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Fr. Roger J. Landry
Pontifical North American College
Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent
April 3, 2000
Is 65:17-21; Jn 4:43-54
As we begin week four of our six week pilgrimage toward Calvary, the Church gives us a Gospel that not only reminds us that God can indeed work miracles this Lent, even in us, but also helps us to focus on the significance of the encounter with Jesus we’re making, or should be making, during this season. There are three stages in the encounter between Jesus and the royal official, stages which we see repeated time and again in the lives of our contemporaries whom we’re called to serve, and stages which can provide a healthy index for us to see where we are in our encounter with Jesus this Lent.
The first stage of encounter with Jesus we witness is Jesus as the superdoctor, miracle-worker, or means of last resort. The royal official, very likely a Jew from the court of King Herod Antipas, came to Jesus to beg for a miracle for his dying son. He didn’t really believe in Jesus, as Jesus himself says, but he was desperate. “Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus states to him directly, “you do not believe.” Like his boss, Herod — who was fascinated by John the Baptist but eventually had him decapitated to fulfill a lustful promise, and who desired to meet Jesus to have him perform a sign, only then with his soldiers to treat him with contempt, mock him, cover him with a purple robe and send him to Pilate to get crucified — this royal official was not really interested in a life-changing relationship with Jesus, but only wanted something from him, to impose on him to see him perform a miracle for the sake of his son. He didn’t even have the faith of pagan Roman centurion who, when asking Jesus for a miracle, believed that Jesus could heal his servant by his word alone and considered himself unworthy to have Jesus enter into his house; the royal official, rather, came with no faith, just a hope in Jesus’ miraculous power, and insisted that Jesus make the journey with him to his home in Capernaum. I suspect we’ve had many occasions to meet people who continue to treat Jesus in this way, who come to him only when desperate, who plaintively make demands for their prayers to be heard immediately and who almost seem to treat the Lord as a magical employee-for-hire whose Job description is to solve problems, receive no payment in return and then politely get out of our lives until needed again. Sometimes, regrettably and frankly, it seems that even priests and seminarians can regress to this type of very distant relationship with Jesus when they fail to maintain a regular prayer life. But there is a grace in any encounter with Jesus, even if people originally come to him out of utilitarian or imperfect reasons, and Jesus can use it to draw people to the next studium of relationship with him, which is a trust in God’s word.
We see the royal official ascend to this stage in today’s Gospel. Jesus tells him, “Return home. Your son will live,” and St. John informs us that the man put his trust in the word Jesus spoke to him and started for home. The trust was obviously incomplete, since when he was later informed on the road that his Son was healed, he still needed to verify through his questions that it was on account of Jesus’ word. But he trusted enough to depart, hopeful in God’s word, without having to see the miracle with his own eyes. This is the beginning of faith, for a believer walks by faith and not by sight, as St. Paul writes to the Church of Corinth. He trusted in God’s word enough to act on it, to walk by this incipient faith back toward Capernaum. Countless good Christians today are at the stage of Christian life. They hear the word of God, trust it, and try to put it into practice. They do their best to keep the commandments. They believe Jesus when he talks about the Eucharist, about heaven and hell and salvation. They put their trust in the Church and try to do good to their neighbor. Many even are set on fire for the word of God and try to spread it. But often they stop here. Often the word, the linguistic communication of God, becomes an end for them, rather than a means to bring them into deeply personal contact with God. They stop at the law rather than go to the Legislator. They halt at the words of God rather than, through those words, come to the God who said them. The words themselves can almost become an idol and a roadblock to a deeper growth in faith. This can happen even occasionally to good seminarians and priests, when they begin to treat every word as equally important and fail to see the purpose behind them, when they neurotically attach themselves to the letter of laws without even trying to perceive their purpose or spirit, when they seem to pay more attention to taking their handkerchiefs out if a Mass celebrant doesn’t adhere to every red letter in the sacramentary rather than to entering more deeply into the prayer of Christ in the Mass. Listening to the Word of God and trying to put it into effect is obviously a good thing, and another grace-filled occasion, but it remains, in the final analysis, still just a means to lead us to the third stage of encounter, the PERSONAL adherence to Jesus as the Word Incarnate.
We read in the Gospel that upon the recognition that his son was healed at the very moment that Jesus said he would live, the royal official and his whole household “thereupon became believers.” Every miracle God works, every word He utters through the pages of Scripture, is meant to bring us to faith, not just in God’s power to work miracles, not just in the prophetic, sagacious and inspired words found in the pages of Scripture, but in God himself. And this faith in a person, if true, denotes a relationship that is meant to change everything in our lives. We no longer are independent agents, lone rangers, acting more or less on our own in a sort of loose, respectful trusting alliance with Jesus, but all our words, all our actions, and meant to be done through, with and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, to the glory of God the Father. Such a relationship is meant to help us to die to ourselves so that we might be able to say in truth, like St. Paul, that it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. This is the totality of the personal relationship to which we’re called in Christ, so that others, in seeing us, particularly as priests, may say that we are truly other Christs, worthy to bear the name Christian. This personal encounter with Jesus is the goal of Lent. This is the goal of life. This is the goal of every Eucharist, when we literally become one flesh with the Lord so that he might live in us and together we might bear fruit that will last. | <urn:uuid:17c4c42f-4174-45ba-9fc8-75d07fc544a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.catholicpreaching.com/the-three-studia-of-encountering-jesus-monday-of-the-4th-week-of-lent-april-3-2000/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982732 | 1,501 | 1.757813 | 2 |
By CHELSEA JENSEN
Coffee berry borer damage is resulting in diminished quality that could jeopardize the region’s position in the global coffee market, a grower and processor said Friday.
Before the pest, identified in West Hawaii in September 2010, green bean coffee dropped off at the company’s processing station was of higher quality with about 22 percent graded extra fancy; 30 percent fancy; 24 percent No. 1; 13 percent prime; 4 percent peaberry; and the remainder, lower H-3 and off grades, said Tom Greenwell, with Greenwell Farms Inc. About 93 percent of the coffee bought was graded Kona.
This harvest, the 2012-13 season, Greenwell said, none of the green bean coffee could be graded as extra fancy, fancy or even No. 1. Instead, more than 75 percent of the coffee was graded within the prime categories with the remainder comprising 4 percent peaberry and lower and off grades.
He also noted the percentage of prime coffee this season will likely decrease because as the season is winding down, coffee berry borer damage rates appear to be increasing placing more coffee in the lower H-3 grade. The current harvest has thus far resulted in about 86 percent graded Kona.
Despite the dismal news, the market for green bean coffee remains strong, he said.
“The market is great and prices are good,” said Greenwell, “but, eventually quality is going to catch up with the price of coffee out there, and, they’re (the consumers) going to go, ‘nah,’ because there’s better quality coffee out there.”
Growers can take steps to reap the benefits of a strong market by making changes to battle the pest and turn out high-quality green bean coffee, Greenwell said. To do this, growers must work together to combat the beetle, as well as deter processors from purchasing highly infested cherry.
“We all need to band together, work together, and do what’s right for this industry and get us through it,” he said. “The market is there, but I believe it’s not going to wait around for us.”
Dozens of people turned out for Greenwell’s presentation on the coffee berry borer infestation and its impact on the Kona coffee industry held during the Kona Coffee Farmers Association’s annual Expo Friday at Makaeo Events Pavilion in Kailua-Kona.
Native to Africa, the coffee berry borer is a small, dark-brown beetle about the size of a sesame seed, that was first confirmed in the Kona area in September 2010 and then sporadically in Ka‘u the following May. The pest destroys coffee when the female burrows into the fruit and lives its life cycle within the seed, or bean, causing damage that can make the coffee relatively worthless.
Greenwell also presented a multitude of data on the coffee berry borer infestation rate he’s kept the past two growing seasons, based on coffee cherry he’s purchased from farmers throughout North and South Kona.
According to a graphic presented by Greenwell, during the 2011-12 season, coffee berry borer infestation ranged from less than 5 percent in the North Kona Makalei area to more than 20 percent in the area of Tobacco Road in Captain Cook and back down to less than 5 percent near Honomalino in South Kona.
During 2012-13, the infestation appeared to increase with the Makalei area showing a just under 10-percent infestation rate, the Tobacco Road area a more than 15-percent infestation rate, and the Honomalino area, an infestation rate nearing 25 percent.
“We do not have control of the beetle yet, though there are a few farmers that do,” he said. “The bottom line is: only the farmers can control this — there is no magic machine to get rid of CBB when it comes to the mill.”
He also reported data showing the borer has affected the recovery ratio: It now takes nearly 8 pounds of coffee cherry to turn out 1 pound of green bean. Before the borer, the ratio was about 5.5 pounds cherry to 1 pound green bean, he said.
Now in its sixth year, the KCFA and Hawaii Community Federal Credit Union-sponsored expo connects farmers with various services offered in the area, said association president Cecilia Smith. More than two dozen booths offered an array of information, products and services to help local farmers.
REVISED CBB RECOMMENDATIONS
Also during the expo, Suzanne Shriner, a member of the association’s Pests and Diseases Committee and state coffee berry borer task force, said that after two years of field experience and experiments, the association is changing its recommendations for integrated pest management. The information will be available free at the association’s website, konacoffeefarmers.org, on Monday; membership is not required.
One of the revised recommendations regards the use of coffee berry borer traps. Initially, the association advised that traps could help control the infestation; however, Shriner said the association has learned that the traps are more effective for identifying an infestation area rather than controlling it.
The second revision will address the amount of Beauveria bassiana fungus to administer when treating an acre of coffee, she said. Until now, the association recommended using 7 ounces per acre, however, experiments have shown that using 21 ounces has the same kill rate, but the product continues to kill the beetle for months longer than the smaller dose.
Bruce Corker, a KCFA member who sits on the legislative committee, provided an update on the association’s work with the state Legislature this biennial session. A petition asking Gov. Neil Abercrombie to repeal the state’s 10 percent coffee blend labeling statute was circulated during the event.
The association also plans to introduce, again, legislation to reform the labeling law in 2014, he said. Currently, the state blending law requires only “10 percent blend” be printed in small text at the bottom of a package, what is known as the identifying statement, and leaves it up to a blender to disclose what other coffees were used.
“It’s been 21 years and we’re still at it,” he said about efforts to change the state’s current labeling law. “It’s a long battle, but we’re working on it.”
For more information about the association, visit Konacoffeefarmers.org.
Email Chelsea Jensen at [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:31c4b116-e279-4647-86ad-6a781802ac81> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hawaiitribune-herald.com/sections/news/local-news/coffee-berry-borer-hurting-industry.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949339 | 1,425 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Few advertisers had sold fake Rosetta Stone products
Language-software developer Rosetta Stone has agreed to dismiss the three-year-old trademark-infringement lawsuit against Google for the sale of its trademarks to competitors and counterfeiters for advertising.
Google and Rosetta Stone have further agreed to collaborate on combating online ads for fake goods and avert the misuse and exploitation of trademarks on the Internet by enhancing detection methods.
Google allows advertisers to purchase the rights to deploy certain words or phrases as keywords for paid ads on its site that would redirect users to websites of competitors and software counterfeiters.
The lawsuit was filed in 2009 with the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia and the terms of the settlement have not been disclosed.
Both the firms said in a joint statement: "At the end of the day, both companies would rather cooperate than litigate, and we believe this agreement is an important step toward eliminating piracy and trademark abuse on the Internet."
Rosetta Stone claimed that those advertisers had created confusion among consumers and also alleged that few advertisers had sold fake Rosetta Stone products. | <urn:uuid:06b1162f-c582-492a-ba50-64ca40656e40> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://media.cbronline.com/news/rosetta-stone-google-settle-trademark-infringement-lawsuit-011112 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968854 | 218 | 1.78125 | 2 |
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Slowly surmounting a key obstacle, the shuttle Endeavour maintained a heading Saturday through the streets of Los Angeles toward its retirement home at a museum.
Endeavour’s final mission began when it departed from the Los Angeles International Airport before dawn Friday, rolling on a 160-wheeled carrier past diamond-shaped “Shuttle Xing” signs.
Friday evening it stopped as crews spent hours transferring the shuttle to a special, lighter towing dolly. Then around midnight, it traveled over a bridge across Interstate 405, an especially tricky part of the complicated journey because of the size of the space craft and width of the bridge.
The shuttle was pulled across the Manchester Boulevard bridge by a Toyota Tundra pickup, and the car company filmed the event for a commercial after paying for a permit, turning then entire scene into a movie set complete with special lighting, sound and staging.
Police stopped traffic on the freeway below for the duration of the traverse, which took about three minutes.
Crews preparing for the crossing had to take down power lines, leaving about 400 residents of surrounding Inglewood without power for what was expected to be several hours.
Once on the other side, crews began the lengthy process of returning it to the original carrier, before resuming its journey early Saturday.
Another tricky part comes later in the day when Endeavour treks through a narrow residential street with apartment buildings on both sides. With its wings expected to intrude into driveways, residents have been told to stay indoors until the shuttle passes.
On Friday, hundreds of camera-toting spectators, some with pajama-clad children in tow, gaped as the 170,000-pound Endeavour inched by with its tail towering over streetlights and its wings spanning the roadway.
Over two days, it will trundle 12 miles at a top speed of 2 mph to its final destination — the California Science Center where it will be the centerpiece of a new exhibit. It’s expected to reach the museum sometime Saturday evening.
After an initial bumpy ride and a brief delay, the shuttle pulled off a massive feat of parallel parking by backing into a shopping center parking lot for a layover as crowds cheered on.
“This is unlike anything we’ve ever moved before,” said Jim Hennessy, a spokesman for Sarens, the contract mover.
Spectators flocked to the parking lot in the Westchester neighborhood to get a glimpse of Endeavour, which was guarded by an entourage of police, private security and construction crews.
Janet Dion, a family therapist from nearby Manhattan Beach, marveled at the shuttle, its exterior weathered by millions of miles in space and two dozen re-entries.
“You can sense the magnitude of where it’s been,” Dion said, fixated on the heat tiles that protected the shuttle during the return to Earth.
James Nieuwdorp, a technician for a transit agency, saw Endeavour’s aerial victory lap around California last month and traveled to see it again before it becomes a museum piece.
He enjoyed how the shuttle brought strangers together. There was “lot of camaraderie — something that’s hard to be seen these days,” he said.
Shuffling a five-story-tall shuttle through urban streets was an undertaking that took nearly a year to plan. Because the 78-foot wingspan hangs over sidewalks in some locations, police enforced rolling street and sidewalk closures along the route.
The limited access frustrated some businesses that counted on huge crowds lining the curbs to boost business.
Saturday is typically the busiest day for James Fugate, who co-owns Eso Won Books in South Los Angeles. But with Endeavour expected to pass through, Fugate braced for a ho-hum day in sales.
“We don’t close because we’re slow. That’s when you pull out a book to read,” he said.
The baby of the shuttle fleet, Endeavour replaced Challenger, which exploded during liftoff in 1986, killing seven astronauts. It thundered off the launch pad 25 times, orbited Earth nearly 4,700 times and racked up 123 million miles.
Transporting Endeavour required a specialized carrier typically used to haul oil rigs, bridges and heavy equipment. The wheels can spin in any direction, allowing the shuttle to zigzag past obstacles. An operator walks alongside, controlling the movements via joystick. Several spotters along the wings are on the lookout for hazards.
Before Endeavour could travel through the streets, some 400 trees were chopped down, cable and telephone lines were hoisted, and steel plates were laid down to protect the streets and underground utilities.
Endeavour will mostly travel on wide boulevards with some boasting as many lanes as a freeway. While there have been advance preparations, there was remaining work to be done during the move, including de-energizing power lines.
The route was selected after ruling out other options. Dismantling the shuttle would have ruined the delicate heat tiles. Helicoptering it to its destination was not feasible. Neither was crossing on freeways since the shuttle is too big to fit through the underpasses. The cost of transporting it cross-town was estimated at over $10 million.
As complex as the latest endeavor is, Southern California is no stranger to moving heavy things.
In 1946, Howard Hughes’“Spruce Goose” aircraft was built in sections and hauled from Culver City to Long Beach, 30 miles away. In 1984, an old United Airlines DC-8, with its wings and tail disassembled, was towed from Long Beach to the science center.
Earlier this year, a two-story-tall chunk of granite was hauled 105 miles from a rock quarry to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. | <urn:uuid:8ba0cb08-f90f-4a38-a691-6072ed26a6e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailylocal.com/article/20121013/NEWS04/121019800/0/rememberingpa.us/rememberingpa.us/dailylocal | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950421 | 1,244 | 1.617188 | 2 |
July 17, 2007 By Patrick Michels
using call centers, rather than walk-in offices, for processing requests for benefits.
Signs of Trouble
According to a report published in April by HHSC Inspector General Brian Flood, the young TIERS program suffered hiccups during its pilot phase: longer case entry times and the inability to create certain case history reports necessary for federal compliance.
Despite these early problems, the HHSC needed a data management system to support the new call-center model of doing business. HHSC officials had to choose between using SAVERR, TIERS or a vendor's proprietary call-center software. The call centers became a wild card that seriously complicated the TIERS changeover.
SAVERR worked, but the agency had already been directed to find a replacement, and the technology was quickly becoming outdated and unsupportable. TIERS - developed for the state by Deloitte Consulting LLP - was still a work in progress, but the HHSC had invested more than five years and a few hundred million dollars in the program. Neither SAVERR nor TIERS was designed to work in a call center; both were built with in-person interviews in mind, Goodman said.
According to Flood's report, the HHSC considered allowing the call center contractor to use its own software to calculate eligibility when the contract was awarded, but managers decided they'd rather control the data management tool so they wouldn't be forced to remain with a given vendor to run the call centers.
The HHSC decided to stick with TIERS and try to get it running smoothly in time for the call center rollout. TIERS needed to be tweaked to fit this new demand however. For example, the data entry fields were shrunk to fewer pages because the condensed format makes more sense for taking information over the phone.
Even before being adapted to call centers, TIERS was very complicated, and both Flood's report and a separate federal audit found that the program had serious design flaws as an eligibility-processing tool.
Still, when the HHSC submitted a plan for the changeover with the federal Food and Nutrition Service, which provides the state money for food stamps, the state commission said it would push ahead with TIERS. Based on what HHSC officials were learning from the TIERS pilot, the agency already had a full plate, and the move to call centers complicated the program further.
A Growing Behemoth
Yet, officials continued to add functions to the program. When the HHSC was reorganized to include a handful of other state services, management decided to let TIERS power as much of the agency's work as possible, according to Flood's report, and TIERS grew into a benefits-calculating behemoth. "The project was so large and tech-driven that some of the business needs were not properly designed into the system," Flood said.
Goodman contends the HHSC has handled deployment of the sprawling program just fine, but she agrees it's a big job. "It's like remodeling a house with 4 million people, and they're still living in it," she said.
Accenture LLP won the contract to operate the new call centers in 2005, and the HHSC handed the company the contract for running TIERS as well. The program still needed work, but to speed things along, the HHSC cut off its contract with Deloitte and handed Accenture the job of fixing TIERS, along with starting up the call centers. Accenture eventually contracted some of the work of fixing and modifying TIERS back to Deloitte, at a hefty cost to the HHSC, according to Flood's report.
Accenture Senior Executive Dave McCurley said the project's biggest problems didn't arise from the scale of the program, but from how little wiggle room the company had - due to detailed laws at the state and federal level, and a
You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to | <urn:uuid:d5d2415a-68e6-417f-9173-3647d304d484> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.govtech.com/health/99380279.html?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97452 | 804 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Ben is pursuing a degree in Computer Science on the Game Development Track. He is also the president of the Association for Computing Machinery, a founder of the on campus Game Development Club Member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, a member of Student Engineers Joint Council, and a member of APES.
The ABET accredited CSE department here at Lyle is one of the most diverse programs in the nation. As an undergraduate searching for a BS degree in computer science you can choose from four different tracks: research, security, game development, and lastly general. You may also pursue a degree in Computer Engineering. To get a more in-depth look at the several degree plans please click here.
Each track provides students the same crucial framework to learn all that is necessary to succeed in this rapidly growing field. In the first two semesters, for example, you will have mastered both Java and C++ with the promise of learning many more languages and skills. All of which will make you extremely valuable after you earn your diploma.
There are of course many other amazing opportunities at Lyle. From what I have witnessed, the Lyle School of Engineering stands out from a lot of other engineering colleges around the nation. The school is constantly trying to allow students to get to know people out in the real world by either bringing them to campus to speak or taking students to their facilities. Just last year I was able to tour the Lockheed Martin Production Facility over in Fort Worth—a campus that contains a mile long building. It’s experiences like these that most other students are not able to partake in. Since SMU is a private school in the metroplex, there are also a lot of connections that can be made right on campus.
Being located at the center of Dallas has allowed the Lyle School of Engineering to partner with several leaders in the field, including: Samsung, Deloitte, Lockheed Martin, and more. These partners give you as student countless opportunities to become acquainted with the field outside of school before you even graduate.
If you are interested in joining the CSE department here at Lyle, I suggest you check out their site here. There, you can get more information into all of the exciting research they are performing and the opportunities the CSE department can give you. | <urn:uuid:952abc3c-ccdc-4ba4-bcd1-c239f0407a7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smu.edu/Lyle/Undergrad/ProspectiveStudents/Departments/CSE | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974401 | 463 | 1.554688 | 2 |
FORTUNE -- When President Obama's offshore drilling moratorium halted work off the Gulf Coast in late May, the industry spewed that Washington just doesn't get it. For every rig worker, they argued, there were three to four more jobs supporting deepwater operations -- 21,000 in all, according to Louisiana's Oil and Gas Association. How could President Obama's administration legally close 33 permitted drill sites in the Gulf of Mexico when nearly all passed inspection by the Minerals Management Service after the Deepwater Horizon's April 20 explosion?
Amid the pleading by politicians and talking heads, the industry's challenge was eventually won by an unlikely champion -- a local vessel company called Hornbeck Offshore Services.
Hornbeck (HOS), a $400-million vessel company in Louisiana's St. Tammany Parish, filed a lawsuit against the administration on June 7, a month after the moratorium started. It looked like a classic David versus Goliath battle: a boat operator going up against the federal government.
But Hornbeck was in a bind and had little to lose by going on the offensive. One-third of its sales come from contracting its 200-plus-foot vessels to transport diesel fuel, piping, and drummed material for deepwater drilling operations in the Gulf. Without drilling, its vessels were sitting idle.
"We didn't think from a gut reaction at the time that [the moratorium] was even legal," CEO Todd Hornbeck tells Fortune.
Of its 38 ships in the Gulf, Hornbeck has only contracted 12 to help in the cleanup efforts. That left about 26 ships either idle, on the spot market, or in short contracts to haul supplies. One drilling customer said it would cancel its contract and Hornbeck expected more drilling operators at the 33 sites to follow suit. Analysts cut earnings estimates and downgraded the stock.
No other choice but battle
Under a moratorium in the Gulf, Hornbeck would have been forced to find work for its ships in international waters. Just the commute abroad could take anywhere from 30 days to three months, and so-called cabotage laws make it difficult for foreign companies to quickly find work in international markets.
"We decided, if they're going to shut us down, we've got to do something about it," Hornbeck recalls.
So the CEO and his lawyers dug through the government's report to find holes. A dozen other Gulf-based businesses with more than 10,000 employees joined Hornbeck in the suit, among them, Bollinger Shipyards of Lockport, La., which earns 50% of its sales from constructing and repairing vessels for Gulf production. Their argument centered on the legality of the ban when many drillers met all regulatory requirements.
The case culminated on Tuesday with an injunction against the ban issued by U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans. In his sharp opinion, Feldman agreed with Hornbeck's argument that the broad ban was arbitrary and capricious. "If some drilling equipment parts are flawed, is it rational to say all are?" he wrote. "Are all airplanes a danger because one was? All oil tankers like Exxon Valdez? All trains? All mines? That sort of thinking seems heavy-handed, and rather overbearing."
Hornbeck heard of the verdict while taping an interview for the CBS Evening News. The White House vowed to appeal, and Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar planned to testify to a Senate subcommittee Wednesday in support of a ban.
In a curious twist, it appeared the market expected good news. On Friday, call options to buy the stock at a higher price outnumbered puts by 19 to 1, and shares gained 4.5%. And earlier last week company founder Larry Hornbeck bought more than $300,000 worth of shares, capping a week of more than $600,000 worth of purchases by Hornbeck insiders at the lowest prices since March 2009, according to Thomson Reuters data.
After a brief spike following the ruling announcement, Hornbeck shares closed down slightly on Tuesday and shed another 2% by mid-day Wednesday.
For his part, Hornbeck says he's just happy to be back in business. "We're ready to go to work today -- and we can do that today." But drilling in the Gulf is likely to resume slowly, if at all, as companies like Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) and others wait to see how the appeals court rules before restarting work.
|Bank of America Corp...||13.31||-0.13||-0.97%|
|General Electric Co||23.86||0.20||0.85%|
|Ford Motor Co||14.97||0.02||0.13%|
|JPMorgan Chase and C...||53.63||0.61||1.15%|
The tornado that struck the Moore, Okla., area Monday afternoon left an almost 2-mile wide path of destruction, flattening homes and businesses and taking at least 24 lives. More | <urn:uuid:1bfbd9cc-6b86-42db-93f0-895fe7aeac21> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/23/news/companies/hornbeck_gulf_moratorium.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2010062414 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959504 | 1,027 | 1.539063 | 2 |
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«Piano Concerto for Three Hands and Horribly Out-of-Tune Instruments»
The installation consists of three monitors, i.e. three different kinds of video tapes and two objects. The keyboard of a piano serves as the static metaphor on all three monitors. Movement is produced within this static object by its use in three different ways, each of which also appears on one monitor. Real fields of tension are created by the sequence of associations coupled with the respective use of the piano, i.e. with one monitor on a single level each. Sequences of hectically recorded images are inserted into the instrument in different ways, but always with a thematic connection. I chose the piano as the basic component because, aside from its personal significance to me in connection with classical music, it also expresses and symbolizes bourgeois culture to me.
The atmospheric images created by the installation have a great deal to do with Germany. | <urn:uuid:f2e48676-a35f-4fd3-9d5c-8ba5b7e27a4e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/dreihandiges-klavierkonzert/images/6/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941193 | 245 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Media Contact: Hannah Buchanan
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The University of Texas at Tyler
Faces Behind the Scenes: UT Tyler Mail Services
Editor’s Note: Many staff work behind the scenes at The University of Texas at Tyler. In this four-part summer feature series, “Faces Behind the Scenes,” we will highlight some of the “unsung heroes” within the UT Tyler Physical Plant.
Above: Matt Izard serves as the UT Tyler Mail Services and Central Receiving supervisor. Middle: Izard in his office and in the mail room with Page Chapman and Ryan Lilly, mail clerks. Below: Some of the UT Tyler Physical Plant staff members gather for a photo.
The University of Texas at Tyler Mail Services handles all internal and external mail. Central Receiving receives and distributes goods bought with purchase orders and all overnight packages excluding express mail.
There’s no job too small, large or bizarre the three-member department can’t handle.
Led by supervisor Matt Izard, the trio runs like clockwork and sees varied items and people daily. Mail is picked up once in the morning and delivered to the post office once in the afternoon. All mail is processed by 3:45 p.m. each work day to meet post office deadlines. Two afternoon routes cover all internal packages and mail. The UT Tyler Physical Plant dock also greets all couriers and freight trucks.
“It’s pretty much a daily routine with a little extra stuff thrown in once in awhile,” said Izard, who celebrates 10 years with the university this month and also serves as the UT Tyler Physical Plant’s designated safety liaison. “It’s about interdepartmental communication. I think some may think we’re better staffed than we are, but we get the job done – we make it happen.”
Izard also handles monthly billing shipping, manages postal permits and accounts and oversees the UT Tyler Central Receiving and its warehouse, where surplus capital inventory is held.
“We get anything as small as paper clips to computers – and large equipment for some of the labs, like biology and engineering,” he said of the standard packages he sees.
During the last fiscal year, the department delivered about 17,000 packages. The department saw an incoming mail volume of 232,350, and more than 145,000 pieces of mail were metered and sent to the post office.
As far as the bizarre, one package received didn’t surprise Izard and his crew too much, especially working with the UT Tyler biology department.
“We read the label and realized they were cats to be dissected. I would say that’s the weirdest thing we’ve handled. I’ve heard from the biology supervisor that they’re cats that have died a natural death or they’re road kill. They don’t chase Fluffy down or anything like that,” he said with a grin.
Indeed, Izard sees varied items and people on the job, but that’s one thing he enjoys about it.
“This is a job where you get to see a lot of people and you get to meet new people all the time,” Izard explained. “The campus is beautiful – I’ve always thought that. I actually used to come up here before I started working here and go for walks with my girlfriend then – now my wife. I’m proud of the campus. It’s a great place to work.”
Izard also is a UT Tyler student. He utilizes the university’s Staff Development Scholarship Program, which provides employees full tuition and fee coverage up to six credit hours each term toward a UT Tyler degree.
He is pursuing a bachelor of science in business management.
One of the 15 campuses of the UT System, UT Tyler offers excellence in teaching, research, artistic performance and community service. More than 90 undergraduate and graduate degrees are available at UT Tyler, which has an enrollment of more than 6,000 high-ability students at its campuses in Tyler, Longview and Palestine.
Faces Behind the Scenes Feature Series: | <urn:uuid:ed92e39a-f178-4b73-9ab8-e0f7eb2898da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.uttyler.edu/news/pressrelease/2010/06222010.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945097 | 877 | 1.53125 | 2 |
There’s a recent article in the Global Post examining the actions of the Conservative Party government in Canada and the fallout from its increasingly unpopular policies, particularly in the autonomous province Québec. This time last year the nationalist movement in Québec looked like it had taken a major step backwards with the collapse in the vote of the province’s Bloc Québécois (BQ), the nationalist party at the federal level. There were very real worries that this would have a knock-on effect on its sister party, the Parti Québécois (PQ), which operates at the provincial level within Québec itself as it faced its own troubles (many of them down to internal rivalries or debates about the party’s future direction).
Now things have turned around somewhat after a period of considerable (and at times turbulent) change within Franco-Canadian politics. BQ is no longer looking the spent force some believed (or in the case of Canadian federalists, hoped) it to be, and may be ready for a comeback as some Québécoise voters seem to be already disenchanted with the federalist National Democratic Party (NDP) who they unexpectedly turned to in droves last year, in preference to their traditional BQ loyalties. At a local level some polls are predicting a strong showing for the PQ in expected provincial elections in Québec this year or next, and the target of retaking the government of the province may be back in the party’s sights again.
Meanwhile the Canadian federal government under right-wing Tory leader (and unapologetic Amerophile) Stephen Harper, celebrating a year in power on the back of a parliamentary majority, is continuing to enact a series of measures that seem almost purpose-designed to aggravate the traditional centre-left and social-democratic impulses of Québec’s population, both nationalist and federalist in nature.
“Harper celebrated his anniversary with a speech vaunting policies he said will “sustain the economy of tomorrow.” Many in Quebec beg to differ. They see an attempt to remake the country into an austere capitalist bastion, where the interests of Big Oil trump environmental concerns, where “tough on crime” means soft on gun control, and patriotism involves reverence to the British monarchy.
It’s a version of American Republicanism meeting the European welfare state. The difference is that in Canada, the clash involves a province the federal government estranges at the country’s peril — one that has already held two referendums on independence, the last one, in 1995, coming within a few thousand votes of making Quebec a separate country.
The warning signs are many, some coming from high-profile “federalists” — the term used for those who want to keep Canada united. The most noteworthy is Justin Trudeau, a federal politician from Quebec with the opposition Liberal Party. His father, the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was a long-time prime minister and stalwart in the battle for national unity.
“There is a way of viewing social responsibility, openness to others, a cultural pride here in Quebec that is necessary to Canada,” the younger Trudeau told the public broadcaster, Radio Canada. “And I always say that if I ever believed Canada was really the Canada of Stephen Harper and we were going against abortion and going against gay marriage, and we were going backward in 10,000 different ways, maybe I’d think of wanting to make Quebec a country.”
The statement made headlines across the country, largely due to Trudeau’s pedigree. He’s also touted as a potential future leader of the Liberal Party, which last ran the country from 1993 to 2006. That ended when Harper first gained power with a minority government.
Separatist forces in Quebec sang hallelujah, while some federalists were shocked. In a later interview, Trudeau didn’t back down.
“The separatist option is not the bogeyman it used to be,” he said. “You ask me what the bogeyman is? It’s the one sitting in our prime minister’s chair right now.”
Quebec’s independence movement grew out of the so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, a period when the province’s French-speaking majority shook off cultural domination of the Catholic Church and economic domination of the English-speaking minority. Since then, support for sovereignty has rarely dipped below 40 percent, and politics have been decidedly left of centre.
Harper spent years wooing Quebec, recognizing that winning many of the province’s 75 seats in the federal House of Commons has historically been the ticket to majority government. He even passed a law describing Quebec as a “nation” within Canada.
For almost two decades, Quebecers sent left-wing separatists with the Bloc Quebecois to parliament. Then, in the May 2011 federal election they suddenly gave most of their seats to the federalist New Democratic Party, which has socialist roots. Conservatives won only six seats in Quebec, but formed a majority government by capturing Ontario and the Western provinces. And the clash of visions began.
Needles to say, Harper’s fascination with the British monarchy — restoring the “royal” designation to Canada’s air force and navy, hanging the Queen’s portrait in federal buildings and celebrating her diamond jubilee — doesn’t go over well in Quebec. It’s a province where license plates read “je me souviens” (I remember) — a reference to England’s 1759 victory against France in a battlefield near Quebec City, which turned Quebec into an English colony.
The most bitter fight is over Harper’s new crime law, which imposes minimum mandatory sentences and gets tougher with young offenders. Quebec’s government, which prefers to stress rehabilitation and a more lenient approach to young offenders, has been scathing in its criticism.
“I don’t recognize myself in this Canada,” fumed Quebec’s justice minister, Jean-Marc Fournier, after a recent meeting with his federal counterpart.
All this is music to the ears of Quebec separatists, already honing their arguments for a provincial election that could come this year. “Quebec no longer exists for Ottawa,” said Bernard Drainville, a key politician with the Parti Quebecois, which held two independence referendums when it was in power.
Harper’s majority government has only been in power one year. Already, many fear his greatest legacy may be the breakup of the country.”
- Québec Nationalism On The Rise Again? (ansionnachfionn.com)
- Québec Independence – Only A Matter Of Time? (ansionnachfionn.com)
- Hebert: Harper’s alienation of Quebec just what the Liberals need – Toronto Star (thestar.com)
- Ignatieff insists remarks on Quebec were taken out of context (theglobeandmail.com)
- Celebrate the Charter, but don’t forget the scars of patriation (theglobeandmail.com)
- Kelly McParland: Mulcair and the separatists, a love story (fullcomment.nationalpost.com) | <urn:uuid:83d17f75-4b84-4f7d-822f-e2d79b9da40c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ansionnachfionn.com/2012/05/14/the-canadian-right-pushes-away-the-quebecois-left/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946041 | 1,530 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Haley Barbour said there’s no better government job than governor.
“And this is likely my last government job,” he said.
Barbour’s two-term stint as governor of Mississippi is winding down. A new governor, either Johnny Dupree or Phil Bryant, will be sworn into office in January.
“Eight years is enough,” he said. “Term limits for governor is a good thing, but I would not give anything for this experience.”
The University of Mississippi hosted a conversation with Gov. Haley Barbour Wednesday evening of last week at the Overby Center For Southern Journalism and Politics. Charlie Mitchell, assistant dean of the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss, conducted the hour-long interview.
The talk dealt with a wide variety of topics.
When Governor Barbour is mentioned in Mississippi history, one of the first things atop the praises will be his efforts after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He said he felt it was providential that he was governor when the worst natural disaster in American history hit Mississippi.
His work in Washington prior to becoming governor paid dividends.
Mississippi has received $24 billion in federal assistance so far. The state asked for $34 billion.
“We had a good plan – a reasonable request,” he staid. “Of course, without Thad Cochran, it would not have happened.”
He relived the days leading up to Katrina and the first time he saw the devastation.
Barbour said, at first, evacuation was slow. Then weather experts started warning that the storm could be Camille-like.
“That helped us to get people off the coast,” he said.
His wife Marsha, who was in Hattiesburg when the storm hit, traveled in via ground with emergency crews – clearing a lane of traffic as they went and taking them seven hours from Camp Shelby to Gulfport.
“You can’t believe it,” she told her husband upon arrival.
He flew in later by helicopter.
“It was utter obliteration – nothing there,” Barbour said.
The rebuilding, thanks to a solid plan, has gone well.
“From that day on, there have been so many stories about compassion and unselfishness,” he said.
He plans to become an author after he leaves office – writing a book about Hurricane Katrina.
The rebuilding of the Port of Gulfport continues, and the governor said 25 years from now people will say that’s the most important economic development project of the Barbour administration.
“It will keep on growing,” he said.
The governor also responded to questions about public health, money in politics, dealing with the media, race relations, education and more.
He said he doesn’t watch much TV.
“When I do, it’s usually ball games,” Barbour said.
He threw out an interesting fact – 79 percent of the state’s budget is spent by department heads who do not report to the governor.
He has no regrets.
“I’m confident with the decisions I’ve made,” Barbour said.
His approval rating over the eight years, Mitchell pointed out during questioning, is more than 70 percent.
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With only six months to go until German elections, a new anti-euro party is hoping to tap into growing euroscepticism in Europe's top economy and may take votes away from Chancellor Angela Merkel.
