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This is a call for papers that deal with literary image(s)/narratives of African civilization(s) of the past. The past is broadly defined. This CFP encourages submissions of papers that involve racial notions of either European civilizational parity/relativism or contrasts.
The panel will engage discussion about representations of heritage/legacy in positive or negative capacities. Papers that entail both positive and negative representations of the African past by various writers are welcome. The papers can also include themes about othering and/or notions of the demise and destruction of civilization. The paper can also involve writings in literature, history, and/or anthropology.
Please submit abstracts to [email protected] by September 30th.
Send comments and questions to H-Net
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announcements appearing in this service. (Administration) | <urn:uuid:4a6fa02a-8a5c-4210-ab5e-5de398a986f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=196382 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931192 | 237 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Greed is nothing new to our society. We invented it and then spend our lives either pursuing it or trying to avoid it, depending on who we are. Some of would like to proclaim we are innocent of greed but think about it, do you really need that car you are driving or could you share one with your spouse? Do you really need that cabinet of comfort food or could you survive on bread? How much money do you need to finally feel that it is enough? Do we have to own big screen televisions, IPods and computers or can we all agree that we have fallen into the trap of greed? I can attest my home is full of items that are only serves to appease my appetite for comfort.
However, when we combine greed with low ethics and a desire to rise above your impoverished neighbors, greed takes on a whole new meaning. The latest case of greed to catch and hold my attention is the child-trafficking scandal in China that has been blown wide open. Scum-of-the-earth criminals either steal or buy infants from impoverished or desperate parents iand sometimes supply the children to the orphanages in China, who in turn process them into the international adoption program. (See LA Times article here)
The ripples of this scandal are far and wide, damaging the reputation of international adoption as well as causing worry to the parents of adopted children all over the world. Later when the children are older and want answers about their origin circumstances, many parents will only be able to relay the fraudulent details made up by devious directors and/or criminals. How will this look to the children?
My strongest frustrations are targeted towards the Chinese government’s inability to follow through on investigations and strict punishment to all those involved in child trafficking. Some proven criminals are executed while others go free and are even rewarded in some circumstances! (see Brian Stuy’s post here)
Readers of my book, Silent Tears, have written me numerous times in the past few months to ask what I feel they should do about the dilemma of not knowing whether their children were trafficked or not. I don’t have all the answers but here are some of my thoughts:
1. Search out any websites with pictures of children who were trafficked to see if the photos match your children’s finding photo. Baby Come Home is one based in China. (You can hit the “Translate” button in top right corner of their website for English)
2. Keep an open mind and read all you can find on the issue of child trafficking in your child’s birth country in the pursuit of awareness.
3. Never pass along unproven details of your child’s origin to your child as truth. If you don’t know, tell them you don’t know. Do not make up fairy tale stories that they will remember into their adulthood.
4. Do not tell your child they ‘may have been stolen’ before they are old enough to process a statement like that. Talk to a counselor or other professional for advice on how to proceed at what age.
5. Carefully investigate any adoption agency that you are considering signing on with. Get references! Google! Research!
6. We can all support any attempts at setting up a DNA data base in China for parents of stolen children to come forward and have a chance at one day solving the mystery of their child’s whereabouts.
Also remember that many abducted children were stolen for other purposes and were not involved in the IA program. Some children are used as props for beggars or taken to work as laborers—there were even children rescued in one case who were still wearing their school uniforms while performing hard labor in a brick kiln. People will erroneously surmise that all of China’s stolen children can be found in homes around the world, living new lives with adoptive parents but the reality is that I believe it will come to light that only a very small percentage of the children actually were adopted. Many more are probably still in China, forced into unfortunate circumstances by the greed of their own people.
If you have any ideas or comments to share with others on this subject, please do! Perhaps there are other ways to deal with this issue that I am not aware of, and we’d like your input.
Most of all please do not let the cases of child trafficking steal your joy of raising your child! If you entered into the adoption program before all of this came to light, you are innocent of any wrong-doing. You should maintain a balance of being educated for awareness purposes while avoiding having your life turned upside down for something you cannot control or resolve.
Trackback from your site. | <urn:uuid:775dbfe6-a88d-42e1-a8e6-69f5d1f8449f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kaybratt.com/2010/01/stolen/ | 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 | 0.972196 | 970 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Aunt Norie’s Sewing Room
I was all cozy and warm in my snug little apartment awaiting the monster blizzard our weather forecasters were predicting. It sure came in right on target.
For now, I have that little, “snug as a bug in a rug” feeling. However, when it lasts as long as forecasters predict, that feeling can turn into “that chicken in a coop” feeling.
Out my window I’ve seen the mail carrier, the trash pick up and the UPS delivery, all go by. All in a matter of just a few minuets. God bless all of those whose job it is to be out in any, and all, of the bad weather, be it snow, rain, searing heat, etc.
We “old timers” maybe appreciate our weather people perhaps more than most of you. We were farmers. We had to be always ready for whatever might come over the horizon at any moment. Winters were longer and more harsh. Our winters would spawn three or four blowing, drifting, freezing blizzards, always in December and even through March.
Agnes Kissenger grew up in western Kansas, where the winter wind never stopped. She one time told us about a day she never forgot. She, the oldest of four, had walked (I think she said) about a mile and a half to the little country school, when big fat snowflakes began falling. Their teacher sent them all home.
She was a new teacher, and chose to disregard the old rule. They tried to tell her: If bad weather moves in, keep the kids at school. “She told us to go straight home, you’ll make it.” The snow soon came in so thick you couldn’t see through it. They tucked themselves into a shock of fodder (corn stalks). Before long they heard their dad yelling, singing, whistling. He had, of course, come after them. He knew they had to be hiding somewhere between home and the schoolhouse.
They busted out of there and ran to get in dad’s wagon. He had hitched up the team and came for them. “Oh yes, the teacher heard about it,” she said. “She was so sorry, of course. A day I never forgot.”
A big, big, thank you to all of you out there working in this kind of weather.
Love you and God bless.
— Aunt Norie, P.O. Box 265, Tonganoxie 66086; [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:97cdc812-41fa-4b21-8d06-0714f34e78f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tonganoxiemirror.com/news/2011/feb/11/aunt-nories-sewing-room/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982066 | 551 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
DPP Solutions: Setting Up Redundant Storage
A look at the extensive possibilities of external hard drives as a digital photo archive
External hard drives offer these methods in a casing the size of a novel. Advents in external hard drive manufacture offer bigger capacities with longer shelf lives, too, and with street prices for external drives hitting under $200 for one TB of capacity, it's hard to argue against the strength of external drives as an archival medium.
Mike Mihalik of hard drive manufacturer LaCie explains. “We've migrated to disk drive systems and individual drives being the primary vehicle for not only the work we do every day, but also for archiving,” he says. “Just as photographers take good care of their negatives, if you take good care of your disk drive, especially if you're using it as an archive medium, and you have multiple copies, your chances of a data loss are pretty slim. It's when you have only one copy of your important information that you risk having a problem because you have nothing else to go to if something should go wrong.”
|Western Digital My Book Studio Edition Library |
The biggest advantage that external hard drives have over other archival solutions is convenience. Internal drives always will be the most cost-effective solution, but with many externals now including 3 Gbps data transfer through standard eSATA connections, the bottlenecking that historically was associated with external hard drives has dissipated. The ease of plug-and-play also gives photographers a lot of flexibility when it comes to coworkers, customers and clients viewing and sharing large amounts of files across multiple workstations. Keeping your large archive of photos mobile also stops your primary computer's resources from being consumed by others who need to access those files. Most importantly, from a portability point of view, if there's a fire in the building, you have your entire file system safely in your hands.
Most externals offer a two- to five-year minimum warranty, which is based on full operational cycling, so unused they generally will last longer than that life span. Drives are a mechanical device, though, and they eventually will fail. However, drives also offer the ability to duplicate themselves automatically across one or more drives, diminishing the risk of catastrophic loss.
Operating systems can split attached hard drives into a redundant array of independent drive structures (RAID). Many drives come bundled with software that will perform this function, as well. RAID on a single drive can be done through partitioning, though most everyone recommends using at least a dual-drive system. NewerTech's Guardian MAXimus FireWire 800/400+USB 2.0, for instance, includes the capability for live activity data redundancy through RAID 1 mirroring on paired SATA drives with up to 1 TB of capacity each.
“There are two basic types of RAID—RAID 0 and RAID 1,” says Chris Haeffner of OWC. “RAID 0 is commonly called striping. As the data comes in to the dual-drive units, it alternates itself really quickly on the two drives, so you have little chunks of data on both drives. That's done for speed, because while one drive is working on something, the other one is picking up on the next task. The downside there, though, is that if one drive happens to fail or goes bad, all your data is gone, which is where RAID 1 comes into play—which is mirroring. It's two drives that mirror each other, so as the data comes in, it automatically copies to both drives at the same time. If one goes down, you're still up and running off the other drive.”
Simplified backup processes are another advantage of external drives. Maxtor's OneTouch III Turbo Edition offers RAID 0 and RAID 1 organization across two 3.5-inch ATA drives, or you can use Maxtor's OneTouch backup for push-of-a-button redundancy, with an option for scheduling automatic backups.
“With our drives,” says Jon van Bronkhorst of Maxtor/Seagate, “on Macs and PCs, you can burn a backup app that will do a scheduled automated backup for you at whatever time you ask it to be run. Then it will do it on a scheduled basis, so every night at midnight when you're not working, it will continue to replicate your content, continue to update the backup files for anything that has changed, and everything will move forward nicely. If you ever do have a failure on your primary drive, you have an up-to-date backup.”
Windows and Macs also have their own automatic backup solutions. At this point, the only necessary evil is proper notation through metadata. From a management standpoint, an image library that builds over the years easily can include thousands of images, so the most important aspect when it comes to long-term archival storage is the ability to easily locate it later by including keywords, dates, locations, subjects and anything else personal that you may use to find a file. Image-management software like Apple's Aperture and Adobe's Lightroom can perform these tasks manually or through customized automation, and even can reference archived images that are stored on unattached hard drives.
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On Monday, November 19, 2012, the twinning between the City of Sunny Isles Beach and Taormina, Italy was formalized in the David P. Samson Commission Chambers (18070 Collins Avenue). The mayors of both municipalities signed the agreement for this program which falls under the auspices of Sister Cities International (SCI). “SCI is a nonprofit citizen diplomacy network that creates and strengthens partnerships between the United States and the international communities.”
With the joining together of these two cities in mind, a delegation from the City of Sunny Isles Beach traveled this summer to the Town of Taormina, on the beautiful Island of Sicily. Delegates remarked on the similarities between the two locations, including world class shopping, seaside hotels, an attractive beach and the fact that both areas are destinations for tourists from around the world. The visitors found the people very welcoming and gracious. The Taormina Commission hosted a grand ceremony and Mayor Norman S. Edelcup signed the Italian version of the Twinning Agreement.
In November, the delegation from Taormina, Italy visited Sunny Isles Beach and Mayor Mauro Passalacqua signed the English version of the Twinning Agreement. The event was as ceremonious and joyful as the signing in Taormina. To welcome the Italian visitors, two young musical prodigies from the Norman S. Edelcup Sunny Isles Beach K-8, Biana Pinchuk and Brandon Goldberg, played for the guests. Their performances included a presentation of the Italian National Anthem.
The two municipalities are now officially joined as International Sister Cities, with the goal to promote commerce, tourism and culture across the ocean. Plans are in process to extend special privileges to visitors traveling between both cities. A cultural exchange is being designed to introduce students from both cities to each other via Skype. With an eye on the future, the older generation hopes to promote understanding between the two cultures and to continue the relationship into the next generation.
For more information about Sister Cities International go to www.sistercities.org/ or contact the Cultural & Community Services Department at 305.792.1772.
Short URL: http://www.communitynewspapers.com/?p=51767
Comments are closed | <urn:uuid:560b2a25-bf6f-4263-a929-1067f80e82d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.communitynewspapers.com/sunny-isles/sunny-isles-beach-signs-sister-city-agreement-with-taormina-italy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939579 | 454 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Starting today, Coloradans will pay more to register their vehicles.
They'll face criminal charges if they possess someone else's passport, Social Security card or driver's license without that person's permission.
And adults will be in big trouble if they're caught "sexting" to a child.
The three measures are among the 57 new laws that go into effect today.
One of the more high-profile bills this year increased auto-registration fees an average of $41 to start, as part of an omnibus transportation bill aimed at raising money to fix 125 of the state's crumbling bridges.
The new law is expected to generate criticism and about $250 million a year, just half of what transportation experts have said is the annual minimum the state needs to maintain its infrastructure.
The state is also adding some text messaging and instant messaging to the list of Internet crimes against a child.
Adults who propose sexual acts or talk about sexual activity could be prosecuted under the law.
Also taking effect today is Senate Bill 228, but its impact may not be felt for years. The law removes a 6 percent annual growth limit on the state's general fund that also ratchets down the budget in years when revenue falls, making it hard for the state to recover from recessionary years. The law replaces the old limit with a new one that restricts general fund growth to no more than 5 percent of the total amount of Coloradans' personal earnings.
Another new law expands health coverage for an estimated 100,000 uninsured Coloradans over several years.
The law imposes a fee on hospitals to generate an estimated $600 million that in turn allows the state to collect a matching amount in federal Medicaid funding and money for the Children's Basic Health Plan to expand eligibility and services and increase Medicaid fees paid to doctors and hospitals.
The state still must get federal waivers to impose the fees, and hospitals and state health officials have not yet ironed out all the details of the fee.
Democrats called it "the most significant health reform legislation in Colorado in four decades," while Republicans argued it will just subtly shift the cost of the fees onto insured patients while doctors and hospitals see increased Medicaid payments. | <urn:uuid:b211f15e-bef1-46a3-9ad4-e9c95dcfa716> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.denverpost.com/commented/ci_12727750?source=pkg | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945223 | 447 | 1.59375 | 2 |
This deadly peace deal
Nothing is so deadly as a half-baked peace agreement. Sadly, this seems to be the lesson from recent events in Darfur. You will remember that an 85-page peace deal was signed with great fanfare in Nigeria's capital, Abuja, back in May.
May's deal has led to more fighting, not less
One faction, led by Minni Minawi and dominated by the minority Zaghawa tribe, signed the deal along with Khartoum's regime. Another SLA group, drawn from the much larger Fur tribe and led by Abdul Wahid al-Nur, refused to sign. These bitter rivals are now fighting one another.
The peace deal caused a complete realignment of Darfur's rebel movement. All those who opposed the agreement are now grouped under a new umbrella organisation styling itself the National Redemption Front.
This includes a new rebel faction called the G19, comprised of a group of commanders who broke away from Abdul Wahid's faction of the SLA. The NRF is the main target of the government offensive now underway in Darfur.
In short, the peace deal has caused more fighting, not less. It has made the Darfur crisis more complicated and far harder to solve.
Jan Pronk, the UN envoy to Sudan, was one of the architects of the agreement. But with great honesty, he has effectively admitted its failure.Â
"Three months after the signing of the Darfur Peace Agreement, the picture is bleak," he writes in his blog.Â
"Nobody expected that security would be restored at once. But presently the situation is worse than in the last three months before the signing of the agreement and it is deteriorating.
"There is fragmentation of all parties. There is complete denial of ceasefire violations as well as of human rights violations. They are not addressed, let alone sanctioned. The agreement was meant to cement the parties together, but it has become a source of further disruption."
The logic behind the deal was the principle that "any agreement is better than no agreement".
The bitter experience in Darfur shows the falsity of this argument.
Nelson Mandela's death will be a moment of great emotional significance – but probably nothing more
June 19th, 2013 17:13
Iran's Rowhani probably wants a deal with the West. Whether he succeeds is down to his boss
June 17th, 2013 10:17
Is Edward Snowden a hero, or has he been dangerously irresponsible?
June 10th, 2013 13:53
What about compensating victims of the Mau Mau?
June 6th, 2013 17:13
Turkey protests reveal the two sides of a volatile leader
June 3rd, 2013 11:50 | <urn:uuid:37cc4b1b-3857-41e1-9711-5fa4032d199d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidblair/3631881/This_deadly_peace_deal/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968274 | 560 | 1.765625 | 2 |
I love art and sciences, but sometimes I feel a bit wary about museums, these human-built environments made for people to entertain (or maybe infotain?) themselves, competing with each other in spectacular shows and exhibitions. Or maybe it is just that I have been spending the last year a bit in a “tourist mode”, scanning through all that Seattle and other cities on our trip lists have to offer. Anyway, there are both better and definitely many worse ways to spend ones time...
A glass globe inside the building, holding a complete Amazonian rainforest ecosystem; you can walk around four stories inside of the globe, researching the ecosystem from the fish below to the canopy above, all complete with living butterflies and birds).
Despite my pondering, I insisted in having the Californian Academy of Sciences located in the Golden Gate Park on our itinerary to San Francisco and I don’t regret this tiniest little bit. It opened in late 2008 and it really is a spectacular place for both young and old; an aquarium, planetarium, natural history museum and research institution, all housed in a completely sustainable, high tech building encasing the old Academy building. It was designed by Architect Renzo Piano, who also draw the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, that famous “guts on the outside” building so avantgarde on its time. In the Academy of Sciences building, the “guts” are actually inside but outside at the same time, just look at the picture above with the glass globe to understand what I mean. K
Totally in tune with the times, the Academy of Sciences building is one of the biggest public LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum buildings, and has been reported and published by the press accordingly. The beautifully undulating roof of 2.5 acres with its rounded portholes did remind me of Teletubbies (being a mother of two children in that generation…), or maybe even of some kind of future space buildings. Looking at the over 1.7 million plants gently swaying in the wind, it felt like promise of better things coming, a time when commercial, public and private buildings will be better equipped for helping to save the planet. | <urn:uuid:7b94443f-e3a4-4296-a20c-161cdb7598c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.intercontinentalgardener.com/2009/08/not-ordinary-museum-californian-academy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958379 | 464 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Mandatory Gun Ownership Considered in Southern US City
In many states, gun ownership by private citizens is up for debate. Recent tragic incidents like the shootings in Newtown and Aurora have prompted voters and lawmakers to consider how private gun ownership should be regulated – or whether it should be legal at all.
One town in northern Georgia is taking an entirely different tack.
The city of Nelson, Ga., is considering making gun ownership mandatory. If a proposed mandatory gun ownership ordinance passes, every homeowner who’s mentally and physically able to handle a gun, isn’t a felon or a “pauper” and doesn’t have any religious objections will be legally required to own and maintain a gun and the appropriate ammunition.
There’s a reason for the proposed law, and it’s not that city council is made up of bunch of gun nuts (well, that may be true) or that Nelson is actually named for John Nelson, a rifle-maker (although that’s true as well). It’s because the small city only has one police officer, who protects its 1,400 residents for eight hours a day, reports GPB news.
“When he’s not here we rely on county sheriffs–however it takes a while for them to get here,” explained Nelson City Councilman Duane Cronic.
According to Cronic, homeowners won’t be forced to actually use their guns – simply having them will be a deterrent to crooks. Reports don’t state whether the city has had crime issues, or whether this is just a preventative measure.
Handing a gun to every Tom, Dick and Harry who hasn’t yet presented with any particularly alarming mental problems instead of hiring more police officers seems like a great idea! And am I the only one who finds it a little ironic that pro-gun advocates harp so much about gun ownership being a “freedom” we’re owed – and here we are, telling people they must own a gun?
What do you think? | <urn:uuid:ea5c6c62-27f5-4ea5-bab9-b1b6e1900ea1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.twirlit.com/2013/03/06/mandatory-gun-ownership-considered-in-southern-us-city/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951529 | 432 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Tibetan self-immolations continue unabated
Protests not as visible as Arab spring
When a downtrodden Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire in protest after his vegetable cart was confiscated by officials, this desperate act of self-sacrifice was seen as a catalyst for a revolution that became known as the Arab Spring.
Contrast this with China, where almost 80 people -- men and women -- have self-immolated since 2009 in protest against Beijing's poor treatment of Tibet, according to rights groups. Yet details of these cases are often sketchy and difficult to verify, such is the stranglehold China has over the region.
As a result the issue has yet to gain real traction internationally.
Beijing has consistently rejected claims it is guilty of oppression in the region and insists Tibetans enjoy religious freedom and better living standards under its rule.
Yet the self-immolations continue.
This week, a 34-year-old father of two burned himself to death in front of a mine in the western province of Gansu, while another 25-year-man set himself alight near a monastery in neighboring Qinghai province -- which borders Tibet, known by China as the Tibet Autonomous Region. Both cases were confirmed by China's state-run Xinhua news agency.
According to the Tibetan government-in-exile and Tibetan rights groups, the victims died chanting slogans calling for freedom for the Tibetan people and the return from exile of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
This brought the number of deaths by self-immolation to 15 in November alone -- the same month that China's political elite ushered in its next generation of leaders during the 18th Party Congress. In their keynote addresses, leaders, both old and new, appeared to strike a conciliatory tone.
Read: Tibetans burn themselves as Chinese leaders meet
In his first speech as Communist Party leader last week, Xi Jinping stressed the need for unity in a country where the Party was becoming too distant from the people. This followed predecessor Hu Jintao's comments to Congress delegates that the Party "should consolidate and develop socialist ethnic relations of equality, unity, mutual assistance and harmony so that all ethnic groups in China will live and develop together in harmony."
But activists warn that if the Chinese government continues to tighten its grip on the Tibetan people in the name of stability, it will only create more resentment. They point to the growing list of young victims prepared to take such extreme action, which they say reflects a desperate and painful state of mind for many.
The Tibet Autonomous Region is heavily policed by Chinese security forces, with Internet content controlled by local authorities and access by foreign media largely prohibited, making reliable information almost impossible to come by.
Pro-Tibetan groups such as the International Tibet Network, say thousands of people have died over the years under China's tenure, through torture, execution, suicides and starvation -- though CNN cannot verify these claims.
The groups also claim Tibetans have gradually become the minority population in their own homeland, as Han Chinese -- China's main ethnic group -- have migrated to the region. London-based Free Tibet says the construction of a rail link to Tibet's capital, Lhasa, in 2006 -- part of China's Western Development Strategy (WDS) -- was intended to cement its control over the restive western regions of China, particularly Tibet and Xinjiang, where separatism remains strong.
"The incidents are a clear indication of the genuine grievances of the Tibetans and their sense of deep resentment and despair over the prevailing conditions in Tibet," Tibetan leader in exile, Lobsang Sangay, said earlier this year. His government-in-exile has repeatedly called on the international community to intervene to prevent further bloodshed.
Chinese authorities insist that self-immolations are isolated incidents and most Tibetans do not sympathize with or support such actions. A senior official from Sichuan, a province with a large Tibetan population that has seen the most self-immolation cases so far, says he knows exactly who's to blame -- the Dalai Lama: the man Beijing calls a "terrorist."
"They plot, incite and instigate -- the root cause for such acts is the Dalai Lama clique," Li Changping told CNN. "His loyalists have called those who committed self-immolation national heroes or freedom fighters, vowing to build them monuments and rewarding their families with lots of money."
The Dalai Lama has long denied China's assertion that he's seeking Tibetan independence, saying he wants only an autonomy that would offer protection for their traditional Buddhist culture.
During an address to Japanese lawmakers in Tokyo earlier this month, he blamed "narrow-minded Communist officials" for seeing Buddhist culture as a threat. He then called on Chinese authorities to investigate and address the causes of the recent surge in self-immolations. "I always ask the Chinese government: Please, now, thoroughly investigate. What is the cause of these sort of sad things?"
Beijing's claim over the region is rooted in history.
It says Tibet has been a part of China since the 13th century, when the Mongol empire, which conquered China and formed the Yuan dynasty, also conquered Tibet. Western and central parts of Tibet are administered by China as the Tibet Autonomous Region, while eastern parts of the region fall under China's Sichuan, Qinghai, Yunnan and Gansu provinces.
After several decades of de facto independence beginning in 1912, Tibet was over-run by China's People's Liberation Army in 1950 to enforce the newly-formed People's Republic of China's claim of sovereignty over Tibet.
In 1959, thousands of Tibetans surrounded the Dalai Lama's palace in Lhasa --- the Tibetan capital -- to protect him against what was rumored to be a plot by the Chinese military to abduct him. The gathering turned into an all-out revolt against Chinese rule, which was suppressed by the PLA. The Dalai Lama fled to India, where he has remained in exile ever since.
Copyright 2012 by CNN NewSource. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:38f204e1-0e88-4e83-bff7-6f335a46eb1b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.clickorlando.com/news/Tibetan-self-immolations-continue-unabated/-/1637132/17520818/-/view/print/-/awwautz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964505 | 1,260 | 1.617188 | 2 |
CORPUS CHRISTI — Rhoda Poenisch, Ingleside
Right to vote against pork
Your Tuesday edition carried an article from The Associated Press about the Hurricane Sandy aid bill (“$50 billion Sandy aid bill sent to Obama).
It clearly stated in the headline that the bill was for $50 billion. In the content of the article, it said $50.5 billion. Thirty-seven billion dollars went to the disaster area for several things including actual disaster-related issues. That left $13.5 billion unaccounted for in the article. In past articles, it was stated that this money would go various places, one as far away as Alaska.
Representative Blake Farenthold voted against this bill, not because he did not want to aid the disaster area, but because it had all of the “PORK” in it.
A letter to the editor in the above-mentioned newspaper criticized him for that by saying he wasn’t compromising and he could only speak out of one side of his mouth at a time. I say, he only speaks out of the front of his mouth. He said his objective was to cut spending. He is trying to do that. I’m not saying that the $13.5 billion will be wasted. It just needs to be appropriated on its own merit, not be attached to an emotional bill that makes anyone voting against it look like Scrooge.
I applaud Blake for his commitment to cutting spending by the federal government. | <urn:uuid:39f9ab32-34b3-4383-a539-ee5293e90964> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.caller.com/news/2013/jan/30/letter-to-the-editor-farenthold-was-right-to/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986507 | 311 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Updates to this story
Yesterday we reported that Google was going to set up a rival social notworking site to worry and bother Facebook. Although neither Facebook or Google would confirm or deny the rumour, Facebook's ex CTO has said that it's "very real".
Adam D’Angelo, Facebook’s ex CTO and now founder of Q&A service Quora, has decided to lift the lid on the speculation, claiming that the social networking site is very much a reality.
Answering a question on his website, which asked "Is "Google Me" a fake rumour? Misleading evolutionary product update? Or is it really a new social network from Google?", Adam wrote: "Here is what I've pieced together from some reliable sources: This is not a rumour. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.
"They realised that Buzz wasn't enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modelling it off of Facebook. Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google.
"They had assumed that Facebook's growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn't be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn't stop, and now they are really scared."
And others have also waded into the debate, leaving comments on Adam's article.
Craig Kanalley, Traffic/Trends Editor at the Huffington Post, wrote: "It's certainly a rumour. I wouldn't call it a fake rumor until proven false. I don't think Kevin Rose would say this if there wasn't something going on. That said, who knows the details? Time will tell."
The original source, a Twitter post from Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, has since been removed, making us wonder if Google or Facebook had a few words.
Here's TechCrunch's take.
We contacted Facebook and Google again in light of this. Facebook's people have said they will get back to us. | <urn:uuid:04f645da-336e-4ca5-aa6d-60e5fbb4656f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.techeye.net/internet/google-me-social-notworking-rumour-is-very-real | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97945 | 438 | 1.726563 | 2 |
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|Boston Art Letter
by Charles Giuliano
|With its rich mix of superb architecture, world-renowned universities and celebrated museums, Boston is a popular summer destination. Undoubtedly the city's greatest cultural attraction of the moment is "Van Gogh: Face to Face," on view July 2-Sept. 24 at the Museum of Fine Arts. The blockbuster features some 80 works by the popular Dutch Neo-Impressionist, ranging from the early figure drawings of peasants in 1882 through works created just before his death by suicide in 1890.
The show was originally hatched by its three co-organizing institutions -- the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art along with the MFA -- to focus on the many representations of the Joseph Roulin family, which is well represented in the collections of the collaborating museums. Indeed, the show contains no less than 17 riveting works representing the postman of Arles, his wife, Augustine, their sons, Camille and Armand, and the baby, Marcelle.
Such a collection of similar poses allows viewers to see the way that van Gogh's style developed from naturalism to a more abstract, decorative patterning and an almost cruel and violent expressionism. Madame Roulin, in some works, is depicted with a crude, hunched body and jaundiced skin. And, in the Met's version of Mother and Child, the baby is such a little perrisher that you really wonder about Vincent's feeling and motive.
There is a great selection of the poignant self-portraits but we greatly miss the Courtauld masterpiece with its bandaged ear. Similarly, the pair of seminal portraits of Dr. Gachet are conspicuously absent. Despite these quibbles, "Van Gogh: Face to Face" is an awesome show.
At the ICA and elsewhere
The summer strategy of the Institute of Contemporary Art is to lure you into the museum facility to see "From a Distance: Approaching Landscape," a group show of 14 artists that is on view July 18-Oct. 8, and then to dispatch you into the fresh air to discover site-specific works by nine artists in a show called "Art on the Emerald Necklace," July 1-Aug. 20. The neglected but magnificent Emerald Necklace is a series of parks that meander through the city, designed by the 19th century landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted.
While the ICA has an ongoing problem of luring viewers to its contemporary shows -- annual attendance is about 25,000 -- the museum has initiated "Vita Brevis," a successful program to place works temporarily in urban locations. The strategy has greatly increased the ICA presence in the city, which plays into the museum's ambitious plans to move from its current 6,000 square foot facility and build a new 60,000-square-foot building as the centerpiece of a major new waterfront development.
The mandate of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in posh, suburban Lincoln is to focus on the artists of New England. Through Sept. 4, it is featuring ten artists in its "Annual."
With no unifying theme, the museum has installed what is in effect ten small solo shows. The most talked about piece, by Remo Campopiano, is an ersatz city populated by ants, their intensive activity monitored by TV. The Persian-inspired imagery of Ambreen Butt has also been well received, as have the deconstructed realist portraits of Frank Egloff. And be sure to check out the 32-foot-high mythological, alchemical silhouettes of Randal Thurston.
The McMullen Museum at Boston College has scored a real coup with "Francois Gilot: 1940-1950," on view through Sept. 24. The legendary former mistress of Picasso and author of the autobiographical My Life with Picasso is expected to be on hand for a reception on Sept. 17.
During a recent weekend visit we checked out the summer highlights in the Berkshires. First stop was the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Mass., where "Seen and Received; The Shaker's Private Art" is on view through April 2001 in its newly completed museum and visitors center. The divinely inspired drawings, which date from the 1840s and 1850s and were created mostly by women, are often in the form of the Tree of Life or intensive hearts with miniscule calligraphy. The Village has a collection of some 20,000 objects. Be sure to tour the site with its famous round stone barn.
The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., is featuring an eclectic mix of paintings, posters, Shriner paraphernalia and clips of silent movies in the provocative, often hilarious "Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures, Orientalism in America, 1879-1930," through Sept. 4. The show is based on works from its permanent collection, and includes paintings by John Singer Sargent and the erotic kitsch of the French Salon painter Jean Leon Gerome.
In the most stunning showcase for contemporary art in all of North America, Mass MOCA (in North Adams, Mass.) is featuring "Unnatural Science" -- a show that's "alive" through Spring 2001. Last year, the general art-world curiosity about the newly renovated, sprawling, former Sprague Electric Company complex was sufficient to fill the parking lot. This year, it looks like more good news -- Mass MOCA is once again a huge draw.
With its industrial-strength galleries, the museum balances both long-term installations by artists like Joseph Beuys and Mario Merz, as well as a major, annual, thematic exhibition.
We get the point of the current show immediately upon interacting with new international art-scene fave Thomas Grunfeld's taxidermy, dubbed Misfit, which features a sheep's head "genetically engineered" onto the body of a stuffed Saint Bernard. "Unnatural Science" also features hilarious videos by Fischli and Weiss, an exotic weaving by Janine Antoni and the epic, inflatable bladders of Tim Hawkinson.
CHARLES GIULIANO is an artist, curator and columnist for Art New England. | <urn:uuid:062b5b5b-7d33-48e0-ba8a-fb485f7c5411> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/giuliano/giuliano7-7-00.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960258 | 1,341 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Fire and Blood
The Courtship of Lady Minerva Parnell
November 26, 1841
Minerva bid farewell to the women surrounding her. Her father waited nearby, a sad look to his eyes. Minerva promised to come calling soon, and bid each of the ladies to do the same; it had been too long since she had seen them.
She walked to her father and hooked her arm through his at the elbow, resting a finely gloved hand on him. "Oh father! Today was beautiful. And did you see? It's begun to snow!" She spoke lightly, giddy still from the large doses of gossip. Her father nodded absentmindedly but Minerva ignored it and forged ahead. "I hope to return soon, Amelia spoke of having a grand Christmas ball, Mary says her family will host a dance as well for the new year. Oh! There will be so many to attend, we'll go won't we father?" Balls meant beautiful gowns as well as the men who would attend. There were several that had been caught by Minerva's fine looks and upbringing, surely one would meet her father's high standards if only he would speak to them. She wondered quickly who would have come calling today or left a small token of their affection.
"I'll see what I can do dear." He nodded again as he escorted her out of the palace's walls. It was a noncommittal answer Minerva knew to expect but one that threatened to crush her spirits regardless. "I hadn't expected to be so late, I'm afraid we'll have to walk home in this." He paused, halting their walk to take in the city springing to life in the early night. "I should send a man to collect a carriage for us."
Blue eyes looked far more excitedly on the night bustle beginning. "Oh, I think a night walk would do us well. The air is so crisp, its not far father, please let us continue." She did not plead, but there was a tone that told her father she would be disappointed should he refuse her request.
Looking into her face he found it hard to say no. He sighed, "Very well. You are warm enough?"
