list throughout the rest of the speech ... all of his new spending proposals everything from ... having the Fed's created a manufacturing hubs to having them finance universal preschool too ... having a tad ... creating new jobs court that the people to buy him to build bridges and roads ... so add this and that again is not much change from the president's agenda in the past this is about continuing to grow the size ... of government the team I want to put up a quick slide that has that a few of these proposals on it ... starting with the idea of raising the federal minimum wage to nine dollars an hour ... from seven and a quarter ... can ... what with this deal employment in our economy ... it would be absolutely terrible ... I know every time you do this it was interesting about that proposal to areas that ... the is aware that she is slightly handcuffed by the budgetary constraints in Washington so some of its proposals and this is a good example of that ... one in which government said that new regulations but the costs are borne by business ... the minimum wage is an excellent example of that if you ... demanded that the minimum wage goes up companies are paying that much more every time they hire a worker and and for overall costs and usually what that means for employers is that they don't hire ... on that they cannot grow their businesses its business that cannot be put into ... the future investment and in growth and so it's at overall I had a bad thing for the attack and was so kind of happy talk about possible tax reform ... just to put up that's like any wants to raise revenues ... by closing loopholes ... aam can Disney is just that a tax hike ... doing this and the other thing about the president's language and it's worth bearing in mind when you hear a Republican talk about tax reform ... they're talking about is ... that getting rid of that special tax breaks for special interest people that now crowd that the tax code ... and using that to lower rates for everybody and help grow the economy when you hear President Obama ... talking about tax reform he is talking about ... raising taxes on specific industries ... up calling it tax reform when in fact the purpose of those ... that revenue reading it is not to lower the tax code but to get that lower rates in the text of but to get ... out of Washington more money to spend a ... weekend there was another initiative we've got one more slot and I wanna put up here ... we talked about a ... fix it first infrastructure program he also touched on energy security ... people care so much about infrastructure and energy security ... what where with the Keystone pipeline in that speech last night I didn't hear it you know ... knowing what you are hearing is that this is a continuation of many of the president's ... proposals for his first term and if this ... stimulus by another name he was another ... fifty billion dollars to throwing infrastructure that works so well the first time around he's wants to give it another column ... on more money for for ventures like Solyndra ... and probably you hear him talk about any that things than actually would help job lake east of the cat that lives in a difficult position his environmental base ... of prove that a lot of this beach has directed that all of this talk about climate change ... they don't like the Keystone pipeline so I e ... you're right that would create a huge amount of jobs and help America's energy and security but ... because that is a tough line in our much loved by his last he did not mention in this piece last ... fall camp I would also mention that there were a lot it was a lot of talk about economic achievements ... given a negative growth in the fourth quarter and declining ... real wages for most Americans | <urn:uuid:517118a4-d5fd-4e76-a4dc-d71eae3a840e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://live.wsj.com/video/opinion-stimulus-30/1170048F-8021-407D-B7EA-B905AB8AD264.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_VideoModule_3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984423 | 877 | 1.765625 | 2 |
9.5-11 Criminal Damage of a Landlord's Property -- § 53a-117e, § 53a-117f, and § 53a-117g
Revised to December 1, 2007
Note: First, second and third degree differ as to mens rea and the amount of the resulting damage. First degree, § 53a-117e, requires intentional conduct and damage exceeding $1,500. Second degree, § 53a-117f, requires either intentional conduct and damage exceeding $250, or reckless conduct and damage exceeding $1,500. Third degree, § 53a-117g, requires reckless conduct and damage exceeding $250.
The defendant is charged [in count __] with criminal damage of a landlord's property in the (first / second / third) degree. The statute defining this offense reads in pertinent part as follows:
a tenant is guilty of criminal damage of a landlord's property in the (first / second / third) degree when, having no reasonable ground to believe that (he/she) has a right to do so, (he/she) (intentionally / recklessly) damages the tangible property of the landlord of the premises in an amount exceeding (one thousand five hundred / two hundred fifty) dollars.
