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Wake up full of beans: Mexican dishes are spicing up British breakfast menus
Forget the full English - Gillian Orr tries a new way to start the day
There's certainly something wonderful about a long, leisurely breakfast at the weekend. Whether you're catching up with family or gossiping about the previous night's events, a substantial dish is an absolute necessity for nattering over. A measly bowl of cereal or a limp slice of toast is not going to cut it. And if you're feeling a bit bored with all the greasy fry ups and eggs benedict on offer, you might be keen to try out something a little different.
The seasoned bruncher may have noticed that Mexican-themed breakfast dishes have been popping up on menus all over the country. Dishes such as breakfast burritos – tortillas bursting with scrambled egg, chorizo, avocado and beans – and huevos rancheros – fried eggs served on corn tortillas topped with salsa and accompanied with beans and guacamole – are among the most popular items. Not only do they inject some excitement into otherwise tired menus, Mexican breakfast dishes are often considerably healthier than your typical full English.
And if you're yet to be swayed, you should know that Jamie Oliver described huevos rancheros as especially good if "you've got a hangover you're trying to shake off".
Wahaca, the popular Mexican food chain founded by Thomasina Miers, this month opened a new restaurant in London's Soho and is for the first time offering a full breakfast menu, serving up delights such as sweetcorn fritters, Mexican eggs, breakfast tortas, Mexican doughnuts, as well as classics including huevos rancheros. Horchata, a beverage made from almond and rice milk with cinnamon, and avocado smoothies, can also be tried out. Mexican cuisine, with its variety of flavours and plethora of spices, most of which are native to the country, mean breakfast is a considerably more colourful affair.
"Food is intrinsic to the lives of the people of Mexico. They socialise, do business, see their family and friends, all over food," says Miers. "And breakfast is a huge part of the day for them; they ensure they eat really well. Breakfasts can go on for several hours and really form part of the day. Much more so than over here."
Miers points out that the main foods that make up a typical breakfast in Mexico are the perfect way to start the day. "Obviously corn is incredibly nutritious, gluten-free and full of vitamins and minerals, so those flat breads which you can use as a base for any of the egg toppings or beans are great," she says.
"The beans used are very nutritious and a healthy part of the diet. Beans, corn and chillies basically provide you with all the protein, carbohydrate, roughage and vitamins that you need so the indigenous diet is super healthy. Avocadoes again are so good for you. Then there are all the amazing fresh juices and smoothies made with incredible tropical fruits. I always think I eat incredibly well when I'm in Mexico and we're trying to recreate that with the breakfasts as well as having some really fun, naughty things like the doughnuts and banana breads."
And although critics might point out that Mexico is now the second most obese country on the planet, Miers insists this is down to the influence of the United States diet creeping over the border and classic Mexican dishes are really very nutritious.
Boho Mexica in east London recently started offering a weekend brunch menu due to popular demand. There they serve up Chilaquiles (corn tortillas with salsa, egg, cheese and a choice of meat), huevos con longaniza (omelette with longaniza – a similar meat to chorizo, black beans, sweet plantains and corn tortillas) and huevos motuleños (fried egg over a layer of sautéed tortilla & ham covered in a roasted tomato salsa topped with green peas and served with sweet plantains).
"Mexican cuisine lends itself well to breakfasts because there's a certain freshness to the flavours," says Enrique Vivas, director of Boho Mexica. "And a bit of spice is good. It doesn't end up feeling so rich or heavy. We've only recently started doing it, but each week is busier than the last."
And it's not only Mexican restaurants that are offering such dishes. They're creeping onto regular breakfast menus too. In particular they are increasingly being offered at American-style diners such as Lucky 7 in Westbourne Grove, London, alongside the usual piles of pancakes and bacon.
But where has this demand for foreign breakfast dishes come from?
