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Choose a State
Scarsdale American Legion Memorial Garden (Scarsdale)
Type of Memorial: Community Garden, Park
Location: Mamaroneck Road
State: New York
Country: United States
Open to Public: Yes
The Scarsdale Memorial Garden was conceived by the American Legion and has gained the full support of the community. Its purpose is to forever commemorate America's fallen heroes and serve as a reminder for the sacrifices made for freedom.
Reason site was selected:
The garden is sheltered by mature trees planted after WW II and is situated between Scarsdale's municipal pool, children's enrichment center and community athletic fields. It is a well-used, accessible public place and located clearly on Mamaroneck Road - the same road used by George Washington's troops during the Revolutionary War. The American Legion, Scarsdale Post 52 has played a special role in the Garden's creation, donating 2 acres of undeveloped land and a significant amount of funding. In 1998, the Legion sold its post to the Village of Scarsdale using the payment to build the memorial garden. The American Legion is committed to keeping the memory of our heroes alive. This site offers an unique, healing design with a winding path that enables the visitor to reflect in a peaceful setting. Private enclaves shelter individual, handcrafted monuments depicting each American war experience. In collaboration with the community's children's enrichment center, the Legion will offer guided tours of the garden to school children (grades 4-7).
Events planned for site:
The garden held an opening ceremony on May 5, 2002 which included local and national representatives as well as religious leaders, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, a Fife and Drum Band, local police officers, families of the victims of 9/11 and many community residents. Our key partners in these events are the Village of Scarsdale and the Junior League of Central Westchester. The Memorial Committee will host annual events, which include a 9/11 Sunset Memorial. On the first anniversary we plan to hold a candlelight vigil with music and reflection. Other annual events will be held on Flag Day, June 14th and on Veterans Day, November 11th. The Legion is also committed to keeping the history of Westchester alive and hopes to publish a 30-page booklet recounting the history of Westchester in wartime efforts.
Do you believe your memorial is a sacred place?:
Our memorial is a special place that has been set apart and dedicated in memory of lives lost and sacrifice for a greater common good. | <urn:uuid:10eb271b-791e-45e7-bd5d-9e2694779c12> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://voicesofseptember11.org/dev/memorials.php?mem_id=223 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951704 | 516 | 1.820313 | 2 |
St. Luke's Hospital in New Bedford threw an open house Wednesday to show off its new da Vinci Si Surgical System robot and, boy, are they proud of this thing.
If you're like me, you have heard about these machines, especially since Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River has been bragging about theirs for the past five years.
The idea is fairly simple in theory, but it's complex enough to build that the price tag runs to $1.8 million, according to factory representative Paul Miele.
The mezzanine at the hospital, where the machine was set up, buzzed with hospital staff, visitors, doctors and reporters for much of the day, and that included me.
Miele sat me down in the operator's seat and aimed my eyes into a large 3-D high-definition viewer. To my left: the robot itself, with servo-driven arms like metal tentacles poised over a practice target made of tiny cones of soft silicone with tiny hoops on them.
There are three, and possibly four robot arms, which go into the patient in real surgery through small incisions called "ports," only a few millimeters long. At their tips they had pincers, but a wide array of tools can be substituted without even taking the probes out of the patient, said Dr. Dennis LaRock, the urologist in charge of the South Coast Health System's robotics program.
Two arms have tools at the end. One carries a high-def stereo video camera.
What happens is this: The surgeon puts his thumb and forefinger into the controls and the robot mimics every move he makes, but 10 times slower.
"It also filters out shakiness," said Dr. LaRock.
I fumbled at first but managed to pick up a few rings and transfer them. With the naked eye, the rings are almost too small to see. In the viewer, they look like the ring toss at Lincoln Park.
The robot arms reproduce every move and can be almost impossibly precise. It feels like repairing a Swiss watch with a pair of vice-grip pliers. The 3-D image makes possible very precise work, everyone says, and after trying this out, I believe them.
The whole reason behind it is to allow small-incision surgery not just for simple procedures but for some complex ones that usually involved wide open surgery.
Here's a sample list supplied by the hospital: urological surgeries such as radical prostatectomies and gynecological procedures, such as hysterectomies; and general surgical procedures such as gallbladder removal and colorectal surgeries.
The robot, understand, doesn't act alone. It's not like welding automobile bodies. The surgeon is in control every second, and the da Vinci stops instantly if the operator turns away from the viewing screen.
The big question Wednesday was whether there is going to be remote surgery. LaRock explained that these robots originated at the Pentagon, which explored remote surgery for soldiers injured in battle but eventually dropped the idea.
But remote surgery won't happen here, everyone agreed. It won't even be from the next room.
The surgeons will scrub up and sit right next to the patient, and they'll be there if there's a glitch of some kind.
Patients will have less scarring, less pain, shorter hospital stays and quicker recoveries.
And truthfully, it's nice to see an advancement such as this that doesn't include radiation or questionable $100,000 drugs.
Thanks for the test drive, Southcoast. I'm impressed.
Steve Urbon's column appears in The Standard-Times and SouthCoastToday.com. Those with comments or suggestions can reach him at [email protected] or | <urn:uuid:6d84a4a3-dbe0-496f-82ea-9b03cc74c6c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130117/NEWS/301170350/-1/rss30 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962505 | 785 | 1.820313 | 2 |
In modifying the Rules of Golf for golfers with disabilities, the desired result should allow the disabled golfer to play equitably with an able-bodied individual or a golfer with another type of disability. It is important to understand that this critical objective will occasionally result in a modification to a Rule that may seem unfair at first glance because a more simplified answer may appear to exist when two golfers with the same disability are playing against one another.
From a practical standpoint, it is useful to subdivide disabled golfers into groups, each one of which has a need for somewhat different Rules modifications. Five such groups are easily identified. They are blind golfers, amputee golfers, golfers requiring canes or crutches, golfers requiring wheelchairs and golfers with intellectual disabilities.
The accompanying website sections are an attempt to adapt the Rules of Golf to these groups of disabled golfers, using the objective noted above as the ultimate goal.
All terms in italics are terms defined in the Rules of Golf. Please consult the Rules of Golf for the text of the defined terms.
This modification of the Rules of Golf for disabled golfers is intended to provide a means by which disabled golfers may play equitably with able-bodied golfers or golfers with other types of disabilities. Hopefully, all of the issues have been addressed, although it is anticipated that continued analysis and further modification will be necessary, as is the case for the Rules of Golf. | <urn:uuid:8f6955f9-bcde-4f8d-923b-3682dd49213f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usga.org/rules/disabilities/Introduction/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96071 | 298 | 1.84375 | 2 |
As part of an innovative partnership called Home Sweet Home (Lar Doce Lar) between multidisciplinary design firm Rosenbaum and TV producer Luciano Huck, the teams went through dozens of Brazilian homes doing dramatic makeovers of interior and exterior spaces. On their 48th home Rosenbaum designed a pretty amazing vertical garden that was suspended in a narrow walkway just outside the house. Reponse to the garden was so huge the firm quickly released design schematics (in Portugese) detailing how to build one. A huge thanks to the team at Rosenbaum for sharing these photos with Colossal!
Greenhouse by Czech designer Kristýna Pojerová is a suspended glass domed lamp with an inner gutter for growing herbs and other small plants in urban environments. A cylindrical opening in the base permits quick access by hand to the lamp’s interior, and allows additional light to exit below. The lamp is for sale at Art Light and retails for approximately $1,900. (via designboom)
I first covered the Mobile Garden project here on Colossal back in October of last year. UIC Art and Design graduate Joe Baldwin continues to pursue funding for his open-air public transit garden, but meanwhile was given the opportunity to participate in this year’s Art on Track festival last weekend by turning the interior of an el car into a fantastic sod-covered, ivy-laden garden. This car circled Chicago’s elevated downtown loop for five hours with several additional cars decorated with numerous other art installations. Photos via noisvelvet. (via inhabitat)
Remember as a child, plopped down in a sandbox with a few trucks and a shovel, when you suddenly struck on the brilliant idea of digging straight down through the Earth, all the way to China? What would you find there? Berlin-based firm Topotek1 keeps that dream alive with their latest installation for the 2011 Xi’an International Horticultural Exposition. The Big Dig is a an enormous hole that simulates an audio connection with Sweden, Argentina, the United States and Germany. While standing at the edge “soundtracks of the life on the other side: cows from the pampas of Argentinas, commuters rushing among transit through New York City, the maritime life of Stockholm, and layers of history so audible among the streets of Berlin. These soundtracks pique the imagination of the visitors, transferring them away from China, away from the garden.” A glass barrier prevents exposition visitors from “becoming too curious” however it would be amazing to see the space with an unobstructed view and imagine sliding down the sloping green surface and finding yourself on the other end. Images by Geng Weng courtesy Topotek1. (via pruned)
James Modern designs one-of-a-kind miniature landscapes. His process begins by working with a glass blowing artist to create unique biomporphic terrariums and then proceeds to plant and substrate selection followed by several months of nurturing the delicate environment. Finally, the terrarium is delivered to the client with detailed instructions on how to care for the miniature world within. James has written a rather detailed how-to over on Design Milk today if you’re interested. I find the patience, investment in time, and meticulous attention to detail in projects like this totally thrilling. From his site:
I hope to provide the truest representation of nature using the Taoist principles of proportion and scale… taking into consideration the shape, texture and size of plants against the earth and the sky… staying true to elements that one would find in nature. These miniature landscapes are enhanced within complementary containers. More like miniature landscape design, I hope you enjoy these self-contained environments. Each represents a place you have seen or somewhere you have yet to visit… the floor of a forest in the northwest, a Zen garden in Japan, a South American tropical forest, or a wetland bog.
You can also learn more about his process, and see more of his work on his blog. | <urn:uuid:8e2bb781-275f-4d02-8cad-5012fb8346b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thisiscolossal.com/tags/gardening/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944504 | 828 | 1.546875 | 2 |
How To Use Photos In Your Blog To Make It More Interesting
Table of Contents
Why you Should be using Images in your Posts
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from writing blog posts, it’s that people barely ever read the whole thing (the majority of people won’t even read this); they read titles. Images are a great way of sparking the interest of the reader to make them read more of your content, as they will see the images and want to know more about them, it also really helps to break up large chunks of writing. There are images relevant to every niche, from screen shots and diagrams to fine art photography.
Which Images you Should Use
Choosing images that are relevant to what you’re writing about is key to successful imagery. You may think that there’s nothing you can use to help demonstrate your point, but there’s always something. Take this example of my post on the Top 20 Photography Websites, even though I wasn’t trying to explain anything, I still used the images to help draw in the visitors. All the screenshots were resized, angled and had darkened edges to make them stand out, a somewhat time consuming task, but worth it when you compare them to a post where I didn’t use any other than a featured image – the difference is huge.
Where to Find Images for Free
There’s always traditional routes of taking photos yourself or asking others for use of their photos, but this can be limiting and time consuming. If you’re looking for an extensive catalog of imagery that you can use, I recommend Flickr as a large chunk of the content is licensed through Creative Commons. For those that don’t know, “Creative Commons provides free copyright licenses to creators who want to grant the public certain permissions to use their works, in advance and without the need for one-to-one contact between the user and the creator. “Noncommercial” or “NC” is one of four license terms that creators may choose to apply to CC-licensed content.”
Creative Commons noncommercial licenses preclude use of a work “in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation”. This can be very confusing and there’s a 200+ page document discussing exactly what people think this mean. Obviously, the majority of websites have adverts these days and people invariable make money from them, which some may consider as commercial, but so long as you’re not linking directly to anything that monetizes the blog post, you should be able to use them. You absolutely can not use these images as a form of advertising.
Then, all you have to do is follow any other regulations they may have in place such as no remixing (editing), provide attribution and share alike (“If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.”).
Another great way of finding images, is to ask readers to submit photos for use on your website for free. A simple submission form is easy to set up and can provide some great photos that take the strain away from having to provide every image, just watch out though, you will have to wade through a load of bad photos too.
Screen shots and diagrams work just as well at demonstrating a point, especially when they’re comparison shots. Have a look at the 2 images below, the first one is a comparison shot I used on my last blog post when trying to show the correlation between spikes in traffic and the change in search engine traffic afterwards. Underneath that is a diagram that I hadn’t seen anywhere else on the internet, and it demonstrates the change of perspective through different focal lengths of a lens. This is a really strong image, and I’ve actually found myself reusing it 3 or 4 times in just a couple months. Working hard to provide content like this makes a real difference to the quality of your post.
Where to Find Paid Images
There are distinct advantages and disadvantages to using paid images; the quality if a lot better and easy to find, but you have to pay for them, and good photography isn’t cheap. Stock image websites such as iStock have extensive catalogs of images, but you have to pay by the size and good photos cost a lot more. On my personal website, I’ve never paid for images, I’ve always taken them myself, but I write in the photography niche so that’s a little easier for me.
Size and Orientation
I’ve experimented with different sizes in the past, but these are the sizes I’ve settled on; fit within 600px*600px for landscape and portrait images, and 450px*450px for square images. The text section of my blog is 600px wide, so the sizes you’ll want to use may differ from mine slightly. The reason I don’t tend to make my images any larger is because I work from a 13inch screen and a 20 inch screen, and photos on a 13inch screen take up a lot of the room, and I like people to be able to see text at both sides of the image so they know to scroll down. If I’m finishing a post about creating a photo, and that photo is portrait, then I may post the photo by 600px*900px.
Linking and Titles
Linking your photos to something relevant is a good way of sharing traffic around your site, or to external sites that you would like to recognize you more. In my post on the Top 20 Photography Websites, all the screenshots of websites also linked to those websites and the owners of those websites were alerted to an article about them. This can be a little bit time consuming, but it’s worth it, even if you do link to them elsewhere on the page.
If you’ve ever looked in detail at the results of a Google image search you’ll notice that the key words you search for are often in the title of the image, so if you title your images with relevant information, then as your blog grows and gets recognised, so will your (hopefully many) images in Google.
Managing and Protecting Images
Here’s a tip, instead of uploading all the files from different locations and resizing them in WP, use software to manage them and programs like dropbox to organize and sync them to multiple computers. There’s a range of different photo file management software that you can use, such as Aperture or Lightroom, and they allow you to export photos to the exact size that you want them. All my files then go into organized folders in my dropbox so that I can work between computers at ease.
If you want to protect your images from being stolen and being used without your knowledge or permission in other places, it’s a good idea to include a small watermark in the corner of the photo with a link to your website. It won’t stop someone who wants to take your photo without your permission, but the watermark won’t distract from the rest of the photo either. If you fear that someone has reproduced your photo somewhere else, use TinEye to trace where your photo has been used.
In the past you may have found it hard to produce a strong featured image, but now that you’ve started including multiple images in your posts, you’ll have plenty to choose from. The one you choose doesn’t necessarily have to most accurately represent what the blog post is talking about, it just needs to stand out on your home page. Have a look at the homepage of my website to see the sort of images I like to use. To see if I’m right about people not reading the whole of a blog post, if you decided to comment, use the word strawberry in there somewhere. | <urn:uuid:2ec4198e-27f3-438e-9580-6659a230c1f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.incomediary.com/how-to-use-photos-in-your-blog-to-make-it-more-interesting | 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 | 0.947247 | 1,659 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Life in Exile: What Happened When My Uncle Was Deported
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My palms feel sweaty as I hold the phone in my left hand, feeling anxious to dial the phone number my grandmother has just given me. “Why am I so nervous?” I think to myself. I am awaiting the voice on the other end of the line, a voice I have not heard in over ten years.
I am awaiting the voice of my uncle, Joseph Cruz, 38, who was deported from the United States to the Philippines in 2002. He is one of two uncles who have been deported; my other uncle is Joseph’s brother, Adrian Cruz, 39.
“Hello? Hello? Melis?” Uncle Joe says. I inhale deeply before greeting him back. “Hello,” I say shyly. “Girl! How are you?” he exclaims happily. Before I can think of what to say, the words stumble awkwardly out of my mouth: “Um, I have a daughter now!”
He laughs loudly. “How did that happen?”
I laugh and I feel at ease. He is the same Uncle Joe I have known since I was a little girl. Since he was deported he worked at a call center Manila. He recently moved to Davao.
Adrian and Joseph were born in the Philippines in 1972 and 1973, respectively, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1978, a year after their father’s petition was approved. Their father is my grandfather, Nicanor Cruz, 72. He came to the United States alone but traveled back to the Philippines to bring his wife Lolita Cruz, my grandmother. They traveled again that year to pick up their sons, the three youngest boys. My mother, Marivic Reyes, 50, is their eldest sister and one of the last people in the family to arrive in the United States in 1980.
My mother was 18 years old when she arrived, so she was able to apply for American citizenship on her own. My mother’s three youngest brothers were not immediately granted citizenship as children, however, because only my grandfather was a citizen at the time of their arrival and immediate citizenship for immigrant children could only occur if both parents were U.S. citizens at the time of their arrival. My uncles Joseph and Adrian were legal U.S. residents because they held green cards.
Like me, my uncles were raised in the southern part of San Diego, practically minutes away from the U.S.-Mexico border. The brothers became heavily involved in gang activity by their teens. Joseph went to prison at the age of 17, the same year that he became a father, a title he still clings to proudly despite the distant and strained relationship between him and his daughter who now lives in Texas.
A Costly Mistake
“At 17, I shot somebody by accident but I signed a plea bargain and basically confessed to it,” Joseph says. “Instead of attempted murder, they changed my charge to assault with a firearm. I had an eight-year sentence but I did half of it, about four years and two months.”
While he tells me this story over the phone, fragmented memories of picking him up outside of the prison with our family come back to me. I was six years old and his daughter (and my cousin) Janelle was four years old. I have not seen her in years but I remember her long black hair, her crooked bangs, and her smile. But most of all, in this pile of fragmented memories, I remember his smile and the utter joy in his eyes after being reunited with his daughter since the time of her birth. Unfortunately, his freedom was short-lived and Uncle Joe was sent back to prison for violating parole. | <urn:uuid:0290bf5d-e3ec-4f9b-a3d7-fcf1925e220f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alternet.org/story/154958/life_in_exile%3A_what_happened_when_my_uncle_was_deported | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990719 | 799 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The Distinguished Lecture Series in Sports Medicine at Hope College will feature the address "Concussion Management in Athletics: A Neuropsychological Approach" by Dr. Michael Lawrence of Michigan Medical PC on Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 7 p.m. in the Maas Center.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
According to Lawrence, concussion is the second leading cause of head injury in the United States, with an estimated 300,000 sports-related concussions occurring annually. His presentation will summarize recent research concerning concussion and literature relating to the proper management of concussion both inside and outside of the game.
Lawrence is a clinical neuropsychologist with Michigan Medical PC in Grand Rapids. He is an expert in the use of cognitive evaluation to make return-to-play decisions following concussions for athletes in a variety of sports. He holds a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Oklahoma with a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at the Geisinger Medical Center.
The Distinguished Lecture Series in Sports Medicine, which features a variety of topics, is designed for health care professionals with an interest in physically active patients, and is intended for students, educators and clinicians alike. It is co-sponsored by Shoreline Orthopaedics, Orthopaedic Associates of Grand Rapids and the college.
Additional presentations in the series during the 2007-08 school year have been scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 14; Thursday, Jan. 24; and Monday, April 21. All lectures in the series begin at 7 p.m. and will be presented in the college's Maas Center, which is located on Columbia Avenue at 11th Street.
Additional information about the Distinguished Lecture Series in Sports Medicine may be found online at: | <urn:uuid:8a596e94-f31a-4c69-a8e1-4b991fde2f03> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hope.edu/print/3357 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946026 | 359 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Seven habits of highly healthy people . . . part I
You probably know Stephen Covey’s landslide bestseller, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. You can relate some of his very true principles to Highly Healthy People, and people who are highly effective tend to be physically healthy more than the general population. (For instance, did you know that Tony Robbins was so amazed by the dramatic improvement in his health eating an alkaline diet that he now preaches it for a day at his seminars?)
For instance, Habit #1 is to Be Proactive. Does your life run you, or do you run your life? With food, we can let it just kinda happen to us, or we can engage in a bit of planning to have food that we both enjoy and that nourishes us well. If we take no thought for food and just wait till we’re ravenous, well, Taco Bell is right across the street. But if we do even a bit of planning and preparation, we have the potential to be the healthiest people on the planet, since we have available to us a huge variety of fresh produce from all over the globe.
Habit #2 is to Begin With the End In Mind. Picture yourself at 70. Do you want to go out like a light switch at 95, having enjoyed the company of your great-grandchildren and travelled the world? Or do you want to go out like a dimmer switch, spending the last 25 years of your life pinned to a chair because of health problems? Too many of us are spending the last decades of our life doing the latter.
If we envision being a spry, mentally sharp 90-year old (like one of my heroes, Gordon B. Hinckley, who lived to 96 traveling the world and serving others), we’re going to have to make choices TODAY that lead to that destination.
Two more Covey habits and what they have to do with the GreenSmoothieGirl mission, tomorrow. | <urn:uuid:ed0f0076-d469-45b0-bd29-4989593560cb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://greensmoothiegirl.com/2008/05/15/seven-habits-of-highly-healthy-people-part-1-of-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959166 | 409 | 1.820313 | 2 |
ANNAPOLIS - The Maryland House of Delegates on Thursday unanimously passed legislation rendering moot a court decision singling out pit bulls as inherently vicious and dangerous dogs.
The bill would require a dog owner to prove that his or her dog is not dangerous if the owner is sued when the animal bites someone. Maryland currently operates under the so-called "One Bite" doctrine, where a bite victim has to prove a dog is dangerous and has bitten somebody before if he or she want to sue its owner. Critics have said this gives all dogs one free bite.
The measure would hold the dog owner solely responsible in any lawsuits stemming from a bite, protecting landlords or dog walkers or anybody else from being sued when a dog bites somebody.
|Also in Annapolis|
|• The House passed a measure to change the way pensions are funded, requiring the state to fully fund its pension systems within 10 years.|
|• The House approved a bill allowing natural gas companies to institute up to a $2-a-month surcharge to cover the replacement of infrastructure.|
|• Legislation was introduced to legalize marijuana. The bill, from Del. Curt Anderson, D-Baltimore, would make marijuana legal for adults 21 and older and create a system to regulate and tax it like alcohol.|
The measure passed the House 133-0. It now goes to the Senate.
"We're absolutely thrilled that the lawmakers have agreed and have passed what we believe is a reasonable measure to address the court's ruling," said Kirsten Theisen, director of pet care issues for the Humane Society of the United States.
"This makes it a much more fair assessment that any dog's propensity to violence needs to be measured by the behavior of the dog and the decisions that dog's owners have made," she said.
The bill came in reaction to a 2012 ruling by the Maryland Court of Appeals that said pit bulls were "vicious and inherently dangerous" dogs. For that reason, their owners were liable if the animals were to bite someone. Other breeds were still held to the One Bite doctrine.
The ruling stemmed from a case where a pit bull terrier escaped its pen and mauled a 10-year-old boy, cutting his femoral artery and almost killing him. The boy's father sued not only the dog's owner, but also the owner's landlord.
In light of the court ruling, many landlords across Maryland took the precaution of warning their residents or outright banning pit bull ownership. Opponents of the ruling called it a de-facto ban on the breed, with owners sometimes having to choose between their dog and their residence. | <urn:uuid:a0ac3ef4-25f0-4d86-adf0-df291b226103> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://washingtonexaminer.com/maryland-house-passes-dog-bill/article/2522248 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977352 | 539 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Collaborators challenge limitations in 'Your Body is Not a Shark'
DANCE After a decade of dancing and choreographing in the Bay Area, Cid Pearlman departed for Los Angeles, spent a year in Estonia, and now lives in Santa Cruz.
At last May's San Francisco International Arts Festival, she re-introduced herself with This is what we do in winter, choreographed in 2010 for both her own dancers and performers from Tallinn, Estonia's capital. In that piece, dance as social activity beautifully co-existed with the art as rigorous practice. This is what made you wonder what else this choreographer might have percolating.
It turns out to be the premiere of the intriguingly named Your Body is Not a Shark, a collaboration between Pearlman, composer Joan Jeanrenaud, and poet Denise Leto. Maya Barsacq, music director of chamber orchestra Cadenza, instigated the project. The women came together with a common interest in exploring constraints — physical and otherwise — as a generative force in art making. "In dance," Pearlman says, "the young athletic body is the norm. I want to explore physical differences because I am interested in complicated stories that show people at different stages in their lives." Shark's seven dancers range from 18 to 64.
As a no-longer-young dancer, the 49-year-old Pearlman knows about the fragility and vulnerability of the human body. But, as she pointed out in a New Year's Day conversation from Santa Cruz, "there are different kinds of virtuosity. There is hugely physical, deeply embodied dancing in your 20s and 30s which relies on strength and sharpness technique. Older dancers bring maturity to their work. If they can't jump so high, don't ask them to. You ask a performer to do what they are good at."
"Limitations can hit you any time," she adds. "It's part of the human condition." Her collaborators know whereof she speaks. Poet Leto, who wrote the text for this production, likes to present her works orally. A few years ago, she developed dystonia, a neurological disorder that has affected her vocal chords. "Sometimes she can get the words out, sometimes she can't," Pearlman says. But like the dancer who finds new ways to use her body, Leto has developed new strategies for presenting her poetry. Among them is the presence of a co-reader, "so if her voice gives out, the other person picks up." Jeanrenaud was a cellist with the Kronos Quartet who had to alter her musical career in 1999, when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She too adapted to the changed circumstances by becoming a solo performer and composer with wide-ranging works in many media.
Each of these three artists has faced the restrictions on their expressiveness by expanding their reach. (And as Pearlman points out, sharks die if they stop moving.) At the core of Shark are Leto's poems, each written within the constraints of separate, highly formal parameters: a sestina, an oulipo, and a tanka. She then turned the verses over to Jeanrenaud, who generated a sound collage and an instrumental score to be performed by herself, percussionist William Winant, and members of the Cadenza chamber players. Leto too will be on stage.
Shark's most demanding task by going farther afield may well have been Pearlman's. Having immersed herself in the verses' technical demands — some of them sound like algorithms — she shaped her choreography along the same rules. Leto seems to be happy with how her partners have worked with the poems. "Taken off the page — by the movement of bodies and the movement of sound — they have become something altogether different," she says in the introduction to the texts' printed version.
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Where can you find a Catholic chaplaincy at an institution of higher learning that’s looking to expand its church to seat 1,400, because the current 850 just isn’t enough?
South Bend, Indiana, perhaps? Well, no, actually: College Station, Texas, where the Catholic chaplaincy at Texas A&M, St. Mary’s Catholic Center, is setting a new national standard for Catholic campus ministry.
Aggie Catholicism is something to behold. Daily Mass attendance averages 175; there were closer to 300 Catholic Aggies at Mass on a weekday afternoon when I visited a few years back. Sunday Masses draw between 4,000 and 5,000 worshippers. There are 10 weekly time-slots for confessions, which are also heard all day long on Mondays. Eucharistic adoration, rosary groups, the Liturgy of the Hours, and the traditional First Friday devotion are staples of Aggie Catholicism’s devotional life.
A rich retreat program is available, and each year some 1,250 students make or staff a retreat sponsored by St. Mary’s. “Aggie Awakening,” an adaptation of Cursillo for students, is one of the cornerstones of the campus ministry; other, specially designed programs include a silent retreat and a retreat titled “Genius of Women.” In 2009-10, 200 students participated in bi-weekly spiritual direction programs, and another 70 took part in the “Samuel Group,” an exercise in Ignatian discernment that includes a commitment to curb what one campus minister describes as “unnecessary TV and Internet use.” Two thousand A&M students, not all of them Catholics, have participated in introductory sessions exploring the theology of the body, and many have continued that exploration in follow-on study groups.
Then there is service. Aggie Catholics participate in domestic and international missions, work with Habitat for Humanity, take part in a ministry to prisoners, and are involved in various pro-life activities. In fact, the 40 Days for Life program is an outgrowth of the Catholic campus ministry at Texas A&M; the national office of 40 Days is staffed by Aggie grads. The campus ministry also works with a local Life Center that helps mothers and families in difficult situations.
All this energy has had a discernible effect on vocational formation and discernment. Since 2000, the campus ministry has averaged some nine students per year entering the seminary or religious novitiates; 132 Catholic Aggies have been ordained priests or made final religious vows in the past two decades. And then there is the vocation to marriage and family, which the campus ministry takes very seriously. Aggie Catholics are also a powerful witness to the rest of Aggieland; 175 new Catholics have entered the Church the past two years through St. Mary’s RCIA program.
The Catholic renaissance at Texas A&M is staffed by two full-time priests, three part-time and semi-retired deacons, one part-time priest, three full-time lay campus ministers, three sisters from the Apostles of the Interior Life, three part-time campus ministers, and four part-time student interns. That probably strikes many campus ministers as a rather large staff. In fact, the people who lead St. Mary’s are stretched—and they began where many others are today.
Catholic campus ministry at Texas A&M is a striking example of “If you build it, they will come.” The program is unapologetically orthodox. There is no fudging the demands of the faith. And yet they come, and come, and come, because Aggie Catholicism shows the campus a dynamic orthodoxy that is not a retreat into the past but a way of seizing the future and bending it in a more humane direction. The premise that informed John Paul II’s approach to students his entire life—that young people want to be challenged to lead lives of heroic virtue, in which the search for love is the search for a pure and noble love—is the premise that guides Catholic campus ministry at College Station.
Texas A&M is a special place, culturally; in many respects, it seems to have skipped the ‘60s, such that its 21st-century life is in palpable continuity with its past. That’s a deeply Catholic cultural instinct, which St. Mary’s has seized to build a program that is a model for the entire country.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. | <urn:uuid:56a646e3-a977-4d1e-af2c-a88758aca95b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.firstthings.com/print/onthesquare/2011/02/aggie-catholic-renaissance?keepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=500&width=700 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960818 | 953 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Hot off an impressive third-place finish in Iowa, a second-place finish in New Hampshire, and boasting a growing national following, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has surged from a semi-known libertarian ideologue to a national political celebrity, even if his electoral prospects still remain slim. Indeed, such Republican luminaries as Donald Trump and even Paul himself have essentially written off chances at the presidency. Yet there is no denying Paul’s libertarian platform has generated interest nationwide.
But a theoretical shift in national political ethos towards libertarianism would portend significant danger for the United States. Although the fundamental tenets of the ideology – individual liberty, protection of private property, governmental non-intervention – are broadly attractive across a wide swath of political perspectives, the actual implementation of libertarian policies is ineffectual at best and hazardous at worst.
There are many Paul opinions available to critique: The incompatibility of his right-to-control-one’s-own-body rhetoric, up to and including drug use, with a rigid anti-abortion stance; his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and his bombastic diatribes against the Federal Reserve, to name a few. But the aspect simultaneously most appealing to Paul supporters and dangerous to national interest is his foreign policy platform.
Paul has distinguished himself from Democrats and his Republican counterparts, both neocons and Tea Partiers, in this regard. He has asserted his intention to close foreign military bases, recall American soldiers, curtail foreign aid, and remove the U.S. from international organizations/agreements like the UN and the WTO, essentially assuming an unprecedented policy of isolationism. Domestic war weariness makes non-intervention appealing, particularly among younger voters, but modern verities undermine the ostensible value of Paul’s foreign policy.
First, Paul’s isolationist conception is the most extreme version in the history of the U.S. Even during America’s earliest years its leaders pursued a robust foreign policy, although one that admittedly pales in comparison to the ideological crusading of the mid-to-late-20th century. Nevertheless, America has always been a presence to a certain degree on the world stage, as evidenced by Walter Russell Mead in “The American Foreign Policy Legacy”, and Paul would return America to an isolationist stance that never really existed.
Also troubling is Paul’s intention to cut foreign aid. This issue is one that has exploded in recent weeks and has been manipulated to the point that foreign aid now seems like the secret bogeyman preventing America from balancing its budget and achieving elusive internal prosperity. On the contrary, foreign aid is a paltry 1% of the U.S. budget, hardly enough to make a significant dent in the deficit. Yet this 1% represents funds that essentially buy America friends and protect its allies. For example, aid to Egypt during the recently concluded Mubarak years effectively bought its acquiescence to our international designs and assuaged Israeli fears of Egyptian reprisal following the Six-Day War. Curtailing foreign aid would create enemies and destroy allies, figuratively and perhaps literally.
This is not to say that America’s foreign policy has always been monolithically good. Even a casual student of history is cognizant of some of the iniquities perpetuated by certain American regimes over the years. But it cannot be discounted that America currently has numerous commitments abroad, commitments that cannot be as easily swept away as Paul would have his supporters believe and commitments that realistically will only be compounded as more issues materialize in the future.