For you to find the defendant guilty of this charge, the state must prove the following elements beyond a reasonable doubt:
Element 1 - Tenant
The first element is that the defendant was a tenant. "Tenant"1 means the lessee, sublessee or person entitled under a rental agreement to occupy a dwelling unit or premises to the exclusion of others. "Premises" means a dwelling unit and the structure of which it is a part, facilities and appurtenances, i.e., equipment within the dwelling unit, and grounds, areas and facilities held out for the use of tenants generally or whose use is promised to the tenant. "Dwelling unit" means any house or building or portion thereof, which is occupied, is designed to be occupied, or is rented, leased or hired out to be occupied as a home or residence of one or more persons.
Element 2 - Damaged property
The second element is that the defendant damaged tangible property. "Tangible property" is something that can be felt and seen. The statute addresses actual, physical damage to property.
Element 3 - Landlord
The third element is that the property is that of the landlord of the premises. "Landlord" means the owner, lessor or sublessor of the dwelling unit, the building of which it is a part or the premises. "Owner" means one or more persons, jointly or severally, in whom is vested 1) all or part of the legal title to property or 2) all or part of the beneficial ownership and a right to present use and enjoyment of the premises and includes a mortgagee in possession. "Person" means an individual, corporation, limited liability company, the state or any political subdivision thereof or agency, business trust, estate, trust, partnership or association, two or more persons having a joint common interest, and any other legal or commercial entity.
Element 4 - Value
The fourth element is that the defendant caused damage to this property in an amount exceeding ($1,500 / $250); that is, the value of the property was lowered by at least that amount. The decrease in value may be proved by evidence showing the cost of repairs necessary to restore the property to its condition immediately before the alleged damage by the defendant. Damage may also be proved by evidence showing a property value decrease in excess of ($1,500 / $250).
Element 5 - Intentionally /
The fifth element is that the defendant <insert as appropriate:>2
recklessly caused this damage. A person acts "recklessly" with respect to a result or circumstances when (he/she) is aware of and consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that such result will occur or that such circumstances exist. <See Recklessness, Instruction 2.3-4.>
Element 6 - No right
The sixth element is that the defendant had no reasonable ground to believe that (he/she) had a right to damage the property. A "reasonable ground to believe" means that a reasonable person in the defendant's situation, viewing the circumstances from the defendant's point of view, would have shared that belief.
In summary, the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that 1) the defendant was a tenant, 2) (he/she) damaged or tampered with tangible property, 3) the property belonged to the landlord of the premises, 4) the property damage exceeded ($1,500 / $250), 5) the defendant (intentionally / recklessly) damaged the property, and 6) (he/she) had no reasonable ground to believe that (he/she) had a right to damage the property.
If you unanimously find that the state
has proved beyond a reasonable doubt each of the elements of the crime of
criminal damage of a landlord's property in the (first / second / third) degree,
then you shall find the defendant guilty. On the other hand, if you unanimously
find that the state has failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt any of the
elements, you shall then find the defendant not guilty.
1 Definitions for "tenant," landlord," and "premises" are from § 47a-1, incorporated by reference in §§ 53a-117e, 53a-117f, and 53a-117g.
Intentional conduct applies to first degree (with damages exceeding $1500) and
second degree (with damages exceeding $250); recklessness applies to second
degree (with damages exceeding $1500) and third degree (with damages exceeding | <urn:uuid:7109a428-8c6d-41ae-b9ba-c066be43fd22> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jud.ct.gov/JI/criminal/part9/9.5-11.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930814 | 1,192 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Currently on display at the Mega Man Boss Battle Tribute show in San Francisco, Andrew Butterworth's scale model replica of Dr. Light's capsule from Mega Man X. No, it's not a real hologram -- it's actually a 2D video cleverly projected using an old parlor trick.
Here's what Andrew had to say about his creation:
"This piece was printed on solid white PLA filament using a replicator 2 from makerbot. It was first modeled in Maya using the original SNES sprite as reference. I got the idea of using the pepper's ghost technique after talking to a friend who has done similar art installations on a much larger scale. Once printing was done, I got to sit down, relax and paint. It reminded me of building model airplanes on my mom's kitchen table. The movie was all taken from a sprite sheet and animated in After Effects. If you get to see the piece in person there is an cool easter egg animation loop. Anyone that has ever played and cleared Mega Man X will get it."
