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By Grant Bissell
St. Louis (KSDK) - 'Tis the season for rip-offs, especially when it comes to gift cards.
Gift cards are a $100 million business, and scammers know it.
The latest scheme involves stealing gift card numbers before the cards are even bought.
Conmen will visit a store and write down the numbers on the back of gift cards. Then they'll wait until the cards are activated and start shopping online with your money.
The best way to protect yourself is to buy a card from behind the counter, if possible.
The Better Business Bureau also has suggestions on how to make a safe purchase.
"If you're buying a gift card on the computer make sure you're doing it through a secure site to protect your credit card information. And make sure that you use a credit card to buy the gift card so that if there is a problem with the gift card after you send it you can challenge it and get the money back from your credit card company," said Chris Thetford with the St. Louis BBB.
Remember, while gift card laws have changed recently, you still need to check for hidden fees and expiration dates.
And if all of this has you nervous about gift cards, you can always give cash or a check instead. | <urn:uuid:6c4df636-982d-4313-b13c-509e58a16eb8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ksdk.com/money/article/350621/5/Gift-cards-vulnerable-to-scammers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954952 | 269 | 1.59375 | 2 |
If you use Aperture, you probably really care about your photographs. You might be a pro with a library that ranges into the 100’s of GBs, or you might be an amateur with 20GB of data, but you care enough to take the time to do the right thing with your images so that you can fulfill your vision of what those images should be. So you calibrate your display, right? And you do it frequently, right? If not, let me quote from Appendix B of the Aperture User Manual:
“Aperture is a powerful digital image adjustment application, but its power is limited to the accuracy of the devices that display and print your images.”
If you want to be able to work with your images on multiple machines, print them, or share them, then you need to be taking full advantage of the fact that Aperture is a color managed environment that uses ColorSync to translate colors to your monitor accurately. But, of course, ColorSync needs to know how your monitor displays colors so that it can do the math. This is why you need to make a profile for your display. Not have a ColorSync profile for your particular monitor means that you’re driving blind when you make adjustments to your images.
As important as it is, I know lots of people that are serious about their images that don’t profile their display. And I think there are two reasons for this: 1) Color management is a complex field and it’s full of lots of big terms and complex numbers; and 2) Good profiling hardware has typically been expensive. It’s been coming down in price over time, but still, to get the good stuff hasn’t been cheap. Combine these two points and most people, it seems, do nothing.
Nowadays, both price and complexity aren’t valid answers. You can get really good basic tools for about $80. They don’t have all the features of their more expensive brethren, but they do a good job for photographers that want to accurately edit their images. To see how good these inexpensive tools are and if I could recommend them to others, I picked up a Pantone huey from the Apple Store the other day.
The huey at work (larger image)
After test driving it a couple of days, I can report back that it’s easy to use. Software setup is an easy drag-and-drop install. Then you plug the sensor in and run the software. It takes care of the rest. And the profiles it makes are good. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t choose it for profile quality over, say, a Monaco Optix (which I also own) or a Pantone Eye-One. But if you don’t have anything at all, this will get the job done.
The huey in its stand (larger image)
A nice bonus feature of the huey is that you can leave it plugged into your Mac and it will periodically take ambient light readings, adjusting the profile in use to react to changing conditions in your workspace. This is something that I wish my other color management tools had.
There is a downside to the huey that’s important to mention here: It only works against the primary display. Considering the price and ease of use factor of the huey, it’s a perfectly acceptable compromise, but it is something to be very aware of. I’ve read that you can play tricks on a multiple monitor workstation by swapping out the main screen and building profiles for each, but this works against the easy-to-use nature of the tool.
The bottom line: You need to calibrate your displays. If you can spend, say $200 or $300 insteed of a $100, look into the Monaco Optix or the Pantone Eye-One. You’ll get super high quality profiles and the ability to work on multiple displays. If, however, you’ve only got $100, then you still have options. You can get the huey for $90. You can get the ColorVision Spyder Express for $80.
No matter what you do, go get a calibration tool already and start getting the most out of Aperture, ok? | <urn:uuid:16219aad-422a-4e0d-983c-f38302971783> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2006/11/color_management_is_essential.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940887 | 890 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Herman Cain says many things I want to hear. But I’ve compared the words of the GOP’s national platforms since the Bush era began in 1988 with the actual performance of the Party’s national officeholders during the same period. I am therefore immunized against any temptation to believe that words spoken by GOP candidates in pursuit of conservative support when they run for office are a reliable indicator of how they will perform once in office.
Over the years I’ve participated in many political and legal battles alongside grass-roots conservatives committed, as I am, to restoring, defending and conserving the constitutional republic established by America’s founders – you know, the one based on the self-evident truth that the will of the Creator God is the first principle that defines right and justice in human affairs. Time and again in the course of our activities my fellow workers have shared their grief and disappointment over this or that supposedly conservative politician who won not only their vote but their hard-working support, but betrayed their hopes once in office.
Their all too accurate lament always brings to my mind the words Shakespeare ascribed to Scotland’s ill-fated King Duncan in his response to the reported execution of the traitor who nearly cost him his throne: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. He was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust.” (Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” Act I, Scene 4) In the era of ambition-driven sound-bite politics, is there any way to distinguish the deceptive campaigners from the candidates who will, once in office, stay true to the principles and policies they espouse?
Part of the way can be found in another scene in “Macbeth” (Act I, Scene 2), when King Duncan praises the valiant sergeant who brings him the glad tidings of victory over the foreign invaders who supported the traitor’s war against his throne. “So well thy words become thee as thy wounds …,” he observes. Particularly when it comes to electing someone to the highest position of trust the American people have constitutionally empowered themselves to bestow, it makes sense to look for the “wounds,” i.e., the evidence that a candidates’ words are matched by deeds performed in the service of the principles and policies they now espouse.
On the whole the present crisis of America’s life is rooted in the betrayal of our national principles being perpetrated in the name of so-called “abortion rights.” Our willingness as a nation to deny the unalienable right to life of our helpless, nascent posterity is proof positive that we have, in the most critical respect, abandoned the will of the Creator God who, according to our Declaration of Independence, endowed us with the rights on which the liberty and self-government of the people depend.
Herman Cain professes to believe the same thing. However, as I think back upon the crucial battles conservatives have waged against the forces seeking to deny the unalienable right to life and disparage the authority of God on which it depends (e.g., the effort to prevent the judicial murder of Terry Schiavo; the fight against the state-supported murder of embryonic human life in Missouri; the fight to defend South Dakota’s law restoring respect for the right to life of nascent posterity; the movement to defend then Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s display of respect for the Ten Commandments in Alabama; the effort in Illinois to decry Barack Obama’s willingness to sacrifice, on the altar of so called “abortion rights,” children born alive despite the abortion procedure intended to murder them), I don’t recall the presence and efforts of Herman Cain.
Those battles were unpopular at the time they were fought. Many who engaged in them were shunned and ridiculed by pundits and prognosticators on every hand. To this day, they live with the scars and aching wounds inflicted upon them. I could not fairly doubt the words of someone like Herman Cain if he were among them. But at least he emphatically proclaims his pro-life sentiments now, as the highest prize of power dances within his reach. On this account, I was tempted to give him such credibility as it deserves. Then I saw the following exchange on John Stossel’s Fox Business program:
I also made this transcript of the relevant portion:
- Stossel: A quickie, a quick question on one more hot subject – abortion …”
Stossel: You’re against it …
Cain: I’m pro-life from conception, yes
Stossel: Any cases where it should be legal?
Cain: I don’t think government should make that decision. I don’t believe that government should make that decision.
Stossel: People should be free to abort a baby …
Cain: I support life from conception. No, people shouldn’t be just free to abort because if we don’t protect the sanctity of life from conception we will also start to play God relative to life at the end of life.
Stossel: I’m confused on what your position is. If a …
Cain: My position is I’m pro-life, period.
Stossel: … woman is raped she should not be allowed to end the pregnancy?
Cain: That’s her choice. That is not government’s choice. I support life from conception.
Stossel: So abortion should be legal.
Cain: No abortion should not be legal. I believe in the sanctity of life.
Stossel: I’m not understanding. If it’s her choice, that means its legal.
Cain: I don’t believe a woman should have an abortion. Does that help to clear it up.
Stossel: Even if she is raped?
Cain: Even if she is raped or she is the victim of incest, because there are other options. We must protect the sanctity of life and I have always believed that. (Applause.) Real clear.
From this exchange, I have no doubt that Herman Cain emphatically declares his personal belief that women should not abort their nascent offspring. I have no doubt that he understands that the denial of unalienable right involved in abortion must lead to other assaults, e.g., on the right to life of the elderly. But I more than sympathize with John Stossel’s confusion when Cain’s emphatic pro-life declarations are accompanied by the equally emphatic statement that, when it comes to the legality of abortion, “I don’t’ think government should make that decision. I don’t believe that government should make that decision.” Equally confused is his assertion that, in the case of rape, “That’s her choice. That is not the government’s choice. I support life from conception.”
Cain has reportedly declared his support for legislation that would acknowledge the personhood of nascent posterity. But if, from conception, the nascent child is a person, how can it be just to allow one biological parent to murder that person, innocent of any crime, even when the other biological parent is a rapist? If we acknowledge personhood and then declare that in certain circumstances innocent persons can legally be murdered (i.e., slain unjustly in violation of the God endowed unalienable right to life), we simply set the stage for intense and extensive abuses of power in any area (such as the administration of government-controlled health care) where violating the rights of innocent people offers expedient advantages.
In this regard, Herman Cain is not making sense. Despite his absence from so many pro-life battles, I am loath to conclude that his emphatic proclamation of pro-life views is just a Mitt Romney-style ploy staged to confuse sincere grass-roots advocates of America’s founding principles. Yet even assuming that this is not the case, his words reveal a profound misunderstanding of the logical consequence of those principles. According to the principles of the American Declaration of Independence, government exists to secure God-endowed unalienable rights. This is the defining obligation of just and legitimate government power. Therefore, just government is obliged to protect by appropriate laws every person’s God-endowed unalienable right to life. Any regime of law that in any case allows parents to murder their innocent children fails this obligation, thereby losing its claim to justice and legitimacy. (This is why, for instance, the “honor killings” sanctioned by Islam’s Shariah law confirm its inconsistency with the requirements of just government.)
Sometimes politicians betray their professed conservative views because they were never sincerely committed to them in the first place. Sometimes they do so because, despite their sincere proclamations of personal belief, they lack the understanding to defend their views when challenged on grounds of law and civic principle. When it comes to making and enforcing laws, personal beliefs and predilections cannot, in practice, be sustained except by people who know how to deal with such challenges. The self-contradiction that confused John Stossel will surely be exploited in the debates and councils (in the public eye and behind the scenes) in the course of which laws are made and policies implemented. Someone who starts by firmly espousing a self-contradictory view will end by surrendering to opponents who embarrass him with that self-contradiction. Sadly, the people who supported him will then lament the failure of principle that, with a little discerning thought, they would have seen coming long before it occurred.
Will we ever again have leaders whose supposed stand for principle survives the belated wisdom of hindsight? Not until we learn to get beyond candidates’ words in order to listen for the sound understanding needed to back them up. When it comes to his professed pro-life views, I do not perceive that sound understanding in Herman Cain. I do see more grief and disappointment on the way for those who once again let vain hope drive them to ignore the warning signs. And when it comes to Herman Cain’s espoused positions, there are more than one. Stay tuned. | <urn:uuid:f0422541-2025-4954-87d2-a0cc5f8ecd53> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wnd.com/2011/09/350033/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953562 | 2,152 | 1.601563 | 2 |
State Panel Recommends Laguna Fishing Closure
Meg Caldwell, director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program, served on a state panel that unanimously approved marine protected areas off the Southern California Coast. She is quoted in the following article:
A state task force recommended a ban on fishing along six miles of Laguna Beach coastline Tuesday, along with a variety of other fishing restrictions up and down the Southern California coast.
The 9 1/2-square-mile, triangle-shaped closure area was one of several that the blue-ribbon panel picked after more than a year of work by a 64-member “stakeholder” group, part of the state-sponsored Marine Life Protection Act Initiative.
“We’re dealing with something really unprecedented,” Meg Caldwell, a Stanford Law School professor and member of the blue-ribbon task force, said shortly before the 5-member panel’s unanimous vote. “The original intent of this act is really to bring our marine coastal endowment back to its former glory, and to allow it to really perform as the engine that it is for our state’s coastal economy.” | <urn:uuid:bbe91dc4-704f-41e9-ad17-144d7d5bba8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.law.stanford.edu/news/state-panel-recommends-laguna-fishing-closure | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958546 | 242 | 1.640625 | 2 |
10 College of Science graduates to receive 2011 Distinguished Alumni Award
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Ten graduates from the College of Science received the 2011 Distinguished Alumni Awards on Friday (April 8).
A ceremony honored alumni that have had a significant impact in their fields and on society. Award recipients include: David Capka, Tracy Choka, George Garrick, William Gommel, Paul Krishna, Thomas Longo, Timothy O'Leary, Vaidyanathan "Ram" Ramaswami, Chun-Fang Wu and Jeffrey Young.
* David Capka graduated from Purdue in 1973 with a master's degree and in 1983 with a doctoral degree, both in computer science. After serving a four-year term with the Purdue ROTC program and beginning his professional career, he chose to pursue a doctoral degree. He is currently chief scientist for Systems Development Operations at Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, a leading global security company. His assignments include a variety of research projects and development contracts focusing on payload management, defense information systems and border control. Capka also serves as corporate partner to the Department of Computer Science at Purdue, serving as a resource for both students and faculty.
* Tracy Choka graduated from Purdue in 1988 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. After having an actuarial internship with Lincoln Financial Group, she found her interests gravitated toward math, statistics, biology and computer science. She now uses all of these as a managing director of Swiss Re America Holding Corp. Throughout her time at Swiss Re, she developed a risk management framework for preferred risk classification, including mortality table construction and empirical data analysis. This framework was recently awarded a U.S. patent.
* George Garrick graduated from Purdue in 1974 with a bachelor's degree in engineering, in 1976 with a second bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in management. Garrick boosted Flycast Communications in 1998 from a struggling startup company to a $500 million IPO in one year and sold it for $2.3 million one year later. Garrick credits Purdue for the constant challenge to figure out how to succeed in the face of extreme pressure and challenges.
* William Gommel graduated from Purdue in 1973 with a doctorate in earth and atmospheric sciences. After serving in the U.S. Army, Gommel realized the U.S. Air Force’s need for weather officers to assist pilots during missions through stormy weather. Before earning his doctorate, he served as Air Force staff meteorologist, chief forecaster and staff scientist in the Pentagon. Gommel retired in 1997 as the commander of the Indiana Guard Reserve. Since then, he has served as chairman of earth and space sciences and director of Noblitt Observatory at the University of Indianapolis. He also is director of the Central Indiana Science and Engineering Fair.
* Paul Krishna graduated from Purdue in 1988 with a master's degree in earth and atmospheric sciences. Krishna had an extensive mineral collection by the time he was in high school. This interest continued through college, where he was offered a job to work Exxon Mobile after graduation. He now serves as environmental programs manager in Irving, Texas, and plays a key role in supplying the country with the energy it needs while ensuring safety and enforcing environmental regulations. He is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers and head of the advisory council for Purdue's Department and Atmospheric Sciences.
* Thomas Longo graduated from Purdue in 1947 with bachelor's degrees in naval science and physics and chemistry, in 1953 with a master's degree in physics and in 1957 with a doctorate in physics. After serving as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, Longo returned to Purdue to research industrial uses of silicon. He researched and developed silicon-based technologies for the next 50 years, working in academia and industry. Today, largely because of Longo’s advancements, silicon is the principal component of most semiconductor devices, such as integrated circuits and microchips. In 1985 he launched Performance Semiconductor Corp., which develops submicron complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology and microprocessors for military applications. Longo retired in 2003.
* Timothy O'Leary graduated from Purdue in 1972 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. O'Leary is an acting deputy and deputy chief research and development officer for the Veterans Administrations Office of Research and Development in Washington, D.C. He also serves on the editorial review board of several journals and has taught university-level courses. He has published in more than 100 journals, holds three patents and is co-author of three books.
* Vaiyanathan "Ram" Ramaswami received a master’s degree from Purdue in 1976 and a doctoral degree in 1978, both in statistics. He is a renowned researcher in applied probability, which has impacted telecommunications in helping ensure dial tones for emergency 911 calls and developing algorithms for video and Wi-Fi hotspot traffic. He has seven patents and has authored 75 research papers. He co-authored a book about matrix analytic methods in applied probability.
* Chun-Fang Wu received a doctorate in biological sciences from Purdue in 1976. Wu is a biological sciences professor at the University of Iowa and is exploring genetic and environmental factors affecting the nervous system. Wu and his associates were the first to identify and characterize genes such as K+, NA+ and TRP.
* Jeffery Young graduated from Purdue in 1988 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. He is president and chief executive officer of Mitsubishi Motors Credit of America. Since 2005 he has opened the door for partnerships and led formation of a three-year joint venture with Merrill Lynch to originate, underwrite and service retail loan production. He also served in the U.S. Air Force and in executives positions in capital markets, risk management and strategic planning at Ford Motor Corp. and Centex Home Equity Co.
The College of Science has been presenting the Distinguished Alumni award since 1990. The award has been received by 175 alumni, including NASA astronaut Andrew Feustel and nationally respected scientist and educator Rita Colwell.
Writer: Amanda Sliepka, 765-496-3006, [email protected]
Source: Janelle Musch, director of alumni relations and special events, 765-494-0586, [email protected]
Note to Journalists: Complete biographies and photographs of the 2011 distinguished alumni are available online at https://www.science.purdue.edu/for-alumni-and-friends/alumni-recognition-a-awards/96-distinguished-science-alumni | <urn:uuid:43d81c76-b26e-4b7c-b269-57530ad9af08> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/general/2011/110411ScienceAlumni.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959035 | 1,354 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
Hypocrisy is nothing, in fact, but a horrible hopefulness.
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake
The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness
Toleration is the best religion.
Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odor
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow. | <urn:uuid:a0f56b6c-1008-4d6f-b918-22003788836b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.finestquotes.com/author_quotes-author-Victor%20Hugo-page-1.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947829 | 276 | 1.632813 | 2 |
By Michael Benjamin
Like many New Yorkers, I thank Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his repeated demurrals concerning a presidential bid in 2016. Cuomo was elected to run our state, not to use Albany as a Triple-A way station on his way to the “show.”
Two hundred and thirty-six years into our nation’s history, a professional political class has arisen where the scions of our most powerful families believe themselves entitled to hold public office. While increasingly commonplace on the local and state level, this trend has taken hold even in regard to the presidency of the United States.
The idea that political bloodlines should determine the presidential nomination process is a growing concern. In 2008 Americans faced the very real possibility of the Bush and Clinton families alternately running the nation for 28 consecutive years. Barack Obama’s emergence and success in clinching the Democratic nomination saved our republic.
Mitt Romney appears motivated by his father, George Romney’s, failed bid for the Republican nomination in 1968. In 1980 Ted Kennedy could not articulate the convictions driving his quest to unseat President Jimmy Carter. The late John F. Kennedy Jr. was hounded by repeated speculation of an eventual political career. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s name is floated weekly as a potential Romney running mate.
Pundits are now goading Hillary Clinton and Governor Cuomo to enter the 2016 fray. Ex-Governor Paterson’s failure to nominate Caroline Kennedy to fill Clinton’s unexpired Senate term spared us from tales of Camelot II.
Is it name recognition, celebrity, laziness, elitism or entitlement that is driving this fever?
Be it elitism or a sense of entitlement, this growing practice runs profoundly counter to the American ideals of rugged individualism, “bootstrapism” and personal merit. Public office should not be treated as a legacy for elites.
The 14 presidents who are graduates of Harvard, Yale and Princeton reflect a measure of elitism that Americans have accepted. George W. Bush was the only president to hold degrees from both Harvard and Yale.
Many students at Harvard, Yale and Princeton are legacy admissions because their parents or grandparents are graduates. The Adams and Bush sons are double legacies because their fathers are Harvard and Yale graduates, respectively.
Notably, 12 elite universities have produced 42 percent of government leaders and 54 percent of corporate leaders, according to research by Thomas Dye. One critic of admissions practices at these elite institutions argues that legacy preferences are widespread and harmful.
I would add that legacy preferences in politics and government are equally widespread and potentially harmful in a representative democracy.
To read the full column at City & State click here.
Trackback from your site. | <urn:uuid:d9281369-12ff-4e90-92c2-65f4cef02f90> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nypress.com/opinion-the-race-to-president-shouldnt-be-a-family-affair/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947503 | 559 | 1.648438 | 2 |
I like to think I am amongst the elite when it comes to being
Saving money, or being more efficient when spending it has always been something close to my swinging brick.
And it’s really an ethic I want to instil in my child.
To understand the value of money, getting best value for that money and being better prepared to make financial choices and even for periods of personal financial crisis.
Being a savvy kid surely is going to have massive benefits for their future. There are so many financial decisions they will need to make, now probably more than ever, and raising a child that understands that, without fearing and worrying about it has to be a good thing.
Anyway, I’ve been asked by the folks at MoneySupermarket.com to join a judging panel for their latest competition.
They are inviting bloggers to share their top tips for encouraging kids to save in return for the chance to win £1,000.
The judging panel will select the best ten entries, who will then compete in a fun day of financial challenges, with the winner leaving with £1,000.
All you have to do to enter is write a blog post containing your top tip for encouraging children to save.
Mine would be to take them car booting. It shows how they can turn their old unwanted toys back into cash, and at the same time demonstrates how things lose value. i.e. They will have to sell a lot of old things, to get one brand new top of the range, must have for Tuesday, toy.
What’s your top tip for encouraging children to be savvy savers?
If you'd like to share, and once you’ve written your blog post simple email [email protected] to let them know you’ve entered, and you can use the Twitter hashtag #superkidsavers too.
The best tips chosen will also be shared amongst all the financial experts advice on the MoneySupermarket | <urn:uuid:7d07523e-2bbe-414d-ae6d-13483680a21f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://singleparentdad.blogspot.jp/2012/10/win-1000-by-being-great-at-teaching.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948872 | 409 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Ask me anything
(Formerly Peace Dividend Trust/PDT Global) We build markets, create jobs, and sustain peace in developing countries by championing local entrepreneurs and connecting them to new business opportunities. Learn more at our website
Colouring the horns of rhinos on the ten rand bill in Africa - aninitiative started by concerned members of the South African community to raise awareness on how close rhinos are to extinction. Members of the public are encouraged to colour the horn on their bill red and continue to use the money until every single ten rand note has the mark.
These words accompany online photographs of the marked bills:
“Can you imagine every single rhino horn made RED on every single Ten Rand Note ?
Can you imagine that every single South African will see this, talk about it and become outraged at the real possibility of our rhino becoming extinct? Can you imagine every single visitor to South Africa this Festive Season seeing these notes, asking questions and creating awareness back home. Can you imagine our government NOT sitting up and taking heed of our outraged voices, having to recall, reprint and possibly even do away with the Ten Rand Note ?
Can you imagine our Africa with no rhino ?”
This is a really interesting public outreach campaign - I’m interested to see its effects. I have no doubt it will impact the public consciousness, but I can only hope that will be turned into effective action. | <urn:uuid:63a67980-80c3-4dd9-b237-e198a3bbaf4a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://buildingmarkets.tumblr.com/tagged/Biodiversity | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949778 | 294 | 1.648438 | 2 |
To avoid the "fiscal cliff," Republicans have recently offered more compromises on tax rates and the debt limit. They are asking for entitlement reform in return, but Democrats seem unwilling to budge on the spending side of the Treasury's ledger.
Speaker of the House John Boehner met with President Barack Obama and offered to increase the tax rate on taxable income above $1 million and to increase the debt limit enough that it would not need another increase for one year. According to unnamed sources in the White House, the offer was rejected, but they acknowledged it was a significant step in their direction on behalf of the speaker.
The private meeting between Boehner and Obama was on Friday and news of what was discussed continued to leak over the weekend. They met again on Monday, beginning at 11:30 a.m.
During the presidential election, Obama and other Democrats frequently complained that Republicans want to protect tax cuts for "millionaires and billionaires." When Republicans offered to increase tax rates just on millionaires, though, the White House said it would not raise enough revenue. Instead, Obama wants tax rates to go up for the top two tax brackets, or those making more than $250,000 per year.
Both sides have moved closer on the revenue side. Boehner initially offered $800 billion in new revenue and is now up to $1 trillion in new revenue. Obama initially wanted $1.4 trillion in new revenue and will now accept $1.2 trillion in new revenue.
On the spending side, though, the two sides still appear far apart. In return for his concessions, Boehner wants entitlement reform. The two ideas being discussed are raising the retirement age and slowing the automatic increases in benefits.
Currently, Social Security and Medicare benefits are indexed to wages, not inflation. Money can be saved, therefore, by increasing benefits at a slower rate. Boehner offered to index benefits to a chained consumer price index, which would still rise faster than inflation, but lower than wages. The change would save about $200 billion over a decade. The White House reportedly rejected that idea as well.
Democrats have not shown a willingness, at least publicly, to go along with entitlement reform. While Democrats have often argued for a "balanced approach," meaning both spending cuts and revenue increases, they remain unbalanced by not agreeing to entitlement reform, complained the editors of The Washington Post, a left-leaning newspaper.
"Since the election last month, a few modest proposals have been floated to slow the growth in entitlement spending. None of these would fix the problem, but they would at least acknowledge that a problem exists. One by one, the ostensible advocates of balance have shot them down, portraying each in turn as a mortal threat to the poor or the aged," wrote The Washington Post editorial board Thursday.
The editors went on to acknowledge that the nation's "underlying fiscal problem," is entitlements, namely Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the health-care exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare."
"But there's no way to fix America's problem without doing something on entitlements," they concluded. "If the Democrats -- and Mr. Obama, in particular -- don't get more seriously into that discussion, they have no standing to complain about the Republicans' lack of balance." | <urn:uuid:0d3cd7e5-70b0-4f84-8076-9147a8704f3b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://global.christianpost.com/news/fiscal-cliff-gop-willing-to-compromise-on-tax-rates-dems-stubborn-on-entitlement-reform-86801/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969353 | 668 | 1.59375 | 2 |
On April 19, a hasty set of emails was exchanged between, ultimately, the BotFarm and a Japanese robot designer. Dig this drama:
Yoshishiro Shibata (credit: Lem Fugitt); robot arm shield
Yoshishiro Shibata, the notable lead designer of the Kondo series of humanoid robots, was on a flight from Japan to San Francisco, all set to participate in Robogames. But wait. The robot wasn’t complete. Hands were vulnerable, open to attack. They needed a shield.
Shibata-san sketched out the right shield, but not even the most motivated Maker can print from the air (unless of course…). He connected mid-flight with friends on the ground to see what could be done. Michael Overstreet of Cowtown Computer Congress Kansas City caught wind of the designer in distress and contacted MakerBot’s Michael Curry, who in turn sought the assistance of Gian Pablo Villamil, a MakerBot Education evangelist and organizer at Noisebridge in San Francisco.
The sketch became a 3D model, and with Gian Pablo on the case, the model became a fully MakerBotted part, ready for show time at Robogames the next day. After printing, Gian Pablo jumped in the car at his workshop on Treasure Island and made the trek over to the San Mateo Fairgrounds.
The handoff was a success. It is certainly cool that a bi-coastal network of Makers were able to materialize a part for someone in need, especially since that someone was on an international flight. But there’s something else here: for Mr. Shibata, having the tools to create a customized part for his robot was a foregone conclusion, which freed him to design and commission exactly what he needed.
We’re happy MakerBot could help in this process!
UPDATE! For a bunch of awesome coverage of all things Robot, including Robo Games, check out Robots Dreams! | <urn:uuid:a6e47c71-8c5d-4175-a5fe-8e0ff5ab6d0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/04/24/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96426 | 406 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Refugees and their Agents
Hirit Belai’s Diary (LRB, 18 July) explains that British immigration officials think that most refugees to Britain deliberately chose their destination, in preference to any other. Experience in Germany, which has the most generous provision of all EU countries, suggests that almost all asylum-seekers have been helplessly delivered into the hands of professional refugee agents – doubtful characters who exact large fees in return for a promise to smuggle their clients into a European country. Germany is particularly good for these purposes, not only because of its generous refugee policy, but because of its adherence to the Schengen Agreement, which allows passportless crossing of the German frontier from all countries except the Czech Republic and Poland.
The country to which a given asylum-seeker is sent entirely depends on the agent, nearly all of whom know which countries in Europe are easy to get into and which more difficult – and exact correspondingly higher fees if a refugee really insists on a particular destination. It is a grotesque impudence on the part of these agents to pretend they can succeed when in nearly all cases they are bound to fail. I hear every day of Moroccan youths who swim across to Spain, only to be turned back if they are caught; of Greek or Turkish fishermen who make quite a bit on the side by ferrying Kurds from Iraq or Turkey to a one of the Greek islands; of Polish agents who take large fees to get illegals across the German frontier. Mostly these attempts fail – but no matter, the agent has pocketed his fee.
On present figures, no less than 94 per cent of all asylum-seekers in Germany are disallowed, but only in very rare cases are they deported: they just stay on illegally. I suspect a comparative study of refugee policy in all EU countries would show that British practice is no worse than others — just a bit tighter.
University of Mainz
In Defence of Raymond Williams
When Fred Inglis approached me for information about my father, Raymond Williams, he told me that he was planning to write ‘a novel of the Left’, and perhaps that is how his book should be read (LRB, 4 July). I can confirm that Dai Smith is the authorised biographer, and my family has every confidence in him.
As the publisher of Fred Inglis’s Raymond Williams, I feel I must correct several inaccuracies in Raphael Samuel’s review. 1. At no point in the book does Fred Inglis claim to be the ‘official biographer’ of Raymond Williams, nor did he ever claim to be so to the publishers. 2. Raphael Samuel suggests that some of those interviewed for the biography now feel that they have been misquoted. All of those interviewed were sent copies of what they had said; they were asked to edit or correct these transcripts, and in those cases where they were unhappy with the general impression created by a longer passage, then that passage was deleted. 3. Fred Inglis’s researches in a variety of archives connected with various periods of Williams’s life included extensive use of the records and reminiscences relating to the history of adult education in England compiled by Dr John McIlroy of the University of Manchester. Your reviewer states that Professor Inglis ‘contrives not to mention it in his acknowledgments’. His eye appears to have wandered here. If he looks on p. viii, he will find that the value of the archive and the personal help given by Dr McIlroy is paid full and generous tribute.
Routledge, London EC4
Yes, Fred Inglis’s biography of Raymond Williams is a bad book, marred by inaccuracies, obtuse and obtrusive opinionation, and inept attempts at ‘imaginative’ writing. But to focus on these flaws, as Raphael Samuel does in his review, or to seek to restore the hagiolatry, as some of your subsequent correspondents have done, is to obfuscate the larger issues which the biography undoubtedly – and uncomfortably – raises.
For example, insofar as Inglis, according to Samuel, resembles Bob Hoskins in the BT advertisements in his account of Williams’s marriage and family life, he is a Brechtian Bob who breaks through the illusion of naturalness to pose a key question of sexual, and socialist, politics: that of gender inequality. Inglis quotes a number of observations, not merely his own, of Joy Williams’s apparent subordination – almost, at times, to the point of self-immolation – to her husband. These observations are necessarily partial, and may be inaccurately and selectively transcribed; but simply to ignore the issues they raise, as Samuel does, is to show contempt for that important strand in modern feminism which argues that a consideration of the way men treat women – in their ‘personal’ as much as their ‘political’ lives – is vital to any genuine ‘long revolution’. Such contempt is hardly surprising in a reviewer who turns a dynamic female ex-publisher into the passive occupant of a bathchair when he states that Carmen Callil is ‘wheeled on’ by Inglis to say that Williams is no novelist.
Perhaps most tellingly for socialists of Samuel’s ilk, there is the matter of Williams’s support, hedged round with qualifications and reservations as it was, for revolutionary violence. Philip Corrigan (Letters, 1 August) should re-read the interviews with Williams collected in Politics and Letters (1979) to remind himself that this man of ‘warmth, humour, kindness’ was ready in certain circumstances – because of that very ‘commitment’ which Corrigan also praises – to endorse and encourage violence against the state of a kind which historically has led, and in the foreseeable future is likely to lead, to death and suffering on a large scale. Inglis’s remark about Red Guards and rotovators, which Samuel quotes, is a vigorous and justified riposte to Williams’s approval of the way in which, in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, people were bullied into undertaking physical work on the land. The riposte is one of a number of occasions in the biography when Inglis raises the crucial question of Williams’s relationship to the kind of revolutionary violence which it is difficult at the end of the 20th century – and specially after 1989 – to see as leading, even in the long term, to a benign outcome.
To say this is, of course, to indulge in what Samuel disapprovingly calls in his review ‘the wisdom of hindsight’. That’s certainly no temptation for Samuel; he seems to have learnt nothing from history. From the credulous Communist who, according to Keith Thomas (LRB, 20 April 1995), wept at the death of Uncle Joe to the gawping consumer of the gewgaws of the heritage industry in the first volume of his Theatres of Memory (1994), Samuel has remained a sentimental gull, sloshing around happily in the lukewarm bath of political irresponsibility. Raymond Williams was not such a child; but we do no justice to his memory or his politics to seek to repress discussion of the possible contradictions, failings and evasions of his life and work.
Seaford, East Sussex
Now that LRB readers have debated the importance of Raymond Williams may I suggest that it is his statue that fills the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square?
‘What used to be called Traumatic War Neurosis, or something similar, is now labelled PTSD – what’s the big deal?’ This is what Sheldon Litt wants to know (Letters, 18 July) after reading Gerald Weissmann’s review of my book, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The answer depends on the meaning that Litt wishes to give to his first ‘what’. If, as it seems, he is writing about a phenomenon that supposedly transcends the nomenclatures and practices of psychiatry, then one would have to agree that that there is nothing really new about PTSD. But as Weissmann makes clear, it is precisely this idea, that traumatic memory is a timeless essence, that the book rejects. The phenomenon that psychiatry knows as ‘traumatic memory’ is a relatively recent development, and during the century and a half of its existence the character of its symptoms and the identity of its victims have been periodically reconceived. PTSD is the most recent chapter in the history of traumatic memory. Litt is correct when he writes that PTSD shares features with the traumatic neuroses of the First World War, but he is mistaken if he supposes that there are no important differences between these disorders, and that they merely rename a constant underlying reality. The character of the traumatic hysterias and neurasthenias was shaped by the moral sensibilities, political institutions and clinical practices of the 1914-18 period; the character of PTSD has been likewise stamped by American participation in the Vietnam War, by the domestic liberation politics of the Sixties and Seventies, and by the profound technological and social changes taking place in American psychiatry during the same period.
Litt also attacks Weissmann for comments he is alleged to have made concerning the disease taxonomy that has dominated American psychiatry since the Eighties, the so-called DSM system. His argument that the DSM system is not scientific is justified only if one thinks of ‘science’ as a technology for uncovering pre-existing truths rather than as one or more distinctive systems for producing and vindicating knowledge. If science is what scientists do, then the DSM system can be said to have revolutionised the practice of psychiatric science it the United States.
McGill University, Montreal
Sheldon Litt’s letter commenting on the DSM reminded me of this bit of wisdom from DSM-III-R: ‘Beliefs or experiences of members of religious or other cultural groups may be difficult to distinguish from delusions or hallucinations. When such experiences are shared and accepted by a cultural group, they should not be considered evidence of psychosis.’ In short, if we’re all crazy, then we’re not crazy.
Mind the gap
In his review of The Oxford English Grammar (LRB, 18 July) Hugh Kenner betrays an ignorance of at least a century of developments in grammatical description, including Sidney Greenbaum’s own landmark collaboration, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985). As important and welcome as Greenbaum’s new grammar is, it is not, as Kenner suggests, the first to depart from what he ingenuously terms ‘the schoolmarm connotations of “grammar” ’. These are, I infer, a preoccupation with normative rules (as opposed to description), ‘accidence’ (as opposed to syntax) and written, as opposed to spoken, forms. Descriptive and syntactic grammars of English have been around for at least as long as the twenty years I have been teaching English (the language). Admittedly, their concern has been mainly with written English. Nevertheless, as long ago as 1761, Priestly premised his rudiments of English Grammar on the principle that ‘the custom of speaking is the original and only just standard of any language.’
Nor is Greenbaum’s grammar ‘unique’ by virtue of the fact that it draws on a corpus of authentic texts for its citations. In Jesperson’s A Modern English Grammar (1909-49) all the citations are taken from published books; The Collins COBUILD English Grammar (1990) draws on an enormous computerised database of both spoken and written English housed at the University of Birmingham. Nor, incidentally, is Greenbaum the first to use the terms ‘monotransitive’ and ‘ditransitive’, as Kenner suggests.
Finally, his contention that coherence ‘simply follows from cohesion’ is demonstrably false. The following text, while notionally cohesive, is clearly incoherent: ‘Hugh Kenner lives in Georgia. And I’ve got Georgia on my mind. Mind the gap. Gap has got three letters, therefore.’ Kenner’s review reminds us that, whereas specialists in English (the language) have written engagingly and with great scholarship about English (the literature) – witness Michael Halliday and Henry Widdowson – the reverse is sadly not the case.
Daniel Kinney and Bracht Branham (Letters, 18 July) are worried that when, in the course of a generally favourable comparison, I noted that P.G. Walsh’s translation of Petronius’ Satyricon ‘hugs the Latin more closely’ I was casting aspersions on the accuracy of their own version. It would be nice to keep both the spirit and the letter of a translated text (and every other level of meaning in between), but since each language has its own peculiar characteristics and will not slip easily inside another’s skin, choices sometimes have to be made. It seems to me undeniable that Kinney and Branham when faced with this choice opted for what they thought was the Petronian spirit over the letter, while Walsh follows more precisely what the Latin actually says. Whether those who are faithful in spirit or those who are faithful to the letter are more faithful to Petronius is a question my review was not attempting to answer.
These differences are perfectly apparent in the passage chosen by Daniel Kinney for comparison, Encolpius’ description of his unresponsive penis. Professor Walsh’s member is of female gender and the eyes she fixes on the ground are two in number, which might lead some readers to suppose a disappointed woman is still in the room. In Kinney’s and Branham’s version the organ in question is an ‘it’ and it has a single eye with which to stare groundwards. This certainly produces a more vivid and more humorous image, but it is not Petronius’ joke. His humour is to be found in the mock-epic bathos, citing Vergil at this juncture and comparing the recalcitrant penis with Dido’s sullen ghost ignoring Aeneas in the underworld. It is hard to know how a translator could have conveyed this rather morbid mixture of lewd and pseud – ‘My dick ignored me, like the ghost of a jilted lover encountered on a trip to hell’ – but some quotation marks might have helped.
