text
stringlengths 211
22.9k
| id
stringlengths 47
47
| dump
stringclasses 1
value | url
stringlengths 14
371
| file_path
stringlengths 138
138
| language
stringclasses 1
value | language_score
float64 0.93
1
| token_count
int64 54
4.1k
| score
float64 1.5
1.84
| int_score
int64 2
2
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
St. Bernard of Clairvaux parish is a family-friendly church community located in the heart of historic Wauwatosa. The mission of St. Bernard Parish is to provide the people of God with the pastoral care and spiritual nourishment they need to proclaim the Good News of Christ in their lives and to the world.This blog will inform the community of events and activities at this special parish celebrating is 100th Anniversary in 2011. Visit us online atStBernardParish.org
Pictures cannot do this justice! It's almost St. Bernard's 100th!That means that it's time for you to purchase a piece of St. Bernard's History! In doing so, you are purchasing a piece of Wauwatosa's History. This 100th Anniversary Cookbook has been published and is selling fast at St. Bernard's Parish Office for $15 a copy. (3 for $40) Inside you will not only find fantastic recipes submitted by parishioners and past parishioners, but you will glimpse the past and see the history construction of the current parish walls as well as view archival memories of the last 100 years.
This is a treasure for ALL of Wauwatosa' residents. The books sells during regular parish office hours (enter Harwood Ave. side of building). Please click: http://www.stbernardparish.org for those days and hours. We also thank the Little Read Book in the village for its support in featuring the cookbook on its shelves. CONSIDER THIS AS THE PERFECT STOCKING STUFFER, TEACHER GIFT, NEIGHBORLY GESTURE this Christmas Season. Humble thanks. | <urn:uuid:2f314161-b303-41e8-b15e-356f5d2db49f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wauwatosanow.com/blogs/communityblogs/43448887.html?action=blog_archive&startDate=12-01-2010&endDate=12-31-2010&blogID=43448057 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946372 | 344 | 1.773438 | 2 |
The San Francisco Port Commission approved a water taxi service on the bay Tuesday that by next month could be taking passengers by boat on the city's waterfront and to other spots on the bay.
Pending negotiations of a final contract, the taxi service will begin Oct. 1. Water taxis - using small launches - were common before the opening of the big bridges more than 75 years ago, but have not been operated for the general public since.
The commission also approved a hop-on-hop-off boat service that will shuttle passengers between the Hyde Street fishing harbor, Pier 39 and the South Beach marina near AT&T Park.
The hop-on-hop-off operation will run on a regular schedule and will be similar to tour buses. It will be operated by San Francisco Water Taxi Co., using the 27-foot boat Emerald Lady that has operated out of Pier 39 for nearly 20 years.
Despite its name, the Water Taxi Co. will not run a taxi service. "We're more like a bus," said David Thomas, who runs the Emerald Lady. The fare would be $10 a person, he said.
The real water taxi - operated by Tideline Marine Group of Sausalito - will be an on-call service, like a conventional taxicab company.
The port has been interested in water taxis for several years. But now, the time is right, said Gerald Roybal, the port's maritime marketing director. Water taxis, he told the commission, "would seem logically to have a significant role to play ... in growth of San Francisco's tourism and travel trade."
The second phase of the America's Cup World Series yacht races is next month, followed next year by the America's Cup itself. In addition, the Exploratorium will open next spring at Pier 15-17.
Both companies have been granted landing rights at three locations - the Hyde Street fishing dock; Pier 1 1/2, just north of the Ferry Building; and the South Beach Marina.
Taylor Lewis, chief executive officer of Tideline Marine, took Roybal for a tour of the landing spots Monday afternoon. The taxi is new and fast, powered by two 275 horsepower engines. The 42-foot boat can carry up to 12 persons.
On a trial run, the taxi made it from the baseball park to Hyde Street, just past Fisherman's Wharf, in seven minutes - a bouncy but scenic ride.
Lewis, a professional yacht skipper, said he and his partner, Ryan Graves, have dreamed of starting a water taxi company since they were in grammar school in Marin.
It is a small company. Lewis, the CEO, was at the helm and Graves, the chief operating officer, served as deckhand on the trial trip Monday.
S.F. to North Bay
Lewis said he was in the process of working out landing agreements at docks in Sausalito and Tiburon as well as San Francisco.
The potential customers, he said, would be people interested in a fast ride from one waterfront spot to another. The fares, he said, would be comparable to taxi fares - he quoted a fare of roughly $38 for two for a ride from AT&T Park to the Fisherman's Wharf landing. Extra passengers, he said, would pay $10 each.
The big demand, he thinks, will be during America's Cup next year, an event that is expected to draw large numbers of large yachts.
These vessels would anchor off Sausalito or in Richardson's Bay, and he thinks their guests would want water taxi service to the bright lights of San Francisco or to the races.
Later, he thinks, his water taxis could run up to Napa in connection with wine country tours - or up to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. "I can take them to places they have never seen," he said.
The Port of San Francisco's agreement with the two firms runs for five years. The port will get 7 percent of the service's gross revenues. Both companies plan to be in operation by Fleet Week on the first weekend of October. | <urn:uuid:d6bc9264-7f73-49dd-9fec-9bfd0dff5d5e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-water-taxis-shuttles-OKd-3857977.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972913 | 841 | 1.523438 | 2 |
San Rafael Desert
This past Easter weekend brought lots of people out to our desert to enjoy the unique opportunities that the San Rafael provides. Four wheelers, horses, dune buggies or the family car, it didn't seem to matter; people were there just to have a good time.
Last fall, we, the Emery County voters decided that we did not like the proposal that was placed before us on the ballot. The proposal was basically, do we want to proceed with having the San Rafael designated a national monument. And we, the voters said no.
I now ask the question "What really should be the fate of the desert?" This is a special place and it deserves special consideration. I dare anybody to drive across this place and not say wow. I do not think that it can be done. I marvel every time that I travel to a new part of the desert.
I recently had the opportunity to drive across this great country of ours. I drove from New York through the mid-section of this country to home here in Emery County. Guess what I discovered. Most of this country is rather boring. This country is filled with rolling hills. In the eastern U.S., these hills and valleys are covered with trees. In the plains, they are covered with grasses and crops. Most of this country is naturally wet and green, Utah is not.
After leaving Lake Erie, which is really just a big body of water that really doesn't make anybody go wow, you drive for hundreds of miles to see any natural characteristic that is different. The next one on the agenda is the Mississippi River and that is pretty cool. You then drive hundreds of miles again before you see something really cool and that is the mountains. After flat for miles and miles, the Rockies do seem special.
And then it is our turn, our San Rafael desert is really the first geological formation that people driving across this great country can drive through, stop in and take pictures and just plain go WOW!!! Our desert is unique. Travelers notice right away, as do visitors to our county.
So what really should be the future of our desert? This past Easter weekend shows that people from everywhere want to camp and play here. People enjoy exploring here. People enjoy its breathtaking views. They should, it is gorgeous.
This question will be answered one day. The future of the San Rafael will be decided, it just probably will not be by us. We had our opportunity; we should hope to get another.
If you really want to keep enjoying the desert year after year, this county should get united and be the catalyst for this change. It is not to late. The change will come; it will probably be better if we are behind it. | <urn:uuid:3e253d59-6214-4dbe-9b96-bd11119345b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ecprogress.com/index.php?tier=1&article_id=1281&poll=77&vote=results | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972288 | 562 | 1.625 | 2 |
The Crow Wing County Community Service Department is reminding residents that August is Child Support Awareness Month.
The purpose of this recognition is to focus attention on the principle of our legal system and community that each and every child needs and is legally and morally entitled to support from both of his or her parents, the county reported.
Perhaps the most visible of these is Child Support Enforcement, which was established by the federal government, prescribed by the state of Minnesota and managed by the county. The current Child Support Enforcement Program was established in the 1970s. Its mission is to promote the well-being of children and the self-sufficiency of families by delivering quality child support services.
Child support services include: locating absent parents, establishing parentage, establishing and enforcing court orders (including child support, medical support, and child care support), reviewing, modifying, and adjusting support orders, working with other states to enforce child support when a parent lives outside of Minnesota, collecting and processing payments for support. Child support offices do not provide divorces, visitation and custody, spousal maintenance establishment, legal advice or counsel.
Parents who don’t receive public assistance can apply for services and are charged a one-time $25 application fee. A 2 percent cost recovery fee is also charged for any child support collected. Single parents who receive public assistance are automatically referred for child support services and do not pay a fee.
In 2011, Crow Wing County Child Support collected an average of $4.82 for every dollar spent to enforce orders for support of children. In total, the county collected $8,181,512.
Dale Parks supervises the Child Support office in Crow Wing County. According to Parks, the county’s operating principle is: “Every child has the right to the financial support of both of the child’s parents. We have 12 full-time, dedicated employees who, with the assistance of the county attorney’s office, ensure that court ordered child support is established and collected on behalf of the approximately 3,672 families we serve. Nearly 92 percent of the families who use our services receive no form of public assistance, relying on our collections to meet their family support obligations.”
Parks praised the Crow Wing County Community Service Child Support staff for their service to the children and families of Crow Wing County and to the county attorney’s office for their commitment to high quality legal services supporting the staffs’ efforts. For more information about child support enforcement contact Parks at 824-1260, or by email: [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:5a86ba9d-f19b-4ed5-aa8d-f95477ea9153> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://brainerddispatch.com/news/2012-08-10/august-child-support-awareness-month | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960306 | 529 | 1.710938 | 2 |
We recommend upgrading to a Web Standards compliant browser for optimal display performance.
E+ stands for "Efficiency Plus," which was created to help our customers better manage their energy use.
We offer a variety of programs, rebates, and other incentives. Choose your service area and customer type
to see how E+ can work for you.
Click here to learn more about the history of the E+ program and how it is funded.
More about Efficiency Plus "E+"In an era of increased attention to energy issues and related costs, more and more people are looking for ways to manage energy consumption. That is why NorthWestern Energy created the Efficiency Plus (E+) brand to signal ways that customers can better manage their energy use.
Efficiency Plus, or "E+", ranges from energy education to rebates for compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), in-home energy audits and custom incentives for businesses. In addition, there are E+ programs that provide valuable services to limited income and senior customers who require energy assistance. In Montana, E+ also includes small renewable generation incentives and the E+ Green program that allows customers to support renewable generation through their electric bill.
This site is separated out by state, providing information on rebates and programs plus lists of preferred contractors where offered. No matter where you receive service from NorthWestern Energy, you can watch how-to videos that might make your home energy improvement project easier. In addition there are energy saving tips, case studies that showcase how a wide variety of commercial customers have saved energy, PLUS outreach information that includes where you can find NorthWestern Energy events in or near your community. Through E+, there is something for almost every customer looking to save energy and money!
In Montana, NorthWestern Energy has been offering energy efficiency programs for more than 30 years, and provides thousands of rebates through E+ programs each year. E+ is just getting started In South Dakota and Nebraska, so while NorthWestern Energy may not yet offer rebates or incentives in your area, there are tips and tax incentives that apply for everyone. Most rebates, programs, and services are funded through the Universal System Benefits Charge (USBC) or electric and natural gas supply rates, collected from Montana customers. The energy saved through these E+ programs means NorthWestern Energy doesn't have to buy as much electricity or natural gas on the open market and that helps hold down costs for customers.
Just like you can count on the ENERGY STAR® rating from the federal government to help you find the most energy efficient products, you can count on the Efficiency Plus, or "E+", from NorthWestern Energy to help you better manage your energy usage.
Copyright © 2007 NorthWestern Energy. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:dbfc4395-ba3b-4b45-a4f9-31aa4f6a9e01> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.northwesternenergy.com/NWEplus/at-work/list.aspx?category=2 | 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 | 0.946664 | 558 | 1.734375 | 2 |
In Woodbury, Kentucky, near the Green River, is a very neat and efficient shop, reconstructed from an old general store that John House frequented when he was a boy.
It was a sentimental restoration project for John and he did 98% of the work himself with very few modern tools and even less money. John dismantled the old store piece by piece, found another similar building to help make up for some of the rotten wood and restored the relic from his early childhood that held so many pleasant memories for him.
Yes, John is related to Hershel and Frank House. He is the youngest male sibling in the family and the three of them (they are close-knit) form a trinity of talent that have turned out many knives, firearms and accoutrements of exceptional quality and beauty.
We should not be surprised. Their father was a hard working man and a boilermaker for 42 years, providing a good work ethic and example for the family. The real stream of artistic talent, however, flows through their mother Coweta’s lineage. She is a musician and professional song writer that has marketed her music to people like Faron Young, Bobby Vinton and LeAnne Rhymes. John’s grandfather, on his mother’s side, Hershel Finney was an iron worker/riveter with talent also. He made beautiful willow furniture, wooden boxes and furniture, providing income during the depression. John also is an accomplished musician, playing guitar (mostly bass) and leading with his vocals. John doesn’t compose like his mother. He calls himself a “clean up writer,” meaning he likes to help refine the lyrics once the song has been written. Presently, he is working on a 14 song CD.
Hershel’s and Frank’s work with longrifles and knives are legendary, but John has emerged as very fine bladesmith and gunsmith with his own distinctive style and flavor. The pictures accompanying this article show a few examples. Here is his story.
John House was born in Woodbury, Kentucky in 1961. Raised in an old lock house on the Green River, John describes his childhood as idyllic with Hershel being a strong roll model and mentor for both him and Frank. John explains:
“Hershel spent a lot of time with us when he came back from the Marines. Though he was twenty years my senior (Frank is a little older than me) he would take us down to the river every day he could and teach us to both fish and swim. We would also go camping. Hershel would make us little knives and things and we grew up watching him work—it’s amazing what you can pick up as a kid by accident. As teenagers, Frank and I would go out there a lot, skipping school often, working on the lathe, making knives and beating and banging on the forge. Those were great times for us. Our skipping got to be such a problem that when the school principal was contacted all he could comment was: ‘I’m not really worried about them going out there and learning all that stuff because they sure as h*ll aren’t learning anything here!’”
John enumerates: “I remember back in the late eighties I hadn’t done much art or knife work and I lost my full-time job. I hung out at Hershel’s a lot and told him I didn’t know what I was going to do. Hershel told me he would show me and I watched and worked with him about four or five days. Then, I just sort of fired up the forge and took off. I have learned much since then, but I needed a push to get me going and so I started building knives.”
These days, John and Hershel conduct gun and knife building seminars together and freely share their knowledge, skill, and expertise. This summer the three brothers are conducting their first gunmaking workshop together at Hershel’s shop in Woodbury. John says he has made many great friends along the way.
Although John likes to build early American flintlock rifles, his favorite style is the later period, flintlock mountain rifle.
Recently, the House brothers teamed up to build an exquisite Kentucky longrifle completely from scratch—lock, stock and barrel. This rifle is being raffled as a fundraiser titled “An American Tradition” for the Contemporary Longrifle Foundation. The Foundation’s purpose is to raise funds to promote the art and history of the Contemporary Kentucky Longrifle and related arts through educational publications, museum exhibits, and grants; and to promote contemporary artists of the Longrifle Culture.
You can read about this remarkable project at the CLA’s web sites: www.longrifle.ws and www.housebrothersproject.com and view photos of this superb longrifle and the three of them at work on this gun, stage by stage. For John House, this was an especially meaningful project on a number of levels. He says: “It was really special to me and an honor to get to build this rifle with my brothers. It makes me awful proud and we always seem to have a lot of fun when we work together.”
John’s gift and interests are first building knives, then longrifles. Over the years, John has built over 100 knives, including belt knives, dirks, and neck knives. In the beginning, buggy and truck springs were used, but today he prefers using 1084 or 1095 cutlery steal because it comes soft and can be shaped and tempered nicely. John says: “We always like to do French and Indian stuff. I like to beat the metal down close because that’s how they used to do it and that means leaving a little scale in order to come up with a good style. I have made belt knives, neck knives and daggers. A knife should have texture and character—I don’t like stuff that is too shiny. I also make my own knife sheaths. That way, the buyer can wear the knife right away and not just stick it in a drawer somewhere. I like to see my knives and guns used.”
John’s Address is: PO Box 11 Woodbury, KY 42288
Reprinted by permission of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association/ Muzzle Blasts magazine, March 2009.
Copy by Mark Sage. Photography by Ric Lambert, Jan Riser, and H. David Wright. | <urn:uuid:20f268e3-cb36-4ff9-ac5e-93b9e18a73b1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://contemporarymakers.blogspot.com/2009/04/cla-featured-artists-john-house.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981384 | 1,359 | 1.515625 | 2 |
I spent my weekend in the cozy confines of the Iron Range with my wife’s family. A weekend spent deep in the taconite-rich soil of Virginia, MN is a welcome respite from my busy city life. It gives me a moment to reflect and ponder on the important things in life. A time to be still and reflect on the passage of life.
Time to read a book like Cool Cos: The Story of Bill Cosby.
This weighty, 138-page tome was published in 1969 and remains the finest, most scholarly overview of the comedic giant’s life available to the public. It is believed by this author that this book won 11 Academy Awards in March 1970, even though no film adaptation of it was ever produced or considered.
A few nuggets of valuable gleaned from the book…
Bill Cosby was born a black child in Philadelphia.
Cosby dropped out of high school, though his IQ was high enough to gain him admission into prestigious private schools. He blamed this failure on a lack of effort on his part.
Atop a blackened mountain in 1964, Bill Cosby destroyed the Fire Queen by stabbing her with a sharpened Amulet of Avercorn. He later turned this into a beloved comedy routine where he made funny faces.
After passing an equivalency exam for his GED, Cosby was a star athelete at Temple University, where he majored in physical education.
Cosby was homeless and destitude from the years 1974-1996. During that time, it is believed that he lost most of his teeth and he earned what little money he had by fighting feral dogs to the death and starring in a family sitcom of some repute.
Cosby was cast as the co-star of the hit television series I Spy, making him the first African-American lead in a television drama series in American history.
Cosby’s mother described him as always being at the center of attention as a child because of his wacky antics.
Before going on stage to perform, Bill Cosby eats raw meat and bays at the moon.
Cosby’s early comedy material was considered very cutting edge. He eventually stopped doing a particular bit where he repeatedly put a loaded pistol in his mouth and would encourage the audience to egg him on to a gruesome public suicide. This routine regularly ended with a three-quarters empty club and Cosby passed out on the stage. Ironically, this bit landed him an appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Bill Cosby pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
Cosby’s bootstraps are now enshrined at the Smithsonian, along with one of his platinum-selling comedy albums and his severed left hand. | <urn:uuid:eadda64e-dccb-42b1-bd1d-01d5eac0aaf7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://johnlarroquetteproject.com/2007/09/24/bill-cosby-americas-mildly-amusing-grandfather/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984192 | 557 | 1.726563 | 2 |
This is an excerpt from “UX Storytellers”:http://uxstorytellers.blogspot.com. If you enjoy it, consider getting the kindle edition of UX Storytellers – Connecting the Dots with all the stories!
Here’s something I believe in: stories are what make us human. Opposable thumbs? Other animals have those. Ability to use tools? Ditto. Even language is not exclusive to human beings.
From my amateur reading of science, the story behind our stories goes something like this: the human brain evolved with an uncanny knack to recognize and create patterns; and through some strange twist of natural selection, gradually over millions of years, our brains started turning the incredible power of that pattern-making machinery on ourselves, until we became self-aware.
Aware of ourselves—our own faces, bodies, journeys, homes, children, tools, and everything else around us. Over eons, we went from being creatures that lived in each moment as it came and went, to protagonists in our own myths. Everything in our midst became the material for making stories, strands of moments woven into tapestries that we call things like “nation”, “family,” “love” or “discovery.”
And “design.” Because design is, ultimately, a story we make. And designing is an act of weaving a new story into an existing fabric in such a way that it makes it stronger, better, or at least more interesting, and hopefully more delightful.
An Origin Story
My identity as an information architect happened accidentally, and gradually. I just kept doing things I liked, that people were willing to pay me for, until I woke up one day and realized I had a career. And the things I liked doing were invariably surrounded by people’s stories.
One of the earliest jobs I had out of college (after trying my hand at carpet cleaning, waiting tables and telemarketing) was as an office manager in a medical office. It was 1990, and this office of five or six providers was running entirely on a phone, a copier and an electric typewriter. No computer in sight. Every bill, insurance claim, or patient report had to be typed anew … as if the 80s had never happened. I talked the owner into getting a computer and a database management package—a sort of Erector set for database application design that I’d seen at a Mac user group a year before—so I could make the office more efficient.
It would’ve been pretty easy to create a quick application with a minimal user interface, if I were the only one using it. But the owner also had a couple of people helping in the office part-time who needed to use the system too—people who had never even used a computer before. Did I mention this was 1990?
So I had a challenge: how to make it work so that total computer newbies could use it? It was frustrating, fascinating, and probably the single most important experience of my career, because it was a crucible for acknowledging the importance of understanding the user.
To understand the people who were to use the application, I had to talk to them, get a sense of what they’d done before and what sort of forms they had used in the past. What sorts of technology? What terminology was going to make sense for them? How do they tend to learn—by written instruction or hands-on activity, by rote or through improvisation? I learned these things by watching and conversing. Eventually I had enough of a sense of those “users” that I had a full story in my head about how they came to the experience of this particular application, in this particular place.
I wasn’t conscious of this at the time; and I was working completely by intuition. I would’ve done a better job if I’d had the experience, methods and tools I’ve picked up since. But looking back, the experience itself has become a story I tell myself when I need a rudder to remind me of my direction as a designer so that, even when I have nothing else to go on, if I just watch, listen and absorb the stories of the people for whom I’m designing, my design will generally head in the right direction.
An Architecture Story
Much later, about ten years ago, I was working at a web design agency, and our client was an organization that acted as a sort of confederation of research scientists, universities and technology corporations. The organization funneled research money from “investor” companies to the scientists and their students in the universities, and in return the companies received “pre-competitive” research and dibs on some of the brightest graduates.
Their website had evolved like so many in those days—having started from a few linked documents, it had grown by the addition of ad-hoc sections and content created in response to member requests and complaints, until it had become a horribly unwieldy mass of links and text. We had been called in to clean it up and organize it. That sounded straightforward enough. But when we started interviewing its users, we found people who were unhappy with the organization and its community in general—scientists who had become more entrenched in their own sub-disciplines, and divisions between those managing the community and those merely dwelling there. Not to mention the natural enmity between academics and business leaders.
We realized that the web site had become a visible instantiation of that discord: a messy tangle of priorities in tension. A new information architecture would mean more than just making things more “findable.” It meant trying to make a digital place that structurally encouraged mutual understanding. In essence, a more hospitable online home for people with different backgrounds, priorities and personalities. It was a chance to create a system of linked contexts—an information architecture—that could help to heal a professional community, and in turn strengthen the organization founded to support it.
That project provided an insight that has forever shaped how I understand the practice of information architecture: the web isn’t just a collection of linked content, it’s a habitat. And the structures of habitable digital places have to be informed by the stories of their inhabitants.
A Survival Story
Much more recently, I had the opportunity to work with a non-profit organization whose mission was to educate people about breast cancer, as well as provide an online forum for them to share and learn from one another. When interviewing the site’s users, it soon became clear how important these people’s stories were to them. They would tell the tale of their cancer, or the cancer of a loved one, and in each case the story was one of interrupted expectation—a major change of direction in what they assumed to be the storyline of their lives.
I learned that this website was merely one thread in a great swath of fabric that the site would never, ultimately, touch. But the site was most valuable to these people when it supported the other threads, buttressed them, added texture where it was needed, especially when it helped fill in the gaps of their stories: How did I get cancer? What do my test results mean? What treatment should I choose? What can I eat when getting chemo? How do I tell my children?
They wanted information, certainly. Articles full of facts and helpful explanations. And the site did that very well by translating medical research and jargon into information people could use. But even more than the packaged articles of information, so many people wanted—needed—to share their stories with others, and find other stories that mirrored their own. The most valuable learning these people discovered tended to be what they found in the forum conversations, because it wasn’t merely clinical, sterile fact, but knowledge emerging organically from the personal stories, rich in context, written by other people like them.
One woman in particular lived on an island in the Caribbean, and had to fly to the mainland for treatment. There were no support groups around her home, and few friends or family. But she found a community on this website; one that would cheer her on when she was going to be away for tests, console her or help her research alternatives if the news was bad, and celebrate when news was good. She made a couple of very close friends through the site, and carried on relationships with them even after her cancer had been beaten into submission.
Here were stories that had taken hard detours, but had found each other in the wilderness and had become intertwined, strengthening one another on the new, unexpected journey.
This work, more than any other I’d done before, taught me that stories aren’t merely an extra layer we add to binary logic and raw data. In fact, it’s reversed—the stories are the foundations of our lives, and the data, the information, is the artificial abstraction. Information is just the dusty mirror we use to reflect upon ourselves, merely a tool for self-awareness.
It was through listening to the whole stories as they were told by these digital inhabitants that I learned about their needs, behaviors and goals. A survey might have given me hard data I could’ve turned into pie charts and histograms, but it would’ve been out of context, no matter how authoritative in a board room.
And it was in hearing their stories that I recognized, no matter how great my work or the work of our design team might be, we would only be bit players in these people’s lives. Each of them happens to be the protagonist in their own drama, with its own soundtrack, scenery, rising and falling action, rhyme and rhythm. What we made had to fit the contours of their lives, their emotional states, and their conversations with doctors and loved ones.
The Moral of the Story
Design has to be humble and respectful to the presence of the user’s story, because it’s the only one that person has. Stories can’t be broken down into logical parts and reconstituted without losing precious context and background. Even though breaking the story down into parts is often necessary for technological design, the story lives only if we serve as witness to the whole person, with a memory of his or her story as it came from that person’s mouth, in that person’s actions.
Keeping the story alive keeps the whole idea of the person alive. Whether we use “personas” or “scenarios” or task analysis or systems thinking, the ultimate aim should be to listen to, understand and remember the stories, precisely because the stories are the beating heart of why we’re designing anything at all.
So, now, when I’m working on more mundane projects that don’t touch people in quite the same way as some of the others I’ve done, I still try to remember that even for the most everyday task, something I design still has to take into account the experience of the whole person using the product of my work. That, after all, is what we should mean when we say “user experience”—that we seek first to listen to, observe and understand the experience of the people for whom we design. We honor them in what we make, when we honor their stories. | <urn:uuid:9b2d6209-d270-45e3-85fd-c1976bf8c5d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://boxesandarrows.com/the-storys-the-thing/ | 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 | 0.978309 | 2,368 | 1.765625 | 2 |
In this article I propose to consider the conditions upon which this enduement of power can be obtained. Let us borrow a little light from the Scriptures. I will not cumber your paper with quotations from the Bible, but simply state a few facts that will readily be recognized by all readers of the Scriptures. If the readers of this article will read in the last Chapter of Matthew and of Luke the commission which Christ gave to His disciples, and in connection read the first and second chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, they will be prepared to appreciate what I have to say in this article.
1st. The disciples had already been converted to Christ, and their faith had been confirmed by His resurrection. But here let me say that conversion to Christ is not to be confounded with a consecration to the great work of the world's conversion. In conversion the soul has to do directly and personally with Christ. It yields up its prejudices, its antagonisms, its self-righteousness, its unbelief, its selfishness; accepts Him, trusts Him, and supremely loves Him. All this the disciples had, more or less, distinctly done. But as yet they had received no definite commission, and no particular enduement of power to fulfil a commission.
2nd. But when Christ had dispelled their great bewilderment resulting from His crucifixion, and confirmed their faith by repeated interviews with them, He gave them their great commission to win all nations to Himself. But He admonished them to tarry at Jerusalem till they were endued with power from on high, which He said they should receive not many days hence. Now observe what they did. They assembled, the men and women, for prayer. They accepted the commission, and, doubtless, came to an understanding of the nature of the commission, and the necessity of the spiritual enduement which Christ had promised. As they continued day after day in prayer and conference they, no doubt, came to appreciate more and more the difficulties that would beset them, and to feel more and more their inadequacy to the task. A consideration of the circumstances and results leads to the conclusion that they, one and all, consecrated themselves, with all they had, to the conversion of the world as their life-work. They must have renounced utterly the idea of living to themselves in any form, and devoted themselves with all their powers to the work set before them. This consecration of themselves to the work, this self-renunciation, this dying to all that the world could offer them, must, in the order of nature, have preceded their intelligent seeking of the promised enduement of power from on high. They then continued, with one accord, in prayer for the promised baptism of the Spirit, which baptism included all that was essential to their success. Observe, they had a work set before them. They had a promise of power to perform it. They were admonished to wait until the promise was fulfilled. How did they wait? Not in listlessness and inactivity; not in making preparations by study and otherwise to get along without it; not by going about their business, and offering an occasional prayer that the promise might be fulfilled; but they continued in prayer, and persisted in their suit till the answer came. They understood that it was to be a baptism of the Holy Ghost. They understood that it was to be received from Christ. They prayed in faith. They held on, with the firmest expectation, until the enduement came. Now, let these facts instruct us as to the conditions of receiving this enduement of power.
We, as Christians, have the same commission to fulfil. As truly as they did, we need an enduement of power from on high. Of course, the same injunction, to wait upon God till we receive it, is given to us.
We have the same promise that they had. Now, let us take substantially and in spirit the same course that they did. They were Christians, and had a measure of the Spirit to lead them in prayer and in consecration. So have we. Every Christian possesses a measure of the Spirit of Christ, enough of the Holy Spirit to lead us to true consecration and inspire us with the faith that is essential to our prevalence in prayer. Let us, then, not grieve or resist Him: but accept the commission, fully consecrate ourselves, with all we have, to the saving of souls as our great and our only life-work. Let us get on to the altar with all we have and are, and lie there and persist in prayer till we receive the enduement. Now, observe, conversion to Christ is not to be confounded with the acceptance of this commission to convert the world. The first is a personal transaction between the soul and Christ relating to its own salvation. The second is the soul's acceptance of the service in which Christ proposes to employ it. Christ does not require us to make brick without straw. To whom He gives the commission He also gives the admonition and the promise. If the commission is heartily accepted, if the promise is believed, if the admonition to wait upon the Lord till our strength is renewed be complied with, we shall receive the enduement.
It is of the last importance that all Christians should understand that this commission to convert the world is given to them by Christ individually.
Everyone has the great responsibility devolved upon him or her to win as many souls as possible to Christ. This is the great privilege and the great duty of all the disciples of Christ. There are a great many departments in this work. But in every department we may and ought to possess this power, that, whether we preach, or pray, or write, or print, or trade, or travel, take care of children, or administer the government of the state, or whatever we do, our whole life and influence should be permeated with this power. Christ says: "If any man believe in Me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water"--that is, a Christian influence, having in it the element of power to impress the truth of Christ upon the hearts of men, shall proceed from Him. The great want of the Church at present is, first, the realizing conviction that this commission to convert the world is given to each of Christ's disciples as his life-work. I fear I must say that the great mass of professing Christians seem never to have been impressed with this truth. The work of saving souls they leave to ministers. The second great want is a realizing conviction of the necessity of this enduement of power upon every individual soul. Many professors of religion suppose it belongs especially and only to such as are called to preach the Gospel as a life-work. They fail to realize that all are called to preach the Gospel, that the whole life of every Christian is to be a proclamation of the glad tidings. A third want is an earnest faith in the promise of this enduement. A vast many professors of religion, and even ministers, seem to doubt whether this promise is to the whole Church and to every Christian. Consequently, they have no faith to lay hold of it. If it does not belong to all, they don't know to whom it does belong. Of course they cannot lay hold of the promise by faith. A fourth want is that persistence in waiting upon God for it that is enjoined in the Scriptures. They faint before they have prevailed, and, hence, the enduement is not received. Multitudes seem to satisfy themselves with a hope of eternal life for themselves. They never get ready to dismiss the question of their own salvation, leaving that, as settled, with Christ. They don't get ready to accept the great commission to work for the salvation of others, because their faith is so weak that they do not steadily leave the question of their own salvation in the hands of Christ; and even some ministers of the Gospel, I find, are in the same condition, and halting in the same way, unable to give themselves wholly to the work of saving others, because in a measure unsettled about their own salvation. It is amazing to witness the extent to which the Church has practically lost sight of the necessity of this enduement of power. Much is said of our dependence upon the Holy Spirit by almost everybody; but how little is this dependence realized. Christians and even ministers go to work without it. I mourn to be obliged to say that the ranks of the ministry seem to be filling up with those who do not possess it. May the Lord have mercy upon us! Will this last remark be thought uncharitable? If so, let the report of the Home Missionary Society, for example, be heard upon this subject. Surely, something is wrong.
An average of five souls won to Christ by each missionary of that Society in a year's toil certainly indicates a most alarming weakness in the ministry. Have all or even a majority of these ministers been endued with the power which Christ promised? If not, why not? But, if they have, is this all that Christ intended by His promise? In a former article I have said that the reception of this enduement of power is instantaneous. I do not mean to assert that in every instance the recipient was aware of the precise time at which the power commenced to work mightily within him. It may have commenced like the dew and increased to a shower. I have alluded to the report of the Home Missionary Society. Not that I suppose that the brethren employed by that Society are exceptionally weak in faith and power as labourers for God. On the contrary, from my acquaintance with some of them, I regard them as among our most devoted and self-denying labourers in the cause of God. This fact illustrates the alarming weakness that pervades every branch of the Church, both clergy and laity. Are we not weak? Are we not criminally weak? It has been suggested that by writing thus I should offend the ministry and the Church. I cannot believe that the statement of so palpable a fact will be regarded as an offence. The fact is, there is something sadly defective in the education of the ministry and of the Church. The ministry is weak, because the Church is weak. And then, again, the Church is kept weak by the weakness of the ministry. Oh for a conviction of the necessity of this enduement of power and faith in the promise of Christ!
Copyright (c)1999, 2000. Gospel Truth Ministries
Wish to Copy a File? READ THIS
HOME | FINNEY LIFE | FINNEY WORKS | TEXT INDEX | SUBJECT INDEX | GLOSSARY | BOOKS STORE
This file is CERTIFIED BY GOSPEL TRUTH MINISTRIES TO BE CONFORMED TO THE ORIGINAL TEXT. For authenticity verification, its contents can be compared to the original file at www.GospelTruth.net or by contacting Gospel Truth P.O. Box 6322, Orange, CA 92863. (C)2000. This file is not to be changed in any way, nor to be sold, nor this seal to be removed. | <urn:uuid:8de6227f-af81-4b6e-bd9b-213da7fd445b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gospeltruth.net/1944power_from_on_high/power04.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97302 | 2,288 | 1.75 | 2 |
RELATIVES HAVE 'INSIDE TRACK' IN LOBBYING FOR TAX DOLLARS
October 17, 2006
Members of Congress and their staffs are barred from using their positions for personal profit. But their spouses and other relatives can -- and often do -- cash in when lawmakers spend taxpayer dollars.
- Lobbying groups employed 30 family members last year to influence spending bills that their relatives with ties to the House and Senate appropriations committees oversaw or helped write, a USA Today investigation found.
- Combined, they generated millions of dollars in fees for themselves or their firms.
- The connections are so pervasive that, in 2005 alone, appropriations bills contained about $750 million for projects championed by lobbyists whose relatives were involved in writing the spending bills.
USA Today examined the family ties between lobbyists and the 94 members of the House and Senate appropriations committees, as well as 250 top staffers who serve those members. Those committees control the federal government's purse strings, allocating hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars each year.
The family connections between lobbying and lawmaking are prompting complaints that Congress is not doing enough to police itself. No rules or laws prevent lawmakers or their staffs from being lobbied by relatives, and proposals to address the practice have stalled on Capitol Hill.
- The newspaper found 53 cases in which relatives of lawmakers or their top aides worked at lobbying firms last year.
- In 30 instances, those relatives, or firms in which they are principals, sought money in the appropriations bills their family members or their family members' bosses helped write.
- Of those 30 relatives, 22 succeeded in getting specific language inserted in the bills that guaranteed money for their clients, USA Today found.
Source: Matt Kelley and Peter Eisler, "Relatives have 'inside track' in lobbying for tax dollars," USA Today, October 17, 2006.
Browse more articles on Government Issues | <urn:uuid:33dc25f3-5f24-4d1d-a394-ac37b043490f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=13276 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963374 | 385 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Make Distinctive QR Codes With QR Hacker
At a Glance
QR (Quick-Response) codes are those square blocks of black-and-white dots that are popping up everywhere these days. Most of us tend to be on the receiving end of these codes: Manufacturers and advertisers put them into ads, hoping that we will scan them with a smartphone and launch ourselves into their part of cyberspace via the URL they contain. But what if you wanted to create such a code yourself--and give it a little visual pizzazz? That's where web-app QR Hacker comes into the picture. If you're just looking to create a QR code for fun, QR Hacker is free. If you're creating codes for your own business, it's $59 per year, and if you're creating codes for clients, it's $99 per year.
This simple Flash-based Web app lets you encode arbitrary text, a URL, phone number, VCard, or even a WiFi access key for Android devices. You pick the data type you wish to encode, and fill in the data you want the QR code to contain. Next, just click the large Generate button, and your QR code will pop on the screen, ready to be scanned by any smartphone.
While a QR code can contain lots of information, it was not designed to be pretty or eye-catching. Half of the QR Hacker interface is dedicated to the task of making your QR code fancier without breaking it. You can round off its pixels, change the background color (or even pick a photo), or change the foreground color. But the feature that really blew me away was the ability to embed a photo or logo right into the QR code: I was able to import the PCWorld logo and place it in the middle of my QR code, and even delete some of the pixels around it to make room for the logo, all without breaking the code. My Android phone kept on recognizing the code instantly, PCWorld logo and all. Impressive. QR Hacker then let me save the QR code either as an image file (PNG) or as a PDF document. The site will soon have a Web Shop for buying merchandise with your code printed on it.
QR Hacker also contains a gallery of codes users created using the application. While many are beautiful, you should exercise reasonable care while scanning them: QR codes can contain URLs leading to risky websites. Just like you wouldn't click any random link on the Web, you shouldn't randomly scan any barcode shown on the QR Hacker website. Still, the showcase serves for seeing what can be done with QR Hacker, and I must admit it features some of the most striking QR codes I've seen yet. | <urn:uuid:1bb92953-08e3-4f12-9e68-2136a4a1a4c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcworld.com/article/253918/make_distinctive_qr_codes_with_qr_hacker.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934679 | 555 | 1.71875 | 2 |
The North Carolina Health and Wellness Trust Fund (HWTF) created the North Carolina “Electronic Health Record Loan Fund Pilot Program” to provide seed money for the state’s healthcare providers. The pilot will provide financial assistance to healthcare providers in Tier 1 counties seeking to create or upgrade EHR systems required for CMS reimbursements beginning in 2015.
“Doctors in rural North Carolina need as much help as we can provide,” said Governor Bev Perdue. “These electronic health record systems will enable them to deliver better medical care in the smaller towns and cities across out state.”