If you're in the area, swing on by the Gauntlet Gallery and check out this amazing piece in person!
Credit: Digital Hippos | <urn:uuid:809b612c-27e8-4267-ac85-eaee36145824> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rockman-corner.com/2013/03/replica-dr-light-capsule-is-vision-from.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958143 | 242 | 1.664063 | 2 |
On June 30, 1994, at 1425 Pacific daylight time, a Cessna 172N, N733AA, collided with telephone wires and poles on takeoff from the Schurz, Nevada, airport. The aircraft was operated by Nevada Cal Aero of Reno, Nevada, and was rented by the pilot for a cross-country personal flight. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed and no flight plan was filed for the operation. The aircraft was destroyed in the collision sequence. The certificated private pilot and two passengers sustained minor injuries; however, one passenger incurred serious injuries. The flight was originating at the time of the accident as a return flight to Reno, Nevada. Use your browsers 'back' function to return to synopsisReturn to Query Page
According to Sheriff's Department officers who responded to the accident site, the pilot stated in an interview that during the takeoff initial climb the aircraft encountered a windshear condition and descended into telephone wires and poles at the departure end of the runway. The responding sheriff's deputies stated that the outside air temperature was about 95 degrees and that the winds were variable and gusty.
The passenger seated in the right front seat holds an airline transport pilot certificate and is an airline pilot. The witness reported that he did not observe a windsock on the airstrip and they had to gauge the wind conditions before takeoff by looking at the trees around the airport. He estimated that the winds were from 310 degrees at 10 knots with higher gusts to over 20 knots. Both he and the pilot stated in separate interviews that the takeoff was normal until the aircraft achieved about 100 feet agl. At that point, the aircraft encountered a "very turbulent boundary layer" and the airspeed indicator "instantaneously went from 80 to 30 knots and the stall horn came on continuously." Both of the pilots stated that they could not recover the airspeed and the aircraft descended to impact with a telephone pole and wire at the north airport boundary. | <urn:uuid:58c6025f-a0aa-4967-bf0e-e3da81f3697e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief2.aspx?ev_id=20001206X01584&ntsbno=LAX94LA269&akey=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972845 | 389 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Filmmakers Ing K. and Manit Sriwanichpoom of the banned Shakespeare Must Die submitted their letter of appeal and put on a Shakespeare-themed public protest today.
Among those taking part in the protest was Tanwarin Sukkapisit, whose Insects in the Backyard was the first Thai film to be banned under the country's new film law.
Receiving much coverage in the international press, Shakepeare Must Die (เชคสเปียร์ต้องตาย, Shakespeare Tong Tai) was banned earlier this month by the Film and Video Censorship Board, chaired by Police Major-General Anek Samplang. The board feared the politically charged film would "undermine the unity of the people in the country".
The synopsis is as follows:
A tale of politics and black magic, translated into Thai directly and exactly from William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, with some cinematic and Thai cultural adaptations, this “Shakespearean horror movie” takes place in two parallel worlds: inside the theatre, the world of the play about the ambitious and bloody general who becomes king by murder, and the ‘outside world’ in the contemporary lives of the (non-specific) country’s superstitious, megalomaniacal, and murderous dictator, known only as ‘Dear Leader’, and his scary high-society wife. Events in the twin worlds mirror and soon bleed into each other until they catastrophically collide, when the players must pay dearly for staging such a play in a society ruled by such a man. What were they thinking, to fight fear with art?
The film had received funding from the Thai Khem Kaeng (Strong Thailand) "creative economy" initiative of the Cultural Ministry's Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, but that was under the previous government of Abhisit Vejjajiva, now the leader of the opposition wing in Thai Parliament.
Although Ing K. says her film is not about Thai politics, there are images in the film's trailer that recall the 2010 political protests by the "red-shirt" movement, which supports the current government of Yingluck Shinawatra, sister of Thaksin Shinawatra who was ousted from power in a 2006 military coup. The tycoon populist leader has been a fugitive ever since, but is making moves to return to Thailand under a proposed amnesty that could also undermine the unity of the people of the country.
And need I say that the "Dear Leader" in Shakespeare Must Die somewhat physically resembles Thaksin?