Can American foreign policy be improved? Yes. Can America’s image in the world be remedied? Yes. But improving and remedying are far cries from abandoning. Ron Paul and his libertarian supporters would do well to understand this.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons | <urn:uuid:62faf8af-ccf7-4106-a0f9-43ebaeadc7b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.policymic.com/articles/3288/ron-paul-is-dangerous-for-america/55584 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959434 | 787 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Early this morning I taught the first session of an 8-session (40 minutes per session) course on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school. The course is part of Red Hat’s community outreach program. My fellow Red Hatter John had come up with the idea for the program at a school meeting and made it happen, I created the curriculum with the help of the Fedora Design team, and my fellow RH designer Eve and I have volunteered our time to run the course. Red Hat has also donated some Wacom Bamboo Pen + Touch tablets to the school to use during the course. This program is something we’ve been working on making happen since last October so I’m very excited to have kicked things off today.
There’s a theme that spans the entire course, involving a rock band:
Blanchard Records, Inc. is a young record label and they’ve just signed a deal with a hot new band. They think this is going to be their big break, so they want to make a big splash – and it’s time to release a new album and kick off a worldwide tour.
There’s just one small problem. The band doesn’t even have a logo yet!
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a logo for this new band, along with the artwork for the new album, a design for their worldwide concert tour poster, and their tour T-shirt.
You’ll learn how to do this using the free graphics program Inkscape, in a 8-session course. At the end of the course you’ll even get your own tour shirt, designed by you, to wear! Sign up today!”
That’s right, one very cool part of this course is that each of the students will produce a design that Walter, the owner of EmbroidMe Chelmsford has very generously agreed to print on T-shirts that the students can keep after the course.
Class Makeup and Organization
I was blown away by how quickly the students picked up on Inkscape. The class is 10 students, all whom are 7th graders. The teachers arranging the course had students ‘apply’ to the class by writing an essay about why they thought they were a good fit for the class – and the students’ motivation was really apparent from how well the class went. The class had originally been planned to be 10 sessions long, but because of various scheduling issues is 8 sessions long. I was really quite worried about this because already there’s a ton of material I have planned, and to condense that even further – well I was worried it would be too much material. After today, however, I’m pretty confident these students can handle what I throw at them very quickly.
The school has fairly new Mac desktops, so we used Inkscape 4.7 on OS X (yes, I know, but baby steps ). The Wacom Bamboo pen AND touch worked perfectly in Inkscape (after some hiccups… you must have X11 2.4 installed for it to work – we learned earlier this week during a test run that 2.3 doesn’t work.)
We had a very good student to teacher ratio as Ken noted (Ken is one of the teachers at the school who has been helping us a lot to make this happen.) Today we had 9 students (1 was absent), and 4 teachers (myself, Ken, Eve, and John.)
Today’s session theme was ‘Inkscape bootcamp’. We ran through the Inkscape bootcamp lesson plan I came up with in a little over 20 minutes. I’d give a quick demonstration of an Inkscape technique up on the projector, then I asked the students to try it themselves and I was able to watch their screens from where I was standing to make sure they were able to get through the exercise. Sometimes one or two of the students would run into trouble, and Eve and I would go over to their workstation and help them out quickly one-on-one. For more involved issues Eve helped out the student and I’d move forward in the lesson so the other students weren’t waiting too long. This seemed to go well for today.
We were left with about 15 minutes at the end of the lesson where I handed out an exercise sheet for the students to run through if they wanted to in order to practice the techniques we had just covered. But I left the time open for them, making it clear the exercises were just a suggestion. Tatica advised me from her experience teaching Inkscape courses that it’s important early on to give the students a chance to play around and discover on their own, and let them ask questions based on where they end up. So we did just that, and by the end of class time the students didn’t want to leave – I think that’s probably a good sign things are going well so far. Some of the works the students ended up with blew me away. Several of the students started playing with opacity and blur and came up with cool effects (one student came up with a circular design that would have easily made a nice disc design for a rock band album ) and compositions.
We laid out the lesson sheets before class next to the students’ keyboard, and one of the students actually had it read at the beginning of class such that he was always a few steps ahead of the class’ progression and he was already exploring the calligraphy tool effects (for example, making wiggly lines using the wiggle control) by the end of the 40 minutes. It was really cool to see.
Follow Along on Your Own
I’m going to try to make a blog post per session to keep you updated on how the class is going, and hopefully to also be a resource to other folks who might be interested in teaching a similar class. I’d like to document any issues we run into and the solutions we come up with as well as the successes we stumble upon to that end.
That being said, here’s the lesson plan and exercise sheets we used for the class today:
Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 1
Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 1 Exercises
If you’re following along at home and have any questions about the lesson or exercise go ahead and ask away in the comments! | <urn:uuid:dbeac594-839f-4f39-b4ae-dee0650f5c4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/inkscape-class-day-1/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=f5309b4960 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979268 | 1,346 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Hartford's funky West End may be best known for its eclectic selection of restaurants, but in the current economy, this source of neighborhood pride and identity is under threat. The clock is ticking on at least one of the neighborhood's classic Chinese storefronts. The popular Brazilian BBQ spot, Churrascaria Braza, closed up shop this past April after eight years in business; an attempted expansion into downtown's Constitution Plaza had overextended the owner's finances.
Next to the now-vacant Venice Pizza on Farmington Avenue, a small note taped to the door of the Abyssinian Ethiopian Restaurant reads, "Dear Customers, as of October 15th, 2012, we will be serving dinner only!" To view this sign as a death notice for the neighborhood might be an exaggeration — they merely stopped serving lunch, it's true — but to say that several establishments are in danger of closure is far less of a whopper. Business is unsustainably slow at the Abyssinian. The question is: Are things so bad that this entire strip could soon go from a haven of kitfo — a spiced minced-beef dish — and collard greens to a place where a Whopper is one of the few options left?
"We are very much struggling. That's why we closed our lunch program. Even dinner is no better than lunch right now," said Getachew Dires, who has managed the five-year-old establishment for almost two years now. (Many Ethiopians are formally referred to by their first names. Dires goes by Getch.) "We are trying our best, but it's very mysterious to us. We have improved our food greatly and have very good reviews."
Getch is not kidding. The gluten-free injera bread (fermented for three days) and the vegetarian and fish entrees at the Abyssinian Ethiopian could go toe-to-toe with East African restaurants in New York City. Kristina Newmann-Scott of the Jamaican Bakery family, former Director of Visual Arts at Real Art Ways, says that the Abyssinian Ethiopian Restaurant is a "treasure" within Hartford's most culinarily diverse neighborhood.
According to Getch, regulars come from as far away as Northampton, but therein may lie the problem. If a business is too dependent on out-of-town diners, the combined factors of a bad economy with sustained high gas prices make the mystery of the missing customers less, um, mysterious. There's also the triple-whammy of competition. According to Francisco Gomes, president of the Farmington Avenue Alliance, "West Hartford Center has become much more of a destination for people; a lot of prospective customers are going there. There is also a lot of attention focused on d owntown, and with all that, the West End has kind of been forgotten."
If destination diners are forsaking the West End, almost as heavily impacted have been longtime neighborhood fixtures dependent on local patrons, such as South Whitney Pizza, which has been in the West End for almost four decades. "Hartford was hit pretty hard," said owner Prince Singh, whose father bought the business in 1997. "Instead of customers not coming in, their order size has gotten smaller." This is a telltale recession buying pattern: Loyal customers with shrinking budgets.
Sunna Liu of China House reports that the restaurant is "slowly going out of business" after being open for 30 years. She describes the problem as "a little bit of everything": more competition from other local restaurants, a bad economy overall and a particularly severe impact on its West End customer base.
Monte Alban, the Mexican restaurant next door to the Abyssinian, opened in November, 2001, during the recovery from the last recession, and the establishment is taking a beating in the current economy. Owner Alfonso Martinez is quick to point out, "Everywhere it is the same, not just here. Business is not like it was before."
One place not to bother worrying about is Mo's Midtown, and if you've ever tried to find a seat there, you'll know why. Owned by the Polish-American Nowak family since 1998, Mo's has a history that stretches beyond the current owners' memory. It's a classic American diner with heavenly omelets and bacon so thick that no one would be surprised to see Faith Middleton zombie-walking through the door, nosefirst.
Fire–N–Spice is doing better than when it opened, according to owner Garfield Haylett, but it's hard not to do better than 2009, when economic gloom was as severe as a slow-moving hurricane. Also, as cutting edge and unlikely a concept as vegan food with a West Indian flavor may sound to some, it may be drawing a healthy balance of out-of-towners and locals from the city's artsiest district.
For those businesses that are struggling, Gomes predicts light at the end of the tunnel. "It's cyclical in nature," he said. "About 10 to 15 years ago, we had a bit of a renaissance with Braza, Tisane and Half Door. Prior to that, businesses here had some very down years." Half Door and Tisane opened in 1999 and 2000 respectively and weathered the last recession; today, they anchor the neighborhood's nightlife.
Gomes says that for some time there has been money budgeted for a new streetscape, like the funds some of the other pedestrian-centric business districts have received. Gomes thinks that the eventual makeover will bring diners back to the neighborhood.
But will the Abyssinian Ethiopian Restaurant be able to hold on that long? Getch spoke of a reality show in which a restaurateur was about to go under until the community rallied behind him. "It's a Wonderful Life"-onomics may sound farfetched, but that classic trope started here in Hartford. In 1917, G. Fox and Company burned to the ground, its sales records along with it. Everyone who had done their Christmas shopping on credit stepped up and paid, because Connecticut Yankees knew back then that a good business is worth keeping. | <urn:uuid:b4bfa2da-d2bc-405b-95ff-783a1b3e0295> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ct.com/entertainment/restaurants/nm-ht46westendrestaurants-20121108,0,4696891.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975483 | 1,255 | 1.515625 | 2 |
“Let’s not be antiquated, let’s get with it,” a supporter of the ban said. “Everything comes from the coasts and it’s coming this way and we are the last ones ones to get it.”
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Mutations in certain genes raise the risk of breast cancer by as much as 80 percent, experts say.
Under the Affordable Care Act, people and small businesses will be able to purchase insurance through a Marketplace. | <urn:uuid:c2847537-5f02-455c-aa42-9fb83cf816f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/healthwatch/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946529 | 419 | 1.5625 | 2 |
SPRING OUTDOORS-WOMAN WORKSHOP MAY 13-15
Popular Becoming an Outdoors-Woman program now offered twice a year; applications for spring workshop now being accepted
PRATT — The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks' (KDWP) Becoming an Outdoors-Woman (BOW) program has become so popular that KDWP is offering a second, spring workshop to complement the traditional fall workshop that has been offered each year since 1994. This year’s spring workshop will be held May 13, 14, and 15 at Rock Springs 4-H Center, near Junction City, the same location as the fall workshop.
The program is designed to provide women a chance to learn about hunting, fishing, and other outdoor recreation in a friendly, supportive environment. During the three-day workshop, volunteer instructors teach participants a variety of skills, including fishing, wingshooting, camping, orienteering, rifle marksmanship, botany, dog handling, archery, and more.
“The fact that we have been filled to capacity three months before the fall workshop for the past two years demonstrates how much this fun and educational program connects women with the outdoors," says Ross Robins, KDWP's Education Section chief. "It also reflects well on long-time program coordinator Jami McCabe and on the skill and experience of our volunteer instructors.”
Studies have shown that many women do not participate in outdoor recreation because they have not had an opportunity to learn the skills that make outdoor activities enjoyable. The popularity of BOW proves that when given the opportunity, many women take advantage of it with enthusiasm. Women who participate in this program learn the outdoor skills that allow them to fully enjoy the natural environment while building self-confidence.
Registration for the May 2011 workshop is now open. The deadline for registration is April 15. Women wishing to ensure themselves a spot should mark their calendars and register early. For more information, go online to kdwp.state.ks.us/news/Other-Services/Education/Becoming-an-Outdoors-Woman or phone 620-672-5911. | <urn:uuid:e4c78b7d-e862-44d1-9e24-cfb5cbc1552b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kdwpt.state.ks.us/news/layout/set/print/KDWPT-Info/News/Weekly-News/3-3-11/SPRING-OUTDOORS-WOMAN-WORKSHOP-MAY-13-15 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946665 | 436 | 1.632813 | 2 |
|Governor McDonnell Announces Support and Funding for Safe Routes to School|
Governor McDonnell Announces Support and Funding for Safe Routes to School
On February 22 Governor Bob McDonnell announced the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) awarded $5.9 million in Safe Routes to School (SRTS) funding to 18 communities across the Commonwealth for the 2012 SRTS grant cycle. The funds will be used for projects that will make bicycling and walking to school safer and more appealing for students at 28 elementary and middle schools.
"The Safe Routes to School program's primary goal is to support communities that want to make walking and bicycling to school a safe and convenient option for children," said Governor McDonnell. "By providing these funds, as well as technical assistance to Virginia communities, we are helping to reduce congestion, improve air quality and promote other transportation choices. We also are encouraging healthy habits that we hope will transform into healthy lifestyles as these children grow."
The SRTS program is designed for localities, schools and non-profit groups seeking to improve walking and bicycling opportunities for children in kindergarten through eighth grades. All local governments are eligible to apply for funding to construct and enhance bicycle and pedestrian accommodations in and around schools. They may also apply for a grant for encouragement, education and law enforcement activities; which schools and non-profit groups are eligible for as well. The statewide program is funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration.
The following localities will receive funding for infrastructure projects to benefit the listed schools. These include pedestrian and bicycle crossings, sidewalks, multi-use trails, signing and traffic-calming improvements:
The next opportunity to apply for SRTS funding will begin this summer. For more information on Safe Routes to School funding and the application process, visit http://www.virginiadot.org/saferoutes | <urn:uuid:720b89f0-d3e8-4159-8f45-520c300d1347> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vaasla.org/content/view/290/44/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955827 | 385 | 1.804688 | 2 |
While Gail was going through a relaxation exercise, I led Tom to a distant location a floor above the lab and on the other side of the building. Once there, I gave him four opaque black envelopes, each of which had been prepared with a color photo inside, and then the four envelopes were thoroughly shuffled. Of course, neither Tom or Gail had any idea what those images might be. I gave Tom a die and asked him to toss it to get a random number 1 through 4. He did, and the photo inside that envelope became his target.
Tom then examined the photo and attempted to send it to Gail. Here is what Gail said during the 20 minute sending period, while under the Ganzfeld stimulation and listening to white noise played over headphones. Each sentence below is a continuous statement. The breaks between sentences indicate long pauses:
Keep feeling like looking up at tall, I'm looking up at something tall.
Something about texture. Texture.
I feel like something has a rough texture.
Tall, very tall impression, looking up high.
Feel as if I'm walking around observing something, like when you would walk in an art gallery or in a museum and you would look at something.
First I'm feeling like tall trees, and then I'm feeling like tall building.
And then I'm like a Yosemite kind of image of a tall rock or a tall, some kind of a very tall solid stone something.
Seeing browns and grays
Something like a feeling of walking around, looking up and being in awe, in awe of something.
Monolithic or I don't know what the word is.
I'm getting images of Mount Rushmore, I know you're not supposed to say things [Gail was asked to avoid naming her impressions, as naming is known to often pull impressions into word-association fantasies].
Half-dome, like just a big stone.
I sort of feel like I'm walking around in a picture, and I'm giving my hand and we're climbing up ...
or something about going up, there's ....
It seems like there's also some kind of a round tall cylinder, and, something long and gray on the right.
At first I felt very much like I was in a nature, forest type of setting, ... and now I'm feeling more
something about a, like
These are the four images in the target pool. Can you guess which one was the target? | <urn:uuid:61a2d653-29b3-4cee-babb-aa96f8d293e0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2010/09/ganzfeld-telepathy-example.html?showComment=1284501980930 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977859 | 511 | 1.671875 | 2 |
07-18-2010 07:34 AM
hye, thanks for the step by step guide. i have a wireless router, but i do not hv the site survey button. my wireless router is aztech wl830rt4. n i can't find anywhere, the site survey button.. :-( so i do not know whether it can be used as a wireless bridge. i can send u the user manual, if u dun mind helping me to set it up. i've tried countless times.. (man, i lost count) i can forward you the user manual if dun mind helping. jus drop me ur email and i'll attach it for u.
hope to hear a favourable reply.
07-26-2010 07:46 PM
Some routers can not be configured as bridge. I have two routers and one .of them works only as a router, but with the other one, I have the option to set it up as a router/bridge/wireless client. You may want to check the user manual of your router to see if it supports different modes. I have seen some routers with a switch outside the router to switch between the modes (for mine, I can do it only through menus). If you have a pdf version of user manual, just search it for the word "bridge"/"repeater" to see if it mentions anything about the option to configure as a bridge.
08-04-2010 12:40 AM
hey, thanks for your reply. i actually found the manual, n sadly, it cannot be used as bridge. thanks anyway for your reply. n how is ur segatae hometheather+ coming along?
08-11-2010 01:58 PM
Although I didn't find the answer I wanted here, the information on this and other threads helped a lot, so I registered to put the info here.
As per this thread, the compatible realtek chipsets are 8709, 8187, and 8191 (and probably 8192).
This led to the discovery that the Patriot box works w/ the same chipsets, and this led to the discovery for some reasonably priced alternatives.
For those not in the US (and ordering mertiline's Airlink AWLL6075 is a hassle), the options for a compatibile dongle would be monoprice (under $17 shipped to Canada) or dealextreme ($17.67 shpped to most of the rest of the world). Looks like those last two use the Realtek RTL8191SU chipset.
I just placed the order for the monoprice one, so I haven't confirmed compatibility w/ the FAT+. I'm only posting this now (before testing) because there's a good chance I'll forget all the links if I waited until I received it and tested it first before posting.
08-12-2010 12:25 AM
well, i tink u've not read the thread where u post ur comments. u can find the realtek chips which are compatible with Seagate. U an have a look at message 46 and 47 of this thread which was posted by me. I've detailed out the realtek chipsets that are compatible and the brands that are compatile with it as well. so, pls have a look at the thread.
PS: i bought mine @ USD14 in my local country, no brand, but it works. so i'm happy.
08-12-2010 02:17 PM
Kalpeshneo: Not sure why it matters to you, but the post in this thread that was the most helpful to me was barsoom's at #39 regarding Monoprice.
You've obviously done some work in compiling that info in 46 and 47, and that's helpful to people who want to print up that list, bring it in to their local computer/electronics store, and pick out whichever one is available. Not my situation. Shipped to Canada, not ebay, minimum price, maximum comptability/performance?
The other Seagate thread actually gives you a way to check and confirm that the FAT+ has the firmware to support 3 specific Realtek chipsets in wifi adapters (see post#10 from TheFatty) 11N8709, RTL8187, and RTL8191SU. Not just the 8191 and 8192 (as per 46 and 47).
The Patriot Box Office seems to have a more active user community, but more importantly, shares the exact same wifi adapter compatibility as far as the wifi adapter chipset. Which is ultimately how I found out that Meritline is the cheapest for the Airlink AWLL6075 for those in the U.S. (frequent coupons to reduce the price to $9.99-$12.99 US w/ free shipping), already confirmed in this thread (and others) to work w/ the FAT+.
Unfortunately Meritline doesn't ship this to Canada (no "globe" symbol in the listing).
The cheapest to Canada is probably Monoprice for $13.53 plus shipping (just over $16 US total), which is slightly better than SigElectronics for $19.99 Cdn plus tax if you pick it up locally, more if you need it shipped.
For the sake of other people who don't live in North America, I included the information for Dealextreme's compatible wifi adapter for $17.67 (including shipping) (looks like I messed up my link in the previous post) to most of the world.
Can't remember for certain about the Airlink, but the ones at monoprice and dealextreme have been confirmed to have an RTL8191SU chipset, which, if you take a look at the PBO threads, reportedly have the best performance when compared directly against the other two chipsets (11N8709 and RTL8187).
I am sure that there are other people who find posts like yours (#56)"...I bought mine @ USD14 in my local country, no brand, but it works. so I'm happy..." helpful, but without knowing what country, what store, if the price is currently available... well, it doesn't really help me figure out if I can get the same wifi adapter as you for a comparable price to my door.
I am also sure that there are people willing to shop around to get an even cheaper price than they could find at meritline, monoprice, or dealextreme. But I figured (apparently incorrectly) that someone reading this thread would see the value in a (non-exhaustive) compilation of current sources for a <$20 US to-their-door alternative to the $70 Seagate adapter. With enough cites/links so that they could feel comfortable that they would be getting the same hardware (and not some updated incompatible version) as the person in the thread who ordered it months earlier.
08-21-2010 12:33 AM - edited 08-21-2010 12:35 AM
I just purchased an HT+ and upgraded immediately to firmware version 1.55 (U.S.).
After reading through this thread, I also bought an Airlink AWLL6075 wireless adapter. Unfortunately I found that although the device is recognized and I can get online, it disconnects a few (usually 2 or 3) minutes and I have to either power cycle the HT+ or remove and re-insert the adapter to get it back online for a few minutes.
To test the Airlink AWLL6075, I installed it in my Windows 7 laptop, placed the laptop on the HT+, and used Windows 7 to set up a network bridge, with a wired connection going to the HT+. In this configuration, I was able to watch several YouTube videos with no dropouts. A DSL speed test showed about 5000 down. I continued to use the Airlink AWLL6075 for other browsing on the laptop for another hour or so. I did notice that the Airlink AWLL6075 installed a Realtek 8192SU driver under Windows, though 8191SU is mentioned in this thread. I believe the 8192SU is needed because the adapter chip is capable of 300 MBit down.
Is anyone successfully using the AWLL6075 with HT+ U.S. firmware 1.55?
What network adatper(s) are definitely working with the current U.S. firmware?
08-26-2010 01:34 PM
I have tested my two Wlan G Sticks with the Seagate:
a) D-Link G122
b) Zyxel ZyAir G-220
and had no luck so far even after the segate has been updated to the new Firmware (1.45euro). :-(
So i have bought the LogiLink Wlan N and hope that the LogiLink will function with the seagate. I hope that Seagate will release a new Firmware to update the Wlan support. I am not sure but i think that Western Digital didn´t have any limitation and had no problems with most Wlan Sticks. Yes, i know that Western Digtal has a Sigma chip and that the Seagate has a Realtek chip. But that is not importat. I am absolutely sure that its just a question of Firmware. So Seagate should update the wlan Stick support.
I have the Seagate theatre since this morning and i think that she is a very sweet Box. i love my Seagate Theatre Plus Box. ^^
Greetings to all Seagate User | <urn:uuid:2fd42cbb-1781-4a2f-8f9a-4a4fc843b171> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forums.seagate.com/t5/FreeAgent-Theater-and-GoFlexTV/WiFi-Adapter-Does-it-have-to-be-Seagate/td-p/42319/highlight/true/page/6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9454 | 1,976 | 1.59375 | 2 |
The news today has been all health care, all the time. And understandably so. But amid the laser-like focus on the Supreme Court ruling upholding President Obama’s new health care system, it is important not to lose sight of the bigger picture. Health care is merely the latest in a long line of social welfare expenditures, going all the way back to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which have swallowed up an ever-growing share of the federal budget—and the national economy.
As this useful Heritage Foundation chart shows, entitlement spending first exceeded defense spending in 1976. Ever since, the trend has been getting more lopsided with entitlements taking up ever more of the economy and defense ever less. That gap has become especially pronounced since President Obama took office in 2009. The percentage of GDP going to the federal government grew from 20.7 percent in 2008 to 25.1 percent in 2011 before dipping slightly to 23.2 percent this year. Meanwhile, the state governments are taking another 15 percent, which means that as a total share of the economy the government is now consuming roughly 40 percent, and of that, less than five percent is going to the military.
I am deeply concerned that further cuts in the defense budget—never mind the cuts that have already occurred—will leave us a crippled superpower. But I also recognize that the military isn’t the only instrument of power projection that we have or need. The State Department, USAID, and other civilian agencies also do valuable work—not always, but often enough that we should hesitate to cut their funding if we want to remain an active, engaged force for good in the world.
Yet, that is just what the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee is proposing. It wants to cut the State Department and foreign operations budget by more than $5 billion next year, from the $54.7 billion the administration has requested down to $48.4 billion. Obviously, cutting State Department funding is easier for Republicans than cutting the Department of Defense, but it is no wiser as a long-term prescription for America’s future. These types of cuts will do little to address our deep-seated fiscal woes, which require entitlement reform, but they will do much to handicap our ability to influence the world.
The Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee have a new chart out today that really clarifies what President Obama’s budget will mean for future national spending priorities. Under Obama’s budget, interest payments on debt will exceed national defense spending by 2019:
The reason for this is that under Obama’s budget, rapidly growing debt would lead to higher interest payments, and substantial cuts to the defense budget would cause defense spending to increase at a slower rate.
In an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley, Rep. Paul Ryan backed away from his comments that questioned whether generals were being honest with Congress by supporting the Obama administration’s defense budget proposal.
Ryan told Crowley that he “misspoke” last week, and said he has called Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey and apologized:
“Yes – no, I really misspoke, to be candid with you, Candy. I didn’t mean to make that kind of an impression. So I was clumsy in how I was describing the point I was trying to make. And the point I was trying to make – and General Dempsey and I spoke after that. And we – I wanted to give that point to him, which was, that was not what I was attempting to say.
What I was attempting to say is, President Obama put out his budget number for the Pentagon first, $500 billion cut, and then they began the strategy review to conform the budget to meet that number.
We think it should have been the other way around. What is the best strategy for our military and so we have a strategy driven budget. Now the result of our review of the president’s budget on the military was we should cut $3 billion from the Pentagon budget over the next 10 years instead of the $500 billion.”
In a great op-ed at Fox News, Mackenzie Eaglen points out the degree to which Barack Obama’s passion for underfunding the Pentagon is at odds with America’s defense obligations. In March of last year, “for the first time, according to the Pentagon’s Transportation Command chief, every combatant commander had a priority one mission requiring the help of the Air Force,” she notes. Even with an administration whose first foreign-policy priority is to curtail intervention abroad, air power was maxed out.
And, in historical terms, it didn’t take much: Leading from behind in Libya, the surge in Afghanistan, support in Japan after the tsunami, and air support for Obama’s trip to South America. We did it all and we did it well but unless you believe in the end of humanitarian disaster and international conflict, America’s defense load is never going to lighten to the point that the Obama budget envisions. Instead, we’ll just be unable to carry it. | <urn:uuid:6d9843b5-9053-4d2f-b63b-1f08c13e641f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.commentarymagazine.com/topic/defense-budget/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964335 | 1,053 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Press Release – NZCID
Eight out of 10 New Zealanders think councils have lost focus on what is important and need to refocus on core public services, infrastructure and regulation, according to a recent Horizon Research report.
The survey of 956 New Zealanders was commissioned by the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development to test public attitudes to local government and the provision of infrastructure services. Weighted to represent the national population the survey has a maximum margin of error of +/- 3.2 per cent overall.
“The research reveals considerable support for the Government’s proposed change to the purpose of local government”, said Stephen Selwood CEO of NZCID.
56 per cent of New Zealanders support the purpose of local government being changed to ‘providing good quality local infrastructure, local public services and performance of regulatory functions in a way that is most cost-effective for households and business’.
Contrary to the unanimous view of Councils across the country that the purpose of local government to promote the “four well beings” should remain unchanged, less than 20 per cent of respondents supported this view.
Respondents clearly believe that councils need to refocus. 80% agreed that it was necessary, with 24% strongly agreeing. On the other hand, a majority, 59%, believe that providing for the four well beings does reflect the needs of residents. This suggests that respondents hold a view that councils moved too far in pursuit of the well beings following the change of the Local Government Act in 2002.
This result is consistent with other findings and comments by respondents throughout the report which show quite a strong degree of frustration that councils are not doing what residents want. For example, while some councils across the country are increasing rates to meet increasing community demands for non-core services just 7 per cent of those surveyed supported this approach. Over half of respondents want a reduction in rates, even if it means a reduction in services.
When this finding is viewed in the context of public understanding of what local government does, a picture emerges of local representation which is not in touch with communities and communities that just don’t understand or fully value what councils do. While four out of five respondents said that they could name their local Mayor, just one third knew who their local councillor was and only a quarter describe their understanding of council policies as “good” or “strong”.
This indicates a need for councils to find new ways of connecting with residents to determine the issues that matter and that existing consultative processes may not be as effective as direct community workshops, online surveys and other means of communication.
This is exactly what the Royal Commission found in its pre-amalgamation assessment of Auckland governance. It is therefore of some concern that Auckland-based respondents still rated their council’s services and cost control more negatively than elsewhere. The survey sends a clear signal to the Auckland Council that it needs to improve its interaction with communities and that it may not yet be leveraging the full value that local boards bring from a community engagement perspective.
When polled on whether the Auckland Council model should be extended to other regions, there was not surprisingly a mixed response. Respondents acknowledged a large number of benefits from a more provincial approach to local government, including improved economic development, stronger influence with central government, and better overall value for money. But concerns about potential loss of community focus and local identity led to a fairly even three way split between those for, against and neutral on amalgamating councils.
“It is clear that any move towards amalgamation like that now being considered for Wellington must provide for stronger local community engagement, better provision of infrastructure services as well as improved value for money through better organisational effectiveness if it is to receive popular support”, Selwood says. | <urn:uuid:033eb6ac-111f-4810-a23a-f01a6573319e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://auckland.scoop.co.nz/2012/11/strong-public-support-for-local-govt-infrastructure-focus/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958156 | 772 | 1.507813 | 2 |
If you thought that hair loss is only prevalent in women, then you have a reason to think again. Hair loss is a very common problem both in men and women, affecting people of all races, ages, and gender. There are so many causes of hair loss, but most of the time the problem is attributed to hormonal imbalances in the body, wrong choice of hair care products, as well as wrong hair styles that leave the scalp weak, inevitably leading to hair loss.
The good news is that you can promote natural hair growth thanks to natural hair loss treatment solutions available. Take your time to read product reviews of the different hair loss treatment options available at your disposal so as to make the right and informed decision about your hair problem. You do not have to content with a receding hair line if there are measures you can take to maintain a healthy hair growth all throughout. Here are some measures which can help you get the most out of the hair treatment product you use.
How to prevent premature loss of hair
For starters, you need to adjust your lifestyle completely. Your diet plays an integral role in the way your hair behaves. Eating a well balanced diet equips your hair with the right nutrients necessary to build a firm and strong foundation that fortifies the hair strands and hair follicles, and enriches the scalp so it can easily hold on to the hair strands even while combing.
The other way to prevent premature loss of hair is through exercise. The benefits of exercise in our bodies can never be overemphasized enough. By working out, your body is releasing hormones that will trigger natural hair growth. By the same token, working out opens up pores in your scalp which promote natural healthy growth of hair.
Having said that, if your hair is at a point where it is experiencing stunted growth, there are some great products in the market that can help your hair grow. Such products are manufactured with the best natural ingredients that promote healthy growth of hair. It is important to read product reviews, and take your time to go through the labels to know exactly how the different hair growth products in the market are designed to work.
With so many products in the market, all which ostensibly do the same thing; it can be confusing to know the one that is right for you. However, product reviews can help you make an informed decision by shedding some more light on how they work as well as their pros and cons. | <urn:uuid:a46505cb-9d06-4ae9-92dc-83d74cf39210> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://illustrationtoolbox.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972625 | 495 | 1.65625 | 2 |
One of the notable features announced with the release of Android 4.2 yesterday was support for multiple users on a single Android device. Google's list of 4.2 features, though, makes it very clear that multiple users is supported only on Android 4.2 tablets, not phones.
TechCrunch speculates that the limitation is due to a patent—US 2005/0107114 A1, "Multi-user mobile telephone," to be specific. The patent was filed in late 2004, granted in 2005, and was penned by then-current Symbian employee Tim O'Cock. The abstract makes it pretty clear that it envisions several different people, each with their own personalizations, using a single device:
A mobile telephone is designed to be used by several different end-users at different times. A first end-user can alter the mobile telephone so that it operates in a manner specific to that first end-user and a subsequent end-user can alter the mobile telephone so that it operates in a manner specific to that subsequent end-user; each end-user has only to respond to prompts displayed on a screen in order to alter the mobile telephone so that it operates in a manner specific to that end-user.
The USPTO lists the patent's current assignment with both Tim O'Cock and Symbian Limited, with both pointed back to Nokia. TechCrunch guesses that the original intent behind the patent was to take revenue from emerging markets by providing an easy method for lots of different folks to share a single phone; in areas of the world where cellular phones are expensive, a feature which lets several people use the same phone gives that phone a competitive advantage.