Apropos T.S. Eliot, Nigel Jackson speaks darkly of ‘the great damage done to the fabric of Western nations by Jewish interests during the last few hundred years’ (Letters, 4 July). Short of referring us to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, would he care to explain? | <urn:uuid:ff62901f-731c-48de-8ec3-ed4604f165f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n16/letters | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96224 | 3,117 | 1.671875 | 2 |
DPS TV spotlights the Great Things Happening across Detroit Public Schools through the lens of a video camera.
See a compelling segment on the Volunteer Reading Corps and hear from the volunteers who make a true difference in our schools by helping children learn to read. Watch children’s eyes light up as they explore the collections at the Cranbrook Institute of Science following an announcement of a groundbreaking new partnership DPS has with the museum. And cheer along as our Cass Tech football team makes history, becoming the first Detroit Public School League team to win the Michigan High School Athletic Association Division I state football championship, and then does a REPEAT!
As a testament to the outstanding talent in DPS, most segments are taped, produced and edited by the students and staff at Detroit School of Arts and Golightly Career and Technical Center.
Detroit Public Schools educational and community television programming airs daily on mydetroitcable access Channel 10 at 7:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., seven days a week.
Check us on on vimeo at: Detroit Public Schools Vimeo Channel | <urn:uuid:55a86e75-4af5-49c5-953c-334be01dc36e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://detroitk12.org/news/dpstv/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944783 | 222 | 1.59375 | 2 |
As a weather-driven event, aircraft deicing allows for little practical training before operators are tested on the deicing pad. Evolving simulation technology has presented another training option.
It’s a tool that developers have claimed the benefits to include familiarizing operators with equipment and the deicing process without the dangers encountered on the ramp; reducing the cost associated with running equipment for training; as well as an opportunity to work on team dynamics.
From Computer to Cab
Global Ground Support LLC, a manufacturer of deicing trucks, rolled out its initial version in 2007. It began developing the simulator as an option for customers to familiarize themselves with its deicing trucks — and ultimately it has served as a selling advantage.
“We had a customer that required a simulator,” says Jeff Walsh, vice president of sales and service at Global Ground Support. “In order for us to bid on this large deicer purchase, we had to have a simulator.”
The company set out to create its own simulator, working with ForgeFx, a software development company. Since its inception, the simulator has undergone several updates, with the newest version due out in August 2009. It will feature the actual joysticks from Global deicing trucks, which Walsh says will enable the trainees to better acquaint themselves with operating the equipment. The newest version will also feature two more models of the company’s deicing trucks, the ER2875 and 2200 open bucket.
The company has also set a focus on improving the deicing experience. Walsh says the simulator now includes a fluid dynamics package and features ten models of aircraft. And the development goes on. The company is also working on adding a component to account for interplay between wind speed and fluid dispensation, according
MPRI: gForce Products Division has also developed a simulator for the market. Rolling out the initial version in 2006, the company partnered with Vestergaard and JBT AeroTech to include its deicing equipment in the software. Apart from the equipment design, MPRI has also focused on upgrading the deicing experience.
“We started out approaching it as what we call a ‘part-task’ simulator,” says Jeffery Kleinsorge, program director of MPRI gForce Products. “You modify the joystick unit so that it can be plugged into a computer with a simulated airport environment. But then our next step was to actually focus on the deicing task. Now, in addition to becoming familiar with deicing equipment, you can actually use that deicer to melt the snow off an aircraft.”
The company has developed the simulator with a “physics engine,” which Kleinsorge says allows the program to be flexible and accurate to various situations.
Servisair initially implemented the gForce simulator at its central deicing facility at Toronto Pearson International Airport in 2006 for training on its Vestergaard Elephant Beta and Beta-15 deicing trucks. It has experienced the upgrades made to the software. “There are now 12 aircraft types we can select to train on. The graphics are much smoother,” says Chris Schock, deicing training supervisor for Servisair. “I guess the biggest selling feature is the physics package that they’ve implemented into it. Before basically the snow would come off in squares; now we can select variable amounts of both snow and ice, and it is a more accurate representation of how it really appears on the aircraft. The contamination will actually come off the aircraft surfaces how it does in the real world.”
Servisair has since added an additional simulator at the facility for two operators to use simultaneously to capitalize on the teamwork benefits. “It’s a team environment out there,” Schock says. “We want to promote and encourage that teamwork environment through team-based learning. | <urn:uuid:d7773085-3ab0-4f14-9149-c161647e70d6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aviationpros.com/article/10372961/a-turn-to-simulation | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963243 | 795 | 1.640625 | 2 |
By Conor Dougherty
Growth in U.S. travel and tourism spending slowed in the first quarter of 2011 as consumers cut back on air travel in the wake of skyrocketing prices, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday.
Inflation-adjusted tourism spending increased 0.6% to a $662.8 billion annual rate in the first three months of 2011. That compares to a 2.6% rate in the fourth quarter of 2010. The big decrease in spending on plane tickets was offset by growth in spending for hotels, shopping, restaurants and bars.
Tourism spending, like the economy more broadly, slowed considerably after a strong rebound last year. Overall travel and tourism spending has increased seven quarters in a row, but the 0.6% first-quarter increase is way down from the 4.9% growth for all of 2010.
Air travel has been particularly hard hit by higher fuel prices. The price of air travel jumped 21.4% in the first quarter, prompting a 9.9% decline in overall air travel spending. The price for accommodations, meantime, fell 3.2% — and accommodation spending grew in response.
Tourism employment rose at a 2% annual rate in the first quarter, compared with 1.6% in the fourth quarter of 2010. That was better than the overall economy, which saw employment increase 1.3% in the first quarter and 0.8% in the previous three months. | <urn:uuid:907b3a2c-2ad4-4c48-b8d0-c9cdbb4d252f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/06/21/tourism-growth-slowed-in-early-2011/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957098 | 295 | 1.523438 | 2 |
September 26, 2003
Liberian Poet to Present Reading at Whitworth
Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, professor of English and creative writing at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, will read from her works on Thursday, Oct. 9, at 7 p.m. in the Music Recital Hall at Whitworth College. The reading is free and open to the public. For more information, please call (509) 777-3270.
Wesley is the author of Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (1998, New Issues Press & Prose), a collection of poems that address the deaths and destruction caused by the Liberian civil war. Her second book of poetry, Becoming Ebony: Poems (March 2003, Southern Illinois University Press), earned a second-place prize in the 2002 Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry.
"Wesley writes with clear-eyed lyricism about her ruthless and beleaguered homeland," according to a Feb. 15, 2003 review in the American Library Association's Booklist magazine.
Wesley, who was born in Tugbakeh, Liberia, earned a master's degree in English education from Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., in 1985 and then returned to Liberia. In 1991, two years into the Liberian civil war, she immigrated to the United States with her husband and children.
"Patricia writes about her experiences in the Liberian civil war, focusing especially on the plight of women and children; her poetry is not, however, bitter or pessimistic," says John Yoder, professor of political studies at Whitworth and author of the forthcoming book Popular Political Culture, Civil Society and State Crisis in Liberia (The Edwin Mellen Press).
Located in Spokane, Wash., Whitworth is a private, liberal arts college affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). The college enrolls 2,200 students in more than 50 undergraduate and graduate programs.
John Yoder, professor of politics & history, Whitworth College, (509) 777-4432 or [email protected].
Julie Riddle, public information specialist, Whitworth College, (509) 777-3729 or [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:e11a6d1a-6925-4280-93a6-1c3ebf280e89> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.whitworth.edu/News/2003_2004/Fall/LiberianPoetReading.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936008 | 457 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Investment Optimism And Pessism: Results Of A New Fidelity Study
A native Bulgarian always complains that "Americans are too optimistic!" I try to explain that some of that is part of the DNA here, while he likes to attribute the rosy outlook to a lack of struggle. To prove the point, he cites an old joke from his former country, which I like to call "The Bulgarian Optimist".
The Bulgarian Pessimist meets the Bulgarian Optimist on the street. The Pessimist says, "Things CAN'T get worse!", to which the Optimist says, "No, things CAN get worse!"
I thought about the Bulgarian Optimist when I read a recent Fidelity Investments. The study examined how an investor's outlook related to his or her retirement readiness. Were investors with a pessimistic outlook more conservative and better long-term planners? Or were investors with an optimistic outlook more aggressive and a bit more reckless when it comes to defining retirement goals?
The most surprising result of the study is that only 15% of pessimists have completed a detailed income plan to help guide their finances in retirement, compared to nearly twice as many optimists (27%). HUH? Does that mean that pessimists just don't want to know the bad news? I would have thought that the pessimist relished the bitter truth.
On a more predictable level, it still amazes me how few Americans, whether pessimistic, optimistic or somewhere in between, are unwilling to hop on line and figure out what they need to do to reach their goals. The optimist in me wants to believe that Americans can right their financial futures by putting in some work. The pessimist in me worries that they won't.
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Use of Marijuana, Ecstasy, Methamphetamine on Rise in U.S.
THURSDAY Sept. 16, 2010 -- Illegal drug use in the United States increased from 2008 to 2009, federal drug officials reported, citing growing acceptance of marijuana and an upswing in ecstasy and methamphetamine use.
Driven largely by growing use of marijuana, drug use among those aged 12 and older rose from 8 percent in 2008 to 8.7 percent in 2009, according to a report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. This represents the highest usage in nearly a decade, officials said.
"The results of the survey, to say the least, are very troubling," Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said during a morning news conference Thursday.
"Particularly disturbing [is] the increase in the use of marijuana among 12- to 17-year-olds," he added. In 2002, 8.2 percent of teens smoked marijuana, 6.7 percent did in 2006 and 2008, and 7.3 percent did in 2009, the report found.
Fewer teens today than in the past see drugs, particularly marijuana, as dangerous, he said: "This usually portends an increase in drug abuse, and that's exactly what we have seen."
Kerlikowske took aim at the media for influencing some of the cultural mind-shift. "I can absolutely not rule out this constant discussion of so-called medical marijuana, marijuana legalization and the downplaying of marijuana harms that is prevalent in the media," he said.
The report, based on a survey of some 67,500 people throughout the country, noted non-medical use of prescription drugs rose from 2.5 percent in 2008 to 2.8 percent in 2009.
Monthly use of ecstasy climbed from 555,000 in 2008 to 760,000 in 2009. The number of methamphetamine users shot up, too, from 314,000 to 502,000 over the year, according to the report.
- In 2009, the rate of drug abuse among 12- to 17-year-olds was still below 2002 levels, but higher compared with 2008, the researchers found. In 2009, 10 percent of teens used drugs compared with 9.3 percent in 2008 and 11.6 percent in 2002.
- Only 49.3 percent of teens in 2009 said they thought pot was harmful, compared to 54.7 percent in 2007. This is the first time since 2002 that fewer than half of American teens thought marijuana was dangerous, according to the report.
Mike Meno, a spokesman for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, told the Associated Press the survey is further proof that the government's war on marijuana is failing despite years of enforcement efforts and arrests.
"It's time we stop this charade and implement sensible laws that would tax and regulate marijuana the same way we do more harmful -- but legal -- drugs like alcohol and tobacco," Meno told the AP.
Rates of tobacco and alcohol use among teens from 2008 to 2009 remained about the same, the researchers noted.
Among young adults 18- to 25-years-old, illegal drug use rose from 19.6 percent in 2008 to 21.2 percent in 2009, again mostly driven by increased marijuana use, the report showed.
Some encouraging signs emerged, however.
Tobacco use among those aged 12 and up dropped to a historic low of 23.4 percent, and cocaine use among those aged 12 and up has dropped 30 percent since 2006, the researchers found.
The report also found a hufe disparity between the number of people who need substance abuse treatment (23.5 million) and the number of those who get it (2.6 million).
The recession may be driving up drug use, said one expert.
Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said that "while a rise in recreational drug use over the past couple of years is concerning, it is not surprising."
These trends correspond with the most severe economic downturn in generations, Katz said. "Drug use may represent an escape from a harsh reality for some; a diversion from inactivity for others; and most ominously, a source of revenue for the vendors who may find legitimate work elusive."
The recession has also eroded public health resources, including educational and treatment programs, he added.
But, "while the economic hardship from which we are slowly emerging may help explain disturbing trends in drug use, it certainly does not justify them," Katz said. "The insidious threat of drug use requires our constant vigilance, and our constant allocation of resources."
To see the full report, visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration .
Posted: September 2010 | <urn:uuid:60dcef44-5e20-4b14-a085-78b3b448d009> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.drugs.com/news/marijuana-ecstasy-methamphetamine-rise-u-s-26689.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949144 | 975 | 1.765625 | 2 |
In the midst of Facebook’s announcement today on major overhauls to the newsfeed, another policy change related to news feed images and sponsored stories is also taking hold. What’s interesting is that Facebook is now trying to solve a problem it created.
In 2012, Facebook rewarded images with higher Edgerank value. We saw amazing content being shared in a visual format and suddenly all brands were scrambling to create custom images for Facebook. The timing was great because Facebook images could have extended lives on Pinterest. The future for marketers looked bright and full of 180x180 images.
But it seems Facebook thought the new content posed a problem for users in the form of spam and cluttered newsfeeds. At the end of September 2012, Edgerank changed and it was the sad trombone heard around the community manager world. Images were now tanking in reach, strategies were now shifting and pivoting, and brands and agencies were getting frustrated.
Today, the frustration continues.
Facebook’s new policy states, “For ads and sponsored stories that appear in News Feed, the amount of space the text in your image takes up may not exceed 20%.” The plan will be enforced by a piece of software that scans any image uploaded to the newsfeed and is then sponsored. The challenge here is that all brands are being limited and punished for other people’s bad creative. And in what’s become typical Facebook style, the policy is not very clear. Cone Communications’ New and Social Media team attempts to add some clarity, and created the following list of typical sponsored content that would be limited by the new policy:
1. Infographics – Infographics are inherently text-driven. By instituting a 20% rule, is Facebook killing the infographic? If the shoe fits…
2. Cause promotions – It’s common today to have brands support a non-profit by featuring an share-to-donate image. These calls-to-action require a certain amount of text to explain the issue, non-profit relationship and terms and conditions of the cause promotion. By sponsoring these types of posts, serious issues get more exposure and engagement, ultimately driving support. These new changes put simple fundraising efforts for non-profits at risk.
3. Public safety announcements – Unfortunately in today’s world, Facebook has become a bulletin board for missing animals and people. These images are often accompanied by very important text indicating last place seen, visual identifiers and contact information. Desperate families often promote these types of posts, and this new policy could take away valuable time from their efforts.
4. Newspaper and magazine covers – as the former Social Media Strategist for USA TODAY, I know just how valuable milestone newspaper covers are on social media. Post an image of a major sporting event win, political election results or Kate Upton, and shares go through the roof. With a new software scanning these images, will they inadvertently block content that the media is trying to highlight? This remains unclear and would be a loss to the media community.
We’ll have to wait and see what the overall brand repercussions are. Facebook is at an interesting time right now, particularly as it clearly defines the role of brands on its platforms. We hope Facebook remembers who helps pay the bills.
--Alex Nicholson, Vice President, New & Social Media | <urn:uuid:156fd936-bb8d-41f9-8313-866141dac0e6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.conecomm.com/facebook-killing-infographics | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961193 | 686 | 1.648438 | 2 |
The report adds that ‘the notion ‘rebalancing the economy’ will occur by stifling investment in the south-east is misguided and potentially damaging’. It argues, because the south-east is the ‘engine’ of the UK, stifling its growth will stifle UK growth.
Dale Harries, Gatwick Airport Parking Centre owner, said: ‘The report is a timely reminder of the important role aviation plays in supporting economic growth and the recovery. There is a growing consensus amongst the industry that capacity in the south-east is an issue. This is supported by the report which notes the conclusion from the DfT’s own projections airport capacity at Gatwick and across the South East will fill up by 2030.’
Dale Harries owns the Gatwick Airport Parking Centre: http://www.gatwickairportparkingcentre.co.uk | <urn:uuid:e18cf11e-b125-4670-af31-e644a6461561> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prlog.org/11908147-gatwick-report-says-lack-of-airport-growth-to-cost-47bn.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953139 | 188 | 1.695313 | 2 |
January 11, 2007
By: by Steve Janack, Director of Communications, CNSE
(Albany) - The College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering ("CNSE") of the University at Albany today announced plans to host a Job Fair for Vistec Lithography, as the first global technology company to move its entire operation to New York's Capital Region begins the process of building its area workforce through the creation of new high-tech jobs.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Assembly Majority Leader Ron Canestrari announced last October that the New York State Assembly would provide $30 million in funding to enable Vistec's move from the United Kingdom, which includes location of the company's global headquarters, business operations and manufacturing at the Watervliet Arsenal Technology Campus and joint research and development at the UAlbany NanoCollege through a newly created Center for Nanolithography Development. Over the next five years, Vistec will invest $125 million at the Arsenal Campus and create 130 high-tech jobs.
The Job Fair, to be held on Wednesday, January 24 from 5 to 8:30 pm at CNSE's Albany NanoTech complex, will mark the start of local hiring for Vistec, one of the world's leading developers and manufacturers of advanced electron-beam tools critical to the future of nanotechnology. A variety of positions will be filled immediately - from applications, project and module test engineers, production technicians and materials director to finance, marketing and administrative personnel - with officials from Vistec on hand to accept resumes and conduct initial interviews on site. The Arsenal Business and Technology Partnership and the New York State Department of Labor will also provide assistance at the event.
In addition, companies throughout the region that are interested in providing materials, supplies and other services to Vistec have been invited to attend the event to speak with company officials about potential opportunities for vendors.
"Vistec is officially on the ground, here, in the heart of Tech Valley, adding still another leading global nanotechnology company to the growing high-tech presence in our region and state," said Assembly Majority Leader Ron Canestrari. "I hope Capital Region residents will take the opportunity to learn more about the high-tech career opportunities being generated by the arrival of Vistec, which has made a substantial investment in our regional economy, and find out if there is a place for them to make a contribution."
Papken S. DerTorossian, President and Chairman of the Board of Vistec Lithography Inc., said, "Vistec Lithography is excited to be here in the Capital Region, close to the UAlbany NanoCollege's Albany NanoTech complex, which will give Vistec an opportunity to recruit a well-trained and educated workforce to help us maintain our global leadership in the highly competitive business of electron beam technology. With the enthusiastic support of elected officials on the local and state level, particularly Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Assembly Majority Leader Ron Canestrari, the commitment of leaders in higher education like Alain Kaloyeros, and the wonderful quality of life in the region and throughout upstate New York, we look forward to building a local workforce of world-class employees to enable Vistec to grow and prosper in New York State."
Dr. Alain E. Kaloyeros, Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of CNSE, said, "Led by the vision, support and investment of Assembly Speaker Silver, Assembly Majority Leader Canestrari and the New York State Assembly, the arrival of Vistec Lithography is creating high-tech jobs for residents of the Capital Region and New York State, and giving companies in the region an opportunity to develop strategic business relationships with one of the world's leading nanotechnology companies. The UAlbany NanoCollege is pleased to lend its support by hosting this initial Job Fair for Vistec, which will assist the company in hiring the highly skilled employees it needs to ramp up its operations at the Watervliet Arsenal Technology Campus and CNSE's Albany NanoTech complex."
Tony Gaetano, President of the Arsenal Business and Technology Partnership, said, "Together with the continued leadership and support of the New York State Assembly and partnership of the UAlbany NanoCollege, we are pleased to assist Vistec Lithography as the company begins to build its workforce in the Capital Region, providing unique and exciting opportunities for talented professionals on the cutting edge of a new industry."
Candidates interested in attending and interviewing at the Job Fair are encouraged to pre-register online by visiting http://www.vistec-semi.com/.
About CNSE. The College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering of the University at Albany-State University of New York is the first college in the world dedicated to the research, development and deployment of innovative nanoscience, nanoengineering, nanobioscience and nanoeconomics concepts, and in May 2006, it was ranked by Small Times magazine as the nation's number one college for nanotechnology and microtechnology. CNSE's Albany NanoTech complex is the most advanced research facility of its kind at any university in the world: a $3 billion, 450,000-square-foot complex that attracts corporate partners from around the world and offers students a one-of-a-kind academic experience, and it is growing. The UAlbany Nanocollege is also home to the New York State Center of Excellence in Nanoelectronics. The CNSE complex, financed through more than $500 million in governmental support and over $2.5 billion in corporate investments, houses the only pilot prototyping facilities in the academic world for the two standard sizes in computer chip design, the 200-millimeter (or 8-inch) wafer, and the 300-millimeter (or 12-inch) wafer. CNSE has more than 250 U.S. and worldwide partners, including some of the world's largest semiconductor and semiconductor-related tool manufacturing companies. For more information, visit the CNSE Web site at http://cnse.albany.edu/. | <urn:uuid:131df071-4e35-4425-a1fc-a8451fa76fbb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cnse.albany.edu/neny/news/details/07-01-11/UAlbany_Nanocollege_To_Host_Job_Fair_For_Vistec_Lithography.aspx | 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 | 0.943339 | 1,248 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Ashley Alvis was born in Virginia, probably Hanover County, say 1752, the son of David and Elizabeth (Stanley) Alvis. He died between 29 Aug 1808 and 27 Dec 1809 in Sumner Co TN.
On 17 Dec 1772 in Goochland Co VA, Ashley married Elizabeth Knolling. She was born say 1755, probably the oldest daughter of David and Mary (Ferguson) Nowlin, and died before her husband’s second marriage, say 1789. Ashley married second about 1789 Martha –?–, said by a grandchild to have been Martha “Nolan.” She may have been a niece of Ashley’s first wife.
In 1789 in Goochland Co VA, Ashley witnessed the marriage of Stephen Nowlin, whom I believe to be his brother-in-law.
Ashley was on tax lists in Goochland County from 1782 to 1793. He next appears in Buckingham County, Virginia, from 1794 to 1805. He continued a close relationship with the Nowlins who were there in the same years.
By 1804 Ashley and his family were in Sumner Co TN. Part of the identification of Ashley Alvis’s children is the fact of their being in this county from 1804 through the 1820s. When the family moved to Tennessee, it appears that at least two sons, John and Charles, stayed in Virginia. Charles came later to the same area of Tennessee.
In 1820 Edmund and Abraham Alvis were in Smith Co TN; Shadrach Alvis had moved to Lawrence Co TN. There were one or two Charles Alvises in Sumner Co in 1830; one of them was Ashley’s son. Martha Alvis’s 1815 will names her children: Ashley Jr, Elijah and Mary.
Two pages of notes on the Alvis family of Tennessee and Illinois were dictated by Edmund Young Alvis, born 27 Feb 1844 in Sumner Co TN, son of William Carroll and Lucinda Simmons; married 31 Dec 1869 to Phoebe E Stonecipher in Marion Co IL; died 11 Mar 1940 in Benton, Franklin Co IL. Edmund Y. Alvis dictated the notes to his son, Edward Carroll Alvis, born Feb 1871 in Marion Co IL. This letter both confirms what I had surmised and provided additional details.
Ashley’s children with his first wife, Elizabeth Knolling, or Nowlin, were:
1. Edmund ALVIS was born about 1778 in Goochland Co VA and died in Macon Co TN, on 25 Jan 1864. Before 1809, he married Phoebe DOVER in TN. Edmund was named in Buckingham Co VA tax lists in 1801-1805 and received a land grant in Sumner Co TN in 1817. Born in 1782 in NC, Phoebe died on 11 Jan 1860. They had the following children:
i. Elizabeth Dover (1809-1882)
ii. William Carroll (1815-1881)
iii. David (1817-<1850)
v. Aury (1822-1858 )
vi. James B (1821-1861)
vii. Sarah Melinda (1827-1892)
2. John ALVIS was born about 1780 in Virginia. About 1800 he married Lucy STRANGE in Buckingham Co VA.
They had the following children:
i. Susan (1801-1876)
ii. William Walker (1808- )
He may have married a second wife, Carolina, who was a widow in the 1820 census, Buckingham Co VA: 010000/00102.
3. Abraham ALVIS was born in 1781 in Virginia. He died in Macon Co TN, in 1854. In 1810 Abraham first married Love VENTRESS possibly in Sumner Co TN. Love died in 1836 in TN. They had the following son plus an infant who died young:
i. Asa (1812-1897)
Abraham second married Elizabeth –?–, who was born in 1806 in TN.
4. Charles ALVIS was born in Virginia in the 1780s. He was probably still in Campbell Co VA in 1810 (30010/10100), in 1820 (210001/11010), and in Smith Co VA in 1830 (00202001/002101). His assumed children were:
i. Zachariah (1803-)
ii. Meredith (1802-)
iii. (Alice?) (1800-)
iv. Thomas S (1814-1894)
v. Caroline (1820-)
5. Shadrach ALVIS was born about 1788 in Virginia and was living in Jefferson Co IL in 1860. On 21 Oct 1804 when Shadrach was 16, he married Nancy HAIL, daughter of James Edmonson HAIL & Jane CRAIGHEAD, in Sumner Co TN. Born in 1792 in VA. Nancy died in prob Jefferson Co IL, aft 1850. They had the following children:
i. Jenny Jane
ii. James Woodford/Woodson (1808-1844)
iii. John Spencer (1814-1867)
v. Harriet Katherine (1820-1843)
viii. Nancy Caroline
ix. Rachael D
x. Joshua B (1832-1903)
xi. Mary (1834-)
Ashley’s children with his second wife, Martha, probably Nowlin, were:
6. Ashley ALVIS was born 7 Mar 1791 in Virginia. He died in Marengo Co AL, on 20 Oct 1883; he was 92. On 2 Dec 1827 when Ashley was 36, he first married Polly Ann SIMFORD in Lawrence Co TN. Born in 1811, Polly Ann died on 19 Nov 1830; she was 19. They had one child:
i. Elijah S (1830-1882)
On 11 Nov 1833, Ashley second married Esther Elizabeth EDMISTON/EDMUNTON possibly in Lawrence Co TN. Born on 9 Mar 1811 in VA, Esther Elizabeth died on 10 Oct 1851. They had the following children:
i. Martha J (1842-1891)
ii. Caroline (1849-1891)
7. Nancy ALVIS was born 27 Sep 1793 in Virginia. He probably died in Washington Co IL. Her first child was a son with Joab Alexander KEELING:
i. Tyra Perry (1820-1896)
On 17 Jul 1821, Nancy married Robert GALBRAITH in Sumner Co TN. Born on 6 Sep 1787 in NC, Robert died in Wayne Co IL, on 9 Nov 1870. They had the following children:
i. Elizabeth Jane (1822-1901)
ii. A T (1828-1870)
iii. Martha J (1833-1901)
8. [possibly] Elizabeth ALVIS was born ca 1795 and married 27 Oct 1819 in Maury Co TN to George Dreskill. It is possible she was the widow of another Alvis, say, Moses Alvis, who is otherwise unknown.
9. Mary ALVIS was born say 1796 and married Eli GILES 11 Apr 1809 in Sumner Co TN. They lived in Marengo Co AL, as did her brothers Ashley Jr and Elijah Alvis.
10. Elijah ALVIS was born in 1801 in Virginia and died in Marengo Co AL. About 1833 Elijah married Mary Ann –?–. They had the following children:
i. Joseph P (1833-)
ii. Ashley Nolan (1836-)
iii. Elijah Thomas (1840-1861)
iv. Mary A (1842-)
v. Sarah C (1847-)
vi. George W (1850-)
vii. Nancy B (1852-)
© Kathy Alvis Patterson 2008
Elizabeth Stanley’s sister, Agatha Stanley, married Ashley Johnson, 15 Dec 1746. This family name is a piece of the evidence which goes toward establishing that Elizabeth Stanley was the wife of David Alvis and the mother of Ashley Alvis.
Ashley Alvis was alive 29 Aug 1808 when he was reported to have found a stray horse (The Impartial Review & Cumberland Repository, 1805-1808, 229). He was probably dead by the time of a deed, recorded in Joyce Martin Murray, Sumner Co TN Deed Abstracts, 1806-1817, p 49: “Page 132 in Deed Book at Courthouse, 27 Dec 1809, Patrick McBride, Franklin Co TN, to Patsey Alvis, Ashley Alvis & Elijah Alvis, $100.00, tr[act] on branch of W fork Goose Creek, part of an entry made by him sd McBride, being 50 acres. Wit: John Carr, Hugh Stephenson.” Also, on 3 Mar 1810 Mrs. Martha Alvis was reported to have found a stray (The Democratic Clarion & Tennessee Gazette, 1810-1811, 121).
The Douglas Register. These entries from the Douglas Register are some members of Elizabeth’s likely family: Children of David Knolling and Mary fferguson: 1. Joseph, b 8 May 1758. 2. Milly, b 1 Sep 1760. 3. Abraham, b 3 May 1763. Other probable family members included: Christopher Norden (Nowlin) m 13 Jun 1754 Mary Emmerson. Children: 1. William, b 13 Jun 1754 [same date?]; Martha, b 28 Oct 175x, bapt. 11 Apr 1757; James Knowling who married 10 Mar 1776 Sarah Webster. Children: 1. Samuel, b 23 Dec 1777. 2. Ann, b 5 Sep 1781; Ann Knolling m 26 Aug 1762 John Webster; Elizabeth Knolling m 16 Dec 1772 Ashley Alvis (whose brother Zachariah also married a member of this same Webster family); either Sarah Knolling who married 29 Dec 1774 Tucker Woodson, or Sarah Knowling, who married 25 Dec 1775 Jacob Johnson; and John Knolling m 22 Nov 1765 Mary Patterson. Children: 1. James Pugh b 22 Nov 1765 [same date again]. 2. Sarah m 15 Oct 1767. 3. Susannah b 15 Oct 1767.
Further evidence that this is Elizabeth’s family includes the family name given Abraham given to one of her sons, the other Nowlins who moved to Buckingham Co VA at the same time as Ashley Alvis and his family, and other intermarriages between Alvis, Nowlin and Webster individuals. Members of the Nowlin family used spellings Knolling and Knowling.
Second marriage. Martha —, ca 1790, assumed from her existence and children; her will, Sumner Co TN, signed 21 Mar 1816, proved Nov 1816. Data on his children in Kentucky, a History of the State, 1885, p. 809. The Alvis Exchange, 16-2: “More about the TN Alvises.” An additional reference, Paul Edwin Power, The Garrison and Allied Families, no date, gives data based on this article and other family records:
a. That other sons of Ashley Alvis Sr. moved to Sumner Co TN.
b. That Edmund was a likely brother of Abraham.
c. That the widow Martha was probably connected with this family, as evidenced by her sons being named Ashley and Elijah.
d. That Asa Alvis died 27 Jan 1897.
e. That Abraham Alvis signed the marriage bond of William Carroll Alvis.
f.That Edmund’s wife was a Miss Dover.
The Virginia Genealogist, “British Depredations in Goochland County,” Vol [?], p 217: “At a court held for Goochland County (agreable to an act of assembly) for Ascertaining the losses to the inhabitants of sd county by the British Army under the Commd of Earl Cornwallis, Sept 27th 1782…” Among the names of those making declarations was Ashley Alvis.
These younger males were in his household: 1798: w/Charles, C [David?], John, 1799: same, 1800: w/son 16+, Charles, David & David Jr, 1801: Charles, Edmund, Meredith & 2 others, 1802: w/Charles, Edmond, Abraham, 1803: w/son, Meredith, 1804: Edm & Abr, 1805: same.
You will be very disappointed to know that the letter does not mention Ashley. It starts with the four brothers. Don’t recall how I got Ashley as the father-probably from talking to someone in the family-EY and most of his children lived to be very old. Since Ashley is not mentioned, probably not worth xeroxing the letter to you, plus it is almost too fragile to copy [although he later did send a copy to me. KP]. So I will just give you the text of the letter here:
Asa Alvis; Edmund Alvis; Shadrick Alvis; Bill Alvis; Four Brothers Came from Virginia to Tenn Sometime before 1800
1. Bill Alvis moved down into Mississippi [The identity of this man is still uncertain. KP]
2. Shadrick Alvis moved to Ill and settled west of Mt Vernon and his Son Butch Alvis moved into the Northern part of the State.
3. Asa Alvis moved into Ky and located across the river from Golconda, Ill.
4. Edmund Alvis married a girl whom it is claimed was found in a dutch oven after an Indian Massacre and was adopted by a Soldier by the name of Harris.
Their children were 1. Betsey or Elizabeth who married Barney Wells and moved to Jeff Co, Ill. 2. Dave who married a woman named Woodcock-he died her children John Alvis died in
Infancy-Dave moved into Northern Ill. 3. Margaret or Aura was never married. 4. Malinda Married Wash Simmons of Eula Tenn
Jim Alvis lived in Westmoreland Macon Co Tenn-his son Jasper still lives there.
Carroll Alvis Married Lucinda Simmons Daughter of Long Tom Simmons of Macon Co Tenn and moved to Marion County Ill about 1849.
This is the history of our family so far as my father is able to give me. He does not remember any of the Wells family Except Barney.
The Wilkins and Alvis families are not related until my youngest Sister married Roy Wilkins. They live in Alto Pass Ill. He might tell you of Uncle Byrd (Byod?).
Sometimes the name Alvis was Pronounced with a broad A and sounded like Olvis. My father will be 88 on the 28th* day of Feb. he is well and fine. I think you will find questions mostly answered in the above report. Dad says tell Matthew B. Hello for him.Think we will go back to Tenn next Spring and if I find out anything new will let you know. Yours Very Respectfully, Ed Alvis
The date was later changed to the 27th in pencil. I have typed the letter exactly as written, except for my inability to decipher Byrd or Byod-maybe Boyd, but not written that way. Ed Alvis’ father, from whom the information came, was Edmund Young Alvis, (Wm) Carroll’s son. I have no idea to whom the letter was written. Matthew B is unknown to me. Ed Alvis died in about 1937. I have had the letter since 1940 or earlier. I assume it was never sent. Ed Bostwick | <urn:uuid:48245389-ba9c-4894-8605-caadff92eb7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://alvispat.wordpress.com/alvis-ashley-of-goochland-and-buckingham-counties-va-and-sumner-co-tn/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=1630920375 | 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 | 0.958555 | 3,310 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Carlos A. Gonzalez Research Opportunity Number 50.63.21.B4054
This research uses a wide range of Quantum Chemical methods in the computation of the energetics and mechanisms governing complicated chemical reactions. The use of ab initio electronic structure methodologies to study such problems has become very popular during the past five years mainly due to the availability of powerful hardware and the development of more efficient algorithms. Despite this success, the routine application of such methods is still limited to problems containing at most, an average of 50 atoms. Recently, there has been an increased interest in alternative methods such as Density Functional Theory ( DFT) and Semi-Empirical Molecular Orbital Theory (SEMOT) that are considerably less computationally demanding. Given the empirical nature of their implementations, these methodologies are not robust enough to consistently predict reactivity and chemical properties with a reasonable degree of accuracy even within the same class of reactions. We are interested in the development and calibration of new DFT functionals as well as new SEMOT Hamiltonians that could reliably be used to predict energetics and molecular properties. Preliminary work leading to the developing of new DFT functionals that could be used in the prediction of reaction barriers and reaction rate constants has started. Another area of research involves the development and implementation of efficient algorithms for the characterization of potential energy surfaces governing complicated chemical systems. So far, a state-of-the-art computer program that uses novel algorithms to locate minima, transition states, and minimum reaction paths has been implemented. Kinetics modules are being developed and will be integrated into the software soon. We have access to an IBM SP2 with 37 nodes, several IBM/RS6000 workstations, and an SGI Origin 2000 with 8 processors. Computational packages such as GAUSSIAN 98, GAMESS-US, MOLPRO 96, HONDO 8.1, MOLCAS, MOLFDIR, and ACES-II are also available. | <urn:uuid:f2b20686-b6e4-49b3-b8a1-1132bf4f7021> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nist.gov/mml/csd/informatics_research/discuss_quant_chem_study.cfm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94041 | 404 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Hi, I'm looking for suggestions for high-protein foods that don't have a lot of fat or carbs. I eat a lot of cottage cheese, skim milk, and meat, but is that all there is? Yes beans have protein, but a lot of carbs...and eggs have protein, but a lot of fat. Any suggestions? I have a whey protein powder that has about 150 calories and 16g of protein per serving I think, any recommendations for higher protein powders?
skinless chicken breasts are perfect, no carbs very high in protein and no fats, Fish like tuna is another great source. It is very high in protein and fats but the fats are what you need like omega 3. lean red meat is another good choice.
The chicken is a must, probably the best source of protein you can possibly get.
fish, shrimp, clams, scallops and lobster are all excellent low-fat sources of protein - but as with all animal-protein sources, the trade off is higher levels of cholesterol.
a 4 oz salmon filet delivers 19 grams of protein and 2 grams of fat. This is about the size of a deck of cards.
a 6 oz chicken breast will get you 51 grams of protein and a bit more fat than the fish... but that depends on the method of cooking for anything you eat.
How many grams per day are you shooting for?
The daily recommendation for protein intake is .63 to .77 grams per pound of body weight (daily) for someone engaged in Body building training. Source: http://www.eatright.org/Public/content.aspx?id=7086&terms=recommended+protein+int ake
Most of the supplemental powders on the market will have about 20g-22g of protein. Personally, I prefer Syntha 6 by BSN. One, it has around 22g of protein per serving; second, it is aspartame free; and third, it has some really great flavors . Try looking at DPSNutrition.com, it is one of the cheapest sites I've found.
Looks like the other members have some excellent suggestions (I'm a chicken & fish fan myself). However, I can't tell if you're a vegetarian. As someone who doesn't eat red meat and pork products, I also eat a lot of soy items...edamame is good, as is tofu (not as protein rich, tho) and Greek yogurt. Depending on the brand you purchase, Greek yogurt usually boasts between 19 and 23 grams of protein per serving. It tastes a little like sour cream, so it's an acquired taste. :-)
I use the liquid egg whites in the carton and make an omelette stuffed with low-sugar salsa (refrigerator section next to eggs), pink salmon in the foil packette that I top on salad (2.5 oz and 80 calories), tuna in foil packette, chx. breast, extra lean ground turkey, low fat cottage cheese (like you), and protein shakes (usually myoplex lite that has carbs as well to make a complete meal-not very someone on a lminimal-carb plan). As someone already mentioned, fat-free greek yogurt is a high protein, low carb source, too.