Minnie nodded pleasantly, "It's lined with fox fur, I can barely feel the cold." She touched softly at the gray wool that cloaked her from her the wind and chill that hung in the air. Beneath it her skirts rustled, but the many layers of deep turquoise did well to keep her insulated. They turned right down the street, the sound of vendors closing shop, of men and women hawking their meat pies, of laughter coming from the nearby taverns was a cacophony of life that Minnie rarely saw.
All around her people bustled on their way, the only ones Minnie saw were dressed just as finely as they. Ahead of them, a tall figure caught Minnie's eye. He walked against the flow, his size only one aspect to catch her attention. There was a darkness that clung to him but Minnie chastised herself for thinking as if she were in one of her beloved poems. Her father stiffened though as he too caught sight of the man.
Garrett had hoped to wait til the morning to speak with this man, but it seemed unavoidable now. He clapped his daughter's hand. "This will take only a moment. Just a bit of left over business to attend to." He sounded resentful, but Minnie obliged even though she had no choice.
"Drago Jacobs, my daughter Minerva. We were just on our way home, if we could keep this brief, I'd be much obliged." He seemed to introduce the two reluctantly, his body moving slightly in front of Minnie as if shielding her. She groaned inside, wondering why her father would act in such a way. There was something different about the man, but Minnie could not help but find him handsome. She smiled at the man, curtsying as she did so.
Behind them, men of the sort that were largely invisible to those such as Minnie Parnell, for they wore no pleasant clothing and did not smell of fine soaps or perfumes, gathered to seek a target. Minnie, with her fine clothes and distracted guardian was a fine target indeed. Dirtied from a life on the streets, and bold from the persistent hunger the three men approached. Her cloak would fetch a nice price, the coin she was sure to carry would be a pleasant bonus.
My Interests can be found here
They moved as sheep. Finely dressed prey with their heart’s blood pulsing. Throbbing. A wash of emotion with each beat of their life. Most were excited; worried; fearful. Their thoughts almost assuredly about trivial affairs that would be forgotten in the blink of an eye. It was in their blood--blood that told a very distinct story. He listened to them all. He sensed them, noted them and discarded each one as he pushed through the evening crowds.
On occasion gentlemen nodded to him with respect. Drago returned each nod muttering a greeting. Tonight his interests were focused on one individual: Lord Parnell.
He moved through the crowds as if gliding through water, his walking stick clicked onto the ground lightly with each movement. His dark eyes reflecting the glow of gaslight torches lining the cobblestone streets. Even with his pale skin, the life and color in those dark eyes was that of a hunter. Not a single soul ever noticed the predator dressed in the finest sheep’s clothing.
Lord Drago Walsh was impeccably dressed as any well-born gentleman of this modern age: a fine suit of black cotton trousers, a pressed white shirt and a deep red silk vest. His ensemble was completed within a thick black tail-coat, and accessories of a top hat and pure white gloves. His walking stick was pure black and topped a silver head of a wolf. Somewhat counter to the latest fashion, Drago let his long black hair fall freely past his shoulders, and his lack of mustache or beard was a topic of discussion more than once among such who cared to speak of it. Many of the older gentlemen thought him still some impetuous youth merely posing as a gentleman of stature and wealth. Not one of those gentlemen dared speak such an insult to the man’s face. In truth, few had such courage.
The crowds parted as if on cue, and Drago spotted the Lord Parnell and his beloved Daughter almost immediately. He smirked slightly has he moved amongst the crowd toward them; letting Lord Parnell take notice.
With gentle eyes he bowed slightly as Minerva was introduced. Had the old man not placed himself ahead he would have offered to kiss her hand. Instead he turned his attention to Lord Parnell as they shook hands.
“My apologies for disturbing your evening, Sir Parnell. I will not keep you long. I simply wanted to confer about your meeting with Lord Westmore earlier today. I assume you and he have come to some accord finally?”
Even as Drago spoke, he spotted the miscreants shifting in the shadows of the nearby alley. He turned his head just slightly as he nodded, only half listening to Parnell’s response. The old windbag always had far too much to say about Lord Westmore—most of it rather unkind. His true interest—three of them—were slowly daring closer toward the Lady. The trio would suit his needs perfectly. He could sense their hunger, and taste their adrenaline in the air. Such feeble minds needed only slightest change of mind. Just a whisper on the wind to offered those three desperate souls a most advantageous plot: Ransom.
They had only reach out and pull her into the alley….
Last edited by MerlotBeauty; 11-28-2012 at 05:45 PM.
Fire and Blood
The lead man stopped abruptly, his pause causing mutters of profanities from his companions. A gloved hand, the fabric torn and thin, rubbed his temple. A smile formed across his face however, as he turned to his accomplices. "Change o' plans boys." He spoke in hushed tones as their betters swirled around them, not wanting to dirty themselves. "She'll fetch us a pretty penny." The men looked back to their leader, perplexed, but the hole in their bellies needed filling and if that's what he wanted to do...well it was worth the gamble. They nodded their agreement and fell in behind him as they closed the distance to the pretty lass.
Minnie listened with increasing aggravation as her father made disparaging remarks about Lord Westmore. While it was her father who had wanted this chance meeting to be brief, he was now rambling at length about the lack of moral character and downright skullduggery of his fellow Lord.
She made do with taking in the form and voice of this Lord Drago. She had never heard his name uttered before, but he spoke pleasantly and seemed quite agreeable particularly compared to her father at the moment. She smiled politely, albeit a bit too friendly, on the chance Drago's eyes returned to her face. He must sit the House of Lords as well, Minnie deduced,
"You'll be coming with us, lady." Something sharp pressed against her back as a dirty hand gripped her arm. She turned, shocked and then disgusted as she saw who held her. Fear surfaced as her brain connected the pressure to the crude dagger held on her. "Father?!" She cried out as she felt herself pulled back to the crowds. She screamed, finally drawing attention from the masses, but it was a short lived noise. A second man grabbed at her and shoved a hand over her mouth. It tasted of coal dust and grime. She stumbled, her fine cloak tearing against the dagger. Both men caught her before she fell to the ground. They held her up by the crooks of her elbows and dragged her back towards the alley.
Her father turned and his eyes shot open. "Minnie! No!" Without a second thought he threw himself at one of the men near his sunshine, and grunted as he felt something pierce him beneath his arm. He stared down where a knife had pierced him and grunted. He saw Minnie being dragged away and took a step forward. "Someone...someone stop them!"
My Interests can be found here
“You, Sir! Go, find a Constable immediately!" Drago shouted to a well-dressed passerby. The man immediately saw the drama unfolding, and turned, shouting for police. Drago then turned back to Lord Parnell.
“Someone! Police! My Daughter! Someone help her. I swear to God I will rip those miscreants- if they hurt a single hair on her-” Lord Parnell grew deep red in the face, his husky frame shaking.
"I will follow and see if I cannot get to her!” Drago let his gaze bore into the older man, who stood both frozen and enraged with worry and panic. “Stay here for the Constable. I will go after these curs and see to your daughter’s safe return!”
The pale man turned then, dashing into the alley. Once he was in the shadows, he slowed his pace. Had he chosen to act he would have been upon the miscreants. Instead, he watched them. He watched her. She struggled, and he found himself admiring her strength. Even as they held a knife against her, her fabric ripped, the hem turning black against the filthy alley streets. He hair, so primly styled was rapidly falling about, the ringlets framing her flushed face nicely, it added to her beauty.
In that moment Drago understood why his Majesty chose her above all others. There was something about her nature. Her smell. There was a light in her soul and even now things deep inside stirred.
For the moment he continued to follow. He watched, and kept himself well hidden. He was curious to see what she would do with these men. Would she simply cow to them? Would she fight back? From the shadows, the vampire smirked. He had a feeling he already knew the answer….
Last edited by MerlotBeauty; 11-30-2012 at 12:02 AM.
Fire and Blood
Minnie continued to scream into her captor's hand, muffled and no one seemed to be coming to her rescue. There were three of them, that much she could tell, but the alley was dark and she hadn't a clue if there were more waiting. She dug in her heels to the dirty ground, scraping them in defiance.
The men halted, at least one of them spitting at her. Her face set hard into a scowl, reacting to both the sense of indignation and roaring fear. The pressure on her back disappeared, the miserable cretin had dropped the blade. The men began to talk amongst themselves.
"Well what do we do wit' 'er now, boss?"
"Close yer mouth."
"How much ya think she's worth?"
"I said close yer mouth!"
Minnie flinched as the boss slapped one of the other men holding her. But thank god, they were distracted by their own petty argument. There wasn't a single sound of anyone coming down the alley. Fear came up her throat as she wondered why her father wasn't here, why there weren't any police coming towards them. She would need to fend for herself.
She steeled her nerves, knowing she had to act quickly while they were still distracted. Her knees buckled, sending Minerva falling out of their grasp and towards the filthy, wet ground. Her hands caught herself, the fine gloves soaking through with a mixture that made her nose crinkle up. The men were taken by surprise, but she couldn't stay like this on the ground a moment longer.
Minnie launched herself up and forward, stumbling against her long skirts and tripping on the hem. She heard fabric tearing again, but it allowed her feet to find purchase with the slippery mud. She took two steps before she felt something grabbing at her again. "No! No! Help me, someone help me!"
My Interests can be found here
It was rather easy for the three men to overtake the wee Minerva Parnell again. It was a known fact that large, heavy skirts were next to impossible to run in, and gain any speed or distance.
“ ‘ere, now lads. ‘old her good and steady.” The “leader” of the small rabble towered over the highborn lady then. His chipped and stained teeth bared before her. “I dun think the bitch will try that again.”
To drive his point home, the man let the palm of his hand fly across the woman’s face. He laughed humorlessly, then, his sickening breath puffing clouds of pungent, sticky vapor over the girl’s face. “Now, then, lads. Take her into the factory and tie her to one o’ the posts. Eh, and keep ‘er silent too. We don’t need ‘er screaming down ev’ry Constable on the block.”
Not far away among the trash and shadows, Draco stood and watched the exchange. Even as a tick worked in his jaw at watching the Lady be manhandled and hit, he encouraged it; such simple minds, so easy to sway. He had but to whisper on the air, and they met his expectations.
Still he did not want them to push them too far. Balance and control. Bring her to the edge of terror, without letting it spill over. Let the boys—the cattle—think they had the power. It would not be long now.
Remaining at a distance, he snuck into the factory, and perched himself above, nearly invisible among the beams, chains and pulleys. From there he watched as the boys did as their leader bid, securing her in old dirty rope and silencing her with torn shreds of her own apparel.
The three men stood, then, one of the three holding a simple oil lantern in his hand. They each snickered and laughed mocking the struggling Lady.
“Alright boys, now we need to set the ransom. Whaddaya say, she’s worth at least a couple hundred pounds. Perhaps even a few horses as bonus for us not sending her back in pieces.” The leader grinned.
“Do we get to play with the girl first? We don’t have to give her back all pretty an’ perfect do we?” Another one leered toward the girl.
The Leader punched the man then. “Y’ell not touch her in any wrong fas’ion! Got it. If you even touch ‘er, I’ll cut off your bits myself.”
The monster in the shadows smirked. It was time.
Drago dropped from the ceiling, and crouched among tables, assembly lines, and other machinery. He made no sound as he moved, and the discussion among the men grew more heated. The leader, without the help of influence was losing his position of power. It was all as expected.
“As a matter of fact, gentlemen, the Lady will be returning with me.” Draco smirked as he darted a look to the Lady Parnell. “If you will remain calm, Lady, I will dispatch of these knaves.”
And so he did. With unnatural speed, Drago unleashed his nature, as he attacked all three men at once. They scrambled across the ground and Drago bared his fangs, tearing into one of the men’s jugular. The other two scrambled up, and advanced on the monster as if to attack. The man in Drago’s grip choked and wheezed no longer able to scream as blood splattered and poured from his neck. He discarded the man, then and turned to the others. With a half-hearted motion he back handed the man with the lantern and he flew back, falling among some boxes. As the glass of the lantern shattered the cool, dry boxes quickly caught fire. The man screamed in agony as he caught fire. There was one man left.
With a dangerous look in his eyes, Draco turned his attention to that man. Blood dripped from the monster’s lips and chin, his fangs stained red. Like a cat ready to pounce he slowly walked forward, and then he was upon the other man. With a blur of motion the last of the criminals died. His neck twisted almost fully around.
As if he just finished some menial task, he turned to Lady Minerva Parnell. His expression softened, as he moved to her and started to work on her binds. “There now, Lady, you are safe now. Let us be away as soon as possible.” | <urn:uuid:dc799d48-dc83-4ae2-94ec-aa17bda71cda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://roleplayerguild.com/showthread.php?178664-The-Courtship-of-Lady-Minerva-Parnell&s=e48280718e14c3d31bc9269eaa8c29be&p=8055238 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986898 | 3,972 | 1.710938 | 2 |
March 16th, 2009 by Rosa
A couple of weeks ago, on February 25th, I skipped my bootcamp class at the gym and went to a Master’s Tea with Judy Logback, the founder of Kallari chocolates, instead. After complaining about the Times Styles’ snarky chocolate review that fawned over Kallari a bit too much, how could I pass up the opportunity to meet and taste chocolate with the woman who founded the cooperative?
Judy, a student at Yale’s School of Management, gave a great talk and tea. She covered the details of how the Kallari cooperative works, what the cooperative’s farmers and chocolate makers do, and how each step that they do themselves earns them more money and helps them work their way out of poverty. I was quite impressed.
Along the way, Judy threw in neat chocolate facts. I learned that processing cacao with alkali (aka Dutch processing) darkens the color of the cacao without affecting the flavor, which explains why some chocolates manage look so much darker than they taste. I also learned that high quality chocolate doesn’t need lecithin as an emulsifier because they’re comprised of just cocoa butter and cocoa solids. And, most shockingly of all to me, I learned that in the U.K., single-origin bars only need to contain 10% of beans from that single-origin. In the U.S., the claims are totally unregulated.
We tasted 8 bars along the way, four of them from Kallair. Three were the above bars that Kallari is now selling via Whole Foods, and the fourth was one of their artisanal bars. While the Whole Food bars are machine tempered and molded, the artisinal bars are entirely handmade, from tempering to molding. Judy had us taste the chocolates as she went through her Kallari slideshow, stopping every few slides ask us about what we thought about what we were eating. It was a little intimidating to verbalize my tasting notes to a chocolate expert, but it was also neat to hear her responses and feedback.
The bars were tasted blindly, though Judy gave us their percentages as we went. The bars and my notes are below the photo.
- 86% Ghirardelli – cool, thin, glossy melt thanks to good use of cocoa butter. Pretty bitter, dry finish, but not exactly unpleasant.
- 85% Kallari artisinal bar – more burnt smell; sweeter, winey notes to the flavor. A thicker melt than the above bar, but still not thick, exactly, and with a slight grit
- 85% Kallari bar available at Whole Foods – thicker melt, fruity finish. Astringent.
- 85% Lindt – strong smell, thick melt. A light, fruity sweetness that gave way to a super dry finish.
- 75% Kallari bar available at Whole Foods – milky, caramel notes with a wonderfully dusky finish (Judy said the caramel notes were from their use of organic raw cane sugar). ZOMG
- 75% Chocolove – sweet, strong cherry notes. Suprisingly thick melt for dark chocolate.
- 70% Green & Black’s – flat fruity citrus sweetness. Unexceptional and, well, flat.
- 70% Kallari bar available at Whole Foods – reminds me of European bars with the dusky caramel flavors.
My favorite bar of the lot was number 5, Kallari’s 75% bar. I went back for seconds, and it definitely merits a ZOMG! I’ll be looking for it next time I’m in a Whole Foods.
Finally, just a logistical note to point out, these bars aren’t technically certified Fair Trade, but I’ve chosen to tag them as such. Kallari has gone so far above and beyond the ideals of Fair Trade that they’re really beyond certification. | <urn:uuid:e72696a8-6cc2-42aa-9cef-4fba3ba10b90> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://zomgcandy.com/2009/03/16/ | 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 | 0.957047 | 837 | 1.539063 | 2 |
I read parts of the New York Times every day. It is a habit I have grown fond of, because it gives a different perspective on things than the television news or the point of view of other papers or magazines.
I do several things, actually. First, I get a synopsis of the early news in each morning’s mail, which I peruse, and then move to my browser to check particular stories. I also get feeds from the various RSS pipelines from the news.
So you would think I might become somewhat alarmed when I heard that the Times is going to initiate a pay model. It certainly is not that the content is without value, but I am somewhat concerned that in their exuberance to turn the fortunes of the Times, they will assess a value much higher than I, or most normal people for that matter, would.
Apparently, I am not alone in that thought, as someone from DownloadSquad has been pondering the same things.
Haven’t we been through this before? The New York Times is apparently getting ready to charge readers for online access. According to sources close to Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. Two main models are being considered. One is the Wall Street Journal’s part-free, part-paywalled plan, where users pay for access to a lot of the paper’s content.
The other, more likely solution is a metered system, where readers will be able to read a fixed number of free articles before they have to subscribe. These models may be working – sort of – for other papers, but The New York Times is one of the papers of record in the US, and has a worldwide readership of 20 million to consider.
What makes Sulzberger think his paper’s readership can sustain the shift to a pay model when so many users won’t even read an article that requires a free account? I know this only anecdotal evidence, and maybe the board at the Times has studies that contradict it, but many people I know won’t even read a free NYT article if they have to log in to do it. BugMeNot.com is swimming with Times accounts you can use to avoid the registration process. If users are willing to go that far to avoid registration, I can’t imagine they’ll react any more positively to the pay model.
That’s not to say that the New York Times isn’t worth paying for. It’s an important resource full of crucial reporting, and I’m sure a great many people are willing to subscribe to the online edition. Unfortunately, the Times seems to have ruled out an NPR or public-TV-like donation model that could take advantage of this public goodwill. I’d like to see the paper give that a shot, considering how important its place as an international resource has become.
Meanwhile, the switch to pay could be preparation for a lucrative contract deal with Apple, based around the tablet device that’s due out later this month. We should find out everything in the next couple of weeks. Until we do, enjoy the still-free-for-now New York Times!
I would definitely get behind a PBS model, but would enough others? I wonder what other things could be tried. It would be sad if the Times could not continue as it is. Anything less, such as a reorganized, smaller version, would not be the draw that the paper is now.
I’m not much on ads that pop up and make the user watch or read, for a preset time, but I would put up with them. What I would not tolerate however, is a mix of having to pay and putting up with ads in the face. Either, but in no way both. | <urn:uuid:f0c13cef-7328-4c4b-9862-68343d62c93c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lockergnome.com/uncategorized/2010/01/19/new-york-times-to-try-pay-model/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967756 | 783 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Roger Federer's 2012 Season Makes Weak Era Argument a Moot Point
Clive Brunskill/Getty Images
Many sports critics regard Roger Federer as the greatest player to ever grace the sport of tennis. At the same time, there are some fans of the sport that constantly do their best to undermine Federer’s accomplishment. One of the most popular ways to do so, seems to be by creating the argument that Roger Federer obtained all the accolades he did because he played in a weak era of tennis.
That idea in itself is weak. It is an insult to several other strong players that were unfortunate to coincide with and have been part of Roger Federer’s age group. Federer did not win all he did because he had no competition, but rather, because he was too good at what he did.
One could mark the beginning of the “Federer era” at Wimbledon 2003, when he raised his first major trophy. It is much harder, though, to mark its end. The moment in which the Federer era officially ended might be the 2010 Australian Open. That year in Melbourne, Federer raised his record 16th major title. It is also the major tournament in which his also record streak of 23 consecutive grand slam semifinals would end. After the 2010 Australian Open, Federer would go nine majors without hoisting another trophy.
Now that the Federer era has been book-ended, it is time to look at its facts. Between Wimbledon in 2003 and the Australian Open in 2010, Roger Federer took 16 out of 27 majors played. No other run in the history of the sport is as impressive as that. Between 2004-07 alone, Federer’s prime, he took 11 out of 16, which was unheard of up to that point.
Many detractors point to the moment in which Rafael Nadal won his first of two Wimbledon titles in 2008, as the beginning of a newer and stronger era. This of course, is mainly done to further subtract from Federer’s achievements. This would mean the “strong era” of tennis began when Federer was already almost 27 years old and reaching the end of his peak years. Even so, 18 majors have been played since then, and Federer still took five of those. Not too shabby for a player past his prime.
Entering this past season, Roger Federer had three clear goals in mind, all of which he achieved. The first, was to win another Wimbledon title; the second, was to return to the No. 1 ranking, and the third was to medal at the Olympic Games. Federer did all that, beating players five to six years younger than him. This year’s success begs the question: how was Federer able to accomplish such things if most of his prime belongs in a weak era?
That is easy to answer. His period of dominance was as strong of an era as the current one. Federer was just at a much higher level than most. When he was in the midst of his dominance, the only one able to defeat him in a grand slam tournament was Rafael Nadal, and throughout most of his prime they only met at two majors: Roland Garros, where Nadal has established himself as the greatest clay court player ever, and Wimbledon.
2012 may arguably go down as one of the best if not the best year of Federer’s career when all is said and done. While it is true that there were other years in which he won more titles and totally dominated the major tournaments, if one puts it into perspective, 2012 might be slightly more significant.
This past season was the first in which Federer was past the three-decade threshold for a full campaign. If one couples that with his being a husband and father of two three-year old twins, there was a lot on his plate all year long.
This year Federer won a total of six titles, participated in 10 finals, and was World No. 1 for a third of the year. It must be said that in terms of trophies hoisted and finals won, 2012 was his best campaign since 2007. More importantly, he proved to himself and the world that despite his age, he still has some more tennis to give.
At the same time, he showed detractors that he was not the benefactor of a weak era of tennis, yet that he might have deprived his age group contemporaries from their own taste of greatness. I personally would not be surprised if Roger Federer won another major trophy next year and several other titles, and frankly, neither should you.
What is the duplicate article?
Why is this article offensive?
Where is this article plagiarized from?
Why is this article poorly edited? | <urn:uuid:50350937-c4ca-43da-aa5a-52db6b4b9334> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1425285-roger-federers-2012-season-makes-weak-era-argument-a-moot-point | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989151 | 979 | 1.734375 | 2 |
I'm in the process of planning out my install of an AA 130, and after reading some threads here, I've opted against a garage installation.
So that got me thinking of alternatives. Opinions and suggestions are welcome...
First option: build small boiler-room structure detached from the house (see pic) out of concrete and cement blocks. Specs in the drawing are not going to be as precise as they are in the drawing.
Second option: dig pit next to house, pour pad, build block walls, or use pre-fab'd concrete box
- Ignoring local codes for now, how high does the chimney (or stovepipe) need to terminate above the shed's roofline? Is it relevant to the house being about 10 feet away?
- Should I pour an additional pad on top of plastic sheeting to elevate the boiler just an inch or two from any ground moisture that may wick up through the floor?
Is underground completely insane? An underground coal bin would be much easier to fill with my trailer, and I have a backhoe that can dig the hole and lower in the boiler no problem. Making it structurally safe is another question. It would need to support a vehicle, and not weaken the soil support of the house foundation. If I could solve those issues, underground is very appealing to me.
I'm not a builder, so I was going to pay/trade someone do the masonry work. I still haven't figured out how to cover the structures, either. Wood and shingles? Not sure how to cover it and still be able to fill the coal bin with a dump trailer.
- (40.98 KiB) Viewed 169 times
- View: New Page • Popup • Select:BBCode | <urn:uuid:f8af2bd7-98cd-427a-92b4-537862fa4a0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nepacrossroads.com/post318280.html | 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 | 0.948793 | 364 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Transportation Security Administration, AP file photo
NEW YORK CITY, NY - U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer called on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to reverse its decision to allow airline passengers to carry small knives, baseball bats, golf clubs and other "potentially weaponizable" equipment onto airplanes.
In a statement released to the media Sunday, Schumer said the TSA should continue to ban knives and other items from airplanes that he says could potentially put passengers, flight crews and aircraft at risk.
"While it's true that pilots are safe, locked behind cockpit doors, these dangerous items still pose a significant hazard to the flight crew, other passengers, and even the integrity of the plane," said Schumer. "These items are dangerous, and have not become less so in the years since they were banned from planes."
Earlier this week the TSA announced that it would be relaxing its ban on some items that had been prohibited in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.
"And with the major security breach at Newark this weekend," said Schumer, "now is not the time for reduced vigilance, or to place additional burdens on TSA agents who should be looking for dangerous items, not wasting time measuring the length of a knife blade."
Undercover TSA Agents were able to smuggle a mock bomb onto a plane at Newark Airport, it was reported earlier this week. | <urn:uuid:604760e2-e4e1-4842-99b5-69b40986b9ce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wgrz.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=205169 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967095 | 290 | 1.671875 | 2 |
NOW you can have your portrait done - and eat it, too. A $20,000 machine equipped with a computer and a robot arm will spray your image (in red, yellow, black, or blue food coloring; sorry, no full-color yet) onto a cake in four to 12 minutes. Cost: $3 to $8.
Ed Barth, a Kansas City real estate agent, developed the machine after his daughter told him she would have to close her bakery for lack of skilled cake decorators. Sweet Art Inc., formed three years ago, has sold the machine to 19 grocery stores and bakeries across the country.
Consumers of all ages love the photo portrait cakes, bakers say: ``Some cry, some scream, some rant and rave; they just `ooh' and `aah' over the portrait,'' says Diane Ray, store manager at Piazza Bakery in Staten Island, N.Y. One of her male customers broke down in tears when he saw the photo cake he had ordered for his elderly mother.
A videocamera scans a photo, which is then digitized and displayed on a graphics monitor. There it is sized and color-coded. At the click of a button, the photo is re-created on a pre-iced cake by the airbrush-wielding robot arm. Any image may be duplicated, and some 300 preprogrammed designs are available, in 14 colors. The arm also dispenses icing borders and such messages as ``Happy Anniversary.''
Whether the fascination will start a trend remains to be seen, but baking industry observers say the machine is much more than a novelty. Because skilled bakers and cake decorators take years to train and the labor pool is dwindling, the industry is increasingly automating. ``I would be surprised if this machine wasn't in a lot more stores in the future,'' says Marc Millstein, bakery editor at Supermarket News.
The machine still can't beat experienced cake decorators, some of whom can decorate a cake in three minutes flat. Nor can it do three-dimensional designs, though Sweet Art founder Barth is working on it.
Mr. Barth also hopes eventually to offer licensed cartoon-character images (Garfield the Cat, for instance) that could be tied in with printed party table decorations, and a computer network to send custom-decorated cakes across the country, in effect. Full-color printing is also planned. | <urn:uuid:9d3f3689-093a-4aa2-a70a-97bb2e189e42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://m.csmonitor.com/1989/0419/pcake.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960374 | 497 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Updated 10/21/2012 11:06 AM
Vigil Marks Anniversary Of Brooklyn Mother's Fatal Shooting
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Worshippers and representatives from the New York City Police Department gathered Saturday at the spot in Brownsville, Brooklyn where a mother was shot and killed one year before while shielding children from gunfire.
The prayer vigil and memorial in front of a supermarket honored Zurana Horton, who was gunned down on October 21, 2011.
The 34-year-old mother was caught in a hail of bullets as she picked up one of her 12 children from school.
She was shot in the face and chest while protecting multiple children from the gunfire.
Horton's mother, Denise Peace, said on Saturday she's grateful for the outpouring of support from the community.
"I don't know how I survived it, but God's been good enough to keep me strong," said Peace. "I just can't, I don't have no words for it, the feeling. You can never say exactly you feel when things happen."
Three men were charged in connection with Horton's death.
Police say Horton was not the intended target. | <urn:uuid:b39ffec5-14a6-4bfb-9625-7e5ba2d47b3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ny1.com/content/criminal_justice/171108/vigil-marks-anniversary-of-brooklyn-mother-s-fatal-shooting | 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 | 0.969423 | 263 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Why Businesses Should Use Social Media For Customer Service
Within an hour, I had written a scathing personal blog post about my experience, signed up for Twitter, and sent a tweet to that CMO with a link to the blog. Much to my surprise, I had a DM from the company within minutes, and by the end of the week the store had followed up with several phone calls – and even shipped a gift card so I could buy that pair of jeans in my size online.
I was completely surprised at that level of customer service, and have since advocated that both brands leverage the power of Twitter as a platform to connect with customers – and for customers to leverage this channel to connect with brands that are ready to listen and take action in ways that most call centers don’t.
Dozens of businesses notably use Twitter well to communicate with customers, but one big brand that has done an exemplary job of using social media as a customer service channel is Zappos. The company, which was founded on a principle of providing “WOW” customer service in general, leverages almost every online platform to communicate with customers to ensure they are receiving the best level of customer service possible. | <urn:uuid:eade360e-ea48-404b-8d49-6e0e9d9388c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://politicalmedia.com/articles/why-businesses-should-use-social-media-for-customer-service | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97831 | 243 | 1.539063 | 2 |
[Summary: aggregating content from the Internet Governance Forum & exploring ways to develop the legacy of social reporting at events...]
Introducing social reporting to an event can bring many immediate benefits. From new skills for those participating in the social reporting, to increasing opportunities for conversation at the event, and building bridges between those present at an event, and those interested in the topic but unable to physically take part.
However, the wealth of content gathered through social reporting can also act as a resource ‘after the event’ – offering insights and narratives covering event themes, and offering contrasting and complementary perspectives to any ‘official’ event records that may exist.
Many of the tools I use when social reporting at an event have a certain ‘presentism’ about them. Newer content is prioritised over older content, and, in the case of dashboard aggregators like NetVibes, or services such as Twitter, good content can quickly disappear from the front page, or even altogether.
So, as we got towards the end of a frantic four days social reporting out at the Internet Governance Forum in Egypt earlier this year, I started thinking about how to make the most of the potential legacy impacts of the social reporting that was going on – both in the event-wide Twitterstream, and in the work of the young social reporters I was specifically working with.
Part of that legacy was about the skills and contacts gathered by the social reporters – so we quickly put together this handout for participants – but another part of that legacy was in the content. And gathering that together turned out to be trickier than I expected.
However, I now have a micro-site set up at http://igf2009.practicalparticipation.co.uk/ where you can find all the blog posts and blips created by our social reporters, as well as all the tagged tweets we could collect together. Over the coming weeks colleagues at Diplo will be tagging core content to make it easy to navigate and potentially use as part of online learning around Internet Governance. I’ve run the 3500+ twitter messages I managed to (eventually) aggregate through the Open Calais auto-tagging service as an experiment to see if this provide ways to identify insights within them – and I’ve been exploring different ways to present the information found in the site.
Learning: Next time set up the aggregator in advance
I didn’t start putting together the site (a quick bit of Drupal + FeedAPI, with the later addition of Views, Panels, Autotagging, Timeline and other handy modules) till the final day of IGF09, by which time over 50 blog posts had been added to our Ning website, and over 3000 twitter messages tagged #igf09.
Frustratingly, Ning only provides the last 20 items in any RSS feed, and, as far as I can tell, no way to page through past items; and the Twitter search API is limited to fetching just 1500 tweets.
Fortunately when it came to Twitter I had captured all the Tweets in Google Reader – but still had to scrape Twitter message IDs back out of there – and set up a slow script to spend a couple of days fetching original tweets (given the rate limiting again on the Twitter API).
For Ning, I ended up having to go through and find all the authors who had written on IGF09, and to fetch the feeds of their posts, run through a Yahoo Pipe to create an aggregate feed of only those items posted during the time of the IGF.
It would have been a lot easier if I set up the Drupal + FeedAPI aggregator beforehand, and added new feeds to it whenever I found them.
Discoveries: Language and noise
I’ve spent most of my time just getting the content into this aggregator, and setting up a basic interface for exploring it. I’ve not yet hand chance to dive in and really explore the content itself. However, two things I noticed:
1) There is mention of a francaphone hash-tag for IGF2009 in some of the tweets. Searching on that hash-tag now, over a month later, doesn’t turn up any results – but it’s quite possible that there were active conversations this aggregator fails to capture because we weren’t looking at the right tags.
Mapping Twitter @s with R and Iplot
2) A lot of the Twitter messages aggregated appear to be about the ‘censorship incident‘ that dominated external coverage of IGF09, but which was only a small part of all the goings on at IGF. Repeated tweeting and re-tweeting on one theme can drown out conversations on other themes unless there are effective ways to navigate and filter the content archives.
I’ve started to explore how @ messages, and RTs within Tweets could be used to visualise the structure, as well as content, of conversations – but have run up against the limitations of my meagre current skill set with R and iplot.
I’m now on the look out for good ways of potentially building some more intelligent analysis of tweets into future attempts to aggregate with Drupal – possibly by extracting information on @s and RTs at the time of import using the promising FeedAPI Scraper module from the great folk at Youth Agora.
Questions: Developing social reporting legacies
There is still a lot more to reflect upon when it comes to making the most of content from a socially reported event, not least:
1) How long should information be kept?
I’ve just been reading Delete, which very sensibly suggests that not all content should be online for ever – and particularly with conversational twitter messages or video clips, there may be a case for ensuring a social reporting archive only keeps content public for as long as there is a clear value in doing so.
2) Licensing issues
Aggregation on the model I’ve explored assumes licence to collect and share tweets and other content. Is this a fair assumption?
3) Repository or advocacy?
How actively should the legacy content from social reporting be used? Should managing the legacy of an event also involve setting up search and blog alerts, and pro-actively spreading content to other online spaces? If so – who should be responsible for that and how?
If you are interested in more exploration of Social Reporting, you may find the Social by Social network, and Social Reporters group there useful. | <urn:uuid:a1c15da1-5275-4808-a8c8-f8f04920b9e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.timdavies.org.uk/categories/techie/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946506 | 1,343 | 1.59375 | 2 |
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Exercise has its benefits, as well as helping you feel refreshed, it will help keep you calm during stressful periods such as exams. It’s good for your body and mind, and doesn’t have to cost anything.
Fitting activity into your daily routine can be as easy as walking instead of catching the bus.
If you fancy meeting new people, or just want to try something new, whatever your past experience or abiltiy, their is something for everyone at the University:
The Any-Body Club is inclusive for all students and staff . It’s perfect for ‘anybody’ who doesn’t want to play competitive sports, but wants to get fit and have fun. Activities, including yoga, tai chi, jogging and aqua fit.