With more than one in four Germans in a recent poll saying they would consider voting for an anti-euro party, the new group, "Alternative for Germany", is gearing up for a major push ahead of elections on September 22.
"We are constantly getting calls, letters or emails from people who want to join or want to support us," said businesswoman Frauke Petry, head of communications at the party, which campaigns for Germany to leave the euro.
The party counts "more than 2,000 members and donors", a drop in the ocean compared to the nearly half a million Germans who are members of the two biggest parties, Merkel's conservatives and the opposition Social Democrats.
Its main aim now is to form regional groups in Germany's 16 states before holding a founding congress on April 14 in Berlin to elect its candidates for the vote in September.
Their first public meeting, in a well-to-do suburb of Frankfurt, the eurozone's financial capital and home to the European Central Bank, attracted some 1,200 people to listen to speeches about the disadvantages of the euro.
In the crowd were a large number of pensioners in their Sunday best, greying professors and liberal professionals, united in their belief that Germany has paid too much to keep the 17-nation eurozone afloat.
The party's creation has roused a great deal of interest in the media both within Germany and abroad and is supported by Hans-Olaf Henkel, a former head of the BDI, the country's leading industry federation.
They are encouraged by a recent survey in Focus magazine showing that 26 percent of Germans would consider voting for an anti-euro party. This figure rises to 40 percent among those aged between 40 and 49.
The majority of the supporters would currently vote for Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) or junior coalition partners, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), explained Petry.
And the "Alternative for Germany" has not gone unnoticed at the senior echelons of the CDU.
"I take all political competitors seriously," said the head of the CDU parliamentary group Volker Kauder.
"We need to explain to people that Germany's prosperity depends in large part on that of Europe ... any alternative to having the euro would be considerably worse for Germany," said Kauder.
He judged the new party to be "institutionalised fear of the future."
-- Filling the eurosceptic void --
Andreas Busch, a political science professor at Goettingen University said there was a "void" when it came to eurosceptic politicians in the German system with all major parties being strongly pro-euro.
However, he said that "all those who have attempted to fill this void have failed", recalling the rise and fall of a "pro Deutschmark" party at the end of the 1990s.
Another expert, political scientist Simon Franzmann from the University of Duesseldorf, said that Germany's relative prosperity at the moment would not help the new party's cause.
The party "is campaigning on a purely economic topic but for the moment Germans are satisfied with the situation in the country and that compensates for their dissatisfaction vis-a-vis the euro," said Franzmann.
Moreover, the way the polls are looking in Germany, a vote for this party might risk opening the door to a more leftist coalition, noted Franzmann, something supporters would want to avoid "at all costs."
"That's why they will in any case vote for the CDU or the FDP."
According to the latest polls, the CDU would win 40 percent of the vote if elections were held now but the FDP would scrape only five percent, meaning a grand coalition between the CDU and the SPD is still a possible outcome. | <urn:uuid:03697a0a-ddad-4c9f-bbb7-50fdfee499f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130317/german-anti-euro-party-takes-aim-at-merkel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960387 | 823 | 1.664063 | 2 |
|Majora's Mask 2: The Untold Legend of the Fierce Deity|
|Release date||July 2, 2007|
Majora’s Mask 2: The Untold Legend of the Fierce Deity - known as Majora's Mask 2: Revenge of the Fierce Deity in Japan - is an action-adventure title for the Nintendo GameCube that was originally released near the middle of 2007. It is described as a prequel to the story of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and players get their first look into the history of the Fierce Deity and Majora’s Mask. It is not part of the main Zelda series, as this game does not allow the player to play as Link, and as such qualifies as a spin-off.
Long ago, the land of Termina was first created. The wise and benevolent creators who would one day be known as the Four Giants immediately took it upon themselves to create two entities that would protect the new land where they could not interfere with mortal affairs. These two god-like entities were fashioned with the use of the Four Giants' strongest magic, created to serve and protect the mortals that inhabited the land. The Four Giants knew their creations as Majora and Oni.
Despite the Four Giants' benevolent magic at work within them, these entities were far from perfect. Each had a vaulting desire to protect and control the land alone, each seeing the other as a threat to the peace, and eager to please the Four Giants, they competed with each other for power.
Neither of them were allowed to show themselves to the people, but both of them quickly began to break that rule. Majora appeared to the innocents of Termina as a thief and a trickster, and all soon learned to fear his deadly deception. Oni appeared to them as an angry god, demanding regular offerings on pain of horrible consequences. He was soon labeled by the people as the "Fierce Deity."
The Four Giants, angry and disappointed with their creations, ordered that their contact with the people be broken at once. The two entties lost their titles as Protectors of Termina. Majora and Oni disregarded that order, and soon broke out into total war, wreaking havoc and nearly completely destroying parts of Termina in their efforts to destroy the other.
The Four Giants immediately took action. In order to preserve Termina and keep it as safe as possible, the Giants used one of their most powerful curses on the two. They were both turned into masks, imprisoned within the deepest, darkest part of the realm for all eternity, and were stripped of their god-like powers. Though they still possessed incredible magic powers, they were no longer demigods.
Feeling shamed and responsible for their two failed creations, the Four Giants promise never to allow Termina to be in danger again, so they removed the memories of Oni and Majora from every mortal in Termina as they rebuilt the land, making sure that none would ever speak of the events that happened there.
Fearing of the future in which their creations might free themselves, the Four Giants hid Majora's Mask and the Fierce Deity Mask away carefully within the realm for the troubled and vengeful spirits to rest.
Still, the Four Giants' creations are not entirely forgotten. The spirits of the once-great are still confined to those masks; their hatred of their masters has spread to a hatred of Termina itself. They cannot be freed unless someone wears the mask, in which case the entities would enter their body and exert control.
The masks remain undiscovered to this day...
...or so they thought...
Unlike all previous Zelda titles, the game doesn’t feature Ganon, Link or Zelda in any way whatsoever. The main “hero” in the game (the character the player controls) is the Fierce Deity. As in Majora’s Mask, the main villain in the game is Majora, and gameplay progresses through puzzles and battles. At the end of every dungeon, there awaits a magical artifact that holds an eigth of the Fierce Deity's original power, not counting the first dungeon. When he gains one of these artifacts, his power increases to give him another special ability to proceed in the game; either to access a new area, solve a puzzle, or defeat a miniboss. Majora is also collecting his artifacts, and so the player must always be time conscious, as Fierce Deity has to collect his artifacts before Majora or the game gives an automatic game over (although once he collects his artifacts, Majora gains all of his at the same time, therefore commencing the final battle).
Like all GameCube titles, this one makes use of the controller.
A Button - Fire Long-ranged attack from weapon.
B Button - Swing Sword for a Short-ranged attack.
Start Button - Pause.
Control Stick - Move.
R Button - Perform an action (i.e. Open a door, pick up an item).
L Button - Go to Inventory.
Y Button - Open Map of Termina.
X Button - First Person View.
- Four Giants’ Catacomb
- Majora’s Lair
- Undergrowth Cavern
- Deepertides Grotto
- Sanded Coliseum
- Wintarctic Mountain
- Lavamagma Peak
- Underground Tunnels
Much like the other 2D and 3D Zelda series games, there is a specific location that actually consists of a number of other locations, called the Overworld. The Overworld in Majora's Mask 2 is the land of Termina, but a still earlier version of it. The Overworld's sole purpose is to provide a connected road to other dungeons really.
The reception to this game was generally positive due to the storyline. In the first Majora’s Mask, the origins of the Mask and Fierce Deity was one of the biggest mysteries in that game. Nintendo Power recently awarded it "The Best Graphics on the Nintendo GameCube" award (the graphics were one of the best-looking titles for the Nintendo GameCube in its lifespan), and the "Best Storyline for a Zelda Game." It was rated 10 out of 10 by Metal Bones. Fans enjoyed the gameplay extensively, specifically the battles, "which have a more into-it feel to them," as stated in Nintendo Power's review of the game in Issue 218 (It received a score of 10, as only one other Zelda game - Ocarina of Time - has managed to get).
- This is the first Zelda game in which the Fierce Deity makes a playable appearance outside of boss battles and cheats, and can be regarded as the “hero” of the game.
- Ganon, Link and Zelda are not mentioned at all.
- This game stars the actual demon Majora, and not Majora’s Mask.
- This game is one of only two numerical sequels, the first being Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. | <urn:uuid:0030e73a-e3df-4d75-9d10-120378c9fe90> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fantendo.wikia.com/wiki/Majora%27s_Mask_2:_The_Untold_Legend_of_the_Fierce_Deity | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966414 | 1,455 | 1.695313 | 2 |
expert advice MORE
Special Needs Accommodations in the Classroom
Q: I have an 11-year-old son who is in the 6th grade. Bryan is a hyperactive child with an attitude. My problem is this: When I request that his teachers fill out his assignment notebook every day to show what is done and what isn't, I get the answer "He doesn't hand it in to be signed". What can I do to get the teachers to get the notebook from him and cooperate with me on this? I have met with his teachers and written several notes, and still no cooperation. I have even told Bryan to hand in his notebook, and, like today, he handed it in, they looked at it, but didn't sign it. Is there someone I can contact for assistance, or am I going to have to go to the school every night and make sure they sign it?
A: It is so frustrating when you feel you have an agreement with someone and they don't follow through. It probably seems like such a simple thing that you are asking each teacher to do, and it certainly would make life at home much easier.
But there is another side to this story. Teachers have many different bases to cover at the end of a school day: special announcements to make, things to pass out, and last minute changes in after-school activities to handle. In light of this, figuring out on the spot what one student has or hasn't finished for homework can be a tall order to fill. Add to it a student with an attitude, and it can become too much.
I suggest that you begin by making an appointment with each teacher (a phone conversation will do). Explain that you need to know what your son is accountable for each day, and that the homework notebook plan isn't working. Let the teachers know that you understand they are very busy at the end of the school day, and that you would like to try an approach that works better for them.
You might suggest that the guidance counselor or the principal play a role in monitoring your son's work. But let each teacher know that you are open to her ideas. In this way you will be getting the teachers to "buy into" the solution. After you have reached a new agreement, send a note to the teachers (with a copy to the principal) thanking them for their support in helping your son succeed. Set a date, perhaps six weeks out, for touching base again on how things are going.
Hope you have better luck this time!
More on: Expert Advice
After teaching in California for nearly ten years, Barbara Callaghan moved to New Hampshire in 1985 and became a principal. After 10 years as a principal, she returned to teaching, her first love and true vocation. | <urn:uuid:5a92c72a-1a45-47fc-9134-baf9f668bf29> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://school.familyeducation.com/parents-and-teacher/discipline/42363.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985613 | 568 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Lodges and Huts
Harwood Lodge (Mt. Baldy, San Gabriel Mountains)
Harwood Lodge is located in the Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains at the base of Mt Baldy (officially, Mt. San Antonio). At 6000’ elevation & 15 miles above Claremont, Harwood Lodge is within easy driving distance. It was built in 1930 to honor Aurelia S Harwood, the first woman president of the Sierra Club and an Angeles Chapter leader. The lodge stands today as a place to get away from the city & enjoy the solitude of clear mountain air & blue skies. For more information, visit the Harwood Lodge website.
Keller Peak Ski Hut (ArrowBear, San Bernardino Mountains)
This ski hut was built in 1938 by the Ski Mountaineers. The hut is managed for the use of all Sierra Club members by the Keller Hut Committee and is staffed by qualified overseers. The cozy rustic hut is located at an elevation of 6800’ on Hwy 18 between Running Springs and Big Bear in the San Bernardino Mountains, across from Snow Valley Ski Area. Winter offers downhill and cross-country skiing; spring through fall offer many hiking trails to explore and enjoy. For more information, visit the Keller Peak Ski Hut website.
San Antonio Ski Hut (Mt. Baldy, San Gabriel Mountains)
The San Antonio Ski Hut was built by the Ski Mountaineers in 1937. It burned down the same year and was rebuilt in 1938. At 8200’ elevation, it is reached by a steep 3 mile, 2200’ gain hike. The trailhead begins 1 mi beyond the locked gate of San Antonio Falls Rd, 80 yds beyond the point where you can look down over your right shoulder and see Harwood Lodge & Manker Flat Campground. The hut has a fully equipped kitchen of utensils, dishes & cookware. Water from a spring is piped directly through the kitchen, running 24 hrs a day. Heat and cooking are provided by wood-burning stoves. The two-story hut provides sleeping space for 20 people. For more information, visit the San Antonio Ski Hut website.
[Keller Hut in February: Header photo by James Carden] | <urn:uuid:75cfc62b-9913-486b-b21d-b46b25e88f4f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://angeles2.sierraclub.org/get_outdoors/lodges_and_huts | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943128 | 461 | 1.835938 | 2 |
India – the next virtualization giant?
The recent growth of virtualization in the Asia-Pacific region cannot be overlooked. Statistics
show that 75% of end-users want to switch to cloud computing services within the next year.
This percentage is the highest compared to other countries of the region (even surpasses
Singapore and Malaysia). The survey was conducted by VMware. China and India lead the
region with their future cloud adoption plans with majority of its organizations ready for
the smooth transformation and implementation of cloud computing solutions. 60% of the
organizations are either planning or have implemented, cloud computing solutions. Greatest
adoption is likely from the ITES/IT manufacturing and infrastructure sectors.
The survey conducted by VMware also showed an upward trend in India’s understanding of
cloud computing and virtualization. Indian audience recognizes the importance of capacity on
demand, pay per use model and automated management. IT as a service is one theme everyone
is trying to follow. While some are trying to provide services, others are willing to buy them
to perk up their businesses. 60% of the organizations in India who are involved in IT related
activities are willing to adopt the cloud infrastructure for scalability on demand as it provides
essential benefits such as reduced hardware infrastructure and simplified IT solutions. Cost
saving is one of the immediate advantages that is attracting people to the concept of the cloud.
With most of the hardware being imported from other parts of the world, this cost-cut can
improve profit margins of most IT service providers. Companies willing to employ private and
public clouds represent 40% of the total while 37% encourage deployment of private cloud only.
Government and banking sectors are opting for private clouds for improved security.
As indicated by the survey, 38% of the companies are willing to deploy both public and private
clouds. The demand for cloud storage is increasing day by day. With expanding databases and a
information exchange frenzy, IT organizations are hungry for data storage solutions which can
be efficiently provided by virtual data centers. This makes India a hotspot for cloud computing
advancements; a place where advantages can be achieved by this new approach to end-user
computing. This new idea separates the two entities of operating system, applications and the
user itself, providing flexibility, mobility to users who need it the most. The focus on Virtual
Desktop is surprisingly high with statistics indicating 70%, which is higher than both Japan and
China. The good news is that cloud computing giants are not debarred from these facts and they
are planning ahead of themselves, targeting countries like India; as Andrew Dutton, GM, VMware
(Asia Pacific Japan), said:
“It is clear that industry has great interest in the hybrid cloud model. The ability
for enterprises to obtain a common cloud infrastructure platform, as well as a common management
model and application services that bridge private and public clouds to deliver interoperable clouds
allowing data and application portability, will be critical.” | <urn:uuid:dabd8fab-3a92-4e08-be82-4be699dcd855> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/12/india-the-next-virtualization-giant/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94018 | 619 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Right now, even though the market has sold off recently, we remain in what is technically called a bull market. Under current economic circumstances, it’s amazing the market is not at half of its current value of 12,250 points. At half current values, a market priced at 6,125 points would represent a cash yield on the Dow Industrials of 4.8% instead of the current 2.4%, far more realistic when the average dividend yield over the last 100 years is 4.6%. In analyzing what is ahead, we can at least get some idea of the risks involved in further investment in the stock market.
For 50 years we have used debt to fuel growth by increasing the money supply through government deficit spending. Growth fueled by anything other than savings is an invitation to disaster. Without real political reform, U.S. economic outlook is disastrous. More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I place the economy among the most important virtues, and public debt as the great danger to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our leaders load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.”
Here is what we are looking at: The dollar will lose its reserve status; the U.S. will sink into a more severe slump than we are experiencing; and there is likely to be a currency collapse far greater than what has already occurred, because 65% of the world’s monetary reserves are in dollars. This will create a panic for gold, and a new currency will have to be created. The battleground in the next five years is the future of the dollar and the dollar’s reserve status.
International contracts are written in dollars. As previously written in Market Watch, there are several viable movements currently under way to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. As always, debtor countries such as the United States want to maintain dollars as the reserve currency. Similarly, countries that are holding dollars as part of their reserves represent the economies that want to make the change. These countries have whopping trade balance surpluses with America. And, as they continue to hold those surpluses, they risk the value of reserves deteriorating further as the dollar goes down in value. Countries such as China, that hold large dollar reserves, do two things when dollar reserves are at risk of losing value:
1. They add to their gold reserves, which China has done, now becoming the fifth-largest holder of gold in the world behind the U.S., Germany, France and Italy, respectively.
2. They try to make their own currencies into a currency fully acceptable around the world. China is already doing that successfully by using its currency, rather than dollars, to settle international contracts.
We are a petroleum-based economy. The price of petroleum is important to the U.S. and our competitive position in the world. Estimated reserves of natural gas in our country were recently upgraded to 2.2 trillion cubic feet, enough to satisfy consumption for 100 years. We are importing 51% of our oil now, down from 60% only a few years ago. Our newly discovered oil fields, especially the Bakken Field in North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana, are estimated to be Saudi-sized reserves. Off shore, where moratoriums on drilling exist, there are another 60 billion barrels of oil, enough for us to become fully independent, and be exporters of oil within 15 years.
The U.S. pays an average of $2.72 for each gallon of gas that we bring to this country and resell. Here are competitive economies relative prices: Norway — $7.41; Germany — $6.82; England — $6.60; Italy — $6.40; France — $6.04; Japan — $5.40; and Canada — $3.81. It’s easy to see mathematically that if the dollar ceases to become the world’s reserve currency, fuel prices would substantially increase. That would increase the cost of production of U.S. goods by 10% to 20%. It would be difficult to be price competitive in world markets under those conditions; the dollar would continue to fall until American-made products can be purchased abroad at a “favorable price.” This is not only an ugly scene — it’s probable. Here are a few other reasons to suggest the stock market might be in for a rough couple of years:
1. Ben Bernanke’s speech recently suggested that the U.S. economy is headed in the right direction. QE2, he claimed, was responsible for adding 700,000 full-time jobs. Although that sounds good, the cost of each new job comes to $850,000.
2. The rise in the Standard and Poor’s Index of 500 stocks under QE2 has mostly been a result of the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar, the price in which the shares are measured.
3. Housing prices continue to go down, and although the government says inflation is running at 3.1% annually, we all know inflation exceeds 3.1%.
4. Yale University professor and housing expert Robert Shiller expects the stock market to gain only between 2% and 3% annually over the next decade. He sees no resurgence of consumer spending because the “real” unemployment rate is 16%, and, he points out, housing prices continue to head south.
5. Seventy percent of the money borrowed in the worst week of our crisis (October 2008) was borrowed by foreign banks. Because the Fed refuses to be audited, we do not know how involved the Fed is with the debts of the rest of the world’s countries that are at risk of going into permanent default (Greece, Spain, Ireland, etc.). How much is the U.S. taxpayer at risk because of the obligations that the Federal Reserve has undertaken, in secret, on our behalf, outside of Congress’ authority?
Public debt has been the bane of governments throughout history. The great Austrian economist, Ludwig Von Mises, called this the “Crisis of Interventionism.” Interventionism aims at confiscating (stealing) the “surplus” of one part of the population and then giving it to the other part. Once this surplus is exhausted by total confiscation, a further continuation of the policy is impossible. The crisis of interventionism is summed up by the adage: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money!” It is not coincidental that growth of public debt fits hand-in-glove with large and invasive government.
For real recovery to take place there must be political reform. We’re in this mess because of unethical politics. There is the usual noise out of Washington that reform is on the way. The Democrats and the Republicans were complicit in creating today’s problems. So far, all “reform” proposals are designed for political expedience instead of reform. Reform can only come from a vastly smaller government. Otherwise, our government will continue to increase our public debt until further catastrophe occurs.
The wise investor will try to protect himself from the stock market. Gold and silver have a long way to go up in price, because the dollar has a long way to go down. Cash provides the patient investor with great future buying opportunities. For investors who cannot resist the stock market, A-plus growth stocks selling at low PEs and yielding more than 3% are Abbott Labs, Chevron, Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson.
George Rauch, Longboat Key, is chief executive officer of Bradenton-based General Propeller and a former Wall Street investment banker.
Currently 1 Response
- Excellent piece.
26 Tribute to Heroes Parade - Main St LWR
5:00 pm - 9:00 pm
28 Braden River Soccer Club Try-outs
29 LWRBA May Membership Lunch
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
31 May YLA Breakfast "Legendary Leaders"
7:30 am - 9:00 am | <urn:uuid:1da2e86d-3f58-456a-a90c-16ed77866794> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yourobserver.com/news/siesta-key/Opinion/0714201112870/Market-Watch-Debt-causes-direction-of-market-to-st | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956259 | 1,690 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Kingsport, Tennessee lies along the banks of the powerful Holston River in Sullivan County and extends into Hawkins County. Kingsport is a major city in the Tri-City Region, which includes Johnson City and Bristol in northeastern Tennessee, and the twin city of Bristol in southern Virginia. Kingsport showed a population of 44,905 in the 2000 Census.
If you’re heading to court in Kingsport, you should know that Tennessee’s legal system includes four trial courts: the Circuit Courts, which, as courts of general jurisdiction handle civil and criminal matters and hear appeals from the courts with limited jurisdiction; the Chancery Courts, which exclusively hear civil cases and generally handle cases that fall outside the traditional common-law actions; the Criminal Courts, located in 13 of TN’s 31 judicial districts, which serve as relief for heavy caseloads in other courts, hearing criminal cases and misdemeanor appeals from the lower courts; and the Probate Court, which hears individual estate cases but only operates in a few districts. Tennessee Rules of Civil Procedure are readily available to the public.
If you have a personal injury case in Tennessee, your claim will be heard in civil court. This Self-Help section of the TN Courts website will tell you what to expect in court. Once you’ve gone through a trial, you may have the right to appeal your personal injury case to the state’s Appeals Court or the Supreme Court. The Tennessee Court of Appeals and the Tennessee Supreme Court both convene in the cities of Jackson, Knoxville and Nashville, as required by the Tennessee State Constitution.
Kingsport prides itself on being a physically beautiful community. A 10-mile Greenbelt runs through the city, winding along the Holston River and through marshlands, meadows, gardens and historic neighborhoods. The 200-mile Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail began in Kingston, leading the way for countless Frontier Settlers. The lush Bays Mountain Park is America’s largest municipally-owned park, with 3,500 acres of nature preserve, a 44-acre lake, a nature center, museum, and planetarium. Also found in Kingston is TN’s most visited state park, the Warrior’s Path State Park, once used as a trading route and warpath for the Cherokee Nation.
Kingsport hosts the annual nine-day summer Fun Fest, which includes the Crazy 8′s Road Race, listed by the Blue Ridge Outdoor Magazine as one of the top five best road races in the South. The Southeast Tourism Society ranks Kingsport’s Fun Fest in the top-20 Events in the region. Well known for its hospitality and top-notch amenities, Kingsport consistently ranks among several privileged cities to hold Amateur Athletic Union National Championships. Kingsport donates a portion of the proceeds of these tournaments to the local area schools.
Kingsport has much to offer students and history buffs. Historic sites here include Allandale Mansion, often called Kingsport’s White House, the Netherland Inn and Boatyard Complex, Hammond House and The Exchange Place, a living history farm. Music of yesteryear rings out at the Old Tyme Fiddlers and Bluegrass Festival in the autumn.
Kingsport, Tennessee is a premier tourist destination and a fine place to live. Residents here pay no vehicle, personal property or state income tax. With one of the most affordable costs of living in the nation, exquisite natural beauty and friendly people, Kingsport is a great place to visit or live. | <urn:uuid:3ba0cebe-e32f-4f06-bbb1-c2d92505035f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ttands.com/Kingsport-Injury-Attorneys.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931366 | 717 | 1.6875 | 2 |
When We Discovered Our Playstation Hard Drive Was Too Small
Recently, I realized that the hard drive in our Playstation 3 needed replacing–because the old one was just too small.
Our PS3 is one of the original models–and had just a 80 gig hard drive. And an 80-gig drive doesn’t go far when you start downloading games and videos.
At first, the hard drive size wasn’t much of a problem because all we were using it for was game-saves–which take very little room–and game demos. But as time went on, we were starting to have to pick and choose which demos we could download because our hard drive was starting to fill up. And eventually, we even had to start deleting demos. But when the 80-gig hard drive became a major problem after the Playstation Network was hacked–and we took the Playstation Network up on their offer of a month of free Playstation Plus.
Playstation Plus members get lots of freebies–free themes for your PS3, free games for your PS3 and PSP (Playstation Portable), free mini-games, and full game trials for your PS3. This is AWESOME STUFF, and we were really excited–except that our old hard drive didn’t leave much room at all for us to download much.
Replacing Your Playstation 3 Hard Drive
1. Order a Replacement Drive
Selecting a Size for the PS3 Hard Drive Replacement
Fortunately, the price of hard drives has been coming down pretty steadily in recent years. These babies are way more affordable than they used to be!
Any 2.5″ SATA notebook computer hard drive should work in the Playstation 3. Notebook hard drives come in two different speeds: 5400 and 7200 rpm. Drives with less hard drive space may come in either speed–but once you get into drives with more space on them, they tend to only come in the 7200 rpm speed. And 7200 rpm drives tend to create more heat during normal operation–something you definitely want to avoid when it comes to choosing a replacement hard drive–especially considering Playstation is known for having problems with creating too much heat.
So what does all this mean? You’re probably better off sticking with a hard drive that runs at 5400 rpm to minimize the heat it will create during operation. In my research, the largest capacity 2.5″ notebook hard drive that runs at 5400 rpm is 750 gigs: check out the 750 Gig Hitachi Notebook Hard Drive I ordered from Amazon.com. Although this particular listing for the Hitachi drive is brand new and doesn’t have any customer reviews yet, many of Hitachi’s other 2.5″ notebook hard drives on Amazon have received exceptional customer reviews–so I can see that Hitachi is one of the best-performing brands.
You can also check out other 2.5-inch Notebook Hard Drives on Amazon.com.
2. Order an External Hard Drive
This drive should:
- be large enough to hold all the data on your old PS3 hard drive
- have a USB 2 connector so that you can connect it to your PS3
- be of FAT32 format. (Since many drives come pre-formatted for Windows, which means they’ll be formatted top NTSE, you can run a utility on your computer to change their formatting to FAT32.) HELPFUL HINT: both Windows and Mac computers will generally have formatting utilities–but the Mac’s utility seems a lot easier to use.
To hold the data left on my PS3 drive, I only NEEDED an external hard drive with 38 gigs of space. But the Western Digital 1.5 TB Drive I found was such a great value that I couldn’t resist. One and a half TB! That’s 1,500 gigs! A nice-sized drive, with excellent customer reviews, will give me room to back up all my photos and videos. ( You can order the Western Digital WD Elements 1.5 TB External Hard Drive from Amazon directly and get free Super-Saver shipping.)
3. Get the Right Screwdrivers
If you don’t already have them, order a size 00 precision Philips head screwdriver. This is the exact size you’ll need to remove the old hard drive from your Playstation 3. You’ll also need a very small flat head screwdriver to remove the door to your PS3′s hard drive. (Using the wrong-sized screwdriver can quickly cause screws to strip–definitely NOT something you want to have happen.)
Based on customer reviews and ratings I found during my research, I ended up buying a set of Felo Screwdrivers from
Amazon. The price was reasonable, and the set came with the Philips head size I needed, plus a conveniently tiny flat head screwdriver that worked perfectly for removing the hard drive cover plate on the Playstation. Another great selling point: according to Felo, these screwdrivers help to dissipate static electricity, which is the enemy of electronics and media-storage devices. Plus, Felo screwdrivers have a lifetime warranty.
A word of warning: although well-made, these screw drivers can become damaged if your screws are tight enough to become stripped, or if the screws are already damaged from having been previously overtightened. So use them carefully! (Fortunately, the lifetime warranty takes some of the worry out of this difficulty.)
4. Back Up the Data from your PS3 to the External Hard Drive
To do this, you’ll plug your external hard drive into your Playstation with a USB 2 cable. Then, go through the Playstation menu and activate the backup utility: you’ll find this utility in your Playstation menu under the System Settings submenu. Note: your Playstation will only recognize an external hard drive that’s been formatted to FAT32: NTSC formatted drives won’t show up at all. THIS STEP WILL TAKE A WHILE: for us, backing up 38 gigs of data took about 2 hours.
Helpful Hint: When to Delete Data, When to Save
Any games, plugins, and themes that you’ve previously downloaded from the Playstation Store can be re-downloaded once you upgrade your Playstation’s hard drive–so you may want to delete these items from your old hard drive rather than backing them up to the external drive and transferring back onto the new drive. Moving large amounts of data back and forth between drive will take a substantial amount of time–much more than simply re-downloading it once you’ve got the new drive in.
5. Remove the Old Hard Drive from Your Playstation 3
SAFETY ALERT: To avoid ELECTRICAL SHOCK, ALWAYS MAKE SURE YOUR PLAYSTATION IS UNPLUGGED before messing with the internal parts.This means uplug your Playstation from the wall AND unplug it from your TV / monitor.
- Using the flat head screwdriver, GENTLY pry off the door to the Playstation 3′s hard drive. It’s labeled with “HDD” on the outside, and is located on one of the end pieces of the unit.
- Grasping the little metal wire handle attached to the hard drive, shift it to the right. You’ll feel it “click” into its new position.
- Gently, pull the wire handle strait toward you. The hard drive should slide out easily–hold it by the edges to remove it the rest of the way. NOTE: pay close attention to the proper sled position, because you’ll need to make sure it’s in the same position when you replace it.
- Using your Philips head screwdriver, remove the four screws that hold the hard drive to the sled. (The sled is the bracket that holds the hard drive in place.) BE CAREFUL not to strip the screws. (This is the place where I had trouble, the first time around–I’ll post my solution to the problem in a later post.)
- Remove the old hard drive from the sled.
6. Replace Old PS3 Hard Drive With New One
- Gently place new 2.5″ notebook hard drive in the sled.
- Attach the new hard drive to the sled with the screws removed from the old drive. (You may also elect to replace these screws with brand new ones of the exact same size.)
- Carefully replace sled into the Playstation 3, making sure it goes in the same way it came out. NEVER FORCE IT! If it doesn’t slide back in without resistance, something is probably not aligned exactly right.
- Grasping the little metal handle, slide hard drive back to the left. You’ll here it click into position.
- Carefully replace cover plate over hard drive.
7. Restore Data to the New Playstation Hard Drive
After hooking your Playstation back up to power and the TV, plug the external hard drive back up to the Playstation. Using the backup utility on your Playstation menu, restore the data you saved on the external drive back to your (new) Playstation Drive. This will take about as long as it took to back the data up.
8. Enjoy Your New Hard Drive!
We replaced our hard drive about a week ago, with no difficulties since. The new Hitachi drive is actually quite a bit quieter than the one that was already in the Playstation. It also seems to run quite a bit cooler than the original drive, probably because it’s a newer line of product designed to use less energy–an added bonus! | <urn:uuid:1b0e08bc-2aa7-4ead-89a8-227d19f1ffc2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nindomom.com/2011/07/09/how-to-replace-your-playstation-3-hard-drive-a-detailed-guide-tips-and-tricks-upgrade-playstation-hard-drive/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93441 | 2,002 | 1.75 | 2 |
Radley Balko and Carlos Miller interviewed on NPR's Talk of the Nation about recording the police.
From the website:
July 8, 2010 The Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King resonated, in part, because it was caught on video. Now, most modern cell phones have video cameras. Many police departments struggle to draw the line between citizens' and journalists' rights to film arrests, and their officers' rights to privacy. | <urn:uuid:a764fd4b-63f5-40f5-83f6-6f9441d31376> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.freetalklive.com/node/11958/related_links | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955045 | 88 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Not long ago, Denver high schooler Erika Ruiz couldn't picture herself taking a college-level class. Now, she dreams of attending Stanford, Princeton or maybe Harvard.
About 1,700 miles to the east, Lauren Goh lives that dream: The recent Golden High School graduate enrolled at Harvard this year and navigates her freshman year with the confidence of a student familiar with the demands of a college schedule.
For both students, the dreams were powered by programs that give high school students an early taste of college — a concept called concurrent enrollment, which dates to 1981.
Now, new state law has streamlined existing programs in hope of expanding the pool of potential college students and offering those who might drop out a reason to stay in school.
By using their share of K-12 tax dollars for postsecondary courses, students reap economic benefits of paid-for college credit hours while getting an academic jump-start.
"It's the best bargain you can imagine for families," said Linda Bowman, president of Community College of Aurora and chairwoman of the committee that pursued the new legislation. "That's a piece of it. But the major driver to me was the whole issue of access for people who, for whatever reasons, hadn't put themselves in a frame of deciding early on to go to college."
It never occurred to Ruiz, a junior at Lincoln, that she might be ready for college-level work, even though she carries a 4.2 grade-point average.
Now that she's taking her third college-level class, in English composition, her mind-set has changed.
"I had some doubts in the beginning," she said. "Now, I have high expectations of myself."
Cost savings would be huge for her family, she said, but she likes the academic incentive that goes with her concurrent enrollment.
"We're poor," said Ruiz, "but this is a good program because if we fail the (college) class, we actually have to pay the class price.
Goh, 18, fit the profile of the high achiever who was the traditional target of concurrent enrollment. For two years, she took most of her classes at Red Rocks Community College instead of Golden High — where she still was elected student body president.
"High school is definitely a unique experience, but I'd had enough of it," Goh said. "At Red Rocks, there were people in their 60s I'd make friends with, from all walks of life. That was the appeal to me."
She earned her high school diploma and associate degree on the same day. Eventually, she faced a choice: Transfer her credits and begin as a junior at any number of schools, or enroll at Harvard for four years.
She chose the Ivy League course because "it's one of those experiences you can't pass up." But she credits her community college experience for providing the tipping point on her application.
The Harvard alumnus who interviewed Goh indicated that despite her unusually heavy academic load, dual enrollment weighed in her favor.
"He said that Harvard was looking for students who were either well-rounded or well- lopsided," she said. "He thought I was well-lopsided."
Eyes on career goals
The process begins with a high school striking a concurrent enrollment agreement with a postsecondary institution. With the help of counselors, students explore class options that move them toward career goals while
Some districts encourage concurrent enrollment more aggressively than others, said Scott Springer, who oversees Denver Public Schools' effort to promote postsecondary education.
That uneven response, he said, reflects the core of the old controversy: Concurrent enrollment programs divert state money to postsecondary institutions that otherwise would go directly to the K-12 schools.
The issue reached a crescendo in 2005, when the State Board of Education voted to disallow programs that provided funding for college with K-12 dollars using a fifth year of high school.
But two years later, the board voted unanimously to reverse that decision, with both Republicans and Democrats citing the importance of reducing the state's 30 percent dropout rate. Gov. Bill Ritter convened a council to explore ways of more effectively linking high school and college — an effort that resulted in last session's legislative makeover of concurrent enrollment, which sailed through on unanimous votes.
The number of 11th- and 12th-graders statewide who take college courses has risen gradually over the past several years to a little more than 5,000.
"We want to double the number of degrees and certificates earned by Colorado students," said Matt Gianneschi, a senior policy adviser in the governor's office. "It's a moral question: How can we enable every student to realize that goal?"
This year, high schools are gauging interest in a fifth-year program so the legislature can determine whether it's fiscally feasible to implement that option next year. It would allow qualified students to earn a diploma and postsecondary credential at the same time.
Scott Mendelsberg, who pioneered the fifth-year approach to funding college while principal at Lincoln High School, contends that the short-term hit to K-12 budgets will be outweighed by the long-term benefits — namely, kids will stay in school and graduate instead of adding to the dropout rate.
"In the long run, the more kids think that school is the answer for them, they'll stay," said Mendelsberg, now executive director of GEAR UP, a federally funded program that steers low-income students toward college.
The new legislation includes cost constraints, such as setting tuition reimbursement at community college levels.
Some high schools bring college classes into their buildings, while in other cases, students attend classes at community colleges, trade schools or four-year colleges.
Chasing college credits
At Martin Luther King Jr. Early College, which serves grades 6-12 in Green Valley Ranch, junior Gloria Valladares recently delivered a talk before eight other students in her college-level public-speaking class.
Ranked first in her class, she has been chasing college credits since learning of possibilities she hadn't known existed.
"It wasn't confidence I lacked," said Valladares, 16, "but I wasn't very informed about college. I always sort of planned it out as an option. Now, it's not an option. It's something I have to do."
Just a few miles south, Aurora Central High junior Irving Figueroa also has raised his expectations. Two years ago, he was pulling C's and D's — until a teacher took him aside and talked to him about his future.
"Flipping burgers," the 16-year-old recalled.
He decided to buckle down. Now he earns B's and C's and has accrued college credit that he hopes to transfer to Johnson & Wales University.
"I might get the first semester of my freshman year done by the time I get out of high school," said Figueroa, who dreams of opening an restaurant. "Some of my friends think I'm a nerd. I don't pay attention."
Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or [email protected]
How the program works
To deliver concurrent enrollment opportunities to students, high schools must first execute a cooperative agreement with a qualified institution of higher education. Then, students may enroll in courses through the following process:
1. Students talk to their guidance counselor and create an academic plan of study. The student's principal, counselor or teacher must approve the academic plan of study.
2. Once an academic plan of study is in place, a student must apply to the superintendent (or designee) of the school district to enroll in postsecondary courses.