Starting Date: 12/28/09
Current Weight: 5# heavier since I stopped using fitday! | <urn:uuid:baecf35b-993a-40cd-809e-79349c686f7d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fitday.com/fitness/forums/food-talk/174-protein-recommendations.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957403 | 698 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Parsons seems to have underestimated the difficulty in unwiring one of the longer, popular ferry routes in Washington State: The Washington State Ferries (WSF) have had Wi-Fi on more frequently used routes for three years, starting with a long-running pilot project that Parsons took over last year. When I spoke to the firm that was running the trial in 2004, they made it clear that the curvy passage for the Bremerton-Seattle run--a 55-minute ride--involved several antennas and rights of way issues.
So it's to my surprise that The Seattle Times this morning writes that Bremerton ferry riders are a little peeved that Wi-Fi is on several other major routes, but not theirs. Bremerton is on the Olympic Peninsula, where housing is still cheaper than in Seattle proper. It's not unusual to have this kind of relatively relaxing commute (less so for drivers, who may have to wait for one or more ferries).
Service is now expected for July because Parsons ran afoul of a rule in one place in siting an antenna, and in another case hadn't yet secured roof rights on the tallest building in Seattle. Seems like pretty poor planning. And why do I know something as a reporter that a multi-billion-dollar firm seemed unaware of? There's a missing piece.
The article also cites Parsons's need to get a license from the FCC, which doesn't make sense. Were they purchasing a license? If they already had a licensed frequency they wanted to use for backhaul, the FCC isn't involved.
The three routes noted in the article, the Winslow/Bainbridge Island, Clinton/Whidbey Island, and Kingston runs, carry more than 50 percent of the system's traffic and, by extension, more than 25 percent of the passenger ferry traffic in the US. The WSF carries about half of all ferry rider trips in the US.
The company wouldn't release statistics on use or subscriptions, but here's a tip to all WSF riders: While Parsons charges $29.95 per month for unlimited use just on their system, you can pay $21.95 per month to Boingo Wireless and have access to thousands of locations and the ferry system at no extra charge. | <urn:uuid:73a4e867-1dbf-4c07-8bb8-432c26832f63> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wifinetnews.com/archives/2007/06/long_ferry_route_in_washington_state_lags_on_wi-fi.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970901 | 462 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Five Reasons America Won’t Fall Off the ‘Fiscal Cliff’
Relax, America. You can put your parachutes away. Washington isn't likely to take the country over the dreaded "fiscal cliff." Even a capital city as deadlocked and dysfunctional as Washington has been in recent years is not likely to risk a move that has so many economic and political ramifications, according to a wide range of experts.
That is not to say the journey won't be contentious and perhaps a cliffhanger. Don't forget, the same cast of characters is starring in this big-screen epic — either a dark comedy or a thriller, take your pick — that has brought Americans to this point before: Democrats ruling the White House and Senate, and Republicans, including a clique of unyielding conservatives, in power in the House.
Yet analysts on both sides of the aisle believe that doing nothing, which on Jan. 1 would trigger the beginning of $600 billion in tax increases and large cuts to the federal budget, would inflict too much damage on individuals' wallets, on the economy, and on America's standing in the world.
The fiscal cliff, after all, was never intended to be a serious option. The elements of it grew out of years of debt avoidance and budget gimmickry that finally peaked in 2011 with the impasse over raising the federal debt ceiling. After a bipartisan congressional panel failed to agree on spending cuts, Republicans and Democrats added the infamous "sequestration" portion — a series of automatic spending cuts that were so distasteful that lawmakers would be forced to agree on more sensible trims.
While an agreement to avoid the cliff could still prove elusive, many veteran Washington-watchers believe a compromise will be worked out to avoid plunging into the abyss on New Year's Eve.
"America's reputation and its economic stability are threatened dramatically by inaction," says Dan Glickman, a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center who previously served as President Clinton's secretary of Agriculture. "Except for a few zealots, most people aren't going to want to see that happen."
Some even believe that the looming fiscal cliff will eventually lead to a grand bargain between the White House and Capitol Hill on reforming America's tax code and entitlement programs – setting the tone, perhaps, for other agreements over the next few years on issues from immigration to energy. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Here are five reasons America won't — or let's say shouldn't — plunge off the fiscal cliff on Jan. 1.
Because of the "R" word.
Many believe the specter of a double-dip recession remains the most important reason that Congress and the president will reach some sort of accommodation by Jan. 1. It's something that neither party wants to see — or be blamed for.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that with the massive spending cuts and tax increases imposed by the cliff, US gross domestic product would shrink by a half percentage point in 2013. (Some private sector forecasters believe the hit could be even more severe.) That amounts to 2.7 million fewer jobs than the economy would otherwise create by year's end, the CBO says, which would push the unemployment rate, now at 7.9 percent, above 9 percent.
Even without the drag of the cliff, the CBO calculates that the economy will grow an anemic 1.7 percent this year and unemployment will hover around 8 percent. With Europe mired in its own fiscal problems, and the world's other big economy, China, slowing as well, a downturn in the United States could have disastrous global consequences.
"I have to believe that common sense and self-preservation will prevail" in the face of such economic peril, says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and a leading advocate for a grand budget deal styled after the president's debt commission. "It's not going to be easier to fix the problem by putting the country into a recession — quite the opposite."
Because of the impact on pocketbooks.
The tax increases imposed by the cliff on Americans, collectively, would be the highest in six decades as measured by a percentage of the economy. No one who pays income tax would be spared, and many others wouldn't either.
Much of the attention has focused on the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts that would benefit the wealthy. President Obama has indicated he opposes any agreement that would extend tax cuts on those with household incomes above $250,000, while House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio believes allowing higher rates on upper-income Americans would slow job growth. Mr. Boehner has implied that the wealthy could pay more by reducing the tax deductions they receive — but not by increasing their marginal tax rates.
Yet many of the tax increases that would occur if the fiscal cliff takes effect would fall on middle-income Americans. A household earning $50,000 per year, for instance, would see its taxes grow by $2,000 in 2013, according to the Tax Policy Center. That's in addition to the planned expiration of tax credits for low-income earners and college students passed in 2009 as part of the economic stimulus package.
One of the biggest impacts would come from failing to fix the AMTalter, or alternative minimum tax. When it was first passed, the AMT was designed to prevent rich people from exploiting loopholes to avoid paying income taxes. But because the AMT wasn't indexed for inflation, it has hit more middle-income families over time. While Congress has acted each year to limit how many people are affected by it, an unresolved cliff package would lead to a nearly sevenfold increase in the number of Americans (from 4 million to about 30 million) who would be affected by the law when they file their 2012 income taxes in the new year.
"You will have 30 million angry constituents and they will ask you why," says John Buckley, a professor of tax law at Georgetown University Law School in Washington, who adds: "I don't think Congress can tolerate that."
Because of the 401(k) effect.
While lawmakers can posture all they want over the fiscal cliff, there is one American institution that registers its opinion every day irrespective of the machinations of Washington — Wall Street.
Many analysts expect the stock market to play a role in pressuring the two sides to hatch some sort of agreement. Letting the nation fall off the cliff — or even approach the cliff — could result in a catastrophic drop in the stock market, they say, which would erode people's portfolios and financial institutions' balance sheets.
"If this craters, that means markets crater," says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the CBO and president of the conservative American Action Forum. "And that means all that collateral for the banks crater." He thinks the nation would be facing some of the same problems it did in 2008, at the beginning of the financial crisis.
The markets have already been registering their views over this fiscal pivot point, as they did over earlier ones. In the first week after the election, the Standard & Poor's 500 index sank 2.3 percent, in part over anxiety about the higher tax rates on capital gains and dividends if the fiscal cliff isn't fixed.
In 2008, after the House rejected the bank bailout plan (the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP), the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 700 points. When the legislation returned to the floor days later, the bill drew nearly 60 new supporters and the legislation passed.
"These catastrophic market moves had a major inspirational effect in getting Congress to act," says Mr. Glickman, who is also a former member of the House from Kansas. "The markets are a big factor in this. [Their impact] may be psychological, but if the markets lose confidence I think Congress becomes more reactive to that."
Because of the sharpness of the paring knife.
The cliff, unresolved, would enforce about $100 billion in infamous "sequestration cuts." About half of that would come from military spending and the rest from across-the-board trims in "discretionary" programs, with the exception of a few things like Social Security, veterans' benefits, and children's health insurance. Groups all across the political spectrum are lining up to prevent the indiscriminate pruning. Republicans don't like the huge cuts to military spending, which would amount to about 10 percent, nor do some Democrats, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who has said it would lead to substantial job losses and reductions in major weapons programs.
Federal emergency assistance would be cut about 8 percent, something that would be difficult even without the sodden destruction of superstorm Sandy. The Secret Service, highway funding, health research, air-traffic controllers, the FBI, environmental protection — outlays for all these would be slashed and all have their constituencies.
"Across-the-board cuts are not policy — they are arithmetic," says Tim Westmoreland, a visiting professor at Georgetown Law School and former counsel to the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. "They are less than mindless."
This was the intention, of course, to goad lawmakers into making "responsible" spending cuts, under the threat of irresponsible ones. Will it work? At least many in Washington are complaining about the reckless nature of the trims, though that is a long way from being able to agree on which programs to pare back.
Because of the changing political calculus.
One popular view in Washington has been that the election changed nothing. The same parties hang onto the same institutions. Commentators bicker over just what constitutes a mandate — was Mr. Obama's win big enough? What about voters returning a Republican majority in the House?
Yet many lawmakers on Capitol Hill have read the election as an order from the American people: Work together. The question is whether it will translate into a deal on the fiscal cliff. Certainly both parties have at least some incentive to get something done.
Obama is free of the burden of having to face the voters again and will be increasingly mindful of his legacy. Neither he nor congressional Democrats will want to waste the first 18 months of his final term in office, typically the most productive time for a lame-duck president.
The Republicans, too, may be in a more compromising mood. While House Republicans in particular had plenty of incentive to challenge the president leading into the election — to make him a weaker candidate — those calculations have changed with the GOP's losses in 2012 and with the party's concerns about 2014. Republicans have also now lost the White House in four out of the last six elections and the popular vote in five of those contests.
"Boehner wants a compromise as well," says David Walker, head of the Comeback America Initiative, a group that promotes fiscal responsibility. "The Republicans can't be seen as obstructionist on all these issues because that will hurt them in the 2014 election."
Boehner, Obama, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada have all sounded conciliatory notes since Election Day, a stark departure from the heated rhetoric of the campaign season. They are being nudged toward some sort of rapprochement by a widening array of outside groups. The business community, for instance, is vowing to play a more vocal role in getting both parties to reach an agreement on the fiscal cliff and to pursue a grand bargain on debt and deficits. Many lawmakers criticized the captains of industry for remaining silent during last summer's fiscal crisis.
"We saw what we did with the debt ceiling, and we're scared to death that the same thing will happen on the fiscal cliff," says Dave Cote, the chief executive officer of Honeywell, who is heading up a coalition of CEOs lobbying Washington for a deal. The group, known as the Fix the Debt campaign, met recently with Obama at the White House.
Still, for all the pressure and practical reasons for fashioning a deal, not everyone is opposed to tumbling into the abyss. Some lawmakers in Washington see political advantage in letting elements of the package go into effect or at least bumping up against the deadline to spur changes.
Many conservative House Republicans vow to fight for the spending cuts they were promised in the summer of 2011 in order to raise the debt ceiling, believing they are necessary to restore the nation's fiscal health.
"What's important is that we not raise taxes, but I think if there's a move to suspend the sequester, I think that's a problem," says Rep. Jim Jordan (R) of Ohio, the outgoing chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the House's largest and most conservative caucus. "The only thing worse than cutting national defense is not cutting anything at all."
Democrats, led publicly by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, have said they would be willing to go into 2013 with no deal, allowing all the Bush-era tax cuts to expire if Republicans don't concede to one of Obama's enduring demands: that tax rates rise on household income over $250,000. They also argue that by holding out for the new year, and letting the tax rates revert back to their pre-Bush-era levels, it offers Republicans cover for a pledge signed by more than 90 percent of them to never raise taxes. The rates would go up — with no Republican vote — and all votes thereafter would be for tax cuts that both sides want, notably for middle-class Americans and small businesses. There are procedural moves the White House could make, too, to blunt the effect of going into January without a deal. It could direct government agencies to hold off on planned spending cuts until later in the year, or have the Treasury Department manipulate withholding rates to mitigate tax changes. Still, all this would only give the administration a little extra time, and if Republicans didn't capitulate, the risk for Democrats is that stock markets could explode, turning a point of leverage into a liability.
"It seems to me that the pressure is perfectly balanced" between Democrats and Republicans, says J.D. Foster, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
With the political pressure mounting on all sides, several scenarios exist for how Washington might avoid the fiscal cliff. Many Democrats, led by majority leader Mr. Reid, want to use the fiscal cliff to reach a broader accord on entitlement and tax reform as well as reducing the nation's deficit.
Boehner, however, has offered a more modest hope: a "down payment" of deficit reduction to prove Washington's seriousness to wary credit-rating agencies, which would be attached to guidelines for achieving tax and entitlement reform in 2013.
Veteran Washington-watchers think the speaker's path is more likely because of its limited aspirations for what is already a chaotic session of Congress between now and Christmas. Such a deal would include perhaps $50 billion in deficit reduction, targets for revenue and spending as percentages of GDP, and goals for entitlement reform for congressional committees to work toward in the coming year.
This is the most viable scenario because it gives Congress "an opportunity to fight another day," says Bruce Josten, the US Chamber of Commerce's executive vice president for government affairs. "The real battle between the two parties is tax and entitlement reform."
And it's this fight that will truly test the current mood in Washington. It will not be about avoiding economic catastrophe, but about the most sacred issues for each party: taxes for Republicans and entitlements for Democrats.
"Everyone's in favor of tax reform before they get into specifics," says Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) of Maryland, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee. "I think there are ways that we can reform the tax code, and we should reform the tax code, but it is not a panacea" for America's economic problems.
While a grand bargain may be difficult to achieve, what worries many analysts is that Washington will do virtually nothing — just enough to resolve the fiscal cliff but not address the nation's debt and deficit problems in a meaningful way.
"Our concern about the cliff is not that we're going to go off it," says Jim Kessler, a co-founder of the center-left group the Third Way. "But that our fear of going off it will convince leaders to do something very modest on the deficit instead of something bold and that we'll miss this opportunity."
If Congress and the White House do come to some substantial accord, however, it could spur progress on other issues, from immigration to education to energy.
"The tone will be set completely over the next 10 weeks," says Mr. Kessler. "If there's a major deal here, the stoppage in the drain has been cleared and a whole series of things can happen." | <urn:uuid:f6f9abbf-3d1b-4e78-a2cf-c1dd05068587> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnbc.com/id/49960630 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968314 | 3,428 | 1.617188 | 2 |
What Are Certified Trade Missions?
U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service Certified Trade Missions (CTMs) are overseas events planned, organized, recruited, and led by private and public sector export-oriented groups outside of the U.S. Department of Commerce. CTMs are hosted by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s overseas Commercial Service offices.
CTMs bring representatives of U.S. companies into contact with potential agents, distributors, joint venture partners, licensees, local businesses, and government contacts.
CTMs typically include the following:
U.S. Commercial Service posts in the targeted markets provide guidance to the sponsoring organization (the organizer) and the participating companies. The posts also provide trade promotion focused services to the organizers which are mutually agreed upon during the application phase of the trade mission. Mission budgets and parameters, once agreed upon in the Certified Trade Missions Application for Mission Organizers, are finalized by a signed Participation Agreement. The agreement commits both the CTM organizers and the posts to specific responsibilities laid out in the Conditions of Participation.
To learn even more about CTMs, please contact Anne Novak at the Global Trade Programs Office of the International Trade Administration’s U.S Foreign and Commercial Service. She can be reached at Anne [email protected].
Read about the recent Certified Trade Mission to Lithuania which took place September 25 – 27, 2011! | <urn:uuid:9abd3aa7-3758-4e58-9d0a-ea85af17f9da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://export.gov/ctm/index.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94502 | 285 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The Society for New Communications Research released preliminary results of their New Influencer Study at the SNCR Research Symposium last week.
While there is no question that social media is rapidly gaining importance, it was interesting to see how they are (or not) measuring the effects of social media initiatives. Only 51% reported to be measuring the effects, and of those, the metrics they most value are enhancement of relationships with key audiences, enhancement of reputation, customer awareness of program and comments/posts relevant to organization/products.
As was brought up in the discussion following the presentation last week – it is interesting to see how soft most of those measurements are. First off, how many companies really measure “enhancement” of relationships or reputation? And how many measure customer awareness? Sure, large consumer-facing companies probably still do some of that – but aren’t those yesterday’s measurements cooked up by the advertising industry? Those that were meant to hide the fact that advertising cannot be effectively measured?
Surely we can come up with better metrics to measure the impact of social media initiatives – what about new customer acquisition, customer loyalty and customer lifecycle value, new product innovation success ratios, return on information, and customer referral ratios & values. | <urn:uuid:a85f56ac-590c-4d31-926e-b38bfee4c240> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.emergencemarketing.com/2007/12/11/the-new-influencers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958833 | 256 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Years ago, when I was in the early stages of my PhD, I gave a joke presentation at a graduate student conference on the taxonomy and evolution of Big Bird. It was the sort of thing you’d see at any conference on avian evolution: a Latin name, reconstructed skeleton, possible place on the great evolutionary tree of birds. The tone was completely serious, despite the subject matter—the sort of thing that might be found in the Journal of Irreproducible Results back when it was funny.
Then, in the storage cabinets of the Berlin Museum of Natural History one summer’s day, I had a revelation—an original scientific insight that I am happy now to share with the world. I realised what kind of bird Big Bird almost certainly is, and figured out something of its evolutionary history.
I presented my findings at the Christchurch PechaKucha #8 in May, and now the audio and (more-or-less) synchronised slides have been uploaded. (A pecha-kucha is a talk in which 20 slides play for exactly 20 seconds each, and the speaker tries to keep up.) All the science is real, and no Big Birds were harmed in the course of this research. Enjoy.
I also tweeted from Christchurch PechaKucha #8, as the format seemed well-suited to Twitter.
First, a pronunciation lesson from Mark Dytham: Pe-CHACH-ka. Perhaps easier to say if you’re drunk. The effects of being in a car crash described as a “rapid decline in function” by a medical student. “In 1981, Queenstown was less like Aspen, more like Twin Peaks.” “Spotlight is my happy place: everybody else is so miserable there.” Chloe Geoghegan showed us her lovely embroidered naive signwriting. The Master of Ceremonies got progressively drunker and more touchyfeely over the course of the evening. Called Christchurch “Auckland” not once but three times. Jo Burzynska coined the word Oenomatapeia: music made from recording the sounds of rustling vines and gurgling fermenting wine. The best quote of the night: “I had a recurring dream about a man putting me in the ground, cutting me up, and turning me into women’s bottoms.” And an awkward moment afterwards: well-wishers complimented my deadpan jokes, like claiming to have a “PhD in giant flightless birds”. Yuk yuk. | <urn:uuid:799ef4a9-989a-45fc-8f91-33df18469172> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.giantflightlessbirds.com/2010/06/big-bird/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954167 | 537 | 1.648438 | 2 |
California tops the list of states in budgetary crisis, but the grim headlines forecasting the Golden State's collapse only make me think back to the vibrant scenes of my childhood in the San Joaquin Valley.
The valley isn't a glamorous part of California. Few visitors do more than breeze through Bakersfield on their way to Los Angeles or refuel in Fresno en route to Yosemite. By comparison with the bays and beaches of the Pacific coast, the middle of the state just doesn't offer much to see. At least not in the touristy or cultural sense.
But the valley is the state's agricultural epicenter, and as the daughter of a valley grower, I spent a good part of my childhood in the 1980s learning to appreciate the agriculture industry. My dad managed stone fruit production for a large produce company based in Bakersfield, and he made every Saturday take-your-child-to-work day.
My brother and I would climb into Dad's work truck and leave our suburban home to head for the orchards--or "ranches"--every Saturday morning. This gave our mom, who taught us at home Monday through Friday, a much-needed break. And it gave us a day alone with Dad. He laid down simple rules for these trips--use the restroom at the company office (no stopping once we're out on the ranch), stay away from the boxed beehives, and watch out for rattlesnakes.
Dad's office was adjacent to a packing shed and around the corner from a "cold storage." The packing shed housed rows of conveyor belts designed to move the fruit to stations where it was packed for storage or shipment, but early on Saturdays the packing lines were usually still. The cold storage was a mystery, forbidden because of its low temperatures and forklifts. Dad would disappear into the refrigerated building alone, leaving to my imagination the experience of wandering a larger-than-life refrigerator.
My favorite part of the day was driving around the orchards. I loved seeing the seemingly endless rows of trees--the settled order of it all. I had no concept of "woods" then because all the trees in my world came in neat rows and grew no more than 10 feet high, pruned for easier, safer picking.On a clear day in the San Joaquin, you could see not only the foothills rising beyond the rows but the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Tehachapi Mountains surrounding the southern tip of the valley. If time allowed, we would end the day with a long drive up and down the roads of the ranches in the foothills. To my brother and me, it was like having our own personal kiddie coaster. Our favorite ranch to drive we called "the Moon" for its crater-like dips. For a few minutes all that existed were those blissful hills.
Saturdays had to come to an end, of course, and we would return to conventional life. Peaches and plums were never the same at the grocery store. They always seemed smaller and less glorious. Whenever we were at a grocery store with Dad, he always "needed" to inspect the produce section. For what seemed like an hour, he would check ripeness and size and look for any damage, such as scarring. Then he would point to the prices above the produce displays and tell us that growers saw only a small percentage of that price, what was left after the costs of farming, packing, storing, and shipping were factored in. I wouldn't fully understand these lessons until I went to work in the business myself.
Three summers I worked in offices at a local packing shed and cold storage. After long days on the job, Dad and I would talk about Rose Diamonds and Snow Kings and air shipments to Taiwan. And later, a time would come when I could be found in the produce section of my own local grocery store inspecting, just as I'd been taught.
When I go home to visit these days, there are fewer trees in the valley. Independent growers downsize or slowly pull out, as the costs of farming rise. Empty patches of land litter the landscape, and orderly, once prosperous orchards are gradually replaced with signs that say "For sale or lease."
Yet my dad, always willing to teach me more about "the business we have chosen," doesn't look on this scene with melancholy. "This has just been a bad year," he says. "But once you finish a season, that's the past." To persevere in farming, you must have what Dad calls the "optimism of the farmer." As he says, "You have to believe that next year will be better." | <urn:uuid:0c9614b5-686d-487d-aaf3-1945d0740100> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/318samnv.asp?nopager=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976752 | 960 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Messerschmidt v. Millender
Whether a police officer can be held liable for executing a search warrant when it is objectively unreasonable to believe that the warrant is supported by probable cause.
The police in this case obtained a warrant to search plaintiffs’ home looking for a weapon used in a domestic abuse incident. The terms of the warrant they sought and obtained, however, authorized the police to search for all weapons in the home, among other things. The question in the case is whether a reasonable officer under the circumstances would have understood that the broad language of the warrant was not supported by probable cause, and whether that is the appropriate standard for imposing liability as the Supreme Court previously held in a 1986 case called Malley v. Briggs.
Make a Difference
Your support helps the ACLU end punitive drug policies and defend a broad range of civil liberties. | <urn:uuid:3a69f77f-09bc-457f-b5e7-8401363eba6b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/messerschmidt-v-millender | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956475 | 172 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Each day, 1.5 million Americans turn to skilled nursing facilities for their long term and post-acute care needs. These facilities are shedding the perceptions of the past and leading the way in providing the most cost-effective, quality care for America's seniors and persons with disabilities. Support from federal health programs is needed by an overwhelming majority of those who turn to a skilled nursing center for their care, with 64 percent of residents relying on Medicaid and 14 percent relying on Medicare.
Unfortunately, over the years cuts have hit nursing facilities hard through health care reform, federal regulations, dwindling state revenues and Congress’ sequestration. The sector has incurred $32.49 billion in total cuts and reductions to Medicare, while Medicaid continues to be underfunded. More cuts to skilled nursing facilities continue to be a looming threat, jeopardizing seniors and individuals’ with disabilities access to long term and post-acute care.
Learn more about the rounds of the reductions skilled nursing facilities have already been dealt and their effect on the profession.
SNF Payment Reductions - A Timeline
Reports Demonstrate Current Struggles of SNFs
Assessing the Financial Implications of Alternative Reimbursement Policies for Nursing Facilities
The Moran Company, December 2011
AHCA commissioned the prestigious research group, The Moran Company, to perform an analysis on overall margins for nursing care centers. Using the most recent data available from 2009, this study found that overall margins are 0.75 percent, demonstrating the challenging situation nursing facilities nationwide are currently facing. The study also concluded that if Congress makes further cuts to skilled nursing and post-acute care centers, margins consistently go negative.
A Report on Shortfalls in Medicaid Funding for Nursing Home Care
Eljay, LCC, December 2011
Eljay, LLC (Eljay), was engaged by the American Health Care Association (AHCA) to work with its state affiliates and other sources to compile information on the shortfall between Medicaid reimbursement and allowable Medicaid costs in as many states as feasible. The estimated 2011 projected shortfall climbed significantly to $19.55 per Medicaid patient per day. Nationwide, nursing facilities were underfunded by $6.3 billion in 2011. | <urn:uuid:8c092dc4-2f64-47b1-8831-5b8459c07368> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ahcancal.org/advocacy/issue_briefs/Pages/NursingHomesontheBrink.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94783 | 439 | 1.765625 | 2 |
The visit of China's President Hu has raised some awkward questions about human rights. As just about everyone with a computer has pointed out, last year's Nobel peace laureate got to host the man who's imprisoned this years laureate. And as has also been pointed out, Nobel peace prizes aren't what they used to be (and they never really were), so maybe it's no big deal.
Still, what should our government do about human rights? Stand up for them all the time, or only when it's easy? Punish nations that violate them (is that why we've inflicted on ourself the penance of the Obama Administration?) or trade with them? While Tunisia was useful as a secular Arab state and enemy of Al Qaeda, we ignored the brutality of its government. Egypt is a strategic partner, so don't get excited about Mubarak breaking a few fingers. If a central Asian country helps us out in Afghanistan, it must be just like Oregon but with yurts and mutton-kebabs.
We have to understand that national human rights efforts will always be hypcritical. As America moves throughtout the world, it can always punish the weak and the useless but must always engage the powerful, the dangerous and the useful. I suppose we should just be glad the French aren't torturing Algerians anymore; we're never quite certain whether we want to engage them or start eating "freedom fries." | <urn:uuid:9b01fdd2-e2f3-4bbb-a611-5958cbb492cf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pichtblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/human-rights-hypocrisy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962833 | 287 | 1.695313 | 2 |
John L. Redman War of 1812 Bounty Land Affidavit
"State of Arkansas
County of Searcy
On this seventh day of December AD one thousand eight hundred and fifty three personally appeared before me an acting Justice of the Peace only authorised to administrate oaths within and for the County and State aforesaid John L.Reaman (sometimes written John Reaman) fifty eight years old and resident of searcy County in the State of Arkansas who being duly sworn according to law delares that he is the identical John L. Reaman who was a private in the company commanded by Captain Manly Ford in the Regiment of volunteers Commanded by Col. Means in the war of the UnitedStates against Great Britten of 1812 that he volunteered at Spartanburg District in the State of South Carolina and was mustered into service at Union Distric South Carolina on or about September AD 1814 for the term of six months and continued in actual service in said war for the term of five months and was honorably discharged at Orangeburg South [Carolina] on or about March AD 1815 on account of having served the full term required by the officers in command of said company (having in the mean time been attached to the Battalion Command by Major William Shields and was discharged with the Battalion under his command) and will appear by the muster rolls of said company he not having his original certificate of discharge now in his possession.
He makes this declaration for the purpose ofobtaining the bounty land to which he may be entitled under the act granting bounty land to certain officers and soldiers who have been engaged in the military service of the United States [before?] September 28th 1850 never received or knowing that he is entitled under any former act of Congress . But this is the second application for bounty land for the afore service but for some cause unknown to him no certificate for land has ever come to his hands and he further declares that he never sold or conveyed nor authorised any other person to sell or convey the same.
[apparently signed in John's own hand with the "d" somewhat obscured but obviously there]
John L. Redman"
End of transcription of original copy from NARA
There follows the signature of the JP, Andrew Melton, and then several others attesting to the authority of Mr. Melton, etc etc.
Points of interest
1866 John L's traditional death date age about 71 in AR
1853 Age 58 makes birth 1795 assume in SC per his AR census
1850 John L. Redman family Searcy Co AR, two Redman children
1840 First Redman (Sterling) Searcy Co AR census. Other adult male in household might be John L.
1820 No Redmans Spartanburg census
1818 A John and "Starling" Redman sell land to Bennett Wilson
1814 Age 19 when enlisted
1814 is year a John Redman died and widow Rachel is administrator. Deeply in debt. Perhaps reason John enlisted?
1810 One John Redman family Spartanburg census. Assume this is John L's family.
1800 Two John Redman families Spartanburg census. Both have two males five or younger. Assume one family is John L's.
1790 One John Redman family Spartanburg Co SC census
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|© 2007 The Generations Network| | <urn:uuid:60ea9f62-5ba5-4717-8ea3-0bfd4b89cc03> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://genforum.genealogy.com/ar/searcy/messages/559.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955849 | 711 | 1.578125 | 2 |
E. Cobham Brewer 18101897. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1898.
I floored him. Knocked him down on the floor; hence, to overcome, beat or surpass. Thus, we say at the university, I floored that paper, i.e. answered every question on it. I floored that problemdid it perfectly, or made myself master of it. | <urn:uuid:57915ab8-68dc-4c20-8d1b-1c6985ba92ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bartelby.com/81/6595.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957751 | 83 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Kindergarten I learned to sit 'Indian style' on a 14"x18" carpet remnant. I also learned I did not like boxing, wrestling or martial arts, even as a spectator. Every time the teacher left the classroom, the boys would jump off their mats and begin kung fu fighting.
One day, the teacher caught them. Now I understand that a logical punishment for some mistakes is to let children follow the negative behavior through to its natural conclusion, so they learn the consequences of making bad decisions. After all, that's what Ward & June Cleaver did for Wally and the Beav... But, these were 5 and 6 year old boys, so when the teacher made them continue the fight until one boy clearly won, all of the rest of the boys wanted a turn, too! From then on, every morning after we recited the pledge, sang the alphabet song, ate a snack and had a bathroom break (which usually meant we had 30 minutes left in our kindergarten day), the teacher refereed. Girls got ringside seating, our mats arranged in a circle so we could dutifully watch on the outskirts of the action. Not that we didn't get attention, too. "Miss Cathy, did I see you uncross those legs? Now just sit right back on your square, little lady!" And, of course, that's exactly what I did. Partly because in those days teachers paddled for obstreperous behavior like uncriss-crossing your legs - thereby, crossing the teacher. And partly because, up to that point of my life, I was ambivalent about my "luck" at being born female. I hated wearing dresses and itchy tights, especially when my big brothers walked around without shirts on. But, after a few months of kindergarten, I really appreciated the advantages of being a girl - and not a boy... or a pit bull.
1st grade I learned to read. In the first couple of weeks, I was put with three other kids in the Owls' Gold Star Reading Club, a great honor. Of course, that meant the teacher spent the least amount of time with our group and always quickly grew impatient with us because we kept forgetting to move the tongue depressors along the page as we sped read aloud. She was a nice lady, though. When she saw me walking to school in the mornings, she'd stop and offer to give me a ride the rest of the way in her yellow Cadillac. "Thank you, but no, Ma'am," I'd always say. She'd smile back at me quizzically, twirling a finger around wisps of blond hair dangling down to golden hoop earrings, and then drive off as the passenger window magically rolled up without her ever leaning over to turn the handle. I'd walk the rest of the way to school thinking of three things: 1) I wasn't sure if Mrs. L counted as a "stranger" or not; 2) anyway, Dad told me to never accept a favor if you don't absolutely have to because you shouldn't feel beholden to anybody; and 3) Be Thankful for What You've Got.
2nd grade School administrators decide to create "accelerated classes" and select the 25 brightest seven year olds to compose a fledgling elitist class. The principal visits our room on the first day of school to tell us how fortunate we are and how he thinks very highly of our fine teacher. And it became clear he did, too, as our princi-pal was constantly summoned to his office to consult about advanced teaching methods... she'd tell us not to move, she'd be right back, then hurriedly switch on PBS television as she left the room. That year, I learned to loathe "The Electric Company." Halfway through the year, I loathed "The Electric Company" and "Sesame Street," which aired afterwards. By the end of the year, I loathed "The Electric Company," "Sesame Street" and no, I did not want to be Mister Rogers' neighbor. Finally, I simply learned to prefer the testing of the Emergency Broadcast System to the resumption of "our regularly scheduled programming."
3rd grade We covered all of the material for 2nd & 3rd grades with a wonderful teacher who'd taught both of my brothers and was in the last of her forty year career. Did not watch wrestling - live or on tv - even once. I learned the best teachers have naturally retiring personalities.
4th grade In another attempt to meet the academic needs of its students, the district implements "cross-graded classes." They took 15 'gifted' kids from the fourth grade and the top 15 fifth graders, stuck them in a classroom together & told the privileged teacher, "Congratulations, this should be easy." Yet, there was still a wide disparity in the abilities of the students, plus the teacher had to go back & forth all day between grades & lesson plan preparations. Eventually, Mrs. McC decided to just give us a week's worth of assignments on Monday morning. We'd race to see who could finish first, a few of us wrapping it up by Tuesday afternoon (in her defense, some kids took until Friday and she was busy helping them). But, whenever you were done, you got free time, which meant you could access the hallowed land behind the partition. For a few months, we reveled in a smorgasbord of craft materials, board games and old sets of Highlights, Ranger Rick & National Geographic. After we'd exhausted those, Mrs. McC supplemented with magazines from home: I learned about feminine etiquette from Redbook, feminism from Ms. and was pleasantly amused by the droll quotes in Reader's Digest. I also learned that you can fit no more than 126 games of eraser tag into a regular school day, 97 on assembly days. Sure, I could have done more independent study. One girl did - she'd break out a book & start reading as soon as she finished her class work. But, that was because she had connections. While the rest of us were limited to checking out two books on our weekly library visit, her mom volunteered and schmoozed with the school librarian so much that she was permitted to check out four books! Frankly, I wouldn't have read four books a week anyway... not when you could play dodge ball instead.
5th grade We were now the fifth graders in Mrs. McC's cross-graded class. Repeat routine from fourth grade, but bored games were replaced by new-used board games, bought for us at garage sales by Mrs. McC's husband. Her teenage daughter also donated some of her "cool" subscription discards, from which I learned my preference for Mrs. McC's Better Homes & Gardens' spreads on leaves or garrets to Tiger Beat's glossy foldouts of Leif Garrett. All year, I reigned supreme as Dictionary-looking-up-words-faster-than-anyone-else-Champion. I stood to deliver an acceptance part of speech, but then meekly sat down when I realized the fleeting fame of a lexicon job well done. Still, it was in fifth grade that I was told that I was scoring at grade level 13+ on many sections of the annual standardized test - how bogus, I thought, who's gonna believe that one? Everyone knows there's no such thing as grade 13 (at least I hoped there wasn't). But, Mrs. McC and my mom seemed very pleased, so I kept my suspicions to myself and asked if I could go outside to play because the rain had made the mud just perfect for slip n slide freeze tag.
6th grade By now, our little core of students had been together so long, we were all aflush in a frenzy of anticipation because we were finally going to get "the hard teacher." She was young and pretty, but aloof & strict. Without a doubt, she'd whip us into intellectual shape. No more free time, no games, no fun of any kind: this was going to be good! We were busy from the moment the bell rang - grammar, math drills, quizzes, more worksheets than we'd done in all previous years combined. I wasn't too sure what I was learning, except for that fact that I was clearly a 'C' - for handwriting - student. But, just as I was about to wilt under her curs(ive)ory disapproval, she suddenly quit to go have a baby and never came back. We were halfway through sixth grade with nowhere to go - whatever were we to do? The next week, Mrs. McC emerged from retirement to finish out this last year of elementary school with us. From that, we learned how much we liked Mrs. McC and just how much she liked us back. Also, her propitious return was of the utmost significance on a personal level, as the third time did prove to be the charm for my shoebox. Gloriously and gaudily transformed into a card-receiving mailbox for her third and final Valentine's Day class party, it was awarded first prize & shrewd Mrs. McC had taught me that all-important lesson about perseverance paying off. And, finally, just for review in case we'd missed it those other times, we learned again that sometimes the "best teachers" are not the best teachers.
But, really, I liked school, as I'd happily tell any adult who asked that original, recurring question. What wasn't to like? I got good report cards, teacher-parent conferences were a breeze, and where else could I be sure to get up a rousing game of kickball between the hours of 8 am & 3 pm on weekdays, which was truly the only worthy criterion in my eyes (revealing the real reason I so despised dresses). Besides, no one had ever heard of homeschooling back then. And, I had no desire to go to a private school like some of my friends, whose parents paid lots of money so their girls could wear uniformly plaid skirts, brag that they scored two whole years above grade level due to their superior educations and meet with the "foxes" from the boys' private school behind the rectory. (I know, that's a cliché, but that's what you get when life imitates art/movies... you get to talk about it with more clichés... Wow, I guess it's, like, a vicious circle, ya know what I mean?)
Plus, I moonlighted. My mom became a teacher at an inner-city high school across town when I was two. For years, she took me with her on in-service days and I accompanied her to many afterschool activities. I got to help decorate her bulletin boards, write on the chalkboards anytime I wanted, shag balls when she coached tennis and, the very best, straddle the rails at football games & dance with the cheerleaders as the band played during halftime. One evening, we went to a school play and I was exceedingly proud because some big kids with whom I was enamored allowed me to sit with them. To prove my sophistication, I distinctly remember pulling out a book from my own backpack at intermission and pretending to read. I even timed it so I turned the pages of Green Eggs and Ham after silently counting what I felt was an appropriate interval (had I actually known how to read). Though they didn't let on how impressive it was, I sensed from then on that I was "in." So, when I told people I loved school, I really did... High school, when I was in preschool, was the greatest learning experience of my life. That was my "home" school, as far as I was concerned, where I found my zone.