The Any Buddy Scheme is for people who want someone to play sport or get fit with. We want to get more people active and enjoying sport at the University- this provides you with the perfect opportunity!
Your Students' Union Athletic Union has one of the largest ranges of sports and intramural leagues in the country. You don't have to compete; you can choose to join in with training to have fun and keep fit instead.
Physical activity is something that everyone can do. You don't need to run a marathon or spend hours at the gym. Look for simple ways to be physically active every day, such as:
Nu2 Sport is a project focused on providing sport for all students and staff in a fun and sociable environment.
Activities, include football, touch rugby, dodgeball and badminton.
For those of you who enjoy a good gym workout or taking a dip in the pool, take advantage of the University sports and gym facilities available on all three campuses. There are three sports membership options, Bronze, Silver and Gold.
Swimming is a good way to get fit, it's also relaxing. It's great as a non-impact, cardiovascular workout whilst toning muscles at the same time. Have a go at the swim for gold programme giving you a good workout every time you go for a swim.
The University of Nottingham is committed to sustainable transport. A Sustrans cycling project working at the university aims to make cycling accessible to and enjoyable for all! Bikes are available to loan for the academic year for a minimal cost.
Slogging it out in the gym on the treadmill not your thing? Take advantage of the University campuses. Have a look at the campus maps and see how easily you could work different routes into your daily routine. Perhaps walk a longer way to your lectures next time!
From pilates and boxercise to urban funk and zumba - these are just a few of the exercise classes available at the University Park Sports Centre. Beginner, expert or just want to try something new; browse the exercise class timetable to see what suits you
Nottingham, NG7 2RD
telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5151
fax: +44 (0) 115 951 3666 | <urn:uuid:0bbcdcc0-508c-43a3-b407-89d68e45478d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nottingham.ac.uk/currentstudents/healthyu/keepingactive.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956586 | 637 | 1.59375 | 2 |
A cri de coeur
Again via Froomkin:
Over the weekend, Andrew J. Bacevich, a prominent anti-war historian, wrote in the wake of the death of his son in Iraq: “The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as ‘the will of the people.’”
Politicians, he wrote, listen only to money.
“Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.” | <urn:uuid:34a60945-07d0-4150-92b5-664d734247ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2007/05/30/a-cri-de-coeur/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973337 | 236 | 1.539063 | 2 |
1 June 2010 – Numerous attacks by the insurgents of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in south-eastern Central African Republic (CAR) have displaced an estimated 20,000 people who remain in dire need of humanitarian assistance even as insecurity has made it difficult for aid agencies to reach them, the United Nations reported.
The new displacements have driven up the total number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the CAR, a country with a history of armed conflicts, to more than 180,000, UN agencies said in a press release issued at the weekend.
The LRA, an army of marauding armed gangs has terrorized villagers in the CAR, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and southern Sudan in recent years since they were routed in northern Uganda, where they waged a brutal rebellion ostensibly against the Government, but which mainly targeted civilians through murders, abductions and mutilations.
Since the beginning of this year, the LRA has carried out 13 raids in CAR, killing 45 people, abducting 90 others and torching hundreds of homes in the prefectures of Mbomou and Haut-Mbomou. Almost the entire population of the two districts have sought refuge in the towns of Bangassou, M’Boki, Rafai and Zemio. Last month alone, at least 15,000 new IDPs were registered.
“I am extremely worried by the humanitarian consequences of the LRA attacks on the displaced and the host communities in this part of the country,” said Bo Schack, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for CAR. “The emergency humanitarian response is very difficult due to heightened insecurity in the area. Most of the affected people depend heavily on humanitarian assistance for their survival,” he added.
A UN mission will travel to the affected areas in the coming days to assess the situation and recommend an appropriate humanitarian response. A similar mission was carried out between 10 March and 2 April when food and non-food items were distributed to the IDPs. Five international relief organizations and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are currently providing humanitarian assistance.
The Government has deployed an additional 250 soldiers to strengthen army units who are already there to provide security to the local population and to track down LRA fighters with the support of Uganda’s armed forces.
“In spite of growing international and national pressure to put an end to LRA violence, we fear that these people will be displaced from their homes for several months… They are traumatized,” said Jean-Sébastien Munié, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the CAR.
“We are collaborating with the Central African Republic authorities so as to bring about a response which is both immediate and adequate for the medium-term,” he added. Humanitarian agencies have appealed for $113.6 million to assist those in need in CAR this year.
spotted by RS | <urn:uuid:5b264047-e389-45c7-aa74-6dc04d770d23> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://apeaceofconflict.com/collaborative-peace-and-conflict-dictionary/z/media-watch/june-2010/june-2-2010/rebel-raids-aggravate-displacement-crisis-for-central-africans-%E2%80%93-un/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957354 | 618 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Moderator: Nicole Marie
Please leave a comment indicating whether you believe you did or did not get your money’s worth from Congress this week.
What you paid
This week, taxpayers spent roughly $107 million on Congress.
Salaries of Members of Congress and their allowances/week:
Speaker of the House: $223,500/52 = $4,299
House and Senate Majority and Minority Leaders: ($193,400/52) x 4 = $14,877
Other Representatives and Senators: ($174,000/52) x 530 = $1,773,462
Allowance for staff salaries and misc: ($1,500,000/52) x 535 = $15,432,692
Non-salary money allocated for Congress: $4.656 billion/52 = $89,538,462
What you got
Staffers wearing jeans to work and taking long lunches!
It was spring break in Congress this week so neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate met. Members often take official trips out of the country (“CODELS” — or Congressional Delegations — is what they’re called) or go home to meet with constituents. (If you want to search the CODELS your member has taken, you can do so here.)
Do you know what your member did over the break? Did he or she hold a town hall? Meet with your local newspaper? Anything?
“We elected our officials to solve our nation’s problems, the foremost of which is the weak economy. They asked us to give them these responsibilities so that they could exercise their leadership and judgment. In the course of their workday, they meet with government officials, captains of industry, and foreign leaders. When these same elected officials phone their Wall Street brokers and take a financial position against the very entity which they are charged with preserving and protecting — the United States — how could it be anything other than a breach of the public trust?”
Haggis@wk wrote:The Washington Post reports that many members of Congress have substantial investments in the industries they oversee. Specifically, many members’ investments overlap with their respective committee jurisdictions. Also interestingly, their stock portfolios seem to perform better than you’d expect.
“A federal judge in Washington has dismissed the wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by Gerald Walpin, the AmeriCorps inspector general who was fired last year by President Obama. And not just dismissed; if the decision by U.S. District Judge Richard Roberts stands, in the future the White House will be able fire other inspectors general as it fired Walpin without fear of legal consequences.”
Shapley wrote:Rep. Rangel again proposes re-instating the draft. This time it is called the Universal National Services Act.
I find it curious that a black man would suggest mandatory servitude in this country. Am I missing something, or something terribly, terribly wrong with this concept?
dai bread wrote:Servitude?
dai bread wrote:Well, o.k. I'd always thought the draft referred to the military and work in the military was regarded as service, not servitude.
The Coburn-McCain report takes issue with stimulus spending on projects like one that entailed research on how cocaine affects monkeys. The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center was awarded $71,623 to study what the report calls, “Monkeys Getting High for Science.”
Bonnie Davis, a spokeswoman for The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said the “small grant has helped protect very important research that will have significant impact on public health in regards to cocaine addiction and the issue of relapse.”
Go a little further down the list and you’ll find even bigger spending. The California Academy of Sciences is receiving nearly $1 million in stimulus funds to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and East Africa to capture, photograph and analyze thousands of exotic ants.
There’s also funding for yoga and hot flashes. Researchers at Wake Forest University have received nearly $300,000 to study whether integral yoga “can be an effective method to reduce the frequency and/or severity of hot flashes” in breast cancer survivors.
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All News & Blogs
School begins in Spotsylvania; Post Oak Middle School opens
Post Oak Middle School Principal Chester Mummau points a student in the right direction during the school's opening day.
DAVE ELLIS/THE FREE LANCE-STAR
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By MELISSA NIX
By MELISSA NIXMULTIMEDIA: View a multimedia presentation on the opening day at Post Oak Middle School
The morning mist had barely lifted when the first school buses came rolling into Post Oak Middle School's freshly minted back lot.
It was 7:30 a.m. Hundreds of kids descended from a seemingly nonstop convoy of buses. They wore a variety of expressions--sleepy, sullen, anxious, excited.
Some stopped to ask Principal Chester Mummau, who was greeting them, for directions.
"I didn't come to orientation, so I don't know where to go," sighed one mop-topped seventh-grader. Mummau quickly put him on the right track to his assigned homeroom.
Students in Spotsylvania, Orange and Culpeper counties went back to school yesterday.
Post Oak, Spotsylvania County's newest middle school, opened its doors to 839 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders.
It pulled students from Spotsylvania and Freedom middle schools as well as John J. Wright, which is to be re-purposed as a community center and alternative school.
"It's a great day for southern Spotsylvania County," said Mummau, adding that "the energy from middle-schoolers keeps me young."
Inside, lockers were slamming and the hallways were abuzz with chatter. Some of the students looked like they still belonged in elementary school, while others sported baby-fuzz mustaches. Teachers stood outside their classrooms like sentinels, ushering kids into them. Homeroom was about to begin.
Stephanie Smiley, who teaches seventh-grade English, is brand-new to the classroom.
"Everyone's new at the school," she said, "so I feel at ease."
Next door, veteran teacher Donna Adams' room was decorated with civics and social studies posters. A string of presidential portraits hung above her whiteboard.
Seventh-grader Matt Simms, 12, was seated under a picture of the Statue of Liberty. He wore a T-shirt that read "5 out of 4 people have trouble with fractions."
"I wish I was still at home, riding my dirt bike," Matt said.
"Exactly!" echoed his friend.
"I'm excited 'cause its a new school, but I'm nervous I'll get lost," offered fellow classmate Katie Spillman, also 12. | <urn:uuid:614714c7-2081-4a82-a790-2cd71812c82d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2006/082006/08242006/216312 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974299 | 599 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The Supreme Court gave video games protection under the First Amendment in its ruling against California's gaming legislation, setting a precedent that should deter other politicians from trying to pass similar laws. The Entertainment Software Association isn't finished, however, and it has filed a motion to be reimbursed $1.1 million in attorney's fees from the state of California.
This isn't the first time the ESA has gone after reimbursement for its legal costs after having one of these laws declared unconstitutional: Louisiana, Michigan, and Illinois have all had to pay up after failing to pass their own laws regulating the sale of video games.
"We look forward to moving forward and working together to raise awareness about the valuable tools and information available to parents," said Michael D. Gallagher, CEO of the ESA, the trade association representing US computer and video game publishers. "From the start of this misguided legislation, then-Governor Schwarzenegger and specific California legislators knew that their efforts to censor and restrict expression were, as court after court ruled, unconstitutional and thus a waste of taxpayers’ money, government time, and state resources."
This is bad news for California's stretched budget and should enrage taxpayers who have to foot the bill. There is a long history of these bills failing on constitutional grounds, leaving state governments stuck with the bill. The legislators who pushed the bill through had to be aware of this history when they took the fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
"It's unfortunate that some officials continue to believe that unconstitutional laws are the answer, when time and time again courts have thrown out these bills and proven them to be a waste of taxpayers' dollars," the ESA said in a statement... four years ago. Hopefully California's government will listen after this expensive lesson in constitutional law. | <urn:uuid:3c45c673-b40d-4950-8ac7-5e759abe9668> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/07/esa-seeks-11-million-in-legal-fees-from-fighting-ca-videogame-law/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964304 | 357 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Alexa - posted on 10/25/2011 ( 2 moms have responded )
My son is 5, we just started Kindergarten this year. He is doing great as far as the school work goes. Picking up everything really well. He just can't behave!! Every day it's a different story. He can't control his talking. He won't stay on task. Lately it's been SPITTING in kids' food or at other kids! Don't know where he learned this behavior, and don't know how to make him stop! We've taken away TV/video games, done homework and gone straight to bed after dinner. We've even not said anything about it, thinking he was liking the attention, whether good or bad. I'm at my wit's end! Please help!!! | <urn:uuid:4b8f818d-92da-422c-88d5-6abcb30afd8c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.circleofmoms.com/moms-with-school-age-kids/help-kindergartener-with-problems-in-conduct-670836 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988876 | 165 | 1.765625 | 2 |
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Administrator Lawrence E. Strickling spoke last week on the impact of the $4.7 billion in BTOP investment (ARRA funding to improve access to broadband). Here’s the quick tally…
- deployed or upgraded 78,000 miles of broadband infrastructure;
- connected 11,200 community anchor institutions—such as schools, libraries and hospitals—to broadband networks;
- installed more than 38,600 computer workstations in 2,600 public computer centers in 1,500 communities; and
- generated more than 510,000 new broadband subscribers.
I presume this isn’t the final tally, since I know Blandin is still doing some final tallies for their BTOP project. Strickling also spoke a bit about job creation related to the funding..
Our infrastructure grantees have directly created thousands of jobs in areas such as construction, fiber splicing and network engineering. But our broadband adoption projects and public computer centers are also driving employment in another way. They are reaching people who may never have even turned on a computer – a group that includes a disproportionate number of low-income Americans, senior citizens and members of minority groups – and teaching them how to use a mouse, navigate the Internet and set up an email account. These programs are also instructing people on how to write resumes, find Internet job postings and even apply for jobs over the Web.
These are skills that many of us take for granted. But for those stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide, not having this basic digital literacy can be a barrier to employment. Many job listings are only posted online these days and many employers only accept job applications online. What’s more, today’s job market demands a basic knowledge of computers, software and the Internet.
And a little bit on next steps…
We are working to determine how we can extend the lessons learned from our projects to other communities that did not receive Recovery Act grants. For example, we will soon release a toolkit highlighting successful strategies to increase broadband adoption in inner city, rural or ethnic communities that can be used by communities anywhere to increase the level of digital literacy and broadband adoption in their areas. For schools, our program will bring 100 megabits per second service to less than 10 percent of the nation’s K-12 schools. Another 30 percent, it is estimated, already receive broadband service at the speeds recommended by the school technology directors association. That leaves around 60 percent of our schools still needing upgrades in order to deliver the quality of education that our students need in the 21st century.
It’s fun to know that maybe we’re a step ahead of the game in Minnesota in terms of extending the program with the Blandin Foundation decision to morph their ARRA-funded project (Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities) into a new iteration, Blandin Broadband Communities. I hope other areas are as lucky and other public and private entities are wise in their investments! | <urn:uuid:2e90e9ba-9844-4188-b48f-2e770c1b32bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blandinonbroadband.org/2013/01/20/what-does-4-7-billion-buy-in-broadband-expansion/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945312 | 612 | 1.789063 | 2 |
For a new program, the Faculty Director will likely take on primary responsibility for academic program development, including course selection and planning. For a pre-existing program, the Faculty Director will take on primary responsibility for evaluation of the existing academic program and recommending and implementing any changes. Study Abroad should be consulted if changes in course offerings are being considered.
For many students looking to go abroad, a short-term study program is perceived as a “trip” (read vacation) for credit. Students expect it will not be as academically rigorous as the equivalent course on campus, and that it will be fun and entertaining. It is important for all those involved in study abroad to ensure that this myth is debunked and that the core of any study abroad experience is academically strong. Faculty Directors can begin to combat this image by being clear about academic expectations. It is necessary to provide to students, from the beginning, a syllabus and summary of policies, reading lists, learning outcomes, and expectations.
Students participating in UI study abroad programs are expected to abide by UI and collegiate codes, policies and procedures regarding academic matters. Students who are enrolled in a foreign university must also abide by the host institution’s academic policies and procedures.
Since study abroad policies should generally be consistent with on-campus policies, the UI General Catalog , is an indispensable resource for Faculty Directors. On the other hand, UI policies and procedures will often need to be modified because they were developed for use on-campus and do not account for the special needs of study abroad. While abroad, the spirit of the law often takes precedence over the letter of the catalog. If further clarification of an academic policy or procedure is needed while overseas, the appropriate staff member in the Study Abroad office should be contacted.
Students participating in programs in which the approvals for degree requirements are established in advance do not need to complete a Study Abroad Credit Approval Form (CAF). In these cases, how the courses and credits apply to degree requirements are all neatly prescribed.
A Credit Approval Form is usually not required on faculty-led programs. However, students can propose that course work be used to satisfy requirements other than those specifically fulfilled by the program. For example, a student taking a literature class abroad may ask to have the class evaluated for Humanities General Education Program credit, area studies for the International Business Certificate, International Studies major area studies, etc. The CAF is given to the student by the Study Abroad administrative coordinator during a student appointment or during the program-specific pre-departure orientation.
All UI students who study abroad must register in the appropriate course number at the UI. If a student is participating in the UI’s Irish Writing Program, for example, he/she is instructed by Study Abroad to register in the appropriate course/section (165:838) for the appropriate number of credits (6 s.h.). Upon the students’ return, this registration is replaced by the individual course titles, semester hours and grades received. Specific courses taken and credit hours earned will be entered/adjusted when a final grade report is submitted to the Registrar by Study Abroad. Study Abroad staff monitor the class lists in an effort to make sure that all program participants are registered before they go abroad, however the ultimate responsibility lies with the individual students.
All UI faculty-led programs are offered for resident credit and report U.S. letter grades to the Study Abroad office. When instruction is provided on behalf of the UI by a local university, for example, a foreign grading scale is often used. In these cases, it is the responsibility of the Faculty Director to convert the marks into U.S. letter grades. There are usually standardized conversion tables to assist in this process.
The Faculty Director and individual instructors determine a policy on class attendance. Excused absences from class(es) are permitted upon the consent of both the instructor(s) and the Faculty Director. Unexcused absences may be cause for disciplinary action, including expulsion from the study abroad program. Instructors should monitor attendance and notify the Faculty Director of any violations. In cases where the program is short, intensive class time warrants exceptional attendance standards in order to assure academic integrity.
In general, UI faculty-led study abroad programs are offered for resident credit. When students receive resident credit, this credit is treated as though it was taken on campus and is included in their UI and cumulative GPAs.
Students’ academic (and disciplinary) records contain confidential information and should be treated accordingly.
If the program offers an array of courses, students may adjust their academic programs at the beginning of the session just as they may do so on-campus. The last day to drop or add courses should be identified and clearly communicated to program participants by the resident director. Note that students are expected to complete all academic requirements of the program. For example, students on a program that awards 6 s.h. of credit are not permitted to drop down to 3 s.h. unless there are mitigating circumstances (which should be discussed with Study Abroad in advance of the student dropping a class).
The appropriate deadline is determined by the length of the program, but is usually set at the 1/5th mark. During the 6-week summer session, for example, students have 6 days to add or drop courses without a W, or to change their grading status. 6 / 30 = .20. A date should be selected that is both pedagogically sound for the course/program and fair and reasonable to the students.
The Faculty Director may impose an appropriate drop/add procedure, and should carefully maintain records of any changes students make in their academic programs. Requiring students to obtain their academic advisor’s signature on a drop/add slip is not feasible. Students are responsible, however, for maintaining communication with their academic advisors.
At the discretion of the Faculty Director and instructor of the course, students may apply for the P/N option as on campus in accordance with UI policies. Many study abroad programs, especially programs of a short duration, do not allow students to take courses on a pass/non-pass basis. Our interest is in maintaining the academic integrity of the program despite the inherent distractions. If students are permitted to make use the P/N option, they must signal their intention to do so by a specified time—generally the same deadline set for dropping or adding courses. Study Abroad must be informed of this decision in writing on an individual student basis. A letter grade must be reported to Study Abroad which is then converted to P/N before being reported to the registrar. Students must earn a C- or above to receive a P grade. Students are responsible for informing their UI academic advisors of any changes made in their academic program.
Students may audit a course if approval is granted by the instructor of the course and by the Faculty Director. It may or may not be advisable to permit students to audit courses. Study Abroad must be informed of this decision in writing on an individual student basis.
As a general rule, study abroad participants should be encouraged to complete all course requirements by the end of the program. However, as on-campus, instructors may report a mark of I (incomplete) if the unfinished part of the student’s work is small, the work is unfinished for reasons acceptable to the instructor, and the student’s standing in the course is satisfactory. The work must be completed and submitted to the course instructor four weeks before the close of the examination period of the next session for which the student is registered. If no change of grade is submitted, the I becomes an F.
Students who are considering withdrawing from the program should be counseled about the academic and financial implications of their action. They have signed a program contract with a withdrawal policy which binds them to pay all of the program fee before the beginning of the program. Any appeals for changes to this policy are made to the appropriate committee in the Study Abroad office for consideration. The Faculty Director should not imply to the student that they will get money back. On the other hand, a Faculty Director should be careful not to talk a student into staying (nor should he/she have talked the student into coming in the first place). Early withdrawal is always a painful step, but sometimes it is an appropriate one.
Undergraduate students are assigned the mark of W (withdrawn) for any course dropped after the add-drop deadline. Students may withdraw their entire registration any time before the 4/5ths point in the session is reached. The date for the withdrawal of registration should also be posted. No credit is given for the session. Any student who withdraws from the entire academic program may not participate in any other aspect of the study abroad program and is responsible for themselves from that point on.
Many study abroad programs employ host country faculty to provide instruction. The grades assigned by these faculty, particularly if they are not familiar with the American educational system, may not accurately reflect the students’ academic performance. In such cases, the Faculty Director may adjust the grades for all the students in the course as appropriate. This should be done before Study Abroad reports grades to the registrar.
A student who has a complaint about a grade received (or any other serious grievance regarding faculty conduct) should first attempt to resolve the matter with the instructor. If the complaint is not resolved to the student’s satisfaction, the student should consult the Faculty Director. If the matter cannot be resolved at this level, the student may submit a written complaint to the Assistant Provost for International Programs. Obviously it’s preferable to resolve disputes quickly and equitably at the time and place where they occur. On the other hand, students have access to a formal grievance procedure.
In cases of plagiarism or cheating, the instructor must inform the Faculty Director, who will in turn 1) notify the Study Abroad office and 2) provide his/her recommendation for dealing with the incident(s). Other penalties, including placement on disciplinary probation, expulsion from the program, and suspension/expulsion from the UI may, if warranted, be imposed by the Associate Dean for Academic Programs.
Students who are physically or verbally disruptive in a class may be dealt with summarily by the instructor and/or Faculty Director. The Study Abroad office must be informed as quickly as possible of any action taken. | <urn:uuid:709d2932-f40a-4b62-9326-6405d9c0ff0f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://international.uiowa.edu/print/1750 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94927 | 2,121 | 1.585938 | 2 |
More and more, hardworking people are finding it difficult to keep-up financially. Wages have not kept pace with the rising cost of housing, healthcare and education, and skill levels have not stayed in alignment with changing industry needs. In fact, more than 24% of Franklin County households earned less than $25,000, or about half of what is considered necessary to meet basic needs. If individuals and families are to realize long-term financial independence, they must have access to tools and resources to maximize their income and help them begin to build assets.
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) helps bridge the gap between what people earn and what is needed to survive. Claimed on a person’s tax return, it is designed to supplement wages and reward work – depending on income level, marital status and the number of dependent children, taxpayers earning less than $48,362 can claim the EITC and receive a refund of up $5,657. Recognizing the EITC’s potential benefit to individuals, families and communities, United Way of Central Ohio partnered with Columbus City Council and the Franklin County Commissioners to launch the Franklin County EITC Coalition in October 2006.
The Coalition’s purpose is to raise awareness of the EITC, to provide free, high-quality tax assistance services and to connect people to financial education resources and savings opportunities. HandsOn Central Ohio serves as our primary point of contact with its 2-1-1 telephone number, connecting people with one of the Coalition’s 19 free tax assistance centers in Franklin County.
At these locations, trained volunteers prepare and electronically file tax returns. Special attention is given to deductions and credits which help provide taxpayers with the greatest refund on their return. What’s more, volunteers take the time to talk to clients about why their refund is important to their longer-term financial health. Since 2007, the Coalition helped income-eligible households complete and file 16,000 tax returns. In that time, these taxpayers have claimed over $19 million in refunds and benefited from an estimated $4 million in savings on tax preparation fees and loans.
Read more about the Coalition’s Community Impact here: 2012 Franklin County EITC Community Impact Report. | <urn:uuid:7d916c37-8982-40ff-9488-4d68c8a065c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://taxtimecentralohio.org/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960059 | 459 | 1.640625 | 2 |
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Though weight reduction merchandise and programs have the aptitude that can assist you lose the undesirable weight, it is important that you could choose this system that can really information and aid you in your quest for a bodily fit body. To have a healthy diet might be probably the most recommendable factor that one must do to help the overall well being aspects. | <urn:uuid:1d5719ae-401d-4e6f-8bbd-b521eee33bf2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://epublish.in/general/products-and-programs-that-can-help-lose-weight | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961236 | 390 | 1.601563 | 2 |
A Few Simple Rules For Money Managers
One of the biggest hazards of being a professional money manager is that you are expected to behave in a certain way: You have to come to the office every day, work long hours, slog through countless e-mails, be on top of your portfolio (that is, check performance of your securities minute by minute), watch business TV and consume news continuously, and dress well and conservatively, wearing a rope around the only part of your body that lets air get to your brain. Our colleagues judge us on how early we arrive at work and how late we stay. We do these things because society expects us to, not because they make us better investors or do any good for our clients.
Somehow we let the mindless, Henry Ford–assembly-line, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., widgets-per-hour mentality dictate how we conduct our business thinking. Though car production benefits from rigid rules, uniforms, automation and strict working hours, in investing — the business of thinking — the assembly-line culture is counterproductive. Our clients and employers would be better off if we designed our workdays to let us perform our best.
Investing is not an idea-per-hour profession; it more likely results in a few ideas per year. A traditional, structured working environment creates pressure to produce an output — an idea, even a forced idea. Warren Buffett once said at a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting: “We don’t get paid for activity; we get paid for being right. As to how long we’ll wait, we’ll wait indefinitely.”
How you get ideas is up to you. I am not a professional writer, but as a professional money manager, I learn and think best through writing. I put on my headphones, turn on opera and stare at my computer screen for hours, pecking away at the keyboard — that is how I think. You may do better by walking in the park or sitting with your legs up on the desk, staring at the ceiling.
I do my best thinking in the morning. At 3:00 in the afternoon, my brain shuts off; that is when I read my e-mails. We are all different. My best friend is a brunch person; he needs to consume six cups of coffee in the morning just to get his brain going. To be most productive, he shouldn’t go to work before 11:00 a.m.
And then there’s the business news. Serious business news that lacked sensationalism, and thus ratings, has been replaced by a new genre: business entertainment (of course, investors did not get the memo). These shows do a terrific job of filling our need to have explanations for everything, even random events that require no explanation (like daily stock movements). Most information on the business entertainment channels — Bloomberg Television, CNBC, Fox Business — has as much value for investors as daily weather forecasts have for travelers who don’t intend to go anywhere for a year. Yet many managers have CNBC, Fox or Bloomberg on while they work.
You may think you’re able to filter the noise. You cannot; it overwhelms you. So don’t fight the noise — block it. Leave the television off while the markets are open, and at the end of the day, check the business channel websites to see if there were interviews or news events that are worth watching.
Don’t check your stock quotes continuously; doing so shrinks your time horizon. As a long-term investor, you analyze a company and value the business over the next decade, but daily stock volatility will negate all that and turn you into a trader. There is nothing wrong with trading, but investors are rarely good traders.
Numerous studies have found that humans are terrible at multitasking. We have a hard time ignoring irrelevant information and are too sensitive to new information. Focus is the antithesis of multitasking. I find that I’m most productive on an airplane. I put on my headphones and focus on reading or writing. There are no distractions — no e-mails, no Twitter, no Facebook, no instant messages, no phone calls. I get more done in the course of a four-hour flight than in two days at the office. But you don’t need to rack up frequent-flier miles to focus; just go into “off mode” a few hours a day: Kill your Internet, turn off your phone, and do what you need to do.
I bet if most of us really focused, we could cut down our workweek from five days to two. Performance would improve, our personal lives would get better, and those eventual heart attacks would be pushed back a decade or two.
Take the rope off your neck and wear comfortable clothes to work (I often opt for jeans and a “Life is good” T-shirt). Pause and ask yourself a question: If I was not bound by the obsolete routines of the dinosaur age of assembly-line manufacturing, how would I structure my work to be the best investor I could be? Print this article, take it to your boss and tell him or her, “This is what I need to do to be the most productive.
Vitaliy N. Katsenelson, CFA, is Chief Investment Officer at Investment Management Associates in Denver, Colo. He is the author of The Little Book of Sideways Markets (Wiley, December 2010). To receive Vitaliy’s future articles by email, click here or read his articles here.
Investment Management Associates Inc. is a value investing firm based in Denver, Colorado. Its main focus is on growing and preserving wealth for private investors and institutions while adhering to a disciplined value investment process, as detailed in Vitaliy Katsenelson’s Active Value Investing (Wiley, 2007) book.
Short URL: http://ContrarianEdge.com/?p=3029 | <urn:uuid:5c63532f-fd94-42cf-b288-84c32a2965ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://contrarianedge.com/2011/10/26/a-few-simple-rules-for-money-managers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951651 | 1,238 | 1.601563 | 2 |
ET TU, ABC? Shortly after March 11, ABC had a world exclusive: a photograph of the only backpack that hadn't exploded and which had 'misteriously' appeared the night after the blasts in a police station, in a room where all personal belongings that had been recovered were carried to. The problem: according to Madrid's newspaper El Mundo, it's a staged photo op
The American TV network ABC's news division showed a false image of the backpack that did not explode on March 11, 2004, according to reporter Fernando Múgica in the Spanish daily El Mundo. According to Múgica, at a Madrid police station "the officers wanted to help the ABC reporters, but when the camera crew came, they didn't have the backpack that had contained the bomb there, so one of the officers showed them a similar backpack which was the property of another officer." Said Mugica, "I don't know whether the network knew this or simply accepted that the bag they were shown was the real one."
Read the rest. Maybe this is why the URL of the original ABCNews.com page
returns an error message. Hopefully, you can read a verbatim copy at the Georgia Institute of Technology's webpage
, which also reproduces the images:
A sports bag containing an unexploded bomb was discovered in the wreckage of one of the train cars. Click here to see the picture.
A cell phone found in the bag, and the fingerprints on the phone, led Spanish police to Jamal Zougam, the suspected ringleader of the Madrid attack. Click here to see the picture.
The unexploded bomb contained about 22 pounds of a whitish-colored plastic explosive. Click here to see the picture.
Also packed in the bag was a large quantity of bolts and nails, the potentially deadly shrapnel. Click here to see the picture.
However, the Spain Herald's story touches just one aspect of the much longer, and much more disturbing account by El Mundo (unfortunately its online version of the print edition is for paying subscribers only, but here you can see the verbatim copy of it; it's a bit long, but if you read Spanish it's absolutely a must-read). According to the journalistic investigation, the Tedax officers (Spanish police bomb squad) hid for three months to the investigating judge that an X-ray done to the real (not to the staged for ABC) backpack showed that there was no way it could have ever exploded since it had unconnected cables. Something odd, since it had always been said that the bombers were technically proficient. At the same time, the Tedax chief cellphone number appeared misteriously in the phonebook of Carmen Toro, allegedly one -together with his brother and husband- of the suppliers of the dynamite used for the March 11 bombs. When the investigating judge called the number, a chief's aide answered the phone and said that it belonged to one of the guys in the squad, "who used the boss' name as a nickname" (can I put a hundred exclamation marks here?).
Remember: this backpack was the only that didn't explode and appeared from no one knows where. But it was what was found in it what allowed the opposition to make the case that it was Islamic terrorists -as the Socialists were saying- and not ETA -as Aznar's government had initially said-, for two reasons: first, the kind of explosive, Goma 2 ECO instead of Tytadine (the usual in the latest ETA attacks). However, the conclusion that the exploded backpacks had Goma 2 ECO in it was made because of what was found on the unexploded one, not on actual forensic analysis of the explosion site, since apparently once it's gone off it's absolutely impossible to know for sure, being both Goma 2 ECO and Tytadine two brands of generic dynamite.
And second, because of the SIM card inside the phone. But, if the cables had been connected, the bomb would have gone off not by a phone call or another electronic trigger, but by the internal's alarm clock which was programmed to turn the phone on and vibrate. Most phones don't need a SIM card for that, but the model chosen by guys who were alleged phone experts (since they owned a phone shop) was the Mitsubishi Trium, precisely one of the few ones who need a SIM card inserted to function as a mere alarm clock. And it was the analysis of the SIM card which, less than 48 hours after the blasts, allowed the police to arrest the alleged perpetrators.
So El Mundo wonders whether this backpack is a real piece of evidence or a red herring used to divert the blame from ETA to al-Qaeda by operatives (inside law enforcement forces?) to fool the chain of command upwards and therefore leaving Aznar's government standing on their wrong foot. Add this to the agit-prop campaign by pro-Socialist media which I mentioned in this and this post, and this intriguing information of Socialist party official contact with Islamist (see previous posts here and here, and also two great posts by Dan Darling over at Winds of Change here and here and two others at Eurabian Times here and here).
And then come back tomorrow, as I'll have more information published in today's edition of El Mundo (free summary in Spanish here) reporting that the cellphones used for March 11 were unlocked in a phone shop owned by... a Spanish police officer. And not just any police officer: it was Maussili Kalaji, a Syrian born citizen who had been granted Spanish citizenship several years ago and entered the police department when he arrived in Spain after his past as an Al Fatah member and as an agent for the Soviets' intelligence services. Apparently as soon as he left the police academy he was assigned to infiltrate extremist groups and so he got acquainted with such nice guys as Abu Dadah, currently under trial for the 9/11 plot and who will be on trial again in the future for his role on March 11. He also was assigned to the security detail of judge Garzón, now on leave and teaching at a New York's university and who insisted that, no matter what Aznar was saying on March 11, he knew from minute 1 that he knew the bombings had been by Islamic terrorists, not ETA. I think we know now why.