A grant of $127.461 was awarded to the North Carolina Medical Society Foundation to provide technical assistance to evaluate the EHR loan fund pilot program over a five year period. The Center for Community Self-Help, a Durham-based non-profit will manage the $750,000 loan fund and underwrite prospective borrowers. The Center will also work in partnership with the North Carolina Medical Society Foundation and the North Carolina Area Health Education Centers to identify eligible providers and help them transition to advanced EHR systems.
The revolving loan fund is designed as a pilot program to expand its initial capital within the first year of operation. Individual loans are expected to range in size from $40,000 to $60,000 and may be used to:
• Purchase a certified EHR technology or upgrade an existing EHR system to meet certification criteria
• Train personnel in the use of the technology
• Improve the secure electronic exchange of health information
Loans will vary in pricing based on the borrower’s credit/collateral profile and will feature flexible repayment terms to better serve the needs of a wide variety of practices. | <urn:uuid:54f7189f-7e01-4d71-a30d-a11d03bbc252> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://telemedicinenews.blogspot.com/2010/09/nc-makes-ehr-loans-available.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939982 | 351 | 1.515625 | 2 |
TAMPA---Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a Tea Party and conservative favorite elected in 2010, delivered an electric address before delegates at the Republican National Convention and elevated the energy of the arena like no other speaker before him.
Rubio, whose family immigrated from Cuba, laid out the foundation of Republican economic ideals as experienced by his family with a combination of charisma and tough talk.
"As a boy, I would sit on our porch and listen to [my grandfather's] stories about history, politics and baseball while he puffed on one of his three daily Padron cigars," Rubio said. "I don't recall everything we talked about, but the one thing I remember, is the one thing he wanted me to never forget. The dreams he had when he was young became impossible to achieve. But there was no limit to how far I could go, because I was an American."
Making the case for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Rubio said the problem isn't that President Barack Obama is a bad person, but a "bad president" implementing old and failed ideas.
"These are tired and old big government ideas," Rubio said. "Ideas that people come to America to get away from. Ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world, instead of helping the world become more like America."
And he said rather that serving up hope and change, Obama was offering an approach of "divide and conquer."
"He tells Americans they're worse off because others are better off, that people got rich by making others poor," he said. "No matter how you feel about President Obama, this election is about your future, not his. And it's not simply a choice between a Democrat and a Republican. It's a choice about what kind of country we want America to be."
Rubio said the American dream is what separates the United States from others, what makes it special.
"Special because we've always understood the scriptural admonition that 'for everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required,' " he said.
And though economic stagnation has depressed America's morale, Rubio told the appreciative audience that there was something they could do to turn things around.
"Yes, we live in a troubled time, but the story of those who came before us reminds us that America has always been about new beginnings," Rubio said. "And Mitt Romney is running for president because he knows that if we are willing to do for our children what our parents did for us, life in America can be better than it has ever been. We're special because dreams that are impossible anywhere else come true here."
With the crowd riveted, Rubio closed by saying the goal of government should be "to make sure America is still a place where tomorrow is always better than yesterday. That is what our politics should be about."
"And that is what we are deciding in this election," he added. "Mitt Romney believes that if we succeed in changing the direction of our country, our children and grandchildren will be the most prosperous generation ever and their achievements will astonish the world." | <urn:uuid:de2264d5-4e73-40a4-8f23-db8d75a32175> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/08/30/florida-sen-marco-rubio-champions-romney-the-american-dream?s_cid=rss:florida-sen-marco-rubio-champions-romney-the-american-dream | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977432 | 638 | 1.5625 | 2 |
There is a place that exists, hidden from the rest of the world by a formidable mountain rage, forgotten, or maybe, simply, yet to be acknowledged. Lacking electricity, the millions of stars that appear every night in the heavens are the only primetime shows the people have ever known. Survival depends on the land, thus the weather dictates the extremity of the poverty these people are exposed to daily. The sunrise can find a whole family huddled in their small kitchen with no windows or ventilation, braving the smoke for a chance to sit closer to the fire while tortillas are flipped in the skillet. Silence becomes a remarkable companion for anyone visiting from below, who has unconsciously become accustomed to a constant stream of noises and distractions.
Up until two weeks ago I had no idea that a place like the Meseta Andia existed. I had heard tales from my good friend Padre Kevin (a Priest from England) who has made two visits to “Las Altura” (the Heights, as the Meseta Andina is referred to by the people in the town below). Padre Kevin works in the Parish of Frias in the Andes Mountains. His parish includes about 100 small pueblos scattered throughout the mountainous terrain, 14 of which are on the Meseta. Padre Kevin, along with the another Peruvian Priest, deacon, and 3 Marist Sisters spend much of their time traveling to each pueblito, ensuring that each one is visited by a priest or nun at least once a year. Padre Kevin showed us pictures and told us tales of sitting around for hours waiting for the person from the next town to come with the horses to lead you to the next pubelito, eating small potatoes, cheese, and tortillas for breakfast lunch and dinner, and staying in the house of a local, sharing food, shelter, and sometimes a bed with these generous people, willing to share what little they have. The stories were impressive, they sparked my imagination and my interest, but they were never able to convey the immense beauty of the Meseta and the people who have made it their home.
Padre Kevin invited my roommates and me to experience the Meseta, accompanying him on one of his pastoral visits. Brenden and I traveled with Padre Kevin while Roger and Ellen went with Hermana Palepa on her visits. We planned to visit three villages, helping Padre Kevin to hold meetings, talk to school children, hold mass, and, yes, sing (a lot). Walking up to the Meseta, it is hard to imagine that anyone lives on the summit of the mountain peaks. The five hour walk up seems to lead to a dead end, the top of the mountain, and nothing more, but the efforts are rewarded, and as the last bend of the trail opens up a whole different world is revealed. As though from a storybook, green hills and small brooks and bright flowers can be found 3,000 meters up, at the summit of a mountain. This place is so cut off from the outside world, only accessible by foot or horse due to a heavy rainy season, it is a sensation unlike any other, as though you have been lead into a different world, where time is slower, and the petty stresses of the world below become insignificant.
In our 4 days, we were welcomed warmly into three different, yet beautiful and generous families. I never appreciated the simple beauty of a mass, a blessing I have taken for granted my whole life, until I celebrated with people who know that this is their own chance to receive Eucharist, talk with a Priest, and celebrate sacraments for an entire year. After mass, instead of rushing off to their busy lives, the people gather, and out of nowhere they begin to pull out food, whatever they may have, and put it all on a table. The people who have just shared the Bread of Christ break the bread of their own hands, of their own sweat, and of their own land; with their neighbors. The food my appear meager by normal standards, but becomes, like the loaves and the fishes, sufficient to feed all of the eager mouths, and everyone leaves knowing they have eaten food given and made of love, shared with neighbors and friends.
Our experience in “Las Alturas” was truly a once in a lifetime opportunity. It opened for me new perspectives and expanded my understanding of the world in which we live. I will never forget the people I encountered on the Meseta. Though I doubt I will ever be able to make the trip again, it is a memory I will return to countless times in my life. The tranquility and peace I felt during my visit is something I will always remember and strive to maintain despite the stresses and distractions the sometimes try to overpower.
Chulucanas, Peru 2005-2006 | <urn:uuid:e90bf1df-b879-424f-a25b-6222de28182b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.osavol.org/blog/default.aspx?page=17 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971621 | 989 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Minyanville attacks deregulation vis-a-vis Bernie Madoff in the article "Deregulation to Blame for Madoff Fiasco". Now while chock full of rather illogical statements which might be better left ignored, a dissection of this article does highlight some misconceptions in regards to regulated vs. unregulated markets.
Madoff senior was charged with a single count of securities fraud. He was released from prison a few hours later after posting $10 million bail. If convicted, Madoff faces 20 years in prison and a fine of $5 million. His list of victims includes Steven Spielberg, New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, and the European bank HSBC
The question arises: How did this happen?The answer is quite simple: Madoff’s investment firm was allowed to operate for 2 years without regulation from the SEC.
Well here's at least a very basic error. Madoff's swindle spanned far more than two years. If this is a mis-type, and they meant to say 20 years, then the statement is false as there was SEC oversight, with an investigation in 1992 to prove it. Madoff was even advising the SEC...
Odd, isn’t it? Diamond miners in the Congo are subjected to body-cavity searches to prevent them from secreting tiny gems - but savvy, ambitious men like Madoff are allowed to wander around unsupervised, carrying diamonds the size of fists. And we pretend to be shocked when some of the loot goes missing.
Here’s a thunderbolt: There’s no such thing as a “free-market economy.” What does the “free” part of it mean? I have found no convincing explanation.
Wasn't sure to even include this one, admittedly. While indeed there is currently no country which can provide an example of a 100% free-market economy, most economics books nevertheless can explain what a free market economy means, this should be obvious to most and for perhaps another post. Anyhow, some businesses operate in effectively free market environments. Moving on.
Every financial system requires rules and regulations to function. The PR coup of the “free-market economists” is that they managed to convince the American public that only little people need rules.
I predict, as the case goes to trial, that coverage will focus on Madoff’s personality flaws, the warning signs, and his dramatic fall from grace. But that’s trivial. What’s important, and worth discussing, is that Americans are so deathly afraid of “regulation” that we meekly allow ourselves to be swindled.
Now, the WSJ does a far better job at explaining this last post and at delivering an overall rebuttal to this Minyanville post, than I can do here. (Madoff and Markets) | <urn:uuid:9393be4d-c3cb-42a5-a0d3-4aa2ff2d3151> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thestalwart.com/the_stalwart/2008/12/madoff-an-argument-for-or-against-regulation.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958379 | 595 | 1.601563 | 2 |
As residents of the world's consumer capital, New Yorkers can have anything delivered to their door at any time. They can have their hair cut in the living room, have champagne and caviar rushed to them on a whim, enjoy a shiatsu massage in their own bed or invite a clairvoyant to predict their future from Tarot cards laid out on the kitchen table.
But there is one thing that is currently unavailable for delivery to those who live in this most can-do of metropolises. Women can not legally give birth at home in the presence of a trained and experienced midwife.
This city of more than 8 million people, with its reputation for being at the cutting-edge of modern urban living, now lacks a single midwife legally permitted to help women have a baby in their own homes. "It's pretty shocking that in a city where you can get anything any hour of the day a person cannot give birth at home with a trained practitioner," said Elan McAllister, president of the New York-based Choices in Childbirth.
The collapse of New York's legal home birth midwifery services has come as a result of the closure two weeks ago of one of the most progressive hospitals in the city, St Vincent's in Manhattan. When the bankrupt hospital shut its doors on 30 April the midwives suddenly found themselves without any backing or support.
There are 13 midwives who practise home births in New York, and under a system introduced in 1992 they are all obliged under state law to be approved by a hospital or obstetrician, on top of their professional training.
St Vincent's was prepared to underwrite their services, but most other doctors and institutions are not, and they now find themselves without the paperwork they need to work lawfully.
Miriam Schwarzschild, one of the 13, is now in the invidious position of either abandoning her clients or operating illegally. "Apparently by taking a woman's blood pressure I am committing an illegal act," she said. She has no doubts about what she will do: she will stand by the six to eight women she helps in labour every month, law be damned. She said she intends to "fly under the radar", but is anxious about what would happen should she be reported to the state authorities. "At any time a nurse or doctor could report me, and once that happens they could go after my licence and shut me down."
Jitters are spreading among the tiny community of home birth midwives. The rumour has circulated that one of them has already been shopped to the authorities by an obstetrician at a hospital where she transferred one of her clients in need of medical attention.
The crisis of home birth in New York city is an extreme example of a pattern found across America. Fewer than 1% of babies are born at home in the US, and in New York that figure is as low as 0.48% — about 600 babies every year out of 125,000. That compares with a rate of about 30% in the Netherlands.
In much of Europe, midwives play the lead role in assisting most low-risk and healthy women to give birth, handing over to a specialist doctor or surgeon only when conditions demand. In the US, that relationship is reversed.
Obstetricians, who are trained to focus on interventionist methods and often have never even witnessed a natural birth, are in charge of about 92% of all cases. As a body, they are fiercely resistant both to midwives – who under the private medical system in America are their competitors – and to women choosing to remain at home.
In 2008 the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists put out a statement effectively instructing its members to have nothing to do with the "trendy" fashion towards home births. Yet despite Acog's stance, and despite the fact that the US spends more money on pregnancy and childbirth-related hospital costs than any other type of hospital care ($86bn a year), the country has the unfortunate distinction of having one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the industrialised world. Its rate stands at 16.7 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with 7.6 in the Netherlands and 3.9 in Italy. Britain's rate is 8.2.
On top of that, about one in three pregnancies in the US end in a caesarean section — a product, critics say, of the highly interventionist approach that includes frequent induced labours and epidurals. Amnesty International recently dubbed the US record on childbirth as a whole a "human rights crisis".
Knowledge of these statistics, and of what is now happening to New York midwives, makes Julie Jacobowitz-Kelly see red. She is one of Schwarzschild's clients and is preparing to give birth to her first child, a boy she and her partner have already named Benjamin, whose due date fell today.
She said the current illegal status of the home birth midwives was "a travesty, it's absolutely ridiculous. It angers me that experienced midwives like Miriam are in jeopardy."
That is a view shared by some senior New York politicians, including Scott Stringer, Manhattan borough president. "There are 600 women who are going to give birth in the next year who want midwives with them at home, and to take away their rights and choices is so backwards it's embarrassing," he said.
Midwifery organisations are scrambling to persuade other hospitals to take over St Vincent's role by signing the so-called "written practice agreements" the midwives need to be legal. So far 75 hospitals have been approached; not one has replied.
Meanwhile, a bill is sitting before the New York state assembly that would scrap the system of practice agreements and allow the midwives to offer their services free of the control of obstetricians. But the bill may not be put to a vote at all this year.
"At the end of the day, hospitals are for sick people, and I'm not sick," said Jacobowitz-Kelly. "I'm going through one of the most natural processes women can go through, so why do it anywhere other than the most natural setting — my home."
• This article was amended on 17 May 2010. The original expressed maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in the Netherlands, Italy and Britain as percentages instead of ratios. This has been corrected. | <urn:uuid:fae08e57-bc68-432f-9fd4-b00de39da970> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/14/home-births-new-york-midwives | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972734 | 1,315 | 1.726563 | 2 |
The summer REU program is sponsored by NSF-Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education program (NSF-NUE). This program runs from May 30th to July 25th, 2012 and it is open to Georgia Tech undergraduates who are US citizens or permanent residents across schools in the colleges of Engineering and Sciences. Specifically, participants are expected to learn the fundamentals of nanoscale science and engineering, gain hands-on experience with research tools, work in research labs on nanotechnology-related research projects, and ultimately translate their learning into modules for K-12 education.
Full scholarship in the amount of $5,000 (including housing allowance) will be provided to the awardees and additional $2,000 research expenses (for lab supplies and access to GT shared research facilities) will be allocated to research groups. Awardees are expected to perform research full time without taking any summer classes for the duration of the internship.
Overview of the Program (PDF)
Contact program coordinator for more information: Dr. Dong Qin at [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:d3d3017b-9d0f-454f-9975-a6622f41eb33> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tfe.gatech.edu/reu-program | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937487 | 221 | 1.601563 | 2 |
A young woman named Sabina was beaten, raped and murdered outside her home in north central Philadelphia last week. As of today, there have been 28 homicides and 80 rapes recorded in Philadelphia this year, devastating to love ones and wrenching to communities. As I write, hundreds if not thousands of people have gathered for a memorial send off for Sabina in the community-owned park and gardens called Liberty Lands, among them several who are very dear to me and are very involved in organizing the event.
Local businesses, friends and neighbors have raised over $40,000 for Sabina, including $25,000 as a reward for the apprehension of her killer. They have flown her family from Hawa'ai and will cover the memorial and funeral expenses. They are looking out for each other the way sometimes happens in small towns and closely knit neighborhoods,which is what the Northern Liberties section of the city is today thanks to more than a decade of extraordinary grassroots locally-driven urban renewal.
The few young urban pioneers who put down roots in what was in the early 1990s a blighted region of abandoned industrial sites and decaying tenements came to invest in the neighbors as well as the neighborhood. One of my friends who moved here at that time says they took a practical approach to building community in what was then a virtual combat zone. They decided that they would support a single strip club that worked with the community and actively oppose any others. They had no parks so they created some. They organized. And things began to change.
The real estate boom that peaked in 2007 absolutely transformed property values and attracted upscale residences and businesses, but many long-term residents remain. The area is a mosaic, a patchwork of colors and textures, of building up and coming down, but it is vibrant and it is not on life support. It is safe to park on the street. But it is still not safe for a young woman to ride her bicycle home alone at night.
Sabina Rose O'Donnell technically lived in an adjacent neighborhood in North Philadelphia, but that does not matter to the many people from far and wide who are bravely bearing witness to her murder and celebrating her life today. She was by all accounts a vibrant and much loved young person who moved freely through these neighborhoods until the night of her death, and she loved Liberty Lands. I am deeply moved by the massive show of support from so many there today, and very very proud of what they have done and continue to do.
The clouds wept for Sabina yesterday, and now there is sunlight in the Northern Liberties. In spite of everything. And because of everyone. | <urn:uuid:560674ae-4040-4b18-8c09-811abd507315> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://greensleeves.typepad.com/berkshires/2010/06/the-clouds-wept-for-sabina-and-the-sun-shines.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982888 | 532 | 1.742188 | 2 |
China 'Tries to Have it Both Ways' at G8
July 7, 2008 - 8:13 PM
Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - President Hu Jintao's presence at a gathering of G8 leaders in France is a reflection of China's desire to be accepted into an important and exclusive developed nations' club, analysts say, even as China continues to present itself as a spokesman for the developing world.
Hu at the weekend became the first Chinese leader to accept an invitation to attend a meeting of the leaders of the world's seven top industrialized democracies -- the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada -- plus Russia.
Both Beijing and the summit organizers stressed beforehand that the new president was not attending the main meetings, but would meet the leaders on the sidelines, and also take part in expanded meetings with leaders from developing countries.
Russia was invited to G7 summits for several years before the grouping was widened to include it in what's now known as the G8.
China -- whose economy is larger than that of Canada and Italy and is much bigger than Russia's -- was first invited to attend a meeting three years ago, but declined.
A Chinese-language Hong Kong newspaper, Ching Chi Jih Pao, said the "groundbreaking" attendance at the meeting in Evian was the first step towards joining the G8.
But the Chinese leadership has been at pains to assure the developing world that it was not abandoning what it has long seen as its role as a spokesman for the Third World.
A report by the official Xinhua news agency said that Hu, at a meeting with three developing countries' leaders on Monday, had "stressed that China is a member of the developing countries."
It quoted him as telling the leaders of Algeria, Brazil and Malaysia that "China will always side with developing countries no matter what changes the international situation will undergo."
The four leaders attended an informal meeting between the G8 leaders and those of 11 developing countries. Chinese media reports made it clear China was firmly in the latter group.
Ching Cheong, a China analyst with Singapore's Straits Times, noted last week that ever since communist China's founder, Mao Zedong, proclaimed that China would "forever belong to the Third World," no subsequent leader has shifted from that stance.
That was why Beijing had emphasized the difference between attending the summit itself and the meetings on the sidelines, he said.
According to Jean-Pierre Cabestan, the director of the French Center for Research on Contemporary China, Beijing hoped to have it both ways.
"China wants both to be perceived as the spokescountry of the poor and developing nations as well as a full member of every exclusive club," he said from Hong Kong, where the center is based.
Cabestan said the fact the French government organized a pre-summit meeting on Sunday was merely "a diplomatic nicety" designed to enable China to meet with the leaders of the wealthy nations without appearing to contradict its own policies.
China accepted the invitation this time, he suggested, because its interests concur with those of the French government and "old" Europe - "in other word the part of Europe which is the most critical toward the U.S."
Hu's attendance also underscored Beijing's national and international ambitions.
Cabestan declared it "incredible" that the G8 countries were effectively "begging" China to join, despite the fact it is not a democracy.
Russia had only eventually been allowed to join after becoming "a constitutional, albeit not perfect, democracy," he said.
For Western countries, "the line separating authoritarian systems from democracies" appears to be becoming less and less important, Cabestan added, predicting that China's authoritarian nature would create disagreements among G8 members in future years.
While in France, Hu met President Bush Sunday for their first meeting since the Chinese leader became president.
Xinhua said the two discussed North Korea's nuclear program, Taiwan, terrorism, and the SARS epidemic which emerged in China late last year and spread to around 30 countries.
Beijing's initial attempts to play down or even cover up the spread of the flu-like virus were widely criticized, but upon becoming president in March Hu ordered officials to take effective and transparent action.
Xinhua reported that Bush had praised China's efforts and achievements in combating SARS.
It also said Hu had accepted an invitation from Bush to visit Washington, and that he had invited Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to visit China.
Send a Letter to the Editor about this article. | <urn:uuid:fa5de07c-da23-4f32-9d13-1a1bffc53432> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cnsnews.com/news/article/china-tries-have-it-both-ways-g8 | 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 | 0.977925 | 948 | 1.5 | 2 |
Tropical Storm Alberto not seen to gain strength, forecasters say
MIAMI (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Alberto churned slowly toward the South Carolina coast on Sunday where heavy rain and dangerous surf are expected from the beach resort of Myrtle Beach south to Savannah, Georgia, forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
Bringing an early start to the Atlantic hurricane season, Alberto rose to tropical storm strength on Saturday and by Sunday morning was about 95 miles south-southeast of Charleston, according to the latest update by the hurricane center in Miami. It carried maximum sustained winds near 50 miles per hour.
Alberto was moving slowly west-southwest with tropical storm force winds extending about 70 miles from the center, but the hurricane center added, "little change in strength is forecast during the next 48 hours."
Dangerous surf conditions were predicted along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina through Monday before the storm makes a slow turn to the northeast, making its way along the U.S. mid-Atlantic seaboard before dissipating in about five days.
That would keep it well away from the Gulf of Mexico, where U.S. oil and gas operations are clustered, but could bring squalls and rough surf to the Carolina coast.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to November 30, but storms outside that time frame are not uncommon. Alberto was the earliest-forming Atlantic storm since 2003, when Tropical Storm Ana formed more than five weeks before the official start of the season, the hurricane center said.
(Additonal reporting by Jane Sutton; Editing by Jackie Frank)
- Tweet this
- Share this
- Digg this | <urn:uuid:5a10d77c-2609-40ff-a45a-a0435fb8a40e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/20/us-storm-alberto-idUSBRE84I0EP20120520 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959576 | 344 | 1.546875 | 2 |
This morning I became increasingly more aware of just how large the globe of woodworkers is and how small our globe has become with regards to woodworkers connecting with one another. Some months ago I blogged pretty extensively on something I call the Real Woodworking Campaign and many if you signed up insupport of my efforts to repatriate people to the craft of working wood. This was the perspective of working real wood using skilled methods that weren’t so much hard but required self discipline and a working knowledge derived at through the actual working of wood itself. For two decades people have become awareoaf a need to work with their hands regardless of their profession. Plumbers and politicians, priests and personal trainers discover the art of hand tool woodworking atryst art building stuff from scraps of wood, drag tools out of boxes and revamp abandoned equipment to see bright steel instead of rust. Few creative crafts have the same level of appeal and that is amazing to me too.
Tell me what the answer is to this phenomenon we call simply woodworking. How or what can we do to to enhance what we do and be more inclusive of others. I highly regard American woodworkers who form guilds and clubs large and small to pass on skills, share knowledge and generally get together regularly to drink coffee and enjoy working wood together. Can this happen more globally? I think that it can. You men in sheds in Australia are doing your bit too. That’s quite wonderful. | <urn:uuid:31d27655-5b42-4404-b31f-68be0bc40d2c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://paulsellers.com/2012/07/glad-for-the-globe/ | 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 | 0.970382 | 297 | 1.773438 | 2 |
As we have said before, labeling is risky business.
This point was driven home again a few weeks ago when Pfizer recalled 1 million packets of birth control pills after discovering a packaging error.
In a statement, Pfizer explained that some blister packs of Lo/Ovral-28 and its generic equivalent could contain an inexact count of active ingredient tablets and that the tablets may be out of sequence (packs come with 21 active tablets and seven sugar pills to regulate menstruation).
While the this episode didn't relate to language or translation, it still serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of quality in drug and device packaging - and the risks associated with a lack of quality.
The Lo/Ovral-28 problem prompted the New York Times to ask:
"What if you end up pregnant because of the packaging mix-up? Is Pfizer offering to cover the cost of the pregnancy or terminating the pregnancy? Or to pay for other health-related costs, like the cost of buying another form of birth control?"And, looking into the future, Pharmalot is predicting a "Pfizer generation".
It will take years to determine whether or not Pfizer has any financial liability for unwanted pregnancies. The potential exposure is huge. And even if actual liability is small, getting to that decision will involve long and expensive legal maneuvers.
Medical translation providers should take this opportunity to test their procedures for QA and QC - and review their professional liability insurance!
[Thanks to Mary Shillue for the heads-up!]
For more on quality processes and risk management in medical translation, take a look at the following:
- Quality matters, or: Is risk a four-letter word?
- Customized medical translation is the wave of the future
- Why translators need editors
ForeignExchange's METRiQ quality system provides medical device and pharmaceutical companies with measurable, known quality for packaging, labeling, and IFUs. To learn more, contact ForeignExchange Translations. | <urn:uuid:218ce1b4-4a4c-4fcb-b5dc-950f74087c3e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.fxtrans.com/2012/02/packaging-mistake-leads-to-product.html | 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 | 0.93296 | 410 | 1.734375 | 2 |
EVANSVILLE — Evansville city government officials hope the James Bethel Gresham Memorial Home adjacent to Garvin Park can continue being a salute to veterans, although in a different way than it has been in the past.
The home, 2 Wedeking Ave., suffered roof and water damage, endangering its artifacts.
Most of the home's most valuable items, such as a military equipment trunk, newspaper clippings and an American flag that is said to have been the one draped on Gresham's casket are now in custody of the Evansville Museum.
Gresham, an Evansville native, was the first U.S. casualty of World War I. After his death in 1917, city residents built the home for use by his mother, Alice Dodd, who died there in 1927.
The Department of Parks and Recreation has been looking for a new owner and for possible alternative uses for the property. Now that more than $12,000 worth of roof repairs are complete, Parks Director Denise Johnson said the city has spoken with ECHO Housing Corp. about taking the property and using it as transitional housing for local veterans in need.
ECHO is a nonprofit agency with the goal of combating homelessness.
Johnson said that in the past, the Gresham home has housed Department of Parks and Recreation interns and has also been used as office space while also serving as a memorial to Gresham's life.
The property transfer remains subject to city Parks Board approval. Johnson mentioned the talks with ECHO during this week's Board of Park Commissioners meeting, and she and board chairman Jay Ritter will discuss the issue with Mayor Lloyd Winnecke.
Given the Gresham home's history as a veterans memorial, the possibility of using it as transitional housing for veterans seems appropriate, Johnson said. "If we can make it happen quickly, we could have veterans in here by the end of December." | <urn:uuid:a4d8459a-ad5d-483a-9310-2b55131c2175> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.courierpress.com/news/2012/oct/21/no-headline---greshamhome/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975184 | 389 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Arts: Arts & Crafts
Erasmus Huis Spirit
Reality expressed in Sculpture Part II
Text and photography by Loreen Neville
20th March 2009
“Today, sculpture development creates an interaction with performance art. Performance art is one of the forms of expression in visual arts that crosses disciplinary lines. The artist can become a part of the work’s elements, which sometimes use the element of smell too. Installation art is an expressional concept that carriers the same spirit. The embryo of installation art’s thoughts was founded in the 1920s by Russian Constructivism activists, with Vladimir Tatlin as one of its leaders. Tatlin created a work using corners of two sides of a wall as its elements. Interaction from both sides created an object, which depended on the tension of steel cables in the walls.” -Dolorosa Sinaga
Here sculptor Amalia Sigit Rajab produced a mannequin wrapped with maroon sash laced lined with thin bendable wiring to give a blowy wind-like effect. Henna-like patterns were painted over the body of this mannequin. Propped in between a grey scale make shift wall, dangling by thin iron rods.
Admiring sculptor Amalia Sigit work, it is as though she infused fashion into her work thereby showing her designer instinct skills. By dressing up the mannequin with clothes and henna paint, a statement of fashion and lifestyle is made here, cleverly disguised in sculptor. Amalia Sigit is keeping up with the dandy trend of fashion with its audacity. Her model work is suited for interiors like in the shopping malls. This interaction will also stand out if the governor of Jakarta could engaged Amalia to decorate the streets during the festive seasons of Hari Raya, Christmas, Gregorian New Year and Chinese New Year which falls along consecutive monthly periods. Jakarta streets are usually decorated with miserable lightings on palm trees often with spoilt or fused bulbs that don’t work. Often from the work of half-hearted unprofessional without bothering with tiny bulb maintenance!
Here Amalia displayed a fairy-like green figurine with holey bat wings colored green, yellow and blue. I wondered why she entitled it; learn to fly because the doll appears to be gracefully dancing raising her left foot up. She had a green tail too. This fairy would really fit in with my toy collection next to the dinosaurs. This graceful swan-bat-fairy like toy sculptor was not for sale. Since I am able to relate my toys with Amalia’s art, therefore Interaction as thus taken place here.
Tom boyish sculptor Innes Indreswari, a lecturer at the Bandung Institute of Technology showcased outdoor and indoor pieces. Her works are all bold, strong with positive and negative interpretation as the sculptor planned it to be. She incorporates her work as trying to represent women. As tom boyish looking as she is, I think her outdoor piece entitled, ‘PIN’ made out of dried banana fibers and wrapped by a red painted metal sheet with gold trim paints resembles her inner protest towards men and she could be right because men can be a pain in the neck especially when they are in power, those silly kings! Innes told the press that, banana trees can only produce one batch of fruit before it withers, and is replaced by the seedlings. This is what happens to a woman’s life often treated as second or third class citizens, needed often only as props. Innes further says that this nation cannot progress because for women are the pillars of this nation”. The 3 meter art form, PIN is an apparition for it can be interpreted as a large bowling pin, a Christmas outdoor décor, a buoying or a huge size Russian wood doll without the facial feature.
Fantastic array of in-door modern contemporary egg-shaped ornaments by sculptor Innes
It is not that I have not seen the same type of art form model before because I own similar or exactly the same types in real jade, marble, onyx and also I have a 24 carat gold plated egg in my secret cabinet.
It is not that I have not seen this particular art shape model before because I own similar or exactly the same forms except my pieces are in real jade, marble, onyx and I also have a 24 carat gold plated egg in my secret cabinet. In this exhibition, Innes mixes her talent piece, ‘My Son=My Sun’ of brass with wood produced in 2007. It is subjective for it appears like the stone on the wall or Kaaba called Hajre Aswad in Mecca. The bronze sculpture inside the black lacquer hole looks human in form perhaps as in my son.
Innes’s copper base, egg shaped sculpture entitled, ‘My World’, copper wire 2007, are wires stringed tightly around to form the shape with a bent on one side. It is beautiful and abstract. Why would Innes name it her world? It is so closed and safe up like inside an embryo a flower bud. Maybe perhaps the artist has hidden secrets or is waiting to bloom. But what baffles me about this art is why was it listed as produced in 2007, when the brass metal plate below the copper-wire art stated 2004? Hey, it caught my investigative eye!
Innes’s ‘Egg’ bronze produced in 2004, work is pierced lightly with dots. All Innes egg pieces are truly artistic pieces that will fit in any offices or homes. Innes had worked wonderfully with metal and here again the egg representing reproduction or birth. Innes has managed to remind us of the auspicious egg in her sculptures. Eggs means life but Innes art is lonely, safely secured in metal egg cocoons.
Taufan A.P, born in Pasuruan East Java, produced these range of bronze, silver-plating and aluminum figures. The piece, ‘Lady in silver’, a silver plated figurine produced in 2007 stood in size 17 x 27 x 62cm. Taufan managed to capture in silver, the flow of a woman’s attire breezed to one side. The head was animal like in appearance. His sculpture, ‘The Woman’, in aluminum produced in 2008 looked like the Oscar’s award except this is a woman. Her figure was shaped to be slim with a graceful scanty cocktail like wrap dress. I guess this would be the artist’s dream girl. This piece stood out in size 20 x 20 x 95cm.
Taufan’s most interesting piece is his bronze piece, ‘The Couple’ produced in 2006, sized 30 x 13 x 48cm, is molded in such a way that the texture seen from afar can appear like folded hard stone washed leather. I think that Taufan used the cold cast method which is a combination of powder bronze metal and polymers binding the bronze metal without being time consuming. The cold cast method also makes it easier to shape or mould.
At first I thought he had sculptured it from acrylic materials but after touching, it was definitely cold bronze. The two heads of the bronze sculpture were looking away from each other and resembled dog or vulture faces. The heads although faced away from each other were jointed by a semi folded cloak like, embedded to have separate bodies yet linked by two thin metal rods as stands that looked like the legs. I really enjoyed and like it for its artistic uniqueness. It can be interpreted into many explanations. The texture is captivating.
Sculptor Anuspati work:
Now this piece, I don’t get it! An art work that look like an upside down dog house or kennel, made out of wood for the outdoors. Too much borrowed art from the ideal dog house here. The rain that night of the exhibition had sort of washed away the wordings of the title of this piece.
But what surprise me though after down loading this digital photograph, from a distance the beams that held the huge glass frame window of the Erasmus Huis center at the back, of this art piece made the entire piece look like a chapel in a distant or a grave. He produced this piece in 2006.
Anuspati ‘object #12’
Made of wood, produced in 2005.
Looks like a ‘pocong’ in wood. I don’t know, I don’t get the art work of Anuspati.
I am not inspired therefore no words can easily flow out.
Sculptor Yani Mariani Sastranegara produced soul of emerald and Mandala Bayu mixed media of copper and gold plating.
Artistically sculptured as mass form like the base and then shaped into a form. His objects are works of inspiration, like figures in the wind from his piece of Mandala Bayu.
Soul of Emerald has this blob base mass molded into a tree root that becomes a woman holding a globe that looks like earth.
So creative. Yani talents are natural and he is tremendously gifted. Yani born in 1955, in Rangkasbitung, Banten. His work is very original from what I have seen in this particular exhibition. I truly appreciate originality and respect it. Yani has been in exhibitions since 2003 and will travel far with his beautiful abstract metal sculptures and figurines.
- Erasmus Huis Spirit of Interaction Reality expressed in Sculpture Part I
- Speech of H.E. Maxime Verhagen, Foreign Minister of Netherlands
- Speech of Art Curator Madam Dolorosa Sinaga
- Photo Album of Event | <urn:uuid:8180c5b8-01ec-4d54-8287-81e66e663217> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rovinginsight.org/library/index.php?content=arts-artsncrafts-article-Erasmus-Huis-part-2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961813 | 2,027 | 1.742188 | 2 |
About the Garrick Theatre
The Garrick Theatre opened on 24 April 1889 with The Profligate, a play by Arthur Wing Pinero. In its early years, it appears to have specialised in the performance of melodrama, and today the theatre is a receiving house for a variety of productions. The theatre is named for David Garrick, considered the most influential Shakespearean actor.
The Garrick Theatre was designed by Walter Emden, with CJ Phipps brought in as a consultant to help with the planning on the difficult site, which included an underground river. Originally the theatre had 800 seats on 4 levels, but the gallery (top) level has since been closed and the seating capacity reduced to 656. The beautiful gold leaf auditorium was restored in 1986 by the stage designer Carl Toms and in 1997 the front facade had a facelift.
The Garrick Theatre has mostly been associated with comedies or comedy-dramas. Recent productions include No Sex Please We're British, which subsquently transferred to the Duchess Theatre in August 1986. On 24th October 1995 the Royal National Theatre's multi-award winning production of JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls opened here, having played successful seasons at the Royal National Theatre's Lyttelton and Olivier theatres as well as the Aldwych Theatre and a season on Broadway.
A proposed redevelopment of Covent Garden by the GLC in 1968 saw the theatre under threat, together with the nearby Vaudeville, Adelphi, Lyceum and Duchess theatres. An active campaign by Equity, the Musicians' Union, and theatre owners under the auspices of the Save London Theatres Campaign led to the abandonment of the scheme.
The gold leaf auditorium was restored in 1986 by the stage designer Carl Toms, and in 1997 the front façade was renovated. The theatre has mostly been associated with comedies or comedy-dramas.
Sydney Grundy's long-running French-style comedy A Pair of Spectacles opened at the Garrick in February, 1890. Mrs Patrick Campbell starred five years later in Pinero's The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith. Afterwards, the theatre suffered a short period of decline until it was leased by Arthur Bourchier, whose wife, Violet Vanbrugh, starred in a series of successful productions ranging from farce to Shakespeare. In 1900, the theatre hosted J. M. Barrie's The Wedding Guest. Rutland Barrington presented several stage works at the Garrick, including his popular "fairy play" called Water Babies in 1902, based on Charles Kingsley's book, with music by Alfred Cellier, among others. The only piece actually premiered by W. S. Gilbert here was Harlequin and the Fairy's Dilemma (retitled The Fairy's Dilemma after a few days) a "Domestic Pantomime" (1904). In 1921, Basil Rathbone played Dr. Lawson in The Edge o' Beyond at the Garrick, and the following year Sir Seymour Hicks appeared in his own play, The Man in Dress Clothes. In 1925 Henry Daniell played there as Jack Race in Cobra and appeared there again as Paul Cortot in Marriage by Purchase in March 1932.
More recent productions are listed below and include No Sex Please, We're British (1982), which played for four years at the theatre before transferring to the Duchess Theatre in 1986. On 24 October 1995, the Royal National Theatre's multi-award winning production of J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls opened here, having played successful seasons at the Royal National Theatre's Lyttelton and Olivier theatres as well as the Aldwych Theatre and a season on Broadway.
In 1986, the Garrick was acquired by the Stoll Moss Group, and, in 2000, it became a Really Useful Theatre when Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group and Bridgepoint Capital purchased Stoll Moss Theatres Ltd. In October 2005, Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer purchased the Garrick Theatre, and it became one of five playhouses operating under their company name of Nimax Theatres Ltd, alongside the Lyric Theatre, Apollo Theatre, Vaudeville Theatre and Duchess Theatre.
THE GARRICK THEATRE PRODUCTIONS
1947 - Laurence Olivier directed Jack Buchanan in Born Yesterday, with Coral Browne in a revival of Frederick Lonsdale's Canaries Sometimes Sing.
1950 - Richard Attenborough and Yolanda Donlan transferred from the Savoy Theatre in To Dorothy a Son.
1955 - The revue La Plume de Ma Tante was an enormous success, during the run of which Jack Buchanan died, in 1957.
1958 - Dora Bryan in Living for Pleasure.
1959 - Margaret Rutherford and Peggy Mount in Farewell Farewell Eugene.
1960 - The Stratford East production of Lionel Bart's Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be began a long run with Miriam Karlin.