Learning can, should and does happen everywhere. Ultimately, we chose to homeschool Mikaela & Katrianna based on our family situation and the girls' personalities. But, I don't think there's one "right" way to get an education. Public school, private school or homeschool - it's often what we learn outside of these constructs that counts the most. | <urn:uuid:0a7fe263-0b7f-45e8-bfdf-330e5a0cdab5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.globeschooling.com/2009/05/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985441 | 2,507 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Making Family Connections with NavianceFriday, December 09, 2011 By Angie Ramirez
Family Connections by Naviance is a new program that allows students and their families to make choices about higher learning. The website allows any student to research colleges, compare colleges and careers, sign up via web for a campus visit, and much more. This is a new approach that the counselors and career centers are taking in order to improve the chances of students getting into college. The counselors here at American strongly encourage students at all levels to use this website. They find it very useful for preparing for college. “Definitely, it [Family Connections] has a lot of features to assist students in planning for college and beyond. It’s also great because parents can access it as well. Each student can pursue their own interest using the website,” counselor Mr. Banez said about Family Connections. This website also helps the counselors and the career center aid students who are looking for colleges. The students who are unable to meet with their counselors can use this website at home. “The information is current and very organized and easy to follow. It’s very useful information. Some student feedback that I have gotten is that it really helps them plan and think about their future. They also have said that it is interesting and that they are learning about themselves,” Mr. Banez continued. This websites helps the students learn about themselves and the careers that they can pursue when they are older. It also helps them form plans and decide which college is best. “I took that really interesting personality quiz and it told me my career options,” sophomore Revati Kapshikar said about her experience with the personality quiz. Another aspect of this website is that it has an up-to-date list of the majors in certain countries that are available. It also lists thousands of colleges for the student to choose from. “My counselor told me about this website and I really like the search function and the list of the majors there is. It’s really cool,” sophomore Eric Chen said. Students recognize this website as an effective tool to help them achieve their goals for college and their future. “I highly recommend this website [to other students] because if you don’t know what you want to do in the future this [website] will help you find and narrow down your interests.” sophomore Priscilla Ng said. “My friend told me about this website. It helps me find colleges. It also helps me plan and set goals for college,” junior Upashna Singh said. This website is a pot of gold that fell from the sky to help students. Students now have another resource to help them get and find information about their dream colleges. Family Connections is a website that every student should know about in order to gain knowledge about themselves and their future in a convenient and interactive way. Visit Family Connections by Naviance at http :// connection . naviance . com / americanhigh . Students can go to their counselor's office and get their log in code. The website can also be accessed through the American High School site. | <urn:uuid:cfc201d1-7bb0-4811-9ec3-7c86c919e41b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://my.hsj.org/desktopmodules/asne/asne.venexusarticles/renderplaintextarticle.aspx?articleid=481370 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976632 | 650 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Recently, the Los Angeles City Council voted for three supposed Department of Water & Power reforms:
- Creating an Office of Public Accountability with a ratepayer advocate;
- Requiring DWP’s budget to be submitted earlier, with a guarantee that “surplus” funds will come to the city of L.A. for general fund uses;
- Granting the City Council the authority to remove the DWP’s General Manager or DWP Commissioners with a two-thirds council vote. The council could also override the mayor’s removal of the GM or commissioners with a two-thirds vote.
If the council approves the measures Dec. 7, they will appear on the March 8 ballot. But here’s the deal: These reforms are hardly bold and they don’t begin to solve the numerous inherent problems at DWP. In fact, the ballot measures are a cynical and opportunistic attempt to take advantage of near-universal public distrust of DWP.
The original job description for the new ratepayer advocate position promised real reform. It declared “the role of the OPA shall be to (1) promote efficiency and effectiveness of the department; (2) provide a centralized focus on ratepayer protection and consumer complaints; and (3) provide independent analysis of department actions, particularly as they relate to water and electricity rate actions. The OPA shall advocate against excessive rates and shall provide expert advice on rate actions and strategies which most economically accomplish the City’s policy goals and protect the department’s long-term interests.” But the role has been significantly watered down to the point of ambiguity.
From an environmental perspective, the measures almost completely miss the mark. Of course greater accountability is needed at DWP, but giving the City Council the authority to fire the GM and the commissioners is not a solution.
The DWP needs stability at the GM slot more than anything else, given the turmoil associated with having nine GMs in the last decade. The Office of Public Accountability with a ratepayer advocate will be yet another layer of bureaucracy. The focus will be on determining if rates are too high, not if DWP is using revenues to overhaul decaying infrastructure and move towards green energy and a sustainable, local water supply.
The mayor has made bold pronouncements on renewable energy (40% renewable by 2020), coal (get rid of polluting coal by 2020), and water management (increased conservation, water recycling, rainwater capture and wellhead treatment). However, the DWP is not progressing towards meeting these ambitious and admirable goals in a timely manner.
No initiative can mandate the leadership that is needed to ensure that DWP replaces or repairs decaying infrastructure and moves forward aggressively on sustainable local water supplies and a 40% renewable energy portfolio without dirty coal. The Office of Public Accountability shouldn’t be needed to hold DWP responsible for meeting the city’s goals. That’s the job of the DWP Commission, City Council, and the mayor’s office. They all need to make sure that DWP senior managers meet environmental milestones, provide more complete financial information, and tie rate increases solely to infrastructure replacement, repair and maintenance, green power enhancement, and sustainable local water sourcing.
Mayor Villaraigosa and the City Council could create a culture of accountability through the DWP budget, rate setting, and annual performance reviews based on the achievement of interim milestones, but they haven’t chosen to do so.
Because of the current financial crisis, there is a complete reluctance for the council to raise water and power rates, but what the city truly needs is an investment in sustainable water infrastructure and renewable energy. This transformation will not come cheaply, but I truly believe that most of the public could support rate increases if there were true DWP reform that included economic transparency and rate increases directly tied to needed green infrastructure.
Funds must be found to wean Los Angeles from coal (approximately half of its current energy is from dirty coal) and start relying on renewable energy. Funds are needed to replace, repair, and maintain decaying water and power infrastructure. Does anyone really believe the water conservation caused pipe ruptures? Or was it the fact that DWP’s water conveyance infrastructure is in dire need of a major overhaul.
Funds are needed to upgrade environmentally damaging once-through-cooling power plants to more energy-efficient, dry cooling facilities that don’t suck the life out of the ocean. And funds are needed to shift DWP from its growing reliance on MWD water, by shifting the city towards greater self reliance through conservation (which the city has done well on, but there is room for improvement), water recycling, well-head treatment of local groundwater, and rainwater capture and use.
As MWD water rates continue to rise and the future of imported water transfers grows in uncertainty, self reliance becomes critical from both an environmental and economic perspective. Other than conservation, DWP’s sustainable water programs are an embarrassment and its water recycling program is far behind every other water agency in the region.
Rate increases are needed to fund L.A.’s transformation to green energy and sustainable local water, but they won’t happen without major reform and strict accountability for every penny of the rate increase.
As I’ve stated before, a critical and long overdue reform is to separate water from power. A true watershed management approach includes sewage, stormwater and drinking water.
The Department of Public Works has responsibility over sewage and stormwater, but DWP is in charge of drinking water. Public Works has embraced watershed protection and has even reorganized and planned to better manage watershed resources. Other than water conservation, DWP hasn’t changed much in water management since the days of Mulholland.
(Another benefit could be the creation of a culture that mandates equal pay and benefits for equal work. Currently, an engineer, executive, analyst or administrative staff member working at City Hall makes about 20% less in pay and benefits than someone doing the same work at DWP. )
Separation of water from power can benefit the energy side of the equation too. A single-purpose power agency could be far more efficient and could be held more accountable to meeting the city’s green energy goals and complying with climate change regulations.
The time for true reform is now, but reform does not happen overnight. An ambitious goal of 2015 to separate water from power is achievable, but only if the mayor and the City Council act now to take the bold measures necessary to modernize L.A.’s infrastructure in order to meet Mayor Villaraigosa’s first stated environmental goal: to make Los Angeles the greenest and cleanest major city in America. | <urn:uuid:f40209e4-d232-470e-b16c-f4b731c6eeb1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://spoutingoff.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/true-reform-at-dwp/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941534 | 1,384 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Forex losses may be moved from the P&L account to the balance sheet.
Foreign borrowing is another area where forex fluctuations affect companies.
Take Rural Electrification Corporation (REC), for example. For the half year ended September 2011, the company had Rs 9,096 crore in foreign-currency borrowings.
Even though the company doesn’t have to repay foreign-currency borrowings anytime soon, accounting rules requires such borrowings to be reported based on the closing exchange rate at the end of each accounting period. The gain or loss arising on this restatement has to be shown in the financial statements.
Originally, all such notional losses had to be shown in the P&L account. Predominantly due to this exposure, the company made forex losses of about Rs 132 crore in April-September 2011, bringing profits lower by that amount.
Under the new rules which REC started following from the December quarter, if a foreign-currency borrowing (term of more than 12 months) relates to a depreciable capital asset, translation differences from the loan could be added to/deducted from the asset, instead of charging to the P&L account.
When a company has other foreign-currency borrowings that cannot be directly attributed to an asset (say, for general expenses or working-capital requirements), then the translation difference could be charged to a special translation difference reserve.
Later, this amount can be spread out and amortised. By taking this up, about Rs 198 crore of forex losses for the company moved from the P&L account to the balance sheet.
Hence, the profits of Rs 770 crore for the quarter were propped up by the same amount.
These changes to the rules were first made in 2009 and were applicable only until the year ended March 31, 2011. In December, the dates were extended till March 31, 2020, also allowing companies who did not take it up in the past to do so now. | <urn:uuid:c6bab437-e39d-4866-b037-787dd718ae7a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/investment-world/article3901243.ece?homepage=true&ref=wl_home | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968915 | 406 | 1.835938 | 2 |
GnuPG has slow hash built-in in form of iterated+salted S2K.
Does it have disadvantages in comparance with bcrypt or scrypt? Is GnuPG's slow hash method easily automated in GPUs?
OpenPGP's "Iterated and Salted S2K" is just a single hash instance over a very long input, which consists in the repeated concatenation of the salt and the password. This is extremely GPU-friendly, especially when using a hash function which is built over 32-bit elementary operations (this category includes MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160; GPU are not as good at dealing with 64-bit operations, e.g. SHA-512). Consequently, an attacker will get a good boost out of GPU when trying to attack a password which has been processed with that key derivation function.
Note that this puts S2K in the same category than PBKDF2: although their internal structures differ quite a lot, they have similar usage patterns on the hardware. Comparatively, bcrypt and scrypt need much more fast access RAM, which puts GPU at a disadvantage. Bcrypt still fits in a few kilobytes of RAM, hence is still susceptible to optimizations through FPGA; scrypt looks even better, but it is shiny because it is new, which is not a good thing in cryptosystems (like good wine, good crypto must wait a few years for optimal quality; see this answer for a more thorough discussion).
Let me stress out that, in practical terms, OpenPGP's S2K (or, for that matter, PBKDF2) very rarely turns out to be the weakest part of a given system. For all its shortcomings, S2K is much better than a simple non iterated hash-with-salt, and a fortiori an unsalted hash invocation, as is unfortunately still commonly encountered in deployed applications.
Most hash functions ( it appears this includes S2k) are not memory intensive. As such you can run a bunch of computations of their iterated variants on a GPU very cheaply.
Scrypt, however, is designed to be memory intensive, so you can't really run it effectively in parallel without huge memory requirements. | <urn:uuid:177bee27-1ec5-4049-acde-61a19ea2ec89> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/3252/is-bcrypt-better-than-gnuppgs-iteratedsalted-hashing-method | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960332 | 473 | 1.8125 | 2 |
CARACAS, Venezuela — CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Hugo Chavez made a surprise return to Venezuela from Cuba before dawn Monday, saying he is feeling better as he recovers from surgery that removed a cancerous tumor.
State television showed the video of Chavez arriving about 2 a.m. local time (2:30 EDT; 0630 GMT). The station didn't air the video until a little after five hours later.
"I'm fine. I'm happy," he said after stepping off the plane. "A perfect landing."
He hugged his vice president, Elias Jaua, and his elder brother, Adan.
In a telephone interview later, the president told state television he was having breakfast. "I'm devouring everything," Chavez said.
Chavez said he spent "very difficult days" in Cuba but that his recovery is going well. "It's the beginning of my return!"
President Raul Castro saw him the Venezuelan on the tarmac as he departed during the night from Havana. From the door of the airplane, Chavez saluted, raised a fist, and then waved.
Chavez arrived a day before the 200th anniversary of Venezuela's declaration of independence from Spain.
He had been in Cuba since June 8 for what ostensibly was a previously scheduled visit. Doctors said he underwent an initial surgery on June 11 to have a pelvic abscess removed and then a follow-up surgery to remove a cancerous "abscessed tumor" from his pelvic region.
Chavez announced the second surgery Thursday after 18 days out of sight. Neither he nor doctors gave details about what kind of cancer it is or what treatment he is receiving.
Jaua said he and others were "very excited to receive our president."
"He's going to rest for a while," Jaua said.
He said that Chavez had plans to address his supporters from the balcony of the presidential palace later Monday. | <urn:uuid:5af753a9-038f-409e-ae25-7197dca4b0c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vcstar.com/news/2011/jul/04/chavez-returns-to-venezuela-from-cuba/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984344 | 397 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Failure of the wheel tax resolution was deemed by Cleveland Daily Banner editors and staff writers to be the No. 2 local story among the Top 10 for 2012.
Approximately 75 percent of the voting public cast a ballot against the proposed tax increase.
The tax had been debated as a way to finance borrowing money needed for capital projects initially requested by Bradley County Schools in 2011. These capital projects included an academic building at Lake Forest Middle School to alleviate water-related issues, an expansion at Walker Valley High School and a new Blue Springs Elementary School.
Cleveland City Schools would have also received funding for a new elementary school.
Bradley County commissioners were not in favor of increasing property taxes to cover the financing needed for the projects. The county could not borrow the money for the projects without creating more revenue.
The Commission sought to remain neutral on the issue in order to give voters a chance to decide for themselves. Leading up to the vote, details of the levy and who could be exempt continued to draw discussion from the public and also from local government leaders.
The Commission told members of the Bradley County Board of Education and Bradley County Schools Director Johnny McDaniel that it would be up to them to convince the voting public of the need for the projects. Many schools sought voter support through use of school signs.
Both school systems voiced support for the tax at their regular meetings.
In the end, school board members were not surprised that the tax was rejected by Bradley County voters.
An additional $16 fee would have been added to registration for motorcycles. County commissioners had discussed exempting motorcycles, but eventually the fee was included on the ballot. Vehicle exemptions mandated by state law were kept intact, including motor-driven bicycles and scooters, farm tractors and self-propelled farm machines not intended for highway use. Individuals who were former prisoners of war or 100 percent service-related disabled veterans would have been exempt.
Commissioners explored the possibility of granting exemptions to low-income elderly residents, but ran into stumbling blocks.
Since car registration notifications are set by the state and not by local government, residents would have received a bill whether they were exempt or not. Reimbursing those who qualified was also discussed. The Commission discussed possibly adapting the guidelines used for the county’s property tax freeze program.
Many of the details about the proposed wheel tax were negotiated by the finance and education committees.
Opinions ran high in the days leading up to the vote with multiple “Letters to the Editor” being submitted to the Cleveland Daily Banner, and public forums addressing both sides of the debate also were held.
The Commission could have passed the wheel tax with 10 votes by its members on two separate votes in favor of the tax. However, a petition signed by 10 percent of the voting public would override the Commission’s actions. | <urn:uuid:ff70ddcf-e64d-46a3-b49c-bb07ccb8d896> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.clevelandbanner.com/pages/full_story/push?article-Failed+wheel+tax+takes+year%E2%80%99s+No-+2+spot%20&id=21279547&instance=homesecondleft | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983604 | 579 | 1.625 | 2 |
Alcohol/Drug Detox & Rehab Programs
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"I would highly recommend Gallus Detox to anyone in my life with an addiction problem. Thanks again for helping me to start my life without alcohol dependency…" - Read more of what our patients say—their own detox success stories—about how fearful they had been of detoxing and withdrawal, how safe and cared for they felt with our team, and how that experience has changed their lives.
Alcohol & Drug Rehabilitation: Rehabilitation has been shown to be an integral part in continued long term sobriety. Alcohol and drug rehab may include individual and group counseling, establishing support groups and meetings, family therapy and counseling, lifestyle management, meditation, and other activities and measured to address alcoholism and drug abuse. However, many rehabilitation centers do not offer a detox program and, if they do offer this process, most do not have an advanced, medically-supervised detox program. The majority of these rehab centers focus on assisting patients with managing their addiction over the long term which may be for a few weeks or stretch into several months. Visit our alcohol/drug detox and rehab directory for resources to help with ongoing recovery.
If you have questions regarding how our alcohol and drug detox treatment programs differ from rehabilitation services, please talk with us. We can also assist you with finding a rehab center for continued recovery after a successful detox.
If you or your loved one are suffering from alcoholism, drug addiction or other substance abuse and need help, please call us at 855-338-6929 to discuss whether our customized Detox Treatment is the best program for you. Be assured we value your privacy and all your information is kept strictly confidential. Contact Gallus Alcohol and Drug Detox Centers today and take the first step towards rehab and recovery. | <urn:uuid:3dc78f49-fe9b-4e8f-88a9-4fe5d15f5d7a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gallusdetox.com/drug-detox-services/detox-and-rehab | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954994 | 514 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Praise of Obama insults the memory of great leaders
Art Ingram, Seymour
This is in response to Frances R. Besmer's Nov. 15 letter, "Obama belongs among the panoply of great presidents." To mention President Obama in the same sentence as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt is a heinous insult to American history. Obama has sent this formerly great nation down a path of destruction from which it likely will never recover.
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FREEPRESS wrote on Nov 29, 2012 5:29 AM:
Paul Ruszczyk wrote on Nov 29, 2012 9:54 AM:
White Democrat wrote on Nov 29, 2012 8:04 PM:
Sandy Socks wrote on Nov 29, 2012 9:18 PM:
We had an election and your guy lost. Too bad. That's democracy.
Whatever faults you claim this country has, have been around long before Obama took office.
What is an embarrassment to this country isn't the Obama Admistration. It's people like you who can't accept any other opinion other that what they hear on Fox News.
Shame on you. The last thing you should call yourself is a patriot. "
INDYMAN wrote on Nov 30, 2012 7:57 AM:
- Rep. Greene's 'no' votes were in his district's interest
- 'Hope and change' has resulted in harmful policies
- Rep. Nardello has kept her promise to run a clean, positive campaign
- Murphy's ideals in Senate contest are wrong for state
- Nardello's votes have made us less safe and poorer
- Obama has shown disrespect for values Americans cherish the most
- Obama, Murphy and other Democrats mount attacks on religious freedom
- Writer had special interest in outcome of Tuesday's voting
- Berger fails to consider needs of his constituents
- Abortion should become a rarity, not commonplace | <urn:uuid:22116b46-146f-47d1-ad19-df65f737792a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2012/11/30/letters/686991.txt | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955628 | 502 | 1.5625 | 2 |
By Michael Goldstein
By Dennis Romero
By Sarah Fenske
By Matthew Mullins
By Patrick Range McDonald
By LA Weekly
By Dennis Romero
By Simone Wilson
LAST YEAR, WHEN GRAY DAVIS— still governor, for the time being — acknowledged just how deep the state’s budget mess was, he decided to save a few million bucks by lifting the requirement that cities, counties and the several hundred other governmental bodies draw up agendas for their meetings and make them public. He figured the local governments would still post agendas, at their own expense, even if the state no longer reimbursed them, because it would be irresponsible not to.
Nice try. The public outcry was fierce, and Davis had to back off the plan almost immediately.
Also last year, a San Mateo County judge rejected an attempt by the Palo Alto Daily News to find out the names and salaries of public employees in a handful of California cities. Public Records Act or no, the judge said, the names of people who are paid with taxpayer money, and the amount of that money that they get, is none of the public’s business.
Laws making it clear that the government works for the people and that its business is the people’s business have become shockingly easy to brush aside. And so we have Proposition 59, which arguably does little more than to say about key public-access laws, “We really mean it.”
The ballot measure would elevate five groundbreaking laws from the statute books to the state Constitution, where they could not be overturned or ignored — for the most part — without a vote of the people. Prop. 59 also would require courts to broadly interpret laws that further the people’s right to get government data, and narrowly interpret laws that cut the other way, like exemptions and exceptions that allow closed sessions and confidential documents.
The Ralph M. Brown Act requires city councils, boards of supervisors and other local legislative bodies to provide public notice of their agendas and to conduct their meetings openly, in public. The Grunsky-Burton Act does the same for the state Legislature, and the Bagley-Keene Act applies to other state bodies.
The California Public Records Act makes clear that anyone can see copies of state and local government documents, subject to clearly posted written guidelines. The Legislative Open Records Act provides that the public may inspect legislative records. The act also requires legislative committees to maintain documents related to the history of legislation.
It would be bad form to oppose a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the people rights they already have, and the Assembly and Senate voted unanimously to put Senate Constitutional Amendment 1 on the ballot as Prop. 59.
But check out who opposes 59: Mountain View lawyer Gary B. Wesley, who takes local governments to court when they claim they have a right to go into closed session to talk about litigation, as is permitted by the Brown Act. Prop. 59 may be better than nothing, Wesley says, but that’s not good enough.
Still, it’s a step in the right direction. You only have to see how the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors plays fast and loose with the Brown Act to know something must be done. Last month they slunk into closed session under the exception that allows them to talk privately with their lawyers about filing lawsuits, and instead talked about (and maybe even adopted) a plan to close the trauma center of Martin Luther King–Drew Medical Center.
It would be overkill to repeat how badly the board muffed the Brown Act in 2001. But what the heck? They were trying to stop a petition for a ballot measure to raise pay for home health-care workers, but they didn’t want anyone to know. So they retired behind closed doors, under the litigation exception. Instead of talking about filing a suit, their lawyer suggested that he do something so improper — fail to turn over petition data to the county registrar — that the people behind the initiative would sue them! See? Closed session is okay because we’re talking about lawsuits! It was brilliant. And sneaky and disgusting.
The lawyer apparently thought so too, because he later called up three of the five supervisors and said never mind. That, too, may have violated the Brown Act. Then the board met in closed session to talk about their lawyer’s suggestions further under the exception for personnel evaluations.
How many city councils and boards of supervisors, paid with your money, sit in your buildings and figure out ways to keep information from you? There’s no way to know. Prop. 59 won’t put a stop to it, but it’s a step forward. There’s nothing wrong with yet one more statement on the books that the public’s business must be public. We really mean it.
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Check out the hottest list of places and things to do around your city | <urn:uuid:76b600bf-9a63-4cfc-96b6-4e3c8fb80cd9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.laweekly.com/2004-10-21/news/the-people-s-business/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96473 | 1,036 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Much newsprint has been wasted recently on the split between the APA (American Psychiatric Association) and the NIMH over the revision of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that is going to be called the DSM-5. In my view, letting the 100,000 manuals bloom is not going to be any better of a solution than letting the 100,000 diagnoses bloom in the long run. If we are going to treat every patient as an individual, for the sake of the individuality of his or her condition (and genetic makeup), that’s going to make for a whole lot of variation in disorder (and/or order) expression.
The New York Times covers the story, regarding the NIMH APA divide, in a story with the heading, Psychiatry’s Guide Is Out Of Touch With Science, Experts Say. Of course, it always depends on which experts you ask. The experts the mass media is still slow to consult, and the New York Times is no exception in this regard, are those experts with lived experience on the receiving end of mental health treatment.
While typically critics of the DSM have tackled the subject from one side of the political psychiatric spectrum, here comes mob boss Thomas Insel, godfather of the NIMH, attacking from the other. In the first instance, you have people who object to the biology in biological psychiatric theory, (Theory, now there’s as important a word as any.) in the second, you have a group that doesn’t think the APA is biologically grounded enough.
The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.
The DSM focuses on symptoms precisely because we don’t know the causes. Dr. Thomas R. Insel, apparently, thinks otherwise.
Precision seems to be a big part of the problem. In psychiatric diagnosis, theoretical speculations aside, there are no precision tools.
The creators of the D.S.M. in the 1960s and ’70s “were real heroes at the time,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Broad Institute and a former director at the National Institute of Mental Health. “They chose a model in which all psychiatric illnesses were represented as categories discontinuous with ‘normal.’ But this is totally wrong in a way they couldn’t have imagined. So in fact what they produced was an absolute scientific nightmare. Many people who get one diagnosis get five diagnoses, but they don’t have five diseases — they have one underlying condition.”
Or, a possibility not considered here, we’ve got five misdiagnoses floating around for which there was no underlying condition in the first place.
Solution. The NIMH is developing it’s own manual, Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC.
About two years ago, to spur a move in that direction, Dr. Insel started a federal project called Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC, which he highlighted in a blog post last week. Dr. Insel said in the blog that the National Institute of Mental Health would be “reorienting its research away from D.S.M. categories” because “patients with mental disorders deserve better.” His commentary has created ripples throughout the mental health community.
Consider, ripples sent throughout the mental health community, ripple throughout the “mental illness” community (i.e. the mental health ghetto). Now whether “patients with mental disorders” are going to get “better” treatment thereby is a big leap. Too big a leap in fact to make. So sorry, my poor victims of standard psychiatric malpractice!
Whatever you call it, my guess is that this switch still represents a way of billing insurance companies, the most important role for patient consumers a psychiatrist assumes. Of course, given that this paradigm change is all about biological explanations, I expect the treatment the insurance companies will be paying for is a chemical fix. Given this situation, the extent to which pharmaceuticals damage patients is still the great unasked question biological psychiatrists do their best to avoid asking.
Filed under: Biological Psychiatry, Brain Damage, DSM, Force, Fraud, Health Care, Mental Health Care, Misdiagnosis, Oppression, Pharmaceutical Company, Polypharmacy, Psychiatric Drugs, psychiatric survivor, Research, Violence | Tagged: american psychiatric association, dsm 5, mental health treatment, theoretical speculations, thomas insel, thomas r insel | 2 Comments » | <urn:uuid:a1f02854-b063-4993-ba8b-fdb8b77e65c1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lunatickfringe.wordpress.com/category/biological-psychiatry/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934759 | 1,002 | 1.8125 | 2 |
In 2013, we continue to celebrate the Year of Faith, which began in the Diocese of Raleigh on October 20, 2012, and will conclude on November 24, 2013, the Feast of Christ the King. Pope Benedict XVI declared the Year of Faith as an opportunity for every Catholic to enter into a deeper relationship with Jesus through the Sacraments and rediscover the Faith and Church with a willingness to share it.
“The Year of Faith is giving Catholics opportunities to look at faith and see new ways of practicing, learning and imparting the faith,” said Sr. Rose Marie Adams, Executive Director of Catholic Formation and Evangelization.
The Year of Faith Steering Committee, which prepared the Year of Faith Resource booklet (PDF) for the Diocese of Raleigh, divided the year into four quarters, each focusing on one of the “pillars” of faith from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Each pillar was supported by two themes. The first pillar, The Creed, began the Year of Faith during the months of October, November and December. Using the resource booklet, Diocesan parishes and schools incorporated the themes and the special focus on Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral into their activities, catechesis and celebrations. See how the faithful executed Theme I: The Church Guided by the Holy Spirit and Theme 2: Mary, the First Disciple.
January, February and March move on to Pillar II: The Sacraments. The themes supporting this pillar are the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation and Sacramentals and Popular Devotions.
During Pillar II, Sr. Rose said several parishes will host Lenten Penance Services in addition to regularly scheduled weekly Reconciliation opportunities. Students and parents in Sacramental Preparation classes at St. Thomas More in Chapel Hill will be attending a Family Retreat devoted to the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
By definition, Sacramentals are sacred signs instituted by the Church that mediate spiritual effects such as blessings, protection and peace throughout the Church (CCC 1667). Some examples are the Rosary and medals of saints. In Elizabethtown, Our Lady of the Snows Church is inviting faith formation students to bring their favorite Sacramentals to class for discussion.
Popular Devotionals and prayers are ways we permeate everyday life with prayer. Some examples are Novenas, Liturgy of the Hours and Stations of the Cross. St. Mary in Laurinburg prays the Novena to the Immaculate Conception every Wednesday and the Rosary before weekend Masses.
The special focus of Pillar II is the History of the Diocese of Raleigh. “Every person in the Diocese should know when and how, through God’s grace, our Diocese was founded,” said Sr. Rose. The history of the Diocese can be found in the Year of Faith Resource booklet.
In addition to parish participation in the Year of Faith, Diocesan Catholic Schools are also participating. Among the activities taking place at Cathedral School in Raleigh will be a History of the Diocese Quiz Bowl during Catholic Schools Week. “We look at Year of Faith as a pep rally for faith for our children,” said Cathedral School Principal Mrs. Donna Moss. | <urn:uuid:14ffc060-bfb8-4b8d-8055-c7c4a031e430> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dioceseofraleigh.org/news/view.aspx?id=1765 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953731 | 668 | 1.570313 | 2 |
The summer festival season is about to begin with the opening of Hay 2010, and one of the questions that will inevitably crop up, a question that authors and panellists dread, is: where do you get your ideas from?
The pursuit of creativity is not generally a question that gets a good answer. But last week, at the Royal Philharmonic Society Music awards, the artist Grayson Perry, a wonderfully transgressive character, said something that struck a chord with me, especially in the context of an issue I've been puzzling over viz. the effect of the IT revolution on the creative process.
In the course of his remarks, which were mainly about classical music, naturally, Perry observed: "Being creative is all about being unself-conscious; being prepared to make a bit of a fool of myself. In my experience, embarrassment is not fatal."
He followed this with some remarks about the dangers of "cool", and concluded: "I'd like to make a plea for difficulty over cool. In the end, being difficult is the coolest thing you can be."
But it was Perry's focus on "unself-conscious" that caught my attention. To me, that's the essential – perhaps the only – key to creativity.
Art is a mystery whose lineaments are often obscure to its protagonists. The artist – writer, painter, musician – does not like, indeed often cannot begin, to explain his or her work. That will be because, if genuine originality is at stake, the artist will probably be in two minds about what he or she is up to, and unwilling to offer an easy account. This, I think, is where Perry's plea for "unself-consciousness" comes into play.
For new and original books to flourish, there must be privacy, even secrecy. In Time Regained, Marcel Proust expressed this perfectly. "Real books", he wrote, "should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk, but of darkness and silence."
How many "real books" enjoy "darkness and silence" today? Not many. In 2010, the world of books, and the arts generally, is a bright, raucous and populist place. The internet – and blogs like this – expose everything to scrutiny and discussion. There's a lot of self-expression, but not necessarily much creativity.
So the question I ask is: can the secret state of creative inspiration flourish on global platforms on which everything is exposed, analysed and dissected?
This, I think, is a topic that has begun to exercise quite a few writers, but just off the radar. As Don DeLillo puts it in his recent novella Point Omega: "It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself." And self-knowledge must be the vital first step in the creative process. | <urn:uuid:86a9f689-bb2b-40b2-a3e9-bd3c35707f12> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/may/17/hay-festival-creativity-fiction | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971703 | 582 | 1.617188 | 2 |
What are the lessons for UK politicians from Obama's win?
So Barack Obama has been re-elected as US president. What are the lessons from the campaign and result for British politicians?
1. Incumbents can still win
Since the crash of 2008 10 European governments have lost office - by my last count. Obama has shown that incumbents can be re- elected. Some comfort for David Cameron.
2. Negative campaigns work
Four years ago Obama promised to run a positive campaign. This time around his team ran a brutal personal assault on Romney for being rich, uncaring and out of touch (sound familiar?). It worked. One senior Labour figure told me he feared that the Tories would learn this lesson.
3. Minorities matter
Republicans told themselves that Hispanics shared their values and their belief in hard work and family. Nevertheless they overwhelmingly voted Democrat. The Tories say the same about Asian voters and have about as much success with this increasingly important voter group.
4. Women matter
Obama lost the support of white men but got away with it thanks, in part, to greater support amongst women. The so-called gender gap used to be the Tories' secret weapon. Labour are now trying to turn it back on them
5. Money and ads can't buy an election
Cash helps in any election but multi-millionaire Mitt Romney has shown that no amount of it can compensate for an uncharismatic candidate, a divided party and a message which veers from pandering to the party base one minute then appealing to moderates the next. | <urn:uuid:caf997ba-4529-493a-9c6e-6ca8bb7353fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20235270 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959266 | 317 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Library Patrons Want E-Books Over Every Other Downloadable Media
By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid
Library patrons, it turns out, are just like everybody else when it comes to e-books: increasingly, they want them.
According to the new Patron Profiles report from Library Journal and Bowker, 28% of library patrons want to download e-books at their local libraries. That number increases when it comes to library patrons who also read e-books: nearly two-thirds of those want e-books available at their local libraries.
E-books were more in demand among library patrons than music and video (see chart below).
The report, geared toward librarians planning for the future, recommended that libraries adjust their strategies based on the rise of tablets, other devices and downloaded media.
“There’s no question that library patrons want e-books,” said Rebecca Miller, the editor for the Patron Profiles series and editor-in-chief of School Library Journal. “The big picture context is that libraries are in this they — they want to share e-books and they want to help people discover authors and new titles through e-books.”
While demand for e-books among library patrons and the rest of the population continues to increase, some publishers have been hesitant to make their e-books available to libraries.
Of the six largest U.S. publishers, two have full-fledged agreements with libraries to lend e-books (Random House and HarperCollins), two are currently running pilot programs (Hachette and Penguin) and two are not currently making their books available to libraries (Simon & Schuster and Macmillan).
Proponents of making books available to libraries argue that library patrons who borrow e-books are also e-book buyers and that in a world of dwindling bookstore shelf space, the library is becoming an increasingly important place for readers to discover new authors and new titles — both in print and e-.
The publishers may be hesitant to make their books available to libraries for fear that consumers will borrow them rather than buy them, cutting into sales.
There have been several studies that suggest that library patrons who borrow e-books also buy e-books. The most recent of which was a study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life project which found that among people who borrow e-books from libraries, 41% bought their last e-book.
“If they borrow, they buy,” said Miller, referring to the Pew study and others. “They discover books in the library. It’s true of e-books and print books.”
Regardless of whether it’s a good deal for publishers or not, library patrons, more than any other media, want to be able to borrow e-books from their library and libraries will be moving to provide that service to them:
Among library patrons, the Kindle e-reader is the favored e-reading device, but the Kindle Fire and iPad tablets are nos. two and three respectively. Just over 20% of library patrons own a Kindle e-reader and just over 30% of library “power media users” (defined as those library patrons who borrowed or downloaded any non-tradtional media either daily, weekly or monthly) owned one. About one in five patrons owned a Kindle Fire and about one in six owned an iPad.
According to Miller, the researchers who crafted the analysis of the raw data said that library patrons are a good proxy for the general population and resemble it very closely.
Among the study’s other findings:
– Digital patrons, those patrons who have a smartphone, e-reader or tablet computer, are more active in the library than every other kind of patron across all library activities. From the report: “Currently, 12% of library patrons own tablets, 16% own ereaders, and 28% own smartphones.”
– Library patrons expressed a desire to access library services via mobile apps but many libraries don’t yet have a dedicated app and so only 3% of patrons have used one.
– Library e-patrons, defined as those who visit their library website an average of once a week, go their to determine accessibility of content and to search for information in the library’s special databases. However, they are generally dissatisfied with the quality of their library’s website.
Write to Jeremy Greenfield | <urn:uuid:60f12f52-e2d7-485e-92c6-307fd29d5229> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/library-patrons-want-e-books-over-every-other-downloadable-media/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945756 | 921 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Having your pathway light up is a great conversation starter and amuses everyone that comes over. Learn how to use glass blocks and sun jars to create a cool attraction in his front garden. He stocked up blocks and set up the power harvesting equipment (just some solar panels from Home Depot). He then wired it to the glass blocks that have LEDs in sun jars attached to the side.
This is a great project that will add something different to your garden or backyard. What’s more, it’s really cheap to do. Solar panels and wiring can be harvested from existing products such as garden lamps.
As many others commented on the guide, there are a hundred and one ways you could mod this project or use the idea in a different way such as interior design or to illuminate another fixture or fitting. | <urn:uuid:b226ed86-b668-4b3c-8e46-b2bf4ce5e32c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hacknmod.com/hack/diy-solar-powered-walkway-weekend-project/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946893 | 170 | 1.835938 | 2 |
As 2011 draws to a close, many investors are asking me what I expect the global economy will look like next year.
While I don’t have a crystal ball, I do believe that three economic scenarios could play out in 2012. In my recent Markets Perspective piece, I’ve assigned probabilities to them based on how likely I believe they are to occur.
The most likely scenario is that “The Great Idle” continues. This is the term I’m using to describe a global economy that continues to muddle along with slow but positive growth, avoiding an economic crisis.
A severe global recession in 2012 is a second possible scenario. In fact, I’m placing higher odds on another global recession than I did last year.
If this were to occur, it would most likely stem from policy failure and a banking crisis in Europe. It could also be the result of policy mistakes in the United States or some unexpected event like an oil shock.
There’s a tiny chance of a third scenario, which is really an unlikely fairytale ending to this year’s downturn. In this scenario, emerging markets would resume stellar growth and the developed world would revert back its long-term average growth.
In the chart below, you can find the exact probabilities I’m assigning to the three scenarios as well as the investment strategy I favor for each.
In a world where so many different outcomes are possible, investors should consider building a portfolio that represents the two scenarios they believe are most likely. This essentially means having two portfolios, with each one weighted roughly inline with the odds of the scenario.
The portfolio could be adjusted over the course of 2012 as signs of the various scenarios — such as progress on a European fiscal union and European Central Bank bond purchases (see my Market Perspectives for more signs) — play out.
If your investing timeframe is longer than one year, consider lowering exposure to Treasuries and raising exposure to global mega caps.
There’s always the chance that events will happen that will change the global economy in unforeseen ways. For instance 2011’s unexpected events included devastation in Japan, a spike in crude oil prices, and a near perfect streak of policy missteps in Europe and the United States. These unpredictable developments turned what was predicted to be a difficult year into an excruciating one.
But the portfolio ideas below could at least help you prepare for the wide range of scenarios that can be predicted today.
[click to enlarge]
In addition to the normal risks associated with investing, international investments may involve risk of capital loss from unfavorable fluctuation in currency values, from differences in generally accepted accounting principles or from economic or political instability in other nations. Emerging markets involve heightened risks related to the same factors as well as increased volatility and lower trading volume. Securities focusing on a single country may be subject to higher volatility. Bonds and bond funds will decrease in value as interest rates rise. An investment in the Fund(s) is not insured or guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or any other government agency.
Investors should consult with their financial advisor prior to implementing any investment strategy. | <urn:uuid:b9e43c85-9964-4198-92f0-2debb093824d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://seekingalpha.com/article/317615-portfolio-strategies-for-3-possible-2012-economic-scenarios | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949296 | 642 | 1.671875 | 2 |
ELON, N.C. -- Erin O'Connell took the tour this week at Elon University, a handsome, up-and-coming college with a $31,000-a-year price tag. That's hefty -- but $20,000 less than some "uppity" schools she may have to cross off her list.