And that's not all: Kalaji's sister was the translator for the police in charge of translated the wiretapped conversations between the alleged March 11 culprits before the bombings; and his ex-wife, also a police officer, was the first to arrive at the scene where another key evidence pointing to Islamic terrorists and not ETA was found: a white van with detonators and some tapes with Koranic verses. Socialists blame Aznar's government for hiding this but, of course, maybe its guys got there first...
As I said, stay tuned. | <urn:uuid:5c396c98-986d-41b9-a78c-caffaa876f1f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://barcepundit-english.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981473 | 1,421 | 1.6875 | 2 |
I wonder if there is any connection to the bad years that both Barack Obama and Hugo
Chavez have experienced? You think? For President Hugo Chavez, the year has been knocked by a deep recession, ever higher
crime and electricity shortages, and Venezuela's opposition has its best
shot in years to regain a national voice in an election on Sunday for a
new parliament. (Reuters)
For President Barack Obama, the year has been knocked by loss of jobs, failing economy, failed policies by a Democrat majority in Congress, an drastic increase in the nanny state and those dependent on government. The American opposition, Conservatives and TEA party participants, has it's best shot to stop the Obama agenda and turn things around, regain control from the Liberals and RINOS in the November 2010 and November 2012 elections.
Liberty at Stake in Venezuelan Elections
Venezuelans will go to the ballot box on September 26 to vote on the composition of their National Assembly. Polls indicate that the opposition is slightly more popular than the government, though two-thirds of Venezuelans surveyed want Hugo Chavez not to seek another term next year.
Their disapproval is well-founded, and opposition groups are smart to participate in next week's elections, rather than stage a boycott as they did in 2005. Simply put, the stakes in this year's parliamentary elections are too high; opposition voters must turn out in large numbers if they want to expose, and thereby help curb, Chavez's authoritarianism, according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow Alvaro Vargas Llosa.
"Given the shady electoral body, the campaign of violence and intimidation against critics, and various restrictions imposed on the news media and other organizations, there is scant chance that the official tally will match the number of real votes commanded by the coalition," writes Vargas Llosa. "If the opposition gets a third of the Assembly, Chavez will have to disqualify, throw in jail, beat up or expel a very significant number of elected parliamentarians belonging to a high-profile body based in Caracas--as opposed to a governor here or a few mayors there."
Continue reading about Venezuela elections below the fold
Beyond electoral illusions: the totalitarian regime of Hugo Chavez
Lessons from the Poor: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit, edited by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression, by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty, by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
The Americas Report | Sep 21, 2010
By Luis Fleischman
On September 26, Venezuela will hold parliamentary elections. Since Hugo Chavez was elected to the presidency in 1998, Venezuela has been transformed from a country with democratic institutions to one where the president controls all branches of government. The upcoming elections serve the purpose of making Chavez look like he is presiding over a free society but in reality provide no real chance for change. In this context, it is important to understand the true nature of the present Venezuelan political reality.
Many observers, journalists and scholars have tried to define the Chavez regime. Some have referred to it as being neo-populist and others have called it an illiberal democracy. Neo-populist refers to a regime characterized by the mobilization of marginal masses led by a charismatic leader. Indeed, Chavez has established a direct and authoritarian relationship with the people and has redistributed state funds amongst the poor in order to secure their support and win legitimacy for his regime. The legislature, the judiciary and other branches of government and civil society have become subordinated to his will and executive authority. Such was the case with regimes like that of Juan Peron in Argentina in the 40‘s and 50‘s and with some differences the government of Getulio Vargas in Brazil in the 30's and 40's.
An illiberal democracy is a regime that mixes authoritarianism and elections. This type of regime uses democracy to take power and then governs in authoritarian ways.
Undoubtedly, the Chavez regime includes aspects of both populism and illiberal democracy. However, I would argue that the Chavez regime is moving beyond populism and illiberal democracy in the direction of totalitarianism.
Zbigniew Brzezinski defined totalitarianism as a system of government where instruments "of political power are wielded without restraint by centralized leadership ... for the purpose of affecting a social revolution , including the conditioning of man on the basis of certain arbitrary ideological assumptions... in an atmosphere of coerced unanimity of the entire population". This provides a good definition of where the government of Venezuela is heading.
First, there is the element of indoctrination. (continue reading) | <urn:uuid:92da78b4-ee2d-4b6d-9602-34ce893d619d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://righttruth.typepad.com/right_truth/2010/09/bad-year-for-hugo-chavez-and-barack-obama.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95327 | 957 | 1.648438 | 2 |
LECOMPTON, Kan. - In Lecompton, Kan. , they're proud of their history.
Ellen Duncan's so proud, she painted a mural on the post office wall.
"Main Street in Lecompton, about 1910, I think," she described it.
The post office is prominently featured in the street scene.
But that could change in today's Main Street Lecompton.
Paul Bahnmaier is president of the Lecompton Historical Society, and he explains "The last of June our mail carriers were notified that they had 10 days to decide whether they wanted to be transferred to Perry."
That makes people here afraid that their post office could be moved straight out of Lecompton.
Richard Thacker has had the same post office box since 1960.
"We're spoiled by being able to come up here and get the mail everyday," he admitted.
And while Perry's only 3 miles away, they say it just won't be the same.
"It's a social place. People ... look at the billboard up there and see what's going on," Ellen Thacker described the community bulletin board and the conversations that go on around it.
The possibility of losing their tiny postal station isn't popular.
"Well, I don't think it's a good idea, takes away the identity of the town," the muralist Duncan said.
And they don't understand the reasoning behind it.
"We're not a dying community like some of these post offices that they're closing and I regret that they're being closed, but this makes no sense whatsoever," Bahnmaier said.
So here in the place where they say "the civil war began", they're starting a fight, putting up signs, having meetings and contacting lawmakers.
All in the hope that they can keep their post office's door open in the 66050 zip code.
Copyright 2012 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:f2567785-e000-4b6e-b7df-c730a861a843> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kshb.com/dpp/news/region_kansas/lecompton-historical-society-is-on-a-campaign-to-save-its-post-office | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974315 | 424 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Iran says to send humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Syria
Published Saturday 22/12/2012 (updated) 23/12/2012 17:56
Palestinian women who had been living at Yarmouk wait outside the
Lebanese immigration authority to have their papers stamped at the
Lebanese-Syrian border Dec. 18, 2012. (Reuters/Jamal Saidi)
DUBAI (Reuters) -- Iran plans to send humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Syria living in an area recently seized by Syrian rebels, Iran's ambassador to Syria was quoted as saying on Saturday.
Iran has been a staunch supporter of Syrian President Bashar Assad of Syria who has been battling to put down a 21-month uprising against his rule, and Tehran has also long cast itself as a champion of the Palestinian people.
The aid would be dispatched to Yarmouk, a Palestinian district near the center of Damascus, which has become one of the latest battlefields for Syrian rebels and a target for Assad's artillery.
Earlier this week, insurgents took control of the Yarmouk camp, a densely populated urban district home to thousands of impoverished Palestinian refugees and Syrians.
Rebels said on Thursday they had negotiated to put the camp back into the hands of anti-Assad Palestinian fighters. There are some 500,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants living in Syria, and they have been divided by the uprising.
Iran will send an initial shipment of blankets, food, and medicine in the coming days via Damascus airport to be delivered to Yarmouk officials for distribution among Palestinians, Iran's ambassador to Syria Mohammad Reza Sheibani told the Mehr news agency on Saturday.
Iran's Foreign Ministry and the Red Crescent organisation had taken the decision to send the aid, Sheibani said. He did not say specifically when the aid would be sent.
Western countries have accused Iran of supplying weapons to Syrian government forces to help put down the uprising, though Iran has denied it is helping Assad militarily.
Both Assad's government and the mainly Sunni Muslim Syrian rebels have enlisted and armed divided Palestinian factions as the uprising has evolved into a civil war.
Thousands of displaced Yarmouk residents have fled the violence for the Lebanese border or set up Palestinian communities elsewhere in Damascus. | <urn:uuid:c769be1d-7af1-4ff3-9ca3-6ba15a0ea318> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=550111 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964449 | 458 | 1.515625 | 2 |
THE Bus (Hernando County, Florida)
The Brooksville Shuttle, and Blue Route join Hernando ParaTransit at the Mariner Square shopping center on SR 50 in Spring Hill, Florida.
|Slogan||Whenever you need a ride, THE Bus is there.|
|Founded||October 28, 2002|
|Headquarters||1525 East Jefferson Street Brooksville, FL 34601|
|Service area||Hernando County|
|Service type||bus service, paratransit|
|Destinations||Brooksville, Spring Hill|
|Hubs||Brooksville, Spring Hill|
THE Bus is a cooperative effort of the Hernando County Board of County Commissioners, Metropolitan Planning Organization, City of Brooksville, Florida Department of Transportation, Federal Transit Administration in serving the people of Hernando County with affordable public transportation.
Prior to the establishment of THE Bus, the only resemblance to public transportation available in Hernando County were a tourist bus company in Brooksville, and a local ParaTransit company, which was privately owned. On October 28, 2002, the Spring Hill Routes started serving the greater Spring Hill area. One week later, November 4, 2002; the Brooksville Purple Route started serving the Brooksville area. The system started with 4 buses in Spring Hill and 1 bus in Brooksville, which shuttled riders between Brooksville and Spring Hill. By the 7th day of operation, ridership surpassed the 3rd year projection of 200 trips per day, with ridership of 219 trips. After 22 months of operation, THE Bus was averaging 425 to 434 trips per day.
On May 3, 2004, Hernando County added the Brooksville Shuttle Bus—Green Route, along with the Pasco-Hernando Community College—North Campus stop. The former Purple Route was moved entirely within the City of Brooksville. Travel time was extended from 6:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M., and the Spring Hill routes were extended from YMCA of Hernando County to Spring Hill Regional Hospital. In addition, they decreased the Brooksville–Spring Hill shuttle travel time from 90 minutes to 60 minutes.
Presently, THE Bus is averaging from 540 to 675 riders per day. The highest ridership since the initiation of the bus system was 882 trips on January 3, 2006.
Fare Structure
The cash fare to board the bus is $1.50, however a 60 cent discount is available to medicare card holders, persons with disabilities, and students (with a valid ID).
THE Bus operates 3 fixed bus routes throughout Hernando County: two in Spring Hill and one in Brooksville.
- Spring Hill: Blue and Red
- Brooksville: Purple
As of October 2009 THE Bus has 3 buses in service.
Possible Suspension of Service
Due to the ongoing budget crisis at the local, state, and national levels, as well as low ridership, the Hernando County Board of Commissioners voted in late April, 2009 to cut THE Bus service in half, reducing the frequency of trips (from 60 minutes to 120 minutes). Additionally, the county commission rejected a stimulus proposal that would have called for five new buses. The county will instead look into refurbishing three of their existing buses to lengthen their lifespans. No date for the cutbacks has been determined.
Reduction of Service—October 1, 2009
On June 23, 2009, the Hernando County Board of County Commission approved to move forward with the reduction of service to the fixed route system, THE Bus. These changes included a decrease in the frequency of bus travel along the routes from one hour headways to two hour headways. This was accomplished by reducing the number of operating vehicles from six to three. In addition, the Brooksville Route 3/Purple Route and the Brooksville Shuttle/Green Route were combined into one route, the Brooksville Route 3/Purple Route | <urn:uuid:3145f96f-1692-4be4-9a0e-d6cbd8f44e44> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_Bus_(Hernando_County,_Florida) | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935799 | 826 | 1.554688 | 2 |
For those who have not been following my reasoning on this matter here is an introduction:
- Since the 90s banks get liquidity for providing loans by packaging the loans into securities and selling those securities to 3rd parties (real estate is not real any longer from the point of view of the banks)
- As the banks were giving more and more loans with lower requirements (higher risk) they were lobbying the congress to change the bankruptcy laws to make more difficult for consumers to protect their homes by declaring bankruptcy
- As the loans started to default, the Asset Backed Securities (ABS) started to lose value and it became hard to find buyers (liquidity crisis of the past few weeks) (check the previous article)
- What banks need now to reestablish adequate levels of liquidity is to transfer the risky loans to investors with pools of real estate to back the loans (i.e., they don’t back the loan with only the property mortgaged but with other assets as well)
- If they manage to do that, their ABSs will have investment grade again and they will be able to sell those to raise money
I asked yesterday “Are you ready to live as a renter in the cul-de-sac you used to own”. I repeat the question today, because this drive to concentrate real estate is not aimed only to the working class and the poor but to the middle class as well.
Enjoy the AP story
Subprime Mortgage Woes Spreading
Wednesday August 29, 2:07 am ET
Subprime Mortgage Crisis Spreading to High-End Housing Market
NEW YORK (AP) — The subprime mortgage crisis is spreading to a somewhat unexpected place: homes costing more than $500,000.As lending has rapidly gotten more restrictive for borrowers taking out large loans, sales of expensive homes have fallen sharply around the country during what should be one of the busiest seasons for buyers and sellers, mortgage bankers and real estate agents say.
To some degree the change is due to difficulty getting financing, as borrowers are finding fewer lenders willing or able to fund “jumbo” mortgages, loans for amounts greater than $417,000. Such loans are too big to be guaranteed by government-sponsored housing finance agencies Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or Ginnie Mae.
Given the troubles in the subprime sector, investor appetite for all types of mortgage loans not guaranteed by housing finance agencies has nose-dived.
Banks until recently were able to offload the risk of many jumbo mortgages by selling the loans to investors. But now, as investors burned by the subprime debacle have become extremely picky about what they will buy, banks are having to keep more of these loans on their own books and as a result are charging higher rates.
Some lenders — such as Countrywide Financial Corp. — have made a point of saying they’re now most focused on making loans that can be guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie.
Other lenders have simply tightened up their lending standards, for example by no longer making jumbo loans to lenders who can’t fully document their income, even if they make large down payments and have stellar credit histories.
The banks that are still making jumbo loans are charging substantially higher rates to compensate for the lack of investor demand. Borrowers who could have gotten rates as low as 6.5 percent in June are now having to pay as much as 9 percent.
But aside from the financial impact of higher rates, in certain high-priced real estate markets, the effect of the suddenly tighter lending environment is more psychological, mortgage bankers and real estate agents say, as buyers and sellers alike don’t want to plunge into an uncertain future.
“Showings are down, contracts written are down, and sellers are just as backed away as buyers are,” said Lou Barnes, a partner in mortgage bank and brokerage Boulder West Financial Services in Boulder, Colo. The company arranges for financing on many higher-priced condominiums and houses in the state.
“I think the psychological damage is worse than the financial damage” which is already bad enough, he said. Even for buyers who have plenty of cash or can easily afford higher mortgage rates, the sudden change in the financing environment reduces “the ardor to buy a house unless you have to,” he adds.
With numerous buyers and sellers sidelined, the higher cost of big mortgages is bound to put downward pressure on home prices should the lending environment stay tight for a long period of time, said Ellen Bitton, president of Park Avenue Mortgage, a mortgage bank and brokerage that does business in several states, including New York, Florida and Utah.
In New York, the most pronounced effect so far has been at the very top end of the market, for properties priced $25 million and above, said Dolly Lenz, vice chairman with Prudential Douglas Elliman.
“Every single person I have at the highest end is on hold. They’re going to wait and see what happens,” she said. “It has nothing to do with them being able to afford” properties or not, Lenz added. “It’s a confidence thing. They somehow feel poorer, whether they are or not.”
In California, where the median home price is well above $500,000, jumbo mortgages are as much as 44 percent of all mortgages issued in certain metro areas, according to data from First American LoanPerformance.
In and around San Francisco, where the median home price is about $1.1 million, the tougher financing environment has created a “hesitancy” and has led to some canceled escrows for buyers around the $1 million range, said Rick Turley, president of the San Francisco and Peninsula Region for Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage.
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You can subscribe to the newsletter via spam free feedblitz.com. | <urn:uuid:17038f86-7119-4c38-b1fe-fb9470f7bd16> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thepoliticsofdebt.com/2007/08/29/subprime-mortgage-woes-spreading/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97017 | 1,259 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Jalopnik has a piece on a mostly forgotten piece of automotive history: the US government built a fleet of ultra-safe cars in the 1970s. The "RSV" cars were designed to keep four passengers safe in a front or side collision at 50 mph (80 kph) — without seat belts — and they got 32 miles to the gallon. They had front and side airbags, anti-lock brakes, and gull-wing doors. Lorne Greene was hired to flack for the program. All this was quickly dismantled in the Reagan years, and in 1990 the mothballed cars were all destroyed, though two prototypes survived in private hands. "Then-NHTSA chief Jerry Curry [in 1990] contended the vehicles were obsolete, and that anyone who could have learned something from them had done so by then. Claybrook, the NHTSA chief who'd overseen the RSV cars through 1980, told Congress the destruction compared to the Nazis burning books. ... 'I thought they were intentionally destroying the evidence that you could do much better,' said [the manager of one of the vehicles' manufacturers]." | <urn:uuid:b3971c77-990b-4817-b142-0ce67fa71080> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/28/1548233/when-the-us-government-built-ultra-safe-cars?sdsrc=nextbtmnext | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987535 | 227 | 1.679688 | 2 |
"I started out to write a book about data literacy," says Pete Forde, co-founder and CTO of Toronto startup
, "to galvanize people to understand that data, as a democratic, free resource, could be used to create both good in the world and business value. That turned into a working principle." And that, says the web developer-turned-entrepreneur, turned into a company.
BuzzData, which had a soft launch roughly six weeks ago, sets out to allow people to share and work with data sets more effectively, improving on the traditional top-line presentation of spreadsheets and databases, while allowing direct and archived interaction between users. Already, with no formal marketing or advertising, the site has quietly attracted 1,800 core users to its free public version. These "data VIPs," as Forde calls them, are building a community the company hopes will demonstrate the utility of a premium collaboration product marketed to companies who work with data.
The project sprung out of a consulting job Forde and his firm Unspace
were working on for an outside investor. He says their efforts began in earnest when a core team of three people, including co-founder and CEO Mark Opausky, started collaborating. Over the summer, BuzzData began hiring, staffing up its office near Queen and Spadina to employ 11 people. Their current staff size, Forde says, is expected to support the company as it scales up, with any future employment growth coming in customer support and logistics.
And the book? "You could say it's being written every day," Forde says. "There is still much to be written."
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Pete Forde, co-founder and CTO, BuzzData | <urn:uuid:c1e59e09-7716-4074-930b-3062786eaaca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yongestreetmedia.ca/innovationnews/BuzzData0921.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973794 | 359 | 1.539063 | 2 |
The stately Spaniard, graceful as a tree swaying in its dance with the wind, savage and noble.
The Nihilist Russian, watching in her lair, instinctive and ready to kill. Her hatred of government marking her as the free barbarian.
The Parisian, knowing the correct convention of a funeral or an adultery, civilized and logical to her glove-tips.
Of the three women the two first are simple, but civilization is complex, and it may mean to be cultivated with regard to intellect like the Jesuits, art like the Greeks, morals like the Irish, or religion like the Arab.
In which way will the women of the future develop? Will she strive like the frequenters of the salon of Madame de Rambouillet to excel in intellect, or like Saint Teresa of Spain as a religious mystic ? We have seen both these types, and I have no doubt that we shall see many shining examples of morality, but at the moment I cannot think of any conspicuous woman of whom no one has whispered scandal. For in these days if people do not trip in one direction, it is said it is because they prefer to trip in another; and soon it will be taken as a sign of evil life that one should live in a desert on bread and water. I mention in passing that our late Queen is usually admitted to have been conspicuously moral. In the arts we have seen, and hope to see again, great women novelists and actresses. In history we have an array of splendid uncivilized women immortalized from all time—Medea, Electra, the Roman empresses, Queen Maive of Connaught, the Russian heroines. Whether they excelled most as noble savages or as gloriously barbaric haters of ordered life, I cannot stay to consider.
For I want the women who read this book not to dwell upon the past, but to look forward to the great century that is waiting for their alchemy, to transmute its life by giving it a more intent purpose. Are we going to be like the very badly dressed lady of title, whom we heard the other day imploring us to behave ourselves like other people, just as we dressed like other people, in order not to be conspicuous! Or are we really going to make something out of this brilliant opportunity given us by the “refusal of the vote,” and the quickly spreading passion of enthusiasm which is moving the women of all nations to make a fight against the patriarchal faith of the goat-worshippers.
Mr. Gorst says that the object of life is making (moral) love. I think the object of our life is to make experiments, as gardeners make experiments in floriculture. I quarrel with absorption in the family because family jealousy is a bar to that kind of social intercourse which is the only education worth having, and the only experience which can lead to any result worth having. They say in France, “Love is a play in which the acts last five minutes, and the entr’actes for any time you like.” If it filled the whole of life it would only mean that life would be as short as that of the ephemeral winged, creatures of the insect world. Family love cannot absorb us if we wish to survive. We are complicated, and our possibilities of social and political intercourse are a subject of endless interest and inquiry. Let us then start again on our voyages of discovery, this time with a little more purpose in our method and delight in our hearts.
Women want the vote, it is true, but what they want more, and what they are getting, is strength to hammer through the prisons which have kept them for many centuries packed away conveniently for use on occasion. They are all coming out into the daylight for the first time within our memory, and now the real movement of life begins.
We want to change public opinion about divorce, contagious diseases, and forethought with regard to breeding. We want married women to recognize the various proportions of sexuality in each sex, to make allowance for the passionate, and to admit that we are greatly indebted for our culture to individuals who do not desire to be parents.
In conclusion, all I can say is, “Talk! talk! talk!“ We are more moved by one conversation than by many eloquent discourses. After all, what is so permanently delightful as communion of ideas? So once again I say, “Go on talking until the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized women have found out all they can learn from each other. Plenty of men will be glad to help them in their discoveries.” | <urn:uuid:be4aec80-95e6-4357-aee1-4e7ba7d03bd4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hermetic.com/farr/modern-woman/the-savage-the-barbarian-the-civilized.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966693 | 956 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Students, Harry Tatham and Jack Mason report on their Greenland training expedition in The Lake District which took place on 30th March - 3rd April
The training expedition began immediately at the end of Lent term. As everyone else was leaving to go home for the holidays the Greenland team were on the M6 heading North to the Lake District. The first night was spent at Hollows Farm in the Borrowdale valley near Keswick. At the crack of dawn were woken by Mr Saville to the lovely aroma of porridge made with water! We needed as much energy as we could get for what was to come.
Our first walk began by ‘gaining height early’ climbing Sour Milk Gill, before scrambling up Base Brown to Green Gable. It soon became clear that Mr Saville did not like taking the easy path as we scrambled up the broken cliffs to the summit. This was a steep start to the journey especially as we were carrying everything we needed to survive independently for the next few days on our backs. We continued along the ridge up to the summit of Great Gable were we enjoyed a well-earned rest. We found that the vertical trek ‘to gain height early’ drained our energy rather quickly, but we had our limited supply of chocolate bars to keep us going. From Great Gable we then headed west over Kirk Fell before dropping steeply back down into Ennerdale valley. By now we were all really starting to feel the effects of the first days walk but it was far from over! With Mr Saville’s words of “not far now, just over the next hill” and the thought of a warm meal we all romped up Pillar Rock and onto the atmospheric peak of Steeple. From here you could see back over the very tiring route we had travelled, with Great Gable dominating the skyline. Our first nights camp was in an almost surreal spot known as Scoat Tarn on the west edge of the Lake District, with views out over the sea toward the Isle of Man and North up to the Scottish borders.
The second day our hike began with a scramble from our campsite to get back to the ridge of our existing route. After spending a good hour recovering with a gentle downward slope, we came face to face with Yewbarrow. This steep ascent was a true scramble, relying on every member’s balance to keep them from a slight tumble, especially with an 18kg bag on our backs. This was a very rewarding climb and at the summit we were greeted by some beautiful views over Wasdale and our next checkpoint, Scafell Pike. Descending Yewbarrow proved to be a challenge with there being no clear footpath the slope was covered in scree but every man came down alive. The next challenge ahead was Scafell Pike which looked daunting when at the foot of the mountain, so as a result we had a tactical half hour siesta in the valley base. Scafell Pike (England’s highest mountain) and the ensuing journey to our second nights camp, proved to be the most challenging part of the training expedition both physically and mentally as none of us had any energy reserves left to climb the seemingly endless series of path and ridges. By the time we had all made it to summit there wasn’t a man in the team who wasn’t taking the weight off their feet and enjoying the spectacular view that we could have had if we hadn’t been fully surrounded by thick cloud and fog! Here we had the most amazing, well-deserved Twix any of us had ever eaten. From here to our next camping spot, it was a steady downhill slope to another beautiful spot beside Sprinkling Tarn, and for the first time Mr Saville wasn’t the first to the campsite and, for once didn’t find the best spot to pitch the tent, as Matthew Walter beat him to it. A second night of dehydrated food beckoned and of course the luxury of Oat-so-Simple with water for breakfast. Yum-yum-yum!
The next morning brought great news as we realised that at the end of today’s activity we would finally be able to shower and recuperate. After packing our tents we made the shorter hike down to the minibus which took us back to Hollows Farm from where, after a short café stop, we re-grouped ourselves and spent the rest of the day climbing on Wodens Face a 25mt high rockface just a short walk and river crossing from the campsite. Watching the varied first attempts at crossing what was only a very small river it became clear that we all needed to practice this important skill before we leave for Greenland although we did provide amusement and an amusing spectacle for a few tourists resting by the river. Alex Taylor gained the Muppet of the trip award when he removed his shoe to cross to avoid wetting his trainers and promptly threw them to the opposite bank, where a slightly short throw resulted in them landing in the water; Uncomfortable wet feet and wet shoes. We spent about 4 hours rock climbing putting our rope skills to the test on a number of different climbs. The following day we had hoped the overnight rain would have filled the rivers so we could undertake some river crossing practice, however, after waiting until midday for the rain to clear, the rivers had still not changes noticeably from the previous day, so we decided it was time to pack up camp and head back home, dropping Jack and Dougie off in Ambleside for a revision camp at Windermere School. We returned to Trent tired, and with lots of wet kit but also some good memories of what had been a hard but rewarding few days spent in the hills. | <urn:uuid:86885fa1-68bd-4d0c-8fa0-cc06ac9be08a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.trentcollege.net/media/news/default.aspx?id=92&cat=0&range=2012&pg=9 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98164 | 1,180 | 1.59375 | 2 |
This word pertains to a person, animal, or object that continously escapes termination. This person, no matter what they or it does cannot get in trouble. Prone to take hour and a half lunch breaks, likes to cut in line, and excessively disappears for long periods of time.
Hey did you see that chick sleeping in her car? What an amo...
it means "i love" in italian
amo brent very very much!
New Zealand slang with many meanings and used in many different ways. Mainly used in South Auckland.
1)Short for Amateur
3)Stuffing something up
4)Can be used if you disagree with something
3)You amoed it.
4)You like apple than microsoft! Your amo!
The most beautiful girl in the world,
AMO is the most beautiful girl in the world.
Air Maintenance Officer. The man or women in the military air wings that is in charge of maintenance. The only thing they care about is getting planes running or air craft parts built. They will pretend to be your friend until you slip up then you see the truth on who they really are.
I thought that AMO was cool but then he made us work 14 hour shifts because we had to many broken planes.
disrespectful slang term for an Amish person
Get off the road, ya dumb amo!
Short for Asian Emotional. Often seen wearing large baggy pants to accomodate their large cotch area. Amos have their own style of fashion which is unique to them and them only. They dont cry about how much their life sucks and they dont slit their wrists. They dont even have to be Asian.
Typical amo boy:
- choppy/flippy Mrs Brady hair
- baggy jeans
- wears a lot of black
- is part of an Amo 'group'
- continually refers to himself as being the most amo kid around
- listens to bands such as My Chemical Romance, Energy (Asian boy band), Fall Out Boy, and Matchbook Romance
- likes to act all mysterious
- is in love with Kelly Clarkson
- has myspace pictures of himself with messed up bed hair, hiding his face, taken from above.
- a photowhore
- doesnt like to be referred to as emo, scene or goth
- loves playing make believe
guy: "Im so amo with my yellow/not tinted skin and my black/blonde streaked hair ima gonna go meet up with my amo buds. dont bother me so yeah. "
girl: "omifreakingosh youre wearing eyeliner!! You cant be amo. kthanksbye. Amoxcore for life!!!!" | <urn:uuid:fa66e85f-5eee-4dc2-80f5-b642ecc31201> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Amo&defid=4525433 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938411 | 577 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Bastrop County Sheriff Terry Pickering said he had no details about the victims, including when or how they died.
The fire was the largest of dozens burning throughout the drought-stricken state. It started Sunday near the town of Bastrop, about 25 miles south of Austin, and quickly spread, fanned in part by winds from Tropical Storm Lee, which dumped its rain on Gulf Coast states further east.
The state Forest Service said Tuesday morning that firefighters hadn’t begun to contain the fire, which had destroyed about 600 homes and forced the evacuation of hundreds of others.
State emergency manager State emergency management chief Nim Kidd said it was the most destructive fire of the year in Texas, and that the number of homes destroyed would likely go up after the hardest-hit areas are assessed.
Texas officials say more than 1,000 homes have been destroyed and more than 100,000 acres have burned in wildfires over the past week.
Gov. Rick Perry, who cut short a presidential campaign trip to South Carolina on Monday to return to help oversee firefighting efforts in Texas, toured a blackened area near Bastrop on Tuesday.
“Pretty powerful visuals of individuals who lost everything,” Perry said. “The magnitude of these losses are pretty stunning.”
Some residents said they were surprised by how quickly the blaze engulfed their neighborhoods.
“We were watching TV and my brother-in-law said to come and see this,” Dave Wilhelm, 38, who lives just east of Bastrop said. “All I saw was a fireball and some smoke. All of a sudden: Boom! We looked up and left.”
Wilhelm returned Tuesday to find his neighbor’s house and three vehicles gone, some of his own children’s backyard toys destroyed but their house spared.
“Some stuff is smoldering on the lot behind us. Inside of the house, we smell like a campfire. We’re definitely very lucky.” | <urn:uuid:d9a7985d-45e2-46b5-be28-9da7628f2687> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.couriernews.com/view/full_story/15406427/article-Officials--2-killed-in-massive-Central-Texas-blaze | 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 | 0.977027 | 412 | 1.539063 | 2 |
|La radio au service du monde rural des pays ACP. (CTA, 1995, 64 p.)|
This list of names and addresses, which is in its first edition, is computer-generated by Gret's Exchanges and communication unit. It does not claim to be either exhaustive, or totally reliable, as this would be impossible given the number of countries involved and frequent staff changes amongst the heads of radio stations and of programmes. It should, however, facilitate regional and international contacts between specialists (journalists, producers, those responsible for radio, for training or for international organisations, contributors, etc.) in the field of communication and rural radio broadcasting. In order to meet this goal, we will make sure that it is widely distributed to the interested parties.
We wish to thank all the partners - journalists, producers, organisation heads and contributors - who have been willing to give up a few moments of their time in order to provide us with information. We hope that you will give us more of your attention, since as you know the data contained in this list require continuous updating. Please do not hesitate to inform us of any change which would help to maintain the accuracy of the details provided on you or on your colleagues. This list of names and addresses is also available in computer form. For additional information or to advise us of a correction, contact:
Exchanges and communication unit | <urn:uuid:3b83b248-fa53-4981-aa97-ff5e3378f49d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzdl.org/gsdlmod?e=d-00000-00---off-0tulane--00-0----0-10-0---0---0direct-10---4-------0-1l--11-en-50---20-help---00-0-1-00-0--4----0-0-11-10-0utfZz-8-00&cl=CL3.9&d=HASHb5513bbe71b8bf1d8a0946.7&hl=0&gc=0>=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94663 | 280 | 1.546875 | 2 |
There are two ways of getting something. Doing it yourself, and getting someone else to do it for you. So what happens when someone else is clearly far better at doing something than you.
This is why your strengths are important, becuase 99% of the time its much better just to do what you’re best at. You get more done, you can sell more and make more profit. Awesome.
What this also means is don’t just start any business because its painless. Anyone can clean houses and wash cars. That's easy. That’s why the rates are so low. Instead of thinking “what’s the easiest thing I can do”, think “what is it that I’m best at?” Learn to leverage your strengths, and win.
And business advantages mean more profit, less work and a better chance of fulfilling your vision. Do what you’re good at.
It’s like getting married...
If your still in your teens, its okay if you’re not married yet (hehe) but run with this idea. Which one of these do you think is more natural, more likely and has a better chance of success?
Decide to get married first - scout for partner, propose
Find a partner, build a relationship. Idea of marriage comes across, and its a good idea. So you do it, work hard and make it a long term success.
I hope and pray you chose the second one. You’re not desperate, are you?
Just like a marriage, with business its a really, really bad idea to play “just to take part”. Play to win, or don’t play at all. Because when you invest as much time and money you need to get a business, even a part-time business, you need to be committed to succeeding.
Why commit yourself to an ongoing struggle rather than something that’s comparably easier and way more fun?
So here comes a nasty, un-nerving question. Here goes...
What Are You The Best in the World At?
As Seth Godin points out in his book, ‘The Dip’,
being the best in the world is seriously under-rated.
It’s a serious question. What are you the best in the world at? Anything? Because in the world of Google and the rest of the internet which can index and rank you with billions of competitors in fractions of a second, boy does being #1 matter! Who chooses "the B team"...?
If you want a job, you have to be the best person for the employer at that time. You have to be the best in the world. Just like when you sell something - you are the best provider for your customer. You’re the best in the world. That front page story is the best story of the day.
But quickly, you need to know...
Good Grades Don't Make You Awesome
School aren’t about making you the best in the world. They’re about making whole classes of good grades. That's their purpose. So even with your flawless set of grades, you’re in a class of flawless - in other words you’re average. Good, but average. One of the ugly ironies of the school system...