Thailand's National Film Board will make a final decision on April 25 whether it will allow the release of Shakespeare Must Die, according to The Nation.
Update: There's more coverage in the Bangkok Post, with Manit threatening to defy the ban and an interview with Ing K. | <urn:uuid:781954b0-2c75-4062-b515-409de33327c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thaifilmjournal.blogspot.com/2012/04/shakespeare-must-die-not-quite-dead-yet.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9516 | 615 | 1.640625 | 2 |
As an American who has been living in France for the past 10 years, I can certainly offer a lot of advice about living abroad and about traveling. Most Americans assume that others will love them when they travel - since they are helping the economy, showing an interest in the country, and offering their support. This, however, is not always the case.
Not everyone loves America. I know this is difficult to hear since most of us are so patriotic and attached to America. It's important to understand, however, that many people in other countries enjoy their country as it is - and they don't necessarily welcome foreigners to come and loudly walk through their streets.
With this in mind, here are a few pieces of advice. Don't wear obviously American clothing, including items with American flags on them, baseball hats and GAP t-shirts. Try not to wave your map around as you walk down the street. Map out your route in the morning and try to be subtle about your confusions. Don't assume that everyone knows English, or that everyone wants to talk to you.
Remember that, while you are on vacation, the people you meet are going about their daily lives. Try to respect their space and their country. And have a great time! | <urn:uuid:65c0dae3-14c7-4bf7-b630-16238951a76d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://american-in-france.typepad.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987345 | 255 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Another grim sign of the global economy comes from the Comite Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne, the Champagne producers’ professional body. The Times Online reports that the committee has released its most recent figures which show that Champagne sales are down for the first time in almost a decade. In eight months, global sales have fallen by 2.6 percent.
Exports to the States have really plummeted, down by 22 per cent in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2007. Sales in the UK are also down but only by 4 percent, and the French consumption of Champagne fell by 4.2 percent. This may actually be a little bit of good news for Champagne producers who have been struggling to keep up with demand for the past few years. Also it may allow time for vineyards in the newly assigned Champagne districts to flourish before an increase in cork popping begins anew. | <urn:uuid:a955609e-65e4-4903-a580-00cfd0f68a2e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.seriousaboutwine.co.za/2008/10/champagne-sales-down/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951389 | 188 | 1.625 | 2 |
ideas for primal emergency food aid
I am working on a project developing a ready to use product to be used as part of global hunger relief/ emergency food aid. The current products in use are a paste that is peanut based, with milk powder, sugar, and some vit/min, or a dry mix of wheat/ soy/ corn/ milk powder to be blended with water. Additionally, cheapest available bulk wheat, corn, rice, soy, vegetable oil, and sugar are shipped, and milk powder supply has been reduced as cost has increased.
Major aid organizations (Doctors Without Borders, and Medicins Sans Frontieres) are calling for inclusion of animal fat in these products, in place of the vegetable fats.
Given the data on the issues with grains, sugar, milk, and vegetable oils, I've been wondering what a Grok- style biochemist/ food scientist might come up with as alternatives? Parameters for such food aid include being stable at room temperature for up to two years, cost of course, and the paste formulation being soft enough for weak sucking ability (used in the more extreme malnutrition cases) and providing most of the macro and micro nutrients on a daily basis for both adults and children, and transportability.
Although the project has several ideas in development, I am sure there are some among MDA readers that will have useful thoughts to contribute. If anyone is involved in this area already, I'd be pleased to contact him or her, as well, for 'on the ground' experiences and opinions. Our project's intent is to formulate a product that will provide sufficient nutritional support for the person to heal and actually thrive, rather than merely survive, as with the current food aid offerings.
Thank you for your thoughts and consideration!
I'm afraid I'm really just posting to bump this so someone wiser will find it. I think your project is superb, and if it needs funding you should tell every paleo blogger out there.
Can you get something useful by starting with pemmican? I know it's not a soft paste, of course, but as a starting point...?
Definitely Pemmican fits the bill and the texture can probably be manipulated by adding more fat, if necessary. Several online sources listed on Wiki already sell pemmican--could be a great starting place.
I read that properly made Pemmican can be stored for decades--wow!