It's easy to see how this patent might be a potential stumbling block to any company wanting to implement a similar feature. The patent language is broad enough to cover just about any possible implementation of multiple user accounts, and even though no Nokia phone has shown up with anything like "multiple users" on the feature list, anyone with something similar in mind would have to deal with licensing from Nokia.
The loophole which Google is using to bring the feature to tablets is that the patent language very clearly states "mobile telephone" over and over again. In 2004 when the application was filed, consumer-grade tablet devices were but a twinkle in technologists' eyes (stylus-driven "tablet" notebook computers notwithstanding). The patent narrowly applies to phones, not "mobile communications devices" or anything else.
However, the "freedom to tinker" mindset which pervades the Android ecosystem might win out here. If the feature is available in tablets, it is likely only a matter of time before enterprising Android 4.2 hackers (and I mean hackers in the good sense of the word) find a way to enable the functionality on their handsets. | <urn:uuid:c7a97f61-7232-409e-8001-736e86eed79e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/10/nokia-patent-may-be-keeping-multiple-accounts-off-of-android-4-2-phones/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950963 | 574 | 1.632813 | 2 |
No doubt, if Microsoft reverses course over Windows 8 – for instance, by restoring the familiar “Start” button to the opening screen – it will provide abundant fodder for the writers of business school case studies.
But is the comparison with Coca-Cola’s famous 1985 marketing U-turn, when it brought back “Coke Classic” following a consumer backlash against its “New Coke” recipe, correct? Read more
Warren Buffett’s foray into IBM, acquiring a 5.5 per cent stake in the company, seems to defy his longstanding antipathy to investing in technology companies. But it depends on what the meaning of “technology company” is.
Mr Buffett’s main objection to technology has always been its unpredictability, as he explained in this discussion with Bill Gates in 1998, which was published by Fortune magazine:
“I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they’re going to look like in 10 or 15 or 20 years. That means businesses that will look more or less as they do today, except that they’ll be larger and doing more business internationally.”
“So I focus on an absence of change. When I look at the internet, for example, I try and figure out how an industry or a company can be hurt or changed by it, and then I avoid it. That doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s a lot of money to be made from that change, I just don’t think I’m the one to make a lot of money out of it.”
It is a shock to hear Muhtar Kent, chief executive of that quintessentially American company Coca-Cola, suggest that the US is now less friendly to business than China.
But Mr Kent’s comments – “In the west, we’re forgetting what really worked 20 years ago” – echo what I heard two weeks ago at Harvard when I talked to Michael Porter, perhaps the world’s best-known expert on competitiveness. Read more | <urn:uuid:3b6b8881-75ef-478e-b62f-13fc5c2f71f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.ft.com/businessblog/tag/coca-cola/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962743 | 436 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Richard West has earned bachelors and masters of science degrees in engineering and a masters in business administration, all from highly regarded colleges. He has kept up with his technical field, including the latest computer applications, and accumulated more than 20 years of solid engineering and engineering management experience. Yet his career path has not been smooth, and, in fact, he is currently unemployed!
Work history. After receiving his degrees and completing his military service commitment, Richard went to work for a large firm, but resigned after a few years. As a 34-year-old engineer, he wanted more challenging work assignments and better pay.
He went to work for a small firm that specialized in his technical area, became a project manager, and also enrolled in an MBA program. A few years later, Richard and a coworker started their own engineering business. By 1990, the firm had three engineering subsidiaries and plans to start a fourth. Richard also completed his MBA. In 1994, the partners had some major disagreements, so Richard sold his share of the business.
Richard then joined a large firm with a division in his specialty, but, unfortunately, Richard and the division were eliminated in late 1997. Now at the age of 52, he was facing an employment and financial crisis with two of his three children yet to complete college.
As he contemplated his future, he thought about his father's career. His father had worked for only one firm after leaving the Air Force in 1946. As long as he followed the rules, did not make waves, and concerned himself with job security rather than job satisfaction, Richard's father survived and retired at the age of 65. He was never wealthy, but the family never went hungry, either. They owned a modest home, and Richard's mother never took a job outside the home. Richard attended a highly regarded college through a combination of loans, grants, and financial aid.
During those years, Richard often wondered why his father did not seek out employment that would enable the family to have a nicer house or send the children to better schools.
Perhaps his father's life-style was desirable because the business and social environments were much less competitive. The half-life of an engineering education lasted nearly a lifetime; communications were basically limited to telephones, mail and the radio; organizations were reasonably stable; and a person's worth was not measured by what they owned.
Richard realized that he had to survive in a new, and totally different, working world. His working environment can be characterized by global competition, pervasive communications networks, rapidly changing technology, and unpredictable career paths.
The future. How should Richard and his wife, Joan, spend the rest of their lives? Joan, age 52 and a trained professional, recently started working with private clients in addition to her full-time hospital work. Her income, plus Richard's part-time college teaching and consulting earnings, together support the family. However, this takes a toll on his wife's health and their family life.
Richard and Joan and the children have agreed that Richard should enroll full time in a doctoral program, where he will teach part time and earn his doctorate as soon as possible, so he may continue to teach and research. They will also try to reduce their expenses so that Joan may reduce her working hours.
Ask the Manager
Q: Do research and development groups tend to have performance curves analogous to the human life cycle--tentative youth, productive maturity, and declining old age? If so, how should managers deal with this tendency?
A: Your analogy is somewhat valid, however, age (per se) need not mean stagnation in either an individual or a group.
It is natural for both individuals and groups to structure their work activities to increase the level of certainty and reduce stress. Over time this can lead to a standard way of doing things, at the cost of reduced communication. This reduction can affect three areas of communication: intraproject, interproject/organizational, and professional.
Research projects usually perform better when project members maintain high levels of technical communication with outside professionals. Whereas, performance in development projects is related to more contact within the organization, especially marketing and manufacturing.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a strong relationship between project longevity and decreased levels of communication activity and project performance. Perhaps a type of "group think" begins to occur within project groups who have been together for some time. They often behave as if they believe that outsiders aren't likely to provide important new ideas or relevant information.
When they do communicate, they selectively accept outside information that supports and maintains the group's current decisions, policies, and strategies. Some solutions:
1. Periodically rotate a new member in and a long-time member out of the group.
2. Challenge the project group to assess its
performance. Ask if it is a victim of group think. | <urn:uuid:0d90d82a-1f9e-424d-87ab-176fe251d646> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=221993 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985412 | 985 | 1.585938 | 2 |
One year ago, I engaged a financial adviser. We had a review of my portfolio this week. The portfolio has done well. I made about 8% over one year, which is very good, considering how disastrous the year 2011 has generally been, for stock markets around the world.
This performance has been possible, because a good part of my portfolio was not in the traditional sort of equity funds. In fact, a good part of the portfolio was not in equities at all. The advantage of being an accredited investor is that I get to invest in more esoteric instruments that may not be accessible for ordinary retail investors.
Of course, this doesn't mean that esoteric instruments always make money. They can lose money too. However, they do significantly broaden your diversification options.
My financial advisor is now recommending that I consider a life settlement fund. I already know about these. I've never invested in these before, but I've read about them. In principle, they make sense to me. However, they have been the subject of some controversy in the US (which is also the only major market for such investments). How do they work?
A life settlement fund invests in life insurance policies. Where do they get these policies? They buy them from the policyholders. Who are these policyholders? Typically, they are people with a low life expectancy. They could be very old, or they could be suffering from some terminal illness such as AIDS or cancer.
So let's say you have a life insurance policy that promises to pay $1,000,000 when you die. And you happen to be very ill. You can't get the money while you're alive. And the money will be useless to you, when you die. You would rather have the money now, which you can immediately use either for your medical treatment, or just to enjoy what's left of your life.
In that case, the life settlement fund could buy the policy from you for, say, $800,000 (I have no idea what the typical pricing is like - I'm just using the $800,000 figure as an example). You get $800,000, to spend as you please. Two years later, you die.
The life settlement fund then gets to collect $1,000,000 from the insurance company. So essentially, over a two-year period, the life settlement fund has made a $200,000 profit, out of its $800,000 investment (less the premiums that the fund paid over that period).
This is the kind of investment that a life settlement fund makes. Of course, it does not just invest in one or two policies. Instead it invests in large numbers of life policies.
It's rather morbid. The faster these people die, the more money the life settlement fund makes. Conversely, the longer these people live (and who knows, a few people may even manage to recover from their supposedly terminal illness), the less profitable the fund will be. A "good" investment is someone who is very ill, has high chances of dying soon and owns a policy with a large payout.
For the investor, what are the advantages of investing in a life settlement fund? Well, it is excellent for diversification purposes. There is very little correlation to equity markets, or bond markets, or commodities, or other more-traditional classes of financial investments. Thus your investment could continue generating good returns, even if stock markets collapse badly.
The way they did, this year. | <urn:uuid:9ef8f716-d035-4c87-a6b8-c8814c9569b4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mrwangsaysso.blogspot.com/2011/11/investing-in-death.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975827 | 713 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Mutts with Manners
"Every dog must have his day." — Jonathan Swift
Trained for your house at the big house: connecting homeless dogs with loving families
The Danville-Boyle County Humane Society (DBCHS) has recently launched a new program known as Mutts with Manners to help homeless dogs have their day and find forever homes.
Sponsored by the DBCHS in conjunction with the Northpoint Training Center in Burgin, KY (Northpoint Trained Canines Program), the new program pairs carefully screened prison inmates with 5 shelter dogs for a 6-week period. Ten inmates, working together with a professional trainer, prison staff and volunteers, provide the dogs with basic obedience training, socialization, behavior modification, and one-on-one companionship. In the end the dogs participating in the program graduate with a wealth of valuable skills that help give them an increased chance (or a paw's up!) on finding a loving home.
The inmates and the dogs live together in the prison dormitory and attend weekly training sessions. They follow a strict training regimen that provides the dogs with the structure they need to adapt into a traditional home. Demand for balanced, trained dogs is high as proven by other successful model prison training programs across the United States.
By the time they are released, the "mutts with manners" are more confident, better behaved and are looking forward to starting a new life with an easier transition to a new loving family. They are all AKC Canine Good Citizen certified, too!
Adopt a mutt with
Check out the Mutts with Manners up for Adoption!
For more information
about our Mutts with Manners call (859) 583-1774 or (859) 329-9436 or write | <urn:uuid:9ecbacb8-4a54-4d05-a7e4-b0cadb6e0620> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.homes4pets.org/manners.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942406 | 367 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The day after Thanksgiving I received an e-mail from the City of New York, informing me that due to budget problems, they were slashing their support for homeless youth programs, greatly defunding street outreach efforts and drop-in centers. Our drop-in support is being cut in half.
I prefer to talk about our housing programs, and the remarkable resilience that so many of our residents show in rebuilding lives that have been shattered by homophobia and family rejection. The realities we deal with in our two drop-in centers are harder and more brutal.
In New York City, there are 3,800 youths who sleep on the streets every night. Over 1,000 of these youths admit to being LGBT. There are only about 250 shelter beds for homeless youth in NYC, so the great majority are left stranded on the streets. LGBT kids from all over the country flock to our drop-in centers for the food, showers, medical care, mental health treatment and other forms of support we provide.
Our case managers work valiantly to help find shelter for these kids, but the reality is there are so few safe options for LGBT youth that we are often forced to advise them on how to survive while sleeping in places like subway trains, parks, abandoned buildings and construction sites as they wait for one of our beds to open up. Yesterday one of our case managers described spending the afternoon trying to find shelter for a girl who had just come to us. When his efforts were exhausted and he had to tell her that she would be out on the street for the night, she sat in his office and cried.
I hate what I see our kids going through. So many thousands of vulnerable kids being cast out of their homes for being gay, deprived of all family support, and forced to fend for themselves without the resources to survive. I hate the way the suffer violence and degradation on the streets, the way they get gay bashed in mainstream shelters, the way so many have to survive through prostitution. I hate seeing youth be so deeply traumatized.
This phenomenon of thousands of LGBT youth being thrown out to the streets by parents who will not accept them is the most terrible face of homophobia in our time. Is there is a greater wrong being perpetrated against our community? I do not understand why protecting our terribly violated and abandoned youth is not the top priority of the LGBT movement. I do not understand why our advocacy organizations are not fighting to make certain that our tax dollars are allocated to supporting these abandoned kids. It is a nightmare that there are so few resources to protect these kids.
With these budget cuts, our ability to provide our drop-in centers is jeopardized, but I am not willing to reduce what little support these poor kids have. The drop-in centers are the safety net for the kids out on the street and I cannot imagine closing our doors. We desperately need an outpouring of support from the community to keep our drop-in centers open. Please be as generous as you can in this time of trial and, please, see if you can persuade friends to help.
Checks can be sent to:
Ali Forney Center
224 West 35th Street, Suite 1102
New York, NY 10001
Ali Forney Center
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Trading Down and Out: Does This Trend Really Hold for Most Markets?
The latest edition of EconSouth—the Atlanta Fed's quarterly economics and business magazine that examines regional, national, and international topics pertinent to the Southeast—offered quite a focus on the real estate sector.
- The Fed @ Issue column presented a balanced case for optimism and concern about the housing recovery.
- The Regional Economic Information Network (or REIN) section of the issue offered further insight into home price indices in the Data Corner department. Further, interviews with the Atlanta Fed's six regional executives in the On the Ground department homed in on more granular, market-based outlooks for the housing recovery.
- The comeback of the South Florida condominium market was profiled in the article "Does the Return of the Cranes Signal a Housing Revival in South Florida?"
The "Return of the Cranes" article included a brief sidebar titled "Trading Down and Out: A Quick Look at Recent Rental Market Trends." It highlighted a recent trend where, as occupancy rates increase and effective rents rise, multifamily tenants in many markets have begun to move out of Class A properties into Class B properties, Class C properties, or out altogether (and into single-family properties).
Business contacts constantly remind us that real estate is local and stress that conditions vary by market and even submarket. With that in mind, I wondered how multifamily fundamentals for a sampling of markets across the Southeast might stack up. Would a closer look at vacancy rates and asking rents for these markets reveal conditions ripe for tenants to move down or out? If so, would the trend in fundamentals be similar between larger, primary markets and smaller, tertiary markets?
The short answer is yes.
In primary markets across the Southeast, like New Orleans and Jacksonville, the year-over-year percent change calculation shows that vacancy rates in larger markets have indeed been on a downward trajectory (see the chart).
In tertiary markets across the Southeast, like Huntsville and Biloxi-Gulfport, the year-over-year percent change calculation shows that vacancy rates in smaller markets have also been on the decline (see the chart).
Asking rents in primary markets across the Southeast have been on the rise, as reflected by the year-over-year percent change calculation. It is important to note that asking rents are defined as the "advertised rental rates for available space" before rental concessions are taken into consideration (see the chart).
A similar trend holds true for asking rents in tertiary markets across the Southeast (see the chart).
Perhaps not surprisingly, this trend of low vacancy rates and rising rents was echoed by markets large and small across the region. As one might expect, there are occasional outliers to the general trend. While the outliers should serve as an important reminder that real estate is definitely local and conditions do vary between markets, it is reassuring to know that high-level takeaways—for example, multifamily tenants are likely trading down and out due to high occupancy rates/rising rents—hold true for the vast majority of markets.
By Jessica Dill, a senior analyst in the Atlanta Fed's Center for Real Estate Analytics
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Listed below are links to blogs that reference Trading Down and Out: Does This Trend Really Hold for Most Markets?: | <urn:uuid:6db339cc-8f04-4221-8fbd-34821268d87a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://southpoint.frbatlanta.org/southpoint/2012/10/trading-down-and-out-does-this-trend-really-hold-for-most-markets.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933025 | 685 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Slovakia ratified EFI Convention
Slovakia has ratified the Convention on the European Forest Institute. The Convention on EFI has now been ratified by a total of 25 European countries. Entry into force will take place on 27 April 2013.
The ratifying countries are now Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK.
These countries are Members of the Institute. They hold the highest decision making body of the Institute, and they meet in ordinary session every three years. Croatia holds the Chairmanship of the Council for the period 2011–2014. | <urn:uuid:09f7b0bb-2cae-4183-8eae-93caaac8d5a2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fordaq.com/fordaq/news/Slovakia_EFI_Convention_ratification_31699.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941666 | 154 | 1.5625 | 2 |
FORT PIERCE — The Royal Palms of St. Lucie kicked off its new year with a food drive to benefit the area's neediest families. The Palms' members donated several hundred pounds of food to Harvest Food & Outreach Center, a non-profit located at 2520 Orange Ave., Fort Pierce, whose primary mission is to alleviate hunger, provide crisis counseling, and educational opportunities to impoverished St. Lucie County families.
The food donated by the Palms was used to stock Harvest's emergency food pantry. The food pantry is in place to assist families who are in an emergency-type situation, and may have not other source of food available to them at the time.
Every week, more than 375 families come through the doors at Harvest where they are greeted by volunteers and on-the-job trainees who are working to get their lives back on track.
Eligible shoppers are treated to a varying array of major label food products as well as fresh produce and meats.
In addition, Harvest is staffed with crisis care counselors who assist families who may be experiencing life changes due to loss of employment, financial stresses, and other related setbacks. Counselors provide proactive referrals to area partners who assist with helping to get clients back on their feet.
Further, Harvest offers its Passport to Prosperity, a 12-week educational program, which provides training and coursework relevant to securing employment. Participants study for a portion of the day in a classroom setting, then conduct on the job training within the cost share grocery center, stocking shelves, performing cashier duties, and facilities maintenance.
For more information about Harvest Food & Outreach Center, visit http://stlucie.harvestfoodoutreach.or... call (772) 468-8543. | <urn:uuid:63e2fb31-b5cd-4e79-bb49-df7160e380fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2012/sep/18/royal-palms-of-st-lucie-host-food-drive-for-harves/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958878 | 366 | 1.570313 | 2 |
The Hon. HENRY TSANG: My question without notice is addressed to the Minister for Energy. Can the Minister update the House on the efforts by the New South Wales Government to boost government apprenticeships?
The Hon. IAN MACDONALD: I thank the member for his question, and commend him for his knowledge and interest in this matter. As we have said on many occasions, we are facing unparalleled times: a global financial crisis unlike anything we have seen since the Great Depression. As the Treasurer told this place earlier this month, because the bulk of the New South Wales economy is service based, we are particularly exposed to the global economic crisis. That is why the New South Wales Government is pumping much-needed investment into the economy through major infrastructure spending—some $56.9 billion over the next four years and beyond. This infrastructure spending will support 150,000 jobs.
One growing area of investment is the electricity industry. Energy businesses are investing billions of dollars to upgrade essential infrastructure to ensure families and businesses have the power to grow. In these uncertain economic times it is reassuring that there is scope for a lifelong and prosperous career in the electricity industry. Integral Energy expects to invest $4.2 billion over the next four years—its largest network investment plan ever. This is vital work not only in replacing and upgrading electricity assets, but also in meeting an expected growth in peak demand. To help deliver this massive capital works program, Integral Energy will continue to recruit people, in particular young workers, through its apprenticeship program.
This year it will welcome 59 new apprentices, taking the number of apprentices training at Integral Energy today to 239. That is a record for Integral Energy and demonstrates its commitment to training the new front line—the next generation of electricity workers. Many of these apprentices are fresh out of school. However, a number have joined the program in a bid to change their career direction and learn new skills. One member of the 2009 class is 47 years old, proving the adage that it is never too late. Integral Energy is achieving another important milestone today. As we speak, Integral Energy chairman, Mike McLeod, is formally opening the $14 million state-of-the-art Hoxton Park Technical Training Centre in Sydney's west.
The training centre will train 300 Integral Energy apprentices over the next five years, complementing their TAFE studies at nearby Miller TAFE. I am advised that the Hoxton Park facility boasts many features unavailable in other technical training centres throughout Australia, such as the all-weather pole training area. The centre boasts a simulated substation, covered electrical safety training area, seven lecture rooms and four workshops, and an outdoor power pole training area, including cables capable of being energised safely to give apprentices an understanding of working on live electrical equipment.
The centre also incorporates the latest in energy and water-efficient design, including a 180,000 litre water tank to store rainwater collected from the roof for use in bathrooms and gardens, and on sensor-controlled air conditioning and lighting. I congratulate all those involved, especially past and present trainers, who have dedicated many hours providing wise counsel to the next generation of electricity workers. The New South Wales Government supports efforts by its electricity businesses like Integral Energy to invest in young people. Young people fresh out of school are among the most vulnerable in times of rising unemployment.
Last month the Premier announced a $370 million investment in government apprenticeships, tripling the number of government apprentices by an additional 1,000 every year in the next four years. In more good news on this front, Country Energy has announced a drive to recruit 60 new electrical workers across regional and rural New South Wales. It is good to see Country Energy investing in jobs that will boost service levels in this essential industry. The new recruits will work out of 40 field service centres across the State, strengthening Country Energy's already strong field-based workforce. Close to 1,700 are currently working on government projects, including power generation and supply, water supply, transport and health. We will continue to support these efforts, and we applaud Integral Energy for doing its part in securing a future for young people. | <urn:uuid:d5b141a2-4149-4c81-931f-7561516e9e4c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/hansart.nsf/V3Key/LC20090325025?Open&refNavID=HA8_1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957692 | 851 | 1.546875 | 2 |
WASHINGTON - President Clinton on Friday certified Mexico and Colombia as fully cooperative allies in fighting illegal drugs, even though most hard drugs flooding the United States come from those countries.
The president's declaration illustrates the extent to which Washington's paramount interests, from regional stability to trade, influence its annual assessment of the drug threat posed by foreign countries.
On Capitol Hill, two Democratic senators who led a failed attempt last year to overturn Mexico's certification dropped their opposition. The Democratic senators joined six Republicans in sending a letter Friday to Clinton urging the White House to incorporate new standards for evaluating Mexico's cooperation.
House speaker Dennis Hastert signaled that he was not seeking a fight with the administration over the issue. | <urn:uuid:b2863327-3e76-40e0-8e6c-b3c7c6c6147e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/1999/feb/27/in-the-headlines-mexico-colombia-receive/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947209 | 140 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock has returned to a New Orleans high school she adopted after Hurricane Katrina to help open a health clinic there.
Bullock's appearance Sunday coincided with the fifth anniversary of the storm that devastated coastal Louisiana and Mississippi. She joined a host of politicians, educators and school supporters for the clinic's ribbon-cutting ceremony.
The free, full-service medical and dental clinic is scheduled to open in the fall. It is yet another place Bullock has left her mark at Warren Easton Charter High School. She's previously donated money to help restore Easton, which is the city's oldest public high school.
The school was swamped when Katrina and the subsequent flooding swept up to nine feet of water into its buildings.
The Associated Press | <urn:uuid:e6078d86-1c3f-4844-8f40-7e6de77c0a07> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2010/aug/29/sandra-bullock-marks-5th-anniversary-of-katrina/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9709 | 156 | 1.523438 | 2 |
TechFlash delivers technology news and trends from your city and beyond.
Cambridge startup Co3 Systems Inc. is betting that the 3.2 million Massachusetts residents – nearly half - who have been victims of data breaches over the last four years will drive the demand for his company’s data breach management software.
A report released this week by the state’s Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation cites the fact that there have been 1,800 incidents in which banks, hospitals, retailers and other organizations exposed the personal data, such as Social Security and credit card numbers, of customers. CEO John Bruce told Mass High Tech that most security software focuses on preventing a data breach.
“If you look at what’s available if something actually does happen, there’s almost zero,” he said.
His software helps a company prepare for what Bruce calls an “inevitable” breach with specific information on all the different laws. Bruce said the basis of the business is the spate of laws regarding data breaches which states have passed in recent years. Massachusetts’ Data Security Breach Law went into effect in 2007, and Bruce says that 46 of the 50 states have all passed their own versions, all with different requirements and hefty fines for companies that don’t comply.
He added that while the software is designed for companies to use ahead of time to prepare for a breach, it will still help a company after the fact, just less efficiently.
He says he’s grown the company from five to 15 employees in the last five months at the same Cambridge headquarters, where, he says, two former successful tech startups – RSA Security, later sold to EMC, and Allaire Corp., which was acquired by Macromedia - also were based.
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About Life Strategies
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The Scriptures contain numerous verses relating to marriages and the interactions between a husband and wife.
"Then the LORD God said, 'It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.'" Genesis 2:18
"For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh." Genesis 2:24
"If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD." Joshua 24:15
"I will give heed to the blameless way. When will You come to me? I will walk within my house in the integrity of my heart." Psalms 101:2
"Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight." Proverbs 3:5-6
"Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all transgressions." Proverbs 10:12
"Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law." Romans 13:10
"Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you." Ephesians 4:31-32
"And be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.
Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body.
But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her,
so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word,
that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.
So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself;
for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body.
FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND SHALL BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH.
This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church.
Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband." Ephesians 5:21-33
"Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart." 1 Peter 1:22
"In the same way, you wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives,
as they observe your chaste and respectful behavior. Your adornment must not be merely external -- braiding the hair, and wearing gold jewelry, or putting on dresses;
but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God.
For in this way in former times the holy women also, who hoped in God, used to adorn themselves, being submissive to their own husbands;
just as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, and you have become her children if you do what is right without being frightened by any fear.
You husbands in the same way, live with your wives in an understanding way, as with someone weaker, since she is a woman; and show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered." 1 Peter 3:1-7
"To sum up, all of you be harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, kindhearted, and humble in spirit;
not returning evil for evil or insult for insult, but giving a blessing instead; for you were called for the very purpose that you might inherit a blessing. For, THE ONE WHO DESIRES LIFE, TO LOVE AND SEE GOOD DAYS, MUST KEEP HIS TONGUE FROM EVIL AND HIS LIPS FROM SPEAKING DECEIT.
HE MUST TURN AWAY FROM EVIL AND DO GOOD; HE MUST SEEK PEACE AND PURSUE IT." 1 Peter 3:8-11
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Current Affairs Yushchenko in Prague: Eastern Partnership no substitute for EU membership
On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko began a two-day official visit to the Czech Republic. At a joint briefing with his Czech counterpart, Václav Klaus, at Prague Castle on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Yushchenko called for increased ties between Kiev and the EU, and insisted that this January’s gas crisis was not of his own doing.
One of the Czech Republic’s priorities during its EU presidency, an Eastern Partnership between the bloc and six former Soviet states, was top of the agenda at Tuesday’s briefing. The partnership, which will include Ukraine as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, will mean stronger ties between the EU and the ex-Soviet states – making travel easier, increasing trade and bringing more EU development funds.
Speaking on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said that he welcomed any sort of dialogue between the EU and Kiev, but stressed that the Eastern Partnership was no substitute for full EU membership, which Ukraine is eager to obtain. Czech President Václav Klaus agreed, and added that he was looking forward to welcoming Mr Yushchenko back to Prague on May 7, when the Eastern Partnership scheme will be launched officially.
The recent gas crisis between Russia and Ukraine was also discussed at Prague Castle on Tuesday afternoon, though nothing new was said on the matter. President Viktor Yushchenko repeated that Ukraine simply did not receive Russian gas this January to distribute to the rest of Europe. Again, he insisted that the gas crisis was not Ukraine’s fault.
When asked whether Prague was considering revising its stance on visas for
Ukrainian workers, President Václav Klaus said that, as an EU member
state, the Czech Republic’s hands were tied. Mr Klaus did, however, say
that the Czech Republic greatly valued its Ukrainian labour force;
Ukrainians make up one of the biggest immigrant groups in this country. The
Czech President added that trade relations between the two countries were
in an extremely healthy state, with Czech exports to Ukraine rising by 10%
over the past 10 years. Mr Yushchenko agreed that bilateral relations were
in an excellent condition. | <urn:uuid:15ea20fe-bdc7-48c0-a1d0-b0bd80bb88c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/yushchenko-in-prague-eastern-partnership-no-substitute-for-eu-membership | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978765 | 458 | 1.632813 | 2 |
NEWARK — Newark isn’t considered a haven for bike riders.
Heavy traffic, a lack of bike lanes and few places to park bicycles make the state’s largest city a challenge for anyone who regularly pedals its streets on two wheels.
But Rutgers-Newark is trying to change that image to get more of the campus’s 11,750 students to bike to class. Over the last year, university officials have held city cycling tours, built a new bike park and offered free loaner bikes to persuade students, faculty and staff to leave their cars at home.
"It’s basically to get students to think about alternative means of transportation," said Brad Armstrong, a spokesman for Rutgers-Newark’s Commuter Transit and Parking Services. "We’re trying to change the commuting culture here."
On Wednesday, the university hosted the first of two Cherry Blossom Bike Rides through Branch Brook Park. More than 30 students pedaled the mile from campus to the park, stopping among the budding cherry blossom trees for a free box lunch provided by the university. Some students used their own bikes. Others used free cycles provided by the university.
A second bike tour will be held Monday at 11:30 a.m. The purpose is to get students comfortable riding in the city, Armstrong said. Campus officials want students to consider the benefits of commuting into Newark by train and cycling to campus.
"It’s a very tough sell," Armstrong said. "I’m out there telling them, ‘Hey, you can put the bike on the train.’"
Tamara Issak, a graduate student in English, said participating in similar Rutgers bike tours over the last year helped her get over her trepidation about cycling on Newark’s streets.
"It was the first time I’d gone bike riding in an urban area," said Issak, 25. "It’s kind of exciting riding the bike with other people."
Like many students, the Wayne resident said she would bike to campus if it was practical. But there is no easy way to get from her house to a train line to Newark. So, she continues to drive.
Rutgers-Newark started its bike program because it has the most severe parking problem of Rutgers’ three campuses. The school’s parking lots and garages are often full and many students are regularly late to class because they are circling the campus looking for street parking.
Parking rates on campus range from $12 a day for visitors to $626 a year for commuter students and $995 a year for students who live on campus, Rutgers officials said. Faculty and staff must also pay to park.
A 2007 study found the lack of parking was often the top complaint among Rutgers-Newark students and administrators. The study also found more than half of students driving to campus live within a half-mile of an NJ Transit train station or light rail stop, meaning they could take their bikes on the train and cycle to campus. About half of NJ Transit buses also allow passengers to transport bikes.
"It’s a practical issue," said Helen Paxton, a Rutgers-Newark spokeswoman. "But it’s also an environmental issue."
Last year, Rutgers-Newark spent $116,000 to turn a vacant lot on University Avenue into a small bike park, Paxton said. The site includes bike racks, tables and storage lockers students can rent for $90 a year to lock up their bikes.
The university also purchased five bicycles students can borrow for free with a student ID — though one of the cycles has already been stolen, campus officials said. Another 10 bikes were recently purchased for Rutgers-Newark’s maintenance department employees to cycle from building to building.
Kimberly Plank, a graduate student in the biology doctoral program, said she is proof students can bike to campus. She rides from her Newark apartment to class, about 2 miles round-trip, several times a week. She also regularly cycles to the supermarket in neighboring Harrison.
Plank, 26, said she loves the ability to get around Newark without a car. But it hasn’t been easy. Last year, she suffered minor injuries when she startled a motorist on Martin Luther King Boulevard.
"I’ve gotten struck by a car making a right turn," said Plank, of Enola, Pa. "I think they just don’t expect cyclists." | <urn:uuid:65a51ea2-328f-46c2-b3b1-11b5105f1202> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/04/rutgers-newark_host_cycling_to.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969965 | 926 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Foreign-language films seem to come with an expectation to be arty and abstract, but in fact they’re found in all styles and subjects, much like the American and British films we’re all familiar with. One of the best things you can do if you’re planning to travel abroad, or just need to find out about another country’s culture for an essay, is to get acquainted with their film industry. You not only get a taste of that country’s way of life, but also an idea of what passes for popular culture there, and perhaps even some suggestions of where to go on your next holiday!
I asked some of Sussex’s international students to recommend their favourite film from their home country, and their choices ranged from a Christmas comedy to an avant-garde thriller. They’re all available on Amazon, so there’s no excuse not to take your first steps to being a connoisseur of international cinema!
Pedro Abellán & Patricio Novales (Spain)
Alejandro Amenábar’s first movie, Tesis, winning six Spanish Cinema Academy awards, is a convincing attempt within the defiant psycho-thriller genre, unexplored before he did and never overtaken.
Ana, a journalism student involved in her thesis investigations finds a dark trade network of snuff movies, gore records where the victims are not actors, but real kidnapped students.
Room-mates and professors are involved. Who can you trust? Who not? Will she discover enough before becoming the next involuntary protagonist?
Intrigue is assured in this film, the start of the brilliant career of the most avant-garde Spanish director. Enjoy your fear.
Rang De Basanti
Prateek Sureka (India)
A Generation Awakens was not only a film. It was the celebration of youth. It’s said that art imitates life, but after this film life imitated art.