*Gulp*. I’ve got nothing.
Before you start feeling ashamed from your lack of Olympic Gold medals and nobel peace prizes, let’s work out what “the world” is.
“The world” is your world. Not our home planet, but the world in which you live in. The places you go, the people you see and your circles of influence. Are you the best at something at school? Or within your friendship group? Maybe you compete at something locally, or elsewhere?
There are some exceptions to this though:
I’m awesome, but other people might be awesomer...?
If they’re not on your radar, they’re not competition. Just like in Sun Tzu’s Art of Waryou must always respect your opponents, but if they’re not showing up, they're not competition.
I’m still young. What if I just focus on getting good at something?
It takes time and effort. You’ll encounter the resistance and have to fight through it. It’ll be hard work, and most people won’t make it. But yes, its possible. And you just might make it if you work out how to get good at getting good.
What happens if I change the game so it plays to my strengths?
Like using your creative design skills in a grey, dead-end industry? That’s perfect! That’s how companies like Apple and Google enter and transform markets. It seems to work!
Like you probably, my school offers a choice of sports from an early age. What happens is people choose the sport they like, they spend year after year of games sessions playing, practicing and learning the sport. The result is groups of people playing sports to an advanced level, and loving it!
They’re playing to their strengths (literally) - they’re playing the sport they prefer. In the position they’re best at. Every week. Strengths are built through talents, experience, education and skills.
What Is Talent?
Malcomn Gladwell wrote a book on talent. It’s called ‘Outliers’ and its basically about finding out about what makes the exceptional cases in the world. Its fascinating. Go read it.
What he essentially uncovers though is talent comes from hours of practice, and lucky opportunities. Here’s a great video summary:
Think of gaming. Studies show that teenage gamers are getting almost as much gaming time in as they are schoolwork, meaning most gamers are “talented” by the time they graduate. The hours of practice, plus the luck of having a console (or gaming PC) makes you talented.
What Are You Good At?
What Do You Have Experience In?
What Have You Learnt About?
What Are You Skilled At?
Its difficult in your teens, since you’re not necessarily old enough or had the opportunity to try lots of different things out and work out what you’re amazing at. Some teens will have a whole portfolio of different skills, whilst others won’t have accumulated so much yet.
Either way, you’re not thirty-something. You needn’t worry! That’s what this site is all about - building those personal strengths. By the time you are 30, and have netted years and years of actual business experience under your belt, imagine how far ahead of the rest of the pack you’ll be. Being young now can actually help...
Embrace Your Limitations
Limitations make things hard. You have to choose, make tough decisions and try really hard to make a profit. Those kind of practices put you miles ahead of anyone else. Listen to this talk about how a one-armed boy won a judo competition, by embracing his constraints...
Focus on Few Things, but kick-ass at them!
Jim Collins researched and wrote a book on "Good to Great". There are so many really important takeways, but one of his concepts he calls the fly-wheel. It takes a lot of effort over a long time, in one direction before something gains momentum.
Stick to doing one or two things frickin' well - master one or two strengths. Build momentum and go be the best in the world. Go be King.
The Strength of Your Plan B
You may be the best basketball player in the world; one trip or fall, one broken hand and you're nothing. What I think dictates peoples real strength - at the very highest level - is the strength of their plan B. What happens if it all goes wrong?
It helps to be self-competitive. If you're unsure whether you should do football or swimming in your afternoons, because you're good at both and find them a lot of fun, you're in by far the better position than the person who has to go swimming because they're not good at much else...
When it gets competitive, the strength of your Plan B is crucial. Besides, getting good at getting good at stuff is an extraordinarily useful habit ;)
Take this with a pinch of salt, but it may still useful for confirming what you're already thinking. It's 50 questions where you agree or disagree with a statement about yourself like "I love to read daily". You then get an end score and some suggested strengths.
Your Vision Why dreaming big can have such a huge impact on your business, but how "getting real" is what will make your dream a reality.
Personal Strengths How and why to build a business based on your personal strengths, why you should embrace your limitations and how to maximize your talents.
Passion Passion is that unusual force that means you wake up in the morning; here, you'll learn why money doesn't equal passion, how to find your passion and what to do with it.
Resources How to get all the people, the money, the kit and the training you need to make your business actually happen. Without this, you'll be forever frustrated.
Business Mentors Having experienced experts guiding you through this whole "business" landscape is the single fastest-accelerator for your teen business. Discover the secrets to successful networking here.
Masters of Marketing Marketing is the single most misunderstood part of everyday business. Here, get introduced to the Masters of Marketing who will really teach you how to win customers. | <urn:uuid:0dc04bfc-28af-4094-8443-1274b7871431> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yourteenbusiness.com/personal-strengths.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950287 | 2,046 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Analytics in Action: Pricing
Bringing additional precision to pricing
It’s widely known that changes to a pricing strategy can bring benefits with a relatively small amount of effort. On the other hand, the wrong moves in pricing can have an equally outsized effect. Which is why so many companies leave pricing untouched--even when they know a new approach may be needed. For them, pricing is an unknown and as long as it’s not completely broken, they feel that they can work around any pricing inefficiencies. As a result, they are likely leaving a lot of value on the table.
It doesn’t have to be that way – especially when companies are generating valuable data that could be used to guide their pricing efforts. Pricing analytics can complement the wisdom and experience of sales teams, partners and others, from transaction-level analyses and behavioral segmentation to logarithmic- or regression-based price analyses. For business leaders who are concerned that their pricing strategy is overly reactive and speculative, employing pricing analytics can be an effective new development. And Deloitte can help you put it to work today, bringing our leading pricing capabilities together with a deep analytics bench. Not only do we know pricing and analytics, we know business. And that can make all the difference.
|Raise your pricing IQ
New Pricing and Profitability Management leader Ranjit Singh gives his take on using analytics to raise an organization’s pricing IQ.?
|Understanding the Economics of a Business: Top Down or Bottom Up?
Should you follow the lead of sophisticated investors and apply a value-based approach to managing your business? And if so, what’s the best way to do it?
|Do Something About it
For multinational manufacturers, the links between strategy, business activities, and enterprise value can be unclear. Can pricing analytics help?
|Mining for insight
Pricing analytics can help companies better examine their customers, products, and marketplace dynamics to help improve their growth and profitability.
|Pricing and Profitability Management: A practical guide for business leaders
Explore all the resources about the book.
|Pricing and Profitability Management: A lever worth pulling
Tune into this episode of Deloitte Insights to learn more about how companies can increase profitability through an effective pricing strategy.
Meet our people
What we offer | <urn:uuid:dc5a06f1-6053-4fa7-b9d1-1e08270264f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/Services/additional-services/deloitte-analytics-service/09c2ee09fe9c2310VgnVCM2000001b56f00aRCRD.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933883 | 485 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Even in a tough economy, increasing profits can be easy: Just cut costs enough and the bottom line keeps improving. But companies can only do that for so long.
Now Wall Street wants evidence that they're actually pulling in more money.
Big names like General Electric, IBM and Texas Instruments are among the companies that have matched or beaten analyst estimates for profits in their quarterly earnings reports and still had their stocks punished because of disappointing revenue.
Wall Street wants to see sales growth because companies that are raking in more cash are more likely to hire people.
"We've got a major stimulus, major deficit. We need to get out of this and see that it's working, and sales are the best way to do it," said Howard Silverblatt, an analyst with Standard & Poor's.
"It all comes down to jobs — that's the bottom line," he said. "Without the jobs, there is no recovery."
In theory, corporate revenues should be growing by now. The economy has been growing for a year. And at some point, companies squeeze out all the profit they can through cost-cutting — including employee costs. Growth in actual sales has to take over.
At first glance, second-quarter earnings look encouraging. Of the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 that have reported so far, earnings per share are up almost 50 percent from a year ago. Nearly two in three firms have beaten expectations.
But sales have risen only a disappointing 5 percent. That's clearly not enough for investors, even when companies turn in results slightly higher than Wall Street's expectations.
"The growth story is what the market is focusing on now," said equity strategist Cleve Rueckert of Birinyi Associates, a stock market research and money management firm in Westport, Conn.
And the market has gone sideways since earnings season began last week. Individual companies that might normally expect their stocks to be lifted by strong profits have taken a hit.
• General Electric Co. posted its first quarterly profit since 2007 last week and issued an upbeat outlook, but investors seized on its 4 percent drop in revenue as a sign of concern because GE touches almost every part of the economy. Its stock fell 5 percent.
• IBM Corp. stock tumbled nearly 4 percent Monday after the computer company beat earnings expectations and raised its profit expectations for the year but fell short on sales.
• Texas Instruments Inc. reported a near-tripling of profit and a 42 percent surge in sales. Yet its stock sank more than 5 percent following the earnings report Monday. Why? Technology investors were banking on even better revenue figures.
The story was similar at Delta Air Lines Inc., the world's largest airline; Gannett Co., the biggest U.S. newspaper publisher; toy maker Hasbro Inc.; and giant banks JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp.
Not to downplay the importance of corporate profits to the economic recovery.
Market-watchers applauded last quarter as companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index reported 92 percent higher operating earnings than a year earlier — the biggest yearly increase ever, Silverblatt said.
Those healthy results reflected an improving economy and suggested that Americans were spending more again. But after five straight quarters of bigger profits, investors are showing they want more evidence the recovery is on the right path.
Analysts say sales are the best indicator of when companies will start adding jobs. When jobs will come and where they'll come from are two of the biggest questions hanging over the recovery.
"The stimulus programs were supposed to jump-start the economy and break the downward cycle by convincing both companies and consumers that better times were here," Silverblatt said. "Earnings are good, but so far we're not seeing the sales or the jobs."
Investors may be overreacting, said Paul Hickey, co-founder of stock-data tracker Bespoke Investment Group in Harrison, N.Y. But it appears they can be won over when the numbers are good enough.
Just a week ago, Intel reported quarterly revenue that was more than a half-billion dollars above analysts' expectations en route to its biggest profit in a decade. Its stock climbed.
Wall Street's wariness, its instinct to sell at any hint of possible trouble, is understandable at a time of great economic uncertainty and a volatile market. No one wants to be burned like they were in 2008.
But sooner or later, they want to see companies delivering results on sales that are as good as the ones on profits.
"You have to have revenue growth eventually," says Hickey.
© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:6576d013-c892-4a55-8b21-dda58cef87e9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.moneynews.com/InvestingAnalysis/US-Earnings-Eye-On-Revenue/2010/07/21/id/365210 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968158 | 970 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Peter Thiel wants to burn down Harvard. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but maybe not one Thiel would mind. Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and angel-investor in Facebook--Wallace Langham played him in The Social Network--would like Americans to seriously rethink the value of higher education. He thinks we have an education bubble right now, the way we had a tech bubble and a housing bubble. We believe fervently in the value of education, but our faith may be misplaced. Look at all these college graduates moving back in with their parents, kneecapped by student loans.
Thiel doesn't think it has to be this way. He's starting a new investment program called 20 Under 20, where he'll find 20 promising teenagers and pay them $100,000 to start a company instead of going to college. Thiel announced the existence of 20 Under 20 in September, but he talks about it a lot in a recently published interview with TechCrunch, so it's on people's minds again.
Does it make sense to give kids a hundred grand and tell them to skip college? Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at Business Insider is all for it. Gobry recounts his own somewhat staccato path through college, law school, and business school, and admits that it may not have been "worth the debt and the opportunity costs." Had he not gone to school, he writes, "something tells me Business Insider would have hired me regardless."
Less sanguine about Thiel's plan is Marion Maneker at The Big Picture, who notes that Thiel's efforts may be misguided. "Why doesn't Thiel make it possible for anyone who wants to go to Harvard to be able to do it?" Maneker wonders. "Wouldn't it be possible given the backing of the right kind of successful and smart people to make a superb education both more affordable and effective?"
Whatever the merits of Thiel's program, Nitasha Tiku at New York points out that he probably won't have a hard time appealing to the kids. "Who will the next generation of entrepreneurs listen to?" writes Tiku. "Their folks or the dude whose San Francisco manse comes equipped with a butler?"
Maybe Thiel could split the difference and look into setting up a degree program in entrepreneurship--something that "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams called for in The Wall Street Journal this weekend. "I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature," Adams wrote. "But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money."
Instead, he says, we should be preparing kids to get out there and "master... the strange art of transforming nothing into something." But it should happen in a classroom, he says--so maybe this is something he ought to take up with Thiel. | <urn:uuid:5de244d3-f93d-41d5-94c9-bb0e2eb41664> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2011/04/peter-thiel-believes-future-belongs-college-dropouts/36561/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964733 | 594 | 1.8125 | 2 |
LONDON — In a case that has dogged Anglo-American relations for a decade, Britain said Tuesday that it would not send a confessed computer hacker to the United States to face charges relating to a spectacular break-in of Pentagon databases and other sensitive networks around the time of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Home Secretary Theresa May also said that the British government, Washington's closest ally, would re-examine its controversial fast-track extradition treaty with the United States to see how some suspects might be kept in Britain for trial rather than shipped across the Atlantic.
Speaking in Parliament, May told lawmakers that 46-year-old Gary McKinnon would not be extradited to the United States because of his mental health problems, which include suicidal thoughts and Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. Handing McKinnon over for prosecution would breach his human rights, even though he stands accused of "serious crimes," May said.
The politically fraught decision is likely to rouse the ire of U.S. officials, who have sought for years to get McKinnon onto American soil. They say that his hacking of nearly 100 U.S. military computers, which he admits to, caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage and sparked a disruptive network crash soon after the Sept. 11 attacks.
McKinnon maintains that he broke into the computers to look for secret government evidence about UFOs and extraterrestrial life.
His case has become something of a cause celebre in Britain, where many see him as a misguided, eccentric but ultimately harmless computer nerd up against a prosecution-happy American judicial system. Members of Parliament, civil liberties campaigners, lawyers and other activists have championed his cause.
"It was an incredibly brave decision" not to hand McKinnon over to the United States, said his mother, Janis Sharp, who has led the fight against his extradition. "To stand up to another nation as strong and powerful as America is rare." | <urn:uuid:67048caf-ee8a-41d7-b60f-6dca0b9fdbbf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tampabay.com/incoming/britain-blocks-extradition-of-hacker-who-broke-into-pentagon-computers/1256777 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979961 | 393 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Terrapins are armored Koopas with green shells that appear in Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. In the game, they are the weakest soldiers in the Koopa Troop, even weaker than a Goomba. A similar (and much stronger) enemy is the Terra Cotta. The word "terrapin" is an ambiguous term referring to turtles, which Koopas are quite similar to.
Terrapins fight solo or in groups of two to four and attack their opponents by punching, which does not do much damage. They patrolled the halls of Bowser's Keep in search of intruders, and appear mostly in the very beginning of the game, before Exor crashes into Bowser's Keep. They only had 10 HP and 1 attack power, and 8 defense; this made battling them good training for Mario at that point in the game. Mario also gains no EXP for defeating them.
Terrapins are the precursors to the Koopatrols of the Paper Mario series. However, Terrapins and Koopatrols themselves are very different from each other in stats, although their main purposes are identical in that they are both armor-clad Koopas who guard Bowser's Castle.
Notable Terrapins
Names in Other Languages
|Koopa Troopa Soldier; from the Japanese name for Koopa Troopa (Nokonoko), and hei meaning soldier | <urn:uuid:cbc69e84-e8ff-4268-a1ad-7b21b8be3935> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mariowiki.com/Terrapin | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952483 | 294 | 1.742188 | 2 |
COLOR ME RED
By the time this article reaches your desk there is a very good possibility that the Bush Administration will have a database on "all" air passengers.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is setting up a program that will color-code each air traveler, depending upon that person's threat level.
This will be a computerized system that will check the backgrounds of all passengers boarding at the air terminal. The TSA tried to get the airlines to turn over passenger records to government officials, but not a single airline agreed to the plan. The system is called CAPPS II and was devised by - (to quote Chuck Baldwin) "a bunch of control freaks in the Bush Administration who are attempting to turn America into a police state." CAPPS stands for Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening.
Uncle Sam not only wants to know who you are but where you are going and how long you are going to stay. You will give the system your full name, home address, telephone number, date of birth and travel itinerary. The database will be easily accessed to other information such as public records, commercial computer banks and even mailing lists. Each traveler will receive a numerical score and scrutiny at the checkpoint and red indicates that you are a really bad threat to our way of life and you cannot take this trip.
Frequent fliers can bypass this Gestapo-type infringement on our rights by giving government all their personal information up front. The government says the databases will not include bank records, credit ratings or medical records. Please be aware that this is the same government that issued me a Social Security card that states, "For Social Security Purposes - Not for Identification."
General Motors now installs a computing system called OnStar. OnStar is a remote assistance product to be used by the driver of the automobile to find directions, unlock the door when you've locked yourself out, or put you in touch with authorities when necessary.
OnStar can be a really big help if a driver has a problem while out on the road "BUT" anyone with the proper equipment can eavesdrop on conversations inside the automobile that is so equipped. Since OnStar uses Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, your whereabouts are known at all times.
Big brother now has the capability of keeping up with your every move. Is there a possibility that soon it will be mandatory to install OnStar in ALL vehicles, just as ALL air travelers must succumb to CAPPS II? How long will it be before our highways and byways contain checkpoints where we will be required to stop and show our papers?
Wake up America - It's later than you think.
© 2004 Derry Brownfield - All Rights Reserved
Derry Brownfield was born in 1932 and grew up during the depression. He is a farmer and a broadcaster. Derry attended the College of Agriculture at the University of Missouri where he received his B.S. and M.S. degrees. He taught Vocational Agriculture several years before going to work as a Marketing Specialist with the Missouri Department of Agriculture. Derry served as Director of the Kansas City Livestock Market Foundation at the Kansas City Stockyard prior to establishing himself in farm broadcasting.
Derry started farming when he was 16 years old and received the Future Farmers of America State Farmer degree in 1949. Since that time the Brownfield Farm has grown to over 1000 acres maintaining a herd of 200 registered Charolias cows.
In 1972, Derry and his partner established the Brownfield Network which now serves 250 radio stations throughout the Midwest with news and market information. In 1994, Derry started his own syndicated radio talk show and he is one of the most popular radio talk show hosts in America. The Derry Brownfield Show can be heard on approximately 80 radio stations in 23 states. With his entertaining sense of humor and witty commentary he has captured audiences for over 30 years. His ability to present an informative talk show while being light and colorful is why he has a large loyal listening audience.
Derry Brownfield is a practical farmer, a practical
business man and a very entertaining speaker. He travels extensively throughout
the country speaking about his common-sense point of view. Web Site: www.derrybrownfield.com
"Uncle Sam not only wants to know who you are but where you are going and how long you are going to stay. You will give the system your full name, home address, telephone number, date of birth and travel itinerary." | <urn:uuid:2250571d-68c1-464a-8596-fd4565d3e1c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newswithviews.com/brownfield/brownfield44.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95466 | 916 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Christy Moore (born on May 7, 1945, in Newbridge, County Kildare) is a popular Irish folk singer and guitarist, well known as one of the founding members of Planxty. His first album, Paddy on the Road (a minor release of 500) was recorded with Dominic Behan (brother of Brendan) in 1969.
1970 brought his first major release, Prosperous (named for the village of Prosperous, County Kildare, where the album was recorded), which brought together the four musicians who shortly thereafter formed Planxty: Liam Óg O'Flynn, Andy Irvine, and Dónal Lunny. For a time they called themselves "CLAD", an acronym of their names, but soon decided on Planxty.
After leaving Planxty in 1975, Moore continued on his solo career (reforming his old band on occasion) which he has been doing ever since. He also formed the band Moving Hearts with Lunny and five other musicians in 1980. In 2000 he published his autobiography, One Voice. | <urn:uuid:778285cd-d8eb-489b-8114-bb819986b6c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chordie.com/song.php/songartist/Christy+Moore/index.html?filter=googlecom | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985848 | 223 | 1.53125 | 2 |
A travel document that is to be physically cancelled should be examined thoroughly to ensure that it has not been altered in any way before cancellation.
Where there is suspicion that a travel document has been altered or is counterfeit the document must not be returned to the holder or physically cancelled. Instead, the matter must be referred to the Passport Fraud Section and is to be handled in accordance with their instructions.
When travel documents are cancelled under the Australian Passports Act 2005 (Section 22 refers), the document must be defaced to ensure it can't be used again as a primary identity document for travel purposes. This is done by cutting off and disposing of:
- the machine-readable zone (from the bottom of the inside bio-data page); and
- the part of the front cover corresponding to the MRZ.
Returning cancelled passport to holder
On request, a physically cancelled passport may be returned to the holder, unless it is suspected that it has been obtained fraudulently, in which case it is to be forwarded to Passport Fraud Section.
The same applies to an Emergency passport that is cancelled, see ‘ Replacing an Emergency passport ’.
Valid visas in cancelled passport
If the passport has valid visas that the client wishes to continue to use, the client should be advised to contact the appropriate foreign embassy/consulate to ensure the visas in a cancelled passport will continue to be honoured if presented with a newly issued passport.
Regardless of any valid visas, the MRZ and the corresponding part of the front cover must still be cut off to show that the travel document has been cancelled.
Expired travel documents: cancelling
Whenever staff are presented with expired travel documents that have not been physically cancelled, they must also cut off the MRZ and the corresponding part of the front cover.
It is not an option to leave a replaced or expired passport physically un-cancelled under any circumstances.
Deceased person’s travel document: cancelling
Staff should be sensitive to the feelings of the next of kin when cancelling the passports of deceased Australians, particularly to ensure that the photo is not cut.
It is not an option, however, to leave a deceased person’s travel document un-cancelled under any circumstances - the MRZ and the corresponding part of the front cover must be cut off. | <urn:uuid:801eb14c-0b75-409c-9774-85b6f27ab659> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/passports/Policy/CancellingTravelDocuments/Physicallycancellingatraveldocument/index.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941113 | 480 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Last month over 150 Industrial Design professionals from neighboring states came together for IDSA’s Regional Conference in Detroit. Designers from as far away as Pennsylvania came to hear industry experts present on topics as diverse as Cars and Kids to the modern office space – all based on the conference theme of Rebuilding our Region with Design. According to Kevin Shinn, the outgoing Mideast Region VP and Global Industrial Design manager at Dow Corning Corporation, the theme was developed as a topic that both speakers and attendees would enjoy and would be especially salient considering Detroit’s recent rebirth.
Julie Heard started the conference off with someinteresting facts and figures about the IDSA Organization. Even in the face of a stagnant economy, IDSA grew by 24% in 2011 to over 3200 members so they must be doing something right. The organization presented more than 150 events last year and received more than 1.6M visits to their website, where members can take advantage of Design Case Studies, a directory of Education Papers and network with other professionals.
After the typical technical gremils were put to bed, the conference started with a couple of presentations from The College of Creative Studies. Mark West took us through an interesting story of his childhood, and the inextricable link he had to the auto industry. He lamented the current state of the education system as he sees art, history, language and music classes being eliminated to make way for the emphasis on English and math brought about by No Child Left Behind. Maria Luisa Rossi took us through how design can have a positive impact on society, which is not surprising since “most designers are optimists”. It was interesting to see how many students from around the world have been brought to the Detroit-area by CCS.
Brian Baker kept the audience entertained with stories about the auto industry. But not just any stories. He brought many misconceptions and little know facts to light that have been obscured by the passage of time. Like the misapplied desire to be different that caused the Edsel to have a face that “looked like an Olds sucking a lemon”. Apparently “the thrill starts with the grille” only applies to certain cars. Baker also brought attention to the talents of Bill Porter, his special guest for the conference.
Speaking of great designer, Jeff Gale from Chrysler took us through the story of the new Dodge Dart. Gale is that rare designer, who also has taken the time to understand the engineering of the vehicles through his time spent autocrossing and working on his 1970 Road Runner. OK, rare might be a bit of a stretch because I know more than a few designers who spend their free time wrenching. But it is still refreshing to see people in the auto industry who actually understand how a car works.
Gale took us through Chrysler’s design philosophy that strives to create a performance aura around their cars. The image that was presented was that of an ice cube on fire and it appears that they have managed to present a vehicle that is at times both memorable yet sensible – sort of a modern day Steve McQueen.
After seeing the wonderful images of the Dart in development, Jeff Block then took us through some wonderful images of Steelcase’s new ideas for the office of the future. His presentation really brought the point home that Space Matters. He brought to light the fact that this is the first time in history that 4 generations have been together in the workforce. He also talked about the fact that Millennials feared cubicles more than minivans and how the way we work today is driving the design of the future office.
On Saturday we were treated to a great story about the Damsels of Design at GM by Teckla Rhoads and Susan Skarsgard. The first, Helene Pollins, was brought on board in 1943 by Harley Earl. By 1956 there were 11, yet only 10 more were added by 1994. While women may have opriginally been hired to be “the look-out for anything that might snag their nylons”, women designers now hold positions of design importance at various car companies.
All in all the event was enjoyable and if you are in the design industry I would higher suggest attending a future event. I made some new friend, learned some new facts and came away with a greater appreciation for the talent in this industry. Check out www.idsa.org to find an upcoming event in your area. | <urn:uuid:aa761242-61a9-477b-9468-45c65ebe94b4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thesupplierblog.com/2012/04/28/idsamideast/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978662 | 910 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma Is Featured Soloist On Ashes of Times Redux Score
Ashes of Time was originally completed in 1994, to limited release. Since then, the existing prints and negatives have been damaged or destroyed. Director Wong Kar Wai says, "we decided to revisit this project to create the definitive version." He and his colleagues gathered as much existing material as could be found and restored those elements, using advanced technology that had not existed in the early '90's. He also collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma to create a new soundtrack, rearranging some of the original compositions by Freddie Chan and adding some original ones.
On the Ashes of Time Score, Yo-Yo Ma and Wu Tong, joined a group of young Chinese musicians in the recording studio to re-create the score for Ashes of Time Redux. On this recording, Ma's cello, as the instrument closest in pitch range to our voice, becomes a principal "narrator" telling us of love, life and loss.
To infuse the sounds of East and West for the Ashes of Time Redux score, Chan chose traditional Chinese instruments "dongxiao" (vertical bamboo flute) and "gaohu" (two-stringed fiddle) and recorded a guitar, which can imitate the sound of the "pipa" (Chinese flute). According to Chan, the "dongxiao" epitomizes the solitary existence of swordsmen, while the high-pitched squeaks of the "gaohu" presents the unpredictability of fate and human savagery.
The soundtrack is a testament to the remarkable achievement of artists crossing the great divide between traditional and classical, folk and modern, East and West.
For more information on the film Ashes of Time Redux visit: http://www.sonyclassics.com/ashesoftimeredux | <urn:uuid:e1188db9-e6e6-48c4-a595-0e9c685724ee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yo-yoma.com/news/cellist-yo-yo-ma-is-featured-soloist-on-ashes-times-redux-score | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940915 | 382 | 1.671875 | 2 |
On this day in 1748, Capt. John Crocker received permission to set up a rope walk on Bartlet Mall for 10 years. The rope walk, which had the appearance of a long, covered bridge, ran parallel to High Street in front of where the Superior Court building stands today. It featured sophisticated machinery to wind rope from hemp.
— Information provided by the Historical Society of Old Newbury | <urn:uuid:e57d1ac6-5e24-4b71-bed9-a6b95cfae29c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newburyportnews.com/local/x1837425470/This-Day-in-History | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959502 | 81 | 1.726563 | 2 |
The European Color Initiative (ECI) ia a group of experts which is dedicated to advancing media-neutral colour data-processing in digital publishing systems. It was founded in June 1996 on the initiative of the publishing houses Bauer, Burda, Gruner+Jahr and Springer in Hamburg.
1. Media-neutral preparation, processing, and exchange of color information in accordance with the Color-Management-Standards of the International Color Consortiums (ICC)
2. Standardisation of data-exchange formats between contractors and clients in the publishing process.
3. Codification of guidelines (i.e. colorspace, file formats) for the exchange of colour information for printed media.
4. Cooperation with national and international organisations and standards groups (for example in formulating practical procedures for the ICC and ISO)
5. Commiting all members to publishing those colour profiles which are relevant to their work, and to supporting the ICC-Standards and the ECI-recommendations.
6. Publishing the ICC color profiles of the members and interested companies, as well as various tools and information relevant to the goals to the organisation.
7. The establishment of ICC-based proof-processes.
8. The exchange of experiences, ideas and educational measures, as well as the support and proliferation of ICC-based colour-management processes.
9. Cooperation with relevant hard- and software producers with emphasis on the developers of standard applications, such as Quark, Adobe, Macromedia, and the providers of colour-management tools.
No membership is necessary to support the goals of the ECI or to publish colour profiles of the ICC server. For the exchange of ideas, technical discussions, and workflow questions about ECI subjects, a mailling list has been set up on this server.
Membership in the ECI workgroup is reserved to individual persons and is voluntary. Every member is tasked with tangible objectives. Passive members or members expressing goals contrary to those of the ECI can be excluded from the council at any time. In the interests of efficiency, the number of members in the working group will be restricted. Applications for membership are presented by the council chairman, debated in the council and then decided. The ECI council consists of the chairman and three members, all of whom are elected by the membership as a whole. | <urn:uuid:d4f98a50-efa1-43bf-bc87-dda1dbe75f35> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eci.org/en/eci/goals?DokuWiki=df1649917f2412fc205357551f7a16d4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941387 | 480 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Christmas is just over a week away, and as the holiday draws closer, border-crossing traffic will be growing.
To help the make the process faster, they will introduce new document-reading kiosks now in use at all Paso Del Norte pedestrian lanes.
Officials say that it's best to anticipate the trip across the border to take longer.
"We see a big increase in the amount of traffic so we're encouraging people to take proactive steps to address that increase in traffic," said Roger Maier, CBP. "We are telling people to be prepared for the extra inspections, build a little extra time into their trip have their documents ready and if they've acquired anything in mexico to be prepared to declare that to the cbp officer upon arrival."
Failing to declare food items like fruits and vegetables can result in a fine of a couple hundred dollars. | <urn:uuid:efa5b34f-0cd9-40e1-99d5-eb5581ef7c03> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kdbc.com/print/node/22100 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944216 | 179 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Connect is a partnership of public higher education institutions in southeastern Massachusetts—Bridgewater State University, Bristol Community College, Cape Cod Community College, Massasoit Community College, Massachusetts Maritime Academy and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Established in January, 2003, Connect has two basic goals: to improve the quality, accessibility, and affordability of higher education; to advance the economic, educational, and cultural life of southeastern Massachusetts.
Connect realizes its mission by focusing on four major areas, with activities and initiatives that: enhance academic programs and ease transfer of students among the institutions; foster economic development throughout the region; promote cultural programs and projects; share expertise and resources. The executive officers of the Connect institutions act cooperatively to strengthen their institutional missions, and to enrich the life of the region.
Higher education plays a pivotal role in improving the quality of life of both individuals and communities. As public institutions of higher education dedicated to serving the region and Commonwealth, the Connect schools are embedded and engaged in the well-being of the cities and towns that are their neighbors. There are no ivory towers here—only groups of citizens and institutions with expertise and resources to share.
The Connect partnership strengthens the leavening role of public higher education in society. It has become a model for cooperation among regional institutions of higher education, and for interaction with various segments of society, for the betterment of all. Within this site are some examples of the work of Connect in the four major areas of its mission, examples of the partners’ vitality and impact on groups as numerous as they are diverse—from school districts, to businesses, to social service agencies, to governmental organizations.
Please visit these web sites to learn more about Connect and its projects.
Within this site are some examples of the work of Connect in the four major areas of its mission, examples of the partners’ vitality and impact on groups as numerous as they are diverse—from school districts, to businesses, to social service agencies, to governmental organizations. | <urn:uuid:83dfe931-dcff-403f-a28d-b23cc7c1b890> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bridgew.edu/connect/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960499 | 404 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Addressing liturgical matters amid concerns of a swine flu outbreak, Bishop of Dallas Kevin J. Farrell has advised his diocese’s pastors to consider suspending the reception of the Holy Eucharist under both species and to take other steps to respond to possible health dangers. The first reported death in the U.S. from swine flu came on Tuesday, when a 23-month-old boy visiting from Mexico died in Houston.
Bishop Farrell’s April 28 letter said awareness has increased about “the potential danger of the possibility of a serious epidemic of ‘swine flu’ for which there is no vaccination.” To assist in preventing the spread of a possible epidemic, he asked that pastors consider modifications to the distribution of the Eucharist and also ensure that Eucharistic Ministers use proper hygiene before distributing the Eucharist at Masses.
He also advised that pastors tell parishioners to be attentive to public health announcements.
The bishop further asked that pastors offer prayers for those afflicted by the illness and for public health officials addressing the possible threat. | <urn:uuid:a527a699-cbb4-47c8-a07c-bba6ca36cce5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://acatholicview.blogspot.com/2009/04/swine-flu-impacting-catholic-communion.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959168 | 223 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Pressure on men to come up with the goods at precisely the right time of the month for women trying to conceive is causing infidelity and even impotence, according to research.
One in 10 men have succumbed to an affair because of the pressure of women’s narrow window of ovulation and four out of ten men have even blamed their impotence on the stresses it causes them.
Research, carried out in South Korea found that men with previously no sexual problems were experiencing problems producing testosterone which affects their libido.
As a result, experts advise abandoning strictly timed sex after three months for a break before resumption.
“Timed intercourse seems to impose a substantial degree of stress on male partners including erectile dysfunction and in some cases, causing them to seek extramarital sex,” scientists wrote in the Journal of Adrology. | <urn:uuid:6cb3f91f-2d73-482a-bfb4-c2d4b3f47232> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/woman/life/pressure-of-conception-making-men-fall-flat-28751904.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967483 | 176 | 1.578125 | 2 |
A reflection by Mother Maria-Michael Newe, OSB.
