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Doughnut Jimmy wrote:Any chance of a link to the article Oldlibrarian?
Clip from documentary
Jan Van Quirm wrote:Hmmm!
Not convinced with either of those although the case for Jupiter/TLTW&TW; Mars/Prince Caspian; Sun/Dawn Treader and Moon/Silver Chair have their attractions, but what about the other 'stand alone' stories of which we only get Mercury was it for Horse and his Boy (also the Mare and her Girl), but we'll skip the gender prejudices since they're of their time and at least the ladies (Hwin and Aravis) got virtual equal billing, though obviously Shasta and Bree are the leads in that.
Despite what's being said in there about Tolkien being dismissive of Narnia, he and Lewis were very good friends before, during and after Lewis wrote the 7 books and in fact Lewis was more famous than Tolkien at the time (The Hobbit had some success after it's publication but LotR didn't have much mainstream success until George Unwin brought out the late 60's paperback). What Lewis and Tolks did have was a friendly rivalry and they constantly challenged each other's techniques which did lead them both into some of their finest writing. But in Lewis' case this was actually The Cosmic Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra and That Hideous Strength) which of course also had the good/evil theme but I'd say had far more identification with an astronomic/astrological approach than Narnia. For a start the first 2 were respectively set on Mars and then Venus.
This insight into Lewis' literary motifs is fairly misleading as well. There's an awful lot known about both Lewis and Tolkien in relation to their academic circle's club, known as The Inklings, in which neither of them were the most successful commercially for quite a long time. They both had a fondness for myth and medievalism and together they defined the processes of 'mythopoeic' writing - that is in inventing a fictional myth-based world. That interest has obvious bearings on both Narnia and Tolkien's Middle Earth but it also led to a bet between the two academics to write a commercial book about space travel and time travel. They flipped a coin I think and Tolks got time and Lewis got space. Of the two Lewis was more faithful to the basis of the bet but Tolkien's lure to archaic myth led to the formation of Middle Earth and the rest, as they say, is history.
My final argument on Lewis and Narnia remains unchanged whether or not the planetary themes a goer or not. This means nothing to the writing which in Narnia's case hasn't stood the test of time as a children's book. I loved the books when I was 8 and I liked the imagery of the more profound ones as I went into double figures - I thought they were sophisticated and grown up. And then I read Tolkien and found the passion and the depth that Lewis never had. Tolkien was the better writer no question of that in my mind.
I think Lewis' literature was the more adventurous and compelling conceptually and I wonder what would have happened if he'd met Joy Gresham before he'd written the Narnia books - the main problem with them looking back as an adult is that Lewis wasn't a father and had had a very unhappy childhood. Tolkien had 6 kids and he wrote The Hobbit and less well-known books for them...
SimStars13 wrote:I've always loved the Narnia books, although they get dreary after repeated readings I never really thought about the religious stuff that much.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests | <urn:uuid:53b53c4f-db79-45c2-a3fa-bef67e4b962a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1700&p=257645 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987346 | 760 | 1.640625 | 2 |
From the gold rush days up until recently, California was seen as the “Golden State,” full of endless economic opportunity. The California economy is now the laughing stock of the country. The current economic climate in California is so gloomy that businesses continue to leave for other states at record pace. Going with them are the thousands of good paying jobs that should stay in California. Businesses that choose to stay are faced with increased regulations and tax burdens, causing them to make tough decisions like laying off employees or closing up shop for good.
On the Modesto City Council, I sought out ways to increase investment in the community, and partnered with business leaders in Modesto’s manufacturing industry to establish an Economic Capacity Bank, which will bring new business and create new jobs in Modesto.
I promise to continue to fight to create an environment that will attract businesses back to California, increase the number of jobs in the Central Valley and stimulate the economy. Small business is the driving force behind our economy, not big government interference. I will pursue policies that promote business growth and investment, and I will oppose policies that hinder it.
I want a California that I can be proud to call home and that will provide future business and economic opportunities for my children when they grow into adulthood. | <urn:uuid:dd859368-2410-4fc9-9565-cc2cf2298b76> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kristinolsen.org/issues/economy-and-jobs?_c=10l84yc7kbd5319 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957417 | 259 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Hi Tony, There are two (other) BBC related radio programmes on computers & technology that I know of. One is called iPM, (sharing what we know), and is put out weekly on Saturday evenings after either 6.00 or 6.30 hours, on the BBC Radio 4 (Web site). (It is also available ad a podcast. (iPM - Interactive Pm? - being a substitute for their 'PM' during the week, perhaps. I think it's re-broadcast on some BBC local stations such as Radio Wales, etc., but I can't promise that.) The other programme I'm familiar with is BBC World Service's Digital Planet, broadcast at various times on Monday, Tuesday and early Wednesday, also available as a downloadable podcast. I mention these in part because the BBC Click-On-Line programme is largely a TV/video experience, even over the Web. between the three of them, they cover much common ground. Thus, I listen to Digital Planet regularly whilst occasionally listening to iPM. I use the Click Online programme if a BBC technology article which interests me links to it. (Of course, I cannot do all of these things in the same or an approximately same time-frame!) There is even an NPR - WPR, World Public Radio - programme, actually) which produces a technollogy programme in part collaboration with BBC World, again as a podcast; and it's also a pretty good show. There's just loadza stuff out there. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Sweeney" <tonysweeney1@xxxxxxxxxx> To: "vics" <vicsireland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2008 11:37 PM Subject: [vicsireland] Click url www.bbcworld.com/click It is not the BBC url that possibly most of us might be used to! Tony. | <urn:uuid:455065e6-9f3a-43c2-9b20-c18ce0e5f6b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.freelists.org/post/vicsireland/Click-url-AND-TWO-OTHER-TECHNOLOGY-PROGRAMMES | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947003 | 387 | 1.617188 | 2 |
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Ruso and the Demented Doctor (edition 2008)
by Ruth Downie
References to this work on external resources.
Wikipedia in English
No descriptions found.
In the spring of the year 118, Gaius Petreius Ruso has been stationed in the Roman-occupied province of Britannia for nearly a year. After his long and reluctant investigation of the murders of a handful of local prostitutes, Ruso needs to get away, volunteering for a posting with the army in Britannia's deepest recesses. These hinterlands are the homeland of Ruso's slave, Tilla, who has scores of her own to settle there. Her tribespeople are fomenting a rebellion against Roman control, and her former lover is implicated in the grisly murder of a soldier. Ruso is appalled to find that Tilla is still spending time with the prime suspect. Worse, he is honor-bound to try to prove the man innocent--and the army wrong--by finding another culprit.
(summary from another edition)
Two editions of this book were published by Audible.com.
An edition of this book was published by Penguin Australia.
Is this you?
Become a LibraryThing Author. | <urn:uuid:0251355b-f8b9-4369-8a39-eaaa65b1ddb8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.librarything.com/work/4390023/92361419 | 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 | 0.94491 | 263 | 1.78125 | 2 |
And Mr. Bush's record? His Web site does not mention breast cancer once. Texas advocates on women's health issues say the governor's wife, Laura, has been great on the subject. One coalition of Texas women's groups says that 4 in 10 Texas women over age 50 have not had mammograms in the last two years and that Mr. Bush did not support one of its financing requests.
Not that either candidate's record is as much an issue as why politics and exploitation go together so often. Those of us with reason to know about the gravity of this disease find that most unfortunate. ''Breast cancer is a political issue, but this is not the place to endorse specific candidates,'' said Hillary Rutter, director of the Adelphi New York Statewide Breast Cancer Hotline and Support Program.
''We should be looking at candidates and fighting for things that are important -- access to treatment, research dollars, quality of care, patient confidentiality.''
Substance! Try making an engaging, 45-second attack ad out of that. | <urn:uuid:a421d100-198c-4c83-8d2d-79849e0be2de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/06/nyregion/metro-matters-exploiting-breast-cancer-for-politics.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962243 | 212 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Small business today generally refers to businesses generating under $3 million in annual sales. That's not so small to most people. And big business was small business at one time. The challenge is "how do you get there from here"? The financing community is about to get some real financial assistance-and it's called Factoring. Traditionally, start-ups use the Small Business Loan as seed capital, and this still remains the ideal, lowest risk choice. Once up and running however, the issues of cash flow, funding growth, dealing with seasonal slumps and the like, become the day to day issues that determine the financial stability and future potential of the company.
The present financing options available to serve these purposes are (1) traditional bank financing, and (2) additional private investment. Each of these options achieves the goal of providing funds to your business but as is always true, there are associated costs.
Bank financing has the nasty side effect of burdening your business with additional debt, not only capital repayment but additional debt by way of interest.
If the goal is to fund growth, taking on additional debt certainly takes a chunk out of the disposable funds available to finance that growth and affects the financial position of the company for years to come. The application process is long and cumbersome. The delay between the time of submission of the application to disbursement is substantial as well, putting extra constraints on the timing of your financing needs. And...what if traditional bank financing is not an option for you? In some cases, you may not be creditworthy, many have used up your available credit limit, or be in violation of debt/equity ratios.
The other common route is private investment. In these cases, the injection of capital is given in return for an equity interest in the business. There are a variety of forms this can take but suffice it to say, that the end result is a dilution of your equity in the company that you have built. While often a great choice for large corporations, the effects are more widely experienced in small companies, especially family run or owner operated businesses.
Diluting equity, or granting an ownership interest to an outside party generally waters down the value of all shares and creates a situation where one shareholder has a preferred status and priority in payment over the original investors. As well, it often creates a loss of control over the decision making processes depending on the clout of the private investor and the amount of money invested. These are serious hidden costs.
So, what now? You can't go to the bank because you are at your credit limit and you don't' want a private investor, but you just got this huge $10 million dollar deal and you need to build a warehouse. Well, there's a new financial hero to the rescue and its name is "Factoring". To say it's new is really a mistake since it has been around since the days of the Roman Empire. The United States factors 50 times as many transactions as Canada and over $1 trillion in sales is factored worldwide annually. In the United States, many banks even have factoring divisions. Some scandals in the United States have left factoring with a undeserved tarnished reputation. In fact, it is a champion of small business and an essential tool in the arsenal of financing options.
Factoring involves the sale of accounts receivable at a discount. Essentially, you sell the receivables that are due to you by your customers to a "factor", who discounts the value of them and pays you in advance. The discount depends on many factors but is generally between 3-6% for a pre-negotiated period of time and a fraction of that thereafter. In essence you are raising funds not on the basis of your creditworthiness but that of your customers. So you may not be able to get credit but as long as your customers are creditworthy you can leverage that to raise funds for your own business.
For example, you may do home stereo installations and work from your truck, but your customer could be Future Shop! BUT, here's the beauty, you have not created the extra burden of debt, nor have you diluted your equity. Yes, you have taken a hit up-front, but, the money did not come out of your pocket and is a cost of doing business. The important thing is that it allowed you to fulfill your main goal of getting financing in a timely manner and being able to take advantage of a growth opportunity that would have otherwise evaded you.
The same line of reasoning works for seasonal businesses who need to maintain a continual cash flow to fund operations. This is a great tool for that! Now, I must confess that I came upon this discovery because I have a client in this field, but sincerely (and morally), this is no sales pitch, it's an honest opinion, because the beauty of this little known source of financing was like a secret that was too good not to share.
The legalities of this financing are equally as simple. If bank financing is in place then all that is required is that the bank give up its first ranking security on the receivable being factored. The bank is generally amenable to as it still has security on everything else. The factor then takes the place of the bank on that receivable and takes security much in the same the bank would. Furthermore, because there are no interest charges on your money, none of the banking legislation is applicable, making the entire transaction simpler all around. The charges you pay are discount fees, the cost of having your money now and avoiding all the burdens of other methods of financing. Second mortgage anyone?
I think what you will find most surprising is that factoring is highly endorsed by financial professionals, including banks. It makes a lot of sense though that they should. Business clients have many needs and professionals, be it lawyers, accountants or bankers need to respond to them. Banks like that it keeps their clients financially afloat when they cannot help them. Small and medium businesses often fail because of short term cash flow problems, not because business is bad!
Traditional bank financing and private investment can never be replaced. They are the cornerstones of corporate finance. The problem is getting to the point where you can truly benefit from their value. Small business to medium, and medium to large, factoring is fulfilling an untapped niche in the financial industry.
While it takes a lot of (paper) work away from us lawyers, I am still all for it. I guess the secret's out of the bag! | <urn:uuid:53575399-aaae-45a9-acb4-dc2ae80320f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.franchise-info.ca/supply_chain/2012/08/innovations-in-small-business-financing-factoring.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972306 | 1,328 | 1.804688 | 2 |
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
July 17, 2001 |
Three weeks ago, veteran New Mexico educator Jesse L. Gonzales turned down the chance to be Compton's new schools superintendent, citing declining physical strength. On Monday, after a change of heart, Gonzales agreed to take over one of the most stressful education jobs in California. Gonzales, 63, will be the first locally appointed superintendent in Compton in eight years.
May 14, 2000 |
The border, for Velia Gandarilla, is a point on a sidewalk she strides across every school day as the sun starts to rise over the desert. "I don't see the difference going from one country to the other. Just going to school," says the 17-year-old who wakes up at home in Palomas, Mexico, but attends classes--and will graduate this month, a first in her family--in the United States. At 6:55 a.m., her styled hair still wet, her violin case in hand, Velia enters the U.S.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 8, 2000
Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo pondered long and hard on how to recover the National Autonomous University campus from student strikers outraged by a plan to increase tuition from two cents a year to $100 for those who could afford it. Zedillo had reason for pause. As a student in Mexico City in 1968 he felt the weight of the intolerant government of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who, unable to deal with a student protest, sent in his soldiers.
February 6, 2000 |
When students first went on strike last April to protest new fees at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, there was an air of righteous struggle for free education at public universities in this poor country. More than nine months later, as strikers at the barricades fight bloody skirmishes with students who want to go back to classes, that original lofty purpose is a fading memory.
March 13, 1999 |
Professor Socorro Marcos, a department head at Monterrey Technical Institute, was chatting recently with two postgraduate students. Julio Larios asked her to serve on his thesis committee, while Juan Carlos Cielo Flores had questions about a paper's final draft. During these discussions, Larios was in Honduras, Cielo Flores was at his office in Peru, and the professor never left her desk at the Monterrey Tech campus in this northern Mexican city.
November 29, 1993 |
Half the year, Ernesto Robledo puts on blue jeans and a T-shirt and walks about a mile to school, just like any other fifth-grader at Park Avenue School in Yuba City, Calif. The other six months, he dresses in the crimson sweater, white shirt and checked pants uniform of the Altamirano Grade School, six dirt blocks from his home here in central Mexico. | <urn:uuid:a80b1e62-35f9-4627-82f8-df793dffbe95> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/mexico-education | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954731 | 595 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Jae C. Hong/AP
Sen. Marco Rubio, Aug. 23, 2011.
Sen. Marco Rubio, Aug. 23, 2011. Jae C. Hong/AP
Sen. Marco Rubio blamed the news media Thursday for making too much of his differing versions of the story behind his parents' immigration from Cuba in the 1950s.
While the freshman senator from Florida acknowledged he might have gotten some dates wrong, he told reporters that his overall telling of the story was consistent. Rubio said:
... The story's the same one. Like I said, are there dates that are different, that we were wrong, because I didn't know. I mean, we're talking about things that happened 15 years before I was even born.
But, the bottom line is, the story is essentially the same one, and I think it's been blown way out of proportion by some people in the media.
Fact of the matter is, my parents came here from Cuba in search of a better life. And they always hoped to return to Cuba if they could, they tried, and they've been permanently separated from their homeland, which also makes them exiles. And it's shaped me.
Rubio has made his parents' immigration from Cuba an important part of his own political biography. But the differing versions of the story, some more dramatic than others, have caused some to question whether he has engaged in embellishment.
In one version of the story, Rubio's framing of the story left the impression that his parents fled into exile after Cuban dictator Fidel Castro swept into Havana from the Sierra Maestre mountains in 1959.
But Rubio backed away from that version after the Washington Post's Manuel Roif-Franzia reported that his parents had actually arrived in Florida in 1956.
In a statement on his Senate website in response to the Post story, Rubio indicated that his parents had intended to return to Cuba after the communist takeover. As support for that, he said his mother returned to the island with his older siblings in 1961.
But as NPR's David Welba reported earlier this week, in 2009 Rubio told All Things Considered co-host Robert Siegel that his mother returned to Cuba in 1961 to take care of her father who was in an accident.
Rubio added during that interview with Robert that the Cuban government refused to let his mother and brother return to the U.S. for nine months.
On the statement on his website, however, Rubio indicates that his mother and siblings returned to the U.S. after a month and gave no indication that the communists had impeded their exit.
Rubio had been a Republican rising star, frequently mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate. His Cuban-American background was seen as an important asset that could help the party appeal to Hispanic voters, many of whom have been turned off by the GOP's hard-line stance on illegal immigration.
But the discrepancies in his the details he's offered about his family's emigration from Cuba has raised questions about his political future. | <urn:uuid:65b7c576-26a4-46cf-a7bf-fe16d7cfcc3d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/10/27/141769392/rubio-accuses-media-of-excess-in-reporting-his-familys-cuba-story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98938 | 618 | 1.796875 | 2 |
December 09, 2002 Copyright © by United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
- Then Job answered and said:
- I have heard this sort of thing many times. Wearisome comforters are you all!
- Is there no end to windy words? Or what sickness have you that you speak on?
- I also could talk as you do, were you in my place. I could declaim over you, or wag my head at you;
- I could strengthen you with talk, or shake my head with silent lips.
- If I speak, this pain I have will not be checked; if I leave off, it will not depart from me.
- But now that I am exhausted and stunned, all my company has closed in on me.
- As a witness there rises up my traducer, speaking openly against me;
- I am the prey his wrath assails, he gnashes his teeth against me. My enemies lord it over me;
- their mouths are agape to bite me. They smite me on the cheek insultingly; they are all enlisted against me.
- God has given me over to the impious; into the clutches of the wicked he has cast me.
- I was in peace, but he dislodged me; he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces. He has set me up for a target;
- his arrows strike me from all directions, He pierces my sides without mercy, he pours out my gall upon the ground.
- He pierces me with thrust upon thrust; he attacks me like a warrior.
- I have fastened sackcloth over my skin, and have laid my brow in the dust.
- My face is inflamed with weeping and there is darkness over my eyes,
- Although my hands are free from violence, and my prayer is sincere.
- 1 O earth, cover not my blood, nor let my outcry come to rest!
- 2 Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and my spokesman is on high.
- My friends it is who wrong me; before God my eyes drop tears,
- That he may do justice for a mortal in his presence and decide between a man and his neighbor.
- For my years are numbered now, and I am on a journey from which I shall not return.
Table of Contents Previous Chapter Next Chapter
1 As the blood of those who were unjustly slain cries to heaven for vengeance (Genesis 4:10; Ezekiel 24:6-9), so Job's sufferings demand redress.
2 Witness: refers either to God or, more probably, to Job's prayer.
New American Bible Copyright © 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC. All rights reserved. Neither this work nor any part of it may be reproduced, distributed, performed or displayed in any medium, including electronic or digital, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
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For information: [email protected].
Priests for Life sponsored the first New York City-based "Face the Truth" tour on November 14, 2002. Joseph Scheidler, Founder and Director of the Pro-life Action League in Chicago, came to New York for the historic event, as did leaders from other parts of the country. Participants held signs showing the public what abortion looks like, and handed out fliers explaining what they were doing.
The Face the Truth tour was held in Staten Island in the morning and in Brooklyn at midday. This was the prelude to much longer tours that would take place in New York City in April. Fr. Frank Pavone, organizer of the event, said that from now on, seeing images of aborted children will be "a regular part of life in New York City, until the killing stops."
From April 1-10, 2003, Face the Truth was conducted at 28 different locations within the five boroughs of New York City. Activists from as far away as California and the state of Washington joined the Priests for Life staff for this daily public witness. A bus was hired for easy transportation to the various locations, and two days were spent in each borough.
Lives were saved, as at least seven women came up to participants at various stops to say that they were scheduled to have abortions, but changed their minds when they saw the images. (We ask those who are against the use of images to tell us what we should say to those moms, and to their children.)
Minds were changed, as people young and old thanked us for revealing the truth of what abortion is. Pro-life activists were encouraged everywhere we went.
Some people were angry that children would see the signs. The angriest ones, however, never had their children with them, and any children who did see the signs had very normal reactions. "Mommy, what did they do to that baby?" The "problem," of course, is not that children saw the signs, but that they saw through the empty rhetoric by which their pro-abortion parents mask this violence. | <urn:uuid:0dadab02-9a15-4a33-9988-b41fdd2b8c8b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.priestsforlife.org/library/document-print.aspx?ID=2165 | 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 | 0.988868 | 436 | 1.6875 | 2 |
- Last Updated: 9:54 AM, June 2, 2010
- Posted: 12:54 AM, June 2, 2010
DOUBLE TAKE Don't miss. Running time: 80 minutes. Not rated (nothing offensive). At Film Forum, West Houston and Varick streets.
Alfred Hitchcock's films and TV shows of the late 1950s and early '60s are examined in the context of the Cold War in the delightfully quirky quasi-documentary "Double Take," which is a lot more fun and less academic than it sounds.
Director Johan Grimonprez, a Belgian-born instructor at New York's School of Visual Arts, adroitly repurposes many of the witty introductions (written by James Allardice) that the filmmaker performed for his "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" TV series. The show made Hitch the best-known director in the world.
This collage of a film also includes unintentionally fascinating commercials from one of the show's sponsors, Folger's coffee. It also features clips from Hitchcock's films of the era such as his minimalist masterpiece "Psycho," which Hitchcock filmed using the crew from the TV series.
All this fantasy is intercut with newsreel and TV clips spanning a period roughly from Vice President Richard M. Nixon's "kitchen debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a US trade exhibition in Moscow to the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Perhaps the rarest clip shows Khrushchev and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro sledding in the Soviet Union.)
The film also has a fictional narrative thread referred to in the title.
While filming "The Birds" (his last classic film) in 1963, Hitchcock is called away from the set to take a phone call. Instead, he meets an older double of himself -- who claims to be the Alfred Hitchcock of 1980, the year of his death.
"If you meet your double, you should kill him," Hitchcock said more than once -- and doubles are a recurring theme in his films.
Hitchcock is portrayed in these new sequences principally by Ron Burrage, a former waiter turned professional Hitchcock impersonator who is briefly profiled.
Like the Master of Suspense's best films, "Double Take" (which makes great use of Bernard Herrmann's haunting "Psycho" score) is an intellectual puzzle that also works as a thoroughly accessible entertainment. | <urn:uuid:27481201-49e3-4b2a-8c7d-8edb0baaa19f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movies/cold_war_medley_of_greatest_hitch_B8d4QKWwvOnBFH5D9DIh1O | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954299 | 491 | 1.617188 | 2 |
By Bill Francis
Claire Smith is accustomed to working outside the status quo, so being the first female keynote speaker in the 22 years of the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture is par for the course.
Held at the different venues at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, the three-day event kicked off Wednesday afternoon with Smith’s keynote, titled “Race and Gender: Perspectives from the Press Box.” Smith is not only a female in a male- dominated field, but she’s also African-American.
Currently a news editor at ESPN who covered baseball for 27 years at the Hartford Courant, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Smith offered a unique perspective on the trails and tribulations she had to endure as a woman and a minority in her chosen field.
Honored for her writing numerous times over the years, Smith, a longstanding member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, admits that “being a woman and being African-American in the field of baseball writing remain somewhat unique and far too unusual in this day and age.”
Smith talked about being drawn to the field because of her mother’s love of Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson, who faced hardships as he crossed the big league color line in 1947.
“I knew of his story from the moment I could walk and talk, I think, because my mother, more so than my father, was a Jackie Robinson fan,” Smith said. “America was always represented as what is possible. She passed that on to me.
“I wanted to know as much as I could about sports. The older I got the more I wanted to know. I was able to dovetail this interest that never made me want to think about anything other than baseball.”
Smith would late joke about another Hall of Famer: “As Yogi Berra would say, Jackie (Robinson) - thanks for making this necessary.”
Encouraged by her mother’s love of Jackie Robinson (her father was a Willie Mays fan), Smith has always bled Dodger blue. So it should come as no surprise when visiting the Hall of Fame Plaque Gallery prior to her speech she made sure to check out the bronze likenesses of Robinson and Sandy Koufax.
Moving on to gender, Smith said that’s always been the more intriguing and difficult aspect of her life in baseball.
“It’s safe to say by the time I started covering baseball it wasn’t politically correct to show any kind of prejudice in terms of race in major league clubhouses,’ Smith said. “Not so much to show prejudice against women. It happened early, it happened often.”
Often the only women in a baseball clubhouse, Smith called it “tough, it really was tough.”
“I don’t believe there is a female writer of my generation who didn’t have a tale to tell that wouldn’t bring another female writer to tears because it was a very vulnerable place to be,” Smith added. “And often your male peers were so busy doing their job that they couldn’t interrupt their jobs and come to your aid.”
Smith then recalled her defining moment, her “tipping point,” came in the 1984 National League Championship Series between the Chicago Cubs and San Diego Padres when she was physically removed by players from the Padres clubhouse after Game One. While the situation was eventually resolved, thanks to Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, it left scars for a number of years.
But despite the hardships Smith suffered due only to the profession she chose, she told those in attendance to encourage their students, daughters, nieces and granddaughters to pursue sports writing as a career. Not only are there numerous opportunities with the Internet, but also it can be a very rewarding.
Bill Francis is a library associate for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. | <urn:uuid:4dda4386-4ca3-43d8-bb11-1598530c9c75> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://baseballhall.mlblogs.com/2010/06/02/breaking-barriers/?like=1&_wpnonce=1168c91a63 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976879 | 838 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Rules and forms
Society rules (150KB PDF): http://www.sca.org/officers/equestrian/pdf/equestrian_handbook.pdf
Available here in Word document format, or here in PDF format.
Lochac equestrian rules
All participants please remember Rule 1, from the Rules of the List as found in Corpora. Here it is:
"Each fighter, recognizing the possibilities of physical injury to himself or herself in such combat, shall assume unto himself or herself all risk and liability for harm suffered by means of such combat. Other participants shall likewise recognize the risks involved in their presence on or near the field of combat, and shall assume unto themselves the liabilities thereof."
The following are to be read as an addendum to the Society rules:
- An Equestrian marshal shall inspect all equestrian equipment for safety e.g. loose fitting, splinters, failed stitching etc. before use by participants.
- Lances/Spears must always be held vertically when on horseback, except when actually running at the target.
- Riders must provide written information on what to do/who is to take responsibility of their horse/equipment in the event of an accident which leaves them unable to take care of said horse/equipment. This information must be supplied on arrival at an event. The EqMIC must be aware of the location of and be able to access this information at all times.
- Authorization cards are valid for 4 years.
- Lochac Authorizations: These are the authorizations that are currently available in the Kingdom of Lochac. In all cases the KEO may deputize Equestrian Marshals to authorize individuals in the areas specified below.
- General Riding - A person with this authorization may participate in the following activities:
- General Riding
- Processions (or leading an unauthorized rider during a procession)
- Driving (harness). Driving is using harness and a cart/gig/chariot. A person with this authorization may participate in the following activities:
- Driven games with the passenger controlling weapons, driver controlling the horse.
- Driving or harness work to offer transportation solutions both people and/or gear.
- Mounted Games (Non-Contact) - A person with this authorization may participate in non-contact games such as but not limited to the following examples:
- Spear throwing - pig sticking/tent pegging
- Mounted Games (Contact) - two types, light and heavy
- Combat (heavy) - full body shots (human) using armour and weapon specifications as per the society equestrian handbook. No thrusting is permitted. Note that this is NOT SCA heavy armoured combat.
- Crest Combat (light) - only valid target is the crest - using weapons as per specifications in the society equestrian handbook.
- Mounted Archery
- A person with this authorization must be able to handle the bow safely while on the horse - the rider must ensure the horse is happy with the noise and action of a bow prior to competition.
- Must be able to display ability to control horse during competition when reins may not be available.
Recommendations and Notes
- Remember at all times that horses may kick or bit without warning.
- Nationally recognized approved safety helmets are recommended at all times when riding.
- It is highly recommended that all horses are vaccinated for Tetanus and Strangles. It is the owner/rider's responsibility to ensure that vaccination cards are easily available and/or presentable where required by law.
- Prior to the commencement of any games, protocol should be determined for what to do if an unhorsing occurs; this is the responsibility of the EqMIC. Ideally there should be one person to attend the horse, one person to attend the fallen rider, and one to attend the other rider (if applicable). A First-Aider shall liaise with the rider to assess their ability to continue. If a rider falls unconscious AT ANY TIME, the First Aid officer or the EqMIC have the authority to prohibit the rider from further participation in the event.
- Signage is not required as per the society rules III Event Requirements, B3(a), due to Lochac's affiliations with the SCA society, (SCAA and SCANZ).
- Horse archery should have both an Eq Marshal and an Archery marshal present during events.
- The EqMIC of an event should be made aware that a stallion will be present prior to or upon entry to an event; this will be the responsibility of the rider to convey.
- The lists officer will issue authorization cards for equestrians after receiving the appropriate paperwork and fee (where applicable).
New Zealand Specific
- Please note that New Zealand has an exemption from the Society BOD regarding Equestrian insurance as stated in Society rules. As such, Equestrian events in New Zealand are not required to obtain the Society insurance.
- Waviers are not signed in New Zealand, as notified by SCANZ. | <urn:uuid:419d5519-5a4f-4ea1-9400-8b465978665d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sca.org.nz/equestrian/rules-forms.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930893 | 1,053 | 1.5 | 2 |
What can YOU say in six sentences?
He could lie with facility, on his feet and ready to leap up into the endless Forest of Untruths, swinging from vine to vine like the lying monkey he is.
So one afternoon a few years back he's a tad bored and engineers a convo with a pal, so he can end it with the phrase cool beanz and then, pause, innocently ask if his amigo knows where the saying comes from.
His confident explanation: beaucoup bien was a French Canadian expression, a whole heap of wellness, so to say, and when the Cajuns hightailed it out of Acadia down to Loiusiana in the 1760s they took the phrase with them. And slang being slang, beaucoup bien became 'coup bien, which in turn was anglicized to cool beans by kids in the 50s and 60s. Then Generation X came along and changed the plural suffix to a 'z', which makes no sense at all but looks way edgy.
And if that ain't the truth, it might as well be. | <urn:uuid:bda625db-5a98-4375-b950-bec37a283158> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sixsentences.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2045283%3ABlogPost%3A577116&commentId=2045283%3AComment%3A577083&xg_source=activity | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968649 | 233 | 1.773438 | 2 |
- Posted March 21, 2011 by
District of Columbia
This iReport is part of an assignment:
What I Know: Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer’s Slide – Care and Support (Part 6)
Home Care or Institutional Care? How do you decide?
This choice can be a heart-wrenching experience. My wife told me that she knew Peggy did not want to be in an institution. Apparently, Peggy had told her, “If you take me to a place, I might as well die.” Personally, I think this is an unreasonable burden to place on a child. I don’t believe there is a one size fits all answer to this question.
I pointed out in an earlier article that we experienced a period of physical violence. This was primarily aimed at caregivers, but on one occasion I watched Peggy coax her little dog, which she loved dearly, to come close. When he did, she hit him hard enough to almost knock him over. That was totally unexpected. From that point on, we had to make sure that her pet was not the target of a violent outburst in addition to keeping ourselves safe.
This stage lasted over a year. From what we have heard, it does not occur with all dementia patients. But, it certainly occurs for some portion of them. During this time, I would often remind my wife to be careful to position herself such that she wouldn’t catch an elbow across her face. Peggy was certainly strong enough to cause pain and injury if she connected.
Looking back, I could imagine a family caring for an Alzheimer’s patient for some time, placing the individual into an institution if the situation became too dangerous, and eventually bringing the patient back to the home when the violent period had passed.
We reached a period where I thought keeping Peggy in our home was too dangerous. My wife and I discussed it and she convinced me that she was capable of staying safe. We successfully passed the violent stage without major incidents so I must admit that she was correct. Still, I would recommend that home caregivers carefully consider this point.
I would also recommend that home caregivers take advantage of support groups. It is one thing to read about Alzheimer’s care here or elsewhere. It is quite another thing to be able to interact with other people facing the same issues. In some cases, people remodeled their homes to allow wheelchairs to pass through narrow doorways. Others may have converted bathrooms into handicapped facilities. Issues such as eating, sleeping, bathing, and caregiver breaks were discussed.
The common thread for all was that the Alzheimer’s victim was sliding back towards becoming an infant, totally reliant on caregivers for their wellbeing. Beyond the decline, conditions for one patient might be quite different than the conditions for another patient. One might be totally unable to walk. Another might be so large that the caregivers had real difficultly with bathing and other functions.
Alzheimer’s patients are scared. They cannot understand what is happening to them. They can’t find the words to express their fears. They don’t remember how to use a fork or spoon. They don’t understand that medicines are intended to help them. They sure don’t understand why they have to lose their dignity and let someone bathe them and clean them after using the bathroom. It is hard to comprehend what thoughts are passing through their minds. So, when you make a decision to place someone in an institution or keep them at home, here are some things to keep in mind.
First and foremost – can home caregivers remain safe? Next, will an institution track intake of food and fluids? Will the institution ensure medicines are taken? In discussions with other families, we learned that some institutions take the attitude that if a patient does not take an offered drink or medication, that is the patient’s right. I would agree that this is the right of any patient who is capable of making such decisions. I don’t think anyone would believe that all you have to do is place food and drink in front of an infant and let him/her fend for his/her self. If you are planning on using an institution, make sure you agree with how they are going to handle this situation. How much time will the patient be stimulated by interaction with others each day? We have visited facilities and noted that many patients are simply left sitting in chairs near their rooms or in community areas, but for much of the time, there is nothing to stimulate them. If a patient can no longer use the bathroom alone, how often will she/he be helped? You don’t want someone laying in bed or sitting in a wheelchair for hours waiting to have a dirty diaper changed. Each worker in an institution will need to interact with a number of patients. Understandably, they can’t devote the whole day to dealing with one patient so they try to place the patients on the worker’s schedules. Of course, you need to consider cost differences.
All I can recommend is that you do your research, consider the issues that are relevant to your specific situation, and then make the best decision that you can.
How often do you need to see the doctor will be discussed in the next part. | <urn:uuid:2862cf56-9e25-4db5-aff3-2a2c09dffff2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-577478 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977667 | 1,083 | 1.796875 | 2 |
What Individuals and Businesses Need to Know About the American Taxpayer Relief Act
On January 2, President Barack Obama signed into law the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, H.R. 8 (ATRA), preserving many of the key tax provisions passed during the George W. Bush presidency, which were scheduled to...more
2012 Tax Act -
The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (the “Act”) was signed into law on January 1, 2013 to avert the tax law changes that were one part of the “fiscal cliff” facing our country’s economy (the other...more
On January 1, 2013, Congress passed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (the “Act”), which halts tax increases scheduled to go into effect for most Americans as part of the so-called fiscal cliff. The Act generally...more
JD Supra gets your content noticed, increases your visibility and makes your marketing efforts hassle free...