3. If approved, the student may register for college courses.
THE ASCENT PROGRAM
Beginning in 2010, subject to legislative appropriation, high school seniors who have accumulated at least 12 college credits through concurrent enrollment may be eligible to continue as concurrently enrolled students for one year beyond their fourth year of high school. Students in this program may be eligible to earn both a high school diploma and a postsecondary credential at the same time.
Sources: House Bill 1313; Governor's Office of Policy and Initiatives | <urn:uuid:4ee7b2c6-3f48-43f5-b2cd-65ddf3b8b7b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.denverpost.com/frontpage/ci_13398454 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974326 | 1,694 | 1.632813 | 2 |
An £82.5m scheme is being launched today to give 18 - 24 year old entrepreneurs finance and support.
The scheme could potentially start over 30 thousand new businesses, in a move to boost enterprise and economic growth.
Any young people aged 18-24 accessing the StartUp Loans will receive expert and personal support to help develop a business plan and access training. Where the business plan is robust and approved, they will be able to access a loan, typically in the order of £2,500, with a repayment period of up to five years.
Prime Minister David Cameron said:
"StartUp loans are a fantastic opportunity for young people, not only to get the financial support they need, but also to give them the confidence to believe they can do it, that they can turn an idea into the next global brand."
The StartUp loans will be administered by a range of organisations that have experience in working with young people, including the Prince's Trust and Manchester-based Economic Solutions Group.
James Caan, one of the UK's best known entrepreneurs, has agreed to chair a new body to oversee the allocation of funds and to work with delivery partners to ensure the young people gain the maximum benefit from the support and finance on offer.
Young people looking for support and finance through the StartUp loans can register at www.startuploans.co.uk or http://businessinyou.bis.gov.uk, where they will receive regular updates and information.
The announcement comes on the day that Lord Young's report on enterprise is published. The report sets out the UK's enterprise landscape and offers guidance on starting a new business. A PDF of the report can be viewed here. | <urn:uuid:452d8f92-47c4-49d1-bfc8-40d71d030bc4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.conservatives.com/News/News_stories/2012/05/80m_StartUp_loans_for_young_people.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95756 | 347 | 1.703125 | 2 |
I think there’s a good case to be made for a necessary being (NB), driven by an argument from contingency. But what else can we say about the NB?
I think a lot about the nature of this NB, and have been oscillating between different conceptions. At one pole is a conception of a chaotic and indifferent mega-cosmos which contains every non-contradictory thing as an actual or latent part. Then, I consider incrementally “tamer” NB’s which are shaped by additional necessary features.
To start, it certainly seems plausible that a broad range of logical and mathematical truths are necessary. Perhaps all reality must contain some minimum degree of order, so it can be grasped by reason (although I don’t see why our local physical laws should be thought specifically necessary). Much more controversially, my study of the mind/body problem leads me to suspect all concrete existence is necessarily experiential or proto-experiential in character. And, going further on a limb, where there is experience, there is value: perhaps value and morals are somehow grounded in the nature of the necessary being.
But this project of “taming Chaos” gets increasingly problematic.
Coming at this from the other direction, most people who posit an NB are theists who believe in a personal God with various attributes who sometimes acts as an agent within the world. I don’t see right now how I’d ever get to this conception.
What seems most clear is that the NB must be the maximum instance of existence. Any more specific or idiosyncratic depiction of God runs the risk of being inconsistent with this. (I thought Mark Johnston, in his book Saving God, is good on this point, when he argues that if God is the “highest one”, any devotion to a more specific and hence lesser deity can be seen as idolatry.) This is where “divine simplicity” breaks down, too: the only arguably “simple” NB is the metaphysically maximal one.
Once you layer God with attributes which are derived from human properties, and most obviously if you make God an actor in an earthly drama (rather than him “in whom we live and move and have our being”), it seems clear you’re no longer talking about the NB.
Comments welcome -- this is difficult stuff! | <urn:uuid:33f352b6-58b4-4d4f-bc58-6c7faa9ca01b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://guidetoreality.blogspot.com/2010/09/necessary-beings.html?showComment=1284933412303 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952028 | 495 | 1.617188 | 2 |
CHAMPAIGN — The city council could decide this week if it wants to give more public access to food trucks looking to sell treats on the streets.
Officials launched a pilot program this summer that allows registered trucks to operate on public property for longer periods of time than city laws would normally allow.
Although city officials have yet to say specifically what the changes might be, council members could give administrators the green light to start drafting a new law that is more accommodating to mobile restaurants when they meet at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Champaign City Building, 102 N. Neil St.
"I'm happy that food trucks can work with the city and that they're starting to work with food trucks," said Zach Ware, owner of the Crave Truck, a mobile "street waffle" vendor.
The existing city ordinance treats food trucks as peddlers — meaning if they want to operate on public property, they have to move to a different location every five minutes or so.
Several food trucks already operate in the Champaign-Urbana area, including Hawaiian Ice and Mas Amigos, which operates primarily on private property zoned for commercial purposes where the trucks do not have to move every few minutes.
And then there's Derald's, which operates at parking meters in Urbana on the University of Illinois campus. That city has an ordinance similar to Champaign's, but without the five-minute restriction.
But of all the mobile restaurants in Champaign-Urbana, Ware's Crave Truck may have taken the most advantage of Champaign's pilot program.
Ware said he thinks the accommodations the city has arranged are great, and he hopes they stick around.
However, according to a memo to the city council, food trucks can sometimes conflict with "brick-and-mortar" restaurants.
The two businesses often work in direct competition with each other, and "mobile food trucks do not pay real estate taxes, and their use of city streets and public parking lots might be considered a 'public subsidy,'" according to the memo.
Sometimes food trucks are noisy, and they can occupy needed parking spots, it said.
The memo also lists benefits, and city officials have said food trucks can add another layer to the downtown and Campustown areas.
"Mobile food trucks often add to the vibrancy and street life of an area (especially an entertainment district like a downtown)," according to the memo, "and provide a festive feel for visitors to the area." | <urn:uuid:b30dca3d-9ac6-4ee2-8919-fb9e4f52bf86> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.news-gazette.com/print/1039411 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959426 | 511 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Take a magazine. Put an iPad behind an advert on a printed page. Behold: moving pictures.
This is one of the latest advertisements from Lexus, and in reality all the paper is doing is acting as a screen, with images projected on to it from behind. Just as huge buildings have become popular film backdrops using projection mapping technology, now simple printed pages are doing the same thing. | <urn:uuid:fb67cc6a-a6a6-4b9a-bb40-11ccec6f2133> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cultofmac.com/tag/projection-mapping/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960091 | 81 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Here’s one thing President Barack Obama and Republicans actually agree on: Mental health has to be a big part of the gun violence debate in Obama’s second term — because people with serious mental illness shouldn’t have guns.
Obama thinks he has the perfect solution: the mental health provisions in Obamacare.
But Republicans don't want to give him any credit — and that’s a lousy starting point for even a small bipartisan breakthrough on guns and mental health, the one place many advocates had hoped they could find common ground.
(PHOTOS: Politicians speak out on gun control)
The Obama administration is playing up how the law will make access to treatment easier by extending health coverage to millions of Americans — the start to curbing shooters with a history of mental health problems like Jared Lee Loughner in Tuscon, Ariz., Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech, or James Eagan Holmes in Aurora, Colo.
But that strategy presents a problem for Obama: By tying hopes for mental health and gun control in his second term to the most divisive achievement of his first term, he's left himself little hope of capitalizing on a rare moment of agreement on mental health to move a bill through Republican-controlled House.
Even the Republicans in Congress most likely to support a mental health push aren't rushing to Obama's side to defend the health care law.
Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), a psychologist who’s the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee, says he had “hoped for more” from Obama on mental health issues, and he’s going to hold hearings on how to improve the nation’s mental health system because “the underlying cause in mass tragedies like Newtown is that the perpetrator had an untreated or undertreated mental illness.”
(PHOTOS: Supreme Court upholds health care law)
Murphy spokeswoman Amy Larkin says the congressman doesn’t have other specific solutions in mind — yet. She says he’s just going to talk to as many mental health experts as possible to find out what works and what doesn’t, and that “he really wants to take his time” before rushing into legislation.
Health care advocates also admit that any package would just be the start of a long process.
“I’m very, very positive about the fact that we’re having a national discussion about mental health, but it should be viewed as the beginning of the process, not the end of the process,” said Liza Gold, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Georgetown University School of Medicine.
There are central unknowns: It's unclear how affordable the health care reform law will make mental health coverage or what it'll include.
And then there are other questions about what should be done about the small subset of people with serious mental illness who could be dangerous, but don’t think they need treatment. That is sure to set off a hot-button debate over personal rights vs. public safety — and where these people would get treatment in the first place.
Obamacare isn’t the only way the gun control proposals address mental health. Obama is also talking about everything from putting out final rules on mental health parity, which is supposed to equalize the coverage of mental health and other health services, to training teachers to recognize signs of mental illness.
But the administration says Obama’s health care law — which it calls “one of the largest expansions of mental health coverage in a generation” — has to be part of the answer, to help people with serious mental illness get treatment before they become dangerous.
“That’s part of the picture. It’s an important part, because it addresses the kinds of people who might be in and out of health coverage,” said Anita Everett of the American Psychiatric Association, who’s an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.
Top Republicans are saying they want to take a broader look at the issue of mental illness and guns too, but they’re being silent on whether the hated Obamacare law could be part of the solution.
Mental health groups, however, are cheering the Obama’s health care law as a big step forward, saying it could help expand coverage to young adults — the age group where the first signs of serious mental illness often show up.
“These people are often not in a position to get coverage through the workplace, or they may not be poor enough to qualify for Medicaid,” said Debbie Plotnick, senior director of state policy at Mental Health America. “The Affordable Care Act will help people who really would have fallen through the cracks.”
The next steps, though, raise more troubling questions. And that’s where the sensitive politics of mental health could make it harder for even the experts themselves to see eye to eye — much less Obama and the Republicans.
For one thing, just having mental health coverage doesn’t always mean people can afford their share of it. A typical practice is for health insurance to cover only a percentage of the “allowed charges,” meaning the patient’s own costs can still add up. And they’re likely to pay more if the doctor isn’t part of the insurer’s network.
Aetna, for example, outlines this example for its individual and family coverage: If an out-of-network psychiatrist bills $200 for a 30-minute session, only $150 of that would be an “allowed” charge, and Aetna would cover 60 percent of that — so the patient would have to pay $110 out of his or her pocket.
“It’s really expensive to maintain someone with severe mental illness with private insurance,” said Gold.
How much will that change in the future? For people who get their insurance through their employers, that depends on the final rules for the 2008 mental health parity law, which the Obama administration now says it will put out next month.
But another big question is how generous the mental health benefits will have to be in Obamacare’s new health insurance exchanges, where individuals and small businesses would get their coverage. Those details could become more clear when the administration releases its final rule on the law’s “essential health benefits,” which it’s also promising next month.
And then there are the issues where Obama and Congress are going to get conflicting advice from the mental health experts themselves.
What should be done, for example, about the person with severe mental illness who doesn’t think he or she needs treatment? Some groups are pushing for another look at ways to require patients to get the treatment if there are clear signs that they could be dangerous. The problem, of course, is determining how clear those signs have to be — and where’s the line between protecting the public and just locking patients up with no way to treat them.
The Treatment Advocacy Center, a group based in Arlington, Va., is pushing for a new look at state laws that require someone to be “imminently violent or suicidal” before they can be committed for inpatient mental health treatment against their will. “That leaves out a lot of people who may become violent or suicidal — it’s just not provable yet,” said Brian Stettin, the center’s policy director.
The group also wants broader use of court-ordered “assisted outpatient treatment” for people with histories of violence or arrests. The best known example is New York’s “Kendra’s law”, which Stettin worked on as an aide to then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. And it wants to make sure states provide enough psychiatric beds to treat people who can’t live safely in the community.
“That’s where the president’s recommendations fall short, in our view. They really don’t say anything about how they’re going to get mental health care to people who don’t understand that they need it in the first place,” said Stettin.
But the issue of requiring treatment against the patients’ will is a sore subject within the mental health community — pitting the doctors, many of whom want stronger laws, against the advocates, who see dangerous civil liberties problems if the definition of a person who’s “likely” to become a threat becomes too broad.
“That starts really infringing on people’s rights. How do you define ‘likely’?” Plotnick asked.
It’s also not very useful, she said, at a time when there are fewer community hospitals available to treat patients with severe mental illness and insurance companies often don’t want to pay for a long period of inpatient treatment anyway.
“You can legislate ways to pick up more people against their will, but without some way to help them, you haven’t solved the problem,” said Plotnick.
There’s also a general sensitivity about putting so much focus on people with mental illness — which Obama has tried to acknowledge in his public statements.
But it’s on the agenda because of its possible role in the most high-profile mass shootings, like the ones in Tucson and Aurora. But mental health groups point out that mental illness isn’t anywhere close to dominant factor in most violence. The American Psychiatric Association’s Paul Appelbaum told Vice President Joe Biden’s gun violence task force that 96 percent of all violence in the United States is committed by people with no mental illness.
And Obama picked up one of the group’s other points, about how people with mental illness are more likely to be victims, in his speech at the White House on Wednesday: “We will make sure mental health professionals know their options for reporting threats of violence — even as we acknowledge that someone with a mental illness is far more likely to be a victim of violent crime than the perpetrator.”
So whatever else Obama and Congress do on mental health — focusing on the small subset of people who could commit horrible crimes — there will be plenty of ways the dialogue could get tripped up before it even begins.
“It’s a double-edged sword that mental health is on everyone’s minds now,” said Plotnick. “It’s on everyone’s minds for the right reasons and the wrong reasons.”
This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 6:30 p.m. on January 17, 2013. | <urn:uuid:ccf64c92-175c-47aa-8b0b-dd39c3824de8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=789FC221-120A-4B1F-9587-24AF4C8F4257 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959294 | 2,221 | 1.679688 | 2 |
To someone like myself in the US startup community, the idea of the Samwer brothers sounds terrifying. Imagine you're a startup founder and your new company is just taking off. Suddenly, a Samwer clone comes along and gobbles up your European market way before you can get there - you'll end up having to buy it later for a lot of money. This has happened to Groupon with CityDeal, and it looks like it's happening to Airbnb and Zappos.
Why does their approach work?
Let's say your Silicon Valley based startup just became successful and proved out their business model. Now you has to deal with fundraising, hiring, and scaling to new users. International expansion gets put off until you have more time to breathe. Meanwhile, the Samwer brothers activate the clone machine. While you're struggling to recruit engineers in the talent jungle of Silicon Valley, the Samwer brothers redeploy existing resources and follow the models they've learned from other startups.
Another key factor is that it's easy for US founders to overlook opportunities in other developed countries. I'm not sure if this is because of the psychological draw of American exceptionalism or a genuine lack of awareness of the Internet landscape in other countries, but it's a clear blind spot. Germany, the Samwer brothers' home base, is a great country to target: High purchasing power, high-speed Internet widely available[*], and a large target market of people who all speak the same language and are technophile.
Finally, Germany has a great talent pool of technical people and a comparative dearth of interesting tech companies to work for: If you're a talented engineer, you can't go work for Airbnb or Zappos, so why not go work for the respective Samwer clone?
I've always believed that great entrepreneurs find and exploit the shortcuts to success in a system. It turns out that taking established business ideas from the US to Germany is one of these shortcuts, and you have to respect the Samwers for finding it.
[*] To illustrate, my brother lives in a small town in Germany and his Internet connection is substantially faster than what I can get from Comcast near downtown San Francisco. | <urn:uuid:72ff6e3d-6494-4f19-b9cd-54e0c9edc560> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2012/03/samwer-brothers.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96128 | 444 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Latinos and President Huckabee
We think a good case can
be made that the very people
who will decide the next
election are only being
addressed obliquely, and even
then, only in a negative way.
According to a recent poll conducted by The New
York Times, the No. 1 issue driving Republican
voters in Iowa was, overwhelmingly, immigration.
The word “amnesty,” which Ronald Reagan used
to describe his sweeping immigration reform in
1987, is now an epithet. The winner in Iowa, former
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, made a leap in one
week from his righteous debate statement “In all
due respect, we are a better country than to punish
children for what their parents did” to announcing
his plan to force between 12 million and 20 million
undocumented workers to register within 120 days
or face deportation and banishment for 10 years.
The growing virulence of the Republican talk
about “walls” and “lawbreakers” has led to the GOP
losing every bit of Latino support it benefited from
in the 2000 elections. Documented Latino immi-
grants and their progeny understand that hate talk
doesn’t discriminate between those with documents
and those without.
There’s a lesson here for the Democrats. Al-
though we do see a link between the good will gen-
erated by white voters in Iowa who supported Sen.
Barack Obama and white people nationwide, there
is no evidence that this translates in any significant
way to Latino voters.
The Democratic Party, which could benefit from
the negative feelings the Republicans have gener-
ated, doesn’t seem to have either the conviction,
the insight or possibly the courage to speak plainly
about immigration. Perhaps they feel that the
negatives outweigh the potential positives in this
Bad idea: As is the case in selling any product,
the absence of a negative is only a compelling
case for commodity pricing. If Latinos come out
and vote for president, it is likely we will see a
Democratic victory. However, negative feelings for
Republicans are not enough to get Latinos to take
action and get off the couch to vote against them.
Translating a web site into Spanish isn’t going to
move the needle.
That’s why there may be a good case to be made
for getting used to the concept of President Hucka-
bee at the current juncture.
Partners and Cofounders | <urn:uuid:a1515186-c83e-4cf9-b18f-0e2c698395b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.diversityinc-digital.com/diversityincmedia/200801?pg=10 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943157 | 538 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Also, states like Jammu and Kashmir and those in the North East have cited logistics problems in implementing the decision to limit the number of subsidised cylinders to six per household in a year, he said.
"They have gone by some arithmetic that on an average only six cylinders are enough (for a household). This is arithmetic, (but) there is also a chemistry, which they have not done," Moily told NDTV in Bangalore.
Stating that the government has deregulated many things, he said the decision to raise the cap rests with the oil companies.
"This (raising cap) is a matter the oil PSUs will have to consider... we have given a lot of liberty of oil companies, we (the oil ministry) do not want to take decision," he said.
"Of course," was his reply when asked if there were demands to raise the cap. "Our AICC spokesperson has said there should be an increase in the cap and many political parties have also said that."
"Some of the states like Jammu and Kashmir say logistics is a real problem for them. Putting a cap has put a lot of hardship. Many of North Eastern State Chief Ministers have also raised (the issue)," he said. | <urn:uuid:1f76ae7c-972a-4fa6-ae7a-7b519bdf6a1a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/954010.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.991119 | 253 | 1.539063 | 2 |
How do I get rid of cattails and phragmites? Fran – Disco, TN
Rough Around the Edges?
As you’ve enjoyed your pond over the spring and summer, all of a sudden you begin to see that our pond have built what seems to be an impenetrable wall of Cattails and Phragmites. No worries! Emergent weeds won’t ruin your summer fun. Here are the right tools to get even!
Treating emergent weeds in your pond is a two step process. You will want to focus on dealing with your existing growth first. You can kill Cattails and shoreline grasses down to the root by spraying them directly with Avocet PLX. If you are dealing more with Phragmites, Primrose or Loosestrife then you will see better results using Kraken mixed with Cide-Kick. Make sure you are spraying the plants when they are alive and actively growing so that the aquatic herbicide is carried throughout the plant’s root system. A Tank Sprayer is a great way to apply these aquatic herbicides. Also note if the emergent weed growth is very thick, a couple applications may be needed to gain complete control. Once you see all of the target weeds brown and wilt you can cut them down and drag them away with a Weed Cutter and Pond & Beach Rake.
Once the weeds are cleared away from the edge of the pond you will want to focus on keeping them from growing back. While you can not keep every cattail seed from blowing into your pond, you can extinguish their food sources to deter then from making a repeat performance. Apply some MuckAway pelletized bacteria around the shallow areas of your pond to help digest any nutrient-rich slime that has accumulated on the bottom of the pond over time. This layer of muck acts as fertilizer for new weed growth, smells bad, and as if you needed another reason, it feels terrible between your toes when you are swimming in the pond. Aquatic weeds can also use sunlight as a means to grow so you can benefit from using Pond Dye to shade the pond as well. Not only will you reduce the amount of sun exposure your pond receives you can also choose a color that accents your pond and improves the appearance of the water body.
Some people enjoy the look and coverage that emergent weeds like Cattails provide. If you have considered keeping a few around for aesthetic purposes rest assured it is absolutely harmless to do so. You can still control and maintain these areas of growth using Avocet and Kraken, just be sure to mark off boundaries to keep the weeds from slowly creeping their way back out into the pond and out of control.
POND TALK: Has a wall formed between you and your pond? How did you gain the upper hand over Cattails, Phragmites or other emergent weeds?
Filed under: Cattails, Emergent Weeds, Phragmites, Pond & Lake, Weed Identification Tagged: | Cattails, controlling cattails, controlling emergent grasses, controlling phragmites, Loosestrife, Phragmites, Primrose | <urn:uuid:f0b72524-5814-49b1-b481-e83db9f4420a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.thepondguy.com/2010/08/27/how-do-i-get-rid-of-cattails-and-phragmites-%E2%80%93-pond-lake-q-a-%E2%80%93-week-ending-august-28th/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=aa068c7847 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93934 | 664 | 1.835938 | 2 |
June 7th, 2005
A new PR survey in some of the newspapers this week suggests teenage girls would prefer to be glamour models than nurses, doctors or teachers.
The ‘study’ (to promote a mobile entertainment company), asked girls aged 15-19 if they’d like to be someone like Abi Titmuss, Germaine Greer or Anita Roddick.
Perhaps not surprisingly 63% stated they’d like to be a glamour model.
A closer look at the ‘data’ tells a slightly different story. The girls didn’t really opt for the glamour model choice. After all, only 7% said they wanted to be like Jordan. However, teenage girls currently know Abi Titmuss as the star of ‘Celebrity Love Island’. So it’s likely respondents were stating they wanted to be a celebrity, rather than a glamour model.
This is also probably why they didn’t identify with Germaine Greer or Anita Roddick, older women teenage girls may not have heard of, or certainly don’t see as ‘famous’. The creators of this ‘survey’ obviously didn’t know their sex role models though, since Germaine Greer was a sexual trailblazer for many women (and not averse to posing nude in magazines), whilst Roddick’s daughter runs the upmarket sex store Coco de Mer.
Had the survey asked teenage girls to pick between glamour models and other young celebrities – film stars, sportswomen or television presenters, then perhaps a different result again might have emerged – with non-glamour celebrities favoured. This survey implies glamour modelling is the must have career for teenage girls, but the reality is this ‘survey’ forced them to answer in such a way.
And whilst we’re on that subject, did any newspaper reporting this ‘study’ question the ethics of a survey company asking underage girls if they’d like to be glamour models or lap dancers?
Although it’s a poor (and highly unethical) piece of ‘research’, this story does allow debate on career choices for girls.
In an era when Abi Titmuss can command for one magazine column, the equivalent of four to six times a nurse or teachers annual salary, it’s hardly surprising girls would aim for a career that pays well and seems glamorous.
And this trend also has an impact on those within the education or health professions. Apart from our abysmal salaries, there’s the issue of glamour models moving into the areas of journalism, sex education, and relationship advice. Jodie Marsh and Abi Titmuss have both hosted advice columns in lad’s magazines, and more glamour models are following suit. None are qualified to offer advice, and the information provided either by the model or staffer who writes the column, is frequently misleading or dangerous.
So all those sex educators, nurses, or academics out there that could offer quality information (at the fraction of the cost) are overlooked because they’re not famous.
And being famous is the key.
As this ‘survey’ found – 89% of respondents wanted a job where they’d be recognised and a celebrity, whilst only 11% thought they might like to achieve with little recognition.
Who could blame them? If you word a survey question like that what other answer could you expect? And yet there’s a point here. I, like most academics, can vouch for the draining effect that achievement without recognition (or pay) has.
I don’t for one minute believe the results of this survey, but other research suggests increasingly teenagers list ‘being famous’ as a career option. They don’t list a specific profession, nor mention being talented, happy, or qualified. They just want to be famous. What are the implications for their emotional well being when it dawns on them this is unlikely to happen?
I’d like to believe if more coverage were given to other women in different careers, alongside glamour models and other celebrities, that they too could become role models. I’ve no objection to women wanting to be glamour models, but it’s a shame if that’s all we’re permitted to aspire to. If other professions were given half as much attention or endorsement, people would be keen to pick them. That said any discussions on this issue have to be carefully handled as it becomes very easy to start blaming and shaming women who are glamour models and ignore wider issues about media, PR and youth aspirations.
And if your choice was a job where you’d be given recognition, decent pay, and satisfaction, people would be more likely to pick that career. I know I would.
Update September 2012
This study has become what Sarah Ditum refers to as a Zombie Statistic (as in it won’t die). It was cited as evidence of sexualisation of young women in the 2012 Home Office Report and continues to appear in other reports and media coverage in debates on sexualisation (usually with a slut shaming subtext). When BBC Panorama investigated sexualisation in 2010 they were unable to find evidence of this survey even being completed. So it seems it wasn’t a case of a duff study being misrepresented, but actually a situation where a survey was NEVER EVEN UNDERTAKEN. This is therefore not a ‘statistic’ from a dodgy survey, but a completely fabricated piece of data. And clearly one that should be challenged at all costs. | <urn:uuid:50286a79-3416-4327-bc93-f94eeb4b9dca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.drpetra.co.uk/blog/glamorous-careers-for-girls/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96018 | 1,182 | 1.773438 | 2 |
I think you might be confusing "push" and "SMS".
Push allows an email client to receive a message shortly after it has been sent, without waiting for a "fetch" window at n minutes.
If you just want all mail to show up as SMS (text message), you can use Gmail's built-in forwarding to achieve this. It will forward the email as soon as it is received, and all SMS messages are delivered in a "push"-y manner, so this should do what you want.
- Open Gmail's "Mail settings"
- Select the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab
- Click the button to "Add a fowarding address" and enter your phone's SMS text number (you can find a very comprehensive list of carrier email-to-SMS addresses here: http://www.emailtextmessages.com/)
- Verify that you own the address (they will send a verification code to the address, and you'll enter it in Gmail)
- Select to "Forward a copy of incoming mail to" that address you just entered
- Choose to "keep Gmail's copy in the inbox" if you would also like to be able to access your email the traditional way
You don't need to sign up for any third-party service, it's free, and you'll get your SMS messages immediately.
If you only want to forward a subset of your email, you can set that up in Gmail as a filter with a rule that forwards to your SMS email address.
Keep in mind the limitations of SMS, though. The theoretical maximum length for an SMS is 255 concatenated 160 character messages, but most carriers will limit it to only a few messages -- so you might lose a lot of body text on longer emails. But it will serve as good, fast notification that a new email has arrived. | <urn:uuid:678661cd-ece5-40df-aeaf-1911d377fc6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/13713/is-there-an-iphone-app-that-can-give-me-a-push-notification-of-a-new-email?answertab=votes | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954308 | 385 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Tue 10th Jan 2012 09:40 | Back
Queenslanders are set to be become better equipped to prepare healthy meals at home as Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food Mobile Kitchen will travel throughout Queensland teaching basic cooking classes. The Good Foundation today announced that the purpose built kitchen classroom on wheels will commence its 2012 Program starting in Logan on Friday 20th January 2012. Developed with the support of the Queensland Government and electrical retailer The Good Guys, the 14m long Truck will travel to metro and regional communities teaching Jamie’s philosophy on food and inspiring people back into the kitchen.
“Based on current trends, 3.7 million Queensland adults will be overweight or obese by 2020 and our Government is determined to do all we can to turn those figures around,” Health Minister, Geoff Wilson says. “Obesity and chronic disease is largely preventable. About 4000 premature deaths could be prevented each year in Queensland simply by changing the lifestyles of Queenslanders.”
“This partnership is about giving Queenslanders the tools and information to help themselves by learning basic cooking skills and building people’s confidence in the kitchen, empowering them to make better choices about food.”
“There is an urgent need to educate Queenslanders about preparing nutritious meals and help them to lead long, healthy lives, and this program will greatly assist us in this as it travels around the state,” Geoff Wilson said.
Jamie’s Ministry of Food Truck will offer a five-week cooking course, comprising of one 90-minute cooking class per week. Participants throughout the State will learn Jamie’s hints and shortcuts to cooking simple, healthy and tasty meals using fresh ingredients. The course also covers meal planning, budgeting and shopping tips as well as key nutritional information.
“The truck will go into a scheduled location for 11 weeks and comes complete with a team of dedicated Food Trainers. Each class can hold up to eight participants and is completely hands-on so participants get to see, smell, feel and taste everything they cook," Jamie’s Ministry of Food Australia Program Director, Alicia Peardon says.
“A truck is such an incredible asset for the Ministry of Food because it allows these life-changing cooking classes to reach loads of different communities, even if they’re quite remote. It just shows that Ministry of Food Australia is doing everything it can to help as many people as possible.” Jamie Oliver says.
The Queensland Government was the first state to partner with Jamie Oliver’s highly successful Ministry of Food program, committing up to $2.5 million over four years to support its delivery through The Good Foundation.
Jamie’s Ministry of Food was born out of the wartime food shortage and rationing crisis. These days it’s a different type of crisis: it’s about tackling the obesity crisis this country is faced. Cooking skills used to be passed down through the generations but now that chain has been broken. A rise in busy working families, the popularity of convenience foods and a lack of compulsory food education in schools has resulted in a generation of people who have not been taught the basics of cooking.
About the author: Alicia Peardon is the Programe Director, Jamie's Ministry of Food
Discuss cooking and more. Register | <urn:uuid:95725d78-d97f-4a82-a3e9-b41448aff538> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jamieoliver.com/au/jamies-ministry-of-food/news.php?title=jamie-oliver-s-mobile-kitchen-to-roll-in | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946625 | 675 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Your next phone: A 6-inch 'phablet'
Hot gadget is a combination of a phone and tablet
Last Updated: 128 days ago
You may have a hard time believing this one, but your next gadget may be a combination phone and tablet.
The next big tech device is expected to be the "phablet," a combination of smartphone and tablet.
Looks Goofy, But....
Have you ever seen someone walking around talking into a tablet? It looks funny at first.
But stop laughing: You may be doing this in a couple of years. It's already a rage in Japan, which often sets trends ("Hello Kitty," anyone?).
Phablets are also called "fat phones," hence the "phab" part.
Think of the advantage: Not only does it save $200 (average phone cost), but it eliminates the need to carry two separate devices, since most of us no longer talk much on our phones anymore.
And the huge success of the Samsung Galaxy Note -- a large smartphone -- indicates more are headed here.
Doesn't That Stink?
But from the "doesn't that stink" file, the fact that many men will not like the idea of carrying a phablet.
A small tablet like the iPad Mini or Kindle might appeal to women, as it fits in their purse. But It won't fit in a man's pants pocket, unless you wear cargo pants to work.
Which will then lead to the next trend: More and more "man purses," to carry that phablet.
Apple Dipping a Toe in the Water
Apple is already making the move: It has just announced it will start selling an iPad Mini with a built-in cellphone in China later this year.
Apple has no plans -- yet -- to sell it in the US. But if it continues losing market share to Samsung, watch for an iPad Mini phone very soon. Tech bloggers say the iPad Mini is almost designed to be a phablet.
But it will face a lot of competition from Samsung, which has a big head start.
Copyright 2013 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:d6642b70-ec92-4a65-a1ff-f4e260cd8605> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theindychannel.com/news/daily-extras/your-next-phone-a-6-inch-phablet | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943777 | 462 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Some links are the redheaded stepchildren of the link building world. They are considered the low-hanging fruit, or even the spoiled fruit, but they're nowhere near the pick of the bunch. But even though we'd never put apples from the ground into a pie, they are good for making cider.
A few bad apples can spoil the whole cart, but with these links the predominance of bad fruit in these groups has made it easy to dismiss the whole shipment. But we don't have to.
No one should build an SEO campaign around any of these methodologies, but they aren't entirely the wasteland we often consider them to be. In spite of being the untouchables of links, in the right perspective, there are some redeeming qualities for even the links nobody loves.
- Why They Have a Bad Rap: Nofollows don't pass power. The nofollow tag actually says to search engines, "I don't vouch for this link." That means none of the usual benefits of a link pass on to the site being linked to. So because these links won't help a website with their search engine rankings, they get dismissed as useless.
- Reason For Redemption: So what if nofollowed links aren't going to impact your search engine rankings? That doesn't mean they can't be helpful.
The original intent of a link was to send people from one place to another, not spiders. So even when you remove the secondary function you still have the initial intent. If a link is given, and well deserved, it can easily drive traffic to your website, hopefully interested traffic.
Nofollowed links also offer additional brand exposure. Yes, direct links will do all of these things too, which is why when given a choice we always want our links without the nofollow attribute. But just because a link doesn't help us rank, doesn't mean it's a complete loss.
- Why They Have a Bad Rap: If blog commenting was a basketball game, spammers took the ball, the court, and the net, threw them in a trash compactor, and ruined the game for everybody. Most blog comment links don't pass any power and for good reason: they're abused and violated more frequently than they're used constructively. So now blog commenting as link building is a joke, because it's automated, pointless, and sometimes just reading them makes you want a shower.
- Reason For Redemption: If you use blog comments to offer genuine feedback on a blog post it's actually very valuable. How do you introduce yourself to a powerful blogger? Commenting on their work is a great way to break the ice.
Maybe they won't notice you the first time you do it, but if you hang out long enough and offer genuine knowledge or interesting insight into the conversation, you're bound to catch someone's attention. And often, it won't be just the person behind the blog. The community of readers who see your input may be intrigued to find out more about you, leading to traffic on your site.
But the benefits of blog comments can only be gained from commenting in the purest form. If you use a generic, barely English, template comment with a keyword masquerading as a name, you're wasting your time -- and annoying everybody.
- Why They Have a Bad Rap: Link trades got popular a long time ago, when everybody was swapping links like swingers swapped spouses in the '70s. It didn't matter what your site was about because everyone had a dirty links page they were willing to give space to anybody who was willing to link back. The free love age of link exchanges pretty much dirtied the process for everyone.
- Reason For Redemption: When a reciprocal link is natural, it isn't a bad thing at all. An organic link exchange usually happens when two sites reference each other in a reasonable context. When site A links to a great article on Site B and site B links to site A to show their visitors where they've been referenced on other sites, that pattern is motivated by human behavior and self-interest.
But the focus here isn't simply the link, it's the information the link provides. When you get back to the root of it, those reciprocal links are extremely valuable. They lead to partnerships and collaborations, and they tie like-minded, like-themed, comparably-authoritative sites together. So those kinds of link exchanges may not be the biggest rankings boosters, but they can lead to other great things.
- Why They Have a Bad Rap: The thing about directories is that most of them are pretty useless. "SEO friendly" directories usually accept most any site, although many of them draw the line at porn. The links you get are often indirect and not cached -- or even if they are, pass so little power that they do very little, if anything, to impact rankings.
- Reason For Redemption: It's like shopping for clothes on the clearance rack -- if you're willing to wade through the crap that no one would ever want, you might just find something awesome. When you take the time to sift through all the different directories out there, you may discover that there are a few that are worth getting listed in.
Local directories, niche directories, and small, human reviewed directories that people actually utilize could send traffic. Signing up for a few directories may also be a quick way to help get a new site cached.
Most directories aren't worth paying for, but in some cases, it may not be the worst thing. Whether it's free or paid, always check the listing pages of any directory to make sure the links are direct and the pages are recently cached.
It also helps to get some ideas about the traffic the directory gets, before deciding if it's worth the time or money. Directory listings aren't a sustainable link building method but they're worth dabbling in and conducting your own research.
Off-Topic & Non-Keyword Anchor Text Links
- Why They Have a Bad Rap: When a link comes from an off-topic site or has random anchor text it doesn't help our ranking goals. So these links are looked down on, maybe not as much as some of the others on this list, but they still don't get much respect.
- Reason For Redemption: Maybe these links aren't really helping a site in terms of the SERPs, but they do bring something to the table. First, we need these kinds of links to comprise a natural back link profile. When a site's backlinks are too on target, too perfect, it could be a cause for suspicion.
But the best reason for off-topic links is that when you break out of your typically "relevant" market you open yourself up to a completely new group of people. And from a non-search engine related marketing perspective, the more exposure a website can get the better. So off-topic links are really just a foray into a new, untapped demographic.
These backlink rejects have in most cases earned their bad reputations by being mostly garbage. But that doesn't make them entirely beyond salvation.
These will never be the best, most powerful kinds of links. These will never be methods that any site should put all of their energy into. But for each one of them there is an exception to the rule.
Granted none of these bad boys are the guys you bring home to mom, but you can party with them from time to time. Because when you look it from the right angle, there's something worthwhile in each of them.
Know your Ambiguous Customer: Effective Multi-Channel Tracking
Wednesday, June 5 at 1pm ET - Learn why a move from the "batch and blast" email approach enables better conversations with your customers.
Register today - don't miss this free webinar! | <urn:uuid:02499f6f-5f46-4208-8c82-49a9c3619dda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2048791/The-Redeeming-Qualities-of-Links-with-a-Bad-Reputation | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965143 | 1,604 | 1.617188 | 2 |
The following is part of an email I received from a young student on my post 'The Valley of Wonderment, 1987-2006'. I am sharing it here, and shall soon try to answer the two questions asked at the end of this excerpt:
As you say that the bookstores, libraries and cinema houses were fast vanishing when our collective life started to live in the Valley of Wonderment (1987-2006), which left the young minds of Pakistan in bewilderment. Their questions were left unanswered. Though if there had been some efficient means of bringing them closer to the literature Pakistan have produced, the films we have made and the messages our heroes have tried to convey through them, they certainly could have found the answers they were looking for. Also being in this ‘Valley’ the youngsters probably had little choice as to whom shall they make their role-models. Patriotism and positive thinking was there, but it had no direction to follow (as you quoted "they are in love but do not know with whom").
