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According to HSBC experts, Vietnam has been successful in reducing demand to control inflation, but this has also decreased economic growth more than expected.
No consumer demand
In the first quarter of this year, economic growth declined to only 4.1 percent against the same period last year, marking the lowest rise since March, 2009. The service sector experienced the sharpest decrease.
The slow growth of the economy reflects the tight credit supply. Businesses are facing various challenges and this was shown in the declining outstanding loan balance in 2011 and 2012. Difficult access to capital resources has forced thousands of businesses to dissolve or halt their operations, especially real estate and construction companies.
The growing gap between exports and imports is another sign of the decrease of domestic demand. Exports have been up 22.1 percent since the beginning of the year, while imports have risen only 4.4 percent.
As most of Vietnam’s imports are materials for production, the gap shows businesses’ careful consideration. In fact, imports of fertilizer, cotton, fiber, footwear material, steel, automobiles, petrol and gas have seen sharp declines compared to the same period last year.
With economic growth slowing down more than expected and inflation following a downward trend for months, HSBC predicts that the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) is likely to loosen monetary policies in the third quarter of this year.
The Government will also facilitate the economy’s credit growth through administrative tools and the implementation of preferential credit policies for the economy’s key sectors.
However, HSBC forecast that Vietnam’s economic growth in 2012 will reach only 5.1 percent, much lower than the 5.9 percent of 2011, despite loose monetary policy and faster growth in the remaining months of 2012.
Scenario for the Vietnamese currency
Although there have been more positive signs for the stabilisation of the Vietnam dong , such as the decreasing trade deficit and the surging FDI inflow in the past six months, HSBC experts maintain their cautious view on the stabilization the currency, as they are concerned that the monetary policy may become too loose if inflation bounced back at the end of 2012.
If inflation keeps decreasing, the Vietnam dong will be stable, they predict.
They also said the SBV’s decision to cut deposit interest rates in March and April and the downward trend of inflation are positive signs for the currency, which has long been in a vicious circle of devaluation and inflation.
Although Vietnam managed to curb inflation, experts warned of the price pressure which is likely to return to Asian countries in the second half of the year.
If the SBV’s monetary policies fail to keep pace with the market, there will be a negative impact on the Vietnam dong by the end of 2012, they said. | <urn:uuid:76b34711-9a9f-45d8-81e1-4ffc4d8f4ce8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.baomoi.com/Info/Declining-demand-slows-down-economic-growth/12/263859.epi | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950995 | 566 | 1.773438 | 2 |
"A father complained about tainted milk powder after his 13-year-old daughter developed kidney stones after drinking the powdered milk in May. The Department of Health of Gansu Province received a hospital's report of 16 infants suffering from kidney stones after drinking the same formula in July.
However, the scandal was covered up until September. A total of 12,892 infants across China have been hospitalized with the effects of tainted milk powder as of Sunday morning, and at least three babies have died, according to the Ministry of Health.
"In some areas and departments, there is a culture among government officials that everybody struggles for more power and shuns responsibility. This neglect of the interests of the people is totally unacceptable in the current reform of the administrative system, which aims to build a service-oriented government," said Wang Shiquan, a doctor of the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong.
China's top quality control official, Li Changjiang, resigned on Monday over the tainted milk scandal, becoming one of the highest-ranking officials punished after the acclaimed Olympics. "
It's absolutely unbelievable that babies die in this country because of the fuzzy food regulations and lack of proper checks. That said, at least responsible authority figures are held accountable and do step down, which is not a common thing at all in several other countries I won't specify here. Pity though they only take up responsibility once their lust for power leads to accidents so severe that people will have to find out about them. | <urn:uuid:7e119a77-88ef-424f-ab66-e6286fdfff00> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lunesu.com/index.php?/archives/51-Chinese-milk-killing-babies.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975591 | 302 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Syria violence forces thousands from country
BEIRUT – Om Jamal crossed into Lebanon from her home in the Syrian village of Ain Al-Tennour, where forces loyal to dictator Bashar Assad ransacked homes and terrorized residents.
Her village is part of the region of Reef Qusayr, where people of different faiths have lived together since antiquity until Assad's campaign to crush an uprising turned the region into a bloody battleground. Villagers refuse to surrender, fathers bury sons hurriedly every day and doctors struggle to save children sliced by shrapnel.
"There is a boy who is shell-shocked and hasn't moved, and babies have stopped nursing from their mothers," said Om Jamal, 39. "There's no way we can handle this anymore. We are going insane over it."
PHOTOS: Unrest in Syria
The violence has intensified in Syria in recent weeks, forcing thousands of people to the borders of Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Iraq.
Fighting in the capital of Damascus ebbed Tuesday but raged in the commercial hub of Aleppo, where attack helicopters rocketed apartment buildings shielding armed rebels and frightened residents.
Qusayr is among the latest areas to be engulfed by violence. It is southwest of Homs, which Assad's military has pounded with artillery for months.
Refugee camps outside Syria's border are growing. People search for relatives and friends to see who has made it out. "The Syrian government is firing about 20 to 30 mortars at my town every day," said Ahmed, a pharmacist from the city of Al Bab who feared using his full name. "I have two children aged 2 and 5. It's very difficult for them to hear the bombing each night. They can't sleep."
In the past week, the United Nations estimates, 18,000 people have fled Syria for Lebanon. In total, nearly 115,000 Syrians have registered as refugees with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees since Assad's offensive began in March 2011.
The true amount is probably higher since most refugees do not register, said Dana Sleiman, spokesperson for the agency in Lebanon.
People have streamed in all week from villages such as Ain Al-Tennour. Syrian state TV reported Tuesday that regime forces had destroyed "terrorist headquarters" in Ain Al-Tennour, referring to a base of the coalition of military defectors known as the Free Syrian Army.
In Wadi Khaled, a border region of Lebanon, people from Ain Al-Tennour said every woman and child in the village left. Their husbands, brothers and sons stayed behind to defend what is left of the village.
"I was helping my husband before, but those [thugs] will come in, and they don't spare women or children," said Om Mohamed, 35, who fled with her five children. "We're not afraid of their weapons. We're afraid of our honor, that we would be raped."
Ain Al-Tennour is among 40 or so villages that surround Qusayr. As the battle for the nearby city of Homs escalated at the end of 2011, virtually all trading stopped with Qusayr. Shelves emptied of food and families relied on handouts.
"Things got really bad last month," said Om Khaled, 39, who escaped with her four children. "We had several days without even bread. The Free Syrian Army sometimes gives us food, but they don't have much."
"There was a shelling in the barn at night when a child went to milk the cow," said Om Jamal. "The shell blew the cow to pieces. I ran outside and found the girl. She was standing there in shock, barely wounded; her skirt was burnt and covered with dust."
Abu Ahmed, 40, arrived in Lebanon a month ago with his six children after Assad's forces set fire to his house, he says. Since then, he has crossed back into Syria many times to help others escape.
Ahmed says the Lebanese help the refugees.
"There are good people there who are sympathizing with us," Ahmed said.
But even Lebanon is not safe. Syrian troops have attacked areas of Wadi Khaled as recently as early July.
"I never thought Bashar Assad would last this long," Om Mohamed said. "I thought he would step aside without doing what's he's doing to us. But he's a man who is not afraid of God."
Contributing: Bradley Secker in Reyhanli, Turkey | <urn:uuid:194219b8-3eb5-4497-a89e-a5aba2ba7490> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-07-24/syria-refugees-assad/56466606/1?csp=34news | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98287 | 920 | 1.726563 | 2 |
The Obama administration paid a PR firm nearly $500,000 in stimulus funds to run a barrage of ads on White House-friendly cable programs promoting its green job training program.
According to government records, the Labor Department paid the money in late 2009 to a company that negotiated a media buy on MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" and "The Rachel Maddow Show." The ad was set to run more than 100 times -- 14 times a week for two months.
It's unclear how many people might have gotten involved in the green job training program because of the ads. But in terms of direct economic impact, the official online entry on the contract listed zero jobs created as a result of the payment.
"On the surface, this doesn't pass the basic sniff test," Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told FoxNews.com.
Chaffetz, who said he's writing a letter to the Labor Department seeking more information about the contract, complained that the federal government already spends "way too much" on advertising as it is.
He said the targeting of these ads also raises questions about "political motivations."
The $495,000 contract was awarded to McNeely Pigott & Fox Public Relations.
The Labor Department defended the expense, suggesting in a brief statement Wednesday afternoon that the decisions on placement were largely made by the contractor.
"Job Corps has used media buys over the decades to inform potential participants and referral sources as well as employers about the Job Corps program. In this case, the Department of Labor relied on an outside contractor and media buying expert to perform research, conduct cost comparisons of media outlets, determine the most cost-effective way to reach the target audience, and create and place the ads," the department said.
Two department spokesmen also told The Washington Times that Larry King's former CNN show was considered for carrying the ad but was dropped because MSNBC was thought to be able to reach more viewers.
But Rick Manning, a spokesman with Americans for Limited Government who used to be chief of staff in the Labor Department's public affairs office in the George W. Bush administration, took issue with the department's explanation of the purchase. "The fact that they claim that they delegated this spending authority to a consultant without oversight is outrageous," he said.
The Maddow and Olbermann shows -- the latter of which is no longer on MSNBC -- have been two of the friendliest programs toward the administration on cable TV. Maddow herself cut an MSNBC ad last year touting government investment in infrastructure -- an Obama priority -- as she stood in front of the Hoover Dam and called on the country to "figure out whether or not we are still a country that can think this big."
The official "award summary" on the Labor Department contract explained that the ads were meant for "raising awareness among employers and influencers" about the green job training program and to move a "target audience" to contact the Job Corps Call Center to ask about enrolling.
The summary cited "existing and new training initiatives in high-growth and environmentally friendly career areas."
According to the Labor Department, the Job Corps committed more than $9 million in stimulus funds toward growing its training program and brought in more than 60,000 students to participate in the process.
The department reported that it was adding training programs "for an emerging green economy" -- by developing concentrations for such careers as weatherization technician, smart meter technician and other fields. | <urn:uuid:5a2e40fc-788b-47b7-a99e-2ab32faac101> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/22/labor-department-spent-500g-in-stimulus-funds-on-ads-during-olbermann-maddow/?intcmp=trending | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968579 | 714 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The UNU-GTP is operated at Orkustofnun, which has been an Associated Institution of the UNU since 1978. Orkustofnun is a government agency under the
Ministry of Industry and Commerce. Its main responsibilities have been to advise the Government of Iceland on energy issues and related topics, and (until 2003) to carry out energy research and
provide consulting services relating to energy development and utilization.
The UNU-GTP pays for the services of staff members at ISOR and Orkustofnun, in accordance with contracts. The UNU Fellows have full access to the research facilities and the multidisciplinary research environment of Orkustofnun and ISOR, which united, for over three decades, have been amongst the leading geothermal energy research institutions in the world.
The UNU-GTP also has a close cooperation with the University of Iceland (UI). Staff members of the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Engineering have
been amongst key lecturers and supervisors of the UNU Fellows in some subjects since the establishment of the UNU-GTP. A co-operation agreement was signed in 2000 between the UNU-GTP and the UI on
MSc studies in geothermal science and engineering.
The UNU-GTP has six full time staff members (employed by Orkustofnun), but lecturers and support staff are hired from ISOR, the UI, and other agencies/companies. Every year, about 50 staff members of these institutions render services to the UNU-GTP under contracts. This allows the flexibility required to provide highly specialized training in the nine fields of specialization offered.
The UNU-GTP is academically governed by a Studies Board, which is composed of experts (from ISOR, UI and RU) responsible for each of the specialized
courses. The UNU-GTP Director is the chairman of the Studies Board. | <urn:uuid:90881b95-fac8-4ac9-ade7-5f79352b50dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.unugtp.is/page/organization | 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 | 0.954296 | 404 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Though downtrodden world indexes point to deep disquiet among investors, valuations of individual stocks vary widely. Fishing the bottom for low-rated bargains is one way forward. Shareholders may be better served by forking out for higher class equities.
The world’s 200 largest quoted stocks trade at an average of 11.5 times expected forward year earnings, according to Thomson Reuters’ StarMine database. The average hides a broad range, even excluding outliers. BP the U.K. oil giant, trades on a multiple of 6. L’Oréal, the cosmetics company, sits at nearly 18 times earnings estimates looking 12 months forward.
Stocks priced below average are sure to attract the attention of bargain hunters – especially when the averages themselves are modest by historical standards. But Morgan Stanley research published on Oct. 17 supports the ageless wisdom that investors often get what they pay for, and that it is often worth paying premium prices for premium quality.
Often but not always. Morgan looks back to the Nifty Fifty stocks of the 1960s. The companies were supposed to offer high growth and low risk, and enthusiasts argued that the companies – Procter & Gamble, IBM and Polaroid were on the list – were all but certain to grow enough to justify any valuation.
For a while, it all worked out well. From 1964 to 1972, the Nifty Fifty companies produced better earnings growth than U.S. peers and their share prices outperformed the S&P index by 15 per cent a year. But enthusiasm became excess. The Nifty Fifty price-earnings ratio topped 40 at the height of the bull market that preceded the stock market rout of 1973-74. In the later 1970s, Nifty Fifty shares underperformed.
The current market looks more like 1964 than 1972. Of the 200 largest quoted companies around the world, a top-notch group of 50 are on course to deliver an average 20-per-cent increase in earnings in the next 12 months. These shares trade on a forward P/E ratio – calculated by StarMine – of 13. Even if the analysts’ estimates are too optimistic, there appears to be good value in this new generation Nifty Fifty. | <urn:uuid:564ffbad-12a9-4523-bae7-6e55cc8e86dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/rob-insight/investing-like-its-1964/article4199606/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952342 | 457 | 1.757813 | 2 |
London, September, 1907
It will add greatly to the interest of this work if I briefly describe the circumstances to which, under God, it owes its origin. Nothing will so clearly show its aim and object, or so well explain its one great design as embodied in its title: How to Enjoy the Bible.
In the autumn of 1905 I found myself in one of the most important of the European Capitals. I had preached in the morning in the Embassy Chapel, and at the close of the service, my friend, His Britannic Majesty’s Chaplain, expressed his deep regret at the absence of two members of his congregation, whose disappointment, be said, would be very great when they discovered they were away on the very Sunday that I was there.
As it was a matter which I could not possibly alter I was compelled, perforce, to dismiss it from my mind with much regret, and returned to my hotel.
In the afternoon a visiting card was brought to my room, announcing a gentleman holding a high Government position.
In explaining the object of his visit be began by saying that be had been brought up as a Roman Catholic; and that, a few years ago, there came into the office of his department a copy of The Illustrated London News. As he was learning English at the time, he was naturally interested in reading it. The number contained an account of the funeral of the late Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the illustrations of which attracted his attention. The letterpress made some reference to Mr. Spurgeon’s sermons and the world-wide fame which they had obtained. This led him to procure some copies of the sermons, and these, by God’s grace and blessing, were used for his conversion.
He was at the time thinking of marriage, and felt the importance now of finding a Christian lady for his wife. At the same time he began to attend my friend’s English Services, and before long he found an English lady, residing at that time in ---- , and in due course the engagement ended in marriage.
The lady, however, was, she told him, an “Anglican”; and saw no necessity for her future husband to make any formal recantation, but for private and public reasons advised him to make no change in his religion.
But grace had changed him so completely, that it was not a case, merely, of his holding the truth, but of the truth holding him: consequently he could not rest until lie had renounced not only his former Roman Catholic religion, but all religion that had anything to do with the flesh; for he had found his all in Christ, and was satisfied with the completeness which God had given to him in HIM.
After their marriage they began to read together the sermons which had proved, under God, so great a blessing to himself; and, before long, the same happy result took place in his wife’s case, and they rejoiced together in the Lord.
They soon however began to find that they had much to learn. Reading the sermons and the Word of God they felt that there were many subjects in the Bible which they found little of in the sermons. True, they found the same sound doctrines and useful teaching, and spiritual food; but, they found also the absence of other truths which they longed to know.
They spoke to my friend their minister, and told him of their trouble. He lent them my book on The Church Epistles. This book the began to study together, and as the husband told me, “we went over it, three times, word by word.” This they did to their great edification. “But,” he said, “we soon discovered that you did not tell us everything, and there were many things which you assumed that we knew; and these we naturally wished to learn more about. So, a few weeks ago, we resolved to take our holiday in London; find you it out; and talk over with you the things which filled our hearts.
“ In due course we went to London ; ascertained your address on enquiry at the office of The Christian, and made our call. We found, to our disappointment, that it you were here, in the very place from which we had set out to seek you.
“ So we returned here at once, and arrived only last it night, but were too tired to get from our suburb to the service this morning.”
Not till that moment did I discover that these were the same two persons to whom my friend the chaplain had referred when he spoke of his regret at their absence from the service that morning, and of the disappointment which he was sure they would experience.
“I have lost no time in searching you out (he said), it and am delighted to find you. You must come out to it us and see us in our home tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow (I replied) I am going to P-.”
“Oh, you cannot go,” he said; and in such a tone of voice and manner as made me really feel I could not.
I said, “I am not travelling alone, but my friend is standing near in conversation ; I will go and speak to him on the subject.”
We soon concluded that as our proposed journey was only for pleasure, it was clearly my duty to remain for a day, so we postponed our projected journey to another season. I returned to my new friend, and said we would gladly go out to him on the morrow.
At this he was very pleased; and spoke, now, freely, of the great desire of himself and his wife to know more of God’s Word.
“We want (he said) to study it together, and to be as independent as possible of the teachings and traditions of men. In fact,
“WE WANT TO ENJOY THE BIBLE.
“We want to read it, and study it, and understand it and enjoy it for ourselves!”
This, of course, sounded very sweetly in my ears; and it was arranged that he should come into the city, the next morning early, and fetch us out to his home in the suburbs.
He arrived soon after 8 o’clock, and by 9 o’clock we were sitting down together over the Word of God. There we sat till noon! In our preliminary conversation reference had been made to some work the lady had undertaken in the village. So we opened our Bibles at Matt, x. 5, 6, where I read the following words:
“Go not into the way of the Gentiles … but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
I did not know until a year afterwards that my friend naturally held the usual anti-Semite views of the governing party, or this would probably have been the last Scripture I should have quoted. But though, at the time, I little thought of what I was doing, God was over-ruling all to the accomplishment of His own purposes.
The lady, at once, very honestly exclaimed, “Oh, but I do go to the Gentiles.”
I replied, “But you see what this Scripture says.”
She said, “Is there not another passage which tells us to go into all the world?”
“Yes” (I replied); and, finding that passage, I asked, “What are we to do with the other?”
She confessed her perplexity and asked me to answer my own question.
I replied, “Both are the words of God, and both must be absolutely true. We cannot cut one passage out of the Bible and leave the other in. Both are equally true, and we may not use one truth to upset another truth.”
I proceeded to explain, alluding to the universally acknowledged fact that “circumstances alter cases.”
The circumstances connected with the former passage showed that the Lord was sending forth the twelve to proclaim the King, and the Kingdom at hand : while those of the latter showed that the Proclamation had been unheeded; the Kingdom rejected, and the King crucified. And I asked “Were not the circumstances so different in character and time as to fully account for the fact that the former command was no longer appropriate to the changed conditions?”
I pointed out that there was a precept which specially set forth our responsibility to the Bible as being “the Word of Truth” (2 Tim. ii. 15), and that was that it must be rightly divided. This command to rightly divide, being given us in connection with this special title “the Word of truth,” spoke to us, if we had ears to hear, and told us that unless we rightly divided the Word of Truth we should not only not get the truth; but, as God’s workmen we should indeed have need to be “ashamed.”
I showed that, if we would indeed enjoy the Bible it was absolutely necessary that we should rightly divide all that it contained, in connection with its subject-matter, as well as in connection with its times and dispensations.
In illustration of this important duty I pointed to such passages as Luke ix. 2, 3, compared with chap. xxii. 36, where the words “BUT NOW” gave the Lord’s own example; showing how He distinguished the difference between the two occasions.
I also referred to Rom. xi. and showed bow, by “rightly dividing” the subject-matter, the great difficulty was avoided of supposing that those who were assured in Rom. viii. 39 as to the impossibility of their separation from the love of God, could ever be addressed in chap. xi. 21, 22 in words of threatening and warning lest they “be cut off.” The key to the solution of the difficulty was in chap. xi. 13, where the Apostle distinctly states that he was addressing “Gentiles,” as such, and of course as distinct from the Jews, and, the Church of God:
“I SPEAK TO YOU GENTILES.”
I also illustrated the subject by a reference to Heb. vi. 4-6; and x. 26-30. But, as these and other passages are all dealt with at length in the following pages I need not do more now than refer my readers to them.
Our conversation continued (as I have said) till noon and, as it proceeded, my friends could hardly contain themselves for joy. As for myself I began to see in what form I should respond to my friends’ desire to “enjoy the Bible.”
On my journey home to England I thought much, and long, and often, of my pleasant intercourse with my new friends: and I was impressed by the thought that what they needed, thousands needed, and that the vast majority of Bible readers who were filled with the same deep desire to “enjoy the Bible” were beset by the same difficulties in attaining that desire.
Shortly after my return to England my thoughts began to take shape, and finally resolved themselves into what now appears in the “Table of Contents,” and which in the following September I had the great joy of going over with my new friends.
I visited them again in their home this September (1907), and bad the pleasure of reading over with them the proof of this “Preface,” so that it might faithfully record all that had so happily taken place.
This explanation of the origin of this work will show that no better title could be chosen, or would so well describe its object, and explain its end. My prayer is that, the same Spirit who inspired the words in the Scriptures of Truth, may also inspire them in the hearts of my readers and may cause each to say (with David), “I rejoice in Thy words as one that findeth great spoils” (Ps. cxix. 162): and to exclaim (with Jeremiah), “Thy words were found and I did eat them, and Thy Word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart” (Jer. xv. 16.)
It was this combination of the “WORD” and the “WORDS,” both here and in John xvii. 8, 17, that suggested the sub-title “The Word and the words; how to study them.”
Part I. deals with the “Word” as a whole. Part II. deals with the “words”; and, under twelve Canons, gives the important methods which must be observed and followed if we would understand, and enjoy them. A varying number of illustrations is given under each division; these are by no means exhaustive; and are intended only as a guide to further study.
This work should be gone carefully through, with Bible in band, in order to verify the statements put forward, and to enter on the margins of the Bible notes for future use.
This may be done individually; but, better still, in small classes meeting for the purpose, when each point could be made clearer and more profitable by mutual study and conversation.
With the hope that this course will be adopted by its many readers in many countries and climes, this work is at length sent forth.
My thanks are due to all those who, on hearing of its projection, volunteered their financial help to ensure its publication: and, above all, to “the God of all grace,” and “the spirit of wisdom and understanding” for bringing it to a happy issue. | <urn:uuid:78772175-02c1-4be7-b93a-aea30dac63da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bible.org/seriespage/preface-how-enjoy-your-bible | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987465 | 2,877 | 1.8125 | 2 |
According to recent research, one reason American women are getting fatter is because they spend less time on doing laundry, cooking and other household chores.
It Behoovers You
Did you vacuum today with one of those 20 lbs monsters your grandmother had? No? Then you cheated yourself out of, uh, exercise. That is pretty much what a recent study argues makes today’s American women fatter.
That and spending less time on household chores in general. According to the researchers, when they compared “time-use diaries” of women from 1965 and 2010, the typical stay-at-home woman today spends 13.3 hours per week on household chores and in 1965 it was 25.7 hours. Which they say results in an appreciable difference of 360 kcal less burned per day.
On the other hand, the women of the 60s spend about eight hours per week on watching television, today it’s seventeen (today of course including all those valuable and enriching moments spent on Facebook).
Is Saying This Sexist?
The cry “sexist” is already swelling up around the poor professor who led the study, no matter how much he in the New York Times stresses that it’s not a call for women to do more househould chores. Christa Desir, young adult author and self-declared feminist, is already frothing at the mouth, together with a number of other prolific women’s rights activists.
Uh, it does really sound sexist. At a first glance and if you have the attention span of an ADD sufferer and if logical reasoning isn’t really your forte.
Because, heah, ladies, there is actually little reason to doubt that we do have to spend way less time on household chores than our mothers and grandmothers. And who could argue that we don’t do what we do with superior hardware and it takes a lot less effort? There also is the inconvenient fact that many stay-at-home women didn’t exactly take women’s lib as a call to do more fitness, you know? And, finally, it’s not only the guys who do spreadsheets on a PC the entire day but still eat like they don a hard hat day after day to build a dam called Hoover (ten points for cheap pun).
I bet if you reintroduced the 20 lbs vacuum behemoths from 1965 and sold them as “fat loss miracle that cleans at the same time” you would get takers, too. But that not’s female, that’s human nature for you.
Picture courtesy of “Pete“. | <urn:uuid:384f6a3c-e09b-4b58-ba6c-bbbdb5d5751a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://evilcyber.com/losing-weight/lack-household-chores-women-fatter/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950307 | 553 | 1.695313 | 2 |
A federal court judge ruled Monday that hundreds of protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention were arrested without probable cause and that other New York Police Department tactics employed then were illegal.
The ruling opens the city up to potentially significant monetary damages and shines a spotlight on the NYPD's methods of handling large-scale, unpredictable protests.
The city said it was considering an appeal but declared a partial victory because the judge upheld the so-called no-summons policy—a special tactic adopted for the convention. That policy mandated that officers must arrest people for minor crimes and noncriminal violations that normally would result in only a summons or ticket.
The lawsuit stemmed from police action in general at the Republican convention, which drew hundreds of thousands of protesters to Manhattan to protest the Iraq War and the policies of former President George W. Bush. Specifically, the suit focused on Aug. 31, 2004, dubbed "The Day of Rage" by police because their intelligence indicated that some protest groups were determined to cause trouble in the city then.
On that day, a group of protesters staged an unpermitted War Resisters League march from the World Trade Center to Madison Square Garden.
The crowd only made it a few steps onto Fulton Street when a deputy police chief warned them to disperse, according to court records. By then they were surrounded by police with netting, according to court records. Within seconds the deputy chief ordered what turned out to be 226 arrests on charges related to blocking the sidewalk. The arrests were recorded by a film crew taping a documentary.
City attorneys argued that officers had "group probable cause" to make the arrests, meaning the crowd was acting as one. On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Sullivan in Manhattan rejected the city's theory and ruled the arrests on Fulton Street illegal.
"Based on the undisputed facts, and particularly the video of the Fulton Street march and arrests, the court finds that there was not even arguable probable cause to make those arrests," the judge ruled.
"An individual's participation in a law-breaking group may, in appropriate circumstances, be strong circumstantial evidence of that individual's own illegal conduct, but, no matter the circumstances, an arresting officer must believe that every individual arrested personally violated the law. Nothing short of such a finding can justify arrest," the judge's ruling said. "The Fourth Amendment does not recognize guilt by association."
"We're gratified that the judge rejected the city's claim that the NYPD has the discretion to engage in mass arrests when officers observe individual unlawful activity," said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit. "This ruling is a victory for the right to protest—a core democratic principle. It places an important check on the abusive policing tactics used to suppress protests during the 2004 RNC."
The city claimed victory on two issues. First, the judge upheld the "no-summons" policy, calling it the city's "answer to a threat derived from intelligence sources—namely, that demonstrators aimed to 'shut down the City of New York and the RNC.'"
Second, city attorneys said the judge ruled that fingerprinting those arrested under the "no summons" policy didn't violate the First and Fourth amendments of the Constitution, as some lawsuits charged.
"The Court upheld these policies under the most exacting judicial scrutiny possible, finding them constitutional and warranted in light of the threats the city faced during the RNC," said Peter Farrell, senior counsel at the city's Law Department.
But Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and lead counsel in the case, said the judge did find that police violated state law by arresting people charged with noncriminal violations. About 1,400 people were taken into custody and later fingerprinted after being charged only with a violation, including those arrested at the Fulton Street and Union Square protests.
And that may cost the city, Mr. Dunn said. In deciding damages, he said the court can consider the illegal arrests and fingerprinting as well as the detention time and conditions of the former bus depot that was used as a holding area for those falsely arrested during the RNC. He said the ruling leaves the city facing "significant" financial damages.
"With this ruling, the time has come for the city to put this controversy behind it, to settle the rest of the convention cases, and to make sure that mass arrests never happen again here," Mr. Dunn said.
The judge said he couldn't rule in favor of either the city, which sought to have another part of the lawsuit thrown out, or those claiming the mass arrest of about 400 near Union Square were illegal.
The judge said he couldn't determine based on what the city and lawyers for the arrested presented whether police made a sufficient effort to remove innocent bystanders from lawbreakers attempting to block the streets or if probable cause existed in every arrest. That case is still headed for trial.
Write to Sean Gardiner at [email protected] | <urn:uuid:11ddd617-d149-4813-99cd-617f1e8dc82d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444004704578031050540111858.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972088 | 1,018 | 1.578125 | 2 |
With funding from the Walmart Foundation, VolunteerMatch is making it easier for nonprofits to get the help they need.
Hunger exists all around you. As a volunteer, you can make an impact. Whether ensuring that children aren't hungry at school or providing the elderly with at least one hot meal a day, we invite you to join us.
There are 3,525 ways to fight hunger at 8,622 organizations. Find out what's happening in your area. Together we can end hunger one meal at a time.
Medium levels of food insecurity
High levels of food insecurity | <urn:uuid:bef744fe-74db-4a05-9da6-e84b0b685321> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.volunteermatch.org/fightinghunger | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937735 | 118 | 1.570313 | 2 |
As the point of this conversation is to develop different packages designed to take variable internet connectivity into a fixed maximum (the connections to Cogeco), I would also like to know how this happens.
For example, in Cogeco land around my house you have basic, standard, advanced and pro packages. If you hit the maximum throughput with your connections to cogeco, what happens?
Do all requests get prioritized equally and everyone slows down? Or do pro packages (because they pay more) get higher quality of service then an basic package? Or Vice Versa as to not slow down the masses for a few guys with 60Mbps connections that are saturating the network?
rocca Start.ca Premium join:2008-11-16 London, ON kudos:11
We try to avoid saturation, if it does happen then everyone has fair share at the pipes, however statistically speaking the people with faster speeds will still get more bits through than people with slower speeds. | <urn:uuid:2f13d0e6-d9e6-48be-90c0-c3af4d49ae66> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28055800- | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945507 | 199 | 1.789063 | 2 |
When Bridgette Wiefling M.D. started at the Anthony Jordan Health Center, common wisdom had it that the federally qualified health center was on life support and soon would be unplugged.
Such centers are an outgrowth of 1960s-era activism. In exchange for federal money, they agree to provide primary care to the poor. Patients are a mix of Medicaid recipients on welfare, elderly Medicare patients, recent immigrants and working poor with inadequate or no insurance.
In the best of circumstances, such centers are fragile, Wiefling says.
In a statute intended to guard against corruption, federally qualified facilities are not supposed to do better than break even financially. Still, they are required to treat any patient meeting income guidelines whether they can pay or not.
Medicaid-which many private physicians avoid, complaining it fails to cover costs-is Jordan's biggest payer, accounting for 70 percent of revenues. Half of the center's Medicaid reimbursements come from Medicaid HMOs, which pay better rates than straight Medicaid to private and system-affiliated practices but less to federally qualified facilities. Medicare, which pays better than Medicaid, accounts for 10 percent of Jordan's revenues.
Twenty percent of the facility's patient population has no insurance. Uninsured patients are supposed to pay on a sliding scale, Wiefling says, which for some might mean token payments and for others no payment. Management of federally qualified centers by law is overseen by a board, more than half of whose members must be drawn from the center's patient population.
When Wiefling started at Jordan as a staff physician in 2005, the health center was unsound financially and losing staff and patients. Over the next two years, its situation deteriorated. When she was named CEO in 2007, Jordan had a $6 million deficit and was running an operating loss of $600,000 a year.
In the three years since Wiefling, 39, agreed to move from medical director, which she had moved up to in 2006, to CEO, Jordan has stabilized and even expanded.
Located in Rochester's northeast quadrant at Hudson Avenue and Holland Street, Jordan treats some 15,000 patients a year, roughly 6,000 more than it did in 2007. The deficit is gone. The health center, which has expanded services, has reached break even with an $8 million annual budget, she says. Its 135-member staff includes a stable core of some 25 providers, including physicians, nurse practitioners and dentists.
Richard Kennedy M.D. is a Jordan staff physician whom Wiefling counts among her closest allies. A family medicine doctor, he is employed by the University of Rochester Medical Center's Medical Faculty Group, which contracts him out to Jordan. He came to Jordan some six months before Wiefling was hired as a staff physician.
"When I started at Jordan in January 2005, I was told that it was about to close," Kennedy says. "It took about two years to get to the point where it was actually ready to shut down. It didn't look good then. People were leaving. I would look out my window and see strikers."
Kennedy had moved to Rochester from Saratoga Springs, where he had practiced in a "more or less regular family medicine practice." He was attracted to this area, as Wiefling had been, by the UR School of Medicine and Dentistry's biosocial psychological curriculum. He came to do a URMC fellowship concentrating on family medicine for the poor and underserved.
So certain did the Jordan Center's demise seem when he started there, Kennedy says, "the fact that I was really being hired by the university meant that I would have a job at Highland Family Medicine or somewhere else at UR was a big reason why I took the job."
Robert Thompson, a member of the center's foundation board, calls Jordan's turnaround "nothing short of miraculous." Its transition came in a series of gradual steps over some 18 months that "kind of snuck up on us."
Before moving to Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield as a vice president six months ago, Thompson ran the Rochester-based Monroe Plan, the biggest Rochester-area Medicaid HMO and one of Jordan's biggest payers.
What cannot be credited directly to Wiefling in the health center's turnaround is the work of "the really terrific administrative staff" Wiefling assembled, Thompson says. The Jordan CEO's accomplishments are even more remarkable given her relatively young age and lack of executive experience.
When the Jordan board tapped Wiefling for CEO, the previous CEO had resigned, leaving the financially troubled facility leaderless. In the breach, the director of another local federally qualified health center had agreed to jointly manage both facilities but had resigned after six months, with Jordan spiraling down financially at an accelerating rate.
"There was a (CEO) search committee, which had been looking for some time," Thompson says. "A couple of us went to them and said: 'You've got a gem right there; why don't you give her a try?' "
Debbie Ajewole, a Head Start program worker with Action for a Better Community, is the center's chairwoman.
"Dr. Wiefling is the best thing that ever happened to the Anthony Jordan center," Ajewole says. "It would not be here today if it weren't for her."
When Wiefling was named CEO, she had been medical director for a year. She had ascended to that position after a single year as a staff doctor, her first position after completing a two-year residency at URMC.
"I was a catalyst. Everybody's given above and beyond," Wiefling says. "What makes you successful is the community and being in the community."
Patient volumes improved partly because Jordan added dental and mental health ser-vices after community members told her they were needed, Wiefling says. Jordan also has added preventive health services at a women's infant and children program center it had been running on High Falls Boulevard.
Part of why Jordan has been able to add and expand such services is that Wiefling has made the facility an effective magnet for grant dollars, a supplemental source of revenue that has been key to pulling it out of its financial hole.
To pull in grant money from funders such as the Greater Rochester Health Foundation, which awarded a $600,000 grant to Jordan in 2008, Wiefling has used a streamlined method designed to get a maximum reward. That involves doing preliminary work, such as identifying funding sources and writing early proposal drafts in-house as much as possible, and hiring professional grant writers only to do final polishing.
The key to success in grant writing, Wiefling says, is less in how the grant is written than in the viability of the project. Her view is if an organization first identifies a need and figures out how it might serve that need and which foundations might see serving that need as their mis-sion, grant dollars will follow.
Another key to stabilizing Jordan was reaching an accord with Service Employee International Union 1199 Upstate workers. A lot of the financial ills that plagued the health center traced to Jordan's pension and contract obligations to union workers, Thompson says. Concessions were needed to stabilize the center's finances. But the 45 SEIU staffers were not inclined to give up hard-won benefits.
When the union workers' contract expired in 2008, negotiations lasted a year before an agreement was reached some 12 months ago. Wiefling speaks highly of the union staff, but past tensions are clearly a painful memory for her. The union agreement was a problem for the center that needed to be solved. In the end, concessions were wrung, Wiefling says, but she seems to have taken little joy in extracting them.
On the water
Wiefling is slight of build and wears her dark hair up. She has an easy smile and an enthusiastic manner. A wind-burned complexion is the product of hours spent sailing, her main non-work pursuit.
"I've always lived on water, but I started out small," Wiefling says. "I grew up on a creek and then built a house on a lake. Now I'm on a Great Lake."
Wiefling is married to Mark Schiesser, the president of Triline Automation Corp., a Henrietta-based maker of fluid power and control components. The couple lives on Lake Ontario in Wayne County and owns a 32-foot sailboat, which they sail for pleasure. Schiesser and Wiefling crew on a 42-foot ocean racing boat owned by venture capitalist Kenneth Johnson, Wiefling's former boyfriend and business partner.
Johnson's firm, Kegonsa Capital Partners LLC, grew out of Kegonsa Technology LLC, a technology transfer company Wiefling and Johnson started in the 1990s when she was working as a researcher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The company was named after Lake Kegonsa, on whose shores Johnson lived and Wiefling separately had a small house built.
"Bridgette has a couple of personal characteristics that I think made it possible for her to succeed in the way she has," says board member Thompson. "She's very smart, she's a quick study, and she has an innate sense of leadership."
Kennedy does not disagree, but adds Wiefling's ambitions were not initially in management.
"I don't think that being a CEO was the life trajectory she was looking for, but that's the kind of person she is," he says. "If there's a need, she'll fill it."
Wiefling meant to pursue a medical career from an early age. She grew up in rural Butler County in Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh, the fifth child and only daughter of a farm family whose cousins, aunts and uncles were, like her own parents, farmers with deep roots in the area.
Like many small, family farmers, her father, who raised beef cattle, also worked at a full-time day job, as an electrician. Wiefling is the only member of her immediate family to attend college. Her brothers followed their father into the electrician trade.
"My mother hammered into me that I had to go to college," Wiefling says. "She'd tell me: 'You have to go to college; you can't be dependent on a man.' If I ever said I wanted to be a nurse, my mother would say, 'No. You'll be a doctor.' My wanting to be a doctor didn't start out as altruism. I wanted to save my own family."
Though her father had health insurance through his electrician's job, doctors in the rural reaches where most of her family lived were scarce, Wiefling says. Her determination to be a doctor crystallized at the age of 13 when her mother's mother died as an indirect consequence of a doctor's misdiagnosis.
Her grandmother had been in generally poor health, Wiefling says. A bad reaction to a dye for a CAT scan-ordered by a
doctor looking for a physical cause for complaints Wiefling believes were due to undiagnosed depression-sent her grandmother into a downward spiral from which she did not recover.
"My mother had to pull the plug on her," Wiefling says. "It ruined Mom. She felt like she killed her own mother. What dawned on me was that my family didn't have good health care."
Wiefling went to college on scholarships and loans, including a small scholarship she got as a Junior Miss pageant winner. She started at the University of Pittsburgh but found inner-city living disconcerting and transferred to Slippery Rock University, a less urban setting an hour north of Pittsburgh.
She majored in biology as an intended premed course, but Wiefling did not immediately attend medical school. A three-year hiatus between graduating with a bachelor of science degree in biology in 1992 and starting studies toward an M.D. partly was due to lack of money. But Wiefling says she also was not confident she had what it took to be a doctor.
She investigated two possible research positions, one at a University of Southern California lab in Los Angeles and another at the University of Wisconsin.
She was set to take what seemed the more prestigious job, at USC, rather than the one at Wisconsin, which was working for a researcher who happened to be the father of her biology professor at Slippery Rock.
Her suspicions were aroused, however, when the USC researchers' eyebrows went up when she told them whom she had interviewed with in Wisconsin. They strongly downplayed the Wisconsin biochemistry researcher, Hector DeLuca, trying to give Wiefling the impression that work with him would be a bad career choice.
DeLuca, it turned out, is a legendary figure in biochemistry, the discoverer of the active form of vitamin D, meaning a form of the substance that the human body can use when ingested. Working in DeLuca's laboratory, Wiefling became an expert of sorts.
In Wisconsin, Wiefling started seeing Johnson, who taught her to sail. She credits her work with Johnson in starting the technology transfer company for giving her business experience that has proved invaluable in running the Jordan center.
"It was a great experience. I learned how companies work and I learned that anything is possible as long as it's done properly," she says.