"I'm going to be pulling out my hair to make ends meet," said the high school senior from suburban Boston. "I'll apply for anything and everything I possibly can." As for more expensive schools, she said: "While the title would be nice, I might not get out with both arms and both legs."
It's prime college-visiting season for the high school class of 2009, which next fall will send the greatest number of graduates on to college in American history. But the souring economy and the crisis on Wall Street are shrinking families' college savings, and some parents wonder whether they will be able to afford tuition at the schools their youngsters are looking at.
Around the country, students deciding where to apply may have to scale back their dreams. Some private schools worry they could lose business to public universities. Already, federal loan applications are up, and some schools are seeing more aid inquiries.
Most students won't decide on their college plans for six months. But a recent survey of 2,500 users of the Web site meritaid.com found 57 percent of students were considering a less prestigious school for money reasons. In a similar study by Applywise.com and Next Step Magazine this week, 50 percent of families reported limiting their children's college choices to less expensive options.
Because of plummeting housing prices, many families can no longer count on the equity in their homes to help them pay for tuition. Meanwhile, 529 college savings plans have been hit hard in the stock market. A year ago, they held a combined $110 billion. Preliminary figures from Financial Research Corp. show the value of 529s declined 9 percent last quarter even with new money coming in -- and that was before last week's slump on Wall Street.
"We're revisiting their overall financial plans," said Ivan Nalibotsky of Capital Solutions Group, a college financial planning service in Bethesda, Md. "In many cases folks are going to have to be dipping into some of their own personal resources, and reevaluating their personal retirement goals in order to get the kids the four or five years of education they planned."
One of his clients now plans to start at a community college and transfer to the University of Maryland rather than going straight to a four-year private college.
Some parents are hoping to secure financial aid, something they previously assumed they didn't need or couldn't get.
"We haven't qualified before. We might now," said Betty Morris of West Chester, Pa., who was touring Elon this week with her son Jack.
The good news for such families is that the college financial aid system is in many ways tilted toward higher-income families, thanks to tuition tax breaks and financial aid that is based on merit, not need. At Elon, for instance, about 40 percent of the 5,000 students get merit aid.
When it comes to need-based aid, many middle-income families underestimate their chances and focus too much on the "list price." A large number of schools have substantially expanded aid in the past few years. At many highly competitive colleges, families earning $80,000 typically pay no more than half price.
A few prestigious schools that cost $50,000 or more a year have made more aid available to families earning well into six figures. At Princeton, for instance, virtually all families earning as much as $200,000 qualify for grants covering half of tuition or more.
O'Connell's mother, Rosemary O'Connell, an executive assistant at a financial firm, said: "We'll do what we can for her. We don't want her to graduate $200,000 in debt."
Parents' college savings funds are taking a hit at the same time many schools' endowments are being eroded by the downturn in the stock market. Colleges rely on their endowments for financial aid.
"It won't be an impossible problem for Harvard, Pomona, Princeton, but a lot of other colleges will find it hard to provide the same level of aid as in the past," said Robert Shireman of the California-based Institute for College Access and Success.
Ultimately, many parents will simply stretch and borrow. Higher education is so important to many families, it often doesn't obey the laws of supply and demand.
"They always said, 'You pick the school, we'll figure out the money,"' Emily Schroeder of Baltimore, who is applying to Elon this year, said of her parents. Her mother, Judy, said price is a consideration but not the biggest one.
"It's her future and I want her to be happy and I want the fit to be right," she said. "If it cots a little more money, that's OK."
The other option: be very smart, or very lucky. Only one parent on the Elon tour looked fully at ease -- Pat O'Hara of Richmond, Va., who was visiting with daughter Lindsey. Cost really isn't a factor, he said: "I moved all into cash about six months ago."
On the Net: | <urn:uuid:f077194a-dc27-4a19-9433-d5d764ce468d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.mlive.com/kalamazoo_gazette_extra/2008/10/as_economy_swoons_parents_fret.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977381 | 1,107 | 1.625 | 2 |
Shift-to-thrift warning falls on attentive ears
'People with debt are rushing to pay it off. Businesses have been doing their bit, too.'
TWO years ago, when the China boom was gathering momentum and people were talking about ''permanently'' higher commodity prices, Glenn Stevens offered some advice.
It might be ''prudent'', to save the bulk of our commodities windfall, the Reserve Bank governor suggested.
Sounds sensible. But central bankers are always saying that kind of thing, only to be ignored, right?
Since then, the economy has been whacked by a global slump, the eurozone crisis has worsened, and budget revenue has been written down by tens of billions.
The original mining tax from 2010 was meant to raise $12 billion over two years. Now there are doubts the more industry-friendly version will hit its lowered forecast of $6.5 billion over three years. So surely, it would be fair to assume Stevens' tip was overlooked, or at least overtaken by events.
Well, guess what? The country has indeed followed the governor's advice, at least to some extent.
But instead of saving more of the proceeds of the boom through the budget, it's been done by private citizens and businesses.
This is not the dominant story we hear, which criticises the eight years of pre-GFC tax cuts under the Howard and Rudd governments that were funded by an earlier phase of our commodity windfall.
As Stevens pointed out in a speech last week, however, the country has, in fact, been saving more of its natural resource pay cheque these past few years, even if the Commonwealth budget hasn't. For households, this extra saving has made cutting debt and slowing spending much less painful than it would have been otherwise.
When talking about national saving, it's easy to confuse the behaviour of the government with that of the whole economy. By this logic, if the budget is in deficit, it must mean the whole country is somehow failing in its financial management.
Opposition parties like to spread this misconception by conflating budget deficits with ''pain for all Australian families'', as Joe Hockey put it last month. But this narrow focus overlooks a huge shift in household behaviour.
In the mid-2000s, the average household was spending more than it earned (negative saving) thanks to soaring asset prices and growing use of debt. Now, we save a more respectable 10 cents in every dollar.
In a sign of this caution, the share of household financial assets held in term deposits has almost doubled since the GFC to 14 per cent, its highest level since the late 1990s.
People with debt are rushing to pay it off. Half of all mortgage borrowers are ahead of their repayment schedule - and 30 per cent of those have a buffer of two years or more. Businesses have been doing their bit, too.
Barclays economist Kieran Davies reports that business term deposits as a share of corporate profits are at a record high of 72 per cent - double the pre-crisis average.
Non-bank companies have funded about 10 per cent of their growth from retained earnings, up from 7.5 per cent before the GFC.
All this saving is easy to overlook, because it's taking place across millions of households and firms.
The budget deficit, on the other hand, is given huge amounts of attention by the media. And at $43.7 billion last financial year, it is without question, a big number.
But the undeniable fact is that national saving HAS been much higher in recent years.
According to Stevens, we are saving the highest share of national income since the late 1980s. Luckily, this shift to thrift occurred as we were getting a free kick to our incomes from rising export prices.
Even people working in industries unrelated to mining have benefited indirectly through the higher dollar, which increases everyone's purchasing power.
This income boost was unrelated to the sudden move towards greater household caution. All the same, it made for a smoother transition to an environment of slower spending growth and increased saving.
''Given that the change to household behaviour was probably inevitable, the income boost from the terms of trade arrived at a rather fortuitous time,'' Stevens says.
''It helped to accommodate a rise in household saving and a slowdown in the build-up of debt in a fairly benign fashion.''
So to claim that Australia has simply squandered the boom is a tad simplistic. Despite the failure to save much when commodity prices surged between 2002 and 2008, and despite the mining tax disappointment, we've done a better job at saving in recent years. And this has made the economy more stable.
But the bigger question still is whether we've taken full advantage of this one-off boom in a way that will benefit future generations.
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry said last week there was a good chance we'd be importing many natural resources by the end of this century.
''Australians of the future will identify this generation as that which extracted unparalleled monetary reward from the continent's natural resources; a monetisation of non-renewable resources unmatched in any previous generation, and unlikely to be matched in any that follows,'' he said,
Saving more of the resources windfall was one of many things Henry said we should be doing to ensure a lasting legacy. He also named priorities such as ''path-breaking'' investment in science, ''high-yielding'' investment in human capital, and deepening links with our regional neighbours.
Compared with these lofty goals, putting a bit more of each pay cheque into the mortgage or savings account seems pretty small. But at least it's a start.
Ross Gittins is on leave. | <urn:uuid:80971480-7215-41a0-bafa-6ab046d339b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.canberratimes.com.au/business/shifttothrift-warning-falls-on-attentive-ears-20121125-2a1fn.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970365 | 1,176 | 1.59375 | 2 |
|Uploaded:||December 24, 2012|
|Updated:||December 25, 2012|
Well guys, before I get into the days' first tutorial, I wanted to wish everyone a happy holiday, Merry Christmas, and happy new year. I found out yesterday that Disney Animated Studios is coming out with a new film based on Hans Christian Anderson's book “The Snow Queen”. It's called Frozen and it's due to be in theaters November of 2013. In this lesson we will be learning "how to draw Kristoff", step by step. Kristoff is a mountain man, his reindeer and snowman. All the characters probably have a likable quality to them, but there is only three main characters that will actually talk. The reindeer and snowman will be voiceless. Kristoff is going to be voiced by Johnathan Groff. I like the looks of Kristoff, and drawing him will be a breeze. I will be back soon with more tuts for you all on this Christmas day. I think you will find that drawing Frozen characters will be as fun as making pie. Adios people. | <urn:uuid:0841751a-d920-4db5-8d90-f4ddab2f0ca4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dragoart.com/tuts/14573/2/1/124163/how-to-draw-kristoff,-kristoff-from-frozen-step-1.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958999 | 233 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Apple announced today that that would pay a dividend of $2.65 a share and buy back $10 Billion in stock. Both are bad moves. I am not bullish on Apple stock, even as it soars in price and the company makes record profits.
By the way, the idiot media, on NPR, reports this as a "first ever dividend!" for Apple. Nice way to do your homework, NPR! But Apple did pay dividends, back in the day when it thought it was successful and would be, forever. Times changed, and they stopped paying dividends. Now they are, again.
But to the eighth-graders running NPR, well, that was before they were born, so it doesn't count, I guess.
What could possibly go wrong with Apple? Everything.
To begin with, buying back the stock is problematic. At the current stock price, they are buying back shares at the highest possible price. Ford did this, when it was soaring at $40 a share, and as a shareholder, I thought, "Great, this will make the price go even higher!" It did not. In fact, it dropped to about $8 a share and stayed there, as the market for highly profitable jumbo SUVs dried up and people realized that paying $10,000 more for a pickup truck with a seat in the back was idiotic. As I noted in another posting, buying back stock is one way a company can pay shareholders - by increasing the values of shares. But there are other reasons to do this as well - to pay back high-level employees.
In this instance, they are buying back shares only to prevent the stock from being diluted. Huh? Well, it turns out, they owe their employees a lot of money - in the form of stock options. And as the company grants those options and churns out more shares, the price-per-share will go down, making the stock options worth less.
Hmmmm...... So, buying back shares shores up the price, making stock options worth more. Who makes this decision? The guy getting the stock option. Who wins? You, the little guy who bought 10 shares of Apple? No. The Executive who exercises his option and cashes in on a million shares - which chumps like you and me buy, because the new iPad makes us wet.
In other words, they are using this huge war chest of money to pay themselves on the inside. They can't just hand themselves bonus after bonus - that would be unseemly. But a previously promised stock option? What is the harm in that? Just be sure to spike the share price and you are sure to cash in, big time.
So while these announcements might sound like "good news" for shareholders, they really aren't. The dividend works out to a paltry 1.8% at the current price. As they buy up more shares and the price tops $600 a share, this dividend will shrink in value further. In other words, if you are buying this stock for the dividend, you might as well buy Treasury Bonds. They at least pay 2-4%, depending on term.
I won't repeat the comments made in my previous post. Bottom line is that proprietary "sealed box" technology is never going to take the world by storm, unless it is a government-granted monopoly like the phone company used to be. People will gravitate toward cheaper pad devices running more open-sourced software, such as Android. And eventually, the apps for such open-sourced or open architecture will outnumber that for Apple - just as it did for the Apple computer and Mac.
Apple's basic business model dictates that it will always be a margin player. The market abhors monopolies, cartels, single-source technology, sealed-box technology, and the like. And yet, this is Apple's primary business model - you buy it all from us, and tough shit if you don't like the price. IBM did this for decades - but eventually, it too, fell victim to the marketplace, ironically as the result of a product it introduced - the IBM PC.
And no, the competition isn't sitting idly by and saying, "Gosh, golly, gee-whiz, I only wish we could make a competing product to the iPad! But we're too dumb and lazy to do so!" No, that isn't going to happen. No, they are going to bring out competing devices at prices closer to their actual value and cost. Just as the jumbo profits on SUVs encouraged competition from Japan and Europe, the same will be true in the pad market. Apple has a head-start, but others will quickly catch up, as they already have in the smart phone segment.
Apple products are expensive and just not that great. The vaunted interface is clumsy, and if anything breaks, well, you have to send it back to the factory for repair. Most people want something cheaper and easier to use.
I suspect that 2012 will be a banner year for Apple. The stock will likely soar to $600 a share or more - based on the dreams of small investors who see the big profits but not the big picture. But the problem with banner years is, what's next? They cannot grow the market share without bringing down prices - which in turn reduces margins and profitability. They have to come up with a "next big thing" and it is hard to fathom what that could be.
If you buy Apple at $600 a share, you may be buying at the peak - like buying gold at $1800.
The secret in investing, is not to pick winners who have already won, but to pick the companies that are on their way up, or have a steady history of growth. Long-term, such stocks increase in value and rate of return.
Buying the peak of the mountain leaves you nowhere to climb. And often, particularly with tech stocks, they can fall quite a long way. | <urn:uuid:644d62c6-902e-43aa-8c24-ee5a826522d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2012/03/why-i-am-bearish-on-apple.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974383 | 1,233 | 1.59375 | 2 |
I have to admit I had a hollow feeling when I read about the speech Mayor Finizio gave at a weekend ceremony held in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King.
The mayor talked about his own experience in civil rights, as a gay man, and said over the years he has tried to "strike down discrimination wherever it could be found."
And yet it was only last week that I had spoken to the mayor about his firing in December of the first black firefighter recruit hired by the city in more than 30 years, someone who might have finally begun to tip, ever so slightly, the racial balance in the largely white department.
The mayor's excuses for supporting the fire chief's decision to uphold the predominately white face of the department struck me as extraordinarily thin. He referred to a still-passing test score of 79 and some minor discipline at the state firefighting academy, where the recruit, Alfred Mayo, was the only black in a class of 48.
Apparently, the worst offense involved Mayo being accused of writing the name of the class in small letters in wet cement in a fresh section of new sidewalk.
Mayo denied the cement writing, although evidently his admission that he did tell another recruit, who confessed to a similar writing-in-cement incident, that he should not have admitted guilt, was, in the end, held against him. (A copy of a report on the strange cement incident appears online with the column.)
Before I read Mayor Finizio's grand remarks about striking "down discrimination wherever it could be found," I had just finished reading an email I had received from Mayo.
He sent along some quotes from a letter he wrote to his uncle right after he was escorted off the academy grounds, in the wake of his firing by the New London fire chief and mayor.
I hate to admit to being a softie, but it struck me as an especially sad moment.
"I NEVER ever said a cuss word out loud at the academy but upon being walked out I wanted to and (I FEEL) I had every right to cuss out those instructors so bad for what was happening, but I am so respectful that I still said 'sir' and spoke respectfully the whole time . . .
"I know you can guess what I felt like but I assure you it was worse," Mayo wrote in describing his departure.
"I was humiliated more than I have ever been in my life. I had a state police man walking right next to me like I was a damn criminal. When I went and shook EVERY instructor's hand as I left, he was right behind me.
"The guys I grew close to saw the tears in my eyes and one good friend had one in his eyes as we caught eye contact.
"I wanted so bad to give him a hug but I kept my head up high and walked across the street to my car then drove off, while the state cop and those two instructors who made my time there a living hell watched me."
He went on to write that he doesn't want to sue the city. He just wants his job back.
Maybe, as time goes on, we will know more about what happened to the city's first black firefighter recruit in more than 30 years.
It is sure beginning to look, based on what's on the record, like discrimination that ought to be struck down wherever it's found.
This is the opinion of David Colllins | <urn:uuid:5db5b509-5f8e-4c70-895b-9f0faf855eec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://theday.com/article/20120118/NWS05/301189940/1069/rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989672 | 703 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Pinups on the warehouse wall. A pat on the fanny at the water cooler. Sexy remarks in the hallway. Innocent enough, you may think. But such practices can make your company an uncomfortable place for many of your employees. So uncomfortable, in fact, that you are running the risk of being sued if you choose to ignore what the courts call a sexually hostile environment.
It was nearly a year ago, in June 1986, that the U.S. Supreme Court, in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, confirmed what some lower courts around the country have told employers for years: if your employees have to contend with sexual innuendo as part of the daily nine-to-five, your company -- not just the offending employee -- could be held liable for violating federal and some state laws against sexual harassment. An employee no longer has to show a tangible loss, such as missing out on a promotion or losing a job, to win a sexual-harassment case. A hostile or offensive work environment can be grounds for a successful lawsuit.
What some people might think of as mere pranks -- exposing undershorts covered with hearts, for example -- the courts may call sexual harassment. Requiring an employee to wear a uniform because of his or her sex can be the basis for a sexual-harassment claim, whether the employee is a bank teller, bartender, elevator operator, or whatever.
Of course, not every dirty joke amounts to sexual harassment. Courts recognize that antidiscrimination laws aren't intended to mandate clean language. When do sexually aggressive words, touching, flashing, or the prominent display of girlie posters and the like cross the line from legally accpetable behavior to sexual harassment for which you may be legally liable? That's exactly the rub: courts will continue to decide case by case. If I had to give you a rule of thumb, I'd suggest you put yourself in the shoes of those likely to be harassed by what they encounter on the job. Is unwelcome sexual innuendo more than trivial or occasional? Does it significantly color the work environment?
While the Meritor Savings Bank case extended employer liability by one measure, it has also offered employers greater protection. Until Meritor, many courts around the country had said that you as a top manager are always responsible if one of your managers or supervisors creates a hostile working environment, even though you may have known nothing about the problem. In the Meritor case, the Supreme Court decided that whether or not you'll be held responsible depends on the particular circumstances. Three issues are likely to be critical:
1. Did your managers use the stature that comes from their jobs to create the hostile environment, or was their behavior purely personal?
2. Did you know about the problem -- or should you have known about it -- and did you take effective action to stop it?
3. Did you have a well-articulated grievance procedure that made it reasonably easy for employees to discuss sexual harassment with managers who could do something about it?
The dollar consequences of losing a sexual-harassment claim can be substantial even when the victim is an employee with limited earning power. In addition to back pay, an employee can seek actual damages, which may include pain and suffering, and punitive damages. The court can also order you to change the way you run your business. It may require that you hire extra managers, for example, or that you separate certain workers from one another.
Your best protection against claims, of course, is to be genuinely concerned about your employees and to do what you can to make your company a good place for people to work. And that probably includes not only a particular attitude on your part, but also a program to prevent sexual harassment. Here are some suggestions:
* Discuss the issue of sexual harassment with all employees and advise them that harassing another employee violates federal law and, in some situations, state law.
Make sure your employees understand what sexual harassment includes. It will probably come as a surprise to many that offensive words and pictures can be illegal. Announce -- and post -- a clear policy stating that victims will get help and offenders will be disciplined. It's not enough just to have a policy, however; you must enforce it as well. The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, had a policy forbidding sexual harassment and even had seminars for its supervisors. It lost a case brought against it, however, because it was clear from the testimony in court that the policy wasn't effective enough. The managers knew about the harassment and even participated in it.
* Establish a procedure that harassed employees can use to get help from management. It should provide for quick action and confidentiality, and it should ensure that any employee can easily speak to a manager not involved with the harassment.
Just having a general procedure isn't good enough. The Meritor Bank had an established grievance procedure, but the plaintiff was afraid she'd lose her job if she used it, and the court deemed it ineffective. One fatal flaw: the plaintiff would have had to take her complaint to the manager who was harassing her. A procedure doesn't have to be complicated to be effective. You may send a letter to all employees advising them of your policy on sexual harassment. Tell them if they're concerned about this problem, they needn't go through usual reporting procedures. They can talk to anyone in management. In addition, you may want to identify one person whom they can contact about sexual-harassment claims, so employees who may be timid about raising the issue will have an easy entry into the management hierarchy.
To help assure a speedy response, give your managers deadlines. For instance, require that they begin their investigation within 24 hours after receiving a complaint about sexual harassment. At a minimum, this would mean meeting with a harassed employee, discussing the situation, and identifying other people to talk with.
* Meet with all managers to remind them of their special responsibility to guard against sexual harassment.
Make sure your managers understand the different kinds of behavior that can support a sexual-harassment claim. A single mention of their responsibilities probably won't do. Just as with other legal responsibilities, such as complying with labor laws and race- and age-discrimination laws, management must be aware of the need for constant vigilance against sexual harassment. Provide for periodic review of management obligations, such as the need to be reasonably well informed about what goes on among nonmanagerial employees -- your potential liability isn't limited to actions by a management employee. You also can be hit with claims if one worker sexually harasses another.
Whatever steps your managers take can't be halfhearted if they're to be effective or to stand up in court. The West Bend Co., for example, lost a sexual-harassment suit even though its supervisors had held a few general meetings to explain the company's policy against abusive language and offensive posters targeted at one employee. What they didn't do was address her specific complaints directly.
* Promptly investigate any claims of sexual harassment or situations that indicate an employee may be subject to sexual harassment.
Your managers may feel squeamish about talking with a concerned employee -- the easiest reaction for them may be to joke about the problem and hope it will go away. Or they may tell the employee to handle it one way or another, or to tough it out. Managers may even make their own assumptions about what's going on and decide that the employee "deserves" whatever sexually provocative behavior he or she is concerned about. This kind of reaction on their part could lead to a law-suit against you.
Approach a complaint about sexual harassment systemically, as you would less emotional problems. Arrange for private conferences and learn the facts. Ask the harassed employee to be as specific as possible about what happened, when, and where. Determine whether other employees may have witnessed the incidents described. Conduct confidential discussions with accused employees.
When there are no witnesses to help resolve conflicting stories, the best step may be to separate involved employees by giving them different assignments. But be careful: if you move an employee to a less desirable position after a complaint about sexual harassment, you may be charged with unlawfully retaliating against the employee for exercising his or her rights.
* Provide for a quick remedy if sexual harassment is confirmed.
The severity of a remedy will depend on circumstances. Merely reprimanding an employee may be enough. Separating employees may resolve a situation. Firing the offender may be the only choice, but again, be careful. You may be subject to legal action by the fired employee. One manager who had been demoted because of a sexual-harassment claim was reinstated when a court decided his comments to another employee were trivial incidents in an otherwise completely professional relationship that had to be judged in context -- the complaining employee often called him at home late at night to discuss her personal problems.
An adequate remedy must also consider the harassed employees who may need extra help. Their performance may have suffered, or they may have lost time from work, and you may have to compensate for this by providing back pay or extra training.
It's possible, of course, they you'll do all that is in your power to provide a good working environment and still be sued for sexual harassment. If that's the case, you have a handful of defenses.
It didn't happen. Seldom do employees venture a complete fabrication, but I've seen cases in which an emotionally disturbed employee has just imagined things. Whenever you are alerted to the possibility that an employee is being sexually harassed, however, your first step is to investigate. Dismissing an employee's concerns as trivial before you get the facts is sure to count against you.
It happened, but it was part of a consensual relationship. Courts may be wary of this defense. Because an employee submits to a supervisor's or co-worker's aggression doesn't make the relationship consensual.
It happened, but it was trivial. Even a single incident may be enough to give an employee reason to complain about sexual harassment, but courts have found that a comment on someone's physique, an off-color joke, or even a little touching doesn't add up to sexual harassment when a long relationship between the employees involved had otherwise been entirely professional, and when the affected employee had admittedly been rewarded for professional performance.
It happened, but I didn't condone it, and there was no way I could have known about it. This will be especially tough to prove if the offending employee is a supervisor or manager. Generally, since you've given these people substantial authority over other employees, you'll be held responsible for how they use their power. Courts will consider such points as how prominent the behavior was, how long it had been going on, whether other employees were aware of it, whether the victimized employee tried to talk to management about the problem, and whether you make it reasonably easy for employees to talk about such problems.
It happened, but I made a real effort to correct the problem as soon as I learned of it. Courts will ask if you learned about the problem as soon as you should have, and whether your efforts were effective. They're likely to consider whether you disciplined the offender, how you responded to the victim, and whether you've made reasonable efforts to prevent similar problems in the future. | <urn:uuid:eca837d4-0bba-4abd-813f-ee505e9898ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.inc.com/magazine/19870501/1182_Printer_Friendly.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973481 | 2,295 | 1.601563 | 2 |
One of the most distinctive qualities of Jews everywhere in the world has always been our ability to disagree and remain in dialogue. That is, we argue but stick together. Jewish families are typically loud, contentious, and verbally energetic. Jewish organizations are active, engaged, and often contentious. But we have an ability, after thousands of years of overcoming adversity, to pull together in spite of our many, many differences. Most of the time.
I was reflecting on this fact of Jewish life the last few days. In truth, both in our homes and in our organizational life, we often sound like we are engaged in something closer to courtroom combat than the loving and harmonious lives that we aspire to living. This friction is something typical of every Jewish group I have ever had the privilege of being a part of, and to someone not initiated into the verbal thrust-and-parry natural to Jews it can seem that there is real animosity when the situation is quite different than that at heart. It’s just that in Jewish life everyone considers himself or herself to be an expert on, well, everything, and when you get more than one maven in a room at the same time he or she is each certain to be certain that they are right about everything, or at least whatever it is you are talking about at the moment.
This verbal vigor is a great shock to those not raised in loud Jewish homes, and it inevitably leads some people to conclude that Jews are the most difficult, contentious lot ever formed by God. And that’s not counting how it is to be part of a Jewish organization or organizational leadership, which frequently seems a great deal like herding cats…
But the real point is not that we Jews can argue; everyone knows that. It’s that in spite of these arguments we are able to overcome our differences and work together to accomplish really great things. And that underneath the dispute of the moment we fully understand that we are not really fully breiges with anyone, that we intend to remain in conversation and dialogue and community no matter what we may say in the heat of the moment. Real Jewish identity means understanding that we can disagree and yet remain connected. | <urn:uuid:08dc0e8d-2192-4ae3-808b-23c24cddd895> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.templeemanueltucson.org/about-us/our-staff/cohon-blog | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97342 | 444 | 1.828125 | 2 |
All those new year’s resolutions we’re attempting to make good on right now really boil down to one thing: the desire to be happy. Happy with how we look, how we feel, how we relate, how we live. Research indicates that we humans are not so great at predicting what will make us happy; Malouf goes the other way around to root out the causes of our stress and trace the evolution of our definitions of happiness and contentment.
If you favor a cross-disciplinary approach to tackling life’s big questions, you’ll appreciate the combination of philosophy, theology, art, literature, and mythology Malouf brings to this latest exploration of the pursuit of happiness.
You needn’t have read the first thirteen books in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series to know that this, the fourteenth and final book, is a big freaking deal. Indeed, I haven’t. The conclusion of a beloved series is always newsworthy, and this one is even more so because Jordan, the series’ creator, died in 2007, leaving many fans fearing the story would never be concluded.
Brandon Sanderson stepped in to finish the job, and if his spots atop the NYT bestsellers list for books 12 and 13 are any indication, he hasn’t let fans down. This is one of the year’s most anticipated books, and I’ll be watching eagerly to see how readers respond.
It is one thing to talk about the value and importance of friendships between women and another thing entirely to offer up one’s own friendships–the successes, the failures, the warmth, and the wrongdoing–by way of example and exploration. To do the latter requires guts, candor, and a willingness to expose one’s own weaknesses and mistakes. Sonnenberg rises to the challenge beautifully and with remarkable grace in She Matters. She recalls “the deeply known friend” to whom she could say absolutely anything without fear of judgment. “She showed me how simple: you witness and love, and you feel loved.” There’s the friendship that felt perfect at the time but reveals itself as uneven and not nearly reciprocal upon reflection; the college friendship that doesn’t hold up under real-world pressure; the mature and shifting relationships that mark adult life; and many more.
The “she” hovering over all these stories is Sonnenberg’s mother–their fraught relationship is the subject of her previous memoir Her Last Death–whose ideas and lessons prove difficult to overcome and re-wire. This is a book about the family we’re born into and the families we choose. It’s about one woman’s attempts to create healthy and satisfying friendships after a dysfunctional childhood, and the universal lessons we can learn from her. It’s about heartbreak and disappointment and quiet hurt. And, happily, it’s about the rare and wonderful magic of life-changing, life-sustaining friendships and the powerful bonds between women. Buy this. Read it. Buy copies for the women who make your life better. Read it again. Highly recommended.
Liberty discussed this in her preview of books to watch for in January and described it as “Intense, linked stories, revolving around women and the damage in their lives.” That’s a perfect description, so rather than reinventing the wheel, I’ll add my voice to the chorus of early praise for this collection.
Steinberg’s short stories read like a combination of fiction and poetry I’ve not encountered anywhere else–they’re haunting and gorgeous and painful and so, so spare–and I found a new reason to be in awe of her on every page. The second story, “Underfed,” is particularly dazzling. A single, pages-long sentence comprised of countless clauses separated by colons, semicolons, commas and connected by ideas and heart, it is WOW.
I would lie on the grass; I would consider stars; I would consider my size; I would consider how the world began; it began, as you know, as a spark; and I began, as well, as a spark; and then everything grew; and a lot of things happened; and a lot more things happened; and the future was the present; and the present was a battle in my head; it was another line for me to cross…
See what I mean? | <urn:uuid:3aad5c92-366b-4fc6-be32-10088c9bb907> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bookriot.com/2013/01/08/fresh-ink-new-books-out-today-january-8-2012/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951357 | 934 | 1.578125 | 2 |
By KEVIN CLARK
The moment before an NFL quarterback snaps the football has always been a golden opportunity to play head games.
In most cases, a quarterback will shout a pattern of words that make no sense on their face, but serve as a form of code. These codes can communicate something as simple as telling the center when to snap the ball, or as complex as changing the play to something else.
In the last year, however, there has been a development that is unprecedented in the long history of quarterback signal calling. Thanks to a change in the way television broadcast microphones are positioned on the field, these strings of code that quarterbacks and linemen shout out before the snap are being relayed directly to the ears of millions of fans—and all of the team's future opponents. Realizing their code languages may be compromised week to week, quarterbacks have taken the only avenue available to them: speaking total gibberish.
To camouflage what they're trying to do, all of the NFL's biggest-name quarterbacks are employing a string of random, nonsensical shouts that make them sound, at times, like 1-year olds.
"The quarterback gets up there and they get to talking about anything," said Oakland Raiders safety Tyvon Branch, who said the difference this season is palpable. "You'll hear the quarterback yelling off a lot of random stuff. I'm like, 'All that can't mean anything.' They'll yell 'Blue 80, set, wait wait, check check check' and you know they aren't checking anything."
Prior to the 2011 season, NFL umpires, who wore microphones and doubled as the network's boom operators, captured on-field sounds from their convenient position behind the linebackers. But when the officials were repositioned for safety reasons, the league needed to preserve its close-to-the-action sound. The easiest solution was to place microphones on offensive linemen. Today, all starting guards or centers now must wear a microphone, and all the once-muted pre-snap chatter has become public knowledge, whether teams like it or not.
Not surprisingly, players say that the best NFL quarterbacks are also the best at disguising what they'll do—be it to a viewer at home or to the defensive linemen five feet away.
"It's kind of a funny thing. I watched the Patriots game the other day. Tom Brady always used to say 'Omaha' and that meant the ball was going to be snapped on 'set-hut.' Now he's saying 'Alpha,'" Dolphins guard Richie Incognito said. "I had a conversation with an offensive line coach the other day. They can hear everything. It's wide open. It's something that I don't like. It's something that I definitely think has changed the game. We're constantly going back over stuff and code words, I don't like other teams being able to hear what we're doing."
The secret language of the quarterback is vital to defense and offense alike. A pass-rusher could gain a massive advantage if he knows when the ball will be snapped, since he can start moving toward the quarterback a split-second faster than usual without jumping offsides. The quarterback, of course, has a much simpler goal: making sure he gets rid of the ball before the oncoming 300-pound behemoth pounds him into the turf. In that scenario, even a half a second is crucial.
Many teams now give their defenders recorded broadcasts, the kind millions watch at home, with the idea that they'll crank up the volume and be able to study an opponent's calls.
As a countermeasure, Incognito readily admits that teams, including the Dolphins, like to toy with opponents who may be over-scouting the broadcasts. Players say that Baltimore's Joe Flacco and Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers are among the best in the league at taking advantage of overeager defenders.
So in this brave new world of openness, a few established stars rule. Daniel Muir, a veteran NFL defensive lineman, estimates that 80% of Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning's calls from the line of scrimmage are made up.
And though Manning was the master of the audible before the rule change, players say it has taken on a new importance.
"He'll bluff you just to do it because he knows he can," Muir said. "He's holding up two fingers. He's calling out all these colors, 'purple, blue.' The only time it's funny is when you see someone on TV jump [offsides] and you say, 'Ah, idiot,' but the fact of the matter is that you get out there on Sunday and it could happen to you and they'll be at home laughing at you."
Jets backup quarterback Greg McElroy, who acknowledged that being a modern-day NFL quarterback is akin to an acting gig, said there are also unwritten limits to what quarterbacks can say now that the whole world can hear everything. McElroy said that in high school in Texas and at the University of Alabama, away from live microphones, some of his snap counts "really got weird. We'd come up with some pretty insane stuff, mostly inside jokes."
Write to Kevin Clark at [email protected] | <urn:uuid:fa8f4571-307f-437b-9237-d54cc1d07924> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323353204578129381777622430.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_sports | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973092 | 1,079 | 1.695313 | 2 |
This article was originally published in the October 8, 1974 issue of the Boston Phoenix
“Moo is a cow
When she makes a bow
To a meadowful of hay;
Shoo is a hen
When she’s back again
And you want her to go away.
Peek-a-boo is maybe I don’t see you,
But I’m sure you can’t see me.
Splash is a stone
When a big one’s thrown
In a river or lake or sea.”
—from “Moo Is A Cow,”
a children’s song written by Father Leonard Feeney in 1945.
“You heard this filthy kike say that Jesus was not God. I ask God to punish this dirty Jew in a most conspicuous manner. I ask God to punish that cigar-chomping Catholic who stands next to that blaspheming Jew and does not lift a finger to protect Jesus and Mary.”
—the very same Father Leonard Feeney, responding to a heckler on Boston Common, July 10, 1956.
Leonard Feeney, a defrocked Jesuit priest and pretty much of a legend in this city as a result of the “sermons” he preached on the Common every Sunday without fail for eight years, from 1949 to 1957, attracting sometimes as many as a thousand people to heckle and to laugh as much as to listen—Father Leonard Feeney is in the news again.
He is being courted by the Catholic Church, the same church that silenced him 25 years ago and then excommunicated him for heresy four years later, his official sin being his dogged insistence that no one can achieve salvation outside the Church. Nearly two years ago the Vatican, through the quiet efforts of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, removed its censures from Feeney and 29 of his devoted followers, allowing them to partake once again of the sacraments of Roman Catholicism. And also allowing Feeney, once again, to perform his priestly functions with Papal approval.
All of which means little, probably, since Father Feeney has been performing such tasks for his hard core devotees—dubbed “Feeneyites” by the press in the ‘50s—all these years anyway. But to Feeney, now 76 years old and in the twilight of a bizarre lifetime of controversy, the last 17 years of which he has spent in virtual exile from all the rest of us damned non-believers, the removal of censure must be a real comfort. It means he will die within the official fold and it also holds the promise of eventual recognition by the Holy See of his monastic little band, calling themselves “Slaves of The Immaculate Heart of Mary.”
Hopefully, other Catholics will then be allowed to visit Feeney at his idyllic retreat in Harvard, Mass.
“It was an act of charity, you might say,” offered Brother Gabriel, a tall, pale, and sad-eyed Feeney follower, last week. “Since Vatican II [the Catholic Church’s effort to modernize itself in the early ‘60s], the extreme liberals in the church have been allowed to drift farther and farther to the left without censure—like the very liberal Dutch and German theologians. There is now, finally, a movement to give the same consideration to the right.” | <urn:uuid:63d14a9f-b3c4-4ff8-ad1f-00a50274c1c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/91119-father-feeney/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970499 | 734 | 1.820313 | 2 |
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|1584: Cathedral of the Annunciation, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
of the Annunciation, Ottawa,
Catholic Church of Canada, a member of the Traditional
A simple grey stucco building, dating from 1905, previously
owned by a West Indian congregation of the Church of God. It
lies on a modest plot in a residential neighbourhood, and thus
there are no church grounds to speak of. Inside is a tiny chapel,
with small, generic stained-glass windows. The chancel contains
no windows but is beautified by several icons, each illuminated
by a lamp. A room off to the side of the chancel houses the
small electric organ.
The congregation was established some 30 years ago by the Revd
(later Bishop) Carmino de Catanzaro, the former rector of St
Barnabas, the Diocese of Ottawa’s flagship Anglo-Catholic parish.
Father de Catanzaro was deeply concerned over such issues as
the ordination of women, the relaxation of rules around remarriage
after divorce, and the introduction of modern liturgies. Today
the church also takes a more conservative stance on homosexuality.
Three masses are celebrated every Sunday, along with the eucharist
and either morning or evening prayer on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
They also conduct Bible study sessions and both Alpha and Beta
The cathedral is near Ottawa’s Corso Italia, a neighbourhood
famous for its Italian heritage and events as well as top rate
restaurants and family owned businesses. Corso Italia attracts
an eclectic clientele, including politicians, hockey players
and movie stars.
The Revd Peter Jardine, curate, was the celebrant. The Rt Revd
Carl Reid, suffragan bishop and rector, was the homilist.
The date & time:
Sunday, 15 June 2008, 10.00am.
What was the name of the service?
How full was the building?
The tiny building was respectably full about three-quarters
Did anyone welcome you
A woman asked me if I needed a prayer book and leaflet, which
Was your pew comfortable?
The pews were extremely creaky.
How would you describe
the pre-service atmosphere?
My party and I got lost en route to the cathedral, and I'm afraid
we arrived late during the decalogue, of all things,
which we felt very embarrassed about interrupting as we settled
into our creaky pews.
What were the exact opening
words of the service?
"The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom then shall
I fear?" from the introit of the day.