Yes, there was a time when all I knew about myself or the world was what others told me. My life was hollow and I had no solid reason to live, and consequently had no idea how shall a life be spent. Be it politics, philosophy, human behavior, arts or religion, my thoughts about life were quite superficial, dealing only with the surface, never looking for anything deeper inside. This was the time I stayed in the ‘Valley’ and although my efforts had no specific direction at that time, still it turned out to be fruitful as I was able to observe people and histories at that time which acted as a base for my future ideas and thoughts.
And now you have made me believe that every person has to pass through this stage. Perhaps it is some sort of a ‘grounding stage’ and sort of compulsory as well.
If yes, then that means that it had to be a part of our history, so that we can ask as much questions as we can, collect material which can help us fight our doubts and also in our future journey. I have always heard praises of the 20 years you have termed as the Valley of Wonderment, that there was peace all across the country, we had fewer problems and things were calm, and nowadays there is unrest everywhere, also in the heart of every Pakistani. From youngsters to their parents, from established businessmen to working class, everyone is in a strange quest. And now I feel that the ‘calmness’ of that time can be termed as ‘a collective slumber’ which ended to bring this ‘activity’ and ‘hustle and bustle’ of life. Today nearly all of us feel a need to change and revolve, although every single human being evolves in a different way, and we need to merge all the different frequencies of change in one wave of revolution.
Although I myself have not seen the James Bond film you are talking about, still I can notice the close link it has with the Pakistani public. And also ‘Living on the edge is the only way Pakistan lives’ is so true a statement! Living on the edge gives us strength and it prepares us for future, just like mechanism of immunity prepares antibodies for future use.
Now my questions to you are:
- Am I right in saying that Valley of Wonderment provided a grounding stage for us as a nation, and no matter what, every great nation has to experience it?
- Also, I have seen many people full of patriotism and good feelings for Pakistan but they hardly perceive depths regarding many issues faced by our country. So it can be said that they are on the right track but they still have to pass the ‘grounding stage’ and have to focus their energies more precisely? | <urn:uuid:3a8769bd-8b25-4058-b473-62d59992d758> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://khurramsdesk.blogspot.com/2010/02/stufents-reflections-on-valley-of.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986685 | 782 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Every business needs bright people. But some businesses sell what their bright people think about. When Bud Michael came to the realization that he would have to fire one of his brightest and most senior engineers, it took courage. Having only been CEO of Availigent for six months, the problem seemed clear to him. The technical team, after five years and two prior management regimes had settled into a low productivity pattern. The software business had settled into a negative cash flow pattern. Mr. Michael’s job was to turn the tide.
After six months of gentle leadership and building his credibility with the team of 16, he grabbed hold of the tiller firmly and announced some key targets and a time frame, and told everyone that to succeed; the team would have to work hard. Everyone seemed ready for the stepped up pace. He brought the four informal leaders of the team into his office one by one and explained that their behavior would have to change to set an example for the rest. They confirmed that they were on board.
When “The Talk” fails
After two weeks, the senior engineer’s behavior had not changed. The 10 a.m. arrival – followed quickly by foosball games, extended lunches and long breaks – was only occasionally interrupted by work. Mr. Michael had another meeting with him, advising him that change needed to happen, and fast. Again, the senior engineer said the right things.
The entire organization as well as Mr. Michael believed that this engineer held many of the keys to their core technology, called checkpointing. Numerous patents had been won, and everyone on the team would turn to this engineer for key answers and resolution of problems. And of course, he had kept about 60% of this key knowledge locked up in his head. He couldn’t be fired – especially in this new crunch time.
A month after the CEO’s big speech, the senior engineer’s behavior was still unchanged. The rest of the team had improved some, but the senior engineer’s call to the foosball table was still coming twice daily and was being heeded by others. Mr. Michael could either let it be and face a loss of personal credibility and know the company would never gain the momentum needed to turn around, or he could fire his most senior engineer – his best intellectual capital. Worst case, the company would fail sooner rather than later, saving the investors money. Best case, the remaining team would rise to the challenge of facing their past dependency on the senior engineer.
Mr. Michael did what CEO’s are paid to do – make the big decisions.
- The next morning, the senior engineer was gone.
- That afternoon, there was shock, disbelief, insecurity and worry for the future.
- Two weeks later, the team knew they could fill in all the holes, and was more productive than they had been in years. Availigent hadn’t missed a beat.
- Within a month, the senior engineer had found a new job he loved, and was performing quite well there.
Doing the right thing
Most CEO’s know that a common failing is firing too slowly. Most of us are guilty as charged. But the gutsy move that Bud made at Availigent serves as a reminder and as encouragement to all executives to fire executives that don’t fit.
The underlying value that motivated Bud to dismiss the engineer was that every employee, including the CEO must always be true to the business, and deliver value. Too much play time and leading the other employees in bad habits was not about producing value, and likewise, for Bud to be true to the business, he had to step up the intensity of the whole organization.
When you have someone that everyone turns to for help, look for signs of unhealthy dependency. Is everyone relying on this person because it is easier to ask than to figure it out? Is the person not creating system and documentation so that people can be more self-sufficient? Do you have insufficient depth of staff such that no-one else has a clue? Avoid unhealthy dependency, and the recovery period from a dismissal will be much shorter.
No-one is indispensable. If this doesn’t prove it, I don’t know what will. I’m not saying that firing key executives, technology leaders, or key salespeople won’t hurt – it usually will. But the ongoing benefits are almost always greater than the damage during the recovery period.
Everyone in the company has to be on ONE team, and the CEO is the leader of that team. In matters of values, strategy and underlying behaviors, never tolerate anyone that is not following your lead. Tolerance of deviants destroys your credibility, weakens your leadership and damages the value set you are trying to create of enforce. Of course, be sure you’ve firmly established your credibility as a leader before you take on an informal leader in the company. Many will feel a loss at the time of the dismissal, but you need them to feel safe and secure in switching their leadership to you.
The CEO’s job is to replace anyone that doesn’t fit really well into the company’s future plans. Fire the misfits.
- The CEO has the duty to dismiss any executive that isn’t pulling the company forward to its desired future state.
- Identify signs of unhealthy dependency on one person and work hard on reducing the dependency.
- You can survive firing key executives if you plan it well and work your plan. | <urn:uuid:bf2f09d0-3830-4212-adab-0864ed32d5f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ceotoceo.biz/publications/best-practices-illustrations/item/22-firing-key-employees-when-you-must-and-how-availigent.htmlhttp:/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98224 | 1,142 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Jun 19 2012
The head of the now-suspended UN observer mission in Syria is travelling to New York to brief the UN Security Council in person amid growing concern that the escalating violence may spell the end of the monitoring effort and international envoy Kofi Annan's peace plan.
General Robert Mood and UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous will meet the 15 council ambassadors behind closed doors to give their assessment of the upsurge in violence by government forces and the opposition in recent days, which led to Gen Mood's suspension of patrols and all other activities by the 300 unarmed observers on Saturday.
Mr Annan's six-point plan calls for an immediate cessation of fighting, first by the Syrian government and then the opposition, with the goal of launching a political dialogue.
British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said on Monday that council members are eager to hear what Gen Mood thinks.
"I think there will be a lot of member states of the council, including us, who will be questioning now what the future is for the mission and, therefore, by extension the Annan plan, in light of these recent developments on the ground," he said.
The three-month mandate of the observer mission expires on July 20. Mr Lyall Grant said he could not rule out that the council might end it before then.
He blamed the Syrian regime for the mission's decision to suspend its patrols in light of the violence: "Their brutality against their own civilian population has led to the sort of spikes in violence that we've now seen."
Russia and China, who have close ties to Syria, have vetoed two resolutions that mentioned the threat of sanctions against President Bashar Assad's regime. But they did vote for the resolution authorising the observer mission and endorsing Mr Annan's six-point plan.
"We're very concerned about the suspension of mission observers in Syria and we believe that the parties - all parties in Syria - should offer full co-operation to mission observers," China's UN Ambassador Li Baodong, the current Security Council president, told reporters.
Mr Li said there have been "some different conflicting reports" about the current situation in Syria: "We want to know the real situation ... and we want to hear first-hand situation from General Mood." | <urn:uuid:7b15b03f-aeab-41d2-91ed-a7e0da3087c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.uxbridgegazette.co.uk/west-london-news/world-uk-news/2012/06/19/un-chief-observer-to-brief-council-113046-31213722/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959911 | 460 | 1.53125 | 2 |
The National Capital Region YMCA-YWCA has a long history of delivering employment, enterprise and newcomer services in the community. Committed to helping people reach their full potential, our employment programs are designed to enhance the skills of youth and adults to prepare them for meaningful jobs in the workforce.
Some of our earliest initiatives included the creation of a night school for newsboys, finding employment for young women in the late 1800s and founding Carleton College in 1941, an institution for part-time evening study, which later became Carleton University.
Today our vibrant offering of employment programs and services include:
- Self Employment Benefit Program
- Employment Access Centres
- Language Assessment and Referral Centre
- Newcomer Information Centre
- Power of Trades | <urn:uuid:a5a18831-5d3b-401d-be5d-bd236ccd26a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ymcaywca.ca/Adults/employmentservices/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945061 | 156 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Note how frequently Obama waves away legitimate criticism by depicting them as "distractions."
Last night in Pennsylvania he deflected criticism regarding his remarks about small town Americans and their crutches of religion, guns, xenophobia, and isolationism by stating this:
So I think that this is an example of, frankly, how the political debate can distract us from what is really at issue and that is: How are we going to create a just and fair society where people are getting a fair shake? And that’s why I’m running this campaign.
It's not all that original to note that much of Obama's rhetoric is pretty vague -- often vapid. But I've begun to notice how many things Obama regards as distractions. When he labels a given issue a 'distraction,' he's saying that someone is whipping up a an issue from whole cloth simply for political gain.
So who does he think is being insincere: gays who want to marry, or people of faith who think marriage is for a man and a woman? How about in the competition between border enforcement advocates and those who want amnesty for illegal aliens? Or between those who favor abortion on demand, and those who believe life begins at conception?
All of these are important public policy questions, with divisions among Americans that prevent easy solutions. Obama shouldn't denigrate broad swaths of the population just because it would be difficult to address their concerns.
Obama also has been engaged in an effort to distance himself from Wright. He has called Wright his "moral compass" and "sounding board" and Wright has been his "spiruatl advisor" and the inspiration for his "Audacity of Hope" speech. Now he merely is his "Pastor". | <urn:uuid:1f8dd7ef-331e-40a0-bd68-57e3240d4af2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/04/driving_us_to_distraction.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984207 | 354 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Butterfly Releases are a good way to celebrate all the important occasions in life. They're amazing additions to marriages, anniversaries, funerals, commemoratives, birthdays, vacations, rites, and even company events. There's an old Indian legend that's frequently read at butterfly releases as the guests make a wish and release their butterflies. Each release will have it’s own unique memories and can become a practice that's passed down from parent to kid. Butterflies could be released in their own individual container or they could be freed from a mass release container, dependent on the occasion and the design you find most interesting. Butterflies should really only be released outside on a bright or clouded day with a temperature of almost seventy degrees. It worstens when they just about force their chidren what they feel is correct for them. This may simply been evaded if his elders respected their son’s wish and helped him on his way but instead of making him take profession of their choice. Another thing is inherited professions like a barber’s child would be a barber and a buisness man son’s must look after his folks buisness. A release held in a warm, bright, flower filled area is best. None are rather more impressive and memorable than that of the butterfly in flight.
Click link if you need stuff all about votive cup holders | <urn:uuid:44a8e000-a524-4e08-b928-16a9b48814c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.votivecandleholders.ws/candle-votive-holders/celebrate-with-butterflies-the-flying-flowers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972485 | 284 | 1.640625 | 2 |
A 9-year-old girl has given birth to a baby girl in Jalisco state, Mexico.
The 9-year-old girl, known simply as Daphne, became pregnant at age eight.
The father of the newborn child is allegedly a 17-year-old boy. He has run away, according to the 9-year-old's mother.
"We are looking for the young man to get his story because [the 9-year-old new mother] does not understand what has happened," Jorge Villasenor, with the state prosecutors' office told The Telegraph. "This is a rape or child sex abuse case."
The 9-year-old girl gave birth on January 27 in Zoquipan Hospital. The newborn baby was reported to be 5.7 pounds. Both children were released from the hospital last weekend.
The hospital reports both mother and daughter are doing fine, but that they will have to do extensive follow-up work due to the extreme circumstances of such a young mother.
Jalisco state police spokesman Lino Gonzalez, who confirmed the health of both girls, told the AP that the family of the 9-year-old mom alerted the authorities after their child successfully gave birth and the teenage father had disappeared from the neighborhood. The 9-year-old told police that he was her boyfriend.
Gonzalez says the boy will face sex abuse charges if his paternity is proven.
Last year, a 10-year-old Columbian girl gave birth to a baby girl. The 10-year-old was reportedly a member of the indigenous Wayuu tribe, known to have traditional customs of women giving birth at a young age. | <urn:uuid:092a2735-6cb7-4d08-ae5e-084e47632d92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kpopstarz.com/articles/20307/20130207/9-year-old-gives-birth-9-year-old-mom.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990259 | 346 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Tom Igoe teaches courses in physical computing and networking, exploring ways to allow digital technologies to sense and respond to a wider range of human physical expression. Coming from a background in theatre, his work has centered on physical interaction related to live performance and public space. His current research focuses on ecologically sustainable practices in technology development. He is the author of two books, “Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects,” and with Dan O’Sullivan, “Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers,” which has been adopted by numerous digital art and design programs around the world. Projects include a series of networked banquet table centerpieces and musical instruments; an email clock; and a series of interactive dioramas, created in collaboration with M.R. Petit. He has consulted for The American Museum of the Moving Image, EAR Studio, Diller + Scofidio Architects, Eos Orchestra, and others. He is a contributor to MAKE magazine and a collaborator on the Arduino open source microcontroller project. He hopes someday to work with monkeys, as well. | <urn:uuid:c3b39187-cf49-4c0b-9762-c648732900da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.oreilly.com/et2009/public/schedule/speaker/2071 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93953 | 233 | 1.8125 | 2 |
In this post, I will share with you the “secret” secret of success. After reading this post, you will be able to apply this secret and find yourself among the “super-achievers” and celebrities that you have always looked up to.
Since this is neither a product review nor an advertisement, I will tell you the secret right away, and then tell you how you can go about applying this secret in your life to become more popular, earn more money, attract the right partner, succeed at your job, and find the meaning of life. Research shows that after you apply this secret principle, your blog traffic will increase tenfold, you will also be able to take better photographs, lose as much weight as you desire, and cross the roads in Hyderabad quickly and easily.
The secret is simple – fairness. Fairness is the secret formula for all success. Fairness can open doors to opportunities that you did not know existed. But of course, this is a truth that all of us know. Here is a quick look at the amazing principle of fairness.
Why does fairness work?
From time immemorial, man (and woman) has used his wisdom to discern between good and evil. Day is good, night is evil; white is good, black is evil; clear is good, muddied is evil. For reasons beyond our comprehension, we are not comfortable with the principle of goodness without an evil to contrast it against. With the subsequent expansion of “civilization” and the “discovery” of the lands of the unfair, the fair people finally got proof that this was how the creator meant things to be. Otherwise, it would have been the unfair who discovered the fair, innit?
This belief has been nurtured and perpetrated down the ages, till it has become ingrained within us. It was the fair that gave our nation the first taste of modernity, in education, in governance, and in healthcare. It was the fair who were at the forefront of the newly formed nation of ours. It was the fair who have given leadership to our country. The only time that we were stuck with a leader who was not fair was when a person who knew more than a dozen languages had nothing to say. That’s “not fair” for you. Of course, the fact that a new and different (as good as alien) kind of fairness was being groomed is beside the point. Over time, fairness, indigenous or otherwise, has been proved to be the touchstone by which all things and people are judged.
How does fairness work?
Fairness works on the principle of cause and effect. If you are fair, you will automatically do the right thing, make the right decision, and take the right path. It might seem inconvenient in the short run, but your fairness will bear fruit in the long run. Being fair is simply being in accordance with the principles of nature. People who are not fair might seem to be making gains but in the long run, they will lose out. See the consequences of being unfair below.
I was not born fair. Can I become fair?
Not being born fair is the result of past karma. Your parents must be either unfair people themselves, or have done some very unfair things in their lives, as a result of which you are unfair too. The other possibility is that you were a very evil person in your previous birth. There is no way you can escape from the fact that you have been born unfair. At best, you can try and capitalize on the reservations and quotas that the fair have made for your type. However, there are steps that you can take to become less unfair in this lifetime. The first step you have to take is to publicly disown your unfair self. You can do this by cutting your hair short, wearing long overcoats and always carrying a large handbag. This must immediately be followed by a conscious decision to dissociate from all things and people that are unfair. If you practice this diligently, in the course of time, you may be eligible to be counted among the fair.
Fairness is like religion. You may be born without it, but there are many who will help you acquire it. You might lose it once you have it, but you can get it back with a dab of foundation and a flick of the compact. The best part of it is that you can lose it over and over again, and get it back every single time. Remember, public memory is short, and no one wants to remember things that are not fair for too long, so just go for it.
How to become fair?
Some ways of becoming fair are easy, some are not, but all of them are fair. The easy way to become fair is to use fairness creams. Remember that one cannot become fair overnight, nor is there one surefire formula for becoming fair. You have to use these creams day and night on a regular basis, and keep using different brands of them, in order to get result. Also keep in mind that you need one kidney to survive, so don’t go about selling the second one to buy those products. You must also be careful not to overuse them, since you might just wake up one morning and find that all the ammonia in them has bleached your face away. Of course, then you will not have to worry about where to hide your face, since you will no longer be having a face to hide. During this process, since you have already disowned your unfair self publicly, if you need to make a public appearance, you will have to resort to foundations and face powders that are meant for fair people. If you use the less fair versions of these, you will be rejected by those you care for, so be very cautious.
Fairness goes deeper than the skin, so just using fairness creams is not enough. You have to shun all the ways of unfair people. Three excellent educational aids for achieving this are the all season DVD packs of Friends, Desperate Housewives, and Sex and the City. Study these carefully and try and personify the superior values that they promote. Many people make the mistake of discarding their unfair accents and adopting a fairer one. This strategy can backfire and people might think that you are nothing but an unfair person with lot of makeup who works in an outbound call center. However, if your speech is anything like mine, with a preponderance of aiyo’s, haila’s, and why because’s, you may want to go for an accent training program, and mind your pee’s and kaiku’s.
What are some of the consequences of not being fair?
If you are not fair, you will not be able to sing well at college functions. You will not get interviews with stars if you are a television newsperson. If you are not fair, you will end up paying more dowry. If you are not fair, no one will complain if you do not burn with an even blue flame. If you are not fair, your chances of being in an accident engineered by the fair multiply. If you are not fair, you may succeed in the short run, but sooner or later, your unfairness will catch up with you, and you will be eating crow, maybe Jim Crow. Even the best of education, the most expensive jewelry and the best designer clothes cannot help you if you are not fair.
But surface level jokes and double entendre's aside, if you are fair, the world might look past you, you may be ignored when opportunities arise, and people might reject you, but you will sleep well knowing that you have done the right thing. If you are not fair, on the other hand, you might get a high score in an exam, but have already flunked the real test of life.
“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.” -Benjamin Disraeli
(The picture in this post is that of Mehul, our niece, daughter of Subhomoy and Kaberi, at a recent family function.) | <urn:uuid:d04f7739-c26f-4fcc-ab2f-d2e164f6c3d1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://subhorup.blogspot.com/2012/02/history-of-secret-of-success.html?showComment=1328860643843 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977241 | 1,691 | 1.539063 | 2 |
The sister of 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi has been arrested by Iranian authorities, among 10 new arrests reported by the opposition on December 29.
Nushin Ebadi was detained at her home on December 28.
Shirin Ebadi told RFE/RL's Radio Farda that authorities from the Ministry of Information had threatened her sister and told her that she herself must give up her human rights work.
"When my sister was summoned [earlier] by the Ministry of Information, she was told that she has to move out of her house,” Shirin Ebadi told Radio Farda by phone. “She has a separate house, but it is in the same complex where I am living. And they told her if she doesn’t move, and if I continue working at my job, she will be arrested.”
“At first, I thought this was a joke. But unfortunately, it became clear to me that it was not a joke,” Ebadi said. “And on Monday [December 28] at 9 p.m., four people came to my sister’s house -- one of them was my previous interrogator, who had threatened to make an arrest -- and then she was arrested and taken away."
Ebadi said she does not know why her sister has been targeted.
"Whether I have done good or bad, I am responsible for it,” she said.
“My sister has neither participated in [the recent] Ashura demonstrations nor in previous demonstrations,” she continued. “Basically, fortunately or unfortunately, she is not involved in any human rights or social activities.”
A prominent journalist, Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, and a women's rights activist, Mansoureh Shojaee, were also reportedly detained the same night as Nushin Ebadi.
The developments come after at least eight people were killed in clashes between opposition protesters and security forces on December 27, the worst unrest in months. | <urn:uuid:c2ebb58c-c58d-4746-b083-e407b3384778> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rferl.org/content/Shirin_Ebadi_Says_Sisters_Arrest_Tied_To_Ebadis_Work/1917114.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98947 | 420 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog
Almost always, command line tools are more efficient than desktop ones, especially for file management. Recently, however, I found myself needing to clean up the file names from six hundred ripped CDs, removing illegal characters, replacing spaces with hyphens, and half a dozen other minor adjustments. To my surprise, the most convenient tools for the task were on the desktop: The Thunar Bulk Rename utility, KRename, GPRename, and pyRenamer.
The trouble was, I needed more options that the mv command supports. Working on a Debian system, I could have used the rename command, if I remembered enough Perl to make it effective. And, of course, I could have written a BASH script or played around with sed. But all these would have taken time when I wanted instant gratification, so I turned to these desktop tools hoping for a quick fix.
As the name suggests, this utility is part of Xfce's file manager Thunar. Started with the option -B, it opens in a window in which much of the functionality is hidden in right-click menus or drop-down lists.
However, if you can overcome any initial panic caused by this simplicity, Thunar Bulk Rename's use rapidly becomes self-evident. In the top two-thirds of the window, you right-click to add files -- not directories.
Then, in the bottom third of the window, you can choose the format for the renamed files, adding a date and/or time, inserting or overwriting text, adding numbers, removing characters, searching and replacing characters, or switching between upper and lower case letters. You can then choose whether each change applies to the file name, and/or its extension, and the exact position at which each change can be made. As you set up each change, you can preview what you are doing in the list of files at the top of the window.
The result is a reasonably thorough set of options, but one that sometimes seems needlessly complicated. Why, for example, have the option to state the position from which characters will be removed? After all, chances are that if you want to remove a character in one place, you will want to remove it everywhere -- and, if not, a search and replace will do. And what is the point of a detailed set of options to denote date and time if they are not specified in the interface? Nor is there any option that I could see for creating copies of the chosen files in a new location, instead of overwriting the existing files. For reasons like these, I soon abandoned the Thunar Bulk Renamer.
By contrast, KRename organizes its window so that the steps are self-evident. All you need to do is follow the numbered tabs. In the first tab, you select the files. In the second, you decide whether to leave output in the current directory, copy or move them to another directory, or to create symbolic links in another directory, and whether you should overwrite the originals.
However, just as you are starting to feel confident, you hit the third tab, in which you have to choose the plugin to use. Some of these plugins are highly specific -- for instance, there is one exclusively for font names, and another for reading the metatags for audio and video files, and yet another for reading metatags for JPEG and TIFF format graphic files. For some, like Transliteration, there is no clear sign that you have selected them in the interface, or whether you need to add anything. Nor can you choose two plugins at once, although I would have thought using the Permissions plugin with any of the others would be a popular choice.
As if this mess was not confusing enough, on the fourth tab -- which you must click before the Finish button is available for use, regardless of whether you require it or not -- are more renaming options, centered on the file name. You can choose to work with the Simple Filename tab, and only add a prefix or suffix, or go to the Advanced Filename tab and create a template for future use, or make such changes as a numbering system that starts at a given point, or do a find and replace.
KRename has a lot to like, including sub-windows from which you can select building blocks for some of the more complicated options. But the third and fourth tab are frankly a mess, and although anyone with enough experience to be doing a bulk rename in the first place can probably navigate the mess, the question is why they should bother doing so. Unless you are prepared to be patient, Krename can be almost as arcane as the most complex command line tool you have seen.
GPRename's window is simpler than either Thunar Bulk Rename's or KRename's. The top is a basic file manager, with a directory tree and list of files, along with a few basic options. At the bottom are four tabs, each clearly named, with all the options on each tab visible at the same time.
One advantage of GPRename is that it allows you to select directories, instead of just files.
Unfortunately, it does not allow you to apply more than one change at at time. It also shows the Thunar Bulk Rename's obsession with character position on the Insert Delete tab, and descends into KRename's use of obscure building blocks to make Case Change more complicated than the average user expects. Still another disadvantage is that, while you can number files, you cannot change the order in which the numbering applies. These shortcomings more than offset the advantages of the simple interface.
I have not checked which came first, but GPRename and pyRenamer have almost identical interfaces. The main difference is in the organization of the tabs; pyRenamer has six to GPRename's four, and, although GPRename's are more clearly named, pyRenamer, like KRename, has options specific to certain types of files.
PyRenamer's tabs: Patterns (which can be used to change the types of characters used in file names); Substitutions (common changes, such as spaces to underscores or capitalization); the self-explanatory Insert/Delete; and Images and Music (for renaming these types of file using their metadata).
PyRenamer also makes extensive use of building blocks, but mercifully provides dialogs as a crib, and has the considerable advantage of allowing you to set up multiple renaming options in a single pass. You can also rename files one at a time, before applying all changes.
A particularly useful option in pyRename is Remove Accents, accessible with one click and helpful in creating files that BASH can use regardless of locales.
My sole complaint about pyRenamer is that you cannot set up multiple Replace patterns at the same time. However, since you can remain on the Substitutions tab and apply patterns one at a time, the inconvenience is not as great as it might have been. After working with the others, the simplicity and arrangement of pyRenamer makes it my tool of choice for renaming on the desktop.
Choosing a Renamer
The one drawback of this investigation is that, by the time I had chosen pyRenamer, I had taken more time than I would have done to remember basic scripting. Since I am unlikely to be digitalizing another six hundred music albumns soon (or ever again), what I found is of limited use to me.
Still, if you find yourself in the position of needing a mass renamer, I recommend trying the ones mentioned here in the reverse order in which I mention them. Probably, pyRenamer will meet your needs, but, if it doesn't for some reason, maybe one of the other ones will.
Emacs can do that!Yes, I know, Emacs can do everthing (TM) and it gets tedious to be told.
wdired mode takes a dired (Emacs file manager) buffer and basically makes it an editable text document. You can use all the Emacs editing tools and macros to make your changes to the file names and file properties and then save the changes to disk. It's incredibly useful and powerful and dired can show multiple directories for you to work in.
A good addition to your articleHi,
I was searching for a good file renamer, and came accross your article. I tried them all but could not achieve what I wanted to : searching files matching against regular expressions, and adding a sequential number to the filenames. None of the applications mentioned in this article could achieve that (KRename maybe, but it was way tooooo slow).
I then found this nice application that can just to what I wanted. It is the Swiss knife of the file renamers. Its name is Métamorphose. It is a cross platform and open source renaming application, so it can run in Linux systems (tried it on debian 6 with no problems at all).
Here is the home page :
It really worthes a try and would help a lot of people to find it in your article.
Longtime litigator revives an ancient suit against IBM alleging Linux infringes on Unix copyrights.
Specialty distro keeps the focus on advanced learning.
The openSUSE Conference will be held July 18-22, 2013, at the Olympic Museum in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Security breached at home sites of the CMS project.
Lead Java developer vows policy changes and more attention to fixing problems.
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013. | <urn:uuid:5122ecc3-7cc1-41d5-999d-ba0c956ac59b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfield-s-Blog/Bulk-Renamers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940076 | 2,087 | 1.570313 | 2 |
When the Democrats kick off their convention Tuesday in Charlotte, it will be, among other things, a naked attempt to hold on to North Carolina in the electoral college. The prize is 15 electoral votes which, in a close election, can make or break a candidate’s quest.
Just to give you a sense of how difficult that might be, consider that in 2008 President Barack Obama won here by 0.3 percent margin of victory -- only about 14,000 votes.
Now consider that Bill Clinton, son of the south and keynoter at this week’s convention, was never able to claim victory in North Carolina. In fact, the last Democrat to come out ahead in the presidential sweepstakes here was that other southerner, Jimmy Carter -- and only the first time around, in 1976.
Right now, both Talking Points Memo’s "Polltracker," which combines various polls, and Nate Silver's "Five Thirty Eight" blog in the New York Times, tip North Carolina to Mitt Romney by one or two percentage points. Silver gives Romney a better than 60 percent chance of taking the state.
So what will it take for Obama to win here? Believe it or not, Obama’s best bet is to appeal directly to North Carolina’s Latinos and to hope that, working in tandem with African-Americans, they can provide a heavy block against the GOP, whose candidates are currently ahead in the governor’s race (Pat McCory leads Walter Dalton by about 7 points) and dead even with the Democrat in the senate. Any movement in either of those races could affect the top of the state ticket.
Now, keep in mind Obama’s razor thing 14,000 vote 2008 margin and consider these numbers:
- North Carolina’s population grew by more than 18 percent since 2000, and a good chunk of those new residents are African-Americans and Latino, who doubled their population in a decade. Together, blacks and Hispanics constitute 61 percent of the 1.8 million new residents in the state. Non-Hispanic whites are only 65 percent of the population.
- About 100,000 Latinos are registered voters in North Carolina (that’s the conservative estimate -- some say twice that) -- more than 40,000 since 2008, which should make Obama’s team optimistic. A third of all registered voters in North Carolina are people of color.
- Sixty percent of North Carolina’s Latinos are of Mexican descent, and about 13 percent are Central Americans, according to the U.S. Census. More than 80 percent are under 40 years of age -- meaning that immigration, healthcare and education are strong issues here. Whatever Obama’s abysmal deportation numbers, his DREAM Act executive order, the Affordable Care Act and the Pell Grants move should all play well to Latinos here. (But working against him is a Latino unemployment rate here of 10.2, above the national average.)
- In 2008, African-Americans mirrored their population on the voter rolls at 21 percent, and about 38 percent of Democratic voters. This year, the Obama campaign has launched a massive voter registration drive in the African-American community to preserve that block of voters, but they’re also looking at 19 percent black unemployment here, which could dampen some enthusiasm.
North Carolina is about as toss-up as a state gets, and though the numbers suggest the future belongs to the Democrats, this election is just two months away. It’s absolutely anybody’s game.
This is the first in an occasional series. In the next few weeks, ’ll be looking at how Latinos -- the so-called swing vote in this year’s presidential election -- play in each of the states where the race is within a few percentage points. | <urn:uuid:8e324a63-ff79-4891-9582-df06027e2514> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wbez.org/blogs/achy-obejas/2012-09/latinos-north-carolina-are-vital-obama-and-democratic-party-102153 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952491 | 780 | 1.539063 | 2 |
"It is the worst of times, and it is the best of times." With these words Victoria Jackson Gray-Adams described the context within which 45 leaders from the independent progressive politics movement met for a weekend of "progressive dialogue" December 4-5 in Washington, D.C. As Vickie elaborated, it is the worst of times because of the massive injustice, oppression and poverty, the destruction of the environment, the continuing dangers of nuclear devastation and all the other crises we are faced with today. Yet, it is the best of times because there are signs of hope, people organized, organizing and acting to change those conditions, the most recent, and historic, example being the labor/youth/environmental/human rights/direct action coalition in Seattle which blew the cover and shook the foundations of the imperial World Trade Organization.
The Progressive Dialogue was a meeting called by Elaine Bernard, Noam Chomsky, Bob Clark, Ron Daniels, Angela Davis, Victoria J. Gray-Adams, Manning Marable, Miya Yoshitani, Baldemar Velasquez and Howard Zinn. It was organized as a collaborative effort between these individual conveners and a task force of IPPN which worked with them to do the necessary outreach, planning and logistical work.
Invited were representatives of national and state progressive third parties, as well as individuals who are national leaders of organizations, or with a national constituency or prominence, who support independent political action. In order to maximize the possibilities for substantive dialogue, the number of people invited was limited to about 85. Forty-five attended and many of those who couldn't attend took the initiative to communicate their interest and desire to be in contact afterwards. Represented were organizations of students, people on welfare, peace activists, Greens/environmentalists, farmworkers, labor unions, socialist organizations, Black radicals, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender activists, people of faith, people's lawyers, popular educators and anti-corporate activists.
The meeting's participants were very conscious that we were getting together immediately after "the battle in Seattle." Several of the participants had been there, including one who presented rough video footage Saturday evening of what took place out on the streets on "shutdown Tuesday." One decision of the meeting during its final session was to draft a statement from this gathering to send to the organizers of the various Seattle protest actions indicating our profound and grateful support of their work and inviting them to dialogue about ways we can collaborate to further our common goals.
A Unity Statement was also drafted, which says, in part, "We affirm that a critical need exists in the United States for a unified, progressive political movement. The emerging climate of widespread distrust and disaffection with the two-party political system of corporate rule opens the opportunity to accelerate collaboration between progressive parties and organizations and the development of a broad-based progressive political movement in the U.S. We acknowledge the need to greatly expand the alternative politics movement. We must reach out to disaffected, disenfranchised and neglected constituencies, including labor, the working class, welfare recipients, youth, students, the poor, the elderly, people with disabilities, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender people, Greens/environmentalists, farmers, artists, the homeless, people of color, white collar workers and all who desire a transformed society which has as its primary purpose to serve the needs of people over and above the interests of corporate power."
It was agreed that we would explore various mechanisms to strengthen communications within this developing unity movement: a video exchange network, an internet email list serve, creation and distribution of progressive TV news and talk shows or audio programs of national interest, web site linkages, utilization of Independent Politics News and other publications, and raising money or accessing resources to provide computers for low-income organizations.
We also began to identify other groups and key constituencies not present over the weekend to invite to be part of this on-going process of dialogue and development.
And a subcommittee was authorized to begin exploration of a national people's convention in the future, the specific time to be determined, bringing together the sum total of our independent progressive politics movement, thousands of people, to discuss and adopt a common platform for the 21st century, showcase and highlight positive electoral and non-electoral organizing around the country on the part of all of our groups, and dramatically say to the country as a whole, we are here and we are getting it together.
However, like most things in life, there is another side to this story. As positive as the meeting was, it was not an easy meeting, and there were tensions, differences and weaknesses that, in some cases, we could barely even identify, much less discuss, because of the short time we had. We are still in the process of recovering from the history of fragmentation, lack of communication and disempowerment of our overall people's movement that has been the case for 25 years or more.
One weakness that was discussed to some extent, was the insufficient numbers present, or actual absence, of constituencies that need to be "at the table." Among them: low-income people, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender people, people with disabilities, students/youth, prisoners' rights activists, and Asian/Pacific Island and Indigenous Peoples.
We still have a ways to go in learning how to really hear each other, genuinely dialogue without defensiveness, talk with each other and not, at times, past each other.
Language was identified by some participants as an issue, that some of us talk about our visions, our strategies, our programs, our beliefs in ways which make it harder for those on the receiving end of injustice and oppression to understand, identify or join with us, to develop as activists and assume leadership roles.
Within the progressive third party movement as a whole there is insufficient involvement and leadership from low-income people and people of color. To some extent this was reflected in the meeting, particularly as far as low-income people. We need to make conscious efforts, including fund-raising to cover travel and other costs, to change that.
Finally, although many of us recognize the importance of connecting electoral activity to movement-building/grassroots organizing/work around issues, we have a ways to go before that becomes a reality. The winner-take-all, big-money dominated, two-party electoral system has much to do with this problem, and proportional representation is a critical electoral reform.
The IPPN was empowered by the body to follow-up on the decisions made in collaboration with the conveners and those people from the meeting who volunteered to work on different tasks. This process has begun.
There was discussion of possible regional meetings. These will happen to the extent to which participants in the meeting, or those invited and not present, come forward to take the initiative to plan them, in coordination and with the support of the body as a whole.
At a time and place still to be determined, it is likely that there will be a follow-up national meeting. This will be determined by the success of the follow up on the decisions made December 4-5, as well as the extent to which the Dialogue participants, invitees and new invitees indicate their commitment to this process.
It is the worst of times; it is the best of times. It was an historic meeting; we are struggling to transcend our history.
Ted Glick is national coordinator of Independent Progressive Politics Network, P.O. Box 1041, Bloomfield, N.J. 07003; 973-338-5398 (t), 338-2210 (f), www.ippn.org | <urn:uuid:d743b432-3c30-4f2e-b64e-a1cb910421b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://populist.com/00.4.glick.unity.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967759 | 1,565 | 1.84375 | 2 |
In a mix of populist and reform measures, government today raised the cap on supply of subsidised cooking gas (LPG) to nine cylinders per household from six and virtually deregulated diesel prices allowing "small" hikes over a period of time.
Diesel prices in all probability may be hiked by Rs. 1.50-2.0 per litre in the first instance that can be as early as tonight following the decision taken by the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
The CCPA however left LPG and kerosene prices unchanged.