Before attending medical school, Wiefling also studied German at the University of Salzburg in Salzburg, Austria, and soil chemistry at the Pushchino State University Institute of Soil Science in Pushchino, Russia.
Wiefling decided to go to medical school after she and Johnson broke up. She quit her job with DeLuca and was accepted at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. She put herself through medical school, working jobs in a greenhouse and as a waitress and with financial aid. After earning a medical degree in 2001, she started a residency at UR.
She chose Rochester partly because it is within driving distance of her parents' home in Saxbury, Pa. But she also had not lost sight of her original aim of serving poor communities, Wiefling says. She chose UR because of the school's equal emphasis on the social and psychological as well as the biological aspects of care.
During her residency, Wiefling developed a program working with other residents to interest them in community-based care, and she worked at a clinic in Honduras. She also has worked as a member of an outreach team providing medical and gynecological care at a rural health clinic in Bolivia. Her work in Central and South America was strikingly similar to working with underserved groups at Jordan, she says.
At the end of her residency, Wiefling won a national award as that year's standout in public service from the American Association of Medical Colleges. The UR medical school also won an AAMC award that year.
Wiefling had looked locally for jobs without luck and was planning on relocating. She went to the AAMC dinner in Boston to collect her prize, taking her mother as a guest at the awards banquet. Seated at her table were then URMC CEO McCollister Evarts M.D. and other URMC dignitaries.
When they asked what her plans were, Wiefling told them she had been looking for a job in Rochester but was having no luck, adding she would not mind working at Jordan. The clinic soon hired her.
Wiefling is relentlessly upbeat about Jordan's prospects. She enthuses over the primary care preventive medicine program and past achievements, such as a successful implementation of an electronic medical records system, quelling the center's labor unrest and financially stabilizing the center. Yet she is hardly ready to rest on those laurels.
A disappointment to Wiefling-and to himself, Kennedy says-was the failure of the Rochester Children's Zone, an ambitious project modeled on the successful Harlem Children's Zone started and run by activist Jeffrey Canada in New York City.
The idea is to mark off an inner-city area in which organizers work to provide resources to participating families sufficient to see children through primary and secondary schools and college. Where Canada largely has succeeded, attracting millions in corporate support, the Rochester zone ran off the rails after promised state funding fell through and a key supporter, former Rochester superintendent of schools Manuel Rivera, left the area.
The project was not a Jordan initiative, but its goals were the same as Wiefling's, Kennedy says. As successful as the Jordan center might be, he believes, Wiefling sees it more as a means to an end than an end. Through the health center's programs, the community it serves could be bettered in ways that go beyond the purely physical well-being of residents.
"When she's out on the lake sailing, I think that's what she thinks about," Kennedy says.
It is a vision Wiefling does not deny. Still, she says, managing the health center remains a no-net high-wire act in which each step demands full attention.
"You're made to live on the edge," Wiefling says. "If you're not on top of it every minute of every day moving the coconuts around, you're going to go down."
Bridgette Wiefling M.D.
- Title: CEO, Anthony Jordan Health Center
- Age: 39
- Education: B.S. in biology, Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, Pa., 1992; M.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., 2001
- Family: Husband Mark Schiesser; stepsons, Eric Schiesser, 19, and Rob Schiesser, 24; stepdaughter, Krista Schiesser, 17
- Home: Ontario, Wayne County
- Activities: Sailing, crewing on an ocean-racing sailboat
- Quote: "You're made to live on the edge. If you're not on top of it every minute of every day moving the coconuts around, you're going to go down." | <urn:uuid:005d2640-9452-450e-9b96-a416b7126713> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rbj.net/article.asp?size=1&aID=184656 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983136 | 3,751 | 1.625 | 2 |
MDC hosts Discover Nature field day for KC Boys & Girls Clubs
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Dozens of kids from Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City enjoyed paddles, nets, critters, fish and fun June 27-29 when they visited the Missouri Department of Conservation's (MDC) James A. Reed Memorial Wildlife Area near Lee’s Summit for a Discover Nature Field Day. The youths participated in various activities to learn outdoor skills such as fishing, canoeing, identifying bugs and learning about mammals and snakes. MDC Outreach and Education staff organized and hosted the event with help from volunteers such as members of Missouri Master Naturalist chapters. | <urn:uuid:3285a307-4a1d-4bf7-bf71-900aef45cff2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mdc.mo.gov/newsroom/mdc-hosts-discover-nature-field-day-kc-boys-girls-clubs?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941319 | 135 | 1.703125 | 2 |
What goes better with music than booze? Not much, we say — and you say too, if your drink consumption at the Phoenix’s ninth annual Best Music Poll award show is any indication. And since we drink so much of it, shouldn't we expect it to be produced sustainably?
As with everything we consume these days, the raw ingredients of beer, wine, and liquor can carry chemicals from pesticides and fertilizers. The greener, healthier option is to brew alcoholic beverages made with natural ingredients — organic barley or grapes, for example. And it’s no surprise, given the proliferation of environmentally friendly business practices, that organic drinks are steadily gaining popularity. (Organic-beer sales jumped from $9 million in 2003 to $19 million in 2005; the market since then has only grown.) In fact, the options are so expansive that beer needs its own column.
One local brewing company, Peak Organic, is a trendsetter in this area — Peak founder Jon Cadoux has been experimenting with organic ingredients for almost a decade; he’s been bottling Peak Organic for about two years. His reasons for going green are simple: “It tastes a heck of a lot better,” he says.
Last week, Cadoux and fellow laid-back beer guy Geoff Masland (Peak's co-founder) were nice enough to give me a tour of their facilities, which they share with several other brewers in the Shipyard Brewing Company building in the East End.
The most important consideration of organic brewers, they told me, is to keep the organic raw materials separate from their non-organic counterparts. The third-party organic inspector is “fanatical about it,” Cadoux says, pointing to a mountain of organic Canadian barley that’s kept in its own area of the building. Next, we step into the freezing holding room for the New Zealand hops; the room smells very, well, hoppy — pungently, bitterly sweet, in a woodsy way. At this point, Masland expresses his desire to source Peak’s hops more locally in the future — it’s been a challenge to find large-scale organic producers in this region.
That’s why Peak’s spring seasonal offering, the Maple Oat Ale, is special — it’s sourced not just organically, but also locally, with Maine oats (from GrandyOats) and Vermont maple syrup (from Butternut Mountain Farms). When the beer was released in late March, it became an instant favorite. But beer-drinkers aren’t buying it because it’s organic, or made with local ingredients. They like because of the way it tastes. “No one’s going to buy it if it tastes mediocre,” Cadoux says. And it doesn’t — the Maple Oat Ale is clean, sweet, and robust.
“It’s a no-brainer,” Masland adds. “If you can create something that’s delicious, and not have to use chemicals,” like the big guys do, it can get some more attention for a niche beer in a market filled with small microbrews.
The cheap, non-beer-connoisseur part of me prefers to drink PBR (at FatBaxters, now owned by the Rosemont Bakery, a six-pack of Peak’s Maple Oat Ale is $9.11 including tax and deposit; a sixer of PBR costs $6.08). But I’m willing to give my old ways the heave-ho, at least for the summer, when cold beer is at its best. For a change of pace, I’ll try sipping on a slightly more expensive richer-tasting, organic six-pack, rather than guzzling my way through watery lagers that are brewed by way of the same industrial-agriculture complex that I try to avoid when it comes to my food choices.
And I can pick from a variety of brews: other organic options include Wolaver's ales (from Vermont), Samuel Smith’s Organic Lager, and St. Peter’s Organic Ale. | <urn:uuid:56eb7499-c8f6-42aa-9066-dc786f88c6db> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thephoenix.com/boston/food/61606-cheers-to-green-beer/?rel=inf | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946622 | 884 | 1.75 | 2 |
3 months ago
a steel barrel could have been available to medieval man as we can find evidence of these in guns of the period and would have improved the reliability of the bronze cannon but not enough about this improvement was mentioned
You are about to report a comment. Once reported, the comment will be sent to our moderation team. If the moderation team feel the comment is inappropriate, it will be removed.
Channel 5 Broadcasting Ltd. 2013 | <urn:uuid:8ca45432-fbd7-4345-ac0b-c7cd0bade32f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.channel5.com/shows/beat-the-ancestors/episodes/medieval-machine-gun/comments/305273/comment_reports/new | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958346 | 88 | 1.554688 | 2 |
New talks on Iraq constitution address Arab identity Kate Heneroty at 9:55 AM ET
[JURIST] Iraqi lawmakers said Saturday that new discussions on the text of the Iraqi constitution [JURIST news archive] are underway, following calls for national unity after a Baghdad stampede of Shiite religious celebrants incited by the rumor of a suicide bomber that killed nearly 1,000 [Reuters report] earlier this week. Among other things, Sunni leaders want new wording declaring Iraq part of the Arab world. The current constitutional text calls only the Arab people of Iraq part of the Arab world. The Sunni Congress of the People of Iraq issued a statement Saturday urging that a revised document reflect an Arab identity and rejecting the "division of Iraq and squandering of its wealth and resources under the pretext of federalism." Sunni representatives confirmed they were negotiating with Kurdish and Shia counterparts. Sunni negotiator Saad Janabi said, "I think it will be possible to change the wording of some articles." Aljazeera has more.
4:12 PM ET - An Iraqi official said Sunday that the renewed constitutional talks had complicated the printing of five million copies of the draft charter in preparation for the October 15 referendum. A senior member of the National Assembly's constitution drafting committee told Reuters, however, that whether last-minute changes were made to the document or not, "we will start printing it this week." Reuters has more.
Paper Chase is JURIST's real-time legal news service, powered by a team of 30 law student reporters and editors led by law professor Bernard Hibbitts at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. As an educational service, Paper Chase is dedicated to presenting important legal news and materials rapidly, objectively and intelligibly in an accessible, ad-free format. | <urn:uuid:07be6923-3ba9-41a4-9670-6e48f861ed22> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jurist.org/paperchase/2005/09/new-talks-on-iraq-constitution-address.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948727 | 360 | 1.78125 | 2 |
But looking at it again, I'm convinced it's a hoax. And you should be, too. Here are a few obvious telltales:
Typos and grammatical errors
Companies put a lot of effort into their online presence, and any sufficiently large organization (like ASUS) has a change control process for any web pages that get posted. One obvious step in that process is spell-checking and proofreading. Yet the "Asus.co.uk" web page is littered with typos and grammatical errors:
- With the Eee PC™ 1008HA, you don't have to put up with a cramped, uncomfortable keys — its keyboard is 92% full-size with wide, well-spaced keys. The large Backspace, Enter and right Shift keys help reduce finger fatigue to a minimum, too.
- Enjoy superb video conferencing experience on the move with bright 10” display, built‐in 1.3 megapixel webcam and Digital Array MIC, which enhances speech‐centric applications like Skype and even your podcast recording.
- With its 160GB hard disk drive, the Eee PC™ 1008HA provides ample storage for all of your documents, images and multimedia files; 10GB of free online storage wiath 5GB of downloads per day means you can keep your data within easy reach from any computer.
- Super Hybrid Engine (SHE) enhances energy efficiency and reducespower usage by up to 15%*, delivering up to 6 hours*of unplugged usage.
- ASUSTek (UK) Ltd. © 2009 All rights Reserves
If a company is going to use ® or ™ in their copy, they will be consistent about it. But check the "Asus.co.uk" page again, and you'll see that sometimes "Eee PC™" is written "Eee PC" (without the ™ mark.) Check the top paragraph, and the date reminder.
Look closely at the "It's better with Windows" paragraph, and you'll see more examples of this:
The Eee PC™ 1008HA comes pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows XP Home and Microsoft Works. With Windows® XP, you can be sure that your Eee PC™ will be compatible with your existing Windows applications and devices. Windows® XP is also easy to use and delivers a dependable experience that Microsoft and a worldwide community of partners stand behind. Visit www.ItsBetterwithWindows.com » to find out more.Incorrect copyright
The "Asus.co.uk" page says "ASUSTek (UK) Ltd. © 2009 All rights Reserves". But check the actual ASUS UK page, and you'll see consistent use of "© ASUSTek Computer Inc. All Rights Reserved."
Missing branding and links
Take a quick look at the "It's Better With Windows" page. Where are the links to Microsoft.com? Where are the other references to Microsoft? For that matter, there are no references at all to Microsoft. Trust me, if marketers at Microsoft had been involved in this campaign, the name "Microsoft" would show up dozens of times, and there would be plenty of links back to Microsoft.com.
Poor web design
Microsoft may turn out a shitty desktop experience, but at least their web folks know something about web design. For example, they know enough to put together a web site that doesn't consist solely of a single JPEG background image, and an embedded video. All that text on the page? It's all part of a single image.
Microsoft doesn't own the page
This should have been the first and easiest way to tell that the "It's Better With Windows" site is a fake. Open up the page, and view the html source code. You don't have to understand html to see a few imporant clues:
- The video file links to collaborationpeople.cdnetworks.us instead of Microsoft.com. CD Networks is a content delivery company, so that's why the file is hosted at their domain. Clearly, "collaborationpeople" is the account name that owns the actual video file. But Microsoft also does lots of content delivery. It's guaranteed that if Microsoft put this together, the video asset would be hosted by Microsoft.
- Web statistics are being gathered by google-analytics.com. But Microsoft views Google as one of its biggest competitors in web search engines and marketing. Microsoft would never allow a key competitor to track the web hits of an "important" marketing site such as this.
I'll stop there. The spoofed "Asus.co.uk" page and the fake "It's Better With Windows" site were good attempts at a hoax, and I have to give them credit for putting something together that fooled so many people at first glance. But no, this is a hoax. Nothing to see here, move along. | <urn:uuid:f7aa6ecd-68c6-4020-8892-adb75160a69b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://linuxinexile.blogspot.com/2009/05/better-with-windows.html?showComment=1243774971307 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930465 | 1,005 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Yesterday, I was helping a client solve a customer problem. The discussion was going round and round and round but never seemed to move towards a resolution. The discussion was really more like a complaint session and not a problem resolution discussion. As such, the emotions where starting to escalate to a point that might have had no return.
It is possible to get your project back on track and the client happy again. First and most important is that you have to communicate with your client and accept responsibility for the problem resolution process. This doesn’t mean accepting responsibility for the problem, just to the process of resolution.
Here are the key 4 Steps to problem resolution:
- Identify the problem
- Describe the situation
- Discuss the preferred outcome
- Solution /alternative solution | <urn:uuid:b5d2784f-5407-4a8a-af50-e9afc711fc66> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.canadiancontractor.ca/uncategorized/problem-solving | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961546 | 159 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Pope Benedict XVI has called for an 'end to the bloodshed' in Syria and denounced the 'savage' violence in Africa, even as news came in of a Christmas attack on Christians in Nigeria.
Delivering his traditional Christmas message, the Pope touched on several other of the world's conflict zones.
A capacity crowd of 40,000 pilgrims filled the vast St Peter's Square to hear the 85-year-old pope, resplendent in red vestments, deliver the To the City and the World message.
Speaking from the balcony of St Peter's Basilica, the Pope called for a return of peace in Nigeria, where he said 'savage acts of terrorism continue to reap victims, particularly among Christians'.
But even as he spoke, news was filtering in of a deadly Christmas attack there.
Gunmen attacked a church in the northern state of Yobe during a Christmas Eve service, residents and police said, killing six people including the pastor, before setting the building ablaze.
It is the latest attack to be blamed on the radical Islamist sect Boko Haram, which has repeatedly targeted churches during times of worship, including multiple attacks last year on Christmas Day.
The Pope also said: 'There is hope in the world ... even at the most difficult times and in the most difficult situations.'
He prayed for peace in Syria, whose people have been 'deeply wounded and divided by a conflict which does not spare even the defenceless and reaps innocent victims'.
In a message watched by millions around the world, he called 'for an end to the bloodshed ... and dialogue in the pursuit of a political solution to the conflict'.
His wide-ranging speech called for peace in the Middle East and appealed to the new leadership in China to respect religious freedom there.
In Indonesia, more than 200 Muslims threw rotten eggs at Christians wanting to hold a Christmas mass outside Jakarta, police said.
About 100 Christian worshippers had gathered for the mass near the spot where they hoped to build a church but saw the project barred by district government and community members.
At the midnight mass in Bethlehem, the most senior Roman Catholic bishop in the Middle East issued a special call for efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
'Only justice and peace in the Holy Land can re-establish balance and stability in the region and in the world,' Patriarch Fuad Twal told worshippers in the West Bank city, the traditional birthplace of Jesus.
'From this holy place, I invite politicians and men of good will to work with determination for peace and reconciliation that encompasses Palestine and Israel in the midst of all the sufferings in the Middle East,' Twal said.
The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, in his final Christmas Day sermon, acknowledged that last month's failure by England's state church to approve women bishops had been 'deeply painful'.
The decision had damaged the church's reputation, said Dr Williams, who steps down at the end of the year.
The liberal leader, head of the world's 80 million Anglicans, fought over the past decade to bridge the divide between with the church's traditionalists.
In South Africa, former leader Nelson Mandela shared Christmas greetings with visitors to his hospital bedside, including his wife Graca Machel, other family members and President Jacob Zuma.
'We found him in good spirits,' Zuma said. 'He was happy to have visitors on this special day and is looking much better.'
The 94-year-old anti-apartheid icon was admitted on December 8 to a Pretoria hospital where he has been treated for a recurrent lung infection and had surgery to remove gallstones.
Another prominent former world leader was confined to a hospital bed for Christmas this year: Margaret Thatcher of Britain.
The 87-year-old former prime minister was admitted to hospital on Thursday for a minor operation to remove a growth in her bladder.
Also in Britain, Prince William and his pregnant wife Catherine were absent when the royal family attended a Christmas church service.
William and Kate, who is recovering from severe morning sickness that landed her in hospital for four days earlier this month, broke with tradition to spend Christmas Day with her family rather than the royals.
The 86-year-old Queen, who had missed church on Sunday due to a cold, appeared in good spirits as she arrived for the service at her Sandringham estate in Norfolk.
In her Christmas message, she paid tribute to the athletes and volunteers who helped make the Olympic and the Paralympic Games a success, and said it had been 'humbling' to see vast crowds joining celebrations marking her 60th year on the throne.
In the United States, the organisation responsible for monitoring North American airspace helped children track Santa Claus's progress as he completed his whirlwind journey around the globe.
The Santa tracker set up by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a US-Canada joint operation, said Father Christmas and his hardworking reindeer were resting at the North Pole, having delivered more than seven billion gifts during his annual journey. | <urn:uuid:9b52c97b-c739-4bb6-be1f-b32d298f2e13> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wap.news.bigpond.com/articles/TopStories/2012/12/26/Pope_urges_peace_in_Christmas_message_829981.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97349 | 1,038 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Used to describe someone who is good-looking, but under the age for consentual sex.
"Damn, she's hot!" "No way man, she's risk."
Best board game ever
RISK rules all games
used to describe a bad or potentially disastorous situation or condition.
"Can't believe they're knocking the Brig down to make flats.."
"Ken, it's risk like."
"Awww naah, nae mair Buckfast for me, I'm feelin a bit risk."
Can be used instead of 'go', 'do' etc.
"You wanna risk the shop?" - Would you care to attend the shop with me?
"Jaysus, I'd love to risk her." - Goodness, I would enjoy having relations with that beautiful lady.
Acronym for Reduced Income Several Kids.
In the 80's and nineties, sociologists identified a subpopulation of the Baby Boom generation consisting of childless couples both engaged in primarily professional occupations. Designated by the acronym DINK ( Double Income No Kids), this group had substantial disposable income and heped drive the luxury markets of the time.
Approximately 20 years later, the DINK has evolved into the RISK ( Reduced Income Several Kids) and from the luxury standpoint is merely indisposed.
A risk is a person who exhibits homo-erotic or excessively cheesy behaviour. This could be a reference to the following:
Excessively gaudy or inappropriate clothing
Cheesy or general tacky behaviour and looks.
This can lead to different uses of the word such as 'risky' when pertaining to someone's aesthetic as opposed to simply embodying a 'risk' in it's true form.
'Check that guy out! Risky bloke!'
'That chick sounds like the biggest risk'
'That guy's the biggest fucking risk ever'
'Is that bloke wearing the riskiest shirt ever or is it just me?!'
'How risky was that chick's head?'
*tosser says something completely unfunny*
'Yeah thanks risk...'
Authors: Andrew Sprowl and Courtney Wilemanmore...
Views on Religion
There are so many religions and beliefs in this world you can’t even keep track. In this, high pace, hellish lifestyle society lives and breathers each day can be quit hectic. Who has time to do things like, going to church, or open and read the Bible? The truth is, no one really. People who have lives can’t. Even if they wanted to, the closest thing they get to is searching religions on Wikipedia. That’s why I am here to say that you can go out and look. Look for a new, more exciting religion. It IS ok.
One night two teenage kids devised a plan to outwit Heaven and Hell. They talked and devised a place where you go when you die. A world that is never ending. This place is between the two “known destinations”. A Clubatory if you will. If you believe in it then it believes in you.
This night club is closer to Hell then heaven only in the way that sin and lust are present here. Just as an Earthy club might be. At the front of this erotic, flashing club is a notice that says “Dance at Your Own Risk”. Rightfully, the club is named risk.
Risk is jammed pack full of the hottest and sexiest people. Even if you’re not people there consider you either way. All people can dance just like they were born too. Risk also has a full bar, rave light, the deepest subwoofers and complimentary Bubble Rap floors. It’s a crazy black and red Club. With the newest and sleekest designs and architecture... | <urn:uuid:f6991460-93a4-43e7-9f65-d67c7fbd4454> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=risk&defid=354585 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934766 | 805 | 1.640625 | 2 |
As I write this blog at 12:15 am on our 14th day at sea we are scooting along at about 8.0 knots in 11 knots of breeze. And, the night sky is spectacular and includes a beautiful view of the Southern Cross. We have now logged over 2000 nautical miles and are in the final leg of our trip to the Marqueses Islands in French Polynesia. The boat just seems to glide through the water.
We are also now less than one degree north of the Equator and sometime in the morning we will be crossing it. We will celebrate this milestone with a special ceremony known as "The Line Crossing Ceremony". This ceremony is an initiation rite in the Royal Navy, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Marine Corps, other navies and on other sailing vessels, which commemorates a sailor's first crossing of the Equator. Originally, the tradition was created as a test for seasoned sailors to ensure their new shipmates were capable of handling long rough times at sea. Sailors who have already crossed the Equator are nicknamed Shellbacks, often referred to as Sons of Neptune; those who have not are nicknamed Pollywogs.
Equator-crossing ceremonies feature Pollywogs receiving a subpoena to appear before King Neptune after crossing the line. King Neptune then officiates at the ceremony, which is often preceded by a beauty contest of men dressing up as women, and each department of the ship being required to introduce one contestant in swimsuit drag. Having no Shellbacks on board to take the lead on this ceremony, we Pollywogs have to be a bit creative.
We will celebrate dressing up (I guess I know what my costume will be) as well as swimming across the equator, toasting some champagne and offering gifts (likely most of the champagne) to King Neptune. Should be a fun day. And, we all look forward to becoming Shellbacks!
Day 13 Stats
Distance: 172 miles; Total trip: 1981 miles; Average daily distance traveled: 152 miles
Average Speed: 7.2 knots; Average overall speed: 6.3 knots
Sea Conditions: Seas have been beautifully gentle. We've had a clear sky with some scattered high altitude clouds. Hot and humid, around 80 degrees. Winds today were from the E to the ESE varying mostly from 8-13 knots. This wind angle has us sailing close reach which our boat loves.
Incident Report: Nothing at all to report. A fairly lazy day.
Total fish caught: One fish.
Produce Inventory: Lost a mini watermelon today - sadly, as we were holding it out for our equator party.
Meals/Snacks: Breakfast was Matzah Fry (can't have Passover without at least one morning of Matzah Fry - it's like French Toast but with broken up pieces of soggy matzah). Snack was matzah with our friend Daniel's homemade peach jam (thanks Daniel!). Leftovers for lunch which we knew would draw complaints from our younger crew: Brisket and carrots, plus lettuce salad with hearts of palm and mandarin oranges. Afternoon snack was Matzah Pizzas, a favorite around here. Shabbat Dinner was tomato, pepper and feta salad, rosemary potatoes, and Seared Tuna Balsamico.
-Michael (just north of 0.0 degrees north!)
At 4/23/2011 07:41 (utc) our position was 00°55.84'N 129°43.62'W | <urn:uuid:e13cb8af-306a-44bd-9b53-a1cef980f6c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mitgang.blogspot.com/2011/04/day-13-great-day-and-more-tomorrow.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955395 | 735 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Tough Issues Facing Bush in India and
By Ahmad Faruqui
Global Beat Syndicate
NEWARK, Calif.—When President George W. Bush visits India and
Pakistan next week, he can expect a warm reception in India and a
chilly one in Pakistan. This is a major reversal. During the past
half-century, relations between Washington, New Delhi and Islamabad
have undergone a sea-change.
have never been quite as warm between India and the United States as
they are now -- a far cry from the frosty Cold War years. India is
viewed by Washington as a rising power, on a scale with China.
Bilateral relations continue to improve, especially due to India's
emergence as a global player in the IT outsourcing business. In his
National Security Doctrine of 2002, Mr. Bush committed to forging
closer strategic and military ties with India, and that seems to be
working. Last July, he agreed in principle to give India access to
long-denied civilian nuclear technology, including fuel and reactors.
issues must be ironed out before Congress will approve that deal, not
least the need for India to separate its civilian from its military
nuclear facilities. Urgent talks are ongoing to make this happen before
Mr. Bush arrives in India, and failure to get that done will be a major
fly in the ointment during his visit.
relations are warmer because, growing trade and financial ties aside,
both counties are democracies (ours the oldest, theirs the largest)
with diverse cultures; both view themselves as victims of terror.
contrast, Mr. Bush is likely to face a far chillier atmosphere in
Pakistan, which for nearly 40 years saw Washington as mostly a major
"ally of a kind." While Mr. Bush enjoys close personal ties with
Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, more than 70,000
people have taken to the streets in four major cities, ostensibly to
protest the Danish cartoons, but in reality to express their
displeasure with military rule.
is more: anti-American sentiment is running high because of a botched
U.S. attempt to strike Al Qaeda's top leadership in a remote area of
northern Pakistan. The airs strike killed more than a dozen Pakistanis
and Musharraf was not able to elicit an apology from Washington. This
has overshadowed the good will American gained when U.S. troops and aid
workers assisted Pakistanis in the aftermath of a huge and catastrophic
earthquake in Pakistan last October.
as well, more than ever, Musharraf is now viewed as being Bush's
puppet, and in that context, Bush's visit will weaken Musharraf
further. Quietly, the White House has been pressuring Musharraf to
retire from the army next year, when parliamentary elections are
scheduled to take place, and run as a civilian candidate. Musharraf has
been dropping hints that he will get himself re-elected through the
existing parliament and postpone parliamentary elections for 2008. In
addition, he seems increasingly reluctant to retire from the army.
many Americans, Pakistan is a country governed by an enlightened ruler
who is fighting terrorists at great personal risk. To Pakistanis,
Musharraf is an army chief who deposed a democratically elected
government. Even Pakistanis who initially welcomed him have become
tired of him.
military rule in Pakistan has repressed minorities and women and
worsened inter-provincial relations throughout much of that troubled
country's existence, ever since it was created in 1947. This has caused
religious extremism often manifest in outbursts of sectarian killings
and terrorism. Nor have any Pakistani leaders, civilian or military,
been able to tame a culture of tribal justice that lets the
perpetrators of gang rapes go free. In many urban areas, the residents
live at the mercy of armed gangs and robbers.
every expert agrees, Pakistan's problems are inherently political in
nature and cannot be solved by people in uniform. In his second
inaugural address, President Bush declared, "It is the policy of the
United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements
and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of
ending tyranny in our world." In Pakistan, Bush should make it a point
to speak directly to the people of Pakistan through national radio and
television and reassure them that his global commitment to democracy
does not exclude the 160 million people of Pakistan.
the Bush administration is set on bringing constitutional rule to
countries without a real democratic tradition, it has all the more
reason to restore democracy to Pakistan, which does have a history of
democratic rule and whose founder was a democrat par excellence.
Doing so will go a long way toward stemming the tide of rising
anti-Americanism in the world's second largest Muslim state. | <urn:uuid:e0546e16-9cf9-423a-8808-704c617d0e23> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/faruqui030106.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950079 | 1,027 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Journal editorial: State holds on to extra tax
Idaho is apparently still climbing out of the economic recession that washed over the nation in 2008. For the second year in a row, income projections used to set the state budget were below actual revenue collected by the state. As Idaho closed its books for the 2012 fiscal year June 30, it had $35 million more than it estimated.
It brought total state tax revenue to $2.587 billion – 5.9 percent more than the previous fiscal year.
Gov. Butch Otter was quick to say the additional revenue does not represent a surplus going into the next fiscal year. The $35 million will be quickly funneled into the state’s “rainy day” accounts which will grow to about $75.5 million.
“I’m grateful that Idaho’s economy continues to improve and that more Idahoans are finding work,” Governor Otter said. “I am also pleased that we have been able to set aside almost $75.5 million for future rainy days.”
Idaho Code automatically channels money into the rainy day account known as the Budget Stabilization Fund anytime annual revenue growth exceeds four percent. This fund has a current balance of about $23.8 million that will get a $25.8 million infusion. The second largest rainy day account is the Public Education Stabilization Fund which has about $40 million right now.
The governor and Republican legislators are proud of growing the state’s savings accounts and are quick to call it wise money management. But that ignores the fact the state already salted away $35 million from last year’s $105 million surplus that arrived because revenue projects were low in 2011. State spending for services to its citizens was based on the lower projection.
The Republican-led legislature split that $105 million three ways with a third going to tax breaks for Idaho’s wealthiest citizens. One third went into savings and the last third will be spread over five years to restore teacher salaries that would have been reduced by Idaho Superintendent Tom Luna’s “Students Come First” education reforms.
Again some state budget items were left unfunded because the governor and legislature embraced low ball revenue projections for fiscal 2012. When $35 million more arrived, it was simply moved into the state piggy bank.
There’s nothing wrong with conservative fiscal policy. Idaho’s Constitution requires the state to balance its budget each year so no political party can claim victory for simply following the law. And Idaho tends to ride out national recessions better than many states.
The problem is Idaho’s recovery from the Great Recession is lagging behind many other states. The dominant political party will argue that this is because taxes need to be lowered even more and regulatory agencies need to be eliminated. Democrats will suggest its because the state is timid about making investments in its universities and K-12 education system or improving infrastructure.
Rainy day funds may provide an emergency buffer, but they don’t generate jobs.
And savings don’t pay for health services for the state’s poorest residents.
Fortunately, after cutting the funding for preventative dental care and many mental health services the pervious year, the Idaho Legislature did boost its share of Medicare funding by $100 million this year to bring them back. Since 70 percent of the state’s Medicaid budget comes from the federal government in the form of matching funds, that $100 million went a long way.
We believe it is important for the state’s leadership to refrain from grinning too much about a growing savings account if it doesn’t understand the value of money well spent. Savings are good, but sometimes investments pay better dividends.
Even a rich man will starve to death if he doesn’t buy groceries. | <urn:uuid:bfa1779c-cf81-44e9-8e45-f2782beedbf3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pocatelloshops.com/new_blogs/politics/?p=9325 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959351 | 791 | 1.570313 | 2 |
In normal times, one could argue that the $7.3 million the state spends to subsidize two Amtrak rail lines to Chicago is simply the cost of supporting public transportation.
And it just might be a valid argument, if Amtrak could show great value for the money it receives from the taxpayers of Michigan.
We don't argue with the notion that having train service to Chicago is a nice thing. But is it truly a need that requires a public subsidy?
Our issue here is twofold: Is the $7.3 million now spent on Amtrak the best use of dwindling financial resources for a state mired in a persistent fiscal crisis; and who is using the train to Chicago?
Is there a high public good being accomplished through the Amtrak subsidy? Or are we merely providing folks who want to go shopping on the Miracle Mile a taxpayer handout to help pay their way to the Windy City and back?
That's why -- at least from the perspective of triggering a much-needed conversation -- we welcome the efforts of some lawmakers in Lansing who want to trim Amtrak's subsidies.
As Michigan idles state offices, talks about releasing prisoners early and struggles to keep sate troopers on the road, it seems inane not to have an honest discussion on whether the $7.3 million spent on Amtrak is a good use of public money.
And if we still want to support public transportation, then is Amtrak the best recipient?
Or, how about using the money as a lure to launch commuter rail service across the state? Or between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo? Or between either of those cities and the lakeshore?
Again, we are not against supporting public transportation where that support is justified.
But the debate over subsidizing Amtrak goes back at least a decade when Congress began to pull federal subsidies and demanded Amtrak become self-supportive by 2002 -- a goal that was accomplished by getting more money from the states.
There are a lot of things that need a frank public discussion right now in Michigan.
Subsidizing Amtrak seems a good place to start.
Contact B. Candace Beeke at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter @candacebeeke. | <urn:uuid:3aa0a250-e4cf-408f-89df-e0a65a095035> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.mlive.com/westsidestory/2009/07/train_bound_for_nowhere_amtrak.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949108 | 454 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Iraq plans to increase its southern oil storage capacity to 8.5 million barrels by the end of 2013, to help cope with export bottlenecks caused by bad weather or technical problems, a senior Iraqi oil official said on Monday.
Speaking at the opening of four new oil storage tanks near the southern city of Basra, the head of the state-run South Oil Company said the new facility will add a capacity of one million barrels to existing 5.5 million barrels available.
“Today we have managed to add one million barrels and boost oil storage capacity up to 6.5 million barrels. Another two million barrels capacity will be added by end of 2103,” Dhiya Jaffar told Reuters.
Jaffar said the storage capacity increase will help Iraq to pump crude to export terminals at the Gulf for a period of more than a week to avoid export halts during rough weather or any other unexpected glitches at the southern oilfields.
“Shutting down production because of weather has negative impact on oilfields operations, and is a source of tension with foreign oil firms. More storage capacity means less of these problems,” Jaffar said.
Export infrastructure, rather than production, is the main hurdle to the OPEC-member keeping exports steady.
Iraq’s oil exports fell to 2.34 million barrels per day (bpd) in December from 2.62 million bpd in November due to rough weather and technical problems with a single point mooring terminal in the Gulf. | <urn:uuid:f1d74170-039f-4982-999c-4f63fae3de35> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2013/01/14/260436.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94514 | 311 | 1.804688 | 2 |
E-readers are a dime a dozen, but they aren't quite a dime in cost. But it's getting close. While e-reader prices overall have been sinking lately, this sets a new bar. A new low bar, that is. The new Txtr Beagle is said to be the world's smallest e-reader, and perhaps the cheapest as well. It doesn't require any cables or chargers, and is the first e-reader to receive e-books sent from a smartphone. The unit itself is just 5mm thick, weighing 128 grams and operates using two AAA batteries. Users can start reading any of the preloaded eBooks or book previews in seconds by simply switching the device on and selecting the book of choice. The txtr beagle communicates with the txtr Android reading application, to add more eBooks. Pair the txtr beagle with the smartphone using the standard Bluetooth protocol, and you'll be able to shoot over content with just a click. Basically, it's a companion device, which is enabled by your smartphone. Craziest of all? The $13 price point. Top that, Amazon! | <urn:uuid:6de6d6b3-5240-40c2-a6b7-cec4cddd2663> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hothardware.com/News/Txtr-Beagle-EReader-Is-Worlds-Smallest-Costs-Just-13/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949599 | 236 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Bosses Are 4 Times More Likely To Be Psychopaths
If you think your boss is a nutcase, you may be onto something, a new study suggests.
According to the findings, nearly 4 percent of bosses fit the profile of a psychopath, compared with 1 percent in the general population.
Babiak's research, which examines how many psychopaths had infiltrated major companies, will be aired next week in a British television documentary.
In the film, Babiak tells the show's producers: "Psychopaths really aren't the kind of person you think they are. In fact, you could be living with or married to one for 20 years or more and not know that person is a psychopath," the Daily Mail reports.
The psychologist goes on to say that individuals identified in his research could be termed "successful psychopaths," who are capable of mimicking the personality traits that people find most pleasing in their leaders.
"Their natural tendency is to be charming," Babiak says in the film. "Take that charm and couch it in the right business language and it sounds like charismatic leadership."
Babiak and University of British Columbia researcher Bob Hare developed an extensive questionnaire to determine how many bosses were psychopaths, the Daily Mail reports.
The concept of the "successful psychopath" is well-known, notes The Village Voice. In a blog item, the New York City weekly cites an article published four years ago by Scientific American which reported: "Some investigators have even speculated that 'successful psychopaths' -- those who attain prominent positions in society -- may be overrepresented in certain occupations, such as politics, business and entertainment."
Ruthless corporate behavior has been a popular theme in Hollywood films in recent decades. Gordon Gekko, the character portrayed by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie "Wall Street," is perhaps the best known portrayal of corporate ruthlessness.
More recently, Kevin Spacey's character in the 2011 movie, "Horrible Bosses" (see video clip below), showcases the kind of callousness and disregard for others that Babiak's research hints at.
(Note: The video contains language that some viewers may find offensive)
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David Schepp has spent more than a dozen years covering business news for the electronic and print media, including Dow Jones Newswires, BBC News, Gannett Co., and most recently at AOL's DailyFinance. Nearly 10 years ago, he started writing a weekly People@Work column, looking in depth at issues facing workers in today's workplace. Follow David on Twitter. Email David at [email protected]. Add David to your Google+ circles.more... | <urn:uuid:ffcc84fa-2cea-42f4-9439-97aeb2574e7e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2011/09/06/bosses-are-four-times-more-likely-to-be-psychopaths/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943381 | 598 | 1.671875 | 2 |
If you’ve ever wanted to own a Superman or Batman or Justice League #1, your chance is at hand: D.C. Comics on Wednesday started rolling out “The New 52.” It’s rebooting a host of superhero story lines, effectively starting them over, all over again. Apparently Flash and altering the course of history have something to do with it.
So, of course, do marketing and efforts to boost sales. I have to admit as an occasional comic book reader in college (hey, something had to take the edge off James Joyce and Kant, and I hadn’t yet discovered Rabelais) that my interest is piqued. But it also made me wonder if this was yet another example of what we seem to be seeing a lot of in film and TV — a lot of repacking of tried and true brands and formulas, and a hesitancy to take risks with truly fresh material.
The New York Times explored this in a piece on D.C.’s move, and noted that this isn’t necessarily new. Long ago, before printing presses and mass publication, we humans loved to tell and retell stories, especially of heroes and adventures. It quotes Henry Jenkins, the provost’s professor of communication, journalism and cinematic arts at the University of Southern California: “Part of the nature of culture is that we retell stories that are meaningful to us, again and again, in different ways.”
Still, Jenkins questions “revamps that have no clear purpose, endless numbers of ’80s TV shows being brought to the screen with no innovation to speak of.”
The issue has been studied and spoofed — one Web site wryly offers a Plot-o-Matic to generate your own made-for-Hollywood movie proposal, using some of the worst of film’s tropes, and you can read all about tropes here, to the point where you start to wonder if there is anything new under the Klieg lights.
What do you think? Have you give up on originality? Or have you seen something lately that gave you hope? Is it just that we see the big money spent on remakes and old brands, while plenty of new material is out there waiting to be discovered and remade someday? | <urn:uuid:888ede3e-35ef-4095-ab2a-c03426f89c4a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion/are-remakes-the-new-originals/14282/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945411 | 482 | 1.585938 | 2 |
All about Malachite →
This is a great video for those who are really interested about Malachites metaphysically properties such as its healing powers and how to utilize this stone in the proper way.
Crystal of the Week: Malachite
The crystal of the week is Malachite! Malachite is unique in that about 60 per cent of it is made up of Copper. Large deposits are rare, and can be commonly found in Russia, Africa and Australia. The name Malachite derives from the Greek word “maloche” which is a plant with leaves similar in color. Malachite is commonly associated with growth and abundance. It is also known for aiding...
Children Miners →
Tanzanites are beautiful, but we have to remember and remind ourselves that most pieces of jewelry we wear are dug by children, especially precious stones. Tanzanite is mostly mined by children in Africa, however you can buy certified gemstones and jewelry that comes with a certificate authenticating that it is certified fair trade.