Learn More or Schedule a demo | <urn:uuid:51c8e07c-9618-4a83-9fbe-db31ca030cd7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jdsupra.com/topics/dividends/affordable-care-act/income-taxes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963278 | 208 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Al-Jazeera’s Ramallah Office Reopens
The Ramallah office of the Qatari satellite television channel, al-Jazeera, reopened Friday, two days after Palestinian security forces shut it down, said the channel Saturday.
The channel said the reopening came after Palestinian President Yasser Arafat received members of the channel’s team and law maker Hanan Ashrawi.
The Palestinian Authority had closed al-Jazeera's office allegedly because it broadcast previews for a documentary on Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon that included a shot of an Arafat opponent dangling a shoe over a portrait of him, a sign of disrespect.
The Palestinians' action sought "to change the tone of a television program by resorting to force, something all free media reject," al-Jazeera said in a statement Wednesday.
The statement added: "Al-Jazeera will never under any circumstance stop covering the Palestinian cause."
Al-Jazeera, founded in 1996 shortly after Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani took power, has become immensely popular in the Arab world for its frank coverage of social and political issues – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com) | <urn:uuid:7b0ea475-adeb-4402-9282-e4c4b6ecd141> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.albawaba.com/news/al-jazeera%E2%80%99s-ramallah-office-reopens?quicktabs_accordion=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938964 | 256 | 1.515625 | 2 |
RANCHO CUCAMONGA--The Rancho Cucamonga Fire District has begun the process to find architectural services for a new training center for Jersey Station, just southwest of Milliken and Jersey avenues.
The Fire District is preparing to issue a request for proposal from area firms. The services are budgeted at $500,000 for fiscal year 2012-2013. Additional costs have yet to be determined.
Cost figures for the architectural services will be rolled into next year's budget, with planning anticipated to begin in the next fiscal year, Bell said.
Preliminary ideas for design features of the training center include a five-story high tower, and several adjoining structures called "annexes" to simulate other architectural features firefighters may encounter in the field, said Deputy Chief Don Cloughsey, who manages fire fighter training.
A conservative estimate for completion of the structure may be about five years from now, Bell said.
"We would like it to be open no later than 2017 or 2018, that would be our goal," Chief Bell said. Jersey station currently has a training area, utilizing "sets" and props made out of large shipping containers to simulate various fire and emergency scenarios.
Plans for a more permanent structure, utilizing architecturally planned features to better simulate actual architectural features and environments, have long been in the works. A training center was part of original plans for the station, which were drawn up in 1989. Jersey station
Other plans include new classrooms, and a new emergency operating center that the fire department can use in a major emergency, and can serve as a back up emergency operating center to the one located at city hall.
The fire station opened a new fire station on Hellman Avenue last year at a cost of about $4 million.
For more stories and videos from Rancho Cucamonga, please visit @RanchoNow on Facebook and Twitter, and www.dailybulletin.com | <urn:uuid:0d30b752-91e9-496d-8e44-53d61d859d61> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailybulletin.com/lakers/ci_22532251/rancho-cucamonga-fire-district-hire-architect-training-center | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955669 | 397 | 1.570313 | 2 |
The steady erosion of newspaper circulations naturally has led many to predict that the printed ad circular is not much long for this world and will quickly disappear as consumers demand more digitized ads and coupons. Last year, the Associated Press, along with 32 other publishers and 30 retailers, launched iCircular to help stave off declining ad revenue. Even Google has jumped into the fray with the launch of Google Circulars, a service that creates digital versions of full-page print inserts normally found in newspapers, with the goal of “trying to get online visitors into [offline] stores.” From the stark decline in demand for print publications, it appears that printed circulars are well on their way to extinction…or are they?
On closer inspection, print circulars are not going the way of the dodo anytime soon and will actually play a vital role in the marketing mix for the foreseeable future. Because of print circulars’ overall ease of use for consumers, it still reigns as an effective marketing tool for retailers. Poring through inserts in the Sunday paper and in-store to find coupons and deals are still part of the shopping ritual ingrained into the consumer psyche over generations.
This is the case overseas as well. In a recent The Times article*, J Sainsbury, Britain’s third largest grocer, vowed that printed, in-store coupons are “here to stay.” Chief Executive Justin King emphasized that coupons have been a key factor in Sainsbury’s efforts to change its reputation as a pricey supermarket fit only for wealthy customers.
That’s not to say that digital will not inexorably rise to the top as the go-to marketing medium for retailers. Millenials in particular are most likely to view a store’s website on a PC, and are more likely than other demographics to use a social media website or smartphone as an alternative to the paper circular, according to a December Nielsen study.
However, the transition of circulars to all forms of digital media will be much more gradual as retailers continue to experiment and learn what works and what doesn’t. Print and digital will work together harmoniously, syncing brand messaging for more targeted, omnichannel marketing efforts. Segmentation and personalization will play much larger roles in this environment.
Despite retailers’ forward-looking strategies relying heavily on digital circulars – via email, website, mobile, etc. – printed circulars are still experiencing very significant usage. Last month, the Newspaper Association of American (NAA) released a report (conducted by an independent research firm) which revealed that 73% of Internet users had read printed advertising circulars within the previous 30 days. In fact, 48% of all the respondents preferred printed circulars overall, citing various reasons such as “easier to use,” “can scan more quickly,” and “easier to deal with coupons.” Only 25% preferred online circulars while the remaining 28% had no preference.
The Nielsen study showed that 70% of shoppers have expressed a desire to have their circulars delivered digitally in some form. However, only 18% of shoppers have ever used a smartphone to find what’s available in-store and only 33% have accessed that information on a tablet device. In contrast, 90% of shoppers still want paper delivery.
With this in mind, retailers are currently challenged to not only develop circulars across traditional and digital channels, but to tailor each type of circular to keep brand messaging consistent. Segmentation and personalization are significant trends in the creation of circulars, which can now be highly targeted when they are distributed via direct mail and e-mail. Variable data design and production tools (VDPs) enable marketers to create highly personalized messaging by merging data, text and imagery based on customer history or segment. This results in auto-populated email templates, custom web pages and trackable URLs/QR codes for each customer and personalized direct mail books.
Based on what we have seen while working with retailers, managing circulars production to fulfill multi-channel, personalized environments is increasingly cumbersome and time-consuming. Decisions must be made about product inclusion and pricing; content needs to be gathered from multiple sources; co-op funding needs to be agreed upon with partners and complex approvals need to be managed.
Reviewing and approving drafted circulars alone requires a great deal of coordination - from development of the artwork; to distributing proofs to various teams of reviewers; to gathering feedback; to coordinating revisions and gaining final approval – across print, email, web, and mobile campaigns. Many retailers are now deploying special workflow tools to manage this complexity and deliver circulars on time. ProofHQ is just one such tool. We’ve helped retailers to manage this process to deliver these assets quicker than previous methods, mainly hard copy and email-based proofing.
So while much has been made of the transition to digital circulars, retailers cannot deny consumers’ overall attachment to their traditional printed counterparts. Print will still be the bread-and-butter promotional tool, while digital slowly gains more traction. Retailers should continue to be proactive and include print as an integral tool in multichannel marketing campaigns, reaching customers when and how they want to be reached.
About the Author
Mat Atkinson is the founder and CEO of ProofHQ, an online proofing solution helping marketing teams deliver projects faster and more efficiently. ProofHQ is used by thousands of companies across the world, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to freelance designers. Before ProofHQ, Atkinson founded Mtivity, a software company providing workflow and automation solutions for enterprise marketing teams and print service providers.
*“Grocers put their faith in coupons as shoppers go back to basics”
May 9, 2012
Article is available with subscription | <urn:uuid:05897b29-3c9f-4949-92c7-dd6e161172c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.retailingtoday.com/print/298616 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946541 | 1,195 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Thankfully, the clash between Washington and Beijing over the downing of a US reconnaissance plane off Hainan Island never spiraled out of control like the Chinese jet that buzzed the EP-3E. On Whidbey Island, Washington, where the US crew is based, people broke out the yellow ribbons, but Administration spokespeople carefully avoided the term "hostage." Although George W. Bush jumped out of the blocks with harsh words that sounded like leftover campaign rhetoric, he commendably cooled it, silenced his hawks and gave diplomacy a chance.
The successful resolution of the spy plane impasse underscores an important principle: Diplomacy must be paramount in the contentious US relationship with China, whether it is a question of releasing detainees, easing tensions in the Taiwan Strait or confronting the Chinese on workers' rights.
What does not augur well for future diplomacy is the rising chorus of demands to punish the Chinese. A series of flash points in US-China relations loom--arms sales to Taiwan, most-favored-nation status, Beijing's bid for the Olympic Games, missile defense systems. The Pentagoners in search of a reliable threat and the conservatives who cast China as the new communist Antichrist are agitating to sanction, contain and undermine the regime (see Michael T. Klare, "'Congagement' With China?" April 30).
A reckless Chinese pilot may well have been at fault in the spy plane collision, but that's not the main point. The incident illustrates the larger danger of increasing military confrontations impelled by both sides. Conservative commentator Edward Luttwak writes in the Los Angeles Times that in the Clinton Administration's waning days, Adm. Dennis Blair, commander in chief of US forces in the Pacific, accelerated electronic intelligence flights on his own initiative. And when the US plane was downed, Blair proposed that the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk sail toward the Chinese coast; this was fortunately rejected as too provocative. Such actions point up the danger of military-driven policy replacing civilian control. China is not a military power and won't be for another decade, so why play into the hands of Chinese army hawks with more US intelligence flights or advanced arms sales to Taiwan?
China and the United States must work to reduce military confrontations. They should move away from bilateral slanging matches and toward greater use of multilateral regional forums. Unilaterally, the United States should ground the intelligence planes. We do need intelligence about China--but not the kind gathered by spy planes. We need a better understanding of the strains and struggles within the Chinese government. We need to understand public opinion, such as that expressed on the Internet (where anti-American feelings are vented these days), which can influence the leadership. We need more exchanges--not just military to military but people to people, institute to institute--to weave a wider web of understanding and respect between the two nations. (China's arrest of three Chinese-American scholars is a setback to such exchanges. The arrests, like right-wing demagogy about Chinese espionage in this country, only fuel distrust.)
Similarly, the next shopping cart of arms for Taiwan should not include Aegis-equipped destroyers or other advanced weapons that might encourage a precipitate move toward independence by Taiwan. The democratic government deserves continued US support in the international arena, but Washington should stick to the ambiguous one China, two China formula that has allowed both countries to gradually build deeper economic and political ties.
How the Bush Administration handles Taiwan and other issues in the weeks and months ahead will determine whether the Hainan Island incident will be remembered as a model for resolving US-China disputes or as the pretext that triggered an East Asian cold war and a nuclear arms race. | <urn:uuid:ef31b6a1-c717-446a-ac12-6f1a350ad9b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thenation.com/article/chinese-boxes | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934873 | 753 | 1.6875 | 2 |
When you cannot escape
Cos they’ve got it on tape
It’s “Legitimate Rape” to your credit
Now the system is broke,
Even GOP folk
Say you clearly misspoke when you said it
Still you must not lose face
With your radical base
You must keep them apace while you edit
Say you spoke off the cuff
But on rapists, you’re tough
Hope this whistle’s enough, and embed it.
But it’s out on the wire
And despite your desire
You have started a fire and you’ve fed it
Now, you miserable gent,
You begin your descent,
But your path only went where you led it.
You’ve likely heard already, about Rep. Todd Akin, who is the latest in a series of politicians and other abortion foes and clueless idiots to claim that rape (“legitimate rape”, that is) causes women’s reproductive systems to shut down, or emit a hormone, or otherwise actively prevent pregnancy from occurring. It’s a common enough myth that Planned Parenthood addresses it on their website:
I heard that a woman can’t get pregnant from being raped. Is that true?
No, it is not true. Women can and do get pregnant from rape. In fact, more than five percent of all rapes result in pregnancy. That is one reason why Planned Parenthood is fighting so hard to make it mandatory for emergency rooms across the country to offer emergency contraception to women who have been raped.
Emergency contraception can reduce the risk of pregnancy by 75 to 89 percent. More than 22,000 unwanted pregnancies a year could be prevented if all U.S. women who were raped were provided with emergency contraception.
A mixture of wishful thinking, Catholic school misinformation, and victim blaming (if she got pregnant, she must not have been legitimately raped), it’s a common enough belief that does not hold up to the slightest inquiry–but that does not stop it from flourishing. Confirmation bias works wonders–bad information that supports our world view is welcomed with open arms, while sound information that attacks it is fended off with all our ability. Akin “misspoke” (translation: got caught).
But what he said is what a sizable percentage of his base wants to hear, so he has to be careful in how he backs off. His “misstatement” was part of his “tough on crime” stance, wanting to punish rapists, but not punish the innocent babies. Presumably, when the microphones are off, he can even speak of punishing “legitimate” rapists, whom we can identify because they don’t actually create babies.
Note, though, in his concern for punishing rapists and protecting babies, which person has completely slipped beneath his radar. The woman is not even part of the formula. In backing off from his statement, Akin is forced to recognize half the population, and to express his “deep empathy” for them.
So deep is his empathy that it goes without saying. Apparently. At least, until someone points it out. | <urn:uuid:62c3ec8e-703b-40fb-b62d-269e1470d8e8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://freethoughtblogs.com/cuttlefish/2012/08/20/legitimate-pinheads/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964075 | 655 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Irrational approached - 1 Dec 2008By Bridget Farham
Today is World AIDS Day. Today, and for the rest of this month, the media will highlight one of the worst pandeimics that the world has seen. In today's newsletters there is an open letter by Helen Epstein to UNAIDS - a world body that is responsible for directing research into ways of halting this terrible scourge.
Sub-Saharan Africa has long born the brunt of this pandemic and many reasons have been put forward for this. But we keep coming back to one relatively simple fact - multiple concurrent partners - the subject of Epstein's letter. It is becoming more and more apparent that it is this single facet of African behaviour that is making prevention efforts fail.
I recently received an email from a colleague in Abidjan. He has given me permission to use it today.
"Last month I playfully went to take an HIV test. On the list that day were 82 of us. By evening the results came out. Only 15 had "HIV -Negative", 67 were HIV positive. Among the infected 67, 48 were women, and among these women, 37 were married ones. (Mine was negative anyway).
My new neighbour is a pretty 24-old undergraduate and mistress to a man whose wife is my long time friend (although the man hasn't seen me before). His mistress has two young lovers who come to pass the night in her place separately. Desperate to save my friend (wife to the man), I visited her and narrated what I've been seeing her husband do and the dangers she might be facing. This is what she said, " Kingsley don't worry, just leave him alone. I've got a boyfriend too."
HIV-AIDS is creeping freely in Abidjan."
We can only hope that UNAIDS takes note of both Epstein's letter and the evidence all around them. | <urn:uuid:46276ec4-2c3a-460c-a018-ef537a274be8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bizcommunity.com/EdsColumn/196/148/442.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981008 | 389 | 1.578125 | 2 |
According to a federal study, municipalities nationwide need more than $300 billion worth of upgrades to water and sewer systems over the next 20 years, including projects in our local counties. U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., says $29.7 billion worth of improvements is needed in New York state.
The data should come as no surprise. Localities have been lamenting the poor condition of infrastructure for years. Throughout our region, some sewer and water pipes are decades old and in need of replacement. The cost, however, makes many projects prohibitive, and localities end up doing patchwork repairs to get by.
Schumer points out an estimated $7.2 billion in sewer and water system repairs are needed in upstate New York.
Local counties need millions of dollars in water and sewer system repairs. According to data from Schumer's office, Fulton County needs $28.7 million for eight projects, Montgomery County needs $82.9 million for five projects, and Hamilton County needs $4.7 million for three projects.
Schumer's office cites needed projects in Caroga, Perth, Northampton, Mayfield, the town of Johnstown, the city and town of Amsterdam, Mohawk, the town of Florida, Speculator and Lake Pleasant. The cities of Gloversville and Johnstown have talked about the need for infrastructure work as well.
The federal and state governments cannot ignore the issue. Localities cannot afford to handle the costs on their own. The federal government, while bloated and lacking in spending restraint, nonetheless provides funding for necessary and worthwhile projects; infrastructure is one of them. Without dependable water and sewer services, industrial, commercial and residential growth suffers, affecting the economy and quality of life.
Schumer is fighting funding cuts for water and sewer repairs. We support efforts to maintain federal and state funding for these projects. | <urn:uuid:03f7acfb-9a48-43ca-bd00-007dfd330e47> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.leaderherald.com/page/content.detail/id/544641/Infrastructure-needs-attention.html?nav=5005 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947903 | 384 | 1.828125 | 2 |
David and the six hundred men with him came to the Besor Ravine, 1 Sam 30:9
David and his men went from mourning to action. They stopped missing what they lost and started thinking about what to do about it. They took the time to listen to the Lord and then made sure they were obedient to what He said.
When you’re at the end of the rope, you need to refocus from the pain to the promise. You need to know what the promise is and take the steps you can to move towards the promise.
There are two keys to help you refocus from the pain to promise. They are remembering prophetic promises and declaring the promises of Scripture.
Find out more at HopeInTransition.com | <urn:uuid:e78af219-7f33-4fee-adc1-4b14204ba5b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://revtrev.com/hope/hope-refocuses-from-the-pain-to-the-promise/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98359 | 153 | 1.578125 | 2 |
St Helier prepares plans to save key hospital services
St Helier Hospital is preparing alternative options for its long term future that would avoid the closure of its accident and emergency departments.
More than 40 doctors, nurses and other staff, from the hospital's trust,as well as local GPs, councillors, patients and representatives from other NHS organisations, met on Friday to discuss a plan to save the under-threat services at the hospital.
The meeting held in partnership with health think-tank The King’s Fund was organised in the wake of St George's Hospital withdrawing their bid to merge with St Helier earlier this year.
Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust must soon find an alternative financial plan that will allow it to meet the Government target of becoming a foundation trust by 2014.
The meeting took on greater significance after it emerged a string of vital services - including St Helier's children's ward, A&E and maternity services -were under threat as part of the NHS's Better Service, Better Value (BSBV) review.
The hospital is drawing up a plan that allows it to gain a financially sustainable future that includes the key services. Plans include looking at whether other NHS services could be brought onto the site to maximise the benefits to patients and improve efficiency, including GPs helping to assess patients that come to hospital.
Friday's seminar was the first in a series of planned meetings ahead of the hospital publishing a list of possible options for the long term future of St Helier by July.
The hospital wants the options on the table before the NHS SW London makes a decision on whether to move forward with its plans to axe the frontline service at St Helier by going out to public consultation.
Matthew Hopkins, Trust Chief Executive said: "The decision by St George’s not to ‘bid’ to merge with St Helier means we need to look at other options to ensure the hospital can continue to deliver the best and most efficient services for its patients and local people in the long term.
"We are facing tough financial times and need to think innovatively about what we can do to ensure our services are sustainable in the years to come.
"The recommendation put forward by the BSBV review (for the future of St Helier) is just one way of thinking and, importantly, it is still subject to a formal public consultation. As such, we continue to plan for all eventualities."
Paul Burstow, MP for Sutton Cheam said: "The BSBV review has put forward an option for the future of St Helier. However, I don’t believe it is in the best interest of local people, patients and the hospital’s staff.
"Therefore, it’s good to see the trust working with its own doctors and nurses, as well as local GPs, councillors, patient groups and NHS partners to find a better, more patient-centred long term option." | <urn:uuid:89a298df-1d97-4779-bc67-1030177884a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.suttonguardian.co.uk/news/9717684.St_Helier_prepares_plans_to_save_key_services/?ref=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955317 | 609 | 1.5 | 2 |
ied. "I'll meet you after school down by the boathouse."
"I'll be there," Bart answered. "Don't say anything to any of the others."
Sandy promised; and then the gong rang and the boys and girls hurried into the school. All that morning Bart was wondering what Sandy had to tell him. That it had to do with the dinner the nine intended to hold was his belief, but he did not see how the first-year lads had found out about it so soon.
"If they're up to any tricks," said Bart softly, "I think we can play two to their one. Let 'em try; it's all in the game."
"Let's go for a swim, Bart," proposed Ned, when school had been dismissed for the day. "Frank and Fenn are going."
"Where you going?" asked Bart.
"Up by the Riffles, of course," the "Riffles" being a place in the Still river where the boys frequently congregated. Near the Riffles, which were a series of shallow places in the stream, was the swimming hole and a little further up was a good place to fish.
"I'll meet you later," Bart replied. | <urn:uuid:a529fdcb-1a4b-4155-96b1-be5f1f5ba5ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://manybooks.net/titles/chapmanaetext06fkrss10.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.995632 | 261 | 1.6875 | 2 |
News tagged with hispanics
Costs to treat stroke are projected to more than double and the number of people having strokes may increase 20 percent by 2030, according to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association.
Cardiology May 22, 2013 | not rated yet | 0
The surgical management of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in U.S. hospitals varies widely depending on the race of the patient, according to a new study.
Cancer May 21, 2013 | not rated yet | 0
Massachusetts' healthcare reform didn't result in substantially more hospital use or higher costs, according to data presented at the American Heart Association's Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Scientific Sessions ...
Health May 16, 2013 | not rated yet | 0
(HealthDay)—For U.S. children aged younger than 18 years, the prevalence of allergies increased from 1997 to 2011, with age, race/ethnicity, and income all affecting the prevalence, according to a May data ...
Immunology May 03, 2013 | not rated yet | 1
(HealthDay)—The number of testicular cancer cases continues to climb slowly but steadily in the United States, according to new research.
Cancer May 03, 2013 | 3 / 5 (2) | 0
The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans climbed a startling 28 percent in a decade, a period that included the recession and the mortgage crisis, the government reported Thursday.
Psychology & Psychiatry May 02, 2013 | 5 / 5 (1) | 1
(HealthDay)—English-acculturated and bicultural (high English and Spanish acculturation) Hispanic adults report lower engagement in skin cancer-related behaviors, according to a study published online April ...
Cancer Apr 18, 2013 | 5 / 5 (1) | 0
Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues analyzed national data to investigate the differences in cancer prevention beliefs by race and ethnicity. They found that minorities, including blacks, Asians and Hispanics, ...
Cancer Apr 17, 2013 | 5 / 5 (2) | 0
Pre-pregnancy body fat, in-pregnancy weight gain, gestational diabetes combine to increase risk of high birthweight
A new study shows that a woman's pre-pregnancy body fat (adiposity), in-pregnancy weight gain, and presence of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) can all combine to steeply increase the risk of giving birth to large-for-gestational ...
Diabetes Apr 09, 2013 | not rated yet | 0
(HealthDay)—The likelihood of diabetes in young adulthood is increased for those who are obese as adolescents and those with persistent obesity, compared to those with adult-onset obesity, according to ...
Diabetes Apr 05, 2013 | not rated yet | 0
Among kidney failure patients on dialysis, Hispanics tend to live the longest and Whites the shortest, with Blacks' survival time in between these two, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Jo ...
Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes Mar 28, 2013 | 5 / 5 (1) | 0
Effective health screening and preventive care is known to reduce health care costs and improve health outcomes, yet new research from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) shows that restrictive Medicaid policies ...
Health Mar 27, 2013 | not rated yet | 0
Pregnant women who experienced financial, emotional, or other personal stress in the year before their delivery had an increased chance of having a stillbirth, say researchers who conducted a National Institutes of Health ...
Obstetrics & gynaecology Mar 27, 2013 | not rated yet | 0 |
Cases of tuberculosis reached an all-time low in the United States last year, but the disease continued to affect minorities at much higher rates than whites, health authorities said Thursday.
Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes Mar 21, 2013 | not rated yet | 0
Humans have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes that carry instructions for assembling the proteins that do the work of cells. Work led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital found that children who inherit certain variations ...
Cancer Mar 19, 2013 | not rated yet | 0 |
Hispanic (Spanish: hispano, hispánico) is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Portugal, Andorra, Gibraltar and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term can mean a person of (usually) mixed race with a Spanish surname. As such, the term to many people in North America has lost its association with Spain and Portugal, and has become associated primarily with Latin America. This usage is viewed by some as incomplete since the term Hispanic has referred to Hispania (Iberian Pennisula: Modern Day Spain and Portugal) and its Hispanic inhabitants (The Spanish and Portuguese) for thousands of years. Currently many federal and/or state agencies have made this distinction, and presently include peoples of Spain (Spanish) and peoples of Portugal (Portuguese) in classifying Hispanics. However, while some individuals from Spain and Portugal classify themselves as Hispanic, others emphatically do not.
The term has also been used to denote the culture and people of Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas countries formerly ruled by the Spanish and Portuguese Empire, usually with a majority Hispanophone population. Collectively known as Hispanic America, this region includes Mexico, the majority of the Central and South American countries, and the Spanish-speaking island-nations of the Caribbean.
"Hispanic" is also used by people in the United States who are of Hispanic American origin (Hispanic and Latino Americans). Cultural elements (Spanish names, the Spanish language, Spanish customs, etc.) and people known as Hispanic can also be found in other areas that were formerly part of the Spanish or Portuguese Empire, such as in Equatorial Guinea in Africa or in the Spanish East Indies and Brazil (Portuguese in South America).
For more information about Hispanic, read the full article at
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. | <urn:uuid:8d92667a-cedc-4647-83dc-ef8f84cc73af> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://medicalxpress.com/tags/hispanics/sort/date/all/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953683 | 1,281 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Local hospitals rank well even as state sites score poorly overall
BY SHANNON MUCHMORE World Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
10/24/12 at 3:27 AM
Oklahoma hospitals have been performing worse than expected overall, although some individual hospitals in the state have good marks, according to a report released Tuesday.
The report from Healthgrades uses data hospitals report to the federal government to evaluate them in handling 28 common conditions and procedures, such as different surgeries or a heart attack.
Oklahoma as a whole ranked worse than average in most services. Some area hospitals, however, saw good news in the report.
St. Francis Hospital was found to be among the 100 best hospitals for critical care and orthopedic surgery care.
Hillcrest Medical Center was one of the top 100 hospitals in spine surgery, and St. John Medical Center received that distinction in joint replacement, according to data from Healthgrades.
Oklahoma performed worse than the national average in risk-adjusted mortality regarding heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia.
It performed better than the national average in total knee replacement, hip fracture treatment, and back and neck surgery.
People can use hospital quality information, such as the rankings from Healthgrades, to choose the best hospital for their needs, and hospitals can use the information to pinpoint best practices and see where they need to improve, said Dr. Peter Aran, senior vice president and chief medical officer at St. Francis.
Doctors and nurses who might be resistant to change can look at the data and see that they need to do something different, he said.
"When we share this information with them, they have to reflect on 'What can I do better?' " he said.
In addition to quality departments, all the hospitals in the St. Francis Health System have quality improvement councils that meet regularly and discuss what can be improved, Aran said.
Part of the reason Oklahoma ranks poorly in hospital quality measures is because patients in the region tend to be more unhealthy than average and to have more chronic health conditions, he said.
Also, fewer doctors and nurses are available to treat the growing patient load, Aran said.
"We have an uphill challenge that we're all grappling with," he said.
Original Print Headline: Hospitals' test results a mixed bag
Shannon Muchmore 918-581-8378
St. Francis Hospital nurse Debra Chadwick checks patient Gloria Bachman in the Critical Care Unit. St. Francis was ranked among the best 100 hospitals for critical care and orthopedic surgery care, according to a recent report. STEPHEN PINGRY/Tulsa World file | <urn:uuid:69e83471-2eaa-4110-8dc2-55660e33e27d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tulsaworld.com/site/printerfriendlystory.aspx?articleid=20121024_17_A8_CUTLIN612396 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949313 | 546 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Mrs Amy Frances Christy Jacobsohn (née Cohen)
Mrs Sidney Samuel Jacobsohn (Amy Frances Cohen) was born in London the daughter of Moreno Cohen and Alice Frances (nee Jones). Her father died when she was a baby and in the 1901 census she is listed at the District Infant Orphan Asylum in Wanstead, Essex.
She boarded the Titanic at Southampton as a second class passenger together with her husband Sidney Samuel Jacobsohn, mother and sister Juli. To reach their initial destination Montreal, Canada, they bought ticket number 243847 for £27.
Amy Frances Jacobsohn had suferred a miscarriage early in 1912 and it was decided that she and Sidney together with his mother in law and sister in law would holiday in California where Alices son farmed. It is unclear why they were travelling to Montreal first.
Mrs Jacobsohn survived the sinking. She was rescued by the Carpathia in lifeboat 12.
On the Carpathia she sent a telegram to her husband's parents:
Together with the Christys, she returned to England on board of the Megantic on 11 May 1912.
References and Sources
Michael Findlay (1998) Revised Passenger List in Judith Geller Titanic: Women and Children First. Haynes. ISBN 1 85260 594 4
Philip Hind (Editor)
Christopher Haviland, UK
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Titanic Passenger and Crew Summary
Name: Mrs Amy Frances Christy Jacobsohn
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Join our group on Facebook for the latest discoveries. | <urn:uuid:66274d0e-ccd6-458f-a530-0dd7eabe39e4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanic-survivor/amy-jacobsohn.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935444 | 348 | 1.679688 | 2 |
This week the Los Angeles Times's Web site carries the story "Kirk Douglas on the blacklist: Why Hollywood showed so little courage," referencing the actor's recently released memoir. The article also appears in today's Chicago Tribune print edition, titled "How Douglas took on blacklist with 'Spartacus.'" Author Patrick Goldstein reports Douglas is particularly proud of hiring former Communist and unrepentant member of the Hollywood Ten Dalton Trumbo to write the movie "Spartacus."
Several paragraphs into the piece, Goldstein writes:
Looking for headlines, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called a host of showbiz talent to testify about their associations, real or otherwise, with the Communist Party. Trumbo, in fact, was a member of the Communist Party from 1943 to 1948.
Goldstein, writing of Communist associations "real or imagined," then goes on to acknowledge Trumbo's party membership. He suggests the committee was merely looking for publicity, but the truth is that Communism was a significant problem in Hollywood and warranted investigation. Numerous members of the film industry confirmed Red penetration and one is quoted in the February, 2012 Los Angeles Times Magazine A Hollywood screenwriter testified that John Howard Lawson, another screenwriter and first president of the Screen Writers Guild, told students at a school for actors:
“It is your duty to further the class struggle by your performance. If you are nothing more than an extra wearing white flannels on a country-club veranda, do your best to appear decadent, do your best to appear to be a snob, do your best to create class antagonism.”
He would instruct writers: “Do not try to write an entire Communist picture. The producers will quickly identify it, and it will be killed by the front office. Try to get five minutes of the...party line in every script you write...If you can make the message come from the mouth of Gary Cooper or some other star who is unaware of what he is saying, by the time it is discovered, he is in New York, and a great deal of expense will be involved to bring him back and reshoot the scene.”
The magazine also quotes Paul Jarrico, screenwriter, movie producer and Communist Party member:
“Oh, we were certainly involved in efforts to affect the content of films,” says Jarrico. “We were wide-eyed about the possibility of writing movies that would affect millions and millions of viewers."
Asserting the House Committee on Un-American Activities was solely looking for headlines in its Hollywood investigations is a disservice to history. There's ample evidence that Communists and their minions actively worked on transmitting their views to unwitting audiences. | <urn:uuid:280ab677-a23a-4c4b-a3a7-7c85fbdab149> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newsbusters.org/print/56501 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966911 | 550 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Posts Tagged ‘steady job’
In today’s economy, the owners of a house in Toronto has become cheaper than ever. With interest rates low and falling prices is a good time to buy real estate in Toronto.
Interest rates are at their lowest point – was the lowest in the past 10 years and is still expected for next year (and then increase by 2 to 3% Even if the prices of owner now lower house, you take one. represented as attractive selection of hiring, with the bank, tighter restrictions on loans can be taken with the possibility of using these low interest rates is a challenge. If you are a buyer with a steady job and are a decent signal is the property a feasible and affordable if you can prove to the lender that you actually make the financial commitment.
In addition to the incredible interest, real estate more affordable than in the past two years. The average price of properties in downtown Toronto has been reduced by 10% last year. In February ’08, the average price was $ 522,480 and in February ’09 the average was $ 473,991. This change in the market now a great opportunity for buyers, especially those who could not residential property over the past two years. If you are a buyer for the first time at home, there is little incentive for government programs that can help to finance. Programs such as RRSP buyers plan and offer the first home buyers tax real property transfer cuts a bit ‘hand when it comes to costs and payment of closing.
At the market peak in 2007, it was not uncommon to see him to sell the property the day they were put on the market and see for other dwellings in a property. Today we see a lot less. For the first time in years we are currently experiencing a buyers market (excess inventory and offering buyers the advantage.) With a buyer’s market, homes on the market for a long period of time caused a collapse in prices. With the average number of days on the market in February ’09 in downtown Toronto is 43 days , buyers now have a real chance to compare prices and really think about buying. It is a buyers’ market for buyers and take advantage of this market.
Business Marketing Management, serving you develop your business and marketing strategy | <urn:uuid:47db3dd7-eb85-4231-908e-1166e15597c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lalupitaelsalvador.com/tag/steady-job/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977831 | 470 | 1.507813 | 2 |
"I want it now," the former Abilene mayor said in her keynote address at the Martin Luther King Jr. tribute.
But she learned that it takes patience, perseverance, courage, faith and other superlatives to make a difference.
Nearly 100 people gathered for the yearly celebration that was flavored by performances from young people, lively music and inspirational speeches.
Change doesn't necessarily occur because you attend a service like the one Sunday in north Salina, Bailey-Mason said, or sing in the choir.
"Embrace change, one encounter at a time," she said. "Be the agent of change."
Bailey-Mason was among a number of speakers who trained the focus on young people to carry on the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr., the beloved 1960s civil rights leader, whose 84th birthday was Tuesday.
Among them were Damion Cooper, a senior soccer and basketball player at Salina Central High School, whose interpretative praise dance earned a standing ovation at the service. Capt. Darius Bridgeman of St. John's Military School asked the audience to imagine a world without hate and judgment where anyone can become the person they want.
"Basically, we would have a perfect world, more or less," Bridgeman said.
While he acknowledged that we all make mistakes, pushing for improvement is important.
"My challenge to you is to remain hopeful and faithful ... don't take the most popular path," Bridgeman said, and make the world what we thought it was like when we were young.
"Love everyone," he said.
After singing in the 35-member MLK Community Choir, directed by Ramona Newsom, Alex Botz, a seventh-grader at Lakewood Middle School, closed the performance by saying, "You have the power to change the world. I dare you do it."
Youths are vital "to keep this thing going ... so you don't have to ride in the back of the bus," the Rev. Kerry Broadus Sr. of Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, of Salina, said in his closing prayer.
"I think it's wonderful when we have young people with the courage to stand in their truth," Bailey-Mason said in her address.
Songs carried several messages: "If I can help somebody along the way, then my living shall not be in vain," Sandy Beverly of the Salina Human Relations Department, sang from the podium.