"The CCPA considered the issue of raising the cap from six to nine and the CCPA has agreed and raised the cap from six cylinders (per household in a year) to nine," Oil Minister M Veerappa Moily told reporters here.
"As far as diesel is concerned, oil marketing companies have been authorised to make price correction from time to time," he said. "It (price correction) can commence even from today."
However, Finance Minister P Chidambaram maintained that the oil companies have been allowed to make "small correction ... I am looking at same subsidy bill as was expected earlier".
Administered diesel price has always been a sensitive issue with the fuel being consumed in large measure by public transport and freight carriers. It is always feared that any hike in its rates can lead to a cascading effect on prices.
Price of diesel was last revised on September 14 when it was hiked by a steep Rs. 5.63 per litre. At present, diesel costs Rs. 47.15 per litre in Delhi.
Subsidised LPG costs Rs. 410.50 per 14.2-kg cylinder and any household requirement beyond the new limit of 9 cylinders will cost a near market price of Rs. 895.50 per bottle. MORE
The government had in September capped the supply of subsidised cooking gas to six cylinders per household in a year, with a view to checking diversion to unintended beneficiaries.
However the decision met with widespread protests as only 44 per cent of population used six or less cylinders in a year.
With today’s decision, consumers will get five subsidised cylinders instead of the previously mandated three in the period up to March 31, 2013. From April 1, 2013 they will get nine cylinders in a year.
Moily said there will be no change in price of LPG and kerosene.
The increase in the LPG cap would mean an additional subsidy outgo of Rs. 9,300 crore annually.
On diesel front, sources said the government has kept the quantum of hike and the timing a secret to avoid petrol pumps stopping sales to make quick profits.
Oil Secretary G C Chaturvedi said CCPA has authorised oil firms to make "small changes over a period of time".
"There was no discussion on the quantum of price increase or the period over which these changes are to be effected. It has been left to the oil companies," he said.
He, however emphatically stated that the government had not deregulated diesel prices. "If we are to deregulate, then diesel price will have to be raised by Rs. 9.60 per litre, which is not the case. Only a small quantum of change has been permitted over a period of time."
Asked if it was partial deregulation, he said "it wasn’t even partial deregulation."
The government, he said, will continue to subsidise diesel, cooking gas and kerosene.
"The finance ministry will meet all of the under recoveries (loss)," he said.
State-owned oil companies sell diesel at a loss of Rs. 9.60 per litre, kerosene at Rs. 30.64 a litre and LPG at Rs. 490.50 per 14.2-kg cylinder.
For the full 2012-13 fiscal, they are projected to lose about Rs. 165,000 crore.
'No objection to govt's proposal'
The Election Commission has granted no objection to the government's proposal for an increase in the cap of subsidised LPG cylinders from six to nine in a year.
The decision was taken at a full commission meeting held on Thursday under the chairmanship of Chief Election Commissioner VS Sampath, and communicated to the Union Cabinet, which met to take a call on the matter.
The government had on Wednesday written to the Commission, seeking its view on the issue of raising the cap on LPG cylinders since the Model Code of Conduct is in operation in Nagaland, Meghalaya and Tripura which are going to polls next month.
During the last phase of elections in Gujarat in December, the Commission had taken a serious note of the government's announcement regarding a possible raise in the number of subsidised LPG cylinders each family can have in a year.
The poll body had then asked the government against making any such announcement in future without its approval when the model code is in operation. | <urn:uuid:4b9cc705-765b-4361-8375-ca9d29a4523c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/Govt-raises-cap-on-subsidised-LPG-to-nine-from-April/Article1-990977.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973053 | 1,031 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Student-Athletes Get Career Advice on Turning ‘Pro’
NCAA statistics reveal that 97 percent of student-athletes who compete in college will turn pro in something other than athletics.
Helping to ease the transition from student-athlete to future employee was made a bit easier as the Providence College Department of Athletics, in conjunction with the Career Education Center and the Office of Academic Services, held its fourth Student-Athlete Career Night.
The event in Slavin Center ’64 Hall was sponsored by Yvette M. Boisclair, Esq. ’84 and Mark S. Mandell, Esq., whose generosity brought the career program to life four years ago.
Nineteen professionals — including 12 alumni — representing various fields networked with and provided career advice to more than 100 Friar student-athletes from the junior and senior classes. The evening kicked off with a video from former field hockey standout Kerianne Murphy ’10, whose experience at Career Night two years ago helped lead to her career as an analyst at EMC.
Following the video, Mandell addressed the student-athletes, emphasizing, “Regardless of how much money you make, you are not truly wealthy until you give back.” He stressed the importance of networking and being receptive to the guidance offered by the professionals in attendance.
The student-athletes received one-on-one advice from professionals representing everything from the financial services industry to the education arena, as they dined together in Slavin Center ’64 Hall.
A relevant, valuable experience
The ability to network over a meal is something the student-athletes appreciated.
“It was great to have the opportunity to talk to people who have knowledge in our prospective fields of interest,” said Kerry Ann O’Connor ’14 (New Rochelle, N.Y.), a women’s soccer player. “Being seated at tables with career professionals could have been an intimidating experience, but everyone made me feel comfortable, and the advice I received is invaluable.”
O’Connor especially enjoyed hearing the mentors recount how they persevered and succeeded despite the trials they faced along their respective career paths.
“Hearing the stories from professionals with varied backgrounds helped me realize that there are many possible paths to get to the same destination,” she said. “It is important to develop and sustain relationships along the way; you can learn as much about yourself as you can others.”
Bryan Annecchino ’14 (Darien, Conn.), a member of the men’s lacrosse team, was grateful for the opportunity to network and seek counsel from industry leaders.
“The knowledge we received was beneficial to all the student-athletes in attendance. The alumni and staff offered career advice that will help to distinguish ourselves from others in the workplace,” said Annecchino.
Second-year Head Men’s Basketball Coach Ed Cooley served as the keynote speaker and walked the guests through his career from a high school coach to PC. Cooley spoke about appreciation and the importance of creating relationships that will open doors in the future.
The master of ceremonies for the event was Robert G. Driscoll, Jr., associate vice president for athletics and athletic director. The evening concluded with women’s softball player Marie Flego ’14 (Little Silver, N.J.) speaking on behalf of her fellow student-athletes.
In addition to sponsoring the Student-Athlete Career Night, Boisclair and Mandell have established an endowed scholarship fund and two immediate-use scholarships to assist student-athletes in need. In appreciation of their support, they were presented a framed picture, autographed by the student-athletes who attended Career Night.
— John Larson
Read more about what's happening at the College at PC News. | <urn:uuid:4a8b08e7-10be-4875-b2bd-3bb83f85a512> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.providence.edu/news/headlines/Pages/studentathletes.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970065 | 807 | 1.804688 | 2 |
FSA Notes Changes in loan, LDP provisions for 1998 crop Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman announced several changes to the marketing assistance loan program and the loan deficiency payments (LDPs). These changes make the loan and LDP provisions available for producers who may not have been eligible prior to the changes. One of the major changes was allowing nonrecourse loans and LPDs on grain with high moisture. The South Dakota State FSA Committee set the high moisture limit at 35 percent. Previously, the limit was 28 percent, so this will make more grain eligible. Commodities that do not meet warehouse-stored loan standards, such as sample grade grain, are now eligible for a nonrecourse marketing assistance loan or LDP.
Another major change is the eligibility of LDPs and nonrecourse loans on all contract program crops and eligible oilseeds that have been harvested in an alternative manner, such as silage, ensilage, cobbage, earlage, hay, cracked, rolled or crimped, or using machinery that either mutilates the grain or mixes the grain with other parts of the plant that produced the commodity. Commodities harvested as other than grain will be eligible for a loan or LDP.
For commodities harvested in a form other than grain, producers will be required to first report the acres that were actually harvested in a form other than grain. Actual production will be required for the acreage that was harvested as grain. The actual yield from the acres harvested will be used to establish the bushels on the area not harvested as grain. Crop appraisals and crop insurance records will not be used to establish yields for this purpose. The local County Committee can use three similar farms to set yields in certain situations, such as if no acreage of the crop was harvested for grain on this farm.
Producers who were previously ineligible for an LDP or loan, and are now eligible due to these changes, need to go to their local FSA office and request an LDP by completing a CCC-666 LDP or CCC-709, depending on loss of beneficial interest. For previously ineligible quantities that were fed or sold prior to the change in policy, producers will be allowed to certify the date of the harvest and quantity, if fed. For sold production, the producer will need to provide the date of delivery and quantity. The LDP rate will be the rate in effect on the date of delivery or date of harvest.
Please stop in the Clay County Farm Service Agency for additional information or to sign the necessary forms. Beneficial interest must be maintained to be eligible for loans and LDPs and field direct LDPs can be requested when harvested grain goes directly from the field to a buyer, or is fed. | <urn:uuid:41a1035f-b08a-4ae5-8d9e-8feb8ec24b8c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://plaintalk.net/1998/10/fsa-notes-changes-in-loan-ldp-provisions-for-1998-crop-agriculture-secretary-dan-glickman-announce/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954272 | 561 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Since it's World Autism Awareness Day I thought I would write about a little something that's been on my mind lately.
Right after spring break I got a new student. He seemed to be having trouble adapting to our schedule. After 2 weeks of teaching said student I'm almost positive he has Asperger's Syndrome or some other form of autism. My niece has it, and there are many similarities to the glimpses I got of her at that age. I haven't said anything to the parents, because I'm not sure why he transferred to our school. I know he is closer to his mother's job now. I know they pay tuition for him to go to our school, because they still live in the district where his old school was. I can't help but wonder if the teacher at his old school mentioned that he might need to be tested because of his problems, and his parents didn't agree or want to accept it. From what I can tell he's an only child. He reads and writes beautifully (From what I've read good handwriting isn't normal for autistic kids...hm...). He can count better than most. Based on those things he is a model student. But something is definitely wrong. I've talked to my principal, and she thinks we should wait to talk to the parents. She told me to make notes. Document behaviors that stand out. I've started doing that. I just wish I could call his old school and get some feedback from them.
While looking things up online I came across this fictional story about a kid with Asperger's Syndrome that I thought I would share. Just in case anyone out there is interested. | <urn:uuid:419be985-cb82-40d7-b8a0-952c6f296ac9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dixonsturkey.blogspot.com/2010/04/world-autism-awareness-day.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.992959 | 338 | 1.640625 | 2 |
When you ask the average person what they need from their employer, there may be a variety of responses, but some of the most common concerns that are raised include better wages, medical/dental benefits and job security.
In these tough economic times, many employers are finding it hard to meet the needs of their employees, but yesterday, it was confirmed that Apple will be increasing the hourly wages for staff that work in retail locations. These salary increases will go into effect next month and may be as high as a 25% increase. Apple staff were told about the raises during one on one interviews that they had with their individual managers. The raises came into effect after an internal review was conducted by Apple at the request of John Browett who is Apple’s retail chief. Understandably, Apple staff that received a raise were pleased with the news, but many did say it was a long time coming.
According to Apple, the wage increases reflect the current market conditions and ensures that Apple staff are adequately compensated for their work. They also take into account that an Apple store is viewed upon as a high end retail outlet. Over the years, we’ve heard so much about how hard nosed Apple can be with outsourcing jobs overseas and job eliminations, that news like this is a nice change. | <urn:uuid:ba7f28da-e47e-4a57-86a8-8a02c92776a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.coated.com/apple-retail-employees-receive-wage-increases-06211201/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988596 | 263 | 1.695313 | 2 |
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The recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed continued growth in the construction industry, with 30,000 jobs added in December. Employment gains in construction have been driven by the housing recovery, based on hiring data from Hound.com.
Pasadena, CA (PRWEB) January 19, 2013
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ job report signaled a steady, if not booming, economic recovery. Growth in the construction industry continued to post strong job gains, with 30,000 jobs added in construction in December. Increased hiring in construction has been spurred on by a corresponding housing recovery, according to jobs data on Hound.com.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its jobs report this month, reflecting a jobs climate of steady employment growth. Nonfarm payroll employment rose in December, with 155,000 jobs added. Despite a more positive jobs outlook, hiring was not strong enough to bring down the unemployment rate, which remained unchanged at 7.8 percent. Among the industries that posted the most job gains, the construction sector showed continued growth, adding 30,000 jobs in December. Employment growth has been spurred on by the housing recovery and is reflected in the breakdown of which sectors within construction fared especially well: 13,000 jobs were related to building construction and 12,000 jobs were for residential specialty trade contractors. These figures show increased demand for both commercial and residential construction.
Jobs data from the most recent BLS report corresponds with hiring data on Hound.com, a leading job site. Hound has seen jobs in construction spike in the tail-end of 2012, with 7,509 openings posted on the site as of January 17. Much of the current demand is directly related to the fact that, just a few years ago, the construction market was contracting. During the recession, many construction workers were either laid off or changed professions because of the lack of jobs. With demand picking up again, employers are again looking to fill the void left by the recent recession.
With the general consensus being that the housing market has gained traction, one of the biggest industries to benefit has been the construction sector. The success and health of the two sectors have always been irrevocably tied to one another: when the market is down, people don’t buy homes, and companies don’t build. It did not help matters that the housing market crashed during one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression. Now, both housing starts and building permits are up again, and construction activity is being driven along by rising home prices and the lowest mortgage rates the nation has seen in a long time.
Only time will tell if growth in the construction industry will continue, but for job seekers looking for work in the sector, there are certainly more reasons than not to be hopeful.
Hound.com is a job search site based in Pasadena, CA. It’s a part of the Employment Research Institute and owned by A. Harrison Barnes.
For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2013/1/prweb10337983.htm | <urn:uuid:70e7b9f1-be5d-4829-acd0-114d407b06f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fox2127.com/story/20630454/strong-construction-hiring-driven-by-housing-recovery-according-to-houndcom | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960383 | 657 | 1.71875 | 2 |
I haven't contributed to gcc, except by bug reports.
However, I have worked with many C and C++ projects. In my experience, you CAN represent objects very cleanly in C-- the kernel is a good example. C++ has its advantages for certain applications, but it's far from a cure-all. It's kind of funny that on "Linux weekly news" people haven't read the opinions of the creator of Linux about C++. | <urn:uuid:ddde39bf-593d-4764-98db-f78729923d4c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lwn.net/Articles/530576/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980088 | 93 | 1.804688 | 2 |
"The king is dead, long live the king," is a call which, in its Arabic form, is sure to be heard before too long in Saudi Arabia. In the latest chapter of the saga of the House of Saud, the ailing and aged King Abdullah returned to the kingdom on Feb. 23 after a three-month absence, which included two back operations in New York City and a month's recuperation at his palace in Morocco.
It wasn't quite a triumphant return. Upon his arrival in Morocco, the king was brought down to earth in a wheelchair, carried from his aircraft in a scissor-lift disabled-passenger vehicle modeled on the design of a catering truck. A similar contraption was employed on his return home to Riyadh. The gerontocratic monarch is, obviously, on his last legs.
The real story of the king's return, however, was the gifts that he lavished upon his population. The king took the opportunity of his arrival to announce financial handouts to the Saudi population worth an astonishing $36 billion, including, according to the Financial Times, a 15 percent salary raise for public employees, reprieves for imprisoned debtors, and financial aid for students and the unemployed. And all this on top of Saudi Arabia's planned budgeted expenditure of $400 billion through the end of 2014 on improving education, infrastructure, and health care.
King Abdullah's largesse looks a lot like preventive medicine to ensure that Saudi Arabia does not catch the revolutionary disease spreading from Tunisia and Egypt across the Arab world. But few serious analysts of Saudi Arabia think that politics in the kingdom could play out as dramatically as the events in North Africa.
A tweet or two by a young, foreign-educated, Saudi woman resentful of her lack of rights does not make a Riyadh Spring. And it is unlikely that much will come of a Facebook campaign calling for a day of protests on March 11, or that an online petition signed by more than 100 Saudi academics and activists demanding a constitutional monarchy gains momentum. The kingdom is, in the judgment of many, an extraordinarily conservative place, where people know their place and do what their parents tell them. To the extent there is a national sport, it is either driving dangerously or lethargy.
But it appears that not even Saudi Arabia can escape the currents of unrest sweeping through the Arab world. And the royal family, through its mismanagement of the kingdom's public infrastructure, might have brought some of it on itself. This has been one of Saudi Arabia's wettest winters, bringing calamitous floods to the coastal city of Jeddah. During one stormy night, three months' worth of rain arrived in a few hours. At least 10 have died, and more are missing. It was during one of January's storms that the fleeing ex-President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia arrived with his entourage.
The sewage system of Jeddah is basically nonexistent; at best, it is inadequate. In many houses, the waste from the bathrooms flows into underground tanks that are emptied every few days by fleets of tanker trucks. The trucks used to drive into the hills to the east of the city and dump their cargo into the deceptively named Musk Lake. That was until 2009, when heavy rains raised concerns that the dam at the western edge of the lake would break -- evoking fears that a proverbial wave of fecal matter would sweep downhill several miles to the city below. Since 2009, Musk Lake has been partially drained and treatment plants set up at what is hoped is a safe distance further into the desert.
However, fears arose this winter that even the remodeled Musk Lake would once again pose an excremental threat to the city, and Jeddah's citizens protested vociferously. Prince Khalid al-Faisal, the regional governor who is rated as being a good candidate for the throne sometime in the future, visited the flooded areas and commiserated with those affected. Interior Minister Prince Nayef took a helicopter trip over the flooded areas, peering through the windows, Bush-after-Katrina-like, at the devastation below.
As the world's largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia has huge earnings but, by virtue of its relatively large population, has a GDP per capita much lower than those of neighboring Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Even this wealth is badly distributed, and, in Jeddah, many still face real hardship.
King Abdullah's generosity to the people of Saudi Arabia was probably motivated by a desire to both ease the difficulties of the kingdom's own poor and reinforce the House of Saud's reputation during what promises to be a difficult transition period. The princes are going to need the support over the next few months.
In televised and well-photographed action in the Council of Ministers building over the last few months, a bizarre charade is being played out. Crown Prince Sultan, King Abdullah's designated successor, is chairing meetings of the Council of Ministers, as well as greeting visiting foreigners and Saudi dignitaries. Sultan, however, is reportedly suffering from Alzheimer's disease and, anecdotally, does not even recognize government ministers who he has known for years. A WikiLeaks cable described Sultan as "for all intents and purposes incapacitated."
Keeping Sultan in the public eye appears to be an elaborate deception carried out by his younger full brothers or his sons, as part of a palace plot to ensure Sultan becomes king when Abdullah dies. This would allow him to choose the next crown prince -- either one of his own full brothers or one of his sons. Having been undermined by Sultan and his close relatives for decades, King Abdullah has tried to blunt such a maneuver by setting up a so-called Allegiance Council, made up of his 30-plus half brothers or their senior sons, to choose a future crown prince. This wouldn't stop Sultan from becoming king, but it would widen the choice for crown prince beyond Sultan's closest kin.
However, the Allegiance Council could simply be voided by Sultan once he becomes king or by those pulling his puppet strings. So Abdullah's other blocking tactic is simply not to die anytime soon. If Sultan meets his maker before Abdullah, the main problem disappears -- though a new one would be created, as Abdullah and the wider Allegiance Council would still have to outmaneuver Sultan's surviving full brothers, who would continue to form the largest single voting bloc in the institution.
This, at least, is the chess game currently being played within the House of Saud on the question of succession. Whether the Saudi people will accept this quietly, given the winds of change running through the rest of the Arab world, is quite another question. | <urn:uuid:feb2a540-de82-4d83-a03d-0037e3a14ee8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/1/saudi_arabias_musk_revolution?page=full | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975964 | 1,364 | 1.804688 | 2 |
| "Jordana was brought to the U.S. when she was twelve years old. At the age of 23 she was arrested by ICE officials after they came to her home looking for her brother. Jordana had no criminal history and no deportation order. ICE alleged that she had entered the U.S. on the visa waiver program and was thus not entitled to a removal hearing before an immigration judge. When ICE initially tried to remove Jordana, she refused to board the plane and requested a hearing before a judge. As a result, ICE placed her in segregation at the Elizabeth Detention Center for three weeks, and then transferred her for four months to Hudson County.
Despite being eligible for the DREAM Act and meeting the requirements for prosecutorial discretion under the recent memo from ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton, ICE refused all initial requests to have Jordana released. Jordana was ultimately moved to Delaney Hall and released after interventions by U.S. Senators Menendez, Gillibrand, and Durbin. She spent nine months total in ICE detention. A month after her release, ICE admitted in Court filings that it erred in stating that she had entered on the visa waiver program and that Jordana had been entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge all along."
The immigration detention system in the United States has grown drastically over the last 15 years and the appalling conditions in the detention centers that house immigrants have reached a tipping point.
President Obama made promises to reform this inhumane system in 2009, and while there were some efforts to improve the system, the reality on the ground has not changed. Now, conditions at 10 of the worst jails and prisons that house immigrants have gotten so bad, the only option is to begin shutting them down.
Tomorrow, Thursday November 15th, national and local leaders from the Detention Watch Network (http://detentionwatchnetwork.org/) will release a series of reports titled, "Expose and Close," to reveal the widespread pattern of mistreatment at ten of the worst immigrant prisons across the country. Speakers will call on President Obama to close these detention centers and issue a list of reforms to ensure the safety, dignity and well-being of immigrants held in detention.
Among the report's findings:
- Roberto Medina-Martinez, a 39-year-old immigrant, died at Stewart in March 2009 of a treatable heart infection. An investigation conducted following his death revealed that the nursing staff failed to refer Mr. Medina for timely medical treatment and the facility physician failed to follow internal oversight procedures.
- A man with serious emotional health problems in the Houston Processing Center in Texas was placed in solitary confinement for months at a time, a practice which the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has deemed torture.
- At Baker, Etowah and Pinal County Detention Centers and Jails, families are only able to visit with their loved ones in detention through video monitors after having driven hundreds of miles to see them.
- At the Pinal County Jail complaints regarding sanitation include receiving food on dirty trays, worms found in food, bugs and worms found in the faucets, receiving dirty laundry, and being overcrowded with ten other men in one cell and only one toilet.
In conjunction with Thursday's national launch, Detention Watch Network members around the country will be releasing their local reports in a coordinated effort to call for closure of these ten jails and prisons across the nation that exemplify some of the most appalling conditions of immigrant detention. These facilities include Etowah County Detention Center (AL), Pinal County Jail (AZ), Houston Processing Center (TX), Polk County Detention Facility (TX), Stewart Detention Center (GA), Irwin County Jail (GA), Hudson County Jail (NJ), Theo Lacy Detention Center (CA), Tri-County Detention Center (IL), and Baker County Jail (FL).
Please stay tuned. | <urn:uuid:04fded3a-8b20-4538-b15d-120c7b4dc17f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.promigrant.org/showDiary.do?diaryId=1453 | 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 | 0.962833 | 787 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Seventeen thousand runners will descend on Jerusalem in three weeks for the third annual Jerusalem Marathon, an event that is expected to pump NIS 10 million into the local economy.
Mayor Nir Barkat kicked off the countdown to the marathon on Monday by stressing the race’s impact in bringing worldwide recognition in the sports world to the capital.
“The marathon has breathtaking views, clear air, a challenging route, and last year we even had some hail on the way,” said Barkat, noting the race was ranked by the British Women’s Running Magazine as one of the top ten spring races around the world.
Barkat placed the emphasis on the draw for international runners. There are 1,600 runners coming from 52 countries around the world, including Brazil, Croatia, Argentina, and even Turkey and Jordan. | <urn:uuid:81a337b8-acc4-472a-a8d3-9583b4fc5e34> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jpost.com/Headlines/Article.aspx?id=302077 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944526 | 170 | 1.734375 | 2 |
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- Riverbanks Zoo and Garden in Columbia, S.C., is offering lucky gardeners a chance to put in orders for its famed poop produced by elephants, giraffes and zebras.
Zoo spokeswoman Susan O'Cain says one cubic yard of the manure will be available for $43 a load. The manure sells out quickly, and each order is limited to two loads.
Zoo animals produce about 1,500 pounds of manure every day. For those interested in small amounts, pint-size and two-gallon buckets are placed at zoo entrances throughout the year.
O'Cain says the poop will be available for pickup on March 23. Orders may be placed through www.riverbanks.org . | <urn:uuid:67d7d5a4-9790-40c8-a786-daca49d29933> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.crescent-news.com/ap%20odd%20news/2012/02/27/sc-s-riverbanks-zoo-offers-its-poop-for-planting | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940775 | 162 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Geirr Tveitt - Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 5. Piano Concerto No. 1 in F major, Op. 1; Piano Concerto No. 5, Op. 156. Håvard Gimse, piano; Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Bjarte Engeset, cond. Naxos 8.555077 (52'10).
Geirr Tveitt (1908-81) was, along with Harald Sæverud (1897-1992), the most important Norwegian composer of his generation. Sæverud was the more outward looking of the two composers -- Lorentz Reitan writes that he never used a folk tune in his music -- while Tveitt collected and used them obsessively. Indeed his most popular surviving collection of music, the Hardanger Tunes, consists of straight-forward transcriptions of folksongs. Unfortunately, Tveitt's achievement is difficult to assess since so little of his prolific output survived a fire in his home in 1970 (of a corpus of over 300 works, around 90 are known to have survived).
Given Tveitt's reputation as a folklorist, the two piano concertos recorded here have a surprisingly cosmopolitan flavor. The Piano Concerto No. 1 (1927) written when Tveitt was a 19-year-old student in Leipzig is a remarkably assured work There's a touch of Rachmaninov in the swelling finale, but the quiet coda is ineffably Norse. The work opens quietly as well with a haunting modal tune introduced by the piano with minimal accompaniment. Some intensely beautiful passages follow as the horns and woodwinds trade phrases with the piano. The central movement is a fleet, dancing scherzo centered on a cadenza which is finally overwhelmed by a rhythmic conclusion. The work has a compact, arch-like structure, suggesting the influence of Bartók, although Tveitt's idiom is much less radical.
The Piano Concerto No. 5 (1954) dates from a period when Tveitt was living in Paris and touring the world as a conductor and soloist. It's a tuneful and dramatic work, a real crowd pleaser; however, it suffers from an overreliance on neo-Romantic clichés. The first movement opens with a quotation from the "Uranus" movement of Holst's Planets. Several other themes, some quite interesting, are introduced and then explored by the soloist, but the movement fails to cohere. Fortunately, the second movement, entitled Dance aux campanules bleues (The dance of the bells in the Blue [Mountains]) finds Tveitt in a more characteristically Norse mode. Monothematic, ethereal, and concise, the movement is everything one would hope for from the composer of the Hardanger Tunes. The finale, based on folk dances, returns to the heterogeneity of the first movement. This time it is far more successful, perhaps because of the distinctive rhythms that propel it. I imagine the piece would work better in the concert hall where its showiness would be more effective.
Håvard Gimse is an excellent soloist, maneuvering his way through the Fifth Concerto's thorny Rachmaninoviana with ease. At times the Royal Scottish National Orchestra sounds a bit complacent and tired, but overall they provide solid support. This is an interesting release for anyone who has been seduced by the magicof the Hardanger Tunes and would like to discover other facets of Tveitt's talent. | <urn:uuid:278438a3-eb9f-447e-bac3-581fbdac2c15> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.classical-music-review.org/reviews/Tveitt.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954823 | 734 | 1.648438 | 2 |
A society where most everyone uses autonomous cars is also a society where being able to drive a car is a lot like being able to ride a horse—a quaint, cute skill to have. It’s a society where we may no longer enjoy driving down highway one through Big Sur, or along an empty desert highway at night, because most people may not even own a car, and if they do, they certainly aren’t driving it themselves. They’re passengers, distracted by other things like iPhones or iPads or Kindles or whatever else they’re playing with, because taking a car is now just free time.
I for one can’t wait for this. I would love to be able to spend my 90 minutes per day commuting blogging or doing something else. And as for missing out on road trips, that past time is a dying breed already. And just like hiking, camping and even horseback riding, the people who want to do it still find ways to do it. | <urn:uuid:4e31c287-2323-455e-a1d9-f444487e495f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://berserkhippo.com/2012/02/we-need-autonomous-cars/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963671 | 205 | 1.703125 | 2 |
If the Supreme Court upholds health reform’s individual mandate, will it really be a victory for President Barack Obama?
Or will it just mean he gets to keep owning the least popular part of the law?
Obama will say it’s a victory — because it will vindicate his signature legislative achievement. And it will avoid a chain reaction of problems with other parts of the law if the court pulls the mandate out.
(Also in POLITICO: 5 Supreme Court takeaways)
But as the Supreme Court takes up the mandate Tuesday, what’s at stake is not just the legal question — whether Congress overreached by requiring nearly all Americans to buy health insurance. There’s also the broader political question of whether Obama can really win this one.
The public has never liked the idea that the health law will require Americans to buy insurance starting in 2014. Even Obama opposed the mandate during his presidential run.
And if the court puts its constitutional stamp of approval on the mandate, the justices are not likely to change public sentiment.
“Even if the Democrats run the table [at the Supreme Court], it’s still going to be just as unpopular,” said Mark McClellan, director of the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution and a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
All of the media attention on the mandate this week — the health reform lawsuit is the Supreme Court’s highest-profile case at least since Bush v. Gore — isn’t going to help. The lawsuit by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business says the health law’s mandate is an unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach by the Obama administration.
And the law’s opponents say the Supreme Court can’t stop them. In fact, a ruling upholding the law could merely energize the Republican base in the November elections.
“The issue is much bigger than the mandate in the health care law itself,” said Leonard Curry, chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. “The issue is the contrast between the free market and the government and a government-controlled economy. Obamacare is simply a symptom of the president’s ideology.”
That doesn’t mean the White House and its allies won’t try to use a ruling in their favor to try to quell the controversy.
If the court upholds the law — which many legal experts cautiously predict will happen — they’ll frame it as the definitive end to the health reform controversy. Obama and his allies will urge the states to move forward with implementing the law and encourage Republicans to stop complaining about the legislation.
But supporters of the law recognize the challenge.
“Even if we get a great favorable ruling, we still have a lot of hard work ahead of us,” said Eddie Vale, spokesman for Protect Your Care, an advocacy group with close ties to the Obama administration.
“Obviously, the mandate is a contentious issue and not popular and not fully understood,” he said. “But when you sit down and have conversations about the [law’s benefits], … the way that you bring the mandate into it is to say the way you pay for all of these benefits is the mandate.”
The greatest obstacle for supporters of the law is that message doesn’t conform to a quick sound bite. Most Americans’ eyes glaze over when someone tries to explain that the health law’s consumer protections will throw the health insurance pools out of whack if the mandate doesn’t draw in the young, healthy and cheap-to-cover people.
“Anytime you have to put two or three sentences together, you have basically lost the argument,” said Bob Crittenden, executive director of the Herndon Alliance, which supports the health law. “These are abstract concepts.”
And as members of Congress look toward the 2014 implementation date, it’s hard to imagine how Republicans will resist forcing a vote to delay or further weaken the mandate requirements. Such a vote would put pressure on Democrats in swing districts who wouldn’t want to be seen supporting the mandate.
“It doesn’t take much legislative pressure to delay things a year or two,” McClellan said.
Congressional Republicans are hoping to tap into the emotional argument against the mandate: that it puts the government in charge of their health care and, for the first time, allows Congress to require Americans to purchase something.
“I think the passion that brought about the rise of the tea party had a lot to do” with the health care law, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters in the Capitol last week. “I really think Obamacare is a metaphor for the excess of this administration. The stimulus, the debt, the nationalization of health care … all of this government excess.”
A recent poll from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that about two-thirds of Americans oppose the individual mandate. It continually ranks among the least popular pieces of the health law.
Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) said the law’s worst pieces haven’t even come to light yet. He expects bigger problems when the rest of the law is put in place: a costly expansion of Medicaid as it adds millions of people, cuts to Medicare and more doctors refusing to take Medicare patients.
“The worst is yet to come,” Johanns said.
Kate Nocera contributed to this report. | <urn:uuid:5f73d5e4-2a37-4b87-8ada-73f438f34d8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=375FDCED-5BEC-49E7-A949-9660D1906BFE | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941752 | 1,158 | 1.5 | 2 |
New documentary presents hope and promise for NZ kauri forests
Press Release – Song of the Kauri, directed and produced by Mathurin Molgat
New documentary presents hope and promise for NZ kauri forests – World Premiere
Song of the Kauri, a documentary to premiere at the 2012 New Zealand International Film Festival, presents a new vision for the future of New Zealand’s kauri forests.
The story unfolds through the labours of renowned Northland Luthier Laurie Williams who works with kaitiaki Karamea Davis and specialist forester Steve Lane to select and fell a tree to provide the raw material for his instruments – guitars, violins and ukuleles from kauri.
The film then discusses the possibilities of resurrecting mighty kauri forests as it investigates the economics and science of such a vision with experts including kaitiaki Karamea Davis, author Keith Stewart, investor George Kerr, Scion Research kauri specialist Greg Steward and forestry professor Euan Mason.
The film marks the directing debut of Mathurin Molgat, a former World Cup skier who has worked in film production (on both sides of the camera) since 1983.
When Karamea Davis said “I want my trees to sing” he was referring to his philosophy that a Laurie Williams instrument made of kauri could travel the world as an ambassador for New Zealands’ forests and could carry a strong environmental message. Kauri could become New Zealands’ currency in the new world of green economics. “I knew then that I had to make this film” says director, Mathurin Molgat.
Delving deep into the past as it looks towards the future, the documentary covers many perspectives and features cameos by globally recognised musicians including guitarists Jackson Browne, Nigel Gavin, Michael Chapdelaine and Tiki Taane and violinist Miranda Adams.
“As I followed the story of kauri it became clear that there are untapped global markets for kauri and that native forestry should be and could be tree husbandry – for every one we cut down, we plant two,” says Molgat. “I learned that plantation kauri is most certainly possible and that under plantation conditions, kauri is not at all slow growing. We could literally grow ourselves an immensely valuable and unique currency and we owe it to ourselves and the kauri to explore the possibility.”
Economist and columnist David Grimmond supports the movie’s limited-harvest message.
“What interested me were the economic and environmental messages underpinning the film,” he said. “It’s clear a regulatory system that permits the limited harvest of a valued species can be an effective environmental protection tool. Absolute protection of a threatened species such as kauri can have undesirable consequences including removing legitimate economic incentives to expand the habitat.”
“Song of the Kauri offers real possibility and is incredibly engaging and watchable. This is an entertaining and important documentary for New Zealanders and I’m delighted to see it included as one of the few movies that will screen in every festival location.”
The 94 minute documentary features the dedication a small crew including award winning editor Annie Collins, Director of Photography and Cinematographer, Swami Hansa, co producer David Turnbull, and sound recordist John Patrick. Song of the Kauri opens as part of the film festival with its world premiere in Auckland on July 28. It will travel with the festival throughout New Zealand screening in many centres. For screening and booking details click here. | <urn:uuid:edff858e-d08c-4e9e-8bb5-a7dd0fe46931> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://happyzine.co.nz/2012/07/19/new-documentary-presents-hope-and-promise-for-nz-kauri-forests/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944917 | 734 | 1.5 | 2 |
Big Bud Powder
$30.00 — $400.00
Big Bud Provides Amino Acids: Feed Your Plants by Enriching With Reduced, Organic Nitrogen.
Advanced Nutrients has formulated Big Bud to supplement a regular program of mineral nutrition in your garden with a complement of 19 amino acids for alkaloid and protein synthesis.
The 19 amino acids in Big Bud are precursors to every metabolic process that occurs in plants. This is because amino acids are the building blocks of all proteins. Furthermore amino acids are the direct precursors for many plant biochemicals, especially alkaloids.
The intense growth of high-yielding plants presents the grower with many more metabolic processes that can be supplemented directly with Big Bud’s ingredients. These ingredients will “bulk-up” growth because amino acids are hoarded and stored by actively growing plants. Plants recognize them as precious precursors for proteins and alkaloids, and once amino acids are inside the plant, being moved along with the sap of the phloem, they are directed to areas of high biosynthesis and growth.
Amino Acids are called “reduced nitrogen”, since they have the “amine” or -NH2 group in their structure. Amino acids are the first thing that plants synthesize when they are fed mineral nitrogen such as nitrates (NO3) or ammoniacal nitrogen (NH3). Other Amino acids get synthesized from the simple ones like glycine, aspartate or serine. Amino acids are sometimes called “organic nitrogen” as they have both carbon and nitrogen in their molecular structures. Using Big Bud regularly will by-pass, or “jump ahead” of the conversion of mineral NH3 and N03 into organic nitrogen.
Big Bud provides your plants with 19 pre-synthesized, biologically active amino acids; these will be stored for later use, or be converted into alkaloids, protein and new enzymes, bulking-up all plant growth. | <urn:uuid:33ee55b4-0876-458b-afdd-914d2b3378a7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mrsweetshydro.com/shop/big-bud-powder/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94034 | 423 | 1.648438 | 2 |
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Ambergate is located in southwest Western Australia and has a population of around 560 (51.3% male, 48.7% female). Around 168 families live in the area and of those 40.5% have one or more children under the age of 15. 7.7% of families have only a single parent while 42.3% of couples have no children. Ambergate covers an area of approximately 28360 hectares or around 284 square kilometres (km2) (70078 acres).
The most common income bracket for people living in Ambergate is between $400-$599 per week (15.5% of people). 7.3% have no income and high income earners ($2000 or more per week) account for 3.4% of the population.