"I think maybe this massive burrito craze has made people look into Mexican breakfast a bit more and realised it's more than just burritos," suggests Miers. "There's such a massive interest in other cuisines at the moment and it's an extension of that, too. The recession has meant so many new start-ups specialising in foreign dishes that there is so much diversity on offer. It's made people really curious."
By Milton Crawford
1 onion, diced
Large garlic clove, very thinly sliced
1 green chili pepper, de-seeded and chopped
1 400g can chopped tomatoes
Handful of coriander, chopped
Salt and pepper
1 can refried beans
4 corn tortillas
4 free-range eggs
1 red chili pepper, de-seeded and finely sliced (to garnish)
Heat a little oil in a frying pan or wok and gently fry the onion, garlic and green chili for about five minutes, until the onion is softened but not coloured.
Add the tomatoes and half the coriander to the pan, then season with salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for about 15 minutes, until the mixture has thickened slightly.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 220C, and gently heat the refried beans in a saucepan over medium heat. Lightly brush the tortillas with oil. Place directly on a rack in the oven for approximately 10 minutes, until golden and slightly crispy.
In a separate, heavy-bottomed pan, fry the eggs gently in a little olive oil. Just before serving, add a squeeze of lime juice to the tomato salsa, and stir in.
To serve, place a tortilla on each plate (slightly warmed). Spread a quarter of the refried beans on each tortilla, followed by a little salsa, and top with the fried eggs. Spoon the rest of the salsa on and around the eggs. Garnish with the remaining coriander and the sliced red chili. Serve with wedges of lime.
Taken from The Hungover Cookbook, Milton Crawford (Square Peg, £6.99)
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It looks like someone linked you here to our printer friendly page. Please make sure you go Back to Safehaven.com for more great articles just like this one!
The Pound Gets Pounded
As the global currency war intensifies, the majority of attention has been paid to the 17% fall of the Japanese yen against the U.S. dollar over the past few months. The implosion has given cover to the sad performance of another once mighty currency: the British pound sterling. But in many ways the travails of the pound is far more instructive to those pondering the fate of the U.S. currency.
Japan has a unique economic and demographic profile which makes it a poor stalking horse. Newly elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Bank of Japan have clearly and forcefully committed Japan to a policy of inflation at any cost. Even in a world of serial money printers their plans stand out as exceptional. Britain, on the other hand, is charting a more conventional course to the same destination.
The UK government, under conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, has succeeded in bringing marginal discipline to their budgetary imbalances. From 2009 to 2012, British government expenditures rose a total of just 1.6%, which was far below the official pace of inflation. (In contrast, U.S. federal spending grew by 7.9% over that time period). Since 2009 the British have kept their debt-to-GDP ratio lower than America's and have cut into that metric at a faster rate. But while the British are conservative when compared to their American cousins, they are hardly austere when compared to Germany (which continues to have a nearly balanced budget and extremely low debt to GDP). Paul Krugman blames Britain's lackluster economic performance on their misguided experiment with austerity.
The monetary side of the equation also puts the UK within the spectrum of its peers. Ever since the Great Recession began in 2008 the Bank of England, led by outgoing Governor Mervyn King, has been far more stimulative than the European Central Bankers in Frankfort (but not quite as much as the Federal Reserve or the Bank of Japan). In contrast to the permanent and ongoing bond-buying quantitative easing programs underway in the U.S. and Japan, the Bank of England has engaged in such measures only selectively.
Given the relatively moderate approach pursued by the British, the poor performance of their currency may be hard to fathom. The deciding factor may be that the Pound Sterling is not nearly as vital to investors, or as integrated into the global economy, as the U.S. dollar or the euro. The greenback, being the world's reserve currency, has always benefited from demand that is independent of its economic fundamentals. The euro benefits from the size of the euro zone and the legacy of German banking discipline. The pound enjoys no such privileges and as a result foreign central banks do not feel as pressured to prop it up. As a result, over the past few years the pound has been... pounded. Since July 2008, the currency is down 26.7% against the U.S. dollar, and in recent months it has started falling faster than all other developed currencies except for the Abe-pummeled yen. Since October 1, 2012 the pound has fallen by 4% against the dollar and 8% against the euro.