What books did the congregation use during the
The Book of Common Prayer, in the Canadian edition
of 1962, and the English Hymnal were the main books.
Also available was the English Gradual (Part III: the
Proper), but the propers were included in a more convenient
leaflet. I was also given, but did not need, a booklet containing
the order of matins, evensong, and mass.
What musical instruments
An electric organ in a small side room that contained a window
through which the organist could see what was happening at the
altar. The organist played competently. The mass setting was
Willan’s Missa de Sancta Maria Magdalena, apart from
the Gloria and Creed (both from the Missa de Angelis)
and the Lord’s Prayer (Merbecke).
Did anything distract
Not adversely so. There were two children who made some noise (as can only be expected), but they were generally well-behaved.
Was the worship stiff-upper-lip,
happy clappy, or what?
The service was formal Anglo-Catholic it could be described
as stiff upper lip, but not in a bad way. The Book of Common
Prayer was followed rather faithfully, with the interpolation
of minor propers plus the Orate fratres before the
eucharistic prayer and the Ecce Agnus Dei before distribution
of communion. The epistle and gospel were chanted. The homilist
noted the lack of red-letter days in the ensuing week, and reminded
us that Friday is a day of abstinence. The bishop, vested in
rochet, mozzetta, and zucchetto, sat down on the floor to give
a children’s address before the sermon to two little girls who
had come forward.
Exactly how long was the
On a scale of 1-10, how good was the preacher?
6 Bishop Reid was well-spoken and his homily was doctrinally
rich, if not particularly polished.
In a nutshell, what was the sermon
Jesus’ parable about the blind leading the blind reminds us not to judge others, as we ourselves deserve judgment. Too often, the need for repentance is swept under the rug in our modern age, but it must not be neglected. Penitence, however, should not lead us to obsession or despair, but to joy in the infinite mercy of God.
Which part of the service was like being in
I was delighted that the chants were all congregational, unlike
many Anglo-Catholic churches with choirs that take much of the
service music. There was also a prolonged silence before the
communion rite, which was just what my restless soul needed.
Also, in a gesture that underlined how unsubtle our entrance
had been, the homilist opened by welcoming "our visitors."
And which part was like
being in... er... the other place?
I am not a fan of the great eucharistic intercession of the
Prayer Book ("Let us pray for the whole state
of Christ's Church and the world," etc.) on even my most
patient days, of which this was not one.
What happened when you
hung around after the service looking lost?
We queued up and greeted the bishop and curate (I kissed the
bishop’s ring), both of whom invited us to the reception downstairs.
The curate promised that "We actually have reasonably good
coffee." During mass I had whispered to a member of my
party that I needed him to taste the coffee for my report, and
I was afraid that the curate might have overheard me!
How would you describe the after-service
In a word: impressive. Coffee and orange juice, some excellent
miniature apple strudels, ham sandwiches on miniature croissants,
cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and a cake. Several people came to
chat with us and were happy to answer our questions about the
How would you feel about making this church your regular (where 10 = ecstatic, 0 = terminal)?
9 Despite some doctrinal differences, I would happily
attend mass here if I lived in Ottawa, and will be sure to return
when I find myself in town again.
Did the service make you feel glad to be a
It did. I thought the combination of high-churchery and hearty
congregational participation was perfect.
What one thing will you remember about all this in seven days' time?
The sight of the bishop, in full vestiture, sitting on the floor
for the children's sermon.
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I have been thinking back on my life and the changes I have seen in my 52+ years on this earth. Many, many technological changes have changed and enriched all of our lives, among other things.
But I was especially struck by the social changes. Many for the better, but some decidedly for the worst.
Clearly, in today's world, as opposed to the 1950s and 1960s when I was young, our nation has come to grips with itself and opened the door for opportunity to all people, regardless of race, or creed, or gender. Despite the fact that there are some people who still harbor, and probably always will, bigotry and hate in their hearts, the United States as a whole has opened the door for all people, whomever they be and wherever they come from, who legally reside here, to make the best of themselves and achieve good things for themselves and their families.
But we have also seen the pendulum swing too far in this regard. Others, who have behavioral and life style choices that are neither healthy for themselves or for society as a whole, or who are not here legally, want to push for and receive, in essence, civil right status so that they are free to practice and receive public aid for these choices that have nothing to do with race, creed, or their actual gender.
Overall, that discussion is left for another day, but let it be clearly understood, that this "entitlement" and "something for nothing" and "you must accept me regardless of my choice," attitude is neither healthy nor beneficial for society as a whole.
On the one hand, including everyone in their sincere and reasoned desires to achieve success in life regardless of race, creed, or gender, benefits society. Particularly as individuals seek to obtain that success according to the principles of liberty, hard work, responsibility and the free market we enjoy in this nation.
On the other hand, people who make bad life style and behavioral choices demanding to be included in the same, or those demanding the same while having no commottment to, or love for the principles of liberty, responsibility, hard work, and/or the free market to obtain it can be disastrous and destructive to society.
We see the seeds of both all around us today...and we also see their consequences.
Also make no mistake, that the enablers of the latter, particularly politicians and so-called journalists and educators, who promote such trends, do so for their own personal power, gain, and benefit, and are not doing so out of any commitment to, or desire to see the general welfare of our nation and society, or of those individuals, bettered.
This leads me to the real point of this article, a discussion of what I term to be the "Old School," and how and why it has been reviled and is fading in this nation, along with how and why it became the way of doing things...and what may lead to its re-establishment of it in our free society.
The Old School is typically associated with older men, who are felt to be far too severe, far too demanding, demeaning to others, and too chauvinistic in their outlook and their approach to life and life's issues.
Make no mistake, I am not speaking of the "Good Old Boy Network," which is much more akin to the enablers of what ills society today. I am speaking of the older, traditional way of doing things, and particularly of how men fit into that equation and why.
Such men are viewed in today's world as hopelessly out of touch with our modern "ethics" and ways of thinking. They are viewed as far too authoritative, and something to be ignored at best, or punished by society for their ways, using in the full force of law at worst.
Over my 52 years of life I have known many such individuals...and perhaps have been considered at times (particularly by my children when they were teenagers) to be one myself.
So be it.
I have thought long and hard about this.
I have thought about such men as "Dallas" (this was his nickname), an older gentleman who lived in a very small town near where I was raised near the Red River in Texas. Dallas was born in the 1880s. While he grew up as a young child, he and his family still feared and experienced occasional Indian raids from marauders along the Red River and its tributaries. He was raised by people who lived through major attacks, who witnessed men, woman, and children, being dismembered and violated in every imaginable way. Dallas was direct in his thought and in his action, even into his eighties and nineties when I knew him. In the 1970s there were those who joked about Dallas...behind his back.
I think of another individual with whom I am well acquainted. We will call him "The Rancher" who lived in North Texas. To this day the Rancher is thought of as too severe and opinionated. He is direct to the point of being in your face when you cross him. The Rancher never treated his wife or kids with what today's generation would consider great compassion or tender feeling. Some felt he was very demeaning to his wife...that he talked down to her...yet she was true to him and loved him deeply until the day that she died.
I think about one of my Uncles who was considered very similarly to the Rancher, who served in World War II and was not what some called "tender", who avoided emotion and spoke directly to his wife and children...and whose wife tenderly cared for him to his dying day.
Of my father, a World War II vet of the Pacific, God rest his soul. Who also was very direct, raised from colonial-day, seed stock in Alabama who then moved to Texas just before the war to attend college. My Dad was direct, he was demanding, he wore the "pants" in the family and everyone knew it.
I could go on.
I will admit as a teenager that I viewed my own Dad from time to time as too harsh and demanding. He was the king of the nest, king of his home. You did not argue with or cross my Dad. I cannot tell you how many times he would say to me, "Son, I don't want any argument from you, I want you to do what I say and act like your life depended on it."
I can remember asking myself as a young man, "What are you talking about? My life doesn't depend on this or that stupid chore you want me to do!"
But I did not argue because I know he would treat it that way, and would deal severely with any deviation or rebellion as if though it did.
Then I grew up.
Men like Dallas lived in a time when their very life did depend on doing what they were told. In the mid to late 1800s in parts of Texas, the consequences of not doing what severe men, who acted in their way out of love for their families and friends in directing them, were aptly displayed in butchered and violated, and dismembered corpses.
Men like my father and "the Rancher" were raised by such men, who in their own lifetimes had seen such things (in Worled War II and elsewhere)...and tried to pass it along to the rising generation. Men who took seriously, more seriously than emotion or the desire or need to be "liked", their duty to teach, raise, and protect their own.
Now, it has been well over a hundred years since we have experienced any large scale warfare associated with such butchery in this country...though we hear of criminal acts doing the same types of things all the time in large cities and other areas where the numbers actually exceed in total what produced the "Old School" over a hundred years ago and before. It's just that most of us do not experience ourselves or know of those who have.
The "Old School" went through a revitalization of sorts in the 1940s and 1950s because of the millions of men who experienced the same types of things in World War II and saw the results of such atrocities carried out in other lands where they fought and defeated ideologies that perpetrated such behavior.
My Dad, my Uncle, and the Rancher were some of those men. There were millions and millions of others. They were not only raised by parents and grand-parents who experienced it in this nation, they then witnessed it in warfare away from these shores.
Now we live in today's world.
Today uncompromising demands of fundamental principle are mistaken for demeaning. Straight, uncompromising talk about such things is mistaken for being "mean"...or at least labeled as such by many in our "post-modern" (whatever that is supposed to mean) society.
But my Dad not only was a man of the "Old School" himself, he warned his children, all four of his sons, about what our primary responsibilities were, the providing for and protection of our families and liberty, and that those responsibilities should never be influenced by emotion, or superficial issues. He was strict, he was straight, and he was demanding, and he also had great faith in God and Jesus Christ and was equally committed to those principles of charitable giving and work. As a result, over the years...particularl when I became older and could look at things more objectively, I came to know that he was not mean or demeaning in the least. He simply taught directly, through word and deed, that our primary responsibilities should be guided by unyielding, fundamental principle and by hard cold logic attendant to them.
I thank him for that knowledge in this time when principle is denied and ignored...or worse, trampled on and counted for naught, and when emotions rage in the hearts of men.
Please do not misunderstand or misconstrue me here. I do not condone actually demeaning or abusive behavior in the least. But I have come to recognize that some things that have nothing to do with those behaviors are labeled as such in today's world.
Today we face enemies who desperately want to come to these shores and inflict terrible, untold harm and atrocities on all of us. On our wives, children, the aged, and each one of us. These enemies have infiltrated us and are working tirelessly at weakening our resolve, and the underpinnings of our society. Some of them are religious fanatics in nature, others are ideological fanatics...all of them hate our liberty, our traditional life style, and want to destroy it and as many of us as possible in so doing, They buy up all sorts influence and so-called leaders (political, religious, and all sorts) with money, power, vice, and enticement.
All the while we have large parts of the media and other politicians who enable them, a media that lessens or hides their intentions and the things they perpetrate, and educators who would teach our very children that it is we ourselves who are to blame for people who want to kill and destroy us.
We had a fore-taste of the results of such attitudes and malaise on September 11th, 2001. We have seen it perpetuated in other countries ever since, most recently in Bombay (Mumbai), India.
Make no mistake...these enemies wish to perpetrate such evil on us right here in this nation again. They have been hurt by the Bush administration who, despite ravings against it, has taken the fight to the enemies in their own lands, freeing upwards of sixty million people in the process, and causing the leaders of these enemies to cower in holes in the ground because war has been waged against them abroad, and excellent intelligence work has rooted out and foiled their attempts here on our shores.
As compassionate a conservative as the Bush administration has been on other issues, they have been tenacious and decidedly "Old School" when it came to taking the fight to the terrorists...and the so-called progressive elements in this society have raged in fever pitch the entire time. But we are safer and better as a people because of that old school attitude of not giving in to such emotional and false flag arguments in the face of such evil...and say what they will, the fact remains...we have not been hit again by any major attack, despite the enemy's efforts tot he contrary.
I pray we as a people can continue in such a vein, but the new administration and a majority of people who elected them seem hell-bent on "change" in this regard.
Mark it well, such change will lead to more attacks. The enemy will be emboldened by any perceived weakness or retreat, and will take advantage of the lull.
We need the old school, and it may well take a horrible disaster, where millions of Americans become acutely aware of the hate and derangement of the enemy, and the futility of not being crystal clear, uncompromising, and unrelenting in our commitment to face them head on and protect our families, our life, and our liberty with ferocity and with strict determination.
May we re-adopt the old school in this regard, somehow short of that...and should we fail, may we as a people re-adopt it immediately upon suffering such a disaster because we let our guard down.
God bless the "Old School" when it comes to these issues. May we recognize and lift up such people when we see them. Thank them for their commitment and commit ourselves to being unflinching as they.
It was their attitudes, put into practice that defeated the abject enemies of German Nazism and Japanese Imperialism, and defeated them so soundly and thoroughly that those ideologies remain a hiss and a by word to this day. Those same commitments defeated the Communism of the Soviet Union...although the "Old School" was rapidly being watered down during that time, with the exception of its revitalization under Ronald Reagan....which revitalization occurred because of the misery that resulted in departing from those principles during the Carter years.
Perhaps, soon, we will see it re-emerge again. I pray that it is so.
Dragon's Fury - World War Against America and the West: Following great success in the War on Terror, politicians and analysts alike thought that future global conflict was impossible...but they were wrong. Journey into a possible future where Islamic terrorists sharpen their horrific skills & ally with Red China. In such a future, can the U.S. & western civilization survive?
The Stand at Klamatjh Falls: How rural western farmers and their supporters stood up to entrenched environmentalism, activist judges, and agencies of the Federal Government in southwestern Oregon...and prevailed. | <urn:uuid:3b132ae9-e002-4c56-aaf9-486fa5582a88> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jeffhead.com/oldschool.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984875 | 3,040 | 1.695313 | 2 |
I spent the morning recently checking on a garden for refugee children-of-war. The last time I saw it was maybe six weeks ago, and I was nervous to see it again. We had not created the garden with Farmer D products due to budgetary constraints, although we did top it off with enough Farmer D nourishment to get through a decent spring harvest. It had been performing poorly since then. Summer seeds didn’t germinate. Tomato plants were stunted. Cucumber leaves curled. It was just plain old sad and demoralizing, and we lost the summer crops completely.
We eventually did a soil test, added the needed organic amendments, and tossed a cover crop mix from Farmer D Organics that included buckwheat, cow peas, and millet to add organic matter and nutrients. People watered, and before long I heard that the cover crops were growing, but I hadn’t seen it. I have recently experienced a couple of other situations where gardens in which we had “saved money” by skimping on “the good stuff” (Farmer D’s) resulted in reduced germination, growth, and yields, so when I opened the gate to the garden that morning, I held my breath. The picture above is what I saw. Abundant. Green. Healthy. Robust. The students will now turn under the cover crops, let them decompose for two weeks so soil organisms can feed off them and excrete nutrients that are then usable by fall crops. They’ll top it all off with Farmer D Organics planting mix and custom-blended fertilizer and then plant a wide variety of lettuces, cooking greens, herbs, and root crops. And then this garden will be back in business.
Listen, I know that money is often (if not always) an issue, and I know personally what it’s like trying to fund new gardens as well as keep them happy and productive season after season. What I have discovered, however, is that, in many cases, it is most likely worth the extra effort to raise a little extra money and get enough of “the good stuff” rather than cut corners. When I do that, I have a more satisfying gardening experience, volunteers flock to our successful projects, donors like to give to vibrant gardens, and we can all get on with the work at hand (growing delicious, healthy food) rather than spending all our time trying to “fix” the soil. This is not to say that learning how to create your own balanced soil is not a necessary learning experience–it’s just that it can take years and perhaps might be a better fit for a demonstration bed rather than for all the beds in a learning garden or one that feeds the hungry where more immediate results are desired, or one in a highly public space where aesthetics matter (such as a community garden in a city park) where healthy growth just plain old looks better.
I talked with Greg Padgett at the store recently about some of the successful fundraising efforts he has seen at the school and special project gardens that he installs and maintains for Farmer D Organics. He suggests:
* Check out garden grants, such as from Whole Foods’ Whole Kids Foundation, The Captain Planet Foundation, and others. There is an ever-growing list of them easily accessible online (simply search for school or community garden grants). Typically, you will have more success in obtaining a garden grant if you already have your garden started and you have proof of volunteer support and matching funds. I know, I know, it’s a little chicken-and-egg, but maybe try one of the following ideas first to actually get your garden going, and pursue grants to continue or expand it.
* Ask local businesses to sponsor your garden, perhaps by paying to fund a bed and having their company name displayed on it;
* Ask parents to donate, perhaps by “purchasing” a brick or stepping stone in the garden;
* Hold fun runs and other fundraisers for the garden such as selling something garden-related like GrowUms seed kits (the school makes 50% of the price on each one sold);
* If your school encourages “planned giving” as part of estate planning, encourage legacy gifts for the garden from grandparents of students and alumni. See an example of a school’s planned giving communications here;
* See if your PTA or any companies where parents work offer matching funds;
* Consider raising money by renting plots to the community as part of your school garden.
In addition to whatever communications methods you currently use, be sure to use social media to ask for donations and encourage people to ask others in their networks to donate as well. You’ll be surprised when someone’s uncle in Peoria or friend in Portland is happy to donate! Keep your request upbeat and exciting, inspire confidence that you can achieve the objectives defined, and make paying easy by including an online payment option such as Paypal. Be sure to keep communications going with photos and updates about your garden’s success (consider starting a blog, or having the students do this) because, let’s face it, you’ll most likely need to ask again if you want to be able to keep getting “the good stuff.” And, you know what? It’s worth it.
No related posts. | <urn:uuid:89624427-80c9-4bda-a48b-2b6c245f801b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.farmerd.com/2012/09/how-to-raise-money-to-get-the-good-stuff/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968522 | 1,119 | 1.523438 | 2 |
They say that if you take a big task and start slowly and apply consistency, everything becomes possible. The long journey begins with one step kind of philosophy. Yet, the fact remains that you have to be focused on the journey for it to be completed – focused on one thing only.
And the same metaphor applies in almost every aspect in life. No matter the intensity that you put into doing something, the outcome will always be positive if you keep focus and try to improve.
Yet, every opportunity that offers even the tiniest payoff is immediately seen as some beauty dressed in an haute couture gown. And we lose focus. We try to invest ourselves in many tasks while dividing our attention and thus doing things halfheartedly.
Focus on one thing at a time
Our mind works by following the concept of comfort and security. Most of the time, that is. And with such mental wiring we are somewhat conditioned to positively respond to every seemingly fruitful opportunity. The moment we hear something appealing in terms of offering a payoff, we dive in, and dive in head first.
But the thing is, you see, that once we try one thing we are reluctant enough to keep being open for countless of other opportunities.
And while it’s always great to consider options, the truth of the matter is that they distract you from focusing on one thing at a time, thus not allowing a full use of your potential.
There is no need in having a plan “B” since it distracts from plan “A” – Robin Sharma (tweet this)
And Robin had it right. The moment he started his writing career (though it wasn’t exactly a career at the time), he quit his law practice. And this was hard initially since both finances and recognition were to be lost over time.
But if he decided not to go against his comfort zone reflex, he still would have been this lawyer who tried writing and things just never took off.
What he did though, is focusing on one thing and one thing only. He didn’t care about everything else that was on the table. The rest is a story we all know quite well. His first book, despite initially being turned down by many publishers, became number one bestseller, and sold millions of copies throughout the world. His second one, also successful, and so on and so on.
If he was to share his secret formula, I believe that it is something in the lines of focus on one thing at a time and keep pushing forward. Step, by step.
How to focus on one thing in three steps
Everything that translates into going against your reflexes and mental wiring is hard at a number of levels. Therefore solutions should be looked for in our mindset.
If we know that countless opportunities appeal to us because of the fact that we seek comfort and security, then the question on how to focus on one thing gets easier.
- Condition yourself to believe that whatever you are focused on, will ultimately bring you that comfort, that level of security.
Try and vividly imagine the benefits and the course in which your progress will take place. Not might, but will. Believe wholeheartedly that you are doing the only thing that will give you payoff.
When this step is done, it gets a lot easier.
You see, we try different things only as a safe switch in case our initial plan doesn’t work. So put the switch on safe, and keep it there all the time.
- Seeking for comfort and security in what you do is only part of the picture. Encouraged by that, you should try and disregard other opportunities. Or better yet, not even try to visualize about how the outcome would look like if you follow in that direction.
Focusing on one thing is easier when you follow your plan and use that every time another opportunity shows itself.
The final step is so obvious, that when you read it you will go like: Duh. But it is the most important as far as realization goes. Again, this is not some magic formula, nor I claim any sort of guru status whatsoever. It is, rather, something that I notice as I walk the walk myself. Makes sense too.
In order to focus on one thing only, the equation is simple really. Just do one thing at a time. Slowly, inefficiently even. But do it – Day in and day out. You will get frustrated from time to time, feeling that other opportunities will pass you over, but endure this initial overwhelming feeling. Progress will ultimately come. It is always behind the corner, just that the corner sometimes takes more time and effort. But we get there; and for sure.
Focusing on one thing at a time is something that goes against our nature. We are curious, driven by comfort and security, and these things tempt us to reach for so many of an opportunity. But it is always a bigger payoff when we stick with something for a while longer giving it our undivided attention, rather than trying myriad of other things and doing them halfheartedly. Focus on one thing and one thing only.
Image credit: By Jack Batchelor | <urn:uuid:98e8ca7e-948e-4c65-b887-84ec4aae8aa7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lifestyleupdated.com/2012/12/07/how-to-focus-on-one-thing/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971864 | 1,060 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Friday, May 3, 2013
College football programs are not allowed to place website addresses or social media messages on the field due to rules that were recently amended by the NCAA. Tell us what you think of the athletic association’s decision.
#GoDawgs or #GoJackets? Whichever your preference, you won’t see either on an NCAA football field this fall. The NCAA’s recent “Bulletin on Field Markings, Uniforms, etc.” expressly prohibits “social media designations such as URL’s and hashtags” (Hashtags are words or phrases that are preceded by the # symbol that can be used online to group messages together or to rally support for a common cause, such as for a favorite team.). The rule means that while you may see your fellow fans using Twitter and other social media platforms while at the game, you won’t see “#SicemDawgs” between the hedges at Sanford Stadium or “#GaTech” on Historic Grant Field in Bobby Dodd Stadium. Speaking of UGA, another Southeastern Conference school, Mississippi…
Friday, March 22, 2013
In the digital age, are we allowing children to use, and potentially abuse, social media at too early of an age? Tell us what you think.
Last March, a student who attended New Manchester High in Douglasville was arrested after allegedly making an online threat against his school. Earlier this month, a Pebblebrook High student from Austell found himself in jail after he allegedly posted threats on Instagram. And last week, Paulding County authorities increased their presence at East Paulding High School as a precautionary measure after a message spread on Twitter said that someone would be bringing a gun onto campus. Though these incidents are seemingly unrelated, one common factor is the usage of online services and social media. In the wake of these incidents, and countless others out there we want to ask: Lastly, many online services require users to be of a minimum age. …
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
The department's social media account began last week.
- POLICE & FIRE
Tuesday, January 29
The Cobb Police Department now has a Twitter account. The real-time social media account began on Wednesday, Jan. 23, and includes an update on an accident on Interstate 285. Users can also sign up by texting "Follow CobbPolice1" to 40404. Cobb PD created a Facebook page last year. | <urn:uuid:a5ece0fe-d2cd-4ba6-8b5b-d7e438acdd22> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://smyrna.patch.com/topics/Twitter | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956656 | 513 | 1.835938 | 2 |
|Jul 26, 2012 --
Ethanol 85 gasoline was not available within 30 miles of Paxton, Nebraska. The region contains two ethanol producing plants. Those plants help supply jobs and support the local economy. A need existed to offer the product to consumers and thereby support the ethanol plants.
Through the Section 9007 Rural Energy for America Program, fiscal year 2011, Rural Development was able to provide Paxton Pit Stop with a renewable energy grant of $10,382 or 25% of the total project cost. The grant, along with the applicant’s funds, made the installation of the new pumps happen.
Dennis Campbell, owner, estimates the added product will increase his fuel sales by 25-30% annually and support the two ethanol plants in the region.
Dennis said “Within the first week my sales increased substantially because of adding E85 and the installation of card readers. The card readers have offered customers the additional option of purchasing fuel 24 hours a day.” | <urn:uuid:5259f91d-49e1-4e01-8912-8a395be96c61> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/STELPRD4017556.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938342 | 202 | 1.648438 | 2 |
I wrote in 2009 that black and white spectators were useful principally with white trousers and a blue jacket, but I overlooked another important use for the shoe and that is paired with a cream summer suit, whether linen or some other fabric. The thing that black and white brings to the party is that it looks fine during the day but can also be worn at night, when plain black shoes of any kind just look wrong with cream colored trousers.
At this point I was tempted to go down a road that explained that the Roman senators wore black cloth shoes with their togas and no-one complained about those aesthetics but it occurred to me that we have come a long way since then and owe a great deal of that progress to the proliferation of brown shoes during the day. The trouble is, brown looks as out of place after sundown as unrelieved black does in bright sun shine and the effect of that unfortunately is to relegate cream colored trousers to day wear lest one find oneself looking as two normally skilled dressers did a while back. The solution of course is the black calf and cream buckskin spectator, which is a concept so simple that I have to wonder why it never occurred to me before.
This leaves us with the not unimportant question of how profligate one must be to consider bespeaking a pair of shoes that are likely to be trotted out only a few times a season, but in answer I turn to summer photos of the late Duke of Windsor, a man who wore black and white spectators so often that he needed several pair.
Case, if it can be called that, closed.
Photo: Ralph Lauren | <urn:uuid:056e1f5c-ca18-4bd0-bc51-fd4573e5d654> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://asuitablewardrobe.dynend.com/2012/05/case-for-black-and-white-spectators.html?showComment=1336402195109 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977195 | 330 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Last Sunday [while it was snowing!] I went with my girl to hit up the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center (Official site / Frommer’s site), which is home to the largest to-scale city model in the world: Shanghai 2020!
I have always been a architecture fiend, and this was a hidden delight. Well, maybe not so hidden, as the Exhibition Center is located inside a massive modern building in the middle of People’s Square. 5 floors of exhibits chronicle the history and modernization of Shanghai, from the feudal dynasties (SH was a fishing village), to when the first Europeans arrived to trade (SH was a fishing village), through to today (when SH was a massive city), and on into the future (when SH turns into the worlds’ economic metropolis of the world (you heard it hear first!)).
Old photographs were what I found the most interesting, as the trasformation of this city is truly beyond words. Just look at the image of the Pudong skyline in my last post, when I was in Shanghai for the first time some 10 years ago, only 3-4 buildings were built (including the Pearl Tower), so I can only imagine what Shanghai will look like in another decade in 2020… oh wait nevermind, on the 5th floor they have the worlds largest to-scale city-model in the world: Shanghai 2020!
The center obviously showcases much about the upcoming Shanghai Expo, and I can’t wait to see some of the structures they are planning to build, truly remarkable stuff. Still can’t decide which one I will like more… Thomas Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion (consisting of 60,000 transparent rods) or the Switzerland Pavilion by Buchner Bründler Architects (which has a ski lift through, over, and around it -no I am not joking). | <urn:uuid:06ccc05b-18f0-48c7-923f-0cc9596a41c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://timvan.com/blog/tag/2020/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961507 | 386 | 1.515625 | 2 |
aficionados are familiar with the trio of great
collaborators who helped make some of Hitchcock's
best films so memorable: Bernard
Herrmann (composer), Robert
Burks (cinemaphotographer) and George
Tomasini (editor). Together, they brought
a chillingly clean, professional touch to The
Birds (1963), Vertigo (1958) and The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 version). Individually,
they brought their talent to bear on Strangers
on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953),
Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955),
The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Wrong
Man (1956), North by Northwest (1959),
Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) and
Marnie (1964)—the bulk of Hitchcock's
great, mature work.
What about Hitchcock's costume
designers? Edith Head's
a good guess—and a correct one, more often
than not, for Hitchcock and almost everybody else
working in Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1980s.
(In all, she designed costumes for three hundred
and fifty-four films.)
But what about Hitchcock's art
directors and set designers?
Can you name one?
Don't worry: nobody else can either.
So ask yourself another question:
can you name an object or a set that you remember
readily from a Hitchcock film?
Ah, that's much easier, isn't
The shower scene and the creepy
Bates mansion in Psycho, the sleeper train
car and that wonderful lodge in North by Northwest,
the fateful tower and the art gallery in Vertigo,
the chest concealing the dead body in Rope (1948),
the dark, wainscoted mansion of the three-and-a-half-fingered
man in The 39 Steps (1935).
Or what about Mount Rushmore in
North by Northwest? Hitchcock wasn't allowed
to film on the real national monument, so he had
a set designed to scale.
Actually, Hitchcock's films have
wonderful sets—so why can't anybody name the
people who helped design and build them?
couple reasons come readily to mind.
First, Hitchcock storyboarded his films copiously
before ever talking to designers, and much of the
credit for the visual strength behind his films
should go to him. But possibly as importantly, Hitchcock's
sets have a strangely generic quality that belies
both their complexity and the sophisticated role
they play in defining the films' characters.
Hitchcock is famous for his lack
of interest in the nuances in character—he
once said the best actor would be a tailor's dummy.
And he was positively flummoxed when Paul Newman
wanted to chat about the motivation behind
his character in Torn Curtain (1966). So
the subtle help Hitchcock gets from the sets is
all the more important.
Take, for example, the slightly
cloying, effeminate interior Robert Taylor's character
finds himself trapped in with The Birds.
While he spends weekdays in the city, on the weekends
he travels to nearby Bodega Bay, where he stays
with his mother and nearly-eleven-year-old sister.
The mother (played by Jessica Tandy) smothers her
son, chasing off potential mates like...well, like
a bird chasing a cat from its young. The house interior
is rather bland in its colors (grays predominate),
with low-backed upholstered furniture that offers
neither hints of a particular style nor much comfort,
and the space gives off a tense, neurotic sense
of unwanted closeness. So when Taylor boards up
the house to protect his family (and potential mate)
from the marauding birds, there's inevitably going
to be a meltdown in the suddenly claustrophobic
For another example, let's look
at the elderly parents of Joan Fontaine's character
in Suspicion (1941). They live in a striking
British mansion, with tall, leaded-glass windows
and heavily carved oak doors. Clearly, we're told,
these are wealthy, stable people. They've been here
for generations, and as long as their daughter knows
her role in upper-class society, their genes will
be staying here for years to come.
But look at the furniture in this
opulent house: it's remarkably frumpy and boring.
So ignore the house's wonderful bone structure and
ask yourself: would you want to live with
this couple, with this furniture? Yes, the place
is worth a bundle, and a good decorator could bring
it around, but what if you could leave it for, say,
Cary Grant? Sure, he's got a bad reputation as a
womanizer and a gambler among the locals, but just
look at the guy! What woman would choose to take
her mother's place in that musty old chair, spending
her dwindling years with a needle in her hands,
when she could be living it up with a dashing playboy?
All right, so he may be a murderer
as well as a gambler and a womanizer. Isn't the
fun worth the risk?
Actually, no. At least, not for
Hitchcock's main characters. They tend to get punished
rather severely when they go looking for adventure.
As boring as that old couple in Suspicion
may be, you're much safer with them than you are
with Grant in that dashingly bright house and that
winding staircase with its ominous shadows (anyone
care for a glass of warm, glowing milk?).
But here's another question for
you. Whatever made you think you could actually
end up with Grant to begin with? The fact that so
many of Hitchcock's characters are uncomplicated,
even boring people (put into striking dilemmas,
of course) may help us project ourselves into them—even
though most of us don't look like Cary Grant or
Grace Kelly. But it's not just their undistinguished
lives that makes it so easy for us to slip into
their characters. I think it's primarily the dowdy,
boring furniture that helps us make the leap, frankly.
Put Joan Fontaine in an exquisite palace and people
may have trouble projecting themselves into her
Apparently, the average viewer
is more than likely going to err on the flattering
side when it comes to their body-image, but they're
pretty damn accurate when it comes to sizing up
their tastes in furniture.
maybe the word 'generic' is too derogatory a word
for Hitchcock's sets. Actually, the pieces are often
quite nice—but they rarely leap at us the
way, say, the Deco liquor cabinet does in Jake's
office in Chinatown. This is a signal distinction,
I think: Polanski is trying to evoke a past era
explicitly by drawing our eye to stellar examples
of period furniture. Hitchcock, on the other hand,
primarily worked in the present. He had little need
to telegraph 'Deco 1930s' to his audience, and he
was thus under less pressure to make his sets do
Instead, Hitchcock's after something
a little simpler with his sets: the frumpy, boring
couple gets frumpy, boring furniture because...well,
because they're frumpy and boring.
It's a simple formula, really.
When you don't want the actors chatting you up about
motivation, you sometimes have to let the
furniture do the talking.
the individual pieces tell us a lot about the characters
and help us make the precarious leap into thinking
we're all Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.
But what about the sets as sets?
Here, I think, we can see most clearly how involved
Hitchcock was with the set design. Consider, for
example, how often Hitchcock's love of difficult,
even claustrophobic experiments hinged on brilliant
set design. In Rope (1948), he used a set
with walls built on wheels so that he could have
the cameras move unimpeded around the film's group
of three rooms. (Placed prominently at center-stage,
of course, was that corpse-concealing chest.)
The shower stall in Psycho
was built in sections, so it could be partly disassembled,
thus allowing a variety of complicated camera angles.
And in Rear Window, Hitchcock had an entire
apartment building with a courtyard mocked up so
that James Stewart could stare across the courtyard
into his neighbors' windows—each window, of
course, functioning like a miniature movie screen
showing Stewart (our flattering mirror image) individual
comedies, melodramas and (of course) murder mysteries
staged on isolated sets.
But it's not just neat, complicated
trickery that shows us how caught up Hitchcock was in
the set design. It's often where the furniture
was placed in those original storyboards that matters.
Consider, for example, how brilliantly the husband's
heavily formal and masculine desk works in Dial M
for Murder. For much of the film, we are confined
to the couple's apartment living room, and the desk
sits with its back to the heavily draped windows, confronting,
even controlling the room—just as Ray Milland's
character tries to control his wife. (And what about
those perennially closed drapes? Do they symbolically
conceal the secrets behind Milland's seemingly respectable
That Grace Kelly's struggle with
her intended killer takes place on top of the desk
itself (which holds the title's telephone, no less)
only underlines what Hitchcock is trying to make
the desk tell us about the couple.
Hitchcock, smart as he is, didn't select each lamp
and chair and sofa and put each one into place.
So who are the designers behind the sets?
I'd like to report that there's
a single, unsung hero behind it all. Unfortunately,
there's not. Over the course of his career, Hitchcock
drew on a variety of set designers and art directors,
some undoubtedly provided contractually by the various
studios (which functioned something like a present-day
HMO with its list of participating physicians).
It is, in general, a good though
not remarkable group of artists. Alfred
Jung, Albert Juliann and Oscar Fredric Werndorff
worked with him until 1938, when Hitchcock
left British studios for Hollywood. Among this group,
Jung probably did the most outstanding non-Hitchcock
work, with Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Black
Narcissus to his credit.
Through the forties, Hitchcock
worked principally with Van Nest Polglase, Darrell Silvera, Russell A. Gausman,
Emile Kuri and Thomas N. Morahan. Although
Polglase worked on a few good non-Hitchcock projects
(Citizen Kane being most prominent), the
most significant designer to come from this period
is Silvera, who worked on more than two hundred
films, including everything from Val Lewton's Cat
People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard
Man to Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another
World—with Citizen Kane thrown
in for good measure. Kuri, on the other hand,
went on to work on several live-action Disney movies
like The Absent-Minded Professor and Blackbeard's
Ghost. (Another name that pops up in the Forties
with Hitchcock is Robert Boyle—he
would later work as production designer on North
by Northwest, The Birds and Marnie.)
Likewise, a variety of designers
worked on the mature films of the Fifties and Sixties.
Among them: Edward S. Haworth,
George James Hopkins,
Sam Comer, Hal
Pereira and Henry Bumstead. Hopkins has the most distinguished
(as well as the longest) resume, with the high points
running from Casablanca to My Fair Lady
and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Pereira
and Comer, on the other end of the scale, did a
lot of work together on Jerry Lewis comedies.)
So there are groups of
designers who worked with Hitchcock for a period
of time, but the overall vision and purpose behind
the design—character development, audience
projection, sophisticated layout, etc.—carry
across the groups. Leading us to conclude, of course,
that it was primarily Hitchcock's vision (probably
in the earliest stages of storyboarding) that drove
But that, I suppose, is hardly | <urn:uuid:4c83d0b1-8e61-4410-a641-16d8892b27fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thewag.net/film/hitch.htm | 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 | 0.938294 | 2,738 | 1.671875 | 2 |
The bad news for Iowa Democrats is that a poll by the highly respected Selzer & Co. for the Des Moines Register shows the incumbent Democrat Governor, Chet Culver, losing badly (by 24%!) in his re-election bid to former Republican Governor Terry Branstad, a likely candidate for the GOP. Iowa, is one of the real swing states in the country. It narrowly voted for Al Gore in 2000, and just as narrowly for George Bush in 2004. In 2008, it was the state that ignited Barack Obama's Presidential bid in the Iowa Caucuses, and Obama won the state last November by 9%. With independents moving heavily to the GOP (58%), and even a fifth of Democrats abandoning the Governor, the news from Iowa is hardly reassuring to Democratic incumbents around the country in other swing states or House districts
Governors' races are very important for the GOP in 2010. Having a Republican in office gives the GOP a voice in decisions that will be made on Congressional and state legislative redistricting after the 2010 census. If the GOP can win some of the Governors races in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in 2010 (now all held by Democrats), this could impact a few House seats for the next decade. Of course, if the Presidential race is close in 2012 in these states, having a Republican Governor won't hurt either. | <urn:uuid:9ddee9d4-a3dd-4e80-a2a4-715870ebdff0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/11/bad_news_for_dems_in_iowa.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969301 | 272 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Two houses of bitter enemy dwell in a city that is kissed by the sea.
A hatred that is rooted beyond their knowledge to see
The sorrow thy own action bring.
Their son and daughter at the first moment met was enough
To cage their hearts in a prison of love without a key
That agony will bring.
Before they could speak of the joy their own eyes hath found
Their friends crush their dreams.
When they found they love their enemy
They curse their heart for its treachery.
Oh sweet Ana we play both the victim and villain in this game of hearts.
We cage our hearts against the venomous love but nothing taste so
Sweet as your name upon my lips.
In moments my joyful heart is empty with sorrow
Then I must repeat your name till my heart is full with so much joy my heart would break.