It is a film about a group of friends who are aware of things around them and want to change the corrupt system in India. Thing go nasty when one of their friends who is an air force officer dies in a fighter plane crash. The explanation given by the authorities
is that he was an irresponsible pilot. The truth is the fighter plane had faulty parts because of corrupt bureaucracy and personal favours of defence minister. They assassinate the defence minister to revenge the death of their friend and capture a radio station to tell their story. This film gave India a reason to stand and speak for what is going on in the country. It gave a way to protest peacefully. This film was imitated when the government
passed laws which were not ethically right.
I love this film because it truly describes what youth is all about – passion, inspiration and a burning desire to change the world. We all are like that, aren’t we?
Le Père Noël est une Ordure
Marie Neirynck (France)
A very famous movie in France. The casting of “Father Christmas is a jerk” is great and the characters are very funny. The action is set up in an emergency calling centre office. It is called « SOS détresse-amitié ». If people are desperate and need to talk to somebody, they can call there. It is Christmas Eve and two of the employees are staying to answer the calls. Josette comes this night. She is a young, half-homeless pregnant girl, moving around with her trolley because she just broke up with her seedy boyfriend Félix. Félix is desperate
and wants to have Josette back. He arrives dressed up in his working suit: a Father Christmas suit. This is one of the best French comedies and the kind of film one can watch twenty times, always laughing as the first time. It is therefore a French cinema classic, a cult movie. | <urn:uuid:3bce1125-968c-432c-b255-f641ca170c82> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.badgeronline.co.uk/2008/12/foreign-film-favourites/?cat=26 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961693 | 817 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Of course, a digital camera is always great for taking family photographs. Millions of people do that every day. However, for the genealogist, a camera can serve as a multi-purpose tool. It's even better than a Swiss Army Knife!
My favorite use of a camera is for snapping pictures in a cemetery. It serves as an automated notebook, recording the transcriptions. However, even better, the resulting images serve as source citations for the records you keep. I cannot think of a better source citation than an image of the words that were etched in stone. Of course, you will want to record the date, too. This is easy to do with most digital cameras that will optionally record the date and time on every picture taken. | <urn:uuid:b911b817-ed07-4ba4-afa6-3a97e7866450> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/11/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980481 | 151 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Since its foundation in 1885, Channing has been known as a happy and successful community... read more »
Channing is a registered charity. It is now possible to use our direct and secure online donation pages to make a gift to Channing School.
In the Summer of 2013 Channing will embark on its most ambitious development programme ever. Click here for more....
Open Day Visits
Each year we set aside time for parents to look around the Junior and Senior School. Find out more »
All pupils in year 10 take part in Take Your Daughter to Work Day which takes place during our Enrichment Week in June. The focus of the Enrichment Week for Year 10 is looking beyond the Upper School.
In Year 9 girls use the Fasttomato questionnaire and careers data base, which links their preferences to careers, in year 11 girls are given the opportunity to take part in the Morrisby VGS programme after which they are given an individual report detailing their aptitudes and suggestions of higher education courses which match their strengths and interests. All pupils in Year 11 are given careers interviews to discuss their aspirations and to assist them in choosing AS levels that keep their options open.
In Year 12 all girls use the Morrisby Coursefinder online questionnaire to match their subjects and interests to suitable higher education courses.
The careers library houses invaluable resources including books such as Student Finance, The Times Good University Guide, How to get Into Medical School and Writing Personal Statements. All of the University prospectuses and found here as well as publications detailing the requirements for specific courses and careers. Pupils are advised, however to check the most up to date information using the UCAS website, www.ucas.com. What do Graduates Do? Gives insight to the likelihood of employment after studying a particular course, the Kent University website www.kent.ac.uk/careers also lists similar enlightening statistics.
Careers education is taught by tutors from Year 7 and aims to raise pupils’ awareness of the roles of different people in the community and the skills and talents that are required by specific types of employers. It also aims to focus pupils on their personal attributes and to equip them with knowledge of what they need to achieve to follow particular career paths.
Each year Channing hosts its own Careers Convention for Year 10 and 12 girls, they are enriched by professionals from a wide range of careers fields such as Medicine, Advertising, Interior Design and Finance.
Programme of Career talks
We offer pupils the option to attend career talks from the widest range of careers; many speakers are Channing Old Girls who are truly inspirational and motivational to our current pupils.
Work Experience, Volunteering and Community Service
All pupils in Year 9 take part in the Take Your Daughters to Work Day, which takes place on the fourth Thursday of April each year. In 2010, it will take place on Thursday 22 April.
Work experience placements are arranged by many girls following Year 11 and by all girls in Year 12. Students wishing to read Medicine should arrange a hospital placement and a long-term volunteering placement, such as in a hospice or for a medical charity. Work experience or volunteering most certainly accelerates personal development and facilitates exposure to new and unfamiliar situations.
www.volunteering.org.uk to find out the opportunities that are available. Community Service is compulsory for those taking part in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme. | <urn:uuid:86a6dc8f-5871-41c9-8832-e9011c1f01ab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.channing.co.uk/senior-school/upper-school/careers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945993 | 698 | 1.804688 | 2 |
ICANN Continues to Prove It Can't
Published 13:18, 31 July 12
I have been writing about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, since its birth in 1998 (see the ICANN entry on Wikipedia for a good summary of how that came about, and the evolution of the organisation since then.) That move was contentious at the time, since it saw the running of the Internet's basic infrastructure taken out of the hands of the geeks, personified by Jon Postel, and put in the hands of the business world. As a fully intended side-effect of that move, it also placed the system fully under the control of the US, rather than allowing a more distributed, global approach to evolve.
From its earliest days, ICANN has been beset by problems and controversy. For example, one of ICANN's directors, Karl Auerbach, had to sue the organisation in order to obtain access to its corporate records. Lack of transparency has been a recurring criticism throughout ICANN's life, despite some half-hearted efforts to address this.
ICANN hasn't really achieved much in its years of existence, and that's turned out to be a good thing, since it has had relatively little negative impact on the free evolution of the Internet. But a year ago it voted to expand the current 22 generic top-level domains (TLDs) to allow practically any word to be used. The problems of doing so are obvious: abusive registration of similar domains in unusual TLDs is likely to increase the scope for user confusion - and hence phishing and spam, both of which are bad enough.
So why has ICANN embarked on this headlong rush to allow huge numbers of new names? The fact that successful applicants will be required to pay $185,000 for each domain probably has something to do with. Also relevant may be the revelation that some members of the ICANN board have links with domain name registries. A few months ago, no less a person than the outgoing ICANN CEO himself spoke out against these kinds of conflicts of interest, which shows the seriousness of the problem.
If the prospect of opening up TLDs in this way was bad enough, the reality is proving even worse. As this analysis of the hundreds of names that were applied for shows, Google in particular wants to take control of many key words:
But as the company had suggested last month, it was pretty active, going after some clearly Google related names, including .google, .goog, .gmail, .android, .gbiz and .goo. But it also has a few more broadly worded ones, including .ads (which no one else sought), .car (for their autonomous vehicles?), .dad (just in time for father's day?), .mom, .dog, .family, .fyi, .plus, .tour, .prod, .here, .prof, .phd, meme., .lol, .day, .love (which has a lot of competition), .rsvp, .mba, .vip, .web, .eat, .soy and (believe it or not) .and. There are some strange ones too, like .zip, .boo (did Google scare you?) and .foo. They also want .page (is Larry getting his own TLD?).
One of Google's main competitors for key words is Amazon:
Amazon and Google actually come up against each other an awful lot, including for .buy, .shop, .store, .free, .game, .play, .movie, .show, .mail, .map, .spot, .talk, .wow, .you and .cloud -- all of which have a bunch of other suitors as well. They also go head to head (with no other competitors) for .drive. They just missed each other in going after children. Google wants .kid, while Amazon wants .kids.
Why does this matter? Well, assuming some or most of these names go through, they essentially give companies like Google and Amazon control over key ideas online. Not in the sense that they will be able to stop people using the words, but from the power they will exert over some of the most obvious use of them as signposts.
This concentration of power has been brought about by the move away from the national TLDs to global ones based on common words and ideas. That then makes the Internet much more likely to be policed for alleged infringements of trademarks and copyright - something that ICANN has already showed itself quite happy to facilitate. That could be very problematic for open source projects, who may find themselves removed from the Internet entirely because a company somewhere has alleged some kind of infringement, quite possibly inadvertent.
ICANN's reputation has hardly improved in recent months. First there was a security breach that revealed details about applicants for the new domain names to other companies that were applying. Then it finally dawned on ICANN that the insane gold-rush for new generic TLDs that it had instituted could bring the Internet to its knees:
ICANN plans for rigorous evaluation of multiple criteria of all New gTLD applications received, a number which currently exceeds 1900. Because ICANN also is committed to measured delegation rates to monitor any impact on root zone operations, it designed the New gTLD Program so that approximately 500 applications will be evaluated at a time. This often is referred to as "batching."
And so it came up with a breathtaking plan:
Each applicant will be notified to register into an online system and directed to select a target date and time.
Applicants will return to the online system on that day and try to hit "Generate" as close to their target time as possible. It's kind of like a game of digital archery. First you set the target and then you try to hit it with as much accuracy as you can.
Yes, ICANN decided to turn the process of destroying the Internet as we know it into a game.
Except, of course, this bad idea didn't work either:
Operation of the digital archery portion of the New Generic Top-level Domain Program has been suspended.
The primary reason is that applicants have reported that the timestamp system returns unexpected results depending on circumstances. Independent analysis also confirmed the variances, some as a result of network latency, others as a result of how the timestamp system responds under differing circumstances.
The evaluation process will continue to be executed as designed. Independent firms are already performing test evaluations to promote consistent application of evaluation criteria. The time it takes to delegate TLDs will depend on the number and timing of batches.
The suspension provides time to investigate technical concerns. ICANN's staff and Board will continue to listen to community comment about digital archery and batching.
It also provides time for other organisations, like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an arm of the United Nations, to point to ICANN's blunders, and suggest that the task of running the Internet should be taken away from it:
The rationale for the move by the ITU seems to be that because the Internet is a global entity, it should be managed according to global standards. At the moment, control over the fundamental levers and gears that underlie the Internet — including the domain-name system — lies with ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which is a private, U.S.-based nonprofit organization. The secretary-general of the ITU, Hamadoun Toure, told Vanity Fair that “When an invention becomes used by billions across the world, it no longer remains the sole property of one nation, however powerful that nation might be.”
Although ICANN says it operates on a multistakeholder model that involves groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium, there has been a lot of criticism of the organization over the years, from allegations of conflicts of interest to moves such as the recent expansion of the top-level domain system — an expansion that could lead to hundreds of new domains such as .lol and .youtube. Some believe this was an unnecessary landgrab by domain registrars and could actually make the Internet more confusing rather than less.
To be clear, the ITU taking over the Internet would be a complete disaster, and it's not anything I would ever advocate. But the fact that the ITU can even think about doing so is made hugely easier by ICANN's dreadful record. Had it run the global name system in a halfway efficient manner, it would be much easier to defend it. On the basis of the appalling job it's done so far, it certainly should be deprived of its current functions.
However, the solution is not to give them to a faceless international body like the ITU where they will become prey to naked political ambitions (not least from countries like China, India and Russia.) The only sensible thing to do would be to set up an independent, technical board that ran the Internet for the benefit not of companies looking to exploit its possibilities, or of countries looking to use it as an instrument of control, but of the Internet itself. That is, its decisions would be based on technical criteria designed to make the whole thing run and evolve as smoothly as possible, for the benefit of all constituencies, undistracted by other agendas that damage the underlying infrastructure, as ICANN's current moves threaten to do.
That might seem hopelessly idealistic, and may be it is. But it's worth pushing as a third way in the current situation, which is fast coming down to an impossible choice between seeing the Net destroyed by ICANN's ham-fisted commercialisation or by ITU's all-too efficient politicisation. | <urn:uuid:00533360-365d-4e62-87fc-a02834c88a48> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/07/icann-continues-to-prove-it-cant/index.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963079 | 2,004 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Spartanburg, South Carolina. It is the second-largest city of the three primary cities in the Upstate region of South Carolina. Spartanburg is located 98 miles (158 km) northwest of Columbia, 80 miles (130 km) west of Charlotte, and about 190 miles (300 km) northeast of Atlanta. Spartanburg's population was 39,673 at the 2000 census. Spartanburg is a college town, with six institutions of higher learning:The University of South Carolina Upstate (formerly known as University of South Carolina Spartanburg, or USCS). Converse College - Founded in 1889, Converse is a comprehensive masters institution with a co-ed graduate school and an undergraduate women's liberal arts college. Spartanburg Methodist College - The only 2-year, private, residential college in the state. Spartanburg Community College. Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic - South Carolina's only chiropractic college. Wofford College - Founded in 1854, Wofford is a Phi Beta Kappa liberal arts college with an enrollment of approximately 1,450 students.
Shannon is from the Spart. | <urn:uuid:e05d7d36-1ff3-4b94-a00a-ee101afb8e11> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Spart&defid=5411936 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932682 | 228 | 1.648438 | 2 |
UA Students are encouraged to take full advantage of the many extracurricular programs, centers, and other activities that enrich students’ university experience. Students from different cultures and backgrounds will find centers that provide academic, cultural, and personal support as well as serving in an advocacy role.
ASUA Pride Alliance Strives to maintain a resource center that offers a secure, supportive social and academic environment to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning individuals, as well as straight ally students at the UA and in the Tucson community.
Clubs and Organizations Provide a number of opportunities for students to actively participate in myriad activities. ASUA offers a number of campus clubs and organizations including mail service, fundraising assistance, recruitment programming, marketing techniques, and club funding.
Women’s Resource Center A nondiscriminatory organization devoted to providing resources and information to the UA community about women's issues.
We welcome suggestions for additions to this site. Please send your suggestions. Contact us. | <urn:uuid:25346690-2977-4742-92ac-eb45099b50ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.arizona.edu/student-resources-4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943827 | 198 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Shaun Botterill / Getty
Sochi, Russia - host city of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games
SOCHI, Russia - While Moscow digs itself out of a huge snow storm that hit the Russian capital in the last few days, organizers of the Winter Olympics are worried a lack of white powder could become a problem next February.
Unseasonably warm temperatures this winter in Sochi have forced local organizers to store some 450,000 cubic meters of snow in the nearby Caucasus Mountains that surround this sub-tropical Black Sea resort.
"We've prepared seven separate areas for snow storage high up in the mountains," Sergei Bachin, general director of Roza Khutor, a ski resort in Krasnaya Polyana that will host Alpine skiing, snowboarding and freestyle Olympic competition, told Reuters.
"I want to assure all the competitors that there won't be any shortage of snow next February even if we encounter even warmer temperatures next year," he said.
"We're storing such huge amounts of snow just in case."
The snow will be covered with a "special thermo seal", to protect it from melting during the summer, Bachin said.
"We expect that about 140,000 (cubic meters) will melt away but we'll still have more than 300,000 cubic meters of snow available for next year," he predicted, saying the storage will cost his company an extra $11 million.
Nevertheless, Sochi 2014 chief Dmitry Chernyshenko has stated on several occasions that the weather has become a bigger problem for the organizers, who are frantically trying to finish all the construction projects on time, than security or the infrastructure.
Mikhail Mordasov / AFP - Getty Images
The Winter Olympics arrive in Sochi on Feb. 7, 2014. A look at how the Russian city is shaping up for its moment in the spotlight.
Bachin, however, assured that Krasnaya Polyana, once a sleepy mountain village, about 70 kilometers from central Sochi, would be ready to host all the outdoor Olympic events next February rain or shine.
"Of the 76 Olympic test events scheduled in Krasnaya Polyana this winter a great majority had been completed and only a handful have been called off because of bad weather," he said.
"I think we've passed the test as the last major event of the season was held this weekend in nearby Laura complex."
Usually, Krasnaya Polyana has the opposite problem - too much snow and the risk of avalanches, Bachin said.
"This was a very odd winter. Even locals don't remember when was the last time they had such warm days in the mountains. It's highly unlikely we'll see the same kind of weather next year," he added.
Reuters contributed to this report.
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions. | <urn:uuid:7dd9479c-88e1-4e2c-8694-a00c0368137e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/climate | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965828 | 581 | 1.804688 | 2 |
The lawsuits caught many intellectual property experts by surprise. And for good reason.
The plaintiffs alleged that a well-known, decades-old business practice was, in fact, copyright infringement. Moreover, the alleged infringers were two respected law firms that specialize in IP law.
Plaintiffs sued McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff (MBHB) and Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner (SLW) for doing what patent firms around the country regularly do—copying articles from scientific and medical journals, and submitting these copies in patent applications as evidence of prior art. The law firms were attempting to comply with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) Rule 56, which requires patent applications to provide all prior art references material to patentability. Failure to provide such references can render any resulting patents unenforceable and expose the patent attorneys to sanctions for ethics violations.
Copying articles for use in patent prosecution “has been done for quite some time. It is a common practice,” says Christopher Larus, a partner at Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi. “I’m not aware of any controversy around this in the past.”
But there’s a controversy now. Two publishers of scientific and medical journals, John Wiley & Sons Ltd. and the American Institute of Physics, want to be paid when law firms copy their articles for patent prosecutions. The publishers assert, in lawsuits filed Feb. 29, that making such copies without authorization is infringement, and are seeking damages and injunctions against both MBHB and SLW.
If the suits are successful, it could significantly affect patent law firms and their clients. Licensing articles would create “additional delays and costs,” says Marcus Thymian, MBHB’s managing partner. “And those costs would likely be passed onto patent applicants, which could stifle innovation.”
The effects could reach far beyond the realm of patent practice. A win by the publishers “is likely to have a broad-ranging impact on ... lawyers generally submitting materials to the courts,” says Larus. “Law firms that make copies of documents for purposes of submitting them to the courts would look more closely at copyright issues.” As a result, he adds, companies involved in litigation could face significantly increased costs for legal services.
The key issue in these lawsuits is whether the law firms’ copying is “fair use” and thus not infringing. To decide that issue, a court must consider the four factors specified by Section 107 of the Copyright Act: the purpose of the copying, the nature of the copyrighted work, the percentage of the work that was copied and the effect of the copying on the market for the copyrighted work.
After reviewing these factors, the general counsel of the PTO concluded that copying articles and submitting them in patent applications was fair use. The Jan. 19 memorandum asserts that “the first factor weighs heavily in favor of fair use” because applicants are “submitting [an article], pursuant to a legal requirement, based on its factual, rather than its expressive, content.” The second factor also favors fair use, because the articles are factual and published. The third factor is neutral because even though articles are typically copied in their entirety, whole articles are often required to provide the information needed in patent applications. The final factor supports fair use because law firms typically obtain the articles from legitimate, licensed databases—so the copyright owners have been paid for the articles. Moreover, the memo declares, “there is no basis for concluding that” submitting the articles to the PTO “has any significant negative impact on the market for the [articles].”
This memo won’t settle the issue. The PTO’s interpretation of copyright law is outside the agency’s area of expertise—patent and trademark law. It is unclear, therefore, how much weight the courts would give to the agency’s pronouncement.
Some experts dispute the PTO’s analysis. They assert that law firms make profits by prosecuting patents, so the firms are copying articles for commercial purposes. That would weigh against a finding of fair use.
Moreover, even if PTO regulations require an applicant to submit a copy of a scientific article, “the regulations don’t require an applicant to submit an unlicensed copy,” notes William Dunnegan, a partner at Dunnegan & Scileppi. “Paying the copyright owner is just another cost a patent applicant must incur in order to make money by obtaining a patent.”
These arguments, however, don’t fit easily with prior court rulings. The relatively few precedents in this area indicate that fair use protects an entity that copies a work without payment and uses the copy in order to seek a legal remedy or other government action. For instance, in Religious Technology Center v. Wollersheim, the 9th Circuit held in 1992 that it was fair use for an attorney representing a client in litigation to copy a work and provide the copy to experts in order to prepare them to testify at trial.
There’s another issue: When a law firm copies an article for the PTO, it routinely makes at least one additional copy for its files. Even if the former is protected by fair use, the latter may not be.
The key case in this area is American Geophysical Union v. Texaco Inc. Texaco’s researchers copied articles from the plaintiff’s scientific journals and placed the copies in their files for later reference. Such copying was not fair use, the 2nd Circuit held in 1995.
That case may be distinguishable. Texaco made copies in order to pursue research, while the law firms made copies in order to help clients comply with PTO requirements. “This is not identical to Texaco,” says Prof. Peter Menell of University of California, Berkeley and Stanford Law Schools.
Many believe MBHB and SLW have a strong argument and should defend their fair use rights in court. “We have been contacted by clients, other law firms, industry organizations, law professors and others who have offered their support,” says MBHB’s Thymian.
But going to court would impose significant costs in time and money. Purchasing a license would be much less expensive, at least in the short run. That may be why about half the law firms that received warning letters from the publishers have purchased additional licenses from the publishers, according to a patent attorney familiar with the situation.
And if a law firm goes to court, there’s no guarantee it would win. “This is a hard case,” says Menell. “It is not a slam-dunk for either side.” | <urn:uuid:917dbece-2b41-407c-a5c5-7fada0969c99> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.insidecounsel.com/2012/04/30/suits-against-ip-firms-raise-fair-use-questions | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952689 | 1,416 | 1.726563 | 2 |
HANNAH STORM: As part of a growing probe of abuse by U.S. military prison guards, the Army is investigating the deaths of 10 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan and has already concluded that two others were homicides.
General Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is at the Pentagon.
Good morning, General.
PACE: Good morning, Hannah.
STORM: General, this report which detailed these abuses was completed at the beginning of March. Why didn’t the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, see this report? And why wasn’t the president made aware of what was going on?
PACE: Well, two different parts need to be understood. One is the reporting up the chain of command, which was done immediately. On the 13th of January, the allegations by the soldier inside the unit were reported to his Army chain of command. On the 14th of January, the Criminal Investigative Division team was sent to do the investigation. The phone calls were made up the chain of command. I know I knew about it within hours of the 14th of January. And everyone was kept apprised orally of the ongoing investigation.
The major general completed the investigation. And what happens with the paperwork itself is that each commander in the chain looks at the work, reads it in detail, does his analysis of what he or she should be doing with it, makes their decisions, and then sends it up the chain. So the fact that the paperwork did not get to Washington DC did not mean that the information did not. In fact, it did.
STORM: So you’re saying that General Richard Myers was well aware of the situation and that the president was well aware of the situation as well?
STORM: There are those who claim that the soldiers who were involved in these incidents were merely following orders. So what did you find in your investigation? Did you find that to be true?
PACE: Those soldiers were not following orders. That is not what we expect of ourselves. It is not what the American people expect of us. We are expected to perform our duties honorably. And the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of young men and women, active, Reserve and Guard who have served in Iraq have done so honorably.
These incidents are not acceptable. They are being thoroughly investigated. They were reported from within the chain of command. And there are five or six separate investigations ongoing as I speak that are, in fact, looking into every detail of every facet of this that we can find.
STORM: If General Myers was aware of what was going on and the president was aware of what was going on, there’s outrage right now on Capitol Hill that none of the members of Congress knew what was happening. Why wasn’t it made aware to Congress? Why did the American public have to see it in news reports and members of Congress have to see this in news reports before understanding what was happening?
PACE: Well, as I recall, it was around the 16th of January that General Kimmitt made his first public announcement at a press conference. And then when charges were preferred on the 20th of March, General Kimmitt made another general announcement of what was going on.
We did have phone calls inside the chain of command, as I said, about the status of the investigations and some of the details of what was being found out. But we also need to make sure that we do the justice part of this in a very precise, measured way so that, in the process of trying to get to facts quickly, that we don’t at the same time turn our justice system on its head.
The best I know, Congress was -– the leadership of the oversight committees, the House Armed Services Committee, Senate Armed Services Committee, House Appropriations Committee and Senate Appropriations Committee, were notified sometime last week that these investigations had found what they found.
STORM: Now the president is being forced to go on Arab television to defend the actions of the U.S. military. And our relationship in the Arab world is tenuous at best. How does the military feel about putting the president in this position?
PACE: This brings discredit and dishonor on all of us who serve in the military and brings discredit on our country. And we don’t like doing that to ourselves, to our country, certainly not to our president. We are going to go about finding out how this happened, why it happened, take action against those who are responsible, and correct our training systems and our procedures as best we can to prevent this in the future.
STORM: And who is to blame? Is it the officers? Is it their superiors? Where’s the breakdown in the chain of command?
PACE: Well, that’s all part of the review process right now. And it would be inappropriate for me to specifically point out an individual or individuals. That will come out in due course as we let the legal system do what it’s supposed to do in the proper time line.
STORM: As a proud member of the military, how does this make you feel to see these pictures and hear these horrific reports?
PACE: It makes me sad. It’s just not right. It is not who we are. It is not what we represent. There are thousands and thousands of wonderful Americans right now serving our country overseas. They’re the ones who deserve the credit. And things like this are not what we’re about and are not acceptable.
STORM: Do you expect more cases to come to light?
PACE: I expect that as these investigations track down all the possible leads, that there will be more things that will need to be looked at very, very carefully. Usually when an investigation like this takes place, as they chase the various elements, more people come forward with bits and pieces of information that they think they might have, and that leads you to look at other things. So there will be more investigation. Where that will lead, I don’t know.
STORM: General Peter Pace, thank you so much for your time this morning.
PACE: Hannah, thank you.
"THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS PREPARED BY THE FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE INC., WASHINGTON, D.C. FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE IS A PRIVATE COMPANY. FOR OTHER DEFENSE RELATED TRANSCRIPTS NOT AVAILABLE THROUGH THIS SITE, CONTACT FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE AT (202) 347-1400." | <urn:uuid:1de4b611-7e81-4d8c-801c-145334628157> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2977 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982542 | 1,381 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Parking regulations |Accessible parking | Student Accessible parking permit application | Faculty/staff Accessible parking permit application | Dos and don'ts | Parking maps
Students, faculty and staff who desire to appeal a parking violation must do so by filing an appeal form within five school days from the day the violation was issued.
- Possession of a stolen or forged permit is a criminal offense and can not be resolved through the Appeal process.
- Appeal forms are available on your myGate parking channel.
- Appeals will not be accepted after the five-day period has lapsed. The right to appeal will be forfeited. The University Police Officers and Parking Enforcement Officers are not permitted or authorized to void parking tickets. Each appealed violation shall be adjudicated by the appropriate judicial committee (disposition is final).
Grounds for Appeals
Appeal when you have valid grounds. You should limit your appeals to those circumstances for which the parking ticket was issued in error. For example, you did not commit a violation. Disability (unless a valid state issued disability placard is held) and Fire Lane violations may not be appealed .
Only the individual who obtained the permit can appeal a citation issued against it. In the event the vehicle does not display a parking permit, only the individual who operates the vehicle on campus may appeal a citation(s) issued to the vehicle. | <urn:uuid:19604bda-a510-4caa-ac15-61d4e0019cc3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://murraystate.edu/HeaderMenu/Offices/PublicSafetyAndEmergencyManagement/ParkingManagement/Appeals.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948173 | 277 | 1.523438 | 2 |
The Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear and High-Yield Explosive (CBRNE) - Enhanced Response Force Package (CERFP) is a Department of Defense directive aimed at building up homeland defense with National Guard resources.
Although CBRNE is the general field in which they operate, CERFP can also assist local, state and federal agencies in natural disaster responses. This new initiative will be able to provide immediate support in mass casualty events to increase the ability of agencies to respond to a disaster with search and extraction, decontamination and medical triage and initial treatment teams.
“This new and enhanced National Guard capability is unique within our region,” said Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. “During times of emergency, our neighbors and fellow states have always stood ready to assist us, and now Louisiana will be standing ready to assist them should the need arise.”
Louisiana received the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s region VI mission in 2010.
“This mission greatly increases our emergency response capabilities by providing Louisiana and the region with a very unique unit that has highly trained Guardsmen, and state of the art equipment,” said Maj. Gen. Bennett C. Landreneau, the LANG’s adjutant general.
“The placement of this unit in Louisiana greatly enhances our state’s capabilities to respond to any domestic threat within our state and the region, and allows us to provide further enhanced capabilities in support of our first responders, state and federal agencies during any disaster,” said Landreneau.
The LANG is undergoing a series of individual and collective training requirements that will culminate with an external evaluation in April 2012. Once certified for full operational capacity, more than 250 Guardsmen will be ready to deploy within six hours of an incident when called upon by the adjutant general.
“After the successful external evaluation, CERFP will receive validation in the fourth quarter of 2012,” said Capt. Jake Witte, special projects officer for the 61st Troop Command.
Units designated as CERFP include the decontamination unit from A Company, 2nd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment located in Breaux Bridge; search and extraction unit from A Company, 256th Brigade Special Troops Battalion located in New Roads; and the medical care unit in the new Joint Readiness Training center located in Baton Rouge, comprised of Air Guard personnel.
“CERFP is a response capability that will fall under the direction of the adjutant general and will be available to support local, state and federal agencies response efforts in the event of a mass casualty disaster,” said Witte, also serving as the commander of the decontamination unit. “Although we generally operate in a CBRNE environment, we are available during natural disasters or other events deemed necessary by the adjutant general.”
Over the last month more than 110 Guardsmen have completed the basic casualty search and extraction course at Camp Gruber, Okla., and more than 100 personnel have completed decontamination training in Breaux Bridge.
Louisiana’s CERFP is one of 17 nationwide and can be used to provide confined space and collapsed structure rescue, mass casualty decontamination and mass casualty medical care in CBRNE incidents including natural disasters where mass casualties are present in a toxic environment. CERFP can support with all or part of their capabilities to enhance response from local, state and federal agencies. | <urn:uuid:90ed327b-9a88-4730-994e-5928b7ef2eb8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stmarynow.com/pages/full_story/push?article-La-+Guard+has+newest+emergency+response+force+package%20&id=14787223&instance=secondary_stories_left_column | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941585 | 716 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Writer, editor, professor, etc. For more information, see jaygabler.com.
In about 1989, when I was 13, our next-door neighbor sold me his TI-99/4A. First released in 1981, the TI-99/4A was one of the first successful home computers allowing users to do actually useful things like track finances and write and edit word-processing documents. The basic model just had a keyboard and a cartridge slot (you plugged it into your TV), and its processor was about 1/267 as fast as that of an iPhone 4. At God knows what expense—I’m estimating it would translate to about $5,000 today—Jerry had completely tricked his TI-99/4A out with peripherals including a floppy disc drive (without it, you could only record your programs on an audiocassette recorder), a speech synthesizer, and a printer. I think I paid him like $500 for the whole thing, payable in installments of babysitting money.
I remember vividly that our Duluth neighbors’ TI-99/4A, sometime in the mid-80s, had given me my first eerie opportunity to type letters and see them appear on a television screen. That was in the computer’s BASIC programming mode, which was what you got by default if you turned it on without a cartridge in the slot. Once I had a TI of my own, I took advantage of the opportunity to buy books, programs, and other peripherals at bargain-basement prices from Texas Instruments, which had discontinued production of the TI-99/4A in 1984 and was trying to dump its inventory of supplies. (The shipments were delivered—wait for it—C.O.D.) I remember a frustrating phone conversation with an operator in Lubbock who was trying to get me to find a pen; and I couldn’t understand why on earth she wanted me to find a pin. “A pin!” she cried in her thick Texas accent. “Not a pin, a pin! A pin!”
At the time my career ambition was to become a computer programmer like my uncle Jeff and aunt Jackie, so I taught myself BASIC, in part by checking old computer magazines out from the library and painstakingly copying hundreds of lines of code into my TI so that I could play simple games like Moon Landing. My crowning achievement as a programmer was this game for darts scorekeeping—it worked, and even included an opening animation of a dart flying across the screen and sticking to a dartboard.
My career aspirations as a programmer ended when I failed to land a position as a teen intern at Cray, the supercomputer manufacturer then based in a Twin Cities suburb. My mom took me out to the Cray headquarters, where I competed against dozens of other teens (mostly, but not exclusively, boys): we each had to write a program in our language of choice that would result in the display of an accurate list of all the prime numbers from one to 100. I wrote a program that tested each number, and I’m sure it would have worked, but I’ve always wondered if they would have given me the internship if I’d just written a one-line program, then walked cooly up to the scientists and handed them my sheet of paper while all the other kids gaped in astonishment that I’d finished the whole program in just two minutes.
10 PRINT “1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 97”
When I decided to get rid of the TI-99/4A in the mid-90s, I wrote to the Computer Museum in Boston (since merged with Boston’s Museum of Science) asking whether they wanted it as a donation. They never wrote back.
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Oren Kessler is a writer in Jerusalem whose work has appeared in The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz. A version of this post originally appeared on Foreign Policy.