1962 - Sheila Hancock in Rattle of a Simple Man.
1967 - Brian Rix presented and appeared in Stand By Your Bedouin, the first in a season of farces, including Uproar in the House and Let Sleeping Wives Lie.
1971 - The last of these farces was Don't Just Lie There Say Something.
1972 - Antony Shaffer's Sleuth transferred.
1973 - Dandy Dick starred Alastair Sim.
1975 - Robert Stigwood presented Aspects of Max Wall for a six-week sell-out season.
1976 - Richard Beckinsdale headlined the risque comedy Funny Peculiar.
1977 - Side By Side By Sondheim transferred and was a continuing success with its third cast.
1978 - Ira Levin's thriller Deathtrap began a long run until 1981.
1982 - No Sex Please, We're British transferred from The Strand Theatre and remained until 1986.
1986 - Judi Dench and Michael Williams in Mr and Mrs Nobody.
1987 - William Gaunt and Susie Blake in When Did You Last See Your Trousers? by Ray Galton and John Antrobus.
1988 - Jane How and Zena Walker transferred from The King's Head, in Islington in Noel Coward's Easy Virtue.
1989 - Rupert Everett and Maria Aitken in another Coward, The Vortex; and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good transferred from the Royal Court Theatre.
1990 - Short seasons of Bent with Ian McKellen and Michael Cashman and Frankie Howerd At His Tittermost are followed by the first major West End transfer from the newly-managed Almeida Theatre with The Rehearsal by Jean Anouilh.
1991 - Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa transferred from the Phoenix Theatre
1993 - John Godber's On the Piste and Steven Berkoff's One Man.
1994 - Tom Courtenay in Moscow Stations and a festive season with Fascinating Aida.
1995 - The Live Bed Show with Paul Merton and Caroline Quentin, the Abbey Theatre production of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars and Clarke Peters in Unforgettable - The Nat King Cole Story, precede the arrival of the Royal National Theatre's An Inspector Calls, which began its second prolonged season in the West End.
2001 - Feelgood transferred from Hampstead Theatre followed by J B Priestley's Dangerous Corner.
2002 - The hit British premiere production of This is Our Youth plays two seasons either side of a successful run of The Lieutenant of Inishmore.
2003 - The fourth cast of This is Our Youth, followed by Jus' Like That!', Ross Noble and Wait Until Dark.
2004 - Ricky Gervais workshopped his latest stand-up venture, Politics, followed by a revival of David Mamet's Oleanna and The Solid Gold Cadillac, starring Patricia Routledge and Roy Hudd.
2005 - The Anniversary with Sheila Hancock, Elmina's Kitchen by Kwame Kwei-Armah, On The Ceiling with Ralf Little, You Never Can Tell with Edward Fox
2006 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest starring Christian Slater and Alex Kingston, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell starring Tom Conti, Amy's View starring Felicity Kendal
2007 - Young British actress Billie Piper makes her stage debut in a new production of Christopher Hampton's Treats, Bad Girls: The Musical, Absurd Person Singular
2008 - Peter Pan - El Musical, Derren Brown's Mind Reader – An Evening of Wonders, and Zorro
2009 - A Little Night Music transferred from the Menier Chocolate Factory, The Mysteries - Isango Portobello Theatre Company, Arturo Brachetti's Change
2010 - The Little Dog Laughed starring Tamsin Greig, Rupert Friend, Gemma Arterton and Harry Lloyd, All the Fun of the Fair, a jukebox musical based on the songs of David Essex, When We Are Married starring Maureen Lipman and Roy Hudd
2011 - The Hurly Burly Show a contemporary burlesque revue starring Miss Polly Rae, and in May Pygmalion will be transferring from Chichester Festival Theatre starring Rupert Everett, Kara Tointon and Dame Diana Rigg
2011 - Chicago transfers from the Adelphi Theatre
2012 - Loserville, a new musical by Elliot Davis and James Bourne, starring Aaron Sidwell and Lil Chris.
2013 - Rock of Ages transfers from the Shaftesbury Theatre. | <urn:uuid:43aa08bb-c4ee-4f4c-8567-2ce007e884ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.garrick-theatre.co.uk/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94033 | 1,984 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Snow flurries are falling in the ballroom of the Watson-Curtze Mansion, 356 W. Sixth St. Fairies have taken over the guest bedroom.
Every holiday season, the mansion is transformed for the Erie County Historical Society's Victorian Holidays. In past years, it's been with a Broadway flair, a fairy-tale whimsy and a hint of holiday song.
This year, Melanie Kuebel-Stankey came up with the theme "Yes, Virginia," based on an 1897 editorial published in the New York Sun defending the existence of Santa Claus and the magical wonder of the holiday.
People forget that the holidays aren't always about shopping and to-do lists, said Kuebel-Stankey, the Historical Society's director of visitor and member services. It's about joy, love and other wonders. That includes Santa Claus.
1) How were you involved with the Victorian Holidays exhibit this year?
This year, I'm the one who came up with the theme. I was sitting at the front desk looking at the fireplace early one Saturday morning before everyone got here and thought we need to get the magic back, what the holidays used to be when they were about friends and family, and making an effort.
A present wasn't something you bought from the store. A present was part of your time and your energy and your effort, and you made something.
That kind of holiday magic that has gotten lost in all of the running here and there and all the to-do lists. "Yes, Virginia" just popped into my head, and I thought, "That's it!"
2) Can you briefly explain what "Yes, Virginia" is about?
Virginia O'Hanlon wrote to the editor of the New York Sun asking if there was a Santa Claus. And Francis Church wrote this very eloquent response that (said), yes, there is a Santa Claus because every one person cannot know every thing there is to know about this world, and that love and joy and generosity make life worthwhile.
The whole Santa Claus idea, it's a feeling. It's a way of generosity and romance and love and joy and all of this wonderful stuff that you can't see or touch. And that's where the holiday magic really hides.
3) How were you able to decorate based on an editorial?
We have this wonderful house that was here in the 1890s when the editorial was written. When you read through it, we picked up on words.
"Generosity" -- what did generosity mean in the Victorian period? It was that dining room where when you had friends over for dinner, you made an effort. These people were important to you, so you went the extra step in making them feel welcome and appreciated. It's a really good feeling that goes both ways.
"Romance," that was an easy one. The Victorian Period was perfect for that. And of course, the newspaper office is where he wrote the editorial.
We have signs in each one of the rooms that pick up a piece of the editorial, and highlight and explain. It's a little bit of background on how it fits. And it's there for visitors to read or not, depending on how they want to experience it.
4) What did it take to get this all done?
What we did was the divide-and-conquer strategy. I got everyone a copy of the editorial, picked up some of the words and just said here are some ideas on how it relates to the period.
Everybody picked up on something a little different. It was interesting how people bonded with a different element and it all just worked.
We start the day after Halloween. It's pretty much two and a half weeks.
It's fun because we all go to our rooms and do our own thing ... then we room-hop to see what everyone is into.
5) How has the exhibit been received since it opened in late November?
Very well. We're getting a lot of people who want to see the house at night with all the lights on. Most of the time, the mansion is only open during the day. It has a certain magical quality at night when you see it.
-- Lindsey Poisson | <urn:uuid:b216ec81-c2bd-4f10-bea5-bdf809ccd936> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://goerie.com/article/20111212/NEWSMAKER/312119882/Decorations-transform-Erie's-Watson-Curtze-mansion-for-holidays | 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 | 0.977481 | 870 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Papers of William Murray, noted
The New Yorker writer and published novelist. Materials document the literary and professional career of California-based writer noted for
his mystery fiction and contemporary feature writing. The collection contains correspondence, both professional and personal;
typescripts and drafts of published and unpublished literary works; appointment books and notebooks; biographical materials;
and audiorecordings of his interviews, notes, and readings.
William Murray, born in New York City on April 8, 1926, was the only child of William Murray, head of the New York branch
of William Morris talent agency and Danesi Murray, an Italian actress, opera singer, and publisher. At age 6 months, after
his parents divorced, Murray moved with his mother to Rome, Italy; he returned to the United States at the age of 8. He attended
Phillips Exeter Academy from 1942-1943, and, after graduating, he enrolled at Harvard, where he developed his interest in
opera and singing. After college, he spent time in the Army Air Force and qualified for the GI Bill. He returned to Italy
shortly after to pursue his opera career; when he lost his voice temporarily, he turned to fiction and journalism. Already
a freelance writer and a stringer for
TIME, he acquired his first professional job in the fiction department at the
THE NEW YORKER in 1956 and continued as a staff writer for more than thirty years. | <urn:uuid:c85f5aeb-0459-4dd0-a1f6-ee2bf206fcc3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oac4.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt6k4039jk/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971819 | 297 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Published May 02, 2012
At some point everyone has either waited tables, or at least had the pleasure of being served at a restaurant. Let's face it, sometimes it's not so pleasurable --either for the server or the served.
But does apparent bad service also deserve a lesson on how to do your job?
The following note was posted on Reddit by someone claiming that a friend of a waitress supposedly received this note after serving a customer.
Don't tell every customer you're very busy to excuse your lack of serving skills. Your job is to attend to us, not make us feel like we're an inconvenience. A little bit of personal attention goes a long way in the form of a tip. Just my two cents.
The customer left two pennies for their "trouble."
Cruel tipping stories are hardly new. A Seattle bartender was not only stiffed on her tip by a customer, he also insulted her by scrawling on the receipt: “P.S. You could stand to loose (sic) a few pounds.”
That prompted the bartender to post a picture of the receipt on her Facebook page, along with the customer’s name, Andrew Meyer. Soon, angry readers found and re-posted the so-called dead-beat tipper's Facebook page --but it was the wrong Andrew Meyer. It was bad all around.
Then there was the incident of the receipt showing a 1 percent tip and the handwritten "get a real job" note. A person who called himself a banker reportedly left a $1.33 tip on a $133.54 bill, and left a note telling the server to "get a real job".
It apparently was a hoax. According to TheSmokingGun, the restaurant where the bad tip was purported to have been left found the actual receipt. Rather than a bill of $133.54, the receipt showed a $33.54 bill, and a tip of more than $7.
While it's unclear if the two-cent tipper is real or if two cents were left, the note taps into a frustration we've all had at some point while being the brunt of bad service. Is the note a teaching moment, or its author just a jerk? Let us know what you think. | <urn:uuid:6094ff51-780d-4ab0-b707-37b7b34f59f7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2012/05/02/waitress-left-two-cent-by-customer/print | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968755 | 469 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Books & Music
Food & Wine
Health & Fitness
Hobbies & Crafts
Home & Garden
News & Politics
Religion & Spirituality
Travel & Culture
TV & Movies
Conclusion of Interview with Peter J West
How does the author balance his time between family, friends, and writing? What advice does he have for those who are striving to be published?
How do you manage to balance your time between family, friends, and writing?
It's difficult. I have a day job which pays the bills but requires a lot of time and a lot of commuting.
I barely see friends these days. The few hours I get spare quickly gets taken up spending time with my wife, writing, and sorting out day to day bits and pieces. If you take your writing seriously, then other things are going to slide. It can be pretty difficult. You need to be sure about what your priorities are.
If you could spend one hour with just one person, dead or alive, whom would you choose? Why?
Probably Professor Stephen Hawking. He has achieved so much in life despite suffering from a terrible debilitating disease for most of his life. I admire how he stretches his mind and works so hard to achieve great things in physics, despite all of the things holding him back. He doesn't use his life as an excuse for underachieving. He never gave up because things were hard or unfair.
Do you have any advice for writers who are striving to be published?
I would say question yourself about why you want to be published and be honest in your answers.
Decide whether you are writing because:
(a) You want to be famous
(b) You want to be wealthy
(c) You want to be popular
(d) You want to be respected by other authors
(e) You want to be respected by readers (the general public)
(f) You want to be respected by critics
(g) You want to win awards
(h) You want to write good stories.
(i) You want to write entertaining novels
(j) You want to write good literature
(k) You want to create
(l) You want to lose yourself in something
(m) You want to prove something to yourself
(n) You want to prove something to someone else
(o) You are unhappy with some other part of your life
These are all different things, and require different steps to reach that goal. Don't confuse one for the other. Be honest with yourself. If you are looking to make money, you will get a better hourly rate at your local supermarket.
To be published by traditional publishers or by the self-publishing route takes an immense amount of work, not only on the writing itself, but in learning how to market and distribute your own books, and a whole host of skills required to create digital formats, work with social media, and setup blogs, Goodreads accounts, and manage any advertising plans you might have.
Make sure that you understand the shear quantity of hard work it will require, and also understand that to build a platform will take years, not weeks. Shortcuts are a fool's hope. Expect to make no money. Expect to work long hours. Expect the writing you worked your heart out to create, to be criticised and pulled apart by people who you will never meet. Be ready to accept all criticism and learn from it. Put your pride aside and say, yes I can take that on board and improve my skills and make my writing better. That should be your aim. Make sure that every year your writing is better than it was before, not just in your own eyes or the eyes of your friends and family. Get feedback from people who have never met you and have no reason to be polite. Ask real readers what they think. That's the only way to improve.
Remember that writers write. Unless you are physically writing every day, you are not advancing towards your goal. You should read widely also and learn from the styles and techniques of others. Success doesn't come without hard work. In writing this is more true than ever.
Thank you, Peter West, for such an amazing interview. I look forward to the release of your next book.
If you would like a copy of Information Cloud, I have provided an Amazon link for you below.
Content copyright © 2013 by Lisa Binion. All rights reserved.
This content was written by Lisa Binion. If you wish to use this content in any manner, you need written permission. Contact Lisa Binion for details.
Website copyright © 2013 Minerva WebWorks LLC. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:93d08107-46a8-4365-8b9a-4e51347603b1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art179425.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959605 | 958 | 1.53125 | 2 |
That at the end I may be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in the Messiah, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Here we have the walk of faith.
Faith in or of? In this passage the translation is normally “by faith in Christ”. But we need to remember something. One of the major things my father taught me was what he saw in the grammar of Galatians 2:20
…the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God…
I don’t live by my faith in Jesus, I live by His faith and what He did. Yes, I need faith, but even that is a gift. I can’t produce this powerful faith. All I can do is receive it as it is given to me. It’s a small quibble, but the attitude behind it is important. All we have is given. By grace we are saved by God.
Paul gives us a glimpse of his priorities in the context of his obvious lack of certainty—at least in most translations. However, Vine’s gives us a glimpse of something more. He believes that the words used (a different form of the word resurrection coupled with the word used for attain) suggest that Paul is talking about experiencing oneness with Jesus’ resurrection life and its power.
This goes back to something I’ll cover more in the Romans book—the idea that we literally die and are resurrected into the body of Jesus when we believe. That we experience His life lived out through us. Whatever Paul is precisely talking about here, it is obvious that his top priority is getting closer to, becoming one with, entering into the fullness of life in the Messiah—living in the Kingdom now.
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect. But I keep pushing to make it my own, because Jesus the Messiah has made me His own.
In this life we never completely attain this maturity, this walk of faith, this knowledge of the Lord. In the flesh we will always “see in a glass darkly”. But we persevere, press on, continuously strive, knowing that our striving isn’t what matters. What matters is the One we desire to be one with. He promised it will happen. Our job is to keep focused on the prize, always remembering the goal—oneness with the Lord Jesus Himself as His joyful obedient slave.
When we finally get to go home this will be our reality. We focus on making that as real as possible here.
Brother & sisters, I do not consider that I have achieved this. But one thing I do: forgetting what’s behind and straining toward to what’s ahead, I press on toward the goal—the upward call of God in Jesus.
The prize is the upward calling, the invitation to heaven, being part of the resurrection, joining the marriage feast of the Lamb. As this is a walk of faith, this is never a sure thing—or it would not take faith.
But as we see Paul’s straining to attain we realize that nothing else matters. The short time we are on this planet does not even begin to compare to being called to join the Kingdom in the new creation where He will be with us and among us face to face. Our goal is to please Jesus—that he will testify that he knows us and that we have been thankful, obedient slaves. | <urn:uuid:537d36d4-0fb3-407f-9d4e-5fd42d3b7f69> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://radiqx.com/2012/10/do-you-have-the-faith-of-jesus/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970499 | 772 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has stressed once again the need for Singaporeans to procreate.
Speaking publicly for the first time after National Day at a constituency national day celebration dinner on Saturday, Lee warned of adverse consequences if the country’s declining birth rates continue.
“If we go on like that, this place will fold up, because there’ll be no original citizens left to form the majority, and we cannot have new citizens, new PRs to settle our social ethos, our social spirit, our social norms,” he said, noting that Chinese reproduction rate is now at 1.08, Indians at 1.09 and Malays at 1.64.
“So my message is a simple one. The answer is very difficult but the problems, if we don’t find the answers, are enormous,” he added.
Lee acknowledged the pivotal role that work permit holders have played in building Singapore’s infrastructure, and the contribution of permanent residents, without which he said the country’s population would be older, smaller and would lose vitality.
Further, he noted that in the long term, Singapore’s “educated men and women must decide whether to replace themselves in the next generation”. Currently, 31 per cent of women and 41 per cent of men are choosing not to do so, he noted.
“But we’ve got to persuade people to understand that getting married is important, having children is important,” he said. “Do we want to replace ourselves or do we want to shrink and get older and be replaced by migrants and work permit holders? That’s the simple question.”
MSF to tackle problem: Chan Chun Sing
Responding to Lee’s call for solutions to Singapore’s citizen population crunch, current acting Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Chan Chun Sing, who will be taking on the newly-established Ministry of Social and Family development (MSF), said the latter will pursue efforts to encourage younger Singaporeans get married and start families earlier.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the same event, Chan acknowledged that the issues are “challenges that cut across different ministries”, and said there are two aspects to the population situation — material and economic, which the government will work on, reported Channel NewsAsia.
“But like what Mr Lee said, the most important aspect has to do with the less tangible... (what) we value as a society — the institution of the family,” he said as quoted by the media outlet. “How do we see the institution, and the family... these are things we really need to work on as a society because it concerns our common future.”
The Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) hit a new record high of 371 at 1pm on Thursday, again climbing into the "hazardous" range of above 300, according to data from the National Environment Agency (NEA). | <urn:uuid:44a9677f-8978-48e2-baae-35f157cf61bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sg.news.yahoo.com/singapore-%E2%80%98will-fold-up%E2%80%99-if-citizens-don%E2%80%99t-reproduce--lee-kuan-yew.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948623 | 619 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Cracked Filling or Tooth
If you want a smile that's your crowning glory, you may need a crown to cover a tooth and restore it to its normal shape and size. A crown can make your tooth stronger and improve its appearance.
It can cover and support a tooth with a large filling when there isn't enough tooth left. It can be used to attach a bridge, protect a weak tooth from breaking, or restore one that's already broken. A crown is a good way to cover teeth that are discolored or badly shaped. It's also used to cover a dental implant.
If one of our Spodak Dental Group providers recommend a crown, it's probably to correct one of these conditions. Our concern, like yours, is helping you keep your teeth healthy and your smile bright - literally, your crowning glory. For your convenience and to make sure you get the best result possible, our master ceramic artist will fabricate a customized crown right here in our own on-site dental laboratory. | <urn:uuid:984fb68c-6b3c-43af-8ad8-d6a25d7ce177> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.spodakdental.com/cracked-filling-or-tooth.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951239 | 208 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Helena Holmes, a 17-year old girl from Hull, England, came down with a devastating case of Toxic Shock Syndrome and subsequently went bald. But while bald, Helena was spotted by a modeling agent, who then signed her to a 3-year contract. (Thanks, Tampax!) Here's a question: Although most of us born before 1985 were duly warned about the dangers of TSS with regards to tampon-use, we haven't heard about it in years, nor known a woman who has suffered from it. (Apparently there was an outbreak of cases in the 80's, but things cooled down after that.) Anyway, in the interest of public service — and because, well, today is a reeaalllly slow news day — we've decided to ask the question: Does the fear of Toxic Shock Syndrome send you running to the Always aisle? (Side note: Maybe the easiest way to avoid TSS is to acquire a fashion-industry-mandated eating disorder and stop menstruating altogether!) Let us know after the jump.
Bald Toxic Shock Girl's Misery Turns To Joy After Winning Three Year Modelling Contract [Daily Mail]
Toxic Shock Syndrome [Kids Health]
Toxic Shock Syndrome [Mayo Clinic] | <urn:uuid:de604ead-86f2-4129-a4df-84ea7ff9334f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jezebel.com/338218/is-anyone-still-scared-of-toxic-shock-syndrome?tag=periods | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94603 | 257 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Why are we just starting now?
Published: Friday, January 18, 2013 at 9:22 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, January 18, 2013 at 9:22 a.m.
I read with interest the article by Matthew Albright and was glad to hear school boards are looking at security at our schools.
But there are some questions that must be asked.
Why are we just now looking at security at our schools?
Ever since schools were made “gun-free zones,” they have become a prime target for people who want to murder a large number of people to make a name for themselves or a statement.
We should have been looking when Columbine happened.
And to clarify a statement by one of the people interviewed, the guard at Columbine was unarmed, thus was unable to stop the two shooters there.
The article states the schools are looking at locking doors after students enter.
Again, why weren’t we doing this sooner?
The Newtown shooter broke into a locked door to enter the school.
The cost to put armed security in every classroom would be extremely expensive.
The training for these people needs to be looked at.
They need to be highly trained with the proper weapons and ammunition. That is an expense that would have to be taken into account. And well-trained people would need the pay commensurate with that training.
A possible solution is to put a minimum of two officers at each school. Depending on the size of the campus, more would be assigned.
To assist these officers, have alarms on doors, not so much audible alarms but detectors that let a central station know of a door or area being accessed.
Camera systems would also help. I do commend the boards for looking at ways to intervene with the young people to try, hopefully getting them the help they need, to reduce the chances they won’t become one of those people who commit such an act.
Armed security is not the solution to violence, but trying to intervene early in their lives is one step toward a solution.
Everyone has to understand there is no perfect way.
Armed security in a school would probably not prevent some people from getting killed in an attack like Newtown, but it will greatly enhance the chances that a large number of people would not be killed, if not deter the act from happening in the first place. (The shooter now knows he may be challenged by an armed person).
I wish the school boards of both parishes the best in coming up with good solutions.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged. | <urn:uuid:33769839-5973-4718-8be8-b64db4e76414> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.houmatoday.com/article/20130118/LETTERS/130119659/1267/entertainment02?Title=Why-are-we-just-starting-now- | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978991 | 559 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Following last week's withdrawal from the elections of the largest Iraqi Sunni Muslim party, divisions have deepened in the country over the question of whether to hold the elections on January 30 as scheduled. Some moderate Shiite politicians are so alarmed by the rising sectarian tension in the country, they are now joining moderate Sunni Arabs in calling for a delay in the elections.
If Iraqi Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is to be believed, his Shiite-led coalition group, the United Iraqi Alliance, could win this month's elections by a landslide with some 80 percent of the votes.
Shiites make up at least 60 percent of Iraq's 26 million people. And they are eager to exercise that political power, which was long repressed under ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
Shiites may form a large majority but they are just one of many groups who make up Iraq's ethnic and religious mosaic. On January 30, all Iraqis are supposed to go to the polls to elect a representative assembly, which will choose a new interim government and draft a constitution.
But that hope is dimming amid signs that many Sunni Arabs, the second biggest group in the country, may not take part in Iraq's first free elections.
Last week, the largest mainstream Sunni party to have entered the race withdrew because it said security conditions were too poor to permit fair elections in Sunni-dominated regions. Citing similar problems, some Sunni political groups have chosen not to register and are calling for a boycott.
A spokesman for the mainstream Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, Ammar Wajeeh, says most Sunnis are still hoping for a delay in the elections.
"The security situation is still bad, as you know," he said. "We think that the situation in general is improper [for elections]. We haven't enough time and freedom to make advertisements because of the situation. We shall not join again as long as the time of the election will be the 30th of January."
Making up a fifth of Iraq's 26 million people, Sunni Arabs have traditionally dominated Iraq politically and were the backbone of Saddam's dictatorship.
They now fear an almost certain majority Shiite win at the polls, a fear that is helping fuel the Saddam loyalists and Sunni Muslim extremists who are waging a violent insurgency in Baghdad and in areas north and west of the capital to derail the elections.
Without the participation of the Sunnis, international observers have warned that the elections may be considered illegitimate and provide even more fuel for a greater Sunni rebellion.
On Sunday, another prominent Shiite member of the United Iraqi Alliance, Sheik Humam Hamoudy, reached out to Sunni Arabs, calling for talks to avert a sectarian conflict.
Mr. Hamoudy says his party endorses calls by some Shiites, including Iraqi Planning Minister Mehdi al-Hafedh, to hold a national reconciliation conference ahead of the elections. But the sheik says Sunnis with ties to Saddam's Baath Party would not be welcome at the talks.
The demand to exclude Baath party members leaves little room for compromise. Sunnis point out that most jobs in Saddam's government required party membership, and being a Baathist does not mean that the person participated in Saddam's atrocities against the Shiites or any other groups.
The Sunnis are nervous that the Shiites, who see the elections as a historic opportunity to reverse decades of oppression by Iraq's Sunni rulers, will exact revenge.
Although they will almost certainly win the election, Shiite leaders promise to include Sunnis in their government. They have rejected Sunni calls to delay the elections, saying the move will only encourage the insurgents and postpone Iraq's progress toward stability and reconstruction.
That is also the position of the country's most revered Shiite spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is supporting the United Iraqi Alliance Party.
Speaking through a spokesman on state-run television Saturday, the reclusive Mr. Sistani reminded his followers that he expected every one of them to cast a vote on election day.
In 30 days, the ayatollah said, we will have the opportunity to give birth to a new state and we expect everyone to participate in this momentous and important phase of our history.
President Bush and the Iraqi interim government have also rejected calls to delay the elections. But with time running out, some moderate Shiites are saying that it may be better to delay than to hold flawed elections.
Ghassan al-Atiyah is a former exile and a political analyst, who has established a secular, multi-ethnic party to contest the elections. He says he favors delaying the elections until a large group of moderate Sunnis can be brought in to help calm sectarian tensions.
"Now, we are at a critical juncture. If we go to elections, this will simply consolidate the division in our society. With the Sunni Arabs isolated, this is a recipe for a disaster," he said.
Mr. Atiyah says his solution is not to isolate but to engage the Sunnis who are feeling marginalized.
"We have to widen the middle ground among Iraqi society, the moderate middle ground. What we've tried to do is to open a dialogue with moderate elements in the resistance. We are trying to convince them, 'Try to present your political views. And if delay is a must, it should be part of a package, a delay for two or three months provided that you are able to stop the violence or at least reduce it by 80 percent.' The negotiation will be a political one," he said.
Mr. Atiyah says he fears that post-election Iraq may be just as violent and divided, if moderates do not work together to try to bridge the widening sectarian gap.
In a grim warning which supports Mr. Atiyah's fears, Mr. Wajeeh of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party says no Sunni will accept the results of elections that did not include them. | <urn:uuid:18d4f0e2-ded0-4f01-a1f0-27e41260d534> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.voanews.com/content/a-13-2005-01-03-voa46-66363522/546460.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964731 | 1,205 | 1.8125 | 2 |
4/1/2011 1:12 PM ET|
A prescription for diaper rash cream?
A provision in the health care overhaul encourages people with flexible spending accounts to seek a doctor's OK before buying over-the-counter medications.
Sandy Chung is grappling with a new kind of request at her pediatrics office in Fairfax, Va.: prescriptions for aspirin and diaper rash cream.
Patients are demanding doctors' orders for over-the-counter products because of a provision in the health care overhaul that slipped past nearly everyone's radar. It says people who want a tax break to buy such items with what's known as a flexible spending account need to get a prescription first.
- Calculator:How much will long-term care cost?
The result is that Americans are visiting their doctors before making a trip to the drugstore, hoping their physician will help them out by writing the prescription. The new requirements create not only an added burden for doctors, but also new complications for retailers and pharmacies.
"It drives up the cost of health care as opposed to reducing it," says Chung, who rejected much of a 10-item request from a mother of four that included pain relievers and children's cold medicine.
Unintended side effects
Though the new rules on over-the-counter drugs amount to a small part of the massive overhaul of the health care system, the unintended side effects show how difficult it can be to predict how such game-changing legislation will play out in the real world.
Some doctors, irked by the paperwork and worried about lawsuits, are balking at writing the new prescriptions. Pharmacists and retailers say the changes mean they have to apply a personalized label on 15,000 different everyday products for customers paying with certain debit cards.
The over-the-counter provision isn't the only part of the health care law that has defied expectations:
- Health policy experts predicted that new insurance pools for high-risk patients would attract so many expensive enrollees that funding would be quickly exhausted. In fact, enrollment is running at just 6% of expectations, partly because of high premiums.
- A provision preventing insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing health conditions prompted insurers in dozens of states to stop selling child-only policies.
- And a piece of the law designed to centralize patient care by encouraging health care providers to collaborate is running into antitrust concerns from regulators.
To the handful of congressional aides who came up with the idea to limit tax breaks on over-the-counter drugs, it was supposed to be a minor tweak to raise revenue and to discourage wasteful spending on health products.
Squeezing out tax savings
About 33 million Americans are in families that have flexible spending accounts, which are funded through payroll deductions and allow consumers to pay for health expenses with tax-free dollars.
The change also applies to health savings accounts designed for consumers in insurance plans with high deductibles. If fewer people use these accounts to buy drugs, the government gets more tax revenue. Retail sales of over-the-counter medicines amounted to about $17 billion in 2010, not counting sales at Wal-Mart, according to Nielsen Co.
What the law's writers didn't anticipate was the determination of some people to squeeze every last drop of tax savings from their accounts.
When Dianna Greer of San Diego and her son came down with a cold, she wanted a $13 bottle of NyQuil and daytime cold medicine -- and she wanted to pay for it by tapping the $5,000 in her flexible spending account.
Greer says her doctor wouldn't write prescriptions without an office visit, so she went without the drugs. Later, she got the prescriptions from a doctor at the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia.
"It feels like you're begging for something when it's your money," she says.
Much of the health law, which passed last year despite overwhelming opposition by Republicans, doesn't take effect until 2014. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that an additional 32 million Americans will get insurance, and the law has already extended tax credits to small businesses for buying insurance and allowed many parents to keep their children on their health plan until their 26th birthday.
But opponents say it costs too much and gives the federal government too much control over health care. Republicans in the House voted this year to repeal the law, though the measure died in the Senate. Opponents are trying to get it struck down in the courts, a fight that is likely to last until at least next year.
Target for change
As that larger battle plays out, the over-the-counter provision is emerging as a top target for change. Republicans in both the House and Senate have introduced legislation to repeal it and return to the old system. The largest chain-drugstore lobbying group is backing the effort, arguing that the new rules are inefficient and limit access to the medicines. Asked whether she would support such legislation, Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said: "I'd take a look at it."
A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which oversees tax policy, says the provision "enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress, but, as the president said, anything can be improved, and we are always willing to listen to ideas about how to make health care better and more affordable."
Tax breaks for over-the-counter drugs date to 2003, as popular drugs like the allergy medicine Claritin began switching to over-the-counter status. The Internal Revenue Service loosened the rules on flexible spending accounts so consumers could use them to buy thousands of nonprescription medications. The tax-free dollars can also go for insurance co-payments, eyeglasses and other out-of-pocket health costs.
VIDEO ON MSN MONEY
You know there is this group of doctors that group together and limit the number of people that can go into medicine? I forget their name, but it's for real - straight from a doctor's mouth.
If you ask me half the medical system could be replaced by online questionnaire flowchart logic. If you want to abuse it and O.D. on something go right ahead, that will be one less car on the highway when I go to work. The best info I ever got for my skin problem came from a logical flowchart I found on the internet, not from my doctor's assembly line approach to making money and rushing patients out the door.
We have a f.s.a. and i would never buy over the counter meds with it. I like that we have a plan to set aside our money for that reason. I have a son with aspengers and he goes to the doctor every three months for an evaluation and meds. With out that we would not be able to afford his meds and visits. I do not like the health care insurance that we have but it is better than paying what was ahead if his company stayed with the insurance provider that went up 30% in cost. And we have till 2013 for them to have a lock on how much the can raise rates. Each state is different in how much they can raise rates. We do not get to decide. Bty we have a $4000.00 deductable to meet and by my caculations we will not meet that in a year.(And i praying we dont) I am only hoping that there will be a change in the system. Its a no win situation that has the goverments hand in how we pay,how our doctor treats and diagnoses. Obamas health care plan was to see that everyone would have healthcare insurance and that it be more affordable. This plan has made us pay more for the total package and not helped us. Thank you obama for putting us in this crisis. But im glad to have my f.s.a. to use.
Copyright © 2013 Microsoft. All rights reserved.
Quotes are real-time for NASDAQ, NYSE and AMEX. See delay times for other exchanges.
Fundamental company data and historical chart data provided by Thomson Reuters (click for restrictions). Real-time quotes provided by BATS Exchange. Real-time index quotes and delayed quotes supplied by Interactive Data Real-Time Services. Fund summary, fund performance and dividend data provided by Morningstar Inc. Analyst recommendations provided by Zacks Investment Research. StockScouter data provided by Verus Analytics. IPO data provided by Hoover's Inc. Index membership data provided by SIX Financial Information. | <urn:uuid:a9787c4b-474d-434a-9924-0eada51ede80> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://money.msn.com/health-and-life-insurance/a-prescription-for-diaper-rash-wsj.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961932 | 1,733 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Today is Day 20 of the Thirty Days of Love. Today’s action is to investigate what the immigration detention system looks like in your area. Click here for resources, family actions, and more! Click here to sign up for the daily Thirty Days of Love emails.
In November 2011, I was driving home after an HIV benefit, when I was pulled over for not having a license plate light. I was dressed in drag, wearing jeans, high heels, a wig, and a cute shirt. The police officer gave me a sobriety test, which I passed, with heels on and everything. But I had been drinking a little that night, although he was going to let me go, a second officer pulled up, and they decided to take me in.
I was thrown into the jail, in drag. The people who were detained were playful, whistled, and even friendly, but the harshest looks I got were from the police officers. Early the next morning, around 4:00 AM, I was taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center. My mother was trying to help me, and had sent money to a friend for my bond, but they told her I had an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hold. This meant that they had identified me as undocumented, and they would not let me out. I spent the next 120 days in jail.
In detention, there is little privacy. I was paid only $1 for an 8 hour work day and some of the guards were racist and homophobic. Despite all of this, the hardest thing was not being able to see my family.
Although I will never forget how hard it was to be in detention, I am happy that I was able to be out as a queer person. I feel like it gave courage to other people who were also LGBTQ. We would get together, and would talk back to those who were harassing us. It taught me to stand up for my dignity, and to support fellow LGBTQ people in detention.
Thinking about the stories that I heard in detention always make me cry, which is why I try not to talk about it, or think about it. I remember the pain, the isolation, the separation from my family. I continue to organize because I remember all the people that were in there, how much my family suffered, how badly we got treated, and because I have lost so many friends. This is a fight for all of us. The strength that my family showed me and the stories of those still in the detention center are what gives me the will to face my fears.
For today’s action, investigate what the detention system looks like in your area. To get started, check out this map of detention centers and learn more about detention visitation programs.
Angel Alvarez is 23 years old, a self-identified undocu-queer, and currently lives in Phoenix, AZ. He has been in the United States since he was one year old. He has been involved in his community and in the migrant justice movement for many years.
The message below went out on Thursday, July 5, 2012 to Standing on the Side of Love supporters. You can sign-up for these emails here.
I have been working with CREER Comunidad y Familia, an immigrant-led group that serves local immigrant families in San Juan Capistrano, for several years now alongside members of my congregation – Tapestry UU of Mission Viejo. We have been providing after-school tutoring and other activities including teaching each other English and Spanish. Additionally, CREER is a member of OCCCO (Orange County Congregation Community Organization), an interfaith community organization affiliated with the PICO Network that Tapestry also belongs to.
Two years ago, five members of Tapestry UU, who were already passionate about reforming our immigration system led a listening campaign at Tapestry to find a specific action our whole congregation could get behind and become more involved with. Thanks to guidance from our community organizer at OCCCO, we eventually chose to visit immigrant detainees in local jails which serve as detention centers here in Orange County.
We had heard about abuses in the centers and at first we planned to bear witness to some of the egregious things happening inside the walls. As we listened to the immigrant community about what they really needed from us, the project evolved though, into a visitation program to help the isolated people inside. Through research meetings with local enforcement officials, ex-detainees, and immigration attorneys we began making plans to visit the closest detention facility, James A. Musick in Irvine.
Last year at the UU General Assembly in Charlotte I met Grassroots Leadership, a national organization working to reduce immigrant detention and provide support to people being held in detention. In January, Grassroots Leadership came to southern California and trained over 20 people from four UU congregations in Orange County. They also travelled to First UU in San Diego for a training there. It was exciting to learn of San Diego’s similar project, and we have developed a great partnership since then. Grassroots taught us about a whole new world of opportunities for providing tangible support. The Detention Watch Network has become our partner to help us monitor what’s happening inside these centers. We also heard from Jose de Jesus Penaflor, an ex-detainee, who talked about his life before, during, and after detention. He was bonded out by a fund created at First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles. Our support made a huge difference to Jose and his family.
Visitation programs connect people in civil immigration detention with community members. We provide them with a link to the outside world, while also preventing human rights abuses by creating a community presence in otherwise invisible detention facilities. We are also there to help families of detainees.
Having witnessed what these programs can do, I want to ask you to join the upcoming webinar on July 25th led by Grassroots Leadership and Detention Watch Network to learn about what you can do. Please RSVP here:
Everyone at Tapestry, although we have varying opinions of how to fix our broken immigration system, can understand that there are human rights abuses going on in these facilities. We want to help the families of those isolated and provide support to those in detention.
Since our training in January, we have held meetings with jail and enforcement officials, attorneys who do legal orientation know your rights programs in Los Angeles, an organizer of an ICE-approved visitation program, and a local law school immigrant rights group. We were appalled to find out that there are no current legal orientation programs (LOP’s) at the Orange County jails where immigrant detainees are housed. Now that a monthly LOP program has been set up here, participating attorneys are our link to find detainees seeking visitors.
Sign up to learn more about how to start a detainee visitation program here:
We plan to start our official visits in the fall. Spanish interpreters include friends we made way back in the beginning when we began our relationship with CREER Comunidad y Familia. Plans include getting clergy more involved and strengthening this growing interfaith movement. Although this ministry is not directly an advocacy effort as we had first imagined, we are building power through our relationships with attorneys and also with jail and ICE officials.
This has become a very personal issue to me. Not only am I working for and with my good friends in San Juan Capistrano, but I feel part of a big movement, a civil rights movement of our time. From service we are building solidarity.
I hope you will join the July 25th webinar on “Breaking the Isolation of Immigration Detention: Starting a Visitation Program.” To learn more before the webinar, please visit www.endisolation.org.