The call comes. There’s a specific moment when each of us are touched by a word by a gesture by something. And I was thinking of the call of Philip and Nathanael where Jesus says “Because I said to you I saw you under the fig tree do you believe?” (Jn 1:50) Do you believe? That’s what binds us all together—the fact that we believe together. Our focus has to be on Christ. Any time it’s anything other we drag.
We hear about this even with Peter. After the Resurrection when Jesus and Peter are walking along the beach and Peter turns to the Beloved Disciple and says, “Lord what about this man?” And Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come what is that to you? Follow me.” (Jn 21:21-23) I love that. It’s like Jesus is saying “Your concern has to be: you follow me. I’ll take care of the rest. I’m the capstone. I’ll keep it together. Your duty is to follow me, keep your eyes on me.”
Cut out the things that distract you from Christ. Whether it be “O this person has that gift. This person has this. O this person gets to do that.” There is nothing better than to follow Christ. | <urn:uuid:3a949b4a-56ac-4200-8547-392774b78c51> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stwalburga.blogspot.com/2008_10_26_archive.html | 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 | 0.970078 | 316 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Easter celebrations bring an end to Lent, a season many Christians observe with contemplation and disciplines designed to prepare ourselves for the newness of life that Christ’s resurrection promises to all who surrender themselves to God. A relatively small subset of Christians practice introspection and confession in particular as powerful steps toward making needed course corrections in life.
In contrast to ancient religious practices, another influential and well-established tradition offers a more contemporary take on practices for finding life change and spiritual awakening. The tradition is spiritual but not religious, and celebrated Franciscan priest and author Richard Rohr describes it as “America’s most significant and authentic contribution to the history of spirituality.” It is the Twelve Step tradition pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous.
Every year, millions of Twelve Step recovery seekers embark on a searching and fearless moral inventory and admit their wrongs aloud to God and another human being as essential steps towards profound life change. What do these recovery seekers know about spiritual transformation that millions of religious seekers don’t? A lot, as it turns out.
First is that life change starts with recognizing the limits of our own power. Consider the difference between a religious seeker who approaches introspection believing he had the power to make better choices (but simply chose not to) and a Twelve Step seeker who acknowledges that his defects of character took away his power to make better choices. Although we can find a false sense of security in our own power, it leads us towards unrealistic expectations for ourselves (and unwarranted derision).
The second thing Twelve Step recovery seekers know is that life change is possible but only with God’s power. Some religious seekers don’t really believe in the transformation that is being offered to them, or they walk away from confession unchanged but determined to make better choices in the future without genuinely depending on God’s power to make them. Acknowledging that God has this power, that we don’t have to change through sheer force of will alone, is the kernel of hope for healing.
The third thing recovery seekers know is that we have to create a power vacuum in order to make space for God’s power to enter, and that actually relying on God’s power instead of will power is incredibly difficult. Relying on one’s own will is easy. I want what I want, after all. Being demanding or strong-willed about what I want takes little strength of character. Laying down my will, conversely, takes enormous spiritual strength. Religious seekers sometimes approach God in search of a little auxiliary power without taking the difficult step of creating the power vacuum. They may want God to be almighty, but on their terms.
These three truths align to the first three steps of the Twelve Steps. Like the first three, the remaining steps outline a path to healing, life change and spiritual awakening that is much more specific and instructive than much of what religious doctrine offers.
Join the conversation. Do you think God cares or do you actually trust God’s care?
Copyright 2012 Stephanie Walker All rights reserved. Visit www.AcrossTraditions.com. | <urn:uuid:738d7606-bc0d-4b3b-8e7e-9258c0038019> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://community.beliefnet.com/stephanie_walker/blog/2012/04/11/spiritual_steps_to_life_change | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946357 | 641 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Rainy weather put a damper on Daffodil Hill. This week's storms have delayed the opening of the Amador County landmark until sometime next week.
Originally, the famous McLaughlin Ranch in Volcano planned to open its gates today for its 72nd daffodil season. But too much rain made its paths slippery, muddy and dangerous.
"Due to the storms we are currently experiencing, we had to postpone our opening," said the ranch's recorded message on its daffodil hotline. "We hope to open when the weather dries out next week."
Flower fans are encouraged to call the hotline for updates after Monday: (209) 296-7048.
Weather permitting, Daffodil Hill's season extends into early April. Once open, hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily seven days a week. But always call before driving the two hours from Sacramento. For safety reasons, the garden is closed during rainy weather.
Considered the No. 1 tourist destination in Amador County, Daffodil Hill features about a half million blooms in more than 300 varieties squeezed into six acres. The Ryan family, descendents of the original owners dating back to the 1800s, add thousands of bulbs each fall.
Admission and parking are free, but donations are welcome. No pets are allowed.
Located about 50 miles from Sacramento, Daffodil Hill is at 18310 Rams Horn Grade, Volcano. For directions and more, click on www.amadorcountychamber.com and follow the links to Daffodil Hill under "Historic Attractions." | <urn:uuid:e1f05a6c-7311-44ab-9133-be7ebdd95199> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.sacbee.com/ticket/archives/2012/03/due-to-storms-s.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948886 | 337 | 1.601563 | 2 |
- Most tender part of the tuna
- Prepared fresh the day of harvest
- Line caught and dolphin friendly
- Gluten Free
- Size - 8.5 oz/240 gr
Ventresca, the belly of the tuna, is prized by seafood connoisseurs as the most tender and delicious part of the entire tuna. Ventresca is widely known as the finest part of the Bonito del Norte tuna and Nardin makes the finest tuna in Spain. Nardin Ventresca Belly Fillets are line caught, hand prepared and packed in olive oil - resulting in the most tender, flavorful tuna you'll ever eat!
The Bonito del Norte tuna is a small type of Albacore tuna that migrates annually from the Atlantic Ocean to the cool seas of Northern Spain. Once off the coast of Spain, the tuna lingers and fattens up on the plentiful smaller fish there. Only then are they are ready for harvest.
Nardin uses only tuna caught by hand on Spanish fishing boats. Nets or long lines are never used as they stress the fish and lessen the quality of the finished product. The Nardin family selects only the very best Bonito del Norte tuna from each morning's catch. They prepare the fresh (never frozen) fish the same day at their small facility in the Basque country. The tuna is carefully cooked before being cut by hand and placed in glass jars. The tuna is then topped with olive oil to preserve its flaky texture.
Use it as the centerpiece of a salad at your next dinner party or serve as a tapa on crusty bread. If you're feeling a little decadent, this tuna will make the best tuna sandwich you've ever had!
White tuna, olive oil and salt. Gluten Free. | <urn:uuid:f581d8f4-04f4-452e-9a66-faec99758bb5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tienda.com/food/products/se-77.html?site=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942486 | 371 | 1.5625 | 2 |
- About the College
- Future Students
- Current Students
March 4, 2010
ATLANTA – March 8, 2010 – The Georgia Tech College of Computing today announced that it has formed the School of Computational Science & Engineering in partnership with the Colleges of Engineering and Sciences. The new school joins the School of Computer Science and the School of Interactive Computing as operating units resulting from College of Computing efforts to define and delineate the field of computing into focused bodies of study.
"Computation is now widely accepted, along with theory and experiment, as a crucial third mode of scientific research and engineering design," said Jim Foley, Interim Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech. "Our former dean, Richard A. DeMillo, deserves much of the credit for today’s news since the CSE Division was originally his brainchild. Dr. DeMillo's foresight is in keeping with tradition—the College of Computing has always been at the forefront of transformation, and it’s exciting to continue to lead in defining what the field will become."
Growing out of an initiative in high performance computing research, the School of Computational Science & Engineering (CSE) began in 2005 as a division of the College and led the creation in 2008 of CSE interdisciplinary graduate programs that span eight academic units across campus. It now includes other core research areas of the CSE discipline—such as massive scale data and visual analytics, machine learning, modeling and simulation, and algorithms for continuous and discrete models—many in collaboration with other units on campus. The school's education programs strive to create a new type of scholar who is well versed in synthesizing principles from mathematics, science, engineering and computing to innovate, create and apply computational models to solve important real world problems.
"Computing has become ubiquitous in engineering and science, in both education and research," said Dr. Don Giddens, Dean of the College of Engineering. "The new School of Computational Science and Engineering will add significant value to the growing importance of computational approaches in attacking disciplinary and interdisciplinary problems. The College of Engineering looks forward to expanding our joint faculty appointments and research programs."
Dr. Richard Fujimoto will chair the School of CSE, with a focus on building a diverse and multidisciplinary research ecosystem that includes collaborations with scientists and engineers across several application domains; increasing disciplinary strength in exascale, parallel and scientific computing, massive-scale data and visual analytics, and embedded computational systems for real-time decision making; establishing research collaborations in targeted application domains such as sustainable growth and energy, homeland security and defense, and computational life sciences; and creating an education pipeline of skilled, highly educated CSE professionals able to work effectively in multidisciplinary teams.
"The next decade is going to be an incredibly ambitious time for Georgia Tech, and the potential for major scientific impact will be driven by advances in the computational science and engineering discipline,” said Dr. Fujimoto, also Regents' Professor in the College of Computing. "Along with engaging in research at the technical edge of CSE, our mission is to significantly improve our students’ educational experience with novel teaching methods that focus on exploitation of technology, increased personal interaction and content creation."
Critical to the School's creation is the conviction that computational science and engineering is a discipline in its own right, with a distinct body of knowledge defined from the confluence of computing, mathematics, science and engineering, and that CSE fundamentally derives much of its richness and potential for impact from collaboration with other disciplines. The School of CSE is a highly interdisciplinary unit consisting of faculty from the original Computational Science & Engineering division within the College of Computing, including faculty with joint appointments in the Schools of Aerospace Engineering, Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics and the Walter H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, as well as at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Emory University.
"The time is right for Computational Science and Engineering to become a school and Professor Richard Fujimoto is the ideal leader," said Dr. Paul Houston, Dean of the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech. "For several years the College of Sciences has supported joint faculty and developed collaborative programs with this thriving group of computational scientists and engineers. Its interdisciplinary mission is both appropriate to Georgia Tech and essential for the world we live in, where the important problems require team approaches."
The School of Computational Science & Engineering will begin operation immediately.
For more information about the School of Computational Science & Engineering, visit http://cse.gatech.edu.
For information about interdisciplinary graduate programs in CSE, visit http://cseprograms.gatech.edu. | <urn:uuid:fe307b20-d643-4c9b-8b5b-1e565ad89289> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cc.gatech.edu/news/gt-announces-new-school-cse | 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 | 0.945341 | 953 | 1.679688 | 2 |
The Pepper Hospice Home and Center for Care in Barrington, IL, one of the few "green" hospice facilities in the country, is set to open July 1. Built by Hospice and Palliative Care of Northeastern Illinois for approximately $19 million, it is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified. The 42,000-square-foot building houses 16 patient rooms and the non-profit agency's administrative offices. LEED certification added 3.9 percent to its overall construction costs, but hospice officials estimate that long-term savings will repay the investment within 10 years. LEED is the rating system that measures the environmental friendliness of constructed buildings. Support for the hospice facility came from grants and donations, including environmental grants from the state and from the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation.
An article and photos in the Daily Herald portray an open house held at the new facility on June 15. A grant opening celebration is planned for June 27. Architecturally designed to have a minimal carbon footprint in the surrounding woodland area, with drought- and deer-resistant landscaping and rain collection barrrels and the use of solar lighting, recyling and renewable energy resources, the building also has the kinds of homelike, patient-friendly features associated with other freestanding hospice facilities. Its "healing garden" is accessible from the relatively spacious patient rooms, which also include foldout couches for family visitors.
Some might say the main focus of a hospice inpatient or residential facility should be solely on the patient's comfort and quality of life, along with any applicable health facility codes and laws. But perhaps quality of life could be defined more broadly to include tending to the environment and, ultimately, the health of the planet. At the Barrington facility, patients will be able to engage in gardening or simply bask in the sun and fresh air. A quick web search identified a few other North American hospice facilities going down a similar path.
Last fall another green-certified hospice building was said to be under development by Cedars of Monroeville, an assisted living facility in Monroeville, PA, with 16 private rooms, overnight accommmodations for loved ones, a chapel, spa and massage area, and two-story waterfall in the lobby. Facilities also include bike racks, a reflective roof, use of recycled material and preferred parking for fuel-efficient vehicles. Safe Harbor Hospice of Fredericktown, MO, includes environmental awareness practices in every aspect of its business day, with energy-conserving offices, recycling of all recyclable products, higher mileage company cars and hospice home service routes streamlined for gas efficiency. Ian Anderson Hospice in Halton Hills, Ontario, recently went green with solar panels, with the goal of reducing its carbon footprint and saving on the costs of propane for heating the facility and its water. According to insideHalton.com, the six solar panels are a step in the hospice's Project Green, launched in 2009. | <urn:uuid:758272ee-0841-42fd-9567-9228524034e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://growthhouse.typepad.com/larry_beresford/2010/06/green-hospice-to-open-in-illinois.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955274 | 616 | 1.671875 | 2 |
I made it to Leicestershire Records Office and had a look at the prescriptions books of W T Hind, chemist and druggist on Queens Road for over 100 years. I wrote an article about W T Hind here. The office holds the prescription books from between 1894 (so not long after Mr Hind opened for business in 1888) and 1954. They are beautiful, card and leather-bound ledgers in a variety of styles. I looked mostly at the volumes covering 1894-1920. The handwriting was difficult to decipher and the prescriptions were in note form, using archaic terms for obsolete medicines, so it was quite a task to make sense of them.
The prescriptions were interesting from two points of view: Firstly, the prescriptions themselves; and secondly the people for whom the prescriptions were intended. These varied from those not important enough to be named – many servants like “The Maid (Rev Forsyth)” who needed an expectorant “when the cough gives trouble.” She was prescribed Terebene on a piece of sugar. Also “Baby Baker” (who needed lanolin), “Mrs Rattenbury’s baby” (who turned out to be Grace, daughter of the Wesleyan minister John Ernest Rattenbury, one of the outstanding preachers of his day, then living in North Avenue. He founded the Belgrave Hall mission and built Clarendon Park Church) and countless others. Mr Hind seems to have dispensed to quite a clerical crowd as there were lots of Reverend gentlemen amongst his clientele, eg Rev Holmes (could have been the vicar of St Peter’s or the curate of St Nicholas…anyway, he was a bit bunged up and needed oil of eucalyptus in a tumbler of steamy water) and Rev Forsyth (the renowned theologian and first minister of Clarendon Park Congregational Church).
But the prescriptions are fascinating. W T Hind dispensed the medicine of his day and until well into the 20th century much of it was rough and ready, some of it being quackery and much of it being downright dangerous. Take Mr T Pochin’s prescription: Chloroform, strychnine and digitalis three times a day. It must have been a heart medicine, but it didn’t save the poor chap as he died the same year, aged 58. Mr Alfred Edwin Dexter – a commercial clerk living at 51 Howard Road – was prescribed magnesium carbonate, magnesium sulphate, chloroform and aqua…I’d love to know what that was for.
Mr Hind also made up his own “branded” medicines, which all pharmacists offered in the days when medicines were not heavily regulated and when druggists literally made up pills and powders by mixing ingredients. In 1897 Mr Hind offered “The Sulphonal Powders” (a sleeping medicine) and there were several others mentioned. I like this: Hind’s Nursery Hair Lotion.
I couldn’t help buying the label above on ebay last week…Mr W T Hind has really caught my imagination. I am delighted to report that his great-granddaughter – herself a pharmacist – is willing to let me interview her about The Park pharmacy, and I will be sharing the results as soon as possible. Regards, Elizabeth. | <urn:uuid:fb679512-9848-4838-930d-f48f8b7796f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://yourhistories.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/w-t-hind-prescriptions-books/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=671450efa2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978483 | 704 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Google brands ebook monopoly critics 'shortsighted'
Brin and his spin
Poised to create a court-approved monopoly in the digital book market, Google's $125m library-scanning settlement is under investigation by the US Department of Justice and possibly state attorneys general . But Google co-founder Sergey Brin has defended the company's pact with American authors and publishers, calling criticism of the deal "pretty short-sighted and contradictory."
In October, the company settled a lawsuit from the US Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, and if approved by the court the deal would hand Google - among other things - an eternal license to scan and sell and post ads against so-called "orphan works," books whose rights are controlled by authors and publishers who have ceased to exist or can't otherwise be located.
And this legal protection would apply only to Google. "Google will have permission to bring under its sole control information that has been accessible through public institutions for centuries," Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle wrote in an editorial published earlier this week by The Washington Post. "In essence, Google will be privatizing our libraries."
Of course, Sergey Brin doesn't see the problem. In an interview with The New York Times , he said the settlement would allow Google to offer widespread access to millions of books that are largely hidden in university libraries. "We are increasing choices," Mr. Brin told The Times. "There was no option prior to this to get these sorts of books online."
Ah, but that's because no one else was willing to get themselves sued for multimillions of dollars.
Like Google, the Internet Archive has spent years working to digitize the world's library collections. To date, it has scanned over 150 million pages and put more than a million books online. Certainly, the organization advocates putting orphan works on the net. But it believes that right should not be limited to a single company. The orphan-works issue should be decided by government legislation, the Archive argues, not by a civil lawsuit.
"Scanning books and preparing them for discovering and presentation is not rocket science, and it's not that expensive," the Archive's Peter Brantley tells The Reg. "We would be delighted to digitalize [orphans] and make them available if we had legislation-afforded mechanisms by which we could do that - without fear of substantial liability. All we need is legislation."
From where Google is sitting, there's nothing stopping the Archive - or anyone else. Speaking prior the company's shareholders meeting earlier this month, Google senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond said that "anyone who wanted to go scan" books could "come up with a similar outcome," meaning anyone else could reach their own book settlement.
It's true. Anyone could follow in Google's footsteps. They could start scanning books without regard for copyright and hope for a legal onslaught from the world's authors and publishers. In this case, scanning books is extremely expensive. Some have questioned whether even the big names could foot the bill.
"Virtually the only way that Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo!, or the Open Content Alliance could get a comparably broad license as the settlement would give Google would be by starting its own project to scan books," writes Pamela Samuelson, University of California, Berkeley law professor.
"The scanner might then be sued for copyright infringement, as Google was. It would be very costly and very risky to litigate a fair use claim to final judgment given how high copyright damages can be (up to $150,000 per infringed work). Chances are also slim that the plaintiffs in such a lawsuit would be willing or able to settle on equivalent or even similar terms."
Sergey Brin shrugged off such talk as Google was announcing an amended library-scanning agreement with the University of Michigan. Google has been scanning books inside the university's library since 2004, but with the new pact, Michigan has embraced the terms of the court settlement. The Times leads its story with the claim that Michigan's new pact "could blunt some of the criticism" over Google's author and publisher settlement. But that's more Brin spin.
Before ruling on Google's book settlement, a New York-based federal court is kindly accepting complaints from other interested parties. And earlier this month, the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) filed papers asking the court to exercise close control over the settlement.
Among other things, the group complained that the settlement fails to give outsiders a say on the price of the online digital-book service Google plans to sell to libraries across the globe. The amended agreement with the University of Michigan would allow the university to cry foul if thinks the price is too high, and Google hopes that other libraries will ink similar deals.
But as part of the deal, in return for allowing scans of its works, Michigan gets free access to Google's online service for 25 years. Which makes you wonder why Michigan would ever object to price.
"We see the amended agreement as a step - or an attempt - in the right direction," Corey William, associate director in the association’s Washington office, tells The Reg. "But it doesn't address our concern that all libraries should have the ability to request reviews of pricing should a dispute arise. That right has been extended to Michigan - and other libraries - but it hasn't been extended to all libraries."
But if Sergey Brin and company can drown out such voices, they will drown them out. The Reg was amused this morning when we searched Google News for stories on the amended Michigan pact. Google's new news landing page listed five stories and one enormous call-out quote from, yes, Sergey Brin:
Brin spin, indeed. ® | <urn:uuid:fc1cfae6-83bd-4f44-adac-cc48466c1f62> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/21/brin_defends_book_settlment/print.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957315 | 1,204 | 1.5625 | 2 |
New Year’s Eve is a blast on the Malecón. You and about 200,000 of your closest Dominican friends will party and dance in the street together to dozens of different bandstands. This party goes until dawn. Plan your transportation to this festivity wisely. Craziness with taxis is a given. If you really want to be authentic, go and have a sancocho after your long night; you’ve earned it!
Carnaval is celebrated throughout the country during the month of February, having its swan song on the last weekend of February or first weekend in March in Santo Domingo . Representatives come from all the other towns with their town-specific costumes to take part in a long parade and street party along the Malecón with the Carnival King and professional dance groups.
In some years the apex of Carnaval coincides with February 27, which is Independence Day in the Dominican Republic . The Malecón (Av. George Washington) is closed to traffic; stages, booths, and vendors set up camp for entertainment, and the party doesn’t stop until well into the morning. Elaborately decorated floats and expertly designed costumes that won contests in their respective towns all come to be seen in the festivities. The scene along the waterfront explodes with color and jubilation.
Every June the Guillen brothers of Yamasá throw a huge bash for San Antonio. The Fiesta San Antonio attracts locals and tourists alike and is a wonderful opportunity to experience the musical traditions of gagá, gajumbe, and bambulá. The event is a generous one. Traditional comida crilloa and drinks are free. Look for it on the first Sunday before June 13.
The Merengue Festival of Santo Domingo is the largest one of its kind in the whole country, held for two weeks every year at the end of July and beginning of August. Events highlighting the country’s signature music take place all over the city but center on the Malecón. The festival starts with a parade of dancers and musicians along the Malecón and includes food, drink, and arts.
The Día de San Miguel is the September festival of the patron saint of Villa Mella and Ciudad Colonial , celebrated by a procession and traditional music.
The Chicharron and Folklore Fair takes place at the end of November in Villa Mella Municipal Park. Visitors can enjoy the music and rhythms of congos, palos, and priprí and dance the son.
The annual Feria Internacional del Libro Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo International Book Fair) takes place from April to May at the Plaza de la Cultura and is a treat for bookworms.
Avenida Caracas, near Avenida Duarte, also called La Plaza del Libro (“The Reader’s Walkway”), hosted La Feria del Libro Nuevo y Viejo (New and Used Book Fair) (last week of November), which was held for the first time in 2008 and rode on the success of La Feria Internacional del Libro (International Book Fair), one of the nation’s most successful festivals. Expect to see close to 70 vendors along the avenue, where you are sure to find bargains. | <urn:uuid:a791008a-ba70-444f-832d-4a2d399610ae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.moon.com/print/85533 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937776 | 692 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Mike Graves (left) manager of the Kroger store in Walnut Hills, and neighborhood organizer Kevin Wright have devised 'Buy 25' Tuesdays to encourage costumers to spend at least $25 on Tuesdays and give feedback about changes they would like to see in the store.
- Filed Under
Kevin Wright has seen it before: Kroger, the world's largest grocery chain, closes a struggling, urban grocery store, and residents throw up their hands in protest.
Wright wants to prevent that from happening here, where the Kroger store on McMillan Avenue has lost more than $5 million in the past four years.
He's leading a campaign to recruit 200 new shoppers to spend $50 a month at the store, a figure Kroger says will help the location turn a profit for the first time in years. The "Buy 25 Tuesdays" events are getting people out to Kroger twice a month to help meet the goal; they've made the grocer ... | <urn:uuid:305b64ca-f324-4108-9b60-17d01967e996> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20120805/BIZ/308050017/Can-they-save-this-store-?odyssey=tab%7Cmostpopular%7Cimg%7CFRONTPAGE | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959337 | 200 | 1.617188 | 2 |
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The FSF alleges that "in the course of distributing various products under the Linksys brand, Cisco has violated the licenses of many programs on which the FSF holds copyright, including GCC, binutils, and the GNU C Library." Cisco has denied its users their right to share and modify the software as a result, the FSF adds.
FSF Licensing Compliance Engineer Brett Smith writing in his blog said the FSF in 2003 learned that the Linksys WRT54G wireless router used a GNU/Linux system in its firmware, "but customers weren't receiving all the source code they were entitled to under our licenses."
Smith adds that the FSF began working with Cisco in 2003 to help the company establish a process for complying with FSF's software licenses. It also emerged that other Cisco products were not in full compliance either, according to Smith, who described the FSF's five-year effort to get Cisco compliant as a "running game of Whack-a-Mole."
Cisco has refused to "notify customers about previous violations and inform them about how they can now obtain complete source code," Smith claims. "The FSF has put in too many hours helping the company fix the numerous mistakes it's made over the years. Cisco needs to take responsibility for its own license compliance," he adds.
The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the Software Freedom Law Center, which is providing representation to the FSF in this case. A copy of the complaint is available on the FSF Web site.
In a statement, Cisco says: "Cisco is a strong supporter of open source software. Cisco takes its open source software obligations and responsibilities seriously and is disappointed that a suit has been filed by the Free Software Foundation related to our work with them in our Linksys Division. We are currently reviewing the issues raised in the suit, but believe we are substantially in compliance. We have always worked very closely with the FSF and hope to reach a resolution agreeable to the company and the foundation."
The suit came just days after the blogosphere debated whether Cisco is an open-source leech or an open-source champion.
Read more about security in Network World's Security section. | <urn:uuid:ebccd5f7-bd92-4e27-8f3f-da197e1d89c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/121108-cisco-copyright-lawsuit.html?fsrc=netflash-rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969659 | 500 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Novelist John Updike may be at his best when describing the loss of faith. He seems to understand the reality all too well. When the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot is described as losing his faith in early twentieth-century America, Updike traces his collapsing faith to the historical-critical method of studying the Bible — treating the Bible as nothing more than ancient Near Eastern literature. As Updike describes the moment of Wilmot’s fall into unbelief in In the Beauty of the Lilies, he writes of the pastor sensing “a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward.”
Put bluntly, Wilmot’s loss of faith is tied to the loss of confidence in the Bible as revelation. The reader senses that Updike is speaking through the voice of Thomas Dreaver, the moderator of Wilmot’s local presbytery, who advises the pastor with these damning words: “Don’t give up your calling. I promise you, there is nothing in your beliefs or unbeliefs that can’t serve as the basis for an effective and deeply satisfying Christian ministry.” How many pastors have heeded such pathetic and godless advice?
In Roger’s Version (1986), Updike describes the conflict between a believer who tenaciously holds to orthodox Christianity and a more liberal professor of divinity — a man who has embraced the theology of Karl Barth and the morality of situation ethics. The believer does not come off well in the novel, as Updike points the reader toward the path of ambiguity and the embrace of theological mystery.
Now, in his newly-released novel, Terrorist, Updike replaces the evangelical scientist of Roger’s Version with a Muslim teenager contemplating becoming a suicide bomber. As with the evangelical Christian, Updike uses young Ahmad as his foil for theological ambiguity and the danger of theological certitude.
As critic James Wood argues in The New Republic:
Updike is acclaimed as an unfashionably Christian novelist, and much commentary, taking its cue from the author himself, dutifully trots out his interest in Barth and Kierkegaard–but there is a way in which Updike is a pagan celebrant rather than a religious explorer. His impulse is mystically broad rather than theologically exact. He is not especially interested in questions of faith or doubt, because aesthetics can always be wheeled in to solve such questions: the world is uncomplicatedly God’s, and it exists to be lyrically praised. . . . It is the otherness of Islamicism that is missing in this book. Despite all the Koranic homework, there is a sense that what is alien in Islam to a Westerner remains alien to John Updike. What he has discovered, yet again, is merely the generalized fluid of God-plus-sex that has run throughout all his novels.
“God-plus-sex” — that’s just about the right way to describe John Updike’s novel. In fact, it is a pretty good summary of all of his writing. Especially when it comes to sex, Updike does appear as “a pagan celebrant.” Do not waste your time with this novel. | <urn:uuid:7f8df93c-440f-4890-9882-4c222e03f078> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.albertmohler.com/2006/06/26/john-updike-strikes-again/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957391 | 676 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Benedict’s Finale with Beethoven: A “Heroic” Moment
The last weeks of Pope Benedict XVI’s pontificate will be filled with many “lasts.” Ash Wednesday was his last public Mass. February 14 was his last meeting with priests and seminarians of the Diocese of Rome. February 24 will be his last Angelus. His last general audience will take place on February 27 before his final transport to Castel Gandolfo via helicopter on February 28.
February 4 also marked a “last,” perhaps one that will not go down in the annals of history as it should. Everybody knew it would be the last Vatican concert for Giorgio Napolitano, president of the Italian Republic, before he finishes his term as Head of State, but nobody imagined it would be the last concert for Benedict XVI as Supreme Pontiff.
The Italian Embassy to the Holy See offers the concert each year in commemoration of the Lateran Treaty. The orchestra Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, directed by Zubin Mehta, performed the overture to Giuseppe Verdi’s La forza del destino and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. It is a pity this magnificent concert will forever be overshadowed by the events that followed in its wake. Benedict and Mr. Napolitano, both avid music fans, enjoyed similar occasions in the past, most notably at Castel Gandolfo last July when Daniel Barenboim directed the West-East Divan Orchestra in a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies.
As grand as those pieces are, they simply do not match up to Beethoven’s revolutionary Third Symphony in E-flat major, also known as the Eroica (“Heroic”) Symphony.
The “Great Man” and what lies beyond the grave
Too often sensational tales about the composer’s life distract us from his music. For one just getting into Beethoven, it would be best to listen to his symphonies before picking up a biography. Knowing something about his life would certainly help, but if we could go back in time and sit down with him, Beethoven would be much more interested in playing his latest composition than in rattling on about himself.
In no small part, his eagerness to play rather than chat would be motivated by the increasing deafness that began to assail him at the robust age of 30. It eventually prompted him to write a letter to his brothers Karl and Johann now known as the “Heiligenstadt Testament.” It is Ludwig’s excruciating apologia for a reclusive lifestyle and the terrible misunderstandings it caused. Ludwig begs his brothers to have his physician publically declare his condition after his death so that the world “may become reconciled to me.”
Harmony, understanding, reconciliation: these were the ideals that compelled Beethoven to continue working in conditions wholly unfavorable to a musician and composer. Every dissonance, every awkward rhythm was ordered to these ends. Beethoven could keep silent about his struggle with deafness, but his music could not. His growing frustration with a deplorable fate nearly led to despair. “What a humiliation,” he wrote, “when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing.” Sensationalists would like to take the Heiligenstadt Testament as a suicide note, when in fact it proves Beethoven’s determination to continue living no matter what. He confesses that “virtue” and “art” were precisely what dissuaded him from suicide, and he begs Carl to hand these ideals on to his children.
Not long after writing the Testament, Beethoven set to work on the “Eroica.” The symphony was completed in 1804 and bore a dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte while he was still First Consul. Beethoven annulled the dedication after receiving news that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor, purportedly exclaiming that the general was “no different from any other man! Now he will trample on human rights, put himself ahead of everyone, and act like a tyrant!” In place of the original dedication, Beethoven decided that the symphony in E-flat would celebrate the rise of a “great man,” the ideal hero who brings liberty and equality to all mankind. In his comments after the performance on February 4, Pope Benedict noted that the music portrays a hero facing a choice between surrender and battle, death and life, defeat and victory. Each movement expresses some dominant emotion, but it does so by contrasting it with opposite emotions.
The Holy Father’s comments focused on the second movement, the famed “Funeral March,” whose mournful primary theme in C-minor eventually gives way to a hopeful oboe solo in C-major. This in turn leads into an intense double fugue in F-minor, a section of relentless, methodical expansion exploiting every color known to the 19th-century orchestra. The depth of feeling in this passage is wonderfully visible on the face of Count Dietrichstein (played by Jack Davenport) as he listens to the debut performance of the symphony in the BBC made-for-television movieentitled Eroica. This scene is all the more effective in that the horns blare slightly out of tune, heightening the music’s brutal impact.
The fugue is so emotionally charged we are almost relieved when Beethoven finally returns to the original march. But we don’t linger there for long. The violins climb to a soft, haunting A-flat that soon explodes into a blast of trumpets, warning us not to take death lightly. Pope Benedict hears in these stunning musical contrasts an invitation to reflect on what lies beyond the grave. He quoted Beethoven’s plea in the Heiligenstadt Testament for God to look into his soul to see his “love for humanity” and his “desire to do good,” the only things that will outlast his life on earth. The second movement expresses a search for meaning, the Pope continued, which is open to a firm hope in the future.
Philosophizing with rhythm
I must confess that death, love for humanity, and a desire to do good were far from my mind the first time I listened to the Eroica in college. I was aware of its reputation and therefore deliberately avoided it until I had devoured as much Mozart and Haydn as possible. The first bars of Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 in A-major were, thankfully, my first introduction to the classical symphony. I had listened to the Romantics prior to that, though most of my time was spent lounging with friends on Saturday afternoons listening to and imitating recordings of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie. We were crazy about jazz and improvisation, but most of all, we were obsessed with rhythm.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Time Out” album began our adventure. We were eventually led back to the endless possibilities of traditional time-signatures, scooping up every be-bop vinyl we could find. We were fed up with rock and pop, but we still admired the bold but subtle use of experimental rhythm in songs like and “If 6 was 9” (Jimmy Hendrix), “Kashmir” (Led Zeppelin), and “Do It Again” (Steely Dan).
Then Beethoven stepped in. My first recording of the Eroica was of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. I disagree with The New Yorker’s critic Alex Ross on many things, but I join him in placing Bernstein’s recording at the top of my list, and basically for the same reasons. I had just moved into a new dorm that September and had not even unpacked before cuing up the 33. The two opening chords and immediate introduction of the main subject were definitely a jolt. The lilt from D-natural to C-sharp was unnerving. But nothing compared to what happened at bar 23. For the next fifteen seconds, I was transported to another rhythmical stratosphere. Beethoven’s syncopation blows Beyoncé out of the water. I simply couldn’t go on. I lifted the needle, put it back at the beginning, and listened again, and again, and again, tapping along in 3/4 time until I thought I figured it out. Finally, I let myself listen to the entire symphony, scribbled down some notes, and ran to the library to find a score. I was sure Beethoven had slipped in a couple of 2/4 bars in that opening section, but I was wrong. He had superimposed double and triple times without—excuse the cliché—missing a beat. Only later did I realize that Beethoven was preparing us for a whole series of superimposed double and triple meters later the symphony, including in the funeral march.