The service concluded as Eleanor Jones and Newsom led the audience -- holding hands with arms folded -- while singing "We Shall Overcome," a song associated with the Civil Rights movement.
-- Reporter Tim Unruh can be reached at 822-1419 or by email at [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:4578e7f7-6288-4a9c-bc70-9ef1e911af48> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://salina.com/entertainment/story/mlk-service-12013 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971348 | 575 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Delegations from 46 countries are in the United States this week for a summit on nuclear security, but the foreign leaders in attendance are unlikely to let their time in Washington go by without raising other concerns. Here's a look at who's coming and what's on their agenda.
Who's coming: Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci
What they want: Counterterrorism help in North Africa. Obama's nuclear strategy hinges on keeping weapons out of the hands of terrorists -- something Algeria, where the terrorist group al Qaeda in the Maghreb is very active -- has historically been engaged in.
Who's coming: President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner
What they want: Ideally, U.S. support for Argentina's claim on the Falkland Islands. In reality, the Argentines will likely focus on following Chile's lead in drawing down their large stockpile of fissile material.
Who's coming: President Serzh Sargsyan
What they want: U.S. backing in the Turkish-Armenian rapproachement. President Sargysan will hold a rare bilateral meeting with Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama have been attempting to reconcile bitter adversaries Turkey and Armenia, relations between which grew further complicated in March after a U.S. congressional committee decided to label the World War I-era killing of Armenians a genocide over vociferous Turkish objections.
Who's coming: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
What they want: To be a major backer of Obama's nuclear policy. Australia has made eliminating chemical and nuclear weapons a foreign-relations priority. With the U.S. health-care vote postponing Obama's trip to the region and Rudd's own health-care debate bruising him domestically, Australia might just want some Obama love.
Who's coming: Prime Minister Yves Leterme
What they want: For Obama to stop snubbing the European Union. The Belgians take their leading role in the EU very seriously and lately, they have not been happy. In February, Obama decided not to attend a U.S.-EU summit in Madrid and this week he failed to invite a single EU representative to the signing of his new START agreement in Prague.
Who's coming: President Lula da Silva
What they want: R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Brazil wants to play a larger role on the international stage and will probably make a point by defending all countries' right to peaceful nuclear energy -- a reference to Iran's nuclear program. Lula has come out against a round of fresh sanctions against the Islamic Republic, arguing that such steps would only radicalize the regime. Although Brazil denies backing Iran outright, Iranian President Ahmadinejad came to Brazilia last year and Lula plans to visit Tehran in May.
Who's coming: Prime Minister Stephen Harper
What they want: A commemorative DVD of the Olympic gold medal-hockey match. Defense arrangements between Canada and the United States are already the closest in the world. Canada's involvement will be, for the most part, symbolic.
Who's coming: President Sebastián Piñera
What they want: To get some props. Chile just delivered the last of its highly enriched uranium to the United States last month, in line with Obama's push to recover the world's unsecured nuclear material. Piñera, who was just inaugurated in March, will also meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao to discuss bilateral trade. | <urn:uuid:e2ea971a-17a0-4251-8d0d-619db6a276a0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/09/guess_whos_coming_to_dinner | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945628 | 717 | 1.632813 | 2 |
When we first saw the wiring onCarina Vela, one question came to mind: "Does anything electrical work on this boat?" The mass of tangled wires that were led every which way around the cabin were corroded, cut, crimped, and some weren't even connected to the lights and batteries. The only thing that worked when we put the batteries in was the bilge pump (only on manual; the float switch wasn't wired correctly.) Literally nothing worked. This was our indication that we needed to rewire the entire boat. In the following weeks, we ripped out every piece of wire in the boat. When placed together, all of this useless wire took up an entire garbage barrel.
With 500 foot spools of red and black 14 guage tinned wire in hand, dad went to work roughing in the wiring. To make identification of the wire effortless, self-adhering wire labels were permanently laquered on. All of the wire was nicely concealed where possible (#114 doesn't have a head-liner) and was routed to 2 or 6 gang terminal blocks. To ensure that no corrosion was going to occur at the connections, terminal fittings were crimped to mil. spec and soldered. After being roughed in, all of the wiring was tightly bunched and hung with wire clamps.
The next problem was what to do with the antiquated fuse panel that came with Carina Vela. Seeing as every fuse was corroded, we quickly decided to buy a new panel. Custom ordered from Bass Electronics, the new panel had eight switches, each with an LED indicator light, and custom nameplates (these will not be installed until we attach all of the wiring to the panel). In the galley of the Alberg, there is a open section of about 20 by 10 inches behind the countertop. This is located a little off-center under the companionway and is about two feet from the engine. It was decided that the previous wiring being led through that hole, up the countertop and into the fuse panel looked very shoddy, and we wanted a cleaner appearance.
A box of the dimensions to fit that hole was made out of 1/2 inch ply-wood and painted with white Eurathane to match the projected appearance of the cabin. With this accomplished, four 1.25 inch holes were drilled through the bottom of the box to feed the wiring/ battery cables. For the front of the box, a piece of 1/2 inch teak plywood was cut to size. Using a jig-saw, we cut out the holes for the new electrical panel and the battery switch (we may also install the stereo in here). When the box is set into it's spot, it looks like an integral part of the boat, with the galley trim nicely wrapping around the base and the white nicely offset by the teak face. Before final installation, both sides of the teak face will be varnished for water resistance and aestetics.
Up in the v-berth, all of the wiring for the masthead light, spreader lights, and anchor light has been led to a six gang terminal block. Once the boat is uncovered in early April, we will install deck connectors for these lights. We have also roughed in new wire for the entire length of the mast, and will make all the connections when the weather gets better. As for cabin lighting, we are planning to buy a few low-profile lights for the v-berth which will be located under the shelving. Berth lights will be placed in the head and hanging locker, as well as in the main cabin. We are expecting to need approximately eight lights to provide ample light to the entire cabin. | <urn:uuid:e14c113b-e6e4-4d2d-b9b3-af400163bf0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://webspace.webring.com/people/oc/carinavela/rewiring.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97704 | 765 | 1.515625 | 2 |
CHICAGO — EPA Region 5 has awarded approximately $2.5 million to the National School Transportation Association (NSTA) to replace older school buses and install emission controls on others.
The funds are provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 National Clean Diesel Funding Assistance Program. Under this funding competition, EPA Region 5 received 81 grant applications. The awards were chosen to maximize economic impact — particularly job creation — and emissions reductions.
NSTA will provide for replacement of 98 older school buses in the fleets serving school districts in Milwaukee, Kenosha, Racine and Waukesha counties in Wisconsin, the addition of diesel particulate filters to 62 buses in Racine County, and the installation of 26 fuel-operated heaters on buses serving four school districts in Wright County, Minn.
The school bus contractors involved in the project are Dousman Transport, Riteway Bus Service, Durham School Services and M&M Bus Service. Cost-sharing contributions from those NSTA members will bring the total cost to more than $7.75 million.
The project is expected to preserve or create 119 jobs and to reduce pollution in the affected areas by 455 tons.
The Recovery Act allotted the National Clean Diesel Campaign a total of $300 million, of which the National Clean Diesel Funding Assistance Program received $156 million to fund competitive grants across the nation. | <urn:uuid:243c8333-2c6f-42a2-98ff-cade6190ec72> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.schoolbusfleet.com/Channel/Green-School-Bus/Articles/2009/09/EPA-awards-25M-to-NSTA-for-Midwest-projects.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940028 | 283 | 1.804688 | 2 |
This is a question of curiosity. I have a '98 Acura Integra, a cheap car stereo with a 3.5mm aux in, a cheap inverter and a smart phone. If I have the smart phone audio hooked up to the car stereo and the inverter charging the phone I get a high pitched tone through the speakers at around 4k RPM that increases in pitch with the RPM of the engine.
I know the solution is to not use the inverter, there is no reason to be doing that, but I'm curious why the pitch of the noise fluctuates with the engine RPM. Shouldn't the output of that DC outlet be mostly consistent? | <urn:uuid:9274c7be-fe0b-4005-b7d1-cc28f548b788> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/3435/noise-in-stereo-that-changes-pitch-with-engine-rpm/3440 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956462 | 136 | 1.75 | 2 |
Born in Argentina, Norbert Goldberg began his professional career in New York City. He received a B.A. degree from Brooklyn College where he studied symphonic percussion with Morris Lang. He has written extensively on Latin and Brazilian percussion and drumset techniques. His articles have appeared in Modern Drummer, where he originated the "South of the Border" column, and in Percussive Notes as contributing editor of the "World Percussion" column. He is the author of LP's instructional manual "Understanding Latin Rhythms" and contributed to Garland's "Encyclopedia of Percussion." As an educator, Norbert has conducted clinics throughout the country, at four Percussive Arts Society's International Conventions, the first Yamaha Percussion symposium and for the United States Air Force Band.
Norbert's work on drumset and percussion encompasses a wide spectrum of styles. He has performed with Broadway legends such as Chita Rivera, Sandy Duncan, and Tommy Tune and has played in numerous Broadway shows including "Dancin'", "A Chorus Line," "Grease" and "Once On This Island." He has accompanied jazz artists including Cleo Laine, Dewey Redman, Slide Hampton, and composers Lalo Shifrin and Michel Legrand. Recording credits include Gerry Mulligan, Grover Washington Jr., various Latin artists as well as jingles and film scores. | <urn:uuid:9f3fe67d-ce0a-45d1-902c-0bc48cf7161b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://zildjian.com/Artists/G/Norbert-Goldberg | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96642 | 285 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Andrew Lichtenstein returns to Nebraska in drought, photographing an American Place.
A non-profit collective of dedicated photojournalists and writers coming together to explore America and to build a forum to chart its future.
Photographer Andrew Lichtenstein
views (8043) comments (17)
September 19, 2012
Brooklyn, New York
Hay Springs, Nebraska is not a town easy to forget. I first traveled there in the winter of 2004 for the funeral of Sergeant Cory Mracek, a paratrooper killed in Iraq. Despite the bitter cold, every car on rural Route 20, which cuts across Sheridan County, pulled over onto the side of the road to salute the passing funeral procession. In the very small towns of Hay Springs, Rushville, and Gordon, residents bundled up in coats lin ...
Hay Springs, Nebraska is not a town easy to forget. I first traveled there in the winter of 2004 for the funeral of Sergeant Cory Mracek, a paratrooper killed in Iraq. Despite the bitter cold, every car on rural Route 20, which cuts across Sheridan County, pulled over onto the side of the road to salute the passing funeral procession. In the very small towns of Hay Springs, Rushville, and Gordon, residents bundled up in coats lined the street with American flags. I am a person who remembers things visually; so this summer, when I was searching for an American story, I immediately thought of those pick-up trucks on the side of the road. I had not made a picture then, but I knew it was a place to return to, a place that, in my mind, spoke of an older, more traditional America.
Residents of Hay Springs, Nebraska, line up to watch the funreal procession for Cory Mracek pass by,
February 4, 2004.
In the heat of August, I decided to photograph the drought that has paralyzed the farms and crops across a giant stretch of the American heartland. While the drought is very real, and its effects have been devastating for many who earn their living growing and harvesting the food that we all eat, I knew before I even left that I was thinking about more than the physics of the weather. Like with any news event, the drought becomes a prism through which to perceive something more meaningful to me, something harder to explain in a sound byte. I wanted to explore our own country, its conservative bedrock, and gain a better understanding of some of the deep divisions that separate that hinterland from the coasts. If the drought was what got me there, I hoped to stay for the chance to visit a culture very different from my own here in Brooklyn.
Sheridan County is in the remote northwest corner of Nebraska. Named after the Indian fighter General Phillip Sheridan, who systematically slaughtered the buffalo that roamed the high plains in order to starve his Sioux and Cheyenne enemies, many attitudes feel as if they have been fixed in time. Though just a dozen miles south of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Sheridan County is ninety-nine percent white, and local prejudice against the Native Americans on the reservation runs deep. The cattle that quickly replaced the buffalo are watched over by the descendents of the immigrant settlers who labored to tame the land, killing the wolf, bear, and lion. These men and women lived outside of any city’s gates. They fought and died to claim this land as their own, in spite of whatever obstacles faraway easterners from New York or Washington placed in their way.
During my stay in Hay Springs, my hosts were Jim Mracek and his wife Pat, the parents of Cory, whose death had brought me to Sheridan County eight years earlier. Generous to a fault, always willing to help a neighbor, or stranger, in need, the Mraceks are at the same time wary of the larger world that seems to have moved on.
Jim is a caretaker for a 5,000-acre cattle ranch. Like many people who live off of the land, Jim seems to have paid close attention to his surroundings. Dependent upon God’s creatures, it’s easy enough to conclude that the world is a harsh, unforgiving place. At the same time, there is a natural order, an accepted balance, and a rhythm to life that doesn’t have to be questioned or struggled over. On the ranch, there is no such thing as can’t. Hard work and patience and then more hard work solve almost any problem, of which there are many: another fence to mend, a stray calf to find, a pivot to check.
I failed at fully understanding the political beliefs of this deeply conservative part of the nation. The gap between basic political assumptions in rural western Nebraska and my own was just too large to build a bridge over. But self-reliance, hard work, an older, more intimate, connected America; these were all attributes where I could find great beauty, visual and otherwise.
Looking above, into the vast, blue Nebraska sky of the open prairie, I could see the jet streams of the airplanes flying from coast to coast. This is what I wanted to try and photograph, I realized. A place, an American Place, that the rest of the nation only sees from the plane window, those grids of intersecting dirt roads mapped across the seemingly endless expanse of land, viewed from 40,000 feet above.
UPDATE, Sept. 27: The Commerce Department’s report released today downgraded the growth rate of the GDP from 1.7% to 1.3%, citing the effects of the severe drought reducing crop yields and farm inventory.
PHOTOGRAPHS + TEXT by Andrew Lichtenstein / facingchange.org
Editor: Jamie Wellford, Photo
With support from Leica Camera
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[...] new project project, An American Place, is the culmination of work he’s been doing for over a quarter of a century. Powerful ju-ju. [...]
Beautiful photos and story. A recent country song (Fly Over States) hits some of the same notes, but from the other perspective.
this is a wonderful project that parallels andrew’s previous or ongoing “american history” project. he has a wonderful way of capturing the quiet moment so of life. please show us more!
This photographer has a very distinctive way of engaging the subject, a trademark of sorts,that captures a very real essence imbued with social and political relevance, without picking sides or being overt. Well done. Looking forward to the next project.
simply gorgeous work. looking forward to seeing what you do next…
Incredibly moving and beautiful photo story – your pictures communicate in a very honest and empathetic way. Amazing.
The picture of Jim sitting under the portrait of his son made me cry; the tablecloth, the lamp …
You take pictures with your heart.
“Keep a watchful eye for burrs.”
What Andrew Lichtenstein’s photos have always done.
Beautiful and essential work, I am sharing this with my graduate students at UC Santa Cruz. Thank you, Andrew.
Beautiful and important work from one of my favorite, and one of the most genuinely conscious photographers i know. – bravo, Andrew.
This is the kind of storytelling that can bring us together as a country and as people. Know thy neighbor.
Beautifully done, knowing this man lost his son in defense of our country puts a filter of empathy over each image … the beauty of Nebraska speaks for itself.
Spectacular images and insight. Sharing.
Powerful photographs that capture the seriousness and painful realities of the worst drought the Mid West has seen in 50 plus years. Highly recommended.
Beautiful photos, but more than that I can see your words and feeling reflected in the images, they provide a real sense of being there and admiration but aso an honest distance.
A heartfelt view of America’s heartland. Beautifully visualized alongside compelling text. Very powerful work. Thank you for sharing it here.
Wonderfully poignant and haunting at the same time. A must see.
Mail (will not be published) (required) | <urn:uuid:1351f0a9-9d28-433a-a461-7113af659889> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://facingchange.org/blog/2012/09/27/an-american-place/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949221 | 1,686 | 1.578125 | 2 |
May 20 2013 Latest news:
Tabby Cook, six, is helping to raise money for Children in Need by asking her friends and classmates at Fressingfield Primary School to guess the number of sweets in a jar. L-R Tabby Cook, Amy Nab, Phoebe Shears, Jessica Amps
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
SWEET idea is a charity triumph
A GENEROUS schoolgirl is hoping her fundraising idea will add up to a sweet success.
Six-year-old Tabby Cook is helping to raise money for Children in Need by asking her friends and class mates at Fressingfield Primary School, near Eye, to guess the number of sweets in a jar. Each guess means a 20p donation to Children In Need and the lucky guesser will win the sweets.
Tabby said, “I really wanted to raise money for children who need some extra help. I am hoping to raise lots of money.”
Tabby is getting to school early every morning so she can ask parents and children to take part before school starts.
Niall Cook, Tabby’s father, said: “We are really proud that she wants to help others and has come up with a really good idea to raise money.”
Are you raising money for Children in Need? Tell us about it using #CiN #Suffolk on Twitter and upload your photos, news and video at suffolk.iwitness24.co.uk | <urn:uuid:65022993-8e5c-44ef-b2ef-b976eb74f4f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/fressingfield_tabby_is_sweet_on_fundraising_for_children_in_need_1_1692405 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954605 | 306 | 1.625 | 2 |
Some four-legged heroes got the spotlight in Carl Junction today, as the city's post office unveiled the US Postal Service's newest postage stamp, honoring service dogs. Tara Prosser of PAWS K-9 Search and Rescue says it's nice to see.
"It's great that they actually get acknowledged. We know that they do life-saving work. It's just good to know."
Her dog "Lily" was honored for heroism after working non-stop for days to find victims after last year's deadly tornado in Joplin and Duquesne.
Carl Junction Postmaster Sharon Clark describes the stamps:
"One is a guide dog assisting a blind woman, one is a military dog scouting and tracking, one is a therapy dog comforting the elderly, and one is a search-and-rescue dog in the field."
The other point to the stamps is to help remind the public that service dogs exist for more uses than assisting the vision-impaired, which is what the term is primarily used for. | <urn:uuid:9ba3c84f-6243-4f46-88b2-c8632cfb899f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bigdog979.com/pages/13277104.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952982 | 212 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Great Park Project Highlights the Challenge of Base Redevelopment
A raft of factors explains why the city of Irvine’s vision for transforming former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in Southern California is still years from fruition, according to a recent story in the Orange County Register.
For starters, officials’ claims that elements of the Orange County Great Park would be completed within several years were not realistic. And the collapse of the housing market and the economic downturn clearly played a significant role.
But other hurdles are characteristic of just about every base redevelopment effort, regardless of economic fortunes. For one, extensive demolition is required of military structures, including 8 million square feet of runways. The property’s soil and ground water was contaminated, resulting in another obstacle. Finally, the need to rebuild backbone infrastructure presents another barrier to be surmounted.
In the words of Great Park CEO Mike Ellzey, “Everything’s more complicated than it would seem.” | <urn:uuid:f3e27316-4eef-489a-80d0-0d9b0463e046> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.defensecommunities.org/headlines/great-park-project-highlights-the-challenge-of-base-redevelopment/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945631 | 199 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Trying to keep up with all of the changes which occur in the technology field can really become a challenge. This has been the case for many years however so it is really nothing new but it is something that you need to want to do if you are even going to have a shot at accomplishing it. This does not have to do with every single thing in technology by any means but if you are interested in used laptops then you will only have to look at the past for the most part. The research can actually be easy and enjoyable.
With used laptops there will already have been a tremendous amount of technical documentation along with test and trials which have been made available by regular users just like you or me. This is a pretty handy deal because it can allow you to find out quite a bit about a certain used laptop make or model without having to guess at how it work in your particular instance. Most laptops under 100 are going to provide a solid method of getting basic computing tasks accomplished anyway but every now and then if you are technically orientated then you may find the wealth of information to be quite useful. | <urn:uuid:6921adee-3ac4-4b23-9662-ae9e1c1d7cdb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://laptops100.com/used-laptops-and-documentation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978245 | 223 | 1.8125 | 2 |
By Jan Strupczewski and Annika Breidthardt
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Euro zone finance ministers and the International Monetary Fund clinched agreement on reducing Greece's debt on Monday in a breakthrough to release urgently needed loans to keep the near-bankrupt economy afloat.
After 12 hours of talks at their third meeting in as many weeks, Greece's international lenders agreed on a package of measures to reduce Greek debt by 40 billion euros, cutting it to 124 percent of gross domestic product by 2020.
In a significant new pledge, ministers committed to taking further steps to lower Greece's debt to "significantly below 110 percent" in 2022 -- the most explicit recognition so far that some write-off of loans may be necessary from 2016, the point when Greece is forecast to reach a primary budget surplus.
To reduce the debt pile, they agreed to cut the interest rate on official loans, extend their maturity by 15 years to 30 years, and grant Athens a 10-year interest repayment deferral.
"When Greece has achieved, or is about to achieve, a primary surplus and fulfilled all of its conditions, we will, if need be, consider further measures for the reduction of the total debt," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said.
Eurogroup Chairman Jean-Claude Juncker said ministers would formally approve the release of a major aid installment needed to recapitalize Greece's teetering banks and enable the government to pay wages, pensions and suppliers on December 13.
Greece will receive up to 43.7 billion euros in stages as it fulfills the conditions. The December installment will comprise 23.8 billion for banks and 10.6 billion in budget assistance.
The IMF's share, less than a third of the total, will only be paid out once a buy-back of Greek debt has occurred in the coming weeks, but IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said the Fund had no intention of pulling out of the program.
They promised to hand back 11 billion euros in profits accruing to their national central banks from European Central Bank purchases of discounted Greek government bonds in the secondary market.
They also agreed to finance Greece to buy back its own bonds from private investors at what officials said was a target cost of around 35 cents in the euro.
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said on leaving the talks: "I very much welcome the decisions taken by the ministers of finance. They will certainly reduce the uncertainty and strengthen confidence in Europe and in Greece."
Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras welcomed the deal.
"Everything went well," he told reporters outside his mansion at about 3 a.m. in the morning.
"Tomorrow, a new day starts for all Greeks."
However, the biggest opposition party, Syriza, dismissed the deal and said it fell short of what was needed to make the country's debt sustainable.
The euro strengthened against the dollar after news of the deal and commodities and Asian shares also rose.
Greece, where the euro zone's debt crisis erupted in late 2009, is the currency area's most heavily indebted country, despite a big "haircut" this year on privately-held bonds. Its economy has shrunk by nearly 25 percent in five years.
Negotiations had been stalled over how Greece's debt, forecast to peak at 190-200 percent of GDP in the coming two years, could be cut to a more sustainable 120 percent by 2020.
The agreed figure fell slightly short of that goal, and the IMF was still insisting that euro zone ministers should make a firm commitment to further steps to reduce the debt stock if Athens implements its adjustment program faithfully.
The key question remains whether Greek debt can become sustainable without euro zone governments having to write off some of the loans they have made to Athens.
Germany and its northern European allies have hitherto rejected any idea of forgiving official loans to Athens, but EU officials believe that line may soften after next year's German general election.
DEBT RELIEF "NOT ON TABLE"
Schaeuble told reporters earlier that debt forgiveness was legally impossible, not just for Germany but for other euro zone countries, if it was linked to a new guarantee of loans.
"You cannot guarantee something if you're cutting debt at the same time," he said. That did not preclude possible debt relief at a later stage if Greece completed its adjustment program and no longer needs new loans.
At Germany's insistence, earmarked revenue and aid payments will go into a strengthened "segregated account" to ensure that Greece services its debts.
A source familiar with IMF thinking said a loan write-off once Greece has fulfilled its adjustment program would be the simplest way to make its debt viable, but other methods such as forgoing interest payments, or lending at below market rates and extending maturities could all help.
The German banking association (BDB) said a fresh "haircut" or forced reduction in the value of Greek sovereign debt, must only happen as a last resort.
The ministers agreed to reduce interest on already extended bilateral loans from the current 150 basis points above financing costs to 50 bps.
No figures were announced for the debt buy-back in an effort to avoid triggering a rise in market prices in anticipation of a buyer. But before the meetings, officials had spoken of a 10 billion euro buy-back, that would achieve a net reduction of about 20 billion euros in the debt stock.
German central bank governor Jens Weidmann has suggested that Greece could "earn" a reduction in debt it owes to euro zone governments in a few years if it diligently implements all the agreed reforms. The European Commission backs that view.
An opinion poll published on Monday showed the Syriza party with a four-percent lead over the Conservatives who won election in June, adding to uncertainty over the future of reforms.
(Additional reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek, Ethan Bilby, Luke Baker in Brussels, Reinhardt Becker in Berlin; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Luke Baker and Anna Willard) | <urn:uuid:a014273b-a08f-4a45-9eca-8a496ca7e255> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wnflam.com/news/articles/2012/nov/26/euro-zone-imf-to-seek-greece-deal-debt-write-off-main-problem/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96329 | 1,232 | 1.578125 | 2 |
By now many Ricochet readers will have had their attention drawn both to the alarming statistics released on poverty today and to the excellent Heritage Foundation study on what constitutes “poverty” in America. On the one hand, poverty has certainly increased under President Obama. On the other hand, poverty is being so loosely defined as to become virtually meaningless. Of course, the political capital to be gained by statistics related to poverty almost always redounds to the advantage of the Left. Or so it has until now.
As the Heritage Foundation points out, though, virtually all households living in poverty have a refrigerator, a television, and a stove and oven. The vast majority have air conditioning, a microwave, a DVD player, and cable television. Almost forty percent have a personal computer; a third have more than two televisions; thirty percent have a video game system; and 22% have more than one DVD player. These figures are for 2005, by the way, the horrible Bush years.
Such statistics are confirmation of what Adam Smith said long ago. An “improved” commercial society, relying principally on the workings of the market, may distribute wealth unequally (the rich are much richer than the poor); but that is better than all being equal in squalor. And even the poorest people living in commercial society will be better off than the wealthiest and the rulers of unimproved society.
These facts lead me to the inescapable conclusion that the poor should be poorer in America. I mean that in two senses. First, as the Heritage Foundation report urges, we need to redefine poverty to be in line with what most people imagine when they hear the word: that the impoverished are suffering from want of food, housing, clothing, and other basic necessities. The line “30 million Americans are living in poverty” is nothing more than fodder for demagogic Democrats.
Yet I mean this in a second sense. We should look at these figures and be outraged at the welfare state. My household does not have a “non-portable stereo,” though 49% of the “poor” do. My home has only one television, though a third of the “poor” have more than two. I do not have a printer, though 27.9% of the “poor” do. Should we—you and I, as taxpayers—pay for the poor to live with more luxuries than we have in many cases? What incentive do the poor have to get off the dole if their food is paid for with food stamps, their health care is paid for through WIC and other programs, and their daycare is paid for through “early childhood” centers masquerading as schools? The poor should be poorer in America (i.e. have their social programs cut) so they will have an incentive to quit feeding at the public trough. What would happen then to the “poor”? What would then happen—according to Econ 101—is that the money saved from no longer “helping” the poor might actually be invested by people who understand markets in order to create more and better jobs. There would be fewer poor. Republicans can win on this issue. Reagan did. | <urn:uuid:fa994970-6d9d-45e6-b66b-0570fd657c11> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ricochet.com/main-feed/The-Poor-Should-Be-Poorer-in-America/(comment)/208242 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968256 | 667 | 1.585938 | 2 |
WetlandCare Australia News Archive
One of Ballina’s most valuable wetlands was given the five star treatment last Thursday by WetlandCare Australia and their corporate partner Ramada Hotel and Suites Ballina. Team Ramada turned out in force to help remove weeds and plant over 200 trees at an area adjacent to the high conservation value East Ballina Wetland Reserve.
Not sure what to do on mother’s day? How about helping the Koala mums of the Tweed Coast by planting a tree or two? WetlandCare Australia, Friends of Cudgen Nature Reserve, and National Parks and Wildlife Service would like to invite the local community to join them for a community tree planting day at Clothiers Creek Road on the 12th of May to improve Koala habitat in the catchment.
WetlandCare Australia have worked in partnership with Bundaberg Regional Council, Friends of Pasturage Reserve, Bundaberg Landcare, Gidarjil rangers, the local Impact team and the Bargara Lions Club to undertake the planting of 950 local native trees at Pasturage Reserve.
The Ocean Shores Country Club has been working with WetlandCare Australia, Fisheries NSW and Cape Byron Marine Park to deliver environmental restoration works that improve the aquatic health of the waterways situated on its golf course.
Leading NGOs, WetlandCare Australia and BirdLife Australia gave Moreton Bay locals some tips and tricks to help them to get to know their shorebirds over the weekend.
WetlandCare Australia will be joining NPWS to host a field day at Pambalong Nature Reserve in Newcastle, 9 am – 1 pm Sunday 5 May. The day will provide local landholders a chance to learn about the wetland, the impacts of Water Hyacinth, what is being done and how they can help.
Hunter-Central Rivers CMA are hosting a Family Festival at the Ash Island School Masters Cottage, Hexham from 10 am – 3 pm, Sunday 21 April. The day will feature the Croc Stars reptile show, horse and cart rides, fun activities, live entertainment, island tours and much more.
WetlandCare Australia has been working with Wyong Shire Council and three primary schools on the edge of the Porters Creek Wetland, promoting understanding of wetland values and a custodian ethic. Recently we held a Catchment Carnival to provide kids with hands-on activities from a range of local environmental agencies. A video of the Catchment Carnival can be viewed on WetlandCare Australia’s You Tube channel.
The Water & Wetlands Strategy Section of the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage have been working hard to update the wetland resources on their web site. Read on for more details.
We were invited by Wyong Shire Council to engage primary students at three schools bordering Porters Creek Wetland, to complement a broader program of work to protect Tuggerah Lakes Estuary. The program was funded by the Australian Government’s “Caring For Our Country” Program and the theme was “Love Our Living Lakes.”
View the winning art and photography from the 2013 competition
WetlandCare Australia, in partnership with the Australian Macadamia Society and Southern Cross University, has commenced a field trial that will look at the effect owls may have on reducing macadamia nut crop losses from rats.
WetlandCare Australia will be hosting an exhibition of winning and selected works from their 6th annual national art and photography competition at the Hunter Wetlands Centre, opening on Saturday February 2 at 11 a.m. Winning artists and photographers will be presented with their prizes and their works unveiled for public display. Everyone is invited to attend.
Cudgen farmer Barry King, WetlandCare Australia and Tweed Shire Council have been partnering to expand soil conservation projects on the Cudgen plateau.
Work to restore critical habitat for the endangered Giant Barred Frog, Mixophyes iteratus, is underway at a property located between Lamington and Springbrook National Parks, South East Queensland. The property holds extremely high ecological value in terms of both habitat and connectivity between these two World Heritage listed areas, and is home to numerous threatened flora and fauna species.
WetlandCare Australia, with support through funding from the Australian Government’s Clean Energy Future Biodiversity Fund, will protect, manage and enhance the high ecological functional values of the Barratta Creek Catchment which forms the main artery of the Bowling Green Bay wetlands, the only Ramsar site in north Queensland.
The hard work of community volunteers, Friends of Cudgen Nature Reserve, NPWS staff and WetlandCare Australia is paying off at the planting site on Clothiers Creek Road.
Landholder Stewardship – A Success Story for Maintaining Australia’s Biodiversity. We have successfully completed administration of the Australian Government’s Maintaining Australia’s Biodiversity Hotspots program for the Torrington and Ebor-Dorrigo-Coffs Coast regions. The program consisted of a competitive bid process to assist landholders to protect and restore biodiversity on their land.
WetlandCare Australia has been working for Wyong Shire Council with students at three schools fringing Porters Creek Wetlands. Our latest YouTube video shows how the kids took their message to the streets, promoting wetland conservation to their local community.
As part of our Coastal 20 Wetlands Project and to celebrate World Wetlands Day 2013, we are undertaking a tree planting day in partnership with Bundaberg Regional Council and Friends of Pasturage Reserve.
WetlandCare Australia, in partnership with Marine Parks Authority and Coffs Harbour City Council is hosting a free community ‘Wetland Wander’ to celebrate World Wetlands Day on February 2nd.
Community volunteers and professionals involved in wetland conservation are invited to attend a forum being held from 1.30 – 4 PM on World Wetlands Day, Saturday 2nd February at the Hunter Wetlands Centre, Shortland.
WetlandCare Australia partner, BirdLife Australia are holding a workshop about the Conservation of Beach-nesting Birds, showcasing Northern and Southern Coast perspectives in Byron Bay, 3rd April 2013.
Perfect storm for toxic acid plumes in NSW rivers - be informed
The NSW Environment Minister, the Hon Robyn Parker MP, dropped in to have a preliminary viewing of the winning works in the National Art and Photography Competition on February 1.
WetlandCare Australia is undertaking a program of fox and wild dog control using 1080 baits in a number of locations in the Hunter region during from February 20 to March 29 2013
WetlandCare Australia news items, 2012.
View WetlandCare Australia news from 2011.
Farmers working to meet the challenge of farming the floodplain sustainably and profitably will benefit from attending one of two presentations hosted by Great Lakes Council in partnership with WetlandCare Australia.
Thanks to all who visited the WetlandCare Australia stand in the DEEDI tent at Agro-Trend from Thursday 12 April - Saturday 14 April.
Celebrate the first day of spring in the spectacular surrounds of Point Lookout and help the Point Lookout Bushcare Group restore the dunes of South Gorge.
A Grey Globe Award is nothing to be proud of! It is awarded by the World Wetlands Network to Ramsar wetlands to highlight their decline in ecological values. The award is a call to action to protect Ramsar wetlands from threats and neglect.
WetlandCare Australia are currently running a project to help selected Hunter nurseries develop Environmental Management Systems to reduce their impacts on the environment. First Workshop - 30th March.
Our wetland traveller Louise Duff attended Ramsar COP11 in Bucharest, Romania in July. She was attending the Conference for WetlandCare Australia in her capacity as Secretary of the Australian Wetland Alliance, a collective of 73 Non-Government Organisations, and Oceania representative to the World Wetland Network.
2 and 3 February 2012
Are you living near Coffs Creek? You are invited to a free community event on April 28, 'Starting in your Backyard'. Join WetlandCare Australia, Australia's leading not-for-profit wetland conservation organisation, to learn how you can best protect your local waterways and wetlands, starting in your own backyard.
WetlandCare Australia has been working in partnership with the Burnett Mary Regional Group (BMRG) in reducing threats to the Great Sandy Strait Ramsar Wetland and coastal systems.
WetlandCare Australia is a proud Silver Partner of the 2012 Hays Inlet Festival, a festival ‘celebrating the people, places and environment of the Hays Inlet catchment and its waterways through a series of environmental, recreational and cultural activities.’ The festival runs from 1st to 7th June.
WetlandCare Australia is now working with ecologist Nina Kaluza (BEnSc), QPWS and community volunteers to survey and monitor water mice along a 1.7 km stretch of the Maroochy River covering several land tenures. We have located and mapped 114 nesting mounds in total, and recorded information on their distribution, habitat preference and potential threats including erosion and invasive weeds.
WetlandCare Australia held 13 events around Australia for World Wetlands Day in February 2012, and directly engaged over 1000 people in exploring their local wetlands, read more...