Rooted in Faith and Standing on the Side of Love,
Jan Meslin, Member, Detention Dialogues Orange County
May 6, 2012. The Boston New Sanctuary Movement organized a vigil outside the Middlesex Correctional Facility. Since Massachusetts does not have detention centers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts with community prisons to hold the detainees. This facility currently has close to 300 undocumented persons. Standing on the Side of Love was there in full force.
Two kids. About 12 and 9. A girl and a boy. Crying inconsolably. Hugging their moms. We rub their backs, try to comfort them. And, we are crying with them – tears or no tears!
Just before this: One of the mothers is on the microphone. You cannot ignore her voice even if you are deaf. Never mind if you – like me – don’t know Spanish. Her fury and exasperation is flowing out of every pore of her body. Her small body is shaking, trembling. She says, now in English: “Jesus; I love you. I love you for you.” Jesus is her husband’s name. No más deportaciones, she cries. We all take up the chant. No Mas Deportacions! No more deportations!
We are a group of some fifty people, gathered in South Boston, on a beautiful spring Sunday, right outside the Suffolk County Correctional Facility. It is a big and imposing building. I have driven past it on the Southeast Expressway many times, but never had any idea what it was. Here I am now with many others, facing the building.
Photo by Ed Wright
We chant, we sing, we pray. We read the names of more than a hundred who have died in detention; the last one, right here at this very facility. Their only crime: they did not have their “papers.” Rev. Wendy von Zirpolo, minister at the UU Church of Marblehead, reminds us that, except for the Native Americans, we are all immigrants. The Pilgrims arrived with no documents either, I recall.
While the Obama administration has stated that ICE will focus on violent offenders and people convicted of crimes, and not break up families, last month the Department of Homeland Security released a report that flatly belies this policy. From January to June 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed 46,486 undocumented parents who claimed to have at least one child who is an American citizen. The extraordinary acceleration in the dismantling of these families, part of the government’s efforts to meet an annual quota of about 400,000 deportations, has had devastating results. Children of these families experience psychological and economic disruptions, including housing and food insecurity, and anxiety, frequent crying, changes in eating and sleeping patterns, withdrawal and anger. In the long run, the children of deportation face increased odds of lasting economic turmoil, psychic scarring, reduced school attainment, greater difficulty in maintaining relationships, social exclusion and lower earnings. (See The New York Times April 20, 2012 ‘Deporting Parents Hurts Kids‘)
Photo by Dennis H. Brown
We start marching, shouting slogans. We are at the back of the building, along a major roadway. Some people inside the Facility see us. They wave to us; they pound on the windows. Our spirits are lifted: they know we are here. We hope their spirits are lifted too; there is support outside. We march on, cross a little street, go up some stairs, walk on to a bridge. Now we are face to face with the Facility – only some 250 feet separate us. We chant slogans. We wave our hands. We wave our signs. We are communicating in a language we know not; it must be the language of love!
There are fifteen or so windows in front of us. Some seem to have only one or two people; others seem to be packed. Waving, pounding, they try to look outside the windows. We can barely make out their faces, but we can see their hands and arms. And make out human forms. It is all blurry, except for the inhumanity of the incarceration!
Does anyone want to say anything to the detainees inside? Yes, this woman does, someone shouts.
She comes charging forward. She is from Guatemala. She takes the microphone and with a sincerity and force you will never ever see at a political event, starts speaking. I am right behind her. She is forceful. Her voice is strong but full of pain. I don’t understand the words, but I want to reach out and hug her. We are with you, Sister, don’t worry. We will reunite you with Jesus, I want to say. But I just put my hand on her shoulder. She keeps going.
Cars drive by on the road. A few honk. Others pay no attention.
She talks for some five minutes. Now she is sobbing. Julie, a divinity student, comes forward; she knows Spanish and can speak with her. Jesus was picked up some two weeks ago. He is not in good health. Heart and kidney problems. Dear God – this does not sound too good, I say to myself. Doctor? Not, not yet, but next week; they’ve promised him. I ask her if she has a lawyer; yes, she says. Does she needs any help – in any way, can any of the groups present here do anything. No, thank you; she is just very grateful that people have come out in support of the detainees. She does not need anything.
Photo by Ed Wright
The boy comes, hugs her, starts to cry. Another woman is coming forward, distraught but smiling. Her husband is also in there. No, she does not want to say anything. Her daughter is hugging her, crying.
Across the street, in one of the windows, they have put up a sign, one letter at a time: FREE US.
We disperse. I don’t know where the two women came from. I don’t know how they heard about this vigil but organizers from Centro Presente are with us so they may have connected us all. I don’t know what their life has been like. I have so many questions, but no vocabulary to talk with them.
I get back to the comfort of my home and my family. Wonder what they are doing? Wonder what they are thinking?
And: How long will this insanity go on? How long will we – all of us – let it go on.
Rashid Shaikh is a member of First Parish Cambridge Unitarian Universalist Immigration Task Force.
For more information on how to connect with interfaith groups and others conducting vigils, find a New Sanctuary Movement chapter near you (there’s no national website currently, so search for your city on the web) and Grassroots Leadership. Congregations and individuals can join the UUA in the interfaith campaign Restoring Trust: Breaking ICE’s Hold on our Communities to stop the ICE ‘Secure Communities’ mass detention and deportation program. | <urn:uuid:494c4c3b-56e6-4e86-84cf-7fc115d4c0d6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/tag/detention-center/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975135 | 3,070 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Every Wednesday, a group of playwrights meets in a little room just a block away from the blazing lights of Times Square. They do writing exercises and talk about their approach to their work; they also make a point of seeing a show together and then discussing it at the following week's meeting. This proves to be a great springboard for conversation on the nature of drama, what makes a play work, etc.
There are, of course, many playwriting groups to be found all over New York City; what makes this one unique is that its members are all under the age of 18. They are New York City high school students in the Advanced Playwriting Workshop, an intensive year-long class conducted by Brett Reynolds, managing director of Young Playwrights, Inc.
YPI is dedicated to developing the next wave of American dramatists. The organization has been serving this function for 20 years now, and there's no doubt that it has been successful: Over 40,000 students nationwide have participated in its playwriting classes, over 18,000 in its National Playwriting Competition. More than 300 writers have had readings and productions of their plays courtesy of YPI, and many of them have seen subsequent work commissioned, produced, and published. Two early alumni of the National Playwriting Competition, Rebecca Gilman and Kenneth Lonergan, had critically acclaimed plays Off-Broadway last year and are currently represented in New York by Boy Gets Girl and Lobby Hero.
YPI was founded in 1981--oddly enough, not by a playwright. It was the legendary composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim who wanted to create an American festival of plays by young authors after seeing just such an event in London. This notion blossomed into a non-profit organization that encourages and educates grade-school and high-school age writers in dramatic writing through a variety of programs and events. Yearly, a nationwide competition is held and the winners are brought to New York to see their plays given professionally staged readings during the Writers Conference; they participate in workshops and classes, and they get a chance to work with some of the theater's best. Later each year, four plays are chosen to receive actual productions at an Off-Broadway theater during the Young Playwrights Festival.
Then there are the year-round initiatives. YPI sends teachers into classrooms around the country to work with students. And the Advanced Playwriting Workshop (APW) described above brings dedicated and talented high-school age writers together to write about, talk about, and experience drama.
In a way, the APW encapsulates what Young Playwrights, Inc. is all about: nurturing young talent through education and experience. By seeing a variety of shows on a weekly basis, the participants get a broad view of the current theatrical landscape, and talkbacks with the creators of these shows allow the fledgling playwrights to interact with and learn directly from professionals. Reynolds, who has designed the WRITING ON YOUR FEET! Playwriting Curriculum used in the APW and the other workshops and classes offered by YPI, prompts the students to apply what they're learning to their own work through exercises. These assignments are wide-ranging and cover every aspect of dramatic writing imaginable. Some are relatively simple ("How does the writing style of a play inform the style of its production and performance?"), while others are a little more elaborate ("Write a three-scene musical"). This is the starting point for the students, each of whom must begin work on a new play in the class.
If any of the students participating in YPI's many programs wind up winners of the National Playwriting Competition, and they often do, that is icing on the cake. What YPI is about first and foremost is supporting these young writers as they embark upon their careers. But the Festival affords many of them the opportunity to take their first steps into that final, fascinating stage: production.
Through all of these initiatives, Young Playwrights, Inc. gives a leg up to kids whose gifts might have otherwise gone untapped. After all, in an age when teachers across the country are struggling to educate students about everything from sex to the internet (not to mention the nearly neglected 'three Rs'), who has time to teach playwriting? The APW is competitive but, if you've got the stuff it takes to get in, you get to spend a year seeing shows and learning the ropes for free. And those students who win the national competition receive an expenses-paid trip to NYC to see their work produced.
In a recent meeting, the Selection Committee--including such theater luminaries as David Henry Hwang and Lynn Ahrens--met to decide the winners of this year's Young Playwrights Festival National Playwriting Competition. After several hours of lively discussion about the merits of the various plays that had made it to the finals stage, they chose the following:
Eva Anderson, From the Mouths of Babes
Julia Belozersky, Air Blooming with Paper Bags
Adam BlaiR, Dancing in the Snow
Yelena Elkind, The Cultural Headstand and Johnny Likaboot Kills His Father!
Lucy Harrison, Gorgeous Raptors
Julia Jarcho, Nursery
Melissa Maehara, Seven of Hearts
Kyle McCarthy, Store
Robert Rath, Spiffy
Willa Rohrer, Escape From the McCallum St. Bridge
Remember these names. In a few years, you may be seeing some or all of them in lights.
[To find out more about Young Playwrights, Inc., click here to visit the organization's website.] | <urn:uuid:74b9ba90-6d79-4909-b92a-091f652eb9da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/03-2001/this-is-our-youth_1281.html?cid=article-flyover | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969262 | 1,156 | 1.671875 | 2 |
You walk into a party and head for the bar. Suddenly someone is beside you, offering to get you a drink. You begin to talk. Almost immediately you're struck by the eerie feeling that you may have just found Mr. Right. But that's crazy, isn't it? Or is it? Can a person really know something this life-changing so fast?
Yes. We are built to instantly size up a potential partner, an intuitive skill that likely developed millions of years ago as our forebears struggled to rapidly sort friends from enemies. And while today we may not need to protect ourselves with a strong, virile mate, we regularly make up our minds about whether an individual could be an appropriate match within the first three minutes of talking to him (or her).
Indeed, it takes less than one second to decide whether you find someone physically attractive. Too short, too tall, too old, too young, too scruffy, or too scrubbed—he's out. If, however, he fits your general concept of Adonis, your mind races toward the next checkpoint: voice. Once again, you respond in seconds. Women typically regard rapid talkers as more educated and men with full, deep voices as better-looking than they are. Next: his words. We like people who use the same kinds of words we use. We are also drawn to those who have a similar degree of intelligence, share our religious and social values, and come from the same economic background—and we quickly determine these attributes from a man's words (not to mention how he dresses and wears his hair, whether he's carrying a briefcase or a soccer ball, and if he's sporting a gold watch or a tattoo).
But can this handsome, deep-voiced, well-dressed stranger give you what you need? Even on the bigger questions, we often form an opinion within the first three minutes if the conversation turns to, say, politics or kids. So when you do feel an immediate click, go ahead and trust your instincts.
Still, love at first sight doesn't happen to everyone. In one survey by Ayala Malach-Pines, PhD, of Ben-Gurion University in Israel, only 11 percent of the 493 respondents said their long-term relationships started that way. As for the rest of us? Psychologists say that the more you interact with a person you like (even slightly), the more you come to regard him as good-looking, smart, and similar to you—unless you discover something that breaks the spell. So it's wise to hang in for a second meeting. It can take years sometimes for two people to fully appreciate each other. But whether it's love at first sight or love in hindsight, those first three minutes are essential for romance. | <urn:uuid:9092cfd9-0895-44ce-b0e6-a4f449eba0c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Love-at-First-Sight-Helen-Fisher-Love-Column/print/1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966942 | 570 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Sea Shepherd captain arrested in Germany
Paul Watson, the founder of the anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd, has been arrested in Germany and will be extradited to Costa Rica.
"I am currently being held in Frankfurt on charges from Costa Rica," Watson has tweeted.
"Court appearance in the morning."
Sea Shepherd has labelled the arrest as "nonsense" and called for the charges against the Canadian-born Watson to be dropped.
The activist group says Watson, who is the captain of the Steve Irwin ship, has been arrested on a Costa Rican warrant over an incident which occurred in 2002.
"The specific 'violation of ships traffic' incident took place on the high seas in Guatemalan waters, when Sea Shepherd encountered an illegal shark finning operation, run by a Costa Rican ship called the Varadero," the group said in a statement.
"On order of the Guatemalan authorities, Sea Shepherd instructed the crew of the Varadero to cease their illegal shark finning activities and head back to port to be prosecuted."
Sea Shepherd claims that while it was taking the Varadero back to port, the tables were turned.
"A Guatemalan gunboat was dispatched to intercept the Sea Shepherd crew," the group said.
"The crew of the Varadero accused Sea Shepherd of trying to kill them, while the video evidence proves this to be a fallacy.
"To avoid the Guatemalan gunboat, Sea Shepherd then set sail for Costa Rica, where they uncovered even more illegal shark finning activities in the form of dried shark fins by the thousands on the roofs of industrial buildings."
Sea Shepherd says Watson is being assisted while in prison by members of the European Parliament Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jose Bove.
"Our hope is that these two honourable gentlemen can set Captain Watson free before this nonsense goes any further," the group said. | <urn:uuid:75af29e1-77d2-44c0-8df5-390270cf002f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-14/sea-shepherd-captain-arrested-in-germany/4008864?section=wa | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961015 | 385 | 1.507813 | 2 |
According to several reports a 'bug' has caused users to lose unknown amounts of e-mail, and those with address books synced to mobile devices unknowingly had all their synced contacted overwritten.
Facebook's first official response yesterday, sounded a bit like Apple's response to Antennagate blaming the user for not using their phones correctly. The social media giant contented that with the new changes everyone was just confused about how to look in their Facebook inboxes. It was originally explained that by default, messages from friends or friends of friends go into your Inbox. Everything else goes to your Other folder which users weren't checking.
Now however they have changed their tune a bit and released a rather confusing explanation.
Both CNet and The Verge have issued reports from Facebook that, while confusing, hope to clarify the situation. Facebook is now saying that the contact sync is a bug that it intends to fix. According to Facebook, when the API is working correctly, it pushes the primary e-mail address to contacts; for some devices, the API is pushing the last e-mail address associated with a users account out to their friends.
Contact synchronization on devices is performed through an API. For most devices, we've [Facebook] verified that the API is working correctly and pulling the primary email address associated with the users' Facebook account.
However, for people on certain devices, a bug meant that the device was pulling the last email address added to the account rather than the primary email address, resulting in @facebook.com addresses being pulled.
We are in the process of fixing this issue and it will be resolved soon. After that, those specific devices should pull the correct addresses.
So here is the confusing part. Even if Facebook fixes the API to only push the primary e-mail this won't fix anything. What it will do is mean that unless you have personally, manually changed your primary address back to whichever one originally wanted then the only "visible" email address on your profile will still be just your @facebook.com address. To get your primary email address back to the one you specifically want you'll need to follow our guide, "How to change your primary Facebook email address."
This entire fiasco wreaks of privacy invasion. As I stated before, what Facebook has done is essentially hijacked every users emails and forced them through their own server. This not only gives Facebook a chance to add in their own advertising, but adds a secondary way of tracking user data. Hopefully someone will make a call to action here and we'll see a privacy watch group taking a long hard look at what is going on here. | <urn:uuid:27925680-e170-407e-b726-7e041e312885> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.geek-news.net/2012/07/facebook-email-fiasco-gets-worse-and.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963913 | 534 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Thanks for being here guys. I have two questions...
When I look at the title of your book; Complete Reference I immediatly think API, Tag Reference, Configuration. How did you balance that aspect with the how-to, hands on, tutorial approach that you must have had to include?
Aside from covering JSF 1.2, how would you say your book differs from JSF in Action?
Joined: Aug 31, 2006
Although the book is titled "The complete reference" as with other McGraw-Hill "Complete Reference", the book is not merely a reference book with just endless pages of tags references and such. Actually these books (and specifically with ours) are combined with descriptive text, descriptive tutorial and examples along with explanations of concepts just like other books. The reference portions of the book are present as well. In our case we have typical reference material for: The JSF spec components (Core and HTML), The MyFaces components (Tomahawk), The Faces-Config elements and a quick guide for the ADF Faces components.
WRT JSF in Action by Kito Mann.. Actually Kito is a good friend and in many ways the books are comparable. I especially strove to make the book focus on concepts of the core Faces technologies in part 1 leading to a detailed example app in chapter 9 - and then focusing on more advanced topics in the latter chapters and finishing with the reference material. Specifically comparing Kito's book to ours - well ours has more current info with regard to JSF 1.2 and coverage of AJAX. I know Kito's working on the next revision of his book which may cover some of these aspects as well. Try them both?
Joined: Mar 17, 2004
Originally posted by Chris Schalk: Try them both?
Good idea... your book is available as a eBook? (That's one advantage of Kito Manns "JSF in Action" ;) ) | <urn:uuid:1b6a7606-ed1d-4e4f-b1ea-6d613e59ef44> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.coderanch.com/t/212105/JSF/java/Book-Promo-Reference-Tutorial-Balance | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94794 | 397 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Peru grants former Bolivian minister asylum
The uprising was against the then-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Ms Quevedo, who served as a minister under the former president, fled to Peru because she feared she would not receive a fair trial.
In 2003, President Sánchez de Lozada fled to the United States. Two other former ministers, Jorges Torres and Yerko Kukoc, have also fled to Peru. They have requested asylum, which up to now has not been granted. The trial against the three former ministers begins in Bolivia next week. | <urn:uuid:abe9f22c-bad5-46e5-8457-b5f55f00f5ff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.amigosdeboliviayperu.org/NewsStories2009/P211PeruGrants.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984456 | 127 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Small enough to sit in the palm of a hand, a one-pound, white-haired puppy named Lilly has captured the hearts of students and staff at Raisinville Elementary School.
The puppy, less than 2 weeks old, was believed to be left for dead near the school's Dumpster. Principal Mary Ann Cyr discovered the dog as she drove past the receptacle.
"I noticed a small, white animal near the Dumpster. It looked like it was writhing in pain. I thought it was a possum," she said.
Jennifer Devenish, the school's secretary, investigated the curiosity.
"It wasn't a possum but a dog," she said, smiling.
She put Lilly in her car and called kindergarten teacher Amy Pabin, who owns two dogs of her own. They gave the puppy food and water before calling Dana Towler, a Raisinville parent who works as a licensed veterinarian technician at Banfield Pet Hospital in Ann Arbor.
"Her umbilical chord was dried out, so she was a couple days old when they found her," said Mrs. Towler while holding Lilly at the school. "I checked her over, and she appeared to be okay other than her front legs (which were turned in). We've been giving her physical therapy, and she's coming along."
The puppy, named Lilly by students at the school because of her white hair, still has yet to open her eyes or ears because of her age. She also is too young to walk.
"She'll be ready in about seven weeks. We'll take care of her until then," Mrs. Towler said.
The school's staff is looking to find Lilly a good home when she is ready. For now, though, Mrs. Towler and Mrs. Pabin have been caring for the pup around the clock.
"She's fed every four hours. At first, we tube-fed her, but now she's on a bottle," Mrs. Towler explained. "We also do physical therapy on her front legs, which involves stretching."
Mrs. Towler takes care of her during the week, while Mrs. Pabin cares for Lilly on the weekends.
"They are very humble, but Dana and Amy are true heroines," Ms. Cyr said of their efforts to save Lilly.
Since Lilly was found last week, she has been the talk of the school.
"The kids are concerned and ask about her all the time. A lot of the parents ask about her, too," Mrs. Pabin said. "The kids ask if she can be their new (school) mascot."
Even though Lilly needs care for several more weeks, school staff is looking for an individual or family to adopt her. Anyone interested in permanently adopting Lilly is asked to call the school at 265-4800. | <urn:uuid:77c281ee-f0c1-460f-a5cc-eccade60a8a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.monroenews.com/news/2011/oct/21/school-staff-rescues-puppy-left-for-dead/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9901 | 585 | 1.726563 | 2 |
WILL Microsoft buy Google? The mere suggestion of Bill Gates's megacorporation snatching the company still seen as the darling of the dotcom boom was enough to create a storm last week.
Microsoft certainly has reason to want Google's technology, as it currently pays arch-rival Yahoo! for use of its search engine. But Google itself has denied the possibility. Danny Sullivan, editor of the website Search Engine Watch, says, "If Microsoft bought Google, the search engine would instantly lose credibility in many people's eyes."
But it may already be too late to save Google's reputation. The coverage the story has brought demonstrates that many feel it has become as formidable as Microsoft. According to media analysts, Google now runs 76 per cent of all web searches, giving it a market share almost as dominant as Microsoft has of PC operating systems.
For those who still want to champion the little guy, ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content. | <urn:uuid:697dcc5d-a0cd-42d1-b59d-cbbaf9c30d70> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18024200.200-search-angst.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969237 | 211 | 1.664063 | 2 |
The League put together the first forum because during the perennial election-year school reform debates, one voice often missing is the classroom teacher: the most important person at the end of the education policy funnel. The classroom teacher works at the intersection of complex and ever-changing federal, state, and local education policies and the nuts-and-bolts world of helping students learn.
Chalk Talk offers a panel of teachers with varying experiences and viewpoints to discuss how education policies affect work in the classroom. Topics will range from teacher evaluation policies to testing.
The speakers are: Crystal Ballard, who teaches AVID at Olson Middle School; AVID is an international college readiness program. Ballard also is a member of the African American Leadership Forum's Education Workgroup, a group dedicated to closing the achievement gap for African American children, birth through 12th grade, in the seven-county metro area.
Jim Barnhill, a special education teacher at South High School's Life Skills Program, which helps students live and work independently. Barnhill is a Minneapolis Federation of Teachers executive board member, and serves on several school district working groups on teacher evaluation.
Susan Bell, who taught grades 1-8 for 38 years in both the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts. Bell was a Minnesota Teacher of the Year finalist in 2003. Now retired from teaching, she is the test coordinator at the Hmong International Academy, a job that lets her stay in touch with students.
Paul Hegre, who taught in Minneapolis for 23 years at Nawayee Center School and Seward Montessori. Hegre is on special assignment working on the district's teacher evaluation process. He also spent four years coordinating the district's TAP/QComp program, a strategy to attract, develop, motivate and retain high-quality teachers.
James Kindle, a third to fifth grade English Language Learner teacher at Anne Sullivan Elementary, a union steward, and a member of Empowering Educators for Equity, a newly formed group that works to promote educational equity by ensuring that teachers' voices are heard in policy decisions.
The forum will be held at Plymouth Congregational Church, 1900 Nicollet Ave. S., from 7:30-9 p.m. It will include prepared questions, but audience members also will have the opportunity to submit written questions.
On Thursday, October 25, the League will host a Minneapolis School Board candidates forum, tentatively scheduled for Jefferson K-8 School, 1200 26th Street West from 7:30-9 p.m.
Co-sponsors of these community forums include Achieve Minneapolis, African American Leadership Forum, the Education Equity Organizing Collaborative, MinnCAN, and Don Fraser's Achievement Gap Committee.
Support for these forums has been provided by a grant from the Robins, Kaplan, Miller and Ciresi LLP Foundation for Children, a supporting organization of the Minneapolis Foundation.
More information available at: www.lwvmpls.org or call (612) 333-6319. | <urn:uuid:ebd8cbf1-e0ec-492e-bcca-b8ae805a9d56> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://insightnews.com/education/9585-the-league-of-women-voters-minneapolis-host-community-education-forums | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947037 | 615 | 1.765625 | 2 |
The White House and Republicans say trade deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama will incease U.S. exports and create jobs.
WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) -- Congress passed trade deals with Colombia, South Korea and Panama on Wednesday, delivering them to President Obama in time for the South Korean president's Thursday visit to Capitol Hill.
Most House Republicans voted in favor of the deals, while many Democrats opposed them. Several Democrats joined Republicans to pass the bills in the Senate. The deal with South Korea drew the most support in that chamber, passing 83-15, while the Columbia pact had the most opposition, passing by a 66-33 vote.
President Obama, who called the deals "a major win for American workers and businesses," plans to sign the pacts.
"I've fought to make sure that these trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama deliver the best possible deal for our country, and I've insisted that we do more to help American workers who have been affected by global competition," he said in a written statement.
The U.S. agriculture industry has been calling for the deals, which could re-open international markets for high-quality beef, poultry, wheat and soybeans. The U.S. auto industry is also a fan of the deals, which would cut back on South Korean tariffs that have hit Detroit automakers.
Labor, human rights and several consumer groups have opposed the deals, especially the one with Colombia, where labor leaders helping agricultural workers continue to be murdered.
The United States hasn't had trade deals with some of the nations for three years, when previous agreements lapsed. The White House, Republicans and big business groups call the deals job creators, and say they will spur $13 billion in new exports each year.
At several points over the year, it looked like the trade deals might become another casualty of political gridlock.
Indeed, they are among a lonely few bills that this highly partisan Congress is expected to pass this year.
But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suggested Wednesday he doesn't support the deals. "I don't favor these bills, but the majority of this Senate does, so it was important that we move forward," he said.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday that the trade deals are the kind of bipartisan work he'd like to see.
"They're a good start. Three years too late. But still important to do," McConnell said. "They're a good first step and demonstrate how Washington can tackle the jobs crisis."
Union groups say there's no proof that trade deals will deliver tens of thousands of new jobs. And they say the deals don't do enough to protect workers' rights in those nations.
Watchdog group Public Citizen points to studies that say the deals will increase U.S. trade deficits, opening the door for more imports from Colombia, South Korea and Panama.
Critics also say the legislation doesn't address South Korea's currency, the won, which the International Monetary Fund said is undervalued by about 10%. That means South Korean imports to the United States could be slightly cheaper and U.S. exports to South Korea could be a little pricier.
"We should not be entering into a trade agreement with South Korea at a time when we know their currency policies are, at best, suspect," said Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat who planned to vote against the bill.
But the trade deals are a top priority of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which says the deals will directly help some 30,000 small and mid-sized exporters.
The months-long hold up on the bills was over a completely different piece of legislation.
The White House had been waiting to send the trade deals to Congress because the president first wanted Congress to pass a bill funding a jobs retraining program called Trade Adjustment Assistance, which helps workers whose employers have moved jobs overseas.
Last month, the Senate passed the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which would cost $900 million over three years. The House voted 307-122 to pass the Trade Adjustment Assistance program on Wednesday.
|Yahoo to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion: Report|
|Tesla's fight with America's car dealers|
|Amateur investors tap 401(k)s to buy homes|
|Stocks: Yahoo in focus on deal talk|
|Overnight Avg Rate||Latest||Change||Last Week|
|30 yr fixed||3.66%||3.58%|
|15 yr fixed||2.79%||2.72%|
|30 yr refi||3.64%||3.57%|
|15 yr refi||2.79%||2.72%|
Today's featured rates:
|Latest Report||Next Update|
|Home prices||Aug 28|
|Consumer confidence||Aug 28|
|Manufacturing (ISM)||Sept 4|
|Inflation (CPI)||Sept 14|
|Retail sales||Sept 14| | <urn:uuid:bd5e6bd2-1ca1-4134-8160-9e4ba4cddb79> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/12/news/economy/trade_deals/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955615 | 1,032 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Though certainly no originalist, Justice David Souter is not a complete judicial activist, either. On a number of cases and issues, he has rejected the activist “empathy” standard promoted by President Obama to instead cast votes and write opinions that are in accord with the demands of the Constitution and the rule of law. And in a number of cases, particularly in the areas of crime and punishment and lawsuit abuse, he has broken ranks with the Court’s more liberal wing to do so. Here is a sampling of some of Justice Souter’s most significant stands in favor of the rule of law:
Punitive Damages: In Exxon v. Baker (2008), Souter authored a majority opinion, which was joined by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy, explaining that maritime common law imposes limits on excessive punitive damages and thus rejecting a lower court ruling that would have required Exxon to pay billions in punitive damages for the Valdez oil spill on top of the money it had already paid out in damages to compensate for actual injuries, as well as the $2.1 billion it spent on cleanup efforts. This decision was widely viewed as a major loss for trial lawyers, who count on excessive punitive damages to justify bringing otherwise low-damage, often frivolous lawsuits.
Lawsuit Abuse: In Bell Atlantic v. Twombly (2007), Souter authored a majority opinion, joined by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, holding that a plaintiff initiating a lawsuit must go beyond merely stating his accusation and must further lay forth facts that “raise a reasonable expectation” that he may have a right to relief. This decision, the consequences of which are still being worked out in the lower courts, was seen as a major loss for trial lawyers, who frequently initiate lawsuits without any factual basis and then abuse the discovery process to conduct fishing expeditions to find some basis to coerce an expensive settlement.
Crime: In Arizona v. Evans (1995), Souter joined a majority opinion by Justice Rehnquist holding that a defendant convicted of drug possession would not have to go free due to clerical error that led a police officer to stop and search his car.
Privacy: In Kyllo v. U.S. (2001), Souter joined a majority opinion by Justice Scalia holding that government agents need a judge-issued warrant, supported by probable cause to believe that a crime is being committed, to use a thermal imaging device to explore details of a home that would have otherwise been unknowable without physical intrusion.
Victims’ Rights: In Payne v. Tennessee (1991), Justice Souter authored an opinion arguing that the Constitution does not prohibit the consideration of a crime’s impact on the victim and the victim’s survivors during the sentencing phase of a trial.
In nearly all of these cases, more liberal members of the Supreme Court sought outcomes inconsistent with the Constitution and the rule of law. That block would find additional strength if President Obama appoints a liberal activist to the Court to replace Justice Souter, a center-left moderate, and many cases like those listed above would come out differently.
The results: violent criminal would be freed for minor blunders by police, tough sentences for violent crimes would be struck down, trial lawyers would have more opportunities than ever to launch frivolous but expensive lawsuits, and victims of crimes would be denied a role in the criminal-justice system.
The bottom line: Justice Souter was no conservative and no originalist, but replacing him with a far-left activist would change the balance of the Court for the worse. | <urn:uuid:4c93aa44-43b8-42a3-ac12-5a221bd95dce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.heritage.org/2009/05/01/not-a-zero-sum-game-replacing-justice-souter-risks-a-more-activist-court/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968968 | 734 | 1.578125 | 2 |
... like the 700 Continental and United pilots. They'd get more media coverage then the straggly, scraggly folks that predominate in the Occupy Wall Street protest.
A shorter, smaller, niftier protest seems bigger, then, because of the projection into the media. The larger, longer, freer protest will get attention, however, if the media is not on its side.
If that general rule is true, it suggests that protests ought to be well organized. There's a lot of debate at the link about the extent to which the Occupy Wall Street protesters deserve criticism for lack of organization.
I think a big, spontaneous, passionate protest can be effective, but not when it continues day after day. (My opinion is informed by observation of the Wisconsin protests over the many weeks and months.) At some point, people outside of the protests resent the disruption of the flow of ordinary life. If the continuing protest goes well and gathers steam, these outsiders to the protest worry about disorder and chaos.
If a continuing protest declines — and it will ultimately have to decline, unless the authorities break it up — then during the period of decline, the people left in the protest are, more and more, the extremists, the deranged, and the emotionally needy. Few onlookers identify with these people. | <urn:uuid:42fdb36d-d68e-4a20-bab0-fd038fa3d86a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://althouse.blogspot.jp/2011/10/if-only-more-protesters-wore-uniforms.html?showComment=1317489590069 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949808 | 268 | 1.554688 | 2 |
The review question was defined in terms of study design, intervention, comparator, participants and outcomes. Although unpublished studies were eligible for inclusion, no attempts to uncover unpublished studies were reported and publication bias was suggested. Searching for studies in all languages reduced the possibility of language bias. The review process was performed in duplicate, reducing the possibility of reviewer error and bias.
The quality of the studies was assessed, but it was unclear how this was performed and how this was incorporated into the analysis. The results of the validity assessment were not reported. The meta-analyses were associated with high levels of heterogeneity, so the results of these may not be reliable.
In light of high levels of heterogeneity, the possibility of publication bias and the unknown quality of included trials, the authors' conclusions should be viewed with caution. | <urn:uuid:82ca09e9-976a-460f-97ab-3d3ab43ac6a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.crd.york.ac.uk/crdweb/ShowRecord.asp?LinkFrom=OAI&ID=12010000786 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985542 | 164 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Most Active Stories
- Unification Of Ypsilanti And Willow Run School Districts Fast Approaching
- Roundabout Construction Near Costco Will Soon Be Underway
- Emilio Teubal is a 'Constant Reinventor'
- Controversial 413 East Huron Development Project wins Ann Arbor City Council Approval
- Issues of the Environment: Restoring Native Rattlesnake Habitat
Fri March 1, 2013
Latina Sisters Aimed High, Defying Low Expectations
Originally published on Fri March 1, 2013 5:41 am
When Linda Hernandez was growing up in Lincoln, Neb., in the 1960s, her family was one of the few Latino families in town. And that sometimes made school life difficult, she says.
"We had to sit in the back of the class and stay after school and clean the erasers when the other kids didn't have to do that," says Linda, now 60. "But both my parents laid down the law and said, 'You had to go to school.' "
Linda and her older sister, Marta, did well academically. But the school's expectations were low. The school counselor told them not to worry about taking the SAT or ACT tests "because we were Hispanic women, [and] all we would do is have babies," Linda told StoryCorps in Albuquerque, N.M.
"So we went home and we told our parents, and my mother went in the back room and cried," Linda says. "And then that's when my brother said, 'Uh-uhn, it ain't happening.' We were very lucky that he was over 6 feet tall. So he walked us down to school and told our high school counselors, 'My sisters will take the test.' "
But then the sisters encountered another obstacle. "In order to take the test, you had to have a No. 2 pencil," Linda says. "My sister and I, we had to walk the alleys to find pop bottles — because that's when you could still turn them in and get money for them — so that we could have money to buy the pencils to go take the test."
They bought the pencils, took the test and "both scored really high," Linda says. Marta received a four-year scholarship to the University of Nebraska, was accepted into medical school and became an OB-GYN. Linda, who works for the U.S. Postal Service as a labor relations specialist, eventually earned a degree in business management.
Linda says she knew her mother took pride in her children's academic work. She would always post their grades on the refrigerator while they were growing up, Linda says, "and if we got straight A's, they were on the refrigerator until the next time we got a report card."
But Linda didn't realize just how much her mother treasured those report cards until she passed away 10 years ago.
"When she knew that she was ill, she had gone and started making photo albums of us kids," Linda says. "I expected to see family photos that we had of us, but I didn't expect to see the report cards in there. And I didn't expect to see the little graduation announcement from when we graduated from high school. Those were in our photo albums, too.
"One thing that made her feel really good was that all her kids went to school," Linda says. "She was very proud of that."
Audio produced for Morning Edition by Katie Simon. | <urn:uuid:0f84237e-c8c4-49ea-abd8-447f7e14a5f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wemu.org/post/latina-sisters-aimed-high-defying-low-expectations | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.991855 | 720 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Overland Park’s oldest commercial corridor might be getting a facelift.
The city’s downtown was recently designated a Kansas Main Street by the Kansas Department of Commerce.
Overland Park is the largest city to be granted the honor in the 27-year history of the program. Typically, the Kansas Main Street designation has only been for cities with 50,000 people or less.
At no cost to the city, the state program uses a group of experts to determine ways a designated city can improve its downtown. This week, they will spend a few days observing activity, interviewing business owners, and talking to residents in downtown Overland Park. The program focuses on ways the downtown can improve its organization, promotion, design and economic structure.
On Thursday evening, they will present their findings and advice to city leaders.
Robin Fish, the executive director of the Downtown Overland Park Partnership, said Kansas Main Street is more of a self-help program for cities. After all, she pointed out, nobody else is going to save the city. Using the experts’ recommendations, the community has to do that itself.
Although Fish is unsure what the program will recommend, she knows from research that it could be anything from suggesting that the city attract a certain kind of business to fill a gap, or even encouraging the city to focus more on its history.
She is excited to find out ways the city can improve its original business district.
“Downtown is a major piece of Overland Park’s history,” she said. “It began as our community’s gathering place and it remains an important gathering place today.”
Organizers for Kansas Main Street are just as eager to get the ball rolling.
Mary Helmer, the coordinator for Kansas Main Street, said Overland Park is a lot different than most of the cities the program has helped before. Not just because of its size, she added, but because of its organization.
In most cities, experts have to spend a lot of time structuring a downtown community organization before any revitalization can take place.
Since Overland Park already has the downtown partnership, it takes a lot time off the program’s shoulders.
“There is a great organization already set up, which is very nice because that takes away a lot of the groundwork,” she said. “With this program, we try to strengthen businesses first. There are already interesting shops and great restaurants in Overland Park, so that part is going to be a lot of fun.”
She’s also delighted that the city already has several unique events, such as the farmer’s market and Fall Fest.
Not only does Helmer find it important to draw more residents to downtowns’ businesses and festivities, but she hopes the program inspires more residents to live in downtown districts as well. The program focuses on attracting certain demographics, such as empty nesters and young professionals, to call downtown their home.
Jim Seitnater, downtown development director for Hutchinson, Kan., who is also involved with the program, agrees. One of the challenges facing most midwestern downtowns is finding the balance between looking forward and respecting the past, he said. One way to overcome that issue could be turning old spaces into lofts.
“For most towns, the commerce started downtown,” he said. “To keep the story alive, we have to keep these downtowns up and running. It all comes down to finding different uses for old buildings and preserving the city’s legacy.”
After Kansas Main Street makes its recommendations, it is up to Overland Park to follow them or not. Over the next five years, the city is expected to make improvements to its downtown, and its progress will be noted by the program’s leaders.
“Overland Park is a fairly young suburban city, so I think it’s important that we connect to our original” business area, said Jack Messer, director of Planning Development for Overland Park. “I’m really excited to see what kind of changes we can make, to bring more people downtown.” | <urn:uuid:3f71c610-7980-4d39-9e4e-889d2cfab00b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://joco913.com/news/downtown-op-designated-as-a-kansas-main-street/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96657 | 864 | 1.71875 | 2 |
"[L]ess than one-tenth of Atlanta's transportation needs are covered" in a referendum to levy a 1-cent sales tax.
Mike Bodker on Thursday, June 16th, 2011 in a newspaper article
Johns Creek mayor says transportation vote covers less than 10 percent of need
Persuading voters to back next year’s tax referendum to help unclog the region’s roadways may be tough. Divvying up the cash is no cakewalk, either.
Area leaders have asked for billions of dollars in transportation projects they think the region needs, but the proposed 1-cent sales tax can’t pay for all of them.
In fact, it won’t even cover most of them, Johns Creek Mayor Mike Bodker said.