JERUSALEM – The U.S. presidential race might be deadlocked, but when Mitt Romney visits Israel on Sunday, July 29, the presumptive Republican nominee can reasonably expect the most heartfelt welcome he’ll receive anywhere outside Utah.
The proof is in the polling. Thirty percent of Israelis surveyed think U.S.-Israel relations would improve under Romney, while a mere 8 percent said the same about a second Obama term. Among the 300,000 Americans living in Israel (half of whom are eligible to vote), support for Romney is twice as high as it is for Obama.
Romney’s two-day visit — during which he will also meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad — is his fourth ever to Israel, and it’s his first foreign trip since clinching the Republican nomination. The stop is aimed at two constituencies the candidate is desperate to woo: evangelicals — reliably Republican but leery of his Mormonism — and Jewish Americans, heavily concentrated in swing states like Ohio and Florida and vexed, his campaign believes, by Obama’s policies toward the Jewish state.
“A lot of our members moved here as registered Democrats,” says Kory Bardash, co-chair of Republicans Abroad Israel, a partisan advocacy group that claims to mobilize upwards of 4,000 volunteers during election season. “A lot of people are now saying, ‘I’ve never voted Republican, but there’s no way I’m voting Obama.’ That includes many who voted for him in ’08.”
There are now “tens of thousands” of Republican voters in Israel, according to Bardash, but the real purpose of Romney’s trip is to signal his commitment to Israel to voters back home — a cause that is aided by Obama’s apparent inability to connect with Israelis.
The problem doesn’t seem to be that Israelis see Obama as openly hostile — polls show them evenly split over whether he is “friendly” to their country. Instead, many think the president just doesn’t “get” Israel and lacks the empathy of George W. Bush or even his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton.
“President Obama never acquired the connection with the Israeli public that President Clinton had,” says Dore Gold, the American-born president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and a former advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Obama just hasn’t managed to have the same ‘click’ with the man on the street.”
“Many American Jews are very liberal and don’t count Israel as one of the top issues in their life,” says Bardash, a New Jersey native who moved to Jerusalem 16 years ago. “But among those who define themselves as pro-Israel and for whom Israel is important, we believe Obama has lost a lot of support.”
Six in 10 Jewish Americans still say they support the president, roughly the same proportion that supported him a month before the 2008 election, in which Obama ultimately hauled in 75 percent of the Jewish vote. Still, Republican Jewish groups boast that Romney’s 29 percent approval among American Jews is the highest for a Republican candidate in a quarter-century.
And while a solid majority of American Jews continue to vote Democratic, the Israeli left is a shadow of its old self — discredited by the failed peace process led by slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the bloodshed of the last decade’s Second Intifada. The left’s remaining holdouts (represented by just one-sixth of parliament) still generally back Obama, but there is a broad consensus in today’s Israeli center that sees the U.S. president’s first term as a forgettable chain of slips, snubs, and rookie mistakes.
Obama won few plaudits, even among veteran peace processors in Washington and Jerusalem, for his early insistence that Israel freeze all building in West Bank settlements. (American peace negotiator Aaron David Miller included the initiative in his “Dumb Idea Hall of Fame.”) Obama’s detractors argue the move emboldened Palestinians to forgo talks with Israel and unilaterally declare statehood at the United Nations. (The administration insists its threat to use its Security Council veto underscored its commitment to the peace process.)
Yet Netanyahu’s government has rarely been an easy partner. In 2010, the Israeli Interior Ministryembarrassed the White House by approving new housing units in East Jerusalem during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden. The Obama administration was equally chagrined when, a year later, the Israeli premier treated the president to an impromptu history lesson in front of reporters in the Oval Office.
Still, critics accuse Obama of creating “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem in a misguided bid to improve America’s image in the Muslim world. Bardash of Republicans Abroad says that the president was clinging to the mistaken view that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of most of the Middle East’s ills. “The Arab Spring has demonstrated that’s not the case,” he says. “These countries have all kinds of internal problems that have nothing to do with Israel.”
Indeed, just 18 percent of Israelis polled approve of Obama’s handling of the Arab revolts, and even pundits on the center-left have found his Middle East policy perplexing. The president abstained from “meddling” in Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution, but called for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a three-decade ally of the United States and Israel, to resign within days of protests erupting in Tahrir Square. When an uprising broke out in Syria — a staunch ally of Iran and the launching pad for 90 percent of foreign fighters who attacked U.S. troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2008 — Obama waited five months before appealing to President Bashar al-Assad to resign. Democrats maintain that each case was unique and that Obama was trying to position himself ahead of events; Republicans charge the president with watching history unfold rather than employing American clout to shape it.
Obama’s Iran policy has also distanced him from many Israelis. Netanyahu has pushed the White House to more seriously consider military action should diplomacy over Tehran’s nuclear program fail, but Obama has remained steadfastly cautious in his rhetoric. That’s not to say the two governments haven’t worked together: The United States and Israel are believed to have created the Stuxnet worm discovered at Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility in 2010, and that same year the White House pushed through a comprehensive fourth round of U.N. sanctions to complement the three passed under Bush. Nonetheless, roughly half of Israelis surveyed view Obama’s position on Iran’s nuclear drive as too soft.
Smelling blood, Romney has come out blasting, promising the credible military threat he claims Obama has failed to create: “Only if Iran understands that the United States is utterly determined when we say that their nuclear-weapons program is unacceptable is there a possibility that they will give up their nuclear aspirations peacefully,” the candidate states on his website.
Broader Israeli security concerns have proved to be another stumbling block for Obama. Last week, after a terrorist attack in Bulgaria left five Israeli vacationers dead, U.S. officials privately fingered Iran and Hezbollah but declined to implicate them publicly, telling the New York Times the attack was likely a “tit-for-tat” response for Israel’s alleged assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Pro-Israel pundits blasted the statement — which seemed to equate civilian holidaymakers, one of them a pregnant woman, with scientists suspected of developing an illicit weapons program — as another instance of the administration giving the Iranians a free pass.
Moreover, Obama’s popularity is hardly helped by his notoriously frosty relationship with Netanyahu. Whereas the president’s interactions with Bibi have always seemed strained, Romney enjoys an amicable three-decade relationship with the prime minister dating back to their early careers at Boston Consulting Group. “We can almost speak in shorthand,” Romney has said of the Israeli leader. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney sought Netanyahu’s advice on limiting the size of government. And when Netanyahu wanted to help U.S. firms divest from Iran, Romney offered tips of his own.
Asked in the Dec. 10 Republican debate whether he agreed with then-contender Newt Gingrich’s assessment that the Palestinians are an “invented” people, Romney spun the question to highlight his friendship with Netanyahu and, implicitly, Obama’s lack thereof: “Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say, ‘Would it help if I said this? What would you like me to do?’” As Netanyahu remains broadly popular in Israel, the Republican candidate has been able to bask in his reflected glow.
The administration has insisted it has been a stalwart friend of Israel, denouncing Republican criticism as made up of so many groundless “myths.” When Romney told evangelicals in June that he would do the “opposite” of the president on all things Israel, Obama’s campaign promptly shot back: “[D]oes that mean he would reverse President Obama’s policies of sending Israel the largest security assistance packages in history? Does it mean he would let Israel stand alone at the United Nations, or that he would stop funding the Iron Dome [rocket interception] system? Does it mean he would abandon the coalition working together to confront Iran’s nuclear ambitions?”
Still, Team Romney appears convinced that along with the economy, Israel is Obama’s Achilles heel — and is gleefully preparing its poisoned darts.
Romney has accused Obama of “[throwing] Israel under the bus” and has vowed a different approach. “The best way to have peace in the Middle East is not for us to vacillate and to appease, but is to say, ‘We stand with our friend Israel. We are committed to a Jewish state in Israel. We will not have an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally, Israel.’”
Dan Senor, a Romney foreign-policy advisor who co-authored a bestselling book on Israel’s economic success, said his candidate believes “threats to Israel are threats to America; challenges to Israel are challenges to America.… We believe Americans of all stripes, from across the country, identify with Israel. Governor Romney believes support for Israel is an American value.”
Gold, Netanyahu’s former advisor, says Israel hopes to maintain constructive relations with both U.S. parties, but it’s an ill-kept secret in Jerusalem that Bibi and his government would raise a Shabbat toast should America choose to vote in its first Mormon executive.
As the election looms, Israelis appear ripe for the Republicans’ picking: Just 38 percent have a positive view of Obama, compared to 60 percent in 2009. Most can’t vote in America, but Mitt Romney is hoping their affection helps win him just a little more love from those who can. | <urn:uuid:6541dcf3-869c-4816-b27f-0a336cc21f2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thefutureforum.org/government/mitts-pilgrimage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963145 | 2,377 | 1.5625 | 2 |
From the GIC Fall 2003 Newsletter
Nearly one out of every four households is involved in taking care of an elderly relative, according to a National Alliance of Caregiving and AARP study. If you are one of the people providing care, you know firsthand the multiple challenges involved. According to the study, most caregivers are the children of the elderly relative (usually the daughter), have children of their own, and work. Putting it all together successfully, while taking care of yourself, can seem impossible.
Care provided by family and friends would cost nearly $200 billion a year if it were provided by paid caregivers, according to the journal Health Affairs. Caregiving can take a toll on the caregiver's emotional well-being and job performance. Squeezing in an average of 20 hours per week for a period of 4.5 years to take care of an elderly relative may seem nearly impossible with other family and work obligations. Many caregivers make frequent work sacrifices, such as arriving late, leaving early, taking sick or vacation time to attend to the elderly relative. Additionally, caregivers are six times as likely to become depressed from the emotional and physical toll.
Assess Needs and Research Options
Your relative may not be eating properly, getting groceries, taking medications, paying bills, washing clothes or cleaning the house. Instead of jumping in and doing all these things for your relative, research assistance options. Contact the National Eldercare Locator to find services in your relative's community: 1-800-677-1116. If your relative lives in Massachusetts, contact the Executive Office of Elder Affairs; 1-800-AGE-INFO. If you do not live close by and can afford it, consider employing the services of an elder care manager who can assess service needs, arrange for in-home services and provide counseling and support.
When you call prospective providers to schedule an appointment, ask about the services they provide, the application process, waiting lists, fees and minimum hour requirements. Determine whether you will need to provide any documents. Gather your relative's Social Security Number, physicians' phone numbers, and insurance policy numbers. Also be sure to contact your relative's health insurance company to see what services might be covered and provider network information.
The next step is to gently discuss outside help with your relative. Accepting help can be a blow to your relative's self-esteem according to United Behavioral Health. They suggest using "I" messages, such as "I'm concerned about your safety" to deflect defensiveness. If your relative resists accepting help, try to discover the root cause of their resistance. Is it cost? Does he/she view this help as a loss of control? Are the options overwhelming? Try to address the concerns, or come back to the conversation another day. It is important that your relative understand that you cannot provide 24-hour care, and that his/her safety may be jeopardized if he/she refuses outside help. Once your relative is willing to accept outside help, schedule an appointment with the provider when you can be present to participate in determining the best plan of action.
Proactively Avoid Pitfalls
When at your relative's home, take a look around for potential dangers. If your relative has vision or mobility issues, pay particular attention to risks for falls. Install high wattage bulbs, nightlights, and light timers for better visibility. Remove throw rugs or non-sturdy furniture. Install handrails and nonskid strips in bathtubs and showers. Encourage your relative to exercise under the direction of a physician. Spend time with your relative not in the caregiver/recipient role, but instead as parent/child. These good times will help you ride the rough times of caregiving.
Take Care of Yourself
When you are a caregiver, the last thing you feel you have time for is yourself. However, this has to be your first priority. If you fail to take care of yourself, you could jeopardize your health or burnout. Schedule time for exercising and sleeping. Even a small amount of exercise every day can help you handle anxiety and stress. Pursue activities you enjoy - meeting a friend for lunch, listening to music, going to a movie, and playing a sport. Watch what you eat and drink lots of water. Seek help from others, even if your relative objects.
Take advantage of the many resources available. The Family Caregiver Alliance provides news, support groups and online consultations for caregivers. The AARP Caregivers Circle provides a chat board where caregivers can share helpful tips and strategies.
Members of the Commonwealth Indemnity Plans and Navigator by Tufts Health Plan can access United Behavioral Health's comprehensive resources (enter: 10910 as your access code).
If you are exhibiting any of the following symptoms, do not delay contacting your health plan (HMOs and HPHC) or United Behavioral Health (Indemnity and Navigator) for help: feelings of hopelessness, guilt or worthlessness, loss of interest in hobbies you once enjoyed, insomnia or oversleeping, loss of weight or overeating, decreased energy, thoughts of suicide, and/or persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment.
This information provided by the Group Insurance Commission. | <urn:uuid:a362d3b9-2492-4e01-a5f7-4dde93ba645a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mass.gov/anf/employee-insurance-and-retirement-benefits/manage-your-health/mental-health-and-substance-abuse-issues/caregiver-stress.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939174 | 1,067 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Updated 12/27/2010 07:17 PM
FDNY Swamped With Non-Emergency Calls
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The New York City fire department commissioner is reminding New Yorkers to only call 911 with life-threatening injuries, as it needs to concentrate its resources on emergencies.
Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano says the department has been slammed with non-emergency calls following Sunday's massive snowstorm.
He says the system is already taxed and that dozens of ambulances and fire trucks have become stuck on the treacherous roads.
"The streets are unpassable," said Cassano. "Our calls really are backed up and we want to make sure we can get the people who need to be transported to the hospital and life-threatening emergencies."
The FDNY says an additional firefighter was added on all 198 engine companies.
A New Jersey EMS task force is also being put together to send 15 ambulances to the city.
According to Pat Bahnken, president of the EMS union, there is about a three-hour wait for responses citywide. Bahnken says there are about 1,300 life-threatening jobs waiting for response.
"We're always concerned about any backlog," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "You can rest assured it is our number one priority."
The Uniformed Firefighters Association says that it asked the city to declare a state of emergency but that the request was denied by the Office of Emergency Management.
The city late Monday said that no union asked the Bloomberg administration to declare a state of emergency.
OEM says it is not up to the agency to make that call and that it must be made by the state and the governor. | <urn:uuid:5245cd8a-4ab2-4d9f-bff3-ad7e4bd2463d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/131246/fdny-swamped-with-non-emergency-calls | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957619 | 368 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Geopolitics: It’s too early to write Europe off
5 December 2011
Economic power is not the only criterion for global power. What matters is how political systems respond to new crises. And from this perspective, the EU is still in with a chance, writes Dutch historian Dirk-Jan van Baar. Excerpts.
2011 has all the makings of going down in history as a disastrous year. Among other things, America and Europe risk being crushed by their own debts. They are seen as the problem children of the world economy and get lectured to by state capitalists from China, diplomats from Singapore and economists from India. So it is not strange that many observers with a feeling for the times sense that four centuries of western domination are at an end and see the sun rising in the Far East.
The American president is behaving accordingly : he thinks America must get its own economic house in order before embarking on further foreign interventions. If even the most powerful man in the world thinks that Washington has taken on too much, then one can tend to agree with historian Paul Kennedy (who wrote on the theme in his 1987 work The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) that America is suffering from imperial overstretch.
Experimentation and innovation
However, Kennedy made his prophecy shortly before the end of the Cold War. Not only was he blind to the global rise of democracy, but also missed the collapse of Soviet communism occuring right before his eyes. You would think that in the wake of such events, his statements would be a little more reserved, but no, he yet again believes that the West reached an historic “watershed” in which its dominance is petering out almost unnoticed.
Kennedy is a historian for whom economic factors are the most crucial and who attaches less value to the power of ideas and “great men”. Nevertheless these are not the best criteria to guage decline at a global level. It is much more important to see how political systems respond when they go through crisis and and how they cope with challenges hitherto never experienced.
If the Soviet leadership had not thrown in the towel in the eighties, the Berlin Wall might still be standing. If in 1980, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had not resisted growing Soviet influence, the Kremlin may have possibly clung to its own power politics. Why political reformers in Moscow caved in and Beijing’s economic reformers did not will always be subject to historical speculation. However, they show that unquantifiable forces such as determination and faith in one’s cause actually play a decisive role.
When it comes to experimentation and innovation, it is much too early to write Europe off. With the introduction of the euro and EU expansion into Eastern Europe, no other continent has witnessed such a radical trans-national transformation in the last decade. It is only natural then that such transformations falter and face challenges. It remains an achievement therefore that the euro was introduced according to plan and that the eurozone, in spite of a complex debt problem whose scale few had predicted, has so far not disintegrated. This demonstrates that Europe holds much greater political power than it is generally credited with.
A world economy shaped by western ideas
The current crisis, with all its financial entanglement, is leading (albeit unintentionally) to an unprecedented European solidarity that will be difficult to reverse. European leaders including Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, and the European Central Bank are also displaying an impressive ability to learn as they improvise their way through uncharted waters. That the media sees this differently is because point scoring sets the tone and that political leaders are routinely slated. However, I think you can only really judge the calibre of politicians when they have their feet in the mire – which is now the case.
Of course, many things may go wrong, and Atlantic cooperation has seen better days. But the East can only dream of such pacification mechanisms. And even if Asia – still plagued by all sorts of disasters and having still to prove itself when it comes to enduring self-governance – has its future ahead of it, it will nevertheless be a future in a world economy shaped by western ideas. You would have to be a true defeatist to then still speak of the decline of the West.
Translated from the Dutch by Stuart Buck | <urn:uuid:4380ee0d-69e0-4631-a298-5dc23168a587> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1249431-it-s-too-early-write-europe | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969949 | 880 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Just as my female body contains a metaphor for creating new life, so also does my existence in the realm of spiritual pursuits require a creative act.
A benefit of yoga in the marketplace is that there are plenty of women leading the way; we are used to seeing images of beautiful women in advertisements so there is an ongoing potential for commercial success for svelte females in yoga.
But I recoil in shame when I consider what is coming across to consumers: perhaps that yoga cultivates commercially acceptable beauty, or that yoga is for physical fitness. Could it be that yoga is here to help us get laid? Come on... When commercial yoga panders to our insecurities, just like any other product for sale, doesn't that cheapen the potential? Or doesn't that cheapen our estimation of what we, as yoga teachers or yoga businesses offer?
As I read and study about traditional yoga I find myself filtering and editing as I read to try to include myself in texts that were written for male seekers. And I've done a pretty good job, having pushed through countless hours of reading about men in yoga. And I love men in yoga... But when it comes to conceptualizing a vision of my yoga path, the words that were intended for male seekers from earlier generations do not always hit home for me as a female yogi practicing and living in today's world.
And I've heard that there are a handful of obscure examples of traditional yoga that honor women. But, I really haven't seen any that I can identify with.
We don't even have a tradition here in the States, what we have is a marketplace, and what this requires of us as consumers is personal responsibility. Just like it's time for us to take responsibility for the oil we use, it's also time for us to take responsibility for the quality of our hearts and minds.
Maybe it's me. Maybe I struggle with being a female yogi who is not always sure where she really fits in. Maybe I should try to be thin and beautiful and perfect. Maybe you should buy into my yoga because you love my body.
This is what bothers me.
Yoga is about a union between consciousness and form, or the "inner" and "outer" worlds. If popular yoga is too focused on physical feminine beauty, are we ever going to break through to an authentic experience of spiritual depth? Are we ever going to pursue beyond our obsession with physical form and youthful beauty? Right now our "yoga" in most places seems to be right in line with commercial norms.
Yoga tradition intersects with the modern marketplace. And I think that we enter fantasyland when we try to ignore that. Even when someone has learned from a traditional source, what a teacher brings to his or her classes is what they know. It is always their account of that tradition or lineage, so teachers are actually creating as they are teaching.
But, our yoga does inspire questions such as mine, and perhaps that's enough for now. And maybe yoga has arrived in the marketplace at this time to remind us that we are more than consumers. We are human beings with hearts and spirituality, and we can be responsible for ensuring that our world can remain inhabitable and joyful, as well as profitable.
*simul-posted at Elephant Journal* | <urn:uuid:c94a2355-6cc4-4842-9ca6-529399b630bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://brookshall.blogspot.com/2010/05/traditional-spiritual-lineage-is-not.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98073 | 673 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Is there such a thing as internet addiction? Mind Hacks says the debate should be over:
A study just published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior has reviewed all of the available scientific studies on internet addiction and found them to be mostly crap. And not just slightly lacking, really pretty awful.
To quote from the research summary:
The analysis showed that previous studies have utilized inconsistent criteria to define Internet addicts, applied recruiting methods that may cause serious sampling bias, and examined data using primarily exploratory rather than confirmatory data analysis techniques to investigate the degree of association rather than causal relationships among variables.
Rather disappointingly though, the authors just suggest that better research is needed when it’s quite obvious that the whole concept is fundamentally flawed.
Whole (not very long) post is worth a read, as is most everything at MH. | <urn:uuid:620f6f2b-8011-4e84-99a3-00ad0c0da17c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2008/12/16/study-internet-addiction-a-bun/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945852 | 173 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Its rare that all three of them want to do something so I took full advantage of it and gave them a crafty painty activity that spanned the ages of 2-6 pretty well with only a few adjustments...
To start with ( and whilst Jared and Amahli were carrying on like loonies) I gave Jumeirah a few pieces of make up foam I had lying around my craft room to cut up into a few different shapes, nothing fancy, just triangles, squares and rectangles, and explained that we were going to make some patterns with those shapes.
She did this and we stuck some pins into the ends so it would be easy to pick up. I added paint to some old paper plates and she began to make some patterns on a page. I love the mathematical way she did this... creating repeatitive patterns with the shapes ( which was kinda the idea but I didnt want to push it too much).
Once Jared and Amahli saw her printing they too wanted in and so I gave them some great stampers I have had for years and some paint and they were able to print too. Not so patterny or mathematical but they really enjoyed this. Homemade stamps can be made out of anything.. old toilet rolls, cardboard, even carved into a rubber... might have a go at this one later in the week :)
Another exciting afternoon followed with us hunting 5 caches ( see yesterdays post about Geocaching) and finding 4 of them!! Its such a great way to get out as a family and see more of our lovely town. I am totally hooked on this :) And then to make it even more exciting, we found this!!! Its an official Michigan geocaching coin. I am so super stoked to have actually found something important! We are going to take it with us to the Hunter Valley in a few weeks and re cache it for someone else to find :)
I have no idea why blogger is loving this photo sideways.. stupid thing cos I cant fix it but you get the idea and cool it is ;)
And so today, before our hunt, I went and found some treasures to swap for our hunt. And it got me thinking... Maybe, if there are a few of you in the world that are going to do some of your own geocaching, we could do a treasure swap? So I would send a couple of things from Australia that you could use as your treasure and you could do the same! | <urn:uuid:8ce54f7b-4aa7-4411-9b69-3640a37dc933> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mummamadeit.blogspot.com/2011/01/homemade-printing.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985594 | 501 | 1.5 | 2 |
Medical Apparatus. Doesn't sound very sexy, does it? Whether it's made in reference to wheelchairs or prosthetic limbs, the phrase can't help but evoke images of beige plastic, rubber straps and metal screws - dull, uniform and - let's face it - seriously unfashionable.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Thanks to the ingenuity and sartorial savvy of forward-thinking brands, healthcare accessories can be just as stylish as any other accessories. After all, in this image-centric world of ours, we 're judged on everything from our shoes to our phones to even our Twitter backgrounds, whether we like it or not - so why should your medical equipment be any less fabulous than the rest of your day-to-day necessities?
In honour of the Paralympics, we've assembled some of the most stylish and advanced medical apparatus around. You'll never have to put up with frumpy beige equipment again.
The Mind-Powered Wheelchair
No, you read that right. Thanks to some clever researchers in Switzerland, the long-held dream of neuroprosthetics (aka brain-powered machines) is now becoming a reality. Using a combination of EEG readings and AI technology, EPFL's mind-powered wheelchair allows the user to move effortlessly from place to place with only the flicker of a brainwave, and also comes equipped with software that detects and avoids obstacles. Minimal effort, maximum chic.
The Designer Prosthetic Leg
If you're looking to get a leg up on the competition for prosthetic limbs, sports brand Adidas has the answer. Designed with athletes in mind, and crafted with electromagnets to give the wearer smoother movement, the Adidas Symbiosis is spearheading the way towards artificial legs that are both functional and fashionable.
The Bionic Prosthetic Arm
Rather than acting as a mere extension of the body, the METIS Bionic Prosthesis aims to fully enhance the physical capabilities of handicapped individuals - welcome to the future . By connecting directly with the wearer's nervous system, it enables 360˚ movement, and also comes with integrated Wi-Fi and 3G capabilities - and that white corian finish will give an ultramodern edge to any outfit.
The Gold-Plated Hearing Aid
Girl, 2012's all about getting some bling bling for your hearing thing. Grey hospital issue aids are so over - in the spirit of the Games, you need a device that comes in 24-carat gold to really make a winning statement. This device also comes encrusted in no fewer than 220 diamonds. Sounds like music to our ears... though perhaps not our wallets.
The Stylish Diabetes Gadget
Smartphone? Check. Tablet? Check. Ninos Glucose Measurement System? It's ONLY the most stylish device for diabetes on the market darling, where have you been? Slick, compact and with an attractive high-tech design, it's a gadget made with style in mind, and a wealth of clever features to help keep your condition in check. And the best part is, it can check glucose levels without the need to take blood samples.
The High-Heeled Artificial Leg
Thanks to industrial designer Aviya Serfaty, gone are the days of awkward mechanical prosthetic legs - Outfeet are taking the next step for stylish artificial limbs. Moulded out of a lightweight carbon fibre, it gives the wearer a smooth, easy range of motion, and has built-in adjustable settings to create arches in the sole. That's right, a high heel effect is possible; Outfeet also comes with a detachable heel feature. | <urn:uuid:2058aa28-aae3-40e1-a423-2a1e96e12617> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dontpaniconline.com/magazine/style/stylish-medical-apparatus | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935242 | 751 | 1.53125 | 2 |
When visitors travel to Mississippi to discover our state's blues musical heritage, they find the real, authentic experience here - especially in places like Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta.
When you arrive in Clarksdale, Mississippi, start at the famed crossroads of Highways 49 and 61, said to be the site of where legendary blues man Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in order to master the guitar. A large sign with crossed guitars marks the spot of this diabolical deal in Delta lore. Highway 61 runs north to south and is often referred to as the "Blues Highway."
And now that the Mississippi Blues Trail includes dynamic, historical markers at locations throughout the state, you can visit two new Blues Trail Markers that are now in place in the Clarksdale area at the Riverside Hotel and at Muddy Waters' cabin site.
Speaking of Muddy Waters, Clarksdale, Mississippi, is the home of the Delta Blues Museum. Inside you'll find a wealth of information and exhibits about the unique American musical art form that is simply known as "the blues." Permanent exhibits such as Muddy Waters' childhood cabin make the Delta Blues Museum a must-see for everyone.
Clarksdale's rich blues history is evident all over town. On Sunflower Avenue you will find the Riverside Hotel made famous by Bessie Smith who drew her last breath there after a car accident. Issaquena Avenue is where beginner blues men of the past cut their teeth through street performances. Wade Walton's Barbershop was once the site of spontaneous blues jam sessions and tall tales by the owner who was friends with blues great Sonny Boy Williamson and W.C. Handy. Finally, while in Clarksdale, Mississippi, make it a point to tune into one of the country's oldest blues stations, WROX 1450-AM.
Another interesting site in the area is Hopson Plantation. The Hopson Planting Company was established in 1852 to grow cotton, the Delta's cash crop. The 4,000-acre property reached its heyday in the 1940s when the company was first to grow and harvest a cotton crop produced completely by mechanical methods. No longer a functioning farm, the Hopson Plantation and Commissary stands today in much the same condition as it was more than fifty years ago.
After you've worked up an appetite discovering all of the Mississippi blues history and heritage in Clarksdale, you'll have plenty of places to dine. Right beside the sign marking the historic crossroads is another famous Clarksdale landmark: Abe's Bar-B-Q. Since 1924, barbeque lovers have flocked to Abe's to enjoy tender pulled pork sandwiches and splendid sides. Come hungry and order the "Big Abe." Chamoun's Rest Haven Restaurant is indeed a haven of multi-cultural dining in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. An extensive menu features American and Italian fare as well as some of the area's best Lebanese cuisine. Don't leave without sampling the stuffed grape leaves, stuffed cabbage and stuffed kibbie. Delta native and Oscar-winner Morgan Freeman opened the white tablecloth restaurant Madidi with local attorney Bill Luckett. Hit it on the right night and you might run into the Hollywood mega-star. The menu features Southern favorites such as catfish and fried oyster appetizers, while entrees consist of elegantly plated steaks, fish and wild game. Also co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman and local attorney Bill Luckett is Ground Zero Blues Club. This juke joint has a full menu of Southern staples and live music to celebrate the area's rich blues heritage. Ground Zero is the place to cap off your day of Mississippi blues history with the real thing - live blues music by local artists.
Be sure to do some shopping before you leave town - and here's a unique place you'll want to check out: Taking its name from a type of biscuit of similar size, Cathead Delta Blues & Folk Art store features a full selection of Mississippi blues CDs, videos, DVDs, books and collectibles as well as Southern folk art. It's a great place to find some souvenirs for your friends or for yourself. Be sure to stop in and pick up a memory from your trip to the historic Delta. | <urn:uuid:f0f3c261-4692-4d68-9a80-6af80d3c0aa8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.visitmississippi.org/fa---clarksdale.aspx | 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 | 0.941701 | 863 | 1.789063 | 2 |
The UK has probably one of the most cosmopolitan societies within Europe and you will study with people from all over the world in this truly multicultural society. The variety of universities and degrees is broad and degrees will be accepted worldwide. Some of the world's best universities like Oxford or Cambridge are located in the United Kingdom as well.
Programmes in the field of Religious studies, also referred to as Theology usually focus on a certain religion such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam. However, also inter-religious studies such as comparative religion are offered.
Find and compare 114 Masters in Religious Studies and Theology in United Kingdom. Below is a selection of the available study options. If you're interested in studying Religious Studies and Theology in United Kingdom you can view all 114 Master's programmes. You can also read more about the Religious Studies and Theology discipline in general or about studying in United Kingdom. | <urn:uuid:53f8a9b7-e046-4cea-bc64-248c3f26bf36> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mastersportal.eu/study-options/268927075/religious-studies-and-theology-united-kingdom.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956291 | 180 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Thursday Roundup: Neighbors
Carol Byers's husband, Fred, died in June. He had planted 500 acres and Carol had no idea how she would manage to harvest them.
In a wonderful story by Rick Ruggles of the Omaha World-Herald, we learned that the day after Fred passed away, a neighbor, Don Lord, told Carol not to worry. The crops would be taken care of.
Monday, that happened. Fifty farmers showed up at the Byers place with an assortment of combines and the team harvested the 500 acres of corn and soybeans.
This is the way things go, Ruggles reports. Near Bradshaw, Nebraska, Daniel Graves died of cancer in August. On Monday, farmers showed up with combines and grain carts and they harvested the 550 acres Graves left behind.
“I have no words,” said Daniel Graves' son, Dan. “All I know is that I'm proud to be part of this community. And my dad was, too.”
What goes around comes around. Don Lord recalls that when his father died 13 years ago, it was Fred Byers who joined a team of neighbors to harvest Lord's fields. When Don Lord came home from the prayer service for his father, he found Fred Byers at work. “They just showed up and did it,” Lord said.
Showing up is a big part of life, and for most of us, it's hard. Not so for these folks.
Rural Drugs, Urban Drugs — Rural drug abuse tends toward alcohol, prescription opiates and marijuana. Urban drug use is more heavily weighted toward cocaine and heroin. Urban and rural are about equal on meth.
A new report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration counts the admissions to publicly funded or licensed abuse programs. “Rural admissions were more likely than urban admissions to report primary abuse of alcohol (49.5 vs. 36.1 percent) or nonheroin opiates (10.6 vs. 4.0 percent),” said the report, citing 2009 data.
Urban "admissions were more likely than rural admissions to report primary abuse of heroin (21.8 vs. 3.1 percent) or cocaine (11.9 vs. 5.6 percent).”
The common assumption is that methamphetamine is a rural drug, but admission rates in rural and urban programs were nearly equal.
Rural users were less likely to abuse drugs daily, but, on average, they started at an earlier age.
Nebraska Communities Getting Better — The latest Nebraska Rural Poll finds that more than a third of the residents questioned thought their communities had improved in the last year while only 20 percent said things had changed for the worse.
The poll found that a high percentage of people were engaged in local organizations or churches — about three out of four rural residents — but these high numbers were down from the last time these questions were asked in 2002.