Of the 193 private dwellings in Ambergate 46% are owned outright by their occupiers, 26% are being purchased (eg. by mortgage) and 28% are being rented. On average there are around 2.9 people per private dwelling in the area. The composition of occupied private dwellings in Ambergate is as follows: 95.4% separate houses, 0.0% semi-detached houses (eg. townhouses, row or terrace houses), 0.0% flats (including units and apartments).
In terms of people aged 15 years or more living in Ambergate 64% are married, 5% are divorced, 3% are separated, 3% are widowed and 25% have never married.
Ambergate varies in altitude/elevation from about 1 m (highlight point) to 209 m (highlight point) above sea level.
The postcode for Ambergate is 6280.
Neighbouring suburbs/regional areas of Ambergate include Bovell, Jalbarragup, Ludlow, Rosa Glen, Vasse, West Busselton and Yalyalup.
Do you know what facilities are available in Ambergate? Contribute your knowledge by clicking here.
Do you know what recreational activities are available in Ambergate? Contribute your knowledge by clicking here.
Are you a keen gardener? Do you know what edible garden plants grow in Ambergate? Contribute your knowledge by clicking here.
Do you know whether any feral animals, insects and weeds have invaded Ambergate? Contribute your knowledge by clicking here.Do you know of any agricultural activities in Ambergate? Contribute your knowledge by clicking here.
Are you a keen bird watcher? Have you been bird watching in Ambergate? What birds have you seen in Ambergate? Contribute your knowledge by clicking here. As a Bonzle sub-project, we're trying to build Australia's most comprehensive suburb by suburb bird location atlas. A big thankyou to all that have contributed and continue to contribute sightings.
The areas that make up this are outlined in yellow on the map below.
If you're interested in Suburbs/Regional Areas then you may also be interested in Cities, Towns and Villages and Cities, Towns and Villages | <urn:uuid:3aa4a218-0c14-4475-acca-13c4781d1271> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bonzle.com/c/a?a=p&p=280566&cmd=sp&wnb=36728724&c=1&x=115.22166515&y=-33.744732655&w=25174&mpsec=0 | 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 | 0.938791 | 661 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Posted by: presco on Oct 25, 2009
My own original way. The same old effect but you can defy all the physicians and surgeons in the world to find anything in your mouth before and after. No secret loading and I have worked the stunt for two months now and got some good write-ups on it.
You have a little work basket sitting on the table and inside have a paper of needles, a spool of white thread and your bundle of needles already threaded and rolled up in usual manner. This bunch is rolled, of course, so the thread is all at one end and if the bundle is picked up
between thumb and finger at this end the thread is out of sight, just the packet of needles showing. This bunch is stuck into the hole in the spool with the threaded ends up. The spool sits upright in the basket. A glass of water is close by.
Call up your doctor or spectator to examine your mouth. Take from the basket the paper of needles and open and remove same, dropping one or two to show they are loose and otherwise freely allowing them to be seen. Roll them in a bunch and hold them between the thumb and forefinger of your right hand, at same time addressing your audience. State that you also use two yards of white cotton thread for the experiment, at the same time reaching into the basket with your right hand, dropping the needles, picking up the bundle from the spool and also the spool.
This is one continuous move. Break off about two yards of thread then drop the spool into the basket. Now state that you are ready. Bring the packet to your mouth and place on your tongue, bring your upper teeth down on them, this covers the threaded ends but the needles can be clearly seen. Draw them back into your mouth and shift them over on to the right side and clamp between your teeth as far back as possible, this will not prevent you from talking and swallowing water freely.
Now drink about half of the glass of water. Now loop the thread over your tongue and chew it up into a small ball and with your tongue push it up between the gums on your left back side. Drink the rest of the water and be sure and tip the glass over and shake it to show it's empty. Now bring the thread packet over in your mouth and with your tongue get the loose end of thread free. Pull about a foot out and have your assistant hold the end, back away slowly and the bundle will unroll with the needles slipping out. As you get to the last end, bring down the ball of thread with tongue into your mouth and when you remove the last end with your thumb and forefinger you have the little wad of thread also, leaving your mouth free. Try it and watch the effect. | <urn:uuid:7421155c-a9f5-4c1a-bb9b-0cd68649b9e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.xploremagic.com/Presco+Uzbekis/1332-the-indian-needle-trick.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955034 | 569 | 1.5 | 2 |
When Tropical Storm Lee brought major flooding to Harrisburg last September, Community LifeTeam members found themselves rescuing civilians and themselves.
As the Paxton Creek turned into a raging torrent, water poured into homes, businesses, streets — and into the PinnacleHealth Community LifeTeam headquarters at 1119 S. Cameron St.
Many LifeTeam members were out rescuing the public. John Logan, LifeTeam director of operations, and other Life Team staffers worked on rescuing the organization.
At 8:30 a.m. Sept. 8, the PinnacleHealth administration told Logan to find a place to relocate Harrisburg’s primary ambulance service. Forty-five minutes later, he had done so. LifeTeam staffers began relocating the service to an empty car dealership in Swatara Township.
Nine months later, the service remains in the cavernous old Brenner Dodge building at 2222 Paxton St., Swatara Township.
“We are doing long-term planning,” Logan said. “We’re still waiting for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to tell us what we can do with our building on Cameron Street. So far, everyone else has said we can’t go back in like it is.”
Logan is weighing four options for LifeTeam:
— Clean and renovate the Cameron Street building if it is deemed habitable again.
— Lease another building.
— Construct a new building.
— Buy the Brenner building and do some renovations there.
Logan said that all options remain open and that no decision has been made on which will be selected.
“We can’t go through flooding again,” Logan said. “It distracts us from our mission.”
Kevin Dalpiaz, LifeTeam supervisor, said that the Cameron Street headquarters dates to the 1940s and originally was an Acme. He said it was flooded in 1972, during the 1980s, 1996, 2004 and 2011.
The Tropical Storm Lee flood was particularly bad, bringing flood water, sewage and mold into the building. Since the flood, a city inspector condemned the building.
Logan said that Community LifeTeam lived up to the “team” part of its name in the flood.
“The day before the water rose, we went into disaster mode,” Logan said. “We packed things into boxes and put them up on tables. We thought the river would crest at 22 feet that night.”
Instead, the Susquehanna River kept rising, eventually cresting at 25.17 feet.
When Logan needed to find an emergency medical services headquarters fast, he thought of vacated car dealerships and the room they would have for ambulances.
He looked at the Brenner building at 2222 Paxton St. in Swatara Township, saw all the garage space and decided “I want to rent it now.” Minutes later, owner Mike Brenner agreed.
PinnacleHealth officials called a moving company. Five Star Leasing at 19th and Gibson provided box trucks and fuel for free. The move was on.
LifeTeam personnel loaded the trucks with everything from office files to bunk beds.
“The water was encroaching our building by 4:30 p.m.,” Logan said. “We sandbagged near our social hall, turned the power off and left. About 15 minutes later, the water came in. We ended up with a couple [of] feet of water.”Meanwhile, some crews were running calls all over the city. Others staffed two Red Cross Shelters. PinnacleHealth’s Medic 6 crews in upper Dauphin County were transporting patients by boat because the Dauphin underpass was flooded. Dozens of LifeTeam members worked around the clock during the early days of the flood.
Months later, Dalpiaz said that crews have adjusted to the Brenner building, but that something is missing.
“When we moved, it was taking people out of their homes,” he said. “We lost a part of our identity the day we left our building. It was emotional. We’re doing better now, but this is still a garage.”
LifeTeam has adapted to its new location, transforming an empty car dealership into an active emergency medical services station with minimum construction.
The former parts department is an office for field supervisors. Ambulances are housed in a huge bay where mechanics once fixed cars. The old cashier’s station has become a dispatch area. Emergency medical technicians and paramedics write their reports in what used to be a service writers area.
Crews take a break in the former customers’ waiting lounge. Medical supplies are stored in an old vehicle washing bay. LifeTeam mechanics work in an 8,000-square-foot area where they do ambulance maintenance and even put new chassis on ambulances.
Community LifeTeam, which has served Harrisburg for more than three decades, will survive, Dalpiaz said.
Originally called River Rescue, Community LifeTeam later changed its name and expanded services over the years. Now, it serves more than 100,000 people in the city and surrounding areas. Once completely staffed by volunteers, LifeTeam now has 130 paid health professionals and six support staff in its office.
The organization responds to more than 15,000 calls annually.
How to help
Checks may be sent to Community LifeTeam, 2222 Rear Paxton St., Harrisburg, PA 17111. | <urn:uuid:70550f0a-5dc5-4b3c-8d56-65ae39dbca74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/06/community_life_team_explores_o.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962954 | 1,142 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Saturday, June 30, 2007
"A Thurston County judge said Friday that state public-disclosure laws do not require Washington government agencies to release information in electronic form if the material is offered on paper."
Friday, June 29, 2007
The gas companies are appealing a Thurston County judge’s ruling to release the information, arguing that it would make their 22,000 miles of underground pipeline systems vulnerable to terrorist attacks or vandalism. The newspapers that are asking for the information say it’s a matter of public interest, especially following the 1999 pipeline explosion in Bellingham that killed an 18-year-old man and two boys."
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Yet another example of information coming to light via the Public Records Act.
A new law involves the disclosure of agency legal invoices like the Tacoma School District's. House Bill 1897 , which passed in the 2007 legislative session, clarifies that the law always required the disclosure of most portions of an agency's legal invoice. The new goes into effect on July 22, 2007.
Here's the problem the Port faces. Government records such as the tape are presumed to be open to the public. Gray areas in definitions are interpreted by a court in favor of disclosure; that is, the tie-breaker goes to the records requestor. "Minutes" of a closed executive session can be withheld. But "minutes" mean the written summary of the meeting--a tape of the whole meeting seems different than mere "minutes." Furthermore, the Legislature is very good at meticulously detailing exactly what it means, so when it said "minutes"--but not "tapes"--can be withheld it must have meant something. And the tie-breaker in this debate goes to the records requestor.
As for the Port's apparent attempt to shield the tapes from public disclosure solely because they are kept in the Port attorney's office, good luck. The P-I story above quotes Allied Law Group's Greg Overstreet on this. He describes the "potted plant" doctrine, which provides that an attorney merely sitting in a meeting like a potted plant cannot turn conversations into nondisclosable privileged communications. There is much more to the attorney-client privilege than the mere presence of an attorney.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
What a great idea: taping closed executive sessions of public meetings can prove violations and (far more importantly) deter many, many more. Attorney General Rob McKenna (R) and State Auditor Brian Sonntag (D) will be jointly requesting a taping bill in the 2008 legislative session. Auditor Sonntag proposed this same bill in the 2001 legislative session but local government argued--get this--that requiring taping was an "unfunded mandated" which would presumably bankrupt local governments. A small digital recorder costs about $59. The saddest part about this argument is ... it worked, at least in 2001. But we think things will be different in 2008.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Good for BIAW. Often maligned as too "conservative," BIAW does some of the best investigative work around--and usually via the Public Records Act. (Uncovering wrongdoing by the status quo government establishment is hardly "conservative," but that's a discussion for a different day.) Many in government want to weaken the Public Records Act. Ever wonder why?
Washington law prohibits a "search" fee for public records. Many have thought a class-action suit in Washington over illegal "search" fees and excessive copying charges would make sense. After all, an agency is not even remotely deterred by having to refund a few dollars to an individual requestor, but if you group several thousand requestors together for refunds ...
How did you and thousands of other citizens learn about this horrible tragedy? "State records show" means the Public Records Act. "Hundreds of pages of investigative files" also means the Public Records Act. Running this story, which was made possible by access to public records, will hopefully change things for other kids and help us keep our government accountable.
The "review of disciplinary records" mentioned in the story would be via the Public Records Act. The review of "court files" would be via open-government court rules which are similar to the Public Records Act. Then the story magnificently illustrates the importance of the Public Records Act by noting that problem officers are discovered by defense lawyers who find out about them "from a public-records request." Wow. You couldn't come up with a better example of how the Public Records Act allows us to remedy wrongs and keep government accountable. Quite a few in government want to eliminate or severely weaken the effectiveness of the Public Records Act. Ever wonder why?
To be crystal clear: Minutes of an open meeting in Washington are public records subject to disclosure. The law provides: "The minutes of all regular and special meetings except executive sessions of [all] boards, commissions, agencies or authorities shall be promptly recorded and such records shall be open to public inspection."
Tip of the hat to Leslie Graves for this story. She operates a great blog called State Sunshine and Open Records. She provides a weekly roundup of open-government news stories from around the United States in a feature called Random Friday Links, from which I found the NJ story.
Friday, June 22, 2007
"RALEIGH, N.C. — A Dare County judge has ordered the town of Kitty Hawk to pay a newspaper $75,000 to cover legal costs it incurred as it fought for access to government records. The Outer Banks Sentinel sued Kitty Hawk in 2004, after town officials refused to release billing records of the town’s contract attorney in 2003 and 2004. ... Superior Court Judge Richard Parker, in a decision filed June 19, blamed the town’s attorneys for using 'totally unwarranted' tactics in defending the case, adding expenses to the newspaper’s legal costs."
By the way, the Legislature passed a bill in 2007 specifically declaring that agency legal invoices are subject to disclosure (with minor redactions). The law goes into effect on July 22, 2007. What do you want to bet that local governments in Washington continue to deny requests for their legal bills? Denying a public records request when the Legislature specifically passed a law declaring the record to be disclosable is perhaps the best possible example of "totally unwarranted" defense tactics. Prediction: In a few months, OG-Blog will be writing about a huge award of legal fees and penalties because a local government attempted to withhold legal invoices.
While the story doesn't say so, I suspect that the newspaper did what newspapers often do: heard a tip and then verified it with public records. Newspapers don't just print rumors, despite what their detractors think. Public records are routinely used to verify the facts--and that's a good thing. No verification via public records and no story. That's a bad thing, especially if you have students in a public school and had no idea one of your child's teachers was accused of sexual misconduct.
By the way, the Seattle-area teachers unions actually argued in the state Supreme Court a few months ago that obtaining public records showing the identities of teachers accused of sexual misconduct with students was "not in the public interest." Think about it.
"The state is now looking for an expert on open records. The budget that goes into effect in July includes $100,000 to hire an open records ombudsman, someone to help regular people get documents that are available under the state's Public Records Act."
Good for Tennessee. Pierce County is looking at doing the same thing and Washington's Attorney General, Rob McKenna, did the same in early 2005 by hiring Allied Law Group's Greg Overstreet. Now that Overstreet has moved over to private practice, McKenna has replaced him with Tim Ford. A public records ombudsman is one of the few examples in government where a public employee's job is specifically to help individual people with claims against the government. It's rare. But needed.
Imitation is the highest form of flattery so Washington citizens should feel flattered. Our legislature created a Sunshine Committee this year and it will start meeting in July. Good for Florida, which is, after all, the "Sunshine State" (that's what their license plates say so it must be true).
Tip of the hat to Mindy Chambers at the Washington State Auditor's Office who alerted OG-Blog to this.
The Department of Corrections should look at the Attorney General's recently-adopted (non-binding) model rules on providing electronic records (scroll down to "2007 Model Rules (Electronic Records)"). They say that electronic records should be provided in an electronic format in most cases.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Washington does pretty well. For the record: the disclosure of a public employee’s salary is absolutely required by the Public Records Act. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Liability for releasing a public record in good faith? Not possible. RCW 42.56.100 provides: "No public agency, public official, public employee, or custodian shall be liable, nor shall a cause of action exist, for any loss or damage based upon the release of a public record if the public agency, public official, public employee, or custodian acted in good faith in attempting to comply with the [the Public Records Act]." So fear of liability isn't the reason to withhold this record ...
Friday, June 15, 2007
Washington's Open Public Meetings Act does not require an agenda, let alone an agenda with enough information to inform the public of what the meeting is about. So in Washington the public can attend a meeting ... but cannot require the agency to tell them what the meeting is about.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Washington State Bar News Review of Public Records Deskbook: "a landmark, hitting the ball out of the park."
"[The] Public Records Act Deskbook is a hands-on users' guide to getting information from state government, whether one is a lawyer or not. As such, it stands as one of the WSBA's more remarkable and successful efforts to manifest its mission to serve the people of Washington."
OG-blog thinks Pierce County could really use some open-government improvement. Kudos to county councilmember Shawn Bunney for thinking of this and moving forward on it. Once again illustrating that open government is not a partisan issue, Attorney General Rob McKenna (R) and State Auditor Brian Sonntag (D) testified in favor of the proposal.
Friday, June 8, 2007
"City Council members Monday night unanimously called for an investigation of Mayor Jerry Landcastle’s conduct. ... The investigation comes after The Bellingham Herald reported Wednesday that the mayor told staff in March emails to fast-track the permitting process for Fairhaven Candy — despite the business not having adequate paperwork in to the city planning department — because the business would be good for the city and the owner was a local resident."
Monday, June 4, 2007
"There's only one likely explanation for why the higher-ups at the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency spent $409,413 on lawyers to fight a Patriot-News request for records of travel expenses incurred by its employees and board members: They didn't want to embarrass themselves with revelations of high, even ridiculous expenditures on themselves, money that otherwise could have -- and should have -- gone to help students overcome the high cost of going to college." | <urn:uuid:b6fc1a25-0a0d-469a-8137-61f060915903> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://og-blogdotcom.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html | 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 | 0.939337 | 2,353 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Surprise, the NTC Amnesties Its Own Crimes
So reports Mark Kersten in a blockbuster post at Justice in Conflict. You have to read the whole thing; here is a taste:
While haggling between the ICC and Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) over the fate of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and Abdullah al-Senussi continues, Libya quietly, but controversially, passed a blanket amnesty for pro-Revolution rebels.
According to Lawyers for Justice in Libya (LFJL), under ‘Law 38′, amnesty will be granted for any “acts made necessary by the 17 February revolution” and for the revolution’s “success or protection”. Earlier, reports suggested that the amnesty law was being drafted in order to appease Libya’s tribal leaders who presumably fear anti-Gaddafi rebels being held accountable for human rights violations committed during the uprising.
It is no secret that both sides of the conflict committed atrocities. In this context, it is notable that the need for amnesty is in itself an acknowledgement that crimes occurred – otherwise there would be no need for an amnesty in the first place.
Notably, the amnesty law was passed along with ‘Law 37′, which forbids “praising or glorifying Gaddafi, his regime, his ideas or his sons”. Rather precariously, the law claims that Libya is still in a state of war and allows for the imposition of a life sentence on anyone who “harms the state” in glorifying the Gaddafi regime. While, to my knowledge, Western states have remained entirely silent on the subject, LFJL and Amnesty International have harshly condemned the legislation, suggesting that they harken back to the brutal and draconian laws that restricted the freedoms of Libyans under Gaddafi.
Mark provides invaluable analysis of the new law, distinguishing between “good” amnesties and “bad amnesties” and pointing out that, by any measure, this is one of the bad ones. He also rightly adds, referring to Libya’s pending admissibility challenge at the ICC, that “Judges aren’t politically blind. They may not be able to rule that Libya is unable or unwilling to try Saif or Senussi on the basis of the country’s commitment, or lack thereof, to trying other perpetrators, but it certainly doesn’t give a good impression.” I’d simply add that the amnesty foregrounds the importance of the OTP not limiting its Libya investigation to members of Gaddafi’s regime; it must also be willing to prosecute high-ranking rebel commanders who are responsible for serious international crimes during the revolution. Recall what the Commission of Inquiry concluded in its most recent report:
The Commission further concluded that the thuwar (anti-Qadhafi forces) committed serious violations, including war crimes and breaches of international human rights law, the latter continuing at the time of the present report. The Commission found these violations to include unlawful killing, arbitrary arrest, torture, enforced disappearance, indiscriminate attacks, and pillage. It found in particular that the thuwar are targeting the Tawergha and other communities.
As the amnesty law makes clear, when it comes to accountability for the new Libyan government, it’s the ICC or nothing. | <urn:uuid:456a5c0e-f9c0-4b1b-aa97-9bbd503a4f02> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://opiniojuris.org/2012/05/09/surprise-the-ntc-amnesties-its-own-crimes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949123 | 697 | 1.5 | 2 |
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. businesses increased their stockpiles in September, further evidence that economic growth was stronger over the summer than first thought.
The Commerce Department says inventories grew 0.7 percent in September, after a 0.6 percent increase in August.
Retailers, manufacturers and wholesale distributors all boosted their stockpiles. Their sales rose 1.4 percent in September— the most in more than a year.
Companies typically increase their stockpiles when they anticipate sales will rise in coming months. Faster restocking helps drive economic growth. When businesses order more goods, it usually leads to more factory production.
Still, a separate report shows retail sales dropped in October. That suggests companies will have to cut back on rebuilding their stockpiles in the final three months of this year, which could slow economic growth. | <urn:uuid:5458ffd9-aa93-41e6-8f22-e68ed07ab92d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.krem.com/news/national/179296511.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962088 | 169 | 1.820313 | 2 |
If your family is like many Americans, you're likely to get together at some point during the holiday season. Here's a task you should try to fit in between all the eating, drinking and merry-making: checking up on older relatives to see how they're faring. Even if they insist that everything is OK, you should look into these four key areas to see if there's something they need that perhaps they don't even realize:
Look around your loved ones' house or apartment to see if it meets their needs as they age. Can they still safely manage the stairs, or would a chair lift make that easier? Would they be better off in their living quarters were all on one level?
Are you concerned about such things as dark stairs, loose rugs, clutter or fire hazards? Would brighter lighting and clearer passageways help?
Is there a bath on the ground floor and a room that could become a bedroom if necessary?
Could their home be made more convenient with simple modifications, such as easier to use handles and switches, pullout cabinet shelves, a comfort-height toilet or walk-in shower?
If you've answered yes to these questions, talk to family members about addressing the situation.
Their Ability to Drive
If your older relatives are still driving, ride with them and observe their behind-the-wheel skills. Are they having close calls? Are there dents or dings on the car or garage? Do they drive too slow or miss signs or signals? Do they have difficulties at intersections? Have they gotten warnings or tickets?
These are a few signs that it might be time to talk about limiting driving or hanging up the keys.
Look around their community to see what alternative transportation options exist for shopping, medical visits, religious services and visits with family and friends if driving becomes too risky. | <urn:uuid:bd8a77fa-6592-4f08-b7db-7a414a8a23d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aarp.org/relationships/caregiving/info-12-2010/checking_on_aging_parents.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97959 | 373 | 1.804688 | 2 |
‘X’ marks the spot for tax reformIn 1986, Democrats and Republicans came together and enacted a tax reform measure that closed loopholes and lowered tax rates. That was a great achievement. The ’86 act has shaped thinking ever since. Now, when people talk about tax reform, they instinctively say, “Let’s do another ’86-style act.” When they debate tax ideas, they inevitably fixate on the two levers that were central back then: closing loopholes and changing top marginal rates.
By: David Brooks, New York Times | <urn:uuid:d461d129-e9ad-4849-ad97-697746c3e6a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/contentEmail/id/250621/contentType/article/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952421 | 117 | 1.765625 | 2 |
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The CIA still hires a lot of private contractors. How many is too many? And where will it stop?
BOSTON — The CIA’s outsourcing of black operations was back in the news last week. In June, President Barack Obama’s man in Langley, Leon Panetta, pulled the plug on a private security firm’s contract to help locate and assassinate terrorists, but it was revealed that private contractors are also loading and servicing Predator drones in Afghanistan. The triggers are still pulled remotely from the agency’s headquarters in suburban Virginia.
During the Bush administration, private contractors were involved with interrogating prisoners and sometimes subjecting them to torture. The Obama administration has put an end to that, too, but I was startled to read that 25 percent of this country’s intelligence work force is made up of private contractors along with perhaps 70 percent of the budget.
The CIA has always sought outside help and expertise when it needed it. A relative of mine was asked to hastily help in getting a hold of some airplanes to bomb Quatamala City in 1950s when Guatamala fell out of favor with the United States. During the wars in Indochina the CIA ran a contract airline called Air America that became famous in its own right. As former director of central intelligence, General Michael Hayden, has said: “There are skills we don’t have in government that we may have an immediate requirement for.” The CIA has reached into private firms and universities to garner expertise over the years. Add to that a general pullback of resources after the end of the Cold War, and one can sympathize with the need to outsource to react to 9/11.
Controversy will continue over whether, and how much the Bush administration broke the law by keeping all of this from Congress. Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said that “every single intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the Congress. If they are not, that is a violation of the law.”
There is always tension between those who run clandestine operations and those tasked with oversight. One of the problems has been that Congress has trouble keeping secrets, and leaks can prove fatal. On the other hand, governments always long for less supervision. The Reagan administration toyed with an idea of an off-the-books intelligence operation, a sort of secret CIA that could avoid scrutiny. Mercifully for the republic, it never came to fruition.
The emphasis on secrecy in the Bush administration, however, went beyond the normal, and led to frightening abuses. It is easy to see how a devastating terrorist attack, coinciding with a political leadership of the likes of Dick Cheney, could push this country sliding toward a police state. | <urn:uuid:c72fd620-81ed-4f88-a4a9-c63d692f8338> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/090823/outsourcing-intelligence-CIA | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967761 | 571 | 1.625 | 2 |
It’s not always easy to figure out if Congress is in session. When they’re not, they hold pro-forma meetings designed to block presidential appointees. When they are, they hold meetings easily mistaken for the pro-forma versions in which little gets done beyond the routine blocking of presidential appointees. That, or they muck about with Band-Aid solutions instead of actually trying to help the economy.
For a classic Band-Aid solution, see the latest Republican proposal to freeze the pay of federal workers. This might sound like a good idea: The federal workers category includes members of Congress, who don’t earn their current salaries. And why shouldn’t they share in the pain that is afflicting so many other Americans?
Well, in fact, they already do.
A bit of legislation recently landed on President Obama’s desk that passed both the House and the Senate without any dissenting votes whatsoever: The Civil Service Recognition Act.
As you probably guessed — given the bland name and the unusual unanimity among lawmakers — the act is wholly inoffensive. If a federal civilian employee dies on the job, the head of an executive agency may present his or her family with an American flag.
I am not generally in favor of largely symbolic legislation, but the Civil Service Recognition Act doesn’t fall into the solution-in-search-of-a-problem category. Federal workers often end up in dicey and dangerous places, like embassies targeted by terrorist organizations. Thousands of federal civilian employees have died over the last 20 years while performing their official duties, and it’s worth recognizing their sacrifice.
Congressional Republicans said yesterday they would support an extension of the payroll tax cut, but refused President Obama’s proposal to make millionaires pay for it with a small surcharge on their earnings. Instead, they want middle-class federal workers to offset the cost.
The Republican plan would extend the two-year pay freeze on federal workers for another three years, and would reduce the size of the federal workforce through attrition by 10 percent, or 200,000 jobs. In other words, they would make working for the government increasingly painful, and when employees quit in frustration or retire, only one out of three positions would be filled. | <urn:uuid:7b27fc0b-f80b-4200-ad2b-b5111eb84fc6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/federal-workers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954484 | 469 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Academic interest in taboo must move beyond immediate condemnation
Sharpened attitudes ... the Jimmy Savile affair in Britain has shown how insidious and pervasive the sexual abuse of children is, and how brazen it can be.
As I write, I worry what you will think of me. Saying anything remotely sympathetic about paedophilia is bound to invite grave suspicions. Even academic interest in the topic is cause for concern; why is he interested in that? The only acceptable attitude to paedophilia seems to be outright condemnation. All you need to know is that it is bad. Very bad.
The Jimmy Savile affair in Britain has sharpened attitudes. It has also shown how insidious and pervasive the sexual abuse of children is, and how brazen it can be. Sexual crimes against children seem to occur everywhere, even in places considered sanctuaries of family values: children’s programmes, Top of the Pops, hospital wards, care homes, churches. It seems no child is safe.
Public reaction is hardly surprising. Perpetrators must be exposed, vilified, punished, removed from society; everything possible must be done to protect children from them. Those who tolerate them or fail to recognise them are also guilty. Heads must roll.
Surely the best way to tackle so serious a scourge – like any other public health scare – is to commission an expert study of it, so that we can design and implement safeguards based on the best scientific evidence. Yet, as I have said, anyone who takes this approach to paedophilia provokes suspicion. How can they be so objective and neutral and calm? Are they perhaps harbouring perverse tendencies themselves?
The inevitable outcome is that few medical scientists want to be associated with this topic. Those who do work on it keep themselves to themselves. Frequently they are constrained further by issues of doctor-patient confidentiality. As a result, ignorance of paedophilia is almost as widespread as the crime itself. Pitifully, few members of the public (and the journalists who inform them) are capable of answering such simple questions as: What is paedophilia? What causes it? How is it treated? Is it curable?
The same applies to more complex questions such as: Why are most paedophiles male? Or are they? Does consensual sex with a 15-year-old count as paedophilia? Are people who download child abuse images likely to perform actual paedophilic acts? If breastfeeding arouses erotic sensations in a mother, is she a paedophile?
What is the tipping point between normal and perverse pleasure in children? Is this a moral or a medical distinction? If it is a medical one, should the carrier of the disease be morally blamed? What if perpetrators were themselves the victims of childhood sexual abuse, as they almost always are? And if they are, do they have a choice as to what they become?
The answers to these questions are under-reported and patchy, and also unreliable and capable of enormous misunderstanding. News stories about paedophiles are frequently followed by sweeping moral panics that lack a sense of rational judgment based on objective evidence and sound debate. Instead, fear and loathing dominate the social landscape, sometimes generating false accusations directed at innocent individuals with tragic consequences. Why is this so? And what can we do about it?
Today will be the start of a brave experiment. To try to rectify the current situation a new charity, the Loudoun Trust, has been formed, bringing together specialist academics and practitioners. It will compile a database of reliable information on the causes, mechanisms and meanings of sexual crimes against children, and is committed to making this information accessible.
The trust believes the public interest is best served by evidence-based information on this difficult subject. Let’s hope they get away with it.
Mark Solms is professor in neuro-psychology at the University of Cape Town, and a trustee of the Loudoun Trust. | <urn:uuid:ca7f9edc-dc6e-4933-acf8-bf3bc9743a83> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.watoday.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/academic-interest-in-taboo-must-move-beyond-immediate-condemnation-20121127-2a4ev.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95782 | 799 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Disability funding is no indulgence - Stella Young...
Are you willing, along with your promised stint in remote Indigenous communities (where you’ll also come across a great many people with disabilities and their families, mind you) to spend a week every year living as people with disabilities live in Australia? Not one of those silly simulation exercises, where you go out and about in a rented wheelchair or with a blindfold on, but a week...
Some good advice from Dr Seuss...
“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!” ― Dr. Seuss
Teach your children well.
I recently read this post by Tiffany at her awesome blog My Three Ring Circus about how other children react to her daughter. I loved it and encourage you to read the entire post. Here is an extract: From a mother, who truly tries to teach her children that each person is special and has something unique and important to offer the world, I implore you please teach your children well. If not,...
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect...– http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
In any case, shaming teh fatties for being “unhealthy” doesn’t fucking help. If...– Kate Harding http://kateharding.net/faq/but-dont-you-realize-fat-is-unhealthy/
Obesity stigma in Australia: New academic paper
Our new paper on obesity stigma in Australia is now online here. Lewis, S. Thomas, S.L. Blood, W.R. Hyde, J. Komesaroff, P. (in press) How do obese individuals perceive and respond to the different types of obesity stigma that they encounter in their daily lives? A qualitative study. Social Science and Medicine This paper qualitatively explored the different types of obesity stigma (direct,...
Why are discussions about nutrition, food, activity, so naturally framed as being about childhood obesity? This always strikes me as very problematic. Shouldn’t these discussions be about the health and wellbeing of our kids rather than how fat they are or how fat they might get?
Declaration of interest in new WW study.
You may have seen the news about a new study of 772 Adults in Australia, Germany and the UK, which has shown that Weight Watchers + support from a family physician is more effective than just support from a family care physician in helping people to lose weight over 12 months. What hasn’t been reported extensively is the conflict of interest statement, which I share here for your...
Bigotry doesn’t always announce itself. Indeed, it rarely does. Lots of...– Brian at Red No 3 http://red3.blogspot.com/2011/08/bigotry-doesnt-always-announce-itself.html
"Let me tell you, I have NO interest in my fatness... →
What I know about mums.
Today in the Age Magazine segment ‘What I Know About Women’, Australian TV Breakfast Host Karl Stefanovic stated about his wife: Cass has been an enormous support and has put her career on hold to be a mum. I always find this kind of statement quite problematic. For me, this creates an expectation that you can be one or the other - have a career, or be a mum. I work full time and... | <urn:uuid:06c82895-b252-4f7b-ac0d-b0870ec26c89> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://docsamantha.tumblr.com/archive | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938506 | 769 | 1.773438 | 2 |
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52-Week Hockey Training is a day-by-day conditioning program that will get your team in shape for more powerful skating and shooting. It’s a complete schedule for hockey fitness. The book is coauthored by an exercise physiologist and a former professional ice hockey player with more than 25 years of coaching experience -- including stints with the Detroit Red Wings, Edmonton Oilers, and Ottawa Senators organizations. 52-Week Hockey Training teaches the essential components of fitness as they relate to improved hockey performance.
The 52-Week Hockey Training program is incredibly easy to implement. It gives you detailed workouts with specific exercises and drills, and it tells you exactly when to perform them. The book divides the calendar into four primary phases of training:
Each season reflects a change in priorities as the hockey year progresses. The easy-to-follow layout clearly presents the goals and emphases for each season, and it outlines daily on-ice and off-ice conditioning workouts for every season.
Don MacAdam and Gail Reynolds. 2001. Paperback. 200 pages.
Coaching Hockey Successfully makes all these tasks much easier by guiding you through every aspect of the coach’s role giving you a blueprint for establishing a successful program. It’s an all-encompassing manual for beginning coaches and a thorough reference for more experienced coaches.
Author Dennis "Red" Gendron has coached hockey at nearly every level of competition, from youth summer clinics to NHL teams, and his teams have won everything from high school state championships to a Stanley Cup. In Coaching Hockey Successfully Gendron shares his experiences and wealth of knowledge to help you build your own winning hockey program.
Coaching Hockey Successfully gives you advanced skills, drills, and strategies for play in the defensive, neutral, and offensive zones. The book addresses a wide spectrum of vital coaching topics:
• Developing a program philosophy
• Motivating players
• Planning the season
• Preparing for practices
• Building a feeder system
• Handling game situations
• Evaluating performance
Dennis "Red" Gendron. 2003. Paperback. 240 pages.
This new edition of Coaching Youth Hockey is part of the improved generation of the American Sport Education Program’s (ASEP) Coaching Youth Sports series. This widely respected and highly popular series is the best collection of youth sport-specific guides, which are grounded in positive coaching principles.
ASEP, the nation’s number one coaching education program, developed Coaching Youth Hockey to provide coaches with both an explanation of their role and concrete instructions on how to fulfill that role. You will find chapters on communicating with your athletes and their parents, teaching and developing hockey skills, planning and conducting practices, and coaching during games.
This second edition includes a special chapter on the games approach to coaching hockey, which makes practice more fun for the kids and teaching more effective for you, the coach.
American Sport Education Program. 2001. Paperback. 208 pages.
The book includes 75 drills, many of which can be applied to both in-line and ice hockey. Backed by the sport`s premier provider of coach and player instruction, Huron Hockey, Hockey Drills for Passing & Receiving teaches how to develop individual skills and use them within a team concept. In addition to improving puck movement in the offensive zone, the drills also focus on the all-important transition game, where much of the action takes place during a match.
Expert instructors George Gwozdecky and Vern Stenlund provide the key teaching points and practice activities to hone players` abilities to move and keep possession of the puck. Drills within each chapter start basic then increase in difficulty to provide a wide range of challenges and learning situations. Each drill is accompanied by special coaching tips to correct common errors and maximize players` performance.
George Gwozdecky and Vern Stenlund. 1999. Paperback. 216 pages.
Chicago Blackhawks coach Newell Brown and coauthor Vern Stenlund give you every tip you need for quick, creative, and accurate shotmaking. Through a sequence of competitive and challenging drills, you`ll improve shooting technique and learn special ways to light up the scoreboard.
The book presents time-tested drills developed by Huron Hockey School, which has graduated more than 350 players to the National Hockey League. Each chapter presents 10 drills that focus on specific scoring skills. All activities are designed to develop practical skills that carry over into game situations. And many activities are easily adaptable to roller hockey.
The drills progress in difficulty—from simple activities that even beginners can do to elite-level workouts that would challenge the greatest talents in the world. A special Drill Finder section cross references drills by their related skill categories so you can easily find the drills that fit your needs.
Each chapter includes full-page diagrams illustrating the drills and features Key Points and Drill Progressions sections that:
• tell you what Huron Hockey School coaches have learned over the years to make the drills most effective,
• offer tips to help players and coaches reduce the time to master skills, and
• provide helpful ideas to refine the drills to challenge even the most experienced player.
Newell Brown and Vern Stenlund in cooperation with Huron Hockey School. Foreward by Brendan Shanahan. 1997. Paperback. 216 pages.
Shut down your opponents and win more games with Hockey Goaltending. Featuring on and off-ice training and drills to improve reaction time and physical conditioning for this challenging position, this book and DVD package will provide you with the best instruction of techniques and mental strategies to elevate your play and protect the goal.
2009, DVD/Paper, 280 pages.
Hockey Goaltending brings together the world’s top goaltending coaches to create the premier resource for goalies and coaches at every level of play. Their expertise and insight provide comprehensive instruction on every facet of this challenging position:
Off-ice training programs to improve reaction time, strength, flexibility, quickness, and agility.
Techniques to shut down breakaways, passouts, and wraparounds as well as power plays and odd-man rushes.
Detailed instruction on rebound control, recovery skills, and playing the puck.