Hilary, thanks for your vote of interest!
Re: pemmican. I agree it is a terrific base, but I don't think it could be practical from a cost perspective. I know whole foods are the ideal. So far, it appears some sort of vegetable protein concentrate, perhaps from an oilseed, might work, if antinutrients such as polyphenols, phytates, etc. are removed. There have been many studies in this area over the last 40 years or so, but nothing is yet happening outside of laboratories. The US is all about soy, which we would not not want to use. If such a protein were used, it would need to be combined with a substantial amount of fat, and the fat would need to be stablized, and have a healthful profile.
Anyone up for a good puzzle?
Many technicalities involved here, which is why I've posted my query to this knowledgeable forum!
Wow - you need really knowledgeable people. You could try sending a pm to http://www.marksdailyapple.com/forum...ar-Grokologist. (Also, have you talked to Robb Wolf?)
lard? dried fruits and vegetables? whole powdered milk? Acorns? just kicking stuff out here for ideas. tallow or duck fat where pork is a problem? can you get Canada to come off of some hemp seeds? sounds like a very worthwhile cause. Wish I had more to contribute.
tinned sardines/herring and V8 juice....You could thrive on these two items for months...
I can purchase a litre of vegetable juice and a 100g tin of herring for $1 each at walmart.
Last edited by goneprimal; 11-25-2010 at 03:27 PM.
What a great project!!!
But on a global scale, animal fats are gonna be tough. People of many different religions do not eat pork; so lard would be problematic. Hindus don't eat beef, either. Hmmmmmm.... hope you can figure something out.
Tags for this Thread | <urn:uuid:0b8c9acd-e0af-4e65-a222-b97144895af1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marksdailyapple.com/forum/thread18777.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955383 | 926 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Orly Genger: Whole
Known for transforming common nylon climbing rope into elaborate monumental sculptures, New York-based artist Orly Genger has created Whole, a unique site-specific installation, in response to the IMAs Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion. Gengers project for the IMA is her largest and most ambitious to date, incorporating thousands of feet of rope, which she hand-knots, paints and stacks, creating immense sculptures that confront the viewer.
Looped and knotted by hand, Whole evokes the normally intimate processes of knitting and crocheting, yet expands them to a newly epic scale. Gengers work challenges typical associations with craft and textile through its intensely physical creation process, in which the artist wrestles rope into knots and amasses it into powerful sculptural objects. The resulting works are intended to provoke a visceral physical response from viewers, challenging them to reconsider their relationship to the normally unobstructed space around them and forcing them to navigate the space in new ways. Comprised of nine different sculptures, Whole is impossible to fully grasp from a single viewpoint, and in its interplay between its fragmented parts calls into question the nature of wholeness itself.
In its reductive abstract vocabulary, Whole responds to the legacy of Minimalist art, and particularly the muscular abstractions of artists such as Richard Serra. Yet by using pliable rope to weave these monolithic forms, Genger also draws on the Post-Minimalist legacy of artists such as Eva Hesse and Lynda Benglis. Gengers sculpture embodies an elemental tension between obdurate mass and empty space, between hard-edge geometry and organic softness.
Special thanks to the Efroymson Family Fund, a CICF Fund, for their generous support of this project. And to Larissa Goldston Gallery and Universal Limited Art Editions. | <urn:uuid:6b6f2c68-79ef-4efe-b78a-a920a25e8a8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.imamuseum.org/exhibition/orly-genger-whole | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939951 | 380 | 1.625 | 2 |
Technology has turned people into sedentary creatures and led them to make bad and unhealthy choices day in and day out. And because of this, an increasing interest in healthcare boomed and the subject was turned into an important matter for many people across the globe. Families suddenly started to spend a fraction of their earnings on health plans. Select groups all of a sudden embarked on devoting their time in educating people to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Companies and corporations have now made it a point to encourage employees to take care of health.
As such, fitness and wellness applications that aim to engage users have also become increasingly popular among health aficionados. After all, people nowadays are smartphone-obsessed and they’d pretty much take every chance they get to improve wellness while maximizing mobility.