Impulse Marketing and Obesity — Food marketers pay extra to have their goods placed at the end of aisles or in the checkout lines because that's where we make impulse buys. And this is a reason we are getting fatter, according to a new study.
Big Bird and Rural America — Brad Plummer in the Washington Post lays out the case for funding public broadcasting (both radio and television). A lot of it has to do with serving rural communities.
Public broadcasting funding has gotten to be part of the presidential campaign because Republican Mitt Romney says he would cut the $445 million subsidy. And Plummer writes that this would hurt rural viewers and listeners the most:
Now, if Congress took this funding away, NPR and PBS would likely survive, though perhaps diminished—PBS gets just 15 percent of its budget from the government, and NPR just 2 percent. ”Sesame Street” would also be fine, as it largely survives on corporate sponsorships and merchandising deals. But a number of federally-funded public stations around the country might get shuttered. In many rural areas, local stations receive more than 50 percent of their funding from state and local governments.
Is that a problem? Can’t people in poorer or rural areas just watch other TV channels? Listen to other radio content? Perhaps. But the second argument is that public television tends to be more educational than what the private sector offers. As Kevin Zelnio details, only two other cable television networks—Nick Jr. and Disney Jr.—offer dedicated educational programming for children. “Other stations’ programming,” he notes, “does not even come close the educational value of these 2 stations and PBS.” For families that can’t afford cable, PBS is the sole option.
Maine's "Keystone" Pipeline — Maine activists say a Canadian company wants to reverse the flow in a pipeline leading from the coast into Canada and use the pipeline to move tar sands oil from Alberta to the U.S. coast.
The Keystone XL pipeline would move the same product from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. That pipeline was blocked first in Nebraska and then by the U.S. State Department.
Recruiting Docs — Recruiting doctors to rural hospitals will get harder, according to a new report from the Association of Staff Physician Recruiters.
The report "suggests that the increased demand for healthcare services, which are expected with the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act, is going to make recruiting doctors even more difficult for rural providers in the coming years."
"There is no indication whatsoever that rural recruiting is going to get any easier," says Shelly Tudor, chair of the ASPR Benchmarking Committee and member-at-large of the ASPR Board of Directors.
"In fact, the report shows that the cost of recruitment is going up, [which will make it] it harder for rural healthcare organizations to compete. A clear correlation exists between the facilities' population size and acceptance rates, with offers from organizations in larger populations much more likely to be accepted than those in smaller populations." | <urn:uuid:ef4081d7-5458-4ac1-9a7c-efc212fbfc26> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailyyonder.com/thursday-roundup-neighbors/2012/10/11/4553 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970894 | 1,246 | 1.523438 | 2 |
But for more than a decade following Klondike, Berton's name was represented with books drawn from his enterprising Star column and his interview programs and with such polemics as The Comfortable Pew (1965) and The Smug Minority (1968), which attacked the Anglican Church and the business-political axis, respectively. It was not until the 1970s that he attempted to pick up the serious thread of Klondike and resume work as a popular historian. His subject was the building of the CPR, as treated in The National Dream (1970) and The Last Spike the following year. The subject was well suited to Berton's strengths: patriotic verve, the marshalling of colourful detail and, above all, a driving narrative.
The Dionne Years (1977) carried him nearer social history and a smaller canvas. In turning to the WAR OF 1812 in The Invasion of Canada (1980) and Flames Across the Border (1981) Berton again dealt with events large enough to contain his heroic vision of what the past should be, and the smell of gunpowder quickened his pace without leading to narrative excesses. Other historical works have included My Country (1976) and The Wild Frontier (1978), collected sketches of characters and events. Hollywood's Canada (1975) examines the way Hollywood films misrepresent Canada. Drifting Home (1973) is an unexpected slice of autobiography in the form of an account of a northern rafting trip.
Berton returned to the writing of popular history, with The Promised Land (1984), a history of the settling of the Canadian West, and his hugely successful Vimy (1986), an examination of the WWI battle in which the Canadian Corps took VIMY RIDGE in April 1917. In Starting Out (1987), he picked up the autobiographical thread again with a memoir that ends in 1947. Winter (1994), while not overtly historical, continues one of Berton's overriding themes, that which makes us Canadian. In glorifying the season Berton is recognizing the strength of character that allows Canada as a nation to overcome its harshness. In 2004 he published his 50th book, Pioneers of the North, a collection of biographical sketches on 5 of Canada's northern explorers, enigmatic characters that he felt wrote themselves into the landscape of the North. Berton received 3 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARDS, the STEPHEN LEACOCK MEDAL FOR HUMOUR, the Canadian Booksellers Award and numerous honorary degrees and was a companion of the ORDER OF CANADA.
Links to Other Sites
The History of Canadian Broadcasting
This site is dedicated to the visionary pioneers who created Canada’s broadcasting industry. Features profiles of members of the CAB Hall of Fame and much more. From the Canadian Communications Foundation.
Pierre Berton: Canadian
The CBC’s In Depth feature about celebrated Canadian literary legend Pierre Berton. Watch the video clips for some vintage Berton observations about Canadian culture.
Pierre Berton Award
Celebrating those who bring the past to life. The award honours those who have dedicated their lives and careers to reminding us of our identity, our successes and our failures so that our future continues to grow strong. From Canada's National History Society.
A revealing news article about the private life of legendary Canadian author Pierre Berton. From the canada.com website.
Pierre Berton: A Biography
A synopsis of the first ever biography of Pierre Berton, one of Canada’s best-known and most colourful personalities. Written by award-winning author Brian McKillop. From McClelland & Stewart Limited.
Pierre Berton fonds
An online guide to the Pierre Berton fonds at McMaster University.
City of Gold
View a classic short film featuring archival images depicting Dawson City at the height of the Klondike gold rush. Narrated by writer Pierre Berton. From the National Film Board of Canada. | <urn:uuid:a5dedd62-e153-4111-bfa3-4b8abe069159> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/pierre-berton | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935712 | 805 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Daniel Henninger at The Wall Street Journal has an interesting take on why the Democrats see a demon under every bed. In an opinion piece that describes why race baiting, class warfare and predictions of right wing violence predominate Democratic rhetoric today Henninger points to some data in a recent Pew Research Center report:
There was always something eerie about the way the Democrats said their health-care legislation was what the American people had waited “70 years” for. Invoking the ghosts of 1939 was kind of creepy. Then when the moment in history finally arrived, history got no votes from the other party. Whatever the politics, there was something ominous about all this. One felt something else was going on.
A Pew Research Center report just out, the one that says trust in government is at an “historic low” of only 22%, looks like the something else.
Dig past the headline of the Pew study and one discovers why Bill Clinton is insinuating that “demonizing” government could cause another Oklahoma City bombing. If these numbers are at all close to reality, something one can hardly doubt just now, the American people have issued a no-confidence vote in government, at both the national and state level. To the extent one believes in the “consent of the governed,” consent is being eroded.
This report isn’t bad news for the Democrats. It’s Armageddon.
The survey compares views sampled in 1997 with now. The “now” is the Democrats’ problem.
The survey took place this mid-March. After one year of the charismatic, ever-present Barack Obama, after passage of the party’s totemic health-care bill, after spending zillions on Keynesian pump-priming, the American people–well beyond the tea partiers–have the lowest opinion ever of national government.
The “consent of the governed” is a phrase that has appeared frequently not just in the articles on this blog but more so in the comments here, where the real pulse of an engaged electorate can be measured. Henninger believes, and I agree, that something more profound happened in the past year. The news filter that always existed between the electorate and the makers of the news has suddenly dissolved and voters are digesting real time news faster than the political class can respond and spin.
Something unique happened in the first Obama year, about the last thing the Democratic Party needed: The veil was ripped from the true cost of government. This is the ghastly nightmare Democrats have always needed to keep locked in a crypt.
Before the Internet, that was easy. Washington, California, New York, New Jersey–who knew what the pols were spending? The Democrats (and their Republican pilot fish) could get away with this. Not now. Email lists, 24/7 newspapers, blogs, TV and talk radio–the spending beast is running naked.
Of course, the Tea Parties understood this sea change as it was happening last spring. The MSM response (best characterized by Susan Roesgen ) never evolved and is predictably still stuck on stupid at about eighteen months behind the curve. I’m looking forward to their analysis of the 2010 midterms as they figure out what happened just in time for the Presidential primaries in 2012. Similarly, David Brooks is blaming the Democrat’s current dilemma and Obama’s hard left policies on the collision of “history” and current events. Allah does a good job shredding that complaint (follow the links in his piece to other good takedowns of Brooks). Brooks, along with the current administration, the old media organs and the Democratic Congress can’t see the forest for the trees. But their chorus of complaints appear to be an accurate indicator of one thing: when Democratic Leaders like Barrack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid play the race card so casually, attack Rush Limbaugh so easily and demonize the Right as violent so wantonly we can be certain they have lost the debate and the electorate. This is why Daniel Henninger is calling their predicament Armageddon. | <urn:uuid:7e1869f7-7b37-40c9-9be2-9ed55754c51e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wizbangblog.com/2010/04/23/well-that-explains-the-race-baiting-and-mcveigh-comparisons/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957746 | 842 | 1.578125 | 2 |
“This fundraiser attracts a different group of people from any of the other ones that we have,” said Patty Eagar, executive director for Advocates for Children. “We try to have each one of our fundraisers geared toward one demographic or another. Some of the people who are runners are not usually the people who play poker and they’re not the people who [attend] ‘Every Child’s a Star.’ So we like to have a nice variety of things to attract as many different people as we can because we have to raise a great deal of money in order to continue to offer all the services that we have for 2,600 kids a year.
“[The need] is now more than ever. We’ve actually been fuller than ever before in my recollection here at Flowering Branch [Children’s Shelter]. We almost always have a room or two open for an emergency and for the last two [to] three weeks, we have not had any empty space or when we have had empty space we filled up immediately. Unfortunately, the world is not doing a very good job of preventing child abuse. But we’re here to try to fight it with our programs that we have in place.”
Last year, the tournament raised about $10,000 for Advocates for Children, which serves area youth each year through the Flowering Branch Children’s Shelter and other programs that assist in the awareness, prevention and treatment of child abuse.
Since about 55 percent of Advocates’ annual $1.6 million budget is raised by the local community, benefits like the Texas Hold ’em tournament are integral to the nonprofit's success.
On Saturday, registration for the tournament starts at 12:30 p.m., with dealing following at 1 p.m. The cost to participate is $100 per player, which covers playing chips, snacks, dinner, adult beverages, raffle entry and a goodie bag. Prizes range from cash rewards of $1,000 and $500 to an overnight stay at Barnsley Gardens Resort.
“It’s a smaller fundraiser for us,” said Kayleigh Ladshaw, development assistant for Advocates. “It is something different. A lot of our other fundraisers are a little more family-oriented. This one’s a little more adult. So we have drinks for everyone and we have a nice dinner planned. It’s a good time to sit down with your buddies and play a game of cards.
“We raised a little over $10,000 last year and our goal is, of course, to beat that. So anything above [$10,000] would be just wonderful. It goes toward all of our programs. So it’s not a particular program, but it’s just to keep all of our programs up and running and doing well so we can continue to serve over 2,600 kids every year.”
Even though registration will be available at the event, players are encouraged to sign up prior to the benefit at www.AdvoChild.org, 770-387-1143 or [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:5962e293-5437-4265-8a85-9087d751097d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.daily-tribune.com/view/full_story/20392638/article--White-C-Registration-under-way-for-Advocates--Texas-Hold--em-poker-tournament?instance=homesecondleft | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958054 | 665 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Worries about government, economy, prompt spike in non-hunting gun sales
By R.A. Monti and Paul Peirce
Published: Friday, November 23, 2012, 11:40 p.m.
Updated: Saturday, November 24, 2012
Gunshop owners report a spike in sales of handguns and semi-automatic firearms because customers are concerned that the re-election of President Obama will bring stricter gun laws and are nervous about the nation's economic fragility.
“There's enormous concern about what's going to happen and any kind of potential bans,” said Debbie Schultz, the owner of Schultz's Sportsmen's Stop in Kiski Township.
“It's been a real significant increase. It's handguns and black guns like AR-15s ... not weapons related to hunting, but personal security,” said Mark Boerio, owner of the Army & Navy store on Ligonier Street in Latrobe.
“It's not just Obama's re-election. People say they are concerned with the way the government is headed and where it's going to lead with issues like the rising debt,” Boerio said.
Schultz said she hasn't seen a big increase in sales since Obama was re-elected, but many of her customers speak of their fears.
“Listening to my customers, it's twofold,” she said. “Half of them are worried about a ban on semi-automatic weapons, large clips, and that sort of thing.
“The other half is worried about the direction of the country and want to be able to protect themselves if something would happen,” she said.
Tom Melago, owner of Chestnut Ridge Knife & Bow shop along Route 982 in Youngstown, has noticed the spike in business. He was selling weapons at a gun show at Pittsburgh Mills Mall in Frazier, Allegheny County, just after the election “and the place was really packed.”
“Most of the people said if Romney had won they wouldn't have shown up. But it's not only firearms; there's been an increase in survival gear such as MREs (meals ready to eat), backpacks, knives and the like,” Melago said.
The fear of stricter gun laws appears to have taken hold nationwide.
According to the FBI, 1.6 million background checks were done in October through its National Instant Criminal Background Check System. That's up from 1.3 million background checks in October of last year.
Requests for background checks are a good predictor of future gun sales, because federal law mandates a background check be performed before a person can purchase a handgun.
This isn't the first time President Obama has drawn concerns about gun rights. The FBI reported a 13 percent increase in background checks after his election in 2008.
The spike in firearm sales is reflected in carrying permits in Westmoreland County, which are on pace to surpass 2011 numbers by well over 2,000, Sheriff Jonathan Held said.
According to the state police annual firearms report for 2011, 8,087 license-to-carry permits were issued in Westmoreland.
“We've definitely noticed an increase in firearm-carrying permits. But it's been the whole year, not just the last month,” Held said. “We anticipated issuing 10,000 this year, and we've already surpassed that.”
Hard-core gun owners are always concerned about issues that could spark stiffer control laws.
Gun sales soared in July after a man used a high-powered rifle to shoot 58 people, killing 12, during a showing of the latest Batman movie in Aurora, Colo.
During his first presidential campaign, Obama said he supported renewal of the assault- rifle ban, but he has yet to introduce any new legislation, of any form, regarding guns.
But not everyone thinks the president is out to take the guns out of their owners' hands.
The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence, the country's largest pro-gun control group, gave Obama a grade of “F” in 2010 for his lack of gun-control legislation.
R.A. Monti is a freelance writer. Paul Peirce is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 724-850-2860 or [email protected].
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If the bans go thru the gov will confiscate those expensive guns any way. | <urn:uuid:7759ceec-7319-4d50-a450-bad8c28712f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://triblive.com/news/westmoreland/3011696-74/gun-background-obama-sales-increase-checks-election-guns-owner-spike | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966984 | 1,086 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Andy Coolquitt is a sculptor recognized for his ability to transform found objects, furniture and cultural artifacts by stripping them of their inherent function and meaning and re-presenting them under his own terms. For the Somebody Made
series, Coolquitt collaborates with the “persona” of the found or discarded objects with empathy for the creator and the realization that every detail had to be “just so” to consider it complete. With this understanding, he not only toys with the concept of the “readymade” (a term the artist feels is too dismissive of the maker), but attempts to collapse the perception of the unique object with that of the editioned work.The Somebody Made
series derives from Coolquitt’s fascination with the general need for functionality as he came upon each of the original works in alleyways and thrift shops. The final pieces in the series are clear derivatives of the original, hand-made objects but have been remade according to Coolquitt’s intervention and by the hand of an expert woodworker in a variety of luxurious hard woods. Where glue or nails once joined two slabs of wood, dovetails now prevail; where uneven edges once prevented straight lines, now the unevenness is embraced and enhanced with intention; what was once common pine or chipboard is now black walnut.
Each piece is available in black walnut, pecan, maple, or cherry and is limited to an edition of 50 (inclusive of all variations). All are signed and numbered by the artist. | <urn:uuid:3ac59b39-ccd6-45c4-b3a1-7b5814d3f80e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.artwareeditions.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=COOA01 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962849 | 319 | 1.570313 | 2 |
E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber came highly recommended from some fellow small business owners and I’m really glad I read it.
It’s an excellent book which explains how to set up and organize a business so that it is a business and not just a job.
What’s the difference you ask? A proper business is an entity that you run and can sell. A business that is just a job is one where you do all the work and the business can’t survive without you (and can’t be sold).
What is in the book
Gerber uses the example of an over-worked pie shop owner to introduce the idea that we all have a technician, manager and entrepreneur within us.
In order to run a business successfully, we have to let all of the three personalities have a say. In the case study of Sarah, the pie shop owner – she had made the common mistake of letting the technician run the show. She kept very busy baking pies and doing anything else that needed doing, but she wasn’t thinking about how to improve the business or how to hire employees or how to expand or how to set up the business so it could be sold.
Most of the book talks about different ideas and solutions for creating a business that doesn’t rely 100% on the owner doing all the work.
One of the most important themes is that the business is more important than the product. For example MacDonald’s sells hamburgers, but the success of that company is not because they have the best hamburgers – it’s because they have the best business process which they were able to market in the form of franchises.
Who should read this book
I think anyone who has a business or is thinking of starting one should read this book.
If you are serious about your business and hope that it will provide a full time income for you – this book is a must.
If you are just planning to do a bit of freelance dog walking on the side, the book won’t do as much for you, but I think it’s still worth a read.
What I liked
It’s very entertaining and easy to read. The author has decades of experience working with small business owners and knows what he is talking about. I really learned a lot.
What I didn’t like
His definition of a business is fairly rigid. Some people don’t want to create a business they can sell – they just want to make some money on the side in a flexible and fun manner.
He talks a lot about creating a franchise which is a way of thinking about your business so it can be sold. Some of his suggestions for documenting and measurement will apply to McJob employees, but can’t be applied as easily to a professional.
Great book, easy to read. Two thumbs up!
To order this book:
From the United States then please use this link for Amazon.com
Want to learn more about RESPs? Buy The Book:
The RESP Book: The Simple Guide to Registered Education Savings Plans
Everything you need to know about RESPs. | <urn:uuid:6d839368-7b31-4fba-95d9-67f4b2486ae5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.moneysmartsblog.com/starting-or-running-a-business-e-myth-revisited-book-review/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965288 | 655 | 1.75 | 2 |
There is certainly no shortage of books about the Deepwater Horizon disaster: at least eight by my count, and nine if you include the 300-page package of recommendations that the National Oil Spill Commission put out earlier this year (which you can buy on Amazon for about $40). Many of these books were published just in time for this week's first anniversary of the spill, and several of them managed to make it to my desk.
I'd like to say I read every last work of every one of them, but, well, they're all pretty long and I've both read and written quite a bit about the disaster. I wish I could say, "If you were going to read just one book on the oil spill, it should be X," but frankly each of these books offers pretty different takes on the same explosion and ensuing nightmare.
Antonia Juhasz's Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill surveys the overconfidence in safety and technology that led to the situation on the Deepwater Horizon and the scale of the disaster it unleashed. Juhasz, who directs the energy program at the environment and human rights group Global Exchange, talks to the families of the victims of the explosion, combs through accounts of the survivors, and pulls together many of the strings of the story of what really happened on April 20 in a way that's both engaging and informative.
As her 2008 book The Tyranny of Oil would suggest, Juhasz is certainly no big fan of the oil industry. And her criticism is pretty scathing, if not undue. While it has a lot of important information, hers is not the most compelling narrative; it could benefit from some more literary flow and story-telling. Some of her descriptions of people and places a bit clunky and strained. It's an engaging read overall though.
Noted conservationist and writer Carl Safina's offering on the Gulf disaster, A Sea in Flames , is a passionate and detailed account of both the explosion and the giant mess that unfolded over the ensuing months. He expends a good deal of effort explaining things like exactly how drilling works in vivid detail. Having spent a lot of time trying to understand this kind of thing myself, I can only imagine that for him, writing the book was also an exercise in trying to better understand what exactly happened.
Safina's book is best at the points where he does not remove himself from the story. It's most telling moments are when he expresses the frustration and sadness that many who lived through the spill must have been feeling. And one point he recalls trekking across beaches on June 8, which is World Ocean Day. "I'm having a bit of a hard time, emotionally speaking, with that," he writes. No kidding.
Also telling is Safina's exploration of what exactly went wrong in the administration's handling of the spill. It's a question that has bothered me greatly; the Obama administration has pledged to uphold science and has appointed a number of truly great scientists, yet some of the things that happened in the months following the spill were truly horrifying. Safina pays particular attention to Jane Lubchenco, the noted marine ecologist and current head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose handling of both the undersea plumes of oil and the report on where the oil went drew fair criticism. Safina has worked with Lubchenco closely in the past, so his take on the of the pressures the administration faced in dealing with the politics of the spill—the fact that they did not do a particularly good job of it in many regards—is quite interesting.
Safina's writing has many elements that seem more like something jotted in a notebook than thoughts fleshed out for a narrative. At times it's useful, but more often it gets a little grating. Also tiresome is his use of the initials "BP" to make points throughout the book, which gets stretched at times—Big Paycheck, Beyond Payable, Big Pressure, Breaking Point … you get the idea.
For more of an industry insider's take on what went wrong, I recommend Bob Cavnar's Disaster on the Horizon: High Stakes, High Risks, and the Story Behind the Deepwater Well Blowout . Cavnar, who blogs at the Daily Hurricane , spent more than 30 years in the oil and gas industry. His is the perspective of someone who understands the cultural and political elements of offshore drilling, but he also delivers the criticism it deserves. He is also able to maintain realism about both the problems of oil dependence and the logistical challenge of getting off petroleum any time soon.
Cavnar offers a thorough examination on the regulatory system that allowed this disaster to take place, and of the revolving door and close relationship between industry and the government that developed over the years. The portion of the book devoted to where we should go from here left me wanting a bit. Given that nothing has really changed in terms of policy and politics on the issue in the past year, A more detailed look at what should and can be changed would have added to the conversation.
A few other books out there on the topic that I haven't yet been able to check out: Fire on the Horizon: The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster , by Tom Shroder and John Konrad; In Too Deep: BP and the Drilling Race That Took it Down , by Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald; In Deep Water: The Anatomy of a Disaster, the Fate of the Gulf, and Ending Our Oil Addiction , by Peter Lehner and Bob Deans; Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America , by William Freudenburg and Robert Gramling; and Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit , by Loren C. Steffy. | <urn:uuid:553c8b72-2119-4db6-9724-26371e9a3ff3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.globalexchange.org/print/20359 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970116 | 1,209 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Here you will find advice on all aspects of the planning application process including:-
- How to comment on applications we've received
We also cover what to do if you don't agree with the decision we've made on an application in our Planning Appeals section, and what we can do if someone is doing something without planning permission in our Planning Enforcement section.
The Planning Management team deals with all these areas of work and can be contacted for further advice.
Planning Management does not control how a building or extension is constructed. There is a separate system of Building Regulations to deal with this. Our Building Consultancy team can help you with these regulations.
Use these links to get quick access to:
- Search for Applications and Appeals Online
- Weekly List of Planning Applications Received
- Advice on Planning Fees
- Planning Application Forms
- Planning Obligations and Section 106 Agreements
- Planning Committee
- Post Decision Leaflet
A number of links on our pages will take you to the Planning Portal, a national website which advises on various aspects of the planning process. You will need to use the Planning Portal to access application forms. More information is available in our How do I Apply? section.
Some of the links within these pages will take you to a PDF document. To view them you will need the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is available free of charge from their Website. For more information please visit our Guide to Attachments.
Last Updated - 5th April 2013 | <urn:uuid:522867e2-765e-4934-b18f-69d02e8e9d35> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=Planning-Management%2FPageLayout&cid=1223092741103&pagename=BCC%2FCommon%2FWrapper%2FWrapper | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935248 | 305 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Republican leaders like to talk big about supporting our troops, but sometimes actions speak much louder than words – especially when those actions are frankly horrific:
Republican Senators John McCain, Scott Brown, and Susan Collins all support an effort by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, to expand abortion access for military women who are raped. But despite bipartisan support in the Senate, Shaheen's proposal may not make it into the final version of the 2013 defense authorization bill—because House Republicans oppose it...
Under current law, if a State Department employee is raped, her government health insurance plan will pay for an abortion if she wants one. But if an Army medic serving in Afghanistan is raped and becomes pregnant, she can't use her military health plan to pay for an abortion. If she does decide to get an abortion, she will have to pay for it with her own money. And if she can't prove she was raped—which is difficult before an investigation is completed—she may have to look for services off base, which can be dangerous or impossible in many parts of the world. (source: Mother Jones)
This is beyond outrageous. And tragically, the problem is all too real. The military reported 471 rapes in 2011, and yet the true number might be much higher, given it’s estimated that only 13.5% of rapes and sexual assaults in the military are actually reported (source).
Send John Boehner and the Republican leadership a message: Tell them their actions are completely unacceptable.
Tell Boehner: "Stop Blocking Women's Health Care for Raped Soldiers" | <urn:uuid:6b969ada-9913-418c-bb4b-acd9c91063eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://leftaction.com/action/tell-boehner-stop-blocking-womens-health-care-raped-soldiers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965248 | 325 | 1.5625 | 2 |
In 1562, at the onset of the Huguenot War, a young noble woman is in love with a dashing soldier but is betrothed to his temperamental friend, the Prince of Montpensier. Retreating together to his forested estate and called once again into battle, the prince leaves his new wife in the charge of his elder, battle weary right hand man to educate and train her as a lady for the court of Catherine de Medici. "The Princess of Montpensier" is a sumptuous and passionate film from French director Bertrand Tavernier, and one of the most visually potent works from recent years. Adapting the 1622 novel by Madame de Lafayette, Tavernier and his co-screenwriters Jean Cosmos and Francois-Olivier Rousseau open up the material and make it relevant and completely engaging. The actiors are wonderful here. I really enjoyed Melanie Theirry as the titular character and especially Lambert Wilson, as the tutor who gradually develops feelings for her. I think some people will hear the title of this film or read its plot description and immediately be turned off to it. "The Princess of Montpensier" is superior historical entertainment and a splendid feast for the eye that defies all preconceptions one may have before seeing it. | <urn:uuid:39248420-8ce8-470b-ab7f-99e9b53e7811> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://filmreviewsnsuch.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-princess-of-montpensier.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968706 | 264 | 1.710938 | 2 |
It took a guy to do this? House Speaker-elect John Boehner orders a change to benefit just 71 members
The nearly six dozen female members of the incoming House of Representatives will have a new restroom just as close to the chamber's floor as their male colleagues. A sometimes significant comfort, given legislators' propensity to blather.
Ohio's Rep. John Boehner, who retakes the Speaker's gavel from Nancy Pelosi come the new Congress in January, is ordering up a myriad of changes symbolic and meaningful in the chamber to underline the transition to the leadership of a Republican majority this time.
His transition team under Rep. Greg Walden is still drawing up lists.
Out, for instance, go the frivolous House resolutions on somebody's birthday or some team's victory. And now we learn, in comes a brand-new restroom for the 71 female members of the House. And it'll be bipartisan too.
Until now female members have had to traipse much farther than male colleagues to find restroom facilities, even during these past four years of leadership under the country's first female speaker.
This is good news for everyone except one person. The House Parliamentarian's office adjacent to the legislative floor will disappear to make way for the new bathroom stalls.
-- Andrew Malcolm
Click here for Twitter alerts of each new Ticket item. Our Facebook Like page is over here. We're also available on Kindle now. Use the ReTweet buttons below to share this item with family and friends. | <urn:uuid:bb3f6f2d-94da-4f86-b808-797d820bb04e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/12/john-boehner-house-womens-restroom.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949235 | 302 | 1.570313 | 2 |
More National news
Firefighters battle record heat, smoke, terrain across N. Nevada
10:34 a.m. July 9, 2007
RENO, Nev. – Firefighters entered another day of triple digit temperatures, choking smoke and difficult terrain on Monday as they attempted to conquer lightning-sparked wildland fires that have blackened more than 240 square miles across northern Nevada.
The 20,500-acre Thomas fire burned into the back yards of a couple dozen homes in Winnemucca, about 170 miles east of Reno, but spared the houses. An electrical substation and a handful of outbuildings were destroyed.
About 1,500 evacuees were allowed to return home on Sunday.
Initial reports by officials that the 32-square-mile blaze had damaged an unknown number of homes proved untrue after crews were able to scour the area, fire information officer Pete Jankowski said Sunday evening.
The fire also shut down Interstate 80, delayed Union Pacific and Amtrak trains and killed livestock. No injuries were reported.
“It was pretty hairy for quite a while and people thought they would go back to nothing,” Humboldt County Undersheriff Curtiss Kull said. “It was a huge wall of flame coming at the homes. It's amazing that no homes were lost.”
Jamie Thompson, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, said a 10-mile-long fire line that had previously been installed around much of the town played a major role in keeping damage to a minimum.
The fire was 10 percent contained Sunday evening and no estimate was provided as far as when full containment would be reached.
Since Friday afternoon, about two dozen lightning-caused wildfires had blackened some 155,000 acres of rangeland across northern Nevada.
One Nevada fire had scorched about 90 square miles, or 58,000 acres, about 25 miles west of Winnemucca and was 20 percent contained Sunday night.
Another blaze near Jackpot along the Idaho line had blackened 92 square miles, or 59,000 acres, and was 15 percent contained.
In western Nevada, a 15,000-acre fire 10 miles south of Silver Springs was 25 percent contained. Full containment of the 23-square-mile fire was expected by Tuesday evening.
The fires near Winnemucca shut down the interstate off and on Saturday. It also delayed an eastbound Amtrak train by 9 1/2 hours and six Union Pacific trains for varying amounts of time.
“They shut down the line because we couldn't safely go through,” Amtrak spokesman Cliff Cole said. “There was power on the train and the passengers never deboarded the train. They gave them announcements of what was going on.”
Type 1 fire management teams on Sunday took over command of both the fires near Winnemucca and the Idaho line. | <urn:uuid:e7510ad5-0a20-4bbe-8eea-9418552a38b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://legacy.utsandiego.com/news/nation/20070709-1034-nv-nevadawildfires.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973353 | 601 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Google is not out of Viacom's legal woods yet. On Thursday, a U.S. appeals court revived the lawsuit against Google for the use of copyright videos on YouTube.
Reversing a ruling from June 2010, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that, in the words of Judge Jose Cabranes, "a reasonable jury could find that YouTube had actual knowledge or awareness of specific infringing activity on its Web site."
Not 'General Awareness'
Viacom, in conjunction with other media companies such as the English Premier League and several film studios and TV networks, had sued Google in 2007 over the posting of copyright material, including clips from such shows as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and South Park. The plaintiffs said that nearly 80,000 copyright video clips had been posted over a three-year period.
In the 2010 ruling, a U.S. District Court found that YouTube was not liable simply for having a "general awareness" that some protected videos could have been uploaded to its site, and that it did not need to monitor the postings for such violations.
One of the issues had been if the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act protected YouTube and similar companies from such broad-brush lawsuits. A safe harbor component of that law said that a company is not liable if it is not aware of infringement, although it must eliminate infringement if it becomes aware of the violation.
According to the Act, a company could not "induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement," and that meant no editing, review, or control of submitted material, because it would then have knowledge and become liable for infringements.
The appeals court said the lower court correctly interpreted the Digital Millennium Act as requiring knowledge of infringement, but it reinstated the lawsuit because a jury could reasonably find that YouTube had such knowledge. A key difference between the courts is that the appeals court disagreed with the district court's finding that knowledge meant "item-specific knowledge."
YouTube issued a statement that pitched Thursday's decision as a rejection of "Viacom's reading of the law."
The video site contended that, what began as "a wholesale attack on YouTube" by Viacom has now been whittled down to "a dispute over a tiny percentage of videos long ago removed" from the site. It added that "nothing in the decision impacts the way YouTube is operating," and that it would continue to be "a vibrant forum for free expression around the world."
Viacom also saw the appeals court's decision as helping its cause. It said in a statement that "this balanced decision provides a thoughtful way to distinguish legitimate service providers from those that build their businesses on infringement." The company added that the court "delivered a definitive, common sense message to YouTube," namely that "intentionally ignoring theft is not protected by the law."
Google and Viacom are now partnering on content projects, such as YouTube channels for some of Viacom's networks, like the Comedy Channel. Some industry observers are suggesting that Viacom may decide to drop the suit, although Google and other sites receiving posted material could now find themselves open to litigation from other parties, such as studios or newspapers.
Based on your interest in this article, here's something that may be of interest to you also:
Recommended Reading: Search & Destroy: Why You Can't Trust Google Inc.