The pound's health is made more suspect by the extreme challenges faced by the Bank of England as it tries to stimulate the most admittedly inflation prone economy among the major Western nations. Unlike the Federal Reserve, which is tasked by statute to combat both inflation and unemployment, the BofE has only a single mandate: to keep inflation contained. On that score it has been failing habitually. Inflation in the UK has been north of its 2% target for the past five years (the current official rate is 2.7%). In its most recent inflation projections, Mr. King admitted that it will stay that way for years to come, and that it may exceed 3% this year and next. With its currency weakening and inflation accelerating, the mandate of the BofE would clearly indicate that the time has come for monetary tightening.
However, like all central bankers, Mr. King, and his successor, the Canadian Mark Carney, will not be bound by such triflings as statutory mandates and past promises. In his press conference last week, Mr. King spoke of "looking past" current inflation figures to a time when he expects inflation will moderate. When the choice is between inflation and the political pain of economic contraction, bankers (at least those who don't speak German) will choose inflation every time.
While the American media has poked fun at the Bank of England's backtracking, they somehow do not understand that the Federal Reserve would be doing the same if not for the advantages given to us by the dollar's reserve status. Our ability to monetize the vast majority of the annual government deficit while exporting our inflation through half trillion dollar trade deficits and the overseas sale of hundreds of billions of Treasury bonds annually means that we do not yet face the pressures bearing down on the Bank of England.
For now at least Cameron is sticking to his guns and making the politically difficult case to voters that today's hard choices will yield benefits down the road. This puts all the pressure on the Bank of England to satisfy the calls for stimulus. The Federal Reserve is fortunate in that the Obama Administration shares none of Cameron's fiscal determination.
But already the Fed has done plenty of backing off from its prior promises. Just a few months ago Ben Bernanke announced specific inflation and unemployment triggers that would apparently put monetary policy on automatic pilot. But just last week, Fed Vice Chairman Janet Yellen announced that those goalposts (6.5% unemployment and 2.5% inflation) should not be considered "triggers" but as thresholds past which the Fed "may consider" tightening. When U.S. prices start to rise in earnest, look for the denials and rationalizations to come in torrents. The Fed will never acknowledge high inflation no matter what the data, nor will it ever take any steps to combat it. The simple reason is that it will be unable to do so without bringing on the economic contraction that is so terrifying to the British.
However, as British inflation accelerates, the pressure on the Bank of England to change course will intensify. As monetary stimulus continues to take its toll on the pound, price pressures will mount, even as the economy continues to stagnate. In other words, it is charting a course to stagflation. Perversely, this will put even more pressure on the BofE to ease. However, more cheap money will not stimulate the economy but merely cripple it further by fueling the inflationary fire.
At some point the British will have to admit that stimulus doesn't work. To break the inflationary spiral and rescue the ailing pound, the BofE will be forced to aggressively raise rates, at which point the British government will have no choice but to slash spending more deeply than would have been the case had they taken their medicine sooner. However, if the BofE refuses to tighten even in the face of much higher official inflation, the pound may deteriorate further and the UK might be left with the embarrassing choice of adopting the euro.
As far as the United States is concerned, the U.K. is the canary in the coal mine. What they are going through now, and what they may be about to go through, we will surely experience in the years ahead. The only difference is that the leeway afforded to us by our special status simply gives us more rope to hang ourselves. When the noose finally tightens, the fall will be that much more painful.
Peter Schiff is the CEO and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, best-selling author and host of syndicated Peter Schiff Show.
Subscribe to Euro Pacific's Weekly Digest: Receive all commentaries by Peter Schiff, John Browne, and other Euro Pacific commentators delivered to your inbox every Monday!
And be sure to order a copy of Peter Schiff's recently released NY Times Best Seller, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy - How to Save Yourself and Your Country.