"Let's keep in mind that less than one-tenth of Atlanta's transportation needs are covered in this referendum," Bodker told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a recent news story.
Less than one-tenth? But won’t the tax rake in billions of dollars?
Before we address Bodker’s claim, let’s take a quick detour into the complex realm of transportation planning.
Since the effects of a single project can cross city and county boundaries, much of the region’s transportation planning is handled by the Atlanta Regional Commission. The planning body helps area governments with issues that need regional coordination, such as clean air, water and aging.
As part of its duties, the ARC drafted Plan 2040, which maps out transportation, land use, environmental, economic, housing and human service strategies covering the 18-county area for the next 30 years.
Plan 2040 estimates what the region needs, what it will cost and how much it can afford. It found that the region needs about $126 billion in transportation projects. It can probably pay for about $60.9 billion, according to a Plan 2040 report.
As the ARC formed transportation plans for metro Atlanta, state legislators worked to find ways to fund needs across Georgia. Their efforts resulted in the 2010 passage of the Transportation Investment Act.
This legislation created special regional transportation tax districts across the state, including one in metro Atlanta. This district includes 10 counties: Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Douglas, Fayette, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry and Rockdale.
A roundtable made up of Atlanta-area elected officials must come up with a list of projects for the taxing district that can be completed with money from a 1-cent sales tax. If voters back the tax in a 2012 referendum, it gets levied and construction begins.
Atlanta-area jurisdictions have submitted $22.9 billion in eligible projects they would like to see funded by the referendum. The roundtable is trying to cut the list down to an affordable level.
This brings us back to Bodker. As mayor of Johns Creek, he thinks the referendum has a better chance at success if leaders promise to use the money to build road projects.
We asked Bodker how he determined that the upcoming referendum would cover "less than one-tenth" of the region’s transportation needs.
Bodker was talking about money, he told us. To get the "one-tenth" figure, he compared the amount of revenue the tax is expected to raise with the estimated cost of building the projects metro Atlanta needs.
Through Plan 2040, regional planners calculated all the projects the area needs would cost some $120 billion, but the referendum is estimated to bring in only $7.2 billion, Bodker said. That’s less than 10 percent.
The federal government will likely match some of the money metro Atlanta raises from its tax, boosting the amount of transportation projects the region can afford. Still, most of the region’s needs will remain unmet.
We checked Bodker’s figures with those from the ARC, and they are very close. But there’s one small hitch.
A state economist determined that, depending on economic conditions, the 1-cent sales tax could raise between $6.8 billion and $7.2 billion in 2011 dollars, according to ARC documents. Since the current Plan 2040 draft says the region needs $126 billion in projects, the potential tax revenue does amount to "less than one-tenth" of the need, as Bodker said.
Furthermore, projects that make the roundtable list will receive only an estimated $6.1 billion of the tax revenue, an ARC spokeswoman said. The remainder will go to localities. The $6.1 billion figure is also less than 10 percent of the regional need.
The hitch is that Plan 2040’s cost estimate defines the Atlanta region as an 18-county area. The state Legislature designed the planned referendum to cover a smaller, 10-county region. Determining how much of the $120 billion would address needs for the smaller 10-county region is problematic because major projects can affect traffic in multiple counties.
That said, this quirk does not render Bodker’s statement inaccurate. It may have been more precise for him to say that the 10-county referendum funds less than 10 percent of the 18-county region’s needs, but we think it’s safe to say your average voter doesn’t parse regional definitions this closely.
We therefore rule Bodker’s statement True.
Published: Wednesday, July 20th, 2011 at 6:00 a.m.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "North Fulton mayors map strategy for transportation tax," June 16, 2011
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Transportation wish list sliced to $12.2 billion," July 7, 2011
Atlanta Regional Commission, "Plan 2040 Regional Transportation Plan," accessed July 14, 2011
Atlanta Regional Commission, sales tax revenue estimates, accessed July 13, 2011
Atlanta Regional Roundtable website, accessed July 14, 201
Interview, Mike Bodker, mayor, Johns Creek, July 5, 2011
Interview, Julie Ralston, director of communications, Atlanta Regional Commission, July 11, 2011
We want to hear your suggestions and comments. Email the Georgia Truth-O-Meter with feedback and with claims you'd like to see checked. If you send us a comment, we'll assume you don't mind us publishing it unless you tell us otherwise. | <urn:uuid:de7efce0-bce5-491f-a289-f45de7073c57> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2011/jul/20/mike-bodker/johns-creek-mayor-says-transportation-vote-covers-/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943139 | 1,327 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Wolfgang Niggli (SUI), one of the most eminent figures in international Dressage, passed away on Sunday October 30 at the age of 89.
Wolfgang Niggli won his first junior Dressage competition in 1937. He went on to compete in Jumping as a teenager and rode in Steeplechases before studying engineering at the Zurich Technological Institute and becoming a part-time riding officer in the Swiss cavalry.
In 1947, he took the opportunity of being based close to France’s prestigious military equestrian school in Fontainebleau to perfect his riding and competed in many Jumping and Dressage competitions, as well as Steeplechasing.
After working in the USA for several years as an engineer, Wolfgang Niggli returned to Switzerland where he became Vice President (Construction) of the North Eastern Swiss Power Company, but still found time to indulge his passion for equestrian sport.
In 1957 he became a Swiss national Dressage Judge. Four years later he became a member of the Swiss National Equestrian Federation’s Dressage Committee and was Chairman of the Committee from 1964-1973.
During this period he was also Chef d’Equipe for the Swiss team at numerous international competitions, including the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.
In 1964, Wolfgang Niggli became an FEI International Dressage Judge and served on the FEI Dressage Committee from 1973-1976 and again from 1979-1981. He was Chairman of the FEI Dressage Committee from 1981-1993 and remained an honorary member of the FEI Bureau until the time of his death.
Since 1964 up to his retirement from the FEI Dressage Committee in 1993, he judged at numerous international competitions and at three Olympic Games.
In recent years, he was dedicated to helping riders around the world by running clinics using his long experience and knowledge of the sport.
The FEI expresses its sincere condolences to the family and friends of Wolfgang Niggli and to the Swiss equestrian community. | <urn:uuid:4d11c8dd-7c57-416d-940b-2b7666a5741a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.horse-canada.com/horse-news/in-memoriam-wolfgang-niggli-sui/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977246 | 415 | 1.65625 | 2 |
updated: 9/9/2008 9:38:26 AM
IU's Kelley School of Business has built an entirely new campus-- virtually. The school's Kelley Executive Partners (KEP) program will unveil next week an island in the virtual world of Second Life resembling buildings on the IU Bloomington campus. KEP's virtual campus launch will include expert speakers on virtual collaboration, tours of the new virtual campus and a Second Life boat race. Second Life is an Internet-based 3-D virtual world created by its residents.
Source: Inside INdiana Business
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Due to increasing demand for executive education provided by Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, today (Sept. 9) it is announcing it has built an entirely new campus.
The school's Kelley Executive Partners (KEP) program next Monday (Sept. 15) will unveil a virtual campus -- an island in the virtual world of Second Life that bears a striking resemblance to buildings on the IU Bloomington campus.
KEP's virtual campus will be launched in a half-day event that includes expert speakers on virtual collaboration, which will begin at 1 p.m. (EDT). In addition to panel discussions and tours of the new virtual campus, there will also be a Second Life boat race that illustrates how teams can work collaboratively in this technological, immersive environment to solve a variety of problems.
A limited number of people will be able to attend "in world," using their Second Life avatars. Others will be able to view the event online via streaming video.
Second Life is an Internet-based 3-D virtual world created by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of residents worldwide.
Anne Massey in Second Life
Rising travel costs as well as lost productivity due to time out of the office are leading many corporations to explore online solutions for employee collaboration and education. Online learning has become a major area of expertise at the Kelley School, which in 1999 began its highly regarded online MBA program, Kelley Direct. As emphasis on online learning has grown, KEP has tapped the expertise of Kelley Direct in providing online education, earning a top-25 ranking in the Financial Times' 2008 listing of executive education programs.
Virtual worlds can make online learning more engaging and immersive, according to researchers in online education and collaboration, which is key to its effectiveness.
One of these researchers is Anne Massey, a professor in Kelley's Department of Operations and Decision Technologies and a Lilly Faculty Fellow for Information Systems, who will be one of the conference panelists.
"In today's academic and business environments, more often than not, individuals and teams are collaborating across boundaries -- boundaries of distance, time, language and culture in all its forms," Massey said. "Today, as the adoption of Web 2.0 and 3D virtual worlds accelerates, new possibilities for overcoming boundaries are emerging."
John Cady, KEP's executive director, points out the Kelley campus in Second Life has the feel of the Bloomington campus, but differs in many regards, namely stairs, doors and walls.
John Cady in Second Life
"That's because Second Life doesn't have the same constraints as the real world, which we feel facilitates learning. Students have to reassess all of their assumptions in Second Life, and applying that mindset to the real world can help them view business questions anew as well," he said.
Kelley School Dean Daniel Smith added, "The Kelley School has long been recognized as one of the world's leaders in program innovation. A major source of innovation is the talent of our faculty. Anne Massey is recognized as a top scholar in the area of the learning applications of Second Life. Given that global collaboration is a fact of life in today's business environment and the Kelley School's long-term commitment to serving the needs of students and companies around the world, expanding into the virtual world is a natural progression for us."
Speakers at the conference will include Ken Hudson, managing director of the Virtual World Design Center at Loyalist College in Canada; David Levin, IBM TJ Watson Research Center; Christian Renaud, chief executive officer of Technology Intelligence Group; Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins, co-author, Second Life for Dummies; Carolyn Wiethoff, clinical associate professor of management and entrepreneurship in the Kelley School; and Massey and Cady.
Source: IU Kelley School of Business | <urn:uuid:05fe3d01-ffd2-42ac-94a5-4477e8f990a2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.insideindianabusiness.com/newsitem.asp?ID=31390 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952768 | 914 | 1.835938 | 2 |
I finally got around to reading Eugene Robinson’s Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America this week. Despite my doubts, I hoped that the famed Washington Post columnist, MSNBC rock star and Pulitzer Prize winner would say something profound, or at the least, provocative. Not only did I not learn anything new in the three and half hours it took for me to read Disintegration. I learned that Robinson, like so many accomplished Blacks of his generation, doesn’t see Black Generation Xers when talking about the state of African America. The generational divide, perhaps the greatest example of disintegration that Robinson should’ve discussed, he rendered invisible throughout his book.
I know I’m late by Black literati standards in taking so long to sit down and read this book. After all, I bought the book this past Christmas as my personal birthday present. I had a feeling, though, that somehow, this book really wasn’t for me, a forty-one year-old Black Gen Xer who’s spent about half of my life thinking about this and other related issues. To slightly misquote Arnold Schwarzenegger from Total Recall, “Welcome to the party, Robinson!”
Over and over again in Disintegration, Robinson referred to the positions of Black Baby Boomers in a splintered Black America, as well as to the hopes, fears and aspirations of millennial generation African Americans (particularly on issues like the decline of interracial prejudice and educational attainment). I guess because Robinson mostly relied on his personal journey as a guide to understanding the history of African America’s disintegration — including using his sons as a time line template — it meant that folks born between ’65 and ’85 didn’t really count.
Unless, of course, they were part of the Abandoned class, the ones who found themselves increasingly poor and isolated after ’68 in communities like Shaw and U Street in DC. Or, in my case, on the South Side and other pockets of Mount Vernon, New York by the late 70s and ’80s. Then Robinson’s sympathetic voice kicked in, one which acknowledged all of the ills that one in four Blacks face every day. Still, Black Gen Xers are only in the Abandoned in Robinson’s mind and words by proxy.
There are far more obvious errors of omission in Robinson’s somewhat thought-provoking, 237-page column than leaving out an entire generation of post-Civil Rights era Black folk. Like Robinson stumbling his way into Thomas Sowell’s “model minority” argument like a punch-drunk boxer in the final round of a fight. Or, really, like a writer running out of steam at the end of a manuscript.
Robinson’s fifteen-page chapter “The Emergence (Part 1): Coming To America” is all about a new immigration wave of Blacks from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean who are more highly educated than any other immigrant group arriving these days (and are better educated than most Americans, for that matter). Yes this is true in the aggregate. But besides a few examples that serve to exaggerate more than enlighten, Robinson’s analysis sounds like Sowell’s arguments from ’72. Only without the conservative policy implications and with a generous lack of sophistication in understanding the diversity within these immigrant groups.
There’s also the use of these troubling terms of Transcendent and Mainstream, both of which evoke a ’70s-style thinking about African Americans who’ve “made it.” How about “New Black Elite” and “Successful Yet Struggling Black Middle,” both of which are more accurate descriptors? I understand that Robinson’s purpose with Disintegration was to poke and prod readers, albeit in a light way. Still, the book seems written for what he would describe as aspiring Transcendents who are far too busy climbing social ladders to think about cultural and community disintegration post-1968, rather than those of us who do.
Which brings me back to Robinson’s Black Gen X blind spot. How is it possible that someone with the panache and diligence of Robinson could forget about the 26-46 year-old demographic in Disintegration? The reasons are as plain as the positions of prestige that Transcendent African American Baby Boomers occupy and cling to like a man with a fingernail death grip on a precipice. (And, despite Robinson’s protestations to the contrary, by his own definition, he and his family are Transcendent. Who else gets to hang out with Oprah and Vernon Jordan or do interviews with President Obama without being Transcendent?)
Me and my generation of Blacks had been written off by Robinson’s gangs of elites and wannabe elites by the time I was a college freshman at the University of Pittsburgh in ’87. Our ideas about the disintegration of Black America and what that has meant over the past forty years are undoubtedly fresher. Yet we as a group aren’t asked about our ideas. Apparently when Black America disintegrated, we fell into a black hole. At least in Mr. Robinson’s neighborhood. | <urn:uuid:7e46276a-62cd-4e2f-b34a-09fe288deded> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://donaldearlcollins.com/tag/invisibility/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955459 | 1,090 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Hear some of the year's most memorable NPR stories and musical performances in these special podcasts.
Memorable Moments Podcast »
Memorable Moments 2007
At War, At Home
An NPR investigation last December found that supervisors at Colorado's Fort Carson punished soldiers who suffered mental anguish. Leaders at the base now attend mandatory training on spotting troubled soldiers, but mental health experts say it may be doing as much harm as good.
There have been at least 110 suicide attacks in Afghanistan this year. An Afghan doctor who conducts bombers' autopsies says that up to 80 percent of suicide bombers in Kabul are disabled.
Hassan Khaliday, a 24-year-old dentist struggling in war-torn Iraq, tells of the torture and decapitation of a close friend. His corpse was left in one of the markets. Khaliday says this is the reality of Baghdad; happiness is destroyed. He sought refuge in Jordan but was refused entry.
Army Spc. Ron Hinkle barely survived an IED blast in Iraq that left him with brain damage. Bad advice from the Army has left him with mounting medical bills. Now he and his family may lose their Colorado ranch.
The first hour after an attack is crucial for wounded soldiers. Injured troops who get medical help have a 95 percent chance of surviving. Eagle Dustoff, a medevac unit in Iraq, keeps its mission simple: Evacuate the wounded as quickly as possible.
The Yellow River has long reflected the glories and the problems of China's past. Today, rapid industrialization is taking its toll on the country's "mother river." In this five-part series, NPR travels along the river to see the threats and challenges that lie ahead.
In what was once the capital of the Ottoman Empire, one of Istanbul's most notorious slums has sprung up. Tarlabasi is a densely populated maze of narrow streets that wend between crumbling Ottoman-era houses built on a hillside.
Iran's leaders have seen their nation as the key regional power in the Middle East. But since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has been consistently unable to fulfill this ambition. NPR examines the country and its relationships with its neighbors.
India's holy Ganges River travels 1,550 miles from the Himalayas and across the plains of north India before spilling into the Bay of Bengal. A five-part series explores life along the river: its extremes of ancient and modern, rural and urban, and rich and poor.
Laura Bush has just completed a tour of Africa, stopping at a school in Bamako, Mali. The U.S. Embassy there helped to spruce up the school before her arrival, making it more amenable to a photo-op.
To get to the heart of the global warming story, you've got to look past the polar bears and melting glaciers. Because the scientific explanation for climate change depends to a very large degree on the behavior of one very particular atom: carbon. In five animated episodes, Robert Krulwich explains why it's all about carbon.
Iceland's winters are long, dark and cold. But one of the country's favorite winter hobbies is to take a swim in outdoor heated pools or lounge in backyard hot tubs. Heat and electricity are cheap, clean and plentiful here — and Iceland wants other countries to take notice.
In an effort to meet a Kyoto Protocol pledge, Japan managed to cut about 1.4 million tons of CO2 emissions last year. The nation reduced summer air-conditioning use, overturning a decades-old "suit and tie" tradition along the way.
In the late 1950s, scientist Charles David Keeling began research that would prove to be a key signpost of climate change. His meticulous monitoring of carbon-dioxide levels in the air at Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory is carried on by scientists today.
Rufus Wainwright makes richly orchestrated, theatrical pop music inspired by the traditions of cabaret, musicals and opera. Hear Wainwright perform selections from his latest CD, Release the Stars, in a full concert recorded live from New York's Gramercy Theater.
Bay Area disc jockey Jimmy Lyons got Brubeck to play piano for the Monterey City Council more than 50 years ago to convince it to put on a festival. The Monterey Jazz Festival is in its 50th year, and Brubeck returns for his 14th appearance. Hear his complete concert.
Wildly imaginative, exuberant and always unpredictable, Björk has built an iconic career by consistently breaking new creative ground. Her latest CD, Volta, is a high-energy, tribal romp across cultures. Hear Björk in a full concert from New York's United Palace.
Playing under the name The Swell Season, Irish singer Glen Hansard and Czech newcomer Markéta Irglová sing affecting folk-rock songs with blissful harmonies. Hear the stars of the sleeper hit musical Once recorded live in concert from Washington, D.C.
Invite the world's finest orchestra to play in the world's most famous concert hall, and the makings for a major musical event are in place. Hear the famed Berlin Philharmonic live at Carnegie Hall, playing music by Mahler, and an exciting U.S. premiere by Thomas Adčs.
English comedian and actor Sacha Baron Cohen's popular film Borat is now out on DVD. Cohen is best known for his characters Ali G (a journalist from England), Bruno (a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion reporter) and Borat (a reporter from Kazakhstan).
The Kitchen Sisters explore the saga of a Texas corn chip and C.E. Doolin, the can-do visionary behind it. Doolin, who envisioned Fritos as a side dish, never imagined anyone would consume an entire king size bag.
For more than seven years, All Things Considered has followed the story of one Alzheimer's patient, Tom DeBaggio. And it's apparent in a recent visit with Tom and his wife, Joyce, how sharply his health has declined.
Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report talks about his book I Am America (And So Can You!). Colbert targets race, religion, sports and the American family as well as more mundane topics like breakfast cereal and the Hollywood blacklist.
Twenty years ago, Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa hopped a border fence from Mexico into the U.S. and became a migrant farmworker. Today he is a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University, and a researcher looking for a breakthrough in the treatment of brain cancer.
The acclaimed Nigerian writer talks about the premise of his debut novel Things Fall Apart, why he stopped writing for nearly 20 years and how his experiences with Nigeria's fractured political past still shape the way he envisions Africa's future.
Norman Mailer's work combined sweeping cultural criticism, erudition and obscenity. He was deliberately provocative, says book critic Maureen Corrigan, and he wanted to be remembered as a novelist, though he made a strong impact as an essayist and journalist. | <urn:uuid:07150197-9617-4f16-818e-7cab86d82629> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/moments_2007/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954939 | 1,460 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Polk County 'probable' swine flu case ruled out Eleven schools in Orono, Minn., will be closed today and one school in Minneapolis will also be shuttered due to probable cases of swine flu, state health officials said Sunday. Rocori Middle School in Cold Spring — which has been connected to the state's lone confirmed case of swine flu — would also remain closed today.
When a swine flu case forced two neighboring Minnesota schools to close, an obvious question arose: Was it a staff member from a shared cafeteria or a student back from spring break? School officials didn't know. Minnesota health officials wouldn't say. And the absence of information fed a small-town rumor mill that prompted one parent to set the record straight about her daughter's cough.
Pawlenty: 'Expect more' cases in the state Minnesota's first swine flu case has been confirmed, leading a central Minnesota community to close two schools through Tuesday. Rocori Middle School and nearby St. Boniface school will be closed because a woman connected to the public schools came down with the flu. She is recovering.
UPDATED 9:40 A.M. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and state health and education officials discussed the state's first "probable" case of H1N1 influenza virus, better known as the swine flu, in a news conference this morning. Two schools serving Cold Spring and Rocori, Minn., have voluntarily closed for the day, officials said. The person infected is expected to recovery completely and did not require a stay in the hospital, officials said.
View your ad here! Cost effective targeted advertising. Contextual advertising starting as low as $79/month. This includes targeted ad delivery and search results! Add your business to the Marketplace » | <urn:uuid:2a110b6b-6e4b-4156-8d61-a1b3d9d0594e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/tag/tag/rocori/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971493 | 368 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Inspections, Compliance, Enforcement, and Criminal Investigations
CPG Sec. 585.850 Sweet Potatoes - Sirup Pack
Because confusion has arisen about the application of the provisions of 21 CFR 155.200 to canned sweet potatoes packed in sirup, it has become necessary to clarify our policy about the labeling of such articles. In 1968, some canners of sweet potatoes were advised that the standard of identity for canned sweet potatoes makes no provision for a sirup pack, and therefore, labels of canned sweet potatoes in sirup should bear a listing of ingredients in accord with Section 403(i)(2) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and *21 CFR 101.4*. At the request of interested canners and the National Canners Association we have reviewed the history of and past statements concerning sweet potatoes packed in sirup.
The standard of identity for canned sweet potatoes, as promulgated February 28, 1940, and at present, does not specifically provide for the original standard sanctioned water as a packing medium and sugar and dextrose as seasoning ingredients without requiring label declaration of these ingredients. The standard has since been amended to provide for additional nutritive sweeteners as seasonings. However, it now requires label declaration of the optional ingredients.
Although at the time the standard was promulgated it was generally known that sweet potatoes were being packed in sirup, the findings of fact, conclusion, and final order (resulting from a hearing) were silent concerning this practice. Following publication of the order no attempt was made to prohibit labeling of sweet potatoes as being packed in sirup provided such statements were not false or misleading. Recognizing the fact that sweet potatoes were being packed in sirup, FDA stated on September 5, 1940, (Trade Correspondence No. 325) that it had not had occasion to make any determination of just where seasoning leaves off and sirup begins in canned vegetables.
Again, in a letter to a packer dated January 1, 1960, we acknowledged the practice of labeling sweet potatoes as packed "in sirup". This letter states that "if a packer elects to make any label declaration about the packing medium, such declaration should not be false or misleading in any particular". Further, this same letter suggested that the USDA Standards for Grades of Canned Sweet Potatoes, promulgated in 1951, be used as a guide in determining label statements of sirup designations and the Brix measurements thereof.
We considered the possibility of establishing separate standards of identity for canned sweet potatoes, including standards for solid pack, vacuum pack, and sirup pack. However, we lack data needed as a basis for establishing such standards, and we do not anticipate being able to make the investigations needed to obtain such data in the near future. Until the standards of identity for canned sweet potatoes are updated or further announcement is made, our policy concerning canned sweet potatoes in sirup will be as follows:
No regulatory action will be initiated on the basis of canned sweet potatoes, other than mashed, bearing a label designation such as "packed in sirup" or "in sirup" when in fact the packing medium is one made by using water and any one or more of the optional sweeteners provided for as seasoning ingredients by *21 CFR 155.200 (c)(3)*.
The density of the sirup need not be declared, but if a specific designation such as "light sirup", "heavy sirup", or "extra heavy sirup" is used in the labeling such sirup should meet the "cut-out" Brix measurement as given in the following table:
Designation BRIX MEASUREMENT
Extra Heavy Sirup 30o or more
Heavy Sirup 25o or more, but less than 30o
Light Sirup 18o or more, but less than 25o
In Water Packed in Water
The standard of identity *(21 CFR 155.200)* provides for use of water without label declaration. The standard now requires the declaration of the sweetening ingredients. Therefore, label declaration of the sirup ingredients by common or usual name is now required.
*Material between asterisks is new or revised.*
Reissued: 4/16/79, 10/1/80 | <urn:uuid:71abd5f3-fa1b-49b7-b5c2-d150b8c55c70> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/ComplianceManuals/CompliancePolicyGuidanceManual/ucm074640.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944243 | 863 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Posted by Intuition Girl
Another day older, another day wiser! Pinch yourself because you have clearly made it beyond the wildly-branded doomsday (of December 21, 2012)! Over the past years, groups of people from around the globe were anticipating one or two catastrophic events to unfold: The collision of Earth with Planet Nibiru – the infamous “Planet X“; and the end of the world as interpreted by some translations of the ancient Mayan Calendar. Truth be told, there are many counterproductive new age movements that cater to those seeking some form of spiritual and/or emotional understanding or personal healing.
It is easy to dupe individuals into becoming cult followers through campaigns of fear and paranoia. It has been a common tactic used throughout the ages to control the masses by some “leaders”. Heaven’s Gate founder, Marshall Applewhite used such fear tactics to attract potential followers to his cult group. As you may be aware, self-prophesying can lead to lethal consequences – as was the case in 1997 when he and his band of soul seekers performed mass suicides. The same holds true during the time of Haley’s Comet (in 1910). People worked themselves up mostly because of the fear from an implied calamitous Earth strike.
In the book, The Copycat Effect, the author Loren Coleman writes, “When Halley’s Comet made its closest approach to the earth in 1910, several people killed themselves out of contagious fear and panic.” In hindsight, did the comet itself invoke mass suicides? No. In truth, self-fulfilling prophecy has created and continues to create the most dire circumstances, and sometimes even deadly outcomes.
Even author Mark Twain was snared in his own self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1909, Twain wrote: “It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’ ” Twain died exactly one day after the comet’s appearance in 1910.
Tom Peters, prolific writer said, “Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.” While you are thinking about this profound statement, I want you to question yourself on the belief systems that have molded you and those which you have established for yourself (in your life). If you are like most people, you choose to put yourself into one of two roles: A) Follower or B) Leader. There is no in-between. Either you lead, follow or get out of the way. Which role do you choose for your life path?
Since you are a spiritual being, your life force dictates the power that you have and that which you create for yourself. Remember, you have the freewill to choose and build your own destiny. Mother Teresa is noted as saying, “I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.” As much positive that Mother Teresa contributed to society, she, too had her moments of weakness. We all do. However, when you choose to use your good judgment and common sense, you find that bogeyman tactics will begin to fall to the wayside. Stop putting an emphasis on self-fulfilling prophecy and the paranoia of the world, and start putting more focus on all that you are capable of creating and contributing to your life, your environment and the community in which you live. By all means, create a productive self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, “I am going to succeed at fill in the blank,” or “I am going to be healthy, prosperous and happy.”
Will catastrophic events still happen? Count on it. Throughout the centuries, this old Earth and civilization has endured a barrage of happenings including great floods, famines, wars, hurricanes, hailstorms, tornados, mass killings, earthquakes, volcanoes, and yes, even comet strikes. It is the new millennium, and we are still here. Breathe. Tomorrow is another day. How you choose to live today, the belief systems in which you invest your energies, and the choices you make to create your own destiny are ultimately what will dictate your personal outcome in life.
Joan Marie – your Intuition Girl
© Planet X, the Mayan Calendar and You- 2013
By Joan Marie the Gift, Intuition Girl
Leave a Reply | <urn:uuid:d94daa3d-6dea-4315-ae0c-389eca1c541f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.intuitiongirl.com/find-peace-and-joy/planet-x-the-mayan-calendar-and-you/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956342 | 965 | 1.609375 | 2 |
What Is Taking All Of Our Brain Power? Pins And Passwords [POLL]
I have one for my computer at work. I have one for my phone. There’s one for my debit card, iTunes account and bank account. You need one for your home alarm, your laptop and many cars. There’s one to get into the building at work and one to access each different website that houses just about every part of your life.
And you know what the advice is from the experts? Don’t ever use the same one for two different things. Really? Pin numbers and passwords are taking up way too much brain capacity.
Don’t feel bad at 1:30pm today when somebody asks you what you had for lunch and you can’t remember. It’s not your fault. Blame the bank or the internet or anything that makes you remember yet another pin or password. Now, I’m not against password and pin numbers. They’re there for our protection and security. I’m just opposed to running out of memory space in my brain.
And pin numbers and passwords use up all of our creative energy as well. Not only do you have to think of one that isn’t obvious, but you have to think of one that isn’t obvious and isn’t related to any other pins or passwords you have…and oh yeah, you have to be able to figure out a way to remember it yourself.
In case you’ve forgotten, I’m talking about pins and passwords. I don’t blame you if you forgot. It’s not your fault. | <urn:uuid:57a39f93-f4dc-442b-9588-5924c1556243> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://943thepoint.com/what-is-taking-all-of-our-brain-power-pins-and-passwords-poll/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942761 | 349 | 1.726563 | 2 |
As I write this, I’m sitting in the cluttered office of my three-bedroom, two-bathroom home, typing away on a nice laptop and enjoying a high-speed Internet connection that I claim I could not live without. Having just gotten home from church, I’m wearing a dressy navy-blue outfit, which I’m convinced would look better with a matching pair of navy-blue shoes. My house is equipped with running water, central heat and air, and Satellite TV. We’ve got more than enough food stuffed in the pantry. In fact, I could stand to lose five or six pounds.
Yet, in my mind’s eye I can travel back to India, where I visited a young mother in her home. The woman, her husband, and three children lived in a one-room house with cement walls. In one corner sat a little stove and some cooking supplies; in the other, a TV for watching cricket. The woman offered me her very best chai and special crackers. Her eyes filled with joy when she saw that I liked what she had offered. She and her family could live for more than a year on what I make in a month.
The global community in which we live sure makes it hard to remain blissfully ignorant about wealth and poverty. More than 39,000 children die every day from preventable diseases. The UN estimates there are around 34 million refugees and internally displaced people around the world. Food shortages and droughts result in millions of deaths each year.
And yet, in America, most folks own at least two cars and spend a good deal of time worrying about getting fat.
For years, I have wrestled with difficult questions concerning God’s goodness (even His existence), as I observe the incredible suffering around the world and the continued prosperity of the Church in America. Why would God intervene and “bless us” with scholarships and raises and home loans and new church buildings, while allowing little children to suffer the long and painful death that accompanies starvation? Are these people considered our neighbors? If so, are we not obligated to provide for their needs before we indulge our desires?
The focus of yesterday’s post was our nation’s wealth. Today we focus on personal wealth.
I suppose the question for me is this: As long as we are aware of the poverty of others, is it a sin for us to be rich?
This is a subject rarely preached about on Sunday mornings. It seems that the evangelical preoccupation with sexual sins leaves little time for confronting the sin of greed. (How many of you have been a part of a church that “disciplined” a member for hoarding his wealth or mistreating employees? And how often does “care for the poor” register as an important political issue among evangelical voters?) In fact, more often than not, evangelicals seem to regard material wealth as a blessing from God. I can’t tell you the number of times someone has told me that God provided him with a new car or a large sum of money as a sort of “thank-you” gift for continued faithfulness.
And yet, considering what the Bible has to say on the subject, I think it’s safe to conclude that wealth is – at best – a mixed bag. Perhaps not inherently evil, it is indeed a great temptation.
For example, Psalm 112 says, “Happy are those who fear the Lord, who greatly delight in his commandments…Wealth and riches are in their houses…they are gracious, merciful, and righteous. It is well with those who deal generously and lend, who conduct their affairs with justice…They have distributed freely, they have given to the poor.”
Clearly, wealth can be a blessing if it is used to benefit the poor.
And yet Jesus makes it abundantly clear that wealth can also be a curse.
Matthew records Jesus as saying, in no uncertain terms, “It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God..With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
So why do we not regard wealth with more trepidation? It seems to me that if wealth can be such a significant stumbling block on the path to salvation, we ought to urgently warn against its possible dangers, perhaps in the same way we warn against the dangers of pornography or lust. Growing up, I must have been told a million times that I must be careful of putting myself in “compromising situations” with boys. (You know, “don’t spend too much time alone”; “don’t stay overnight,” etc.) Yet, I was never warned of avoiding compromising situations regarding wealth. Making a lot of money was always regarded as a positive thing.
In Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus goes so far as to say “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for your shall be satisfied….But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry.”
If I learned anything during my trip to India it was this: The gospel makes more sense among the poor. Without the constant pull of materialism, and without the guarantee of daily bread, our need for God is more pronounced and His voice is clearer. At the end of the day, I have come to see wealth as a spiritual DISadvantage, more curse than blessing. (Thankfully, Jesus reminds us that, with the help of God, it is possible for a rich person to follow Him…despite the enormous challenge.)
No wonder Paul warns Timothy, “For we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either. If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content. But those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. But flee from these things, you man of God…”
In such a materialistic society, the Church MUST reclaim the strong language used by early church leaders to warn of the potential dangers of wealth, and we MUST be more careful of proclaiming all wealth as an undisputed blessing from God.
Writes Sider, “More biblical texts warn of God’s punishment of those who neglect or oppress the poor than tell us that material abundance results from obedience…It is a heresy, particularly common in rich nations, to think that wealth and prosperity are always a sure sign of righteousness. They may be the result of sin and oppression, as in the case of Israel [see previous post]. The crucial test is whether the prosperous are obeying God’s command to bring justice to the oppressed.” (99)
While the Bible does not seem to teach that MAKING a lot of money is a bad thing, it certainly teaches that KEEPING a lot of money, to the neglect of the poor, is a bad thing. Consider the strong language found in James 5:
“Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries which are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments have become moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver have rusted; and their rust will be a witness against you and will consume your flesh like fire. It is in the last days that you have stored up your treasure! Behold, the pay of the laborers who mowed your fields, and which has been withheld by you, cries out against you; and the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. You have lived luxuriously on the earth and led a life of wanton pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.”
It’s really easy to point fingers and say that this passage applies to slave-owners or stingy, Scrooge-like misers. But in this country, middle class families live luxuriously compared to the poor around the world…and (thanks to the information age) we know it! We know good and well when we stuff ourselves at an all-you-can-eat buffet that there are people dying of hunger around the world. Living in our suburbs, we may not see poverty next door, but we may see it down the street, across town, or across the world. I have a closet full of “moth-eaten” clothes that I hardly ever wear because they’ve gone out of style. And my belongings far surpass Paul’s standard for contentment – food and covering.
So, I return to my original question: As long as we are aware of the poverty of others, is it a sin for us to be rich? How much is too much?
I try to keep this in mind when I think about giving: If it doesn’t require sacrifice, it’s not really giving. The Jesus said, “give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you.” If I am only giving from my abundant surplus, perhaps I am holding too much back.
I’ve really struggled with and prayed about this question a lot, and I welcome your thoughts on the subject. In what ways do you choose to live more simply? How do you think about giving? What biblical guidelines do you use for your giving? In what ways do regular, middle-class Americans exploit the poor?
I welcome your thoughts and ideas! | <urn:uuid:196f1a9e-aff6-45d3-ac7d-381f583745f0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/article-1220293872 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970479 | 2,088 | 1.570313 | 2 |
If any group of activists could avoid finger-pointing, you’d think it’d be the anti-bullying crowd. Apparently not. In October—National Anti-Bullying Month—one longtime anti-bullying activist took the fight to another, condemning it for allegedly advancing the gay “agenda” in Clark County schools.
We should’ve seen this coming, of course: the fraying of what seemed like a universally agreed-upon mission, a concept that both Lady Gaga and red states could get behind. But anti-bullying is proving to have gray areas—areas, it seems, worth fighting over.
Marvin Nash, the founder of Wyoming-based Bullying Hurts, sent out a news release Oct. 11 stating that the organizers of the Las Vegas-based Flip the Script program are using the bullying issue “as the Trojan horse to input other agendas in school systems.”
“In conjunction with Nevada-based R&R Partners and Foundation,” Nash wrote, “the development of a program titled Flip the Script has used their creative genius and superb marketing skills to introduce, as curriculum, programs whose specific agendas target LGBT and often exclude other issues of bullying.”
Flip the Script is a media campaign that encourages students, parents and educators to take a pledge against bullying, which it defines on FlipTheScriptNow.org as “ANY [caps theirs] hurtful behavior that is done on purpose to harm another person.” Its creators deny the allegation that there is a gay-specific agenda but do oppose gay-related slurs among others. The central message of Flip the Script public service announcements is that bullies act the way they do because of their own insecurities. One often-played radio spot features a cheerleader belittling another girl by saying she’s too fat to try out for the squad, but then confessing her real worry: that the girl might take her spot (“It’s what defines me.”) If there’s a gay army in that Trojan horse, it’s pretty well hidden.
• • •
Nash is a former rodeo clown, “Starvin Marvin,” who first began using his clown character to teach kids the anti-bullying message more than 10 years ago. He and his wife Darlene sell workbooks and DVDs and organize school and community programs nationwide as Bullying Hurts. In his school assemblies, Nash compares being bullied to being in a ring with a bull, and uses the safety of his rodeo barrel as a metaphor for safety from bullies.
The Nashes agree that it’s not OK to bully using derogatory names based on sexual identity. But, they say, the bullying movement has begun to focus more on gay issues than on other reasons kids get picked on, such as ethnicity. And, they say, there’s a distinction between opposing gay slurs and teaching kids that it’s OK to be gay.
“Our concern is that the LGBT movement is using bullying to leverage their way into the schools to promote a separate agenda—acceptance of the gay lifestyle—as opposed to genuinely trying to stop bullying for the sake of stopping bullying,” Darlene Nash says. The Nashes associate Flip the Script’s message with the Human Rights Campaign’s Welcoming Schools and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance programs, which aim to teach acceptance of gay and lesbian people.
Officials at the Clark County School District say they don’t use the Flip the Script materials in their anti-bullying programs, but they support the campaign’s mission, and a district administrator attended Flip the Script’s Town Hall Meeting in September. The district has its own anti-bullying coordinator and develops its own programs based on grade level. It supports diversity generally rather than focusing specifically on the LGBT community.
The Nashes say they’re about protecting children from bullies, not about arguing on behalf of ostracized adults, and that the anti-bullying movement should focus on kids.
“We object to [gay activists] them using something important—bullying—to get a different agenda into schools,” Darlene Nash says. “While they are convincing school districts that any bullying is gay-related, there are many children who dread going to school today because they stutter or wear braces or have a limp. The school districts are in danger of sacrificing help for those kids. That’s our issue. Bullying is bullying and has a much larger scope than gay issues.”
• • •
This dispute was likely stoked by more than LGBT-phobia. Its roots may also be in a flooded anti-bullying market. Bullying Hurts and the Flip the Script campaign are only two of countless anti-bullying programs on the cultural forefront.