5 February 2012
View the award winning works from the 2012 WetlandCare Australia National Art and Photography Competition. Also included is a list of winner's names and artwork titles.
4 February 2012
2 February 2012
2 February 2012
Planet Ark’s Schools Tree Day, July 29 is the dedicated day for Australia’s younger generation to play their part in National Tree Day, Australia’s largest community tree-planting and nature care event. On 23rd July over 120 students from 3 local schools in Warnervale joined in the event, planting 300 trees and shrubs to improve the health of Porters Creek Wetlands. The schools that took part were Mackillop Catholic College, Warnervale Public School and Lakes Grammar Primary.
Record number of toads caught at WetlandCare Australia’s 14th annual Cane Toad Muster at Yamba Golf Course
This year WetlandCare Australia, the leading national not for profit wetland conservation organisation, took on the challenge of hosting the 2012 Cane Toad Muster at the Yamba Golf Club. The evening was a great success, with enthusiastic volunteers attending from the local area and from as far away as the Blue Mountains. Volunteers from Clarence Valley Conservation in Action, and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, provided invaluable assistance with weighing, counting, and euthansing the toads. Representatives from local and regional government bodies also lent a helping hand.
The local community turned out in force last Sunday to help WetlandCare Australia, Friends of Cudgen Nature Reserve and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service plant over 950 koala habitat trees at Clothiers Creek Road. This was the first in a series of community tree planting days to be held at the Clothiers Creek Road site and is part of WetlandCare Australia’s Coastal 20 Wetlands Project, funded by the Australian Government’s Caring for our Country Program.
Byron Bay Tree Services are now supporting WetlandCare Australia!
2 February 2012
21 February 2012
1 — 5 PM Thursday 17 November 2011 Hunter Wetlands Centre Sandgate Road Shortland
2 February 2012
The prize-winning artists and photographers in the 5th annual WetlandCare Australia National Art and Photography Competition were publicly announced and their work unveiled at the CSIRO Discovery Centre in Canberra on the eve of World Wetlands Day, Wednesday, February 1.
2 February 2012
This June edition of the Monthly Wetland Snippet is brought to you by Golden Chain Motels. | <urn:uuid:490e1838-513a-4d09-8a2a-e36c19aeb06d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wetlandcare.com.au/index.php/news/news-archive/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935573 | 2,451 | 1.5 | 2 |
The main topic of the Sunday talk shows was the debate over raising the nation's debt ceiling. Obama's announced Afghanistan troop withdrawal, the two votes on Libya in the House, and Michele Bachmann's strong showing in a new Iowa poll rounded out the rest of the top stories.
Debt Ceiling Debate
The key issue in that debate is whether Congress will approve an increase to the debt ceiling and whether Republicans will support revenue increases, along with spending cuts, to pass the measure.
On Fox News Sunday, Senate Assistant Minority Leader John Kyl (R-Ariz.) was asked if Republicans would support a deal that would raise $1 in revenue for every $3 in spending cuts. “The key here is economic growth,” Kyl said. And, “there's also a very practical problem in the House of Representatives, it's not going to pass if you have a big tax increase.”
When asked if Republicans could accept revenue increases that come from eliminating tax deductions and subsides, Kyl replied, “We have always been willing to [eliminate tax deductions and subsidies] in the context of overall tax reform, but we're not going to be able to do it in order to raise revenue as part of this exercise that should be about reducing spending.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made the same point on ABC's This Week: “Throwing more tax revenue into the mix is simply not going to produce the desired result. It won't pass.”
House Minority Whip James Clyburn, appearing after McConnell on This Week, took issue with McConnell for not distinguishing revenue derived from ending tax deductions from revenue derived from increasing tax rates. “How do you call closing loopholes to oil companies ... how do you call that a tax hike? That is not a tax hike. You only hike taxes when you raise rates,” said Clyburn.
On CNN's State of the Union, Bill Burton, former Deputy White House Press Secretary to President Obama, warned that Republicans could make a strategic blunder if they don't compromise with the president. He said that “if [Speaker of the House John] Boehner isn't able to go in [to the White House] and make a deal and make sure the nation doesn't default ... then Republicans will end up owning the economy as much as the president does.”
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R), on the other hand, said the debt ceiling debate is the result of a failure of leadership from the White House during his interview on Meet the Press. “The first thing is that the president had to get involved personally ... everyone has got to put skin in the game ... If you're the executive, you've got to be the guy out there pushing and leading. You can't lay back and wait for someone else to do it."
“If the president has made a mistake here, it is this laid back kind of approach where he's waiting for someone else to solve the problems, some people say it's a political strategy, no matter what it is, it is not effective in solving problems.”
Senator's Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Jim Webb (D-Va.) appeared together on Meet the Press to discuss foreign policy with Afghanistan and Libya. Both supported the president's decision on Afghanistan while also offering some warnings. Reed said that, as U.S. forces pull out, diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban should “be at the top of our priorities. As we shift out of our military led presence we have to have a strong diplomatic led presence.”
On This Week's panel, Vali Nasr, professor of International Politics at Tufts University, commented, “If you reduce [by] 30,000 troops and the Taliban surge, which more than likely they will, then you're caught in a situation [where] you either have to go back in or you have to withdraw the other 70,000. We're handing over the momentum to the Taliban and we're putting our eggs into some kind of negotiated settlement whereas we're taking away our leverage to get the Taliban to make a negotiated settlement.”
On Libya, Reed stated that he supports a bill to be authored by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would authorize the use of force in Libya. Webb, on the other hand, said that he would support amendments to that bill that will be offered by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) that would more severely limit the use of force in Libya.
Webb also criticized President Obama's use of force in Libya, saying, “The reasons that he used for going in defied historical precedent. We weren't under attack ... there's a very serious issue of precedent here."
“On the other hand, we need to be clear, once Gaddafi's gone, we won't have American troops in there as a peacekeeping force.”
In the Fox News Sunday panel, Bill Kristol said he was “unhappy” with House Republicans who voted to cut off funding for military operations in Libya or against authorizing the use of force. “I would've voted with the eight Republicans who voted for the authorization for the use of force,” said Kristol.
On State of the Union, Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, also criticized his fellow Republicans. “We saw in the Libyan debate a lot of Republicans coming out against, I think the president's pretty good strategy, in this case just for political reasons resulting in an odd alliance between the anti-war left and the anti-Obama right.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) appeared on Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday. On Face the Nation she was asked about her religion and “calling from God” to run for office.
"I prayed about that, as well," Bachmann said. "And that's really what that means. It means that I have a sense of assurance about the direction I think that God is speaking into my heart that I should go."
On Fox News Sunday, she clarified her position on same-sex marriage, saying that she would support an amendment to the Constitution that would define marriage as between one man and one woman.
Throughout her interview on Fox News Sunday, Bachmann emphasized that she is a “serious” candidate, using that word three times. When she was asked, “are you a flake?” alluding to the public perception that many have of her, she replied, “I think that would be insulting to say that because I'm a serious person.” | <urn:uuid:b9773294-c3d3-4ad1-a7f2-628984aceb5f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.christianpost.com/news/sunday-talk-show-roundup-6-26-2011-51594/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976674 | 1,376 | 1.5 | 2 |
Jeb Bradley is a primary sponsor of New Hampshire Senate Bill 120.
Senate Republican Leader Jeb Bradley is proposing changes to New Hampshire’s election laws so voters will know who is paying for negative television campaign ads and material mailed to their homes.
That’s the sell for the low information voter, but the Boston.com article even had a bone for the blogosphere.
Bradley said he set the $5,000 threshold for the independent groups to protect the free speech rights of those spending a small amount. The bill wouldn’t cover bloggers, he said.
‘‘They are not intended to be caught in the net,’’ he said.
I wonder why he felt it necessary to add that point?
Was it because of all the electrons I’ve employed in the course of exposing the risk SB 120 presents to the general public? I can only hope someone is listening, and not just to reassure me, though I confess that I am less worried about the affect of SB 120 on my hobby; given that I have logged somewhere between three and four thousand posts over a number of years, my presence is clearly more opinion based journalism. I could probably argue for the same exclusion afforded the print and television media. No, my concern is for small business owners and more casual practitioners of political punditry. I am also weary of professional politicians exercising legislative authority over speech.
Regarding the former, small business owners in this state are the people who pay the bulk of the taxes. They deserve to be able to exercise their free speech rights without having to dodge bureaucratic hurdles or worrying about being accused of violating the ‘Law.’ Despite any number of so-called ‘protections, this bill will still suppress political speech.
While that is more than enough in my mind to kill it, there is one other thing it will likely do. Business owners will still be on the hook fiscally. The bureaucracy will not stop driving up the cost of doing business. It will still be in their interest to have their voices heard so they will have to find a way to do so that limits their chances of accidentally violating the new law. They will need to limit their legal exposure to lawsuits and fines. And how do businesses communicate with the governments that tax them when other avenues become difficult or are closed? They hire lobbyists.
If they cannot afford a lobbyist on their own they will form associations and pool their resources to hire speech-professionals. These costs will be significantly less than the risk of failing to dot an ‘I’ or cross a ‘T.’ And a lobbyist will inoculate them from the infection of legal challenges from professional activist groups who will be trolling the public discourse for any opportunity to make an example of someone with the new law in force.
SB 120 will institutionalize the act of engaging with the legislature by placing more of it in the hands of paid professionals acting in the interests of their ‘employers,’ That means more full time lobbyists competing for the attention of lawmakers–with expense accounts.
So SB 120 does not just run the risk of inadvertently silencing people who are fearful of stumbling over the law. It increases the odds of more free lunches for state Senators being wooed by lobbyists, while making it more likely that your voice will not be heard as clearly or as loudly.
They’ll deny it, but reality sings a different tune.
The growing mass of lobbyists representing special interests in DC over the decades is a direct result of the Federal government accumulating more power and influence over everything that happens. As long as you have to travel to the nations capital to control how you will be taxed and regulated, those being taxed and regulated the most will find a way to be heard. It is no different at the state level. So SB 120 not only creates a potential risks for speech amateurs–effectively silencing some of them in the process, it shifts influence away from those less connected or able to afford to get connected and into the hands of paid professionals and the interests they represent.
And once more and more of those paid professionals are in Concord, plenty of people with the resources will find plenty of other things for them to lobby.
Lobbyists and special interests also provide avenues and opportunities for more and larger sums of money–all documented sweet as you please–to find their way into the campaign coffers of the best listeners in the legislature.
SB 120 may sound like some docile effort at transparency, but what it really does is open a door that only benefits the well connected and those already elected.
Go ahead and deny it now, but do not deny that you were warned. Speech is not the only thing at risk here.
Steve has been recognized as the Americans For Prosperity Blogger of the month for December 2012 | <urn:uuid:46123b0b-4d50-467f-aa01-f9ec5963b9fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://granitegrok.com/blog/2013/02/the-bill-wouldnt-cover-bloggers-he-said | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965572 | 989 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Noted IHK scholar Prof Shaida passes away in Srinagar
10 October, 2012
Srinagar: In occupied Kashmir, noted scholar and writer Professor Muhammad Abdullah Shaida passed away on the intervening night of October 7/8 at his residence Mirza Kamil Sahab in Srinagar. He was 82.
Professor Shaida, who was one of the founder members of Jamaat-e-Islami of the occupied territory, had worked in different capacities and authored several books in Urdu, Kashmiri, Persian and Arabic.
He had tremendous command over Urdu, English and Persian. Besides, he was one among those considered as experts in Iqbaliyat and the University of Kashmir used to formally invite him to deliver special lecturers on Iqbal's poetry and philosophy.
A large numbers of people belong to different walks of life including political, social and religious personalities participated in his funeral prayers, which was led by the veteran Kashmiri Hurriyet leader, Syed Ali Gilani.
Meanwhile, Amir Jamaat-e-Islami of occupied Kashmir, Muhammad Abdullah Wani and the Jammu and Kashmir Tehreek-e-Hurriyet General Secretary, Muhammad Ashraf Sehrai, have expressed profound grief and sorrow over the demise of Professor Shaida. | <urn:uuid:829636d5-abef-47f9-9f8c-3a6284c307dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://paktribune.com/news/Noted-IHK-scholar-Prof-Shaida-passes-away-in-Srinagar-254020.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968265 | 266 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Minnesota Criteria Pollutant Emission Inventory:
Frequently asked questions
- Who must submit an emission inventory report?
- What is the purpose of the emissions inventory?
- Do I need to include all my emission sources in the emission inventory report?
- Do fugitive emission have to be reported in the emission inventory report?
- Who pays the majority of fees in Minnesota?
- How does it all work?
- What is the penalty for failure to submit an inventory?
- How many days do I have to pay the fee?
- Who can I contact if I have questions regarding emission inventory or the fee rule?
All facilities that are required to obtain an air emission permit are required to submit an annual emission inventory.
The emission inventory is used to track the actual pollutant emissions of each facility and to determine the type and quantity of pollutants being emitted into the atmosphere. The data is then used to calculate an emission fee for each facility.
Yes. All emission sources with the exception of "insignificant activities" should be reported in the emission inventory. Insignificant activities are defined in Minn. Rules 7007.1300.
Yes. All fugitive emissions, with the exception of fugitive emissions resulting from "insignificant activities," should be reported in the emission inventory. Insignificant activities are defined in Minn. Rules 7007.1300.
The following industry sectors pay the largest portions of the aggregate fee amount, because they are the largest emitters of airborne pollutants: utilities, mining industries, manufacturing industries, refineries, and the pulp and paper industry.
Facilities requiring air emission permits are required to report to the MPCA annually, in their emission inventory reports, information regarding their emissions of regulated pollutants. The MPCA then calculates the dollar per ton fee, based on the statewide annual emissions in the most recent emissions inventory. Each facility is then assessed a fee by multiplying the dollar per ton rate by the amount of pollution the facility emitted to the air.
For a given facility then, accurate emissions reporting is critical to having the fee assessed correctly. The rule includes the procedures to follow for calculating emissions.
Facilities that failed to submit emissions data on time will find that their fees are based on 1.5 times the most recent actual emissions in tons for which an emissions fee was assessed, per Minn. R. 7002.0025 Subp. 3.
The Air Quality Division sends an invoice for the fee to each facility early in the calendar year. Facilities have 60 days from the invoice date of the bill to pay their fees. If the fee is not paid within 60 days of the date of the fee invoice, a late fee of 10 percent must be submitted with the fee payment. An additional 10 percent of the original payment is due for each additional 30-day period that the payment is late.
For questions regarding the emission inventory, call Michael Smith at 651-757-2733. | <urn:uuid:75f99bc4-630c-43e4-b0d0-b65bb1b164a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pca.state.mn.us/index.php/air/air-monitoring-and-reporting/air-emissions-modeling-and-monitoring/criteria-air-pollutant-emission-inventory/frequently-asked-questions.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934422 | 603 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Sport .18 Hydroplane Racing Guidelines
To help meet the ever-growing interest in racing ready-to-run sport hydroplanes, AquaCraft has put together this simple set of racing rules.
The IMPBA (International Model Power Boat Association) and NAMBA (North American Model Boat Association) have also adopted rules for RTR racing. By following their guidelines or those we've prepared, you can race legally at club or district levels.
This class of racing is intended only for similar sport hydroplane boats that are manufactured for the radio-control hobby. Drivers of all skill levels are welcome to participate.
Boats permitted for entry must not only be made for the R/C hobby, but also be available nationwide from hobby shops or e-commerce.
Production Sport Hydroplane Racing Rules (Nitro Engines)
To be allowed entry, your model boat must meet all of these criteria:
You must race your boat only as it was designed by the manufacturer, with the following exceptions:
Any of the following will disqualify your boat from racing:
If it's not mentioned here...it's not legal!
The Race Course
The course is set up as an oval, with boats racing in a clockwise direction. Its length and width, as well as the number of laps to be raced (usually six), are up to the host.
A minimum of seven buoys — six course buoys and one start line buoy — are placed in the water. The front set of buoys should be approximately 50 feet from the driver's shoreline.
Three buoys (numbers 1, 2 and 3) are arranged on the left side of the course, and three buoys are positioned on the right side (numbers 4, 5 and 6). Typically, the start buoy is placed in the center of the course. You are not allowed to "cut the course", or run inside the buoys, at any time - before, during or after the race.
To start the race, a countdown timer is set for two minutes and thirty seconds (2:30). Boats must be running and on the course before the timer reaches the two-minute mark.
When the countdown ends, the race begins. The boat closest to the start line without going over is in first place. If a boat jumps the start - or is positioned to the left of the start line when the countdown ends and the race begins - it is called over by the contest director (CD) and must pass the start/finish line before it can be credited for starting the race. | <urn:uuid:b6d35e65-ff24-466d-b511-94e47fdc3700> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aquacraftmodels.com/techsupport/racing-guidelines-hydro.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947741 | 527 | 1.65625 | 2 |
This week, my Latitude post looks at the recent decision by Egyptian authorities to impose earlier closing times. I am against this — not in the absolute, but because the decision has been hastily prepared, Here's the crux of my reasoning:
This is why the government’s recent decision — made without public consultation or forewarning — to impose closing times on shops, cafés and restaurants nationwide came as such a shock. The authorities argue that forcing stores to close early will save electricity, something of a necessity because Egypt is constantly on the brink of brownouts. (This summer there were even prolonged blackouts when the national grid collapsed because of air-conditioner use). The curfew, it is hoped, will also improve traffic by sending people home early, and impose order on residential areas that are otherwise kept awake at night by street noise.
At least that’s the theory. Shopkeepers, chambers of commerce, business associations and much of the opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government say the decision will hurt an already struggling economy. Many also fear that enforcing strict closing times will only exacerbate the traffic problem, at least at certain times — especially since the government intends to impose the new rule without preparation. Metro and bus service has not been increased, for instance, and no special provisions have been made to accommodate shorter working days, like increased parking space.
After the government’s original deadline for closing most shops at 10 p.m. and restaurants at midnight — Nov. 1 — came and went with nary a change in behavior, it relented. It pushed back the curfew for shops to midnight and the deadline for implementation to next week. Some restaurants and bars will also get to stay open till 2 a.m.
Read the whole thing, of course. | <urn:uuid:2d7b4a18-2ed8-4260-8112-e1b098266b51> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://arabist.net/blog/2012/11/13/in-latitude-shortening-the-workday-is-no-way-to-regulate-cai.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954187 | 362 | 1.6875 | 2 |
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Three weeks before they go to the polls, millions of Kenyans watched and listened to the nation's first-ever presidential debate, with the two front-running candidates trading barbs over the looming trial of one of them in the International Criminal Court.
Morning talk shows in Nairobi on Tuesday were still buzzing about the previous night's debate — broadcast live on Kenya's TV and radio stations — among eight presidential candidates who stood behind sleek, futuristic podiums. Much of the focus was on the two front-runners: Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Kenyatta, the son of Kenya's founding father, faces crimes against humanity charges at the ICC.
The charges against Kenyatta and his running mate William Ruto relate to violence that killed more than 1,000 people after the last elections in 2007. The violence was sparked by a dispute over who won the presidency — Odinga, then an opposition leader, or President Mwai Kibaki, who was seeking a second term. A peace deal allowed Odinga to become prime minister in a coalition government.
Kenyatta's trial is scheduled to start in April in The Hague, but he insisted during the debate that it won't hinder his ability to run the country if he's elected president on March 4. The ICC prosecutor says the trial may last for years.
"If the people of Kenya do decide to vote for me as their president, I will be able to handle the issue of clearing my name while ensuring the business of government continues and our manifesto and agenda for Kenya is implemented," Kenyatta said.
But Odinga said the country cannot be governed remotely, and quipped that running a government on Skype from The Hague would be tough to manage.
During the debate, moderators as well as other candidates asked questions. An audience of about 200 people also questioned the candidates. Local media reported that millions tuned in to the live broadcast.
Monday's debate covered a range of other issues, from the role tribal affiliation plays in the distribution of jobs and resources — and which is cited as a major cause of problems in Kenya — to corruption in government, to education and health care.
All eight presidential candidates promised to concede if they lose the elections and to use the judiciary to resolve any issues that arise.
A second debate is set for Feb. 25.
Kenyatta is charged with crimes against humanity for alleged involvement in the murder, forcible deportation, persecution and rape of supporters of Odinga after the 2007 vote. Ruto, a former education minister, faces charges of murder, forcible deportation and persecution of supporters of Kibaki.
Despite supporting rival camps during the 2007 vote, they are now on the same ticket. | <urn:uuid:c511ea1f-a1fb-41b3-bff5-95365ee4e7aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.krem.com/news/world/190741681.html?ref=next | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970317 | 574 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Stream Live from our website:
Download from our website: Download this Podcast here
Dr. Wallach starts the show discussing several health challenges such as high blood pressure, peripheral artery disease, heart disease and stroke. Contending these are caused by nutritional deficiencies and can be prevented and symptoms reversed. Citing the specific nutrients that are deficient and which disease states they are correlated.
Pearls of Wisdom
Doug Winfrey and Dr. Wallach discuss a news article concerning a study of ADHD. The study found patients given a cocktail of high-dose B vitamin had less grey matter loss than those given a placebo. The study participants were give vitamins B6, B12 and folic acid and followed for two years.
- Dan's mother is experiencing leg and hand cramps.
- Noel has a friend recently diagnosed with osteopenia.
- Bill has dermatitis on his scalp.
- Carmen has a friend who has been diagnosed with a bone spur in her shoulder.
- Paul has high blood pressure and he wants to control it without drugs.
- Amy has been diagnosed with IBS (irritable bowel syndrome).
Call Dr. Wallach's live radio program weekdays from noon until 1pm pacific time at 831-685-1080 or toll free at 888-379-2552. | <urn:uuid:d729a0dc-69a2-40b1-b1a8-e8a83a629775> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ksco.com/community/slavablachin/photos/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=14&Itemid=36 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940445 | 269 | 1.6875 | 2 |
I disagree with Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s characterization that President Obama is anti-entrepreneurship or self-reliance ("Mr. President, nobody else 'made that happen,'" July 22). The GOP whines that they hate government, but they're more than happy to accept Social Security, Medicare, police and emergency services, tax subsidies, corporate welfare and earmarks.
As a parent, making sacrifices for my children is part of the job description. However, it's also my responsibility to instill a sense of gratitude, not entitlement. When my 7-year-old tells me I'm mean or she hates me, I eliminate some of her privileges. Perhaps if Republicans had to deal with the austere government they claim to want, they'd learn to appreciate all the blessings they currently take for granted.
Mr. Ehrlich, Democrats aren't anti-success or wealth. We just want those who have benefited from America's many opportunities to stop trying to erect barriers, preventing others from doing the same. We all benefit from investments in infrastructure, education and research, so why exactly is gratitude for the role of government so controversial?
Kimberly Bonnette, Columbia | <urn:uuid:474e9e6f-f20d-4413-aace-6e90f5e9e7a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aberdeennews.com/topic/bs-ed-government-ehrlich-letter-20120724,0,4368059.story | 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 | 0.962975 | 243 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Teenage girls are apparently starving themselves to achieve what many underweight models have: a "thigh gap."
The "thigh gap" is the space between a very skinny woman's legs where they don't touch above the knees.
This is all circling back to the internet problem of thinspiration or thinspo.
Twitter took measures to try and stop these kinds of negative inspirational images from spreading by banning hashtags like #proanorexia and #thinspiration.
Though it's not like girls can't just google that stuff and find it anyway.
What needs to happen is women in the limelight need to help promote a healthier body image.
So even though Twitter has removed over 30,000 images of graphically skinny women, it still might not be enough.
Girls need to know they're beautiful at any weight!
P.S. CLICK HERE to "follow" Perez on Twitter!
P.P.S. CLICK HERE to "like" Perez on Facebook!
[Image via WENN.] | <urn:uuid:94903422-d4da-478c-96ca-447d823666a7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://perezhilton.com/fitperez/2013-02-11-teenage-girls-starving-themselves-to-achieve-model-esque-thigh-gap/?from=tease_cocoperez | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949188 | 213 | 1.765625 | 2 |
(A) A corporation may be dissolved voluntarily in the manner provided in this section.
(B) A resolution of dissolution for a corporation shall set forth:
(1) That the corporation elects to be dissolved;
(2) Any additional provision deemed necessary with respect to the proposed dissolution and winding up.
(C) The directors may adopt a resolution of dissolution in the following cases:
(1) When the corporation has been adjudged bankrupt or has made a general assignment for the benefit of creditors;
(2) By leave of the court, when a receiver has been appointed in a general creditors' suit or in any suit in which the affairs of the corporation are to be wound up;
(3) When substantially all of the assets have been sold at judicial sale or otherwise;
(4) When the period of existence of the corporation specified in its articles has expired.
(1) The voting members at a meeting held for that purpose may adopt a resolution of dissolution by the affirmative vote of a majority of the voting members present in person or, if permitted, by mail, by proxy, or by the use of authorized communications equipment, if a quorum is present or, if the articles or the regulations provide or permit, by the affirmative vote of a greater or lesser proportion or number of the voting members, and by the affirmative vote of the voting members or the affirmative vote of the voting members of any particular class that is required by the articles or the regulations. Notice of the meeting of the members shall be sent to all the members who would be entitled to vote at the meeting by mail, overnight delivery service, or any authorized communications equipment.
(2) For purposes of division (D)(1) of this section, participation by a voting member at a meeting through the use of any of the means of communication described in that division constitutes presence in person of that voting member at the meeting for purposes of determining a quorum.
(E) Upon the adoption of a resolution of dissolution, a certificate shall be prepared, on a form prescribed by the secretary of state, setting forth the following:
(1) The name of the corporation;
(2) A statement that a resolution of dissolution has been adopted;
(3) A statement of the manner of adoption of that resolution, and, in the case of its adoption by the directors, a statement of the basis for the adoption;
(4) The place in this state where its principal office is or is to be located;
(5) The names and addresses of its directors and officers;
(6) The name and address of its statutory agent;
(7) The date of dissolution, if other than the filing date.
(F) The certificate described in division (E) of this section shall be signed by any authorized officer, unless the officer fails to execute and file the certificate within thirty days after the adoption of the resolution, or upon any date specified in the resolution as the date upon which the certificate is to be filed, or upon the expiration of any period specified in the resolution as the period within which the certificate is to be filed, whichever is latest, in which event the certificate of dissolution may be signed by any three voting members and shall set forth a statement that the persons signing the certificate are voting members and are filing the certificate because of the failure of the officers to do so.
(G) A certificate of dissolution, filed with the secretary of state, shall be accompanied by:
A receipt, certificate, or other evidence from the director of job and family services showing that all contributions due from the corporation as an employer have been paid, that such payment has been adequately guaranteed, or that the corporation is not subject to such contributions;
(2) A receipt, certificate, or other evidence showing that the corporation has paid all taxes imposed under the laws of this state that are or will be due from the corporation on the date of the dissolution , or that such payment has been adequately guaranteed;
(3) In lieu of the receipt, certificate, or other evidence described in division (G)(1) or (2) of this section, an affidavit of one or more of the persons executing the certificate of dissolution or of an officer of the corporation containing a statement of the date upon which the particular department, agency, or authority was advised in writing of the scheduled effective date of the dissolution and was advised in writing of the acknowledgement by the corporation of the applicability of section 1702.55 of the Revised Code.
(H) Upon the filing of a certificate of dissolution and those accompanying documents or on a later date specified in the certificate that is not more than ninety days after the filing, the corporation shall be dissolved.
Amended by 129th General AssemblyFile No.117,HB 508, §1, eff. 9/6/2012.
Effective Date: 05-16-2002 | <urn:uuid:f7a9688a-b677-4082-97cd-54df31b72bd9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/1702.47 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950365 | 999 | 1.5 | 2 |
Speaking at the 2012 Product of the Year awards held at Summer Place, Sandton, last week (2 February 2012), Masie dropped a bombshell: “Google is dying,” he said.
He qualified the statement, explaining that people are using social platforms like Facebook and Twitter and asking questions there because they get more dynamic and personalised results.
Masie related an anecdote of a recent trip to New York, where instead of searching on Google for a place to eat he received recommendations from his connections on Facebook.
The result he got through the social network by querying his contacts rather than a search engine provided him with a better result, Masie said.
In a follow-up interview, Masie emphasised that Google itself isn’t dying. “The pie of search query volumes in the world, that business is shrinking,” he said.
As an example, Masie pointed to Siri, the natural language speech interface Apple bundled with the iPhone 4S. Siri uses Google as a last resort, Masie said, preferring results from other technologies before it starts using Google to get data back to the user.
“That’s a worrying factor,” Masie said.
It’s not that traditional search is not valuable or that consumers aren’t using it anymore, Masie said. “I just believe that’s not where it’ll be in the future.”
Masie is not alone in his belief that search as we know it is in decline. After the incorporation of Facebook “likes” into Microsoft’s Bing search results last year (2011), the director of Bing told Huffington Post that traditional search is failing. | <urn:uuid:9d91aac9-749f-482c-bbb0-47b4806d213a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/42761-google-search-dying-former-google-sa-head.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932388 | 355 | 1.75 | 2 |
MANKATO - After decades of accidents and fatalities, one of the Highway 14's deadliest segments will get long-sought safety upgrades.
Gov. Mark Dayton and the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) announced Tuesday in Mankato that the segment of Highway 14 between North Mankato and Nicollet will receive a four-lane expansion by 2017 or 2018. Additionally, safety improvements will be completed on the stretch by this winter.
MnDOT Commissioner Tom Sorel received applause when he said the four-lane project was guaranteed in five to six years. The project will cost $21 million to $35 million. MnDOT will provide $21 million to $23 million, and the Legislature will allocate the rest. The project will take two years to construct.
Staff photo by Josh Moniz
Gov. Mark Dayton, center, accompanied by 1st District Congressman Tim Walz and State Sen. Kathy Sheran, presented an improvement plan for Highway 14 between North Mankato and Nicollet on Tuesday in Mankato.
Whether MnDOT builds an $11 million bypass at Nicollet or ends the four-lanes just before the town will depend on how much the Legislature funds the project.
In addition to the four-lane project, MnDOT will complete safety improvement work on Highway 14 before this winter. The road will have its lines redrawn to allow an 8-foot median between the two lanes while work will be done to "beef up" the road's shoulders.
The road's shoulders will diminished in size. The median will consist of vertical tubes down the middle that will rise into the air when bumped to give drivers a visual warning. The rest of the median will consist of rumble strips. The space between the lanes is designed to keep minor driving mistakes from becoming head-on accidents.
Swanson said the improvements won't be duplicate work because it will be done in a way to set up the eventual four-lane project. He said the only unknown factor is whether the four-lanes will route through or around Nicollet.
Finally, MnDOT will sponsor targeted increases in law enforcement along Highway 14 to reduce dangerous driving habits.
The project is a sudden reversal for MnDOT after officials indicated last April that funding constraints essentially took a four-lane expansion off the table. That position was presented during MnDOT's safety audit of Highway 14 from North Mankato to Nicollet, which has three times the state average for fatal crashes on similar roads. This data dramatically outpaced previous fatal statistics for Highway 14. Seventeen fatalities occurred on Highway 14 since 2000, compared to 13 deaths in the I-35 bridge collapse. Four-lane advocates claimed this comparison proved Highway 14 was inherently unsafe and stifled regional economic growth.
MnDOT argued that falling gas tax revenues and increasing construction costs limited it to only maintaining existing infrastructure with "low-cost, high-benefit" project. MnDOT officials planned to leave Highway 14 in its 20-year construction plan.
Instead, MnDOT advocated small-scale safety improvement projects until four-lane funding arrived sometime in the future. MnDOT presented a new Corridor Investment Management Strategy funding program to specifically push the smaller projects. Highway 14 area residents and regional legislators publicly rebuked the plan.
Tuesday's announcement drew support from Highway 14 advocates, but also criticism about whether MnDOT could have funded the project sooner.
MnDOT's funding will come from the Mankato-based District 7 regional office's $46 million in annual funding. What exact funds will be shifted remains unclear.
MnDOT District 7 Transportation Engineer Jim Swanson said the funds will be pulled from future unallocated funding for 2016 and beyond. He said the funds may have originally gone to various safety improvements around the district, but will now be rerouted for the four-lane project.
The reasons for MnDOT's change of heart remains unclear. Dayton said the first momentum on the project came from an April meeting that State Rep. Terry Morrow (DFL-St. Peter) and State Sen. Kathy Sheran (DFL-Mankato) organized between himself and Sorel.
First District Congressman Tim Walz attributed the project's realization to Dayton, primarily for bringing a political focus to force movement towards improvements.
"Gov. Dayton has taken this from the top and said 'This will happen,'" said Walz.
Dayton responded that he considered it a collaborative effort.
MnDOT officials maintained that the project was only driven by the safety audit, which "validated the concerns about Highway 14."
still looking forward
Although all officials at the press conference praised the four-lane project as a major accomplishment, they cautiously added that there was still a strong need to complete the rest of the four-lane expansions for Highway 14. No immediate plans have been made with MnDOT yet on the remaining two-lane segments of Highway 14.
Morrow said that the planned improvements were the best he could have hoped for. He plans to continue pushing for a complete four-lane highway to New Ulm. | <urn:uuid:b6059d81-8cc3-4fd0-9411-68af44d967a7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nujournal.com/page/content.detail/id/530058.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954298 | 1,055 | 1.617188 | 2 |
A three-day conference for women in North America involved in the mathematical sciences began Thursday at the University of Minnesota.
The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) and the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) organize the workshop, called Career Options for Women in the Mathematical Sciences, every four years.
Cheri Shakiban, associate director for diversity at the IMA, said they invited speakers from all around North America to talk about discoveries and opportunities for women in the field. There will be 45 presenters from different campuses and companies over the three-day conference. Shakiban said topics will include things like skill development, developing technical research programs and grant writing. Fadil Santosa, director of IMA and University professor , said the workshop will also cover the barriers to career advancement women face.
“Women make up about 30 percent of math sciences Ph.D.s finishing their degrees in a given year,” he said, “yet if you look at a typical math department, in the Big Ten for example, you find very few women in the senior ranks. The same goes for women Math Ph.D.s in companies; a lot of the key positions, with very few exceptions, are held by men.”
This sentiment and hope for education through the workshop was echoed by Carme Calderer, a professor in the school of mathematics who helped organize the workshop.
“There are a lot of prejudices [against women] that remain, but there is a lot of work that has been done,” Calderer said. “A lot of it is trying to even out the field so that women can prosper everywhere.”
Women from large cities and small towns were called to participate at the workshop.
“All the different perspectives they bring in will make it a lot more interesting,” Shakiban said. “I am sure that most of the women will take something away from it.”
In addition to the speakers coming from diverse locations, they are at different stages of their careers, which IMA hopes will open their eyes to possible unique opportunities within the field.
“They will see women from many different stages and ages,” Calderer said. “The other thing [we wanted to do] was to give them the opportunity to let them see state-of-the-art issues in the field.”
Calderer said she feels the field is rapidly advancing, and more young women need to become involved in opportunities like the workshop to explore possibilities.