Tanzanite Smuggling →
Crystal of the Week: Tanzanite
The Crystal of the week is Tanzanite!!! This gorgeous stone was only discovered 45 years ago. The name Tanzanite is well suited for this stone can only be found in Tanzania, Africa near Mt. Kilimanjaro. It is one of the most expensive stones on the market, and has an extremely high re-sale value making it unfortunately a blood stone. With the Diamond industry plummeting, many children soldiers...
Good Karma →
Emerald minners get lucky →
Crystal of the Week: Emerald
The crystal of the week is Emerald! First mined in Egypt over 4,000 years ago and today is commonly found in Brazil, Colombia, Russia, Pakistan and South Africa. Emerald is considered a precious stone, one of only four with Ruby, Diamond and Sapphire. The reason they are categorized under precious stone is for their rarity and brilliance. Metaphysically Emeralds reveal the truth and encourage...
The Tourmaline of the day is Pink Tourmaline! pink Tourmaline is very similar to a stone I highlighted in the past, Kunzite. Both of these stones are connected to the heart chakra so they are both great for love connections! It is great for healing and listening because it connects people emotions. Therapists and healers are recommended to wear Pink Tourmaline for it helps patients open up their...
The Jasper of the day is Ocean Jasper! Ocean Jasper is very beautiful and very rare, being only found on the remote coast of Madagascar which can only be mined at low tide. Ocean Jasper is great for opening and activating both the throat and heart chakra, which is why it helps people to express their feelings of love through actions. It is also known for helping people to relax and bring...
Crystal of the Week: Tourmaline
The crystal of the week is Tourmaline! Tourmaline comes in multiple colors and forms and is found all over the world. You can find basically every color of the rainbow in a piece of Tourmaline however, it grows in quartz so it is very difficult to extract the crystal pieces from their matrix without breaking them. Every piece of Tourmaline has its own metaphysical properties so everyday this week...
Crystal of the week: Rhodonite
The crystal this week is magical and beautiful Rhodonite! Deriving from the Greek word for Rose: rhodon, it ranges from dark pink, to translucent with sometimes brown and black veins running through the color. It is magically known for helping us to manifest deep wants and ambition and also for improving communication skills and helping our voices get heard. It is also very helpful in easing times...
Amazonite: Power stone →
Crystal of the week: Amazonite
Amazonite is the crystal of the week! Named after the Amazon River for its bluish and green coloring, it is actually not even found in the Amazon, mostly in Madagascar, Mexico, Russia and Canada. Popular in ancient Egypt jewelry and artwork, for it was very easy to handle and mold. Amazonite has traditionally been linked to fertility, protection and spirits of the dead. Many people use Amazonite...
Crystal of the Week: Moldavite
The crystal of the week is the mysterious and magical Moldavite. Most commonly found in The Czech Republic, it is thought to be formed from a meterorite crahsing into sand. Many people associate it as being a space stone, and therefore it makes people feel “spacey”. Moldavite is translucent green stone with a rough texture. It helps connect people into their inner selves and true...
Crystal of the week: Turquoise
The crystal for this week is Turquoise! Turquoise is another stone that has holds many metaphysical properties that can help improve our lives. The Native Americans used it in many of their sacred and spiritual jewelry pieces they made. Turquoise forms when water combines with aluminum and copper, thus why it has a bluish color. It has always been known to be a protective stone. Back in the...
The Opal of the day is Fire Opal, which I think os one of the most beautiful looking Opals. Fire Opal’s are great for those who are going through a hard time, or need some recovery time. They are great for helping restore energy and bringing people back to life after an emotionally or physically rough time.
As you know the crystal of the week is opal, and with all the different types of Opals i’m also doing Opal of the day. Today’s Opal is Cherry Opal. You can assume why Cherry Opal was given its name, but it also comes in orange. Cherry Opals are known for helping to regenerate tissue and blood. Many people who get into accidents or have surgery wear Cherry Opal’s to help speed up... | <urn:uuid:0f987bd3-8990-48a7-9f57-fd42056f5399> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://crystalconnection.tumblr.com/archive | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96037 | 1,217 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Female Political Prisoners & Newborns at Evin Prison Deprived of Drinking WaterOct 3rd, 2010
Sunday October 3rd, 2010 – According to reports from “Human Rights and Democracy Activists in Iran”, ward 2, a female ward at Evin has been deprived of drinking water for the past 24 hours, resulting in poor health conditions for female political prisoners, regular prisoners and newborns held at this ward. Water has been cut off completely at ward 2 for the past 24 hours, making it difficult for female prisoners to have access to drinking water. The lack of water has also lead to undesired sanitary conditions resulting in a number of female prisoners experiencing diarrhea and nausea.
Ward 2 also includes a number of newborns and toddlers under the age of two, incarcerated with their mothers. The lack of water has also led to undesired health conditions for these children and their mothers.
So far all complaints to prison officials by female political prisoners and other female prisoners has been in vane. The head of this ward, Mrs. Rezai, has refused to answer their requests and to take care of the problem. If water is not restored to this ward, it will result in further deterioration of the health conditions, putting the lives of these prisoners at risk.
The water used at the women’s ward at Evin is drilled through through the main water wells at Evin. This water is not hygienic and has resulted in acute kidney problems and other health conditions for both the prisoners held in this prison.
Currently there are only 20 female political prisoners being held at Evin prison. Their names are as follows:
- Nazila Dashti
-Reyhaneh Haj Ebrahim Dabagh
-Manijeh Safar Elahi
-Mathare Bahrami Haghighati
-Ezrah Saadat Ghazi Mirsaeed
-Kefayaat Malek Mohammadi
The Human Rights & Democracy Activists in Iran, condemns depriving helpless female political prisoners, regular prisoners, newborns and infants from access to drinking water for long periods of time and calls upon the the High Commissioner for Human Rights and other International bodies to end crimes against humanity in Iran.
Human Rights & Democracy Activists in Iran
October 3rd, 2010
Translated by: Banooye Irani
11 مهر 1389 برابر با 3 اکتبر | <urn:uuid:615fd1a2-d71f-4b52-b2a2-ae2758a83dbe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iranian-americans.com/2010/10/2231.html | 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 | 0.944842 | 505 | 1.75 | 2 |
I first encountered his dissembling at an intelligent design conference held at Calvin College in May 2001. Meyer had written in 2000 that "Systems that are characterized by both specificity and complexity (what information theorists call "specified complexity'') have "information content''."
The only problem is, information theorists don't use the term "specified complexity" and they don't refer to "specificity" when discussing information. At the time, there was precisely one mathematician who was pushing the term "specified complexity", and that was William Dembski, who tried (but failed) to create a new, mathematically-rigorous definition at information which (were it coherent) would be at odds with how information is defined by other mathematicians and computer scientists.
I went up to Meyer at the conference and asked him, "You wrote that 'information theorists' (plural) talk about specified complexity. Who are they?" He then admitted that he knew no one but Dembski (and Dembski himself is not much of an information theorist, having published exactly 0 papers so far on the topic in the peer-reviewed scientific literature).
So the use of the plural, when Meyer knew perfectly well that information theorists do not use the term "specified complexity", was just a lie - and a lie intended to deceive the reader that his claims are supported by the scientific community, when they are not.
(Another anecdote: while I was waiting in line to ask Meyer this question, I was behind a woman who couldn't wait to meet Meyer. She gushed as she shook his hand, saying she was so honored to meet the man who was responsible for recruiting so many people for Christ through his work. He smiled and thanked her. And they claim ID is not religious!)
Meyer was also caught dissembling about the "No Child Left Behind" education bill, falsely claiming that it obligated Ohio to teach about alternative theories.
Now Meyer is back with a new book, and an op-ed in the Boston Globe to help flog his book. In the op-ed, Meyer claims, "Information - whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal - always arises from an intelligent source." But this is the same old bogus ID claim that is repeated endlessly and endlessly, and it's not true. At least it's not true if you understand "information" in the sense that it is understood by mathematicians and computer scientists. For example, in the Kolmogorov theory, any random source produces information.
But then again, Meyer, with his little honesty problem, doesn't seem too concerned with the truth. What's important is, as that woman ahead of me in line told him, saving souls for Jesus.
Martin Luther once said, "What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church...a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them." It seems that Stephen Meyer would agree. | <urn:uuid:a9591e47-85b7-4f2a-bf4d-9f1bf21d7c63> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://recursed.blogspot.com/2009/07/stephen-meyers-honesty-problem.html?showComment=1248319864119 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978377 | 634 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Monday, April 9, 2012
Quick Tip #9 When Faced With An Equine Medical Emergencycy
Exhale. That is step one. Take a deep breath, exhale and then give a close, thoughtful examination of the horse. Shut up crying and whining. There will be time for that later. For now, determine the answer to every question that the vet is going to ask you when you call in. The correct answer to "How big is the cut?" is never "Its big." The correct answer is "About three inches long, but over an inch deep at its deepest point."
Your horse's life might depend on your ability to maintain your composure in an emergency.
Posted by Steve Edwards | <urn:uuid:13890155-91ec-48e6-85ab-b96f80bb856b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://msindianhorses.blogspot.com/2012/04/quick-tip-9-when-faced-with-equine.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952183 | 146 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Former Vice President Dick Cheney speaks in Oklahoma City about his heart failure
Former Vice President Dick Cheney shared his successes and struggles in politics and heart disease Saturday with a ballroom full of Oklahoma health care professionals during the 2012 Integris Advanced Cardiac Care Heart Failure Symposium.
Political will kept him busy for four decades, but personal will and the best in medical technology keeps Dick Cheney alive beyond retirement.
The former vice president shared his successes and struggles in politics and heart disease Saturday with a ballroom full of Oklahoma health care professionals during the 2012 Integris Advanced Cardiac Care Heart Failure Symposium.
Five weeks to the day after getting a heart transplant, Cheney, 71, said prudence and good timing kept him ticking even when the odds were stacked against him.
“The first time I was aware I had a problem was in the middle of my first campaign for Congress,” he said. “I got out of the car, walked into the emergency room, lay down on the table and passed out. That was my first heart
Heart disease, when fatty deposits block the flow of blood in the arteries, is the leading cause of death in the United States. Six million people currently suffer from it, with 580,000 new diagnoses each year at an estimated cost of $40 billion.
Cheney was 37 when he had his first of five heart attacks. Since then, he's undergone just about every heart procedure there is — angioplasties and stents in his arteries, surgery to repair aneurysms behind his knees, a pacemaker to keep his ticker thumping.
After a heart attack in 2010, a battery-powered implant called a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, was installed to keep blood flowing to his organs. About 20 months later, in March, Cheney's faulty heart was replaced with a new one.
Cheney attributed his success in fighting the disease to his decision to seek professional help after his first heart attack. When the doctor said conditions were ripe for continued heart problems, Cheney said he quit smoking cigarettes, changed his diet and began to exercise.
An internist convinced him to stay in the Congressional race, Cheney said — a fight not just for political power, but to stay vibrant and relevant.
“He said, ‘You're going to be in a lot more danger having to spend your life doing something you don't want to do,'” Cheney said. “That advice stuck with me from the very early days, and I did the things a prudent man would do — I followed the advice of my doctor.”
Most people, especially young people, hesitate before seeking help, he said. Those are the ones who don't make it.
But developing a long-term treatment plan is
“About the time a new technology came along was about the time I needed it,” he told the audience.
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- 4073Oklahoma tornadoes: 27 remain hospitalized from tornadoes | <urn:uuid:186d22e5-a892-4eef-b6d3-b767716d2fdb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newsok.com/article/3672926?click_action=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969328 | 738 | 1.507813 | 2 |
“We are driving them, sir!” [Union General Winfield S.] Hancock called proudly to the staff man. “Tell General Meade we are driving them beautifully.”
Lee was there in the clearing, doing all he could to stiffen what little was left of Hill’s resistance, and so had Longstreet himself been there, momentarily at least, when the blue assault was launched. He came riding up just before sunrise, a mile or two in advance of his column, the head of which had reached Parker’s Store by then, and Hill’s chief of staff crossed the Tapp farmyard to welcome him as he turned off the road. “Ah, General, we have been looking for you since 12 o’clock last night. We expect to be attacked at any moment, and are not in any shape to resist.” Unaccustomed to being reproached by unstrung colonels, however valid their anxiety, Old Peter looked sternly down at him. “My troops are not up,” he said. “I’ve ridden ahead —” At this point the sudden clatter of Hancock’s attack erupted out in the brush, and Longstreet, without waiting to learn more of what had happened, whirled his horse and galloped back to hurry his two divisions forward. So Lee at least knew that the First Corps would soon be up. His problem, after sending his adjutant to order the wagon train prepared for withdrawal, was to hang on till these reinforcements got there, probably within the hour, to shore up Hill’s fast-crumbling line. Presently, though, this began to look like more than he could manage; Wilcox and Heth, overlapped on both flanks, gave ground rapidly before a solid mass of attackers, and skulkers began to drift rearward across the clearing, singly and in groups, some of them turning to fire from time to time to their pursuers, while others seemed only intent on escape. Their number increased, until finally Lee saw a whole brigade in full retreat. Moreover, this was not just any brigade; it was Brigadier General Samuel McGowan’s brigade of South Carolinians, Wilcox’s best and one of the finest in the army.
“My God, General McGowan!” Lee exclaimed from horseback, breasting the flood of fugitives. “Is this splendid brigade of yours running like a flock of geese?”
“General, these men are not whipped,” McGowan answered, stung in his pride rebuke. “They only want a place to form and they will fight as well as they ever did.”
But there was the rub. All that was left by now for them to form on was a battalion of Third Corps artillery, four batteries under twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Colonel William Proague, lined up along the west side of the clearing which afforded one of the Wilderness’s few real fields of fire. The cannoneers stood to their loaded pieces, waiting for Hill’s infantry to fall back far enough to give them a chance to shoot at the bluecoats in pursuit. However, there was no time for this; Proague, with Lee’s approval, had his guns open at what was already point-blank range, shaving the heads of the Confederate retreaters in order to in order to throw their anti-personnel rounds into the enemy ranks. This took quick effect, particularly near the road, where the Federals tended to bunch up. Flailed by double-shotted grape and canister, they paused and began to look for cover: seeing which, the cannoneers stepped up their rate of fire. Lee remained mounted alongside Proague, who kept his men at their work — “getting the starch out of our shirts,” they called it — without infantry support. This could not continue long before they would be overrun, but meantime they were making the most of it. Smoke from the guns drifted back, sparkling in the early-morning sunlight, and presently Lee saw through its rearward swirls a cluster of men running toward him, carrying their rifles at the ready, and shouldering Hill’s fugitives aside.
“Who are you, my boys?” he cried as they came up in rear of the line of bucking guns.
“Texas boys!” they yelled, gathering now in larger numbers, and Lee knew them: Hood’s Texans, his old-time shock troops, now under Brigadier General John Gregg — the lead brigade of Field’s division. Longstreet was up at last.
“Hurrah for Texas!” Lee shouted. He took off his wide-brimmed hat and waved it. “Hurrah for Texas!”
No one had ever seen him act this way before, either on or off the field of battle. And presently, when the guns ceased their fuming and the Texans started forward, they saw something else they had never seen: something that froze the cheers in their throats and brought them to a halt. When Gregg gave the order, “Attention, Texas Brigade! The eyes of General Lee are upon you. Forward . . . march!” Lee rose in his stirrups and lifted his hat. “Texans always move them,” he declared. They cheered as they stepped out between the guns. “I would charge hell itself for that old man,” a veteran said fervently. Then they saw the one thing that could stop them. Lee had spurred Traveller forward on their heels; he intended to go in with them, across the field and after the bluecoats in the brush. They slacked their pace and left off cheering. “Lee to the rear!” began to be heard along the line, and some of them addressed him directly: “Go back, General Lee, go back. We won’t go unless you go back.” He was among them now, flushed with excitement, his eyes fixed on the woods ahead. They stopped, and when an attempt by Gregg to head him off had no effect, a sergeant reached out and took hold of Traveller’s rein, bringing the animal to a halt. “Lee to the rear! Lee to the rear!” the men were shouting. But his blood was up; he did not seem to hear them, or even to know that he and they were no longer in motion. At this point a staff colonel intervened. “General, you’ve been looking for General Longstreet. There he is, over yonder.” Lee looked and saw, at the far end of the field, the man he called his war horse. For the first time since he cleared the line of guns he seemed to become aware that he was involved in something larger than a charge. Responding to the colonel’s suggestion, he turned Traveller’s head and rode in that direction. On the way he passed in rear of General Evander Law’s Alabama brigade, about to move out on the left. “What troops are these?” he asked, and on being told he called to them: “God bless the Alabamians!” They went forward with a whoop, alongside the Texans, who were whooping too. “I thought him at that moment the grandest specimen of manhood I ever beheld,” one among them later wrote. “He looked as though he ought to have been, and was, the monarch of the world.”
— Shelby Foote, The Civil War: Red River to Appomattox. | <urn:uuid:dcd7fd4b-401f-44b6-a5bd-c16d02ea7582> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2007/06/hurrah_for_texas.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987216 | 1,621 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Just in time for LinuxCon, we are pleased to announce the first draft of FHS 3.0!
The LSB Workgroup has released update 3 to the Distribution Tests and Application Battery for LSB 4.0.
The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is a reference describing the conventions used for the layout of a UNIX system. It has been made popular by its use in Linux distributions, but it is used by other UNIX variants as well. The Linux Standard Base (LSB) refers to it as a standard.
Call for Participation
The LSB workgroup is preparing FHS 3.0, which will be the first FHS release since 2004. As part of that release, we are soliciting contributions from all interested parties.
The LSB workgroup is an open project, which welcomes contributions from all interested parties.
When targeting Linux as a platform, application developers want to have some assurance that the code they write on one Linux distribution will run on other Linux distributions without having to go through extra effort. This matches their experiences on other popular platforms, such as Windows or Mac OS X.
The LSB workgroup is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) version 4.1.
The LSB workgroup provides the following documentation resources: | <urn:uuid:e7d9d2e7-a228-4baf-9296-f7a1399c9da8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.linuxfoundation.org/tags/lsb?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930427 | 270 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Fundraising is a great way for councils to add to their grant pool or support council originated programming. Whether it be for supporting more projects or
creating an LCC-run community project, this resourceful page includes all the information needed to start and manage a fundraising project.
Managing Fundraised Dollars
Many fundraising activities will need seed money to get up and running. There are some resources immediately
available to the council; for example, councils may use the interest earned on their account for fundraising purposes. Another source of funds is the five percent of
the annual allocation that councils may use for administrative purposes. This could be put towards fundraising expenses such as postage, printing, phone bills, or
maintaining a website. A council may also submit a local council-originated (LCO) grant for a program or activity for
which fees will be charged. As with all LCO grants, the program must reflect local needs and be approved by the state panel.
Following the fundraiser, councils need to track the new funds in their account. Since LCCs are considered government agencies, all monies - including
fundraised monies - must be deposited and maintained in the municipal account that is designated for the council. Donated and earned monies should be tracked by
the council treasurer so the council knows the ongoing total of both locally raised funds and state funds. The MCC's ledger template is a helpful tool for this process. As stated in the guidelines, the
funds may be accessed only through the process used by the municipality's treasurer and/or accountant's office for the expenditure of public funds. Separate
checkbooks or non-municipal accounts are not permissible.
Councils can use locally raised funds (including interest earned) for purposes related to the arts, humanities or interpretive sciences, however, they do
not have to have MCC approval to spend money they have raised. Councils may save their fundraised money to put towards a large-scale project. If this is the case,
the council should communicate to the town its intentions to set aside funds for a future goal. Locally raised revenue is also reported to the MCC in the annual
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To be successful fundraisers, councils should have an inspired idea, an articulate case, a passion to see it through, and community contacts. Fundraising is all
about building relationships and showing people the value of the council in the community. Councils should note that all contributions made to LCCs are
tax-deductible under Section 170(c) of the Internal Revenue Code.
A good way to start is by putting together a simple fundraising plan. The plan should include an outline of the project, a project timeline, the amount of money the
council wants to raise overall, who will be responsible for each task, and a publicity plan. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you move forward:
- Start small. Don't sponsor expensive events that could leave the council in debt or wear out volunteers. Keep costs down by getting goods and services donated from
local grocery stores and businesses.
- Share the work. Collaborate with other groups or LCCs on a fundraising activity. Collaboration allows the council to cast a wider net, and increases the chances of
raising money. Plus more volunteers means more help with various tasks.
- Be persistent. First attempts at selling tickets or soliciting donations may not be as lucrative as anticipated. It often takes time to build a successful
fundraising event or activity.
- Show your appreciation. When someone donates money or time to support your cause, follow up with a thank you note and be sure to keep in touch with them. It's
beneficial to have friends in the community who support your cause, and you never know when you might need to call upon their generosity again.
- Reflect on the results. Ask for feedback from LCC and other community members to evaluate the project. Consider these questions:
- Was the activity well-publicized and presented?
- Was the timing effective?
- Did the council stay within the budget?
- Did the council meet its participation and fundraising goals?
- Was enough money raised to make the event worthwhile?
- Overall, was it successful and should it be repeated?
- Are there other fundraising strategies that might be more effective?
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Who to Approach
Fundraising is about building relationships. Councils should think about their constituents and their community, and develop a plan on who to approach for
Individuals: Individuals are an important group to engage in fundraising efforts. Councils should think about those who already know about and
support the council's work in the community. These individuals will make up the base of the support group.
Municipalities: Many councils find that asking their town or city for money is a successful fundraising approach. Before contacting the
municipality, familiarize yourself with the municipality's local officials, community needs, and the impact that the council has or could have on the community. Over
time the council can build a relationship with the municipality. Council members need to
be able to convince the town or city official that investing in the council's cause will help them advance their agenda. Find out if the city/town has a strategic
plan and learn what role arts and culture play in the plan. This will help the council understand how its work can support their city/town's goals. If the plan
does not address arts and culture specifically, think about how the council's work supports other areas of focus, whether it is providing after-school programming
for at-risk youth, or supporting the local economy by creating community events. The New England Foundation for the
Arts has a helpful website that measures the financial impact cultural institutions have on
Businesses: Businesses are another important group to consider when fundraising. Larger corporations may have grant opportunities available for the
council to apply to, while local businesses may give donations or sponsor a specific event that the council is putting on. For more information about soliciting
donations from larger corporations, read the corporate donations guide.
Foundations: Corporate, family, or community foundations will have grant opportunities available. Make sure the council is a good match for the
foundation's guidelines. When grant writing, be sure to clearly show a need, an idea for a solution, and data to support the case.
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LCC Facts and Figures
In fiscal year 2011, 87 Local Cultural Councils reported receiving $100 or more of locally raised funds and/or interest:
- Total of funds reported: $223,516
- Mean or average reported: $2,569
- Median reported: $690
- Largest amount reported by a council: $16,632
LCCs were surveyed to identify the sources of their local revenue and reported the following:
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Types of Fundraising
There are as many ways to raise money as there are ways to spend it. Some of the most common fundraising techniques are:
- Annual appeal letter
- Donation jar at LCC funded events
- Approach local businesses/banks for donations (both financial or in-kind goods/services)
- Hold an arts festival to raise council visibility and showcase community artists
- Benefit concert with silent auction/raffle
- Open Mic series
- Combine a raffle or silent auction with a:
- Pancake breakfast/spaghetti dinner
- Art show
- Benefit Concert
- Studio tours/art walks
Most councils raise money through a cultural event rather than, for example, a bowl-a-thon, in order to remain consistent with their role as sponsor of
local cultural activities. Less traditional audiences could be rewarding, though. An activity like a bowl-a-thon may reach a broader segment of the
community, which could raise more money and reach a new audience for council-sponsored programs. Keep in mind that fundraising has two benefits - money raised
in the short term, and visibility over the long term.
Remember that it is possible to fundraise, and many councils do so successfully. Raising money can be hard work, but holding a council-originated project or
creating the capacity to fund more applicants is worth the effort. Read the LCC Fundraising Success Stories to
learn how councils have implemented many of these types of fundraising.
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Fundraising Success Stories
Dennis Cultural Council: Letter Campaign
The Dennis Cultural Council found that a simple letter writing campaign was very profitable compared to the amount of time and energy that went into it. On a
bi-annual basis, the council sends out a donation letter, and their most recent drive netted a $500 profit. The council started their mailing list by
having each member come up with 10 names and/or businesses they felt were interested in arts and culture, and now includes the list of registered voters in the
town. The council adds personal touches and convenience measures, such as hand-signing the letters and including a stamped return envelope with the solicitation.
All donations are acknowledged with a handwritten thank you note containing a Dennis Arts and Culture Council sticker, and the names of donors are listed on the
Wellfleet Cultural Council: Municipal Funding
For the past two years, the Wellfleet Cultural Council has received support through the town budget. The council approached the town by sending a letter to the
Town Administrator requesting an allocation for the council. Council members then attended a board of selectmen meeting where they gave an overview of the grants
funded through the program and the various citizens and organizations involved in each. By emphasizing that their request of $2,000 was rather small when compared
to the whole town budget, and that the funds have widespread impact across the community, the council was successful in securing municipal support. The council uses
the municipal funding to augment the amount available for granting each year.
Medford and Harwich Local Cultural Councils: Raffles*, Auctions & Events
To increase visibility and raise funds through a new avenue, the Medford Arts Council held an event at Flatbread Pizza to take advantage of the restaurant's
fundraising program that donates a percentage of proceeds from pizza sales to area non-profits and public organizations. In addition, they had a silent auction
with donated artwork and prizes from local business, as well as a raffle. The council raised over $1,300, and was able to promote itself to a broader segment of
In Harwich, the council organized a jazz concert at a local venue and tied in a silent auction. Patrons purchased tickets to the concert, and were then able to bid
on the 15 items up for auction. The council chose the Wychmere Beach Club as a venue, which had recently reopened following renovations and added to the appeal of the
event. They solicited a number of donations from area business and member connections, and paired up certain items to increase the base value. The council sold over
200 tickets and raised more than $5,700 with the event and auction.
*If the council is interested in holding a raffle, be sure to check with the city/town solicitor ahead of time in order to abide by state gaming
Westborough Cultural Council: Festivals
The Westborough Cultural Council has had great success promoting the councils and fundraising through its event "Arts in Common". The council has sponsored
the event for the past three years, which features musical performances, arts and craft vendors, craft demonstrations, children's activities, food booths, and a silent
auction with over 75 items. The council begins planning far in advance, and is quite active for four to six months preceding the event. They find that this has not
only generated funds, but helps build community and gives local artists a chance to showcase their talents.
Southwick Cultural Council and West Springfield Arts Council: Alternative Approaches
To take advantage of an on-going community project, the Southwick Cultural Council created a fundraiser out of the town's efforts to renovate the town hall
stage by selling "inches" of the stage and providing deeds to all who bought an inch or more. Following the sale, a plaque was installed with the names of the
contributors. The council found that not only did this raise money, but it raised the profile of the council, as well as community support for the renovation.
The West Springfield Arts Council (WeSPAC) created a partnership with the local technical school as part of their fundraiser. Carpentry students crafted 30
birdhouses, which were on display for a month at the library and then sold for $50 apiece. The council has sold all of the houses each year they’ve done the
fundraiser, which translates to a quick profit of $1,500, while providing local students with the chance to show off their skills.
...And don't forget - fundraising can always be as simple as a donation jar. One council made over $300 by placing a jar at the refreshment table during an
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Tips from LCC Members:
- Communicate with possible partners/collaborators in town.
- Have a sense of humor!
- Remember that people are busy. Simple fundraisers like letter campaigns can have a great return without requiring the same time and energy as an event.
- Consider all sources when fundraising.
- Make sure your support to the community is visible through press and word of mouth.
- Engage support from others who want to contribute to the community.
- Work hard to be visible.
- Plan carefully and prepare for unforeseen problems.
- Make sure each council member steps up to take responsibility - fundraising is an all or nothing venture.
- Don't be afraid to approach larger institutions for donations or raffle/auction items.
- Try not to pay for advertising, and price your events so that families can attend.
- Patience is key with planning and execution.
- Fundraising takes more time that you expect. Be sure to 'test' your idea on a few people to work out issues/questions before approaching the general
- The more exposure you have, the better you'll do.
- Make sure you have the man/womanpower to successfully manage your chosen fundraising strategy.
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Making the Case to Raise Funds - Fundraising presentation for LCCs given by Eric D'Alessandro, MCC Program Officer: Download this presentation
The Grassroots Fundraising Journal
Map for Non Profits' Free Management Library
The Chronicle of Philanthropy
Foundation Center's Proposal Writing Short Course
Articles and further reading:
The Ten Most Important Things You Can Know
about Fundraising (PDF)
8 Ways to Raise $2,500 in 10 Days (PDF)
Tips on writing solicitation letters and templates:
Step by Step Fundraising
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MGH Hotline 10.08.10 In commemoration of Women in Medicine Month, the MGH last month hosted Eve J. Higginbotham, SM, MD, senior vice president and executive dean for Health Science at Howard University, who presented "Cracking the Glass Ceiling in Academic Medicine," Sept. 20 in the Thier Conference Room.
Cracking the glass ceiling
BREAKING THE GLASS CEILING: From left, Winfred (Win) Williams, co-chair of the Multicultural Affairs Office Advisory Board; Rigotti; Anne Klibanski, MD, director of the Center for Faculty Development and chief of the Neuroendocrine Unit; Higginbotham; Peter L. Slavin, MD, MGH President, Theodore Stern, MD, director of the Office for Clinical Careers
In commemoration of Women in Medicine Month, the MGH last month hosted Eve J. Higginbotham, SM, MD, senior vice president and executive dean for Health Science at Howard University, who presented "Cracking the Glass Ceiling in Academic Medicine," Sept. 20 in the Thier Conference Room. Higginbotham reviewed the current state of women in academic medicine and explored strategies to change the demographics of medicine and science. More than 50 faculty members attended the event.
"We were delighted that Dean Higginbotham helped MGH celebrate and recognize the increasing number and career progress of our own female physicians," says Nancy Rigotti, MD, director of the Office for Women's Careers. "In sharing her own experiences breaking barriers in her career, she was an inspiring example of what is possible, and she shared her insight and strategies for other women to succeed in academic medicine."
Higginbotham noted that more women are entering the medical field than ever before -- but once a woman attains her initial faculty rank, her advancement up the ladder is slower than a man's progression. Higginbotham suggested that this may be due to an environment where women may feel discouraged from pursuing leadership roles. She asked both women and men in the audience to help change this perception by encouraging women to pursue positions that educate future medical professionals, such as deans of medical schools, presidents of teaching hospitals and other leadership roles.
Higginbotham also encouraged diversity in these positions to promote a more positive and multifaceted environment and to display to all aspiring physicians that every position can be achievable for every individual. She ended the presentation stating, "Collectively we can crack the glass ceiling."
For more information about the event, contact [email protected].
U.S. News & World Report ranks Mass General the #1 hospital in America based on our quality of care, patient safety and reputation in 16 different specialties. Learn more about why we're #1.
Search the archive for previously published news articles, press releases and publications.
Departments and Centers at Mass General have a reputation for excellence in patient care. View a list of all departments. | <urn:uuid:a91acc7c-21a4-413f-a30d-a878e88622bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.massgeneral.org/doctors/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=2382 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940423 | 613 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Before surgery at Children's at Lexington, eating and drinking are not allowed for certain periods of time. Follow these instructions carefully to prepare your child for surgery. If your child eats or drinks after the indicated time, the surgery may be canceled. Note: No food or drink is allowed in Pre-Op areas.
Specific instructions for children having day surgery at Children's at Lexington:
- Before the surgery: Do no eat any solid foods after midnight, including: candy, gum, non-human milk (cow, soy, rice, etc.), thickened formulas including commercial ones such as AR (which is added rice).
- 6 hours before surgery/procedure: stop drinking formula and fortified breast milk. Children over the age of 12 months must stop formula 8 hours before surgery/procedure.
- 4 hours before surgery/procedure: stop drinking breast milk
- 2 hours before surgery/procedure: stop drinking clear liquids
- G-tube formula feeding: should be stopped by midnight. (Children under 1 year of age may continue G-tube formula until 6 hours prior to surgery/procedure)
- Clear liquids include: water apple juice, Pedialyte. No carbonated beverages should be consumed during the 8 hour pre-surgery/procedure period.
Also, your child must remove all jewelry (including navel or other body piercings), nail polish, acrylic nails and contact lenses before coming to the hospital. Please leave all valuables at home.
Preparing your child for surgery
The Day Surgery staff can arrange an individual meeting with your family upon request.
For surgeries taking place at Boston Children's Hospital at Lexington, call 781-672-2300 to make arrangements.
Call your child's doctor or the appropriate Day surgery number if:
- your child has a cough, chest cold, sore or strep throat, nasal discharge (runny nose), conjunctivitis or has recently been exposed to the chicken pox;
- has any history of croup, pneumonia or mononucleosis (mono) within last six months; or
- has a history or family history of bleeding or frequent nosebleeds.
What to bring the day of surgery
- Your child's insurance information, including authorization numbers.
- All of your child's medication bottles, and/or pharmacy receipts, so medication doses can be verified.
- A written list of any questions you and your child may have.
- Your child's special blanket, stuffed animal or small toy.
- A CD player/iPod with headphones if your child is having local anesthesia. He or she may be able to use them.
- Two adults may be with your child in the Preoperative area and Recovery Room; however, please do not bring brothers or sisters, or additional people such as grandparents or friends.
- A copy of court papers regarding legal guardianship, if this applies:
- The phone number of the legal guardian or social worker if you are not the legal guardian.
- No cell phones or laptops in Pre-op or PACU areas.
Day before surgery
Lexington: A nurse will call you before 2 p.m. to confirm the time of surgery. The nurse will review information with you and answer any questions you may have. If you do not receive a call by 2 p.m. the day before your surgery, please call a member of the Day Surgery staff at 781-672-2300 between 2 and 3 p.m.
When to arrive at Day Surgery
Please arrive at least one hour before the scheduled surgery time. This allows time to register and perform necessary assessments. If your child is scheduled for surgery at 8:30 a.m., please arrive at 7:30 a.m.
Parking at Children's at Lexington is free.
The Day Surgery Unit is located on the first floor. The entrance can be found on your left-hand side after the last set of double doors.
Consent for surgery
Surgery cannot take place unless consent forms are signed. A parent or legal guardian must sign consent forms for surgery for children under age 18. Patients 18 years or older can consent to their own care.
If a patient age 18 or older is unable to give consent for treatment and/or surgery, the legal guardian must sign. For example, those who are incompetent or have developmental delays are often unable to give informed consent. If your child is 18 years or older and you are his or her legal guardian, please bring the legal documentation.
All female children age 12 and older will be tested for pregnancy.
The surgeon will meet with you in the Family Waiting Room. The nurse will take you to your child's bedside when your child is settled in the Post Anesthesia Care Unit (recovery room).
Most children stay in the recovery room for 30 minutes or up to two hours after surgery. Some stays are longer, depending on the surgery and the patient's diagnosis.
Your child's nurse will teach you what you need to know to care for your child at home, answer any questions you may have and give you written instructions. You may take your child home when he or she is ready and you have learned the care required.
Please make sure all transportation arrangements are made for discharge following surgery. Be aware that public transportation is not an option after receiving anesthesia or sedation.
The morning or afternoon after surgery, a Recovery Room nurse will call you to see how your child is doing. | <urn:uuid:491f6be0-4484-401c-ab72-6f72cdc9e1d6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.childrenshospital.org/clinicalservices/Site1864/mainpageS1864P23.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930176 | 1,133 | 1.757813 | 2 |
From specialty restaurants to Japanese-themed hotels, new businesses are springing up in Bangalore to cater to the needs of Japanese expatriates.
Rents go down, grocery bills shrink, companies lay off workers and people move away to live in the countryside–and yet somehow Tokyo continues to be the world’s most expensive city for expatriates to live in. Most of the blame can be placed firmly on the relentless strength of Japanese currency against the U.S. dollar, according to the annual cost of living survey by international human resources consulting firm, Mercer. The capital shot back to top of the chart, swapping runner-up position with the Angolan capital of Luanda, which came first last year. Other Japanese cities–Osaka and Nagoya–also placed in the top 10. The results show that, all in all, Japan is one of the most expensive countries on earth for expats.
This summer marks the end of an era for foreigners residing in Japan. Starting July 9, the 60-year-old “certificate of alien registration” — the credit-card sized i.d. informally known as “the gaijin card” — will go the way of yakiimo carts, weekly Astroboy broadcasts, and uniformed men punching train tickets. New residents will instead be given a “residence card” similar to the ones Japanese citizens carry, except for a special marking designating the holder’s nationality.
Japan Inc. lost yet another foreign CEO on Wednesday.
Nippon Sheet Glass Co.’s American president, Craig Naylor, is stepping down after not quite two years in his post — a decision that “reflected fundamental disagreements with the board on company strategy,” according to a statement by Group Chairman Katsuji Fujimoto. “This is regrettable but we thank Craig for his efforts over the past two years and wish him well in the future.” Mr. Fujimoto didn’t elaborate on what the disagreements were.
Japan is number one again, but not for good reason: Tokyo and Osaka are the two most expensive cities in Asia, according to Mercer’s annual cost of living survey released on Wednesday.
This comes as news to anyone living in Tokyo these days, where the rents – usually the single-biggest expense for an expatriate – for expat-type apartments have plunged about 10-20% since the credit crisis in 2008, as bankers fled the city in droves. Even more pressure has been put on rents since March 11, as more expats have fled Tokyo due to the uncertainty surrounding the nuclear plant situation. Eating out isn’t that pricey either: a decade of deflation means that one can eat a beef sukiyaki bowl at Yoshinoya for as little as ¥280, or $3.50.
A stronger yen hurts overseas sales and profits at Japanese companies when converted into their home currency.
But Japanese companies aren’t the only ones to feel the pain: For foreign companies sending their employees to Japan on long-term assignments, a stronger yen means larger expenses to cover the expatriates’ cost of living.
In 2010, Tokyo was the world’s most expensive place for expats to rent a two-bedroom apartment, according to a report published this week by human resources consulting firm ECA International.
As Tokyo’s legions of office workers headed to work Monday morning, some of Japan’s most hardcore American football fans were congregating at the few establishments showing the NFL Super Bowl live.
One of these, the Tokyo Sports Café in the central entertainment district of Roppongi, opened its doors before 8 a.m., offering an “American breakfast” of suspiciously yellow scrambled eggs, shiny strips of bacon, green salad and little sausages speared with toothpicks—plus all the draft beer you could drink–for 5,000 yen.
Tokyo may not be the most popular destination for foreign business executives heading for Asia these days, but the city still offers some big benefits. There’s the clean air, for instance, and of course the world’s best sushi. A financial crisis-induced exodus of expats of late has also meant cheaper rent and easier admission to a certain international preschool in Roppongi.
And to that list comes a new addition: State-of-the-art lounging at the Tokyo American Club, a membership organization where many of the city’s elite expats and their families hang out.
The new TAC building opened its doors Tuesday at its original location in Roppongi. It hasn’t come cheaply: The three-year redevelopment project, conducted jointly with big Japanese developers Mitsubishi Estate and Takenaka Corp., came with a $150 million price tag.
It’s a well-known factoid that Japan’s average price for residential land has declined steadily for nearly two decades. And that trend shows no signs of abating particularly with the economy still in the throes of deflation.
So it comes as a bit of a surprise that one of Japan’s major real estate developers, Sumitomo Realty & Development Co., recently started leasing a super-upscale condominium in which the most expensive apartment costs a mind-boggling 5.31 million yen a month — just under $64,000 and nearly equal to the nation’s average annual income.
The penthouse, located in the heart of fashionable western Tokyo’s Daikanyama district, is one of the priciest in terms of rent in the country in recent years. And, according to Sumitomo Realty, it’s already set to be snapped up for the asking price. The developer declined to disclose the identity of the keen customer.
So what does it look like?
The Galapagosization of Japan continues. According to a survey released today, a shocking two-thirds of the country’s white-collar workers said they didn’t want to work abroad…ever.
The results are downright depressing, given that Japan has recently suffered the ignominy of ceding its position to China as the world’s second-largest economy. The younger and more junior the employee, the greater the resistance to the expat life: 70.7% of “regular employees,” or those who aren’t managers, said they didn’t want to go abroad, according to a survey of 400 people conducted by the Sanno Institute of Management, a graduate school in Japan.
Common reasons were “I can’t speak English,” or “The overseas environment may not be safe.” Managing directors — usually older employees in their 40s and 50s — had the least resistance to working overseas, with only 42.9% saying they wouldn’t go.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in 2011 sparked broad debate on radiation, health and safety. Fukushima Watch contributes to that debate, with sharp, easy-to-understand commentary on things nuclear and energy-related in Japan.