Take a look at these five smartphone apps that can be of great help when you want to stay fit and healthy:
The Endomondo Sports Tracker app is one of the most downloaded fitness and wellness apps out there. Basically, it records data from almost any type of physical activity and provides useful info like the number of calories burned and the recommended level of rehydration you should get after exercise. What makes it stand out from other apps is that it incorporates a social networking aspect for users to be able to connect with like-minded individuals. This allows them to compete and participate in challenges, exchange real-time messages, and the like with fellow users. The app is reportedly being used by companies like Harley Davidson, Kimberly-Clark, and The Coca-Cola Company so perhaps it’s ideal for employees of any sized business who need to stay fit.
People who are too lazy to exercise will greatly benefit from this app designed to reward users or give incentives to those who are diligent enough to break a sweat. Nexercise promises to inspire users by giving them free stuff in exchange for doing specified physical activity. For example, exercising for a minimum of 15 minutes with the app open on your phone gives you points that you can accrue to get discounts on chewy exercise bars. It sort of turns the usually boring process of exercising into a more fun and purposeful activity, pretty much like a game – complete with a prizing platform.
This app specially made for the iPhone gives you hardcore stats about your workouts and then helps you make sense of the data you got. The Digifit iCardio Multi-Sport Heart Rate Monitor Training, or Digifit for short, allows you to track your runs, bike rides, and other workouts when your phone’s basic GPS and accelerometer functions are not up to snuff. At the end of your activities, information such as distance, time, and pace are provided so that you’ll get a clue about your progress or accomplishments. What’s amazing about this app is that you can even connect it to a heart rate sensor to get more in-depth info. Be prepared, however, to shell out a few more bucks for the add-ons that will make all these interesting components work.
MyFitnessPal is basically a calorie counter and exercise tracker for iOS users. Its foremost function is to help you figure out how many calories you’ve been taking in and using up (burning). It has a diary-like function that lets you log everything you eat and drink, together with all the exercises you complete. Although it’s quite extensive like most popular fitness apps, it wouldn’t work correctly if you don’t input a lot of info about yourself including your age, height, gender, weight, and general level of activity. For the “activity” part, the app provides you with several options and helps you point out to a specific one. For instance, someone who’s in a RingCentral virtual office setup should select the “sedentary” option, basically because such a setup is akin to having a desk job that doesn’t require a lot of strenuous movements.
Ever stumbled upon that popular site called WebMD that turned the world of pharmaceuticals into a less confusing, less convoluted place? It’s also available to phones now through the Medscape app. As of this writing, it’s being used by over two million users, composed mostly of physicians, medical students, nurses, and other healthcare professionals. Medscape primarily takes you to an enormous database of drug information including brand names and generic versions of these medical products. This app can also be valuable to those who need to check the medications they’re taking but don’t have extensive knowledge or resources to do so.
If you want to stay fit or become fit, take advantage of these widely available smartphone applications. Who knows, you might get the six-pack abs you’ve been fantasizing about using these tools.
Tags: Apps, fitness apps, health, lifestyle, Mobile, tech, wellness | <urn:uuid:182db77b-6083-4dbb-94fd-34ea531478b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gossipblower.com/tag/health/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945211 | 998 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Publications and Resources » Breakthrough Creativity: Achieving Top Performance Using the Eight Creative Talents
Howard Gardner's classic book Multiple Intelligences exploded the myth that intelligence can be measured along a single dimension. Now Breakthrough Creativity: Achieving Top Performance Using the Eight Creative Talents shows that creativity, like intelligence, exists in a variety of forms. It demonstrates most convincingly that organizations need to make use of creativity in all its dimensions to achieve high performance.
More than just "thinking outside the box" is required for leaders to build a flexible, adaptive organization that will grow and prosper and provide the environment that attracts and keeps its best talent. Based on research in personality, innovation, and creativity, as well as the author's experience in business, the book describes eight distinct creative talents. People of each talent have a unique way of looking at challenges, collecting data, and generating creative solutions.
Breakthrough Creativity describes in individual chapters how each talent works and how each contributes to the creativity of the organization. Each chapter also contains tips and techniques to improve the decision making, team building, and strategic planning and thinking processes of each talent. The book brings to life the stories and rich experiences of working individuals around the world to help readers discover their own creative talents and use them to further their professional and personal lives.