Ana! My dear sweet Ana!
Let loose the dove that we cage and kill the wicked beast that keeps us at bay.
You fill me with disgust that you injected your venomous poison in my veins.
I hate you and yet with every fiber of my being I also love you.
This makes the same amount of sense as a legless chair.
Like a court jester I play the fool.
This must be some kind of jest from God that finds it humorous
for all my despair.
Oh Lord, find another fool to be your jester.
I was in heaven until you plucked me up and dropped me into hell.
Surely this is hell to love someone who only speaks in serpent
Tongue to thine own ears.
I ask for the rose and got the thorns; the rose is her heart and the thorns
Is the words that keeps it from being mine.
I met my Romeo and that tale ended in a tragedy
I dare not put a dagger to my own bosom to slay a ghostly creature that moan out Antonio’s name.
Have I done some ill toward God and been cursed to love a man that surly hatethe me
Like all of his kind hateth my family.
Love is like a rose, if one is not careful it can prick thee.
One must travel lightly in the matter of the heart or one is doomed to swallow
loves poisonous pill being ever consumed under it control.
Like a puppet I am controlled by the puppeteer , Antonio.
To move to his sweet music.
I curse thee Antonio for your mischievous eyes and devilish smile.
Surely you have won the hearts of maids with that grin alone
You didn’t win my heart, you stole it like a cunning thief
You rob me of a treasure that belongs to a just man
A good man not a foul creature of your house
Did someone slip me a love potion?
Did it take effect at the moment our eyes met
No! that is madness!
This is madness to love someone where there is no hope of having them
I envy the birds flight and freedom
If I could sprout wings to fly and the freedom to love
I would mend our hearts as one
Tragedy of their quarrel kill their own moral to do the right thing
what is just.
Love can mend the bridge that hate hath burn but pride and shame can poison
Thine own eyes to see not the truth but believe in a lie
Nothing poisons the body more than pride being slave to thine own mind.
The tragedy of Antonio and Ana is a tale of woe.
They could have the fruit that love brought but pride and shame poisoned it
And now they are the ones to blame. | <urn:uuid:11941a56-c554-437f-aef3-f82722e8d484> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.druidry.org/board/dhp/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=36073 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936515 | 760 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Thursday, September 30, 2010
I seem to have an endless supply of long narrow strips of watercolour paper from cutting down full sheets to sizes I want to fit into frames.
As a result, I'm using the left over pieces as little slices of printed ocean or lake life. This is a section of the third piece with is a little more narrow - 4 x 22 approximately. A series of these hung as a stack on the wall could be quite interesting.
The addition of watercolour and sand creates an almost abstract piece for these sea stars. This started with a print of a Boreal Asterias sea star, which is common in the waters around the province and starts life as a pale purple colour drying to a sand colour. I have been lucky to access more sea stars of different varieties, one with six legs that is very red and another with nine legs. Sea stars or starfish as they are commonly known are amazingly aggressive in their habitat of the sea floor and can decimate sea urchin and mussel populations. | <urn:uuid:d3121f0b-40cc-4d37-93a2-adfbd91f73cd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://illustratedlife.blogspot.com/2010/09/asterias-vulgaris.html | 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 | 0.967185 | 209 | 1.671875 | 2 |
KATHMANDU, July 29: Saraswoti and Sani Niraula are sisters studying at Sidheswari Secondary School in grade six. The two sisters, like their mother and sisters, are fasting in this holy month of Shrawan but they don’t know why they are actually doing it.
For Saraswoti, this is her second year of fasting but for Sani, it’s her first. Even though it’s her first time, she’s following all the norms very strictly. She gets up early in the morning, goes to the temple to offer her prayers, then gets ready for school and hits the road empty stomach on the day of the fast.
When she comes back home in the evening, until she offers her prayers again, she doesn’t eat and when she finally sits to eat, she makes sure that she doesn’t eat garlic, meat and onion.
“I am fasting because I want to excel in my studies,” says Sani. According to her, her elder sister also started fasting so she can do well in her studies.
Most of their friends in school are fasting too and their parents are not complaining or stopping them in any way. They are fasting because they want to and there have been no pressure as such from anyone.
Sanu Niraula, mother of Saraswoti and Sani, has been fasting every Monday in the month of Shrawan since the past 11 years and she says that she hasn’t forced her children to take it up.
“They can do whatever they feel like. It’s their wish at the end of the day,” she stresses.
20 years ago, Bishnu Sahani, 38, started fasting. After she got married, she continued with the fast for the betterment of her husband and sons. However, not everyone knows why they are fasting and the real meaning behind it.
Studying in Continental Academy School, Srijana wanted to fast but her mother threw the idea out of the window reasoning she would fall sick. When Srijana saw her friends fasting at school, she wanted to do it too.
“If not for this year, I will, for sure, fast next year,” opines Srijana, who doesn’t have an idea about the tradition of fasting.
Another student of Continental Academy, Ashmita Thapa, currently studying in grade three, is mimicking her sisters and neighbors and fasting this year.
On a Monday, she gets up in the morning, worships the Peepal tree and then leaves for school without eating anything donning green, red and yellow bangles.
Her hands are covered with the mehndi designs but she doesn’t know why she’s wearing the mehndi or the colorful bangles. “My mom bought me these and I just wore it,” she shares.
Even though Ashmita is fasting, when she sees her friends feasting at school during the lunch time, she feels like eating but she doesn’t. She eats only when the evening sets in with her father at home.
Learning from adults and fasting without knowing the reason behind it, doesn’t seem like a good idea as fasting can cause various problems.
According to Dr Jyoti Ratna Dhakpa, fasting can cause the body to lose a lot of calories which can lead to weakness, fainting and mental pressure, especially on school going children. Similarly, not eating during the day and only in the evening can hamper the memory power and also cause diarrhea, according to Dr Dhakpa. | <urn:uuid:179aed2c-fdcf-4bd7-9ecb-5aa2df64f4fa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=38791 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9814 | 767 | 1.554688 | 2 |
[Video Link to Al Jazeera report]
Invisible Children's "Kony 2012" video has been viewed by millions online around the world. By view counts alone, it is now the most viral video in history. It is now the first ever YouTube hit publicly screened in the northern Ugandan town of Lira—and it didn't go so well.
The screening was hosted by African Youth Initiative Network (AYINET), an NGO founded by Victor Ochen (LRA abductee turned peacekeeper) mentioned in this previous Boing Boing post. Ochen and AYINET thought Ugandans who had been personally affected by the LRA and Kony deserved an opportunity to see what all the fuss was about.
Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire attended the AYINET screening of Kony 2012 last night, and tweeted that local radio stations heavily publicized the event in advance. "There were 5000+ people at the screening," she says, "Many rode bicycles from villages to see the #kony2012 video in Lira."
Malcolm Webb attended the event in the Mayor’s Gardens in the city center, and he reports for Al Jazeera:
Having heard so many great things about the film, the crowd’s expectations were high. People I spoke to anticipated seeing a video that showed the world the terrible atrocities that they had suffered during the conflict, and the ongoing struggles they still face trying to rebuild their lives after two lost decades.
The audience was at first puzzled to see the narrative lead by an American man – Jason Russell – and his young son. Towards the end of the film, the mood turned more to anger at what many people saw as a foreign, inaccurate account that belittled and commercialised their suffering, as the film promotes Kony bracelets and other fundraising merchandise, with the aim of making Kony infamous.
One woman I spoke to made the comparison of selling Osama Bin Laden paraphernalia post 9/11 – likely to be highly offensive to many Americans, however well intentioned the campaign behind it. The event ended with the angrier members of the audience throwing rocks and shouting abusive criticism, as the rest fled for safety, leaving an abandoned projector, with organisers and the press running for cover until the dust settled.
Kagumire adds this morning that AYINET has suspended further screenings, "not to further harm victims or provoke any violent response."
Invisible Children's bracelets and t-shirts aren't likely to receive a warm welcome in Uganda, either. Kagumire says "The Northern Ugandan people want the government to stop Kony 2012 tshirts from entering the country; the video sparked heated talks on 5 radio stations in Lira... one caller said #kony2012 t-shirts cannot cross Karuma. It would be too provocative."
Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:a89a7bf9-790b-4be2-a89a-c649e760a68e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/uganda-screening-of-kony-201.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962192 | 651 | 1.671875 | 2 |
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Robert Doyle has been lord mayor of Melbourne since December 2008 – but James Money knows him from an earlier life: Doyle taught him English in Year 8.
‘I felt that the fact he knew who I was would be an advantage in asking him to sit for an Archibald Portrait, and he’d said he liked a political book (Broken promises) I illustrated four years ago,’ says Money.
Money went to Melbourne Town Hall where he did a series of sketches and took photographs. He initially considered painting Doyle sitting in a large, ornate, dark wooden council chamber chair but decided to simplify the portrait. Then he tried using a brown background to suggest the traditional nature of Mayoral role.
‘But when I was talking to him, it became clear that he takes a very modern approach to the position so I decided to get rid of the traditional look,’ says Money. ‘I wanted the portrait to be confronting because I got the impression he was someone who wants to get things done. He has lots of ideas and is quite in your face – and he has a very interesting face.’
Money uses an old-fashioned scraperboard technique. He made the board for this portrait from Masonite, which he covered with 12 layers of clay mixed with white acrylic. Once dry, he put a layer of black Indian ink over the top then made the portrait by scratching into the surface almost like an original etching. From there he used watered-down inks and aerosol cans and, again, scratched the colour back.
‘It’s very graphic,’ says Money. ‘Though it’s an old-fashioned technique, the aerosol gives it a modern spin. It’s the biggest work I’ve made in this way and it took a couple of months. I started as a caricaturist using cross-etching so I wanted to incorporate that scratchy look into the painting.’
Born in Melbourne in 1974, Money graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1995. In 2003, he won the Savage Club Drawing Prize. This is his first time in the Archibald Prize. | <urn:uuid:a0fd8b3c-779c-49c7-90f7-d3dcc81c956c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2010/29080/ | 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 | 0.977055 | 466 | 1.742188 | 2 |
The Three Kindred are interwoven, together and with the Three Hallows, at the heart of Ár nDraíocht Féin’s Indo-European view of the cosmos as I understand it. The Ancestors dwell within the Underworld and are reached through the gate of the Sacred Well, the Gods and Goddesses dwell in the Upperworld and hear us through the gate of the Sacred Fire, and the Spirits of the Land live in our own world where the gate of the Sacred Tree sends our voices to them.
The ancestors have been, rather counter-intuitively perhaps, the most distant of the Kindred for me. I think that there are two explanations for this. The first is the general Western movement towards a more nuclear view of family. The second is more personal, which is that I never really knew any of my grandparents. My father’s parents died when I was very young such that I have only the fuzziest of memories of them, and my father had his own reasons to rarely talk about them. My maternal grandmother died when my mother was still young. This left only my maternal grandfather whom I saw infrequently and mostly only remember as a chain smoking, whiskey swilling old crank who had no use for his grandchildren and who in any case passed away when I was still a young man. It seems no wonder to me, then, that I have always felt disconnected from my ancestors.
These issues may not have been so difficult to manage if I could at least say that my ancestry is firmly rooted in my chosen hearth culture (Celtic). The disconnect could then simply be seen as a temporal interruption within a lineage. However this is not the case; my paternal ancestry is entirely Finnish and my ancestry on my mother’s mother’s side is entirely Germanic. It is only from that crank of a grandfather that I get my Celtic bloodline.
As a result of these difficulties, I have had to work pretty hard to form a personal relationship with the ancestors, both those of blood and those of hearth.
I have been doing so by keeping items that belonged to them on my hallows altar, by engaging in genealogical research, by asking my parents to speak of them, by reaching out to them in ritual, and to a lesser degree through meditation; I have a Phillip Shallcrass book which includes a lesson for an ‘ancestor tree’ meditation which I have found to be quite effective. Perhaps the best way I have found to connect to them has been through photographs; when my aunt passed away five years ago my mother, sister, and I found a trove of old photos in her house and spent a long evening looking through them and discussing who they were and what they were doing.
As far as the nature of the Ancestors, I see them as the Mighty Dead who have great wisdom which they are by and large willing to share with their descendants. And so in ritual I typically making offerings of ale to them and ask for their guidance. Occasionally during the offerings phase I will ask them to welcome in as ancestors any newly departed friends or loved ones in the community.
In comparison to the Ancestors, I have found the Spirits of the Land to be easier to contact and yet much harder to communicate with. Unlike our ancestors, these Kindred have entirely alien minds. It is generally not too difficult to appease them and thereby hope to gain their favour, but working with them is an entirely different matter. For instance the faery folk I will leave offerings to, generally of wine and honeyed bread and especially on Midsummer’s Eve, but I am far too wary of them to yet ask of them any boons.
There is one Nature Spirit that I have been working on forming a relationship with, which is the White Hart, of course. The Hart is the guide to the dark, secret, heart of the forest where the Mysteries of the Goddess are to be found. I have sought the Hart through magic and mysticism, and am slowly working on building him a wonderful outdoor shrine.
Other than the White Hart, the Spirits of the Land are great in number and diverse in type. Our Indo-European fore-fathers identified a vast array of them: the Sidhe, nymphs, satyrs, leprechauns, goblins, trolls, dragons, dryads, mermaids, the list goes on and on. These are the Old World spirits, although many of them have followed our ancestors across the waters. Then there are the Spirits of the *this* Land, those which were identified by the natives. Some we know of by an animal name; buffalo, coyote, fox, raven. Then there are some which are very far more alien such as the Wendigo and Thunderbird. Although they do not make up the stories of our Indo-European ancestors, we live and walk and practice on their lands and so we must give them due honour as well.
We give the Spirits of the Land this honour during ritual with invocations and offerings. My offerings are typically edible things that come naturally from the land; seeds, nuts, and fruit, although as mentioned earlier I also sometimes offer man-made stuffs such as bread and wine to the Fae.
As far as my own locality goes, I mentioned in my Nature Essay that I live on twelve acres of Carolinian forest ravine land . Although there are some paths though it, it is mostly wild and uninviting towards humans, with thick rose brambles, dense pine groves, frenetic webs of vines, creeping poison ivy, and a creek whose alternating flows has created steep banks. I have been trying to feel out the spirits in this place, and have discovered a couple of places where I can feel the energy of some great hidden spirit. I have yet to determine how to, or indeed if I even should, interact with these spirits however.
Finally we come to the subject of the third of the Three Kindred; the Shining Gods and Goddesses. On this topic I do not want to delve too deeply into my personal relationship with these beings since this will be the primary focus of my next essay, on my spiritual practice. I will, however, discuss my evolving understanding of the nature of the gods, however.
It is hard to articulate this evolution, although I suspect that it is common amongst Neo-Pagans. It may be easier for the younger generations, fortunately for them, who were not coerced into reciting The Lord’s Prayer every morning at school, but for my generation and those that came before me even if our families did not attend church every Sunday we were still inculcated with Christianity at every turn. Yes, we read the stories of the gods of the Norse and the Greeks, and they spoke to us on some deep level that the Bible never reached, but at the same time we were told by our teachers and parents that they were just myths — they weren’t real.
To make matters more difficult, when one is indoctrinated into a culture of monotheism it tends to limit the possibilities for belief even if one disavows the ultimate being of the predominate religion. For some, another type of monism may take the place of “God/YWH/Allah” but for most people atheism is the only alternative that seems to make sense. The road from monotheism back to polytheism is hard indeed. So, when I was introduced to modern Paganism via Wicca back in the 80′s at age 19, even though I felt the call of the gods I still felt more comfortable perceiving them as either archetypes or personifications rather than real beings unto themselves. It has taken me much of my adult life to peel away those artificial layers and return to the Gods and Goddesses of my ancient ancestors.
But I have finally arrived at the point where I see the Shining Ones as my ancestors once did, as individual entities limited in time and space but with great power and sublime personalities. I honour them both personally, as I shall discuss in more detail in my next essay, and in ritual. In ritual we generally call upon all of the gods who are willing to attend, and to which I usually offer wine, as well as the Deities of the Occasion, whose offerings tend to be richer and as appropriate as possible.
I would like to conclude with a note that the lines between the Three Kindred can sometimes be blurred. As mentioned, great ancestors can be deified, and for certain great and individual Nature Spirits the differences that set them apart from the Gods can be subtle. The delineation is in some ways artificial, but well suited to the limited grasp of the spirit and spiritual world that humans have. | <urn:uuid:97334f41-16e8-40f5-9bde-da2f6af96662> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://atthesignofthewhitehart.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/the-three-kindred/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977639 | 1,799 | 1.664063 | 2 |
As the country moves closer to another presidential election this fall we are left to ponder, whither America? The industrial age gravely wounded the republic; the post industrial age, the age of technology, may see the republic’s burial. Arguably the technocratic age was ushered in when the United States developed and used the atomic bomb against the Japanese. The French writer and thinker, Georges Bernanos described this event as, “The triumph of technique over reason.” And so it was and has been to the present. The rapid pace of technological innovation has called into question the very idea of a unique human nature. Like the splitting of the atom, genetic engineering seems to have accomplished C.S. Lewis’s character Screwtape’s hellish nightmare of the marriage between the sorcerer and the rationalist. We are told that technology will banish hunger, eradicate disease, allow us to be masters of our destiny—promises as old as the Serpent himself. Can technique and technology, however, be the sole or even primary foundation for a humane culture, a civilized society?
The foregoing question is rarely addressed let alone asked. If the curtain is peeled back from the marvels of our day what do we find? Information technology has so transformed the financial markets that even experienced brokers and investors liken Wall Street to a rigged casino. Agri-business firms have acted with callous viciousness towards farmers who have wanted no part of their genetically modified seed. Such businesses are not above supporting greater political consolidation to protect their markets and destroy their competition. For example the modest market share achieved by organic and sustainable farms is under constant assault by corporate agriculture and their minions in Congress. The banker bailouts, of course, are of the same species and deserve little comment given their infamy. The evils of economic and political consolidation, now referred to as globalization, are inspired by the seven deadly sins, as such consolidations have always been so inspired.
It would be tempting to present the South as the great fortress that has withstood the assault of these tendencies, but alas this was never wholly true. Our region has produced its fair share of homegrown rent-seekers, satanic mill boosters, numbskulls, petty tyrants and “progressives” of all stripes. We may have sired fewer people who believe God has given them a right to order the lives of their neighbors, but sire some we have. Nevertheless, we have also sired more sons and daughters who have been and still are the deadly enemies of the busybody and the would-be totalitarian. We have thinkers, and poets, and scholars who are concerned with the “permanent things” and their vital and necessary connection to a civilized and humane society. I am deeply grateful that some of these folks have contributed to this issue of Arator.
This issue’s contributions cover the fields of history, literature, political science, and poetry. What holds this wonderful variety of scholarship and poetry together is the wonderful vision of a human life and society that is more than a sum of techniques. Dr. D. Jonathan White’s piece speaks of the prudence and sage defense undertaken by Rhode Island and North Carolina in the period of their independence. Dr. Kyle Scott offers to us humility as a chief political virtue, and as a necessary antidote to the hubris of today’s politics. Dr. Jack Trotter examines the important social thought of South Carolina’s William Gilmore Simms, a man deeply concerned with the great questions. The Jefferson Davis scholar, Felicity Allen, has provided the first six edited letters of Jefferson Davis, each of which provide an example of a man whose dignity and grace in defeat and intense trial speaks well of both the man and the society that produced him. The other letters will appear in future issues of Arator. Finally the eminent poet, David Middleton, has graced us with verse that celebrates the culture and mores of people who belong to a certain time and actual place, and who live the virtues in the breath and movement of their simple and profoundly meaningful lives. From each of these works we see how the virtues, both the lesser and greater, are so necessary for the right ordering of man and his society. And this teaching, this cause for hope, which echoes down to us through the centuries, is among the best things the Southern tradition bequeaths to us. | <urn:uuid:32f83756-76b9-4897-8454-e4a7e5755883> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aratorjournal.org/ed_note3.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960667 | 901 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Since 2003 Dave Paradi, author of The Visual Slide Revolution and 102 Tips to Communicate More Effectively Using PowerPoint, has conducted several surveys about what annoys people the most about PowerPoint presentations. On 27 September 2011 he posted ”Full Results of the Annoying PowerPoint survey” in his blog, the aptly-titled Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog. You can read his analysis of the full results in his post.
The top five annoyances, with the percentages of the 603 respondents who selected these in their top three, are
The speaker read the slides to us – 73.8%
Full sentences instead of bullet points – 51.6%
The text was so small I couldn’t read it – 48.1%
Slides hard to see because of color choice – 34.0%
Overly complex diagrams or charts – 26.0%
How many of these are you doing in your presentations?
As an audio-visual technician for ten years I can attest to points 1, 3, 4, and 5 personally. So many business presentations had these issues it was embarassing. It was actually while still working in this field that I was inspired to write the article that became the post, “10 Lessons Learned from the ‘Other Side of the Microphone.’“
To improve your presentation, try doing the opposite of the above top five most annoying things:
1. Don’t read your slides.
2. Don’t put too much text on your slides.
3. Use large fonts. People in the back still have to be able to see the slides.
4. Use simple, contrasting colors.
5. Simplify any charts or diagrams you use. In most cases, the audience does not need statistics precise to two decimal places on the screen. Put the exact numbers, if necessary, in the handout. Or just round up (or down).
Make your presentations less “annoying,” and people will learn more. | <urn:uuid:fec6b2d4-1cfa-42cd-879f-fe5c5f0c7fb8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://michaelhait.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/make-your-presentation-less-annoying/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=1c947633de | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938244 | 421 | 1.703125 | 2 |
November 14, 2002
Is Donated Resarch Copyrighted?
Q: Many years ago, a cousin of my mother wrote and offered to share pictures and information with her. He died before I was able to contact him but he donated his research to the local historical society. I got copies of his family group sheets from society and was able to find some new leads to follow. My findings and conclusions regarding some of the records vary from his. I've made arrangements to send copies of my research to a local library to help future researchers and would love to include a copy of my deceased relative's family group sheets. I'm not sure if I am allowed to do this since he did not publish the genealogy material himself. I would really like to include his information because he spent decades researching his family and because our research differs (I feel I should provide that other view point for a later researcher to decide on their own). Also he included references that I haven't been able to track down and locate but someone later might be able to. Is there a copyright on genealogy material donated to a historical society? -- Karen
A: If I have understood you correctly, you wish to incorporate the family group sheets that your cousin compiled in the family history you are now wishing to publish. I am assuming that you were going to scan or photocopy the family group sheets and include them, not only for the information that they share but also to remember him for the work he put into the family history.
It sounds like your concern is in making sure that you don't usurp your cousin's copyright by including the forms in the book. If all you are going to do is to transcribe the forms into your genealogy, there is no copyright issue since facts cannot be copyrighted. Of course, you would want to acknowledge that the information came from the now deceased cousin.
If you wanted to photocopy the forms themselves and include them in the book, it is my understanding that this would be acceptable as well. The information was donated to the historical society. You would probably want to make mention of where the original files can be found, and be sure that the historical society does not object to your including the records in your book.
Copyright was created to protect that creativity. While genealogy involves a lot of work, a family group sheet is simply made up of facts and is generally not protected by copyright. A published family history is protected because of the organization and the inclusion of anecdotes, analysis, photographs and such. A family group sheet does not include anything creative, simply acting as a form in which to record the facts that have been uncovered, thus exempting it from the copyright laws.
It might be a good idea to check with the surviving family of the cousin though to make sure that they did not wish to publish the information. This just helps to keep good feelings among the family. Your motives are to preserve his information and make it available to anyone researching that lineage. I suspect that you would be able to include them in your work, provided you acknowledge who compiled them and where they now can be found.
If you haven't done so yet, you will want to visit the Library of Congress Web site and investigate their Copyright section. There are many useful pages there.
Hit a Brick Wall
Q: I have traced my family tree to my great-great-grandfather but have unable to find information on his parents. Do you have any suggestions for getting over this brick wall? -- James
A: When we first get into genealogy we are often amazed at how quickly and easily we uncover information. At some point, however, virtually all researchers find themselves up against a brick wall.
When you come up against a brick wall, you need to examine the wall and see if there is a spot where you can get through or at least over it. This means that you need to not concentrate on just your great-great-grandfather. It is likely that he had siblings. It is likely that there are other families living in the area where you have found him that share the same surname.
You need to get to know them all. Just as you have collected records on your great-great-grandfather, you must begin to compile records on these others as well. Are there similarities? Do you see naming patterns in the offspring of those who are around the same age as your great-great-grandfather? Could they be siblings? Do these individuals interact with your great-great-grandfather in records, acting as witnesses for one another for land sales or probate? Have you looked at the probate records for those sharing your great-great-grandfather's surname?
Often if the information you need cannot be found in the records on your direct ancestor, they may be found in the records of siblings. Of course there are times when it becomes necessary to build a case that supports your assumptions as to who you think the parents are. Usually this requires showing how everyone else of the same surname in the area cannot be the parents. While we would love to find that one record that states unequivocally who the parents are, there are families in which this isn't the case and instead we must just spend the time and energy building a case that leaves no question as to the relationship.
In Search of Great-Grandfather
Q: I was wondering if you could assist me in locating vital information concerning my great-grandfather, Cluad G. ReQua. According to my grandfather's (Shelton Elmo ReQua, who was born February 23, 1912, in Blackwell, Oklahoma) birth certificate, he was born in Kansas, and was 32 years of age at the time of Shelton's birth. I have contact both the state of Oklahoma and the state of Kansas vital records but they could offer no additional information. What do you suggest as my next course of action? -- Richard
A: Vital records, that is the recording of birth certificates and death certificates, are a relatively contemporary resource. Most states did not begin to record them until the early 1900s, though some counties were recording them in the late 1800s. Given that your grandfather was born in 1912 when your great-grandfather was 32, that means he was born about 1880 and it is possible that vital records were not being recorded at that time.
It sounds like you do not yet know where in Kansas your great-grandfather was born. Thus, the first step in your research is to narrow down your search to a county rather than the entire state of Kansas. Based on the information you supplied, it does not appear that you have as yet attempted to search for the death record on your great-grandfather. This would be the first step I would take. Usually the death certificates not only supply you with full birth dates, but they may also supply you with the names of your great-grandfather's parents, something you would want to find out anyway.
If you do have the names of his parents, then I would turn my attention to the 1880 census. Now with an every name index, I would see if I could find your great-great-grandparents listed. Finding them listed in the 1880 census would give you a county in which to concentrate on for any available birth certificates or church records.
If you don't know his parents' names, it would hurt to do a search on the ReQua surname in the 1880 census index to see how many families can be found in Kansas and in what counties they are localized. Then you would want to begin systematically going through each county ruling out those who are living there as potential family.
So, first, try to find the death certificate for your great-grandfather. Second, be sure that you are not trying to jump back, skipping valuable records, such as the 1920, 1910, and 1900 census as you research the ReQua surname. If you can find your great-grandfather living in Kansas in 1900, that would be a good county to begin your research. When combined with those of the ReQua surname who were living in Kansas in 1880, you may begin to see a pattern and be able to more easily identify where in Kansas your great-grandfather was born.
Creating My Web Site
Q: I have my own personal web site and I would like to add my family tree for my family to view. How do I create family tree web pages? -- Chuck
A: If you are using the Family Tree Maker software there are two methods in which you can share your information online through your own personal Web site.
Create an RTF File - The first method requires that you have a software program, such as your word processing program, that can read the RTF (Rich Text Format) file and then be saved as a Web page or copied and pasted to an HTML or Web design program. Most of the current versions of word processors do much more than simply send our creations to the printer. They often allow you to be creative and then save the document as an HTML file. Once the file is an HTML file, then it can be uploaded to your personal Web site and displayed online for cousins to find.
Create a PDF File - If you have Version 10 of Family Tree Maker, there is another option available to you. More and more I am finding people using PDF (Portable Document Format) to share information. Unlike HTML that may adjust what the person sees when they visit your site, based on their computer's settings and limitations, a PDF file is almost like you have taken a photograph of the report as it would look if you sent it to the printer. While a PDF file requires that those trying view the files have a special program, the good news is that the program in question, Adobe's Acrobat Reader, is available for free.
One of the reason I like the PDF file is that I can be very creative in Family Tree Maker, and then export the elaborate chart or report as a PDF and not lose anything I have added. Those accessing the file will find that it is easy enough to view and there is even a search function built into the viewer. Another plus to the PDF files is that while people can view your information it is a little harder to copy and paste it into their database.
In addition to sharing your family history on your own Web site, you may also want to think about uploading a page on the Family Tree Maker site as well. This will be indexed in the FamilyFinder and may help you in making a connection with another cousin. Uploading to the Family Tree Maker site is easy given the entire process is simplified by streamlining it. The uploading and placement of the files is all done behind the scenes as your Family Tree Maker software talks with the Web site to get the right files uploaded and displayed.
Rhonda R. McClure is a professional genealogist specializing in celebrity trees and computerized genealogy. She has been involved in online genealogy for fifteen years. She is the author of the award-winning The Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Genealogy, now in its second edition. She is the author of four how-to guides on Family Tree Maker. In late 2001, she wrote The Genealogist's Computer Companion. She is a contributing editor to Biography Magazine with her "Celebrity Roots" column and a contributing writer to The History Channel Magazine. Her latest book is Finding Your Famous and Infamous Ancestors. She may be contacted at [email protected].
|© 2011 Ancestry.com| | <urn:uuid:1d254f2b-e156-4b8f-84a3-12c2e6b0ee07> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://genealogy.com/genealogy/askr111402.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979955 | 2,357 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Published in Women's Health Weekly, April 7th, 2011
"Maternal blood was collected before delivery and fetal blood was collected from the umbilical cord at delivery. Placental tissue samples were obtained after delivery of placenta. Homocysteine, folic acid, vitamin B12...
Want to see the full article?
Welcome to NewsRx!
Learn more about a six-week, no-risk free trial of Women's Health Weekly
NewsRx also is available at LexisNexis, Gale, ProQuest, Factiva, Dialog, Thomson Reuters, NewsEdge, and Dow Jones. | <urn:uuid:88085d9c-d183-4ecf-9176-aa58a14bc037> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newsrx.com/newsletters/Womens-Health-Weekly/2011-04-07/44040720112WW.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947728 | 131 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Anna Dauzzano da Siracusa
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The Legitimate Businesswoman herself.
Argent, A dolphin naiant sable, a bordure gules.
|Awards & Offices|
| Award of Arms, Order of the Burdened Tygre, Letters of Marque (Bridge)|
Warranted Marshal of Fence
Signora Anna Dauzzano "Don't call me a Pirate" da Siracusa came to the Barony of the Bridge by ways of Trimaris in 2002, where she had been playing on and off for a few years during high school and college. She is garb diva, a legitimate businesswoman, a warranted marshal of fence and a pretty good brewer, too.
Anna was born in the mid 16th century to a Spanish mother and Italian father. The youngest of seven and the only daughter, her early life on the olive plantation just outside of the ancient city of Syracuse was one marked of memories running among the Greek and Roman amphitheaters and learning to beat up her older brothers.
After her father's death while she was still young, her mother sent her to live with her wealthy paternal uncle on the mainland in Naples in hopes of Anna becoming more educated, and the opportunity to be successfully married to a Spanish nobleman with access to a larger dowry. Unfortunately, education proved to be more of a curse than a blessing, and Anna found herself engrossed in the classics while working in the offices of her uncle's shipping company in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. After turning down several profitable marriage proposals, her uncle saw in her a better businessperson than noblewoman, and gave her the ship, La Delfina Nera (the Black Dolphin), to sponsor and run as her own corner of his larger conglomerate.
Disagreeing with the tribute demanded by the Spanish crown for them to continue to operate out of Naples, the Dauzzano clan packed up and relocated to Venice, which gave them greater access to the Eastern Mediterranean and the goods coming off of the Silk Road. Anna, along with her brother, Maximo, took La Delfina Nera and another ship, the Giovanni, to the island of Cyprus to be more strategically placed for trade with the Ottoman Empire out of Constantinople. This is a dangerous place to be, as the Ottomans continually press the Venetian merchants and shippers on the island, and threaten invasion.
Because of Anna's standing as an unmarried businesswoman rather than a wife and mother, she is often under attack by speculations of being a heretic and witch, though she has yet to be brought before the Inquisition. The often-unorthodox trade tactics of the Black Dolphin are also constantly under scrutiny, and Anna and her crew have been branded as pirates by the Spanish and Ottomans.
In her daily life, Anna balances the ledger, takes inventory, and enjoys wearing the fashionable and more comfortable clothing of fine ladies in Constantinople compared to the stiff, carded bodices and heavy skirts of the West. "Pants make it possible."
About La Delfina Nera
La Delfina Nera, otherwise known to English speakers as The Black Dolphin, is a Genoese Carrack constructed for the Dauzzano Shipping Company in their earlier days. Due to its age, the ship is constantly being patched and repaired, so, to cover the tar on the exterior of the hull, the ship maintains a solid black wash at all times.
Offices & Positions
- Deputy Seneshal of Trollhaven, 2003-2004
- Arts and Sciences Champion for the Barony of the Bridge, 2011-present
- Matrona of Villa del Delfina Nera
- Autocrat for Black Rose Ball, 2004
- Autocrat for Black Rose Ball, again. 2010.
- Co-Autocrat for the Coronation of Lucan VIII and Jana V, 04/02/2011.
Projects & Publications
- Currently writing novels about her personae. | <urn:uuid:2137f9d6-362c-414a-89f5-618db9c23a4e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eastkingdom.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Anna_Dauzzano_da_Siracusa&oldid=13928 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95433 | 877 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Re: Warming the CO2 bottles
>My living room, where the tanks I run with Yeast reactors are
>kept, is quite cool too. I've found that I can keep my pH very
>stable by keeping the bottles sitting on a reptile tank heater.
>This is on a timer set to be one when the lights are on and off at
>night. When the bottles cool down at night, they still put out
>some CO2, but not as much as when they're just a little warmer.
I saw this with delight and immediately phoned my fish shop who sell these
things. They told me that it was a good idea and several of their customer
had done this *BUT* there had been problems with the thermostat on the
heaters going wonky and getting much TOO HOT, in fact cracking glass tanks.
As this would be pretty fatal to a plastic bottle I thought I'd better let
you know about it just in case. Their brand is a Zoomed. They also had a
suggestion for warming up the yeast that seems safer to me. They stand the
bottles in a small (2 gallon) tank with a regular aquarium heater and keep
them nice and toasty that way.
Just thought I'd pass this on.
still sunny and warm in Vancouver. | <urn:uuid:c0c706c8-dbde-49f9-9097-9267913c7ff8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fins.actwin.com/aquatic-plants/month.9602/msg00255.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981145 | 280 | 1.617188 | 2 |
(IX-143: displacement 15,333; length 446 feet; beam 58 feet; draft 27 feet; speed 10.7 knots; complement 132; armament 1 4-inch gun, 1 3-inch gun; class Silver Cloud)
The second Silver Cloud (IX-143) was laid down in 1919 by William Cramp & Sons, Philadelphia, Pa., as the merchant tanker Alameda (q.v.); disposed of in 1922 after a fire and served in merchant service as Olean and Sweep; and acquired by the Navy from the War Shipping Administration on a bare-boat basis while at Eniwetok, Marshall Islands, on 12 July 1944; commissioned on 12 July 1944, Lt. Comdr. H. R. Will, USNR, in command.
Silver Cloud was acquired by the Navy for use as a mobile floating storage tanker, capable of holding 84,277 barrels of fuel oil. Three days later, she fueled her first two destroyers. She remained in the Marshall Islands until 17 August when she sailed for Manus Island, Admiralty Islands. Silver Cloud dropped anchor in Seeadler Harbor on 28 August and before departing, on 28 December 1944, had fueled almost 200 ships.
The tanker's next destination was San Pedro Bay, Leyte, P.I., via Hollandia, New Guinea. She arrived at Leyte on 15 January 1945 and remained in the Philippine Islands until 30 December when she sailed for New Orleans, via Panama, for disposal.
Silver Cloud arrived at New Orleans on 10 March 1946 and sailed the next day for Mobile, arriving on the 12th. She was decommissioned and delivered to the War Shipping Administration on 29 March. Silver Cloud was struck from the Navy list on 17 April 1946 and sold to Pinto Island Metals Co. on 21 January 1947.
15 April 2004 | <urn:uuid:c9f45529-90e7-499b-b185-b4759ab0b4b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/s12/silver_cloud-ii.htm | 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 | 0.955646 | 376 | 1.679688 | 2 |
She did, and in a big way.
To date Leslie has written and illustrated more than a dozen children’s books that feature characters instilled with their creator’s quirky sense of humor. More than two million copies have had their pages turned by tiny fingers around the world.
Takashimaya, a high-end department store chain in Japan, became so enamored with Leslie’s designs after reading about her in Glamour magazine that they have devoted entire sections to her private collection of more than 800 products, consisting of nature-based images inspired by her work as a global research volunteer for Earthwatch. Leslie’s bright and bold designs can also be seen on the carpeting, fabrics and wallpaper at the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel.
When If Rocks Could Sing, a beach-y twist on an alphabet book, was published last year it was an instant success and Leslie delights in showing off the A- to Z-shaped rocks and their tiny accessories that took 10 years to find. To add to the number of projects she juggles is teaching a workshop called “The Quest for Inspiration” at Rancho La Puerta Spa in Tecate, Baja California, Mexico. It’s a passion of hers and the reason is personal.
Read the entire article in the February 2012 issue | <urn:uuid:86347188-2f26-4bcc-897e-a3464f23ccd1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lesliemcguirk.com/tag/interactive/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968551 | 275 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Kent State University to Offer New Bachelor Degree in Public HealthPosted Oct. 28, 2009
Kent State University has received approval by the Ohio Board of Regents to offer a bachelor of science (B.S.P.H.) degree in public health. Kent State University is currently accepting applications for the B.S.P.H. program for fall 2010, and courses will be available this spring semester through the Experimental Programs (EXPR) Division. The College of Public Health is also planning an undergraduate certificate in public health.
This is the first degree program of Kent State’s newly created College of Public Health, Ohio’s second college of public health. The new college was established to help meet the demonstrated state and national need for public health professionals. In Ohio alone, the projected shortage of educated and trained public health professionals is estimated to be in excess of 10,000 workers by 2020. Kent State’s College of Public Health is also a response to the University System of Ohio strategic plan, which asks universities to leverage existing areas of excellence to improve education, research, service and economic opportunities across Northeast Ohio and the eastern half of the state.
“This new public health bachelor’s degree and our College of Public Health leverage our nationally recognized expertise in health and behavior, nursing, biopreparedness, and violence prevention,” said Kent State President Lester A. Lefton. “Kent State is ideally positioned to produce knowledgeable, well-trained public health professionals to help meet this growing workforce demand for Ohio and our nation.”