Japan Real Time is a newsy, concise guide to what works, what doesn’t and why in the one-time poster child for Asian development, as it struggles to keep pace with faster-growing neighbors while competing with Europe for Michelin-rated restaurants. Drawing on the expertise of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, the site provides an inside track on business, politics and lifestyle in Japan as it comes to terms with being overtaken by China as the world’s second-biggest economy. You can contact the editors at [email protected] | <urn:uuid:c6eb44f3-86b8-44f7-bfa5-03444bf18c66> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/tag/expats/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95228 | 1,604 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The Loonie, the Kiwi, and the Aussie aren't named "comdolls" for nothing - they earned their titles as commodity dollars because their respective economies are highly dependent on exporting commodities. As such, these currencies tend to have strong correlations with the commodity markets, and they usually move hand in hand with one another.
But lately, this hasn't been the case - the comdolls have been going their own separate ways. Why aren't these high-yielding currencies moving in tandem anymore?Reason 1: Easing Chinese demand
Though all three economies benefit from China's appetite for commodities, Australia seems to be the most sensitive to fluctuations in Chinese demand. After all, China is responsible for over a fourth of Australia's total exports.
Australia and the Aussie found themselves on the receiving end at the peak of China's boom, but when growth in the world's second largest economy started to cool down, its demand for Australian goods and the Aussie began to decline as well.Reason 2: Diverging fundamentals
Australia has been seeing its fair share of disappointing reports as of late, namely in retail trade, the housing market, and in manufacturing production. If you recall, retail sales noted a not-so-merry Christmas in Australia as it showed a 0.2% decline in December. Likewise, the housing market saw losses of its own as building approvals dropped 4.4% in the same month.
Meanwhile, the AIG manufacturing index continues to indicate contraction in Australia's manufacturing industry, most recently printing a reading of 40.2 for the month of January. Take note, this report hasn't seen a reading above 50.0 (which is indicative of growth) since February of last year.
Canada has also been showing signs of struggle, as employment levels recently dropped by 21,900 last month. It also shares the same sore spots as Australia - building permits dropped by a whopping 11.2% in December, just as manufacturing sales declined 3.1%.
But while these two countries have been having a rough time, New Zealand seems to be holding up quite well. Demand for its top exports, wheat and dairy, is still strong and has been contributing to economic growth in the country. Even the retail sector has been seeing improvements - it recently clocked in a growth of 2.1% in Q4 2012, surpassing forecasts for a 1.3% increase. No wonder business confidence is at a one-year high!Reason 3: Differing takes on monetary policy
As I mentioned last week, market participants have started to price in an RBA rate cut following the series of negative reports from the Land Down Under. It also does not help that Australian policymakers have been very vocal about their discomfort with the Aussie's strength.
The minutes of the central bank's latest meeting confirms that further easing could be in the cards. The report's main takeaway is that the housing market has benefitted from the latest rounds of rate cuts. With inflation still being tame, there could still be more room for easing. Does this mean there's more room for AUD/USD to trade lower too?
On the other hand, policymakers in Canada as well as in New Zealand are seeing the positive side of having strong currencies.
In one of his most recent speeches, BOC Governor Mark Carney didn't seem to sound at all worried about the Loonie. He credited its recent gains to a number of factors that include the central bank's credibility and a healthy banking sector in Canada.
Heck, he even cited that the strong exchange rate is advantageous to Canada since it makes importing machinery, equipment and information and communications technology cheaper. New Zealand Prime Minister John Key seems to share the same sentiments. He reportedly said that consumers in New Zealand actually benefit from the Kiwi's recent strong rally!
If economic reports from Canada and New Zealand come in better-than-expected this coming week, speculations that the two economies can handle higher currencies would be confirmed.
I wouldn't be surprised to see USD/CAD find resistance at the top of the rising channel or NZD/USD tap new highs and maybe even rally past .8500. | <urn:uuid:cbf64dee-ea2b-4bed-9719-3e2ac5313497> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fxstreet.com/fundamental/analysis-reports/piponomics/2013/02/19/ | 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 | 0.974395 | 847 | 1.609375 | 2 |
President’s Budget Includes Funding Increases and Cuts to Blood Cancer Programs
The President’s budget proposal for fiscal year (FY) 2011 was delivered to Congress on February 1st. The President’s budget reflects the economic climate and an effort to reduce spending. As a result, domestic programs are being squeezed. While indicating continued support for cancer research, the President’s budget falls short of the commitment needed for cancer prevention and screening.
The President’s budget provides the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with $32 billion which $1 billion more than the FY 2010 appropriated level. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) includes an additional $126 million for a total of $32 billion $5.26 billion in FY 2011.
The cancer programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are cut by $19 million (3.9 percent) under the President’s budget. The Geraldine Ferraro Blood Cancer Program is eliminated under the President’s Budget. The Geraldine Ferraro Blood Cancer program received $4.7 million in FY 2010 provides important educational resources that help and support vital patient services as well as helps support community-based organizations that serve a critical role for cancer patients and their families.
The IMF will be working to ensure Congress supports the cancer programs funded through the NIH, NCI, and the CDC. For more information about IMF’s activities, please visit IMF’s advocacy page at www.myeloma.org.
President to Lead Congressional Health Care Summit
President Obama has scheduled a bipartisan congressional health care summit for February 25th in Washington, DC that will be broadcast live on C-SPAN. This meeting is intended to draw more Republican input into health care reform legislation that has been largely directed by Democrats. White House officials have made it clear that the President will not be starting from scratch and that the House and Senate bills would remain an integral part of the legislation. Republican leadership is uncomfortable with the possibility of participating in this meeting without starting over on health care reform and has asked the President to scrap the current House and Senate passed bills as a measure of goodwill.
The House and Senate are in recess for Presidents Day. Both Chambers will resume legislative business on February 22nd.
A number of Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have announced that they would not be running for reelection in November. This list includes Representatives Marion Berry (D-AR), Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), John Shadegg (R-AZ), and Diane Watson (D-CA) as well as Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN). | <urn:uuid:c1485f2b-b247-4d68-be9f-328c7b7287d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://myeloma.org/ArticlePage.action?tabId=0&menuId=0&articleId=2906&aTab=-1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946913 | 553 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Physical conditioning and mental stress reduction - a randomised trial in patients undergoing cardiac surgery
1 Cardiac Surgical Research Unit, Alfred Hospital, Department of Surgery, Monash University, Baker IDI Institute Melbourne, Australia
2 Department of Epidemiology & Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
3 Department of Physiotherapy, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Australia
4 Occupational Therapy Services, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Australia
BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2011, 11:20 doi:10.1186/1472-6882-11-20Published: 9 March 2011
Preoperative anxiety and physical unfitness have been shown to have adverse effects on recovery from cardiac surgery. This study involving cardiac surgery patients was primarily aimed at assessing the feasibility of delivering physical conditioning and stress reduction programs within the public hospital setting. Secondary aims were to evaluate the effect of these programs on quality of life (QOL), rates of postoperative atrial fibrillation (AF) and length of stay (LOS) in hospital.
Elective patients scheduled for coronary artery bypass graft and/or valve surgery at a public hospital in Melbourne, Australia were enrolled. Patients were randomized to receive either holistic therapy (HT) or usual care (UC). HT consisted of a series of light physical exercise sessions together with a mental stress reduction program administered in an outpatient setting for the first two weeks after placement on the waiting list for surgery. A self-administered SF-36 questionnaire was used to measure QOL and hospital records to collect data on LOS and rate of postoperative AF.
The study population comprised 117 patients of whom 60 received HT and 57 received UC. Both programs were able to be delivered within the hospital setting but ongoing therapy beyond the two week duration of the program was not carried out due to long waiting periods and insufficient resources. HT, as delivered in this study, compared to UC did not result in significant changes in QOL, LOS or AF incidence.
Preoperative holistic therapy can be delivered in the hospital setting, although two weeks is insufficient to provide benefits beyond usual care on QOL, LOS or postoperative AF. Further research is now required to determine whether a similar program of longer duration, or targeted to high risk patients can provide measurable benefits.
This trial was conducted as part of a larger study and according to the principles contained in the CONSORT statement 2001. | <urn:uuid:d1f57a8d-e668-4bb4-8f16-c337cca8b8ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/11/20/abstract | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932322 | 485 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Please welcome Elizabeth Wein to the blog today as part of the blog tour for her new book Code Name Verity. Set during World War II Code Name Verity is a story of friendship against the odds and the struggle to survive during war time. I'll be reviewing the book soon, but until then, read on for Elizabeth's post on the real-life inspirations for Code Name Verity.
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Publisher: Egmont.Release date: February 6th 2012.
I have two weeks. You'll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.
That's what you do to enemy agents. It's what we do to enemy agents. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and cooperation is the easy way out. Possibly the only way out for a girl caught red-handed doing dirty work like mine - and I will do anything, anything, to avoid SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer von Linden interrogating me again.
He has said that I can have as much paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember about the British War Effort. And I'm going to. But the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France - and Allied Invasion of Two.
We are a sensational team.
Guest Post: Elizabeth Wein on the real-life inspirations for Code Name Verity
The problem I have in listing ‘real people who have inspired me’ is narrowing it down.
I think that the two most obvious inspirations for Code Name Verity are Annette Berman and John Moffat. In civilian life, Madame Berman was my French teacher throughout high school, and John Moffat was a fellow pilot and board member when I was on Scottish Aero Club’s Executive Committee. During the war, as a teen, Mme Berman (we just called her Madame most of the time) worked for the French Resistance. Her Jewish family lived in
as the war began and were later hidden by friends in a country village where they pretended to be Roman Catholics. The young Annette was pretty quickly discovered to be a natural translator - she was fluent in French, German, Polish and English; the local Resistance cell also used her as a courier. Her tales of delivering dynamite in her bicycle basket were the stuff of legend during my school days. Although we lived 4000 miles away from each other in later years, I remained in contact with Mme Berman until her death in 2008 - long before I ever thought about writing Code Name Verity - and I even made sure my children got to meet her. She was a hugely talented, generous, unassuming, funny, and inspiring person. Nothing in Code Name Verity is directly based on her life; I felt that would be intrusive. But her influence on me is a lasting one. Paris
John Moffat was never a personal friend in the way Mme Berman was to me, but he was certainly an inspiration as a pilot. He has become quietly legendary as ‘The Man Who Sank the Bismarck’. While it is true that he makes occasional media appearances (such as the BBC’s National Treasures Live and Shipwreck Ark Royal) and co-authored the book I Sank the Bismarck, I first knew him as a modest and venerable member of the Scottish Aero Club. My personal encounters with John were limited to committee meetings, aero club events, and evenings in the pub, and it always bewildered me a little trying to reconcile in my head the young Swordfish pilot who delivered the crippling blow to a German warship with the witty octogenarian who was occasionally flamboyant when performing a suggestive song in the pub or at the annual club dinner. Well into his eighties John was still flying a humble little Piper Colt incorporating the word ‘
’ in the registration after the Ark Royal, the aircraft carrier he flew from during the war. To my certain knowledge, John’s career as a pilot spanned more than 60 years. ARK
Annette Berman and John Moffat are people I knew personally - indirect influences on the plot of Code Name Verity. The direct influences are all people I know through reading their amazing life stories: the real men and women of the Air Transport Auxiliary and the Special Operations Executive. I’m not sure I can make a comprehensive list because there is always someone else.
So here’s an idea: Mapping the two main characters from Code Name Verity to a few of the many people whose lives inspired me to create their fictional representatives.
‘Verity’ has her origins in a number of Special Operations Executive agents. The ones whose stories hit me hardest were Noor Inayat Khan, Alix D’Unienville, Violette Szabo, and Odette Sansom. Two of these women survived the war; all four of them were captured, tortured, refused to give up any information and were eventually deported to concentration camps. The stories of Noor Inayat Khan and Violette Szabo are the most gut-wrenching because of the truly horrendous circumstances of their deaths (both were executed in captivity). None of them were over thirty. Violette Szabo, a young mother, was captured in a furious gunfight; Noor Inayat Khan, a gentle, lovely, determined daughter of an Indian and an American, author of children’s books, was betrayed and unwittingly gave away most of the rest of her circuit because she didn’t know she was being watched. Alix D’Unienville and Odette Sansom’s stories are inspiring because of the horrors they endured and yet managed to survive. Alix D’Unienville went on to become a writer herself - her 1949 book En Vol (‘In Flight’) is a moving, perceptive and gently mocking travelogue which to my mind rivals St. Exupery for its honest and appreciative experience of the wonders of flight in the first part of the twentieth century. Violette Szabo and Odette Sansom both had films made of their wartime experiences: Carve Her Name With Pride (starring Virginia McKenna of Born Free fame etc.) and Odette, which features a curious cameo of Maurice Buckmaster, head of the French section of the Special Operations Executive, played by himself.
My own character Maddie Brodatt of the Air Transport Auxiliary has several different roots as well. As well as being based on stories of ATA women, some of Maddie’s experiences are also based on those of Hugh Verity (no relation! The name is a coincidence - I didn’t discover this fellow till halfway through writing the novel). Hugh Verity was an actual Moon Squadron pilot, who successfully flew over 30 landing missions into occupied France (possibly more than any other pilot). Fortunately for me, he wrote about it, meticulously documenting his and his squadron’s wartime scrapes and successes in the book We Landed by Moonlight (1978).
Some of Maddie’s flying adventures are based on Hugh Verity’s, and some are based on those of other female ATA pilots, such as Betty Lussier and Diana Barnato Walker. Betty Lussier was an American university student of British ancestry who was determined to make a contribution to the war effort, and her tales of training with the ATA and begging flights with bomber crews would sound very familiar to anyone who’s read Code Name Verity. Lussier herself left the ATA in 1944 to become an agent with the newly formed
OSS - she was disappointed that ATA women weren’t being allowed to fly in continental Europe! She often remarks that she’d like to be a combat pilot in her autobiography, Intrepid Woman (William Stephenson, British spy famously codenamed ‘Intrepid’, was her godfather).
My experience is that most women ATA pilots didn’t feel they needed to be in combat, but they were disappointed at not being able to ferry aircraft in
Europe. The first woman ATA pilot to fly to France after the Allied invasion of did so in September 1944. This was Diana Barnato Walker, and her flight was not-quite-above-board, so an awful lot was resting on its success. She got lost in fog on her way back to Normandy , hit a clear patch in the right place at the right time, and got VERY LUCKY. (Later in life she became the first British woman to break the sound barrier.) England
If I tried to make a complete list of the amazing real-life stories that went into my head and came out as Code Name Verity, it would be about a mile long. Many of the minor characters have their basis in real historical figures also. Like me, they are inspired by real people. But, also like me, my fictional characters are their own individuals leading their own lives. Ultimately, I made them up.
More about Annette Berman
More about John Moffat
More about the SOE Agents
The following blog entry includes portraits and bios of most of the SOE women I mentioned, except Alix d’Unienville:
For a brief bio of Alix d’Unienville:
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein is out now from Egmont , £7.99 | <urn:uuid:5e2b6d78-5a61-435a-84f2-b8f2b431619d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://daisychainbookreviews.blogspot.de/2012/02/blog-tour-author-elizabeth-wein-on-real.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967831 | 1,958 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Veteran technology reporter Declan McCullah observes that a revised cyber-security bill permits the president to "seize temporary control of private sector networks during a so-called... emergency."
The bill would allow the president to unilaterally declare "a cybersecurity emergency" for non-governmental computer networks in order to respond to a threat.
Other sections of the bill go even further: they proscribe government-controlled certification programs that license computer security professionals. And it goes on to demand that certain, privately-owned computer systems and networks be managed only by those professionals who have achieved the federal certification.
A reproduction of the relevant section of the bill is available at PoliteTechBot.
"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."
Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller's aides this week...
Hey, it's only centralized government control of the Internet.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
In all seriousness: if you were elected President and wanted to transform the U.S. into a third-world banana republic like Venezuela, how would your policies differ from those of Obama?
Hat tip: Matt Drudge. | <urn:uuid:d4c8a932-f93b-47d4-8aaf-9bdefa6b5501> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/08/red-alert-bill-would-give-obama.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940393 | 317 | 1.71875 | 2 |
DEL MAR — When the Grand Avenue Bridge was a bridge, it was unlawful to dive, jump or fish from it. Those activities are still prohibited now that the structure has been partially demolished and turned into a viewing platform.
But to avoid ambiguity, City Council unanimously agreed to amend the municipal code at its July 13 meeting by adding a section that specifically bans diving, jumping or fishing from the Lagoon Viewpoint — Old Grand Avenue Bridge, as the overlook is now officially known.
Hoping to minimize clutter, Friends of the San Dieguito River Valley planned to install one sign stating that only fishing from the structure wasn’t allowed.
“We felt that if anybody dove off or jumped they would only do it once because they would kill themselves,” said Jacqueline Winterer, president of the citizens group and chairwoman of the ad hoc committee in charge of signage.
“I don’t think you can conclude that all human beings are logical, sane or careful,” Councilman Richard Earnest said. “You will find somebody who wants to do a half-gainer off a bridge just because they want to.”
Brian Mooney, interim planning director, agreed. “If you have a body of water and you have somewhere where you can jump (into) it, somebody will jump,” he said.
Leslie Devaney, the new city attorney, said signs aren’t legally required but they would be helpful to inform visitors and decrease potential liability issues. Winterer said she will instruct her group to include all three prohibited activities on the signs.
The Grand Avenue Bridge once provided access from San Dieguito Road to a landing field for blimps. It was originally slated for complete demolition as part of the San Dieguito Lagoon restoration project, but Winterer suggested eliminating two sections and turning it into a viewing platform. It opened to the public in late March. | <urn:uuid:00c3f3ca-9c52-438c-b85d-650ab48d5ba5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thecoastnews.com/2009/07/diving-fishing-banned-from-overlook/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964803 | 405 | 1.523438 | 2 |
iRun and Rock: a new race in support of first responders
April 3rd, 2013
When Nicole Taylor, a military wife and nurse by day, took classes to become a certified yoga teacher, she had no idea it would lead to the creation of iRun and Rock, a new race in support of first responders.
The June 1, 2013 event features a 1km, 5 km, 10km, 4km Full Battle Team Relay and rock concert put on by Glass Tiger. Perhaps more importantly, it’s generating momentum for Post Traumatic Stress disorder research and awareness in the first responder community.
Held at the Ray Twinney Recreation Centre in Newmarket, iRun and Rock will bring together speakers, display booths and educational materials to educate lifesavers and their families on what PTSD is, how it can affect them and what treatment options are available.
PTSD has traditionally been associated with soldiers, but Taylor works at a hospital with first responders, so she sees firsthand the devastating effects PSTD can have in other lines of work involving life or death situations.
Trying to alleviate some of the damaging emotional trauma faced by lifesavers, Taylor offers a specific kind of yoga at her studio in Barrie. “Taylor Made Yoga” holds classes for soldiers, veterans and first responders suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
She was surprised by the number of OPP officers who began attending classes alongside military veterans.
“These are men who have been living with trauma for many years,”said Taylor.
That’s why Taylor was inspired when she heard about the First Responders Day Act 2012 – it’s a bill that’s supported by all political parties but has yet to be proclaimed. It was the perfect occasion to hold a race in support of the first responders and their families.
PTSD has a way of transferring itself from the initial responder to other members of the family. Taylor has been educating teachers in the area about how trauma can be transferred to other members of the family.
“There’s more suicide among kids of first responders then any other population,” said Taylor.
The funds from the race go towards a research study at York University which is looking at the effects of PTSD on first responders. It’s being conducted completely on the time and efforts of volunteers.
“I think that when it comes to PTSD, people are so tired of keeping it well hidden. It’s time for this community to come together as a unified group and start thinking about it,” said Taylor.
iRun and Rock is about education and awareness, but it’s also about the community. Taylor says it’s a community of people who are so used to taking care of others.
“They don’t do anything for themselves.”
Taylor thinks that’s why support for the event has already generated so much attention.
“There is a way through this and we’re standing together in this.”
To get in touch with one of the organizers of the event go here or send an email to: [email protected]
Leave a Comment | <urn:uuid:f9d38522-f87f-4c29-b678-6c3384c07e44> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://taylormadeyoga.ca/category/yoga-for-ptsd/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964358 | 661 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Shelley Duvall biography
Born in 1949 in Houston, Texas, Shelley Duvall was discovered at an engagement party in 1969 by location scouts for director Robert Altman. Duvall would go on to star in several Altman films, including Thieves Like Us (1974) and Popeye (1979). In 1980, she teamed up with Jack Nicholson and played Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Duvall has also founded two successful television production companies.
Born in Houston, Texas, on July 7, 1949, actress Shelley Alexis Duvall was one of Bobbie and Robert Duvall's four children, and their only daughter. By her own account, Duvall was an artistic girl with lots of energy, whom her mother eventually nicknamed "Manic Mouse." "I was a little terror sometimes!" Duvall said in a 2012 interview. "I used to run around a lot, tipping things over."
Duvall graduated from Waltrip High School in 1967, and then enrolled at South Texas Junior College, where she studied nutrition and diet therapy. To help pay for school, Duvall worked as a cosmetics salesperson at a local department store.
Her acting career began by accident. In 1969, while attending an engagement party for a Houston artist, Duvall was spotted by a pair of location scouts, who had been hired by director Robert Altman for his upcoming film, Brewster McCloud (1970).
Though Duvall's acting background was somewhat limited—she'd performed in a handful of high school plays—Altman was intrigued by Duvall's unique looks, most notably her large eyes, lanky build, and engaging, toothy smile, and offered Duvall a part in his new film. Duvall accepted and went on to portray a Houston Astrodome usher and the love interest of the film's main character, Brewster McCloud.
Despite its poor reception, Brewster McCloud launched Duvall's career and set in motion a working relationship with Altman that would benefit them both in the coming years. The pair collaborated on Altman's next film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and then later in Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975) and 3 Women (1977).
By the late 1970s, Duvall was a respected and well-known Hollywood actress. In 1979, she reconnected with Altman again for the live-action version of Popeye. The film, which starred Robin Williams as the title character and Duvall as his beloved Olive Oyl, was one that Duvall was at first hesitant to embrace, because she has been teased as an Olive Oyl look-alike while growing up. Eventually, though, Duvall changed her mind and her performance helped solidify the film's success.
In 1980 Duvall took on the role of the bumbling and innocent Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson. Working under Kubrick, Duvall later recalled, was the most challenging and rewarding experience of her acting life.
"The first few weeks shooting were so much fun and we all got along great," Duvall recalled. "So, when it came to shooting a serious scene, whether it be looking shocked or terrified, I couldn't do it. I would start giggling. After a while Stanley became impatient with me, and just let loose. And that terrified me! But you have to understand, some scenes take hours to make, sometimes, a whole 12 hour shooting day would only translate to being three minutes on screen. So you go into a scene acting terrified or cying, and by the end of the day you just don't have anything more to give, [but] there is the genius of Stanley Kubrick. He gets it out of you. But it was very tough and grueling."
Duvall also brought her talents to the small screen. Perhaps most notably in Berrnice Bobs Her Hair, part of PBS's Great American Short Story Series. In the 1990s, Duvall took on a number of guest roles in programs such as NBC's Frasier and ABC's Aliens for Breakfast.
In addition to her on-screen work, Duvall has also become a respected children's show producer. In 1982, she formed her own production company, Platypus Productions, and went on to create two award-winning programs for Showtime: Faerie Tale Theatre and Shelley Duvall's Tall Tales and Legends.
In 1988, Duvall formed a second production company, Think Entertainment, which created several other new shows including, Nightmare Classics, Shelley Duvall's Bedtime Stories, and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle.
Since the 1990s, Duvall's acting career has been largely quiet. Tired of the rush and mayhem of city life in Los Angeles, Duvall returned to Texas, where she has effectively retired and settled into a life raising animals and enjoying the quiet. "I write a lot of poetry," she has said. "Would love to publish a book of my work one day." That doesn't mean, however, that Duvall has ruled out a return to her acting career. "I still get a lot of scripts sent to me," she has said. "A return to acting is never out of the question." | <urn:uuid:7164629f-668f-4964-b750-c4e6c7f64e30> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.biography.com/print/profile/shelley-duvall-20902851 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981725 | 1,098 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Progressives and Liberals, Movements and Political Parties - Part 2
April 22, 2008 - 10:52am ET
In my previous entry I laid out the differences between liberals and progressives, movements and political parties. For those of you who haven't time to read through it, a brief recap: Liberals believe in socio-economic justice, whereas progressives believe the same thing but also in taking it to the next step—using government as a powerful tool with which to achieve it by making Big Business behave. The Progressive Movement, much like movement conservatism, has a definite set of goals, and the Progressive Party is the political force through which we can reach them.
Today I'm going to touch upon short and long term strategies. As I pointed out in my last entry, the Progressive Party exists in a handful of states including Vermont and Washington. These chapters have made noticeable headway in the last five years. In the Green Mountain State, six Progressives have been elected to the legislature, and this year the party is running what is shaping up to be a viable gubernatorial campaign in absence of a Democratic candidate (for more information, see the Wikipedia entry). Meanwhile, Washington's chapter is making headway at the local level.
Both of these chapters have formed within the last ten years—Vermont in 1999, and Washington in 2003. Given these results, it isn't so difficult to believe that the same cannot be accomplished throughout all fifty states. But why do this?
There are short and long term reasons. In the long term, of course, the purpose is to eventually give rise to a political party around which the Progressive Movement must eventually rally. With the Democrats increasingly beholden to corporate interests (having been preceded by the Republicans), disorganized at the national level, and broken as an opposition movement to conservatism, efforts to reform it from within are unlikely to succeed because of the monetary infrastructure that keeps the leadership "safely" away from heeding the voices of the progressive base.
While this does not mean we should give up trying to restore the party to its New Deal-era roots, we must alter our strategy for the short term. If Democrats insist upon running corporate-conservative candidates (I refuse to call them centrists, because I don't believe a consistent political center exists), and reneging on promises such as ending the occupation of Iraq, drastic measures must be taken. This means building up a viable third political party.
The purpose of this in the short term, I should point out, is not to try to compete with two large and very well-funded major parties. Sun Tzu admonishes the wise commander to avoid fighting multi-front wars, and it would be political suicide to attempt to compete with both of them. Instead, progressives should follow the Vermont and Washington strategies of running against Republicans and corporate-conservative Democrats (CCDs for short), and offering support to Progressive Democrats and independents.
A large enough bloc of Progressive votes may move CCDs to adopt progressive platform positions during elections, and continued pressure in between cycles can keep them there. Consider the examples of CCDs Al Wynn of Maryland, and Leonard Boswell of Iowa. Wynn had been forced to move to the political left following a 2006 primary challenge from Donna Edwards. But even then, he had not moved far enough to suit the needs of his constituents. This year Edwards soundly defeated him in the Maryland-4th primary. This put the fear of electoral ruin into Boswell, who pretends to represent Iowa's 3rd District, so much so that he signed onto impeachment efforts against Dick Cheney.
Running Progressive candidates, therefore, can serve to help bring Democrats in line as a genuine opposition party to the GOP. In states and districts such as California's 8th, where Democrat Shirley Golub is running to unseat Nancy Pelosi in the primary, efforts may be a little trickier because of the independent run of Cindy Sheehan. But it's still worth trying. The point isn't necessarily to win against Pelosi, though given her performance of the past year and four months, a victory would be nice. The point is to send a message to the incumbent that cowardice and complicity in the face of Bush-Cheney crimes will not be tolerated.
Many would argue that such a strategy would only serve to hand victory to Republicans, but this thinking is flawed for the simple reason that history does not support it; John Kerry ran a granny campaign in 2004, not daring to appear liberal, and Al Gore in 2000 ran such an indistinguishable campaign for president in 2000 that he failed to muster enough votes even to win his own state of Tennessee. Both of these Democrats ran to the political right, out of fear of offending the mythical center, only to end up in tight races in which George W. Bush was able to steal victory through electoral fraud. Similarly, as blogger David Swanson points out, Barack Obama this year appears to be making the same mistake—with the result that once again a Republican will manage to steal a victory out of a close contest.
It doesn't have to be this way. Since voting for the "lesser" of two evils hasn't achieved results, the only real solution then is to embrace the a strategy that has. And there is cause for optimism in thinking a Progressive challenge to the senator from Illinois (such as that mounted by Ralph Nader) might get him to listen and take heed. In 2003, Black Agenda Report applied pressure to Obama to restore the text of his supposedly anti-war speech from 2002 on this senatorial campaign web site. And in the recent dust-up over the apparent purge of anti-war delegates in California, pressure from outraged supporters led to their reinstatement a day later. Making Obama run to the political left would ensure a wider margin of victory, such that McCain's vote-fraud machine could not credibly claim to have won the election.
By creating a political party through which the Progressive Movement may reach its desired goals, and by running strategic campaigns against targeted politicians, elected officials from the major political parties can be brought to account. It's a matter of creating and implementing effective strategies and tactics.
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Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future | <urn:uuid:f1645701-f9de-40a9-86aa-ff9b70dd1a91> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/progressives-and-liberals-movements-and-political-parties-part-2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963912 | 1,293 | 1.648438 | 2 |
It is important to recognise that the vast majority of styles and variations may have never been documented at all, with every little remote village possibly having some knowledge passed down from generation to generation. The Shaolin Temple merely happened to be a gathering place with a strong enough tradition of formally collecting this type of knowledge. Therefore there may be a lot less meaning to "Shaolin style" than many people assume. There is a great condensed history in The Shaolin Workout although I'm sure many better references are available.
I believe that a lot of work was done to formally document Chinese martial arts by the Central Chinese Martial Art Institute in the early 20th century. However with the Cultural Revolution outlawing the practice of martial arts, many of the masters either fled China or stopped practicing openly. Some established schools in Taiwan and Hong Kong but many are now old and very traditional in their teaching approach in that they'll only teach one student, if they can even find one they consider worthy; most are also weary of foreigners. As you can imagine, this is a serious threat and possibly countless forms and sub-styles have been lost already.
Back to establishing a link between specific schools and the temple, it is best to ask for the particular school's lineage of masters and try match that up with known historical figures.
The opinion of my school's master is that what is practiced at Shaolin nowadays is a much more acrobatic form of Wushu acceptable to the current Communist government, and the Shaolin area with its countless "Shaolin" schools is merely exploiting the name for commercial gain. (I am merely relaying other visitors' impressions here, take it for what it's worth.) This view was reinforced when the traveling Shaolin Monks show visited our school in 2010. For one, the troupe were amazed at some of the forms - particularly weapons forms - that they witnessed in a western school. What I'm getting at here is that an official "Shaolin stamp of approval" may not mean a whole lot today. By the same token, it sounds like the Communist Party has also realised that they've made a mistake in wiping out a huge chunk of history and are actively working to restore some of that in the name of national pride. Just bear in mind that their vision of Wushu may no longer fit the traditional definition of martial arts. (Think WTF Taekwon-Do.)
The "real Shaolin" styles are probably lurking in a myriad tiny independent schools in the most unexpected places, and proving a formal connection is not necessarily all that important. | <urn:uuid:4f66bf83-f248-437e-b935-67e5e3eb752d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://martialarts.stackexchange.com/questions/407/have-any-kung-fu-styles-established-a-formal-connection-to-the-shaolin-temple | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972448 | 525 | 1.625 | 2 |
If getting a loan for a business startup is challenging enough, getting a loan for the startup of a technology business is even extra challenging. There are a lot of things that could go wrong in a technology business so that banks and financial companies are extra cautious in lending money to technology business startups. However, it is not to say that obtaining a loan for technology business startup is out of the question.
There are special venture capitalists that have appetite for investing in promising new technologies. These capitalists are technology entrepreneurs’ best friend in starting up their businesses. Before you can get the attention of venture capitalists, however, you need to make sure you have all requirements.
Aside from detailed, flawless business plan, you should prepare other requirements. Venture capitalists will even look at the character of the technology entrepreneur. They will favor technology entrepreneurs who show enthusiasm, honesty, and genuine belief in their products or services. The venture capitalists will also look into the technology companies’ expertise, experience, and skill set of the employees. All these parameters will make sure that the company will make money, maybe not immediately, to repay the loan with interest.
The technology company’s top management must do all they can to show to the venture capitalists their capabilities in adopting to change while maintaining growth. The strength of the company’s management team alone is guarantee enough for some venture capitalists. Products and services come and go every year, but the strength of the company’s management team to adopt to change ensures the company will ride out all challenges along the way.
It is also nice if the technology entrepreneur can chip in some capital from his own pocket or from other so called “angel investors.” This shows the venture capitalists that you or other people believe in your new technology to make money in the future.
Angel investors include family, friends, and other interested party to your new technology idea. It is not hard to convince your family and friends, so take advantage of this opportunity to obtain perhaps the quickest loan. The entire capital you needed may not be covered by your angel investors, but the gesture will be seen by venture capitalists as positive sign to your business.
Some state governments also have funds intended to invest on promising emerging technology companies. Check out your state business office if they offer loans for emerging technology companies and inquire how you can avail of the funds. Often, these state-owned loan opportunities require less collateral compared to bank and other financial investor loans. In some state-owned foundations, a technology entrepreneur can burrow anything from $50,000 to $500,000 worth of financial assistance.
Getting loan for your technology business may be challenging, but with the right attitude and right idea to sell, the money you need to start your technology business is still within your reach. Just be prepared to be unique and to think out of the box to impress your possible investors. | <urn:uuid:36326356-4f3a-4188-8b24-fcf6f2275474> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.technologyventures.org/getting-a-loan-for-tech-business-startup.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959051 | 581 | 1.789063 | 2 |
PBS // 2011 // 60 Minutes // Not Rated
Reviewed by Judge Clark Douglas // March 24th, 2012
Is your trash can making raccoons smarter?
I chuckled quite a bit throughout Raccoon Nation for two reasons. First, raccoons are kind of adorable. I realize they cause all sorts of problems for homeowners, but seriously, how can you resist the charms of those inventive bandits? Second, the usual array of animal experts seem fairly clueless about a number of crucial details of raccoon life. A more appropriate title for this DVD -- Raccoons: Seriously, What the Hell?
This hour-long PBS Nature special sets out to take an in-depth look at raccoons' natural habitat: the big city. Raccoons are increasingly setting up shop in neighborhoods, multiplying at remarkable rates and adapting to their new environment with astounding speed. "Raccoons have changed more in the past 40 years than they have in the previous 40,000 years," claims one expert. "You can't see any changes physically, but there have been major changes in the way they think." While there seems to be little consistency in the way raccoons behave from region to region (or even from neighborhood to neighborhood), it's clear they're persistent and quick learners.
Despite their outwardly friendly appearance, raccoons are regarded as a nuisance. They dig through trash, make giant messes, wake people up in the middle of the night and make life miserable for suburbanites (in that regard, they're a bit like an Alan Ball production). As such, people have gone to great lengths to "raccoon-proof" their personal property. Here's the fascinating thing: the more preventative measures people take, the harder the raccoons work to get at it. They're getting progressively smarter, and somehow find a way to overcome each obstacle we give them. "They're not quite on our level, but they're getting there," one expert says. Another claims some sort of raccoon apocalypse is just around the corner; it's unclear whether or not she's joking.
Raccoon Nation is a bit less focused and more humor-oriented than many Nature excursion; there's a kind of deadpan sensibility which isn't generally found in this sort of programming. It's a lot of fun to watch, and the consistently enjoyable raccoon footage keeps things afloat even when the experts are doing little more than verbally scratching their heads. What we have here is a great deal of extraordinary and puzzling evidence without much of a conclusion. Here's hoping further investigation provides us with Raccoon Nation 2.
The DVD presentation is solid enough, its standard definition 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen image offering sturdy detail and depth. Some of the nighttime footage is a bit noisy, but that's only to be expected given the cameras and shooting conditions. The Dolby 5.1 audio track is also decent, though for some reason it was determined this program needed music that sounds like a collaboration between John Carpenter and some evil clowns. At any moment, I was convinced one of the raccoons was going to reveal itself as a demon wearing a furry disguise. There are no bonus features.
I for one, welcome our new raccoon overlords and look forward to aiding them in their noble quest to destroy all humanity (or at least raid all their refrigerators). In the meantime, educate yourselves by checking out this intriguing little documentary.
Review content copyright © 2012 Clark Douglas; Site layout and review format copyright © 1998 - 2013 HipClick Designs LLC
Scales of Justice
* 1.78:1 Anamorphic
* Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (English)
* English (SDH)
Running Time: 60 Minutes
Release Year: 2011
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
* PBS Nature | <urn:uuid:d89fc6bc-89ab-4aa3-936c-ed635c82d2f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dvdverdict.com/printer/raccoonnation.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947398 | 787 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Volume 81, Number 12 | August 18 - 24, 2011
West and East Village, Chelsea, Soho, Noho, Little Italy, Chinatown and Lower East Side, Since 1933
Photo by Clayton Patterson
Kevin, left, and Troy Harris at Clayton Patterson’s gallery.
L.E.S. hip hop history stars in Baruch brothers’ new film
By Lincoln Anderson
The origins of rap and hip hop are firmly situated in the 1970s Bronx. But there’s another neighborhood that also lays claim to having written an important chapter in the story of what is today perhaps the planet’s dominant musical and cultural force: the Lower East Side.
Unfortunately, the L.E.S. has never gotten its proper due for the part it played in this vibrant art form’s evolution.
Now, two brothers who grew up in the Bernard Baruch Houses project are aiming to bring that untold story to light. Troy and Kevin Harris are currently putting the finishing touches on a new two-part documentary film, “No Place Like Home: The History of Hip Hop in the Lower East Side.”
The film includes footage the brothers shot back in the 1970s and ’80s, as well as recent interviews with former and still-active emcees, dancers and graffiti artists reflecting on the Lower East Side hip hop scene. Almost everyone in the movie grew up somewhere in the broad swath of Housing Authority developments along the East River between E. 14th St. and the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a close-knit community — and one of their enduring bonds has been hip hop culture.
Troy Harris recently screened a 30-minute preview of the film for The Villager and Clayton Patterson at Patterson’s Gallery and Outlaw Art Museum, at 161 Essex St.
Lean and fit with a clean-shaven head, Harris, 47, who still lives in Baruch, brimmed with enthusiasm as he described the film and its characters, whom he knows as friends and neighbors.
One of the documentary’s highlights is footage of KRS-ONE talking into Kevin Harris’s camera during an appearance on the Lower East Side. Kevin would do the filming while Troy would set up the interviews. While the famous rapper admits he grew up in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he says he spent time at the E. Third St. Men’s Shelter as a young man, and that it was during this period that he wrote his material for one of rap’s all-time top albums.
“I wrote ‘Criminal Minded’ in two places,” he says, “[sitting on a bench on] the Brooklyn Bridge and the Lower East Side. … And when I was in the shelter, there was this graffiti writer that used to put these black figures on the walls. I think it was REVS or COST.”
“No, it was Richard Hambleton!” Patterson interjected, referring to the “Shadowman” artist, while watching the film playing on his extra-large flat screen.
KRS-ONE also notes that scenes from Charlie Ahearn’s “Wild Style,” credited as being the first hip hop movie, were filmed at the East River Park amphitheater. In addition to Hambleton’s eerie figures, he recalls Tompkins Square Park as inspiring him.
Showing how everything is connected, Harris asked Patterson to back up the film and then go forward in slo-mo to see the late Eddie Garcia — a.k.a. “Fat Eddie,” the beloved Vladeck Houses youth activist who died a year ago — briefly visible in the background of the KRS-ONE interview.
As Harris explained it, there are “five elements” to hip hop: D.J.’ing, rapping/emceeing, dancing, clothing/style and graffiti. (Some hip hop purists count only four.)
As for the dance element, local Lower East Side legends proliferate in this hip hop history. There’s Wiggles, a break dancer who, Harris noted, could go spin-for-spin with anyone from the Bronx. And there’s the amazing Bam the Liquid Robot. The film features an extended clip of Bam “pop-locking” — doing intricate mechanical moves that would tie Gumby up in knots. Bam starred in the movie “Krush Groove,” performed with the Fat Boys, and also coached Fred Berry (Rerun) in his signature dance steps on “What’s Happening!!” Bam finishes off the clip by doing the funky-floppy Rerun dance.
The Lower East Side also was known for its “uprockers,” similar to break dancers, but mainly staying vertical, as opposed to doing spin moves on the ground. Chino-3 and Curly — who is now a grandmother, Harris noted with amazement — strut their quick-stepping stuff in the film.