“It’s really a very attractive possibility right now,” Calderer said. “It is the future. We are going to see great things in the future and mathematics is going to play a big part in that.”
Shakiban said they had to turn interested women away due to lack of space and money, but added it would be nice to expand the conference in the future.
“I think the young mathematicians will leave the workshop feeling energized and excited about their future,” Santosa said. “We hope some will become future leaders of the mathematical sciences community and come back here to tell those coming up how it is done.”
Nominate an exceptional graduating senior for the upcoming Ski-U-Mah Issue!
UMN students have traveled to Florida colleges to collaborate with students on various projects.
When UMN students plan for a vacation, having trip cancellation travel insurance is a worthwhile commodity to check out.
Minneapolis Used Cars
Give back to the Minnesota community with a boat donation at boat4causes.org.
If you have been involved in a car accident call a Philadelphia Car Accident Lawyer for a free consultation. | <urn:uuid:38e9e334-839a-4563-b3f8-c685edd40f2f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mndaily.com/2009/04/02/u-hosts-workshop-women-sciences | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969044 | 775 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Jamie Ewing, teacher at White Center's Mt. View Elementary School was awarded top honors in Microsoft’s Partners in Learning U.S. Forum.
Microsoft names Mount View teacher one of nation’s top educators
Jamie Ewing takes top honors in Microsoft Education Forum
Jamie Ewing, a fifth grade teacher at Mount View Elementary, was awarded top honors in Microsoft’s Partners in Learning U.S. Forum.
He is one of 16 educators in the nation honored for inspiring student learning and impacting positive change through technology in the classroom.
The Forum annually recognizes innovative teachers and school leaders who creatively and effectively use technology in their curriculum to help improve the way students learn.
Ewing won first place in the Collaboration category for "Using Technology to Develop Science Fair Projects for the Virtual World."
“Our cloud-based science fair takes the idea of the ‘old school’ card board science fair and spins it into the 21st century,” says Ewing.
Students begin by exploring earth systems and designing related science experiments. Students present their experiments as interactive web games, videos or PowerPoint presentations.
The digital presentations are stored on a Windows Live SkyDrive, so students can bring their ideas to other schools around the world. Once data is collected and experiments are finished, student groups use their findings to create a project addressing environmental damage. Community presentations are made in person and also via Skype.
Thousands of teachers from across the country applied for the U.S Forum, and 100 were selected to compete. The 16 U.S. winners advance to the Partners in Learning Global Forum, held in Prague in November.
“These winning educators are catalysts for change and are the best in the nation at embracing technology to inspire and engage students and help transform education in their local communities,” said Andrew Ko, general manager, U.S. Partners in Learning, Microsoft.
(Editor’s Note: Here’s a story Robinson Newspapers published on Mr. Ewing last year.)
Mr. Ewing teaches with style in White Center
By Deanna Duff
Students returned to school this month and teachers were ready with lessons on reading, writing and arithmetic -- and a small dose of fashion in the case of Mt. View Elementary School teacher Jamie Ewing.
Formerly a New York fashion designer, Ewing is tailoring his fashion background to inspire students in the White Center classroom.
"The Mt. View staff is really amazing. We come at education from all different directions, together as a team, and do whatever we can to make it work for the kids," says Ewing.
Ewing has taught at Mt. View since 2007 and his artistic background and cutting-edge attitude have energized the curriculum. During the 2010-2011 school year, he integrated technology into his fifth-grade classroom via an art and web-design project. The program was one of 78 chosen nationally for recognition at the Microsoft Partners in Learning U.S. Innovative Education Forum held last July.
"I wanted to work with the kids and expand their idea of what education meant," says Ewing.
Students designed a mock homepage in the style of Bing.com, which utilizes photo backgrounds. Their inspiration was to answer the question, "What does education look like?" Students were challenged to capture their answer in a photograph. Students chose everything from playgrounds and classrooms to the Seattle skyline. They then used design software to frame the final project.
"The challenge with tech is to integrate it so that kids are using it as a tool," says Ewing.
He incorporates creative components, such as the photography aspect, to increase the "fun factor."
"I want to take an ordinary project and make it exciting. I think that art is an easy way for students to express themselves. This whole idea is completely informed by my own art background," says Ewing.
The North Carolina native earned an undergraduate degree in fashion design and worked in New York for nearly a decade as a menswear designer for companies such as Macy's, Bugle Boy and Barneys New York.
Among his most memorable experiences was the opportunity to meet high-profile designer Marc Jacobs and work his runway shows.
He found himself considering a career change after moving to Washington in 2000. His focus landed on becoming a teacher, which he first considered while in college.
"Within two weeks (of considering a career change), I quit the job I had and was enrolled in a master's program for teaching. It's the best thing I've ever done in my life," says Ewing.
These days Ewing is more focused on his teaching style, but his fashion savvy still inspires. As a college student, his nickname was "Etch A Sketch" thanks to his ever-changing looks ranging from preppy to punk - including a red and green mohawk.
His signature style is now a shirt and tie. "I wear a tie every day because I want to present myself in a certain way to the students. Whether the kids know it or not, they respond differently," he says.
Ewing and a fellow Mt. View teacher have a yearly competition to see who can wear a tie for the most consecutive days (school spirit days are exempt). Ewing won last year, lasting until May or June. "We're pretty hardcore!" he says, crediting his own victory to determination and having "A lot of ties in rotation."
Tech projects and tie competitions aside, he hopes his own varied and somewhat fantastical life also inspires students.
"I've been very, very fortunate with the experiences I've been afforded. I stress with my students that all they have to do is show up to school, work really hard, believe in themselves and then go off and do whatever their dream is," says Ewing. | <urn:uuid:f394d249-91f8-4511-b8c0-ee6d34d2a7a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.westseattleherald.com/2012/08/08/news/microsoft-names-mount-view-teacher-one-nation%E2%80%99s-0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975911 | 1,194 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Erue completes nursing professional development certification
Susan Erue, Ph.D., Chair of the Iowa Wesleyan College Division of Nursing, has successfully completed the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) exam and is recognized as Board Certified in Nursing Professional Development.
Dr. Erue is a 1984 graduate of Iowa Wesleyan. She earned her master’s degree from Western Illinois University and her Ph.D. from Madison University. She has been a member of the Iowa Wesleyan College faculty since 2002.
ANCC is the largest and most prestigious nurse credentialing organization in the world and a subsidiary of the American Nurses Association (ANA). ANCC certification exams validate nurses’ skills, knowledge, and abilities. More than a quarter million nurses have been certified by ANCC since 1990. More than 75,000 advanced practice nurses are currently certified by ANCC. ANCC offers nursing certification in 26 different specialties. | <urn:uuid:d426bb7f-52c6-4ed6-a25c-c58d22949bc6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iwc.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&layout=content&id=1011&Itemid=612 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969709 | 190 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Congressman Joe Barton, born in Waco, Texas, is not the sharpest tack in the GOP bulletin board (see Rep. Barton: Climate change is ‘natural,’ humans should just ‘get shade’ “” invites ‘expert’ TVMOB (!) to testify). But he still thinks he outsmarted our Nobel Prize winning energy Secretary yesterday.
[Extended pause for laughter.]
Obviously he didn’t — but I do think that Chu missed an opportunity to answer the standard denier question that Barton was really asking. The Hill‘s Twitter Room (!) reports in Tweets You Need to Read (!!):
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) thinks he stumped Energy Secretary Steven Chu at a hearing today. He tweets:
I seemed to have baffled the Energy Sec with basic question – Where does oil come from? Check out the video: http://bit.ly/O4m0p #tcot
The video is from a subcommittee hearing on energy legislation during which Barton quizzed Chu, a Nobel prize-winning physicist, on oil formation. Here’s how it went down:
Barton: You’re our scientist. I have one simple question for you in the last six seconds. How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean?
Chu: (laughs) This is a complicated story, but oil and gas is the result of hundreds of millions of years of geology, and in that time also the plates have moved around, and so, um, it’s the combination of where the sources of the oil and gas are-
Barton: But, but wouldn’t it obvious that at one time it was a lot warmer in Alaska and on the North Pole. It wasn’t a big pipeline that we created in Texas and shipped it up there and then put it under ground so that we can now pump it out and ship it back.
Chu: No. There are-there’s continental plates that have been drifting around throughout the geological ages-
Barton: So it just drifted up there?
Chu: That’s certainly what happened. And so it’s a result of things like that.
Certainly plate tectonics is a key reason Alaska has so much oil (see here). But Barton wasn’t really asking where the oil came from.
Barton was just repeating a standard global warming denier talking point that it was a lot warmer in Alaska at one point in the past, which deniers continue to assert somehow proves that current warming is part of a natural cycle, and not human driven.
What Chu should have explained is that the climate changes when it is forced to change. Past warming were driven by natural forcings, including massive releases of greenhouse gases. But now humans are dwarfing the natural cycles and natural forcings by pumping out greenhouse gases at a much higher rate than ever occurred in the past — see Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks. The result, as Wonk Room explains:
During the Triassic, the entire planet was indeed a hothouse and entirely deglaciated. The carbon dioxide (CO2) content in the atmosphere was at its highest ever levels, spiking from 1000 parts per million to 3000 ppm. The end of the Triassic period was marked by one of the largest mass-extinction events in Earth’s history.
Habitable conditions for humanity, hundreds of millions of years later, are very different. Carbon dioxide levels, which had been below 300 ppm for the last 650,000 years and was stable at 280 ppm during the rise of human civilization, have skyrocketed since 1800 because of our burning of coal, oil, and natural gas to 388 ppm, a nearly 40 percent rise.
Indeed, many fear that a huge methane release is what happened during the Permian-Triassic extinction event. And we are clearly risking that again here on our current emissions path — see Arctic Research Center: The underwater permafrost is thawing and releasing methane and Tundra Part 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss.
The last time the planet was as warm as during the Triassic, it was largely ice free, which would yield sea level rise of some 80 meters (260 feet).
Ahh, now I see Barton’s plan. Look at his district:
A quck check on Google confirms my suspicion about Trinity Country in the East of his district:
He wants beachfront property for his district!
Maybe he is even buying up land, like Lex Luthor did in the first Superman movie. Hmm. That would mean Barton was an evil genius. Okay, maybe not. Especially since sea levels probably don’t rise fast enough for him to cash in — see Nature sea level rise shocker: Coral fossils suggest “catastrophic increase of more than 5 centimetres per year over a 50-year stretch is possible.” Lead author warns, “This could happen again.”
Okay, maybe he’s just another anti-scientific denier. | <urn:uuid:fe6461d5-582a-4fb5-b3e9-49de4f6b87cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/04/23/204004/barton-chu-oil-scienc/?mobile=nc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960411 | 1,079 | 1.625 | 2 |
Joined: 17 Aug 2006
| Post subject: Backgammon Books
|Many people have asked me, "What are the best backgammon books and where can I get them?"
The answer is, there are many, many great books, but what you should read depends on what level your game is at.
If you are a complete beginner, or someone who is in the early stages of learning, I believe the best book is called Backgammon, by Paul Magriel.
If you advance to the intermediate stage, where you know all the opening rolls, understand when to double based on the pip count, and understand the basic strategies of match play, then you are ready for more advanced books.
One of the best I recommend for this level is called Advanced Backgammon, By Bill Robertie.
Then, there are many, many other books for advanced players that either specialize on certain aspects of the game or analyze matches played by great players to illustrate the various complexities of the game.
All of these books can be found on a backgammon web site that Carol Cole operates. The link for the site is http://www.flintbg.com/boutique.html
In addition, you can find most of these books, new and used, at Amazon.com.
I bought my first backgamon book in a book store.
Personally, I found it hard, when I was a beginner, to read a whole book on backgammon....I found articles and personal instruction very helpful. It wasn't until years later that I started reading the books, and I learned that even after years over the board there was so much in those books that I never realized or thought of that could help my game.
So my best advice is, if you really want to advance your game, at any level, read books and articles as you play, but also get advice from better players and watch better players as there is nothing as good as seeing how the theories actually work when you apply them over the board. | <urn:uuid:edd3417c-7567-413c-b844-a06ce0e42131> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.backgammon.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1196 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973901 | 417 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Monday, August 29, 2011
So much has been going on so I'll try to catch up on some of the key stories.
They won't necessarily be in chronological order, but oh well.
We still are receiving young nestlings of many kinds. Western Tanagers, English Sparrows, House finches and so on. I've included a picture of a young Western Kingbird that we raised and released. What a little cutie.
We also got in a nestling Red-Tail hawk that was blown out of his nest just a few weeks prior to when he should have flown away. There were some terrible storms in the area he came from and this is when he was found on the ground. It worked out well since we had just taken two young Red-Tail hawks for Best Friends Animal Society. They needed to learn how to kill and so did our little Red-Tail. He was just a little younger than the other two, which were siblings, but they learned together. The two sibling Red-Tail hawks were released together near Price. We had two locals, Dave and Shauna O'Brien release them.
While all of this was going on, the Ferruginous hawks were growing fast and they needed to learn to kill at the same time the Red-Tails were learning, so they all went into the large flight together. The Red-Tails were the quickest to learn and then the Ferruginous. Once the Red-Tails were all released, including our little one found after the storm, then the Ferruginous were the only ones in the flight, so we gave them a couple of weeks longer to master that skill and then they too were released, almost at the same spot where the two Red-Tails had been released. We asked Jim and Kathy Fowers to do the honors. Jim has been instrumental in a number of cases, having picked them up in areas we are very far from. He has also dropped off many patients to me, meeting me in the canyon that runs between Utah county and Carbon county. He too is very committed to getting these creatures what they need at any time, day or night. A true kindred soul. I'll post those release pictures later.
Sadly, there have been some deaths, as it is with this kind of work. I got a call one night that an owl had been hit by the local college. I drove up there and the lady that saw him in the road was still there, making sure he got the help he needed. It was a Great Horned owl with substantial trauma. The next day we took him to our vets and had x-rays, which showed injuries that could not be repaired. So sad as this was just a fledgling owl and had to be euthanized. A sad, sad day.
Teasdale, our Great Horned owl that came in from central Utah on New Years day, was finally placed in an educational facility in Cody, Wyoming. He was non-releasable due to trauma in one of his wings, which made perfect flight impossible. We determined he was a good candidate for education so once a place was found and approved, the transfer was made. I'm glad this opportunity opened up for him and now, he can settle into his new life. I hope he will be happy during his new life as that is our only priority, the animal.
Finally, we got in a new Golden Eagle. This one was hatched this year in Seviere county and was found in a coal mine in the area. They notified the wildlife department and they, in turn, caught her and we picked her up. With no injuries, she was in horrible condition. Very dehydrated and thin, causing her weakness which allowed her to be picked up without a fight. Not good.
Sufco Mine out of Salina, Utah stepped up to the plate immediately and asked if they could help with the cost of her care. Wow, that never happens! She needed several weeks of slowly hydrating and feeding various foods, starting out with simple formulas and then working her way to and eagles normal food. She is now getting stronger and learning to get up onto high perches and flying. Her next step is learning to kill. She is housed with Fury, our other Golden Eagle. I think this is good for the both of them. Fury is still unable to get up onto high perches, suggesting there is a balance issue still going on, probably the result of the lead poisoning.
Well, that's good for now. Remember to click on the pictures to see them at their best.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
The chipmunks are finally released. All three went at the same time and my grandson helped. I released them in an area called Swede's Pond. I hope they do well.
Two of our orphaned Kestrels are now kill testing. They will need several days of successful killing and then will be banded and released. One of the orphans is not releasable. I have two groups interested in him for educational purposes so I believe this will be a good option for him.
We had another young male Kestrel come in that wasn't so fortunate. He was terribly thin and dehydrated. I figure, by the weight and what it SHOULD be, he hadn't had any food for at least a week. We immediately went to work, tubing a formula for critical carnivores, but he was too far gone and died after several hours. What a short little life, I hope we made his final hours more comfortable.
Our milk fed Kestrel is doing well. Her tail is finally growing back and she is eating well, in spite of all that her finders did to her.
We have a young hummingbird we have been caring for, now for about 5 weeks. Another stupid human story. The people were feeding her the hummingbird food you buy at the store, exclusively. So now, we have another angel that is malnourished during a critical time in their young lives for an extensive amount of time. She isn't doing well, but I keep hoping. She is being fed every half hour throughout the day and until my bedtime.
And last, we have a new Raven with us that had been being kept as a pet, which is illegal, so he really doesn't know he's a Raven. He is hanging out with another Raven that came in from Moab with an injured wing. So far, so good.
That's going to be it for now. Enjoy the pictures.
Feathered brothers and sisters, you came to us broken and as you bled…….we saw you desperate, dehydrated, desiccated, diseased, distressed, emaciated, famished, frayed, frightened, helpless, hungry, ragged, ravenous, shaken, shocked, shot, sickly, stressed, stunned, tattered, thirsty, traumatized, torn, weary and wounded. Defiantly, you stood us off with your last breath as we tried to tend to you. We saw you come in as cute, naked, fuzzy, cuddly youth, as mischievous, defiant adolescents, as fierce, regal rulers of the sky and as cunning, maimed elders whose time on earth was almost done. You endeared yourselves to us, bit us, charmed us, footed us, delighted us, hissed at us, talked to us, mantled at us, and graced us with your presence.
Some of you mended and were able to go on your way, never looking back. Some of you were injured in ways that prevented you from going, so you stayed with us to teach us…….And we came to love you. Others were too far gone, and you went home - where you fly free from pain with the Great One. All of you have touched us, and we are changed because of you.
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I remember when I first saw “The List.”
It was the middle of freshman year. One my housemates showed it to me, explained that it was provided to him because he was an athlete, and asked if I wanted to take a look. I did. It was unremarkable, particularly to someone who had, at that point, little knowledge of the difficulty level of Stanford courses. Never did it cross my mind, even as a young reporter, that it would be worthy of a news story.
Now, The List is in the open. The Daily, along with the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, published today a story by a group of a Stanford student journalists—many of them, staffers for this paper—about the perceived easiness of The List and the University’s reaction to it.
But three years and countless Stanford academic experiences after first viewing The List, my view has not changed. The List, on its own, is not a story. Why? It is not exclusively a list of easy courses. If it were, that would be worth noting. And there are some there, to be sure. But they’re mixed in with classes of varying difficulty, and aren’t organized to give the reader any conception of which ones are less of a burden than others. Set up instead by time slot, it presents a sample of courses across disciplines. It’s easy to see why many perceive it to be geared toward younger athletes who may still be finding their way—it’s a way to try different fields. That upperclassmen use it too is irrelevant; breadth does not imply ease.
I echo Austin Lee, director of academic services at the Athletic Academic Resource Center (AARC), which produces The List, when he says:
“An objective evaluation of the courses included on The List reveals several courses that most students would consider to be academically rigorous.”
I will say, unequivocally, that The List contains two of the hardest classes I have taken at Stanford. PoliSci 114S is taught by the titans of the security field, includes an intensive, two-day simulation and papers graded as harshly as any I have produced in my time on the Farm. Excellence and dedication is demanded. And for someone without a civil engineering background, CEE 64 presents a significant challenge—I spent countless hours a week relearning chemistry just to perform at even a proficient level on the course’s biweekly tests. Don’t get me started on the end-of-quarter project.
Now, I have heard an athlete refer to The List as “easy,” but said athlete is also one of the five smartest people I have encountered on this campus and so for him, everything is simple. He doesn’t count. Other than that, I’m at a loss—when I’ve asked other athletes about The List in the past, many will push back about just how “easy” it is. Perhaps they’ve been burned, because the student who sees these classes and assumes they’re all “easy” is in for a rude awakening.
It boils down to this: If I go onto CourseRank and look for classes with average work loads of 1-5 hours a week and most grades in the “A” range, I can get a better view of Stanford’s “easy” classes than this list can ever give me. Or, if I was still a youngin’, I could consult an upperclassman. Back when the school still used HPACs, I would go to mine to ask for the best—read: least difficult—way to fulfill general education requirements for subjects I had no interest in. This was common practice amongst practically everyone I knew at Stanford. For the record, peers at other top five academic institutions would employ similar tactics. Stop the press: sometimes, college students want a lighter load.
What, then, is the basis for this story?
The major question is: why is this list produced at all? It screams of special treatment under the guise of time-management. Athletes have full schedules, but Stanford prides itself on a student body that does 17 different extra-curricular activities in addition to a normal courseload. Students will regularly take on full-time jobs in addition to their classes; there is no list out there to help them navigate the waters.
But how far do we take this? If we want everyone on equal footing, we ought to eliminate the Athletic Academic Resource Center, because it’s an extra benefit for athletes. A proposition that is, of course, ridiculous and one that I doubt many people want, but it underlines the essential point: Stanford has and will treat athletes differently from other students. And it’s fine—we’ll explore that more later. So does Harvard: they have a center called Athletic, Academic, and Personal Excellence designed specifically and exclusively for athletes that helps with, among other things, “academic counseling.” This is standard operating procedure for all schools, and the “civilian” who complains about AARC’s existence is one surprisingly lacking in agency. But since we’re talking about The List, it follows logically that AARC, in its capacity as an academic resource center, would provide a list of classes to take that fit the specific needs of the people its serving. It makes…perfect sense. Any adviser on this campus could do the same; that they don’t is not AARC’s fault.
In discussing it in the Daily office, and speaking to some of the writers who contributed to the piece, two other major story lines arose to justify the piece’s newsworthiness. First: Stanford’s reaction to The List was so puzzling that it almost implied guilt, and made it newsworthy on its own. Second: that the aim is not to look at Stanford athletes through a national prism but rather, to see if the University’s proclamations about its student-athletes—namely, that they’re held to the same standards as and treated no differently than their classmates—rang true. All valid points.
To the first: in response to the reporters’ inquiries about The List, Stanford’s move was to…discontinue it. Puzzling. Unless you see something inherently wrong with The List, why do that? Here’s a common reaction from non-athletes I’ve encountered who have read the article: initial outrage that The List exists and then, upon reading the classes mentioned, an admission that “it’s really not that easy.” That comes from fuzzies and techies alike. What, then, is the University’s beef? The List may have outgrown its time—it was developed before tools such as CourseRank existed—and the reporters’ snooping brought its antiquated nature to the minds of University administrators. Julie Lythcott-Haims, dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising, hinted at this idea in the original article. But in the absence of an explanation, there are other possibilities to consider: canceling The List as soon as someone starts poking their head around could either be a desperate attempt to make it seem like it doesn’t exist or an admission that, yes, something was up, and needed to be remedied. Both are curious, both require examination, both demand column inches.
To the second: Stanford likes to create an image that its athletes and “civilians” are perfectly integrated and that the school is status-blind. It’s a nice idea. It’s also not entirely true. One example: the admissions process. Since recruits will occasionally self-report GPAs and SAT/ACT scores, we know that a star football player with, say, a 1700 composite, or a low 3.0 GPA, could gain acceptance to Stanford, while a regular applicant with the same stats would be laughed out of the room. Instead of acknowledging that there is, sometimes, a difference, the University would prefer to put up blinders until it is forced to comment.
But there’s no reason to take that tact. Outside of the military academics, which have their own special criteria, Stanford still has the most rigorous athlete admission criteria of any major Division 1 school. Once on campus, these players must go to the same classes as any other student. And while some courses may be easier relative to others at the University, it is still Stanford: there is no (to quote a commentator on the Daily web site) “underwater basket weaving” here, there’s no “General Studies” major like there is at, say, Michigan (otherwise a top public institution) and—pardon the elitism—our introduction classes can likely match up with more advanced courses at other schools. (There is also not an inherent correlation between “introductory” and “easy,” particularly at Stanford.)
This extends into a normative argument, and here’s the (obvious) rub: Stanford wants to make sure that it is seen as equal to the upper crust of the Ivy League. And it is, with student-athletes that are largely as talented in the classroom as they are in their sport. Acknowledging that there are exceptions here and there for athletics doesn’t change any of that, and the University does not serve itself by plugging its ears and stomping its feet while trying to create this pristine image. I understand the reporters’ intuition upon hearing about The List—is there a hole in this ideal, and is the University creating a special class of students?—and believe that the university’s actions only served to enhance the story’s vitality. I posit that if Stanford didn’t push an unrealistic idea of flawlessness, it is likely that this story doesn’t come to pass.
I do not fault the reporting team for pursuing this angle or question why this report was written. The group includes some of the best journalists I have encountered in either an amateur or professional setting, and I trust their judgment. That said, it is perhaps too quick to label the courses as “easy,” and there is missing context, both in terms of the world inside the Stanford bubble—the singular focus of the piece—and the national scene. Simply put: even if The List was solely “easy” classes—which, again, it’s not—it would not reach even the bottom rung of academic help student-athletes get country-wide.
Ultimately, The List is largely irrelevant, though people will focus on it, and wrongly so—its existence is innocuous, and should not shatter anyone’s notions about the academic rigor or standards of the University. Cole Underwood, a freshman offensive lineman, responded to the piece and said it best:
“Stanford athletes work hard in the classroom, hard in athletics, and are good people. Don’t let anything bring you down.” | <urn:uuid:f0ad6f26-d7ce-4e5e-b5b6-ca6226f75ade> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/03/09/perspective-on-the-list/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964419 | 2,312 | 1.625 | 2 |
Beneath the blue skies of Southern California they labored, T-shirted rebels with a grinder in one hand and a paint brush in the other, hacking out their works of art from '51 Mercs. It was a time when goateed maniacs like Ed "Big Daddy" Roth built wacked-out, bug-eyed, fiberglass hot rods with names like "Beatnik Bandit" or "Outlaw;" when rogue bikers like Van Dutch would transform pin-striping into a whole new art form; when crew-cut drag racers would queue up at the Hula Hut to show off their full-race strokers before tearing up Slauson Avenue.
While the '50s might be remembered as the era when automobile manufacturers cudgeled on the chrome and the tail-fins, the true car design revolutions were occurring in dingy little California garages by self-taught customizers. It was their innovations that would eventually lead to today's $18 billion aftermarket parts industry, and it was their ideas that auto companies would soon imitate to great success.
The godfather of this empire--the man who pioneered it all--is the King of Kustoms, George Barris. His collection of Barris Kustoms at Star Cars in Gatlinburg, which owner Charlie Moore opened a few months ago, offers a three-dimensional tour of a master artist's imagination. While the 30-odd cars focus on what made Barris famous--his creations for television shows and motion pictures--they're the frosting on the cake of a career that helped shape the car in your own driveway.
"Cars today are just an extension of what we were doing in the '50s," says the 71-year-old Barris from his famous North Hollywood shop, Barris Kustom Industries. "Lowered bodies, aerodynamic designs, front ends molded into one piece without chrome bumpers hanging out, slotted tail lights, ground effects packages, spoilers, half-tops, sunroofs...All that stuff, we were doing. That's what we pioneered. Now the manufacturers are doing it because there's a demand."
When Barris started Barris' Custom Shop with his brother Sam in 1945, you couldn't say there was much demand for such services. You got what you bought, and not many people seriously considered physically changing their cars. But Barris was never fully satisfied with Detroit's styling efforts; in the '30s, his first car was a hand-me-down 1925 Buick that he and his brother proceeded to change a bit--by giving it an orange and blue paint job with diagonal rainbow stripes.
"I never liked anything stock. I always liked to see what I could do to improve what [Detroit] made," he says. "So that was why I went into customizing--I had more enjoyment from making something better than to continue making it as it was. A lot of people, companies, and collectors like to restore antiques or classics, but to me that wasn't a thrill to put something back the way it was. I would like to take a '57 Chevy and make it look better rather than just make it another '57 Chevy."
At the Custom Shop, he and Sam would take even more radical steps to transform Detroit's lumpy family cars into sleek badasses: chopping tops and lowering suspensions, blending fenders into the main body, filling in seams and removing trim. On the groundbreaking Hirohata '51 Merc (named for its owner), Sam Barris dared to remove the radically chopped car's center roof pillar, creating a new "hardtop" look which Detroit quickly copied after the Kustom was featured at the 1952 Motorama. All of this was new stuff at the time--styling concepts that George had to sell the public on. And he didn't have much competition, either.
"Actually, I had to pioneer it," he says. "What I mean by 'pioneer it' was I had to really show people what we could do--most people didn't understand. But then all of a sudden they said, 'Oh, you mean you can chop that top, you can change those fenders, you can make a better looking grill than was in there.'"
In the early years of his business in the late '40s, most of his customers were ex-servicemen who wanted something that looked new instead of the same old pre-war designs. Then one of Barris' creations made it on the cover of a new sports car magazine called Road & Track in 1948, and his ideas began to get national attention. By the '50s, things were heating up. His cars began winning prizes at big car shows. He became a correspondent for such magazines as Hot Rod, Car Craft, and Custom Cars, adding excitement to the new hot rod culture that was spreading from California across the country. And, even more importantly, he began supplying cars for the nearby film industry, starting with 1950's Running Wild with Mamie Van Doren.
It was a fortuitous bit of timing--the automobile was just beginning to become a featured player in the movies, and who better to fashion cars with star power? Barris became the supplier and customizer to the studios, making cars for High School Confidential, The Lovebug, Fireball 500, and many others. And with that kind of notoriety, he started getting celebrity clients who wanted him to create their personal dream cars--John Wayne, Clark Gable, Bob Hope, Dean Martin...Each client had special needs, which Barris fulfilled to great success.
"Liberace, he liked cars strictly for show biz--a lot of Sterling silver, a lot of jewelry, a lot of rhinestones--because he used them for his promotions and his shows. Whereas Frank Sinatra, his cars were strictly safety vehicles. We took a Dual Ghia and we made two master cylinders for the brakes, two electronic gas pedals--everything was because he wanted a back-up. If a brake failed, he wanted another brake there to back it up."
Even after working with most of the biggest names in Hollywood royalty, Barris insists that he could never single out one client as his favorite.
"How can you say you like Frank Sinatra over Dean Martin or Dean Martin over Elvis Presley or Zsa Zsa Gabor? Everybody had their own impression of what they wanted: Zsa Zsa Gabor wanted a Rolls Royce with a lot of jewelry. John Travolta wanted a wild performance Pontiac Trans-Am Firebird ("Firebird Fever"). Farrah Fawcett wanted a Foxy 'Vette. Everybody has their own individuality, because a car is really an extension of the person."
In the '60s, Barris' Kustoms could be seen on all the most popular TV shows: 77 Sunset Strip, The Munsters, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Green Hornet, The Monkees. His most famous TV car is probably the timeless Batmobile, the flaming turbine-powered supercar that was yearned for by every kid growing up in the '60s and '70s; Barris created it from the legendary dual-cowl Ford show car, the Futura, and it still looks like it could take on Barris' newer movie Batmobiles. In the '70s and '80s, the TV boom continued with Starsky & Hutch's Torino, Knightrider's talking Firebird, The Dukes of Hazard's Charger. The only disappointment in that period was his brother Sam's death from cancer in 1967.
Meanwhile, in the movies, Barris was everywhere: various James Bond cars, Burt Reynolds' Bandit from Cannonball Run, the Ghostbusters' ambulance, Fred Flintstone's car from the live-action movie, Jurassic Park's Ford Explorers...Many of these now-priceless bits of Americana can be seen at Star Cars' Barris Collection--and, again, Barris says he has no particular favorite. "No--that's like telling a family that's got 15 kids, 'Which one's your best one?' What inspires me is not which one you like the best, but the challenge...and that when you complete a project, your client is satisfied."
Right now, Barris' shop is creating some vehicles for a few children's shows--tricked-out motorcycles for FOX's Beetleborg and a series of custom cars and morphing motorcycles for an upcoming show called Team Knightrider. "It's kind of a sequel to the original Knightrider we did with David Hasselhoff in the '80s, but it's got five different young kids that use these automobiles to combat crime, terrorists, and things like that. There's a lot of action, but no killing."
Perhaps even more exciting for kustom car fans, Barris is concocting a pair of special new show cars, just like in the old days.
"[One is] a brand-new Cougar made into a 1950 Ford Woodie. That means it's a Woodie but it's a Cougar, and I have touches of what I call the millennium--the 2050 vehicle. It's not way out because I still got the '50s design; and I'm introducing that in the big show in Oakland in 1998. And in 1999 is the big tribute to me from the Automobile Association, and I'm building a special '51 Merc that's both of the '50s and also the 2000 era."
With automakers and aftermarket parts suppliers offering the very same products he pioneered in the '50s, George Barris' legacy grows ever larger with countless consumers creating their own personal "kustoms." Even more telling is the fact that big car companies like Chrysler are making and selling their own hot rods, from the Plymouth Prowler to the Dodge Viper. Hot-rod culture is "in" these days, popularized by "low-brow" artists like Robert Williams and Coop and evident by the racing stripes on expensive slacker-wear. Although Barris hasn't taken on any protégés lately ("We don't have the time"), he's enthused about the kustom car scene today, from the cool cars to the new artisans.
"There are a lot of tremendous artists out there, a lot of good young designers, and there's a tremendous amount of craftsmen. There are great, great car builders now. It's expanded into where it's a major marketplace because the young craftsmen have realized that working with your hands has done more and can do more than putting on a white collar and tie and working at the bank." | <urn:uuid:532e5ed7-7169-48d6-9379-9d28f1f645c1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.metropulse.com/news/1997/sep/11/king-kustoms/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976519 | 2,201 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Photo Editing is not easy task without any help and without any knowledge of editing software like Photoshop, firework and others . But Now kid level knowledge for editing make you a good editing designer by help such utilities website on internet. For this there are many online web applications which can edit your pictures and images online without the extensive knowledge of any graphics application. Photo Editing is always fun and its pretty essential if you want your pictures to look good. You can apply many cool effects, that can make your photo look better and more enhanced. [ Read More ]
Archive for the ‘Softwares’ Category
If you are kind of geeky person and love to hang out with your mobile then you must definitely be looking for some cool stuff for your mobiles like Free Games, Wallpapers, Softwares etc. One of our readers asked us about some sites from which he could download free mobile games, so here in this article we are providing you with the complete list of sites to download all the cool stuff for your mobile.
Gone are the days of travelling tens, hundreds or thousands of miles for business meetings with colleagues or clients, thankfully! Remember how much time and energy was wasted, waiting for trains, getting stuck in almighty traffic jams or hanging around airports? Not to mention the associated costs of hotels, corporate entertainment and transport fares.
Pc Wizard is a great system detection and analysis tool. The program is most advanced system information program on the market since 1996. It can identify large range of system hardware including latest technologies. The tool is updated on periodic basis to be compatible with the incoming hardware technologies. It can also benchmark the computer system. Hardware range it can analyze and benchmark include CPU performance, Cache performance, RAM performance, Hard Disk performance, CD/DVD-ROM performance, Removable/FLASH Media performance, Video performance, MP3 compression performance.
Come up with an Idea: So you want to make the next COD or Minecraft? Well you’re going to need a new game idea, because the next hit is not going to be either one of those.If you don’t have a game idea in mind then this is what you can do. List some of your favorite games. For each game listed write 2-3 reasons why you like those games. In a few minutes you will already have a dozen or so ideas that you can pull on to add to your game!