Mental strategies to put you in the zone and keep you there.
On- and off-ice drills to refine your skills and elevate your play
Laura Stamm’s Power Skating DVD will show you how to get to loose pucks faster, react quickly to the play, and get back in position in balance and under control. In addition, you’ll discover how to improve your skating in all the fundamental skills. You’ll learn proven drills to help you practice and master each maneuver. The DVD presents skills and drills in these six areas:
Balance and control, Smooth and powerful stride, Turning speed and lateral mobility, Aggressive starts and sudden stops, Quick turns and transitions, Agility maneuvers.
Laura Stamm has been teaching hockey’s best players how to skate for more than 30 years. Her internationally renowned Power Skating Clinics have helped thousands of junior skaters and pro players to increase their speed, ability, and efficiency on the ice. Several NHL teams have adopted her Power Skating System.
In addition, former National Hockey League player Doug Brown and Lee Jelenic of the American Hockey League provide top-quality demonstrations of each skill and drill. This DVD presents every technique you need to practice to skate your best and elevate your game.
2005, 50-minute DVD
With 446 drills covering every facet of the sport, The Hockey Drill Book is the most comprehensive resource.
Former National Hockey League and World Championship gold-medal coach Dave Chambers has spent thousands of hours in the world’s top rinks. In The Hockey Drill Book he provides you with the same drills used by North America’s and Europe’s elite.
The 446 drills cover each position, offensive and defensive systems, pregame warm-ups, on-ice conditioning, and game-specific situations, including power plays, penalty killing, and face-offs. (Dave Chambers. Foreword by Pay Quinn. 2008. Paperback. 392 pages)
Hockey Tough provides players and coaches proven methods for mastering the mental side of the game. Author Saul Miller shares the psychological training and emotional management techniques he has successfully taught individual hockey players and teams for over 20 years.
Throughout the book, NHL stars such as Mark Messier, Pavel Bure, Chris Pronger, and Markus Naslund offer insights and tips on a variety of topics related to achieving a winning mind-set for the sport. These players explain how to focus and score, how to deal with personality conflicts on and off the ice, and how to bounce back with confidence after a subpar performance.
(Saul L. Miller. Foreword by Herb Brooks. 2001. Paperback. 224 pages)
Hockey Plays and Strategies presents all of the popular offensive, defensive, and special teams systems used in today’s game, as well as tactical advice on making in-game adjustments and player match-ups at every level of play. .
Veteran coaches Ryan Walter and Mike Johnston share more than 160 plays, systems, and strategies to control the ice and light up the net. In this one-of-a-kind guide, you’ll learn these skills: Puck movement within the neutral zone to set up for attack zone entry and scoring chances on the rush.
Capitalizing on all odd-man rush scoring chances and shutting down the opposition’s opportunities.
Executing lock-down defensive play in all zones to eliminate good scoring chances and shots on goal plus many many more! .
2010 Paperback 232 Pages by Ryan Walter and Mike Johnston.
Ron Wicks was an NHL referee for more than twenty-five years. As a whistle blower in hockey games all over the United States, Canada, and Europe, Ron tells his story in A Referee's Life. He candidly talks about his fellow officials, his relationship with the players, coaches, and general managers, and the meddling of club owners. Ron has rubbed shoulders with legends of the game such as Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Bobby Orr, Mario Lemieux, and Wayne Gretzky, and his stories of putting them and hundreds more into the penalty box take you right into game night. Along with numerous funny, serious, and candid anecdotes, this book gives space to Ron's musings on the game as it evolves here and around the world. A Referee's Life has plenty to say about pride and the great game of hockey. Ron was thrilled to be an integral part of the game for over forty years, and it shows. As in all of his years of refereeing, he pulls no punches and calls them as he sees them. A Referee's Life (978-1-897508-48-0, 160 pages) is published by General Store Publishing House, Renfrew, Ontario, and retails for $19.95.
We Ship to Canada • We Ship to USA • We Ship International | <urn:uuid:f1c1f3b7-b652-4b7b-a693-266bb249dcef> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://coachdepot.com/cat/hockey+books | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943356 | 2,302 | 1.625 | 2 |
The company annually supports fundraising efforts that benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). Traditionally, teddy bears can be purchased and funds donated to the charity.
Smith said staff first presented the idea of sponsoring a yard sale in 2010. Two weeks later, he and other volunteers were sitting in front of the business at 1332 Chattahoochee Drive greeting people who had come to be a part of the event.
That year, the local office raised more than $3,300 for Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. The total in 2011 was $3,688.
The company reported $139,747 was donated in 1910 and $161,670 in 2011.
Prior to the first yard sale, Smith said he did not know so many people have been diagnosed with diabetes. Once he started campaigning for the event, he quickly discovered he wasn’t aware of the statistics.
A number of people shared their experiences during the yard sale, but Smith remembers one that touched his heart.
A woman called and said she had some items to donate. She said she thought it was a great cause but did not have any money.
However, she did have clothing she wanted to give.
Smith learned that she had a child with juvenile diabetes and heard how it had affected the entire family.
In addition, a man donated $50 that had lost several toes due to the disease.
“Every fourth person told their story of having diabetes or a family member, friend or acquaintance had been diagnosed with diabetes,” Smith said.
Later, he discovered his late grandmother had diabetes, and that his father and grandfather also have the disease.
“Since I got involved in this charity, it has opened my eyes to how people are affected,” he said.
Smith and his staff will once again host a Charity Yard Sale from 8 a.m. to 12 noon Saturday, Sept. 8, at Republic Finance.
Donations of clothes, toys, tools, furniture, sports equipment and similar items are now accepted. The idea is to clean out your garage and help a great cause.
For more information about how you can help support the yard sale, contact Page Dunn at 770-684-8382.
All proceeds will go to Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).
Since its founding in 1970, JDRF has funded more than $1.5 billion in research. More than 80% of JDRF’s expenditures directly support research and research-related education. | <urn:uuid:5330c2d0-5688-40dc-a063-fe8bc6a2f8b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cedartownstd.com/view/full_story/20020557/article-Charity-Yard-Sale-Saturday- | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985397 | 515 | 1.59375 | 2 |
In 34 minutes, Larry Modic’s house was down.
A worker operating a huge excavator from Ray Bertolini Construction Co. demolished the Akron house Tuesday morning and was scheduled to tear the house next door down, as well.
“This was pretty easy,” said Joe Bertolini, president of the company. “We do it every day.”
At 8:10 a.m., machinery took down the first chunk of the back of the Manchester Road home.
At 8:44 a.m., the final brick pillar on the porch was felled. All that was left was rubble.
Modic, 57, who has an apartment in Lakewood, was trying to establish residency in Akron.
He bought the brick house near Summit Lake in May for $10,000 and said he was unaware that the city housing division had cited the home for repair issues and issued orders to repair the problems. He spent weekends in the 1925 home, trying to fix it up.
The demolition came after the city won a court fight last week.
Modic had threatened violence during his ordeal with the city about code violations. Akron police took him into custody in January and transported him to a local mental health facility. He then was transferred to the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center’s Wade Park facility.
Police found four loaded rifles, a loaded handgun, two boxes of ammunition and a flak jacket in the house. Modic has not been charged with any crimes related to the threats.
Volunteers helped him remove his personal belongings over the weekend.
The two homes knocked down Tuesday were among 650 vacant or abandoned homes that are to be torn down in the city this year, said Abraham L. Wescott, Jr., development manager of the city’s Department of Planning and Urban Development.
Wescott estimated another 2,000 homes in Akron are potential candidates for demolition.
The effort to rid the city of dilapidated homes, Wescott said, “without a doubt” is having a positive impact on neighborhoods.
Demolitions this year in Akron will be paid for mostly from $3.9 million from the Moving Ohio Forward Demolition grant from the Ohio Attorney General’s office. The money is from a settlement from five banks over foreclosure abuses and fraud and unacceptable mortgage practices.
Modic attended a June meeting of the Housing Appeals Board and was given 30 days to make repairs. At the July meeting, he received 60 more days to make repairs. But at the September meeting, which Modic did not attend, the board voted to condemn the home.
Modic failed to appeal the decision within 30 days as required by law.
Attorney Warner Mendenhall filed a suit on Modic’s behalf last week in an attempt to block demolition, but Summit County Common Pleas Judge Paul Gallagher ruled against Modic and allowed the demolition to go forward.
Other issues addressed in the lawsuit by Mendenhall over the city’s demolition process are still to be heard and decided in court.
Akron officials have said they are researching the possibility that the city will file a third-party lawsuit against the seller of the property to Modic.
Planting a flag
Modic was not present when the home was taken down, but stopped by afterward.
An Akron police officer rescued an American flag that was on the property and gave it to Modic, who then planted it on a side lot next to the remains of his home.
Modic, who served 13 years active duty in the Army and nine years in the Ohio Army National Guard, said he hopes to find a house in Akron and will work for reforms on the housing demolition front. He has even toyed with the idea of constructing a new home on the Manchester Road property.
“It is unbelievable,” he said of the efforts made by local citizens to raise money for another house.
Akron police blocked Manchester Road on either side of the house during demolition. Police Chief James Nice stood by and watched the demolition.
“Modic has really been impressed by the response of Akron citizens,” Mendenhall said. “The people of Akron really understand that what happened was wrong. Larry found so many strangers just want to help him. It is a very touching thing for him.”
Newton Falls resident Missy Thompson, 43, brought her son Tyler, 9, to Akron to see the demolition site and publicly support Modic.
“This just isn’t right,” she said. “This is absolutely not how you should treat people.”
State Rep. Zack Milkovich, D-Akron, has started a fundraising drive to help Modic buy another home. An event will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday at 3 Point Restaurant, 45 E. Market St., Akron.
Milkovich pledged to contribute $1,000 to the cause and said he has identified several houses in the Summit Lake area for under $10,000. He said he also has a list of numerous individuals and vendors who are willing to help Modic. About $2,500 has been pledged so far, including Milkovich’s donation.
To donate to the fundraising effort for Modic, call Milkovich’s office at 330-810-2007 or go to www.savelarryshouse.com.
Jim Carney can be reached at 330-996-3576 or at [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:84350337-634e-4b9c-87aa-d3ec2be6bf55> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/veteran-s-house-torn-down-in-34-minutes-effort-under-way-to-raise-money-for-another-1.370699 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977676 | 1,145 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Yudhoyono asks all countries to adopt green economy
Fri, June 22 2012 01:16 | 1292 Views
Rio de Janeiro (ANTARA News) - Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has appealed to all countries to apply green economic policies together.
The President made the appeal at a panel discussion held on the sidelines of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development or Rio+20 in Riocentro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Thursday.
"We must switch from `greedy` economic to green economy. This is something that we need to develop in our homes, our schools, and our workplace. If citizens of the world commit themselves to change their lifestyle, then global sustainability will no longer be a mere vision but a reality," he said.
It is necessary for the global citizens to change their lifestyle as many people have become victim of their own success, he said.
The President also mentioned how the world is hit by excessive consumerism and greed.
"Now is the time for us to redefine modernity, development, and welfare. We also need to change the attitude of excessive consumption and consumerism," he said.
On the occasion, the President also warned that the world is experiencing a critical period in the lead up to the deadline for the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 and the expiry of Kyoto Protocol. Therefore, it is important for citizens of the world to strengthen the commitment to sustain a global vision to ensure a sustainable future.
"Our challenge is how to ensure that the global economic problems will not divert our attention away from the target (of sustainable development) and climate change," he said.
He underscored the importance of common responsibilities to secure the future of the climate.
"Developed countries should take the lead, but developing countries must also do more," he said.
He also reminded the world community of the need to establish greater collaboration rather than to get involved in confrontation. Even better argument is needed to keep big issues, but in the end all parties must work together. (*)
Editor: B Kunto Wibisono
COPYRIGHT © 2012 | <urn:uuid:8c218daf-cd77-4639-a73a-a2ff1a832eda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://antaranews.com/en/news/83004/yudhoyono-asks-all-countries-to-adopt-green-economy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950585 | 445 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Everything you need to know about e-textbooks before Apple gets involved
Apple is holding an education-themed event this week, and the usual gamut of unnamed sources and rumor-mongers have come to the consensus that the event will focus on Apple's plans to enter the e-textbook business, and possibly unveil a new interactive e-book publishing platform.
This rumor springs from the best-selling biography of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in which Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson said textbooks were "the next business [Jobs] wanted to transform," and that the company had already had several series of meetings about making Apple e-textbooks a reality.
Some have already predicted that Apple's presence would do the same thing for e-textbooks that it did for .mp3 retailing. That is to say, take an already existent (but disjointed) market and whip it into shape with a domineering hand. So before Apple's event takes place, we thought we'd compile a list of the big players in the e-textbook space to create a better picture of the e-textbook business and what Apple will be coming into.
Barnes & Noble Nook Study - Book retailer Barnes and Noble has approximately 2.5 million e-books of all types available, including e-textbooks. Nook Study lets students rent or buy e-textbooks on the web and read them in the Windows or Mac application. The application allows search, tagging, annotations, highlights, and printing. Unfortunately, Nook Study does not yet exist as a mobile application like the regular Nook e-reader does.
Amazon Kindle Textbook rental - Unlike Barnes and Noble, there really isn't much difference between Amazon's regular e-books and its e-textbooks. The cross-platform Kindle application deals with e-textbooks in the exact same way as regular e-books, but Amazon has an e-textbook rental program that lets students buy temporary licenses on books to save money.
Chegg - Chegg began as a textbook rental site in 2007 and grew to become one of the largest of its type. In 2011, the site branched out into e-book rentals, and began offering HTML5-formatted e-textbooks for consumption in the browser. Chegg has partnered with Cengage Learning, Elsevier, F.A. Davis, Macmillan, McFarland, Rowman & Littlefield, Taylor and Francis, McGraw-Hill, John Wiley & Sons, and Oxford University Press for content.
CourseSmart - This online vendor distributes digital material from many of the biggest textbook publishers like Chegg does. CourseSmart's partners include Pearson, McGraw-Hill Education, John Wiley & Sons, and Cengage. With its own desktop software, a Web-based e-book store, a developing mobile presence, an HTML5 user portal, and about five years in operation, CourseSmart is a highly visible channel for e-textbook distribution.
VitalSource - Ingram Content Group's VitalSource is actually the platform that Chegg and at one time CourseSmart, making it one of the most widely used e-textbook platforms in the world. It reaches more than 180 countries and 6,000 universities globally. It's not the face that students see, but it is of immense importance in the still young e-textbook industry.
Kno - This startup from one of Chegg's co-founders first began in the hardware business, trying to get a dual-screen e-reader off the ground, but it eventually morphed into a software-only mobile application and e-book retail/rental store. Now the company has a selection of over 150,000 e-textbooks, and strives to be different by rolling unique learning features into its application, such as behavioral analytics, flash cards, and journaling.
Inkling - Like Kno, Inkling is a mobile application designed specifically for consumption on tablets, and like many of the other services, it offers e-textbook rentals. However, it differs in execution from the likes of Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Instead of renting textbooks for a period of time, students buy their books by the chapter, and each chapter generally costs between $1.99 and $21.99, as determined by the publisher. Right now, Inkling has only a few hundred textbooks available for purchase.
CafeScribe - Educational tools provider Follett Corporation launched its own browser-based e-textbook platform CafeScribe in 2010, and has already partnered with more than 800 university bookstores to be their e-textbook solution. Follett's library has more than 10,000 titles.
Nature Publishing - In 2011, 135-year old Nature Publishing wrote its first textbook, the "born digital" text called Principles of Biology. At just $45 dollars, Nature completely rebuilt the business of publishing textbooks to cater to the e-book generation. The result is a book that is more quick to market, more dynamic, and cheaper.
ScrollMotion - ScrollMotion differs slightly from most of the companies mentioned above because it designs standalone e-reading applications for content publishers, and created the HMH Fuse K-12 "iPad Textbook" app for Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt publishing. Publishers can, with this type of app, offer their content directly to students and consumers. This company is in an extremely important position to watch, because Gartner Research predicted that by 2016, more than 50% of all e-textbooks will be self-published. Making an e-textbook into a standalone app would make it more accessible and visible.
Lulu - Following the self-publishing train of thought, Lulu lets authors create their own e-textbooks, convert them to multiple formats, and assign them ISBNs for listing and sale across multiple e-book stores. Additionally, it has its own retail platform for both physical and e-book sales.
Scribd - Like Lulu, Scribd lets authors or content creators upload their e-textbooks and distribute them either for free or in the Scribd Store. The main drawback of these self-publishing platforms is that they lack the necessary peer review and content vetting that makes textbooks what they are. Gartner Research in December said we can expect providers such as Lulu, Smashwords and Scribd to expand on their peer review capabilities to answer this demand.
Flat World Knowledge - This five-year old company publishes complete, peer-reviewed textbooks under a Creative Commons open license and lets students read them for free online, or purchase them as affordable downloadable e-books or even as printed books. Educators who want to save their students a great deal of money on books and learning materials can choose to "adopt" Flat World texts into their curricula. These texts are given a unique URL and can be shared freely with students without the need for user profiles.
Bookboon.com - Taking the ad-supported route, Bookboon offers about 500 different college textbooks completely free of charge. Available in .PDF format, Bookboon lets users download e-books without even registering on the site. Because of this ease of use, the site boasts over 200,000 downloads per day globally. | <urn:uuid:54b53fde-f2eb-48c0-9e75-7c01098b2ba6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://betanews.com/2012/01/17/everything-you-need-to-know-about-e-textbooks-before-apple-gets-involved/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937089 | 1,501 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Posted: Nov 12, 2012 7:39 AM
Updated: Nov 12, 2012 7:39 AM
JOHANNESBURG (AP) Thieves posing as eager art students with their teacher stole more than $2 million worth of paintings from a museum in South Africa's capital in a daring armed robbery, authorities said Monday.
The theft Sunday at the Pretoria Art Museum saw robbers calmly pay $2.25 apiece for tickets and ask a curator to show them specific paintings at the gallery before they pulled out pistols and forced all others to the ground, officials said. They tied up the curator and others before collecting the paintings they previously asked about, official said.
The robbers favored oil paintings in their theft, grabbing a 1931 painting by famous South African artist Irma Stern of brightly colored sailboats waiting against a pier, city spokesman Pieter de Necker said. Other works stolen included a gouache drawing of an eland and bird by South African landscape artist J.H. Pierneef, a pastel-toned street scene by Gerard Sekoto, a thick-stroked oil painting of a chief by Hugo Naude and a picture of a cat near a vase full of petunias by Maggie Laubser.
The robbers, though apparently having done their homework, left behind another oil painting by Stern showing two musicians because they were not able to fit the painting inside their getaway car, a silver sedan, de Necker said. The thieves left as private security guards at the museum drew close to them, he said.
The museum closed Monday for the week and removed its most valuable remaining possessions for safekeeping, the city spokesman said. Authorities say they now plan to increase security to prevent thefts there. However, the video surveillance cameras at the museum had stopped working on Thursday, de Necker said.
South African authorities had been alerted in case the thieves tried to take the art work outside of the country, said Lt. Col. Katlego Mogale, a spokeswoman for the South African Police Service. She declined to offer any other specifics about the crime, saying police still were piecing together what actually happened at the museum.
"The investigation is continuing," the lieutenant colonel said. "Every measure is being put in place."
Violent crime and murders remain common in South Africa, but high-profile art thefts are rare. In February 2011, thieves stole four small, limited-edition prints by South African artist William Kentridge from a gallery in Johannesburg. Thieves also have targeted bronze statutes in other South African museums, with authorities believing they are actually simply sold for their scrap metal value.
De Necker said he and others believe the thieves were commissioned to go after those specific pieces because of their behavior at the museum.
"We're very, very surprised. It is very uncommon," the spokesman said. "We have realized also that over the last few years ... the overseas market has grown into wanting South African art."
Art theft is the third most lucrative crime in the world, after drugs and illicit arms sales, according to Interpol and the FBI. However, actually selling famous works remains difficult for criminals either locally where the theft happened or abroad, authorities say. Despite the challenges, estimates suggest there are billions of dollars made in stolen art sales annually across the world.
Jon Gambrell can be reached at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP . | <urn:uuid:2733b4dc-0b32-4fd4-8e83-6451e13e29f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.krgv.com/news/thieves-in-south-africa-steal-2m-worth-of-art/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974646 | 690 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Are you a doormat ?
There are givers and takers but unfortunately, some givers give so much of themselves that people will take advantage of them and they will become doormats or people pleaser.
Usually, it’s not intentional , but it does happen.
You become a doormat when you agree to do something you know is wrong and/or don’t want to, just because they want you to.
You should be so happy to be around this person, that you go against your personal beliefs and feelings.
You let them walk all over you even if there is dirt on their shoes.
You really need to evaluate your relationship with him . It will not get any better but will only get from bad to worse.
Don’t be obligated to do for others because you are afraid they will get mad.
Don’t go out of your way to put your life on hold in order to cater to others, so much that you may cancel appointments or never have time for yourself?
Set out your own limits and boundaries.
Do not always conform to his opinions.Don’t keep your opinions and feelings to yourself.Air them out.
Find your own voice or you will be forever be controlled by him.The more space you give him , the more he will exploit it .
Understand what is wrong being a doormat. Don’t sacrifice your time and energy for something you don’t enjoy doing and treat yourself the way you want to be treated.
You are slowly being suffocated and he relished what he is doing to you .
You need to get out before depression hits you . You don’t deserve all those treatments.
Love should not have any pains .If there is ,then it is not love.
You will one day regret wasting your time and energy on a fool who does not deserve you .
Where is your self worth and self respect? | <urn:uuid:249cc881-2694-4e04-932c-60f64755b3ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://laura1318.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/are-you-a-doormat/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956796 | 407 | 1.5 | 2 |
We will Terminate to our new college website : www.ctec.gov.bd
Zorargonj is a Thana based area with amazing natural beauty under district of Chittagong. The Textile Engineering College, Chittagong (CTEC) is situated by the side of the old DT (Dhaka Trunk) Road passing through Zorargonj Bazar. It was established in the year 1911 as a Peri-patetic Weaving School, which was the result of "SHAWDESHI ANDULLON" during the British regime.
It was transferred to the Dewanpur near entry point of Mohuri Project Road in 1960. In 1980 the course of Peri-patetic Weaving School was up-graded to 2-year certificate course in textile technology, which was named as District Textile Institute.
In 1994 a 3-year Diploma course was introduced in this institution under-Bangladesh Technical Education Board to meet-up the growing demand of mid level technologists. Duration of this course was extended to 4-year from 2001.
Considering the high demand of Textile Engineers for the fast growing textile sector, the government has taken necessary steps to introduce 4-year Bachelor of Science in Textile Engineering affiliated to Bangladesh University of Textiles (BUTEX), abolishing the Textile Diploma Course from the session 2006-2007.
Admission test result of 2012-2013 Please follow the link in pdfhttp://www.nittrad.edu.bd/images/pdf/BSc_in_Textile_Result_2013_PDF.pdf
1st waiting list for chittagong textile enginneering college
roll no: 100230, 100399, 100453, 100478, 100480, 100528, 100634, 100667, 100726, 100734
Freedom fighter: 100156, 100678
1st waiting list download the following pdf for details for all textile | <urn:uuid:797451b2-8d48-4971-bb70-e8a9b6336673> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chittagongtextile.webs.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935724 | 404 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Georgia’s Tuition Tas Credit Scholarship Program, which has no accounatability and no reporting requirements, takes $50 million out of the state’s budget and places it with private K-12 schools, which are free to discriminate basen on religion and sexual orientation. While the program was allegedly set up to help poor families get their kids out of poorly performing public schools rather than help the public schools (so there’s that, too), that’s not the way it’s panning out. And now the Georgia General Assembly has plans to expand the program to gut the state budget for $100 million a year.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer Jay Bookman explains the deal:
Let’s take a minute to review how the program works: As a Georgia taxpayer or corporation, when you contribute a dollar to a private-school scholarship program, an offsetting dollar is deducted directly from your state tax bill. For example, if you have a state tax bill of $2,500 and donate $2,500 for a scholarship, your tax bill falls to zero. Since 2008, the program has diverted more than $170 million of state tax revenue to private schools.
According to its supporters, the program was supposed to help finance private-school scholarships for poor children stuck in underperforming public schools. Oddly, though, the law contained no means-testing for recipients, and it quickly became obvious why. The program was a scam. Once it was passed, supporters started openly pitching the program as a means for affluent parents of children already in private school to arrange a state tax subsidy.
“You can take this chunk of money and be able to say, “No, I want this money to go to education, and not just education, I want it to go to the school of my choice, and maybe even more detailed, (to) the student of my choice,” one legislator told parents. | <urn:uuid:2396a17f-541b-4bc0-aa90-2eb70ee8acfb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chaingangelementary.com/?p=4955 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969121 | 400 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News, was sexually assaulted in Cairo after the news of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's resignation broke. The joy and excitement turned to violence in Tahrir Square when Logan, who was working on a story for 60 Minutes, was surrounded by a mob and assaulted. Logan survived the attack and is in the hospital recovering, but the news has sent a chilling message to journalists, particularly women, everywhere.
Logan is no stranger to the peril of working abroad in dangerous places. She has covered floods in Mozambique, land invasions in Zimbabwe, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for CBS over the last decade. Just one week before the attack, Logan and her crew were detained by the Egyptian authorities and treated brutally.
Some might say Logan is very brave. Others might say she is very foolish. As the mother of two children who undoubtedly need their mommy, she puts her life on the line every day in order to get the news to us at their expense. Is it worth it? In an interview a few months ago, Logan said:
But basically it is in my blood to be there and be in the street to listen to people and make the best story I can. But at the same time, I am also aware that I can put my family in a very difficult situation.
She isn't the first female reporter to be in this position. British journalist Christiane Amanpour, who has made a name for herself reporting in some of the most dangerous places on Earth, is also a mother. In 2000, she gave the keynote address at the Murrow Awards Ceremony and she had this to say:
Before my son was born I used to joke about looking for bullet-proof Snugglies and Kevlar diapers. I was planning, I told everybody, to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent. But now, like every working mother, when I think of my son, and having to leave him, and I imagine him fixing those large innocent eyes on me and asking me, Mummy, why are you going to those terrible places? What if they kill you? I wince. I know that I want to say, that it's because I have to, because it matters, because Mummy's going to tell the world about the bad guys and perhaps do a little good.
In a world where moms are told more times than not that we ought to stay in the kitchen, stick close to home, and keep ourselves safe, Amanpour and Logan are doing the opposite. They are purposely going into harm's way to serve a greater good and they are paying dearly.
Any mom who has had a career has to choose at times between her work and her child. It's the way the world is set up. Obviously, Amanpour and Logan are extremes, but the story is the same. We moms are expected to be super human and to do things that no one expects of fathers.
Television journalist Bob Woodruff is a father and no one questioned his decision to be in Iraq when he was critically wounded by a roadside bomb. Anderson Cooper was attacked in Egypt and though he isn't a father, no one mentioned the way he looked or suggested it as the reason he was targeted. The fact is, the pressure on moms -- and women in general -- is far greater than that on men. Men are supposed to be the ones reporting the news, while women need to guard their own safety. The judgment has been so severe, that NPR has been forced to remove comments on their site.
So what gives? Was she wrong to be there? As a mother, I cannot imagine being in her position. I am leaving my children for a trip to Europe soon and it's physically painful to do so. It's hard to imagine being able to do it if I knew I was going into something so dangerous. That is because I am scared. Plain and simple. I am too scared to do what she does and most of us are, in fact.
Fear is paralyzing and if someone doesn't have that holding them back, then more power to them. Logan has courage and strength, and in the end, if bad were to befall her, her son and daughter would know their mother was undaunted by fear, that she was willing to stand up to the naysayers and put her life on the line for the greater good. That isn't stupid. That is brave, so amazingly brave. She is so much braver than most of us, and rather than piling on her, we should be thanking god that there are people like her who are so willing to sacrifice in order to get information to us.
Lara Logan is a hero.
Do you think she was stupid?
Image via Getty | <urn:uuid:c22aaac2-9bca-44f4-8ba1-76b5d85fb1ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thestir.cafemom.com/in_the_news/116386/lara_logan_was_right_to?next=21 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988268 | 996 | 1.75 | 2 |
Little Bear is the story of, what else, than a little bear (voice of Kristin Fairlie). He has many adventures with all his friends, including Duck, Cat, Owl, Hen, Emily, Emily's doll, Lucy, No Feet the Snake, and Tutu the Dog!
The show is a nice way to teach children about feelings of life. It will give them courage, pride, honor and more in their life.
For over the last descade this delightful show has entertained children of all ages including their parents. This animated series is based on the popular children's books illustrated by Maurice Sendak and written by Else Holmelund Minarik.
Little Bear is about the spirited adventures of a curious young cub and his animal friends. Written from a child's point of view, the series celebrates the playful and sometimes enchanted aspects of the everyday activities and important moments in a pre-schooler's life.
Each episode consists of 3 seven-and-a-half minute stories. Each story follows an adventure, a game or an act of imagination in Little Bear's day.
This wonderful show currently airs on Noggin at 5:00 P.M and is also on Noggin On Demand.
10/10 (1 Vote cast) | <urn:uuid:12a71090-daeb-45b5-ad71-0be61e5ce99e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tvrage.com/shows/id-1577 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961627 | 259 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Sales of meat-free and free-from foods are set to top £1bn during 2013, according to new research from Mintel.
Proving it is not a fad, the meat-free and free-from foods market in the UK has experienced robust growth since 2007, with the market seeing a 39% increase in the past five years alone, said researchers. And there seems to be no limit to this growth, with sales set to to top £1bn in 2013.
Meat-free and free-from sales are expected to reach a total of £949m in 2012 with meat-free sales set to reach £607m and free-from market sales expected to reach £342m, said Mintel. Almost four in 10 (38%) Brits have bought vegetarian or meat-free food, while one in five (20%) have bought free-from food.
Amy Price, senior food and drink analyst at Mintel, said: “The meat-free segment has benefited from a more mainstream positioning than free-from foods, with around one in 10 Brits avoiding red meat as part of a healthy lifestyle. However, it is the free-from market which has been driving overall growth, benefiting from increased awareness and diagnosis among allergy sufferers and those self-diagnosing. Free-from has also benefited from a surge in new product development by the specialist brands and own-label players, an increase in merchandising space in-store and endorsement from celebrities as far and wide as Bill Clinton, Kim Kardashian and Andy Murray.”
Mintel’s consumer research finds as many as 15% of Brits choose to keep red meat out of their diet and the majority of which are avoiding red meat for health and lifestyle reasons (13%). Indeed, just 2% of consumers avoid it because they have an allergy or intolerance.
Dairy is the single most avoided food type because of allergies and intolerance. Almost one in 10 (8%) Brits give all products containing dairy (for example – dairy, lactose and cow’s milk and cow’s milk products) a wide berth. A further 7% avoid dairy for health and lifestyle reasons. Meanwhile, a greater number of consumers avoid fish or shellfish as part of a general healthy lifestyle (6%) than those who are avoiding it because of an allergy or intolerance (4%). Overall, 8% avoid wheat, 9% avoid gluten, 9% poultry and 8% nuts.
Meaty-sales for meat-free market
Meat-free foods continue to dominate the meat-free and free-from market with a 64% share. Valued at an estimated £607m in 2012, meat-free foods have increased 20% over the past five years, reports Mintel.
Within the market – ready meals account for around a third of sales and are worth £214m. Pastry (£116m and snacks (£84m) make up the remaining top three meat-free foods. Chilled account for 70% of the sales while frozen foods make up the remaining 30%.
The meat-free segment has profited from a more mainstream positioning than free-from foods, with around 13% of consumers avoiding red meat as part of a healthy lifestyle, while some 6% classify themselves as vegetarians.
“Perfectly positioned to thrive in the current climate, meat-free foods benefit from a cost, health, ethical and environmental stand as well as providing variety in consumer diets. The rising cost of meat has propped up past performance and could act as a boost to the meat-free market in the future,” said Price.
While sales continue to rise, the meat-free market continues to face challenges. Over four in 10 Brits (42%) say they do not like the taste of meat substitutes, while more than a third (36%) believe vegetarian and meat-free foods taste bland. Around a similar number (34%) claim not to know how to cook with meat substitutes. Meanwhile, almost half (49%) of British consumers opt for dishes that do not require meat or meat substitutes (such as pasta with pesto) when attempting to avoid meat.
Just 13% of the population say they buy vegetarian or meat-free foods as a cheaper alternative to meat or fish or poultry, said Mintel. With the retail price of lamb rising by 21% between 2010 and 2011 and fish seeing a 9% jump over the same period, both outstripping the 6% increase in all food, it seems there is more opportunity for the meat or fish substitutes market to do more to position itself as an alternative option.
“The sizeable group of health-conscious consumers are ripe for targeting through vegetarian or meat-free foods and meat substitutes, possibly along the lines of ‘stealth health’, encouraging families to swap a meat-based meal for one that is vegetarian and therefore better for them,” said Price.
Although accounting for a smaller 36% share of the total meat-free and free from market, the free-from segment has been driving overall growth. Between 2007 and 2012, sales of free-from foods almost doubled – rising 90% to reach £342m by 2012. The market is primarily made up of gluten or wheat-free products which are valued at £160m and account for a 47% share of the market and dairy free products which are valued at £157m and account for a 46% market share.
Cost continues to act as a barrier for many consumers with the high price premium of free-from foods, in categories such as bread, indeed, just 14% of users of these products say they are ‘worth paying more for’. | <urn:uuid:aa94d4d8-86c0-49f6-ba83-227f3fd77a5f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://retailtimes.co.uk/meat-free-and-free-from-sales-set-to-top-1bn-in-uk-in-2013-mintel-reports/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968387 | 1,163 | 1.789063 | 2 |
LUXOR, EGYPT – A team of Archaeologists was attacked after removing an ancient marijuana stash from a priest’s tomb.
Fifteen days into an excavation led by Dr. Ellen Burnstein, her team removed a large bag of cannabis which had been interred with the head priest Neferatun. The marijuana was considered sacred, and was used for divination.
That night, Dr. Burnstein and her team were attacked in their lab by a reanimated mummy. Judging from the junk food in his hands and how long it took him to get there, it appears he stopped at a convenience store for snacks and got lost a few times on the way there.
After the six minutes the mummy spent caught in the door, he began moving towards the team and his sacred stash. Several of the assistants and interns held the mummy off with Twinkies and a Phish double live album. While it was occupied, Dr. Burnstein turned on a television in their break room then lured the mummy in with the leather satchel of cannabis. The team was able to escape without injury.
“In my thirty plus years of archaeology, that was easily the slowest mummy I’ve ever seen. Thankfully once the Yo Gabba Gabba show ended he just wandered off with his stash.”
Neferatun has since disappeared, but is believed to still be wandering the desert. | <urn:uuid:ce8fed40-3b7c-464a-8265-a33a4020f0eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/4217/stoner-mummy-attacks/?like=1&_wpnonce=aaa135d5d2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984964 | 291 | 1.804688 | 2 |
This collection contains items pertaining to the Uncle Sam Republican League Club, including administrative documents, membership
information, meeting minutes and financial information.
The Uncle Sam Republican League Club, also known as the Union League Club of San Diego, was founded in 1904. It was a socio-political
organization founded in the spirit of the Union League Clubs that sprung up in support of the Republican Party in the Civil
War and Post-Civil War era (these were also called “loyal leagues”). The purpose of the Uncle Sam Republican League Club,
as stated in its founding documents, was “to promote the interest of good government by every honorable means, and particularly
through the Republican Party” and “to furnish entertainment and to promote the social welfare of the members.” Membership
requirements were simple; the candidate had to be a “straight” Republican and a resident of San Diego County. Many prominent
local Republicans were board members. Among them were Leroy A. Wright, a California state Senator and founding Vice-President
of the San Diego Historical Society, and William Clayton, a manager of the Spreckels companies and President of the San Diego
and Cuyamaca Railway Co. Also in the group were D. B. Northrup, San Diego County Physician, C. L. Williams, President of First
National Bank, and Homer Peters, President of the Marine Biological Association of San Diego (now Scripps Institute of Oceanography).