There are also numerous emcees and D.J.’s, like Apache, Bad News, Kool A.D., Carly Carl, the well-known Sammy Sam, D.J. Ice and D.J. Brass Knuckles, who is also known for his graffiti writing.
“He’s got the five elements,” Harris said of Knuckles, who doesn’t use his graffiti tag name in the film to shield his identity.
Speaking of graffiti, there is, of course, a scene of Chico, a.k.a. Antonio Garcia — the father of the memorial mural — at work on a wall.
Harking back to hip hop’s roots, the preview film starts with Mario, now 50, playing the blues, the bedrock of American popular music. Evoking the gritty Lower East Side while strumming his electric guitar, he tells the sad tale of how his father came from the South and wound up killing a man.
“He shot a man down, right here on Avenue D,” Mario sings, looking into the camera, unblinking.
Another local, Malo, while not a rapper or D.J., was a part of the music scene as a trainer and bodyguard to J. Lo and Marc Anthony.
“Only the strong survive on the Lower East Side,” a shirtless Malo pronounces, his torso ripped.
Speaking of rough days on the L.E.S., although some of the emcees and D.J.’s were formerly in gangs — like Apache, for example, who used to run with the Dynamite Brothers — in the film they stress the positive aspects of the hip hop scene. One emcee paints a rosy picture, saying there really wasn’t any violence or drugs, that it was all about the music and the scene. Watching the clip at Patterson’s place, though, Harris scoffed and said knowingly that wasn’t true — there were drugs. But the Lower East Side was no worse than the Bronx in that regard, he said.
At points in the movie, people do flash a sign with their thumb and index finger, but it’s not a gang sign: It’s a proud “L” for Lower East Side.
Harris said Patterson — who has been documenting the neighborhood since the ’80s in photos, videos and books — was an inspiration to his brother and him in working on the project. Patterson recorded one of the only major videotapes of the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riot, and has a voluminous neighborhood photo archive. Meanwhile, in much the same way, the Harrises have recorded the life and culture of the Housing Authority developments.
“Between Troy and me, we basically cover the whole Lower East Side,” Patterson said, noting he also documented clubs like the Pyramid.
“I just know the streets,” Harris said of his subject matter.
“This is really black and Hispanic history of the Lower East Side in a way that’s never been done before,” Patterson stated of the brothers’ movie.
As for why the Lower East Side isn’t as well known in hip hop history as, say, the Bronx, Harris said it’s because the community is so ethnically diverse that it somehow doesn’t have the same cultural critical mass as other boroughs.
“It’s every man for himself,” he said of the Lower East Side’s M.O.
Harris’s brother, Kevin, 50, attended the private Little Red School House in the West Village, one of the few kids from the projects to do so, Troy noted. He went on to become one of the first black New Jersey state troopers, and is currently in California working on a companion book to the film.
Meanwhile, Donte Harris, Troy’s son, is continuing in his dad and uncle’s footsteps, as the host of “Holla Back TV,” an Internet and TV show. Also available on DVD, the show covers music, film, basketball and more.
“He does it all — he’s a young filmmaker,” his father said proudly.
The 30-minute preview of “No Place Like Home: The History of Hip Hop in the Lower East Side” will screen at Patterson’s Essex St. gallery on Sun., Aug. 21, at 2 p.m. People will first meet up at 1:30 p.m. at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, at the northeast corner of East Houston St. and Second Ave., then make their way down to Patterson’s.Afterward, at the gallery at 3:15 p.m., there will be an opening of a one-man show of gold-leaf artist Jerry Pagane’s painting.
Veteran neighborhood activists recently staged an anti-gentrification protest against the BMW lab, slamming it as just the latest hypocrisy. But Patterson said he supports the project and thinks it’s doing something good by giving back to the community. He noted he’s being paid for his involvement, as he believes others are, as well.
In addition, in another effort to put the Lower East Side and some of its personalities on the map, Patterson, Harris and Orlando Bonilla are teaming up on a special coloring book. Its illustrations will run the gamut of current and former local figures, from artists Peter Missing, Ai Weiwei and Jim Power, to laid-back biker “Freaky Fridge,” emcee Tru Life and current Kentucky basketball standout Doron Lamb, who grew up on the L.E.S., though news articles always just say he’s from Queens.
Similarly, Patterson and Harris said, Councilmember Charles Barron is only known as being from Brooklyn, but he really grew up on the Lower East Side.
“Barron started the Black Panthers on Avenue D; they were handing out food. Jayson Williams — his mother works at Gouverneur Hospital,” Harris noted of the fallen ex-Nets hoopster, adding that the late R&B singer “Luther Vandross is from the Smith projects — nobody knows that. This is what we’re talking about — the Lower East Side always gets lost in the history.”
With their new hip hop movie, at least, the Harris brothers are doing their part to ensure that a dynamic part of that history doesn’t get lost in the mix. | <urn:uuid:3dfc7c00-5009-4639-b8a9-19ea59dd4d7e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thevillager.com/villager_434/les.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96121 | 2,446 | 1.804688 | 2 |
By Daniel Silliman
Returning to a promise to find a way to pay for commuter rail, Clayton County Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell is proposing a funding mechanism and is being backed by the board of commissioners.
Bell will now take his plan to state legislators, he said Thursday, in hopes it will be adopted and will be the creative solution needed to make commuter rail a reality in the Southern Crescent.
The proposed plan calls for a multi-jurisdictional tax district, which would extend along the rail line and only tax the new development created by the rail line. Currently, a tax district cannot extend beyond the county's borders. If the legislature changes that and goes along with Bell's idea, multiple counties and cities could join the tax district, participating in the regional development and sharing the financial burden.
"I believe that potentially, that this mechanism, even absent the fare box, this mechanism could one day, 20 to 30 years from now, could totally fund the train ... It's a creative way of doing it, rather than just directly going to the taxpayers, as opposed to it coming from the county coffers or from county taxpayers," Bell said.
The move comes a year after the county commission backed out of an agreement to take responsibility for funding commuter rail. Bell, with the approval of the board, signed an agreement in 2005, saying the county would cover the projected $4-6 million operating budget shortfall for a commuter rail running from Atlanta to Lovejoy.
The agreement was signed in an attempt, commissioners later said, to get the rail project underway by assuring the Georgia Department of Transportation that money would be available when needed. GDOT, with the agreement from Clayton County on file, moved forward with needed negotiations with the company which owns the tracks and equipment and a company that could manage the line. In 2007, however, newly elected commissioners thought the agreement would saddle Clayton County taxpayers with the entire $4-6 million burden, and voted to renege on the agreement.
Since then, the commuter rail project has been in limbo and GDOT has said it cannot move forward until funds are identified.
Bell -- repeating that he never intended to have Clayton taxpayers pay for commuter rail -- said he believes he's identified a regional solution for the transportation funding. Now that the board has signed on in support, unanimously passing a resolution on Tuesday, Bell will "move judiciously to get it presented to the general assembly and work to get it passed," he said.
At GDOT, however, Bell's bill is only one of "a lot of bills floating through the legislature," according to spokesman Crystal Paulk-Buchanan. With a new commissioner and a looming transportation funding crisis, the department is assessing its finances and is not currently looking at ways to fund specific projects, like the commuter rail.
"For some people," Paulk-Buchanan said, "it will feel like we're taking three steps backward and no steps forward, but it's an administrative change and we hope that, when we're done, it will make things like [commuter rail] move forward."
At Georgians for the Brain Train, Paul Snyder said he likes Bell's tax plan, but believes it will take more than one creative solution to fund commuter rail.
"I don't think the funding mechanism should or can come from one place," Snyder said. "I think it's a dialogue that needs to involve an inordinately high number of officials and organizations, and that's what makes it so difficult ... but, collectively, I think we can get it done."
Georgians for the Brain Train has been focusing efforts on getting commuter rail cooperation across multiple jurisdictions and has also been working on possible funding mechanisms for the project. This spring, Snyder said, the organization hopes to hold a summit for officials along the line from Athens, in the north, through the metro Atlanta area and down to Macon.
"There are a lot of moving parts, when you talk about funding," Snyder said, but "with a funding mechanism that would allow these entities, municipalities and counties to participate, and with some support from the state, I think we can get it done." | <urn:uuid:8c571cde-1d98-4626-97ab-8e1fd076c790> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.news-daily.com/news/2008/feb/08/bell-proposing-commuter-rail-funding-solution/?community | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974129 | 850 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Book Review: Bob Hines- National Wildlife Artist
Bob Hines: National Wildlife Artist by John D. Juriga, M.D.
Reviewed by Patricia M. DeMarco, Ph.D. Director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University
Picture a boy introduced to the wonders of the natural world through the eyes of his Mother. The reward of lessening her grief through his drawings and her unconditional approval of his efforts shaped the remarkable achievement of Bob Hines as a national wildlife artist. He saw the world through a different eye than most people, and gave form to his vision with spare clear lines. John Juriga’s insightful biography follows the struggles of Bob Hines on his path from want and frustration to the accolades of a Distinguished Service Award from the Department of Interior in 1971.
With skilled use of dialogue and a historian’s eye for the backdrop of events, Juriga shows the evolution of attitudes towards wildlife and toward professional writers and artists over fifty years. Just as Bob Hines’ drawings make the subject leap off the page, Juriga’s sketches of Bob Hines’ adventures capture his wit, his bold confidence, and his emotional pain. Bob Hines’ personal experience of the wilderness and intense study of creatures through dissection and taxidermy enriched his talent. We see him as a young man at the height of the Great Depression leaving a factory job to “study art” and to preserve his health. He claimed his own niche as an educational illustrator by striding into the office of the Ohio Conservation Commissioner Don Waters with a sheaf of his drawings under his arm. He walked out with his first job as a wildlife artist. Such boldness serves as an inspiration in these days of entitlements and expectations of welfare.
Bob Hines collaborations with the greats of the conservation movement give the story of his life the drama of participation in events that shook the world. Throughout the narrative, Juriga gives us little snippets of the wry wit and humor that endeared Bob Hines to his friends and associates. We can visualize his terror at sharing camp quarters with foraging bears on an expedition to Alaska or encountering alligators on a night expedition in the Okefenokee Swamp. We can feel the intensity of his association with Rachel Carson from the description of Bob Hines carrying her out of a freezing tide pool where she had returned the day’s specimens after he finished drawing them. We feel his frustration and frailty in his older years at not winning the Duck Stamp competition he built up and ran for so many years as its administrator. The biography leaves us feeling we know him around the fire of a fish camp telling stories of his adventures.
Throughout the tale, runs the thread of struggle for financial security and remuneration. Under that theme, his growing success as an artist does not enhance his feeling of worth and success as a father and husband. Juriga leaves the biography of Bob Hines’ personal adult life to short poignant vignettes, eloquent in what they omit. The makings of a hefty soap opera remain behind the veil of discretion.
Juriga describes how Bob Hines gave his signed paintings for gifts, or for charities in his later years. One such gift, a signed print of his painting of the Bald Eagle, came into the hands of the Philadelphia Eagles football team, and Bob received tickets to the game for a gift in return. “During the half-time show of that particular game between the Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys, Bob’s observant eye spied a peregrine falcon pursuing pigeons above the stadium. Hines recalled, “Nobody else was looking at it. [The falcon] was flying around in a circle, and nobody was looking. I looked [around] to see, and they were not watching it. There’s life and death going right above their heads, and they never saw it. To me it’s amazing!” (Quoted from Chapter 9) Hines had a different focus on the world. During the autumn of 1971, Interior Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton presented Hines the Distinguished Service Award. The citation included this statement: “He paints wildlife in the act of being alive.” This biography puts words behind the drawings and brings the artist to life.
The book is available from Beaver’s Pond Press www.BeaversPondBooks.com or call : 1-800-901-3480
2012 is the centennial year for Bob Hines. The Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio opened its Bob Hines Centennial Exhibit which will remain on display until August 14, 2012. | <urn:uuid:98c152e6-2a6e-4dbd-8f72-1cebc61c36cb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.chatham.edu/rachelcarson/2012/02/29/book-review-bob-hines-national-wildlife-artist/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97277 | 969 | 1.75 | 2 |
Pride & Prejudice : Work information
- Carl Davis ( Music, Images,)
- Performed by
- Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Carl Davis (Conductor)
- Work name
- Pride & Prejudice
- Work number
- 1995-01-01 02:00:00
- Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
- Recording date
Famous and highly acclaimed for his television and film music, Carl Davis also has a career as a conductor, often of his own works. He has composed theatre music, working extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, ballet scores, an opera, and orchestral works.
Born in Brooklyn, New York on 28 October 1936, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music and Bard College, studying composition under Paul Nordoff and Hugo Kauder. Further study followed with Per Nørgård in Copenhagan, where he also worked with the Royal Danist Ballet.
In 1961, following the success of his off-Broadway revue Diversions, Davis moved to England, writing the music for the landmark satirical television series That Was the Week that Was. Film and television work has since flooded in, and his scores include: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981, for which he won a BAFTA and an Ivor Novello award); Napoleon (1980, for Abel Gance's silent film); Pride and Prejudice (1995); and, most famously, The World at War (1974) .
Much of Davis's music reinterprets existing musical styles, even re-using themes of Tchaikovsky in his 1995 ballet Alice in Wonderland, and appeals to a wide public. He collaborated on Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio in 1991 and continues to conduct all over the world, often programming deliberately popular music.
Carl Davis's permanent home is now in London. He is married to actress Jean Boht, and they have two daughters.
The BBCs adaption of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was a huge hit in 1995, not least because of Carl Davis's music. As the composer recalled, it "dealt with a time and a society in which, before the days of television and the gramophone, people indulged in home entertainment on a colossal scale...every well-educated young lady was expected to learn to perform as part of her social training. I decided therefore to use the sound of an instrument they would have played, the fortepiano, which was featured throughout the series. Since then I have created a concert piece...using a modern piano, and which I think I like equally. The thought at the back of my mind was that this was a story about pursuit - the pursuit of a husband, and the pursuit of wealth." | <urn:uuid:932ac5ff-b201-4d35-a7b9-baee38f2f7b4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.classical.com/listen/player4/index.php?token=7RCiGOGMZVG~h$0Wr0RM3bWG9HVC6~Mi36~&inline=1&type=mini | 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 | 0.967511 | 569 | 1.664063 | 2 |
- Vital Apps
Washington DC | 21 Jan 2012
On Thursday, January 19th, sixteen local leaders who prepare their communities for disaster and build a more resilient nation were honored as Champions of Change. These men and women have demonstrated significant innovation and creativity in working to get their communities ready for the unexpected and embraced the approach of involving all members of their communities in emergency preparedness and response, reaching out to faith-based, tribal, non-profit, private sector and community-based organizations, as well as individual citizens.
Mark Benthien is Director for Communication, Education and Outreach for the Southern California Earthquake Center, a research center funded by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Geological survey with over 60 participating institutions and headquarters at the University of Southern California (USC). Mark communicates earthquake knowledge to end-users and the general public in order to increase earthquake awareness, reduce economic losses, and save lives. Many of these efforts are in coordination with members of the Earthquake Country Alliance, a private-public partnership of organizations that provide earthquake information and services, for which Mark serves as Executive Director and lead organizer of the Great California ShakeOut earthquake drill which in 2011 involved more than 8.6 million participants. Mark is also working with the other many regions around the world that are replicating the ShakeOut.
Carolyn H Bluhm is the Community Relations Specialist for the City and County of Denver, Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. For the last five years Carolyn has been the driving force behind the Denver Community Emergency Response Training (Denver CERT) and the Emergency Preparedness Programs which includes a special focus on diverse populations and organizations. She has provided thousands of hours of CERT and community preparedness trainings to community members and organizations in multiple diverse communities including Youth Organizations, low-income Hispanic neighborhoods, multi-ethnic Muslim populations, multi-tribal urban Native Americans, African American, Faith Based and Asian American communities. She volunteers much of her own time to address the training and technical assistance needs of these communities, working many evenings and weekends. Her efforts at a local church and with the Colorado Muslim Society resulted in the creation of a Spanish-bilingual CERT team with more than 60 members and a bi-lingual Arabic CERT team that can communicate in Farsi, Urdu, and Somali.
Brian Blake serves as Earthquake Program Coordinator with the Central U.S Earthquake Consortium (CUSEC), which was established under the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program. Since its inception, CUSEC’s mission has been “…the reduction of deaths, injuries, property damage and economic losses resulting from earthquakes in the central United States”. Brian’s primary role is to coordinate activities related to earthquake preparedness and mitigation in the eight member states and ten associate states of CUSEC. This involves working with local, state, and federal partners to create and implement programs which help communities prepare for, respond to, and mitigate against the effects of earthquakes. Brian has worked on several multi-year earthquake planning and outreach projects including the New Madrid Seismic Zone Catastrophic Planning Initiative, the New Madrid Bicentennial, and most recently, the Great Central U.S. ShakeOut.
The ShakeOut is an annual, multi-state public outreach campaign that involves millions of people who engage in earthquake safety activities. In 2011, more than three-million people across eleven states participated in the ShakeOut. This program encourages participants to take specific actions to become more informed and better prepared for earthquakes and other disasters.
As Director of Communications for Cobb & Douglas Public Health (District 3-1), Master Sgt Darlene M. Foote, U.S. Air Force (retired) is responsible for developing and launching the district’s strategic communications objectives. With more than 20 years of Public Affairs and Communications expertise, she has created plans and outreach programs to include the District Strategic National Stockpile Emergency Preparedness and Response Risk Communications Plan that now serves as a benchmark for other districts statewide. She most recently received Federal recognition for creating the concept, content, and script for the Cobb & Douglas Public Health Safety Village project. Safety Village was designed to communicate Emergency Preparedness and Response messages to elementary students through the use of state-of-the- art, interactive technology.
Wendy Freitag is the External Affairs Manager for the Washington State Military Department’s Emergency Management Division. In this role, she oversees statewide emergency management outreach programs which include disaster preparedness public education, private-public partnerships, and public information programs all aimed at encouraging residents of Washington state to undertake preparedness actions in their households and their communities before a disaster strikes. Prior to joining EMD, Wendy spent a decade acquiring hands-on global and national disaster preparedness and response private sector operational experience managing physical security, national crisis management and business continuity projects and teams at Microsoft and the former Washington Mutual Bank.
Prior to her private sector work, Wendy served on multiple U.S. disaster operations as a FEMA Lead Public Affairs reservist and also worked briefly in a similar role for the American Red Cross. Freitag and her team continue to seek out ways to design outreach campaigns and programs which use a combination of reason and emotion to empower individuals and organizations to proactively prepare for disasters.Programs under her guidance recognize that effective disaster response and recovery occurs at the community level. Disaster preparedness programs must seek out better ways to engage and inspire all community members to become more disaster resilient.
Brenda Gormley has been volunteering as the Denton County, Texas, Cert Coordinator for more than 6 years. During this time she has grown the program from 11 members to over 500 back ground checked, active members. In 2009, under Brenda’s leadership, Denton County’s Citizen Corps Council received the National Award for Outstanding Citizen Corps Council. Brenda is currently the secretary for Denton County VOAD Citizen Corps Council, past chair for North Central Texas Regional Citizen Corps Council (NCTRCCC) where she was responsible for the implementation, growth and sustainment of many Citizen Corps programs. Brenda continues to travel outside of her area to help establish new Citizen Corps programs. In May 2010 Brenda was part of a group that helped to write the first G517 CERT Master Instructor Curriculum, and became a CERT Master Instructor traveling to provide classes in Texas, and recently, in May 2011, helped write the curriculum for G417 refresher classes in Texas. At the 2011 Texas Unites Conference, Brenda was recognized as the first ever recipient of the Jack Colley Citizen Corps Leadership Award. This award will be given annually to recognize the outstanding leadership and service of a Citizen Corps volunteer.
Brenda has expanded her team’s capabilities by creating specialized response teams to assist the Denton County Fire Marshal’s office with common challenges and due to our training we are call upon frequently to assist first responders.
David Maack is the Racine County Emergency Management Coordinator where he is responsible for emergency planning, training, outreach/education, exercises and response. He has written numerous articles on emergency management and has spoken at state, regional and national conferences. David is active in his community, serving on a number of boards, committees and commissions. Over the past twenty one years, he has built an emergency management program that has received national recognition for innovative programs built on community partnerships and collaborations. Many of these partnerships are the direct result of David’s community involvement. Most recently, he has made a concerted effort to work with the faith based community-assisting them in emergency planning and in identifying ways they can assist the community in the aftermath of a disaster.
As Director of Development & Community Relations, Venus Majeski spearheads the advocacy, public relations and development initiatives of the New Jersey Institute for Disabilities. One of the largest not-for-profit agencies of its kind, NJID serves more than 1,500 infants, children and adults with disabilities throughout New Jersey. Ms. Majeski also directs three federal projects of National Significance which provide wrap around services for teens with disabilities and disaster readiness projects throughout New Jersey.
Ms. Majeski is a passionate advocate for persons with disabilities and she continues to participate in and direct numerous advocacy projects. She is a member of many professional and civic organizations in New Jersey. Ms. Majeski is a member of the Middlesex County Commission for Persons with Disabilities, the NJ Emergency Management Association and the NJ Special Needs Advisory Panel.
Martin Makowski has spent four and a half years with the American Red Cross and currently serves as Outreach Coordinator responsible for programming in 13 counties in Illinois and Northwestern Indiana. Martin also coordinates the AmeriCorps Safe Families program, promotes community outreach in underserved and under – resourced communities, and manages the Disaster Preparedness Summit. He is an experienced instructor in CPR/AED, First Aid, Preparedness Education, Kid Safety Programs and Mass Care/Shelter Operations.
Prior to joining the American Red Cross, Martin graduated from James Madison University and was Assistant Director of Development for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. He completed two AmeriCorps terms working with New England Campus Compact and the National Preparedness and Response Corps. A native of the Chicagoland area, Martin continues to serve as a tutor for a clinical tutoring center, Chicago Cares volunteer leader and a writing coach for high school seniors.
Tod Pritchard is the Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for Wisconsin Emergency Management. Tod is in charge of ReadyWisconsin, a program helping people across the state get ready for emergencies. Since joining WEM in August 2010, Tod has developed several media campaigns including Winter Awareness Month with NASCAR champion and Wisconsin native Matt Kenseth. In that campaign, Kenseth urged everyone to have a winter survival kit in their vehicle. He also organized a Tornado Awareness Campaign creating teams of TV stations and retailers across the state to promote the purchase of Emergency Weather Radios. Tod also helped launch the STEP (Student Tools for Emergency Planning) program in Wisconsin.
Before joining WEM, Tod worked as a reporter, producer and news director at TV stations across the country including Madison, Minneapolis, Seattle and Honolulu.
Michael Ripley is the Disaster Response Manager for NBCUniversal located in Universal City, California. In his position, he is responsible for overseeing the studio’s Emergency Plans, Disaster Teams and Emergency Operations Center. Since 2006, Michael has utilized several innovative and progressive techniques to advance the studio’s disaster preparedness efforts including engaging community and public agency partners. He continues to be an advocate for community preparedness by volunteering his time to mentor other community groups and businesses. He serves on the board of directors for the California Emergency Services Association and the Business and Industry Council for Emergency Planning and Preparedness. In 2008 he was designated a Certified Emergency Manager by the International Association of Emergency Managers.
Before joining WEM, Tod worked as a reporter, producer and news director at TV stations across the country including Madison, Minneapolis, Seattle and Honolulu.
Herman Schaffer is the Director of Community Outreach for the New York City Office of Emergency Management. He oversees the Citizen Corps Council, a collaborative network of non-profits, government organizations, and cultural and faith-based institutions focused on disaster preparedness and response; CERT, OEM’s community-based volunteer program; Ready New York, OEM’s emergency preparedness education program, and cross cultural outreach. Herman also coordinates with regional partners to integrate plans and share resources through the Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Team and Urban Area Working Group. Prior to joining OEM in 2005, Herman spent three years as a case manager with Safe Horizon connecting victims of the September 11th attacks with local and federal resources to assist with their recovery. Herman also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia where he helped rural communities develop clean water and hygiene education programs. He maintains his connection with Zambia as the Vice President of Self Empowerment through Education (SEED).
Jodi Simpson is a Homeland Security Planner for the St. Clair County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. She serves on the Michigan Region 2 North Citizen Corps Committee and is the Coordinator for St. Clair County Citizen Corps.
Michael J. Smith serves as the fire chief for the San Manuel Band of Serrano Mission Indians, an American Indian Nation located in southern California. Chief Smith joined San Manuel to aid in the development of the Tribe’s emergency response capability, ultimately establishing a 33 member fire department which serves the region under the California mutual aid system as well as a robust community preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery nexus. San Manuel Fire at the direction of the Tribe has routinely answered calls beyond the reservation during times of community and nationwide emergency. Chief Smith has personally been deployed to aid in the recovery of 9-11-01 attacks and gulf-coast hurricanes and has worked directly with other tribes to enhance their emergency service capacities. Chief Smith currently serves as the President of the California Tribal Fire Chiefs’ Association and remains a licensed paramedic. He voluntarily serves on the local sheriff’s air rescue team as a flight paramedic. Chief Smith is a graduate of the National Fire Academy as well as the University of Redlands.
John D. Solomon was an accomplished journalist on homeland security and other public policy topics. John’s blog, “In Case of Emergency, Read Blog: A Citizen’s Eye View of Public Preparedness” (www.incaseofemergencyblog.com), was launched in March 2008 as research for a book he was writing on preparedness for emergencies from the vantage point of a father-husband-and son interested in helping safeguard his family and community. A resident of New York City, John’s body of work was striking in its reporting, analysis, engagement and impact, in preparing the public, informing professionals, and effecting change in the public and private sectors. John died on November 1, 2010, at the age of 47, of complications from a stem cell transplant for leukemia. At his passing, FEMA Administrator Fugate stated that John “set the standard for what it meant to be part of our nation’s emergency management team.” John is survived by his wife, Abby, and their two daughters, Sara and Rebecca.
Chad Stover is the Deputy Branch Chief for Homeland Security and the State Citizen Corps Coordinator at the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management. He manages the agency’s community preparedness efforts through the Ready Arkansas program (www.Ready.Arkansas.gov). The Arkansas State Citizen Corps Program consists of 22 local Citizen Corps Councils (CCC) and 11 local Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT). These local groups help to promote preparedness activities throughout the state. Volunteers from local CCC’s and CERT’s respond to disasters in their communities and support first responders in managing the disaster. Volunteers are trained from a variety of sectors including high school and college students, factory workers, teachers and senior citizens.
Mr. Stover’s volunteer activities include the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership (HOBY), where he held senior volunteer positions 1998-2008. He’s also worked with groups throughout Arkansas to increase community emergency preparedness. He speaks frequently at community meetings, churches and civic groups. Since 2008, he’s responded to 12 Presidentially Declared Federal Disasters working in emergency operations center, public affair, community relations, public assistance and disaster recovery centers.
Greg Strader serves as the Founding Executive Director of the Be Ready Alliance Coordinating for Emergencies (BRACE). He works with the 450 Partners of BRACE to make his community the most disaster resilient in America. Greg served with the American Red Cross for over 32 years in six communities, responding to hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires, plane crashes and many other disasters. He served as the Escambia Long Term Recovery Coordinator following Hurricanes Ivan & Dennis supporting over 800 families through their recovery from those disasters. He guides the efforts of BRACE in its role as the Citizen Corps & Community Emergency Response Team Coordinator for Escambia County, the City of Pensacola and Town of Century. Greg led his organizations response to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, engaging over 1,900 volunteers that provided over 10,000 hours of volunteer service. | <urn:uuid:6e7da604-f6ef-4118-8e58-f33fd15da2aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bigmedicine.ca/wordpress/2012/01/usa-champions-of-change-disaster-preparedness/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956875 | 3,353 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Hopes and Worries for 2010-2011
The arrival of the 2010-2011 school year is accompanied by renewed enthusiasm, vigor, and dedication, as well as lingering concerns over how to cope with ongoing financial shortfalls. As schools and counties across the country continue to scramble for funding, the good news for many teachers is that the time of uncertainty over cuts and reductions has passed, what’s done is done, and plans for how to best utilize time and resources to create another exciting year of instruction are well underway.
This recent SBO reader survey takes a closer look at how this school year compares to years passed, while gauging specific areas of excitement and concern for music educators nationwide.
Relative to last year, my student population this year will be:
About the same: 55%
“We went from 88 to 115 in the marching band program this year thanks to a good middle school feeder situation.”
Rich Stichler, Lakeview-Ft. Oglethorpe High School, Ft. Oglethorpe, Ga.
“Our feeder programs are helping us grow our numbers slightly. I’d love to see more retention, but we are moving in the right direction.”
George Dragoo, Stevens High School, Rapid City, S.D.
“We have declining enrollment overall for years to come. My one feeder program is not doing well at retaining students, in addition to the general population decline. This is worrisome.”
David Ahrens, Bear River High School, Grass Valley, Calif.
This year, I will have:
More help: 9%
Less help than last year: 26%
The same amount of additional staffing in the classroom: 65%
“With the budget cuts we went through this past year, while they didn’t cut any of the music positions, they cut other •exploratory’ positions at the school so we now have fewer teachers for the same amount of students. This is going to affect some of my band classes because instead of seeing them in two classes per grade level, they are cutting it back to one class per grade so that I can also teacher general music classes.”
Chris Nunes, Westport Middle School, Westport, Mass.
My budget this year will be:
What are your most pressing concerns about the new school year?
“The economic status with many families in our community is very unsettling. My concern is that the families of beginning students will be able to afford an instrument for sixth-grade band.”
Randy Young, Coosa High School, Rome, Ga.
“Making sure that we are able to run the same music classes with our current budget crisis. As of now, the school has cut back elementary music. Students used to receive general music once a week for a half hour. Now it is down to once a week for only half the year.”
Ted Rausch, Portsmouth High School, Portsmouth, R.I.
“We survived attempted cuts last year. We need to keep the program strong and visible this year in order to avoid cuts for 2011-2012.”
Rodney Mueller, Centennial High School, Champaign, Ill.
“Less time for elementary band students due to a reduced staff. And not enough money from the school corporation or Band Boosters to keep up with the instrumentation or technology needs.”
Kevin Christenson, Heritage Junior/Senior High School, Monroeville, Ind.
“I am most concerned about the constant adding of programs (advisory, collaboration, et cetera) that take time away from actually teaching curriculum to our students.”
Patrick J. Kearney, Johnston High School, Johnston, Iowa
What are you most excited about for this coming year?
“Our county has a voice in the county office for the first time in thirty years. I am curious to see what this will do for the arts in my county. I have a great group of beginners coming in this year to watch their progress each year is lots of fun.”
Jason Carter, North Davie Middle School, Mocksville, N.C.
“Starting an after school jazz ensemble and knowing that this style of music will make more proficient concert band players. It will help students become more confident in their playing and will increase their reading and listening skills.”
Patrick Ross, Perry Elementary School, Erie, Pa.
“Challenging every level of string player beginning in fourth grade all the way through middle school and into high school with quality string literature and teaching and reinforcing the basics from quality LH position to RH bow hold. Teaching vibrato every year to more string players is always enjoyable. Finally, in the spring I look forward to going to music contests and seeing how the students respond to the experience!”
Joel K. Jank, Hastings Middle School, Hastings, Neb.
“The students this year are especially enthusiastic about the program, and they have me fired up to do great things.”
Jay Kahn, Maquoketa Middle School, Maquoketa, Iowa
Additional thoughts on the new school year?
“It’s important to keep things consistent from year to year, even though we have huge financial issues facing the schools in California. Many programs have terrific parent support and we will be leaning on them more this year than in years past. We must strive to keep a positive attitude in the classroom and around the campus and community. That positive attitude will transfer to the wonderful kids and community during these tough times. How we handle this situation will define us as music educators and as human beings.”
Norman Dea, Acalanes High School, Lafayette, Calif.
“My goal is to make every effort to be a fantastic advocate for my music program and the programs in the district. I hope to do a better job with my repair and music funds. I hope to finally get my music library organized and also look forward to teaching valuable lessons to my students about character, as well.”
Dave J. Moss, Fremont Academy, Pomona, Calif. | <urn:uuid:b55a5d02-5bb2-4133-877c-835931cbe536> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sbomagazine.com/7853/archives/september-2010/hopes-and-worries-for-2010-2011/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95229 | 1,290 | 1.742188 | 2 |
This circular tour runs for 220 kilometres through the County of Bentheim, linking to a further 25 circuits of between 22 and 58 kilometres in length, which makes it ideal for tours divided into one-day stages and excursions into the Netherlands. This extensive network of cycle paths is a great way to experience the different sides of the region. The scenery is characterised by a mix of forest, meadows, heathland and fields, as well as the Vechte river and a number of lakes and canals. The region also has a wealth of historical and cultural attractions such as the almost 1,000-year-old Bentheim Castle. Terrain: the tour runs mainly on asphalt or paved trails, but there are also surfaces of crushed brick/stone and gravel. Routes are mainly away from busy roads. Lower Bentheim is largely flat, with just a few hilly stretches and gentle climbs in the Uelsen/Lönsberg region. Around Bad Bentheim/Gildehaus there are some short stretches with steep ascents. Scenery: varied countryside in a rural region including woodland, riverscapes, canals, heathland and meadowland. Cultivated wetlands in the north-east of the county. | <urn:uuid:fd13acba-9582-4685-880a-1aa00396d069> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.germany.travel/se/fritid-rekreation/cykling/bentheim-county-cycle-tour.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962027 | 250 | 1.617188 | 2 |
On Monday President Obama offered a creative, efficient method for prosecuting terrorists affiliated with the 9/11 attacks or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: namely, military tribunals in a secure island compound you may not have heard of called “Guantanamo Bay.”
Back on the home front, Representative Peter King, Homeland Security Committee Chair, has planned a hearing for Thursday on whether al-Qaeda is trying to recruit young Muslims in the U.S. and whether Muslim Americans are sufficiently cooperating with federal officials to ensnare would-be domestic terrorists such as American-born Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.
The most infamous failed attack on American soil in the past several years was U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad’s attempted car bombing in Times Square, which was thwarted only because a suspicious hot dog vendor happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time.
Naturally, last Sunday hundreds of willfully naïve, politically correct New Yorkers gathered in Times Square, steps from where Shahzad tried to kill hundreds of New Yorkers, to protest King’s hearing as racist and Islamophobic.
In an effort to dilute the impact of King’s investigation and make it harder for the nation to ask honest questions about the threat of Muslim youth recruitment, Obama had his national security advisor speak at a mosque in northern Virginia to assure Muslims that the federal government was not disproportionately examining Islamic groups.
Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. House, declared on Sunday that focusing on one religion more than any other was wrong, though he graciously allowed that it was OK for us to scrutinize “radicalization.” Radicalization of what? Lady Gaga’s fashion sense? read more » | <urn:uuid:fda3e0c9-a4c7-4793-8747-d2f3bae722af> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://conservativeoutpost.com/tags/keith_ellison | 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 | 0.958885 | 364 | 1.59375 | 2 |
4:47 p.m. | Updated
In this week’s Look pages, the British photographer David Chancellor captures a hunter amidst her trophies; the photograph, along with the additional pictures of other hunters on the magazine’s Web site, comes from a larger project Chancellor calls “Hunters.” Here’s a portion of my recent conversation with Chancellor.
You’ve been documenting trophy hunters for nearly four years. How did you settle on this particular approach?
Because the whole hunting experience, the whole tourist-trophy-hunting experience is one of collecting. They collect, they quite often describe what they do as harvesting, rather than killing, which always intrigued me, and I really wanted to look at what they do with what they have actually harvested. When they’ve killed, what’s the point of it, particularly if it’s something that you can’t eat, particularly if it’s something like cats, which are singularly beautiful animals. You shoot it because you have a particular gap in your trophy room. I was very interested to put the people in context with what they were doing and have a look at their collections. I’m passionate about wildlife and natural history, so as a child I would spend hours in the natural-history museum. I’ve heard from hunters that the U.S. government will actually go to a hunter’s home and work out what the collection is worth, so when the hunter dies, they can collect estate taxes on the collection. Therefore some of the hunters have been donating their collections to museums, so a number of these taxidermy collections were turning up in natural-history museums, and it intrigued me that this is coming full circle.
When you decided to track down the hunters with their collections to figure out where the animals they “harvested” went, why did you choose Texas?
I did a little bit of research, and I went to two hunting conventions, one in Reno and one in Dallas. The hunting conventions are where the hunters will go to book their hunts, where they will decide that they want to hunt a lion, so they’ll go to one of the big hunting conventions and they will meet various people, outfitters they’re called, who will arrange the hunt, and then they will quite often meet the professional hunter who is going to be accompanying them on the hunt in Africa. They’ll book the hunt, pay the deposit and then they next time they turn up, it’s in Africa to hunt the animal. A lot of these people have trophy rooms or thousands of square feet. One of the safari clubs runs an awards program that recognizes hunters for killing and collecting certain species and numbers of animals. That was a good way to figure out who has the finest collections. Most of the hunters I dealt with in Africa probably were at the start of their careers, so they’d have 10 or 15 animals. I wanted to look at the people who were at the end of their career — in the twilight of their lives, you could actually assess what they’d done, what they’d hunted, what they’d actually harvested during their lifetimes.
You were consciously seeking out people in the twilight of their careers. Generally how many animal would they have?
The man in the red shirt has 263 animals, but there are hunters who have far in excess of that. A lot of it is income based. It’s incredibly expensive to hunt at that level.
What went through your mind when you walked into a hunter’s trophy room?
Honestly, I thought, how do I get it all in one frame. Sometimes the trophy room is separate from the house in an annex specially built for the collection. Sometimes, the collection is displayed throughout the house and the hunter lives amongst the 260-plus dead animals. One of the hunters is a mechanic — not a wealthy man. He has animals throughout his entire house including his kitchen and his bedroom. He told me hasn’t opened his curtains in years. You asked me what I think when I walk into a room and somebody has 260 animals in their living room and they are sitting on the sofa doing their paperwork. You think, yes, they are beautiful animals but you’re living amongst death. You are living in a museum.
Have you ever hunted?
Were there moments when you would be in the room and just feel repulsed?
No. The honest answer would be no, because I’ve done so much of the stage before — the actual hunting — that possibly in a way I am desensitized to seeing an inanimate object. I might question why somebody would want to live with so many inanimate objects. The passing of life will always concern me, particularly when it is something as beautiful and something as physically unique as some of these animals they’ve collected. Or the celebration of taking an animal such as a leopard to add to the trophy room. Then I have to step back and look at it and just ask, “Why?” The whole idea of the project is not to say whether it’s right or wrong. It happens. That’s what they do. It’s legal. It’s not to try to pull the curtain back and expose it because it’s completely legal. All of that hunting is completely legal. If any of it is endangered, it isn’t legal. If there are animals in my pictures that hunters are now prohibited from hunting, then they were hunted well before they became endangered. There’s an organization and a structure for it. It is not “is it right, is it wrong?” The idea is to produce a set of images which make people question the logic.
Have you experienced people getting upset by the work you’ve done on hunting?
I knew it would be a difficult subject. I know the photojournalists you work with, they’re dodging stuff that’s being shot at them. I’m just photographing people with dead animals. It doesn’t compare, but there’s a very, very strong antigun lobby and a very strong hunting lobby and to try to walk the fence between the two has been and still is a tremendous battle because I am still very much involved in it.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 26, 2012
An earlier version of this post misidentified the nationality of the photographer David Chancellor. He is British, not South African. | <urn:uuid:3f40feeb-f3f3-47af-bd39-27f2e1722473> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/a-photographer-hunts-down-hunters-in-their-trophy-rooms/?src=tp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975556 | 1,372 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Bagel, designed by Per Jørgensen, 2002.
Earlier this spring, our local art-supply store closed its doors, but not before slashing the prices of its remaining inventory. Among life's many temptations, the promise of discount art supplies looms large, so off I went in search of buried treasure. Actually, not so buried, as it soon turned out — more like a paltry selection of picked-over goods, until a chipboard assortment of "birthday letters" caught my eye.
Birthday letters? I think not. This is Faux Hebrew. Chipboard Alpha Letters, 2007.
I came back to my studio, put the Faux Hebrew upright on my desk, and gave it a good long stare. Maybe it was because it was the week of Passover — overshadowed as a week without bread always is by the sugary delectations of Easter — so I let it go.