It has become our necessity in our daily hectic schedule to listen music, watch movies and sometimes DJ mixing etc. Media Player is the best option for playing back multimedia files. While many media players can play both audio and video, others focus only on one media type or the other. We always go for advance technology to get best benefits by exploring new features so here I am helping you with some best and advanced basic Media players for your PC.
If you’re a tweeter and you own an iphone, then you are probably aware that there are several different apps for you to choose from to access your Twitter account. Some carry basic functionalities and others are more complex and connect to a variety of social media from the one app. Some are free, while other’s will cost you a small amount to purchase them. Browse through the descriptions to see which app fits best with your use of Twitter.
This is a Guest Post by Andrew Norton. If you would like to write for DailyTechPost, check out Join DTP. Videography can be both a profession and a hobby. A videographer is a video construction professional who is accomplished at creating videos for their customer. The services presented by this type of video specialist are in high demand and they get a very bighearted salary.
Do you want to take and print screen shot from desktop screen and add some annotation on it? Screen Capture is such a powerful screen capture and image editing utility. It allows you to take screenshots from any part of your screen in more than 10 ways, and save images in BMP/JPG/GIF formats supports hotkey, auto-saving, clipboard. You can edit the screenshot by drawing shapes, arrows, text, filling color, cropping, resizing and so on. It is easy to use and user friendly! It is most useful resources for web designers and developers as it helps in making designer and developer’s [ Read More ]
This is a guest post by Heather Green . Heather Green has worked as a fashion and beauty consultant as well as freelancing for various wedding, fashion, and health publications. She currently acts as the resident blogger for Online Nursing Degrees where she’s been researching cool nursing jobs as well as RN continuing education programs. If you would like to write for DailyTechPost, check out Join DTP. If you avoid streaming movies and TV shows like the plague because you know it can be harmful to your computer, or if you have a passion for expanding your giant music collection with the [ Read More ] | <urn:uuid:372e6a70-9ccb-4777-93f8-6d5da64ec3e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://techbullie.com/index.php/category/softwares/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944926 | 1,014 | 1.71875 | 2 |
As you walk down Roosevelt Avenue and Northern Boulevard you see hundreds of people strolling down the block. Walking in and out of stores are myriads of very different cultures. This is Woodside and Sunnyside. Woodside and Sunnyside are located in Queens, New York. Although they are both small, they are overflowing with different cultures and places to go.
Woodside has a variety of cultures. Over forty-nine different countries are represented and thirty-four different languages are spoken in this small neighborhood. Even though Woodside is a diverse community, its residents always share traditions that contribute to their "Melting Pot."
Northern Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue are two of the main roads in Woodside. People fill the sidewalks eager to step into one of the malls or walk into one of Sunnyside's quiet restaurants. There are many different types of food representing the different cultures of the community. On Roosevelt Avenue there is a Korean bakery that emits a tempting aroma whenever you pass it. The smell of musg bean rice cakes and sticky sang donuts is very alluring. At night, the various Irish pubs are overflowing with residents gathering to share events of the day. There are numerous public bars in Woodside. Many people go to these bars and enjoy beers, watch football games, and relax with their neighbors. Some of the popular bars in Woodside are The Coach House, Copper Face Jack's, and Charlie's Sports Bar. Very much like Woodside, on a Friday or Saturday night.
The primary subway line that cuts through Woodside is the Seven Train. The Seven Train runs from Flushing to Times Square. Other trains that run close to the Woodside/Sunnyside neighborhood are the G, R, and V trains. | <urn:uuid:6ba2285b-ce44-4d2b-9d06-f8cf21b36876> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nestseekers.com/ForSale/loft/woodside/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962383 | 358 | 1.773438 | 2 |
|Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare|
House-elf mistreaters, including the Malfoy Family.
- Ron: "Never heard of it."
- Hermione: "Well, of course you haven't. I've only just started it."
- Ron: "And how many members do you have?"
- Hermione: "Well, if you two join, three."
- — Ron and Hermione[src]
The Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare, also known as S.P.E.W., was an organisation founded in 1994 by Hermione Granger in response to what she saw as gross injustice in the treatment of house-elves at the 1994 Quidditch World Cup. Having been deeply upset at the treatment and general prospects of house-elves both in Hogwarts and the rest of the wizarding world, Hermione set up S.P.E.W. in order to champion their rights. Hermione originally wanted to call the organisation Stop the Outrageous Abuse of Our Fellow Magical Creatures and Campaign for a Change in Their Legal Status. Since it wouldn't fit on a badge, it was given its current name, though the original name was retained as the heading of the group's manifesto.
- "You know, house-elves get a very raw deal! It's slavery, that's what it is! That Mr. Crouch made her go up to the top of the stadium, and she was terrified, and he's got her bewitched so she can't even run when they start trampling tents! Why doesn't anyone do something about it?"
- —Hermione Granger after the 1994 Quidditch World Cup[src]
Hermione Granger thought it cruel that house-elves were neither paid nor given holidays for their work, so she campaigned tirelessly for a change in their working conditions. She managed to get several students such as Neville Longbottom to join (paying a fee of two Sickles), though they only did so to stop her from badgering them. These students included a reluctant Ron Weasley and an indifferent Harry Potter. However, their sickles were overall wasted, as she kept badgering them about the issues of the organisation.
She would go round the Gryffindor common room shaking her S.P.E.W. badge box at people to make them join. A few seemed interested but refused when they found they had to pay. Apparently a few other people looked "mildly interested" in the campaign, but there are no further reports of anyone else actually becoming a member. She also offered it to Hagrid, but he refused as well saying that the elves liked to work. Fred and George Weasley also put in that the house elves were happy to work at Hogwarts. The rest of the school thought of the organisation as a joke. And so, with little or no support from her unwilling deputies, Hermione battled on pretty much alone, employing tactics such as badge-making and petitioning, but with very little effect. Eventually, she started knitting hats and socks, which she left lying around Gryffindor Tower, hoping to free some unsuspecting elf who picked them up while cleaning the common room.
Becoming infuriated with Hermione's obsession with the Society, Ron Weasley started calling the group "spew" and, on occasion parodied the name by inventing S.P.U.G., "Society for the Protection of Ugly Goblins". Hermione sarcastically replied to this by pointing out that Goblins, unlike House Elves, were capable of defending themselves against Wizards on their own.
The only upshot of her campaign was that she alienated and infuriated the elves themselves. While she was busy knitting clothes to give them in order to set them free, the majority of house-elves are accustomed to their work, and seem to enjoy it. They regarded Hermione's actions as insults to their race. Thus, they refused to clean the Gryffindor common room any more, meaning that Dobby was the only one prepared to carry out this task. Already being free himself, he took all the clothes himself, wore most of them (making a tower of hats on top of his head), and passed some of the others on to Winky in the false hopes of cheering her up. Hermione was not informed of this development, as no one had the heart to tell her.
- Ron Weasley: "Hang on a moment! We've forgotten someone! The house-elves, they'll all be down in the kitchen, won't they?"
- Harry Potter: "You mean we ought to get them fighting?"
- Ron Weasley: "No, I mean we should tell them to get out. We don't want any more Dobbies, do we? We can’t order them to die for us–"
- — during the Battle of Hogwarts[src]
In spite of all this, there are indications that S.P.E.W. did eventually enjoy some moderate success, though it is likely that by then it was disbanded. Hogwarts' house-elves participated in the Battle of Hogwarts in 1998 in an unusually bold move for their kind, although this may have been a manifestation of their extreme loyalty to their "masters". However, it is possible that their contribution to the battle changed some people's views, as even Ron Weasley, a previous vocal critic of S.P.E.W., demonstrated concern and sympathy for the plight for house-elves at the time which prompted Hermione to kiss him.
Also, founder Hermione Granger went on to work for the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures at the Ministry of Magic, where she continued to work for the rights of magical creatures.
Hermione's idea that house-elves should be treated decently led to Harry attempting to be nice to house-elf, Kreacher, which caused Kreacher to be nice and tell Harry the story of his master Regulus Black's visit to the horcrux cave.
- Hermione Granger (Founder and Leader)
- Harry Potter (Secretary)
- Ron Weasley (Treasurer)
- Neville Longbottom
Behind the scenes
- As Winky, Dobby, and all of the Hogwarts House-Elves were omitted from the film version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Hermione was never seen stubbornly advocating their rights, thus S.P.E.W. has never been mentioned in the films. It was however mentioned in the video game adaptation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when talking to Hermione.
- Hermione had founded S.P.E.W. because she saw Winky being set free by Mr. Crouch. Ironically, one of her campaigns was to set elves free.
- While Harry and Ron were said to be secretary and treasurer of the group, respectively, both roles were appointed by Hermione before they agreed to join the group. Never was either said to have actually have accepted these roles, nor were they ever depcicted as acting in them.
- In Turkish, the foundation's name is E.R.İ.T. ("Ev Cini Refahını İlerletme Topluluğu" which stands for "The Society for Prosecution of House Elves' Ease"). In Turkish, "erit" means "melt".
- In Georgian the foundation's name is ედამ (EDAM) (ელფთა დამოუკიდებლობის აღდგენის ორგანიზაცია). If you change დ(D) to ლ(L), you'll get Georgian word for squint-eyed.
- In Hungarian, the foundation's name is M.A.J.O.M. ("Manók Alkotmányos Jogaiért Országos Mozgalom" which stands for "National Movement for the Constitutional Rights of Elves"). In Hungarian "majom" means "monkey".
- In French, the foundation's name is S.A.L.E. ("Société d'Aide à la Libération des Elfes" which stands for "The Society for Helping the Realease of the Elves"). In french, "sale" means "dirty".
- In Brazilian Portuguese, the foundation's name is F.A.L.E. ("Fundação de Apoio à Libertação dos Elfos" which stands for "Foundation to Support the Liberation of the Elves"). The word "fale" means "say".
- In European Portuguese, the foundation's name is B.A.B.E. ("Brigada de Apoio ao Bem-estar dos Elfos" which stands for "Brigade to Support the Welfare of Elves"). The word "babe" means "drool".
- In Spanish, the foundation's name is P.E.D.D.O. ("Plataforma Élfica de Defensa de los Derechos Obreros", which stands for "Elvish Platform for the Defense of the Worker Rights"). "PEDDO" is a namesake word for "pedo", that means "to fart".
- In Swedish, the foundation's name is F.I.S.A. Just like the Spanish name, "fisa" means "to fart".
- In Norwegian, the foundation's name is H.I.K.K. ("Husnissenes Internasjonale Kampkoalisjon"), which in English is the same as "hiccup".
- In German, the foundation's name is B.ELFE.R ("Bund für Elfenrechte" or "Alliance for the Rights of Elves"). The word "Belfer" doesn't exist in German, but it contains "Elfe", the German word for elf.
- In Dutch, the foundations's name is S.H.I.T. ("Stichting Huiself voor Inburgering en Toleratie"). The meaning should be clear.
- In Finnish, the foundation's name is S.Y.L.K.Y. (Samat Yhteiset Lait Kotitontuillekkin -Yhdistys - Same Common Rights for House-Elves -Association) "Sylky" means "a spit" or "spit".
- In Icelandic, the foundation's name is S.Á.R. ("Samtök um Álfaréttindi" or "Society of Elf Rights") "Sár" means "wound".
- In Greek, the foundation's name is Μ.Υ.Ξ.Α. "ΜΥΞΑ" means "snot".
- In Czech, the foundation's name is S.P.O.Ž.Ú.S. ("Společnost pro Podporu Občanské a Životní Úrovně Skřítků" or "Movement for Better Social and Life Rights of Elves"). Word Spožús don't have any meaning in this language, it just sounds funny.
- In Slovak, the foundation's name is S.O.P.L.O.Š. ("Spoločnosť pre ochranu práv a legálne oslobodenie škriatkov"). "Soploš" may mean "the one who produces snot".
- In Croatian, the foundation's name is Z.B.L.J.U.V. ("Zajednica za boljitak ugnjetavanih vilenjaka" which is "The Society for the Benefit of Oppressed Elves"). "Zbljuv" could be translated (as the shortened version of "izbljuvak") as "vomit".
- In Italian, the foundation name is C.R.E.P.A. ("Comitato per la Riablitazione degli Elfi Poveri e Abbruttiti"). "Crepa" is the thir singular person of verb "crepare", a gergal version of verb "morire" (die).
- In Latvian, the foundation name is V.E.M.T. ("Vergojošo elfu maznodrošinātās tiesības"), which stands for "vomit" in English.
- In Lithuanian, the foundation's name is E.G.G.D. ("Elfų Gerovės Gynimo Draugija").
- In Romanian, the foundation's name is S.P.A.S. ("Societatea Pentru Apărarea Spiridușilor" - "Society For Protecting Elves").
- In Slovenian, the foundation's name is B.R.U.H.V. ("Bratovščina razsvetljevalcev ubogih hišnih vilincev"). Bruh is the stem of the word "bruhati", which means "to vomit".
- In Bulgarian, the foundation's name is S.M.R.A.D. ("Сдружение на магьосници за равноправие и авторитет на духчетата", which stands for "Association of wizards for equality and authority of house-elves"). The word "smrad" means "stink".
- In Polish, the foundation's name is W.E.S.Z. ("Walka o Emancypację Skrzatów Zniewolonych"). "Wesz" means "louse" in English.
- In Danish, the foundation's name is F.A.R (Foreningen for Alfer's Rettigheder). "Far" means "dad" in Danish.
- In Hebrew, the foundation's name is אלרגי"ה ("אגודה למען רווחת גמדוני הבית"). The word "אלרגיה" means "alergy".
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (First appearance)
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (video game) (Mentioned only)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Ron acts in it) | <urn:uuid:c038c952-5243-4160-87b6-c132834214bd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Society_for_the_Promotion_of_Elfish_Welfare?oldid=757705 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938021 | 3,227 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Beau Brum: remembering the Birmingham Arts Lab
How the 1960s and 70s counter-cultural hub movement took root in England’s second city.
‘It was ragged and naïve /
It was heaven’
– this was David Bowie’s experience of a Lab-run event at the Croydon Road recreation ground, commemorated in his 1970 single Memory of a Free Festival. It’s one of few traceable references to the 40 or so arts labs that sprang up across the UK in the late 1960s – unknown to most save a few devoted Bowie fans who will recall that he co-founded the Beckenham Arts Lab early in his career. We’re not likely to know about them because they all petered out after two or three years of poor management or not enough get-go or too few volunteers. In Yarmouth, Nottingham, Worthing and Norwich, the artistically curious came together with the idea of forming a counter-cultural, regional arts hub to rival the well-greased avant-gardist movement afoot in moneyed London. But not even Bowie – or Jones, as he was then – could turn his local Lab to any durable good.
The same year of Bowie’s valedictory ballad, leagues north the Birmingham Arts Lab was expanding with every month into its first permanent premises – a youth centre on Tower Street in Newtown. And as the sole survivor of the arts lab movement, it’s become the stuff of legend.
Ian Francis, founder of Birmingham’s Flatpack Festival, has been waiting for the opportunity to investigate it ever since he visited an exhibition of the Lab’s silkscreen posters at the Museum & Art Gallery, shortly after moving to Birmingham in 1997. So this year’s festival – running for ten days over Easter – is dedicated to the legacy of the Birmingham Arts Lab, which sighed its last in 1993. A programme of workshops, docs and an audio installation will authenticate the myth and celebrate the ingenuity of its founding members, whose precedent still inspires an active DIY arts scene today.
The genesis of the Lab can be traced to a meeting between five men (Tony Jones, Mark Williams, Dave Cassidy, Fred Smith and Bob Sheldon) who had all worked at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham and grown fed up with its too-sensible agenda. They decided to create their own exhibition space that would permit them to display and explore experimental cinema, music, theatre and dance. For the first six months, they ran a series of fundraising events called Strange Days (after The Doors album) – featuring bands accompanied by Smith and Cassidy’s then-popular Amoeba Lightshow – while operating from Tony Jones’ bedroom at his mother’s place on Oakwood Road.
Jones’ interest was in film, and when the Birmingham Settlement offered them a share of the Tower Street building, he and his partner-in-purloining-crime Pete Walsh set to building a working cinema space. Jones – who moved on to Cambridge to programme its Arts Cinema, direct the Cambridge Film Festival, co-found the City Screen/Picturehouses network (sold last year to Cineworld) and now heads up the Cambridge Film Trust – remembers equipping the Lab’s gym-auditorium with materials fetched from building sites: “We used to pinch the scaffolding, the clamps, hardboard, chipboard, the industrial Sterling board – anything that was available. You’d just help yourself basically.”
They also inherited cast-offs from bigger, wealthier cinemas, and Jones paints an amusing picture of the magpie-team at work: “The Birmingham Film Society gave us their screen when they moved from the Crescent Theatre. They helped us take it down and we carried the frame complete – 20ft by 10ft – through the centre of Birmingham late at night…”
With a 16mm projector, which they operated themselves, they were able to show, in maiden weeks, Marco Ferreri’s surreal Dillinger is Dead and the Andy Warhol-Paul Morrissey collaboration Flesh. At this early stage, the organisers financed the Lab themselves – until they took a loan from the bank for £300 to upgrade to a 35mm projector. (With cumulative experience, they were later entrusted with regular funding from West Midlands Arts.) They had their own in-house communications organ: a printing press hand-built and worked by cartoonist Hunt Emerson. Simon Chapman installed a silkscreen printing facility with which artist Ernie Hudson produced his famous paint-and-photo posters to advertise forthcoming events.
Three posters by Ernie Hudson for the Arts Lab…
…and an editorial from the Lab’s May 1973 programme, noting the reappointment of Tony Jones after temporary dismissal
This hands-on pragmatism en masse is easily overlooked when so many anecdotes exist to preserve the Lab’s more exuberant past. But clearly, for Jones, much of the enjoyment in running the Lab lay in the raw mechanics, which were in a constant state of evolutionary flux – and will be lost on most of us today. Initially, they used a carbon arc projector, which, by all accounts, is a delicate piece of machinery: it burns a green flame and had the potential, if not closely monitored, to set fire to the reel of film. (Among the many regular volunteers at the Lab, one man took it upon himself to hold steady the carbon arc controls for hours at a time. He didn’t speak much; they nicknamed him Dick Arc.)
As Jones recalls: “Underneath the staircase we had a huge old mercury arc rectifier, and we had to use that to strike up the carbon arcs. Then, when we transferred to Xenon lamps, we changed to different rectifiers altogether. We learnt a lot about the technical side of things, and would often speak to the projectionist at the Odeon Queensway, or at Scala in its heyday. They were showing Lawrence of Arabia on a long run there – so we’d watch and aspire to 70mm. Both Pete and I made sure we kept 70mm going, and when Pete moved to Dublin to join the IFI [Irish Film Institute] he insisted on their having 70mm projectors, and I had 70mm put in at Cambridge. We’re still two of only five venues in the UK and Ireland with the capacity to show 70mm film.”
If Jones and Walsh were matched in their mutual appreciation of the nuts and bolts (“To this day,” muses Jones, “there’s never been a quieter, more compact 35mm projector than the Philips FB7”), they also had their separate expertise. Where Walsh took charge of programme notes, Jones was a gifted and tenacious transactor. In acquiring films for screening at the Lab, there wasn’t a distributor or library he hadn’t had negotiations with. The legendary US film collector Raymond Rohauer lent Jones the complete works of Buster Keaton, which he screened back-to-back over the course of one evening while “playing badminton downstairs as well”. The filmmaker Jack Hazan paid a visit to the Lab when they showed A Bigger Splash: “We persuaded him by sheer force of persistence that we should be showing it… There wasn’t much we didn’t get.”
Eventually, the Lab outgrew its labyrinthine HQ at Tower Street, and moved to new premises on Holt Street on the Aston University campus. On paper, the venue appeared pleasingly similar to the first: an old brewery, repurposed, with potential for gradual expansion. But though the cinema flourished as before, they never received the adequate funding to rehabilitate the Lab’s theatre and music scene. There was talk of a disused garage on the complex that they planned to use as a second exhibition room, but it was much like waiting for Brigadoon – except it never materialised.
Jones left for Cambridge in 1979, whereupon Walsh took the helm of the film programme, which by then had overwhelmed the Lab’s other media outlets and was renamed The Triangle. Bending to funding criteria – in this, its last phase – the Lab adopted a repertory house-style, and stopped the progressive-contemporary fare of earlier days.
There was a sadness that attended the Lab’s decampment, which is generally considered the end of an era. For certain, it wound up the Lab’s famous double- and triple-billings, which fused together artists of disparate disciplines: one on occasion, it screened the René Clair short film Entr’acte with live piano-accompaniment by two pianists on one upright, “and then” says Jones, “we had some ballet and some avant-garde music.”
The comedian John Dowie, who cleaved to the Arts Lab from its inception in 68, and valued the support it provided young artists like himself, disdained the streamlined Lab-that-was at Holt Street: “I prefer my memories of the Lab to remain memories of Tower Street. I don’t think I would have enjoyed the transition of Arts Lab to Arts Centre; of multi-media activities to cinema only (as good as that cinema may have been), or of replacing a rough-hewn do-it-yourself approach to staging art of any kind to a glossy, government-funded method, which seems effective only in terms of killing the things that the rest of us love.”
Those who had first-hand experience of the Lab at Tower Street – and there were many, it seems, who tried the door up the iron fire escape – remember it as much for the community it cultivated as for its open, inclusive, multi-disciplinary events programme that gave a window onto innovative and foreign art never before made accessible to rundown, provincial, auto-industrial Birmingham.
And it was always Birmingham – always for love of the city – that kept the Lab churning. Ian Francis at Flatpack, who found in the Lab’s first incarnation a transferrable tool-kit for setting up his own breakaway film initiative, attributes the longevity of the Lab to the city’s desperate need for the services it provided: “I think it was really important, especially if you’re somewhere like Birmingham and outside of the main centre of production. You get used to things coming down the pipe from somewhere else.”
[And indeed, the Lab poured itself into the local community. Such was its open-handed reputation, Peter Houghton, then-director of the Birmingham Settlement, appealed to Jones and company to try to integrate the disaffected kids into the Lab’s activities to keep them clear of the borstal. They snuck them onto the Arts Lab football team, joined a Saturday league, and won a cup.]
Tony Jones and Terry Grimley (another of the Arts Lab’s earliest members) both speak of the current state of film exhibition in Birmingham with the same impassioned/emotive intensity one suspects herded the Arts Lab to success all that time ago. Jones still registers dismay at the contrast in the cultural arts scenes in Cambridge and Birmingham: “Moving from one to the other, you realise what a job there is to do in Birmingham. The same sort of films would do three or four times the business [in Cambridge], and still will do so – even though you’ve got a city a tenth of the size of Birmingham.”
Thankfully, Flatpack flies the flag for independent cinema exhibition in the midlands. Francis is optimistic about the changed landscape of Birmingham’s arts scene, which favours small organisations over a single, dominant arts space: “That hasn’t meant it’s split up into silos: those small organisations all talk to each other and collaborate. That’s one of the nice things about Birmingham: its open, collaborative ethos. It’s not particularly cliquey, and people generally feel that they have more to gain by working together.”
And so it was in the 70s. In hindsight, it occurs to Grimley that the Lab was “a kind of Noah’s Ark which swept up a lot of talented, creative and/or odd people to help them survive a really drab low-point in Birmingham’s history – sandwiched between the demolition derby of the 1960s and the 1980s renaissance. Sadly, the renaissance now seems to be on hold again… and, of course, we’ve never had a successor to the Arts Lab and Triangle cinema.” | <urn:uuid:8f5d3c39-41d2-4e5a-b03d-b280ac09b198> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/beau-brum-remembering-birmingham-s-arts-lab | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964357 | 2,643 | 1.71875 | 2 |
The spread sheet had been posted on September 9, 2010, to a website called Student of Fortune a site where students can buy help with their homework. (More about it below.) It stayed posted until August 22, 2011, when a patient discovered it and reported the breach to Stanford.
The spreadsheet came from Multi-Specialty Collection Services, a vendor to Stanford, hired to do payment and billing analysis. It was posted as part of a response to a student asking about how to convert data to bar graph form. The identity and motives of the person who posted the spread sheet is unknown.
A spokesman for Stanford correctly stated that "there is no employee from Stanford Hospital who has done anything impermissible." This is true. But that's the problem!
As health care becomes more complex and more digital, information can easily be moved around. Hospitals, medical groups, health plans, and others, use vendors with specialized skills. Sophisticated analysis of population data is crucial for improving quality and constraining costs. But it creates vulnerability to data breaches, as happened at Stanford.
The article mentions other prominent institutions that have experienced major breaches. Apart from hacking incidents and erroneously addressed faxes and emails, an employee at the Lucile Packard Children's hospital stole a computer with the records of 532 patients. And an employee of the Massachusetts General Hospital left paper records on the subway while commuting to work.
Bryan Cline, a spokesperson for the Health Information Trust Alliance, a nonprofit devoted to "the belief that information security should be a core pillar of, rather than an obstacle to, the broad adoption of health information systems and exchanges," said that 20 percent of breaches involve contractors. Cline noted that providers depend on legal contracts with vendors to protect privacy, but as the Stanford case shows, contracts aren't guarantees!
The more interconnected we are, the more our own integrity depends on the integrity of those we're connected to. I practiced for more than 30 years with a large medical group. When patients described bad behavior of clinical colleagues, administrators, or support staff, I apologized. Typically my patients said "you didn't have anything to do with it." I replied with some version of "but we served you poorly, and I'm very sorry about that."
Interconnection creates great opportunities and great risks. Lapses of the kind that occurred at Stanford undermine public trust and could lead to crippling restrictions on the use of digital data. This would be a public health tragedy.
To my reading, Student of Fortune, the homework-help website where the spreadsheet was posted, smacks of the corruption of the educational process. Educators report a vast increase in plagiarism and other forms of pseudo-student work and pseudo-learning. Here's how the enterprise describes how its "tutors," which includes the person who posted the spreadsheet, are paid:
1.Users post questions to our site, seeking help with an academic or technical subject. They offer a bounty for what they're willing to pay for a tutorial that teaches them how to solve their problem.When I search online under "organizational ethics," in addition to links to this blog I find many advertisements for essays business students taking courses on the topic can purchase.
2.You find their question by searching or browsing for questions, or by opting-in to email alerts in your areas of expertise.
3.Write up a great tutorial for their question on Student of Fortune along with how much you'd like to get paid for it. We'll pick a random 20% of your tutorial as a preview and post it for everyone to see. Don't worry... you'll a say in what 20% we're sending, and we never send the end of your tutorial (where we expect you'll put the conclusion).
4.When the other user buys your solution, we'll send you the tutorial (less 18% to cover the bare-minimum cost of processing your transaction).
5.We keep your tutorial around forever, so if it's a commonly-asked question, you could be making money off it for a long time to come! Some of our users have made over $1,000 off of a single tutorial! In these cases, we'll take 40% to help cover the cost of advertising your tutorial.
How's that for an ethics lesson to our budding organizational leaders! | <urn:uuid:1fe47154-f8e0-40a8-bf32-79040532d701> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://healthcareorganizationalethics.blogspot.com/2011/09/stanford-medical-records-posted-online.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958693 | 884 | 1.828125 | 2 |
1983-84 Budget—A Blow to the Productive Forces
WHILE presenting his budget proposals in Parliament, the Finance Minister claimed that the philosophy of his budget was to strengthen "the productive forces in the economy". One would have thought that the Finance Minister was going to unfold a package of reliefs and incentives to the masses of workers and peasants who constitute the most creative productive forces in the economy. It is well-known that the productive potential of the peasantry cannot be unleashed unless land belongs to the actual tillers of the soil, remunerative prices are offered to agricultural produce and the real wages of agricultural workers are raised. In the same way, excess capacity in industry cannot be eliminated unless the workers have a stake in increased productivity. Increasing the real wages of workers and their active involvement in production management are crucial to any substantial increase in industrial production. It is the workers and peasants along with the lower and middle class employees who constitute the major segment of buyers of what is produced for the domestic market. Instead of strengthening the real incomes of the workers, peasants and middle class employees who constitute the bulk of the productive forces, the Finance Minister has set out to stimulate a small stratum of savers in the upper income brackets and corporate investors who have all along been the major beneficiaries of fiscal inducements and developmental programmes.
What is worse is that instead of protecting and raising the real incomes of the masses of workers, peasants and middle class employees, the Finance Minister has relied on indirect taxes, inflationary financing and enhancement of administered prices envisaged within and outside the budget which would further erode the purchasing power of the masses of the consumers and defeat the end objective of stimulating domestic savings and investment. Promoting export in the prevailing climate of deepening recession and rising tide of protectionism in the developed capitalist countries will also be self-defeating. Thus, the philosophy of stimulating productive forces and the manner .in which it is sought to be clothed by the budget proposals are extremely lopsided and disappointing. | <urn:uuid:86f2bc07-d96f-425e-af48-1a8bfece2ae3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/socialscientist/text.html?objectid=HN681.S597_119_052.gif | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953722 | 402 | 1.84375 | 2 |
What does the automotive landscape look like from here? From the news, this week alone, we learned that BMW announced a new electric vehicle line, Toyota will be making a line of home electric car chargers and yesterday the NY Times published a piece about Ford’s “worldwide line of compact cars under the Ford Focus name that will include hybrid, plug-in hybrid and electric models.” A Ford VP says, about this Focus focus, it’s a
“a really, really important car” to Ford Motor’s efforts to thrive in a hyper-competitive automotive industry, it will get “the biggest launch we’ve ever had, the biggest media weight.”
Except, when you actually read the article they miss one little detail.
When we peal back the onion a bit we learn something about how the “majors” are viewing the move to electric vehicles. I went to the Ford website to learn what I coud about the variations on Focus electric vehicles described above.
Here’s what I found. There are eight, count them, EIGHT, Focus models to choose from, here in the US. Every one has a 2.o liter gasoline engine with varying arrays of bells and whistles. That’s it for “the biggest launch we’ve ever had?” No Focus hybrids, plug-in or otherwise and no electric models will be available in the U.S. in this model year. I think that speaks volumes about what Ford thinks Americans want (need?). A small gasoline powered car that gets 40 mile per gallon. | <urn:uuid:e5ce9d75-084b-4634-888c-a03b26aef503> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sciencefriday.com/blogs/02/25/2011/getting-there-part-1-ford-8217-s-biggest-launch-ever.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934811 | 337 | 1.5 | 2 |
By Karen Hall
Marshall County school board policy committee members got more information on standardized school attire at their meeting last week.
Visitors from Maury County were enthusiastic about the difference the policy made in their schools.
"It makes a huge difference in the atmosphere of our building," said Beverly Miller, who is starting her second year as principal of Mt. Pleasant High School. "I wouldn't go backwards," she said. "I wouldn't go back to no dress code. It's a huge cultural difference in our building."
Mary Carter, Maury County supervisor of attendance and discipline, agreed with Miller, stating, "It really cut our discipline (problems) in half."
Before taking the job in Mt. Pleasant, Miller was supervisor of secondary instruction here, so she is very familiar with Marshall County schools and students.
Board members had plenty of opportunities to ask questions.
"We have a dress code," Kristen Gold said. "We just don't have standardized attire. Why is it (the dress code) so difficult to enforce, and why does standardized attire make it easier?"
Simplicity is why.
"We wanted to simplify it so they could focus on instruction," said Rick Robinson, supervisor of secondary instruction. "The more variations there are, the more interpretations there are. We wanted to simplify."
Marshall School Board member Donnie Moses agreed.
"Simpler is easier to control," Moses said.
Carter gave the board tips on how to implement a standardized school attire policy.
"Consistency is the main thing," she said. "Everybody has to be on board."
Robinson added, "We have 20 schools and 20 principals. It's difficult to get agreement on anything, but we try to do the best we can to have a consistently enforced policy."
Carter and Robinson explained that Maury County held a series of public meetings to get input from parents and students, and Maury County leaders spent a total of six to eight months working on the policy.
"Give yourself plenty of time to investigate," Robinson counseled. "Don't assume anything. Once you set a code, don't change it: give it some time for the public to get used to it.
"Give it a lot of thought," Robinson urged.
Expanding on the point, Carter said, "We decided not to change it for three years."
Some parents were totally against it, but Maury County schools' attendance and discipline supervisor said "Some came around to it in the second year," when they found it meant they had to buy fewer clothes and discipline was better.
Miller has "not had a parent complain," she said.
Maury County's basic colors for shirts are navy blue and white, and each school may choose up to four additional solid colors for shirts. Standardized school attire rules apply all the way from kindergarten to 12th grade. Miller admitted there had been a few issues with children moving from one elementary school to another and needing shirts of a different color, but said this was not a big problem.
Robinson said that at first Maury County had considered school uniforms, but they learned that if uniforms were required, the district would have to buy them for all students on free and reduced lunch. With standardized school attire, the required styles and colors can be purchased from many retailers, at a range of prices that fit most family budgets. The required clothes can also be found secondhand. | <urn:uuid:1853f330-fa28-4c36-a6c4-47ebcfcc50ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marshalltribune.com/story/1780956.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984118 | 705 | 1.59375 | 2 |
In less than a year, the winner of this year’s contest will have been inaugurated as our new president. Between now and then you need to keep yourself apprised of the ongoing developments, and recourse to news sources is recommended. Among the best are: The New York Times Campaign 2012 (includes free access to articles, videos, numerous polling results, slide shows, and special reports); Washington Post Campaign 2012 (features on the delegate race, campaign financing, campaign ads, along with its Fact Checker, that “examines the truth behind the rhetoric”); Wall Street Journal Election 2012; Infoplease Campaign 2012; C-SPAN Campaign 2012 (extensive video coverage, including the debates); CNN America’s Choice: Election Center (with nice section on campaign issues); and Politico 2012 Live. For an overseas perspective, try BBC U.S. Election. Gallup polls dealing with the election are here. The Pew Research for the People & the Press Center report – Campaign 2012: Too Negative, Too Long, Dull - echoes what many believe, and journalism.org (another Pew Center) has an excellent Campaign 2012 in the Media feature.
Archive for January, 2012
Senate Bill S3148, recently signed into law by Governor Christie, allows school boards the option of moving school board elections to the general November elections as well as doing away with voter approval of school budgets if the budgets come under the 2% cap. As reported in the news, there are pros and cons to this shift. The Department of Education has produced an FAQ on this matter while the New Jersey School Boards Association, which supported this legislation, has an update and brief overview on this topic as well as stating that 81 school districts have already shifted their elections. Reportage is at: NJ Spotlight, The Star-Ledger, The Press of Atlantic City, The Bergen Record, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
This morning, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, greviously wounded last January, submitted her resignation to House Speaker Boehner. Her letter and video of her resignation can both be found at C-SPAN. A brief biography is available. Information on her voting record, stands on issues, public statements, ratings by interest groups, and campaign finances are here.
His speech, a transcript of said speech, the Republican counter-speech, and various interviews are all aggregated at this C-SPAN site. Highlights of the speech are available courtesy of CBS News, along with analysis. Additional reportage is at: USA Today (includes a “fact check” of the speech); the Washington Post (with its own well-established “The Fact Checker“); The New York Times (along with “Choice Words” – a tally of selected words used by President Obama in his SOTU speeches and by the Republican presidential candidates in their debates, interviews, and speeches); and The New Yorker. A very informative essay, accompanied by a linked listing of all previous SOTU messages and speeches, can be found at the American Presidency Project. Here is an interesting article from the Christian Science Monitor on how the foreign press viewed this speech.