Synopsis: This is the other side of the Google story. In Search & Destroy, Google expert Scott Cleland, shows that the world's most powerful company is not who it pretends to be.
Google pretends to be a harmless lamb, but chose a full-size model of a Tyrannosaurus Rex as its mascot. Beware the T-Rex in sheep's clothing. | <urn:uuid:dd467dac-2b2c-47e0-9c6c-2dd8a4e00967> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=01300170M41C | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967998 | 765 | 1.585938 | 2 |
A tough year to be a journalist
Journalism has become one of the most dangerous careers in the past few years as more media figures have been targeted, imprisoned and tortured by parties who felt threatened to be documented by journalists.
Violence and instability has spread more throughout the globe in 2012 as journalists preformed their obligations to cover the turmoil, especially in the Middle East region as revolutions continue to take place, resulting in the death of 70 journalists confirmed motive and 30 others still under investigation, with Syria leading as the highest casualties amongst all countries.
According to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) whose mission is to “defend journalists worldwide”, this year has ranked the third highest in ten years of targeted journalists who’ve been killed while covering news.
The deadliest country for journalists in 2012 is Syria, with 90 death toll count, followed by Somalia (12), and Pakistan (7).
The number of Syrian journalists killed inside the country defeated the number of killed foreigner journalists. Fatalities were on both sides of the Syrian conflict, opposition and supporters of the regime.
Haidar al-Sumudi, Syrian state TV cameraman, was the last targeted Syrian journalist to be killed by the time this report was published. Sumudi was shot and killed outside of his Damascus house in the neighborhood of Kafar Sousa as he was leaving to work Dec. 21. Summudi was amongst the ten government journalists who were assassinated during the Syrian conflict in 2012.
A former Syrian state TV broadcaster who asked to stay anonymous, forfeited his job earlier this year and escaped the hit list of targeted Syrian journalist told Al Arabiya English in an interview that he worked with Sumudi on numerous occasions and is distraught to lose his colleagues in this “wave of hatred.”
Naji Asaad, another targeted Syrian journalist, was an editor at the daily state-run newspaper Tishreen; he was snipped in his head outside his home in Damascus as he was leaving to work. Syrian opposition press had almost double the number amongst the lines of targeted journalists who were killed by the regime for leaking footages and information of the regime’s violence and brutality against civilians and participating in revealing the truth.
One of the most memorable and acclaimed international reporter, who died earlier this year while reporting on the regime’s execution of airstrikes and shelling, was Marie Colvin.
Colvin, who was on an assignment in Homs for Sunday Times, was amongst two other foreign journalists who were struck by Syrian forces during combat. The two other foreign journalists murdered were French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik and Japanese reporter Mika Yamamoto.
The Committee to Protect Journalists declared Syria to be one of the world’s deadliest places for journalists.
Coordinator of CPJ for the Middle East and North Africa Program, Sherif Mansour asked all sides of the Syrian conflict to abide to the the international law of protecting journalists while in combat.
“Journalists in Syria face a myriad of risks from multiple sources including targeted killings and the deadly crossfire of combat.” | <urn:uuid:a3ef242c-4107-498a-9cb7-583f909b511a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.albawaba.com/business/journalist-syria-458988 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981924 | 633 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Larry BirdBasketball Player
Born: 7 December 1956
Birthplace: West Baden, Indiana
Best known as: Leader of three Boston Celtics championship teams in the 1980s
Larry Bird rose from modest small-town origins in French Lick and West Baden, Indiana, to lead Indiana State University to the 1979 college basketball finals, then went on to a stellar professional career with the Boston Celtics (1979-1992). His five-year 1979 contract for $3.25 million made him, at the time, the highest-paid rookie in the history of sports. Ungainly and far from sleek, but a well-rounded shooter, rebounder, ball-handler and passer, Larry Bird was a three-time National Basketball Association Most Valuable Player, led three Celtics championship teams, and was a major figure in pro basketball's 1980s rise in popularity. His hard-fought playoff matchups against the Los Angeles Lakers' Magic Johnson remain NBA film classics. Since retiring as a player, Larry Bird has served in the Celtics' and the Indiana Pacers' front offices and was a successful coach of the Pacers for three seasons (1997-2000). His personal life made news in 1998 when his daughter, Corrie Bird, said in an Oprah Winfrey TV interview that she regretted their lack of relationship. Larry Bird was married to Janet Condra from 1975-76, and has been estranged from Condra and their daughter Corrie (born 14 August 1977) ever since. Larry Bird said in his 1989 autobiography, "I've never really known how to handle the situation."
Extra credit: Larry Bird unintentionally created his own nickname shortly after arriving in Boston, when the press learned he had offhandedly called himself "a hick from French Lick"... Larry Bird married Dinah Mattingly on 1 October 1989. They have a son, Connor, and a daughter, Mariah, both by adoption... Magic Johnson led the Michigan State University team that beat Bird's Indiana State team for the 1979 NCAA championship... Johnson wrote the foreword to Bird's 1989 autobiography (written with Bob Ryan), Drive: The Story of My Life.
Copyright © 1998-2013 by Who2?, LLC. All rights reserved.
More on Larry Bird from Infoplease:
Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:8b5b3a71-af88-4f22-9a1d-8721f2f4e6f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.infoplease.com/biography/var/larrybird.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970428 | 473 | 1.625 | 2 |
House Republicans were outmaneuvered by the Democratic leadership yesterday in the GOP's latest attempt to focus attention on ethical transgressions by Democratic congressmen.
The action came as the Democrats cancelled a vote on a measure to bring Congress under jurisdiction of independent counsels appointed by the courts.
"Suddenly, the day before it was supposed to go (to a vote) they yanked it," said an aide to the author of the measure, Rep. E. Clay Shaw, R-Fla.
Republicans said the cancelled vote was an indication that the House leadership doesn't want to tighten the rules governing investigations of alleged ethical improprieties.
Independent counsels currently have the option to investigate congressmen. Shaw's amendment to the bill to reauthorize the independent counsel law, however, would mandate that they do so in cases where conflicts of interest arise.
Republicans want an independent counsel to handle criminal investigations of congressmen and an independent commission to review ethical improprieties, now the job of the House ethics committee.
Shaw feels that "If you have an independent counsel it removes the question of whether the House ethics committee is tough enough or whether individual congressmen are being unfairly targeted by the justice department," said his spokeswoman, Helen Rojas.
One of the cases under review by the ethics committee involves allegations that Rep. Austin J. Murphy, D-Pa., improperly handled official funds, allowed another member to vote for him on the House floor and paid an employee for work that may not have been done.
Republicans have lined up more than a dozen instances of Democratic congressmen being involved in ethical improprieties that they say have been whitewashed by the ethics committee. The committee is chaired by a Democrat but includes an equal number of congressmen from both parties.
The Murphy case, which already has been given a preliminary review by the ethics committee, is not specifically cited in Shaw's amendment, but could be a case which would be investigated by an independent counsel, GOP sources confirmed. There are currently 16 Democrats that the Republicans contend are involved in ethical improprieties.
The most fervent critic of the process has been Rep. Robert S. Walker, R- Pa., who blasted the House Democratic leadership for pulling back on a commitment to bring up legislation enlarging the jurisdiction of the federal independent counsel to cover congressmen.
In an interview yesterday, Walker, from Lancaster County, said Democrats were "not about to risk having Congress live under same standards that we set for the executive branch."
House Democrats "don't want somebody who would come in from the outside and simply look at the facts rather than the politics," Walker said. "Therein lies the problem in people lining up for a special prosecutor: They're afraid that this guy wouldlook at some of these cases and actually investigate."
A similar effort to set up an independent, outside panel to review ethical problems involving House members failed by a four-to-one margin earlier this summer, in part because the effort was led by a conservative faction in the House. Walker is the chairman of that congressional group, the Conservative Opportunity Society.
This time, however, the less-strident Florida Republican, Shaw, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, was chosen to put forward the amendment that would bring Congress under the jurisdiction of the reauthorization of the independent counsel law.
GOP insiders said that Shaw was not given a reason for the change in scheduling by the Democrats. Under House procedures, the decision to bring a piece of legislation to the floor is the sole discretion of the House Speaker - in this case, Rep. Jim Wright, D-Tex., one of the members who has been cited for ethical improprieties.
Walker took the House floor on Tuesday to complain that the Democrats were engaged in yet another round of foul play.
"Those Members who are pulling the special prosecutor bill off the calendar are doing so for partisan reasons," Walker said. "Because only one party controls the calendar, and so I have to wonder why it is the House is afraid to face up to it."
Walker said that the inside "rumor" was that the measure was pulled to prohibit consideration of the Shaw amendment. He said the measure was giving "the majority heartburn."
"What ultimate hypocrisy is it for the members to continue to focus on the special prosecutor's looking at the people in the administration, but refuse that kind of coverage for the House."
Shaw contends that the measure cuts both ways, protecting members from partisan attacks from a Justice Department thatmight be run by an opposing party, while also eliminating the possibility of colleagues investigating themselves on Capitol Hill. | <urn:uuid:1e658958-5c51-4dfe-88e1-040bd9ad64c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.mcall.com/1987-10-01/news/2610021_1_ethics-committee-house-ethics-house-democrats | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975532 | 940 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Poll: Few think they can be millionaires
Even though most Americans are resistant to raising taxes, polls have consistently shown support for a millionaire's tax of the kind President Obama unveiled today.
Part of the explanation for that, the Wall Street Journal suggests, is that relatively few Americans now think that kind of wealth is within reach for them:
One reason President Obama’s “Buffett Rule” (applied to those making $1 million or more a year) may be politically popular is that most voters no longer see themselves reaching the $1 million mark – let alone $1 million a year.Continue Reading
According to a new poll from the Associated Press and CNBC, 79% of Americans say it’s unlikely they’ll have $1 million or more in assets over the next 10 years. Fully 61% said it is “extremely” or “very difficult” to become a millionaire in the U.S. today. ...
What’s even more surprising is that the U.S. no longer leads the world in its hopes for upward mobility. Australians are more optimistic, though only slightly: 72% of them said it’s unlikely they’ll become millionaires.
It wouldn't be the only way that the recession atmosphere has changed basic rules of U.S. politics.
Get reporter alerts | <urn:uuid:28fddb8c-5f73-4092-92c8-51624d77af75> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63850.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954276 | 278 | 1.796875 | 2 |
An enjoyable and inspiring music room at school or at home should ideally contain a selection of music books especially because the selection available is so inspiring. The Woodwind & Brasswind has provided music teachers with the best deals on music instructional tools and music classroom supplies since 1978. Check out our comprehensive selection of up-to-date teaching aids for music teachers including a wide variety of CDs, videos, CD-ROMS, and DVDs.
Schott is a publisher and distributor of children’s music educational material, specializing in designing curriculum. They have branches in 10 countries, manage two record labels and publish seven music-oriented magazines. Suffice it to say, they are all about music, specializing in performance and teaching literature, concert and opera editions, study scores, important critical editions, books on music, specialist magazines, sound carriers and multimedia products.
Penguin is one of America’s leading book publishers. Their children’s music book selection features dozens of titles ranging from collections of children’s classics to music-oriented storybooks. Known the world over for their quality paper, binding, typography and color reproduction, Penguin children’s music books are fun and easy, and provide children with clear direction for their musical and personal growth.
Alfred Publishing is a leading designer and publisher of instructional and artist sheet music collections. Alfred offers more than 45,000 titles across the spectrum of instruments, from band and orchestra to rock, jazz and blues instruments, both in instruction and in sheet music. Easy to use, logically presented, and using clear typography and layout, the Alfred publications are among the world’s most respected and popular method books and sheet music collections in the world. | <urn:uuid:ca65f9dc-8c37-4848-8321-4622768ab8bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wwbw.com/Learning-Materials-Classroom---Kids.wwbw | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930782 | 348 | 1.78125 | 2 |
James Cameron Hits the Bottom
James Cameron did it!
The Oscar-winning director of TITANIC and AVATAR, James Cameron resurfaced Monday after plunging to the deepest known point in the world's oceans in his one-man 12-tons 'Deepsea Challenge' submersible equipped with a lot of 3D stereoscopic cameras.
"@JimCameron has surfaced! Congrats to him on his historic solo dive to the ocean's deepest point," said a tweet from his DeepSea Challenge team. J.C. went down 10,99 meters (35,800 ft) and is only the third man to do that after Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard in 1960.
Watch the James Cameron dive video here under.
DeepSea Challenge Video
Hitting Bottom Never Felt so Good
The filmmaker reached Challenger Deep, which is part of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, near Guam, at 7:52 a.m. Monday (5:52 p.m. ET Sunday), said Ellen Stanley, a spokeswoman for the National Geographic Society that is working with Cameron on the project.
The descent took two hours and 36 minutes. "Just arrived at the ocean's deepest pt," he tweeted. "Hitting bottom never felt so good." Cameron then spent hours at the bottom of the trench collecting samples for research that will allow scientists around the world to learn about the habitat and life forms at that depth.Scientists hope that a fresh look at Challenger Deep will provide insight into many unfamiliar life forms in the depths of the ocean.
Source: CNN (another video included). | <urn:uuid:7351108a-e1da-412a-9b7f-8acb51c64e1c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-movies/avatar/2300-james-cameron-hits-the-bottom.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942977 | 328 | 1.835938 | 2 |
For most people, buying life insurance is typically very low on the priority list. It’s just not something we tend to think about day to day. Despite that, it is a very important financial planning tool that is essential for protecting your family and loved ones.
When it comes to buying life insurance, three basic questions seem to come up frequently:
- Do I really need life insurance?
- How much life insurance do I need?
- What kinds of insurance should I buy?
As much as these questions are very important to buying life insurance, there are some other factors to be aware of
Be wary when replacing your insurance
One of my financial advisor friends says when he does not want to talk to people on an airplane, he always make a point of telling the chatty person next to him he sells life insurance for a living. This is because the roots of negativity stem from the old stereotype of the insurance salesperson that wore a plaid suit and went door-to-door peddling life insurance policies.
As much as the insurance industry has changed, there are still some bad life insurance sales people around. Some people of these sales people encourage clients to replace existing life insurance policies simply to pad their wallets and close a deal rather than for the good of the client. Although there may be times where replacing a life insurance policy makes sense, be careful when cancelling an existing whole life or universal life policy. Make sure you get a second or third opinion before you trigger potential surrender charges and lose any preferred rates.
Be careful when selecting a no medical life insurance plans
No medical life insurance policies can be attractive if you have health issues or concerns of being uninsurable. Remember that these policies carry higher premiums and lower face amounts than traditional life insurance policies.
Typically there are two types of no medical life insurance plans:
- Simplified issue policies usually have no medical tests but with a questionnaire containing up to a dozen health questions
- Guaranteed issue policies have no medical tests and no health questions. Guaranteed issue plans have death benefits which are limited to a return of premium plus interest in the first two policy years.
Non-medical life insurance are designed for applicants with significant health issues.
Avoid accidental death insurance
Many Canadian life insurance companies heavily market accidental death insurance to unsuspecting consumers. I’ve seen so many people who think they have life insurance but really only have a low cost accidental death insurance policy. Accidental death policies are very profitable to insurance companies, because they have a very low claims rate. In fact, less than 3% of all life insurance claims are paid out because of death by accident.
Use a life insurance broker.
Many life insurance agents are still ‘captive agents’ which means they only insurance products from one company. Life insurance brokers will shop the market to many life insurance companies instead of just one company which increases the chance of buying better products at better rates.
Don’t get fooled by buying just the cheapest
When buying term insurance, it’s easy to believe that it makes sense to buy the cheapest policy. However, there are times where the cheapest now gets much more expensive later. Some insurance companies use low initial premiums as a type of loss leader to get the sale but then they make it up by jacking up the cost at renewal time.
Just like anything else, remember that it makes sense to do your homework and shop around before you buy any life insurance product.
This article was written in support of the Life Insurance Movement by Good Financial Cents | <urn:uuid:5708e890-45fb-44fb-a5e8-c1ea97263fcc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://balancejunkie.com/five-unconventional-life-insurance-tips/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958562 | 724 | 1.695313 | 2 |
By Robert Evans
GENEVA (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Laureate and anti-landmine campaigner Jody Williams called on the United States on Monday to join a worldwide pact banning the weapons and leave Russia and China among the few world powers who still reject it.
Williams, who in 1991 launched the grassroots drive which brought the Mine Ban Treaty into existence six years later, was speaking at a news conference before a week-long meeting of the 160 signatory countries to discuss how to improve the accord.
"Since (Barack) Obama has been re-elected as president, we are hoping that the United States will now put in writing what it is doing in practice," said Williams, noting that no U.S. landmines had been produced or deployed since the early 1990s.
"If it is doing it already, why not ratify the treaty?" asked Williams, a U.S. citizen who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work as head of the Geneva-based International Campaign to Band Landmines (ICBL).
This week's gathering at the United Nations European headquarters is formally a 15-year review of the pact which bans the production, deployment and export of landmines and provides for helping victims.
It obliges signatory states to destroy stock piles and clear mines on their territory, even if deployed by other countries during conflicts, and offers them financial support for this costly and often dangerous effort.
Since 122 states joined the accord when it was opened for signatures in 1997 in Ottawa, nearly 40 more have come in, including three over the past 12 years, taking the total to 160, or more than four fifths of U.N. members.
Poland is due to announce its ratification during the week-long meeting, a development that brings all members of the 27-nation European Union as well as the entire NATO alliance, apart from the United States, under the treaty umbrella.
When explaining past decisions to stay outside the pact, Washington has said it could not meet its national defense needs or security commitments to allies if it signed.
The Obama administration has indicated that it is reviewing its position and has sent an observer delegation to this week's meeting. U.S. officials say their country has already taken a strong lead in addressing humanitarian issues linked to mines.
They say the United States is the largest single contributor to funds for helping victims of the weapon, a fact confirmed by the ICBL, and has contributed over $2 billion in aid across 90 countries for the destruction of conventional weapons.
But there has been no sign from Russia or China that they may be reconsidering their stance. Both say they need the weapon to protect long land borders.
The ICBL says only India, Myanmar, Pakistan and South Korea -- all with sensitive frontiers -- are known to be actively producing mines, which were killing or injuring 12 people a day worldwide on average during 2011.
Last week the ICBL's annual Landmine Monitor said that this year only Syria had deployed the weapons, laying them along its borders with Lebanon and Turkey as it battles insurgents seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.
(Reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by Tom Pfeiffer) | <urn:uuid:b551f643-2f28-457c-8693-99a41f27dca9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wtaq.com/news/articles/2012/dec/03/nobel-laureate-urges-us-to-join-landmine-treaty/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972857 | 653 | 1.828125 | 2 |
The Helen Mirren of Forgotten Grapes
When you stop and think about it, both Chenin Blanc and Helen Mirren truly are cut from the same cloth. Both reached levels of popularity in the 1970’s – Chenin Blanc as a cheap and readily accessible white jug wine that served as the first furtive wine experience for a generation of young American men and women, and Helen Mirren as a young, nymphal dynamic (and usually naked) ingénue who served as first furtive sexual experience for a generation of young (particularly British) men. They both rose to fame right around the same time – the mid 1970’s – and both rises were sudden and explosive, a veritable “taking the world by storm:” Ms. Mirren from her Shakespearean theater roots to become the (often nude) queen of British art house cinema, and Chenin Blanc from just another grape grown in France’s Loire valley to the most popular grape in California and the best-selling white wine in the United States for most of the decade.
But as is wont to happen with such meteoric ascents, precipitous backslides occurred soon after. For Ms. Mirren, it was her inability to escape from the shadow of her overexposed roots and not being able to display her classically-trained acting chops to a wider world audience. Seriously, anyone remember Helen’s not-quite-blockbusters of the 1980’s Excalibur (playing King Arthur’s female nemesis Morgan le Fay), 2010 (playing a Russian – a no-no in the 80’s), White Nights (playing a Russian yet again), and The Mosquito Coast (not playing a Russian this time, but stuck in the film that, up until Regarding Henry came out, was considered the most forgettable Harrison Ford movie of all-time)? Not exactly the New Classics there.
For Chenin Blanc, it was the inability to escape from the shadow of its jug-wine roots (you know the brands: Charles Krug, Gallo, Inglenook) and the rise of a newer, fresher, more interesting grape named Chardonnay, which soon after its coronation at the 1976 Judgment of Paris had California wine makers swooning and forgetting about all other white grapes.
A dark period loomed long for both parties after these letdowns, with only a few intrepid souls taking notice of the terrific things both were doing during this time, namely, the handful of PBS viewers who happened to catch Ms. Mirren’s tremendous portrayal of DCI Jane Tennison on the BBC’s Prime Suspect (if you’ve never seen any of the series, move it to the top of your Netflix queue immediately!), and the few wine aficionados who kept track and noted with great interest the wonderful Chenin wines being produced in the Loire and in South Africa.
But like all great things, if you keep honing your skills and putting out exemplary work, people will soon re-discover you and take notice. Which is why both Chenin Blanc and Helen Mirren are experiencing comebacks today. Both are now award-winners. Both are demonstrating a vast range and diversity in their current work heretofore unknown in their previous canon: Ms. Mirren in films dramatic (The Queen), comedic (Calendar Girls), action-packed (National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets), horrific (Teaching Miss Tingle), suspenseful (State of Play), and sometimes a combination of all of the above (Gosford Park); Chenin Blanc in wines dry, sparkling, sweet, and even smooth and rich, as in brandies (yes, brandies can be made from Chenin Blanc). Both have achieved huge levels of notoriety both in their home countries and worldwide.
How do I pronounce Chenin Blanc
Chenin Blanc Looks Like:
Call me/on the line/Honey/Call me any anytime... Actually, the word “honey” in that Blondie lyric is especially prescient, since despite the many different forms of Chenin Blanc (dry white table wine, sparkling wine, sweet dessert wine, brandy...okay, maybe not brandy), almost all of these wines have a mellow blonde hue to them. The color won’t be a super bright yellow and will most likely fall somewhere in between a pale straw color and and a dull, slightly tarnished gold, but blonde is the color of a Chenin Blanc, a blonde that should be fairly clear (though in rare instances the wine can be a bit murky and opaque in the bottle and initially in the glass).
Chenin Blanc Smells Like:
You’d think that since Chenin Blancs tend to be bright, lively acidic wines that their noses would reflect this same structure, with lots of lemon and lime and other sharp citrus fruits, right? BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! Wrong, buster. Most Chenins have exceedingly complex noses, with a wide range of scents emanating from them. About the closest you may get to citrus is a sharp green apple scent that many Chenins seem to have, although this aroma can mellow into a slightly softer melon or honeydew aroma. Speaking of honey, you may get a whiff of sweetness and possibly flowers from the wine, as Chenins tend to be sweet-smelling and faintly perfumed to the nose. On top of that, you’ll smell herbs and grass (akin to a Sauvignon Blanc, which also thrives in the Loire valley), and an earthy, clay-like scent that one member of our squadron equated to Travertine tiles (she’s either super high-maintenance or watches way too much HGTV). As for the sweet Botrytisized version of Chenin, the one overriding scent you should get is apricots, but beyond that, there might be hundreds of scents in there. Sweet Chenins are known for their olfactory complexity. Our tasters picked up frozen peas, asparagus, and even banana ice cream...and that was just in one wine. So brush up on your scents before you dip into sweet Chenins.
Chenin Blanc Tastes Like:
Chenin Blancs may be the ultimate sweet-and-sour wine, as they tend to lead with sharp, crisp, acidic flavors primarily in the form of citrus fruits: pineapple, Meyer lemon, even something akin to watermelon rind. But those sour flavors are undercut with a delicate honeyed sweetness. You may get some spicy flavors of cinnamon and pepper on your tongue and you might also get a big mouthful of smoke, which is often the by-product of the wine aging in the charred lining of newer oak barrels, which some producers use to temper the acidity of the wine. This oaking can also lead to a creaminess in the mouth, as malolactic fermentation converts the more sour malic acids into softer, creamier lactic acids (the same acids you find in milk or sour cream and that build up in your leg muscles and start to burn when you sit against a wall with your knees bent at a 90-degree angle for a period of time. Go ahead and try it). This can also make the wine a little cloudy, particularly if this fermentation is still going on in the bottle.
● France's Loire Valley
● South Africa, where it is called "Steen"
● California, especially in Mendocino County and the Sierra Foothills
● Washington state
● New Zealand
● Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina, where the grape is known as "Pinot Blanco"
Cindy’s “Did Juneau?”:
Because of the cooler climate and unstable weather patterns in the Loire, it is one of the few wine regions in France where winemakers are allowed to use a process called chaptalization, in which sugar is added to the unfermented grape juice to increase the alcohol concentration after fermentation and give some heft to the wines. Interestingly, chaptalization does not increase the sweetness of a wine, since the added sugar is converted to alcohol during fermentation. What it does, however, is make thin, flabby wines fuller and gives them more body due to the presence of extra alcohol. Chaptalization is a controversial process, prohibited in Australia, Austria, California, Italy, and South Africa, but permitted in certain wine-growing regions of France, Germany, and the United States that have poor climate conditions similar to
Chenin Blanc is a terrific seafood wine because of its aromatic gusto, its sharp, clean acids, and the fact that it has good weight in the mouth that can stand up to the oiliness of fish. One really great pairing with Chenin Blanc is ceviche. Select some fresh fish of your choice, ‘cook’ it in lemon or lime juice, toss in some red onion, cilantro and avocados to mellow it all out and balance the citrus, and you’ll have an excellent pairing with a Chenin Blanc. Just be careful not to add any jalapenos or other peppers, because a dry Chenin won’t be able to stand up to anything too spicy.
(NOTE: All use of celebrity names and images on ForgottenGrapes.com is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Use of these names or images in no way implies any endorsement for either Chris Kern's Forgotten Grapes, ForgottenGrapes.com, or any of the individual wines for sale on this website. That is why we make you click the button to see the wines we sell - so we can avoid any messy lawsuits!) | <urn:uuid:76ed0e3f-6125-4567-ae6e-e3c5ce143f69> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forgottengrapes.com/chenin-blanc/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942265 | 2,031 | 1.554688 | 2 |
"Russia has once again showed her support to Belarus. That's all," political analyst Valery Karbalevich commented to UDF.BY about the results of the visit of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Minsk on August 14-15.
"Lavrov came to Minsk not because this visit was planned. Meetings under the Union State are held in Minsk from time to time. So I wouldn't make some large-scale conclusions from Lavrov's arrival," Karbalevich said.
Karbalevich: Foreign Relations are maintained with Belarus not by the foreign ministry of Russia, but it is the Russian government, in particular the prime minister and the deputy prime minister, who communicate with the presidential administration on the countries' bilateral relationship. Lavrov has a minor role here.
- But the visit of Sergey Lavrov in Minsk during the diplomatic war with the European Union looks like a support.
Karbalevich: The Russian government actively supports Belarus in all spheres including economy, political issues and foreign policy. This is the current trend of Russia's leadership. And Lavrov has shown this support once again.
Lavrov said that Russia would seek OSCE's recognition of the fothcoming parliamentary elections in Belarus. How realistic does this statement look for you?
Karbalevich: Russia will try to support Belarus in the elections and protect Belarus in all international organizations, it is beyond doubt. But I think that Russia's efforts will have a visible impact.
- And Lavrov's visit, will it affect the position of Minsk in the diplomatic war with Sweden and the European Union?
Karbalevich: Lavrov's visit gave Minsk a confidence in the correctness of actions in relation to the EU. But the conflict is frozen, because the EU is not going to take some actions before the end of October, before the parliamentary elections campaign in Belarus. There is nothing except a general stance of the Russian side. Lavrov once again testified on behalf of Russia that he supports Belarus. | <urn:uuid:d0272b2e-2aa6-4cb8-a113-f92179b27c9b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://udf.by/english/soc/64298-karbalevich-i-do-not-think-that-russias-efforts-will-result-in-a-visible-effect.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953954 | 407 | 1.609375 | 2 |
A Pennsylvania appeals court held Wednesday that the destination addresses — or nearby cross streets — linked with 911 time response reports must be released under state public records laws. The ruling inYork County v. Pennsylvania Office of Open Records overturns a lower court decision that held that the state Office of Open Records was wrong to order the addresses released.
Ted Czech, a reporter for the York Daily Record, requested the time response reports in 2009. The reports list: the time a 911 call is received; the time the dispatcher contacts the police or fire department; and the time authorities arrive. The reports also list the destination addresses for the call. The logs are intended to measure response times to 911 calls. York County denied Czech’s request for the addresses in the response logs.
York County argued that the addresses were not part of the state legislature’s intent when it made the time response records specifically subject to the state’s Right-to-Know Law in a 2008 amendment. The county also said the amendment lacked a clear definition for “time response log.”
The court examined the legislative history of the amendment and found that there was nothing to suggest that addresses were exempt, despite the lack of a definition of a “time response log” and a floor statement from a member of the legislature who expressed the desire for addresses to be exempt. The amendment that was passed did not exempt the addresses from the time response logs and “what the General Assembly did is more important than what any one member said,” the court held. | <urn:uuid:5e124aa3-aa38-4990-9557-61b24ddc745f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://theartofaccess.com/tag/pennsylvania-office-of-open-records/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960977 | 314 | 1.773438 | 2 |
By MARC MCDONALD
Years ago, conspiracy theories were usually only embraced by wacky people who were beyond the fringe. But after five years of George W. Bush in the White House, some conspiracies don't seem that wacky after all.
In a way, this reminds me of Conspiracy Theory, a 1997 film in which Mel Gibson portrayed Jerry Fletcher, a paranoid cab driver who is consumed with dark visions of shadowy CIA plots and black helicopters.
Although initially no one takes Fletcher seriously, as the film progresses, we learn that Gibson's character isn't really crazy after all. The wild conspiracies that he's constantly rambling on about turn out to be true.
I think a similar situation exists in the real world today. Even before the 9/11 attacks launched a thousand conspiracy theories, the Bush White House was already operating in the sort of shadowy nether world that's always been a hallmark of this administration. It's the sort of secrecy that's long fueled conspiracy theories.
Until recently, I was never that big a proponent of conspiracy theories. It seemed to me that the simplest explanation was always likely to be the truth and that a mundane explanation was more plausible than a complex conspiracy.
However, with Bush in the White House, I've come to the opposite conclusion over the past few years. These days, the most plausible explanation IS a conspiracy.
Take for example the event that put Bush in the White House in the first place: the highly disputed 2000 election. To this day, there is still a great deal that is unanswered about this election. A lot of people continue to believe that there was a GOP conspiracy to steal the vote. And the 2004 election was even more controversial and shrouded in mystery.
Although the mainstream media never took an in-depth look at the unanswered questions surrounding the 2004 election, a number of notable books have examined it, including Mark Crispin Miller's just-released Fooled Again. The book examines a number of factors in the election that will warm the heart of any conspiracy buff. These include voter disenfranchisement, mysterious computer glitches and exit poll discrepancies.
To me, the scariest part of the 2004 election isn't the possibility that the Bush people stole it. It's the fact that the media refuses to examine this possibility. After all, this indicates a conspiracy on a much more grand scale than simply a corrupt administration trying to steal votes.
Conventional wisdom has long been that conspiracies on a vast scale are generally implausible, simply because they're too complex to successfully pull off. However, in the aftermath of the Judith Miller/New York Times case, it's become clear that no conspiracy involving the media in this country is too far out to be implausible.
At one time, America's once-credible mainstream media itself made the idea of grand conspiracies implausible. But in the past few years, the U.S. media's credibility has crumbled. No serious person these days believes that a conspiracy is unlikely simply because it hasn't been reported by the mainstream U.S. media.
Because it holds few press conferences and operates in shadowy secrecy, the Bush White House has spawned many conspiracy theories in recent years. Given the corrupt nature of this administration, a lot of conspiracy theories are frighteningly plausible. During a previous era in our nation's history, we could have depended on the media to act as a watchdog. But those days are over. Indeed, Big Media's eerie silence itself seems to give credence to even some of the wildest conspiracy theories these days.
Rethinking Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US
25 minutes ago | <urn:uuid:bd1fd065-0949-4989-bb70-d75e28f30518> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.beggarscanbechoosers.com/2005_10_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96186 | 742 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Maggie Q of The CW's Nikita is turning up the heat on the fight against climate change. You may have seen
her signature fighting moves on Nikita,
but her greatest attack against one of the largest causes of environmental
destruction—the meat industry—is her plant-based diet. There are many proposed
solutions to fighting climate change, but the most efficient option is to go veg.
her ad for PETA, shot by iconic photographer Frank Ockenfels 3, Maggie asks people to
take responsibility and think about how our food choices impact the Earth,
animals, and our health.