Except that I couldn't let it go. It really irked me. I spend a great deal of time in my studio and thus, spent a considerable amount of time over the next few weeks stealing furtive glances at my Faux Hebrew letterforms — which, it turns out, have a rather curious provenance. Joseph Anthony Bartolo created a font called "Hebrewish
" because, as he explains it, "the only Hebrew Latino font I have ever seen didn't really live-up to my expectations." Of course, if Hebrewish does't live up to your expectations, there is actually a real font called Faux Hebrew
, and it's not the one on my desk.
Which means there are even more, lots
more like this. Yes, it turns out there's also one called Talmud
, and one called Jerusalem
, and a slightly more modified geometric version called — get ready for this one — CIRCUMCISION
. Circumcision, designed by Matius Gerardo Grieck, 2000.
Further research revealed that fake Jewish typefaces are sometimes grouped under the heading "foreign fonts" which brings us selections like Sholom
, not to be confused with German type designer Dieter Steffman's Sholom
and probably any number of typefaces from real Israeli type designers
, quite a few of whom are rather gifted.
Clearly, some fonts are just too Western, and that's where modification — or in this case, "hindification
" — can, when done well, can be extremely useful. What's less useful is the humor — which, just as it is for "Asian" or "Mexican
" fonts, is highly questionable. And yes, it's all about appropriateness: fine to use Fake Hebrew for a deli; not so fine on, say, a yellow armband
. Likewise, nobody questions a sign for a burrito restaurant designed in Hot Tamale
, but what about when it's used for a border crossing sign in Texas? Hot Tamale, designed by WSI.
I'm not the first to question the appropriateness (or lack thereof) of "type" ethnicity. (Ellen Lupton, Jonathan Hoefler and others
have written about the faux naif
qualities of Neuland, a font designed by the early Twentieth Century German designer Rudolf Koch
, as the boilerplate "African American" font.) Nevertheless, the degree to which inappropriate things are both said and done (and worse, overlooked) with regard to ethnic, racial and cultural inappropriateness continues to rise, and this includes type decisions. Don Imus, who recently joined Mel Gibson and Isaiah Washington as the latest public figure to commit career suicide through bigotry, lost his job for referrring to the Rutgers Womens Basketball team as a bunch of "Nappy-Headed Hos." Granted, unlike people, typefaces have no feelings — so who cares if they're used without sensitivity and knowledge? But on some level, the line is a murky one: what's the difference between a celebrity making an unforgivable racist remark and a typographer making a font that clumsily perpetuates a cultural stereotype? As a rule, the study of ethics aren't taught in our design curricula. But maybe it should be. | <urn:uuid:77d432d5-cb13-4983-9518-224afeee94cd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://designobserver.com/observatory/entry.html?entry=5597 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96 | 881 | 1.679688 | 2 |
No clouds marred the horizon on that sunny July afternoon as a genuine American hero pedaled his bike down the Champs Elysées, arms spread wide. Lance Armstrong, a recent cancer survivor, had just cruised to victory in the 1999 Tour de France. The improbability of the triumph made it all the sweeter for Armstrong and his team—and for his sponsor, the U.S. Postal Service.
The agency’s investment in the athlete had been an act of faith. When Armstrong discovered he had testicular cancer in 1996, doctors told him that he would never be a world-class competitor again. The French team he had raced with dropped him. “I was given one offer,” Armstrong later recalled. “Only the U.S. Postal Service team believed in me. I had a lot to prove.” So did the Postal Service.
By 1999, both had succeeded. In the preceding few years, America’s 225-year-old postal service had transformed itself from the butt of sitcom jokes into a profitable and efficient enterprise. Carriers were delivering locally mailed letters within 24 hours 93% of the time, up from a low of 79% in the mid-1990s. The public reported they were more satisfied with postal services than with those of any other government entity. Big corporate mailers—magazine publishers, catalog companies, direct-mail advertisers, credit card and utility companies—applauded four years without a postage rate increase. The bottom line was healthy for the first time in years: The Postal Service earned more than $5 billion in surplus revenues from 1995 through 1998. Furthermore, the agency was crafting a strategy and launching initiatives designed to ensure success in the wired world of the new economy, where it would face new technology and new competitors.
For the Postal Service’s management team and employees, that summer afternoon on the Champs Elysées marked a great day to be an American and a glorious time to be moving the mail.
Eighteen months later, at the beginning of 2001, the agency was struggling to stay afloat. Revenue was falling and management was projecting a $3 billion loss for the 2001 fiscal year. Budgets were cut and capital spending was halted. Performance and morale were slipping. In April, the head of the General Accounting Office said the strategic transformation of the Postal Service had a high risk of failing. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent spread of anthrax through the mail only exacerbated a situation from which few people foresaw a quick recovery.
How had such an optimistic scenario turned sour so quickly? Why had the Postal Service’s efforts—seizing the potential of e-commerce, setting and meeting ambitious performance goals, crafting a new strategy—come up short?
This story explores what it felt like to see those efforts stall—and attempts to make sense of why they did. In some ways, the experience of the Postal Service, as a regulated monopoly with a legally mandated mission, is unique. But I believe our story will resonate with any organization trying to keep its own change initiatives from faltering.
A Double Whammy
I witnessed the Postal Service’s turnaround effort from a privileged vantage point. In 1993, I was recruited as vice president for technology applications, charged with creating electronic businesses for the Postal Service at a time of growing concern that the agency could be rendered obsolete by the emerging information superhighway. In 1996, I became the vice president for strategic planning. In this position, I was to help the agency respond not only to technological changes but also to competitors such as FedEx and United Parcel Service, which were offering services beyond simple delivery. These services—package tracking, for example—were eroding the Postal Service’s traditional franchise and undermining its status as the low-cost delivery provider by offering value to customers that more than justified premium prices. | <urn:uuid:b21a6fe4-7010-4ccf-b0f4-b47f7b2d4abb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hbr.org/2002/02/when-a-turnaround-stalls/ar/1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97551 | 796 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Stephen Nessen, Reporter, WNYC News
Stephen Nessen reports for the WNYC Newsroom and can often be heard live on Morning Edition.
As the New York Giants ride up the “Canyon of Heroes,” waving to admiring fans, shredded paper, once ticker tape, now recycled unprinted newspaper, will rain down on the Super Bowl champs.
“There's nothing like the old ticker tape, it wasn't as long and a little shorter and the paper flew better—but this serves a purpose,” said Joe Timpone, senior vice president for Downtown Alliance, who is overseeing distribution of shredded paper for confetti.
Half a dozen workers stuffed 40 clear plastic bags with a total of about 2,000 pounds of shredded paper donated by Atlas Materials and Packaging, a Red Hook based recycling plant, which often uses the paper for pet bedding.
John Cioffi, the manager at Atlas, said he pushed the city into buying paper after he heard about enthusiastic fans tossing their paychecks and payroll sheets out windows during parades. Cioffi’s distinctly off-white brand of ticker tape is 24-30 inches long and about half an inch wide.
As an avid Giants fan, his plant has supplied paper for Giants parades in the past, as well as Yankee parades and previous Veterans’ parades. “At the last parade, we could tell which one was ours from the long strips hanging from trees,” he said.
Downtown Alliance said there will be about 300 sanitation workers and Alliance workers in total, cleaning up after the parade, but the good feelings will linger long after.
“We’re stuck with about three weeks of paper still being blown off the ledges of the buildings. It just stays up there until we get some real windy days and then the paper comes down, sometimes you think it’s snowing outside, that’s how much paper is coming down,” Timpone said. | <urn:uuid:da207ebf-ba68-4e39-a7e8-3f8e48e713b8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/wnyc-news-blog/2012/feb/06/parade-prep-getting-ticker-tape-ready/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955754 | 423 | 1.59375 | 2 |
It has been a staple of gallows humor in our area for years: "Will the last one out of the valley turn off the lights?"
But it isn't even morbidly funny anymore - because they really are getting ready to turn off some of the lights in Mingo Junction.
For years, the decline of industries such as steel making and coal mining in our area has been hard on tens of thousands of Ohio Valley families. School systems and local governments in some places have suffered, too, because of decreases in revenue.
Always there was hope, however. But now many local communities will have to look elsewhere than at the steel industry for hope.
The old, once-mighty Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel network finally has collapsed. Bankruptcy has resulted in piecemeal sale of assets, with it highly unlikely some old mills ever will reopen.
Mingo Junction once was home to key Wheeling-Pitt facilities. Residents of the community prospered. Municipal government did, too. As recently as last year, the outlook seemed solid enough for Village Council to authorize construction of an expensive "splash pad" for children.
Nothing is solid now, however. Closure by RG Steel of the old mill in Mingo Junction has slashed revenue for village operations, to the point that council members met with an American Electric Power representative this week to discuss turning off some street lights.
Street lighting costs the village about $50,000 a year, so turning off some of the fixtures will save a significant amount of money. A council committee will discuss which lights should be turned off.
Finally, after decades in which national politicians passing through the valley often would pledge to rescue the steel industry, there is virtually nothing left to resuscitate.
The lights will not come back on either figuratively or literally for Mingo Junction village government unless a whole new way of doing things - less expensively - is found. As council's discussion with AEP illustrates, officials are ready to be very creative in that regard.
State government should offer all the help in its power. A good start would be for the Ohio Water Development Authority to restructure a loan taken out a few years ago to improve the village water plant.
Like so many other facets of local government, that seemed like a good idea at the time. The steel mill was in operation and, as the village water department's largest customer, was pumping lots of money into Mingo Junction coffers.
Without that revenue, the village may not be able to make the $600,000-a-year payments on the state loan.
State officials should find a way to help Mingo Junction out of its current dilemma. Restructuring - or even forgiving part of - the water loan would be a good start. | <urn:uuid:ff9b5e33-e029-4e0f-b207-87d0adfc5791> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theintelligencer.net/page/content.detail/id/575108/Mingo-Junction-Needs-State-Aid.html?nav=511 | 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 | 0.972889 | 564 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Chinese vice president Xi Jinping visits the White House.
President Obama met with the man who is expected to be the next leader of China on Tuesday.
In welcoming China's presidential heir apparent, Vice President Xi Jinping, President Obama simultaneously assured an ally and prodded a superpower rival.
"With expanding power and prosperity also comes increased responsibilities," Mr. Obama said.
Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton publicly pressured Xi on areas of that have stressed the uneasy alliance, from China's undervalued currency and tilted trade practices to theft of intellectual property.
The administration pushed even harder on China's unwillingness to help halt the brutal crackdown in Syria and on China's own human rights record at home.
Outside the White House protesters tried to turn the spotlight away from the Washington photo opps to China's harsh treatment of Tibet.
After being pressed by the Obama administration Xi responded diplomatically.
"Of course there is always room for improvement on human rights," he sid.
Xi suggested he was open to change and pointed to a Monday night meeting he had with senior U.S. lawmakers.
"Their wise and practical suggestions have provided me with much food for thought," he said.
In addition to Washington and Los Angeles Xi will be traveling to Muscatine, Iowa, a town he visited on a cultural exchange back in 1985. | <urn:uuid:d7e1a0ac-8142-45ac-968b-848c45f71aca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kveo.com/news/vip-visit | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952559 | 273 | 1.664063 | 2 |
The Chase Hotel in Herefordshire has enjoyed a rich and vibrant history, and is still a celebrated focal point as one of the area’s most prestigious Country House Hotels.
The hotel is named after Chase Hill, which was part of the hunting grounds of the Bishop of Hereford in Medieval times.
Shaded pools are now all that remains of Chest or Chase Mill, dating from at least the 17th Century. This was one of three mill sites in Ross-on-Wye, the others being the Town Mill in Brookend and the One Mill at the end of the RopeWalk.
The Chase Hotel site has been occupied under various guises, developed from a farm and mill to a mansion house, before finally becoming the Ross-on-Wye Country House Hotel that it is today. | <urn:uuid:a560ebde-38ae-422a-bdcf-6dee8f7e8edc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chasehotel.co.uk/accommodation/history-of-the-chase | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978654 | 166 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Translated by J.M. Kennedy
is it really copied? I think it is the description of the philologist: it is better to be a day-labourer than to have such an anæmic recollection of the past.--
The attitude of the philologist towards antiquity is apologetic, or else dictated by the view that what our own age values can likewise be found in antiquity. The right attitude to take up, however, is the reverse one, viz., to start with an insight into our modern topsyturviness, and to look back from antiquity to it--and many things about antiquity which have hitherto displeased us will then be seen to have been most profound necessities.
We must make it clear to ourselves that we are acting in an absurd manner when we try to defend or to beautify antiquity: who are we!
We are under a false impression when we say that there is always some caste which governs a nation's culture, and that therefore savants are necessary; for savants only possess knowledge concerning culture (and even this only | <urn:uuid:5ca8a4ef-9725-44fb-a5e0-8ca35f2691a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://manybooks.net/titles/nietzsche1826718267-8.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958769 | 217 | 1.734375 | 2 |
uick Facts of Golden Globe History
It is always enjoyable to watch Golden Globe ceremony. I like watching winner’s speeches. And I think it is fun to know facts about Golden Globe history.
1. In 1928 the Hollywood Association of Foreign Correspondents (HAFCO) was formed. In 1935 another similar association was formed. These two associations only stood for a short time, however they had showed their seriousness by inviting Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and other celebrities in Ball International of Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The foreign press had done uneasy job because Hollywood had not realized the potential of foreign market.
2. In 1941 in the World War II situation, the society was thirst of entertainment. The filmmakers like Orson Welles, Preston Sturges, Darryl Zanuck and Michael Curtiz worked hard to fulfill the need. During the chaos of war, foreign reporters in Los Angeles were united to share contact, information and substances.
3. In 1943 the reporters, lead by Daily Mail reporters, formed the Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association with motto unite without religion and race discrimination.
4. As the representatives of foreign press world, this association thought that they have the responsibility to give appreciation to Hollywood production. This could be best recommendation for film audiences.
Cover of Watch on the Rhine
5. In 1944 during informal ceremony in 20th Century Fox, the association honored the award to Jennifer Jones as the Best Actress for her performance in “The Song of Bernadette” and Paul Lukas was crowned as best actor for his appearance in “Watch on the Rhine”. The Song of Bernadette was chosen as the Best Film.
Cover of The Song of Bernadette
6. In 1945 the association member held a contest to determine the award design, which would be the Golden Globe symbol. Marina Cisternas, the president association for 1945-1946 period, proposed the concept of award design, which is used until now.
7. The Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association celebrated the first social gala in 1945 with dinner party in Beverly Hills Hotel. Film entitled “Going My Way” won the Best Picture, Ingrid Bergman won the Best Actress Award and Alexander Knox won Best Actor Award.
8. In 1950, there were philosophy differences between the members of the organization, then there was separation. They were two groups: The Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association and the Foreign Press Association of Hollywood.
9. They were only separated for a while, after that the reporters were united again in 1955 as “The Hollywood Foreign Press Association” (HFPA). They prepare the term and condition for membership.
10. In 1951, the association decided to divide the best award of film, actor and actress to two categories: drama and musical/ comedy, so every category would be better appreciated.
11. In 1952, HFPA presented Cecil B. DeMille Award. This award is awarded as the honor to them who have contributed for film development. The first receiver of this award was Cecil DeMille himself.
12. In 1955, Golden Globe started to appreciate the achievement in television, beside film. The first awards for Best Television Show that year went to “Dinah Shore,” “Lucy & Desi,” “The American Comedy” and “Davy Crockett.”
13. In 2007, Golden Globe started to appreciate “Best Animated Feature Film” and the first nominations are “Cars,” “Happy Feet” and “Monster House.”
14. Today, Golden Globe has acknowledged the achievements of 25 categories; 14 for film and 11 for television.
15. Dick Clark Production has handled Golden Globe ceremonies since 1983. | <urn:uuid:64526c9e-d001-4c6c-9ef8-f4dd737381cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cinemaroll.com/history/quick-facts-of-golden-globe-history/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956129 | 776 | 1.695313 | 2 |
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Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Catby David Dosa
Synopses & Reviews
A remarkable cat. A special gift. A life-changing journey.
They thought he was just a cat.
When Oscar arrived at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Rhode Island he was a cute little guy with attitude. He loved to stretch out in a puddle of sunlight and chase his tail until he was dizzy. Occasionally he consented to a scratch behind the ears, but only when it suited him. In other words, he was a typical cat. Or so it seemed. It wasn't long before Oscar had created something of a stir.
Apparently, this ordinary cat possesses an extraordinary gift: he knows instinctively when the end of life is near.
Oscar is a welcome distraction for the residents of Steere House, many of whom are living with Alzheimer's. But he never spends much time with them--until they are in their last hours. Then, as if this were his job, Oscar strides purposely into a patient's room, curls up on the bed, and begins his vigil. Oscar provides comfort and companionship when people need him most. And his presence lets caregivers and loved ones know that it's time to say good-bye.
Oscar's gift is a tender mercy. He teaches by example: embracing moments of life that so many of us shy away from.
Making Rounds with Oscar is the story of an unusual cat, the patients he serves, their caregivers, and of one doctor who learned how to listen. Heartfelt, inspiring, and full of humor and pathos, this book allows readers to take a walk into a world rarely seen from the outside, a world we often misunderstand.
Praise for Making Rounds With Oscar
"I love this book — Oscar has much to teach us about empathy and courage. I couldn't put it down."
-Sarah Gruen, author of Water for Elephants
"At its heart, Dosa's search is more about how people cope with death than Oscar's purported ability to predict it."
-The Associated Press
"Beautifully written, heartwarming [...] Told with profound insight and great respect for all involved, this is more than just a cat story (although it will appeal to fans of Vicki Myron's Dewey)."
"You'll be moved."
"Dosa, a geriatrician with a strong aversion to cats, tells the endearing story of Oscar the cat, the aloof resident at a nursing home who only spends time with people who are about to die. Despite hearing numerous stories about Oscar's uncanny ability to predict when a patient's time is nearing, Dosa, ever the scientist, remains skeptical. Slowly, he starts to concede that there may be something special about Oscar. Dosa starts to pay more attention to the cat's decidedly odd behavior, noticing that Oscar seeks out the dying, snuggles with the patient and family members until the patient passes; with others, he smells the patient's feet, sits outside a closed door until admitted, or refuses to leave a dying patient's bed. Dosa discovers how powerfully Oscar's mere presence reassures frightened or grieving family. Ultimately, the good doctor realizes that it doesn't matter where Oscar's gift comes from; it's the comfort he brings that's important. This touching and engaging book is a must-read for more than just cat lovers; anyone who enjoys a well-written and compelling story will find much to admire in its unlikely hero." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
An otherwise ordinary cat, Oscar has the uncanny ability to predict when people in the Steere House nursing home are about to die. Dr. Dosa tells the stories of several patients and examines end-of-life care as it exists today.
When Dr. David Dosa, an attending physician at Steere House, wrote about Oscar in the New England Journal of Medicine, the response was tremendous, with coverage everywhere from Today to People to CNN. Now, in Rounding with Oscar, Dr. Dosa expands his story, using the tabby and the stories of several patients to examine end-of-life care as it exists today. Oscar the cat has very special skill. An otherwise ordinary cat--he'd sooner give you his back or a sideways glance than curl up on your lap--Oscar has the uncanny ability to predict when people are about to die. Adopted by staff members at Steere House nursing home when he was a kitten, the three year-old tabby has presided over the deaths of more than 25 nursing home residents thus far. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death--a blessing, really, because it allows staff members to notify families that the end is near. Oscar is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves because he provides companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. Heartfelt, inspiring, and sometimes even funny, Rounding with Oscar allows readers into a world rarely seen from the outside, and often misunderstood.
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Health and Self-Help » Health and Medicine » Caregiving | <urn:uuid:9cc62e5d-5bcd-4ea7-bb1f-2d06ba2e4a58> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.powells.com/biblio/72-9781401323233-0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959215 | 1,168 | 1.6875 | 2 |
I'm looking for games that use time in interesting ways. I mean that in a narrative sense, so not mechanics like the time-travel in Prince of Persia or Braid.
I'm thinking about this because games are long. A contemporary action game takes me 8-12 hours to complete, and other genres can run 20+. Films take about 2 hours to watch and novels about 4-6 hours to read (an album of music only takes about 45 minutes to listen to!). Television shows are the only mainstream entertainment that matches games in the length of the experience. And yet most games don't use their abundance of time in interesting ways. Many films have stories that last over a year, and many books as well: only a handful of game stories last longer than a few days (again, from a narrative perspective).
Game stories tend to run as the worst 12 hours of [character's] life. I just completed Dead Space 2, which, like its predecessor, runs in "real time," with no skips or jumps. Half life 1 and 2 are like this, Bioshock 1 and 2 are like this, most action games are paced like this. Open world games have "day/night" cycles, but the passage of time has no effect on the narrative. You could wait a hundred days and nothing would change. Same for RPGs. When the story picks up again, it's as if it's been a few hours.
Here are some interesting uses of time:
Dead Rising 2 actually runs in real-time: events are always happening throughout the mall, and you need to get medicine for your daughter at regular intervals. You can just sit in the safe house for the length of the game: you will get an ending and "beat" the game. (Obviously in most games if you do nothing the game will last forever.)
Mafia 2 has the jump through the prison years, which is interesting, but even more interesting is the fact that it contains the conclusion to Mafia 1.
Dragon Age 2 tried to use leaps forward in time, but the jumps didn't have enough of an impact for things to be interesting.
Majora's Mask (an N64 Zelda game), one of my favorite games, is entirely about the passage of time. It plays over three days that the player repeats, each day proceeding in real time. The player must discover what happens over those days across the world.
So: what are some interesting uses of time in game stories? | <urn:uuid:c8dad7b0-b5ae-4bac-9186-d2b8d46a0931> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/forums/showthread.php?340-Interesting-use-of-time-in-games&p=6068&viewfull=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970545 | 505 | 1.601563 | 2 |
You may remember that about a year ago NVIDIA Corporation suffered the greatest fiasco in its history. The company’s new NV30 graphics processor had been supposed to shatter ATI Technologies that was dominating the DirectX 9-compatibles field, but couldn’t eventually do that. The new architecture developed in NVIDIA’s labs went far beyond the requirements of the DirectX 9 standard, but was clumsy with its huge number of transistors. Its first embodiment, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, was a failure. The peculiarities of the GPU architecture together with the introduction of high-speed GDDR2 memory across the narrow 128-bit memory bus made the newcomer from NVIDIA even slower than ATI’s RADEON 9700 PRO in real applications.
NVIDIA corrected the mistake quickly by releasing an improved version, the NV35, a much more viable solution. Anyway, the NV30 left a gloomy impression: the company stopped producing such chips after issuing just a few tens of thousands of them and removed all mentions of the NV30 from their website.
A year passed and NVIDIA released a few successful products, replacing the NV35 with the NV38 core. Besides that, they abandoned the Detonator driver, having switched to the ForceWare suite with its special shader-code compiler introduced for higher performance in modern 3D games. Anyway, graphics cards on chips from ATI Technologies like RADEON 9800 PRO and RADEON 9800 XT have remained the best choice for a PC enthusiast.
Of course, NVIDIA never gave up plans to take revenge on ATI. You certainly heard rumors about the NV40 core long before its actual implementation in silicon. They were talking about 16 rendering pipelines, pixel and vertex shaders version 3.0 support and various other innovations. The rumors were wide-reaching. Some well-informed sources stated that the new chip would work with GDDR3 memory clocked at 1600MHz, while the GPU clock rate would be up to 600MHz...
This situation resembles the one we had about a year ago: the upcoming product from NVIDIA looks impressive in preliminary specifications, rumors and press releases. NV30 also looked that impressive in its time. There’s again much talk about an imminent revolution in the 3D desktop graphics, just like in 2003.
This time, however, NVIDIA is more reserved in its promises. The company also decided to discard the suffix “FX” in the names of the upcoming products – they will be called just GeForce 6800 Ultra and GeForce 6800. I wonder if it is some kind of superstition and they don’t want the NV40 to repeat the fate of the NT30 (which had that “FX” suffix). On the other hand, they may just want to distinguish the new product series from the older one or change the brand completely.
Now, the time of rumoring is over, the new wonder chip from NVIDIA saw the light of day officially and we can talk about it having both official specs and the graphics card on our hands! | <urn:uuid:f25cb000-5fc8-4130-af59-507fb446d053> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/nv40.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955503 | 613 | 1.671875 | 2 |
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- Victory in Seattle as Teachers Win Battle in Standardized Test Boycott
Today's Top News
Teacher Boycott of Standardized Test in Seattle Continues to Spread
A boycott of Washington state’s mandated standardized test by teachers at a Seattle school is spreading to other schools and winning support across the country, including from the two largest teachers’ unions, parents, students, researchers and educators.
The decision by teachers at Garfield High School to boycott the state’s Measures of Academy Progress because, they say, the exams don’t evaluate learning and are a waste of time is fueling a growing debate about the misuse of standardized tests in public education.
The Garfield teachers have now been joined by some teachers at a few other schools in Seattle, including the alternative Orca K-8 school. Colleagues at other schools have sent letters of support, as have groups including the Garfield PTSA, the Seattle Student Senate and a group of more than 60 researchers, educators and education activists, including Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol.
The boycott is the most recent nationally publicized event in an expanding revolt against high-stakes standardized tests and the use of students’ scores to evaluate teachers, schools, districts and states. The test approach is being followed nationwide with the support of the Obama administration but against the advice of assessment experts who say these exams are not designed for such use.
Parents have started to opt out of having their children take high-stakes tests; school boards have approved resolutions calling for an end to test-based accountability systems; thousands of people have signed a national resolution protesting high-stakes tests; some superintendents have spoken out, and so have teachers. It has been building momentum in the last year, since Robert Scott, then the commissioner of education in Texas, said publicly that the mentality that standardized testing is the “end-all, be-all” is a “perversion” of what a quality education should be. In fact, the Texas House just zeroed out funding for the state’s standardized tests in a draft budget to make a statement about over-testing.
Almost all of the teachers and staff at Garfield High are boycotting the test because they say it is not aligned with curriculum and is inappropriately being used by administrators to evaluate teachers, a purpose for which it was not designed. District administrators have defended the test.
The presidents of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which collectively have more than 4.5 million members, issued separate statements supporting the Garfield-led boycott.
AFT President Randi Weingarten, in this statement, thanked the Garfield teachers “for taking a courageous stand against the fixation on high-stakes testing and its harmful impact on our ability to give our students the high-quality public education they deserve.”
NEA President Dennis von Roekel said in his statement, “I, along with 3 million educators across the country, proudly support their efforts in saying ‘no’ to giving their students a flawed test that takes away from learning and is not aligned with the curriculum.”
Here’s a question: Has anybody told President Obama that his education policies have resulted in a growing revolt against standardized testing? | <urn:uuid:32cf7143-a6a4-42d2-aae4-706e289eafa4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/26-5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962471 | 738 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Hurricane Irene may not have wreaked the havoc of Biblical proportions that some may have feared, but it will beat up an insurance industry bruised by a spate of springtime storms, experts say.
The hurricane's price tag may come to around $7 billion, according to Kinetic Analysis Corporation in Silver Spring, Md. But even before Atlantic hurricane season started in June, tornadoes and other storms tore across a large swath of the country.
Eqecat, a company in Oakland, Calif., that models the effects of natural disasters, says tornadoes alone were costing insurers up to $18 billion so far this year, with up to $7 billion of that from just three days, April 25 through 28, according to the New York Times.
Those three days were "likely the most expensive tornado outbreak ever in the United States," according to Eqecat, the Times adds
Add to that, many insurance companies were exposed to the Japanese earthquake.
Meanwhile, one problem that many insurees may encounter is discovering their insurance may cover wind damage but not floods, which Irene unleashed all up the eastern seaboard.
"Many Americans underestimate the risk of flood damage [from a hurricane]," says Michael Barry, a spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute, CNNMoney reports. Many insurance companies require homeowners to buy flood insurance separately.
According to Barry, only 20 percent of all U.S. homes are covered by flood insurance, CNNMoney adds.
© 2013 Moneynews. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:6b84bcc6-4a73-474e-8243-042178d20bf1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.moneynews.com/Economy/HurricaneIrene-TropicalStormIrene-Ireneinsuranceclaims/2011/08/29/id/408978 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966263 | 308 | 1.804688 | 2 |
This preschool program offers a welcoming, nurturing environment for children that are ready for an enriched setting. Families can choose from preset 2-day, 3-day or 5-day options.
Class time allows your child to explore the developmentally appropriate areas of the Montessori Curriculum and includes snack and outdoor activity. Emphasis is placed on the importance of promoting independence with activities such as: hand-washing, pouring, toilet-training and self-dressing. Activities also include puzzles, story time and sorting to stimulate children’s minds, small motor skills and their strong sense for order and classification. Potty training is not required to enroll in this program. The class is designed to help children develop concentration, coordination and habits necessary for the next level which is the Children’s House five-morning program.
Enrollment to the Pre-Children’s House program is dependent on availability of your selection. Please contact Michelle Krauska at Admissions or (262) 547-2545. Please refer to Enrollment & Forms for proper documentation. | <urn:uuid:17de69d9-93bb-4023-a294-50c50b11578b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.msow.org/programs/pre-childrens-house/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931933 | 218 | 1.59375 | 2 |
On managing information, Iraq, Africa, American politics, food, cheese, Monty Python
SIR – Your special report on managing information (February 27th) and data visualisation was a good update for the general reader, but adding a few caveats would have provided some foundation to think critically about what they were seeing. The sheer quantity, speed, beauty, complexity and sophistication of new visualisation techniques are amazing. But they are still susceptible to the prosaic deceptions of data displays such as scale, aspect ratio and placement.
In addition, intensive processing for visualisation can actually destroy information. Some methods average data-points across vast reaches of time, space and magnitude. Many techniques destroy the natural variation in the data and treat outliers as anomalies to be edited or ignored. Our knowledge of physical and economic reality requires that we understand both variability and extremes. If you doubt this, consider the original deceptive climate-change hockey stick, the Challenger O-ring failures, or the meltdown of securitised assets.
Former United States assistant commissioner of labour statistics
SIR – Your special report used “data” and “information” interchangeably, though there is a measurable difference. Data are exponentially abundant and often available at little or no cost. Alternatively, information commands a pricing premium since most managers readily recognise this as the key ingredient in successful decision-making. The defining element that distinguishes simple data from information is insight, or human intervention.
The integration of an individual's analytical abilities, technical skills, experience and intuition interprets and transforms data into something far more valuable: information. Firms continue to need people who can make something of data and create information to guide decision-making. Workers who simply create or process data face a terrible fate: extinction.
Villanova School of Business
SIR – Regarding the “data deluge”, at least some help appears to be on the horizon, according to your sidebar. It seems that “deflation” is already shrinking the gigabyte from 1,024 megabytes to only 1,000. Of course, some creative data accounting is still needed to make those pesky definitions add up, as the ratio between the 220 bytes of the megabyte and the 230 bytes of the gigabyte remains stubbornly equal to 1,024 (not 1,000, as you rounded down). No wonder economists get things so wrong and then wonder why.
* SIR – Useful as they are for the private sector, market-based incentives cannot address risks associated with governmental data handling. It cuts across law enforcement, public protection and delivery of health, education and other public services. People have far fewer choices here, and the consequences of things going wrong can be far more serious.
Second, handling data properly, and making sure that exploiting the many benefits does not ride roughshod over the risks, is too important to be left in the hands of technologists, data scientists, statisticians or operational managers. You are right that information is the new raw material alongside capital and labour. But, like money, it cuts across all organisational activity. Information controls must become just as vital as financial controls to ensure sound corporate governance.
Former United Kingdom information commissioner (2002-09)
* SIR – Your special report noted that Wal-Mart's $400 billion in revenue exceeds many countries' GDPs. But GDP measures value-added while revenue measures gross value. Such apples-to-oranges comparisons are a case of bad data handling.
* SIR - You refer to Herbert Simon as an economist (“Handling the cornucopia”, February 27th). However, although he won a Nobel prize in economics in 1978, he received his BA as well as his PhD in political science. We political scientists always struggle to be taken seriously by other disciplines. Please don't take Herbert Simon from us!
SIR – Why assume there would be a “promised land” for Iraqis after the recent election (“No promised land at the end of all this”, March 6th). Democracies continuously evolve, as we can tell from the experience of countries in the West. True, Iraq is nowhere close to where the engineers of change thought it would have been post-Saddam Hussein, but it has certainly come a long way. You should keep in mind that, prior to 2003, Iraqis had not seen a mobile phone or an ATM machine.
In 2002 Iraqis went to the ballot boxes where there was just one candidate, who received 100% of the vote (officially). In this year's election Iraqis had a choice between close to 6,000 candidates. As you mentioned, the election will show that no single block will be able to rule alone, forcing politicians to form coalitions. But this will teach Iraqi leaders to compromise.
Even if we consider that Iraq has moved from autocracy to oligarchy, or that “Saddam has been replaced by many Saddams”, as Iraqis like to put it, plurality, even with corruption, is always better than one venal and brutal tyrant.
* SIR - Please do not generalise simplistically and damagingly about Africa (“A tribe in trouble”, March 6th). The events in Zimbabwe and Kenya to which your article refers are horrendous, and in both cases there is certainly a racist element within the broader political and social turmoil. But you have extrapolated two examples to cover a whole continent. You wouldn't dream of doing that in your coverage of Europe or Asia, so why do it to Africa?
Conditions for white people in other countries in Africa vary widely from the two examples that you discuss; white people are not a “tribe”, they are simply people. Here in Malawi for example, I am what your article describes as an “engaged white person”. I have chosen to live and work in another society whose different norms I respect and try to learn. I run a small company, and have encountered many ups and downs of business here. But in a decade I have only once encountered racism-–ironically from rich drunk mixed-race people.
Monkey Bay, Malawi
SIR – Political analysts continue to focus on the Republican extremist vote as the main threat to the Democratic majority in Congress in this year's mid-term elections (Lexington, March 6th). Yet it is independent voters who have swung important elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts over the past six months. Much of the resistance to health-care reform is coming from the centre, not the right. Centrists question the Democrats' assurance that the health-care bill pays for itself, and with good reason.
On another point, I have lived for all but 12 of my 58 years in the United States and somehow have never encountered any of the startling characters you manage to turn up to put front and centre in your articles about life here. Where do you find these people? Do you advertise for them in local newspapers? “Wanted: Very irritated voter, preferably reactionary, uses colourful language.” As for the BBC's coverage, you'd think the whole of America was populated with Elvis impersonators from Las Vegas.
SIR – Your article on the spread of genetically modified crops noted that in Europe, opposition to GM food “remains as strong as ever” (“Taking root”, February 27th). In Wales the government has taken a robust approach in opposing GM crops. But our research into public opinion on the matter shows that while a third of the Welsh population would not buy GM food and almost a quarter think it should be banned from sale altogether, opposition overall has decreased slightly.
The greatest change has been a drop in the numbers who are sufficiently well enlightened to comment; 71% of consumers in Wales do not feel confident in their knowledge of GM foods to give an informed opinion. Consumers are keen to have their say in this vital debate, but in order to contribute they need to have access to clear, objective and comprehensible information.
Senior policy officer
Consumer Focus Wales
SIR – The expansion of food supply through GM crops will encourage faster population growth and exacerbate current and future water shortages. Enthusiasm is best reserved for processes that improve the availability of freshwater, such as reducing water pollution and improving efficiency in the use of water. Otherwise, humans will come to know their own version of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—Food, food everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
East Lansing, Michigan
SIR – It is interesting that the Association Fromage de Terroirs, a lobbying group for the French cheese industry, chose gruyère as a symbol of French identity (“Low culture”, February 20th). That cheese originates and is more closely associated with the Swiss district of Gruyère. This only shows that cheese borders became brittle well before Lactalis, the French dairy company mentioned in your article, took over the industrialised production of mozzarella and feta.
* SIR - Monty Python's “Lumberjack Song” is even more “gender-liberated” than your correspondent realises (“Seal of approval”, March 13th). In it, representing two generations of tolerance, the woodcutter in fact wishes he'd been a girlie, just like his dear Papa!
Editor's note: Several other readers have made similar comments but in fact the original lumberjack wanted to be like his dear Mama (see this clip from “Monty Python's Flying Circus”). The wording was changed to “Papa” later, when the song was included in a Python film and their live shows. | <urn:uuid:73571524-611e-4263-a2ac-fb243c146f23> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.economist.com/node/15716919 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952339 | 2,005 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Drug company reps can distribute--but not discuss--reprints of journal articles on off-label uses for drugs, according to an FDA guidance posted last month.
The guidance comes with numerous conditions. As in the draft guidance issued a year ago, reps can distribute articles or texts to doctors, but they must be separated from promotional materials and “should not be the subject of discussion between the sales representative and the physician during the sales visit.” Reprints can be distributed at medical or scientific conferences “in settings appropriate for scientific exchange,” but not “in promotional exhibit halls or during promotional speakers' programs.”
The agency made some changes based on comments received about the draft guidance, including adding language encouraging manufacturers “to seek approvals and clearance for new indications and intended uses for medical products.” The guidance also includes several pages of bullet-pointed addenda on the types of reprints and information considered appropriate and the manner in which companies can distribute information.
FDA dismissed calls for the agency to continue requiring pre-submission of articles, as was mandated under an earlier clause governing reprints which expired in 2006. “Given the sunset of section 401 of FDAMA, these were not within FDA's authority and thus outside the scope of this guidance,” the agency said in a notice printed in the Federal Register.
The guidance says articles distributed should be from peer-reviewed journals and must not be false or misleading. Bespoke articles published primarily for distribution by the manufacturer are off-limits, as are letters to the editor, abstracts, reports of Phase 1 trials in healthy subjects or reference publications that contain little or no substantive discussion.
Information must be unabridged and cannot be marked, highlighted, summarized or manipulated by the manufacturer, and reprints must be accompanied by a “prominently displayed and permanently affixed statement” noting that the uses discussed are unapproved by FDA and any financial ties between the manufacturer and the study's authors, said the guidance, titled Good Reprint Practices for the Distribution of Medical Journal Articles and Medical or Scientific Reference Publications on Unapproved New Uses of Approved Drugs and Approved or Cleared Medical Devices US.
Incoming House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chair Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) blasted the rule ahead of the release of draft guidance in December 2007, saying it would establish a means for manufacturers to sidestep the agency review process and create “a powerful disincentive” to conduct clinical trials. The Prescription Project greeted the news with the quip, on its PostScript blog: “Physicians who see drug reps: be prepared to be flooded with reprints from journals you've never heard of.”
Industry advocates weren't thrilled with it either. Last February, Coalition for Healthcare Communication chief John Kamp told MM&M that the guidance met only the stingiest interpretation of companies' First Amendment rights to disseminate information, but allowed that it would “limit the ability of HHS and state investigators under the False Claims Act to essentially make up new policy about off-label means” and restore that authority to FDA. | <urn:uuid:752613d9-4a07-4df0-8b90-d5f2c109b3a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mmm-online.com/reprints-guidance-has-strings-attached/printarticle/126470/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944786 | 644 | 1.671875 | 2 |
The Convention season has unleashed an avalanche of half-truths and untruths. Some see this as politics as usual. Others claim we are living in a post-truth world. Stephen Colbert has long understood that our present condition has transformed truth into truthiness.
One response to our new practice of political lying is the rise of the fact finder. In general, I am all in favor of fact finders. When they labor in obscurity at, say, The New Yorker—or as I once did long ago at the Washingtonian Magazine—fact finders are supposed to check the facts referenced in an article and make sure that those factual nuggets are accurate: Does Mr. Green really live on 22 Wiley Street? Did he purchase a yellow car last year for $37,000? Is his house really worth $21 million? When I did this at the age of, I think, 18 before the Internet became what it is today, I spent my summer running over to the public records office and looking through the real-estate transactions of the rich and famous. We would not want to insult someone by saying he had paid less for his house than he really did.
Today, there is another kind of fact finding of increasing prominence: political fact checking. It is a different beast entirely. The most well-established of these is Politifact, which has the “Truth-o-Meter” that rates the truth or falsity of public claims on a spectrum that ranges from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” Other sites deliver similarly clever reports on the statements uttered by politicians during the course of the campaign. Part marketing and part well-intentioned policing of a discourse divorced from reality, these fact checkers are trying to bring sense and seriousness to political debate. What they are actually doing is making the problem worse.
The reason for this is that what is being checked today are less facts and more opinions. Take for example the recent anger over Mitt Romney’s advertisement and the continuing Republican claims that the Obama administration is trying to gut the 1996 Welfare Reform Law. Politifact and CNN and many other fact-check organizations labeled the ad a lie. Here is what Politifact said about it:
Romney’s ad says, "Under Obama’s plan (for welfare), you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check."