The issue surged back into popular consciousness when social networking enabled cyber-bullying and several child suicides prompted by bullying made national news. Many organizations were born, from the It Gets Better campaign, which drew participation from politicians and celebrities, to a list of smaller programs: No Bully; Bullies2Buddies; the Bullying Academy; the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program; Steps to Respect, ReportBullying.com and others.
Bullying Hurts sells its workbooks, training seminars and “town hall services” to parents, kids, school districts and communities nationwide. Its “Home Learning Edition” costs $22 and includes two workbooks, a DVD, posters and a completion certificate. The organization is a subsidiary of LRNCO, a Wyoming-based company that also sells bus-driver safety programs.
School districts are a prime market, and federal funding has been made available for schools to pay for anti-bullying programs, so some such programs rely on pass-through dollars.
Other anti-bullying programs offer their services for free, paid for by donations or sponsoring businesses, as in the case of Flip the Script. Flip the Script is sponsored not only by R&R, but also by the Caesars Foundation, NV Energy and more than a dozen media outlets. It does not receive any federal, state or school district money.
The Nashes brought their positive-message turf war to Nevada earlier this year, when Marvin rolled a clown barrel down miles of the Silver State’s highways to promote the Bullying Hurts message. They held press conferences along the way throughout the spring and summer, including one in August at the Plaza Hotel in downtown Las Vegas. Bullying Hurts had planned a conference in Las Vegas for Oct. 4, but postponed the conference abruptly in September, without offering a reason on its website.
Meanwhile, the creators of Flip the Script were hosting their own Anti-Bullying Town Hall on Sept. 26. Participants included representatives from the Clark County School District, Human Rights Campaign, Anti-Defamation League and other civil rights and civic interest organizations, and it was broadcast on Cox cable statewide.
Flip the Script supporters didn’t intend to muscle out Bullying Hurts, says R&R Partners’ director of public affairs Catherine Levy. The firm’s interest in creating an anti-bullying campaign grew out of efforts to toughen cyber-bullying laws in the legislative session last spring.
“We launched [Flip the Script] in September, and it instantly grew,” Levy says. “We’ve had people come out of the woodwork to be involved; it’s a labor of love. We are not aligned with one specific group, but with the anti-bullying message. We acted as clearinghouse.”
• • •
As longtime activists, the Nashes note the rise in competition with some dismay. They describe Bullying Hurts as “the first community service program in the country to insert and apply peer mentoring as the foundation of instructional awareness in the education of anti-bullying in the elementary classroom.”
When a Huffington Post item said, “Thanks to Lady Gaga, Anderson Cooper and all those in the trenches, the issue of bullying is again back on the radar,” Darlene Nash posted an angry response:
“I am both appalled and insulted by this. Is this writer implying that Lady Gaga and Anderson Cooper are ‘in the trenches?’ Give me a break!! ... Now, because a few famous names have jumped on the anti-bullying band wagon—are they trying to say that we will NOW take these bullying issues seriously? ... Wake up America! Ask yourself the REAL reason these people are suddenly getting into the anti-bullying arena.”
The turf-war mentality behind these lines seems to contradict the spirit of the movement. Marvin Nash has traveled the nation, including many stops at Nevada schools, helping kids to think about how to deal with bullies. A principal at a Winnemucca public school endorses the program on Nash’s website. There are pictures of Nash, in his Starvin Marvin attire, rolling his barrel down highways in Hawthorne, Yerington and Carson City. He tells kids about his own experiences dealing with bullies. “I can only speak for myself,” he says, “but I got through it by using several tools ... [I] did not allow the bullies to have power over me! By thinking seriously about them, I realized that they were really no better than me!”
Those last seven words show that bullying is inextricably linked with inequality. It’s all about the assumption of superiority and the assertion of power over others. So there’s no sense in turning a blind eye to the fact that some bullies target specific groups and treat them as inferiors. And if an anti-bullying campaign can help members of such groups realize that the bullies are no better than them, it’s hard to see why someone truly opposed to bullying, in all its forms, would have an objection. | <urn:uuid:7603831b-39a6-4b2e-b594-4c52ea821357> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://vegasseven.com/latest/2011/11/10/bully-pulpits?quicktabs_follow_us=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963264 | 2,088 | 1.757813 | 2 |
MANCHESTER, NH. (AP).- A tall-case clock crafted in 1810 was the heart-stopping piece Peter Sawyer of Exeter proudly brought to his booth this week at the 54th New Hampshire Antiques Show.
Made of mahogany by Boston clockmaker Aaron Willard Jr. and marked inside the door with a label made from a plate engraved by Paul Revere the timepiece was priced at $85,000.
"This is the first time it's been on the market since it was made," said Sawyer.
Antiques aficionados began packing the lobby of Manchester's Radisson Hotel before dawn Thursday, anxious to be among the first shoppers at a show many proclaim to be tops in the country.
What awaited them was a dizzying array of antiques, some like the Willard clock in circulation for the first time since they were crafted many years ago.
Dealers hoped that antiques buyers, as they so often do in down economic times, would spring for special, pricey items as investments.
Samplers stitched by school girls in the early 1800s were priced at upward of $80,000 in the booth of Amy Finkel of Philadelphia, touted by many as one of the leading authorities on samplers in the country.
One dealer referred to the show as "the perfect storm" of the antiques world a coming together of highly reputable dealers who save their most prized items for the event, a zeal to educate a younger generation on savvy shopping for antiques, and no sales tax.
"People from across the country love the no-sales-tax thing," said Finkel. "We know that makes a big difference in people's ability to make that decision, to make the purchase."
The show, which runs through Saturday, caps a week of antiques auctions and shows collectively known as "Antiques Week in New Hampshire," which has become a powerful tourism magnet for the state, drawing dealers and collectors from around the country, hoping to find that perfect piece of Americana.
"It certainly has a great economic impact," said Steve Boucher, communications and legislative director for the Department of Resources and Economic Development. He said that the state does not track visits and spending during that week, but said the show "gets the New Hampshire brand out there in a very positive way."
Admission, $10-$15 for everyone else, is free for anyone under 30 an effort by show promoters and dealers to cultivate a new generation of antiques fans.
Richard Bojko, president of the New Hampshire Antiques Dealers Association that puts on the show, said dealers want to educate new collectors who might be intimidated by the show's standin g and some of its price tags.
"A lot of people who are going to be here have gray hair," Bojko said before the show opened. "We need to educate and develop collectors."
But few took advantage of the offer. In the 15 minutes it took for the line outside the show to clear, only two of the hundreds who entered were under 30.
Howard Oedel, 90, of Hebron, started the show in 1957 with 17 dealers who paid $40 each for a booth at the old New Hampshire Highway Hotel in Concord. This year's 68 dealers pay $1,500 for a booth.
Oedel is back again this year, with his tiny booth filled with much smaller items than he once carried. His priciest offering is a beaded Native American Indian ceremonial shawl for $5,000. In the minutes after the show opened, he sold a vintage postcard of Tilton, N.H. for $10.
"There are a thousand dealers who would give their eye-teeth to have my little booth," Oedel said.
To break into the hallowed ranks of exhibitors you must be a NHADA member, and be considered an extraordinary dealer and someone usually has to die or retire for an opening to exist.
"Generally when you are chosen as a show dealer, it's yours for life unless you really screw it up," said Bojko.
Finkel is the "daughter" in M. Finkel and Daughter, a Philadelphia antiques shop founded in 1947. She joined the NHADA 25 years ago in hopes of one day getting an invitation to join the show's elite ranks. The invite came four years ago.
"I was very fortunate they invited me in," she said humbly.
Maine Antique Digest publisher S. Clayton Pennington calls it "absolutely one of the best shows in America."
"What distinguishes it is the quality of the exhibitors and the quality of the stuff," Pennington said, noting that dealers hoard their best wares all year just to display them at the show.
He said the show has a "laid-back New England feel to it," but also marvels, "I never saw an antiques show where people run" to get in.
When the doors opened at 10 a.m., hundreds raced to their favorite dealers, who set up in the same familiar booth location year in and year out.
Mike and Donna Perry of Woodstock, Ct., who recently retired as antiques dealers, were at the shop buying for their own personal doll collection. Mike Perry without hesitation bought a set of six tiny, primitive African-American dolls from Kathy Schoemer of Acworth for $575, as his wife selected a fabric doll in the same booth.
"When you love something and you've never seen it before, you pay the price," Perry said. He said pitfalls in the economy don't affect the level of collector who comes to this show.
First in line when the doors opened were Carol Kellogg of Hudson, Ohio and Terri Tushingham of Demarest, N.J. Both women said they approach the show with spending limits in mind, but wouldn't reveal their budgets.
"I don't stick to it sometimes," said Tushingham. Both women were in the market for primitives and other folk art.
Richard Plusch of North Conway, a show dealer who has been in the antiques business 42 years, has seen its ups and downs. "The last couple of years have been the most severe downs," he said. "Business is steady, but at a lesser level."
Those with disposable income in challenging economic times often are lured to antiques, Plusch said.
"People feel that rather than just having paper, they'd rather have things, so they do buy," Plusch said.
When the economy tanked in 2008, a friend called him to ask if Plusch still had an Oriental rug he'd been admiring. "I want my assets where I can see them," Plusch quoted the man as saying.
"It's a nerve-wracking time for all antiques dealers, because it's certainly discretionary spending," he said. "But the economy doesn't seem to be affecting some level of shoppers. People still have that need to collect so they're just dropping a zero from their purchases."
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. | <urn:uuid:62c8d24c-db51-4fca-b881-5a8ddf09ddf1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=49798&int_modo=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978255 | 1,465 | 1.578125 | 2 |
I love to read old books. The way books were published a hundred years ago fascinates me (and most of them are still in wonderful shape and will likely be readable for another hundred years, which makes them far superior to what we publish today.) The language in the books is also beautiful in ways that have evaporated over time; we don't talk like this anymore. Reading century-old books allows you to listen to the past as well as visit places that were important to their readers.
When I pick up an old novel, that saying always comes back to me: In a hundred years, will it matter? Did the author wonder that while writing this book? Did they hope someone on the other side of the century would read it?
Recently I found 3 hundred-year-old or better novels at a rare book store that I liked a lot, and I thought I'd write up my impressions of them:
A Spinner in the Sun by Myrtle Reed, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons/The Knickerbocker Press, 1909. Premise: Poverty drives spinster Evelina Grey back to her abandoned home 25 years after being disfigured in an explosion caused by her fiance (who she saved from also being burned up.) Said fiance showed his gratitude by marrying someone else.
Although the prose is definitely over-the-top dramatic, the story grabs you from the first chapter, when Evelina arrives home. On the surface it's a simple train-wreck plot -- burned/disfigured heroine comes home to face the ghosts of her past -- but then it starts getting very interesting. The story also has an amazing plot twist, which the Muses would never forgive me if I revealed, and frankly I never saw coming. It completely knocked my socks off, and you just don't expect a book to do that after 100 years to another experienced storyteller. Excellent book.
St. Elmo by Augusta J. Evans, published by Grosset & Dunlap, 1896. Sweet, perky twelve-year-old Edna Earl witnesses a duel, loses her only living elderly relative, and is in a train wreck (an actual/real one) from which she is rescued by a kindly couple and their ungrateful, nasty, suspicious son (whom they named St. Elmo.)
Some of the novels women authors wrote a hundred years ago were extremely dense, hefty reads, and St. Elmo is one of those. The author must have mainlined the Bronte sisters for a few years before starting out on her own writing career because I kept thinking "Jane Eyre knockoff." She's also very fond of the exclamation point. At the moment I'm working my way slowly through this one, which is a constant wade through over-descriptive passages and dialogue that consists mainly of indignant and declarative speeches -- but even that has some quaint appeal and charm. I haven't finished it yet so I can't give it a thumbs up or down, but I haven't put it aside, so after 113 years it still has staying power.
The Mistress of Shenstone by Florence L. Barclay, G.P. Putnam's Sons/The Knickerbocker Press, 1911 edition. While entertaining a local doctor at the Shenstone estate, slightly neurotic Lady Myra Ingleby learns that her husband Michael has been killed in an explosion during the war.
The Mistress of Shenstone must have been one of the novels that Barbara Cartland read; it has the same sweetness and wholesomeness to it. Everyone is so nice; my mother would love it. But it's also very readable, as if it were written just a couple of decades ago by some sweet romance writer like Cartland instead of 99 years ago (the first edition was published in 1910.) I liked this book a lot because it was elegantly written, all the characters have very good manners, and yet it still managed to keep me involved. I saw the plot twist coming early on -- the author didn't bother with veiling it too much -- but it's also a classic that I doubt will ever go out of style.
The sale pages Putnam put in the back of their novels a hundred years ago are funnier than hell now to read. Myrtle Reed actually has a page for another of her novels, Master of the Vineyard in the back of Florence's book, with this full-page blurb:
"A book of attractive plot, of pure morals, of lofty ideals, which deserve a reading by young and old. We take some pleasure in unequivocally asserting these qualities in Miss Reed's latest novel, because some of those arrogant coteries of unbaked thought, of narrow vision, of too utterly utter estheticism, and that bluestockingism which Moliére so well ridiculed, have affected to underwrite her ability as a writer. The indictment of sentimentality is heard from these bumptious dictators of the community's literary diversions. Miss Reed is not George Eliot, nor George Sand. She probably never pretended to be, and perhaps prefers not to be. She is not a preacher, but her books have a good purpose, are delightful in description, are irradiated with a glow of humor, and if sentimentalism be accepted as a good prescription, in proper doses they are admirable. In the present volume the publishers have outdone themselves in decoration on cover and pages. It is a sumptuous affair." -- Pittsburgh Leader
How would you like to have all that plastered on the front of your novel? Or maybe some tasteful excerpts: "[Not] Bluestockingism" "Too utterly utter" ". . . decoration on cover and pages . . . is a sumptuous affair!"
Myrtle, Augusta, and Florence, it's been a hundred years, and your books still matter -- at least to me. Thanks for some enjoyable time travel. | <urn:uuid:7026f3f9-e63c-4e0b-a132-0a52a3c5baaf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pbackwriter.blogspot.jp/2009/09/in-hundred-years.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976729 | 1,217 | 1.609375 | 2 |
November 16, 2012 |
WASHINGTON -- BP has accepted criminal responsibility for the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a move that it said has put the criminal part of one of the nation's worst environmental disasters in the rear-view mirror. Even if that is true, and the government has insisted that its criminal probe is ongoing, BP's troubles are far from over. On the horizon is a civil case that could cost the company billions of dollars more, as well as continuing concerns by lawmakers about how to safeguard the nation's environment and regulate a key industry.
May 24, 2010 |
The public-private response to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak showed more signs of strain Sunday as members of the Obama administration bashed BP's progress even as they acknowledged they had to rely on the oil giant's equipment and expertise to plug the blown-out well. In one of the harshest government condemnations of the company to date, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said BP had blown "deadline after deadline" and had not "fulfilled the mission it was supposed to fulfill." "I am angry and I am frustrated that BP has been unable to stop this oil from leaking and to stop the pollution from spreading," Salazar said at a Houston news conference.
June 4, 2010 |
In a sign that BP may be on the verge of subduing its uncontrolled well, oil started flowing through a containment cap into a drill ship Friday, even as President Obama chastised the company for launching a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign. As engineers gradually ramped up the flow to the ship Enterprise, cautious BP officials said it would be a day or more before they could judge how successful the cap was at containing the leak that is feeding the largest spill in U.S. history.
November 15, 2012 |
WASHINGTON - As a dramatic, 24-7 webcast showed oil gushing from BP's blown-out well during the spring and summer of 2010, Rep. Edward J. Markey suspected the oil giant was underestimating the amount of the spill. On Thursday, after BP agreed to pay a record $4.5 billion in penalties and fees and plead guilty to criminal misconduct, including lying to Congress to make the spill "appear less catastrophic than it was," the Massachusetts Democrat had this to say: "BP lied to me. And they lied to all Americans.
May 28, 2010 |
A team of top federal prosecutors and investigators has taken the first steps toward a formal criminal investigation into oil giant BP's actions before and after the drilling rig disaster off Louisiana. The investigators, who have been quietly gathering evidence in Louisiana over the last three weeks, are focusing on whether BP skirted federal safety regulations and misled the U.S. government by saying it could quickly clean up an environmental accident. The team has met with U.S. attorneys and state officials in the Gulf Coast region and has sent letters to executives of BP and Transocean Ltd., the drilling rig owner, warning them against destroying documents or other internal records.
January 13, 2012 |
Reporting from Washington -- Toyota Motor Corp. and Goldman Sachs were among the biggest gainers in brand image last year after a rough 2010 that saw each of them enmeshed in controversy, according to U.S. corporate brand rankings made by an online market research firm. More than 13 million product recalls in the U.S. related to sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles starting in 2009 pummeled Toyota's image in 2010, said YouGov, a British firm that tracks brand perception daily with a panel of 2.5 million people worldwide.
August 21, 2010 |
Federal investigators on Monday are expected to confront executives and managers of BP and rig owner Transocean Ltd. about catastrophic failures in oil well design and disabled safety systems that may have played a role in the deaths of 11 crewmen on the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon. The joint U.S. Coast Guard- Interior Department investigation into the April 20 blowout has amassed a trove of testimony during three previous hearings in Louisiana and this week moves to Houston, the hub of the nation's oil and gas industry, where BP and other firms linked to the disaster have offices.
August 5, 2010 |
BP's long and halting effort to bring an end to the Gulf of Mexico disaster crossed a key threshold Wednesday when the company packed its ruptured well full of heavy drilling mud, wresting control more than three months after the blowout unleashed one of the world's largest oil spills. But officials were not ready to declare dead the renegade offshore well, and many in the gulf region were not about to celebrate. "We have reached a static condition in the well that allows us to have high confidence that there will be no oil leaking into the environment," retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man on the spill, said at a White House news briefing.
May 13, 2010 |
There's good money to be made by grounded fishermen hired by BP to protect the Louisiana shoreline from the massive oil sneaking toward its marshes and beaches. But just who gets the job is a source of brewing tensions. Every day, hundreds of fishermen pile onto boats to lay reels of white and orange booms. In St. Bernard Parish, a crew member can make $36 an hour and a captain can make $46, plus $650 a day for the use of their boats. And that tally makes David Palmer, a 33-year-old fisherman with three kids, hopping mad. "It's so messed up it's not even funny," said Palmer, a fisherman here whose turn to earn that money doesn't come until next month.
June 18, 2010
Obama and the spill Re "Obama calls on nation to alter its ways," June 16, and " BP will create fund to pay claims," June 17 President Obama's speech from the Oval Office on the oil spill was by far the worst speech I have ever seen during a major national crisis. But his results from paying hardball with BP's oil leases in getting money for the American victims of the oil spill now are unprecedented. The victims of the Exxon Valdez spill had to wait 20 years to receive a pittance. | <urn:uuid:a0e08427-a127-4454-8ca2-f1e9af0dcc79> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/bp/featured/5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972586 | 1,263 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Postives and Negatives
With eight in 10 Americans now closely tuned in to the presidential campaign, the new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds shifting impressions of the leading candidates. Here's where things stand now.
Kudos to the Winners...
The public appears to have warmed up to each of the four candidates who've won key early contests. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama's strongly favorable rating has climbed 10 points, and with a 63 percent overall approval rating (up 12 points from November), he is the highest rated of all the main contenders.
Following Hillary Rodham Clinton's New Hampshire victory, her favorability rating has bumped up eight points: At 58 percent, Clinton is at her highest mark in Post-ABC polling since June of 1999, when she still served as First Lady.
Two-time New Hampshire winner John McCain zoomed to 59 percent favorable (a 16-point increase), and even better for the senator from Arizona, nearly all of that increase (14 points) came among those saying they feel strongly favorable towards him.
The GOP's Iowa victor, Mike Huckabee, doubled his favorability rating since November (from 21 percent to 42 percent), with much of this gain coming from increased awareness. Back then, half had no opinion of the former Arkansas governor, that number now stands at 20 percent. He's the only one of the four winners to post an increase on the negative side as well: his unfavorable rating rose eight points to 38 percent.
But A Mixed Bag for the Runners-Up...
Rudolph W. Giuliani's favorability rating appears to be following the same path as his support in national polls. At 46 percent, his rating falls below 50 percent for the first time in Post-ABC polling. Last December, amid speculation that he would run, the former mayor earned a 67 percent favorable rating, which at the time placed him higher than other candidates in the race. Now, after a year of campaigning mostly spent as the front-runner for his party's nomination, he no longer leads in votes or likability.
Even with disappointing second-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire under his belt, Mitt Romney has boosted his favorability six points to 34 percent. But there is also bad news for the former Massachusetts governor: his overall rating remains a net negative (46 percent unfavorable) and the percentage rating him unfavorably has risen by five points.
Fred Thompson's favorability rating has gotten markedly worse since November. Although the percentage rating him positively remains about the same (30 percent compared to 33 percent in November), the percentage giving a negative assessment has climbed eight points to 45 percent. About a quarter have no opinion on the former senator and Law and Order star.
The lone Democrat in this category, John Edwards, enjoys a higher favorability rating despite stagnant support levels in the latest Post-ABC national poll. The former senator?s favorability rating reached a new high in Post-ABC polling: 57 percent. About a third rate the 2004 vice presidential candidate unfavorably, unchanged since November.
To be successful in the general election, the candidates will have to appeal to one key segment of voters, independents. Here's a look at how each candidate is doing among the nation's "non-partisans."
|Candidate favorability among independents:|
|Favorable Jan. 2008||Favorable Nov. 2007||Change|
|Hillary Rodham Clinton||59||49||+10|
Full question text and methodlogy for the poll can be found here.
The comments to this entry are closed. | <urn:uuid:42668d10-775c-4281-a9ea-386ca547aa6b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://voices.washingtonpost.com/behind-the-numbers/2008/01/postives_and_negatives.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959548 | 728 | 1.515625 | 2 |
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey businesses would be spared a sudden major boost in the unemployment tax under legislation that calls for it to be phased in to help restore the state’s depleted unemployment insurance fund.
The Senate Labor Committee approved a bill Thursday that would spread the $750 million tax increase over three years.
“For the business community this bill is very positive and forward-thinking,” said a co-sponsor, Sen. Fred Madden of Turnersville. “It will over the next three years let business owners have predictability.”
In a rare display of bipartisan agreement, lawmakers from both parties recognized the need for a gradual tax rate increase while businesses recover from the recession. Unemployment remains at 9.3 percent, and small businesses report that they are still laying off, not hiring, workers.
The unemployment tax rate is set automatically by how much the fund has in reserve in March of each year. Because the fund has no reserve this year, and New Jersey is one of many states borrowing from the federal government to meet its unemployment claims, employers face the maximum tax rate increase possible, about $177 more per employee, if the Legislature doesn’t act.
The bill under consideration lowers the amount of the increase to about $58 more per employee, on average, on July 1, according to the most recent estimate from the Office of Legislative Services, the Legislature’s research arm. Businesses that lay off workers frequently are assessed a higher per employee tax than those that don’t.
Next year’s increase would be about $76 per worker. The business community endorsed the proposal. Michael Egenton of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce said the bill averts “sticker shock” to businesses.
“Yes, your taxes are going up, incrementally, but it could have been a lot worse—you could have gotten a larger tax increase,” he said.
New Jersey has borrowed more than $1.6 billion so far from the federal government to pay unemployment claims.
The fund went broke, in large part, because more than $4 billion was diverted from it to other programs, like hospital charity care.
One provision in the bill requires larger reserves to be built up before employer taxes are reduced. Voters last year approved a constitutional amendment banning future raids of the fund.
The full Assembly unanimously passed the bill Monday. It next moves to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
(© Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.) | <urn:uuid:37b8b5de-0629-46cc-9eeb-51e1544fe9be> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2011/05/12/new-jersey-businesses-may-be-spared-steep-tax-jump/ | 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 | 0.95464 | 536 | 1.53125 | 2 |
The last week of August Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar visited Russia with a series of lectures and seminars. They were invited by »Chto Delat?« (»What is to be done?«), the group of Russian intellectuals and artists, who combain in their practice theory, art and political activism. This visit was organized as a summer educational program, open for everyone, and produced a lot of interest and extremely heated debates. Oxana Timofeeva, a part of »Chto Delat?« and a main organizer of this educational program, asked Slavoj Zizek for questions, seemingly from withing Russian current political context. This dialog is a kind of postscriptum to Zizek's Russian trip.
O.T. In one of your papers you refer to China, where, if you really hate someone, the curse to fling at them is: “May you live in interesting times!” We are now in Russia definitely living in «interesting times», when the entire society basically transforms into opposition toward the state power, and the variety of positions are sharing a certain «common ground», which consists of a kind of cultural confrontation. There is a huge demand for a dialog between, for example, our traditional liberal intelligencia and a younger generation of political left. What do you think about possible perspective of such a dialog? Does it make sense at all? It seems that we have an enemy in common, a personalised autocratic state power, but I think, for a real dialog, this is not enough, one needs something else. | <urn:uuid:7e82f858-9379-407a-a0fe-3128c389170f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=217&Itemid=350&lang=en | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956914 | 327 | 1.703125 | 2 |
The New York Times has just published a story in its Sunday Magazine that managed, in a thousand words or so, both to tell something good about Midwestern kids and to display what's wrong with most writing about American farming.
The story featured Alexandra Reau, a 14-year-old girl in Petersburg, Mich., who has developed a nice business growing all manner of vegetables and herbs in her family's yard and selling them directly to people in the neighborhood. Alexandra is part of the CSA (community-supported agriculture) movement that aims to get fresh produce to customers who pay a flat fee for regularly-delivered boxes of fruits and vegetables. Alexandra sounds like a bright, sweet and ambitious girl, making money for college while learning about plants and how they grow.
Andrea, say the Times, is a "quiet honor student with demurely made-up eyes." And then it asks, gratuitously, "Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?"
Well, everybody who knows anything about American farming, that's who. It should be possible to write about a nice kid growing tomatoes and zucchini in her backyard without succumbing to the urban bias to demonize the people who grow most of America's food. But the Times, as usual, succumbed.
Writing on farming these days seems to descend from the twin peaks of Times Square and Berkeley, home of the locavore guru, Alice Waters, and her best-selling acolyte, Michael Pollan. Which is to say that the national conversation on food goes on over the heads of most Americans who grow it and most Americans who eat it.
Let me be clear. I have no beef with local farming, small farming, niche farming, sustainable farming -- even organic farming, so long as no one claims that organic food actually tastes better. I love farmers' markets and faithfully prowl two or three of them in Chicago every week. I ate in Chez Panisse, Waters' Berkeley restaurant, and had a swell meal. I've read Pollan's books and admire them for the writing, if not the logic. Especially, I salute serious young small farmers like Alexandra Reau and hope she thrives.
But to mistake any of this for the real future of farming, here or anywhere else, is to simply get the story wrong. Which, unfortunately, is what the Times does.
Farming is big business, and that's good. This fact offends many people, especially city-dwellers who've never been on a real farm, but it's true. Farms have been getting bigger and the number of farmers smaller for a century, as technology makes it possible for single farmers to farm ever bigger spreads. Basically, farms have been doubling in size every generation, and there's no reason to think this will stop soon.
The number of American farms has fallen by a third, from 3 million to 2 million, since 1970: the Midwest itself has only half as many now as it did then. Two million farms sounds like a lot, but 1.8 million of them bring in less than $100,000 per year in total sales, with an average income of only $20,000.
Some of these small farms, most of them near cities, cater to farmers' markets or sell "niche" products like ostrich meat or artisinal cheeses to restaurants and urban stores. But most are hobby farms, owned by part-time farmers who earn their real incomes in town. Alexandra's father is a carpenter and her mother a farm extension worker for Michigan State: nobody says she is supporting her family.
The number of these small farms is growing, propelled by the popularity of farmers' markets and projects like the CSA movement. This is great. If we upscale city-dwellers want super-fresh produce and are willing to pay the higher prices it costs, then these little farms will proliferate.
But those who romance them, like the Times writers, should recognize two facts of life:
(1) These are small, relatively inefficient farms, and the food they produce costs more. This means their market is limited to the affluent. Most people will keep on getting their food from Jewel, Meijers, Hi-Vee or (gasp!) Wal-Mart, which sells produce that is perfectly adequate and a lot cheaper.
(2) Most food will be produced by big farms, especially the so-called mega-farms, 2,000 acres or more. This is because agriculture, like every other business, is part of the global economy. Small local providers, in farming and other businesses, will find small local markets. But the real world -- in farming, autos, computer chips -- belongs to big producers.
If farms under 200 acres are growing in number, so-called "commercial" farms, with a couple of thousand acres and average annual sales of $700,000 also are increasing. There are only about 140,000 of them, about 7 percent of the total, but they produce fully 68 percent of all U.S. farm output, according to USDA statistics.
In the middle are the traditional family farms, the mom-and-pop operations that most Americans think of when they picture rural life. These are the farms of a few hundred acres split between corn and soybeans, with some cattle, pigs and chickens on the side. These farms make $100,000 to $250,000 per year -- too big to be hobby farms, too small to compete in the global market. Their number is shrinking by the year.
It must be stressed that almost all the 140,000 mega-farms also are family farms, in that they are owned and often operated by families, not corporations. These are rich families with heavily capitalized operations that depend on contracts with the big corporations, like Cargill or ADM, for both inputs (seed, fertilizer, calves, pesticides) and output (sales).
So why is this good?
Is this big ag inherently evil, as Waters and Pollan and their kind would tell us? Just the opposite. These big farmers are in charge of feeding the world. Globalization has added some 3 billion hungry mouths to the markets that these farmers serve. It is a huge task and only big farms, linked to big agribusiness, can do it.
Not very romantic, granted. Critics like Pollan find it offensive. But those who want to break up these farms, who want to get rid of genetically-modified foods and pesticides, who want a world without agribusiness, who think that small farmers like Alexandra can fill the gap, are making a very cogent argument for mass starvation.
In a world of increasing incomes, when more and more people want to eat meat, and when these incomes happen to be rising in places (like China and India) without the land or other resources to totally feed themselves, it's these big farm operations that will do the job. It is a noble job, as important as any job on the planet. For any tenured professor in Berkeley or feature writer in Manhattan to disparage these farmers is simply disgraceful.
With all regard for Alexandra, she is not the future of American farming -- perhaps only a small part of it, but no more. That 57-year-old guy in the John Deere cap is more representative: as the Des Moines Register has reported, many farmers are in their 50s or 60s and will soon be retiring: perhaps some have children who will take over the farm. More likely, it will be sold to another big farmer next door, once again doubling the size of average farms.
Actually, I'd bet the real future farmer of America is Clay Mitchell, a Harvard grad in his mid-30s who farms his family's 2,400 acres in eastern Iowa virtually on automatic pilot. Mitchell works with Deere and other manufacturers to hitch GPS and real-time-kinetmatic guidance technology to his tractors, harvesters and other machinery. Computer-guided tractors can drive themselves. Sensors build into machinery communicate moisture, acidity and yield measurements minute by minute, row by row, acre by acre.
This high-tech farming produces two major results. One is increased yields, up to 20 or 30 percent more per acre, a vital statistic in a hungry world. The other is minimized damage to the soil: Mitchell calculates that the precision of his instrumentation enables him to cut nitrogen use by 30 percent, herbicides by 20 percent.
This illustrates that these big farms -- factory farms, if you will -- are both cause and cure of the major ills of modern agriculture. All these farms rely on chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers and other potential pollutants to raise yields and standardize quality. These materials damage the land, pollute rivers, are poisoning runoff areas like the Gulf of Mexico. More pollution comes from big cattle and hog farms, with their manure spills. Big farming, which is necessary to feed the world, is not sustainable unless this problems is solved.
As Clay Mitchell is showing, modern technology can minimize this damage. More evidence comes from big cattle operations like Fair Oaks, in northern Indiana, where the manure from its 30,000 cows produces ethane that powers the whole farm. Across the Midwest, researchers in land grant colleges are working with industry to develop fertilizers and herbicides that increase yields while reducing pollution.
It's possible to wish Alexandra well while recognizing the limits of farmers like her. If niche farmers and organic farming could feed the world, our problem would be solved. But they can't. What I really wish for Alexandra that her small business pays for her to go to college and join the ranks of other Midwesterners, the true descendants of Norman Borlaug, who are working to create a better and better-fed world. | <urn:uuid:9bf5d612-022e-4baa-9197-b9dc61453ba1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://globalmidwest.typepad.com/global-midwest/2010/07/the-real-future-of-farming.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957175 | 2,025 | 1.664063 | 2 |
For starters, you need to understand that the vehicle fleet management software is not just there to provide precautionary repair exercises. Software used in fleet management today have so many functions including tracking accounts and setting up proper contact with truckers. In essence, the software can also simplify administrative duties of a trucking company. It is generally responsible for keeping the entire administration informed of all the fleet operations going on throughout the day.
The vehicle fleet management software should also help in proper upkeep of automotive vehicles. Trucking companies cannot afford any form of carelessness when it comes to maintenance. If the fleet maintenance program cannot plan for maintenance in a proper manner and ensure that these plans are complied with, serious incidences like injuries and motor accidents may occur. The vehicle might be damaged to an extent that it will require costly repairs. This is a great loss to a trucking company. The best fleet management software will keep track of each car in the fleet. The fleet maintenance application should also keep track of cars as they arrive for repairs and maintenance to ensure that the schedules are followed properly.
Trucking companies usually have some vehicles under restoration. The fleet maintenance application must keep updated details of the condition of such vehicles. This allows the company to plan properly once it knows when the car will be good enough to get back on the road. It can even start budgeting for a replacement once it is shown that the destruction is too serious and the car cannot be back on the road.
The fleet management software can also provide routing and mileage. This is a very important feature as it helps drivers to minimize the time spent traveling by providing the shortest and best path, which minimizes the period of travel. In the long run, it is a major way that trucking companies use to save a lot of revenue. They can also improve on their customer service since once the details or estimations of travel periods are calculated, the delivery time will be given accurately.
The fleet maintenance application should also provide some driver log auditing services. This basically means that the software should keep track of some crucial information of every vehicle in the fleet. This can include the amount of time and mileage traveled, the depreciation costs per mileage, and traffic violations.
The company should never be required to invest a lot of money on training their personnel how to use the fleet management software. In fact, the software provider should provide some level of free training to your employees as an incentive.
Kelly Alexander is the author of this article on Fleet Management Software.
- Related Articles
- Related ArticlesManagement of type 2 diabetes is concerned about reducing the blood sugar level by strictly following the diet planned by a dietitian and a regular exercise program. Typically, the initial oral medication may...Book of Ra is Germany’s favorite slot machine game. Millions of players perform this game on arcade devices, among buddies on tablet PCs, in offices and on college computers. Beginners play to gain...For increasing visibility of a website on major search engines, you may need different types of innovative functions. Serving customers online is quite popular as well as familiar among people. This is the...Education is very important for an individual. It is a dream of every student to finish their schooling for getting into a new & innovative course. There are many professional and vocational courses ...Is your current core claims system constraining your business? Small modifications and changes can begin to amount to large dollars being spent in IT on claims system adjustments, because completely replacing...
- Latest Articles
- Latest ArticlesNowadays, the technical knowledge is vital to get job in the industry. The students are going for the various courses to get trained in the technical field. But have you wondered which courses are ideal for...So many emails have poured in asking for a sub-penny alert that I have been scouring the OTC markets all week for a beast in the sub-penny range and I have found one that is perfect. I’m excited to present...Research reveals that about 90% of those watching time shifted shows skip ads; however, TV still remains the most effective method of advertising. To make the most of TV ads, there are facts anyone buying ...There are a number of businesses carrying out their activities and earning money. All the entrepreneurs are well aware of the importance of marketing as well as promotion of a business. Because of this ,...Is it not necessary to keep these valuable mobiles under great care and control? Now we shall see some of the common accessories that you generally need. Hold on, I'll get to this and apparently, I'm on easy... | <urn:uuid:b1489025-9ae1-4bc2-810f-9d7581c87c32> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/Attributes-of-Quality-Vehicle-Fleet-Management-Software.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960972 | 928 | 1.75 | 2 |
Just to correct something:
The SSI tables are not straight-up navy tables, they're based on Doppler studies, and thus considered "more conservative" than the navy tables.
There are a number of versions of the tables out there, all of them are at best approximations, and just because a dive profile puts you one column over in remaining nitrogen time, doesn't mean much at all. Your instructor should know that! I wouldn't worry about it -- if you look into it, the difference will only be a few minutes either way.
Another way to look at it is compare it to using a computer: there are different algorithms used among computers, just like there are different tables. If you and your buddy have different computers, and they indicate a slightly different RNT, does that mean one is defective?
Finally, unless you are descending vertically to a fixed depth that happens to be on the chart, staying there, and then ascending straight up, the chart has a built-in "penalty", and will be more conservative than a computer. That's the main reason I like using a computer -- no silly penalties for normal multi-level diving.
If you are really worried about it, as you should be for instance, if you have some condition that pre-disposes you to DCI, then I recommend buying a computer that allows you to program in an extra safety margin, and use it. The Suunto computers, for instance, use an algorithm based on "micro bubble" research that gets imncreasingly more conservative for multiple repetetive dives on the same day, and you can program them to provide an increased level of conservatism.
To me the most worrisome thing about the experience you describe is the reaction of your instructor -- obviously not very knowledgeable about scuba. | <urn:uuid:79f3dbde-81dd-4699-9b2a-956d189110a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.scuba.com/scubaforums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=7075 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954888 | 371 | 1.664063 | 2 |
GUNNISON — Recent livestock mutilations have Gunnison-area ranchers shaken and on the alert for more strange attacks on cattle and horses.
In recent weeks, a horse was shot and had its head skinned at the LeValley Ranch property, which is part of the Esty Ranch holdings, about 8 miles east of Gunnison. The horse also had its tongue and anus removed.
Less than two months ago, a prize heifer in the same heavily traveled area just off Colorado 50 and Colorado 114 had its tongue, lips and anus removed.
"To me, it looks like a ritualistic issue. Either that, or they are high on drugs. There is just no logical explanation for it," said Esty Ranch owner Mike Clarke.
Two other incidents took place on other ranches in that vicinity in May and July.
The four mutilations have prompted the Gunnison County Stockgrowers Association to offer a $500 reward for any information that will lead to a conviction. The Colorado State Patrol has also been alerted to watch for strange activities in that area. The Gunnison County Sheriff's Office, the agency investigating the mutilations, did not return phone calls asking for comment.
Clarke's ranch foreman, Allen Roper, told the Gunnison Country Times that the mutilated animals appeared to be shot, but no bullets were found and that the mutilations were done with knives and were not a result of predators.
The recent mutilations have similarities to mutilations that occurred in the 1960s in neighboring Saguache County. The most famous incident was reported in 1967 when a horse that became known as Snippy had its head and neck skinned. As in the most recent cases, there was no blood at the scene or tracks. The mutilations were never solved.