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By Patrick Anderson
PBN Staff Writer
NEWPORT – Plans to revitalize the city’s historic civic center at Washington Square and replace a gas station there with a park and monument to Rhode Island’s Royal Charter are moving ahead.
Architect John Grosvenor, a leader of the Washington Square Roots community group pursuing the plan, said the owner of the gas station has agreed to a purchase price and negotiations over petroleum-related cleanup are all that remain to reach a sale.
The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit, is acting on behalf of Washington Square Roots to acquire the gas station, which sits at a confusing five-way intersection across the street from the historic Colony House.
The owner of the Texaco gas station, Neil Coffey, confirmed Friday that talks over a sale are ongoing and said he supported Square Roots’ goals for the area.
The land sits near the site where the Royal Charter of 1663, which recognized the colony of Rhode Island and enshrined in it then unprecedented religious freedoms, was read in public for the first time.
Grosvenor, principal of Northeast Collaborative Architects, would like to tear down the gas station and unearth the spring underneath it that made the site the city’s historic focal point. He would also make a public square with a historic monument to the charter, something he said would bolster the city’s bid for recognition as a world heritage site.
Grosvenor said changes to traffic patterns at the intersection are also being discussed and eventually the square may be turned over to the city.
Cognizant of getting community feedback on the plan, community leaders are holding a “charette,” or public workshop, Oct. 19 and 20, to collect ideas for the entire Washington Square area from residents.
Next August will mark the 350-year anniversary of the charter, and Grosvenor said if all goes well, he hopes to have work on the new “Charter Square” started by that time.
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Certain actions are relationship killers. Here are some areas where action -- or inaction -- will make all the difference.
1. Money. It is the No. 1 cause of divorce. If a partner has been unscrupulous, getting the trust back can be a challenge. You can start over, but you have to be willing to make up for what was lost and make sure the business side of your relationship is tuned up.
2. Sex/infidelity. A sexless marriage or unfaithfulness can extinguish love quicker than blowing out a candle. Don't let the flame burn out when keeping things warm is much easier than you think.
3. Disrespect. Research shows that if you call your partner names, belittle him or her, threaten to leave or use insulting language and yell, your relationship has a very low chance of survival.
4. Children. To some, children are bipedal germ carriers; to others, they are a reason for living. When families blend or go through difficult changes, the kids can become the entire focus of your relationship. Make sure to keep things in balance with your partner, so you have the energy to deal with any child issues.
5. Opposite-sex friends. Would you want your mate to hang out with a member of the opposite sex, having lunches, texting, etc.? If the answer is no, then you need to follow the same guidelines and talk with your partner about keeping appropriate boundaries.
6. Resentments. When you are holding pain, hurt or anger in your heart, there is little room for love. If you are harboring some resentment -- and who isn't? -- talk it out and put the matter to rest, so you can enjoy your relationship.
7. Discomfort/remodeling. If you are living in a construction zone, it's pretty hard to feel comfortable. Injury or illness can create a similar situation. Your home should be a place of serenity, so if you are remodeling or are dealing with physical issues, make your comfort a priority.
8. Lying/broken promises. Once you have been caught in a lie or break a promise, things change -- and not for the better. Even if you're afraid of getting in trouble, tell the whole truth and don't break promises, and find a way to make up for past mistakes.
9. Laziness. All good relationships require work. If you are unwilling to do it, your connection will diminish and you will begin to resent your partner. Talking about the kind of work your relationship needs is a good start.
10. Being mean. If you punish your partner when you don't get your way, or if the two of you give each other the silent treatment, you are headed for a lifetime of emotional pain. Stop the nastiness and learn how to heal what bugs you.
It's not very complicated. Avoid these relationship killers, and keep the love alive.
(Dr. Barton Goldsmith, a psychotherapist in Westlake, Calif., is the author, most recently, of "100 Ways to Boost Your Self-Confidence -- Believe in Yourself and Others Will Too." He also hosts "Emotional Fitness" on NPR. Contact him at barton (at) bartongoldsmith.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Three members of a Michigan city council have abstained from voting on a measure that would have prevented them from abstaining on future votes.