Looking back on the episode, I now understand that what bothered me was the order and precision with which Beethoven introduced ambiguity and confusion into his music, and that he did so right off the bat. No need for an introduction, no need to wait for the development. Until that time I was convinced that if you wanted to fool around with rhythm, you had to free your spirit and improvise. You had to suppress rational thinking and give into raw emotion. Rhythm was something you danced to, not philosophized with. Beethoven proved me wrong.
I now realize that my life lacked sufficient turmoil to make sense of what Beethoven was up to. In fact, any turmoil in my life was caused by shirking my responsibility to make sense of the world. Music, for me, was a vicarious way of experiencing life rather than the means of “processing” it—as infelicitous as the term may be. That is not to say that music has no intrinsic value, but only that its ultimate value is refracted through a prism of the maturity, wisdom, and love that come with age. If I listen to Dave Brubeck (may he rest in peace), it is to take a conscious step back and unload my mind of weighty thoughts rather than to discover a higher meaning in unconventional time signatures. Dave Brubeck’s music has value, but, unlike Beethoven, Brubeck was out to entertain, not to enlighten.
The Eroica jumped light-years ahead of Haydn and Mozart even though Beethoven was using the same building blocks. The formal characteristics of the four movements clearly hang together in standard symphonic form. Within that form, however, Beethoven introduces unprecedented dissonance and explosive contrasts that would affect music for the rest of the century. He develops themes to an extent they were never developed before, giving fresh impetus to the use of “variations,” a genre he was most fond of. The thickness of his orchestration, alternating forceful tutti passages with delicate solo lines, gives breadth to the sound without sacrificing economy.
Beethoven took what he learned from Haydn and Mozart but transformed it into something so ethereal that even the untrained ear can hear the difference. He did so not only by unusual tonal combinations, but with awkward rhythms that will haunt you for the rest of your life. Since rhythm speaks to our savage side, Beethoven’s audience may have been ill at ease with his ingenuity. The piece could have sparked a riot not unlike that witnessed at the debut of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. But there is an important difference. Whereas Stravinsky’s aim was to orchestrate an orgiastic outburst, Beethoven was setting up a heroic struggle that could only be overcome through perseverance and resignation. There are moments when the superimposed double and triple meters are in conflict, and other moments when they blissfully coexist. Encroaching deafness caused Beethoven to swing from one extreme to the other, passing from tranquil solitude to terrifying isolation. The hero Beethoven had in mind seems to have been a figure of firm principles but also practical wherewithal. He not only knows what is good, right, and just, he devotes himself to bringing it about. Musically, Beethoven does not tell the story of the hero, but rather develops ideas central to the hero’s existence: struggle in the first movement, death in the second, joy in the third, and a desire to share the fruits of his travails in the fourth. The hero’s emergence as a harbinger of renewed humanity is made all the more poignant by Beethoven borrowing a theme from The Creatures of Prometheus, a ballet in which he depicts the story of the Greek hero who robs fire from the gods and gives it to men.
“Everything is different from today”
From the first notes, it was clear that Maggio Musicale Fiorentino would offer a unique but faithful interpretation. Mehta conducts the first measures not with sharp, downward gestures, but by moving his hands outward from his chest, creating a sense of space that continues throughout the symphony. The tempo is never rushed so that themes can be passed seamlessly from one instrument to another. Gentleness even pervades the development section, giving a majestic sound to the horns and a deliberate, controlled sound to the strings.
Mehta’s attention to the “classic” characteristics of the symphony highlights its anomalies. Contrasts, for example, are executed by dynamic changes rather than by punching the notes. The more relaxed tempo allows the mind to remember kernels of musical ideas later developed into full-blown themes. Devoid of pretence, the piece proceeds with a confidence and poise seldom found in contemporary performances. Mehta has worked with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino for 25 years to place them among the best of European orchestras. They have played the entire cycle of Beethoven’s symphonies several times, and it shows. They know the music backwards and forwards and leave nothing to chance, so that their intense concentration makes the emotion all the more convincing.
Mehta is convinced that, as revolutionary as Beethoven was, he did not and could not start from scratch. He had studied the symphonic form and he wished to remain within it. He certainly intended to widen the symphonic audience, but he did so by maximizing the potential of an already proven musical form. Mehta relishes in the power of absolute music to convey drama through contrasts: fullness and airiness of sound, sudden diminuendos, sforzandos followed by pianissimos, reversals of rhythm, and exasperating tonal ambiguity. Beethoven did change a lot in music, but the soil was already ripe for change by the time he arrived on the scene. The world had indeed changed. As Joseph Haydn remarks in the BBC movie, “everything is different from today.”
Such a thought is no less apt for what the Pope announced on February 11, 2013. The world has changed and, along with it, the role of the papacy. “In today’s world,” the Pontiff said, “subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the barque of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary.” Such strength was always necessary, but not in the way it is needed today. Any pope today must manage a grueling schedule of meetings and audiences, liturgies and voyages. Such demands would test the strength of any 60-year-old, let alone a man of 85.
It would be unfair to use Beethoven’s hero as an allegory for Benedict’s pontificate. Yet I don’t think it would be unfair to view the hero’s confrontation with life and death, with moments of struggle and resignation, as a way of understanding the discernment that led the Holy Father to make the most difficult decision of his life. We all must discern when to overcome our limitations and when to accept them. It is not a question of whether to keep on fighting, but of how to fight. When it seems the battle would be better waged by placing someone else on the front lines, a wise but weaker soldier will yield his place to a stronger comrade.
Perhaps Benedict’s decision will change the papacy forever, or maybe 600 years will pass before another pope resigns. Time will tell. But one thing is for sure. A man of Benedict XVI’s spiritual depth, theological acumen, and love for the Church would never make a decision like this without prolonged reflection, consultation, and prayer. He also would not make it if he weren’t grounded in the profound faith that the Lord is in charge—not he, not we.
After the concert, the Holy Father noted how human existence is marked by a yearning for God, for his mercy and for his love which “offer light, meaning and hope, even in the midst of darkness. Faith imparts this perspective which is not make-believe. It is real. As Saint Paul writes, ‘neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans8:38-39). This is the strength of a Christian born from the death and resurrection of Christ, from the supreme act of a God who entered human history not only with words, but by becoming incarnate.”
If Pope Benedict XVI had said only this, his last eight years on the throne of Peter would still have been an inestimable gift to the Church and to the world.
Viva il Papa!
Msgr. Daniel B. Gallagher is a priest of the Diocese of Gaylord, Michigan.
This item 10184 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org | <urn:uuid:d8abf059-7fd6-4617-9cbc-829b674dd620> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=10184 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970941 | 3,857 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Curious as to people's ideas as to what constitutes a good defense for both your initial redoubt and your final stronghold. Personally, I believe in the doctrine of "Defense in Depth" with ever increasing defensive attributes the further into your territory you go. One can define the areas of protection easily via color code, e.g. your outer layer and largest layer could be protected by something as simple as a triple concertina barrier and be known as a yellow zone.
My final redoubt would be a large tract of open land, farmland preferably, which will be surrounded by the aforementioned triple concertina. A small number of zombies will be halted long enough to be found by Romeo (roaming patrol callsign) teams and dispatched before they are able to penetrate deeper. I speak from experience, having laid out miles of concertina during the course of my enlistment and know how hard it is to move through this barrier if properly staked and positioned. If the zombies did in fact manage to breach the wire, it would leave obvious signs of their passage and enable us to know that there is an intrusive element in our yellow zone. The secondary layer, will surround the primary water source (small lake or pond) and enclose the arable farm acreage closest to the main base. It would be a double line of chain link fence with another layer of triple concertina in between. At several places along the defensive line, I will place "zombie traps", areas designed to be easier to penetrate and funnel any intruders toward a chokepoint with a pit or other entrapment device to hold them in place. Finally, the last line of defense will be build using the large metal transport crates they use on ocean bulk transports and railroads. A double layer (one stacked atop another) of these crates (standard ones can be 20' by 8' by 8') create a daunting defense for both zombies and human raiders. The main gate will be a bus or other large vehicle plated on one side (the exterior). For small groups (returning patrols and the like) a crane elevator system will be used for entry. For larger convoys of supplies or refugees, the bus will be driven to open the gate. Inside the gate area will be further enclosed with a strong wrought iron gate allowing entry to the inner sanctum.
As an additional measure, each building inside this last zone will be surrounded by hesco barriers (boxes made of canvas or ther fiber held into a shape by wire mesh and filled with sand/dirt/debris (used in forward deployed locations by the US military in addition to sandbags for defense) with a small entry way to allow access to the building itself. | <urn:uuid:d8edd3df-03f5-4fc6-99c4-a337f6a040e9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Sergeant_Paul/What_type_of_base_would_you_construct%3F?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948622 | 546 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Massage Robot On Wheels Could Disrupt Massage Industry, Or Not
Robot technology is often spectacular when’s it’s on full display, like the Mars rover, military drones and the Roomba. These incredible machines often complete tasks that humans can only hope to achieve. One company is putting robotic technology to its best use yet: providing automated massages through the use of a tiny car that motors across your body.
Meet the WheeMe. Watch it in action:
Like Wall-E meets Jennifer Love-Hewitt’s character in ‘The Client List,’ the WheeMe is a tiny robotic car that massages and stimulates your muscles as it slowly moves across your body. Sensor technology enables WheeMe to automatically steer itself over your torso without falling off. Your designated driver should be so skilled (just as long as he’s not trying to touch you sensually).
That sound you just heard was the entire massage industry shaking in its robes. Because, really, who in their right mind is going to make an appointment with a beautiful, doe-eyed masseuse trained in caressing, touching and kneading the muscles of the human body (with oils!) when you can just crank up a tiny plastic car and let it ‘steamroller‘ over you until you are reduced to a pile of human gristle?
WheeMe costs just $199.99, plus however many AA batteries you might run through while letting the little massaging robot car run over you while you watch the first two seasons of ‘Homeland.’ Much like the TV series, no happy ending is likely. Yet. | <urn:uuid:86144d1e-f019-4e93-8b96-23fd517c4996> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newsradio1310.com/massage-robot-on-wheels-could-disrupt-massage-industry-or-not/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938976 | 345 | 1.617188 | 2 |
The Scarlet Empress, 1934, directed by Josef von Sternberg, screenplay by Eleanor McGeary, from the diaries of Catherine II, arranged by Manual Komroff.
From the Poetics right up until the post-structuralists blew everything up, literary critics spent a surprising amount of time on taxonomies of genre. Although it has glaring omissions, I think Northrop Frye's was one of the most elegant, if for no other reason than that he mapped his genres onto to the four seasons. I'm not going to do a better job of summarizing the correspondence than Martin Amis in The Information:
Summer: romance. Journeys, quests, magic, talking animals, damsels in distress.
Autumn: tragedy. Isolation and decline, fatal flaws and falls, the throes of heroes.
Winter: satire. Anti-utopias, inverted worlds, the embrace of the tundra: the embrace of wintry thoughts.
Spring: comedy. Weddings, apple blossom, maypoles, no more misunderstandings—away with the old, on with the new.
Well, films have seasons, too. And although it's unlikely anyone running a studio has spent much time with Frye (or even Amis), archetypal criticism is alive and well in the studio release schedules.1 In fact, once you realize that summer blockbusters fit within Frye's definition of romance, it's nearly a one-to-one correspondence.2 We're in the height of summer right now, and more money than ever is ever being thrown at tepid variations on the monomyth. What better time to watch a film like The Scarlet Empress, which belongs wholeheartedly and unabashedly to winter?
On its face, The Scarlet Empress seems like a more common kind of story: a tragedy of overreach. Think of Citizen Kane, The Great Gatsby, or (from a certain perspective) Paradise Lost: stories of overweening protagonists who gain the world and lose their souls. And it's a period drama about royalty, with all the possibilities for lavish sets and costumes that affords. Those lavish costumes are going to be worn by none other than Marlena Dietrich, at the height of her powers:
Bring on the Oscars. So on paper, The Scarlet Empress seems familiar. Against that familiarity, you begin to get a sense of how strange and perverse von Sternberg's film really is. Consider the opening sequence, in which we meet Princess Sophia Augusta Frederica, long before becoming (as von Sternberg puts it in an intertitle) "the ill-famed Messalina of the North." Young Sophia is played by Maria Riva, Dietrich's daughter, and looks every inch a princess.
This is the "childhood innocence" sequence found in the kind of movie The Scarlet Empress sometimes pretends to be: Charlie Kane doesn't want to leave his father, Gatsby doesn't want to go to war, and Sophia doesn't want to marry a king—she wants to be a toe-dancer. But as she settles down to hear her bedtime story, she pulls a creepy-looking doll from beneath the covers and the tone changes. With a different score, the way the doll rises from beneath the blanket could play like the end of Don't Look Now.
And the bedtime story she listens to? A history of "Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible and other Russian tsars and tsarinas who were hangmen," represented on screen by a montage that would be hard to get past censors today, from a torturer whipping prisoners:
To naked women on some strange variation of the Catherine Wheel:
To, most memorably of all, a church bell with a human clapper.
That last shot of the bell ringing rather famously dissolves into a match shot of Sophia's hoop skirt as she rides a swing toward camera. The film is filled with this sort of mordant wit, although there's nothing else that rhymes quite like that. There is a recurring visual motif, though, and it's found in the shot of the doll: something unexpectedly terrible emerging from its hiding place. You can see the same thing in a later shot of an obscene cuckoo clock, or this memorable image of a drill bit slowly making its way through the eye of an icon.
These shots are echoes of the film's greatest, darkest joke: Sophia's introduction to Peter III. Bedtime stories or no, when Dietrich first appears as onscreen, she seems as naive as her daughter, the kind of girl who believes in fairy tales.
So when John Lodge, dressed like the cover of a romance novel, arrives as Count Alessi, envoy of the Russian court, you know exactly what kind of story she thinks she's landed in.
Which is, of course, exactly the kind of movie von Sternberg wants us to think he's making. Sophia's husband-to-be is, according to Alessi,
The handsomest man in the Russian court, tall and formed like a Greek god, a model in fashion and deportment which all of us strive to follow. His eyes are like the blue sky, his hair the color of ebony. He is stronger than a team of oxen and sleepless because of his desire to receive you in his arms. And he can also read and write!
It's the "read and write" that's the tell. When Sophia arrives in Moscow, and excitedly begs the Empress to let her meet her husband, we get the film's central image. A gigantic door is thrown open, and a strange procession emerges: dwarfs in formalwear leading hunting dogs, a steward, a glowering woman (the prince's mistress, it turns out), and, finally, the "handsomest man in the Russian court."
That's Sam Jaffe in his first film role, as a Russian Emperor and a horror-film jack-in-the-box. His Peter III is a sniggering madman: in his first interaction with his new bride, he insists on showing her his new "invention" (a toy soldier glued to a wheel; it's not clear what part of it he thinks he's invented), then rushes off to watch an execution.
Oh, and that glamorous Russian Court we expect to see in this kind of film? With all the pomp and splendor and inevitable Oscars for the costume designer? Here's Empress Elizabeth in all her glory:
Believe it or not, that chair is one of the more subtle pieces of furniture in the film; Elizabeth has an entire table surrounded with chairs like this:
The joke is on Sophia, but it's also on anyone who came to The Scarlet Empress expecting a tasteful historical drama. This might be a good time to point out that the film's posters featured Dietrich in sable; John Lodge was on more of the lobby cards than Sam Jaffe. Von Sternberg really rubs the audience's collective nose in it, too; it's safe to say that fewer tickets would have been sold for a film about the relationship between a brood mare and royal half-wit:
The final act of the film is basically about Marlene Dietrich being Marlene Dietrich, which is always a pleasure to watch. I can't think of another film from this era in which power and sex are so explicitly linked. There's actually a scene where Count Alessi kisses Sophia, then hands her a whip and demands she punish him for his insolence, which somehow sailed right over the heads of the Production Code Administration.3 She doesn't whip him—at that point in the film, she still thinks the handsomest man in the Russian court is losing sleep over her—but never fear, Alessi gets his. No one but no one could use her sexuality as a weapon like Dietrich. If she'd done nothing else her entire career, the shot of her coolly assessing Peter's mistress would have made her a cinematic icon.
Clearly this isn't Sissi. But what's stopping it from being Citizen Kane? After all, Sophia gradually loses her humanity as she becomes Catherine; by the film's delirious end, she's arranged the murder of her husband. Well, for one thing, the tone's all wrong. Imagine a version of The Godfather Part II in which Michael reacted to Fredo's death with a rictus like Dietrich has here:
More importantly, from beginning to end, von Sternberg repeatedly makes the point that Sophia doesn't make any of her own choices. Early in the film, we watch Sophia's routine on entering her own parlor: she curtsies and kisses the hands of no fewer than seven people before speaking. Seven curtsies, seven kisses—and then one more, once she is introduced to Count Alessi. When she leaves the room (after being told that she's travelling to Russia to be married), von Sternberg makes us watch the same ritual, in reverse. Her every action is circumscribed by ritual, and by decisions that were made for her. When she does seize the crown, it's because her husband is insane and his mistress has promised her a shaved head and a trip to a convent. Aristotle would say that's a misadventure, not a tragedy. I say it's an inverted world, a mirror version of fairy tales and costume dramas.
Whatever it is, it's not for everybody. The Scarlet Empress was a box-office flop. But look, if you're feeling cheated, if you want the awards season biopic you were promised, all is not lost. As it happens, there is one grand tragedy in The Scarlet Empress, one character whose fatal flaw leads him headlong into catastrophe.
- If you want to see how to effectively use the kind of close-ups that Michael Bay so egregiously misuses, pay attention to the royal wedding sequence. As Robin Wood points out, von Sternberg doesn't give us much information about where people are standing in relation to one another. Instead, he intercuts close-ups of Count Alessi:
- and Sophia:
- The effect is to make the wedding a scene that happens between betrayer and betrayed, not husband and wife.
- The Scarlet Empress obviously prefigures Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible films, which are also about a relative innocent whose humanity is relentlessly ground out of him. For that matter, you could shoot scenes from von Sternberg's film on Eisenstein's sets and vice versa, and no one would be the wiser. I hadn't seen The Scarlet Empress when I wrote about Ivan; the more you know, etc. I think the Ivan films are better cinema. Eisenstein manages such a consistent paranoiac tone, and there are some pretty incoherent sequences in The Scarlet Empress (Roger Ebert attributes them to von Sternberg being ""impatient when his attention is called away from Dietrich"). But of course, Eisenstein doesn't have Dietrich, so it's a pretty close call.
2The reason it's not one-to-one is that very few people will wager a film's budget on satire. Unless you count the terrible, terrible films the studios dump in January as very subtle satires of Hollywood greed and incompetence. They certainly encourage me to embrace wintry thoughts, so maybe Frye wins again. | <urn:uuid:d9b6b7ac-8731-4cb8-a2ee-95a0f6a0c769> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://criterioncollection.blogspot.com/2011/07/109-scarlet-empress.html?showComment=1310010013345 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965077 | 2,351 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Congratulations on your new home!* I understand your desire to rescue plants, but most states require you get WRITTEN permission from the landowner before you rescue any plants. Some even require a permit as well, even on private land. * I will admit I have done this myself, but I could have been arrested.* In my case these were not native plants and I was driving past a construction site where the bulldozers were already doing 'their thing'.* There were several neglected roses and some daffodils in bloom.* I asked the foreman of the crew if I could dig up some things and he said yes, but I still took a risk.* If anyone sees you doing this there could be problems without getting written permission and possibly permits.
You may want to contact the Native Plant Society of Texas for help with id of native plants.* There's a chapter in San Antonio.* They might even be willing to help with a rescue of plants.* You will have to make it clear that there are certain plants you want to keep for yourself.* They will probably know all about permits.
Here's how to transplant cactus.* Younger plants will transplant better.* Be sure to mark the south facing side of each cactus and face them in the same aspect in which they grew when you plant them.* In other words, the south facing side of the plant where it has been growing should be south facing when you replant it in your garden.* This is very important.* For cactus you may need some type of large tweezers to handle the smaller plants.* You can even use tongs from your kitchen, but I would recommend padding them so you don't pierce the outer skin of the cactus. Here's some helpful sites.
Several pages to read here.
You can search for native cactus and hopefully id other native plants that could be rescued here.
The Native Plant Project is for the lower Rio Grande Valley, but might be a good resource for you as I'm sure the plants don't realize there is a county boundary line.* They have some wonderful booklets for id.* Here's their main page.
Here's their handbooks which you can view online for free.
Many Yucca have a very deep taproot, most especially the tree forms. Try and transplant the younger plants as you will have greater success that way.* It would be best if you could id which species you will be digging so you can learn about them before you dig.* Here's the Texas native plants database for Trees where you can look up some native Yuccas.
This USDA plants database lists native Yuccas and where they are found.* I find it isn't always accurate and many plants often grow where they aren't indicated here.
Here's Texas native shrubs. You can also click on 'Search' on the left and search for cactus.* I got 3 of the shrub forms when I searched.
Yucca alata - one of the tree species, is one of the most difficult ones to transplant due to a long taproot.
Yucca rostrata, also a tree species, is more forgiving, but I doubt you'll find it where you are located.
This might be helpful to id some native yuccas and other plants.
I can't stress enough that you need to get written permission from the landowner for your own protection.* Good luck with this project.* I'd love to know how it all turns out.
When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant. | <urn:uuid:3de30177-cd2f-4bec-95d1-b0ab10b048e7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.backyardgardener.com/forums/f21/transplanting-yucca-cacti-1530/ | 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 | 0.937609 | 746 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Forgotten Books: No Way To Treat a Lady
I remember picking up the first edition of No Way to Treat A Lady by one Harry Longbaugh. The year was 1968 and everybody I knew was pretty much booze-and-drug-addled. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were dead, LBJ was stepping down and Tricky Dick's star was once again rising. The much-overrated (to me) Bonnie & Clyde was filling theaters and Hair was the subject d'jour for the mass media.
And man, did William the writer behind the Longbaugh pen-name, ever do it.
All you had to do was scan the layout of the pages. The story was told in newspaper headlines, partial newspaper stories, long stretches of dialogue, and the demented but hilarious monologues of the killer.
And this was no ordinary killer. Oh, no, as later envisioned on the screen by Rod Steiger, we have an overweight mama's boy who loves to put his victims at ease by disguising himself as various trustworthy people, including a priest. Who said killers can't be kind?
Reflecting some of the same mama's boy problem we have the detective Morris Brummell (on screen played by George Segal) whose own mother constantly rags him about getting a more respectable job like his brother.
And then there's a love interest for Morris Brummell, whom Mom, in her endearing way, may not accept.
Unique, original, one-of-a-kind, unduplicatable...however you care to describe it No Way To Treat A Lady holds up almost fifty years later. The book is superior in every way to the movie, which gets too self-indulgent (for me) with Steiger's hamminess.
William Goldman has had one of the most successful Hollywood runs of all time. The Princess Bride is the only novel of his to stay constantly in print. But he's written numerous masterpieces, including Lady, which is perfect example of taking apart the standard tropes and shocking your readers with your reconfiguration. | <urn:uuid:ce9a03ee-c93c-45af-8005-aefeb4b42c19> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com/2010_06_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977955 | 435 | 1.507813 | 2 |
A funny thing happened on the way to the PBS National Desk episode "Education: A Public Right Gone Wrong": After inviting more than three dozen free-market enthusiasts, the production crew seems to have run out of invitations.
The show's version of investigative reporting is to pit 38 conservative foundation wonks, for-profit and religious school employees, and assorted voucher recipients speaking in favor of privatizing public education against four people defending public schools. Of these four, one is the president and another the chief counsel of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, leaving the impression that only an organization that puts its own bread-and-butter interests at the forefront of educational policy-making has anything good to say about public education.
By all appearances, this PBS program operates under a code of Let the Viewer Beware. Surely journalism ethics reach a new low when the viewer must examine the annual reports of a show's underwriters in order to figure out that the content is long on vested interests and very short on facts. A truth-in-disclosure statement would reveal a web of financial entanglement that touches nearly every public school-basher who is handed the microphone.
None of the 38 public school-bashers offers any data supporting the claims that private and for-profit schools offer a better education. Unlike public schools, private schools are under no requirement to release information on test scores, expulsions, dropouts, attendance and so on. Conspicuously absent from this public school-bashing fete is University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher John Witte, who conducted a five-year study on vouchers in Milwaukee. Witte's findings were, at best, mixed, concluding that parent satisfaction is up among voucher recipients but academic improvement is not ("First Year Report, Milwaukee Parental Choce Program," University of Wisconsin-Madison, 11/91; "Second Year Report," Milwaukee-Madison, 12/92).
People concerned about the performance of African-American children, whom the program describes as especially poorly served by public schools, should look at the findings of Student Achievement Guarantee in Education, a Wisconsin state initiative. The SAGE report shows that a three-year class-size reduction initiative in the first three grades in public schools has produced academic gains, most notably gains in the test scores of African-American children.
But it isn't in the interest of privateers to admit there's anything good about public schools, and so a message of calamity is established from the get-go, with an off-camera speaker (who turns out to be the Hoover Institution's Thomas Sowell) declaring, "The state of American public education is one big disaster.... Parents are not going to sit back and take this anymore."
Actually, the 1999 Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll shows that the majority of parents, even if offered free government-paid tuition, would opt for public over private schools. In Milwaukee over the last four years, new African-American students in public schools outnumber those in voucher schools more than three to one, even though the voucher schools are undersubscribed.
But this show isn't about facts; it's about allowing guests with both financial and ideological stakes in privatizing education to make any kind of unsubstantiated claims they wish. Clint Bolick, chief litigator for the conservative Institute of Justice, asserts, for instance, "Public education has been in serious decline in the U.S. over the last several decades."
In fact, standardized test scores are at all-time highs. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) shows all ethnic groups setting records. The proportion of students scoring above 650 on the math SAT has risen to unprecedented levels. Meanwhile, the number of students taking Advanced Placement tests has soared from 78,000 in 1978 to 704,000 in 1999.
Reporters and other interested parties can easily find this information by reading Gerald Bracey, a respected researcher and policy analyst whose reports on the condition of public education appear in the educational periodical Phi Delta Kappan (10/99).
Admitting to serious inadequacies in public education does not mean granting license to the privileged few to establish an educational marketplace that ignores any obligation to improve education for all children. Vouchers drain public schools of needed funds, and at the same time siphon off the talents of concerned and energetic parents. Public schools are left with the problems private schools don't have to accept.
One example: the Legislative Audit Bureau reports that in 1998-99, just 3 percent of Milwaukee's voucher students have been previously identified as needing special services, and those students received services relatively low in cost, such as speech therapy. By contrast, 15 percent of public school students are so identified, and their services cover the full (expensive) range.
If the free market works so well to the benefit of all children, one must ask why poor children don't have equal access to pre-school education, a bastion of free-market enterprise. Likewise, the free market denies poor children equal access to health care, adequate housing and adequate school buildings. The free market ships jobs paying adequate wages overseas.
What privateers don't want the public to see is that the issue is money, not the adequacy of teachers, the presence of unions or the existence of government red tape. Pure and simple, the standardized test scores of this nation's children can be identified by zip codes, not by whether they attend private or public schools.
Larry Elder, a Los Angeles hot-button radio talkshow host trying to wear a journalist hat, closes the show with one final have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife rhetorical flourish: "Will the control of our children's education be with government and unions, or with parents? I, for one, vote for the parents." Besides mischaracterizing the backbone of public education, Elder's histrionics deliberately cloud the issue: Just because parents choose a private school doesn't mean that school has to take them. Public school is the place where, when you knock, they have to invite you in.
Elder insists this National Desk show is about an "unsalvageable government system." He uses government the way right-wing extremists are wont to do, as a code word for evil. "Public" is used the same way, as a term of scorn and derision. Perhaps someone should remind the folks at PBS what the "P" in their name stands for.
Susan Ohanian is a long time teacher and freelance writer. | <urn:uuid:a36f28a4-2c28-490a-b4a6-f5b78a03ba08> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/out-of-school/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958646 | 1,334 | 1.671875 | 2 |
[dateline] Bruxelles Aprl. 18. 1780
Walsingham with 6 Ships of the line, the troops and the W. India fleet pass'd Plimo. the 8th. and Graves with 7 Ships of the line left St. Helens the 10th. to follow him, and as the winds have been since, Graves having only his 7 Ships and Walsingham a large fleet there is no doubt of their having join'd, but I do not learn with certainty the real destination, of Walsingham and his troops. By the Gazettes it appears that Monsr. Tiernay will be sailing about this time with only 6 Ships so that most probably he will meet Graves in his return, therefore he may chance to share the same fate as the E. India Convoy, unless he is escorted to some distance by an additional number of Ships, for Graves's Squadron consists of 90, 80 and 74 Gun Ships. I thank you for your favor of the 13th. which I received yesterday; the infatuation of our Enemies is evidently the work of Providence for their conduct is precisely that of Phaoroh with respect to the Israelites and I much doubt of a speedy Peace for the measure of their punishment is not yet full. When I was among them they appeared insensible enough, but they are now totally dead to all feeling. The Declaration of Russia and the movement of all the maritime powers of Europe, has not created, that I can perceive, a single emotion either in the ministry or opposition, therefore we have nothing to do but to beat them into their senses. If they have, or do make any overtures of Peace now it will most probably be with a design of dilaying and retarding the operations and plans of F[rance]
'till the Season is too far advanced to effectuate anything decisive this Campaign but I trust that our Friends have too much Sagacity to be duped by such bunglers as the B. Ministry. The conduct of Spain has arisen from various causes, which have been very evident to those that have attentively observ'd the business; but there is no occasion now for entering into those particulars; however as I am well satisfied that every material point has been thoroughly
digested long since, there can be no great field for negotiation now at Madrid on either side. It is said that the British Cabinet in pursuance of their darling system of Coercion, have resolv'd in the Cabinet not to yeild to the claim of the Irish People to a Free Constitution. As Clinton was not heard of in the W. I. the beginning of March, nor in Virga., 'tis probable that the greatest part of his fleet has arriv'd, at their destination at Tybée and that we shall hear of another attack on Chas. Town. 5 of his fleet, as far as I know, have only been accounted for, 1 driven to Engd. 2 to the W. Indias, 1 founder'd off Bermudas and 1 carried into Chas. Town. | <urn:uuid:28f6128e-4195-4f94-aafe-408982fa71e8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.masshist.org/publications/apde/portia.php?id=PJA09d120 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981573 | 625 | 1.679688 | 2 |
A digest of important news from sources selected by our local editors. Delivered weekday mornings.
Environmentally minded shareholder proposals, many of which ask companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and set a plan for reducing them, are at an all time-high this year. And, for the first time, they are joined by a new initiative — asking oil and natural gas companies to study the environmental, legal and financial repercussions of hydraulically fracturing shale.
EQT Corp., CONSOL Energy Inc., Norfolk Southern Corp., Chesapeake Energy Corp. and First Energy Corp. are among the companies targeted by shareholders who see environmental responsibility as a step to financial success. Fracing disclosure proposals have been filed with Range Resources, Cabot Oil & Gas, EOG Resources and others that operate in the Pittsburgh area.
RiskMetrics Group, the largest proxy advisory firm, supports “the vast majority of these resolutions on climate change,” said Doug Cogan, director of climate change research. “The bottom line is that the issue is a material one for most of the companies.”
But half, if not more, of the shareholder proposals introduced each year never make it to a vote, Cogan said. Many are withdrawn by the shareholders after a successful dialogue with the company.
While the proxy season has just begun, some resolutions already have appeared on proxy forms.
Rick Hausman, research director with Clean Yield Asset Management, a Vermont company, drafted the proposal that made it into EQT’s proxy this year. It asked for the North Shore-based firm to produce a sustainability report and address greenhouse gas emissions by Oct. 1.
EQT’s management asked shareholders to vote against the proposal, calling the standard of reporting proposed in the resolution “forty-four pages of vague, confusing detail,” that “will require an extraordinary amount of the company’s time, effort and money.”
[email protected] | (412) 208-3824
Do you support a moratorium on fracking until health risks are clarified? | <urn:uuid:0f065494-cdc3-44e2-8e14-314f7051c3ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stories/2010/03/15/story12.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953916 | 435 | 1.71875 | 2 |
American composer and pianist. Hoiby is known primarily for his stage works, choral music, and songs. He studied piano with Ferruccio Busoni's pupil Egon Petri. He was one of the rare composition students of Gian Carlo Menotti. Possibly due to that influence, he designed much of his early music for the stage, including the operas The Scarf and A Month in the Country. The 1967 ballet After Eden was fairly successful, even to the point of getting recorded on the old Desto label. Most of his music, however, including the major pieces Summer and Smoke and Galileo Galilei, has not made it to commercial recording.
Critics have seized on Hoiby's musical links to Samuel Barber and Menotti – perhaps too hard – and have labeled the music neo-Romantic, as if he did nothing but sing his diatonic head off. Hoiby has written all kinds of music (as have Barber and Menotti, for that matter), some of it quite dense harmonically. I distrust the label neo-Romantic, since all three composers seem obviously attracted and indebted to the wit of Igor Stravinsky's neo-classicism in many of their works. Furthermore, "neo-Romantic" implies a clubhouse with rules, and the three men are nothing if not individuals with clearly-defined artistic personalities. With Hoiby, the truth of the label tends to come in the lyrical passages – slow movements, second subjects, and the like. "Lyric" for Hoiby means song, and many of these passages have the same yearning and ardency of similar moments in Rachmaninoff, although the two composers' idioms differ. For Hoiby, "lyrical" never becomes heavy or overly-sweet. Like Haydn, he seems to possess an abundance of good humor which anchors him and keeps him from being carried away in a gust of sentiment and nostalgia. ~ Steve Schwartz
Major works include The Scarf (1958), A Month in the Country (1964), After Eden (1967), Summer and Smoke (1970), Design for Strings (1953), the two piano concerti (1958, 1980), Galileo Galilei (1975), the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis (1983), and the opera The Tempest (1986). | <urn:uuid:92baba65-4ff7-49ee-abc3-87a929fed336> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/acc/hoiby.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974224 | 480 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Requirements for Membership
What is a "Born Again" believer?