According to a February 2008 report by the Association of Schools of Public Health, America will need 250,000 more public health workers by 2020 – a well-educated, technologically savvy and multidisciplinary workforce that includes epidemiologists, biostatisticians, health educators, health program administrators, health policy analysts, public health physicians and nurses, and occupational and environmental health specialists.
“Public health has an important role to play in reshaping the U.S. health care system,” said Kent State Provost and Senior Vice President Robert Frank, who also is serving as acting dean of the College of Public Health. “The science of prevention, the study of disease causation, and the investigation into environmental and social determinants of health – all core to public health – will continue to inform the health care reform debate. Kent State’s College of Public Health will prepare students to meet the challenges future leaders in health-related professions will face. The college’s faculty will produce cutting-edge research to advance the knowledge of how to keep people safe, healthy and productive.”
Kent State’s College of Public Health currently has 15 faculty members specializing in epidemiology, biostatistics, environmental health, social and behavioral science, and health policy and management. The college expects to have 25 full-time faculty members. In addition to the bachelor’s degree, Kent State’s College of Public Health plans to offer master’s and doctoral degrees beginning in 2010.
For more information on the College of Public Health and the new bachelor of science degree in public health, call 330-672-6500 or visit www.kent.edu/academics/publichealth. | <urn:uuid:892330c5-555c-45f4-97c4-08a8bb18cf26> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kent.edu/news/newsdetail.cfm?newsitem=9BFED230-FD56-B487-8EC4132B102C45B8 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948247 | 671 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is concurrent enrollment?
- How do I know what courses I should take?
- Are there requirements I need to meet in order to participate in Concurrent Enrollment?
- The course I want to take has a prerequisite. What does that mean?
- Do I need to take placement tests to participate in Concurrent Enrollment?
- What are the advantages of doing college classes at Cañada, CSM or Skyline versus AP courses in High School?
- Can I participate in the Concurrent Enrollment Program in my first summer after high school graduation?
- What happens if I fail my college class?
- How can I obtain a copy of my Cañada, CSM or Skyline transcript?
1. What is concurrent enrollment? (top)
Concurrent Enrollment is an enrichment program that provides an opportunity for high school students to get an early start on higher education by earning college credits while still in high school. College courses taken in high school may be used to fulfill college and university requirements without the expense of most university programs. Many courses are transferable to four-year colleges and universities.
2. How do I know what courses I should take? (top)
You should talk with your high school counselor about the college courses that are appropriate for you to take. Your counselor can review your high school transcript and help determine what courses will best meet your educational goals and are suited to your academic ability. Additionally, there is a listing of courses not available to high school students.
3. Are there requirements I need to meet in order to participate in Concurrent Enrollment? (top)
Yes. In order to participate, you will need to obtain written permission from your parent/guardian and your high school principal or designee. Depending upon the course(s) you wish to take, you may need to meet course prerequisites.
4. The course I want to take has a prerequisite. What does that mean? (top)
Certain college courses require that you have acquired specific skills or knowledge in order to be successful in the class. In order to be eligible to enroll in the course, you must be able to demonstrate that you possess the skills or knowledge in order to be successful. There are a several requirements that students must meet in order to participate.
- Cañada College Prerequisties, Corequisites, and Recommendations
- CSM Prerequisites, Corequisites, and Recommended Preparation
- Skyline College Prerequisites, Corequisites & Recommendations
5. Do I need to take placement tests to participate in Concurrent Enrollment? (top)
There are certain courses, like English and mathematics, for which placement tests will be required to determine if you meet course prerequisites. See Class Schedule/College Catalog for specific course prerequisites, placement testing dates, times, and locations. You should make arrangements to take the placement tests as soon as possible, so that you will know if you are eligible to take the course you wish.
- Cañada Placement Testing Website
- CSM Placement Testing Website
- Skyline Placement Testing Website
6. What are the advantages of doing college classes at Cañada, CSM or Skyline versus AP courses in High School? (top)
With the AP courses you complete in high school, you will still need to take the AP test prior to earning any college credit. AP tests are not free, while concurrent enrollment is for residents of California. Remember, not all universities accept AP Credit, and you will also have to score at least a “3” on each test to earn college credit. Even within the UC system, not every university (or even each college within the university) accepts AP credit in a similar way. Go to www.universityofcalifornia.edu and search for “quick reference for counselors” to obtain additional information.
7. Can I participate in the Concurrent Enrollment Program in my first summer after high school graduation? (top)
No. Since you will have graduated from high school prior to the time that the summer session will begin, you will be considered a high school graduate. While you may not participate in the concurrent enrollment program, you are eligible to apply as an incoming freshman.
8. What happens if I fail my college class? (top)
Most concurrent enrollment students do very well in their college classes. However, if you fail the course, you may wish to retake the course at a later time. It is important to know that once you enroll in a college course, you will be establishing a permanent academic record that will remain with you throughout your college education. That’s why it’s important for you to meet with your high school counselor to help you select the right courses. Once you are enrolled, you should also talk with college counselors to make sure you are aware of important deadlines for dropping classes and for obtaining help if you need it.
9. How can I obtain a copy of my Cañada, CSM or Skyline transcript? (top)
To obtain district transcripts, you may go on the web at WebSMART:https://websmart.smccd.eduand log in with your user ID (G #), and your PIN number. Once into WebSMART, click on “Student Services”, “Student Records”, and finally “Request Official Transcripts. | <urn:uuid:2fd4748f-7d56-41fe-b6a4-4d7cadb6d324> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smccd.edu/accounts/smccd/collegeconnection/faqs.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950812 | 1,125 | 1.789063 | 2 |
As the novel opens, letters home to his wife, mother, and three children from Major William Lloyd describe the doctor's work and troubles in the hospital he's established behind the front lines somewhere in France.
But Emma, his wife, has troubles of her own. Her mother-in-law has moved the family to her Long Island estate to escape the city germs, and she rules with an iron hand. Emma's two sons, one at enlistment age, have alarming pacifist sympathies, and the flag-waving chauffeur is spreading rumors against the family.
With growing concern, Emma notices the increasing mention of the French nurse Jeanne Prie in the doctor's communications, and is disturbed by his boundless admiration for her and for the revolutionary work she's doing with victims of the mysterious fevers that are carrying off so many soldiers. Then, as Willie, the oldest son, is drafted, and as Jeanne's miracles, whether saintly or obsessed, stir up controversy, the situation spins out of control, forever changing their lives.
A wonderful and complicated love story, a portrait of a society in transition, a riveting tale of medical suspense, Somewhere in France is a major literary achievement. | <urn:uuid:409d9cae-cbef-42c7-9e21-34dda5669a29> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fishpond.co.nz/Books/Somewhere-France-John-Gardiner/9780375407406 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969232 | 247 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Montana is unique among the states of the United States. While many states proudly display wildlife, farm animals, flowers or trees as part of their twenty five cent commemorative piece, Montana simply has a skull.
Inspired, some think, by early Eagles album covers?
The official state nickname is "The Treasure State."
Awesome destinations
It should be noted that these destinations don't take long to get to, despite the size of the state; Montana is unique among the states by having no speed limit on interstate highways during the daytime.
Missoula is the hippest little town between Seattle and Minneapolis, full of Grateful Dead fans, radical environmentalist wackos, Rockin' Rudy's, and the like. Missoula can be easily spotted from the sky by the big peace sign on the hill.
Glacier National Park
An absolutely stunning national park in the north-west of the state with only glacier in the continental US. It is proof of global warming for anyone who has visited the park in five year intervals. A national park since 1910; it has only one major road, the Going to the Sun Road
Not so awesome destinations
Butte is a rough and ready little mining hamlet famous for three things: child abuse, St. Patrick's Day, and the Berkeley Pit. The majority of Buttians are Catholic because they know hell is a very real place. Butte has voted Democratic in every election since Montana attained statehood, but this is probably because of massive vote fraud by tommyknockers sabotaging the voting machines.
(This is what you might actually see while driving down 1st Street (U.S. 2) on a windy day.)
The greatest Montanananans
- The best thing to come out of Montana in recent years is Senator Jon Tester, who, when confronted by the Republican incumbent during a debate that he wanted to weaken the USA PATRIOT Act, replied "weaken hell, I want to repeal it!"
- Some people think the worst thing to come out of Montana, as of late, is Max Baucus.
- The single greatest Montana of all time was Joe Montana.
- Norman MacLean had a spiffy movie made about him and his brother fly fishing. Reportedly fly fishing became a brief fad in 1992 because of it.
- Rick Jore, a State Representative from Ronan was the only member of the Constitution Party to hold an elected office. Despite his repeated bashing of public education he was made chair of the House Committee on Education by the state Republican party.
- The Montana Freemen were a group of cranks from the sovereign citizen movement who thought they could get rid of all their debts by filing bogus liens at the county courthouse and then floating worthless checks against those liens. An attempted 1994 foreclosure on their property followed by a 1996 standoff with the FBI put an end to that silliness.
- Stan Jones, Montana's perennial Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, is a notorious consumer of colloidal silver. No word yet on whether he will change his name to Papa Smurf.
- Elizabeth Clare Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant who prepared for a prophesized nuclear war by collecting weapons and armored vehicles, presumably to finish off the survivors.
The Montana Power debacle
By area, Montana is the fourth-largest state in the United States. It is also one of the most sparsely populated. In the years before World War I, the state government decided to bring electricity to all of the people of Montana by creating a statewide electric company. The new utility operated as a monopoly, albeit a heavily regulated one. Montana Power built a statewide network of power lines whose installation and maintenance ate up huge chunks of revenue. If it had not been a monopoly, Montana Power could never have broken even, let alone turned a profit. For decades, the people of the state were happy with their reasonably priced, reliable electric company.
Then, in 1997, the Republicans in the state legislature caught the deregulation bug and broke up the monopoly. (And, yes, Goldman Sachs was at the center of it.) Now, many Montanans pay through the nose and the ass for their electricity. And if you're a rancher who lives in the middle of the middle of nowhere, and your power line breaks thanks to an ice storm, have fun waiting for the power company to send out a repair crew.
Not much to do with Montana
Vasily Borodin would have liked to have seen Montana.
- ↑ One has to wonder how it got that name.
- ↑ In 2000, when the U.S. census showed a state population of 902,195, state officials were sure that the state's population would exceed one million by 2010. They were off by about two years as the 2010 census placed the state's population at 989,415.
- ↑ Kohn, David, and Steve Croft. "Who Killed Montana Power?" 60 Minutes-CBS News website, posted 10 August 2003. | <urn:uuid:6cb5b188-906d-4696-8d07-68b190f54e3b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Montana | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962034 | 1,031 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Born in Madrid, Spain, Daniel Beltrá is a photographer based in Seattle, Washington. His passion for conservation is evident in images of our environment that are evocatively poignant. The most striking large-scale photographs by Beltrá are images shot from the air. This perspective gives the viewer a wider context to the beauty and destruction he witnesses, as well as revealing a delicate sense of scale. After two months of photographing the Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Spill, he produced many visually arresting images of the man-made disaster. His SPILL exhibit premiered in August 2010, toured around the globe in 2011 and will continue into 2012.
Over the past two decades, Beltrá’s work has taken him to all seven continents, including several expeditions to the Brazilian Amazon, the Arctic, the Southern Oceans and the Patagonian ice fields. For his work on the Gulf Oil Spill, in 2011 he received the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award , the Lucie Award for the International Photographer of the Year – Deeper Perspective, and was chosen as one of the six finalists for Critical Mass for Photolucida. In 2009, Beltrá received the prestigious Prince’s Rainforest Project award granted by Prince Charles. Other highlights include the inaugural “Global Vision Award” from the Pictures of the Year International in 2008. In 2007 and 2006 he received awards for his work in the Amazon from World Press Photo. Daniel’s work has been published by the most prominent international publications including The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Le Monde, and El Pais, amongst many others. Daniel Beltrá is a fellow of the prestigious International League of Conservation Photographers. | <urn:uuid:44f8ee22-9b4a-4322-8c3a-daecd6fa7a3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.danielbeltra.com/about | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95247 | 352 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Clarification: Mapping Trust and Other Social Networks
The seminal article I mentioned in my post on Trust Networks that lays out 3 networks (Trust, Advice, Communication) is Informal Networks: The Company Behind the Chart by David Krackhardt and Jeffery Hanson, HBR 1993.
Karen Stephenson lays out 6 networks which overlap with the original 3. Her Work Network and Learning Network are similar to their Communication Networks. Her Social Network and Strategic Network are similar to their Trust Networks. Her Expert Knowledge Network and Innovation Network are similar to their Advice Networks.
Her identification of different modes of inter-personal relationships is invaluable, and based on significant experience, but of course increases the complexity of analysis. The cost of social network analysis is also furthered by reliance on surveys for data, which are one-off rather than continous or automatic. Benefits of social network analysis are also hampered by the current means of presenting results, usually in the form of a report or consultation with select managers.
The real value in social network analysis will be realized when the process is automated to realize the speed required for map these dynamic networks and continous to realize nested feedback loops. | <urn:uuid:0f2f485c-2615-4e27-ad8d-0d1ac13e7d2d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://radio-weblogs.com/0114726/2002/11/06.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933631 | 235 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Wednesday Evening (6:30-8:00pm) June 5 - July 24
Gideon: Your Weakness, God's Strength by Priscilla Shirer.
When we hear the name Gideon, most of us think about his 300 soldiers or the fleece he laid out under the evening sky. But like everything else in the Bible, this is a story about God and His people. And because God's people includes you and me, Gideon's story is also about us—our lives, our struggles, and our potential as believers. This study will encourage you to recognize your weakness as the key that the Lord gives you to unlock the full experience of His strength in your life.
This seven-week study will meet in a small group format for discussion, and we also enjoy a time of large group teaching. Childcare is always provided. | <urn:uuid:bcac2a77-2a55-446d-80f3-c60af063d7bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gostonebridge.com/lbs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96543 | 174 | 1.523438 | 2 |
The NYU Scientists Guide to Startups is intended as a quick reference tool for NYU scientists interested in starting a company based on their inventions. This guide is focused specifically on technology-based companies formed to commercialize one or more related inventions made at NYU and protected via intellectual property rights (e.g. patent or copyright) owned by NYU. If you are interested in exploring how to get your technology out of your NYU laboratory and into the market, this guide is for you.
The Guide provides a high-level overview of the startup process, intellectual property basics, working with OIL, startup licensing and the growing NYU ecosystem and resources available to support technology commercialization and startup formation. | <urn:uuid:7a605b7b-8c5b-445a-9516-822fd6763466> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nyu.edu/about/university-initiatives/entrepreneurship/resources-for-entrepreneurs/scientists-guide.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937527 | 137 | 1.75 | 2 |
The inside story of a prison murder that took place while guards slept.
Free, life-saving medicine left on the shelf to expire while government cronies sold their own pricey drugs.
Heavy thugs with shaved heads attacking journalists.
A justice system that abuses victims more than punishes offenders.
Forests on state land cut down with impunity to build cemeteries and mansions for favored officials.
Women sold into sex slavery and smuggled to Dubayy.
Earthquake victims who were promised new apartments by the government after their own had crumbled in 1988, but who still live in shacks.
Any investigative reporter would instantly recognize these stories as a rich load of material to mine. Here in the United States we’d be amazed that all of these shocking events are taking place—routinely—in an area the size of Maryland. Yet in Armenia this is only a sampling of the stories pursued by a small number of intrepid, fearless journalists after an investigative training program run by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) in Washington, D.C. and sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.
Thirteen years after breaking away from the former Soviet Union, Armenian journalists readily tell you that their nation’s press is not free. They confront almost insurmountable obstacles in a society steeped in government, police and legal system corruption.
It would be unrealistic to expect that any month-long program, no matter how ambitious, would result in major changes in work practices or attitudes of journalists. Yet this project to improve investigative reporting techniques for 10 Armenian journalists had a remarkable effect in encouraging them to tackle hard topics and to bring their stories to fruition. This was the most sophisticated and intensive training project I have had the good fortune to be involved with since I began teaching journalists overseas on a Knight International Press Fellowship in 1998.
A Training Journey
Before that fellowship, I had only wistfully fantasized about going over to post-Soviet countries to help build a free press. But in 1997 I had just left a job in Hawaii and had no mortgage or car to support. All my possessions were packed up and put in cold storage, so it was a perfect opportunity to travel and live out some of those fantasies. I asked to be sent to Eastern Europe, and Susan Talalay and the other folks who ran the Knight Fellowship Program granted my wish, assigning me to Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic for nine months. I taught seminars and workshops ranging in duration from one hour to four months, reaching hundreds of journalists. My accommodations ranged from a cozy furnished apartment in Budapest to a blur of old Communist-built hotels with less than perfect amenities. Hours were long.
I was hooked. The year was transformative and set me on a new career path. While I’m very proud of the work I did as a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 15 years, I’ve found that this later work as a trainer to be perhaps more meaningful—because of the friends I’ve made, because it reminds me of the soaring purpose of journalism, despite its rooting in nitty-gritty, grinding details, many of which have to be extracted iota by iota, and because it expands my horizon beyond my comfortable life and wakes me up.
Since 1998, I’ve been engaged in training assignments in Kosovo, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Macedonia (I had been slated to do a training session for a local television station there, but it was cancelled when the station was bombed that day by Albanian rebels). These experiences became the foundation for a training manual I wrote for ICFJ, which has since been translated into 18 languages and distributed worldwide.
In 2001, I went to Botswana for four months as the first John McGee International Press Fellow for Southern Africa. (I was followed by Nieman classmate Philip Hilts, who became the second McGee fellow.) Now I work with foreign journalists on a full-time basis, as director of the Humphrey Fellowship Program at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Initially I found overseas training too daunting. I’ve watched many trainers give up, finding the country too corrupt to allow for independent publications, or the resources too puny, so that reporters churn out two or three stories a day. But I began to see even the smallest improvements as significant and to realize that results won’t occur overnight. And we trainers have gotten better.
The Armenian Project
Last year’s Armenia project, for instance, was so effective because it was intensive; it lasted over several months and focused on producing high-quality investigative stories. Granted, it was more generously funded than most programs and had the advantage of working with strong local journalists, organized by Edik Baghdasaryan, head of the Armenian Association of Investigative Journalists. His tenacity and bravery in tackling the criminal corruption in Armenia astonished me.
In January 2004, the 10 Armenian journalists were flown to Washington for a week of seminars in American-style reporting. Then each of them, accompanied by a translator when warranted, was dispatched to an outstanding newspaper or television station located in cities around the United States. For two weeks they observed investigative practices, often working alongside reporters at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or KNBC in Los Angeles, among other sites.
My mission was to work with the journalists individually on story projects of their own choosing. While the reporters had promised to send progress reports from Armenia by e-mail to me in the ensuing months, I heard little from them. I feared for the worst. After I arrived in Yerevan in May 2004 and began meeting with them, I found that nearly all had made substantial progress. Some had finished major projects.
Not all 10 of them have completed stories, as of this date. Some suggested that editors at participating news organizations should have been required to publish or broadcast projects or, at the least, have been required to give reporters time off from their regular duties to complete a project, if that was the limiting factor. But I am hesitant to place such demands on any news organization. Investigative reporting is not for everyone. We can’t force people into it. Sometimes the obstacles (lack of time, lack of money, resistant editors) serve to dissuade people from stories that they, or their editors, were not ready to take on in the first place.
As trainers, we coach from the sidelines; it is the reporters and their editors who must decide whether or not to put their organization behind a controversial story. After all, it is they who could be fired or find that all the copies of their newspaper suddenly disappear, and it is they who could have their station suddenly lose its license or be visited in their office by heavy-set bodyguards of criminal kingpins. All of these events have happened in very recent years to Armenian editors who have pushed the unspoken limits too far.
I sometimes fear that our training opened people’s eyes and ambitions to the kind of journalism that can be accomplished at some of the best news organizations operating in a free society, but then returned them to their situations with little armor against what the reporters refer to as “the Armenian reality.” Yet as repressive and punishing as oppressive forces of government and criminal corruption can be, reporters in Armenia show time after time their agility in getting stories done—perhaps sometimes in less than perfect fashion than might be wished, but nevertheless done. They play a dangerous game of thrust and parry, advance, retreat. Stakes are high. Punishments are visible, swift and serious.
The 10 participants were from a wide range of organizations and included television and print reporters who worked in newspapers, magazines and online. While some of the reporters were already very experienced in tackling investigative stories, others were not. Likewise, the journalism philosophies of their news organizations also varied widely, from meek to crusading. We endorsed this wide range. Journalism training is after long-term results. Training as many people as possible to reach for higher standards increases the possibility of attaining them.
When I was a reporter at the Inquirer, the newspaper’s policy was not to have a permanent investigative team. Instead, reporters at every level had the opportunity to pursue an in-depth story if they came up with a good idea. At the Inquirer we shied away from the term “investigative reporting,” in favor on “in-depth,” “enterprise,” or “project” reporting. One reason is that we felt that important, in-depth stories should not always have to reveal corruption or catch bad guys. Probing accounts of health, environment and social issues can be equally, if not more, important.
In Armenia, everything reporters do could be considered investigative reporting, because they have to fight for every bit of information. Our training aimed not only to foster ambitious story selection, but also to help reporters in their daily work by encouraging them to base stories on facts and documents while aiming for fairness and balance. Many of the 10 Armenian reporters asked for and received government documents, often to their surprise. Some found the documents to be unreliable, but that, too, is a fact that needs to be reported in a country struggling for transparency. Sometimes the reporters had to scale back their original ideas when obstacles proved too difficult, for now. In training we focused on preparing alternative “minimum” stories to do if the “big one” becomes too elusive.
After my two weeks in Armenia, it was all too apparent that this developing country has made great strides but is struggling to hold onto a tenuous democracy, with only limited freedoms and restricted access to information. Yet I left convinced that these 10 journalists are likely to be important players in Armenia’s future as an open society.
Lucinda Fleeson, a 1985 Nieman Fellow, is the director of the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, which brings outstanding journalists to campus for a year of academic and professional pursuits. Her training manual, “Dig Deep & Aim High: A Training Model for Teaching Investigative Reporting,” is published by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and has been translated into 18 languages and distributed worldwide. This article is adapted from her new training guide, “On the Right Track: Investigative Reporting in Armenia,” also published by ICFJ, in both English and Armenian. | <urn:uuid:ff40396f-ae01-4dd2-bc3b-49319957a026> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/101133/Helping-Armenian-Reporters-Dig-Deeper.aspx | 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 | 0.975377 | 2,167 | 1.632813 | 2 |
After driving the roads of Ontario for about 40 years, it still surprises me why there aren’t more accidents when every day I witness some wild and crazy stunts performed by others behind the wheel. I certainly don’t claim to be a perfect driver, but for the most part, I’m a conservative, stick-to-the-speed-limit kind of girl.
I didn’t learn to drive until I was in my mid-twenties and, when I did, I took the driver’s ed course at the local high school in Sudbury. Some of the lessons I learned then have stuck with me over the years.
Never let the driver behind you drive your car. That’s one lesson I remember and still apply to this day. It’s hard to remember that sometimes, especially when I’m being tailgated, but I resist the temptation to travel at the speed that someone else thinks I should be traveling.
Several years back, I was on my way home to Burlington from Milton, driving along Appleby Line on snow-covered roads. I was driving slower than usual because of road conditions. One, two, maybe three motorists traveling in the same direction passed me.
Later that week, my brother told me that one of his coworkers in Milton said she was trapped behind a slow driver on Appleby Line and was tempted to honk her car horn out of frustration, but decided against it and instead waited for a chance to pass the slowpoke, who it turned out was me.
My response to my brother was, “What would she have said to me, ‘you’re traveling at the right speed, owing to weather conditions?’”
I was being true to that lesson I learned years ago – never let the driver behind you drive your car.
Recently, I’ve noticed that quite a few motorists are getting lax about following the rules of the road. Apart from the usual speed demons, there are the lazy turners, those who don’t use their directional signals or who come dangerously close to my front bumper while making a left turn onto a road where I am waiting at the stop sign to make a right turn onto the road they were traveling along.
There are also those who like to stay in the far right lane heading west at Clappison’s Corners and then speed up and pass motorists who are traveling in the left through lane. This week I observed one driver who did that, passing me and another motorist and, then a few minutes later, taking to the left-hand turn lane at Sydenham Road to pass another westbound vehicle.
Another pet peeve of mine is when I come to a full stop at a signed crossing before proceeding through an intersection and see in my rearview mirror that the driver behind me is following close behind without having come to a full stop.
These might seem like minor occurrences but they’re against the rules of the road, which most motorists follow. I think the roads would be a lot safer if everyone adhered to the same rules. | <urn:uuid:12e17278-1713-4378-990e-fef19208afe6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.flamboroughreview.com/opinion/my-view-driving-home-the-message/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978745 | 643 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Reporting Meghan McCorkell
BALTIMORE (WJZ)— Water main mess. Crews are starting the work to fix a broken water main that brought downtown Baltimore to a screeching halt.
Meghan McCorkell has an update on how long it could take.
Light Street between Baltimore and Lombard is still shut down and authorities say it will stay that way for the next three weeks.
The water gushed down Light Street, leaving behind a giant crater and a mangled mess.
“It’s going to be crazy until they can do something about this. Light Street is tore up,” said Kenny Williams, who works downtown.
The city will tear up two blocks of Light Street to replace the broken main, which dates back to 1889. They’ll also replace another pipe which has been there since 1914.
“We’re going to remove those lines and replace them with new lines so once we go in, we can close this road and not have to come back again,” said Alfred Foxx, director of the Department of Public Works.
The bulk of the repair work will happen on Light between Redwood and Lombard. The road will be completely shut down, creating headaches for those who live and work downtown.
“It’s terrible because you can’t get nowhere. You’ve got to go all the way around,” said Barbara Rictor, who lives nearby.
“You got Artscape this weekend, all that coming up, so it’s going to be ugly,” said Garner Little, who delivers mail downtown.
Some of the businesses along Light Street shut down for the day with no water. The city is working to provide temporary service, but that won’t be up and running until Thursday.
“It does impact their business and I think they can handle one or two days of disruption. If it goes beyond that, it will be very frustrating,” said Kirby Fowler with the Downtown Partnership.
With the extensive repairs on tap, it will be weeks before downtown is back to normal.
Most of the repair work will be done during the day. DPW officials say shutting down the entire street will help the repairs go more quickly.
Three years ago, a city assessment found the water main on Light Street was at a high risk for breaking. It was put on a priority list but obviously hadn’t yet been replaced.
These traffic concerns are expected to last for weeks. Drivers are asked to take alternate routes if possible, or to allow extra travel time. Westbound commuters should use Franklin Street and southbound commuters should use Martin Luther King Boulevard. | <urn:uuid:4feb99c0-2f26-434d-b1cc-2b704c569319> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2012/07/17/water-main-break-causes-traffic-nightmare-in-downtown-baltimore/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948222 | 559 | 1.695313 | 2 |
A tourist who fell in love with a hotel in Portugal liked it so much he spent ten years and £500,000 – building a replica in his garden.
Robin Taylor, 47, spent two weeks on a golf break at The Oitavos Cascais on the Estoril Coast in 2003.
While relaxing on the terrace one evening he decided “over a beer” to build himself a home which looked just like the five star resort.
Robin returned home and immediately began drawing up his plans – including excavating a sand quarry on the land behind his existing house.
He then dug out 700 tonnes of earth and spent a decade and half-a-million pounds building the new home.
His new four-bedroomed property shares many features of the Oitavos Cascais – including a swooping glass front and decking.
Robin even designed the colour scheme and decor inside the new house to look like the plush hotel, which sits in the Sintra Cascais National Park near Lisbon.
Dedicated Robin, who runs a commercial paving company, did most of the building work himself and has now unveiled his decade long labour of love.
He said: “I just remembered what a fantastic building it was, with the decking and the big sliding glass doors.
“I was just sitting there with a beer and thinking how wonderful it would be to live in a place like this. It had always been in the back of my mind.’”
Robin decided to build the new environmentally-friendly, ultra-modern, two-storey home in a former sand quarry that was once his back garden in Swindon, Wilts.
An architect helped him draw up a plan and he was granted planning permission by Swindon Borough Council in 2008.
Work got underway in 2010 and Robin had to chop down 14 trees, which he plans to replace this year, as well as scooping out 700 tonnes of sand and earth.
Robin then used 100 cubic metres of concrete – 15 lorry loads – to create the footings and retaining walls of the new house.
Wooden wall frames were installed with three 2.7m x 6m windows – weighing 22 stone each.
The completed house has four bedrooms, four bathrooms and a games and gym room.
It has an eco-friendly LED lighting system which is activated by sensors and uses ten per cent of the normally required amount of electricity.
Robin said: ‘We’ve built it from nothing. It becomes such a big part of your life. It’s taken years and has been one long learning curve. I know every single wire, hook and nail.
“I love the ecology of the house. It is energy efficient with natural insulation and under-floor heating. I see it as a modern-day living. It’s really open plan. It flows.”
The home, which is on a residential road, is bordered by trees and totally out of view of nearby traffic and passing pedestrians.
His partner, solicitor Emma Rubython, 34, said: “I still get a buzz every time I walk into the drive and see it standing there. I love it. What a place to live.
“I don’t think there’s anywhere like it around. We hope to stay here for the rest of our lives.”
Robin estimates that the house cost him around #300,000 to build but around £500,000 including loss of earnings.
He said: ”This is pretty much as we envisaged our dream house to be. We are not rich people. You don’t really think you’ll end up living in a place like this.
”I feel quite fortunate to have been able to build it and also to have built it in Swindon’s Old Town, which is where I like to live.” | <urn:uuid:04bcfadf-c5e1-4e5a-a157-1015a4fe8252> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://swns.com/news/holidaymaker-loved-portuguese-hotel-built-500k-replica-garden-31923/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974517 | 817 | 1.53125 | 2 |
The Dollar Dance
It rises, it falls, it's bought, it's sold. On how much of our fate does the dollar's height have hold?
11:00 PM, Nov 15, 2004 • By IRWIN M. STELZER
"DOWN AND DOWN I go, . . . loving the spin I'm in" might have been written by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer as an anthem for the dollar. As it spins down, cries of both glee and anguish are heard in the land, and economists scramble to offer explanations.
Some of these experts are confessing confusion, as all--well, almost all--signs point to dollar strength. The latest jobs report shows that the economy is steaming ahead. The Fed has again raised interest rates. Investors are pouring cash into shares, consumer confidence and spending are up, oil prices are down, and retailers are rubbing their hands in anticipation as the Christmas season approaches. Meanwhile, business confidence in euroland is declining, reports show that the E.U.-U.S. productivity gap is widening as the European Union refuses to implement the reforms promised four years ago in Lisbon, and domestic demand in Europe remains flat at best. In short, everything seems to be in place for a dollar rally. Yet we see a $1.30 euro and hear talk of a $2 pound.
And down and down the greenback goes, dropping some 8 percent against the euro and 7 percent against the yen since Election Day. Exporters couldn't be happier, as their goods become cheaper in foreign markets. Bush's Treasury, which continues to say it supports a "strong dollar," is quietly celebrating in the belief that the cheaper dollar will begin not only to stimulate exports, but will also make imports more expensive, reducing the $600 billion trade deficit that most economists say is approaching an unsustainable 6 percent of GDP.
BUT THE LOSERS are also being heard from. Oil producers, who trade barrels for dollars, are grumbling that their cartel-inflated prices are declining in real terms. Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, calls the dollar's fall, and the consequent rise in the euro, "brutal." And the president's home-grown critics have taken to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to announce that "the great American middle class didn't re-elect President Bush so he could debase the currency." It is not the trade deficit, they argue, but excessively loose monetary policy that is fanning a flight from the dollar by investors who see an inflationary surge on the horizon.
There is, in fact, both more and less to the dollar's slide than most news stories would lead you to believe. The "more" is that if investors stampede out of a falling dollar, the U.S. economy might be in trouble. A depreciated dollar makes imports more expensive, and eases the competitive pressure that imported goods create for the made-in-USA variety. That means higher inflation, which would force the Fed to raise interest rates sharply, curtailing business investment, driving down the house prices that, when rising, add so much to Americans' wealth and optimism, and forcing consumers to retrench to meet the higher payments on their credit card debt.
The possibility of such an unpleasant drop is far from zero. The Chinese authorities must find work for their nation's rapidly urbanizing masses, and so are eager to keep their export industries operating at full tilt. To prevent the renminbi from rising, China has been buying dollars, and using those dollars to buy Treasury IOUs. That keeps U.S. interest rates low and stimulates growth in the American market, which then can continue to suck in all those low-priced T-shirts and sneakers that fill the shelves at Wal-Mart. Indeed, a lot more than apparel: on a recent visit to a Wal-Mart my wife and I were astonished to see stacks of shiny made-in-China GE and Sunbeam microwave ovens on sale for $29.99.
BUT THERE ARE INDICATIONS that the Chinese have had enough of this game. Rumor has it that China has been selling dollars and buying Asian currencies. If China indeed decides to end or moderate its support for the dollar, the dollar's slide will accelerate, with all of the consequences described above.
That's the "more." Here's the "less": When Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the economy was booming, the twin budget and trade deficits were rising, and the dollar was strong. In 1986, the finance ministers of the leading trading nations met at the Plaza Hotel and agreed to help the already falling dollar to move lower--by 40 percent, as it turned out. And lo and behold, the world did not end.
So a further decline in the dollar might prove a tonic rather than bad medicine. Think of it this way: A consumer who finds that the $1.30 euro makes a winter break in Spain a bit too expensive, will head for Florida, stimulating growth there.
The "less" that there is to this story also includes the possibility that the large trade deficit will in the end prove more sustainable, and for longer, than economists steeped in academic theory may think. The Chinese are riding a tiger, and can't easily get off. If they stop supporting the dollar, the value of all those bonds, notes and other dollar-denominated assets they hold will fall, with some experts guessing that a further 20 percent decline in the dollar will wipe as much as 3 percent off China's GDP. The Japanese authorities, too, are worried. Their economy's renewed growth is heavily dependent on exports, and they are not likely to sit idly by if the yen continues to rise relative to a falling dollar. So the Ministry of Finance is poised to resume intervention to shore up the dollar.
In short, the good news is that supporters of the dollar can't easily beak their habit, and that even if the dollar does continue to dance to the Arlen-Mercer tune, the enormously resilient American economy will adapt without a major hiccup, as it has in the past.
Irwin M. Stelzer is director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, a columnist for the Sunday Times (London), a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard. | <urn:uuid:5a6ac014-b33e-4571-8882-db75cde34e29> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/926kdldi.asp?nopager=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960987 | 1,311 | 1.625 | 2 |
CSAs: A Hot Commodity
by Eileen Weber
A number of sites like LocalHarvest.org will list all the Community Supported Agriculture programs (CSAs) available in your area of the country. The Fairfield Green Food Guide recently published an online Guide to Spring 2010 CSAs and lists CSAs in The Buying Guide. But what many people don’t realize is how rapidly CSAs have taken hold. Purchasing a share in a local farm in exchange for fresh produce, or in some cases meat, milk, and eggs, has essentially “gone viral.” More and more people are signing up for CSAs and many of them are sold out before the growing season starts. This is good news for the local farmer and one of the most economical ways for consumers to buy locally grown.
According to an article in The Hartford Courant dated April 8th, Shared Harvest CT, an upstart web site launched in March and a subsidiary of Edibles Advocates Alliance, helps connect farmers and the people looking for their produce. It essentially functions as an online classified ad. Like speed dating for crops. Consumers and restaurants can look online for what they want from what’s available, and the current listings include several CSAs.
“Shared Harvest creates a separate sales revenue stream for our producers and opens up that margin so that more people in Connecticut have the opportunity to participate and find their farmers,” Emily Brooks, CEO of Edibles Advocates Alliance, the parent organization for Shared Harvest CT, was quoted as saying.
Growing your own food and selling it is an age-old occupation. But with our societal focus shifting from processed foods, fresh produce is getting the spotlight. Farmers’ markets, CSAs, and farm stands are cropping up at an increasing rate. That’s because there is more demand for it.
For Stacia Monahan, who owns Stone Gardens Farm in Shelton with her husband Fred, her farm is in its third CSA growing season. As far as she’s concerned, CSAs provide her customers with new foods to try that they might not ordinarily pick up at the grocery store.
“There’s an investment in a farm, more than the value of the vegetables,” said Monahan. “By word of mouth, we’ve had more interest than last year. But there’s still plenty of room.”
Word of mouth is exactly what has helped CSAs grow across the country. According to Local Harvest’s January 2010 newsletter, they have nearly 400,000 shares from over 3,000 listings. That translates to 0.5% of all households in the U.S. who participate in CSAs. That might not seem like a lot, but it actually is. With that kind of growth, there could conceivably be close to 20,000 listings by 2020.
Growing your own food has expanded on a different horizon. According to an article on Change.org dated April 14th, prisoners in a Florida correctional facility are getting into the act. The state’s correction facility is working in conjunction with West Florida Research and Education Center to teach inmates how to farm. The article brought up three main points: Prisoners growing their own food meant a meal savings of $60,000; Farming is a sustainable job skill; With a link between nutrition and health, better food could lead to better behavior. That’s at least the hope for the latter statement.
For farmers offering CSAs, it gives them an opportunity to form a closer relationship with their consumers. For Dawn Allen, CSA manager for Gazy Brothers Farm in Oxford, the CSA means they can be more personally focused on the customer. “It’s not that we don’t like farmers’ markets,” said Allen. “But you see hundreds of people come and go. With a CSA, you can be very individual.”
Gazy Brothers has been doing farmers’ markets since 1995. The CSA is relatively new for them in comparison. Allen said that obviously farmers’ markets provide a financial return, but the goal will be to have the CSA as their mainstay. “You can tailor it more,” she said. “We’re really listening to what our customers want.”
With last year’s shares totaling 273, Gazy Brothers is now in their sixth season. Their ultimate goal is 600 shares. Overall, the CSA experience has been a good one for them. But, Allen said the one minor down side to the CSA is when customers don’t tell them there’s a problem until the end of the season. “When customers bite their tongues and don’t tell us they didn’t like something-maybe they got more radishes than they wanted-we’ll wish they said something earlier,” she said.
Each of the farms interviewed for this article said that CSAs were an added bonus to doing business. It not only supports their farms, but it brings them closer to the customer. Good produce. Good face time. Good profit. Now that’s a good business model. | <urn:uuid:419c6c32-0364-439e-8b83-97412fc98d74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fairfieldgreenfoodguide.com/2010/04/20/csas-a-hot-commodity/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96643 | 1,081 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Subsets and Splits