There are so many excellent books on the (sometimes elusive) subject of creativity and this is one of the best.
From: Business Book Review:
"Breakthrough Creativity reminds the reader that being creative is necessary in any endeavor.... Unfortunately, many leaders and managers have no idea how to tap into the great wealth of creativity that exists in the workplace.... And the reason is of course, that most people only understand the myths built up around creativity and the creative individual, with no clue as to its pragmatic realities. Thus, Levesque brings practical understanding to what she perceives to be a skill, rather than a 'gift from the gods,' and provides management development professionals, managers, coaches, and consultants with the practical tools they can use to operationalize these skills.
"In today's business world, where creative capital is just as important and sought after as any other kind, knowing how creativity manifests itself is essential for success.
"With its engaging description of different personality types and relationships to creativity, Breakthrough Creativity is a quick and compelling read."
Consultant, Researcher, Author
Sign up for Lynne's Newsletter to receive tips and techniques for more creative leadership. | <urn:uuid:17df3843-bbc6-4140-8115-feb4c53cacb6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://breakthroughcreativity.com/breakthrough-creativity.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941909 | 514 | 1.632813 | 2 |
EARTHQUAKE!!: If you're old enough to remember the March 10, 1933, Long Beach Earthquake, allow us to apologize for the small type size in our column. Here, let's try it this way: IF YOU'RE OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THE MARCH 10, 1933, LONG BEACH EARTHQUAKE, GIVE US A CALL! NOW, GIVE THE PAPER TO YOUR GRANDKIDS!
We have been writing about the Long Beach Earthquake since its 50th anniversary in, we're guessing, 1983. At that time, Long Beach was crawling with survivors of that quake, and we're pretty sure we heard from all of them. We have several hundred pre-email letters from people with startlingly vivid memories of the quake. We eventually had to tell people to stop, unless something really cool happened to them; not just "I thought a car had crashed into the house." Everybody thinks a car crashed into their house when an earthquake hits.
Now, though, we're all 30 years older, and if you're a survivor of the `33 quake and you were 10 years old when you managed this survival, then (sweet Lord let our math skills hold up under all this) you are 90 now.
So we're coming to you with hat in hand looking for your recollections, even if they only involve your thinking that a car had hit the house.
We know a lot of you are getting cocky and thinking, "No sharing of recollections yet; I'm waiting for the 100th anniversary." And that's fine. God admires your hubris. But we're not sure we'll be writing about earthquake survivors 20 years hence.
We know you're out there, and we're giving you a rather early head start on sharing your memories with us. All you have to do is download the latest version of Office Word, type up your memories of the `33 quake in 12-point Verdana Bold font using Associated Press style, NOT Chicago Manual of Style. Usage of the Oxford comma will result in automatic disqualification.
OR: You can write your memories down on a piece of paper and send it through the mail, or use the emailer, or just give us a call and leave your name and number and we'll call you back. Whatever's easiest for you.
Our phone number and email address are at the end of this column in tiny type.
OC FAIR BANDS: After last year's season-long slate of tribute bands, the Orange County Fair is bringing the real deals back to its Pacific Amphitheater stage this summer.
The first blast of acts announced for the Toyota Summer Concert Series at the July 12-Aug. 11 fair are pretty impressive.
Fair bookers release the season's bands just a few at a time. The initial barrage has the B-52s and X teaming up for the July 18 show; Weezer will play July 26; and ZZ Top will roughhouse fairgoers on Aug. 1. All showtimes are 8 p.m.
Tickets for these first three announced concerts go on sale Saturday at Ticketmaster outlets, online at ticketmaster.com or by phone at 800-745-3000.
You can also purchase them at the fair's box office, accessible from Gate 4 off Arlington Drive near Fairview Road. It's open Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Tickets for the B-52s/X and Weezer start at $29.50; ZZ Top tickets start at $38.25. Tickets include fair admission. | <urn:uuid:d2f00731-9f72-4107-a7d2-ba7ae872ccc3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_22666692/tim-grobaty-do-you-remember-1933-long-beach | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948857 | 745 | 1.5625 | 2 |
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