In 2009, a San Luis Valley rancher found four calves with their tongues sliced out, udders removed, eyes cored and faces skinned. Those cases were never solved, and there also was no blood or tracks around those animals.
Clarke said if there is another incident, he expects "the ranching community will really be up in arms."
"What concerns us," he said, "is what they are going to do next?"
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957, [email protected] or twitter.com/nlofholm | <urn:uuid:dd6f3cc9-8872-45e2-95b9-a706c67c6618> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_21259289/livestock-mutilations-shake-up-gunnison-area-ranching-community?source=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97801 | 498 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Achieving big goals is nothing new for Stacy Allison.
As the first American woman to climb Mount Everest, Alison has literally reached the top of the world, and she will share her story and the lessons she has learned on Thursday when she visits Chattanooga as the keynote speaker for the seventh annual Leadership Address to the Community hosted by the Chattanooga Women's Leadership Institute.
Allison took up climbing in college and quickly progressed in the sport, reaching the top of several of the world's highest peaks before making the more-than-29,000-foot summit of Everest in 1988.
Allison said that the experience of climbing Everest was one she'll never forget, but that she has little desire to return to the mountain that has seen more and more climbers in recent years.
"Everest is a beautiful mountain, but there are so many mountains in the world to climb," she said by phone. "Back when I climbed Everest nobody was guiding the mountain, so there weren't the hoards that are there now. You really had to be a climber to climb Everest back then."
Allison continues to climb, but family considerations keep her from attempting the more dangerous mountains these days. She runs the residential construction company she founded in Portland, Ore., and speaks to groups about the lessons in leadership that she has learned both in climbing and in business.
"I tell stories about what I learned from climbing," she said. "Many of the skills that I needed to climb Everest can be used by anyone to improve their everyday life."
Thursday's event will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the Chattanooga Convention Center with a dinner before remarks by Allison. Some tickets may still be available for $65, and more information can be found online at www.cwli.org or by calling 423-394-8173.
Jim Tanner has worked as assistant sports editor at the Times Free Press since late 2006. He started at the Times Free Press in 2001 and worked as a news copy/design editor from 2001 through 2006. In addition to working as a night and weekend editor producing local and national sports coverage for print and online readers, Jim occasionally writes local sports and outdoors stories. Jim grew up in Ringgold, Ga., and is a graduate ... | <urn:uuid:e781950a-7153-4a91-848f-6cbd13b45ba0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://timesfreepress.com/news/2012/feb/20/allison-tells-of-climbs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978984 | 460 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Does anyone remember the Enron scandal and George Bush's ex-best friend Ken Lay? How about WorldCom-the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history? It is hard to stay focused on corporate crime in America when our nation's leaders put the country on a war path.
But there is a connection between Iraq and Enron that should not be overlooked. It is precisely that the drumbeat for war drowns out the clink of handcuffs locking around American business leaders' wrists. It's the fact that the heady rush of patriotism helps mask the hangover of a bubble economy gone bust.
We're not saying that President Bush's call to attack Iraq is strictly a slight of hand to distract the American public from the plethora of domestic problems plaguing his presidency. But at minimum, the looming war with Iraq presents the opportunity for Bush to duck the corporate scandals and reframe the national debate.
We should be at a political crossroads today, discussing issues that are central to the health and well being of the American people. We should be looking for ways to foster real corporate accountability at home. We should be debating how best to build a more just global economic order. And in the name of national security we should be working aggressively to kick the oil habit, while developing environmentally sound renewable energy.
Instead we seem to be perched at the edge of an abyss from which we risk spiraling into a never-ending cycle of war, terrorism, and the evisceration of our democratic rights. Why is Washington risking a morass that might plague the nation and the world for the foreseeable future?
There are no simple or complete answers. But one thing is patently obvious. It's a three-letter word: OIL.
Invading Iraq and taking over its oil fields is a logical, yet totally insane extension of the Bush administration's foreign policy doctrine. For instance, Bush's unilateralism with regard to attacking Iraq (he has been dragged kicking and screaming to the UN security council) is thoroughly consistent with -- and connected to -- the unilateralism he exhibited when he pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
By bailing on Kyoto, Bush, at the behest of the oil industry, dropped out of a treaty designed to save us from the mass destruction of climate change by moving the world away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy. And if he invades Iraq, Bush further entrenches the deadly connection between US interests and oil interests.
George Bush and Dick Cheney form an axis of oil that sits at the apex of world power. Indeed, they define national security as access to oil. A "successful" war in Iraq could renew US access to oil reserves nearly as large as Saudi Arabia's; this could break the back of OPEC, while providing a bonanza for Bush and Cheney's American and British oil company friends at Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, Chevron-Texaco, Shell and BP.
But such "success" in Iraq --in addition to the huge toll in immediate human casualties -- will also seriously undermine national and global security. One of the ways it will do so will be to further lock the world into energy consumption patterns that broad scientific consensus has determined will deepen global warming and all its impacts.
In essence, the Bush administration's definition of national security serves US corporate interests, allowing some to profit and others to hide. Beyond this, it is not at all clear who else, if anyone, might benefit from this axis of oil.
Maria Elena Martinez is the Executive Director of and Joshua Karliner is Senior Adviser to CorpWatch-a San Francisco based organization working to hold corporations accountable. | <urn:uuid:b74bce0b-dd47-48fa-bdd8-c832338d4d3c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=4508 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935562 | 737 | 1.546875 | 2 |
September 9, 2005
Virginia Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine paid a visit to Charlottesville on Friday in his bid for governor, and he wasn't alone.
Kaine brought along North Carolina Senator John Edwards. The two toured the Barrett Early Learning Center along Ridge Street, the oldest pre-school in the city.
One of Kaine's issues focuses on early childhood education. As governor, Kaine wants to expand existing programs in Virginia so every four-year-old will have the option of one year of pre-K.
"I'm going around the state and looking at some of the programs that are working. Barrett is one of the oldest we can find. It's been in existence since the 1930s, and I think we've got a lot to learn from those that are successful," said Kaine.
"The ideas that are being used not only in this campaign but here in this facility are an example. So, I'm glad to be here and very proud to be supporting this good man to be the next governor of Virginia," said Edwards.
Edwards is also expected to attend a fundraiser for Kaine in Charlottesville Friday.
|There are currently no active polls at this time.
Click here to view other polls on our site and past poll results. | <urn:uuid:9c11c39c-3c3d-4d1f-b1dc-4201d0153afd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newsplex.com/home/headlines/1834942.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983613 | 254 | 1.59375 | 2 |
The Showdown Over NATGAS
A favorite investment play among retail investors with an interest in Washington in the past few years has been a bill that would subsidize cars and trucks that use natural gas as fuel, as well as the special service stations needed to refuel them.
The New Alternative Transportation to Give American Solutions, or NATGAS, Act is about backing away from imported oil as fuel for vehicles and instead employing abundant domestic natural gas. It is the sole surviving element of the Pickens Plan, introduced with great fanfare by T. Boone Pickens in 2008. The Oklahoma-born billionaire has been barnstorming the country continuously since then, posting on Facebook and appearing on cable television, including the financial networks, to promote his pet plan for U.S. energy independence. Pickens can make certain stocks move with every media appearance....643 more words left in this article. To read them, just click below and try Real Money FREE for 14 days.
There’s no substitute for a trading floor to get great ideas, so Jim Cramer created a better one at Real Money and blogs there exclusively. We then added legendary hedge fund manager, Doug Kass, with his exclusive Daily Diary and best investing ideas. Staffed with more than 4 dozen investing pros, money managers, journalists and analysts, Real Money Pro gives you a flood of opinions, analysis and actionable trading advice found nowhere else, and allows you to interact directly with each expert.
Already a Subscriber? Please login. | <urn:uuid:7f7f734d-c97f-4490-90f9-3e79b6baa1cb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://realmoneypro.thestreet.com/articles/03/13/2012/showdown-over-natgas | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939269 | 304 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Tea Party Organizations Nationwide are supporting protests at this time. If you can't go, write a letter or call the local office to express your opinion. We support government integrity, fiscal responsibility and free markets.
The national campaign has over 400 chapters/affiliates across the country. The purpose of the campaign and the Bloomington chapter is to inform and engage the public and Congressional Representatives to end the war and U.S. occupation of Iraq.
To congregate activists, experts, and scholars to brainstorm, discuss research projects, and exchange ideas in hope of bridging the gulf between disparate academic disciplines and subfields. Topics to be discussed are intended to focus on problems forming the world between now and the next 50 years.
Regina Moore, Bloomington's current City Clerk, first conceived the idea of a Democratic Women's Caucus during the local 2003 campaigns. She and Susan Sandberg were the only women to run on the city's ballot in 2003. Moore ran for and was reelected City Clerk.
The right to chose who governs us is one of the most dearly held American traditions. It is the foundation of our system of government. It is also why the Monroe County Democratic Party believes that every voter is important in every election, and why our Party encourages every citizen to exercise his or her right to vote.
The ACLU of Indiana is the Indiana affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is dedicated to protecting the freedoms guaranteed to Indiana residents and businesses by the Indiana and United States Constitutions.
Alex LoCicero (Bloomington Student Chapter Contact) | <urn:uuid:9baaa0d8-f74e-48fe-a47f-1b78cb7984b8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.monroe.lib.in.us/category/community-organization-subjects/political-organizations | 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 | 0.955158 | 320 | 1.765625 | 2 |
This Fall the widget wars will move into high gear. The battle for the desktop is about to begin. And with Longhorn's XAML technology lurking in the distance (and Apple's Dashboard), widgets are likely to deliver a whole new era of desktop customization.
Widgets are essentially mini-applications that live on your desktop. What makes widgets different is that they tend to use less overhead by relying on an existing set of libraries that handle the drawing. As a result, widget developers don't tend to have to worry much about drawing their their content. This means that widgets are usually irregularly shaped and very cool looking.
The other thing that makes widgets special is that because there is usually an underlying set of libraries that handle a lot of the drawing which enables non-programmers can make them.
In the "old days" a software developer would create a program that happened to be skinnable and then skinners could come in and create graphics to skin it. Now, with widgets, the skinners become the developers.
Widget makers can often use scripting languages such as VB Script or Java script as their language. Others use a programming language (such as C++) to make "plugins" that serve as the widget. And a few can even do both.
For the purposes of this discussion I'm going to focus on 5 programs. And bear in mind, I work for Stardock which makes one of these (DesktopX) so while I'm trying to be fair to all, I'm more familiar with DesktopX. It is my hope that users will gain interest in this new evolution of desktop customization (i.e. widgets, no matter whose widgets, are good). It also means I'm going not going to talk about any perceived downsides. I'm going to focus purely on what makes them good.
The 5 programs I'll focus on are DesktopX, AveDesk, Samurize, Konfabulator, and Kapsules.
What's nice about widgets is that they can be used interchangeably. It's not like GUI skinning where you can only be running one at a time. A Samurize widget can be used with an Avedesk widget for instance without any problems. It's not an all or nothing scenario scenario.
DesktopX is the oldest of the group (released around 5 years old) which is both an advantage and disadvantage. It's an advantage because it has built up the largest user base over the years. It's a disadvantage because for most of its existence, it targeted Windows 95, 98, and later ME which aren't really suited for having desktop enhancements. The compromises made in DesktopX 1.x made it unappealing to some people.
DesktopX 2 changed that. DesktopX 2, which was redesigned for Windows XP, is relatively new and has a lot of cutting edge features. DesktopX exports its widgets as actual EXEs which makes them the ultimate in ease of use for end users. And widgets can still be imported into a DesktopX environment for modification and tweaking.
Some DesktopX widgets.
Some of DesktopX's advantages include:
- Integrated COM/ActiveX support. Your ActiveX controls (browsers, Office apps, Quicktime, Media Player) are treated like any other object.
- Unique animation engine. Just put a strip of images together, tell DesktopX how many frames there are and the speed and you have a fluid animation.
- It can be configured from a GUI.
- It includes a plugin model and a lot of plugins
- It can export its content as EXEs.
- It can be used to build desktops (so it competes both as a widget making program as well as a shell enhancer ala Hoverdesk or Talisman).
- Huge library of objects/widgets to draw on.
- Very easy to install/use widgets (just double click on them and they will run and add themselves to your widget/object library).
Konfabulator's future on the Mac has been made a bit murky because of Apple's decision to include Dashboard, a similar technology due for release as part of MacOS Tiger. Dashboard, while not quite the same, delivers much the same end result. Most of us who follow this market are convinced Apple saw the popularity of Konfabulator and decided to copy it as a concept. Apple's defenders have tried to retroactively give credit for widgets to Apple in the form of desktop accessories from 1984. A claim I consider absurd. But no matter what, the net result is that things might get tight for Konfabulator on the Mac. But how it might do on Windows remains unclear with so much entrenched competition.
Konfabulator widget examples:
Very straight forward in what it does: It makes widgets. No other focuses.
Can sit down and work on a single file (the .kon file) to create the widget.
Very high quality widgets included
Quality over quantity
On the Mac, it's really the only game in town until Tiger.
Very good marketing - it gets more press attention than the others combined.
Widgets (mac version) easy to use/run, just double click on them and they run.
Samurize is a VBScript run-time engine that includes powerful development tools for creating widgets. It also includes a great deal of functionality that can be easily plugged in. So if Samurize's developers have already thought of a widget feature (such as CPU meters) it becomes very very easy to make that kind of widget. And if they haven't added it, then it's just a matter of writing the VBScript or other code to get the functionality.
This means that Samurize is much easier than most of the other widget making programs to create some of the common widgets. It is really the leading app for creating system monitoring based widgets because it is so good as making such widgets easy for skinners.
Samurize Widget examples:
Advantages of Samurize:
The best widget development environment. The result is that it makes it much easier for skinners to create a series of widgets that go together. Note to developers - promote your editor more. This is your ace in the hole.
Fairly large library of widgets.
Lots of easy, built in system/network monitoring features.
No nonsense focus. It's not trying to deliver pretty but useless junk, it is for people who want to put useful monitoring things on their desktop with a minimum of fuss.
AveDesk is best described as docklets on the desktop. In fact, AveDesk doesn't call its widgets widgets but instead "Desklets" which I think is a better name than widgets. So I should probably explain what the heck a docklet is.
A docklet is typically a plugin for a dock program such as ObjectDock or Y'z dock. Imagine in a dock sitting at the bottom edge of your desktop with a CPU meter or weather monitor or clock.
AveDesk's author, Andreas, is one of the leading docklet developers out there. So taking these docklets and making them free-floating on the desktop is a fairly natural move. And best of all, it's compatible with ObjectDock docklets so all those ObjectDock docklets on WinCustomize.com can be used as widgets on your desktop as well. And so ObjectDock's popularity actually feeds into AveDesk's popularity (which is ironic since ObjectDock is made by Stardock who makes DesktopX and DesktopX can't use ObjectDock docklets as widgets at this time).
A lot of AveDesk's content is "borrowed" from Konfabulator graphic-wise (another reason why Konfabulator may have some trouble if there's a Windows version - it's going to be competing with its own content) (dwl: I am going by the screenshots I found on-line of how people are using it when compared to the screenshots of how people are using the others).
AveDesk widget (desklet) examples:
Advantages of AveDesk
ObjectDock docklets can be used as desktop widgets
Each desklet is essentially a skinnable application in itself (so third parties can actually make skins for existing widgets as opposed to creating a whole new widget).
While few widgets, widgets tend to be quite nice looking
Cool widget labeling features
Kapsules is the new kid on the block and it makes no bones about being similar to Konfabulator. It is, essentially, Konfabulator for Windows already in terms of functionality.
Kapsules does require users to download and install the .NET framework which does limit some users from using it. But the .NET libraries allow Kapsules to have more functionality out of the box (since it's being coded by one person, this demonstrates the power of .NET).
Advantages of Kapsules:
Strong focus: It makes widgets, that's it.
Very clean underlying design
Relatively simple to add widgets (drag the folders with the .widget extension into the widgets folder)
Unusually good documentation
So there you have it. These are the programs that have become popular for making widgets on the desktop. They can be used interchangeably. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. All of them have reasonably low hardware requirements. Widgets almost always use less memory than a stand alone program would. And each has their own loyal following who will tell you that their choice is the greatest thing since sliced bread. | <urn:uuid:8c04134e-8484-4478-9869-27443e373c35> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://frogboy.joeuser.com/article/27014 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947792 | 1,971 | 1.757813 | 2 |
All Nippon Airways (ANA) seems to have a strange fascination with bathrooms. Back in October, the airline publicly asked customers to hit the restroom before boarding, in an effort to minimize aircraft weight and shorten lines for the onboard loo.
Now the airline is making waves again, by announcing it will designate ladies-only bathrooms aboard its aircraft. Today in the Sky reports that ANA will declare one restroom, generally located in the aft, to be women's-only. Women's-only bathrooms will be present on all but its smaller planes, such as its Boeing 737s and Airbus 319s, even when they are flying longer routes. ANA says the decision follows "numerous requests from passengers."
Men will be permitted to use the facilities under certain circumstances, including:
- When required for safety reasons, just prior to the seat belt sign being turned on during take-off and landing.
- When a passenger is not feeling well and a personal emergency requires such use.
- When there are very few female passengers and the women-only designation has been lifted for the flight (an in-flight announcement will be made in such cases).
This move begs an obvious question: Is this really necessary? And if so, why only one bathroom? Why not split all the restrooms 50/50 between men's and women's facilities? I'm a bit baffled by the whole thing so I can't honestly venture a guess, but what do you think? Is ANA just trying to instigate a battle of the sexes? | <urn:uuid:0c4d7ac1-c69a-4637-b826-1ff6da382072> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smartertravel.com/blogs/today-in-travel/airline-makes-some-bathrooms-ladies-only.html?id=4404714 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968144 | 312 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Bring on the mojitos!!!!! Cuba is the land of rum, cigars and communism. The best thing about travelling to Cuba for me is that it remains an uncluttered and "real" paradise. You will find no McDonalds commercialism here and you can still buy souvenirs for under $10. Cuba has survived more than 40 years of US sanctions intended to topple the government of Fidel Castro. It also defied predictions that it would not survive the collapse of its one-time supporter, the Soviet Union. It's people are survivors and the country offers its own brand of flavour and beauty.
Cuba is a spectacular country, with beautiful and very warm loving people. Most tourists will go to the all inclusive resort areas such as Varadero, Jardines del Rey (Cayo Coco, Cayo Guillermo) or Holguin. My best advice to you as always is to travel around the country, stay in a Casa Particular, where you will be a guest in a Cuban family's home. Have dinner in the Paladares, small private restaurants, and talk to the Cuban people, mingle with the locals and see how they live. Brush up on your Spanish!!!!
Cuban cuisine has been influenced by Spanish, French, African, Arabic, Chinese, and Portuguese cultures. Very little is deep-fried and there are no heavy or creamy sauces. Most Cuban cooking relies on a few basic spices, such as garlic, cumin, oregano, and bay laurel leaves.
So what do I personally think of when Cuba comes to mind (besides bringing home my allotment of cigars and hitching a ride in a 1950's car with smoke pouring out the back end)?
I enjoyed this description. " A Cuban Sandwich, sometimes called a cubano, is a Latin variation on a grilled ham and cheese sandwich. This undeniably delicious sandwich is grilled and made with ham, pork, Swiss cheese, pickles, mustard and Cuban bread. The essential ingredient is the roasted pork. When assembled, the sandwich is lightly toasted in a sandwich press called a plancha, which is only somewhat similar to a panini press but without grooved surfaces. A traditional Cuban sandwich is never made with a panini grill. The plancha both heats and compresses the sandwich, which remains in the press until the bread is crispy and the cheese is melted. It is usually cut into diagonal halves before serving."
4 hoagie rolls (oreferably Cuban rolls if you can find them)
2 T yellow mustard
1/4 pound baked ham, thinly sliced
1/4 pound roast pork, thinly sliced
1/4 pound provolone cheese, thinly sliced
10 thin dill pickle slices, approximately 2 whole pickles
1 T unsalted butter, room temperature
Slice the bread horizontally in half, leaving 1 edge intact. Lay the bread open and spread each side with the mustard. Divide the ingredients evenly among the slices of roll. Start with the ham followed by the pork, cheese, and dill pickles. Bring the tops and bottoms together.
Heat your panini maker or sandwich press. Butter each side of the press. Place the sandwiches inside, press down and grill until the cheese is melted and the bread is flat and browned, approximately 10 minutes. If you don't have a sandwich press, you can heat 6 fireplace bricks wrapped in foil, in a 500 degrees F oven for 1 hour and then press the sandwich between them for 10 minutes. Serve warm.
1/2 kilogram malanga or yam
Grate the malanga or yam and blend with the rest of the ingredients. | <urn:uuid:75412d47-cdf3-46c3-b314-f05a890e5e55> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://morethanburnttoast.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-kitchen-my-world-cuba.html?showComment=1231703040000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934577 | 749 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Last Year's Drought Could Affect Your Planter This Spring
Mar 13, 2013
This could be a false alarm, but there are emails and text messages zipping all across corn and soybean country expressing concern that seed grown during last year's drought may create issues for planter seed meters this spring.
Apparently some of the drought seed is larger than usual, or misshapen, and there are concerns that some seed meters or seeding systems may need to be tweaked to do an optimum job planting them.
I've heard concerns that some corn and soybean seeds are going to be extra big, and in some cases require different or altered seed disks. Finger units may have to be run on test stands to ensure they're adjusted to easily handle the bigger seeds. I've also heard that there may be situations where the larger seeds will require higher vacuum settings on air planters. One email I received suggested larger seeds could require settings in excess of 20 inches of vacuum. That could be a big issue for older planters with vacuum systems that aren't designed to produce much beyond 18 inches of vacuum. Or older tractors that don't have the hydraulic volume to create that much hydraulic flow to multiple vacuum motors on larger planters.
This is all sort of developing as the seed for this year's planting starts to arrive at local dealers. It may not be a big issue; it could be a BIG issue. Your local seed dealer should have by now an idea of what seeds he's going to have available, and should be able to help you decide if your planter needs special attention before you head to the field. | <urn:uuid:1563a3e9-e0fc-4a2c-b7f6-9ca911f7d7bd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.agweb.com/livestock/dairy/blog/in_the_shop/last_years_drought_could_affect_your_planter_this_spring/ | 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 | 0.957828 | 328 | 1.796875 | 2 |
John Steigerwald Column
Super Bowl ratings much about timing
Super Bowl ratings leave every other program in the dark
Planning on watching the Super Bowl?
So are 113 million other people in the United States.
But, really, what else are you going to do? It’s going to be 25 degrees and snowing. And dark.
In case you hadn’t heard, the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers are playing today in New Orleans. Everybody’s talking about it. It’s the biggest sports event of the year in North America. I know that because the Alabama quarterback’s girlfriend, made famous by Brent Musberger, was sent there on media day by Inside Edition – or one of those shows that looks just like Inside Edition – to do player interviews. She’s apparently qualified because she’s really good looking and went to a football game at least once.
There’s no denying that NFL football is America’s favorite sport, but the huge ratings are about so much more than football.
I know that because I saw a news conference for the woman, Beyonce, who’s going to lip sync … I mean sing …, at halftime.
Check the weather forecasts for some of the cities that will probably make XLVII the most-watched TV show of all time. There will be lots of temperatures in the low to mid-20s and plenty of darkness. The Super Bowl, especially now that it’s being played in February, comes at a time when about two-thirds of the people in America could qualify as shut-ins.
What are they going to do instead of watch the game? Have a cookout? Cut the grass? Play the game in mid-June and the ratings would drop by 50 percent. And not because it would be going up against the Stanley Cup Finals.
• Then there’s the Pro Bowl. It was played last week, in case you were fortunate enough to miss it. It got a 9.8 rating in the key 18-49 demographic and won it’s time slot. That can only mean that at least two-thirds of the people who said they wouldn’t be caught dead watching the Pro Bowl, watched it.
Think that number would shrink if the game were played in the middle of June?
I didn’t catch who performed at halftime, but I’m pretty sure it was Manti Te’o’s internet girlfriend. I hear she pretended to sing.
• Game 4 of the World Series sweep by the San Francisco Giants got a 7.6 rating.
• Were you as shocked as I was to hear a man of conscience such as Ray Lewis was being accused of using an illegal substance to help him recover from a triceps injury? If he says – despite the fact that there’s a tape of him placing an order out there somewhere – that he never used deer antler velvet extract, I believe him.
And even though the injury that he was trying to recover from is common among PED users, I would never suspect a man of his character of cheating to get ahead.
• Maybe having the Super Bowl to watch is good for America’s psyche. We can all be distracted from having to deal with the shock and grief of finding out that Alex Rodriguez might have lied to us.
Remember when Rodriguez said he stopped using PEDs before he joined the New York Yankees? According to the Miami New Times, Anthony Bosch, who runs a PED business in Miami, has documents that show A-Rod was buying from him as recently as 2012.
Of course, A-Rod denied everything through a spokesman, “Alex Rodriguez was not Mr. Bosch’s patient, he was never treated by him and he was never advised by him. The purported documents referred to in the story – at least as they relate to Alex Rodriguez – are not legitmate.”
Turns out Manti Te’o is A-Rod’s spokesman.
According to T.J Quinn of ESPN, there are late-night text messages from A-Rod to Bosch, telling him to come to A-Rod’s house to inject him. Rodriguez was still denying the story as of Friday.
As usual, in cases of athletes and the use of performance enhancing drugs, I’m going with guilty until proven innocent.
• Clairton wide receiver Tyler Boyd, is confused. He’s one of the top football recruits in the country and in early January, during the telecast of the U.S Army All-American Bowl, he stood behind a table with hats from Pitt, West Virginia and Michigan State, picked up the Pitt hat and made an oral commitment to play for Panthers coach Paul Chryst.
Since then, he has taken recruiting trips to West Virginia and Tennessee and, apparently, isn’t sure that he made the right decision. Boyd is a kid. It’s understandable that he would want to make a big production out of what was one of the biggest days of his life. It’s the adults who are the idiots.
Where were the adults – other than the shameless shills working for ESPN – preventing him from making a commitment before he had made his official visits?
Is this a complicated concept? Make your commitment after you’ve visited the schools?
The adults should be doing whatever they can to prevent high school kids from creating a media circus and setting themselves up to break a promise made on national TV.
Not facilitating it.
John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.
Defending champ Keselowski tries to build on title (123)
Medical center opening June 3, despite snag with insurer (1370)
Briefs: West Greene hires football coach (1164)
Cecil election as proxy war (1057)
Rogge praises wrestling’s changes (786)
Stanford’s Appel prepares for draft a second time (725) | <urn:uuid:b1609855-6b74-414f-935b-62bcd1e7675c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.observer-reporter.com/article/20130202/COLUMN0106/130209831/0/NEWS02 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974453 | 1,262 | 1.5 | 2 |
US lawmakers push to limit gov't mobile tracking
- — 19 October, 2011 04:11
The U.S. Congress needs to pass legislation that would require law enforcement agencies to get permission from a judge before tracking suspects through their mobile phones, instead of the now-common practice of tracking a mobile subscriber's location after a prosecutor-issued subpoena, two U.S. lawmakers said Tuesday.
Senators Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, joined several advocacy groups from across the political spectrum to push for the passage of the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act, introduced back in June. The legislation would require U.S. law enforcement agencies, in most cases, to get court-ordered warrants to track suspects through GPS information on smartphones and other mobile devices.
It's time to clear up confusion about mobile phone tracking by law enforcement agencies and update parts of the 25-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the law that sets the rules for law enforcement access to U.S. residents' digital data, Wyden said.
"The laws that govern the new media are essentially as old as the staffers who Senator Kirk and I hire to handle new media," Wyden said. "This is an area, it seems to me, where the new tools call for some new, common-sense rules."
The two senators used the anniversary of ECPA as a hook to push for passage of the GPS Act and to host a retro tech fair featuring products marketed in 1986. Joining Wyden and Kirk were the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), the American Civil Liberties Union, the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among other groups.
CDT and other members of the Digital Due Process Coalition have been pushing for changes to ECPA since early in 2010, and the GPS Act would address one of four major concerns identified by the digital rights group. Other legislation in Congress would address other concerns about ECPA, including the privacy of data stored in the cloud.
"Americans deserve a privacy upgrade," Jim Dempsey, CDT's vice president for public policy, said during Tuesday's press conference. "Most Americans would be astonished to learn that government agents can track them, 24/7, without getting a warrant from a judge."
During recent hearings, representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice have questioned the need for changes to ECPA. Changes in ECPA would make it more difficult for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to protect the U.S. public and maintain national security, Valerie Caproni, general counsel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said in May.
Kirk, a new sponsor of the GPS Act, said the bill is a good first step toward protecting the privacy of U.S. residents, although more sweeping changes to ECPA may be needed.
"Government needs restrictions," added Fred Smith Jr., president and founder of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:cb34c924-43ed-4c9a-8b09-301d39d3c21d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/404542/us_lawmakers_push_limit_gov_t_mobile_tracking/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949914 | 658 | 1.734375 | 2 |
So Inherently Dangerous that Only Two Countries in the World Have Legalized This and the U.S. Is One of Them
Mood swings, weight gain, joint pain, tummy problems?you name the ailment, there's a pill for it. And you, the American consumer, are helping Big Pharma sell it. Don't believe it? Well, its' happening right before your eyes, and believe it or not, the United States is one of only two countries in the world that allows this to happen.
A "Disgusting, Dishonorable" Way to Create Sales … Legal in Only Two Countries
What I'm talking about is direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, that barrage of ads you see on TV and in magazines and newspapers, or on the radio and Internet. They're ads telling you to run right out and ask your doctor if this or that pill would be right for you.
Some drug companies have even taken to advertising highly specialized medical devices, like heart stents.
It's a marketing bonanza that's turned America into a medicated mass of people who've been brain-washed into thinking that taking pills will make everything better?even for ailments you might not have. But it's a brilliant move for Big Pharma, who has now turned the consumer into their very own sales rep, and a persuasive one at that. Not only is there a correlation between the amount of money drug companies spend on DTC advertising and the brand of drug patients request from their physicians, but the data shows DTC advertising rapidly converts people into patients.
As mentioned in our featured article:
"It's a disgusting, dishonorable way to generate sales--but it works. In 2008, the House Commerce Committee found that every $1,000 spent on drug ads produces 24 new patients,1 and a 2003 research report found that prescription rates for drugs promoted with DTC ads were nearly seven times greater than those without such promos.2 Ethics aside, these consumer hustles have proven to be profit bonanzas."
As you might suspect, the use of DTC ads has grown rapidly since it was first approved in the U.S. in 1997. At that time, the ads could only be run along with lengthy consumer information warning of risks and side effects, so few companies used them. In 1997, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revised the rule so that rather than providing a full disclosure, companies only needed to meet an "adequate standard" when it came to describing risks to consumers. For those who are wondering, the only other country that has legalized DTC advertising is New Zealand (which did so in 1981).
As noted in the featured article:
"Such squishy words (slipped into regulations by industry lobbyists) are a corporate dream. Thanks to the adequacy loophole, fluffy-puffy, no-worries prescription drug ads quickly mushroomed. In 1997, spending on DTC ads was only $220 million; by 2002, it was $2.8 billion; and it has kept a steady pace of roughly $3 billion a year ever since."
Do Drug Ads on TV Really Impact Consumers?
If they didn't, the drug companies would have abandoned them long ago. They keep close tabs on what works and what doesn't when it comes to their advertising dollars (an amount that's roughly double what's spent on research and development). But if you're looking for more concrete data, the FDA conducted two consumer surveys of U.S. adults, asking them questions measuring the influence of DTC advertising on their attitudes toward prescription drugs, health-related behavior, and on aspects of the doctor-patient relationship.
The preliminary results were as follows:3
- Among respondents who had seen a doctor with the past three months and remembered seeing an ad for a prescription drug, approximately 40-50 percent said that an advertisement for a prescription drug had caused them to seek more information, for example, about the drug and their health.
- More than a quarter (27 percent) of survey respondents in the first survey and 18 percent in the second survey who had seen a doctor in the last three months said that an ad for a prescription drug had caused them to ask a doctor about a medical condition or illness that they had not talked to a doctor about before.
- Approximately 7 percent of respondents said they visited their doctor because of something they read or saw, or because of an ad for a prescription drug.
- Forty-two percent of respondents agreed strongly or somewhat agreed that DTC ads make it seem as though the drug will work for everyone.
Unfortunately, when a patient goes in to a doctor's appointment with a prescription solution already in mind, doctors often feel pressured to oblige. An FDA survey of 500 U.S. physicians revealed:4
- About 75 percent believed that DTC ads caused patients to think the drug works better than it did, and many physicians felt some pressure to prescribe something when patients mentioned DTC ads.
- Only 40 percent of physicians believed that patients understood well the possible risks and negative effects of an advertised drug from the DTC ad alone.
- Eight percent of physicians felt very pressured and 20 percent felt somewhat pressured to prescribe the specific brand name drug when the patient asked the physician to do so.
This can have devastating consequences for consumers, who have bought the industry's racket hook, line and sinker, then walk away with a drug they never needed, or which carries unacceptably high risks.
Take Vioxx, for example?Merck's failed drug that caused 140,000 cardiac events, including more than 60,000 deaths, before it was pulled from the market. Merck admits that Vioxx was never intended for the general public. Yet Merck advertised it to the general public. People saw the ads and started demanding it from their doctors, and Merck sold 20 million prescriptions. Far too many people needlessly died before Merck pulled both the ads and the drug.
Vioxx became a blockbuster drug, primarily through the use of aggressive DTC advertising. And as a result, tens of thousands of unsuspecting people died or suffered heart attacks that would never have used the drug had they not been lured in by the glossy advertisements.
But Merck isn't alone in this; direct-to-consumer marketing is a general practice by almost every drug company in America. The problem is that, like Vioxx, some of the drugs being advertised are not what they appear, meaning if you see it advertised, the old axiom, caveat emptor?let the buyer beware?is something to remember. This is to be expected when you consider the source, because pharmaceutical companies lead the pack when it comes to corporate crime.
Do You Really Want to Trust Your Health to Convicted Corporate Criminals?
Drug companies are master marketers, yes, but you've got to look beyond the empty promises of health and happiness that they tack on to just about every prescription and pill. Make no mistake – the leading pharmaceutical companies are also among the largest corporate criminals in the world, and they are little more than white-collar drug dealers.
Fraud, kickbacks, price-setting, bribery and illegal sales activities are all par for the course for big-name drug companies.
Two years ago, I set out to investigate some of the criminal activities that some of the largest pharmaceutical companies had been convicted of lately, and the amount of gross misconduct, fraud and deceit I found was so insidious, so massive, and so overwhelming that it shocked even me. In all, no less than 19 drug companies made AllBusiness.com's Top 100 Corporate Criminals List for the 1990s! You can read the grim details in full here, but here's a sampling of what the top drug companies are up to:
- Merck: With a long list of deaths to its credit and more than $5.5 billion in judgments and fines levied against it, it was five yearsbefore Merck made its $30-billion recall of the painkiller Vioxx that I had been warning my readers might be a real killer for some people.
After the drug was withdrawn, and 60,000 had already died, Merck picked up the pieces by getting a new drug fast-tracked and on the market. That drug, which you've probably seen numerous DTC ads for, is Gardasil, a vaccine that so far has been linked to thousands of adverse events, and at least 26 unexplained deaths in just ONE YEAR. It's a situation that the FDA and CDC have repeatedly denied, keeping their heads buried in the sand as adverse reports continue to mount.
Meanwhile, over 90 percent of women infected with HPV clear the infection naturally within two years, at which point cervical cells go back to normal. Even more importantly, PAP smears can identify cervical changes, thereby preventing cervical cancer deaths far more effectively than the HPV vaccine ever will, because there's a sufficient amount of time to find and treat any cervical abnormalities if you're getting regular PAP smears.
Alas, as the HPV vaccine is gaining favor, health officials are beginning to argue against the routine use of PAP smears, despite the fact that no one has ever died from this test, while the HPV vaccine is now harming thousands each year.
- Baxter: Dozens of recalls of products that caused deaths and injuries, at least 11 different guilty pleas to fraud and illegal sales activity, more than 200 lawsuits – many of them stemming from selling AIDS-tainted blood to hemophiliacs – and more than $1.3 billion in criminal fines and civil penalties.
- Pfizer: In the largest health care fraud settlement in history, Pfizer was ordered to pay $2.3 billion to resolve criminal and civil allegations that the company illegally promoted uses of four of its drugs, including the painkiller Bextra, the antipsychotic Geodon, the antibiotic Zyvox, and the anti-epileptic Lyrica.
Optimal Health Does Not Come in Pill Form
On average, if you take one prescription drug you'll be exposed to 70 potential side effects. Some of the more commonly prescribed drugs average around 100 side effects each -- and some drugs even carry over 500! Despite this, many people and their physicians use drugs as the go-to treatment, even in cases where dietary changes, exercise and safer natural options like stress reduction and supplements exist.
There's no doubt that the United States has been manipulated into becoming a "polypharmacy nation." The word 'polypharmacy' simply means "many drugs," but refers to instances where an individual is taking too many drugs -- either because more drugs are prescribed than are clinically indicated, or when the sheer number of pills simply becomes a burden for the patient.
The problem is, top-selling drugs have nothing to do with preventive health care! The vast majority of them are sold to you based on their ability to lower or reduce isolated symptoms coming from an underlying imbalance in your body.
When you follow the conventional path it is far more likely you will have more symptoms, and the more symptoms the more drugs you need. Then there will be symptoms from the drugs themselves, for which you then may seek out even more drugs...
That's what the drug companies have been selling Americans for the better part of two centuries, starting with the "patent medicines" formulations from yesteryear. It seems to me that the drug companies have now taken patent medicines to their ultimate pinnacle: a pill for every symptom needed every day.
Is this not a phenomenal business model?
The only thing they need to keep raking in their billions in profits is an endless supply of symptoms, which precludes allowing you to regain your optimal health, because that would drive you out of their customer base. An optimally healthy American does NOT fit in their business model. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you and your family can "opt out" of the pharmaceutical industry's current "sick care" model and truly begin to Take Control of Your Health. | <urn:uuid:d6e158aa-9aaa-467f-be98-844a4f140e2f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/mobile/Non-food/Disease/direct-to-consumer_0715121130.html | 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 | 0.968058 | 2,472 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Back in 1986, when I was still young and foolish enough to do such a thing, I moved across the country. I didn't have a destination address. I simply packed my grand essentials into my Toyota hatchback and drove 2500 miles. On the day I arrived, I rented an apartment, unloaded the car, unrolled my sleeping bag on my new floor, and called it a day.
I did not bring Grandpa's Murphy bed. Okay, technically, it's not a Murphy bed. My grandpa's bed predates the Murphy Wall Bed Company by more than a decade. The Murphy Wall Bed Company did not come into being until around 1900, when William L. Murphy applied for a patent on his folding bed design. But the folding bed had already been around in one form or another for over 200 years. In the 20th century, the term "Murphy bed" caught hold and came to be used in reference to folding beds in general, and by 1989 it was declared a generic term in court.