Dozens of interviews on numerous topics are featured in this collection. Based on over twenty-five years’ worth of interviews, subjects from Kofi Annan to U Thant reflect on the founding of the UN, the Congo question, Cuba, and many other significant international occurrences. Audio downloads and transcripts are available. A great primary resource.
Two smaller unions representing about 5000 state workers have signed contracts with the state. The contracts, which are retroactive to July 1, 2011, call for no raises in the first two years, followed by raises of 1% in the third year and 1.75% in the fourth year. New coverage is at: The Star-Ledger, and Bloomberg (in which Governor Christie says he expects similar concessions from the other unions).
There has been much press of late on income inequality, but many may not realize that the question of income inequality or the distribution of wealth has been a thorny topic for at least 200 years. The following are some recent publications that have a bearing on this problem: Changes in the Distribution of Income Among Tax Filers Between 1996 and 2006: The Role of Labor Income, Capital Income, and Tax Policy (a MUST read, CRS); Growth in the Residential Segregation of Families by Income, 1970-2009 (US 2010 Project); U.S. Neighborhood Income Inequality in the 2005-2009 Period (Census Bureau); Income Distribution (Brookings) ; and Is Income Inequality A Problem in the U.S.? (NPR). For statistics on this topic, please visit the Income, Expenditures, Poverty, and Wealth section of the 2012 Statistical Abstract of the United States. This question is not limited to the United States: Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2011 (Chapter 2 concentrates on income inequality, European Commission); Divided We Stand:Why Inequality Keeps Rising (a substantive examination, OECD); Income Inequality, various reports(World Bank); Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin? (IMF); and World Income Inequality (Conference Board of Canada). And what brought this discussion to the forefront is this CBO report: Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007.
Of course, this was released on a slow news day – Friday. But here is the original text of the announcement. Find out which countires had ratings lowered and which were affirmed.
There are more than a million documents associated with Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. The King Center has digitized an initial offering of two hundred thousand documents ranging from his sermons to letters he received from children. This is an ongoing project; more material will be added. An extensive photo archives in also available (in the “Spotlights” section, select “photos”). An unbelievable treasure trove of primary sources. This project supplements the scholarly edited “Papers” already available online. (This latter site also allows access to the informative MLK Encyclopedia).
Here are two very straight-forward sites that deliver the above information: the first is a listing by date of presidential primaries/caucuses; the second is an arrangement by state that not only includes the presidential primaries/caucuses but also includes the state-level primaries/caucuses for congressional seats. This 2011 CRS report – Presidential Nominating Process: Current Issues - provides needed background on this topic. Also, chapter one of Stephen Wayne’s Road to the White House 2008 focuses on “Presidential Selection: A Historical Overview”; a partial 2012 version of this chapter is available at Google Books. Additionally, these articles are of help: Reforming the Presidential Nominating Process; Reforming Presidential Nominations: Rotating State Primaries or a National Primary?; and Polls and Elections: Support for Nationalizing Presidential Elections.
This newsweekly examined hundreds of online programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels concentrating on business, education, nursing, computer information technology, and engineering. Several criteria were applied to each program (methodology is explained). A simple school name search is provided as well. It should be noted that no for-profit institution made the top of any list.
The New York Public Library has recently finished the digitization of 124 atlases on New York City. Most are fire insurance; i.e. Sanborn, maps of the city and its boroughs. The volumes range from 1815-1948 and contain over 7000 maps. If you want to see what neighborhoods looked like in startling detail back in the day, this would be a good first stop. These maps give you an idea of how the city has expanded over time, and that it did not have the same boundaries as it does now. For instance, where we grew up in Brooklyn is not even on the maps from the 1880s.
At the annual meetings of the AHA, the outgoing president delivers a speech usually from one of the following categories: an historiographical perspective, a state-of-the-profession reflection, or a summation of his/her field of specialized research. Since 1884, some of the great names in history have been elected as president and have delivered speeches. The Archive of AHA Presidental Addresses includes all of these speeches. Read addresses from such luminaries as Frederick Jackson Turner, Robert Darnton, Carl Becker, Joseph Strayer, Charles Homer Haskins, and other prominent names in history.
How Costly Are Debt Crises? (IMF); Finance and the Economy: Occcupy Wall Street in Historical Perspective (CRS); and Are Recoveries from Banking and Financial Crises Really So Different? (Federal Reserve).
This list may be expanded to 120 stores in the near future. For now, there are 80 stores slated to close. For this go-around, New Jersey has been spared any closures.
Gentle reader, in case you have forgotten or wish you had forgotten the previous year’s activities, here are some sites to refresh your memory: 2011: Year in Review (infoplease); 2011 Year in Review (Yahoo); Year in Review 2011 (Reuters); Dynamic 2011 Events to Shape the World for Years to Come (CNN); 2011: Year in Review (CBS); Year in Review 2011: Videos (New York Times); Year in Review: Science Stories of 2011 (NPR); 2011 Year-End Review (Wall Street Journal); 2011: Year in Review (Los Angeles Times); 365 Days: 2011 in Review (Nature); and let us not forget Dave Barry’s take on the past year. On a more local level, please read 2011: The Year in Review in Politics (NJ Spotlight); and 2011 Power List and Year in Review (PolitickerNJ). | <urn:uuid:2b0ee9a4-ce74-4488-b3c4-8af028f2213f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://njculibrary.wordpress.com/2012/01/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939422 | 2,018 | 1.5625 | 2 |
with democracies is that when leaders take wrong decisions, there are mechanisms to hold them
accountable at the implementation stage. Former US President George Walker Bush took an unpopular
decision to invade Iraq but he accounted for every American soldier that was killed during the war.
Bush, whom (former South African President) Nelson Mandela described as not understanding
properly, even in his naivety continued to brief his nation on the war in Iraq.
importantly, countries such as the US and the UK have the luxury of holding free and fair elections
through which leaders who make wrong and life costing decisions can be removed. Sometimes such
decisions are reversed at implementation stage because of pressure from the population.
why Bush and his partner in the Iraq crime, Tony Blair, are no longer leaders.
we still lack both accountability and mechanisms to remove leaders who for selfish interests have
made tragic decisions. And should you demonstrate against such a decision, you will be tear-gassed,
whipped by Kiboko Squad or killed by the state.
That is why Yoweri Museveni is still the
President and is busy preparing his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba to succeed him.
Museveni has not and
will never account for the Ugandan soldiers killed in the jungles of DR Congo.
All we are
told is that the mighty UPDF was able to flush out the ADF rebels. The army now tells us that ADF
has regrouped and is active in Congo. Maybe another invasion is in the making.
While in Congo, we
fought three deadly wars with Rwanda. In one such war, we lost almost an entire battalion of 700
The late Col. Sula Ssemakula who commanded UPDF was a survivor along with a few
The country has never been briefed about the number of our soldiers killed during
the Congo adventure. Senior officers were brought back and secretly buried while the juniors remain
buried in the thick forests of Congo.
My call to Ugandans is that let us use the Sunday night
bomb blasts in Kampala that killed over 70 innocent citizens, to put pressure on Museveni to halt
the Somalia adventure.
At a personal level, the Somalia adventure is very rewarding to Museveni.
Almost everybody in the US is fed up with Museveni but on the other hand, he is still fighting their
wars. And once you agree to sacrifice your people to serve US interests, you will be given some
breathing space. They will train your soldiers and give you free military hardware.
Those are the
benefits Museveni is reaping from the Somalia adventure. There are absolutely no benefits to
All Uganda is doing now is geared towards appeasing the US Generals for our revolutionary
leader to remain in power.
If we had a sane government, we would never have sent our troops to
Somalia. Why make your country a target for terrorist attacks? And which peace are we keeping in
Somalia? The obvious answer is that Museveni wants to continue being relevant to the US
Apart from sending our troops to these senseless adventures, Museveni is
still paying what I would term as bribes to key lobbyists in the US establishment to plead his
We have been paying an annual retainer of Shs 600 million ($300,000) to Rose
Whitakers company, Whitaker Group, in Washington to soften the stance of the US administrators on
Unfortunately the price for his adventurism and overwhelming appetite to remain
president is passed onto us.
Our citizens are being targeted and killed by the Somali
militias in Mogadishu and they have now brought the heat closer to home.
Finally, as we
focus on the bomb attacks, let us not rule out the greedy elements within our system. The creators
of ghost soldiers are capable of doing anything just to earn billions. When bombs were being planted
around Kampala in the late 90s, government used to release Shs 600 million for the Brig Henry
Tumukunde led operations every month. The treasurer of those operations, who is now a retired
Colonel, is one of the richest men in Uganda.
Politics is another possibility. Dictators the
world over, plant bombs and then use that to curtail peoples liberties, especially the freedom to
Let us widen our investigations and for once, Bwana Museveni, you must
The author is the Inter-Party Cooperation (IPC) | <urn:uuid:cea09a57-2001-41bf-ac9d-7c6ff983cbbf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.musevenimustgo.com/index.php?_exp_=1&id=ART&newsid=124 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959399 | 934 | 1.84375 | 2 |
What about you, Mommy?
When your kids ask about your own drug and alcohol history, what should you tell them?
By GreatSchools Staff
“Did you ever try drugs, Mommy?”
I paused as my 11-year-old daughter’s eyes flashed panic.
How I got myself into the conversation was one of those meandering paths through the forest of torturous parental explanations. It all seemed so logical, so well-intentioned… And now stupid, stupid Mommy, what had I done?
My daughter is horrified by all notions of intoxication. If I drink an occasional glass of wine at dinner she regards me askance and asks if I’m drunk. If she hears about a kid at a given high school smoking marijuana, she declares she’s never ever going to that school. If we got to a restaurant where there are adults enjoying pints of beer with their meal, she steers me to the door, “Mommy, ew! It’s a bar.”
In her mind, drinking more than a small glass of wine or beer (her parents’ typically abstemious ration) will lead immediately to projectile vomiting — followed by alcoholism, car wrecks and jail-time in quick succession. A puff of cigarette smoke? You’re on an express train to the nearest cancer ward. Illicit drugs? She embraces the “Reefer madness” world view: one encounter will make you a lifelong addict, living on the streets and stealing from family members.
Of course, she didn’t develop these notions in a vacuum. Being older parents hell bent on stayin’ alive for our kids, my husband and I are avidly engaged (some might say preoccupied) with health. So my kids have probably heard more about the dangers of partially hydrogenated oils, artificial coloring, cigarette smoke, drug abuse, reckless driving, and playing around the open dishwasher with its exposed knives, than many of their peers.
Thus, when my daughter overheard that a friend’s Dad had done a lot of drugs, she demanded an explanation. “Is Melanie's Dad an addict? Did he go to jail?”
Melanie’s father had what might be charitably called a colorful past. Still, I didn’t want him forever branded in my daughter’s mind as a junkie, so I felt the need to give her a little more context. “Actually honey, a lot of adults have tried drugs,” I said.
“Like that guy on the street, right?”
“Well, not just him… other adults too. A lot of them.”
And suddenly there we were, with her asking me point blank about something I wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.
This was uncharted territory. My little girl suddenly peeking into the quandaries of her teen years. Me not knowing what to say — or how honest to be.
Growing up California in the 1970’s, aka experiments-R-US, I’d been a goody two-shoes. Neither drink nor drugs touched my lips. I didn't smoke pot, tobacco, or cloves from the spice cabinet. In college I broke down: I got slammed on my 21st birthday and experimented a couple of times, far less than anyone else I know.
So I told her the truth. Had I had a colorful past I might have behaved differently, but I believe in holding myself to high standards of honesty, based on the idea that if you are committed to being forthright, you will do far fewer things you regret.
Even though I consider my history moderate by the standards of the time and place, this was clearly not the answer my daughter wanted. From her wildly dilated pupils I saw that I’d shattered the comfort of her black-and-white world view.
“You didn’t get addicted, Mom? You didn’t go to jail?”
“What about Daddy?”
Realizing the can of emotional worms I’d opened in her budding garden of a mind, I punted. “You’ll have to ask him,” I said.
When my husband walked into the room a few moments later, over hearing our conversation, he sputtered: “She asked me that already.”
He sat down with her and explained that he too had experimented in college, how stupid it was in retrospect and how little they knew then about the brain and the effect that drugs can have on a developing mind. But the look on her face made us wonder if she now regarded her parents as dangerously depraved, even though at this point my husband and I are about as square as they come. In fact, we were pretty square when square was a word that referred to more than a geometric shape.
“Let’s put it this way,” my husband said. “The last two Presidents have done more drugs than your mother and me.”
The irony struck me — we want to raise our kids with certain absolutes. When I talked to friends about it, none of them had figured out what to do when it came to sharing the details of their own pasts. One couple I know can’t agree: one wants to be quasi-honest, the other wants to fabricate a big fat white lie. Another single Mom, whose ex had a serious drug problem, committed to lying a long time ago, framing her ex’s issues in terms of alcoholism instead of drug abuse.
I turned to the experts to find out what parents should tell their kids about drugs and alcohol. There’s plenty of advice out there, but when it comes to talking about one’s own history, things get complicated: each history and child is different. Suddenly, a choice between forging an honest relationship and protecting your child against the power of suggestion stand in stark opposition.
According to Antidrug.com, research suggests that honest conversation, even about a parent's less-than-squeaky past, has a positive effect on kids' choices, although there are limits to how much detail you should offer. This website is great — it even gives you talking points!
When it comes to what to tell your kids about using drugs and alcohol themselves, most neurologists advocate a zero-tolerance position, stressing how dangerous and debilitating drugs and alcohol are for all developing minds (up to the age of 25!). And I’m right there with them, nodding my head.
At the same time, psychologists who work with teens in the trenches contend that your child will likely do all the things you're afraid of, and extreme prohibitions will only guarantee rebellion. I think, "Not my daughters! They will use their brains and make good decisions!" No parent wants their child to do drugs or drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes — no matter their own past, sometimes precisely because of their own past. But the realities of the adult world, even for those we uphold as worthy of our greatest admiration, are far murkier. I decided I’d made a mistake by spilling the beans on myself without thinking through the implications, and I vowed to revisit the issue soon with a stronger, clearer message.
In the middle of the night, my daughter climbed into bed with us. “I can’t sleep,” she said. She didn’t have to explain why.
I remember being her age and the dawn of new and terrible awakenings glimmering in my consciousness in the middle of the night, when the only solution was to climb into bed with my mother. I wrapped my arms around her, silently promising that whatever else happened, I would be there for her, and that I would always be willing to talk about tough things, even when I didn’t have all the answers and the experts didn’t either.
“I couldn’t sleep either, honey,” I whispered. “Do you want to talk?”
“Naw,” she said. “I love you, Mommy.” And she dropped off to sleep. | <urn:uuid:f19eb123-a658-440d-9eb1-5f7cf8dc06e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.greatschools.org/parenting/4485-what-should-you-tell-kids-about-drug-use.gs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967592 | 1,720 | 1.726563 | 2 |
> From: "Anonymous" <[email protected]>
> I feel that question 6 is somewhat ambiguous. I know
> that the statement "Would you mind getting off my foot?"
> can, and indeed normally is, used as a directive but
> semantically it is a question. Considering also that it was
> given out of context on an exam paper and no speaking
> meaning was there to be interpreted I think that you would
> be justified in saying that it was a question.
Well, that's a sophisticated challenge. I can't complain if
your challenge is based on obviously understanding everything
that was at issue. Question 6 is stricken.
Now I have 2 questions: Why did you send this anonymously?
You should be proud of your comment.
Second, how come no one has challenged Question 32, which is wrong, and
(32) Which of the following are short-term memories:
a. ***episodic memory
b. echoic memory
c. iconic memory
d. digit span
e. all the above
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Feb 13 2001 - 16:23:52 GMT | <urn:uuid:e928cbb1-ab5c-422d-a105-bfae2d1f520f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Explaining.Mind97/0188.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962903 | 254 | 1.695313 | 2 |
If the Denver Broncos and the New England Patriots wind up heading to overtime (always a possibility), it will be the second week in a row that the NFL's playoff overtime rules go into effect. However, they were not a factor in the Broncos' victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers last week since the first play of overtime went for a touchdown.
See, a touchdown on the opening drive of overtime ends the game without allowing a possession for the other team. Had the Broncos kicked a field goal, the Steelers would have possessed the ball for a shot to tie or win the game. A touchdown would have ended the game. A field goal to tie the game would have reverted the game back to its sudden death nature.
If the first overtime is not enough to settle a game, a second would begin under the same modified rules.
For updates, stay tuned to SB Nation Denver. For more on this game, visit Broncos blog Mile High Report and Patriots blog Pats Pulpit. Head over to SB Nation NFL for more coverage of the 2012 NFL Playoffs. | <urn:uuid:48dd92a6-eaea-4847-afe7-b19faabac551> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://denver.sbnation.com/denver-broncos/2012/1/14/2707649/nfl-playoff-overtime-rules-modified-sudden-death-broncos-patriots | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964196 | 211 | 1.546875 | 2 |
A little research helps...
Entereza is a small, but fast growing company. The content and look on their old website was dated due to: growth, increased diversity of services offered, and an adoption of a new branding scheme. Entereza asked for a redesign that would incorporate their new branding scheme and an architecture that would also be flexible enough to allow for future growth, without having to do an overhaul every few years.
I wondered where to start? After doing a content audit on their old site, I realized I would have to recreate the architecture, it was too integrated with the old content. So how could I create a flexible architecture without loosing focus on Entereza's core message and meet an agressive deadline?
To help answer these questions, I did a little research. A simple competetive analysis and brief user research were invaluable. I was able to create realistic personas that helped Entereza understand how their customers would potentially use the website and to identify new content areas.
- PersonasThe personas and scenarios I created were based on the modeling from research from contextual interviews with potential customers of Entereza.
- Taxonomy WorksheetA major task in the redesign was to categorize all of Entereza's services. I created this worksheet by gleaning services from marketing materials and numerous white board sessions I held with Entereza.
- Site ArchitectureThe new architecture is simple and allows room for growth. Content areas were stragically placed based on the goals and needs of the user.
- Home PageThe website is the result of the research I conducted and agile development. I sketch wireframes on paper before coding, but the final design is the product of time spent iterating with xhtml, css, and Fireworks. The main goal of the home page is to give a preview of available content within the site.
- visit the site: www.entereza.com | <urn:uuid:7764495c-21f8-40ef-bc3c-60669b23c866> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kevintsilver.com/entereza.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968539 | 394 | 1.632813 | 2 |
How to Buy a Computer Preloaded With Ubuntu
If you've ever paid attention to the market share statistics for desktop operating systems you probably know that Linux is most frequently pegged at about one percent.
That's a dramatic underrepresentation, of course, due largely to the fact that Linux is free. Whereas Microsoft, for example, keeps careful count of each and every copy of Windows it distributes, in the case of Linux there's typically no vendor keeping count. Rather, users simply download, share, and enjoy the open source operating system to their heart's content without any official monitoring.
Functionally this works just fine for users. The problem is that it makes it too easy for software and hardware vendors, makers of device drivers, and critics of all kinds to discount Linux's importance in the marketplace. That, in turn, makes it less likely that new software will be ported to Linux, for example, or that key drivers will be created for the operating system; in short, it slows Linux's growth.
What can you do about it? Well, if you use Linux already, you can make it known at DudaLibre, which maintains its "We are more than one percent" Linux counter to prove that the operating system accounts for more than the standard estimates suggest.
Next time you're in the market for a new machine for your business, however, another way to help prove Linux's market worth is by buying the distribution you choose preloaded. Not only will it save you the trouble of installing it yourself, but it can also help make sure everything "just works" out of the box, with support for any glitches that may arise.
Perhaps even more important, though, is that since there is a vendor keeping count, your purchase is sure to be included in the next batch of market data.
Specializing in Ubuntu-powered laptops, desktops and servers, Colorado-based System76 is particularly notable because its success has just recently prompted it to start serving the United Kingdom as well. With a commitment to the ideals of open source software, System76 aims to help make it easy for consumers, businesses, schools and governments to make the transition to the world of open source software through world-class hardware, software and support. System76 ships to the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
California-based ZaReason will install a variety of free and open source operating systems on its laptops, desktops and servers, including not just Ubuntu but several of its derivatives along with Debian and Fedora. International shipping is available.
Based in Atlanta, EmperorLinux has been supplying Linux laptops since 1999 to corporate, government, academic, and individual users. Customers can choose the hardware, the Linux distribution, and even the partition setup on their machine, which will be ready to use out of the box with full hardware support under Linux. International shipping is available.
Also specializing in laptops, California-based LinuxCertified offers a variety of installation, customization and training services as well, with support for a variety of Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. International shipping is available.
With a long list of high-profile customers, New Mexico-based Los Alamos Computers offers both workstations and laptops with the customer's Linux distribution of choice preinstalled, though it recommends Ubuntu, Debian, and gNewSense in particular. International service is available.
Though it has a somewhat mixed history with regard to Linux, it would be remiss not to mention Texas-based Dell, which has been offering Ubuntu preloaded on select machines since 2007. As of this writing, one minitower and one Inspiron laptop are listed on the company's U.S. site preinstalled with Ubuntu.
Many other vendors ship computers loaded with Ubuntu and other Linux distributions, of course. For more comprehensive lists of such vendors around the globe, visit Ubuntu's Community Documentation page or similar lists available on TuxMobil and LXer.
Wherever you end up, though, know that your purchase will not only get you a powerful machine loaded with what's arguably the best operating system on earth; it will also help create some long-overdue realistic market statistics.
Follow Katherine Noyes on Twitter: @Noyesk. | <urn:uuid:f980e774-48b6-469a-a726-3504c7cc2951> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcworld.com/article/212014/how_to_buy_ubuntu_preloaded.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934814 | 865 | 1.75 | 2 |
Tanker drivers to be told of Linthwaite chemical site’s ‘danger road’
OPERATORS who transport chemicals to a Linthwaite firm are to be informed of the bad state of the access road by safety chiefs.
The measure was confirmed by representatives from the Health and Safety Executive after a report was produced into the Grosvenor Chemicals fire in 2010 in Linthwaite.
And it was news that was given to members of the Colne Valley Action Group, who arranged a multi-agency meeting in Slaithwaite to express their concern about the firm and about the steep, badly maintained access road to the Manchester Road plant.
The meeting, chaired by Colne Valley MP Jason McCartney, was attended by Kirklees Council Highways, West Yorkshire Fire Service and Colne Valley Action Group.
Action Group member Gordon Ratcliffe told the meeting: “This road is not safe to carry vehicles with dangerous chemicals.”
But the meeting heard how Lees Mill Lane used to access the site is a private road and has no owner to pay for repairs.
Kirklees Council have said the road will only be maintained as a public footpath despite concerns over pedestrian safety.
Chris Flint, head of operations at the HSE, agreed that they will now write to all operators visiting the Grosvenor site to allow them to alert tanker drivers about the bad state of the road.
Access by fire crews was then addressed by West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue’s Kirklees District Commander Keith Robinson.
He said: “It is a bad road. Our appliances fully laden weigh between 14-18 tonnes in comparison to a tanker which weighs around 44 tonnes.
“Whilst the road is in a bad condition we can still get down there.
“It would be down to the driver of that appliance to make a judgement call.” | <urn:uuid:8081949e-2949-4bea-87b5-a06d7334a62d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/local-west-yorkshire-news/2012/03/10/tanker-drivers-to-be-told-of-linthwaite-chemical-site-s-danger-road-86081-30500342/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96325 | 392 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Facebook releases and then pulls 'Find Friends Nearby'
Published Jun 27 2012, 11:01 BST | By Andrew Laughlin
Facebook offered a hint to its future plans for location-based services with the launch of its "Find Friends Nearby" feature this month, only to immediately pull the service. Wired
noticed that the newly-listed social network released the new feature on its iOS and Android apps, giving Facebook mobile users a landing page to find other users who were within a certain vicinity.
The website noted that this was another indication of Facebook's desire to broaden its mobile experience, which is where an increasing number of its users access the network.
But Find Friends Nearby was pulled shortly after it was released, and no official announcement followed on the service.
After contacting a Facebook spokesperson, Wired
was told that Find Friends Nearby was never an official release, rather just a product in testing phase.
"This wasn't a formal release - this was just something that a few engineers were testing," said the spokesperson.
"With all tests, some get released as full products, others don't. Nothing more to say on this for now, but we'll communicate to everyone when there is something to say."
But still, the testing of Find Friends Nearby gives an indication of Facebook's goal to more closely connect its mobile users and also placate its hungry new investors by unlocking mobile revenues. Wired
reported that Find Friends Nearby came out of a Facebook Hackathon event, the all night coding drives that the company uses to brainstorm new ideas.
The site said that Facebook software engineer Ryan Patterson created the feature and initially called it "Friendshake".
In a comment on TechCrunch
, Patterson had said that the feature would help connect people with other Facebook users they have just met, such as at an event or party.
Essentially, the idea would be that instead of having to search on Facebook for the name of a person you have just met, you could just open Find Friends Nearby and quickly add the right profile based on location.
Patterson said that the app would use the phone's GPS co-ordinates to determine the user's location, and it would stop tracking this as soon they left the Find Friends Nearby page.
After briefly testing the service, Wired
said that it was fairly basic, and did not allow users to discover new people based on shared interests, or mutual friends.
Whilst Find Friends Nearby is no longer available, it is considered likely that Facebook will soon roll out some kind of similar service in the future.
In May, Mark Zuckerberg's company acquired startup Glancee, which offers an app that makes it "easy to discover the hidden connections around you, and meet interesting people".
According to reports, Glancee technology has already been integrated into Facebook, suggesting that a deeper location-based friend discovery service is coming soon to Facebook's mobile apps.
But Facebook will need to be careful as services that track people's location pretty much always attract controversy, and the company is already being watched very closely by privacy regulators in the US and Europe.
Only this week, Facebook was criticised for swapping the default email addresses on all user accounts to its own @facebook.com system without first seeking permission | <urn:uuid:8dbb19d8-345c-4371-8515-27073c281ced> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://m.digitalspy.co.uk/tech/news/a390047/facebook-releases-and-then-pulls-find-friends-nearby.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972803 | 666 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Pylon signs are large monolithic outdoor signs. They are usually constructed with large supporting structures such as either masonry columns or steel poles which are firmly mounted in the ground with a strong foundation and sometimes with a decorative base. A Pylon sign is the perfect way to make a large statement about your business. With its sturdy construction, you can be sure it will last.
Pylon signs are used to advertise for shopping centers with many tenants. In these photos Chicago Sign Group has recently built two beautiful Pylon signs for the Fashion Square Mall in Vernon Hills, IL. This is just one of many Pylon signs they have constructed in the past. The designs are usually custom. The shapes and sizes can be any type you chose. This design for the Fashion Square Mall in Vernon Hills, Il was created by an architect, but Chicago Sign Group can help you create your own design or they can design it for you.
Creating such a large sign for your business can be an intimidating process, but Chicago Sign Group can certainly help. They will make sure a Pylon sign suits your business. Be prepared for the flood of new customers.
Know more about Pylon Signs | <urn:uuid:df4f1728-68b9-4da1-968d-1fb8da0893ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chicagosigngroup.com/blog/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967064 | 236 | 1.6875 | 2 |
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Considering the importance of e-mail to most computer users, it's amazing that these programs are something of a software wasteland. If you want a straightforward way to read Internet mail, your choices are limited and not very good. A startup called Stata Labs aims to change that with an e-mail program curiously named Bloomba.
Corporate workers on Microsoft (MSFT
) Exchange systems have just gotten an impressive new version of Outlook (Tech & You, Oct. 27) as part of Office 2003. But this complex mail, scheduling, and contact-management program is overkill for many. Meanwhile, other Windows mail programs seem to be fading away. Microsoft denies reports that it's killing off Outlook Express, a free component of Windows. But the program has not been overhauled in two years, and there's no sign of a new version in the works. Netscape is barely hanging on, and Qualcomm's (QCOM
) Eudora has a minuscule share of the Windows market. Browser-based alternatives to mail programs are fine if you don't get many messages. But they're slow, they don't let you work offline, and they make it difficult to archive messages.
All current mail programs rely on folders as the main way to organize messages. The folder is a useful metaphor harking back to printed memos and filing cabinets, but it may not be the best way to deal with thousands of electronic messages that need to be searched. Unfortunately, most e-mail search functions are pitifully slow and offer seriously inadequate query tools.SEARCH IS THE ESSENCE OF BLOOMBA. The Bloomba e-mail program indexes content as messages arrive, which makes subsequent searches lightning fast. A search for words in the text of hundreds of messages can be completed almost instantly. This allows many conventional folders to be replaced by what Bloomba calls "views." A view is simply the results of a search: Matching messages are saved, and the contents are updated as new matches arrive in your inbox. I have, for example, set up a view that lets me see all messages from family members and another view for any messages referring to a trade show. By contrast, folder-stored messages can only be in one folder. But a message can appear in many views, giving searches great flexibility. For example, a note on a planned meeting with Microsoft at Comdex would show up under "trade shows" and "Microsoft."
Bloomba's search is far more powerful than the lame search tool in Outlook Express. And it's far easier to use than the Outlook version, which can require a dozen or more mouse clicks just to set up a straightforward query. I would like to see Bloomba's search get even better, with features similar to those found in powerful text databases such as LexisNexis. It would, for instance, be a plus to look for two words occurring not as a phrase but in close proximity to each other.
Bloomba can be downloaded from bloomba.com for $49.99. The price includes a copy of SAproxy Pro, an effective and easily set-up version of SpamAssassin, an open source mail-filtering tool. That's a fair price, and Bloomba is attractive to anyone with a standard Internet mail account, including most ISPs, premium Yahoo! and MSN services (but not AOL), and many university systems.
The question is whether enough people will agree with me to make Bloomba commercially viable. Stata Labs was started by its chief technologist, Raymie Stata, and his father, Analog Devices (ADI
) Chairman Ray Stata. It probably enjoys far more patient capital than most startups, but the history of companies competing with products that Microsoft gives away, even if the free offerings aren't very good, is discouraging. Bloomba is a worthy product, but Stata has a tough business challenge ahead. By Stephen H. Wildstrom | <urn:uuid:ac0d69bf-6679-4073-aeae-e6a677a8ffa2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2003-11-02/e-mail-that-blows-the-others-away | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946722 | 839 | 1.820313 | 2 |
This blog should be a permanent post on the homepage of The Jewish Press, and people should read it every day to remind themselves who they really are as Jews and what real Judaism is all about.
Don’t try to brush it off by saying, “What does Fishman know – a former screenwriter from Hollywood?”
Get ready to hear the Torah explained by the greatest Torah teacher of them all – Moshe Rabeinu, as we begin his review of the Torah in the Book of Devarim.
As we approach Tisha B’Av, it is indeed a fitting time to take a new/old look at the Torah and at its eternal truths, which are as true for our time as they were in the times of Moshe Rabeinu. That’s one of the basic principles of the Torah – it doesn’t change.
Sometimes people ask me. “Why do you waste your time trying to teach Diaspora Jews, over and over again, that the Torah is meant to be kept in the Land of Israel, rather than in Brooklyn, Boca, or Beverly Hills?”
The answer is because I love them. When you love somebody, you want the best for them. Even if you saw a total stranger about to fall off a cliff, you’d scream out to warn him – all the more so regarding someone you love.
Now, there are those who say, “What do you mean ‘fall off a cliff?’ Jewish life is great here in Brooklyn and Boca!”
It may seem great to them now, but at the end of their wonderful 120 years in Brooklyn and Boca, when they get to the gates of the real Gan Eden, they are going to be surprised to learn that they have to return back to Earth and live life all over again until they finish their tikun. It won’t help them if they’ve learned the whole Talmud ten times over. They’ll have to go back for another reincarnation. Why? Because they, we, the whole Nation of Israel, were thrown into exile because we transgressed the Torah when we lived in the Holy Land long ago. So our rectification, atonement, and tikun is to return to the Land of Israel and keep the Torah, there, in the Land of Israel, the way it was meant to be kept. Souls are reincarnated over and over again until they get things straight. The lucky ones, that is. For those who aren’t giving the chance, when the Resurrection of the Dead comes around, their bodies will have to roll all the painful way through underground tunnels from their Diaspora graveyards to the Holy Land, because, as the Zohar explains, the Resurrection of the Dead only takes place in Israel.
As we mentioned in a previous blog, our Sages inform us that the roots for the Destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem were planted long before the Destruction itself, on the night the Spies in the Wilderness returned from their ill-fated mission and convinced the Jewish People not to journey on to live in the Promised Land. That night was the 9th of Av. Their rejection of the Land of Israel was the rotten foundation which brought about our later National Destruction as an independent Nation in our own Land.
Afterwards, stripped of our own Jewish Land and Israeli Nationhood, we became minorities in foreign lands. Up until the Destruction, the religion of the Jewish People was the Torah, a combination of Divine laws and commandments that covered our individuals lives and the life of the Jewish Nation, laws concerning the king, the Sanhedrin, the army of Israel, the Beit HaMikdash, national sacrifices, and the agricultural laws unique to The Holy Land. But when we were cast out of our Land, the Torah lost its earthy component, and our physical Nationhood ceased. Instead of being the Divine Constitution of our Nation, the Torah was reduced to moral teachings and a handful of individual commandments, like the bones of a large salmon at the end of the Shabbos morning Kiddush. That’s when “Judaism” started. Stripped of our own Land, and Israelite monarchy, our own Jewish Nationhood was lost. Exiled in other peoples’ countries, we were left with the few ritual precepts that we could still perform, like putting on tefillin, keeping kosher, learning Torah, and observing the Sabbath. Instead of being our National Constitution, the Torah was truncated into being just a religion without its many fundamental National, Political, and Geopgraphic obligations and demands. | <urn:uuid:f2018999-1fc9-46d6-93c7-d6197afb4e1d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jewishpress.com/tag/jewish-nation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964312 | 966 | 1.820313 | 2 |
|Tres Leche Cake|
Joan of FOODalogue has started the year off with another armchair travel adventure with her Culinary Tour 2010 - South of the Border . I really enjoyed travelling with Joan last year and you will too!!!! If you haven't heard of this very popular event check out her site for all the round-ups of delicious recipes and stories by all the participants. This year she has featured the cuisine of 10 of our south-of-the-border neighbours. So far we have travelled to Mexico where we sipped on tequila and margaritas and enjoyed each others company virtually. Then we travelled to El Salvador and the "Ruta de las Flores" (Route of Flowers) where we enjoyed the fiesta atmosphere at the feria gastronómica (food festival) in a small mountain village. Each one of these destinations in her culinary tour challenges you to create a dish outside of your comfort zone and experience new taste and food sensations. You can also do a little armchair travelling and daydreaming through your tastebuds. Our next stop in our armchair travel is:
According to Wikipedia "Nicaragua is the largest nation in Central America, but also the least densely populated with a demographic similar in size to its smaller neighbors. It is located about midway between Mexico and Colombia, bordered by Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. Nicaragua ranges from the Atlantic Ocean on the nation's east coast, and the Pacific Ocean bordering the west. Nicaragua also possesses a series of islands and cays located in the Atlantic Ocean."