Top Lifestyle Headlines
The lineup for Blake Shelton's Healing in the Heartland: Relief Benefit Concert was announced Friday afternoon and it includes some of Oklahoma's biggest music stars.
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Lexington Police are patrolling what they said are the ten most dangerous crosswalks in Lexington after a six-year-old boy was struck at the intersection of Redding and Lansdowne while walking to school last week.
Police said drivers should be cautious about their speed in school zones, but said it's also important to make sure all of the ice and snow has been removed off of your car.
"Clearing your windows completely is of the utmost importance. When you don't, you don't have a full range of visibility, and unfortunately with small children you might think you have a clear coast, you might think you are okay to go, but that snow or frost may be blocking your view of that small child that may be walking behind or in front of your vehicle," said Sherelle Roberts, the PIO for the Lexington Police Department.
Lexington police said they will be out at crosswalks before and after school for elementary students.
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DIANE: Explain that.
JUDY: So, here’s my hand.
DIANE: Five fingers up.
JUDY: Right. So this finger is angry at that finger. Isn’t that stupid?
DIANE: They’re not going to get very far by fighting.
JUDY: … The point is they’re all on the same hand, so we’re all on the same planet, the same universe, so really we’re not separate. Anything I do is going to affect you. Anything you do is going to affect me. Chaos theory, right? A butterfly flaps its wings (in Brazil), and you have a tornado in Kansas…. It’s not I am helping you, it’s more like: Here we are. We’re not even in the same boat; we’re even more intimate than that, so that’s the precepts. When you really get that, then you’re not going to take short cuts. You’re not going to want to lie, you’re not going to want to kill, because if you lie, you’re lying to yourself. If you kill, you’re killing yourself.
DIANE: I think I get what you’re saying. To back up a little bit: If I think about being good you’re saying that gets in the way of me understanding that (you and are just two fingers on the same hand). How does it get in the way?
JUDY: Because you have this thing called goodness that you’re checking yourself against. OK, so a kid runs into the street. There’s the grandma, mom or dad or uncle (watching) If they stop for a second and ask: “Is it the right thing for me to run into the street?” Then he’s dead.
DIANE: Years ago I studied martial arts. What I really liked about learning to spar was that you couldn’t think about (what you were doing). Things happened so fast you had to learn to react instantly. So you’re saying that you can’t think about it. You have to just know what’s right. But there are a lot of people out there in the world who think we have to have moral codes.
JUDY: And how much suffering is caused by those moral codes? Look at your own life. You’re an out lesbian and look at what those moral codes did to your self- image when you were young.
DIANE: I’m not going to argue with that. (But) how do we keep from falling into the traps that our mere humanity create?
JUDY: Like self-delusion and all that stuff?
STAN: The moral codes, or the precepts, are a useful guideline if you’re not sure of what you’re supposed to do in a situation that requires consideration and judgment as opposed to (the situation where) the kid (is) running out in the street.
DIANE: Most people would run into the street.
STAN: Sometimes we do have to deliberate. You have a difficult choice facing you: Do I get an abortion, or do I not get an abortion? Then some kind of moral standards may be useful, to check it against those moral standards, and we do use the precepts that way. Another way of framing this is to look at the two major schools of ethics: One is rule based and the other is virtue based. The rule-based (school) is like the Ten Commandments or the precepts, and they’re taken very strictly: This is what you do; you simply follow these rules and you’ll be good, and everything will be all right.
DIANE: That’s my impression of some fundamentalist churches. I don’t know if it’s all fundamentalist churches and that may not be correct.
STAN: … By the time Zen Buddhism appeared in China, a virtue-based ethics had appeared. The two primary virtues that are cultivated in Buddhism, in Zen Buddhism certainly, are wisdom and compassion, which are two sides of the same coin. So how do you develop wisdom and compassion? One good way to do it is to practice meditation, and really look at things, really pay attention to things and develop the habit of mind of really paying attention to what is before you.