On the back of Rosmer's bed is this information:
A.H. AndrewsI used Google Patent Search to learn more about the bed. This particular folding bed case was designed by Charles Teufel, and only his name appears on the patent. (There were many other interesting folding-bed patents, including one belonging to Charles Teufel and Sanford S. Burr, who patented various folding bed designs over the course of more than twenty years, and another in which Charles Teufel was named as assignor to A.H. Andrews & Company. Because I found the patents rather interesting, a chronological sampling appears at the end of this post.)
Pat'd. Nov. 10, 1886
Aug. 10, 1886
DESIGN FOR A FOLDING-BED CASE CHARLES TEUFEL
DESIGN FOR A FOLDING-BED CASE CHARLES TEUFEL
An interesting online biography of Alfred Hinsdale Andrews includes some history of A.H. Andrews & Co. which manufactured the bed. The company was headquartered in Chicago and had factories there and in Buffalo, New York.
I can only speculate about when the bed was purchased and by whom, but I believe it originally belonged to Rosmer's father, Milton E. Kerr. Milton was married first to Bess Zahniser on 16 September 1886, and after her death to Kate Pettis on 15 December 1889. Perhaps the bed was a wedding gift? Regular readers may recall that Milton was in the furniture business in Omaha at that time. Was he able to purchase the bed wholesale? His first son was born in Chicago in 1891. What was Milton doing in Chicago? Could he have been working in the furniture business there, maybe even as an employee of A.H. Andrews & Company? A little session with the Chicago city directories for 1890-1896 could help answer some of these questions.
As far as I know, the bed spent the first half of the 20th century at a Kerr home in Mercer, Pennsylvania. Around 1951, after Rosmer and Evelyn Kerr bought their home on Lakeshore Road (Lexington, Michigan), Rosmer went to Mercer and, with the help of his son-in-law Karl Parker, moved the bed to Michigan.
I believe the snapshot at the top of this post was taken soon after the bed had been placed in the spare bedroom of the Lakeshore Road house. (In fact, as sharp-eyed observers may have suspected, that's actually a composite of two snapshots which I manipulated in Paint Shop Pro.)
As young children, my sister and I slept in that bed a few times on overnight visits. The mattress seemed quite a bit higher than our beds at home! In my memory, the bed was not positioned by the window, but rather against the wall that Rosmer is facing in the picture.
In the mid-1960s, my grandparents decided to sell the Murphy bed. My mother didn't want it to leave the family, so she and my dad bought it and moved it into the breezeway of their home. A few years later, when I had a home of my own, my mother gave me the bed. Unfortunately there was no way to get such a large piece of furniture into my house due to the floor plan, so I had to leave the bed right where it was.
Over the years, circumstances have prevented me from ever taking the bed, so eventually my mother once again gave the bed away, this time to her youngest grandson. He's never had a place for it either, and thus the bed has now spent forty years in my parents' breezeway.
Last month, Apple wrote about the uncertain future of family heirlooms, and I thought about Rosmer's bed. There's been no mattress in it for years, but the case is in great condition. Although it would bring only about $1200 at auction (a guesstimate, based on a fairly similar piece sold at auction a year or so ago), it's a remarkable piece of furniture which, in the right setting, would be a great conversation piece and, with a new mattress, would also provide comfortable sleeping accomodations for overnight guests.
It's been in our family over a hundred years, and like my mother, I can't bear the idea of letting it go. But I've moved fifteen times in the last twenty years. More often than not, I've done the moving myself. Even though I've graduated from hatchback to minivan, the Murphy bed is obviously more than I can handle. And, just like Apple's family, others in my family have their own limitations of space, lifestyle, or whatever. The day may come when there's no one who has a place for it. Then what?
I don't have an answer for that.
A Bit of Folding Bed History in Patents
IMPROVED FOLDING BEDSTEAD SANFORD S. BURR
1876: IMPROVEMENT IN WARDROBE-BEDSTEADS Burr
1881: FOLDING BEDSTEAD SANFORD S. BURR
1882: FOLDING BEDSTEAD Burr
1886: DESIGN FOR A FOLDING-BED FRAME
1888: DESIGN FOR A FOLDING-BED CASE CHARLES TEUFEL
1889: FOLDING BED S. BURR | <urn:uuid:e17b6a2c-bbd0-4bbf-8cd9-45a7db2e01c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://krentz.blogspot.com/2007/12/my-grandfathers-120-year-old-murphy-bed.html?showComment=1199066580000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976572 | 1,322 | 1.65625 | 2 |
By Richard E. Cohen
February 27, 2004On the night of February 17, after finishing a surprisingly close second to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in the Wisconsin primary, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., made the rounds of television interviews and repeated what has become a familiar theme. Asked on CNN about his campaign strategy, Edwards replied that he planned to emphasize the contrasts between him and the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
"I think it's important for people to know the differences between us," Edwards said. "I like and respect John Kerry very much. And I think he feels the same way about me. But we have differences." Edwards added a few moments later: "There are clear differences between us. Now those differences will become more apparent to Democratic voters."
Judging by National Journal's congressional vote ratings, however, Kerry and Edwards aren't all that different, at least not when it comes to how they voted on key issues before the Senate last year. The results of the vote ratings show that Kerry was the most liberal senator in 2003, with a composite liberal score of 96.5. But Edwards wasn't far behind: He had a 2003 composite liberal score of 94.5, making him the fourth-most-liberal senator.
National Journal's vote ratings rank members of Congress on how they vote relative to each other on a conservative-to-liberal scale in each chamber. The scores, which have been compiled each year since 1981, are based on lawmakers' votes in three areas: economic policy, social policy, and foreign policy. The scores are determined by a computer-assisted calculation that ranks members from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other, based on key votes -- 62 in the Senate in 2003 -- selected by National Journal reporters and editors.
The fact that Kerry and Edwards had such similar scores in 2003 is striking, because during the course of their Senate careers, their ratings have often placed them in different wings of their party.
Kerry has compiled a generally more liberal voting record. After winning election to the Senate in 1984, he ranked among the most-liberal senators during three years of his first term, according to National Journal's vote ratings. In those years -- 1986, 1988, and 1990 -- Kerry did not vote with Senate conservatives a single time out of the total of 138 votes used to prepare those ratings.
Edwards, on the other hand, had a moderate voting record during the first four years following his election to the Senate in 1998. The results positioned Edwards comfortably apart from Senate liberals, but not so far to the right that he locked arms with centrist Republicans. His consistent moderation placed Edwards among the center-right of Senate Democrats. But once Edwards decided to run for president and abandoned his bid for a second Senate term, his record moved dramatically to the left in 2003.
Last year, Kerry, Edwards, and other congressional Democrats who were seeking the presidency, including Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, missed many votes. To qualify for a score in National Journal's vote ratings, members must participate in at least half of the votes in an issue category. Of the 62 Senate votes used to compute the 2003 ratings, Kerry was absent for 37 votes and Edwards missed 22.
As a result, in the 2003 vote ratings, Kerry received a rating only in the economic policy category, earning a perfect liberal score. Edwards received ratings in the categories of economic and social issues, also putting up perfect liberal scores.
A separate analysis showed that of the votes that Kerry cast in the two categories in which he did not receive scores in 2003 -- social policy and foreign policy -- he consistently took the liberal view within the Senate. Edwards did not receive a score in the foreign-policy category; he sided with the liberals on five votes in that area, and with the conservatives on one vote. On foreign policy, Kerry and Edwards -- both of whom supported the 2002 resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq -- last year joined most Senate Democrats in voting that half of the U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq be provided as loans, a provision that ultimately was dropped.
To be sure, Kerry's ranking as the No. 1 Senate liberal in 2003 -- and his earning of similar honors three times during his first term, from 1985 to 1990 -- will probably have opposition researchers licking their chops. As shown in the accompanying chart, Kerry had a perfect liberal rating on social issues during 10 of the 18 years in which he received a score, meaning that he did not side with conservatives on a single vote in those years. That included his 1996 vote, with 13 other Senate Democrats, against the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited federal recognition of states' same-sex marriage laws. Along the campaign trail, Republicans likely will remind voters of Kerry's stance on that issue.
But interestingly, during Kerry's second term, from 1991 to 1996, he dropped back into the pack of Democratic senators and voted more moderately. In those years, he earned composite liberal scores in National Journal's vote ratings ranging from 78.2 to 85.8.
Kerry was especially moderate in his second term when it came to foreign-policy issues. He opposed the liberal position in key Senate showdowns on missile-defense and intelligence spending in 1993, and on procurement of additional F-18 Navy fighters in 1996. Such votes could provide Kerry with some useful talking points for his presidential campaign. Kerry also voted with President Clinton and congressional Republicans, but against many liberals, in favor of welfare reform in 1996, and he occasionally split from organized labor on workplace issues.
Meanwhile, Edwards, the son of a textile worker, has frequently pointed to trade issues as one of the key "differences" between him and his opponent. He has criticized Kerry's support for the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and for other international trade deals during the Clinton presidency. (While Edwards did not serve in the Senate during much of that time, news reports confirm that he opposed NAFTA during his 1998 campaign, although it was not a major campaign issue.)
In fact, both senators have spotty records on trade issues. This helps to explain why organized labor backed other Democratic candidates in the early presidential caucuses and primaries.
Edwards voted with Kerry in 2000 to establish trade relations with China, and in 2002 to extend presidential trade-negotiating authority. Also in 2000, Edwards split from Kerry by opposing legislation to drop U.S. trade barriers with Africa and the Caribbean. (That vote was excluded from National Journal's Senate vote ratings because it did not correlate statistically.) In July 2003, Edwards opposed free-trade agreements with Chile and Singapore, each of which passed the Senate handily, despite mostly Democratic opposition. Kerry missed both votes.
By Richard E. Cohen
February 27, 2004 | <urn:uuid:03cb3a13-3226-4434-95b0-25df88219aa6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/2004/02/kerry-rated-most-liberal-member-of-senate/16054/print/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977409 | 1,387 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Papal Address at Stations of the Cross, at Colosseum
"We Have Been Given the Love That Is Stronger Than Death"
| 1757 hits
ROME, APRIL 10, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of John Paul II's address at the conclusion of the Stations of the Cross he presided over on Good Friday night at the Colosseum.
* * *
1. "Venit hora!" The hour has come! The hour of the Son of man.
As every year, we follow Christ's "Via Crucis" around the Colosseum and participate in that "hour" in which the Redemption was fulfilled.
"Venit hora crucis!" The hour "to depart out of this world to the Father" (John 13:1). The hour of the heart-rending suffering of the Son of God, a suffering that, 20 centuries later, continues to overwhelm and question us profoundly. The Son of God came to this hour (see John 12:27) precisely to give his life for his brothers. It is the "hour" to hand himself over, the "hour" of the revelation of infinite love.
2. "Venit hora gloriae!" "The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified" (John 12:23). This is the "hour" in which we, men and women of all times, have been given the love that is stronger than death. We are beneath the Cross on which the Son of God is nailed so that with the power that the Father has given him over all human beings he may give eternal life to all those who have been given to him (see John 17:2).
Is it not, therefore, a duty in this "hour" to give glory to God the Father "who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all" (Romans 8:32)?
Has not the moment come to glorify the Son who "humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8)?
How is it possible not to give glory to the Spirit of him who resurrected Christ from the dead and who now dwells in us to also give life to our mortal bodies? (See Romans 8:11.)
3. May this "hour" of the Son of man, which we live on Good Friday, remain in our minds and hearts as the "hour of love and of glory."
May the mystery of the "Via Crucis" of the Son of God be for all an inexhaustible source of hope. May it console and strengthen us also when our hour comes.
"Venit hora redemptionis. Glorificemus Redemptorem!" Amen.
[Translation by ZENIT] | <urn:uuid:d4e4f52b-1074-4084-82fe-232eca10eb41> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/papal-address-at-stations-of-the-cross-at-colosseum | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944684 | 589 | 1.601563 | 2 |
MUMBAI: Banks will find it tough to put money in group businesses such as insurance and other financial service companies with the Reserve Bank of India prescribing a ceiling for investment by lenders in group businesses.
RBI has said that banks can invest a maximum of 5% of their paid-up capital and reserves in the case of non-financial or unregulated financial services companies. In the case of regulated financial companies, the bank's investment can go up to 10%. The central bank has also prescribed an aggregate group exposure limit where total investment in all group companies put together cannot exceed 10% of paid-up capital and reserves in case of non-financial services companies and 10% for regulated financial service companies. If any bank breaches the exposure limit either because of a decline in its net worth or increase in investments, it has to report the breach immediately to RBI. Any excess over the limit will be deducted from the bank's tier-I capital and would lead to imposition of penalties and a possible ban on further intra-group transactions. | <urn:uuid:abd35983-3ed2-462c-ba8a-dcd45b5bd6e7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-08-15/india-business/33216306_1_bank-breaches-group-exposure-ashvin-parekh | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957535 | 207 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin immersed me in the world of 1950′s immigrants. Eilis had no decent job prospects in Enniscorthy, a poor, small Irish town several years after World War Two. Her older sister Rose arranges for Father Flood, an Irish priest that now lives in Brooklyn New York, to sponser her as an immigrant to his parish in America. Eilis endures a difficult ship crossing, the trials of fitting in with other single woman in a boarding house, and boring work in a ladies’ department store. Eilis falls for an an Italian American plumber, not the ideal mate, and then a death calls her home to Ireland. The conclusion is devastating as Eilis is torn between two countries and two men.
We are able to adapt to a new life in a new culture many times with relative ease…out of sight, out of mind. Then when we go back home we adjust so quickly it’s as if we never left. The feeling of guilt can wash over us as we realize the people we have left and wonderful times we have forgotten. I found my thoughts directed toward this paradox as I finished reading Brooklyn. | <urn:uuid:30f0e00d-f8a4-4763-8cc1-a65aa3482768> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.manhattan.lib.ks.us/littleapple/2009/09/brooklyn-a-novel/ | 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 | 0.96625 | 244 | 1.640625 | 2 |
|Senate Opens its Doors to the First Philippine Model Congress|
The Philippine Senate today opened its doors to 350 highschool and college students for the first Philippine Model Congress (PMC), the nation's first government simulation program, where participants listened to guest speakers, engaged in debates, caucuses, committee meetings, and plenary sessions to experience and appreciate the proceedings of the law-making process.
“This may be a simulation, but its consequences are real,” said Leandro Legarda Leviste, son of Senator Loren Legarda and member of the PMC Executive Board, during his opening statement. Other members of the Executive Board are Thomas Rosal, Lance Katigbak, Tricia Peralta and Alonzo Virata.
Addressing the participants, Leandro said, “Hopefully, you will one day lead this country – as future business leaders, professionals, senators, and congressmen, and if you don’t make this country great then no one will.”
Keynote speaker former Senator Richard “Dick” Gordon detailed on the importance of vision and a strong initiative among the youth.
“We cannot have any progress without vision. Don't wait until tomorrow - don't be a great man someday, be a great boy today. Say that you’re going to make a change, and recognize that you cannot do it alone. Of course you need to be charming as a politician, but remember to learn, earn, and yearn,” he said.
Other guest speakers were Congressman Rexlon “Rex” Gatchalian of the 1st District of Valenzuela and prominent journalist and founder of Rappler.com, Maria Ressa.
Rep. Gatchalian focused on the challenges of being a relatively young congressman, and urged the participants to “Stop, look, and listen.” He explained that being a keen observer and knowing how to deliver your message are key skills in becoming successful as a legislator.
Maria Ressa, on the other hand, focused on the effect of social media, and how the next generation of leaders can harness the power of interconnectedness and rapid sharing of information for good governance. She emphasized on innovation as a factor in influencing the consciousness of people and inspiring change.
The PMC is run by various Filipino college students to give the student population a voice on current matters through an immersion in Philippine politics, and has earned the accreditation and sponsorship of the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Commission on Higher Education (CHED).***
Office of Senator Loren Legarda
RM.209, Senate of the Philippines,
GSIS Bldg. Pasay City | <urn:uuid:3f220271-3bd2-42ca-9b5e-ad028f4e43a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.philippine-embassybrunei.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=162%3Asenate-opens-its-doors-to-the-first-philippine-model-congress&catid=45%3Apress&Itemid=81 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938715 | 555 | 1.742188 | 2 |
The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn’t come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution.
Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed.
The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family is a flickering light in the evening of the West.
The deconstruction is destruction. Entire countries are fading away, their populations being replaced by emigrants from more traditional lands whose understanding of the male-female relationship is positively reactionary. These emigrants may lack technology or the virtues of civilization, and their idea of marriage resembles slavery more than any modern ideal, but it fulfills the minimum purpose of any group, tribe or country– it produces its next generation.
The deconstruction of marriage is not a mere matter of front page photos of men kissing. It began with the deconstruction of the family. Gay marriage is only one small stop on a tour that includes rising divorce rates, falling childbirth rates and the abandonment of responsibility by twenty and even thirty-somethings.
Each step on the tour takes apart the definition and structure of marriage until there is nothing left. Gay marriage is not inclusive, it is yet another attempt at eliminating marriage as a social institution by deconstructing it until it no longer exists.
There are two ways to destroy a thing. You can either run at it while swinging a hammer with both hands or you can attack its structure until it no longer means anything.
The left hasn’t gone all out by outlawing marriage, instead it has deconstructed it, taking apart each of its assumptions, from the economic to the cooperative to the emotional to the social, until it no longer means anything at all. Until there is no way to distinguish marriage from a temporary liaison between members of uncertain sexes for reasons that due to their vagueness cannot be held to have any solemn and meaningful purpose.
You can abolish democracy by banning the vote or you can do it by letting people vote as many times as they want, by letting small children and foreigners vote, until no one sees the point in counting the votes or taking the process seriously. The same goes for marriage or any other institution. You can destroy it by outlawing it or by eliminating its meaningfulness until it becomes so open that it is absurd.
Every aspect of marriage is deconstructed and then eliminated until it no longer means anything. And once marriage is no longer a lifetime commitment between a man and a woman, but a ceremony with no deeper meaning than most modern ceremonies, then the deconstruction and destruction will be complete.
The deconstruction of marriage eroded it as an enduring institution and then as an exclusive institution and finally as a meaningful institution. The trendy folk who claim to be holding off on getting married until gay marriage is enacted are not eager for marriage equality, they are using it as an excuse for an ongoing rejection of marriage.
Gay marriage was never the issue. It was always marriage.
In the world that the deconstructionists are striving to build, there will be marriage, but it will mean nothing. Like a greeting card holiday, it will be an event, but not an institution. An old ritual with no further meaning. An egotistical exercise in attention-seeking and self-celebration with no deeper purpose. It will be a display every bit as hollow as the churches and synagogues it takes place in.
The deconstruction of marriage is only a subset of the deconstruction of gender from a state of being to a state of mind. The decline of marriage was preceded by the deconstruction of gender roles and gay marriage is being succeeded by the destruction of gender as anything other than a voluntary identity, a costume that one puts on and takes off. | <urn:uuid:4b12b34d-80f8-4ef4-95be-3e1baf288db5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jewishpress.com/tag/marriage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967642 | 822 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Posted March 24, 2010 Garrison, NY
Communications and Marketing
Many egg donation agencies and private couples routinely exceed compensation recommendation limits for potential donors, a new study finds.
From a sample of over 300 college newspapers, findings revealed that almost one-quarter of advertisements offered payment in excess of $10,000, a violation of guidelines issued by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM).
Compensation strongly correlated with average SAT score of the university’s students, according to the study published in The Hastings Center Report by researcher Aaron D. Levine, of the Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition, approximately one-quarter of the advertisements listed specific requirements for potential donors, such as appearance or ethnicity. This also goes against ASRM guidelines, which prohibit linking compensation to donor personal characteristics.
Holding all else equal, such as demand for in vitro fertilization within a state and donor agency variables, Levine found that each increase of 100 SAT points in the average for a university increased the compensation offered to egg donors at that school by $2,350.
Of the advertisements violating ASRM guidelines, many offered $20,000, several offered $35,000, and one was as high as $50,000. Current ASRM guidelines recommend that sums of $5,000 or more require justification and sums above $10,000 are not appropriate.
The extent to which compensation limits are appropriate remains an open question, says Levine, but industry steps to self-regulate could alleviate concerns about exploitation. Monetary thresholds may be valuable if these limits protect a substantial number of potential donors from undue pressure to donate. Levine suggests verifying donor agency compliance (which is currently self-reported) or changing the format of advertisements.
In a related commentary, John A. Robertson, of the University of Texas, argues against greater regulation, and calls the current guidelines into question themselves. “After all, we allow individuals to choose their mates and sperm donors on the basis of such characteristics,” he writes. “Why not choose egg donors similarly?”
Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts offers one of the world’s top public policy programs. The research-intensive and globally engaged curriculum aims to solve complex problems in the public interest related to issues of research and technology, energy and sustainability, economic development and governance of information technology. The School of Public Policy is unique within its discipline in having an active research program at the intersection of philosophy, ethics and policy. The School is dedicated to scholarship and learning that is reflective, effective and sustainable.
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the world's premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities and the eighth best engineering and information technology university in the world by Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities, Georgia Tech’s more than 20,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and minority engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute. | <urn:uuid:fad3cdc4-76bf-41bd-b4a4-e719de2639bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=55065 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934533 | 651 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. was found guilty of gender discrimination and is required to pay millions in damages.
10. Silicon Valley. Californians love your technology, but we’re not ready to put your executives in charge of the state.
9. Money. The Federal Reserve suggests deflation may be the threat to the national economy, but the California political economy is showing strong signs of runaway inflation. Even $140 million of your own money isn’t enough to buy the governorship.
8. The art of conceding. Whitman and Fiorina refused to concede long after it was clear they had lost. What explains this? Two theories I’ve heard. A) No one in Silicon Valley ever admits defeat; just when it looks like your company is cooked, you might happen on a technology that makes you a billionaire. B) Upper-middle-class baby boom girls never learned how to lose. But Title IX, which has since opened up school sports to women, has changed that for younger generations.
7. Local governments. You might have expected to see them on the list of the winners because of the passage of Prop 22, which protects their funding streams from the state legislature even in budget emergency. But Prop 22’s victory may lead to defeat. Expect state legislators to find ways to take revenge for Prop 22. And look for more scandals of the type seen in Bell, since Prop 22 protects local government funding – without changes in governance that would make city officials more accountable.
6. Democrats. Yes, the party won big. But now the party has full political custody of the ungovernable state of California. It’s all downhill from here.
4. The Tea Party in California. Yes, the Tea Party’s big political committee may be in Sacramento, but Tea Party candidates didn’t get far here. Fiorina’s courting the Tea Party didn’t help.
3. The initiative process. Voters still prefer to make their own choices, but half the state thinks the process needs reform. This year’s slate of initiatives show that half of the state is right.
2. Southern California. Yes, we saw all the ads, but the major candidates in the governor’s and Senate races were from the north. And you could tell they don’t quite get us. Even after three terms, Barbara Boxer was clueless enough about Southern California that she talked of her enthusiasm for the San Francisco Giants in a downtown Los Angeles rally. Uh, Senator -- Dodger fans were rooting for Texas.
1. Political consultants. Brown mostly did without them and won. Whitman surrounded herself with a GOP dream team of consultants and lost. The consultants still say that they’re necessary to successful campaigns. But you know what? We think we’ll need to see more recent data before we buy that.
Click here for a look at the Top 10 Winners in the election. | <urn:uuid:bcd9191c-32aa-46d8-992c-29a3027c4b95> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcsandiego.com/blogs/prop-zero/The-Top-10-Losers-in-California-Elections-106642284.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957674 | 606 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self [book]
by Robert Waggoner
Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self is the account of an extraordinarily talented lucid dreamer who goes beyond the boundaries of both psychology and religion. In the process, he stumbles upon the Inner Self.
While lucid (consciously aware) in the dream state and able to act and interact with dream figures, objects, and settings, dream expert Robert Waggoner experienced something transformative and unexpected. He was able to interact consciously with the dream observer-the apparent Inner Self-within the dream. At first this seemed shocking, even impossible, since psychology normally alludes to such theoretical inner aspects as the Subliminal Self, the Center, the Internal Self-Helper in vague and theoretical ways. Waggoner came to realize, however, that aware interaction with the Inner Self was not only possible, but actual and highly inspiring. He concluded that while aware in the dream state, one has both a psychological tool and a platform from which to understand dreaming and the larger picture of man's psyche as well. Waggoner proposes 5 stages of lucid dreaming and guides readers through them, offering advice for those who have never experienced the lucid dream state and suggestions for how experienced lucid dreamers can advance to a new level.
Lucid Dreaming offers exciting insights and vivid illustrations that will intrigue not only avid dreamworkers but anyone who is interested in consciousness, identity, and the definition of reality.
Chapter One: Stepping Through the Gate
Life many children, I had an intense dream life. Dreams were an amazing theater of the mind featuring both glorious adventures and moments of sheer terror. In one dream, a songbird, a meadowlark, I believe, landed on my chest and sang me its simple song, which I immediately understood and woke up singing. In another dream, I found myself on a fifteen-foot Pogo stick bouncing down the deserted streets, almost flying. On occasion I seemed to be an animal - a dog or coyote, for example - trotting along the dark night's sidewalks in a four-;egged gait, totally at peace, seeing the neighborhood from a canine's drooping headed, tounge wagging perspective.
With dreams like these, I was a child who had to drag himself out of bed.
In those early years, I remember clearly only one spontaneous lucid dream. In it, I was wondering the local library and suddenly saw a dinosaur stomping through the stacks. Somehow it dawned on me: If all dinosaurs are extinct - this must be a dream! Now consciously aware that I was dreaming, I reasoned further: Since this was a dream - I could wake up! I reasoned correctly and awoke safe in my bed.
That youthful experience illuminates the essential element of lucid dreaming: the conscious awareness of being in a dream while you're dreaming. In this unique state of awareness, you can consider and carry out deliberate actions such as talking to dream figures, flying in the dream space, walking through the walls of dream buildings, creating any object desired, or making them disappear. More important, an experienced lucid dreamer can conduct experiments in the subconscious or seek information from the apparently conscious unconscious.
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
In those preteen days, before I began lucid dreaming regularly, three experiences kept alive my interst in dreaming and the psyche: occasional dreams that seemed to be precognitive, an unexpected "vision experience," and the very real sense of having access to an inner knowing. Like many, I found life's deepest mysteries in the mind.
For me, the occasional precognitive dream often appeared as small events, like dreaming of someone making an odd statement in a dream, only to hear a real person make the same odd statement a few hours later, or to have a voice in the dream announce an observation that later would be proven correct. Once, the voice explained that the dream symbols meant the dream events would take three years to transpire. I kept track of that date and something incredible did indeed happen in the waking world, directly related to the dream from three years earlier.
Precognitive dreams challenged my budding scientific worldview and disrupted my traditional and spiritual views. Strange coincidences, self-fulfilling prophecies, or unknown information? How was one to tell?
One day in my preteen, church-going mind, I had a mini-epiphany. It occured to me that if God was the same "yesterday, today, and forever," as they said in the Old Testament, then God must exist outside of time, apart from time, in a place where time had no meaning. And, if that were true, then perhaps dreams were the gateway to a place without time, where time existed in one glorious Now. Yet my young science-educated mind balked at this notion. A dreamt event followed by a waking event could be nothing more than sheer coincidence and didn't necessarily entail any foreknowing. Or perhaps it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which I unknowingly helped bring about the even that I dreamt. And even when a dream voice made an observation that later turned out to be true, perhaps my creative unconscious had simply noticed things and, by calculating the likely outcome of those things, made a clever announcement.
As this spiritual questioning was going on, another fascinating incidenct occurred. One Sunday evening when I was eleven or twelve, I lay on my bed reading a book and stopped for a moment to think. As I absentmindedly looked up at the ceiling, my head suddenly turned north and I began to see a vision of a Native American setting overlaying the physical scene. I struggled to free myself from this unexpected experience while another part of me took in the vision. Finally it stopped.
At that young age, what do you do with something like this? In my case, I went to the library. I flipped through a number of books about the Old Testament conatining commentary on visions but found little of value for me there. I also checked out a few books on Native American culture and discovered the vision quest, a traditional practice by which youth gain insight into their lives. Normally a vision quest occurs in ritual fashion. The young person is obligated to leave the tribe and travel alone for a period of days of fasting, praying, and waiting for the visionary experience. Yet why would something like that happen to me? Only years later did I discover that our family had Native American ancestry.
Published by Moment Point Press
Weight: 1.4000 pounds
Click here for more | <urn:uuid:5a5bc78e-ef9d-4713-8a3e-285916c30656> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailyom.com/cgi-bin/display/product.cgi?pid=1597 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96301 | 1,351 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Charity founder Arnold Sarfo-Kantanka aims to inspire Croydon youngsters
6:00pm Thursday 14th February 2013 in News
An award winning entrepreneur who gave up banking to go into community work wants to take a campaign into schools to inspire young people to help others.
Arnold Sarfo-Kantanka, from Broad Green, was told by a teacher he would never be anything, but now aged 26, he has gone on to win multiple awards and is the founder of his own charity.
An experience on a Ghanaian beach when he was approached by a man begging for money, left the former St Andrew’s High School student determined to find a way of making a difference.
He said: "I was on a beach in Ghana and a man came up to me and said ‘give me some money.’
"I could have ignored him but chose to engage him and it made me think what can I do with the opportunities I have, what work can I get to create change."
After leaving his job at investment bank Morgan and Stanley, Mr Sarfo-Kantanka set up Me FiRi Ghana and the WAM Campaign.
He said: "Me FiRi Ghana means I am from Ghana. It is about connecting people and giving people all over the world a sense of identity. It is about looking at what we can do for the country.
"WAM stands for What About Me. The campaign is about recognising the skills and talents we have and looking at how we can use them to help someone else."
After winning three awards last year, including the Spirit of London Community Champion award, Mr Sarfo-Kantanka is now keen to take his work into Croydon schools.
He said: "Everyone has a gift, talent or skills which can help to not only shape their lives, but can also impact on the lives of others.
"I particularly hope to inspire other young people in Croydon. I want to go into our schools and show young people, amongst this gloom and doom they can still make a difference."
For more information visit asarfokantanka.co.uk or email [email protected] | <urn:uuid:7fcb8564-2531-4205-838a-7a8bdf8e8f18> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.croydonguardian.co.uk/news/10227160.Charity_founder_aims_to_inspire_youngsters/?ref=rss | 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 | 0.978364 | 461 | 1.59375 | 2 |
The Wall Street Journal delivered some disturbing news yesterday: South Korea “sharply boosted imports of Iranian crude” in April, buying 42 percent more than a year before, and 57 percent more than in March. Analysts have speculated as to whether Seoul was attempting to sneak in extra oil before European sanctions begin to bite. A more careful look at the data, though, suggests that the spike in Korean imports is less peculiar than meets the eye.
Oil imports naturally fluctuate from month to month. The big question, then, is how anomalous the jump in Korean imports from Iran is. The figure below shows monthly Korean oil imports from Iran going back five years (all data in this post is from Korean customs). It is clear that month-to-month import levels are volatile.
The next figure plots absolute month-to-month changes in Korean oil imports from Iran. One can immediately see that there are several other month-to-month changes that exceed what happened between March and April 2012. We can quantify this: the average month-to-month change is 1.7 million barrels, with a standard deviation of 1.2 million. The upshot is that we should expect to see a month-to-month change of at least 2.7 million barrels – i.e. what we saw from March to April – about twenty percent of the time. If we look only at jumps of 2.7 million barrels or more, we should expect roughly one a year.
One can, however, ask the question another way. South Korean imports from Iran have been on a downward trend. April imports, then, should have been lower than March ones. Working from this baseline, the actual April figure looks like a bigger jump. I looked at the absolute difference between monthly oil imports and what one would have expected had the previous six months’ trend held up. Korean imports in April now look a bit more anomalous. Had imports followed their six month trend, we’d have expected them to hit 3.4 million barrels in April; instead, they clocked in at 7.5 million. Our data suggests that this sort of aberration should happen four percent of the time, or once every two years.
There’s a risk in doing too many statistical analyses (one of them will invariably deliver a phantom result), but let me give you one more way of looking at the trend. Korean imports from Iran dropped by four million barrels between September 2011 and March 2012, or about 700,000 barrels a month, before rising by 2.7 million barrels between March and April. That jump, then, was four times the monthly trend, in the reverse direction. That looks big, but it turns out to be pretty common: it occurred in 20 of the preceding 53 months.
The big test will be what happens in May and June. The Korean government announced earlier today that it expects to report that imports decreased in May. If it does not, and imports stay high, it will be much more difficult to dismiss the April data as an anomaly. After all, very loosely speaking, the odds of something that happens four percent of the time happening twice in a row is about one in five hundred. If imports do drop, though, the current kerfuffle should go away. But be warned: normal statistical noise means that this sort of scare will be repeated as the sanctions continue. Better and more timely data, along with a clear sense of what constitutes an acceptable import pattern, would go a long way to keeping the sanctions on track. | <urn:uuid:e71e8a07-2b43-42b6-ac3d-d5e32d2d8b41> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.cfr.org/levi/2012/05/30/is-south-korea-undermining-sanctions-against-iran/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mlevi+%28Michael+Levi%3A+Energy%2C+Security%2C+and+Climate%29 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963828 | 722 | 1.789063 | 2 |
March 4, 2010
Today's itinerary was intense and full… We were on the go from first thing in the morning until tonight, and it's difficult to process everything we saw, heard, and learned. We met a heady mix of artists, writers, scholars, poets, and chefs. Every one had an incredible story; most are from somewhere else, and heard the call of Santa Fe. I was struck by the talent and chutzpah of people who have come here to pursue a passion or a dream, and have reinvented themselves in the process.
Those who didn't move here from elsewhere, of course, are the Native Americans whose art and spiritual life is felt everywhere. I can now understand why this place speaks so deeply both to the Native Americans and to artists—they are surrounded by mountains and desert, color, incredible light, and rugged earth. There's both a spatial and emotional openness that you immediately feel here.
A bonus to the cultural riches we have encountered today has been meeting the wonderful Santa Fe women who have volunteered to drive us around, open their homes, and join us for some of the tours. Each has a story as well. It is a privilege to welcome them to the JWA community, as they welcome us into theirs.
About the Jewish Women's Archive trip to Santa Fe
For 100 years, artists have flocked to Santa Fe, attracted by its arid beauty and the chance to re-create themselves.
The work of those artists who are Jewish incorporates an understanding of their heritage and of themselves as modern Jews – some embrace and redefine it, while others rebel against or reject it – and with resonances that may illuminate a deeper struggle with the past than is obvious on first glance.
On this trip, the Jewish Women's Archive will explore the rich mix that uniquely defines Santa Fe and provide participants with an inside view of this fascinating community.Read original trip prospectus >> | <urn:uuid:1b002b32-8098-4ea9-9312-c4b7031c8cc0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jwa.org/santafe/blog/land-of-re-invention | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973835 | 393 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Tonight, for the first time in a decade, I watched Nova. Directly after, Frontline started. But, I wasn’t at home in Detroit. I was in my living room in London, England.
Today, PBS launched in Britain and I squealed with excitement.
Halloween made me homesick for America. The WGBH logo and theme music made my living room, thousands of miles from Detroit, feel like home.
I was especially excited because the UK lacks that PBS flagship program all Americans adore, Sesame Street. I would love my kids to grow up watching Oscar and Big Bird like I did.
Sesame Street had a strong presence in my family. Of course we watched it religiously. We sang the songs and played with the toys. My mother even painted life-sized Sesame Street characters on our basement walls. 25 years later, she painted the same characters on my nephew’s bedroom walls.
Britain hasn’t watched Sesame Street since that dark day, back in March 2001, when it left British screens forever. What about Sesame Street didn’t work for Britain? It couldn’t be that the population lacked enough imagination. Britain created Teletubbies and Thomas the Tank Engine, along with other children’s programs that work equally well in the States.
Despite an absence of over ten years, I still feel its whimsical lessons could have a place in Britain. I have to wonder what kind of station PBS is without Sesame Street? PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service. Are they really serving the public if they cater only to adults?
At a time when PBS’ close relation, the BBC, is facing severe funding cuts, maybe Britain needs to look further afield for publicly-minded programming. They don’t need to look far. It’s just around the corner, where the air is sweet, on Sesame Street.
What do you think of a PBS without Sesame Street?
You can read more from Stacie at Mama Lewis and the Amazing Adventures of the Half-Brained Baby. | <urn:uuid:b78e0628-59fe-46dd-b33d-fedbbd56a044> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.babycenter.com/celebrities/11-01-2011-pbs-launches-in-uk-no-sesame-street/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955743 | 434 | 1.625 | 2 |
Did favoritism allow Dick Cheney to get a heart transplant?by Opinion Staff
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has received a heart transplant.
Mr. Cheney, 71, has had a long history of heart ailments and medical procedures. He has had at least five heart attacks, the first when he was just 37 years old.
Mr. Cheney, who had the transplant Saturday and is recovering at a Virginia hospital, had been on the waiting list for a heart for about 20 months.
About 3,100 Americans are on the waiting list. Last year there were about 2,300 heart transplants.
Obviously, not everybody who is waiting for a heart will get one. Last year about 330 people died while waiting for a heart.
Some medical ethicists have questioned whether older patients – particularly those who are in otherwise poor health – should receive transplants. Younger patients are more likely to survive the procedure and to survive longer.
Others say that age should not be a factor. And when the general poor health has been caused by the organ to be replaced – as in the case of a patient with multiple heart attacks receiving a new heart – medical history also should not be the deciding factor. Mr. Cheney has had a series of other cardiovascular problems as well, including circulatory problems in his legs that have required several surgeries.
Chance plays some role in who will get a heart. The donor and recipient need to be good tissue matches. And they need to be in the same geographic area – or have the ability to travel quickly at a moment’s notice – since the procedure must be done within a certain time window.
All decisions supposedly are made according to medical criteria and do not take into account the recipient’s social status. There is no doubt, however, that people with good health insurance or the ability to pay have a better chance of getting a transplant. Just for starters, they’re the ones who are likely to be evaluated for transplants to begin with and to get their names onto a waiting list.
The issue of favoritism is bound to come up when famous people receive transplants – as happened previously, for example, when singer David Crosby received a liver in 1994 despite a history of substance abuse. And Steve Jobs received a liver in 2009 after getting on a waiting list at a hospital thousands of miles from his California home.
Now, Mr. Cheney has received a heart transplant despite his age and history of health problems.
What do you think? Did favoritism allow Mr. Cheney to get a heart transplant? Leave a comment or click on the link below to take our poll. | <urn:uuid:da750a6a-6a2d-4018-bfac-84e2220ee545> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.palmbeachpost.com/opinionzone/2012/03/26/did-favoritism-allow-dick-cheney-to-get-a-heart-transplant/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972633 | 530 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.