That's a drastic distortion of the planned changes to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. By granting waivers to states, the Obama administration is seeking to make welfare-to-work efforts more successful, not end them. What’s more, the waivers would apply to individually evaluated pilot programs -- HHS is not proposing a blanket, national change to welfare law.
The ad tries to connect the dots to reach this zinger: "They just send you your welfare check." The HHS memo in no way advocates that practice. In fact, it says the new policy is "designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families."
The ad’s claim is not accurate, and it inflames old resentments about able-bodied adults sitting around collecting public assistance. Pants on Fire!
On the other hand, here’s what The Daily Caller’s Mickey Kraus had to say after he fact checked a CNN fact check that had come to the same conclusion about Romney’s welfare ad as Politifact had:
The oft-cited CNN-”fact check” of Romney’s welfare ad makes a big deal of HHS secretary Sebelius’ pledge that she will only grant waivers to states that “commit that their proposals will move at least 20% more people from welfare to work.” CNN swallows this 20% Rule whole in the course of declaring Romney’s objection “wrong”:
The waivers gave “those states some flexibility in how they manage their welfare roles as long as it produced 20% increases in the number of people getting work.” Why, it looks as if Obama wants to make the work provisions tougher! Fact-check.org cites the same 20% rule.
I was initially skeptical of Sebelius’ 20% pledge, since a) it measures the 20% against “the state’s past performance,” not what the state’s performance would be if it actually tried to comply with the welfare law’s requirements as written, and b) Sebelius pulled it out of thin air only after it became clear that the new waiver rule could be a political problem for the president. She could just as easily drop it in the future; and c) Sebelius made it clear the states don’t have to actually achieve the 20% goal–only “demonstrate clear progress toward” it.
But Robert Rector, a welfare reform zealot who nevertheless does know what he’s talking about, has now published a longer analysis of the 20% rule. Turns out it’s not as big a scam as I’d thought it was. It’s a much bigger scam. For one thing, anything states do to increase the number of people on welfare will automatically increase the “exit” rate–what the 20% rule measures–since the more people going on welfare, the more people leave welfare for jobs in the natural course of things, without the state’s welfare bureaucrats doing anything at all. Raise caseloads by 20% and Sebelius’ standard will probably be met. (Maybe raise caseloads 30% just to be sure.) So what looks like a tough get-to-work incentive is actually a paleoliberal “first-get-on-welfare” incentive. But the point of welfare reform isn’t to get more people onto welfare .
How is it that Kraus and Politifact could have fact checked the same statement (with Kraus even claiming that he was fact checking the fact check) and yet have come to different conclusions? Why is that all the fact checking that is going on today is not leading to a more truthful debate? Why is it that Republican campaign operatives say they will not be governed by fact checkers? Shouldn't fact checkers be helping to keep political discourse grounded in truth? Actually, not.
The basic confusion here is that between a fact and an opinion. As Hannah Arendt argues in her prescient essay “Truth and Politics,” facts and opinions play very different and equally important roles in politics. Facts are essential insofar as they provide the ground and the sky on which and under which we live. It is crucial to have and accept common facts, for without agreed upon facts we cannot share a world with others. If I know that the President was born in Hawaii and you know he was born in Kenya (or doubt at least he was born in Hawaii) then we simply don't trust each other. We can't talk to one another. We don't share the same world. And we cannot politically live together in good faith as we try to actualize the common good.
Because facts of these kinds are so important, the rise to mainstream prominence of conspiracy theories that question the President's citizenship or insist that President Bush and his administration faked 9/11 are deeply destructive of our political world. Such destructive facts are always present in politics, and yet it is also the case that at certain periods they gain more credence and credibility than at other times. Now is clearly one of those times.
There are many reasons for the splitting of the common-sense world, but one at least is the speed and ruthlessness of change in our modern world. As people are dislocated, uprooted, and unsettled, they naturally seek certainty in what is increasingly an uncertain world. Arendt labeled this phenomenon homelessness and rootlessness.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt explores how the spiritual and material rootlessness of the 20th century have made people today uniquely susceptible to grand narratives provide clear and simple explanations for complicated and often upsetting events. That Jews were the root of Germany's problems or that collective ownership in the Soviet Union could usher in a utopia were stories contradicted by myriad facts. One core element of totalitarian times is that people prefer the security of a coherent narrative to the uncertainty of reality. People latch on to ideologies because they provide meaning and security. What Arendt saw is that the uncertainties of the modern era have made people so needy for such ideologies that they will sacrifice truth to fiction.
There is no doubt that the Internet eases the dissemination and also the force of conspiracies, as people can click through hundreds of links and never leave what is in essence an echo chamber of ideological purity. When people fall into such rabbit holes, they are enveloped by a world that seems real and is difficult to penetrate from the outside.
For that reason it is important to starkly and loudly confront ideological fictions. President Obama was right to launch his "Fight the Smears" website in 2008 to contest and disprove the smears about his religion and citizenship. Many of the fact-checking sites that now exist emerged out of a similar initiative, and in this sense they are deeply important.
But these sites today have gone beyond their original mission of checking facts. It is a fact that welfare reform was passed. It is a fact that the President's administration offered waivers to states to change how the reforms are implemented. As far as I know it is a fact that Republican governors requested those waivers. Whether these waivers go against the spirit of the reforms and whether they are wise, however, those are matters of opinion. No amount of fact-checking can tell you whether what the President did “guts” welfare reform or strengthens it. These are opinions about which reasonable people can and do differ.
While facts are essential to provide us with a common world that we share and in which we can advocate for our particular opinions, opinions are the life-blood of politics. Politics is the activity of people who, while sharing a factual world, come together to talk and act in public. Since people are different, their opinions will differ and they will seek to persuade each other that one way of handling welfare is better than another. That is the beauty of politics, the incessant talking and debating and compromising and leading through which common decisions are made.
That we today seek to transform opinions into facts is, at least in part, a result of our desire for clear answers. We live in a time when we have little patience for meaningful public engagement. We want government to work, which means we want it to keep the roads safe and the borders sound. We want our water to be clean and our food to be safe. And we want children to be fed and the sick to be healed. We don't much care how this is done so long as we can live comfortably and securely and go on with what is really important, namely our private lives. In essence, what we dream of today is a technocratic government that gives us much and demands from us very little.
If government is to work like a well-oiled machine, we need to input the correct facts. This leads us to insist that there are indeed such correct facts, even when we are confronted over and over again with evidence to the contrary. If there is a totalitarian element of modern politics, it is the technocratic insistence that if we simply all agreed on the facts and analyzed them correctly, our problems would be solved. It is no accident that both Mitt Romney and President Obama are technocratic pragmatists. Romney may have more interest in the power of data, but the President has an equally profound faith in the power of experts. Both appeal to the technocratic demand of an electorate desperate for clarity, certainty, and coherence in at a moment of profound upheaval.
As important as facts are, it is just as important to remain clear about the border between fact and opinion. Instead of gimmicky truth-o-meters, which give the illusion that political questions have easy answers, we need to encourage people with different opinions to discuss them in good faith. But the plague of fact checking what are in fact opinions has the opposite effect, since it proceeds on the assumption that opinions are true or false and that one who differs from you is a liar. The effect of fact checking in 2012 is to further polarize discourse and make political discussion almost impossible.
Instead of naming opinions lies, we are better served by good investigative reporting and opinion journalism that makes sound arguments and clarifies the stakes. A well-reasoned article that seeks to argue pro or contra can offer a depth of opinion and insight that far surpasses the gotcha journalism of fact checking. What is needed is not a demand for simple factual reporting, but a willingness to read and talk with people with whom one disagrees.
The problem today is that when confronted with opinions we don't like, we demand not arguments and other opinions but facts and objectivity. Ironically, it is the very demand for facts and objectivity in politics that leads to ideological organs like Fox News and CNBC. Because people insist on technocratic clarity in the mess that is politics, they now gravitate towards those news organization, blogs, websites, and communities that deliver them coherent narratives.
—RB (with assistance from Josh Kopin) | <urn:uuid:5b3bde9b-46d9-49ec-9daa-da490dd48b17> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?tag=welfare | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97012 | 2,751 | 1.726563 | 2 |
As expected, Facebook (FB) filed this week its much awaited S-1 registration statement related to its proposed IPO. As a result, the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR Web site, where regulatory documents can be accessed by investors, crashed and became almost unavailable, as reported by AllThingsD:
The SEC got back to us and in response to the question of whether this [crash] was related to a Facebook surge, spokesman John Nester said, "Greatly increased traffic that began shortly before 5 pm slowed the public website. We are bringing on additional capacity to handle the load."
Is Facebook better than the SEC at handling users volume spikes? At least, it is fully aware that an outage can harm its business (from the company's S-1 filing):
Our systems may not be adequately designed with the necessary reliability and redundancy to avoid performance delays or outages that could be harmful to our business. If Facebook is unavailable when users attempt to access it, or if it does not load as quickly as they expect, users may not return to our website as often in the future, or at all. As our user base and the amount and types of information shared on Facebook continue to grow, we will need an increasing amount of technical infrastructure, including network capacity, and computing power, to continue to satisfy the needs of our users.
More seriously, FB has been able, since inception, to grow its online business (and cope with increased users volumes) mainly through the use of third parties data centers, and it has only recently moved to a different strategy:
In 2011, we began serving our products from data centers owned by Facebook using servers specifically designed for us. We plan to continue to significantly expand the size of our infrastructure, primarily through data centers that we design and own.
There are several reasons leading Facebook to this decision. First of all, one very good economical approach, as the company explained on its "Building Efficient Data Centers with the Open Compute Project" FB page:
The result is that our Prineville data center uses 38 percent less energy to do the same work as Facebook's existing facilities, while costing 24 percent less.
The Prineville data center started operations in April 2011. Facebook developed specific designs, both in terms of servers (hardware) and software that were optimized for use in the new FB-owned planned facilities. The significant increases in energy efficiency achieved thanks to this different approach will contribute to reducing server operation costs.
Facebook also intends to extend this approach to its leased facilities, as explained in this recent article taken from Data Center Knowledge:
Facebook has been working with landlord DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) to implement its Open Compute designs in a data center in Ashburn, Virginia, according to Frank Frankovsky, Director of Hardware Design and Supply Chain at Facebook. The ability to run Facebook's new hardware in leased facilities could be good news for the data center service providers, providing more flexibility as Facebook's infrastructure makes the gradual transition to company-built facilities.
The company is now planning additional facilities:
We are investing in additional Facebook-owned data centers in the United States and Europe and we aim to deliver Facebook products rapidly and reliably to all users around the world.
Facebook is obviously foreseeing incurring into additional CapEx, in the future, for these expansions:
Construction in progress includes costs primarily related to the construction and network equipment of data centers in Oregon and North Carolina in the United States and in Sweden, and our new corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
However, lease expenses, which include data center facilities, are expected to decrease from $219 million in 2011 to $180 million in 2012, the first decrease in recent years (2010: $ 178 million; 2009: $ 69 million).
While it is not easy to break down Facebook's exact expenses on data center leases, the company is working with all the main US listed colocation wholesalers, as resumed by Data Center Knowledge in this September 2010 article:
Here's what we know about Facebook's spending on its major data center commitments:
• Facebook is paying $18.13 million a year for 135,000 square feet of space in data center space it leases from Digital Realty Trust (DLR) in Silicon Valley and Virginia, according to data from the landlord's June 30 quarterly report to investors.
• The social network is also leasing data center space in Ashburn, Virginia from DuPont Fabros Technology . Although the landlord has not published the details of Facebook's leases, data on the company's largest tenants reveals that Facebook represents about 15 percent of DFT's annualized base rent, which works out to about $21.8 million per year.
• Facebook has reportedly leased 5 megawatts of critical load - about 25,000 square feet of raised-floor space - at a Fortune Data Centers facility in San Jose.
• In March, Facebook agreed to lease an entire 50,000 square foot data center that was recently completed by CoreSite Realty in Santa Clara.
The choice of Sweden as the location for FB first owned European data center seems mainly due to the country's weather:
Temperatures hover at 20 below freezing in Luleå, Sweden at this time of year, but that hasn't stopped construction on Facebook new data centre.
A YouTube video [link] posted last week shows front loader trucks rolling through the snow in front of the skeleton of the data centre, with cranes suspended above.
The frigid weather in the city, dubbed "the Node Pole" since Facebook's arrival, is perfect for keeping servers cool and will save on expensive costs of air conditioning.
It will be Facebook's first data centre outside the U.S. and will manage traffic from European users, Facebook's Tom Furlong said in a news conference in October.
While investors can expect future savings from Facebook's new approach in managing its leased or owned facilities, FB users will also be interested in knowing that the company may have just a few large data centers in mind to become more efficient, but also keeps an eye on remaining very well interconnected to all its users, irrespective of their locations.
A quick look at PeeringDB reveals that the company already has a presence in most key peering points all over the world.
The list includes both the European leading Internet Exchange Point like LINX, DE-CIX and AMS-IX, some key facilities like MEGA iAdvantage and HKIX in Asia, and the most important network-neutral data centers players like TeleCityGroup in Europe, with 3 facilities, and TelX, CoreSite (COR), and Terremark (VZ) in the USA, with a strong presence in most Equinix (EQIX) locations in the USA and Asia. In some of these peering points Facebook also interconnects with its most important partners, like Zynga (ZNGA):
(slide from Equinix's analyst meeting in 2010)
In summary, Facebook seems very well equipped to take advantage of its size and lower its data center costs, in percentage, for the future, improving performance metrics and energy consumption, while still delivering to its customers a great experience thanks to its extensive peering throughout the world.
As data center costs make most of FB revenue expenses, it is already a good sign that, as a percentage, costs of revenues decreased from 29% in 2009 to 25% in 2010, and reached 23% in 2011. The company expects this positive trend to continue, as it forecasts a further decline, in percentage, due to efficiencies and scale.
Disclosure: I am long EQIX. | <urn:uuid:0de875de-ab53-4f1d-b24d-19e42af1e03d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://seekingalpha.com/article/338431-facebook-s-1-filing-sheds-some-light-on-its-data-center-strategy | 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 | 0.955427 | 1,565 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Two Schools to Represent Nigeria at World Robotic Olympiad
Two schools have emerged winners at the national robotic competition held in Lagos. Alofos Foundation, Surulere, Lagos and International School, Bayelsa were announced winners by the panel of judges after a stiff contest among 45 schools that registered for the competition across the country. Subsequently, the duo will represent Nigeria in Malaysia at the World Robotic Olympiad.
Speaking at the event, the Managing Director, Arclight Limited, Mr Tayo Obasanya stated that the aim of the robotic contest is to promote science and technology amongst students from age zero to 19, adding that by engaging our children in such competition will help them to compete favourably among science and technology- driven nations.
He said; “whether you like it or not, in the next few years, the world is going to be different and one of the changing factors will be science and technology. Today, our children are exposed to science and we are hoping that with events like this, we will grab their minds and engage them early.”
Students in action during the national robotic competition, held in Lagos.
On his part, the Commissioner for Science and Technology, Lagos State, Mr. Adebiyi Fatai Mabadeje, while remarking on the programme said; “The competition is about robotics and it cuts across the three arms of school, primary, junior secondary and senior secondary.”
According to him, robotic competition helps to stimulate students’ ideas on how they can put into practice things they were taught theoretically in the classroom, thereby broadening their creative horizon in science and technology.
“The government will always be in support of any course that is geared towards developing the knowledge base of the children. One of our focuses is to strengthen educational sector and this is one way we hope to do that. We partner with private sector to do so because government cannot do it all alone,” he said.
Also speaking, the General Manager, Adebusola Adeniyi, Arclight Limited said the competition held at Oriental Hotel Lagos, is aimed at exposing children in terms of science and technology development because it is going to further bring interaction between the teachers and the students.
“The students should not just cram to pass, they should have hands-on experience. They should be able to build things and solve problems; they should know the solutions to these problems without having to cram. This is what lego education is doing.”
Adeniyi informed that the theme for this year’s conference is connecting people and teams from each school are expected to assemble robots to do colour sorting. As the team that builds their fastest get the robot to perform the task, will be heading to Malaysia.
She called on corporate organisations to help support disadvantaged children to get into the programme adding that with the support of corporate organisations, more children particularly the ones in public schools, will benefit from this exposure to science and technology.
- Interswitch Sponsors Exposure Robotic League for Nigerian Students
- Govt Secondary School Jiwa Win FCT Secondary Schools Debate Competition
- 7000 Pupils Stranded After Boko Haram Burns 14 Schools in Maiduguri
- NGO Condemns Rape Incidents in Schools, Harps on Sex Education
- Jigawa Bans Use of Mobile Phones by Secondary School Students in Schools | <urn:uuid:d405cd80-bad3-4e6e-850d-8a798ace5f44> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://infomister.com/2012/10/two-schools-to-represent-nigeria-at-world-robotic-olympiad/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963444 | 702 | 1.640625 | 2 |
China’s Second-Tier Cities Offer Opportunities for Service Industry Exports
Service exports and trade advocacy in China are highlighted at the America–China Business Women Alliance’s annual conference.
by Andrea DaSilva and Xiaobing Feng
Approximately 400 industry and government leaders from across China and the United States participated in the America–China Business Women Alliance’s annual conference on November 5–7, 2008, in Washington, D.C. This event is the only one of its kind that focuses on women who conduct business in China. Nearly half of the privately held firms (48 percent or 10.6 million) are 50 percent or more owned by women. Those U.S. firms employ 19.1 million people and generate nearly $2.5 trillion in sales. China has roughly 20 million women business owners.
(Story continues below.)
|Jade Zhou, executive director of the America–China Business Women Alliance conference, joins International Trade Administration’s Andrea DaSilva (left) and Xiaobing Feng (right) at the conference on November 5, 2008, in Washington, D.C. (U.S. Department of Commerce photo)
At the conference, specialists from the International Trade Administration (ITA) discussed what services ITA offers for exporters and how a budding middle class in second-tier cities indicates that those cities are the real economic engine in China. In particular, demand is strong in the advertising, health, tourism, and information technology and professional service industries. The China Trade in Services Report 2008, published by China’s Ministry of Commerce, shows significant demand for imports of foreign services, with major increases in imports from 2006 to 2007. Film and audiovisual services were up by 22.4 percent, consulting by 29.4 percent, travel by 22.5 percent, computers by 27.0 percent, advertising by 40.0 percent, and communication services by 41.6 percent. However, exporters of services face challenges in entering the market and maintaining businesses in China, with staffing, logistics, language barriers, and intellectual property rights infractions at the top of the list.
What U.S. Exporters Say about China
U.S. exporters at the event discussed additional challenges they have faced in exporting to China because of differences in business practices. Most speakers recommended that new entrants partner with a local expert for easier transition. Many exporters also confront industrial standards and certification issues, insufficient transparency of government regulations, payment and dispute resolution mechanisms, price controls, and approval processes that may favor local businesses.
The Advocacy Center
In response to those and other export challenges, ITA’s U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service (USFCS) employs 157 officers and trade specialists in China. Through its Advocacy Center, and in collaboration with 18 other U.S. government agencies, USFCS promotes U.S. jobs through exports by coordinating high-level U.S. government advocacy for U.S. firms competing for foreign government tenders. In one success story, the center assisted a mid-sized Ohio airport architecture firm in its bid to redesign the Shanghai airport. The Ohio firm is now establishing itself as a player in the Chinese market. Dozens of new airports, including those in second-tier cities, will be built in the next 10 years. The center encourages U.S. small and medium-sized enterprises to export, makes certain that they are treated fairly, and ensures that their proposals are evaluated on technical and commercial merits.
China’s Second-Tier Cities
Second-tier cities are experiencing the fastest economic growth in China, primarily because of the expanding middle-class purchasing power. Second-tier cities are industrial hubs outside of the main centers of commerce and trade. Many Chinese can now stay and work in their cities rather than migrating to larger economic centers in first-tier cities, such as Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai.
China has more than 150 cities with populations that are greater than 1 million people. Sixteen of those cities have emerged in clusters around the Yangtze River delta, which is considered to be China’s commercial backbone and accounts for 21 percent of China’s gross domestic product (GDP); areas outside of Hong Kong and Guangzhou; around the Bohai River delta; and around areas in central China.
“China’s services market will explode over the next two decades [because of] China’s stringent development agenda to double per capita GDP [by] 2012 from 2000 [levels] and [because of] social trends. [Second-tier cities] show rapid urbanization and the emergence of the middle class,” said S. Tien Wong, chair and chief executive officer of Opus8 Inc., at the conference.
The growth of second-tier cities comes from a growing middle class, greater opportunities because of less competition, and increased policy momentum. For example, in the past five years, the Chinese government has invested $123 billion in China’s national expressway system to improve transportation and the supply chain to second-tier cities.
For more information about exporting services to China or the USFCS Advocacy Center, please contact Andrea DaSilva at [email protected] or Xiaobing Feng at [email protected].
Andrea DaSilva is a senior policy analyst with the International Trade Administration’s Manufacturing and Services unit. Xiaobing Feng is the regional manager for China and Mongolia with the U.S. Foreign and Commercial Service’s Trade Advocacy Center. | <urn:uuid:69edd9b5-d8e5-42ae-affa-4920cf67d358> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://trade.gov/press/publications/newsletters/ita_1208/china_1208.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93547 | 1,162 | 1.523438 | 2 |
If you let your domain name registration lapse and someone else gets your prized URL, don’t expect sympathy from a domain dispute panel.
In another reminder of why it’s so important to stay on top of your domain renewals, a Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) decision went against company Rising Star AG in the dispute to get their domain RisingStar.com back. They purchased the URL in 2006 for $5,000 until they accidentally let it expire in 2010 when it was won in a SnapNames backorder auction by the current registrant.
The comments from the UDRP panelists shed some insight on why they made their decision – namely that the new registrant had a legitimate interest in the URL as an investment:
…the Respondent contends that it bought the disputed domain name at an auction for the price of USD 3,300, from which one can take the undisputed fact that the Respondent bought the disputed domain name at an auction for a price of at least USD 1,000, which is an amount considerably in excess of mere registration costs for a domain and can be considered an investment in a domain name.
Many disputes over domains purchased after expiration have gone in favor of the prior owner, especially in cases of established brands. However, you can’t expect to be rewarded your URL back simply because a domain investor bought it after it expired and is now selling it.
When can a dispute work in your favor? When it meets these three criteria (as quoted from WIPO, who oversees the dispute process):
(i) the domain name registered by the domain name registrant is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant (the person or entity bringing the complaint) has rights; and
(ii) the domain name registrant has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name in question; and
(iii) the domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith
Criteria (i) is the basis of every domain name dispute, but all 3 criteria need to be met for a decision to be made in favor of the dispute filer.
In the case of RisingStar.com, the registrant had legitimate interests in the domain name as an investment. Also, merely listing it for sale is not an indicator that they were specifically trying to profit from the complainant’s trademark, which would be bad faith. So criteria (ii) and (iii) were not met.
How do you avoid this dilemma as a business owner?
1. Renew your domain name far ahead of time.
There’s no good reason not to renew your domain months before it expires as it is the most important piece of your business presence online.
2. If you lose your domain, speak with an attorney to see if there may be grounds for a domain dispute.
Understand that the above 3 criteria must be met or it could be a waste of your time and money.
3. If the new registrant is willing to sell it, you may have to buy it back.
If a domain investor gets your URL after it expires, understand that you are fortunate because you still have the opportunity to get the domain back. If another company using it for their brand registers it instead and builds upon it, it likely won’t be for sale and you will have to look for another URL to use.
Categories: Featured Post | <urn:uuid:48956b9b-3833-4720-abc4-b84737920c98> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://domainate.com/2012/08/recovering-your-domain/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947042 | 709 | 1.5 | 2 |
…It is also important to see how the events of the last decade are being rewritten rather rapidly, most particularly, Iraq is being sent down the memory hole. Even economists who admit that the Federal Reserves very low interest rate policy of the middle part of the decade contributed to the credit bubble, seem to have forgotten why this was done. One part was in response to the dot com crash, but the other part was to accommodate the Iraq War. By running low interest rates, the Federal Reserve enabled an administration that wanted guns, butter, and no new taxes. This is hardly a hands off approach to central banking. Greenspan argued for administration policies, including the ill-considered tax bills of the early 2000′s and the “ownership society” which pushed home ownership.
Thus the most important proximate reason for this crisis is being overlooked entirely. It was not the fraud of banks, nor global imbalances that were the driver, but the fraud of the policy of monetizing homes to borrow money to pay for a war that would not return. If there was a ponzi scheme, the first and foremost runner of it, was Bernanke himself, who architected an economic policy which pushed for monetizing homes now, and profitizing revenue now. It is also impossible to look at the academic record and not see that the past was not one of great moderation, but of a radicalism of the right, which was confident in its ability to deal with problems laid out during the Depression by use of new tools of macro-economics. | <urn:uuid:0af4cb5a-6ac9-48b1-9b07-97c659791317> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://agonist.org/stirling_newberry_depression_by_design_the_riot_of_the_rich/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982815 | 316 | 1.742188 | 2 |
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Getting Even (1971)
by Woody Allen
References to this work on external resources.
Wikipedia in English (3)
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0394726405, Mass Market Paperback)After three decades of prodigious film work (and some unfortunate tabloid adventures as well), it's easy to forget that Woody Allen began his career as one heck of a great comedy writer. Getting Even, a collection of his late '60s magazine pieces, offers a look into Allen's bag of shtick, back when it was new. From the supposed memoirs of Hitler's barber: "Then, in January of 1945, a plot by several generals to shave Hitler's moustache in his sleep failed when von Stauffenberg, in the darkness of Hitler's bedroom, shaved off one of the Führer's eyebrows instead..."
Even though the idea of writing jokes about old Adolf--or addled rabbis, or Maatjes herring--isn't nearly as fresh as it used to be, Getting Even still delivers plenty of laughs. At his best, Woody can achieve a level of transcendent craziness that no other writer can match. If you're looking for a book to dip into at random, or a gift for someone who's seen Sleeper 13 times, Getting Even is a dead lock.
(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:50:04 -0500)
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Become a LibraryThing Author. | <urn:uuid:fe4bc0dc-fc07-43aa-b047-2b20a2267d1a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.librarything.com/work/7157 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94245 | 329 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Commenting on the Petraeus case, Katherine Franke posted here about the status of adultery as a crime in 27 jurisdictions. Today I stumbled across an article by Lance McMillian (Atlanta’s John Marshall), Adultery as Tort, 95 N.C. L. Rev. 1987 (2012). Here is the abstract:
North Carolina is one of the last remaining states to recognize tort claims arising from adultery. Ignoring criticism of this position, the appellate courts of the state have consistently and steadfastly refused to abandon adultery-based actions, despite many high-profile opportunities to do so. Traditional torts such as alienation of affections and criminal conversation thus retain their viability. Not everyone is pleased with North Carolina’s isolation in this regard. Attempts in the North Carolina legislature to repeal these perceived legal relics have increasingly gained traction in recent years. With the future of these torts in North Carolina in doubt, the time is ripe to assess whether any compelling reasons exist to preserve them.
In this vein, this Article offers a countercultural defense of North Carolina’s continuing embrace of adultery as tort. First, as the ongoing debate over gay marriage demonstrates, citizens of all political stripes look to government to validate marriage as an institution. Gay marriage advocates see state licensing as an essential step in elevating the status of same-sex couples. Gay marriage opponents, on the other hand, look to the state as the decisive authority for protecting the traditional view of marriage as being between one man and one woman. But if the state is the proper vehicle for legitimizing the marriage bond, as all sides seem to agree, then it follows that the state should have a prominent role in protecting that bond. Second, the tort system presently offers robust protection to victims injured when their business or contractual relationships suffer sabotage from third-party tortious interference. Marriage, as a relationship of demonstrably greater importance, deserves the same level of legal respect. Third, through loss of consortium claims, the law already offers strong protection of the marital bed against intrusions by third-party tortfeasors. The ubiquity of loss of consortium claims shows both tort law’s desire to protect marriage from the actions of third parties and its willingness to intrude into the most private of personal details to effectuate this desire.
By contrasting adultery as tort with these other areas of legal interest, I hope to demonstrate that adultery-based torts are not as far out of the legal mainstream as is commonly assumed, perhaps paving the way for a wider acceptance of claims such as alienation of affections once again.
The full article is available here. | <urn:uuid:2872e52b-ed3c-4ddb-a2e8-62f14275c64e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.feministlawprofessors.com/2012/11/lance-macmillan-adultery-tort/comment-page-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948891 | 530 | 1.539063 | 2 |
A SOUTH Side schoolboy won a giant-sized prize after showing off his artistic talent.
Iman Adlain, 12, from Holy Cross Primary, in Govanhill, won his school a surprise visit from a nine-foot tall giant called Big Rory.
Children across Scotland were asked to create a picture inspired by the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.
Scottish children's author Theresa Breslin was also a special guest at Iman's school.
The competition was organised to mark the opening of the new £18.5 million Giant's Causeway Visitor Centres in Northern Ireland.
More than 400 children entered the competition, which was organised by Tourism Ireland.
Iman also scooped a family trip to the tourist attraction. | <urn:uuid:289b882d-deb8-4b1d-bdd2-5367873a3df7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/mobile/news/giant-prize-is-cause-for-celebration-for-city-boy.17923776 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981079 | 155 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Workforce Development Now!
On a frigid day in January as the reality of vanishing jobs was setting in, a New York City Council committee convened a hearing on a timely, if urgent, subject: workforce development. First up to testify were four CUNY educators, and no wonder: New Yorkers turn to CUNY's vast network of continuing education programs when they seek new skills, credentials and careers, and demand is on the rise.
The City University of New York registered 270,000 continuing education students last year, and with courses, certificates and degrees offered throughout the University in everything from basic skills prep to asbestos abatement to nursing, teaching, and "green" technologies, the University is poised to play a critical role in re-shaping New York's current and future workforce.
But CUNY strengthens the economy in ways that far exceed even the challenge of helping to educate and train a 21st-century workforce during a recession.
From its historic and continuing role as educator of immigrant and low- and moderate-income New Yorkers, to its resurgence as an institution that attracts renowned researchers and high-achieving students, to its leadership in mobilizing needed support for public higher education, CUNY is critical to New York's economic life.
"CUNY is one of the state's most powerful economic development engines, from the high-quality, affordable college education we provide, to the cutting-edge discoveries unfolding in our labs, to the ongoing economic stimulus provided by CUNY students, faculty, staff and graduates who study, work, live, buy and pay taxes here," said Chancellor Matthew Goldstein.
"New Yorkers know that CUNY represents educational value, and in a challenging economy, there is increased demand for our programs and services," Chancellor added. "We are providing the highly educated and skilled workforce our City, State and nation needs to remain competitive."
CUNY recently responded to the economic downturn with new innovations by reaching out to financially ailing New Yorkers. In December, the University partnered with the city Department of Consumer Affairs and the New York Daily News for a week-long public service call-in, the "Your Money Help Line," staffed by 550 CUNY volunteers manning 48 phone lines from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. In five days, the call-in fielded thousands of questions from New Yorkers struggling with debt, credit and investment woes.
The University has assisted thousands of New Yorkers and their families in navigating economic difficulties through other CUNY-Daily News phone banks staffed by CUNY experts: the popular, annual Citizenship Now! immigration help line and the Your Money Financial Aid Hotline. Such efforts help students overcome financial obstacles to entering CUNY, completing their education, and improving their economic status, fulfilling the University's mission to provide diverse New Yorkers – many with heavy work and family obligations — access to a quality education and the skills for success.
The earning power students gain by attending CUNY has long played a stabilizing role in the city's economy and has been a significant factor in building the city's middle class.
The numbers are telling. Four-fifths of all students attending two-year colleges in New York City, and just less than one half of all baccalaureate students here, attend CUNY schools. From 1999-2008, University-wide enrollment soared by 25 percent.
Individuals who earn college degrees are more likely to be employed and to enjoy higher earnings. With 9,553 Associate degrees conferred in 2006, and each degree adding an estimated $6,804 more in earning power, CUNY added $64.9 million to those graduates' earnings, according to the University's Office of Institutional Research and Assessment.
Baccalaureate degrees add another $15,588 to earnings; therefore, the 15,484 bachelor's degrees awarded in 2006 added $241.4 million to CUNY graduates' earnings. And with more than 650,000 graduates since 1978-79, CUNY contributed nearly $13.6 billion more in annual earnings in 2008 to New York City residents than if they had only graduated from high school.
Figures compiled by CUNY illustrate the virtual step-by-step ladder to the middle class that CUNY continues to offer.
- Fifty-three percent of CUNY's first-time freshmen qualify for federal Pell grants for low-income students, 30 percent of undergraduates live in households with income of less than $15,000, and the majority, 62 percent, are in households earning less than $35,000.
- Approximately 35,000 degrees per year are earned through nearly 1,400 degree programs. More than 1.1 million degrees have been conferred by CUNY since 1966-67.
- CUNY's vast array of non-degree, vocational and skill development programs enrolled 270,000 continuing education students last year. CUNY's College Now enrolls more than 47,000 New York City high school students in college prep classes.
- CUNY plays a critical role in the education of people of color in New York City. Last year, African Americans and Latinos were awarded 50 percent of associate degrees, 46 percent of baccalaureate degrees and 28 percent of master's degrees conferred by CUNY.
"For low- and middle-income New Yorkers, CUNY has been, and will continue to be, the higher education vehicle of choice for reaching and staying in the middle class," Chancellor Goldstein said.
With many New York employers and workers in financial difficulty, CUNY's wide-ranging continuing education programs, serving students with varying educational and socioeconomic backgrounds are in increased demand. Last year, 180,000 of the 270,000 student registrations in these programs were for vocational and basic skills preparation.
CUNY has responded to the nation's acute nursing shortage by nearly doubling the number of graduates of its programs in five years. Last year, the National Licensing Exam pass rate for CUNY nursing graduates was 86.5 percent compared with an NCLEX pass rate of 82.1 percent for graduates of non-CUNY nursing programs in New York. The average annual income of 1997-2007 CUNY graduates working as licensed RNs is $73,747. And more than 90% of those who earned their first nursing degree from CUNY's programs during the last decade, and then became RNs, are currently working in nursing, 80% of them in hospitals.
Educating for tomorrow
The New York City College of Technology has been investing in new, computer-driven manufacturing technology so it can provide viable training for future employees of metropolitan area manufacturing companies — a field considered to have significant growth potential. Queensborough Community College is providing "re-tooling" and career evaluation seminars and counseling for laid-off mid- and senior-level corporate employees trying to re-focus, and develop new careers.
CUNY colleges are partnering with local unions to build and sharpen New Yorkers' skills in areas ranging from GED and ESL to computers. Hostos Community College has been offering members of the 32 BJ Union classes that could make them eligible for wage upgrades, such as plumbing, carpentry and refrigeration. With healthcare Local 1199, Hostos has offered Bridge to Nursing programs, and last summer graduated its first 1199 cohort of LPNs. And New York City College of Technology, LaGuardia Community College and Kingsborough Community College have been partnering with the Union of Carpenters and Joiners to work with young people aged 18 to 24, to train for construction apprenticeships. The participants, largely Latino and African-American, have been placed in union apprenticeships and hired by Con Edison and other companies.
Some 35,000 continuing education students per year receive instruction and training through LaGuardia's Division of Adult and Continuing Education, the largest continuing education program at a public college in New York City. The division is funded by more than 40 public and private grants, contracts with local employers, student tuition and tax levy funds, and targets its services — providing educational, vocational, language and "life" skills — to current workers, new work force entrants, low-income New Yorkers, out-of-school and incarcerated youth, and existing and start-up businesses.
At the City Council Higher Education Committee's hearing in December, LaGuardia's dean for workforce programs, Sandra Watson, illustrated the business development assistance CUNY provides. "Marie L." and "Dominique" had dreamed of opening a day care center, Watson said, but as the financial crisis was rapidly unfolding, getting start-up financing was difficult despite their strong credentials. The LaGuardia Small Business Development program helped them rework their business plan, find a lender and deal with the application process, and they were approved for a $120,000 loan in November. They expect to open Little Children's Garden Inc. in Flushing, this spring.
LaGuardia, working with government, business, community organizations and other groups, "is a major partner in New York City's workforce development system and is poised to have a greater impact on the system in the coming years," Watson told the Council.
Investment in CUNY has been essential to the University's rising reputation for academic excellence and cutting-edge research. The University, by pioneering the CUNY Compact model of financing the system through a partnership based on government support, private giving, student tuition and CUNY institutional efficiencies – has made itself a more powerful economic development engine. And that has attracted critical investment — from National Science Foundation grants to CUNY students to private donations that have supported creation of high-end CUNY institutions and programs.
Such successes are drawing increasing numbers of high-achieving students, as well as cutting-edge researchers, to the University. Chancellor Goldstein's Decade of Science initiative is strengthening the University's science programs, and CUNY has expanded Ph.D.-granting authority in the sciences to two senior colleges, to make the University more competitive in the quest for research funding.
CUNY's national reputation as a research hub is growing. The planned construction of the Advanced Science Research Center on the City College campus, and other science buildings around CUNY, is expected to create thousands of construction jobs. But what goes on inside CUNY's labs — from medical discoveries to energy innovations — also has economic implications.
For every $1 million spent on research in New York State, an estimated 12 new jobs are created, according to the 2007 report of the New York State Higher Education Commission. Then there is the research itself, generating important advances in health and medicine, and energy and sustainability.
At City College, electrical engineering Prof. David Crouse, director of the CUNY Center for Advanced Technology in Photonics Applications (CUNY CAT), is involved in the emerging field of metamaterials, used to develop electrical contacts that will increase the efficiency of silicon solar cells without increasing their manufacturing or operating costs.
Dr. Sanjoy Banerjee, distinguished professor of chemical engineering at CCNY and director of the CUNY Energy Institute (and formerly of The University of California system), is studying ways to efficiently store and transport electricity from renewable sources such as sun and wind, for potential use in largely electric, energy-efficient transportation. In cancer research, award-winning Dr. Jill Bargonetti-Chavarria of Hunter College has focused her investigations on the p53 protein, which assists in the suppression of tumor cell growth.
Queens College biochemistry and chemistry Prof. Robert Engel is developing new, durable, non-toxic, metal-free antimicrobial compositions that guard against bacteria and other threats, and can be embedded in products such as building materials, clothing, paints and packaging.
CUNY and the national economy
Chancellor Goldstein's longtime concern about funding and other challenges faced by CUNY and other public universities — such as competition from well-endowed private institutions for highly qualified faculty and funds — sparked discussions last year with the Carnegie Corp. and the heads of other large U.S. public university systems, leading to a "Summit on Public Higher Education" in New York last October co-hosted by the Chancellor and Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian.
The Carnegie Corporation in December published "The Higher Education Investment Act: An Open Letter to President-elect Obama and His Administration," in The New York Times. Signed by the presidents, chancellors and board presidents of 33 state university systems, it emphasized the essential role of public higher education in tough times, and committed the universities to be part of the solution. The letter asked that stimulus money be allocated to states for shovel-ready, higher-education infrastructure projects, to upgrade campuses to educate Americans for the 21st century, and to create construction and other jobs to shore up the economy.
CUNY's $1 billion in planned construction, slated for much-need science labs, critical maintenance and other building projects — such as the 13-story, 600,000 square-foot building rising at John Jay College of Criminal Justice — could create nearly 14,000 construction and off-site jobs, according to Iris Weinshall, Vice Chancellor for Facilities Planning, Construction, and Management.
With private development waning because of the economic meltdown, public projects "will retain many of the construction jobs we have learned to depend upon during the last 10 years of the building boom," Weinshall said.
The mandate to prepare students for the jobs of the future is at the heart of the Chancellor's proposal for an innovative, new community college in Manhattan, one that would require full-time enrollment, focus on math and literacy, and limit majors to fields that have a future, such as health care and environmental technology. | <urn:uuid:40a4f2ad-8e3f-4a47-ada0-eac6b48d2dd4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cuny.edu/news/publications/cunymatters/spring09/workforce-development-now.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959163 | 2,834 | 1.734375 | 2 |
The goal of the Community Volunteer Program is to improve the quality of life for Glendale residents and volunteers through valuable public service projects.
The Glendale City Council created this fantastic program as a one-year pilot project in 1998. The reason for starting such a program was simple—involving Glendale residents and community groups in volunteer service projects develops a healthier, more livable city!