A handful of Union League Clubs in major metropolitan areas survive into the 21st century and have been very influential in
civic projects in the past, but San Diego’s club was short-lived. It was formally dissolved February 14, 1912, less than eight
years after its inception. | <urn:uuid:d1f230d3-ecc3-4732-a805-df16f3d9cc96> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oac4.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8cv4g36/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968801 | 367 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day023.10 Last-Modified: 2000/07/24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What are you referring to then? It is a document that camp officials at Auschwitz had to sign? Mr Irving, is that right? MR IRVING: Yes, there was but, in view of this, let me move straight on to talk about the document which he has produced. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. MR IRVING: You refer to this Hitler secrecy order on page 417, line 2? A. Yes. Q. As the famous Hitler secrecy order No. 1? A. Yes. Q. You date it for some reason September 25th 1941. . 89 A. Yes. Is that wrong? Q. What inference do you draw from that and have you drawn from that? A. It is all right? The date is OK, is it? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is the date suggested to be wrong, Mr Irving? MR IRVING: That is question two, my Lord. I am asking question one at this stage. What inference do you draw? A. I do not draw any inference in the report from the date. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is document 112. MR RAMPTON: I am going to try to find the document. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think it might be worth doing. MR IRVING: Do you not say at line 4 that this order for secrecy clearly covered the operational details of the Final Solution? Is that not the inference you draw from it? A. It was in effect, unless you are telling me it was issued in 1945 or 44, then I think that follows. Q. No. You are implying that this order, unless I have totally misunderstood you, in which case I apologise, was drawn up as part of the security measures to protect the ugly details of the Final Solution? A. Ah no, I am not. I do not think that follows there at all. It certainly did cover all of that. Q. Does not even the most incompetent historian know that the famous Adolf Hitler secrecy order was dated January 11th . 90 1940 and it was issued as a direct result of the famous Mechelin incident when a German plane landed carrying secret documents? A. Provide me with documentation, Mr Irving. MR RAMPTON: Can we just to try and the document? MR IRVING: Probably one of most famous orders Hitler ever signed. MR RAMPTON: I am sure Mr Irving is right about everything but I wish he would give me a moment to try and the document. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you got document 112? MR RAMPTON: Yes. It is file H1 (ix) and it is page 238. We will provide your Lordship, and somebody will do it for the witness. A. Could I have a copy, please? MR RAMPTON: Yes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Could I have a copy too? MR RAMPTON: Yes. I will pass this up. A. 238? MR RAMPTON: 238 is a stamped page number. A. Yes, on the bottom. MR RAMPTON: The right hand corner is said to be document 112. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you got this, Mr Irving? MR IRVING: My Lord, I know all about Hitler's top secret order and I do not need to see this thing. This is a subsequent reissue of it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is a reissue of the same document, is it, . 91 Mr Irving? MR IRVING: That I do not know, my Lord. The original January 11th 1940 version says nobody under any circumstances who has no need to know is to be informed of any secret operation. It is a basic need to know document on which a lot of other governments have modelled their own secrecy laws since then. A. This is where I got it from. Q. So you have never heard of the original basic order No. 1 which was issued on January 11th 1940? I thought every historian knew of it. A. If you can point me to a copy of it, I am quite happy to accept your dating. It does not really affect what I say at all. Q. The question is: You do not know of the January 1940 one? A. I found it here. I quoted it as the date given here. I do not see what the point is you are trying to make, Mr Irving. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Nor do I. MR IRVING: The point I am trying to make is, firstly, once again there appear to be gaps in this expert witness's knowledge of the Third Reich. A. I am sure there are gaps even in your knowledge of the Third Reich, Mr Irving. Q. Secondly, the inference which you invited the reader to draw from your expert report, that paragraph at the top of . 92 417, that there was some sinister connection between the issue of the order and the Final Solution evaporates? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not read it as saying that so I think we can move on. A. I do not draw that inference at all. That is just reading far more into there than is actually there. MR IRVING: Good. Line 5, you quote Henry Picker as saying, "Over state secrets Hitler was totally uncommunicative. He told us nothing in his table talk about the extermination of the Jews in the concentration camps". Does this not render nugatory every clever translation you have made of "Ausrottung" and "vernichtung" in the table talks up to this point and beyond? A. No. I do not recall any mention of the concentration camps. MR IRVING: No, the "Ausrottung" and the "vernichtung"? A. No, we are talking about the concentration camps here. I do not see any mention in the table talk of the concentration camps. That is what he is talking about here. Q. So you believe Henry Picker is being clever when he is saying, "OK, he told us about all the other extermination of the Jews going on but not about what was going on in the concentration camps"? A. That is what he is saying. He says, "he told us nothing in his table talk about the extermination of the Jews in the . 93 concentration camps." It may be clever or not, I think it is probably true. What he goes on to say his (Hitler's) conversations nevertheless revealed his deep rooted and fanatical hatred for all other races. That I think is also a true observation. Q. What about Adolf Hitler's other private staff, his stenographers, the people who took down every word he spoke from September 1942 onwards, people like that, the Adjutants, the private secretaries? A. Oh goodness. You want to go all through all the whole section on the Adjutants now? Q. I do not, but what I am going to draw your attention to is page 36 of the little bundle I gave you and invite you to look briefly at pages 39 and 40. Just run your eye over that letter from a lawyer to me dated 1974, when I was writing Hitler's War. He says that he carried out interrogations of all Hitler's Adjutants, stenographers and people like that in American captivity, and he has all their statements, and what should he do with them, if my memory of the letter is correct. A. Yes. Q. If you go back now to page 36, in the meantime he has now given them to me and I am listing them. That is a little index of them. A. Yes. Q. Page 37 shows that I, like a total idiot, give them to the . 94 archives in Germany, where I can no longer get them now. Is that right? A. Yes. Q. I can only draw your attention therefore to the summary in this listing. If you look down the page numbers on the right of that page 36, there is a statement by Ludvig Krieger, who was one of Hitler's stenographers, his extraordinary impression of Hitler, and Hitler never mentioned the Holocaust of Jews. Right? A. Yes. Q. Do you see that one? A. Well, without actually seeing the written statement, of course we do not know whether that summary of it and account of it is correct. Q. Ah. We will come to that. A. What exactly he means by that is unclear. Q. If you look at the item listed as page 23, Hitler never discuss concentration camps, the statement of another stenographer, Heinz Bucholz ---- A. Page 23? Down the list? Q. Yes, down the list? A. Yes. Q. I think it is true he did not discuss concentration camps. I do not think one sees the word "Auschwitz" anywhere in the Hitler table talks. Q. Your experts have had total access to my records, . 95 including of course those particular interrogation reports, have they not, in my papers in Munich? A. Yes. Q. Did they look at those interrogations, do you think? A. I would have to check, but I do not see what the relevance of that question is. I do not think we used them, put it like that. Q. Do you accept that I used them in my books? A. Yes. Q. And that, if I had statements by members of Hitler's private staff, not only questioned by me but questioned by others and by people far cleverer than myself, all of whom elicited precisely the same information that the Holocaust was never discussed by Hitler or at Hitler's headquarters, is that not a significance? A. Well, there are a number of problems there. First of all, what some of these say is that Hitler never discussed the concentration camps, and that is true. What I say in my report is that he used a generalized language of racism, exterminatory racism, towards the Jews. You can read that in his table talks and in the Goebbels diaries, but he did not go into any details. That does seem to be the case on reading through the table talk. He did not talk in any detail about gas chambers in Auschwitz or the actual processes. The second thing to say is of course that ---- Q. These are all Nazis? . 96 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Will you let him finish? A. Yes. A lot of these people of course were concerned to exculpate themselves, and therefore were being very cautious in what they admitted about what Hitler did or did not say to them. The third thing to say is of course the fact that Hitler did not talk about these things does not mean that he did not know about them, and a number of his entourage who said that Hitler did not talk about the extermination of Jews went on to say that they thought it was very clear that he did actually know about it. MR IRVING: Is there even one member of Hitler's staff who has stated from absolute certainty that Hitler had discussed this to your knowledge? A. All right. We shall have to go through the whole section on the Adjutants in that case which I thought we were not going to do. . MR JUSTICE GRAY: I would be interested, though, if you could tell me and, if you cannot do it from memory, have a quick glance at your report, who are the members of the entourage who you say believed that Hitler did know about the extermination? You do not have to go into the detail of it, unless Mr Irving wants to ask you questions. MR IRVING: I will ask about specific people. A. Right. Q. Did Otto Gunscher make a statement? MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, I do not think this is a satisfactory . 97 way of dealing with it. Because I had said that I was not any longer much interested in the Adjutants, I dare say Professor Evans has not committed them all to memory over the weekend. I do not know because I have not spoken to him. A. I have been repeatedly assured that this was going to be ditched so I have not. MR RAMPTON: I do think it right that, if he is going to answer this perfectly proper question, he should be given time to read the adjutants section of the report, or skim it anyway, so that he can bring it back to mind. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. We have all got time pressure slightly in mind. I therefore was inviting him just for my reference, then I could read about it later, to identify the names of some of those. MR IRVING: It is purely the fact that Otto Gunscher, who I think is the last surviving Hitler adjutant, told my Dusseldorf lawyer five days ago that the first he heard of it was when he was in the Luganka in Moscow. Although he has made statements differing from that, he now accepts that the first he heard of it was when he was in Russian captivity, the first he heard specifically of the Holocaust and of Auschwitz. He was with Hitler from 1936 until literally he was the man who burned Hitler's body. I have a letter from my Dusseldorf lawyer to that effect reporting this conversation. . 98 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is up to you, Professor Evans. Would you rather come back to this, maybe at 2 o'clock? A. I think I would, my Lord, yes. MR IRVING: If we have time. A. If we have time. It has caught me on the hop, I am afraid. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is totally understandable. Do you mind moving on, Mr Irving? MR IRVING: Yes. Page 421, Professor Evans. A. This, as you realize, has been superseded by my letter of 10th January. Q. Paragraph 4? A. Yes.
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Home · Site Map · What's New? · Search Nizkor | <urn:uuid:8627abdd-cf1a-4f29-af39-206b800c2dfd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/ftp.py?people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day023.10 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979315 | 2,935 | 1.625 | 2 |
A lifelong Roswell resident and author of several books about New Mexico history, LeMay takes a fresh new look at the Roswell Incident from an “insider's perspective.”
In "Roswell USA," LeMay presents a careful reconstruction of the famous UFO crash, including details that many readers may not have previously heard. He also provides a unique glimpse into what it’s like to live in the one place on Earth most closely associated with flying saucers and extraterrestrials. His analysis of the odd things that happen in Roswell, especially during its annual UFO festival, is priceless.
LeMay’s keen insight and marvelous sense of humor also focus on some of Roswell's other, lesser-known mysteries, such as the “alien ghost” that haunts the New Mexico Rehabilitation Center. Written with an eye to historical accuracy, and perhaps an occasional wink of the eye, LeMay’s book also chronicles some of Roswell’s “other” mysteries, such as the "second" Roswell UFO Crash (in 1949); Bottomless Lakes where cars sink into the depths and monsters emerge to the surface; the Headless Horsewoman of Lover's Lane, a Victorian Era Spook with an axe to grind against young lovers; and others.
Roswell is by no means the only town to use strange events and bizarre creatures to draw tourism dollars. Nor was it the first. In the second part of LeMay’s book, he takes us on a tour of other towns all over the U.S. that celebrate weirdness – such as Churubusco, Indiana, where a giant turtle sighting in 1948 has served the town well in tourism for the last 60 plus years, and Flatwoods, West Virginia, where a one-time alleged sighting of a strange alien monster has since resulted in the “Flatwood Monster Days” festival. Also, there is Lake Champlain, New York, which has since become America’s very own Loch Ness. Point Pleasant, West Virginia, celebrates Mothman Days and has its own Mothman Museum. Kelley, Kentucky, is the site where aliens from outer space laid siege to a farm house in 1955. And, many UFO enthusiasts visit a lonely country cemetery in Aurora, Texas, where lie the remains of an extraterrestrial, or so they believe, that crashed there in 1897.
"Roswell USA" is published by RoswellBooks.com, and is available in paperback for $14.95 from the author’s Web site at RoswellUSA.com. It is also available on Amazon.com and other major online retailers, and in the Roswell area, may be purchased at Roswell Landing, 205 North Main Street (Phone: 575-622-3036)
Author John LeMay is the author of several books about the history of New Mexico. His works include "Images of America: Roswell," "Postcards of America: Roswell," "Images of America: Chaves County," and "Images of America: Towns of Lincoln County," all published by Arcadia Publishing of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. LeMay is also an archivist and serves on the board of directors for the Historical Society for Southeast New Mexico, located in Roswell.
Noe Torres, editor and publisher of "Roswell USA," has authored a number of books regarding historical UFO cases, including the critically-acclaimed "Ultimate Guide to the Roswell UFO Crash" published in 2010 by RoswellBooks.com. Torres is the section director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in South Texas and has appeared on numbers television and radio programs. He is a regular speaker at the annual Roswell UFO Festival held each July in Roswell, New Mexico.
The Jeff Rense Program, which will celebrate its 18th anniversary in June 2011, is one of the world's most listened-to Internet radio shows, specializing in topics dealing with “exotic and eclectic venues of research and inquiry.” Interviewing more than 50 unique guests each month, Rense’s program has been described by broadcast executives as “a completely new dimension in talk radio” and “the best information program ever.” Rense was also a pioneer in making talk radio interactive, and his radio interviews commonly feature simultaneous online illustrations and images.
The Rense.com internet site is one of the world's most referenced 24-hour news services. It is the top talk radio site and records close to 10 million total hits per month. It has also achieved top-level Arbitron ratings in several top U.S. radio markets. In addition, the Rense.com Web site archives over 150,000 pages of stories, articles, reports and features. Rense.com is in the top .001% of the 20 million websites on the internet, according to rankings issued in 2007.
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Small publisher specializing in books about unidentified flying objects. More information is available at RoswellBooks.com and at RoswellUSA.com. | <urn:uuid:ba84bb60-74be-4c1e-919d-18c2aa10831e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prlog.org/11440923-roswell-author-historian-john-lemay-to-appear-on-jeff-rense-program.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952824 | 1,046 | 1.8125 | 2 |
A delegation from the Viet Nam Administration of Forestry is inspecting deforestation in central Quang Nam Province following instruction from Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai.
QUANG NAM —
The move was made following reports about recent deforestation en masses by local people in valleys with hydro-power projects.
The administration is required to report the inspection result to Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung before April 20.
Focus will fall on deforestation of upstream protective forest in Bac Tra My, Nam Tra My, Phuoc Son, Dong Giang, Tien Phuoc, Nam Giang and Tay Giang districts.
These localities reported that illegal timber exploitation and transport have become more complicated, badly affecting the environment, forest protection and management tasks.
In the past, many rare and precious forests in the area between Nam Giang and Tay Giang districts were considered unapproachable, but thanks to the reservoirs, illegal loggers could now easily get access to these forests, chopping down hundreds of cu.m of timber, Deputy Head of the provincial Forest Management Unit Dang Dinh Nguyen told Lao dong (Labour) Newspaper.
Meanwhile, local residents living in these areas were also found to destroy the forest for farming purposes.
Local residents in Tien Phuoc District, for example, have cut down trees to plant crops, destroying nearly 60 ha of rare and precious forest.
Meanwhile, more than 48ha of protective forest in Bac Tra My District have been deforested over the past five years, which comes to around 700cu.m of timber.
Deputy Director of Song Tranh 2 Protective Forest Management Board Nguyen Vinh Hien said deforestation by local residents still existed as many farmers who have been resettled for hydropower projects still lacked land for agricultural production while they have not found new jobs.
"To prevent further deforestation, local rangers have increased inspection and encouraged local residents to stop destroying the forest while allotting areas for them to protect to help increase incomes," he said.
However, he said, the lack of human resources hindered the forest protection task.
The provincial People's Committee has decided to set up a steering committee on forest development and protection during the 2011-20 period.
The committee will focus on guiding such issues as construction and implementation of forest development and protection plans, forest fire prevention, control and increase inspection over deforestation, illegal transport and trade of forest products.
In the first quarter of this year, local rangers discovered 290 cases of violation, seizing more than 420cu.m of timber.
The province has nearly 426,000ha of forest with total wood reserves of around 30 million cu.m, more than 388,000ha of which is natural forest.— VNS | <urn:uuid:925ad147-40a1-49af-912c-70eb74ccc9fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.baomoi.com/Info/Authority-to-report-on-illegal-logging-claims/6/252704.epi | 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 | 0.942064 | 557 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The National Weather Service has continued a high surf advisory for east-facing shores of Maui and Molokai through 6 a.m. Wednesday.
A high surf advisory for north facing shores was canceled.
The advisory means that high surf will affect beaches in the area, producing rip currents and localized beach erosion. Beachgoers are urged to stay out of the water and away from the shorebreak due to hazardous wave action.
Surf heights of 6 to 8 feet are expected along east-facing shores. | <urn:uuid:2eb4f883-c0ee-4004-bc75-27187f7df4f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mauinews.com/page/content.detail/id/566766/High-surf-warning-still-in-effect.html?nav=10 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965308 | 103 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Patient Rights According to H.I.P.A.A. Regulations
Right to Access Records
Patients have the right to see and get copies of their records within thirty (30) days of request. The patient has a right to see anything in the record. Copies may be made and will be charged at the going rate of five (5) cents per copy.
Right to Request Restrictions
Patients have the right to request restrictions on who sees their records. Any request that is unreasonable will be dealt with on an individual basis.
Right to Confidential Communication
Patients have the right to receive communications about their record in a confidential manner. In this office patients will be given a form to fill out stating how they would like to be contacted.
Right to Amend the Record
Patients have the right to amend their records when they disagree with the content but physicians have the right to deny these requests. A record cannot be changed but a line may be drawn through the disputed entry. The physician may then write an addendum.
Right to an Accounting of Disclosures
Patients have the right to know everyone to whom the office discloses record information for purposes other than treatment, payment, and health care operation.
A log, as required by H.I.P.A.A., will be kept showing each disclosure and the person to whom it is made. This will also show what information is provided and the purpose. This office will only log in the releases for which the patient's authorization is required.
Privacy Notice For Charleston Women's Medical Center
Charleston Women's Medical Center holds record information confidential but will use it for treatment, payment, and health care operations.
Our physicians and staff will use the information to give you the best possible medical care.
Health Care Operation
Our office will use the information for business purposes such as quality improvement and to send you pertinent information.
Disclosure of Info. with Extenuating Circumstances
Health information will be given to family members in case of an emergency or under other circumstances with proper authorization and documentation.
Health information may be given to other physicians under emergency conditions.
Information may be given to the proper authorities when neglect or abuse is alleged or suspected.
Information may be provided to courts or other agencies when a subpoena is given to this office. | <urn:uuid:58625606-4bd1-4917-b9fb-cc26705f9eb1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://charlestonwomensmedicalcenter.com/hipaa.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93276 | 479 | 1.59375 | 2 |
With more than 150,000 local authority jobs under threat, and councils proposing to cut services due to funding pressures, social care staff and service users are increasingly concerned about their prospects. But there may be ways in which they can use the law to challenge and overturn councils' decisions.
Social care workers and service users who feel that local authorities have failed to follow the correct procedures when making decisions to cut services can look to human rights law, equality legislation and case law on consultation processes (see below), according to Ed Mitchell, editor of Social Care Law Today and Community Care's legal adviser.
These laws are most likely to be useful in challenges to the decision-making process, and not to actual decisions to outsource certain services rather than directly provide them.
However, there are some notable exceptions where councils must continue to provide a service or function in-house. These include safeguarding and welfare responsibilities introduced by the Children Act 2004, particularly the requirement to have a local safeguarding children board, though these can be set up jointly by more than one council.
Local authorities must also carry out specific child protection duties, though the Children Act 2008 allowed some councils to devolve responsibility of these to independent social work practice pilots.
In these cases, local authorities must still assure themselves that their statutory duties are being performed by the delegated provider.
Here, Community Care outlines some of the key issues for social care staff to consider if they wish to challenge cuts.
Councils still retain core duties to assess eligibility for services, even if they are cutting budgets.
"Local authorities that are cutting budgets without proper regard to complying with duties are storing up trouble," says Steve Broach, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London who has produced a guide to the law and social care for Every Disabled Child Matters. "The courts will always be sympathetic to individuals who have been getting services and are no longer receiving them.
"It's not going to be enough for local authorities to say they have found 12% savings in the budget. Courts might ask them where they have found it and what else they could do to cut spending."
Mitchell says: "Local authorities can't wash their hands of service users and public money.
"When it comes to the range of services offered, courts recognise the budgetary difficulties local authorities are facing, so allow them to have eligibility criteria.
"But there's a floor beneath which local authorities cannot go when it comes to children's services and community care services. This derives from human rights law - if you have a set amount of money, there are certain people who are, for example, so disabled and needy that they are always going to be entitled to services."
In adults' services, local authorities determine eligibility to receive services using the Fair Access to Care Services (FACS) criteria, which set four levels of need: low, moderate, substantial and critical, the threshold being adopted by an increasing number of councils.
Mitchell says local authorities that "properly apply" FACS criteria are unlikely to leave themselves open to legal challenges because they will automatically identify people with the most severe needs.
However, local authorities tend to face more legal problems due to the way they carry out the (re)assessment processes. "Before services are withdrawn there should be a reassessment of need rather than, for example, cutting everybody's home help or night-sitting services," Mitchell adds.
Although there are no strict rules that set the timescales and defined scope and scale of consultation exercises, local authorities could still face legal challenges if they the process is flawed.
"In most cases it's likely that, before implementing an across-the-board restriction of criteria or service cuts, local authorities should consult interested parties," says Mitchell. "Most of them tend to do that these days but challenges tend to be made on the quality of consultation exercises - for example, whether enough time was given."
Although there are no legal requirements on the length of consultations, Mitchell says three months is considered to be good practice.
Broach says there's a "good chance that the courts would question any decision taken without consultation".
He adds: "Local authorities have to give a reasonable time for a proper response and that would be judged on each individual case. They've got to provide sufficient information so people can make intelligent responses. A lot of consultation documents I've seen are woefully thin on the background to and impact of decisions.
"The consequence of not consulting properly is that they will be made by the court to go back and do it again and do it properly, and won't be able to take a decision unless they have done this."
Courts would also look at the "rationality" and "proportionality" of local authority proposals, Broach says. "Local authorities would have to prove there was a balance struck between the rights of people being affected and the wider need to save money."
R v North and East Devon Health Authority ex parte Pamela Coughlan: this often-cited judgement on continuing care responsibilities set a clear expectation that, if councils do consult on their decisions, they must do so properly. The initial reserved judgement in 1998 said the authority's decisions were biased in part due to a consultation process that was "vitiated by pre-judgment, non-disclosure of materials and inadequate time for response". A 1999 Court of Appeal ruling in the case said the consultation process, though not unlawful, was "open to criticism".
EQUALITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS LEGISLATION
Local authorities could also be challenged under equality legislation, including the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, the Race Relations Act 2000 and, from April 2011, the public sector equality duty introduced by the Equality Act 2010, which will replace the existing race, disability and gender equality duties.
When making decisions, public bodies have to undertake an equality impact assessment and have regard to a range of needs, such as ensuring people with disabilities have equality of opportunity with those without disabilities. This was highlighted in the Chavda v Harrow judgement in 2008 (see below).
Professor Michael Preston-Shoot, dean of the faculty of health and social sciences at University of Bedfordshire, says local authorities have a positive duty to promote human rights, under the Human Rights Act 1998 and European Convention on Human Rights.
In addition, councils making decisions on the services they are providing to communities and to individuals must have regard to the impact on private and family life.
R (Chavda) v Harrow LBC: Judge Mackie QC concluded that decision-makers at Harrow Council unlawfully restricted adult care services to people with critical needs because they had not had "sufficiently drawn to their attention the seriousness and extent of the duties owed under the Disability Discrimination Act 2005", particularly section 49A.
R (Boyejo) v Barnet LBC; R (Smith) v Portsmouth CC: decisions to discontinue resident warden services were unlawful because councils failed to have due regard to the "needs" set out in the general disability equality duties.
AVENUES FOR COMPLAINT
Most legal challenges and complaints are made by individual service users, often backed by voluntary sector organisations.
If complaints are not resolved through internal local authority procedures, cases can be taken to the local government ombudsman. Alternatively, an application can be made for judicial review of a council's decision.
However, Broach points out that judicial review applications must be made no later than three months after a decision has been taken. "That time limit can be waived but it gets much harder after three months," he says.
SOCIAL CARE LAW AND JOB CUTS
Social care law offers little support for staff threatened with redundancy because there are no requirements for local authorities to employ a certain number of staff to carry out specific duties.
Section 6 of the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970 only requires local authorities to appoint "adequate staff" to assist directors in exercising their functions, an omission described by Preston-Shoot as "one of the downsides of the legal system".
"The requirement to have sufficient social workers to perform statutory duties has not been defined in any law or statutory guidance," he adds.
In the absence of clear regulations, union reps are instead considering industrial action where appropriate to register their disapproval of council cuts. In Nottinghamshire, for example, Unison is balloting 3,700 local authority staff to take industrial action on 24 February, the day the council cabinet votes on its budget for 2011-12. | <urn:uuid:a00d9c07-8fee-4c66-a503-69201b2d2530> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.communitycare.co.uk/articles/16/02/2011/116228/how-to-use-the-law-to-fight-social-care-spending-cuts.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955068 | 1,739 | 1.703125 | 2 |
When the Himalayan region of Kashmir became the centre of a war between India and Pakistan in 1965, Al Javed found himself looking for a way out before he got drafted.
A couple of his uncles had ministerial connections, he said. Before long, the PhD student found himself travelling from Pakistan to Edmonton.
He got his degree and, new wife in tow, trekked back to his home country to teach once the conflict had cooled down. But his Canadian-born spouse couldn't adjust. And after years in academics, Mr. Javed said he needed a change of pace.
"I realized that I was not applying my knowledge in a fruitful fashion," he recalled.
"I'm creating knowledge and it's not going anywhere ... it was not turning into anything tangible and useful. So one evening I decided - just like that - I was going to quit academics and change my life and go into industry."
His friends called it career suicide when he moved back to Canada to take on a job with Bell Northern Research in 1977. However, he said his peers overlooked the broad spectrum of telecom technologies that the nascent Nortel Networks Corp. was taking the lead on at the time.
'There was absolutely some mistakes made'
The nostalgia is thick when engineers like Mr. Javed look back upon their time at Nortel a generation ago.
Things aren't as sunny today. At the end of July, the company began selling itself off piece by piece as it proceeded through insolvency.
MatlinPatterson, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens battled over the company's lucrative wireless division, while Avaya Inc. offered US$475 million to buy Nortel's enterprise business.
"There was absolutely some mistakes made (by Nortel), especially in hindsight," said Paul Smelters, a Nortel alumnus now with VenGrowth Private Equity Partners.
"But prior to that, there was a lot of innovation. There was a lot of great people working there, and although it probably was not a focus, I think that was not unlike a lot of the industry at that point."
Many engineers liken their time at BNR, as Nortel's research arm was known at that time, to their degrees at university.
It was the RIM or Google of the 1960s, where self-described geeks often found themselves working on technologies 15 or 20 years into the future - solutions such as broadband networks or wireless communications.
"We used a blackboard with chalk, and this was actually before a lot of computers (were used)," said Mike Dagenais, the current chief executive of Continuous Computing, who joined Nortel's Ottawa office as a co-op student in 1978.
Continued from page 3
"But I was one of these guys who had a printer in my house," he recalled, "so I would run these batch jobs from home in the evening.
"The printer would go off at three or four in the morning. It was one of those dot printers (that would go) 'dat dat dat' (and) wake us all up. I'd print out the results ... modify a few parameters, reset a few things, set it up for another run."
The birth of BNR came with the dawn of the telephone, when in 1874 Alexander Graham Bell patented his invention under the National Bell Telephone Co. in the U.S. and Bell Telephone Co. of Canada.
Just over 20 years later, Northern Electric Manufacturing Co. was created to sell non-telephone apparatuses. A merger recreated the company in 1914 into Northern Electric Co. Ltd.
- Read more special articles :
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- - Nortel Networks union representing former employees has appeal dismissed
But it wasn't until an antitrust suit forced communications giant AT & amp;T to sell off its stake in the two companies in 1949 that Northern began its own internal research and development.
By 1961, the first branch office was opened in Ottawa and underwent rapid expansion, which continued through the late 1970s.
"You could be an engineer coming out of school and within five to seven years, you could be a first-level manager," said Mr. Smelters.
"I think a lot of it was the growth they were going through. A lot of it was also (because) the talent base was extremely high. I remember back then Nortel was (the) place to come out of and work ... so (it) was getting a disproportionate percentage of the top graduates in programs across the country."
Half of the challenge of working at BNR, said Mr. Javed, was keeping up with rapid change in the communications industry.
"We would sit there and say, 'What is the new technology? How do you fit it together and create value that was higher than your competitors had?'
"We continuously read and (went) to conferences, talked to our peers, passed the word and read the literature. That was our job, to continuously do that."
A veritable stream of inventions emanated from Northern's (and later, BNR's) labs during the two decades after they took research in-house.
Their creations included the Trans-Canada Skyway - the world's longest microwave line, stretching more than 6,000 kilometres - as well as advanced video switching and the first dial-in hand telephone.
In 1971, Don Chisholm began his tenure as the first president of the newly formed BNR, which came about after Bell and Northern's research labs merged.
The former Apollo space program scientist pegged digital communications as the direction his company should go in, and emphasized in-house development to get the job done. By mid-decade, sales of internal products had multiplied more than seven-fold, reaching 75 per cent.
The best-known invention that he presided over was the DMS-100, completed in 1979. It was the first digital switch of its kind.
The switch could handle up to 100,000 telephone lines and formed a huge chunk of Nortel's revenue stream for more than 15 years.
"Nortel was in the process of evolving technologies from purely mechanical switches to software-controlled switches, and they needed a lot of software-capable people," said Steve Hume, who was hired on specifically to work on the DMS-100 in 1978.
Mr. Hume, who's currently a consultant, said there was a large spurt of hiring that started "to burst the buildings" on the company's Carling Avenue campus, so he found himself in an office with a window view of the Experimental Farm.
"We talked directly to Bell Canada engineers to plan what they needed so we could (practise) with a direct customer," Mr. Hume said. "They became the prototype customer for many Nortel products, and this gave us insight of what to work on."
After the birth of the DMS-100 came a switch to Internet infrastructure, which formed Nortel's core business throughout the 1980s and 1990s. | <urn:uuid:8505917d-17c8-4b3d-8877-b0b85f80f58d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.obj.ca/Technology/2009-07-27/article-288423/-As-Nortel-dissolves%2C-lab-legacy-lives-on/1 | 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 | 0.984168 | 1,468 | 1.585938 | 2 |
By Kane County Chronicle Editorial Board
County website sets good example
It's a good bet that several county and village officials from across northern Illinois are trolling Kane County's website this week, driven either by curiosity, envy or – perhaps – a kick in the posterior from their supervisors.
If not, they ought to be.
In stark contrast to just about everyone else throughout northern Illinois, Kane County's website – www.countyofkane.org – was given a perfect score this week in the Illinois Policy Institute's latest round of online government transparency audits.
It's not every day that governmental bodies do something to merit praise, so let's give credit where credit is due.
Consider the following:
• Only two other local governments out of 167 audited this year – the villages of Orland Park and Lombard – also received perfect scores.
• Of the 26 northern Illinois counties surveyed, 20 received failing grades (including nearby counties such as McHenry and Kendall; DeKalb squeaked by with a D-).
The Illinois Policy Institute is a nonpartisan institute that for two years has audited the websites of hundreds of Illinois' local governments.
Among the criteria in the audit's scope are the availability of contract information; salaries and benefits of elected and administrative officials; dates, times and locations of public meetings; instructions on filing Freedom of Information Act requests; budgets; financial audits; lists of expenditures and bills; contracts; lobbying information; and information on taxation.
Kane County's airtight performance is especially impressive considering the county earned a lukewarm grade of 72 out of 100 last year, then proactively sought and implemented feedback on how it could make its website more useful to constituents.
According to a county news release, the score, announced Tuesday, is "the result of an intensive effort since March by the county's Information Technologies Department to significantly improve on its original top-ranking score and set an even higher standard for public access to government documents and data."
As staunch advocates of transparency in government, we applaud the county's efforts to display a wealth of information on its site, and encourage county residents to take advantage by logging in and becoming better informed about the many ways in which county government affects your tax dollars and quality of life.
The County Board will experience substantial turnover after this fall's elections. Whatever changes in leadership are forthcoming, the quality of the county's website provides at least one solid building block for the new regime.
Read the article on the Kane County Chronicle website... | <urn:uuid:2519c963-34ed-437f-9bfb-a26e6466ff33> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.illinoispolicy.org/news/article.asp?ArticleSource=4933 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945585 | 511 | 1.640625 | 2 |
I have to get this article to the editor at The SUN in the next five hours.
Why have I let myself get down to the wire with hardly a word on the page yet?
Because I’ve been saying “yes.”
“Yes” to a friend who needed help with a big project.
“Yes” to a coworker who is having boyfriend problems.
“Yes” to a neighbor who needs her plants and garden watered while she’s gone for six weeks.
“Yes” to helping with another fund-raising event.
“Yes” to traveling out to California to babysit my grandson for 10 days while the nanny is on vacation.
It is not that I am unfamiliar with the word “no.” The problem runs deeper than that.
If, like me, you have difficulty turning down a request from a friend, a relative, a coworker, or even a complete stranger, chances are this is closely tied to your self identity — the story you tell about the kind of person you are or want to be. Loyal. Supportive. A team player.
For me, the small requests — the ones that cost me relatively little — are hardest: making phone calls, responding to an e-mail, or helping out a friend. Saying no seems petty and selfish–– not the kind of person I want to be. Yet, these small favors often eat up an entire day. Learning to say no to little things can actually prevent me from bartering my life away.
I’m trying to get a better handle on what I’m saying yes to, and why. I don’t want to start turning down requests left and right. And just because something is difficult or burdensome doesn’t mean I should automatically say no to it. I want to help my friend with her big project, and I enjoy looking after my grandson (and stepping in when my son and daughter-in-law need help). So, yes, these things were important enough to me that I wanted to make time for them. I would call these “good yeses.”
Some of the other items, however, were “bad yeses.” I said yes to the coworker who wanted to unload her boyfriend problem because I was on the spot and couldn’t think of a way out. Or I said yes because the invitation was more appealing than what I was supposed to be working on at that time. My goal isn’t to start saying no to everything, it’s to agree to the things that matter to me most.
When I say yes to helping with a fund-raising event, it often means saying no to something else. Anyone who has worked on a major fund-raising event will tell you about the tradeoffs. We get less sleep, we spend less time with the family, and our exercise program gets temporarily derailed. Or we end up shortchanging everything, so that we don’t do as good a job as we should like to at anything. While these costs may be small in isolation, they can have cumulative effects on our relationships with others and on our physical and emotional well being.
As I try out this new role of not saying yes too quickly, I realize a big step is to buy myself some time so I can cut down on the “reactive yes.”
“Can I count on you to host another fund-raising dinner at your house?” asks the nonprofit director. After figuring out who the benefit will benefit, I tell the director I will get back to her. I want to buy time to explore my alternatives. I’m getting better at not simply saying yes because I don’t want to disappoint someone or look like a stick-in-the-mud.
When I come back, I’m likely to negotiate. A conditional yes allows me to delineate the conditions under which I am willing to help. And it shares with the other person the responsibility to mitigate the demand on me.
I’ve also been practicing a “yes-no-yes” approach. With my coworker who urgently needs to do the 101st rehash of her recent breakup, my response is, “I really wish I had time to talk today, because I know this is a difficult period. I just can’t do it right now. Can we take a walk and talk tomorrow night instead?” A cautionary note: if your second yes is an offer to help in a different way, make sure you are willing and able to do it.
I’ve found all the different steps to be effective and consistent with my wanting to be a good friend and a good person. I still say yes to the things that are important to me. But by pausing to consider my priorities and constraints and the costs of saying yes before the word automatically flies out of my mouth, I can make better decisions about what I should really be saying no to. And that makes each yes that much more genuine and valuable to those who are asking. | <urn:uuid:ff623b74-48e1-430d-a6f3-09bb566bbdc0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pagosasun.com/archives/2011/08August/082511/pagosalakes.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 | 0.968622 | 1,068 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Chapel construction to begin in March
The twin towered Bowdoin Chapel, since last year a cocooned, columnar colossus anchoring the east end of the quad, will undergo structural surgery this March, assuming the sun comes out, said David D'Angelo, Director of Facilities Management. College trustees have budgeted $6 million for the facelift, which they hope will correct the spalling that has severely weakened the building-one of several churches designed by the legendary nineteenth century architect Richard Upjohn.
Nearly 150 Maine winters have pried the outer granite loose from the inner walls-which are a full three feet thick-letting moisture penetrate the mortar, freeze in the winter and send some stones tumbling down.
The college's renovation process will ensure the safety and longevity of the 1855 building, D'Angelo said, and will not alter the chapel's interior.
Bowdoin is in negotiations with Consigli Construction of Milford, Massachusetts, to serve as general contractor. The company will take a careful inventory of the shape and placement of the stones so that they can be removed and returned or replaced to match the original pattern.
Donald Borkowski, the College's project manager, said to The Times-Record, "Each and every stone will be dismantled and labeled and lowered to the ground, put on pallets and stored. And then we're going to start rebuilding it right back up again."
After scouring the east coast for granite samples to repair the exterior, Borkowski was about to send away to Europe to find a suitable stone-fine-grained and slightly brown like the original.
A granite sample from Georgia came the closest, but Borkowski was not satisfied with its coloration. He turned to Geology professor emeritus Art Hussey for advice on finding the original source, which college records called "local." Borkowski said local could have referred to any of the New England states. Hussey reported back just before Borkowski, frustrated, prepared to send away to Europe for continental granite samples. Check the LaChance quarry down the road, he said; 'local' could mean Brunswick!" The men decided to take a sample, just in case.
The quarry query unearthed the progenitor. The stone sample matched.
Geoffrey LaChance Sr. has never chanced upon the Upjohn structure, but the 89-year old is proud his granite, which once provided glass-making mica for World War II tanks, will be drafted to replace a quarter of the 1,800 stones that line the chapel spires. Although he has never visited the building, he said he was more than happy to supply the school with 20 loads from the quarry to repair part of the physical fabric of the community.
The Chapel has housed thousands of summer weddings as well as weekly religious services. The east end of the building holds the psychology department and was once home to the College's library. The architect, Richard Upjohn, was an immigrant from England who became president of the American Institute of Architects and is most famous for designing Trinity Church in New York.
President Barry Mills said the renovation's multi-million dollar budget was justified because of the architectural importance of the building, as well as its central place on the campus and in the College's history. "We look forward to returning the chapel to its former splendor," he said. | <urn:uuid:32521c40-2ebe-4144-bcb8-bf65defd8cdb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bowdoinorient.com/legacy/2003-01-24/news04.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961966 | 694 | 1.726563 | 2 |
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