The words "born again" have always signified something of great importance to those who believe in the Bible. They are expressive of the new birth, which follows the believer's death to, or separation from, sin, and delivers us into the kingdom of God.
The expression is heard frequently today. Many people claim to have experienced this unusual phenomenon. But what is it? What does it mean to say someone is born again? And, how does it happen? What is our involvement, if any, that causes this birth to occur?
These questions are important, and worthy of careful investigation. By examining what the Bible has to say about this matter, we should be able to find the answers.
In John 3:1 and following, the Bible depicts a meeting that occurred between Nicodemus, a Pharisee and ruler of the Jews, and Jesus. During their conversation, Jesus said to Nicodemus: "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Nicodemus must not have understood what Jesus meant, for he asked: "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?"
Jesus answered: "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born again.' "
By answering this way, Jesus taught that physical birth is not the same as the new birth. The new birth was something quite different. Man had to be "born of water and of the Spirit."
What is Water Baptism?
Being immersed in water pictures the death of Jesus Christ dying for our sins. Being raised from the water is a portrayal of Jesus' resurrection in which He conquered sin and death. Thus, being baptized by immersion, the believer visually shows the spiritual death, burial, and resurrection of the believer's life. Baptism emphasizes to the new believer, and to those who witness the baptism, that as a Christian and child of God the Christian now is to live a godly life, resisting sin, and not giving it a place in their lives.
Water baptisms are held throughout the year, but generally correspond to Foundation Bible Classes for church membership. For scheduling and questions please call the church office at 718.290.2000.
What is the Foundation Bible Class?
Foundation Bible Classes are held to lay a solid, biblical foundation for spiritual nourishment and growth. For both new and mature Christians, this class works through the systematic teaching of the Word of God, so each one may understand their position in Christ and become a functioning member of the body - locally and at large. Classes are held for 7 consecutive weeks.
There are two courses available:
Course Level 1 - Basic Christian Fundamentals
Course Level 2 - Advanced Biblical Studies
Course Level 1 is a requirement for membership at The Brooklyn Tabernacle. Both Level 1 and 2 are held during one of our 3 semesters each year (spring, summer and fall). These classes are held on Friday evenings from 7pm–9pm. During our summer and fall semesters, we also offer daytime classes of Part 1 on Thursdays from 10am-12pm. | <urn:uuid:b64b1bec-ad23-4dfe-99fc-989ead666e60> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.brooklyntabernacle.org/members-center/becoming-a-member | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970833 | 719 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Warren Buffet’s partner, Charlie Munger, writes about what he regards as the “reciprocation tendency” in On Success. We consciously or subconsciously want to reciprocate favors, he says. The tendency is stronger when it’s our employer’s money we use for paying back. The tendency is particularly strong when it is government’s money.
Munger feels Sam Walton was wise to prohibit, absolutely, any gifts or favors for his Walmart buyers: “He wouldn’t let purchasing agents accept so much as a hot dog from a vendor.” Munger said that if he controlled the Defense Department its policies would mimic Walton’s.
Would that be too high a bar for our politicians? If those in Congres were prohibited from accepting so much as a stick of gum, would it keep honest and decent people from running? Would we, the people, gain all that much? Perhaps we would.
Munger writes that one psychology researcher blamed Watergate on the genetic tendency we have to reciprocate favors. He felt it encouraged the attorney general to go along with the burglary that — when botched — began the debacle. That mess felled a president. With his fall came changes of all dimension in U.S. and world affairs.
Countrywide Financial Corp was knee-deep in the housing mess that nearly brought down our financial house. Rep. Darrell Issa’s oversight committee found the company made 150 sweetheart loans to Fannie Mae employees. These included the executives at the top. Fannie Mae granted Countrywide favored treatment. Reciprocal?
Issa’s probe also found Countrywide made 30 sweetheart loans to U.S. senators and their employees. What favors did they get in return?
Our congress people are blessed and cursed with the same genes the Watergate Attorney General John Mitchell was. Call me an idealist, but it seems to me we would all be better off if our laws commanded we do them no favors and that they accept none.
Not one grape’s worth. | <urn:uuid:13864fdf-6944-4a2d-8a9c-46316cd21076> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pjmedia.com/blog/can-congress-be-saved-from-its-own-greed/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964474 | 428 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Abolishing the state inspector general's office would be a step backward for Louisiana, and that's why the Senate Finance Committee must restore funding that was eliminated by the House. Gov. Bobby Jindal signed the law that made the inspector general an independent agency back in 2008, at the urging of Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans and other groups. He needs to show that he continues to support this important facet of reform by putting his clout behind efforts to amend House Bill 1 and restore the $1.7 million that the House cut.
Killing this office would be a mistake, and legislators haven't given good arguments for doing so. Rep. Joe Harrison of Napoleonville, who led the charge to eliminate the agency's funding when the bill came before the House Appropriations Committee, claimed that it is "pretty much redundant'' and that other law enforcement agencies can take on the inspector general's tasks.
But the truth is, the state inspector general is the sole agency that is dedicated to finding wrongdoing in the state's executive branch. Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, pointed out that other agencies cited by Rep. Harrison have backlogs of cases to pursue. "Eliminating the inspector general would have a chilling impact,'' Mr. Goyeneche said.
The office has been successful in ferreting out waste and in conducting investigations that have led to indictments and convictions.
If Louisiana didn't have an inspector general, this state might still be wasting money on non-refundable airfares that were never used. The inspector general found almost $230,000 wasted in that manner. Jefferson Parish public school system workers might still be exceeding overtime limits -- a $400,000 discovery by the IG. And the $1.6 million that was stolen from a police retirement system might never have been noticed.
In the 2010-11 fiscal year alone, the state inspector general found $3.2 million in fraud and waste, which was almost twice its budget for that year.
The state will hardly be saving money by defunding this office, and lawmakers should be ready to explain to their constituents why they think a watchdog is unnecessary.
Eliminating the inspector general also would send the message that Louisiana isn't committed to cleaning up corruption. That's not a very smart way to lure business and industry to this state. | <urn:uuid:234a41e7-851e-4855-ae77-b10b0b6ee37c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2012/05/restore_state_inspector_genera.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969301 | 479 | 1.75 | 2 |
When I was in university I used to love going to the talks being given on campus by visiting professors, I used to eat that stuff up. I'd always keep on eye on the posters plastered in hallways about who was lecturing and on what topic. One Friday afternoon (in about 1999) fellow Beams writer Andrew Baxter and I went to see a lecture on something called "Big History". Big History eh, hmmm, sounds intriguing enough, let's have a listen we thought. That talk blew our minds; it was like natural psychedelics, we stumbled over to the campus pub after in some sort of seriously altered state.
The field of Big History views history from "the Big Bang to the present". The whole story of the universe and life on Earth is viewed as one connected, continually unfolding event. Joseph Campbell once wrote that one of the four functions of myth was to stretch time out, to make you aware of the vast expanse of time, so that we could be broken out of our locally oriented (narcissistic) blinders and released into the wonder and magnitude of life itself. This realization can sometimes bring on the death fear tremors, but it can also open us up to a deep spiritual relationship with the sheer fact of being alive. I'm pretty sure something like that happened to me on the day I saw that lecture.
For years I'd think of Big History every once and awhile, wondering whatever happened to the movement, why it hadn't gained more traction and attention. Where'd it go? So a couple of years ago I looked it up and was pleased to hear that there were now several professors writing in the field (although an official journal has yet to be established). One book I read and would recommend is Cynthia Stokes Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. You go from the Big Bang to globalization in 237 pages, and Stokes is all the while summarizing and synthesizing the findings of scholars from multiple disciplines, providing a stunning narrative of cosmic and then human history (and for bibliography enthusiasts like myself, this one is a goldmine). For integrally-oriented folks Big History is a great way to give flesh and girth to our understanding of the historical stages of human cultural development.
Recently one of the founders of the Big History movement, David Christian, gave a TED talk which provides a great introduction to this growing field. For an important corollary of how we can learn to live the process of Big History from the inside, see Craig Hamilton's new free teleseminar Awakening to the Call of the Cosmos: How to Align Your Life With the Impulse of Evolution. | <urn:uuid:c28a17ee-e04c-48ad-8176-4aa51f0476b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://beamsandstruts.com/bits-a-pieces/item/446-big-history-and-the-long-duree | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959512 | 541 | 1.8125 | 2 |
One of the distinguishing hallmarks of leaders, and all who excel, is that they are learners. Leaders continually seek-out opportunities to learn about themselves, about others, and about their world. Importantly, the failure to learn and resistance to feedback have been consistently identified as fatal flaws of those who wish to lead. This page contains links to some of the learning resources that we have used over the years including:
- Assessment Tools: Here you will find information on the assessments we often use to give our clients feedback about themselves, their teams and about job candidates. We have found these feedback tools to invaluable for leaders who want to improve themselves.
- Learning Resources: Here you will find references and links to books, articles, podcasts, videos, tools other learning resources that we believe are valuable to for leaders.
- Team Tools: Here you will find forms and guides for developing and engaging people, clarifying direction and purpose, and improving productivity. | <urn:uuid:48d65959-a228-49d4-8a70-e50254833359> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.credoconsulting.us/resources/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959324 | 192 | 1.8125 | 2 |
If you are like millions of other time-starved moms, the thought of back-to-school shopping leaves you feeling stressed and wondering how you can possibly get it all done within your budget and in the limited time you have. Take advantage of these mom-tested, time-saving tips this year and get your children ready for back-to-school in record time - without busting your budget:
1. Start with a plan: Create a master back-to-school shopping list and budget for each child. Discuss the list and ask your kids what items or brands they want most. Let them help make the budget trade-offs. For example, if they want an expensive pair of shoes, they need to spend less on the backpack or clothes.
2. Closet-cleaning giveaway: Before you start shopping, clean out the closet. Sort through the clothes with each of your children, setting aside items that still fit and giving the rest away to charity.
3. Get the help of a free online personal shopper: Take advantage of PersonalShopper.com, and join over half of the moms in America who plan to do their back-to-school shopping online, according to a national survey by MedeliaMonitor. This free service saves you time and money by sifting through millions of products to find deals and items tailored to your family's needs and interests.
Your children can browse a selection of items from favorite brands, styles and colors and save what they love most to their online wish list. You can then review it together and make your purchases from the comfort of your own home.
4. It's best one-on-one: Schedule a back-to-school shopping date with each child, giving them your undivided attention. They grow up so fast, so invest your time in making lasting memories.
5. Snag sweet deals: Sixty-four percent of moms in the survey said that one of the biggest challenges is keeping themselves and their children within the set budget. Share with each child the amount you can afford to spend. Teach them to value your hard-earned money and how to stretch the budget as far as possible by making smart choices. They will soon learn that they can get far more for their money by searching the sales first.
For more information, visit www.personalshopper.com. | <urn:uuid:00db0751-5a2d-4820-8873-3beefc828337> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bendweekly.com/Schools/738.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943934 | 484 | 1.523438 | 2 |
There is a saying here in the Ukrainian capital: “The more I deal with the customs officers, the more I love the traffic police.”
The traffic police, or militsia, are the ever-present uniformed officers whose white-tipped batons are the signal to pull over to the side of the road. The process is always the same. Once a driver has stopped, a traffic offense—either real or absurd—is explained to him by the militiaman (this can include violations as trivial as “your license plate is too dirty”), money changes hands, and the driver goes on his way. The fines almost always end up in the pocket of the officer.
But as efficient as the militsia is at collecting money right and left from the public (at best this is indirect taxation and at worst it is a type of corruption) they are do-gooders when compared to the Customs Service.
The inventiveness of the Customs Service in finding new ways to collect money from companies and individuals trying to do business in Ukraine surpasses that of some of the worst kleptocracies in history. The issue finally boiled over in a July meeting between the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council—representatives of U.S. firms that have operations in Ukraine—and Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Tigipko.
The overall theme of the meeting was the irreparable harm done to the business environment by the Customs Service. But the specific focus was how their practices are a complete disaster for express mail and parcel services like FedEx, DHL, UPS, and others.
“There are only few countries in the world which ‘outperform’ Ukraine as the worst in the world. It is important to understand the impact of the shipments delayed at Customs which often result in lost revenues, additional costs for companies and the Customs Services itself. It generates numerous complaints from business community and private individuals. Last but not least it constantly deteriorates Ukraine attractiveness among potential investors,” said Vadim Sidoruk from DHL’s office here in Kiev.
“It has become common knowledge that Ukrainian Customs laws regulating express delivery are some of the most, if not the most, complicated in the world,” he complained. No other country requires payment of duties for all parcels addressed to private individuals. The duties are also—he pointed out—of doubtful value to the country's economy, as the costs of collecting them are often higher than the duty itself.
Sidoruk, like so many of us here, holds out little hope that the Ukrainian government would ever enact reforms that would rectify the situation.
“It is hard to imagine just what would lead the parliament and the Customs Committee to make the changes necessary to remove the roadblocks. However, I cannot help but think that if they understood the many development projects that have gone elsewhere in part because of the antiquated customs procedures, that alone would have a very strong impact on their thinking--and actions.”
In July, DHL moved into a new 8,000 square meter, $12 million package processing facility. It is one of the largest of its kind in the world for the simple reason that backlogs created by Ukrainian customs require this kind of capacity. Of all the packages held by customs in all of eastern and central Europe, 70 percent are being held in Ukraine, according to DHL.
The U.S.-Ukraine Business Council has compiled a list of horror stories of delays experience by shippers in recent years. It reads like a textbook of “how to destroy all interest in your country by foreign investors”:
• A major soft drink company imported samples of plastic bottle caps with their logo on them—a total of 6 pieces. The shipment was not released because Ukrainian customs required an official letter from the company stating that the bottle caps would not be used for medical purposes.
• A company imported communications equipment to Ukraine with a value $1,000,000. A CD with installation instructions was included in the shipment. Ukrainian Customs would not clear the shipment until the company produced a revised invoice with the following breakdown: $999,997.00 for the equipment and $3.00 for the CD. "This caused a delay of 7-12 days in the final delivery." | <urn:uuid:79aed3ba-3647-4fe1-9bed-27b95de5c340> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.weeklystandard.com/keyword/Kiev | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967975 | 882 | 1.5625 | 2 |
An evaluation team representing the Middle States Commission on Higher Education got to see firsthand how University of Pittsburgh officials planned and assessed emergency situations. When the team visited the campus for two days in April, it experienced two evacuations from bomb threats against university buildings, including one at the chancellor's residence where a team dinner was planned.
What Pitt officials didn't know was that the Middle States team, which evaluates universities for reaccreditation, would include its personal experiences with the bomb threats in its final report, commending Pitt for its planning and assessment practices that allowed it to react efficiently during the crisis. During both evacuations, the team was relocated quickly to another facility.
"The team observed the benefits in real time, as the university coped with a series of bomb threats during the team's visit," according to the accreditation report.
"Staff, from the chancellor to the football coach, reassured students evacuated from their residence halls late at night; shelters were prepared in case of such evacuations in keeping with earlier planning exercises; the [Middle States] team was moved from one threatened building to a backup site for meetings already prepared in case it was necessary. Without advanced emergency planning, the university could not have functioned as well as it was doing as the semester was coming to a close," according to the report. | <urn:uuid:06547866-241b-48ae-a8b8-e97f369d00c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://universitybusiness.com/news/middle-states-reaccreditation-team-applauds-university-pittsburgh-report | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988582 | 265 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Saturday, May 18, 2013
- As long as they do not take him seriously, the man who says the truth can live for a while in a democracy. Then, the hemlock.
- Democratic parliaments are not forums where debates take place, but rather where popular absolutism registers its decrees.
- Being of “divine right” limited the monarch; the “representative of the people” is the representative of absolute Absolutism.
- In order to oppress the people, it is necessary to suppress in the name of the people that which stands out from the people.
- Revolutions are frightening, but election campaigns are disgusting.
- Liberty is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different.
- No folktale ever began this way: Once upon a time, there was a president…
Friday, May 17, 2013
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
A dozen score years ago today, Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Fürst von Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein was born.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
Sunday, May 12, 2013
As if seeking to prove the truth of Democracy, the God That Failed in a sentence, Obama says that tyranny is impossible, because "the government is us."previous
ABM - A View From The Praires has some thoughts on primogeniture. The same blogger apparently has a plan for reactionary government in Canada.
Tea at Trianon has a post on the cake myth.
Some pseudonym says:
I wonder how many of the "don't read internet comments!" people think democracy is a good idea.Anomaly UK has some thoughts on a reactionary transition.
Over at Nepali Netbook, says Maila Baje:
What would the Nepali Congress do about the damage that has already been done to Nepal’s ability to exercise its sovereign options? Here, the onus would fall heavily on the Nepali Congress, too, because much of that damage was inflicted by its rash desertion of the monarchy in the first place.Writes Mr. Scott Ferrie over at his weblog The Paleo Revolt:
The American Ideology is Neo-Romanism. We worship the pagan god called the modern day, hyper-centralized, welfare-warfare state ruling over a global empire. Imperial Warlords are worshiped as demigods and our insane love for ‘democracy’ has transformed civil society into a real life example of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ where competing interests plunder the rest of society for personal benefit in a short-sighted piranha-fest. Restore the traditional monarchy, restore the enforcement of the U.S. Constitution, or decentralize the modern nation-state out of existence. Any of those options will help.Royal World has a post on the Dutch change of the throne.
So does Radical Royalist, who also posted on a restored German monarchy gaining support. | <urn:uuid:e2234475-c056-44be-8eb3-ca72ec39deb6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wilsonrevunplugged.blogspot.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945989 | 642 | 1.507813 | 2 |
15 March, 2006
The opinion issued by the Ecofin Council confirms the credibility of Greece's economic program whose results are already becoming apparent, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said on Tuesday.
The feedback received from the European Union Finance Ministers, who convened earlier on Tuesday in Brussels, on the country's stability and growth program for the 2005-2008 period, shows that the reforms the government has been implementing will be sufficient without additional measures being necessary, Karamanlis said.
He said that the government's fiscal adjustments are being vindicated and that the government followed a strategy that is bearing fruit.
"These results are not just numbers to appear on the next budget, it is the justification of the efforts of all those who believed that public finances could be 'cleaned up' because it is the only way that the Greek economy can grow competitively and we will create the steady foundations needed for an environment that is socially just and prosperous for all," he said.
"Citizens for the first time can, after many years, be optimistic that serious efforts ensure a secure and better tomorrow for everyone," he added.
He noted that the government came into office inheriting a deficit in 2004 of 6.6% of GDP - or €11 billion - twice as much the maximum Eurozone limit and five times as high as the amount the previous government had forecast in the 2004 budget.
Karamanlis stressed that the government reduced the deficit to 4.3% in 2005, while the forecast for the end of 2006 is for the deficit to fall below 3%.
Source: Athens News Agency | <urn:uuid:b2e247c7-e1c3-4d12-9995-cb7f7b2950c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://greekembassy.org/Embassy/Content/en/Article.aspx?office=1&folder=221&article=17027 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967583 | 322 | 1.578125 | 2 |
A Boynton Beach man has been charged with the unlawful confinement of animals after Animal Control officials were forced to euthanize two seven-month-old pit bulls kept in “deplorable, inhumane” conditions at his home, according to the Boynton Beach Police Department.
Two of three pit bulls owned by 25-year-old Billy Taylor, named Bonnie and Clyde, were euthanized after they were confined in an open back porch in what Animal Control Officer Liz Roehrich called "unsanitary" open wire crates, secured with key-locked padlocks.
“A putrid stench of feces and urine permeated the porch and surrounding grass. Flies swarmed the area,” Roehrich describes in an affidavit. “No available food and water was present and each crate contained overturned bowls that were soiled with feces.”
Roehrich said both crates also contained feces smeared on the bottom, and urine stained the concrete underneath the animals. A third adult dog, a black pit bull, was confined in a chain-link kennel in the backyard of the North Atlantic Drive home.
According to the affidavit, Roehrich was responding to an initial investigation made by the Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control and the Boynton Beach Police Department on July 17. She was joined by a Boynton Beach police officer shortly after her arrival on July 26.
Roehrich said Taylor later arrived at the residence, argumentative and not concerned about the “deplorable conditions” of the dogs. She said Taylor stated he did not have enough time to correct the violations that had been observed in mid-July.
According to the affidavit, Roehrich said Taylor did not keep the dogs inside his home because “they were his alarms in case someone came around the property.”
The two juvenile pit bulls were seized and brought to the Boynton Beach Animal Shelter, and placed in two separate kennels with food, water and bedding. Roehrich said both dogs immediately ate all the food and drank the majority of the water.
Both dogs were subsequently transferred to Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control for evaluation and housing. The animals were later deemed unfit for adoption because they contracted an upper respiratory illness and were euthanized on August 4.
Taylor was given the opportunity to relinquish custody of the third pit bull, but he refused to do so, according to the affidavit report. Roehrich then issued a 10-day warning to provide proof of a current rabies vaccination and license tag.
Roehrich stated in the affidavit report that prior to leaving, Taylor said, “Y’all just want to take all my dogs.”
Copyright 2011 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Latest Local News Stories | <urn:uuid:ee658463-454f-4d7e-83a0-91da6d9ed28b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/region_s_palm_beach_county/boynton_beach/police%3A-boynton-beach-man-charged-with-unlawful-confinement-of-animals-due-to-'inhumane'-conditions | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979483 | 596 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Within months, the country faces a big choice.
A choice not just about who“s in Government, but about the values that will shape our country and the opportunities for our people.
A choice that will affect every area of our lives, every aspect of our future.
If we didn“t know a year ago the difference governments can make, we certainly know it now.
When I spoke at last year“s conference, I talked about the scale of the global economic crisis and warned that we may not yet have seen the worst.
Within weeks, the international financial system was in meltdown, the world economy on the edge of the abyss.
There was a real prospect of a repeat of scenes not witnessed since 1929.
Banks unable to give savers their cash. Firms unable to pay their staff.
In the face of such unprecedented global turmoil, no one government could hold back this economic tidal wave.
But I also said last year that the choices made by governments could reduce the severity and the length of the crisis “ and help people through it.
That was the challenge.
And when the history of this period is written, this country and this party will be proud.
Proud that the people who led the way in stopping recession turning into global depression were our Government and our Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
We intervened to stop the banks failing.
Not for the sake of the banks themselves.
But because the alternative would have been an economy in paralysis and employment in freefall.
Let me assure the country “ and warn the banks “ that there will no return to business as usual for them.
So in the next few weeks we will introduce legislation to end the reckless culture that puts short-term profits over long-term success.
It will mean an end to automatic bank bonuses year after year.
It will mean an end to immediate pay-outs for top management.
Any bonuses will have to be paid over years, so they can be clawed-back if not warranted by long-term performance.
We won“t allow greed and recklessness to ever again endanger the whole global economy and the lives of millions of people.
Over the last 12 months, we“ve also acted to help businesses keep afloat and people stay in jobs and in their homes.
By cutting VAT, we put an additional £1billion each month into the pockets of shoppers and retailers.
Through the car scrappage scheme, we will continue to support jobs in the car and wider manufacturing industries.
Through targeted tax cuts for business and more time to pay, we have helped them weather the storm.
We knew that to have cut investment would have worsened the recession.
So instead of cutting, we brought forward planned capital projects, modernising schools, homes and hospitals.
Countries across the world have followed the same course and co-ordinated action through the G20 in a way which has never been seen before.
I can tell you, having been at every one of these meetings, that ministers around the world recognise this would not have happened without Gordon Brown“s leadership.
The results of this global intervention, led by the UK, is now beginning to come through.
Germany, France and Japan are showing signs of growth.
Many independent forecasters now believe the UK too is coming out of recession.
I think it is too early to say so with total confidence.
But I stick with my Budget prediction that, as long as we continue to support the economy, recovery will be underway in the UK by the turn of the year.
I also expressed my confidence in the underlying strength of the British economy and the skills and energy of its people.
And I believe that confidence will prove to be correct.
For if we continue to make the right choices as a country and the right investment for the future, we are ideally placed to make the most of the opportunities the global recovery will bring.
Investing in the new industries of the future, helping Britain lead the way in the move to a low-carbon economy, supporting the research and innovation at which this country shines.
But had we made different choices “ Tory choices “ the UK and global economy would be in a very different place.
So too would our prospects for the future.
For as well as being a test of leadership for the Government, this crisis was a test of judgement for the Conservatives.
It was a test they failed at every turn.
Every step to limit the severity of this recession and the damage to families, they opposed.
When the crisis began in the global mortgage markets, they thought the answer was less regulation, not more.
When we stepped in to save Northern Rock “ protecting the savings of millions “ they wanted to leave it all to the markets.
When we acted to prevent the widespread collapse of the banks, they protested we were wasting money.
As the financial crisis turned into the deepest global recession since the 1930s, they alone said we should do nothing to support the economy.
At every stage, the Tories have misunderstood the causes of the crisis. Underestimated its severity. And opposed the measures to limit its impact.
And why did they get it wrong? Because the natural response of the Tories is always to step back, not step in.
In this party, we believe it is our responsibility to make a difference, to help people help themselves.
People sometimes talk about the invisible hand of the market, but the last year has underlined how it must go alongside the enabling hand of government.
The Tories in their hearts believe the answer is always for the government to do less, leaving people to fend for themselves.
So just as the support we have put in place is getting the economy back on its feet, they want to withdraw this helping hand.
Having just come back from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, I can tell you that no other government is following their lead.
Whether right or left, in Beijing or Berlin, they know that withdrawing support before recovery is secured risks plunging us back into recession.
We can“t sit back and relax.
Many businesses and families are still struggling to keep their heads above water.
If we followed the Tory route now recovery would be put at risk, prospects for growth damaged, borrowing would, in the long-run, be greater.
We cannot - must not - let that happen.
And we cannot - must not - repeat their mistakes of the 80s and 90s when short-term job-loss became long-term unemployment for a whole generation.
The result was the scandalous loss of potential and talent “ and a huge welfare bill for the country.
And why? Again a deliberate choice by a Tory party to step aside and let people sink or swim.
It is why a key priority for us has been, and remains, to help people off welfare and into work.
And, of course, to make sure they were paid fairly, for the first time, through the minimum wage.
Introduced by this Government, and again opposed by the Tories.
The success of our approach was seen in record employment over the last decade.
And it continues to show its worth even as the global recession hits our economy.
Unemployment is rising here and across the world. Every job lost is a serious blow to that family.
But thanks to the support already in place, more than half of those who lose their jobs come off Job-Seekers Allowance within three months, and almost three-quarters within six months.
Since November, we have helped over two and half million people leave the claimant count.
It explains why unemployment here, although too high, is lower than in the euro area and in America.
But even when we begin to see growth in the economy again, unemployment is likely to keep rising for some time.
It is not within the power of any Government to protect every job.
But we believe it is our responsibility to support people in every way possible to find new employment.
To stop help now “ as the Tories want “ would be callous and counter-productive.
So rather than stepping back, we have stepped up our efforts.
Investing £5bn to provide high quality assistance and advice to those who have lost their jobs.
A guarantee for 18 to 24 year-olds of work or training “ already 47,000 jobs have been agreed for take-up when needed.
A guarantee, too, for every school leaver of a college place or apprenticeship.
The difficult decisions we have taken “ the choices we have made “ have been driven by our belief in what Government can do, and our values of opportunity and social justice.
Yes, debt has risen.
Not just here, but across the world, as tax revenues have fallen as the global recession takes hold.
But had we not borrowed, we would have made a very difficult situation far worse.
The recession would have turned into depression, and debt would have been more, not less.
And this increased debt would be spent not in supporting jobs and families now but on long-term welfare bills.
It would have been irresponsible to walk away when the economic shock waves hit our country.
It will be equally irresponsible, once recovery is secured, not to take tough action so we can live within our means.
I welcome the chance of a mature debate on how we achieve this goal “ even if it is hard to see the Shadow Chancellor playing much part.
There has, after all, been little that is grown-up about his performance so far.
And again, this country and this Government have set the lead “ the first to set out firm plans to put our finances on a sustainable footing.
In the Budget, I laid out how we will halve the deficit over four years.
We are raising revenue by removing unfair pensions relief for higher earners.
And raising the top rate of tax for the very highest incomes.
Because it is right that those who earn the most should shoulder the biggest burden.
And to make sure people can“t avoid paying their fair share, we and other countries are cracking down on offshore tax havens.
We“ve already demanded details of over 100,000 offshore accounts.
And this will mean billions of extra unpaid tax returning to our country, with an expected £1bn from our agreement with Lichtenstein alone.
In contrast, what are the Tories doing? What“s their priority? Their priority is to cut inheritance tax for some of the richest families in the nation.
This cannot be the priority at a time like this.
But the steps we“ve taken to raise revenue are not enough.
In order to get borrowing down, spending will have to be tighter in the years ahead, against a background where public investment has tripled over the past decade.
I believe the public understand that difficult decisions will be needed.
The public know that adjusting to this new reality won“t be quick, it won“t be easy
They are right. But this makes it even more important that these difficult decisions are taken for the right reasons.
For just as there was a choice over tackling the recession and helping the recovery, so there is on public spending.
A choice between a Labour Government which believes passionately that front-line public services are vital to support everyone to meet their ambitions.
And a Tory party which has reverted to type and is relishing the chance to swing the axe at the public services millions rely on.
Cuts driven by ideology “ not by what“s right for families and for the country.
We have already seen the damage such an approach inflicts on the fabric of our nation.
After 18 years of Tory neglect of our public services, the question was not whether every classroom had a computer, but whether every school had a proper roof.
In healthcare, the question for far too many was not whether you could get your operation in weeks, but whether you could get it at all.
A legacy of disdain and underinvestment, of shaming poverty among the young and old, a lack of hope among millions of families.
The result of a Tory party which deep down sees public services as essential only for those who have failed to do well enough to go private for their health care or education.
It was a legacy we have worked hard to put right.
Half a million children lifted out of poverty thanks to increased child benefit and tax credits.
Practical support for families through Sure Start Children“s Centres “ like the one I visited today.
The best ever exam results for our children.
Average time on an NHS waiting list down from 13 to just four weeks.
Helping families through support for childcare and dramatically improved maternity leave and pay.
We won“t put these improvements at risk. We intend to build on them.
Tighter spending doesn“t mean a return to the Tory dark ages.
It does mean a determination to cut waste, cut costs - and cut lower-priority budgets.
This will require difficult decisions.
I haven“t shirked them in the past, I won“t shirk them now.
We must keep the public finances on a sustainable path.
The long-term health of our economy depends on it.
That is why we will introduce a new Fiscal Responsibility Act to require that the Government reduces the budget deficit year on year, ensuring that the national debt remains sustainable in the medium term.
But we need to do that rationally, in a way that is right for the economy, not driven by dogma.
The Tories“ approach is wrong, is na?ve, and down right dangerous.
It will damage our economy now and in the future.
In the next few weeks, I will set out in the Pre-Budget Report how we will protect front-line public services, bring the deficit down, and invest in the country“s future.
We will invest to make our economy grow.
Growth is the best way of reducing debt, creating jobs, and raising living standards.
The low-carbon economy will create tens of thousands of new jobs.
But this won“t happen on its own “ government must work with business.
High-speed rail links will help us tackle climate change and boost our economy.
Again, they won“t happen without government support.
We need thousands of new homes for families “ we will work with the industry to ensure they are built.
We are world leaders in innovation and technology “ we will continue to invest, to harness this ingenuity and create new industries and new jobs.
Extending opportunities to all, removing the barriers which stop people playing their full role in our economy and society.
Fairness, opportunity and responsibility will underpin everything we do.
The last 12 months, more than any time in recent history, has demonstrated the difference Government can make.
The Tories have been wrong on tackling the recession. They are wrong on how to ensure recovery. And they will make the wrong decisions on our public services.
They are wrong because on every question, the Tory answer is to step back, to walk away, to leave people on their own.
So that will be the choice in the next few months.
Maturity and experience against the politics of the playground.
Investment in the future against a return to the past.
I am proud of the difference we“ve made to this country over the past 12 years.
Proud of our judgement and determination over the last 12 months.
And we should be confident we can win the support of the country to keep taking Britain forward.
We have a good story to tell.
It“s time for all of us to go out and tell it.
Conference 2009 Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequor
Within months, the country faces a big choice. | <urn:uuid:8c4bc5af-a191-4645-8c75-361c9aa0b1bd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.totalpolitics.com/print/speeches/35083/conference-2009-speech-by-the-chancellor-of-the-exchequor.thtml | 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 | 0.963151 | 3,306 | 1.617188 | 2 |
For the past two years, Gary Conger has been painting portraits of the rooftop water towers (like the one above) that he sees from his apartment. According to his Web site:
The water towers in my neighborhood (Flatiron/Madison Park) represent an older New York, a city of smaller brick buildings and rooftops that offer living and playing space as well as the hardware needed to run the building. Views of these rooftops and water towers though are being blocked by the new glass towers rising up all around us.
An exhibition of his work, titled "Vanishing New York" (Hey Jeremiah!), is now on display at BooMA, the art gallery at the public relations firm M Booth & Associates, 300 Park Ave. South at 23rd Street, 12th floor. According to the Booth site, "BooMA (with affectionate apologies to MoMA) is one of very few art collections mounted in the halls of New York City public relations firms."
Bowery Boogie has a nice post from last month on water towers. Jeremiah also has some thoughts on water towers. As he wrote, "I think of the iconic wooden water tanks as lovely anachronisms, symbols of the old New York that is rapidly vanishing." | <urn:uuid:965d2fee-476e-4f31-bc06-fe690a111bbb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://evgrieve.com/2008/10/all-along-water-towers.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98334 | 254 | 1.578125 | 2 |
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