The program is now an ongoing city service in the Neighborhood Partnership Office, which gives volunteers a sense of pride by contributing to improvements in the community. In the ten years since the program was created, Glendale has benefited greatly from these projects. Since 1998, more than 25,000 volunteers have contributed nearly 95,000 volunteer hours, which are valued at more than $1.7 million.
Community volunteer projects are designed for large groups of volunteers. The average size of a group is about 25. So gather your friends, relatives or co-workers and become involved in the community. Individual volunteers are welcome to contact the office about volunteer opportunities and join a group of volunteers to help out in the community.
We do not assist those who must complete court-ordered community service. Contact the Parks & Recreation department at 623-930-2691 for assistance with court-ordered community service.
To find out more about our Community Volunteer Program, click here for our brochure.
August 13, 2013: Project Connect
On any given day thousands of people experience homelessness in Maricopa County. Many of these individuals and families are experiencing homelessness for the first time and require only temporary assistance to get back on their feet. Project Connect is part of Valley of the Sun United Way’s long-term, multi-faceted strategy to end homelessness in our community. This monthly event offers instant access to resources people in our community need to start the journey back to health, financial stability, and housing. More than 10,000 individuals have been connected to services since Project Connect began in 2008. Volunteers are needed to work one-on-one with guests, escorting them through the array of service providers available on-site. The guest guide role is a supportive position that encourages a connection between individuals. Other roles available to volunteers include registering guests, serving food, distributing clothes, assisting with the guest check-out area and clean-up. Join us and register to volunteer today at www.vsuw.org or for groups of 10 or more, contact Cate Eckenrode at 602.631.4896 or [email protected]
October 26, 2013: Rock & Roll Paint-a-Thon
The Rock & Roll Paint-a-Thon is Rebuilding Together Valley of the Sun’s largest community service program. The City of Glendale Neighborhood Partnership Office partners with Rebuilding Together to identify homes and volunteer teams in Glendale to participate in this annual event. This community effort engages more than 3,000 volunteers valley-wide in hands-on neighborhood revitalization. Through efforts to paint the exterior of more than 100 owner-occupied homes for low-income homeowners, volunteers positively affect a sense of pride in less-affluent neighborhoods. Moreover, volunteers feel a sense of accomplishment after their house assignment is complete. Gather your team of volunteers and register at www.rebuildingtogetherphx.org
November 23, 2013: National Family Volunteer Day
National Family Volunteer Day is designed to show the benefits of families working together, to introduce community service, and to encourage those who have not yet made the commitment to volunteer as a family. National Family Volunteer Day is held the Saturday before Thanksgiving and kicks off National Family Week. This is a great opportunity for families to come together. Volunteering as a family provides quality time, strengthens communication, and provides opportunities for family members to be role models, while making significant contributions to their communities. Even though this day is geared for families, anyone with an interest to volunteer can join in. To volunteer, contact the City of Glendale Community Volunteer Program at [email protected] or call 623-930-2915.
January 2014: MLK Day, A Day On, Not Off
Each year the City of Glendale Neighborhood Partnership Office partners with HandsOn Greater Phoenix to bring together more than 200 volunteers to participate in the MLK Day, A Day On, Not Off project in Glendale. Volunteers pick citrus at Sahuaro Ranch Park that is donated to St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance to help feed the hungry in Arizona and throughout the United States. Last year, volunteers picked close to 30,000 pounds of grapefruit. During his lifetime, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. worked tirelessly toward a dream of equality. He believed in a nation of freedom and justice for all, and encouraged all citizens to live up to the purpose and potential of America by applying the principles of nonviolence to make this country a better place to live, creating the Beloved Community. The King Day of Service is a way to transform Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and teachings into community service that helps solve social problems. To volunteer, contact HandsOn Greater Phoenix at www.handsonphoenix.org
January – March 2014: Fruit Gleaning at Sahuaro Ranch Park
Each year, the City of Glendale Community Volunteer Program coordinates “fruit gleaning” projects at Sahuaro Ranch Park between the months of January – March. Volunteers are needed to help pick grapefruit and oranges at the ranch so they don’t go to waste. All of the citrus is donated to St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance to help feed the hungry in Arizona and throughout the United States. More than 60,000 pounds of fruit are picked each year by hundreds of volunteers. To volunteer, contact the City of Glendale Community Volunteer Program at [email protected] or call 623-930-2915.
February 2014: Annual Serve Day
Serve Day is a faith-based, community-oriented event organized by several local churches including the Community Church of Joy, Vineyard, Faith Bible Church, Breakthrough Life Church, Christ’s Church of the Valley, Peace Lutheran and others that encourage their members and those in other churches to participate. The City of Glendale Neighborhood Partnership Office partners with the churches on this annual event. More than 500 volunteers participated last year. Volunteer projects include neighborhood and park clean ups, painting homes, gardening, delivering food to the needy, and much more. Serve Day is typically held the Saturday after President’s Day. To volunteer, contact the City of Glendale Community Volunteer Program at [email protected] or call 623-930-2915.
March 2014: Cesar Chavez Day
Each year in March, volunteers complete a community service project in Glendale to celebrate the life of Cesar Chavez who dedicated his life to the struggle for equality and justice for all people. Throughout his work he promoted 10 Core Values which included: service to others, community, and respect for life. To volunteer, contact the City of Glendale Community Volunteer Program at [email protected] or call 623-930-2915.
April 2014: Serve-a-Thon
During the month of April, the City of Glendale Neighborhood Partnership Office partners with HandsOn Greater Phoenix for their annual Serve-A-Thon event. This event brings together 2,500 corporate, civic and individual volunteers. Neighborhoods, communities and under-resourced schools benefit from a variety of projects including: painting homes for the elderly, refurbished libraries, landscaped green spaces, restored playgrounds, and much, much more! The event provides 20,000 hours of volunteer service to schools and neighborhoods in need. To volunteer, contact HandsOn Greater Phoenix at www.handsonphoenix.org
April 2014: Earth Day
Each year during the month of April, millions of people around the globe participate in volunteer projects to promote a more sustainable and “green” environment. The City of Glendale Neighborhood Partnership Office coordinates projects that include park clean ups, sprucing up the Xeriscape Garden located at the Main Library, neighborhood clean ups, and much more. To volunteer, contact the City of Glendale Community Volunteer Program at [email protected] or call 623-930-2915.
May 2014: National Join Hands Day
Join Hands Day is a national volunteer day that specifically targets and develops relationships between young people and adults through neighborhood volunteering. Youths and adults work together on an equal basis to plan, organize and implement the day’s activities. Building relationships across generations restores confidence, trust and respect for each other, and creates a sense of community. Each year, the City of Glendale Neighborhood Partnership Office coordinates volunteer projects that involve youth and adults working together to accomplish this goal. To volunteer, contact the City of Glendale Community Volunteer Program at [email protected] or call 623-930-2915.
Note: As the dates and locations for volunteer projects taking place in 2014 are finalized, they will be updated on the website. Most volunteer events take place on Saturdays from approximately 8 a.m. to Noon. | <urn:uuid:a6520051-d61f-4d43-b7bd-e011ad001cdd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.glendaleaz.com/CommunityPartnerships/volunteer.cfm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938607 | 1,900 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Tax return scammers steal IDs and billions
(CBS News) - Tax return fraud is a growing problem, with more than two million bogus returns filed last year with the Internal Revenue Service - returns filed by thieves who had stolen people's identities.
This type of crime is exploding because of two factors: online companies like Turbo Tax make filing taxes fast and easy; and the IRS, in an effort to get refunds out quickly, does not cross-check the returns against employers' payroll records.
To exploit that, scammers buy lists of names and Social Security numbers of living people on the black market, and troll Internet family support sites to steal the identities of the dead.
In just three years, tax refund fraud has increased by 700 percent - with $2 billion in tax dollars paid out to thieves last year alone.Tips from IRS on protecting yourself from identity theft
In December 2008, Terry and Stephanie McClung welcomed their daughter Kaitlyn into the world. But just five months later, they lost her to sudden infant death syndrome.
"She was the most beautiful little girl," Stephanie McClung said. "She was laid back, happy, hardly ever cried."
The McClungs' grief was compounded by shock when they discovered someone had stolen their daughter's identity, and claimed her as a dependent for the $1,500 it would add to a fraudulent tax return.
"It's a slap in the face," Stephanie said. "It was only not even a year after she passed and you know we had to deal with this."
Or take the case of Sgt. Adam Ray - a West Point graduate killed by an IED in Afghanistan. Scammers filed his tax returns and had the refund issued directly to a green dot debit card from a Georgia bank.
(Watch below: Wifredo Ferrer, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, discusses how tax fraud is reaching epidemic proportions.)How much is the IRS paying out to people who are not the taxpayer?
"It's a number that I can't get my head around," said Tom Boyle of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. "We know one company that you can file through. There was over $300 million filed alone." Boyle added, "And there's 20 of those companies."
The IRS told CBS News they caught 87 percent of fraudulent returns filed in 2011, and they've taken major steps to put in place new processes for handling tax returns, along with compliance filters to detect fraud.
In Sept. 2011, 49 people were arrested in Tampa for trying to bilk the government out of $130 million.
In many cases, the fraud is first detected by the mailman. "Postal carriers have been really helpful. They know their route," Boyle said. "They have told us, 'Listen, I'm getting 60 or 100s of tax returns for this one address and this one apartment building.'"
A postal inspector who worked undercover to break up a massive refund fraud in New York City said he was surprised at the amount of money, "and how easy it was for them to get some of these checks. And the amount of money that I was paid. There were times where I was handed thousands of dollars just on the street for my services."
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., has introduced legislation to increase protection for people like the McClung family and increase penalties for scammers.
"We need the hard, strong fist of the law to come down on these criminals, so that they understand they're not going to get away with this," Nelson said.
"I would like them to go to jail," Stephanie McClung said of the people behind the scam. "And I would like them to pay back every single penny they stole."
- John Miller
John Miller is a senior correspondent for CBS News, with extensive experience in intelligence, law enforcement and journalism, including stints in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI.
- Boston bombings suspect left note in boat he hid in
- American engineer's death suicide or cyber-espionage?
- Incurable bacteria destroying Fla. citrus industry
- What's for lunch? In Japanese schools it's always healthy
- Mark Harmon: Humor and characters make "NCIS" a hit
- Watch: Deer crashes through windshield of bus
- THE DISH: Chef Jet Tila's drunken noodles
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- THE Dish: Chef Jet Tila's drunken noodles
- Amy Grant on success and the inspiration for her music
- Second Cup Cafe: Amy Grant
- Emmy-winner Jim Parsons on his "Big Bang" success
- Identity of mystery man in Bill Gates photo revealed
- Tim McGraw on aging, getting in shape and his favorite song
- Russia offers more evidence in alleged CIA spy case
- U.K. casino accuses U.S. poker champ of cheating | <urn:uuid:bd7d23b4-d9b9-4065-87e5-5789a66619f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505268_162-57400602/tax-return-scammers-steal-ids-and-billions/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973647 | 1,008 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Responsible Pet Ownership
The East Aldine District Board of Directors is dedicated to promoting responsible pet ownership in collaboration with our community partners lead by Harris County Public Health and Environmental Services. To learn more about their services or any of our community partners who are helping us promote and encourage responsible pet ownership please visit the websites below and join us in making a difference!
Our leading partner in the effort to stop abuse and neglect of animals and promote responsible pet ownership we work hand and hand with HCPHES on many pet initiatives including the most recent “Tricks for Pits” Program which as a huge success. To learn more about their great work in East Aldine visit http://www.hcphes.org.
City of Houston – BARC
BARC is the City of Houston’s Animal Shelter and Adoption Facility. BARC is the only city shelter in Houston required by law to accept every animal that comes through their doors regardless of breed, temperament, health conditions, and circumstance (from owner surrender, stray pickup, rescued or confiscated animals). They have built a best-in-class team that stewards our mission of professionalism, responsibility, compassion, commitment, integrity, and accountability. To learn more or get involved, http://www.houstontx.gov.
Friends of BARC was founded in 2003 by a group of animal lovers looking to support the humane care and treatment of the animals residing at BARC—the City of Houston Animal Shelter—and to help them find a chance for a better life. While BARC is fully funded with taxpayer funds, Friends of BARC is a non-profit and is funded 100% by donations. All donations made to our group are used to help the animals residing at the shelter. In addition to sponsoring weekly adoption events, we step in and help when the city budget is unable to support the needs of the animals. Their group has grown over the years and many BARC animals have benefited from their help—but we need your help to do more! Visit http://www.friendsofbarc.org/about.htm to learn how you can help!
SNAP’s mission is to prevent suffering and death of dogs and cats due to overpopulation and preventable diseases, especially in low-income areas. Want someone from SNAP to speak to your school or civic group? The SNAP Community Outreach Program is ready! Call 713-862-3863 or visit http://www.snapus.org. | <urn:uuid:786c328e-25b2-49a4-a8e0-1ff50ffe3cd7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://aldinedistrict.org/gallery-page/responsible-pet-ownership/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9522 | 509 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Asus U33Jc: Much Ado About Bambooby Vivek Gowri on July 29, 2010 9:01 AM EST
ASUS U33Jc—A Look at Bamboo
So let’s get into this bamboo stuff. ASUS is pointing to two main benefits with the usage of bamboo: it’s more environmentally friendly than the traditional ABS plastic while maintaining structural rigidity, and it offers a distinctive look and feel. Let’s start with the first claim.
When we start to dig a little bit deeper into the process ASUS uses to make the bamboo notebooks, we run into some sticking points, starting with the fact that there isn’t actually that much wood. The bamboo “panels” themselves are extremely thin, ranging between 0.18 and 0.45 millimeters in thickness. That’s 0.007-0.018 inches, which is closer to a wood veneer than any kind of wood panel. Veneers tend to be less than 3mm or 1/8”, so the bamboo used on the U-series Bamboo Collection notebooks is definitely in that category. Behind the wood is a geotextile backing, with an adhesive in between to bond the two. The backing is mounted in an injection-molded ABS frame.
ASUS claims that the bamboo process can reduce plastic usage by 20%, and on the U33 chassis, 15% of plastic content is saved. This is all fine and well, but with all the chemicals involved in the protective polyurethane overcoat along with the treating and staining of the wood trim, I can’t vouch for the overall environmental friendliness of the process. With that said, the 15% reduction in plastic content is pretty impressive given how little wood there actually is.
Another interesting claim by ASUS is that the bamboo used has similar tensile strength properties to steel. Assuming that they’re talking about elastic deformation, this makes sense, but it completely ignores two things. One is that as a wood, bamboo doesn’t have much in the way of plastic deformation—wood is a brittle material, so once you hit the point of ultimate tensile strength, it just breaks. The other is that, at less than 20 thousandths of an inch, you could use a material with the tensile properties of water and still not have any kind of effect on the structural qualities of the notebook. Seriously, it doesn’t matter that bamboo is as strong as steel if you’re using panels as thick as three sheets of paper.
Chalk that one up to the marketing team, but at least there’s a nice reduction in the use of plastic. But other than that, this is basically just a regular notebook with a wooden veneer to make it look and feel nice.
That’s where the bamboo really makes its presence felt, quite literally. The wood is just so organic and natural feeling compared to the cold solidity of an aluminum chassis or the generic feel of a plastic chassis. It’s like getting into a Lexus—everything is so warm and soft and inviting, and very high quality. Compared to a regular laptop, that’s the difference; it just exudes a more luxurious vibe. This is a stark contrast to the Adamo, which was all about the style and industrial design. Every surface was metal or glass; there wasn’t a line out of place anywhere on the notebook. The U33Jc isn’t so much about cutting edge ID so much as it is about giving the user a more personal and textured experience. For example, no two U33’s will be alike due to the fact that different pieces of bamboo will have different textures and will mature as the laptop ages. Nuances like that make the U33Jc feel like a special type of mobile computer. | <urn:uuid:a7ace7bd-01c9-4a32-b5bf-83d3ce82ff37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/3832?cPage=4&all=False&sort=0&page=2&slug=asus-u33jc-bamboo-for-the-masses | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949115 | 807 | 1.75 | 2 |
Watched the PBS American Masters bio of Johnny Carson last night. Great bit where he says to Muhammed Ali that he had boxed about eight fights himself in the Navy and Ali said to him that he must have been pretty good because he had no marks on him. Carson told Ali that he didn’t have any marks on him either. Ali says, well, I’m pretty good. This was the later, quieter Ali, not the coarse loudmouthed early Ali. And right there those two might have been the two most famous people in the world at the time.
Something I never noticed before, and this might have been part of what limited mystique George W. Bush had, is the resemblance between W. and Carson. It’s not pronounced, but it’s definitely there. Both apparently got the same results out of drinking as well.
One thing I did not know about Carson was that he was a philanderer. At least he had the decency not to flaunt it.
His schtick, the head whipping from side to side, the darting eyes, all the rapid moves were born in his youthful obsession with magic tricks, his early self-training at being an entertainer. He was trying to hold his mother’s attention, at first, and maybe for a lot of his life. She was apparently indifferent. But it worked on almost everyone else.
Most impressive was the part about how when the television writers went out on strike for several weeks, Carson wrote the entire show himself. He was also a generous man, who helped people in dire straits all the time and never took any credit for it. Was also a voracious reader and a loner, who could spend his time with everyone in the world or just himself. In the end, everyone knew Johnny Carson and no one knew him. | <urn:uuid:f4c3ec76-6360-4385-a7d9-47dcb944cc22> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newpaltzjournal.com/?p=2615 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.992953 | 382 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Teenage girls driven to violence by feuds, drink and jealousy
Two court cases last week sparked debate about
the growth of violence among young women. Here,
teenagers talk about the aggression and bullying
that is part of their lives
Sitting on a cold concrete step by a north London canal, dressed
in pink and black with swinging plastic earrings, thick eyeliner and
hair intensively straightened, the girls look like any other
teenagers on any other British street.
In a week where two court cases involving vicious assaults by teenage girls ignited fears over a growing trend towards violence among young women, these two 17-year-olds are adamant that there is no such phenomenon as "girl gangs", just groups of mates who look out for each other. "If someone's been talking about you behind your back and saying things that aren't true, or if she's being making threats, then you can front her up, and if it gets mean, then you might end up giving her a slap. You can't just go around being bullied," explains Tish. "But that's not violence, that's self-defence. [If] you are a bully, then you deserve whatever you get. Violence is stabbing and a proper beating. I don't hang out with girls that carry knives."
Jozee raises her eyebrows and starts laughing. In March, egged on by her friends, who claimed her stepbrother had been spreading malicious rumours about her, Tish attacked him with a hunting knife. The bottle of vodka she had drunk beforehand made sure she didn't inflict any serious damage, unlike an incident when she was 15 and broke another girl's nose. "I didn't start that fight, she was bullying me and thought she could turn all my mates against me. She deserved that."
Bullying, both say, is about jealousy. Their stories of teenage feuds and disputes get increasingly complex until Tish is in angry tears talking about the unhappiness of her childhood, a drug-addled mum and her succession of violent boyfriends. Neither will admit to ever carrying knives, as police sirens swing past over the canal bridge – Jozee says it is too risky because police now target young women. "They didn't used to stop girls, but it's different now. Now everyone thinks you're in a girl gang when you're just out, even when you're not fighting or doing anything. I don't even like fights, but you can't walk away if a mate needs you."
The girls' attitude to violence is not unusual, according to the women's rights group Engender. A UK-wide survey by the group of 14- to 21-year-olds found that one in three girls and one in two boys thought there were circumstances in which it could be acceptable to hit a woman or force her to have sex.
While young women aged 16 to 24 still have the highest risk of becoming victims of aggressive crime in this country, recent statistics show that there has been a significant rise in the numbers turning to violence themselves. Youth Justice Board figures for last year show that, while overall crime rates are falling, there is a 50% rise in violent crime committed by young women.
From 2004-5 to 2007-8, there was a 71% rise in the numbers of young women being electronically tagged and a 25% rise in offences committed by girls aged 10 to 17. It means girls are now responsible for around 21% of offences that reach the courts. At the Old Bailey on Wednesday Hatice Can, a 15-year-old runaway from Belvedere, Kent, and Kemi Ajose, 17, from London, were found guilty of causing the death of Rosimeiri Boxall, a 19-year-old whom they tormented and bullied before encouraging her to leap to her death from a third-floor window in May last year.
After delivering the verdict many of the jury were visibly distressed as Can, only 13 at the time of the killing, broke down in tears and hugged her mother.
Last week it was revealed that a hairdresser, Ashleigh Holliman, had rammed a pint glass into another young woman's face in an unprovoked pub attack. Holliman, from Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, admitted causing actual bodily harm to Jennifer Wilson, 20, who helped track her down via Facebook, one of the social networking sites blamed for facilitating a rise in cyberbullying by girls.
As part of last week's Anti-Bullying Week, the website Bebo, which is used mostly by teenagers and pre-teens, added a new button to all its profiles, allowing users to click and report if they suspect anyone of bullying. The "CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) report button" gives access to advice and provides details of local police, as well as giving the user the option of contacting specially trained CEOP officers via an online reporting mechanism. Jim Gamble, chief executive of the CEOP, said it was a "one-click" access to safety advice and directions to local police phone numbers.
But Paul McKeever, chairman of the Police Federation in England and Wales, believes the police have lost so much discretion in how they deal with girls offending that more and more young women are now ending up going through the criminal justice system. He said it was "very sad indeed" that teachers and parents no longer felt able to deal with discipline and bullying, and that the police were becoming more involved in disputes between young people in a way that would have been previously unthinkable.
"We are a much more aggressive society now, and combined with the access young girls have to alcohol, plus police having to behave in a more automated manner, we are seeing far more young women exhibiting obnoxious drunk behaviour which feeds low-level violence." His own daughter was mugged by a girl gang, he said. "Violent young women are not a figment of the police imagination," he added. "The vast majority of violent crime is still committed by young men, but there is undoubtedly a rising phenomenon here.
"But let's also keep things in perspective," said McKeever. "Violent crime is committed by a tiny minority of youngsters and most children are great. Let's not demonise young people. We don't need to be afraid of them."
The trend towards violence by girls is not just happening in Britain. Other western European nations report upward trends in female crime, while research findings reveal that over the past 10 years the rate for violent offences involving adolescent girls in Canada has increased at twice the rate for boys.
In America violence by young women has been rising steeply for 15 years. Among the first to look at the trend, US psychologist Richard Felson said it challenges the deeply held assumption that violence against women is different from violence against men because it is promoted by sexism or hatred of women. He says the motives for violence are the same for all genders – to gain control or retribution and to promote or defend self-image. But women are still far more likely to be victims of gun crime than perpetrators in the US, although in the UK, by August this year, more girls had been caught carrying guns than in the whole of last year.
In Scotland, where the lord advocate Elish Angiolini last year told the Scottish parliament of an increase in "appalling acts of murderous torture" by women against women and in the number of young girls using knives, officials are linking the rise to binge-drinking and an increase in "ladette" behaviour.
"This can be gang-related or it can just be that there is someone in a group who is quite persecuted by the gang leader or their cohorts," said Angiolini. "That is the kind of machismo behaviour that hitherto we would only see from a male offender." She put the blame firmly on "the rise in consumption of alcohol".
But researchers and psychologists point out that the picture is, they believe, more complicated than that.
Dr Susan Batchelor of Glasgow University has written several academic papers on the subject and she points out that, while the figures for serious assault by girls rose by 138% in Scotland in the 10 years from 1997, violence was involved in just 2% of all the offences committed by young women.
In her latest, soon to be published report, Batchelor questions whether more girls getting arrested or charged over violence was really "the dark side to girl power" or whether in fact it was just an "invisible minority" being held up to be used as a scary example of social change for the worse.
Dr Val Besag, an international educational psychologist who works with the anti-bullying charity Kidscape, said both alcohol and shifting aspirations were key to the rise in female violence.
"Girls traditionally were heavily socialised to be nice to each other and to be ladylike," said Besag. "We would say to girls who fall out 'go away and be friends'. You say to a boy 'fight back' or 'keep away from them'. We socialised girls to stay in horrendous marriages, to work harder.
"But actually, despite all that cultural and emotional pressure, evolutionary science tells us girls are just as violent as men but they are much, much slower, it takes much more, for much longer, for us to get aroused to anger – we procrastinate. But if you throw in drink and drugs, then you shortcut that. And you can't expect to say to young women: "Here, we've lifted the glass ceiling. Go out to work but just have a small sherry while your male colleagues are knocking themselves senseless with drugs and drink. But, of course, women's bodies can't process alcohol terribly well.
"All these horrendous cases we are seeing of girls killing or bullying other girls will have drink or drugs involved. You only have to come across a crowd of drunken girls on a dark night in Newcastle to see the potential for violence."
In London on Friday night, Jozee is helping Tish, who is still upset, to get up. They are going off to go drinking at a friend's house.
"I blame my mum sometimes, because I think I've got no chances because of her, but it's not really her fault," says Tish, "I've just got a temper on me." | <urn:uuid:bf13ffc1-b2b1-48eb-8aee-8111d83e79f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://antimisandry.com/abuse-dv/teenage-girls-driven-violence-feuds-drink-jealousy-25226.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976382 | 2,124 | 1.742188 | 2 |
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Maine fire department looking for ways not to cut 4-person shifts
By Jen Lynds
The Bangor Daily News
PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Despite protest from a significant number of residents, the City Council last December passed a resolve to reduce the full-time staff at the Presque Isle Fire Department from four to three people per shift effective in January 2013.
In the past few months, however, the city has begun to examine that decision more closely. At the same time, the PIFD is hoping to receive a grant that would postpone the cuts for at least the next two years.
The changes to the fire department were made as part of the council passing the city budget for 2012. The council proposed supplementing the three man crews with on-call firefighters.
Under current four-man shifts, individual firefighters are trained to operate specific vehicles and equipment. With three-man shifts, however, on-call firefighters would have to be trained to operate all trucks and equipment. Firefighters would also be discouraged from having second jobs so they can be available to respond to fires.
During a council meeting in July, the council was presented with a fire mitigation report drafted to offer suggestions on how to lessen challenges at the department if staffing levels drop from four per shift to three.
Deputy City Manager Martin Puckett appeared before the council to describe several options listed in the report.
From that discussion, councilors said that they were interested in exploring some of the recommendations, including pursuing a live-in student program targeting college students studying fire science or a similar program. The cost to implement it would be $15,000-$30,000 and it would take one to two months. They also will consider offering longevity rewards such as bonuses or increases in pay to attract more volunteers and possibly retain current ones. The cost to implement that would be $10,000-$15,000 and would take one to two months. In concert with that, they are interested in hiring summer help and paying per diems to fill sick and vacation times. The cost to implement that would be $35,000-$40,000 and would take one to three months.
According to Fire Chief Darrell White, his department has 21 volunteers, with 12 of those having basic fire school training. Firefighters currently follow a "2 in, 2 out" rule, which mandates that firefighters never go into a dangerous situation in a fire or rescue incident alone. Two enter the burning structure while two remain outside ready to help in case of an emergency. White said that in order to comply with the rule, all four people must be certified to use a self-contained breathing apparatus. The chief said that it takes a minimum of one and a half years to achieve the certification, adding that because the volunteer has to give up a lot of time to attend classes, a number of them are unable to attain the certification.
Councilors have been criticized for their decision by a number of residents fearful of the impact of cutting back on the number of firefighters.
During the July meeting, city resident Brent Andersen, said that he was concerned about reducing the staffing level at the department because Presque Isle has numerous "old houses with balloon framing that is filled with new furniture."
He said that in his opinion, relying on volunteer firefighters that have full-time jobs to consistently respond to a fire is a big gamble. He also noted that the city has a new fireworks store, and feared that inexperienced or heedless users could potentially increase fire hazards.
After receiving feedback from the community and in light of the report, councilors agreed to postpone further decisions about the fire department until next month, when they start looking at next year's budget.
At the same time, White told councilors late last month that the department has applied for a 2012 Safer Grant. If the department receives the grant, it would help cover its expenses for two years. It would fund four positions for two years, including benefits. The city would not have to match the grant.
White said that the department also could hire another full-time officer, which White said would help decrease overtime, for the duration of the grant.
The council authorized city officials to send a letter of support for the grant.
Copyright 2012 Bangor Daily News
Copyright © 2013 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:c3260090-6264-442a-bbff-57c5789063ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.emsgrantshelp.com/news/1337440-Maine-fire-department-looking-for-ways-not-to-cut-4-person-shifts/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961074 | 1,106 | 1.6875 | 2 |
While victims tried to quietly hide from a gunman during last Friday’s massacre in Norway, their cellphones started going off. Reporters were looking for a quote.
Tore Christensen, 25, told Nettavisen.no he could hear the gunman shoot someone only 2-4 yards away from his hiding-place inside a café building. Shortly thereafter, a news reporter called his cellphone.
Luckily, the phone was set to be silent.
“I can understand that family members who may not think clearly tried to call, but I had higher hopes for the professional responsibility of the press,” he told Nettavisen.
A 32-year-old man is charged with killing at least 73 people at a youth camp on the Utøya island in Norway.
“Quite a few people I talked to afterwards had received a call from one or other form of media… I really hope none were revealed while being called by the press,” Christensen told Nettavisen.
I became totally speechless when I read this story today. Is this normal? Do editors tell their staff to call hostages who are being held captive, to ask for an interview? | <urn:uuid:e5bfc7d8-33e2-4d12-9ce4-17356402f0cd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mediahacker.danieldrake.net/post/7991292734/reporters-called-victims-cellphones-while-they-hid | 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 | 0.991011 | 243 | 1.546875 | 2 |
From June through to October, Humpack whales migrate North from their summer Antarctic grounds to winter in the South Pacific.
Many Humpacks head for the waters around Tonga though a distinct population heads for Fiji to breed and calf.
These humpback whales are frequently seen in the waters around Kadavu island.Later in the season we often get a mother and calf enter the island’s lagoons and it is possible to whale-watch and sometimes snorkel with these magnificent giants of the Pacific Ocean.
On most days, our guest transfer boat runs between the resort and Kadavu airport and usually sights any whales resting or playing inside the Great Astrolabe barrier reef .
To sit quietly alongside these awesome huge creatures is an incredible experience, particularly when they are in a playful mood.
When we have a humpback nearby, we run a snorkel boat out and encourage all our guests go along and see the whales for themselves. Its an unforgettable experience.
Large pods of up to 50 pilot whales are common in Fiji waters and are often sighted from the resort’s gamefishing vessel ‘Bite Me ‘.
Usually seen cruising along the outer barrier reef slopes, they sometimes spend time on the sheltered lee side of the reef to rest and feed where it is then possible to snorkel with them.
Frequently see from all the resort’s boats are pods of spinner dolphin. These guys just love to ride the boat’s bow wave and always come charging over whenever you pass them by.
It is easy to sit just inches away from them as they effortlessly porpoise in front of the boat but stick a mask on and jump in and they vanish into thin air (or water I should say). One of their favourite games it to surf in the barrier reef passageway surf breaks.
Called spinner dolphin for their frequent playful spinning jumps, their underwater whistling and clicking are often heard by our divers but they are a rare sight on SCUBA.
Our big gamefishing vessel ‘Bite Me‘ is available for whale watching charters should guests wish to range further afield in comfort, searching for and following whales and dolphins. | <urn:uuid:afc72b0e-ea98-4c29-a4de-bfb0620a6147> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://matava.com/nature/whales-and-dolphins/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95051 | 458 | 1.507813 | 2 |
While the Bakers' union voted against the concessions and went on strike, the 6,700 members of the Teamsters union narrowly ratified their own concession deal in order to try to keep the company in business. Many of the drivers, who also served as Hostess' primary sales force, were earning more money than the bakers, getting commissions for the products they sold to grocery stores on their routes.
Tracy Fea, the wife of a Teamster working at Hostess, said she's particularly mad at the Bakers' union for the strike.
"While they [Teamsters at Hostess] were not at all happy about the additional concessions, they did not want to lose their jobs," she said. "My husband and I feel that if these employees [Bakers] were so unhappy with their jobs and with Hostess, then they should have quit so the company could continue on and the remaining employees that want to work could."
But Joe Lannan, a Teamster based in Kentucky, said he understands the bakers who walked out. He said he voted against the contract and would have struck if the vote had gone that way.
He said the split among Teamsters was between more senior workers and the newer drivers, such as himself. He's been at Hostess about a year.
"There were a lot of nervous guys, mostly with more senior drivers. I've seen a lot of teary eyes," he said.
But he's hopeful that a lot of the drivers will be able to find jobs due to the demand for truck drivers overall.
"The company has been in decline for years. There was no way it was going to get fixed," he said. "Everybody I worked with was looking for other jobs anyway."
Because of his commercial driver's license, Lannan was lucky enough to quickly find a new job, getting a call with a job offer as a fuel truck driver Friday afternoon. | <urn:uuid:44f86c9a-58b8-4d1d-986a-437daa23cc84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ketv.com/news/money/Hostess-workers-blame-management/-/9674314/17448252/-/item/1/-/o9b87fz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.994325 | 394 | 1.539063 | 2 |
1. The community has a sexual assault response team
The Story County Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) provides victims' access to specially trained professionals who can enact a community coordinated response to sexual assaults. In individual cases, a three-person team consisting of a police officer, sexual assault nurse examiner, and advocate respond to sexual assault reports, offering their services but leaving all decisions to the victim/survivor. The SART process can be enacted 24 hours a day, seven days a week by calling 515-292-5378.
2. Off-campus assaults are covered by ISU policy
According to the university Student Disciplinary Regulations, sections 4.1.2 and 4.1.3, this policy shall cover both on-campus and off-campus conduct, as those terms are described below.
On-Campus Violations: The campus includes the geographic confines of the university, including its land, institutional roads and buildings, its leased premises, common areas at leased premises, the property, facilities and leased premises of organizations affiliated with the university, such as the Memorial Union, university housing, and university-recognized housing. University housing includes all types of university residence housing such as halls and apartments. University-recognized housing includes fraternity and sorority chapter dwellings.
Off-Campus Violations: Students should be aware that off campus violations that affect a clear and distinct interest of the university are subject to disciplinary sanctions. As examples, sexual misconduct and harassment are within the university's interests when the behavior:
Involves conduct directed at or by a university student or other member of the university community (e.g., private house party, outside employment);
Occurs during university-sponsored events (e.g., field trips, social or educational functions, university-related travel, student recruitment activities, internships and service learning experiences);
Occurs during the events of organizations affiliated with the university, including the events of student organizations;
Occurs during a Study Abroad Program or other international travel; or
Poses a disruption or threat to the university community.
3. Some resources are confidential
CONFIDENTIAL: Under Iowa law, communications with some individuals are confidential. This means that any information shared by the victim/survivor with a specific individual will not be used against him or her in court or shared with others. This individual cannot be subpoenaed to testify against the victim/survivor in a court of law.
Students should always confirm whether confidentiality applies to the communication. Generally, confidentiality applies when a student seeks services from the following persons:
Psychological counselor (including counselors at ISU Student Counseling Services)
Health care provider (including medical professionals at ISU Thielen Student Health Center)
PRIVATE: Iowa State University is committed to creating an environment that encourages students to come forward if they have experienced any form of sexual misconduct. The university will safeguard the identities of the students who seek help or who report sexual misconduct. That is, university employees will seek to keep the information private (other than a counselor or medical provider).
A university employee cannot guarantee complete confidentiality, but the individual can guarantee privacy. Information is disclosed only to select officials who have an essential need to know in order to carry out their university responsibilities. As is the case with any educational institution, the university must balance the needs of the individual student with its obligation to protect the safety and well being of the community at large. Therefore, depending on the seriousness of the alleged incident, further action may be necessary, including a campus security alert. The alert, however, would never contain any information identifying the student who brought the complaint.
4. ISU can help with housing changes or class conflicts after an assault
The Dean of Students office staff can assist a student in filing formal complaints or, if the student is not ready to file a formal complaint, the staff can work with him or her to address concerns over housing, class assignments or schedules, leaves of absence, withdrawal or other academic concerns. The office staff can also assist the student in notifying ISU Police or local law enforcement, if the student so requests.
1010 Student Services Building
5. Victims or witnesses who used alcohol/drugs should not be afraid to report the assault.
Students are strongly encouraged to report incidents of, or share information about, sexual misconduct as soon as possible. This is true even if the student with a complaint or a witness may have concern that his or her own alcohol or drug use, or other prohibited activity were involved. The Office of Judicial Affairs will not pursue disciplinary violations against a student with a complaint or a witness for his or her improper use of alcohol or drugs if the student is making a good faith report of sexual misconduct. | <urn:uuid:c30ac9c3-cd6d-4126-aaff-bad9f3b928b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://new.dso.iastate.edu/sexualmisconduct/didyouknow.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948166 | 967 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Grenson was born in 1866 as William Green & Son and soon became known for consistency of craftsmanship and materials. The ‘Grenson’ identity was formed in the 1930s and was one of the first brand names to be registered in the UK. With Goodyear welted production at the heart of the Grenson business, the company also introduced the Grens-In Sole to provide soft underfoot flexibility. Innovation in construction, design and materials has kept Grenson modern while retaining the heritage and craftsmanship that confirms Grenson as one of England’s master shoemakers since 1866.
A Quick Note on Sizing
We recommend that you order a FULL size down from your normal shoe size as Grenson's sizing tends to run large.
Ellery Double Monk Brogue
One of Britain's most celebrated shoemakers, Grenson have been in the business of producing the finest quality men's footwear since the 19th century. The Ellery is a classically styled 'monk' strap shoe with a brogued toe cap, expertly Goodyear Welted to a smooth leather sole. Small Brogue Detail at Heel; metal strap buckles. | <urn:uuid:5a4d5256-063f-424e-b03f-e85744001ec3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bonobos.com/grenson-ellery-double-monk-brogue-black | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963978 | 243 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Learning Through Social Media and Games
Louis Loeffler is an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of Instructional Technology at Cardinal Stritch University for Instructional Technology. He works with students who wish to learn how to integrate technology into their teaching and learning. He consults with schools and businesses on the integration of technology into their training.
Field Mapping in the Island Environment: Norumbega and Shetland
Dr. Matthew Bampton is Professor of Geography at the University of Southern Maine. Matthew's research centers on GIS education for undergraduates. | <urn:uuid:2893e31c-fbcc-436d-8b15-4541c56d28b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.umfk.edu/academics/symposium/speakers/default.cfm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951647 | 116 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Adopting a name to memorialize the World War II Estrella Army Air Force Base, that which is now Paso Robles Municipal Airport, the Museum was chartered as a not-for-profit California corporation in 1992, and 501(c)3 accreditation soon followed to establish us with the US Departments of Navy and Air Force, as well as the state of California, as an organization approved to receive surplus aircraft and other government properties.
We are dedicated to the restoration and preservation of military aircraft military vehicles and memorabilia to those who flew and worked on military aircraft. Our approach, however, is not to glorify conflict but rather to make a future generation aware of the fact our way of life does not come without sacrifice.
From jeeps, side arms, early year aircraft, fighter jets recently retired from active duty, to antique ambulances, bombardier sites to modern missiles, from one of the earliest pilot's licenses issued by the FAA to unique personal items carried into combat during the previous century, from artifacts of airplanes which made aviation history, to piles of parts destined to end up as pieces of a fully restored vintage aircraft, you will find a unique collection of aircraft and artifacts. Preserving the equipment and the memories of those who came before us while preserving a bit of history, we have dedicated the museum to the men and women who are serving, whom have served, and, or sacrificed their life while in the military.
On July 19th, 2009,
The Estrella WarBirds Museum added a new facility, The Woodland Automobile Display Building, which preserves yet another chapter of history, automobile racing.
Those involved with the Estrella WarBirds Museum have banded together with a common goal of honoring the past, while inspiring the current and future generations. We do not, in any way, want to stray from our previously stated primary mission dedicated to the restoration and preservation of military aircraft, vehicles and memorabilia of those who flew or worked on them. This work will continue, full steam ahead as we add additional aircraft and related memorabilia.
When our men and women come home from military service, most no longer have access to those wonderfully fast screaming, flying machines. Many found those interests fulfilled through the building, modifying or racing of automobiles.
Now, we can add another chapter of preserved history by complimenting those interests (and opening the doors to a younger generation). This is our gift to Paso Robles and the outlying communities. The Woodland Auto Display is filled with classic automobiles, historical racing cars, and unique artifacts from the world of automobile history and racing.
Come on down and check out our growing facility! | <urn:uuid:c37ce289-2f13-4cc3-80ee-36b511593e38> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ewarbirds.org/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952303 | 541 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Subsets and Splits