Raising animals for food damages the environment. Whether it's the overuse of resources, fossil-fuel emissions, massive water and
air pollution, or soil erosion, the meat and dairy industry is wreaking havoc
on the Earth. In addition, the billions of animals raised on factory farms are forced to endure extremely stressful conditions, often crammed
into spaces barely bigger than their bodies. They are fed drugs to make them
grow at an unnatural rate before they are transported in all weather extremes
to slaughterhouses, where they will die slowly and painfully.
her exclusive interview, Maggie shares why she chose to go naked for this
message and why eating plant-based meals is the best way to combat
environmental devastation, protest cruelty to animals, preserve our health, and
take part in the fight against climate change, sign this pledge to go vegan and share this ad on Twitter!
Almost all of us grew up eating meat, wearing leather, and going to circuses and zoos. We never considered the impact of these actions on the animals involved. For whatever reason, you are now asking the question: Why should animals have rights? Read more. | <urn:uuid:78dff13f-99cb-488e-81c1-5c74020b3e1f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.peta.org/features/maggie-q-climate-change.aspx | 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 | 0.939499 | 366 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Wedding Doubts for Women Often Predict Divorce
They're probably right.
So says a new UCLA study, which concludes that such "pre-wedding uncertainty," more for women than men, predicts unhappy marriages and even divorce.
Justin Lavner, the lead author of the study and a UCLA doctoral candidate in psychology, says:
Newlywed wives who had doubts about getting married before their wedding were two and a half times more likely to divorce four years later than wives without these doubts. Among couples still married after four years, husbands and wives with doubts were significantly less satisfied with their marriage than those without doubts.
Yikes. Forever hold your peace, man. The study will appear in an upcoming edition of the Journal of Family Psychology.
According to a UCLA summary, Lavner's team looked at 232 married couples in L.A. for four years and found that, at the end of the time, the pairs were not always still happily married, if they were still married at all.
Nearly 1 in 5 women (19 percent) with pre-wedding doubts ended up divorced compared with fewer than 1 in 10 (8 percent) of those without such doubts, according to UCLA. For men, those divorce-rate numbers were 14 percent for the doubters, 9 percent for the non-doubters.
When both partners had doubts, divorce was the case for 1 in 5 couples, according to the research:
Doubt proved to be a decisive factor, regardless of how satisfied the spouses were with their relationships when interviewed, whether their parents were divorced, whether the couple lived together before the wedding and how difficult their engagement was.
Lavner argues that pre-wedding problems only "escalate:"
... When women have doubts before their wedding, these should not be lightly dismissed.
Ya heard, guys? No? That's why you're alone. | <urn:uuid:8bac3844-5ca7-4e68-9958-e5fb735eb21c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/09/marriage_doubts_wedding_doubts_ucla_study.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981934 | 391 | 1.515625 | 2 |
ATLANTA - The actual cost of constructing two reactors at Plant Vogtle will vary widely from original projections, but the Public Service Commission only needs to act if the variations exceed a secret percentage, a Georgia Power Co. executive testified Tuesday.
Jeffrey Burleson, director of resource policy and planning for the utility, told the commission the company doesn't see a need to submit revised cost projections every six months, as the commission staff recommends. As long as actual costs stay within the broad range of variation, annual updates of the projections are sufficient.
In some periods, the costs will be less than projected - as in the case with the first six months, and some periods will be higher, he said. Those periods of savings will cushion the upward swings and balance out.
"While it is not inconceivable, we think it is unlikely that there would be a cost overrun such that the project would no longer be economical," Burleson said.
The amount of variation necessary for a revision is a matter of trade secrecy which would be disclosed to the commission but not to the public during testimony.
[email protected], (404) 589-8424 | <urn:uuid:2cca93bd-4de9-4dbc-b448-12f8f6738bd7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jacksonville.com/news/georgia/2010-01-27/story/georgia_psc_told_dont_worry_about_vogtle | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947698 | 243 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Planning your summer vacation? Looking to share the great outdoors with your kids? In need of some backseat/airplane fun for the younger set while en route to your destination? National Geographic Kids Books has two terrific books that will make your family road trip fun, educational and easy to plan.
The Ultimate U.S. Road Trip Atlas contains maps, games, interesting facts and boredom busters (who can spot the wackiest road sign??) to make your next journey an adventure to remember. Every state is featured and includes a map of the state, 5 cool things to do there, fun facts about the state and the animals that live there and even quirky roadside attractions. And, in case this comes in handy, helpful traffic laws you won't believe (who knew you couldn't drive any skunks INTO Tennessee??).
If you're trying to decide which of our country's amazing national parks to visit, NG Kids, together with the National Park Trust, has created National Parks Guide U.S.A. Broken down into regions of the country, this handy guide has all you need to make your visit to these treasured parks an experience your family will never forget. PLUS, grab a copy of National Parks Guide U.S.A. and mark your calendar for May 19th -- National Kids to Parks Day. The National Park Trust and their mascot Buddy Bison wants everyone to have an American park experience and invites every family in America to visit a national, state or local park on this special day.
Not sure what were you would like to vacation with your kids this summer? National Geographic Kids has a couple of books you might want to check out. We received a copy of The Ultimate U.S. Road Trip Atlas and National Parks Guide USA to review and these have gotten DD excited about summer for sure. The National Parks Guide USA offers different activities for the kids to do at each national park and it even has check lists of fun thing for them too. Since we are actually in the process of planning on summer trip with my bff Jessica (for both of our families), this book has come in very handy to figure out what we would like to do with the kids. The US Road Trip Atlas, on the other hand, has maps, games, activities and interesting facts to keep the kids entertained. We are not planning on taking a road trip across the US, but I think would be great for families who are planning on doing that.
To buy the books we received to review, please visit the National Geographic online store.
Many thanks to National Geographic. The company has generously offered a copy of The Ultimate U.S. Road Trip Atlas, a copy of National Parks Guide U.S.A., a stuffed Buddy Bison and a Buddy Bison t-shirt as giveaway prizes to one of my lucky readers. This giveaway ends on May 22nd, 2012.
*You must follow Sugar Pop Ribbons through Google Friend Connect to be eligible to win this giveaway.
*You must also leave me a comment using the blogger comment form for this post to be eligible to win this giveaway.
Read the fine print:
* Lucky winner or winners will be selected through True Random Number Generator.
* If your profile page does not show your email address, please include your email address in your comment. For example: sugarpopribbons at yahoo dot com -- so that I may get in touch with you if you are selected as the giveaway winner.
* Each giveaway winner has 48 hours to respond to my email about getting the awesome giveaway prize to him/her. If the winner does not reply to my email within 48 hours, I will choose another winner using the True Random Number Generator.
* I do contact each winner via email. If anyone is curious about who the giveaway winner is for any of my giveaways, please go back to the original post of that giveaway. Once a winner is selected through random.org, I will post a screen shot of the number picked by random.org. You will be able to see which number has been selected and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you can cross check who the giveaway winner is.
*I received a free product (or products) for review purposes. I did not receive any form of compensation from the company. All opinions are my own and not influenced in anyway. My reviews are not always positive, but they are my personal and honest opinions. Other people's views and experiences with the product or products might be different from mine.
If you can not see the rafflecopter giveaway entry form, please click on "Read More" (see directly below) and the form should appear.
a Rafflecopter giveaway | <urn:uuid:d11b5d0d-545b-4b9b-a351-c4fe0276e052> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sugarpopribbons.blogspot.com/2012/05/take-road-trip-with-national-geographic.html?showComment=1337197080916 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95415 | 962 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Last week we shared the work of photographer Stefani Greenwood, a photographer whose look at nature and people nearly blurs the line between the two. From her work, we caught wind of a frequent collaborator of hers who is also a photographer but whose gaze is focused specifically on people and, like Greenwood’s work, has the ability to change her subjects: Gilda Davidian, a photographer who is able to ground any subject in reality through her portraits.
Now, we’ve seen a lot of portrait photographers in Los Angeles but always are hung up on them being too hyper-manicured or over stylized or just slightly off. What Gilda does is bring this realness to everyone, a commonness that extends to grandmothers and young women dressed in a nude bodysuit and men in various forms of undress and even fellow photographers. They seem incredibly authentic and down to earth, particularly because of how she is able to light and use light in her photos, the colors of her photos, and how she handles subjectivity.
And, for Gilda, subjectivity is where it’s at. In a project entitled Motherland, she explores the Armenian community in Pasadena, where she grew up. She captures young people and older people in and around their homes, places of worship, and relaxation in a way that seems so very natural: even if her subjects are posed, they seem like they are caught mid-thought or in a moment when they may have forgotten a camera was there. Her portraits do a similar job, making environment or lack thereof into co-stars of the photos. They aren’t in your face or attempting at edge but are basic, raw photos of people, which is something so respectable in an artform so entrenched by people trying too hard. | <urn:uuid:4c8baf85-9ac4-48d3-89c7-25cbb1577ca0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.laimyours.com/16203/gilda-davidians-normal-people/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979641 | 365 | 1.585938 | 2 |
TC TO JOHN STUART MILL; 6 June 1836; DOI: 10.1215/lt-18360606-TC-JSM-01; CL 8:352-353.
TC TO JOHN STUART MILL
Chelsea, Monday Morning [6 June 1836].
My Dear Mill,
You are very good: do not mind what I wrote to you; or fret yourself thinking that it is a “favour” to you, and not twice as much a favour to myself.1
The best is, I am pouring out all manner of watery stuff; and hope to have a kind of readable enough Article ready about the time specified, after all. Of what quantity I cannot say; but it promises to be very considerable. Wait then till we see! There are thirteen good days before Saturday come a week, and the west wind is blowing.— For the rest, I have got an enormous white hat, broader than any Quaker's in London; which is a great comfort; the Public happily not objecting much to my avoiding headaches in that way,—tho' it gives me the most Preadamite air, and is indeed ugly and ugly-making to a pitch. My wife has stipulated almost with tears that I shall never wear it “in her sight”; a condition which I observe.
When you write next, send me three old Newspapers, and special word how you are, and how your Father is.
I have heard nothing of my Brother since Tuesday morning when I saw him mount into the Hull Steamer.
A certain forlorn Italian woman, of whom Jane spoke to Mrs Taylor, fares thither I believe today. She is Beatrice,2 but not related to Dante's. Such a mazed waif and stray, blown hither without a word in her mouth or a plan in her head I have never in my life seen. Goethe's Pilgernde Thörinn, stept out of the Novel3 into Reality! May the good lady be able to do or devise something for her.
Shall I lend you Taylor's Statesman;4 a most sufficient solid Dutch Book, of the sort it could be of.
Ever faithfully Your's, / | <urn:uuid:83775590-7b27-46d2-be21-0df3a0677303> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/long/8/1/lt-18360606-TC-JSM-01 | 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 | 0.945226 | 462 | 1.5 | 2 |
The positives of living in the red
Find a balance between your cash flow and investment or see your strategy grind to a halt. Photo: James Davies
Let's face it: hundreds of thousands of investors are attracted to property because of the tax breaks. According to the Australian Taxation Office, more than 1.1 million people claim negative gearing deductions yearly and receive tax benefits to the tune of $5.5 billion.
Having a negatively geared property allows you to deduct an investment loss from your income, including your salary, but it shouldn't be seen as a panacea for a dud investment choice. There are smart ways to use negative gearing, yet there are also hidden traps that can catch out the unwary and those who don't research thoroughly.
If you borrow to buy a house or unit and the expenses are greater than the income, you are negatively gearing. The ATO gives you back a percentage of this loss, to the extent of your marginal tax rate (that is, if you pay tax at 37 per cent, you'll get back 37 per cent of the loss).
Fledgling investors often seek advice about whether they should use a negative gearing strategy. But negative gearing and positive gearing are not ''strategies''; they are terms that describe a cash position.
An investor's strategy needs to centre on the investment fundamentals, such as selecting the right property in the right area. How to fund it is a separate issue.
For most investors, though, the financial returns rely on long-term capital growth, so the total capital growth must cover the upfront cost of the property, all the holding costs and other fees, such as council rates and stamp duty.
Negative gearing gives you a tax break while you wait out the 10 or 20 years needed to achieve good capital growth.
It's vital at the onset that you find a balance between your cash flow and your investment.
You need to decide early whether you're comfortable paying a $30,000 or a $15,000 shortfall out of your personal cash flow each year.
Also, consider what will happen if you lose your job or your partner stops working.
The risks of negative gearing can be the difference between a good night's sleep and lots of tossing and turning.
The structure you use to hold a property affects tax, too. A property held in a family trust can't claim any negative gearing benefits because a trust isn't a tax-paying entity.
You can tap tax benefits by forming a hybrid discretionary trust, in which a family trust is established alongside a unit trust. But the most common and beneficial structure for investors is to use an individual title to hold property. It's here that the benefits of negative gearing are most prevalent, especially if you're paying the top marginal tax rate of 45 per cent.
Another trap to watch out for is using negative gearing for property held in a self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF).
Negative gearing is typically not suited to DIY super because the tax on income is 15 per cent or less.
In fact, the income tax paid on an SMSF can fall to nil, depending on the phase the fund is in. Capital gains tax is discounted by one-third then taxed at 15 per cent within the fund, which is another reason negative gearing should be avoided.
Negative gearing is often derided for inflating property prices. Critics regard the preferential tax treatment of investment property as middle-class welfare that should be scrapped.
Is this going to happen? Don't put any money on it. No government that wants to stay in office will change negative gearing.
The stark fact is that there are 1.1 million voters who provide five out of every six rental properties in Australia and they expect a tax break to do the job. | <urn:uuid:0bd290d1-e546-43fa-a441-6485ae0c13a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://canberratimes.domain.com.au/home-investor-centre/the-positives-of-living-in-the-red-20120413-1wx63.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948487 | 773 | 1.601563 | 2 |
By Gregory Michie
From the opening frames, it's evident that Half Nelson isn't going to be a conventional "urban teacher" film. It begins on the hardwood floor of a bare apartment, where Dan Dunne sits in his underwear, legs outstretched, a scraggly beard creeping down his neck, a dazed, spacey look in his eyes. An alarm clock buzzes insistently in the background. It's time for Dan to leave for school, but he's struggling to peel himself off his living room floor. Soon, we understand why: in addition to being a social studies teacher and the girls' basketball coach at a Brooklyn junior high school, he's a crack addict, a basehead.
Dan wants to be a good teacher, and even when he's coming unglued personally-which is often-he does his best to hold it together for his students. In his classroom he ditches the prescribed curriculum and asks his black and Latino kids to wrestle with tough questions. His methods are part Socratic seminar, part didactic ramble, but his lessons push students to think, to make connections, to see history as something that can be shaped by everyday people working together and taking action.
Yet we're never tempted to see Dan as the savior, the white hero-and not just because of his drug habit. While it's clear that he despises the forces that keep his students down ("the machine," he calls it), the filmmakers remind us that he's not an innocent. When he asks his kids during class one day to name the obstacles to their freedom, their answers come easily: "Prisons." "White [people]." "The school." Then Stacy chimes in from the back row: "Aren't you part of the machine then? You white. You part of the school."
As committed as Dan tries to be to his students, it's obvious that he's holding on by a thread. He succumbs to his addictions at night and is distracted and tired in class the next day. It seems inevitable that his two lives will collide, and one evening following a girls' basketball game, they do. One of his students, Drey, a player on the team, finds him cowering in a bathroom stall, soaked in sweat, crack pipe in hand. She glares at him, more hurt than surprised; he looks terrified. | <urn:uuid:8696af1d-8c42-4cff-8ecb-d267123e8561> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rethinkingschools.org/restrict.asp?path=archive/22_04/city224.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989789 | 488 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Obituary: Franklin Murphy
FRANKLIN MURPHY had the Midas touch: not the conventional gift of turning events or enterprises to material wealth, but the much richer, happier talent of turning humanity to undreamt-of gold - often, the two went together. Few people who came within the vast ambit of his influence - centred at the University of California at Los Angeles in the 1960s and at the Times Mirror newspaper group in Los Angeles thereafter, but spread through myriad academic and arts bodies in the United States - failed to benefit materially from it.
Murphy was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1916, the son and grandson of physicians. His mother was a concert pianist and one of his aunts a painter so that art, a well as medicine, was also an essential part of his life from the beginning. He went to the University of Kansas to study medicine, taking his degree in 1936. He then went to Germany on an exchange fellowship at the University of Gottingen. The collapse of academic freedom, faced with National Socialism, deeply distressed him, and he spent an unhappy winter. In the spring of 1937, he left Germany and crossed the Brenner Pass into Italy. The warmth, the buildings, the works of art and the landscape of northern Italy awoke a passion for the country in him that lasted the rest of his life.
He returned to the United States in 1937 and went to the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia to finish his medical studies, taking his MD in 1941. He continued there, doing research work on tropical medicine until he went into the army in 1944. In 1946, by now a decorated captain, he came home to Kansas, intending to become a practising physician. But he also became an instructor at the medical faculty at the University of Kansas at Laurence. The faculty was in some disorder, and the chancellor of the university set up a committee to report on it, choosing the young but obviously able Murphy as its chairman. That report, besides solving local problems, contained some novel proposals, notably that medical students should spend part of their time in direct service to the community. This had a revolutionary effect at a time when outlying districts were still without regular medical service; it was also an early example of Murphy's gift for solving two problems at once, in particular for making the needs of an institution serve those of a wider community.
In 1948 he became dean of the medical school. He was still only 32, and the next year he was named 'One of Ten Outstanding Young Men' by the US Junior Chamber of Commerce. Three years later, when the chancellorship of the university became vacant, Murphy was chosen. His reign at Kansas was happy but short. Only six years later he left to become Chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles. He improved the campus at UCLA beyond measure, planting it with beautiful and unusual trees. He added 40 new buildings and saw the student body grow from 20,000 to 30,000, raising the university to 'major scholarly distinction in world-wide terms', the goal he set himself. He weathered the storm of student unrest in 1967, refusing to compromise academic freedom while drawing students into the 'advising process'.
In 1968 he left UCLA to become chairman and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Times Mirror Group. He saw the company grow and expand into new fields, as publishing and the wider market of communications grew. It also became a base from which he could extend himself. In Los Angeles he was one of those who founded the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on its present site. He was also a trustee of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and chairman of its finance committee, and chairman of the Samuel Kress Foundation. He succeeded Paul Mellon as chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
Besides all this, Murphy was on countless boards, commissions and institutions, educational, medical and other, where his common sense, creative genius and unerring eye for the right person for the job were valued. Among those who owe their present position to him are his successor as chancellor of UCLA, Charles Young, the Head of the Getty Trust, Harold Williams, the directors of the Getty Museum and National Gallery, John Walsh and Earl Powell, and his successor at Times Mirror, Robert Erburu. He received honours and decorations at home and abroad among them no less than 17 honorary doctorates.
This catalogue of distinction, however, gives no idea of the vitality and individuality of his character. He was no faceless committeeman, no eminence grise. There was nothing grey about him. Life to him, with him, was always full of colour. His door was open to anyone with a new idea, a hopeful enterprise. He would listen, utter a few warm words, make a short telephone call, and - lo, the job was done. He was a wonderful talker, as well as a good listener and no one who heard him will forget the liveliness, the pungent phrases, of his conversation. He was not a big man, but he seemed to fill any room, with his expressive features and the warmth and magnetism of his personality.
Perhaps the association that gave him most pleasure in life was his trusteeship of the Ahmanson Foundation, in Los Angeles. Its vast wealth made possible all sorts of local projects - including the Japan America Community Centre, Plaza de la Raza, the Hispanic cultural centre, and most recently, the Fowler Museum of UCLA, where his prescient purchase, long ago, of Sir Henry Wellcome's anthropological collections finally came to fruition. But to him the most important of all was the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection, of books from the Aldine Press and other early Italian printers in the Research Library Special Collections Department of UCLA. It was the tangible part of that vision of Italy, first formed in his twenties, which grew during many return visits, with his wife Judith, whom he married in 1940, and their friends Charles and Carmela Speroni. All those of us who were lucky enough to help him in its creation will never forget the warmth, passion and energy that inspired him, and, through him, us. As it happens, we were gathered at Florence, at a conference to commemorate the Quincentenary of Aldus, and in honour of Franklin Murphy, on the day he died.
The Ahmanson-Murphy Collection will be a permanent memorial to him, a man of the Renaissance, if ever there was. Next to the library at UCLA is another, the Franklin D. Murphy Memorial Sculpture Garden. It was Murphy who saw the opportunity in the availability of a major collection of modern sculpture and an unused patch of the UCLA campus. With some landscaping he created an island of tranquillity. His own bust is there; it is not a very good likeness (how difficult to catch those mobile, vital features), but it and the gardens round will keep alive the memory of one who did more good to the university, the city of Los Angeles, and a wider community to whom he gave his own humane vision, than anyone else in his time.
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- 5 Vast methane 'plumes' seen in Arctic ocean as sea ice retreats | <urn:uuid:f9cf5ad4-419e-4be7-a964-3099af66971c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-franklin-murphy-1411943.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978542 | 1,755 | 1.820313 | 2 |
A long time ago
I started using computers to make many of my artworks. To me, computers
can help find a different way of expression and can enrich an artist,
as long as curiosity for any new media moves the artist to experiment,
understand, and finally master new techniques as well as the traditional
ones. They can help him produce what he wants to create.
Most of the 63 panel pieces were made directly on a Paint Box. I integrated
some 3D models, made with Strata signs, that were painted and drawn
on different media, and then digitized. The image resolution for each
piece ranges from 2000x2000 up to 4000x4000, depending on the material
I would use to print. For canvas or cotton, it is better to compute
the images at a lower resolution, for silk, at the highest.
A first printout test was done on papers of different weights and
textures, in order to get a better idea of the final work; then all
images were printed on the different, final fabric materials. Some
of the images were printed only once, on one type of fabric. Others
were printed on two or three different types of fabric, mainly cotton
and silk, to obtain different textures and reflections of light.
Finally, all the pieces were sewn together, to form a sort of quilt
or patchwork, and each one was finalized with oil painting and brushes.The
patchwork is hung on a bamboo stick.
Hardware:Quantel DeskTop Graphic Paint Box and Macintosh G4. Software:Quantel,
Strata 3D studio, Pixels 3D, Photoshop (just to write the images on
CMYK .eps format, not to retouch them), Quark Xpress.
Input of some elements: Agfa Arcus scanner. Output: Epson Stylus Color
3000, Iris Graphics .
Print media: silk, cotton, linen, canvas. Additional painting with
oil and brushes.Individual pieces mounted and sewn onto a light, very | <urn:uuid:a05ab38a-4363-40f7-b734-4afcbd427605> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/gallery/S02/onwall/boeri/1technicalstatement.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939538 | 426 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Tomorrow I’m giving a talk on “Enhancing Access to Researchers’ Papers: How Librarians and Use of Social Media Can Help” at a meeting of subject librarians at the University of Bath.
The talk is based on work which I’ve recently described on this blog including the post on How Researchers Can Use Inbound Linking Strategies to Enhance Access to Their Papers.
The talk will also address ideas described in a follow-up post on Profiling Staff and Researcher Use of Cloud Services Across Russell Group Universities in which I suggested that, in addition, to encouraging researchers to make their researcher publications available on their institutional repository, they should also be providing metadata and links to the papers from popular third party services, such as LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar Citations, which are provided particularly for use by researchers and academic staff.
The talk will highlight work in progress in making use of SEO analysis talks, including Linkdiagnosis.com and Majesticseo.com, in order to investigate what the highest SEO-ranking sites which link to the University’ of Bath’s Opus repository are. The initial findings from Linkdiagnosis.com suggests that wikipedia.org, wordpress.com, academic.research.microsoft.com and msn.com are the web sites with the highest SEO rankings which have links to the Opus repository. These four web sites all have an SEO Domain Authority score of 100, where this score “is a 100 point predicative score of the domain’s ranking potential in the search engines“.
The talk then goes on to suggest, as explaining in a post on My Trusted Social Librarian, that in addition to encouraging researchers to use such service, librarians may also help to support researchers by being a social librarians and favouriting (or liking or +1ng) useful resources since such actions can be seen in services such as Google,
The slides are available on Slideshare and embedded below.
I would welcome feedback. | <urn:uuid:0c11d042-4217-478a-881d-f3e34f4fa553> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/ | 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 | 0.936315 | 426 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Today’s post pays homage to chorus-making. Now that term might sound funny to you, but in my theatre experience it has been a tried and true technique for stuffing a bunch of kids into a show in a manageable and productive way.
I grew up doing a lot of theatre. My dad is the artistic director for a company that runs two of the bigger theatres in Cincinnati and actually began with a teen summer theatre about thirty years ago. I spent every summer growing up in a seventy plus cast of teenagers doing everything from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers to West Side Story and Jesus Christ Superstar. This is where I learned the art of chorus-making. It’s very simple really. In breaking down a script, one must infer groups that would or could be present in a scene that may or may not be actually written into the script. I am not saying you should invent characters and lines, but take this example from my current play. Fezziwig’s Christmas party is always a big scene in any version of A Christmas Carol that you might happen to see. I could just trot all seventy students in the cast out on stage, stand them in various positions and let the leads play out the scene from there. But the art of chorus-making asks us for just a little bit more. By creating discrete choruses within a scene, I am able to give each student an authentic character and some stage business that is uniquely their own. In my production, Fezziwig’s party has a band playing up center, a crooner at the front, some girls to swoon and squeal over the singer, waiters, partygoers, and then of course those leads that must speak the dialogue written in the script. This blocking rehearsal will take a bit longer than if everyone was just an extra in the scene, but by chopping those seventy students down into choruses of five to ten in each category, I am able to engage them and empower them to really play the scene and not just be human scenery. It gives the audience a more exciting experience as well. When I feature each chorus member in one way or another, I am featuring somebody’s kid, somebody’s grandkid, sister, brother, or friend. This technique gives every one of my students the chance to act well their part and to feel the honor, the passion, and the pride that lies within each Thespian. | <urn:uuid:0394ed8b-0ad5-4591-a23d-d7d7f2513940> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.edta.org/blogs/first-year-teacher/2012/11/chorus-making | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964126 | 500 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Some people do the most unexpected things. Fifty-three year old Carlene Baldarrama had a happy marriage and a home.
She also had problems with the mortgage company, and 90 minutes before her home was to be auctioned in a foreclosure, she faxed the company a letter which stated she would be dead by the time the house was foreclosed on. Then she took her husband's rifle and killed herself.*
Ninety year old Addie Polk sought the same suicide solution when her home of 36 years was getting foreclosed on by shooting herself in the chest, and fortunately she lived and Fannie Mae let her keep her home.** Not so fortunate was the family of Karthik Rajaram who were shot dead by the family breadwinner in their home near Los Angeles before Mr. Rajaram killed himself, distraught from losing the family fortune in the stock market collapse.
Mitzi Pool, University of Central Oklahoma student, with a credit card debt of $2500 took care of her credit problems by hanging herself in 1997.
I'm in the middle of reading "Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit, and the Era of Predatory Lenders" by James D. Scurlock, and what brings up this matter is the reading of the suicide of Janne O'Donnell's son, Sean. A student of the University of Texas at Dallas, Sean dropped out of college and moved back home to work two minimum wage jobs to deal with a $12,000.00 debt on ten credit cards. He later hung himself.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the eleventh cause of death among folks here in the good ole U. S. of A. is suicide, and as this economic crisis continues there is a likelihood that we'll see more and more in the news stories of people in trouble resorting to desperate measures.
My own son took his life on 29 July 2008, and while some family members cast about seeking reasons and blame, I have no doubt in my mind that it was depression that killed him, and wonder if his money problems were the big factor. When my son got discharged from the U.S. Army in May 2005, he was already carrying a substantial debt.
Jesse had gotten a brand new Ford Ranger with every bell and whistle imaginable when he was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and owed several thousands of dollars on it with Ford Credit. He had a military credit card with a few thousand in unpaid debt, and a credit account with a major electronic retailer. As an aviation chief coming out of military service, he had envisioned getting a civilian job of equal responsibility and management with a salary that would help him quickly pay off his debt, and help carry him through college along with his G.I. Bill.
That never happened. He lived with me for three years before moving to his father's home in Missouri, working several low-paying entry level jobs, and for reasons unknown, he wasn't able to get into Florida Gulf Coast University.
While he did pay off his two credit debts, he picked up a shiny new Visa card. He had gotten to the point to where he felt he could no longer afford his truck and turned it in to a dealership as a voluntary repossession.
During the weeks that followed he fought with Ford Credit trying to resolve the problem of the unpaid balance on the vehicle after it was sold at auction, but with no success. He resorted putting the outstanding balance on his Visa card.
Then his account, for reasons unknown, was frozen, and the bank jacked up his interest rates and payments even though he hadn't missed any and hadn't been late with a payment. How bad it got while during those few months he spent in Missouri, I don't know.
I had gotten news that he was starting to get his life together, but I have to wonder if his credit problems had followed him. It did appear that the bank kept themselves up to date for less than a month they sent me a letter demanding payment from me on the outstanding balance of his account.
I do know that while he was here his money and job problems were the major source of frustration, anxiety, and depression. Maybe credit didn't kill him, but it certainly was one stone in the wall that crushed him.
I say don't give the (insert your favorite derogatory cussword here) the satisfaction. Suicide isn't the answer when the money lenders and debt collectors come beating on your door.
What is the answer, I don't know. I can understand how some of those folks feel for I am in some serious money trouble myself. The desperation, the feeling of bleak hopelessness, and the sense of total helplessness, but I'm just another statistic in the credit storm surge that is drowning numerous individuals and families across the nation.
I got a Sears account and a Visa account that both went into universal default a few years back when an emergency had put me over the limit on another unrelated account. Since then I've accrued thousands of dollars of debt not because I've used the cards on anything, but because of jacked up interest rates and fees, and skyrocketing minimum payments.
Last Friday I got a summons, and I'm going to have to show my face in court so some lawyers working for the bank can rip to pieces every shred of dignity, honor, and integrity that I possess. I have no wages that they can take away, no possessions of any value that they can confiscate, but that won't matter.
One thing I find ironic about the situation is that I'm expected to obtain legal counsel and submit a statement in my defense, but both the filing fee and legal costs are beyond my means. If I had the resources to do those things, I wouldn't be in trouble in the first place.
What should matter for those concerned about fixing our economy is not bailing out financial institutions that had a reckless field day in mortgages and credit cards, but helping the people themselves, the consumers who are paying real price tags in foreclosures and homelessness. We need real bankruptcy reform for the consumers, and regulations against predatory lending practices.
The majority of folks getting crushed by the machine aren't irresponsible idiots on spending sprees, they're responsible, hard working people trying to make ends meet. Like the guy next door, that new freshman at the college, the waitress who takes your order, the teacher trying to inspire students to learn, the police officer directing traffic, or the senior citizen bagging your groceries and so on. These are the faces of debt.
There are things in life worth dying for but debt isn't one of them.
"It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if the did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
-- Henry Ford
*"The anguish of foreclosure" by Michael Levenson, dated 24 July 2008, The Boston Globe
**"Ohio shooting puts face on foreclosure crisis" by Thomas Sheeran, dated 12 October 2008, The Associated Press | <urn:uuid:14a6f595-0965-49b7-8564-c664b1917aa1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.naplesnews.com/blogs/observation_post/2008/oct/15/anothercreditentry/ | 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 | 0.98467 | 1,444 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Clinton is expected to detail what the State Department has done to implement 29 recommendations from the investigation by the review board in addition to a few of her own.
But officials note that she didn't wait for the review board report before appointing a State Department team to work on tightening security.
Joint teams of military special forces and diplomatic security threat analysts were sent to more than a dozen high-risk posts. A senior official was appointed to focus solely on high threat posts.
President Barack Obama ordered a review of security at all diplomatic outposts in the wake of the attack.
Despite the renewed focus on security, Clinton will stress that U.S. diplomats still need to operate in high threat environments.
"The reason that hasn't changed is that these places have a direct and vital national interest" to the United States, one official said.
Clinton also is likely to face questions about the storming of the natural gas facility last week in Algeria during which militants seized dozens of hostages. Three Americans lost their lives.
Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb is believed to have had a hand in the attack. Clinton also will likely face questions about the battle against extremists in neighboring Mali.
Republicans may raise the issue of Obama's suggestion that al-Qaida was on the run following the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
"Clearly Benghazi and now Algeria show that is not the case," one House staffer said. "I would expect questions asking what the U.S. is going to do now." | <urn:uuid:aa0d2d3d-db4b-4993-9588-68440423bfd8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wbaltv.com/news/national/Clinton-preps-for-tough-Benghazi-questions/-/9379440/18240094/-/item/3/-/mugy05/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97745 | 307 | 1.804688 | 2 |
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