DIANE: This may be an impossible question to answer but is there any way you can explain meditation?
JUDY: Before explaining meditation I want to say a little more of what Stan was saying. You’re not just developing wisdom and compassion. Part of that wisdom is to see through your own mind, so your mind is not leading you around.
STAN: Wisdom is not a body of knowledge. It’s the wisdom of insight into your own nature and the nature of this world, a very fundamental kind of wisdom.
DIANE: So in other words, a person with a PhD might not have wisdom.
JUDY: Oh, definitely not.
DIANE: (laughing) Say the two (with) doctorates.
STAN: It’s certainly not a prerequisite….
JUDY: Wisdom means, for example, that it’s harder to fool yourself. When you are doing something out of self-interest, you can see that it’s out of self-interest. It’s harder to convince yourself that it’s not in your-self interest because you can really see your own mind as it works. You start seeing through your mind. We use this phrase don’t-know mind, which is an incredibly open mind, so you’re not bound by your preconceptions, by your self-delusions. You can walk through them. And compassion is the same thing. Compassion is realizing that you are not different from me. I don’t mean that you’re like me. We certainly look different. Our glasses are different. We have different sexual preferences.
STAN: In other words, compassion comes from seeing that reality, our interconnectedness, and that compassion is the natural reaction. Really the heart of this is some kind of meditation practice that develops that habit of mind, which is what a virtue is, it’s a habit. You might say it’s a good habit. …
DIANE: One of the things somebody said when I went to the Zen Center was that you were supposed to act and understand before thought. For some reason that made so much sense to me. So meditation is a practice, something you do every day or almost every day where you sit down somewhere… and you are doing something with your mind, going through a kind of a mind exercise. For the studio audience here, do we want to talk at all about what meditation actually is?
JUDY: There are a lot of different forms of meditation, so we can only talk a little bit about Zen meditation. And we can only talk about Zen meditation in our school, and even then, there are different forms of meditation, so I’ll let Stan start.
STAN: In our practice, the primary form of meditation is sitting meditation, which the Japanese call zazen, which is sitting zen. The world zen just means meditation. It’s from the sanskrit word dhyāna, which means meditation.
JUDY: Say dhyāna really fast. dhyāna (becomes) zen.
STAN: The Chinese pronounce it chán, and they like to shorten things to one syllable, so they said chan. Japanese pronounced that word … as Zen.
We have other forms of meditation, so we do prostrations, for instance, which involves the whole body, up and down, head down to the floor and back up again. The magic number is 108. We also have chanting meditation. The name of the school suggests chanting. The name of our school is Kwan Um, which is more familiar in the Chinese pronunciation Kwan Yin. Which means perceived sound. So Kwan Yin is the Bodhisattva who perceives the sound of the world, the sound of the world’s suffering and reacts with wisdom and compassion. The chanting is a very important part of our practice and chanting is just perceived sound. You’re doing it with other people, so this together action is a very important aspect of our meditation practice. You certainly can do it solo. Judy has done many long solo retreats and is contemplating a 100-day solo retreat next summer. But ultimately you return to the group, you return to the world.
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An Interview with the Deputy Director of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research and Professor of Health Policy and Management and Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
By Laura Trude, HWIC Information Specialist
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 has focused on what this legislation will mean for the general public or how increased coverage in an era of workforce shortages may impact access to health care. However, these bills contain numerous provisions that directly impact the health care workforce. Dr. Tom Ricketts highlights changes in graduate medical education, student loans, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services innovation center and more, and offers his insights on what these provisions will mean for the future of the health workforce.
Now that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 have become law, how will the implementation of this legislation impact the health workforce?
First off, there are a number of components that attempt to improve the conditions for trainees such as loan options and expansion of programs for the placement of primary care practitioners. There’s really a bolstering of all the programs we already have in place and that have been generally successful, but this bill may bring us to a tipping point that may help us turn the corner in primary care.