Nicaragua is a lush and tropical place. It is also the safest country in Central America with some of the friendliest people in the world.
"La comida Nica," as Nicaraguans call their cuisine, is a Latin/Creole mix of indigenous and Spanish dishes and ingredients. As with the other countries we have visited so far corn, beans, plantains, yuca and pork are popular ingredients here. Corn is a used frequently and you can always find it roasted and served throughout the countries by street vendors. Seafood is also common along the Caribbean coast. Although the food in Nicaragua is similar to the cuisine of it's neighbours it certainly has its own flair!!!! Typical dishes include nacatamales (smashed corn and potatoes wrapped in a banana leaf with pork and tomato), vigorón, indio viejo and gallo pinto (which is fried rice and pinto beans). Other special dishes include Mondongo (tripe soup), Rosquillas (a type of cheese and cornmeal biscuit), Picadillo (shredded beef) and Ajiaco (pork and tortilla dish) to name a few. Tortillas are a normal addition as well, and often used to scoop up the food instead of using utensils. Nicaraguans make extensive use of a wide variety of tropical fruits which grow in their temperate climate. Plantain is also often used in many dishes with fried plantain being a staple in many dishes.
If white sand beaches, surfing, and Salsa dancing all appeal to you, couple it up with some volunteer work as a ‘VolunTourist’ for Comunidad Connect on your trip to Nicaragua. The non-profit’s mission is promoting sustainable development in Nicaragua’s Pacific Southwest including local community projects.
Unique to this volunteer vacation however, is the fact that we were able to lodge with a Nicaraguan family as part of a homestay where you have the unique opportunity to experience local life...virtually of course. This was an incredible opportunity to taste the local culture and food and brush up on Spanish! We were able to choose from a variety of volunteer opportunities from planting trees, beach cleanups, agricultural projects or working with rural kids.
As volunteers we were able to enjoy the white sand beaches, go surfing, fishing, horseback riding, or just relax in town and watch an unforgettable sunset. Other activities included visits to museums and colonial sites, volcano hikes, Spanish classes, Salsa dancing, and even authentic cooking classes. Because Nicaragua is not as “discovered” as other Central American countries, VolunTourists can enjoy these incredible sites and activities in peace and tranquility.
“What I liked best was the breathtaking natural scenery that surrounded me everyday, as well as the details particular to San Juan del Sur, from the packaging of candies, soda in plastic bags in the little pulperias to the people watching, the open doors to people’s homes, the music coming from the giant stereo systems in the living rooms, the hammocks and the smells of earth, ocean, fried food and flowers.”
So what would I bring to the table on Joan's Virtual Culinary Tour??????Dessert of course!!!!!I can't wait to see what the others have brought to the table this time around on our virtual tour. I know it sounds as though I have already visited this beautiful country with this post, but perhaps that is just wishful thinking. For now I will be content to travel with Joan in my armchair...for now.
"Pastel de Tres Leches" or "Tres Leches Cake" is named for the three milks in the soaking liquid (Leche means milk in Spanish). The three milks in the soaking sauce for Tres Leches are sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk and heavy cream. In this case I added a little rum and vanilla to make it shine. The heavy cream is also whipped up to use as the topping. Due to the rich ingredients and the fact that it is soaked in a creamy syrup, Tres Leches Cake is extremely dense and moist, almost like a custard. This is an amazing recipe which I adapted from one I found on The Pioneer Woman Cooks. The three milks, when combined, create just the right sweetness, density and "mouth feel" for a rich cake, making it moist but not mushy. It is definitely at it's best when allowed to sit overnight to allow the liquids to be soaked in completely.
The famous cake of three milks is believed to have originated in Nicaragua. With the cuisines so closely knit with it's neighbours there is dispute over where it was first created. It is thought to have come from Nicaragua by most historians. This cake is very popular in Nicaragua, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guatemala. Evaporated milk and condensed milk were sold throughout Central and South America and even the Caribbean because it does not need refrigeration.
Although the cake can be served right away it is even better the next day. Just be careful to cover it well and not add the whipped cream topping until the day you are going to eat this. The cake will absorb any odours in your refrigerator.
**Tres Leches Cake**
1 cup all-purpose flour
1-½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoons salt
5 whole eggs
1 cup sugar, divided
1 teaspoon vanilla
⅓ cups milk
1 can evaporated milk
1 can sweetened, condensed milk
¼ cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 teaspoon rum
For the Topping:
1 pint heavy cream, for whipping
3 tablespoons sugar ( I used icing sugar)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 9 x 13 inch pan liberally until coated.
Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Separate eggs.
Beat egg yolks with 3/4 cup sugar on high speed until yolks are pale yellow. Stir in milk and vanilla. Pour egg yolk mixture over the flour mixture and stir very gently until combined.
Beat egg whites on high speed until soft peaks form. With the mixer on, pour in remaining 1/4 cup sugar and beat until egg whites are stiff but not dry.
Fold egg white mixture into the batter very gently until just combined. Pour into prepared pan and spread to even out the surface.
Bake for 35 to 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Turn cake out onto a rimmed platter and allow to cool.
Combine condensed milk, evaporated milk, heavy cream, rum and vanilla in a small pitcher. When cake is cool, pierce the surface with a fork several times. Slowly drizzle all but about 1 cup of the milk mixture—try to get as much around the edges of the cake as you can.
Allow the cake to absorb the milk mixture for a minimum of 30 minutes. To ice the cake, whip 1 pint heavy cream with 3 tablespoons of sugar until thick and spreadable.
Spread over the surface of the cake. Decorate cake with whole or chopped maraschino cherries, or as in this case drizzle with dulce de leche. Cut into squares and serve.
You are reading this post on More Than Burnt Toast at http://morethanburnttoast.blogspot.com. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to the author/owner of More Than Burnt Toast. All rights reserved by Valerie Harrison. | <urn:uuid:9ffee368-4bbf-43ff-b3e9-d0011d583b33> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://morethanburnttoast.blogspot.com/2010/01/culinary-journey-to-nicaragua-with-joan.html?showComment=1264437946410 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954785 | 1,892 | 1.5625 | 2 |
It’s often said that cultural shifts only become clearly evident with hindsight. Is it possible that the post-fossil fuel era has already begun?
Indeed, for all the talk of insurmountable challenges and very real crises‐both ecological and economic in nature—there are also promising signs of a shift in how our global culture operates. From young people waiting longer to drive through teens building tiny, mortgage-free houses to the trend toward dematerialization and collaborative consumption, we’ve documented some of the early symptoms of what might just be a paradigm shift.
Add to that the fact that some serious business types are questioning the fundamentals of growth-at-all-costs economics, and people everywhere are beginning to ponder the notion of a plenitude economy where quality-of-life matters more than GDP, and you really can make the case that we are witnessing something profound. | <urn:uuid:bdcc8ee4-ab9d-4973-8f04-6ea5792fb340> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://davidrowing.tumblr.com/post/35714475800/is-the-post-fossil-fuel-economy-already-emerging | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947312 | 183 | 1.5 | 2 |
Question with 6 notes
Anonymous asked: Hello! I love your blog and I have a question! I just saw this post that had a picture saying "Imagine a world without muslims" and then someone else commented about how muslims have invented and found tons of stuff, basically saying we wouldn't have the stuff we have right now without muslims. I've seen this sort of replies before but I don't know how to rebut it. Could you help?
The ones I hear most often are referring to “Muslim Algebra” and the discovery of the number 0. I don’t understand why someone from a particular religious group makes a discovery that it should count for anything on behalf of the religion. Isaac Newton was a huge fan of alchemy and wasted countless hours attempting to turn base metals into precious ones, despite this he accomplished so many amazing things and our science has forever changed because of it. He was able to be a great scientist in-spite of his more ridiculous beliefs. When someone of a particular religion makes a great real world discovery I think they should be championed for that in-spite of their predisposition to believe in the imaginary. | <urn:uuid:f70be016-56cc-40b9-a735-e44269e3839a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hatefulatheist.tumblr.com/post/31811584653/hello-i-love-your-blog-and-i-have-a-question-i-just | 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 | 0.978655 | 242 | 1.804688 | 2 |
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Academy Award® Nominee
Starring Djimon Hounsou, Mathew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman... View more >
Freedom is not given. It is our right at birth. But there are some moments when it must be taken.
Academy Award Nominations: Best Supporting Actor...
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Looking for more opinions? Check out our Featured Movie Reviews for Amistad.
Please Note: Reader Reviews are submitted by the readers of The BigScreen Cinema Guide and represent their own personal opinions regarding this movie, and do not represent the views of The BigScreen Cinema Guide, or any of its associated entities.
|by James T. Harris ||Jan 25, 2000|
All I can say is Thank-You Mr. Spielberg for this most Excellent Movie.
First of all...I loved it. This is another one of those emotional films by Steven Spielberg, but like the others, he does a great job with a difficult story line. This is not a feel good movie, nor does it make you feel like you want to go out there and change the world; what it does do, is make you sit back and reflect upon an incident in our nation's history that will disappoint you. The story line centers around the capture, detainment, transportation and murder of men, women and children who are being brought to the United States to be slaves in 1839. The Africans on the ship "Amistad" rebel, take control of the ship, and attempt to go back to Africa to be free. Their dream for freedom is short-lived as their ship is captured by an American Naval ship and brought to the United States. The Africans (led by Djimon Hounsou) are placed on trial, they are fighting for their freedom, but their lawyers and the politicians have turned it into a fight over the issue of slavery. The Africans win the first few rounds only to have their freedom appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where former President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) is recruited to defend them. I was saddened by the role that politics played in this freedom fight and how President Martin Van Buren fought not to do what was right, but fought instead to save his re-election. Earlier I said this film won't make you want to go out and change the world...I think it's because after seeing this film you realize that these political games have been played for the past 160 years by Presidents and you are just fed up. The sad part is to those who are the victims in these political games...don't consider it a game nor do they have a fair chance to win. Bottom line...go see the film and then send President Clinton an e-mail at [email protected] and thank him for not playing political games while he has been in office.
|by Jason Whyte ||Jan 25, 2000|
Funny how Steven Spielberg can't take a joke. The "2 movies a year man" can't make a good flick anymore. Such is the case with "Amistad", Spielberg's overblown black man epic where he over gooifyes every scene as if to say "look, I'm being cool!"
I'm not going to say much about this film; the basic story tells about a bunch of black slaves on trial for killing white folk on a ship. While the idea is good, and some scenes are fine, it takes 156 minutes to get there.
P.S. Watch for the "Let us...FREE!!!!" scene. It's a good laugh.
Picture: 4 Good colors and good detail, it just gets too fuzzy around the middle for some reason. Could have been the print quality.
Sound: 5 A ear opening dts mix, full of rich power and unsettling bass. Also mixed in SDDS and DD.
Photography: 2 It is matted to 1.85:1.
[email protected] ICQ- 4339199
Steven Spielberg has created another masterprice. "Amistad" is a film based on the slave revolt that led to freedom for many slaves who took part in the revolt. "Amistad" is a great history film which teaches us about one of the early victories against slavery. You have to see this film for yourself. | <urn:uuid:b572b246-5759-4dc9-b8ef-d85f0bb0bc43> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bigscreen.com/ReaderReview.php?movie=Amistad | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961684 | 916 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Madonna Louise Ciccone, 16 August 1958, Bay City, Michigan, USA. An icon for female pop stars thanks to her proven ability to reinvent herself while retaining complete control of her career, Madonna is also one of the most commercially successful artists in the history of popular music. Without doubt an artist with star quality, no other female singer in the pop arena has been as prominent or as successful over such a long period.
The young Madonna Louise Ciccone excelled at dance and drama at high school and during brief periods at colleges in Michigan and North Carolina. In 1977, she went to New York, studying with noted choreographer Alvin Ailey and taking modelling jobs. Two years later, Madonna moved to France to join a show featuring disco singer Patrick Hernandez. There she met Dan Gilroy and, back in New York, the pair formed club band the Breakfast Club. Madonna played drums and sang with the band before setting up Emmy...
Read the Full Biography of Madonna
Find products featuring | <urn:uuid:d56c4ae5-aae2-498d-83f6-9a00cfab5aea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oldies.com/artist-view/Madonna.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949523 | 200 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Revell Monogram has announced details of VEXplorer, its first robotics product for the retail market. VEXplorer is a robotics system that provides endless opportunities for novice inventors and robotics fanatics to build and operate robots to do what they want. VEXplorer is an extension of the popular VEX system already embedded in the education system across the country. VEXplorer will bring robotics creation outside the classroom taking the consumer robotics category to new heights.
VEXplorer features a “Spycam” for live transmission to television or USB (Universal Serial Bus) port, a claw that is so precise and strong it can pick up a feather or grip a filled, 12-ounce soda can, all-terrain wheels, and many more parts and servos. With some pre-built assemblies, VEXplorer provides versatility and ease of construction so that inventors can be controlling and exploring with their robot in less than an hour. VEXplorer will also challenge those inventors with more experience, as it has over 300 parts allowing for individualized design. Just like the Mars Explorer, VEXplorer is operated by radio control.
“VEXplorer is the answer to the merging toy and consumer electronics departments of mass retailers,” said Rick Schneider, Revell president and CEO. “VEXplorer provides the educational value that parents want and the entertainment value demanded by today’s kids.” The worldwide market for “edutainment” toys reached $1.7 billion in 2005 and could total $5.5 billion by 2010, according to In-Stat, a market research firm.
Revell’s VEXplorer will be available at most toy and discount merchandise retailers, select consumer electronics retailers, hobby stores and online beginning Fall 2007, at a suggested retail price of $249.
About Revell Monogram
Revell Monogram, a privately held company, has been leading the model kit building industry for more than 60 years with products that provide interactivity, authenticity and fun. Revell Monogram’s product lines are consumer and hobby robotics, model kits including cars, trucks, ships and planes, R/C vehicles, and slot cars. Visit http://www.Revell.com.
About Innovation First, Inc.
Innovation First, http://www.innovationfirst.com, was incorporated in 1996 and is a privately held S corporation. The company was founded on the belief that innovation very early in the design process is necessary to produce simple and elegant product designs. Innovation First began producing electronics for unmanned mobile ground robots and is an industry leader in the hobby, competition and education markets. | <urn:uuid:341b2737-0849-4567-bfbd-5a0f26ec1cc0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/print/revell_monogram | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933894 | 556 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Sat December 8, 2012
An Unlikely Youth Chorus Comes Together Online
Originally published on Sat December 8, 2012 9:09 am
Diana Newlon sits on her living-room couch leading choir practice. With her laptop balanced on one arm of the sofa, she looks at a screen full of videos of girls singing "Jingle Bell Rock." Each girl is in her own little square, arranged Brady Bunch-style on the screen.
Newlon teaches at the Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy — OHDELA for short — and she's the founder of perhaps the only all-online school choir in the state, or even the nation.
Newlon's boss, the principal of OHDELA, thought she was crazy when she suggested starting a school chorus last year. OHDELA students live all over Ohio, and take classes entirely online.
"And he said, 'Well, how could you do that?'" Newlon says. "He said, 'Well, I just don't think they would come.'"
He was wrong. Even with little publicity for the choir, about 20 students enrolled this year. They practice online through group video sessions twice a week, supplemented by in-person practices at least once a quarter. Instead of lining up on risers, they use a video-chat program for the online practices.
"They're there with their bed hair and their pajamas, sitting on their bed sometimes," Newlon says. "Wherever they're at."
It's not perfect. Sometimes the sound cuts out or lags. But a school chorus taught mostly online? Can that even work?
"I feel so, because Ms. Newlon is an awesome teacher," says Erika Blon, a senior at OHDELA and a leader of the chorus. "She's there to instruct us, and if we have a problem she is right there to say, 'Okay, if you have problem with this, listen to how I do it.'"
The chorus is all women for now. It's open to all OHDELA students, but the women say no men have had the courage to stick with it for any length of time.
"We had a guy last year," Blon says. "Poor guy. Poor thing."
Recently, the choir held one of its in-person practices at OHDELA's headquarters in a downtown Akron office tower. Afterwards, as the chorus members got ready to leave, I talked with OHDELA student Hannah Fulks. Fulks has cerebral palsy and her voice sometimes wavers — but she loves to sing. She says she wonders whether she'd be welcomed in a "regular" school chorus.
"Would they accept me or not? I'm not sure," she says. "These girls all accept me like I'm just another girl, but at regular school I'm not sure if they would be this nice."
On Saturday evening, the full chorus will give its first performance in front of a live audience, a holiday concert in Akron. There will be elf hats and Santa costumes and a teacher dressed as the Grinch. Women who have practiced "Jingle Bell Rock" and "Oh Holy Night" via video chat will sing those songs together on stage. Fulks says it's going to be awesome.
"Other people will get to see what a online school can do," she says, "without being together, like, every day." | <urn:uuid:381f0aba-3c7c-4cb9-8d43-6c27421567e9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://krvs.org/post/unlikely-youth-chorus-comes-together-online | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977686 | 709 | 1.5625 | 2 |
AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to millions of articles from top publications available through your library.
Kodak FlashPix standard endorsed by Microsoft, HP, Live Picture
A coalition of vendors, led by Kodak, Live Picture, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, announced a new imaging architecture last week at Comdex. Called FlashPix, the architecture is designed to bring photographic-quality image editing to a broader consumer market.
Derived from IVUE. The image file format underlying FlashPix borrows heavily from IVUE, the format developed by Live Picture. As we reported a year ago in our feature article on the product, IVUE is notable for the way it handles large images. Transformations are stored in mathematical form as scripts called "viewing parameters," which can be applied to the high-resolution file when needed, rather than executed while the user works with a low-resolution file on the screen.
The IVUE format is not only compact, but also faster to process. Images are stored as a quilt of tiles, rather than as one large file. When you retouch in Live Picture, it loads the high-res file for a tile, rather than the whole picture, which greatly reduces the amount of RAM required to process images.
A FlashPix file contains the complete image plus a hierarchy of several lower-resolution copies of the same file. Both high- and low-res versions are tiled. Applications can access either rendition. The coalition … | <urn:uuid:c734773a-571b-459f-8755-94adac93a19c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-18415083/heavyweights-push-digital-photography.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936338 | 305 | 1.695313 | 2 |
The School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) is part of the Faculty of Engineering at UNSW and was founded in 1991 out of the former Department of Computer Science within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. It is now one of the largest Schools of its kind in Australia. The academic staff have research focus in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Embedded and Operating Systems, Networks, Programming Languages, Service Oriented Computing, Software Engineering, Theory, and CSE is a partner in the National ICT Australia group (NICTA).
The Faculty of Engineering is the largest in Australia and comprises of ten Schools, viz. the Schools of Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Industrial Chemistry, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, Surveying and Information Systems, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Mining Engineering and Petroleum Engineering, and the Centre for Photovoltaics.
For further information on the Faculty, visit the website at http://www.eng.unsw.edu.au/
The University of New South Wales was established in 1949. At the main campus in Kensington, six kilometres south east of the centre of Sydney, there are the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences, Built Environment, Commerce and Economics, Engineering, Law, Science, and Medicine together with the Australian Graduate School of Management. The College of Fine Arts of the University of New South Wales is located in the inner Sydney suburb of Paddington. A University College of the University of New South Wales, located within the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, provides tertiary education for officer cadets and officers of the three services of the Australian Defence Force and postgraduate education and research for military personnel and civilians.
For further information on UNSW, visit the website at http://www.unsw.edu.au/ | <urn:uuid:3e25283a-f02a-4da8-8fc4-6bcdc6212a1c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/about/about.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941107 | 376 | 1.546875 | 2 |
The world’s richest man today, contrary to what you may expect, is not Bill Gates or Warren Buffet. His name is Carlos Slim Helu: a Mexican whose rise to the top was propelled by the fast-growing telecommunications industry.
Slim, who owns Latin America’s biggest mobile phone company, America Movil, is now worth $53.5 billion. He got in the telco game during the privatization of Mexico’s national telephone company in the 1990s. Recently, he merged his fixed-line assets – landline operators Telmex and Telmex Internacional — with his mobile company, creating a regional powerhouse that, according to mobile industry data provider Wireless Intelligence, has around 220 million customers.
Why are we telling you all this? Obviously, raking in billions by way of owning a telecommunications company (or three) is not in everyone’s future. But individual investors could still benefit from the industry’s growth by purchasing shares of telecom companies, mutual funds or ETFs.
Covering the world
The telecommunications industry, particularly wireless service providers and vendors focused on these markets, is registering double-digit growth in many regions. Mobile services, which now grow much faster than stagnant landline services, reached 40% worldwide penetration by the end of 2007. As cell and smart phones become a readily-available commodity in even the most remote corners of the world, the wireless industry’s penetration is certainly continuing to rise.
The developing world is the fastest-growing region for telecommunications services, according to the International Telecommunication Union, the leading United Nations agency for information and communication technology issues. Established European companies like Vodafone and Deutsche Telecom are looking to emerging markets for growth. In Asia, two of China’s most successful companies – networking and telecommunications equipment providers ZTE and Huawei Technologies — have benefitted from a strong home market and growing success in international markets, where they compete with household-name companies like Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks.
“We do see a shift towards Asian players, which have advantages from lower costs to highly educated engineers,” says Stépan Breedveld, an Amsterdam-based senior partner of The Boston Consulting Group who serves as global head of the consultancy’s Telecommunications practice.
But the region experiencing highest growth these days, according to ITU, is Africa. At just 28%, its mobile penetration rate leaves ample opportunity for greater advances. (Compare that to Europe, where mobile penetration is estimated at 111%.)
With economies recovering, companies will sooner or later regain the confidence and money to spend on infrastructure upgrades. Digitization and mobile data are driving such investments. According to a report by consultancy Deloitte, as the technology and media sectors rush to embrace all things digital, the global telecom industry will be a key player. The problem is, there is a “traffic jam” in broadband. All the players — from equipment makers and carriers to consumers and regulators — will need to come up with creative solutions to “widen the bottleneck.”
The growing importance of mobile search for smartphones, the success of VoIP on mobile devices, changes in network technologies and pricing plans to cope with the explosion of data, and the sector’s focus on reducing its environmental impact are among the other key industry issues for 2010.
Where to invest
Investors can find opportunities in both traditional telecom stocks that were once landline-focused — such as AT&T and Verizon — as well as newer wireless companies and infrastructure companies such as American Tower.
“The sector is still relatively cheap,” said Sergey Dluzhevskiy, co-manager of GAMCo Global Telecommunications Fund, for an article on telecom funds published by Fidelity. “Dividend yields are high, earning multiples are still relatively low, and we see lots of values in both the traditional and wireless sectors.”
Though AT&T & Verizon in particular have high dividend yields, growth is tough in the mature U.S. market. The action is in emerging markets. That is where a player like Vimpelcom looks attractive.
Vimpelcom, if you haven’t heard, is Russia’s second largest telecom operator, which is now in the process of acquiring Ukraine’s largest mobile provider, Kyivstar. The deal has been in the making since last year, when the Russian billionaires behind Alfa group – Mikhail Fridman, German Khan and Alexei Kuzmichev – paved the way to merge the two companies. The new Vimpelcom Ltd. will have almost 85 million mobile clients (versus 63 million previously). It will trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
To be sure, investing in individual companies is tricky unless you have a sizeable portfolio that can be diversified among stocks in a good variety of different sectors. Investors with more modest portfolios may look into sector funds like GAMCO Global Telecomm; Fidelity’s Select Communications Equipment Portfolio, Wireless Fund, and Rydex Telecommunications Inv.
Keep in mind, sector funds are more volatile than more broadly diversified stock mutual funds, which means that you can expect higher swings in value, whether up or down, than your typical equity index fund that tracks the S&P 500 or Wilshire 5000. Investors should also note that telecom services account for 2.7% of the S&P 500 index based on market cap. In other words, if you own an S&P 500 index fund or ETF, you already have a stake in the sector.
However, if you are looking outside the U.S. where there is greater growth, a higher exposure may be worth considering, says telecom analyst Tibor Bokor of Russia’s OTKRITIE Investment Bank. Bokor recommends allocating as much as 10% of your portfolio to the sector.
As always, be sure to consult with your financial planner or adviser (if you have one) before making any radical portfolio moves.
Tatiana Serafin, a former staff writer at Forbes, now heads Global Markets and Ideas. | <urn:uuid:f98f4cf2-9f73-4f76-81cd-9ee50ac2b295> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mint.com/blog/investing/invest-like-a-billionaire-telecoms-calling/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937269 | 1,263 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Salisbury -- He's got his dad's slightly beaky nose and lean, athletic build. But that's where the similarities end.
James A. Perdue, the little-known son of the famous chicken-hawker Frank Perdue, says he is reforging the family poultry company in his own image.
His father turned a small family egg business into the nation's fourth-largest chicken seller by telling television audiences he was a "tough man" who made "tender chickens."
But Jim Perdue, who took over the chairmanship of Perdue Farms Inc. from his father last July, describes himself as "a tender man."
The younger Perdue intends to follow his father's plan and keep pushing Perdue marigold-yellow-skinned chicken into supermarkets farther west. He is also pursuing new lines of business. Perdue brand poultry soon will be offered to hotels and restaurants, he said.
And maybe, just maybe, Jim Perdue said, he will find a use for his Ph.D. in marine biology by adding fish to the Perdue line.
But to distinguish himself from his father, he also will loosen the reins on managers and workers alike, decentralize power and improve working conditions, he added.
Some people inside and outside the company doubt whether the younger Perdue is really tenderizing a company that continues to face criticism for its treatment of workers, guarantees of product health and handling of chickens.
There is little doubt, however, that the East Coast's premium chicken company will undergo dramatic changes as the elder Perdue hands control of the family-owned company to his only son.
Many in the industry expect the company will have to adjust to slower growth as the boom in Americans' demand for chicken tops out.
And a big marketing problem may loom.
Seventy-one-year-old Frank Perdue still heads the company's policy-making board and still appears in its advertising campaigns. But eventually, the company will have to find some other way to convince the nation's consumers that Perdue chickens are worth a premium of 10 cents a pound as the man they identify with the company, Frank Perdue, reduces his involvement.
* Like his father before him, Jim Perdue grew up in the family chicken business, working weekends and summers for his father.
And, like his father, he returned to the family business after deciding against an academic life.
But the similar histories hide profound differences in circumstances and attitudes.
Frank Perdue joined his father's two-man egg business at age 19. He had dropped out of Salisbury State Teacher's College after realizing he wasn't going to get drafted by a big-league baseball team, and he didn't want to be a teacher.
Jim Perdue joined the family company, which was already selling nearly $100 million worth of chicken a year, in 1973 after he graduated from Wake Forest University.
But after only a year, he quit the chicken business -- for good, he thought.
"I couldn't tell if they [co-workers at Perdue] were telling me I was doing a good job because I was the owner's son," he said, or because he really was doing a good job.
"I went to Seattle, as far away as I could go."
He got a doctorate in marine biology from the University of Washington. But after years of research on topics such as the mating habits of Pacific oysters, the younger Perdue decided that he, too, was not cut out to be an academic.
The years away had given him the self-confidence and maturity to feel comfortable in the family business. "Confidence comes with experience. You aren't born with it," Jim Perdue said.
His father was getting older and Jim Perdue wanted to keep the company in the family.
"It was a good 10 years. I achieved a lot of victories in my own way. I would certainly recommend working away from the family company," he said of his own three children.
"A family company is a one-time deal. Once it is sold, it is lost. It is something I wanted to make an effort to save," he said.
He returned to the family business, which by then was selling $500 million worth of chicken a year, in 1983 and worked in a variety of jobs, including manager of the Salisbury plant.
* As he tours the company's oldest chicken-processing facility, the young Mr. Perdue monitors a line of plucked chickens zipping overhead. They are hanging by their feet and doing a sort of mechanized samba towards eviscerating machines.
Jim Perdue said he learned a lot from his father. And that is why he is intent on imposing a new management style on the 12,000-worker company.
"Dad's style was entirely different," he said. His father's style is "autocra. . . ." He stopped and corrected himself: "authoritarian."
Instead, Jim Perdue wants to give workers more say in their jobs. The company has invited workers to join committees that try to make jobs safer and easier, he noted.
The younger Mr. Perdue also said he doesn't spend nights on the cot his father installed in the company headquarters. | <urn:uuid:aa0d1ae0-c8de-4167-a3b8-4263bba7f511> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1992-03-08/business/1992068061_1_perdue-chicken-salisbury | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987505 | 1,087 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Olympics Made Life-Long Impact On Cyclone Captains
AMES, Iowa - For many young gymnasts the Olympics serves as the first glimpse of the sport at the highest level and moments that go on to inspire for years. Iowa State co-captains Elizabeth Stranahan and Hailey Johnson are no different, but both Cyclones have unique Olympic-related experiences that had an early impact on their gymnastics careers. Those memories still resonate today.
Johnson, a junior from Covina, Calif., shared a training gym with Jamie Dantzscher who was a part of the bronze-medal-winning USA team at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. Johnson also had 2004 Olympic alternate Allyse Ishino train with her at Gliders Gymnastics in Covina.
"I remember watching Jamie in our gym working out and doing events," Johnson said. "I remember watching her on TV and thinking about how a girl I watched train was on TV. To see how hard she worked and all the effort she put into it made the Olympics special to watch. It was incredibly rewarding to watch (Ishino) grow from an Olympic hopeful and transforming that hard work into her dream. It was really interesting to watch because I had first-hand experience."
For Johnson, watching a pair of Olympians train up close
gave her a great appreciation for the gymnasts she will be watching this summer
"As I grew older, I learned how difficult going to the Olympics was," she said. "I think every gymnast has the dream of being an Olympian. I learned how hard and how much dedication it truly requires. Thousands of gymnasts nationwide train and compete their whole life for a mere chance of representing their country. The Olympic team is handpicked and is the best of the best. I have a tremendous amount of respect for those girls."
Johnson said the Olympics inspire young gymnasts everywhere, but it still provides motivation for her and the Cyclones.
"I definitely think Olympic gymnasts are an inspiration to gymnasts of all ages and levels," she said "There is always a boost in academy classes because of seeing them. For me and my teammates, just watching the Olympic trials, it inspired us even more to get in the gym the next day and work harder."
Stranahan had a different personal perspective of the Olympics. A native of Atlanta, Stranahan attended Olympic gymnastics competition in 1996 and being so close to the last gold-medal-winning USA women's squad left an indelible mark on the future Cyclone.
"In 1996 when the Olympics were in Atlanta, my family went to the competitions which was a great experience although I don't remember a lot about it because I was so young," Stranahan said. "I had a lot of relatives who came with us. I just remember knowing it was a big event and pretending to do floor routines on the carpet while we watched the gymnasts on TV."
Like Johnson, Stranahan grew to not only admire but appreciate the Olympic gymnasts.
"Honestly, I didn't really understand the Olympic selection process very well until high school," Stranahan said. "It was during the Beijing Olympics that I really began to follow not only the games, but the competitions leading up to it. The team was suddenly comprised of girls my age, and that gave me a better appreciation for the skills they were performing and the process as a whole.
"In high school, one of my teammates and I used to have Olympian Days which were days that we pretended to be Olympians during practice," she said. "Shawn Johnson used to wear ribbons in her hair when she competed, so on those days we wore ribbons. If we did a nice routine we'd even wave to a fake crowd. It is funny to look back on, but I think it shows how influential the games are and how much they can impact gymnasts at all levels."
Johnson and Stranahan are both eagerly awaiting the start of the London Games. The Cyclone co-captains have high hopes for this year's team, and they have individuals they will be watching keenly as well.
"I have been watching the buildup a lot," Stranahan said. "I went to Visas last year which was extremely exciting. I am most looking forward to watching McKayla Maroney because her form is impeccable. She is currently considered the best vaulter in the world, so I'm hoping she can provide a big contribution to the team bringing home a gold."
"This group is young, and full of raw talent and are hungry to be the best, especially Gabby Douglas," Johnson said. "I will be watching McKayla Maroney and Kyla Ross because they competed in gyms in California. I remember watching them when they were younger, and it will be exciting to see them do what they have worked so hard for, for so many years. I am really looking forward to watching them." | <urn:uuid:58850f27-87ac-4d47-bdba-9077d58a008c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cyclones.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_LANG=C&DB_OEM_ID=10700&ATCLID=205530303 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98516 | 1,022 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Peptide Found in Human Blood Inhibits 60 Strains of HIV, Study Says
...d in lab settings and has been licensed by the German biotechnology company viro
Pharmaceuticals, whose scientific director is a co-author of the study. According to the Chronicle, viro
is conducting animal studies to determine if VIRIP is safe to test among hu...
HIV/AIDS- Possible Cure From Within
...ts increased the anti-viral potency a hundred fold by just changing two amino acids in the sequence.
As of now, the licensed manufacturing company viro
Pharmaceuticals GmbH, whose Scientific Director is a co-author of the paper is conducting animal studies of VIRIP to determine if it is safe to test i...
FDA panel refuses anti-viral cold remedy
...ad hoped to have it on the market in the earliest possible under the brand name Picovir. Mark McKinlay, vice president of research and development for viro
Pharma, says the drug isn't dead. The company plans to meet with the FDA in coming weeks to see what steps they need to take to get approval.... | <urn:uuid:1cb1a18a-5e23-4fac-81a4-326648fa1297> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bio-medicine.org/tag/Viro/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949282 | 242 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Muldoon and Rodgers receive Behrman Award
Posted May 3, 2008; 11:00 p.m.
Paul Muldoon, the Howard G.B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities, and Daniel Rodgers, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, have received Princeton's Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities. They were honored at a May 3 dinner.
Muldoon, a Princeton faculty member since 1990, was named in 2006 as the first chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts, where he is a professor of creative writing. He also is director of the Princeton Atelier and chair of the Fund for Irish Studies. In addition, he serves as poetry editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary fellow of Hertford College.
Muldoon won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for "Moy Sand and Gravel," his ninth collection of poems. His 10th collection, "Horse Latitudes," was published in the fall of 2006. A fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he earned an award in literature from the latter organization in 1996. His other awards include the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry.
Rodgers, a historian of American ideas and culture, has taught at Princeton since 1980. He is the author of three books: "The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920" (1978), winner of the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Prize; "Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics" (1987); and "Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age" (1998), which won the American Historical Association's Beer Prize and the Organization of American Historians' Hawley Prize.
Rodgers has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and has served as a member of the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History. He was chair of the history department from 1988 to 1995 and organizer of its summer workshops for public and parochial school history teachers. He has been a Fulbright lecturer in Germany and Japan and the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University.
Bestowed annually, the Behrman Award was established in 1975 by a gift from the late Howard Behrman, a physician and book collector. | <urn:uuid:aa35bb05-6ea0-48ea-8f10-97812dd74403> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S20/97/69Q14/index.xml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965353 | 580 | 1.507813 | 2 |
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