We’ve got some new things, the teaching health centers that are going to allow us to do some more training and increase involvement with access-oriented health programs and community health centers–that formal integration is really going to provide some momentum for things people have done already, informally and in an unpaid way. This might actually allow some folks to expand the kind of work practitioners find satisfying as well as help with access problems in underserved communities.
We’re also paying attention to general surgeons. We’ve recognized that’s become a big problem for smaller hospitals, for emergency rooms, for many places that depend on them. We’ve had a real flattening out of production of general surgeons and they’re getting older, leaving many places without surgical services. So the bill put in a Medicare bonus payment for them. That’s going to be helpful, but I think we need to pay a little more attention to the structure of all of the specialty training we have. The system allows people to go into places where they feel they are going to do well for themselves and not necessarily for the needs of the nation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for the individual, but it’s really creating misdistribution in the physician workforce.
Reading through the legislation, there’s training for public health that we haven’t had in a while.
There are fellowships, traineeships, support for demonstrations in dental-auxiliary programs. The expanded dental role has been tried before; it is very controversial, but it looks like now we might have the conditions where it might yield more positive results than in the past, at least in terms of acceptance.
What is health reform going to do to the health workforce overall? Well, I won’t necessarily call it a revolution, but I will call it a very rapid evolution.
You mentioned that teaching health centers are going to change training for practitioners. How else will the legislation change health care provider training?
We really do need to train people in management of chronic disease and get people involved and committed to that; there is support for medical homes and for accountable care organizations which will emphasize the medical home concept. The value people want to pay for is embedded in that kind of coordinated care, so we’re going to have to train people to provide that: teaching health centers is one way, medical homes is one way, the accountable care organizations is one way, the innovation programs that are called for are other ways. This is the team process that is mentioned in the legislation. Those are all things that are trying to provide the incentives–financial, organizational, and professional–to really meet those needs where we find there are gaps in the system: in the coordination of care, prevention, chronic disease. That’s where we need more emphasis. I’m looking at that to be something that might really help transform some of our training paradigms. We really need to think about training in a graduate medical education system that is more aligned with where we have needs—and that is chronic, primary, and ambulatory care.
What affect will the teaching health center legislation have on graduate medical education?
Graduate medical education under Medicare is paid for if you are being trained in a hospital, in general. So we’ve never really allowed much graduate medical education in outpatient settings. People do it in family medicine centers that are attached to a hospital, but now we’re talking about places that are more relevant for, say, rural and community-based settings; those are the places that will have these teaching centers. The contrast is that now we can pay for training and set up specific training structures that are out in communities where before those were more or less informal and were done with less than full support.
The legislation also includes changes to educational loans. How might these changes affect people interested in pursuing a degree in a health-care related field?
The bill actually changes the overall student loan structure. The loan structure will actually allow more people to choose to go into helping careers, especially things like allied health, dental assisting programs, or things like that, and not have big loan burdens. The National Health Service Corps is being expanded dramatically through the community health center fund with mandatory funding for the Corps, so that’s going to allow more people to come into it. It’s also giving people more options under the National Health Service Corps to do what are called half-time service waivers, which you have a longer period of service but you only do half-time service. They’re allowing teaching to count for some of the National Health Service Corps payoff. In the past you’d have very talented physicians go out and basically, they had to just see patients and couldn’t get compensated for teaching other doctors who could benefit from the clinical experience. So they changed the rules around the Corps that are going to make it more attractive, more flexible. That’s been one of the problems with the Corps; it’s been a really one-size-fits-all program and you’re either in or you’re out. Now you’ve got some options. I haven’t even touched on nursing because I’m not as knowledgeable of that, but there are a number of expansions of loan repayments in there across the gamut of the Title VIII programs.
How does the legislation promote the public health workforce?
I mentioned the public health workforce loan repayment. We used to have some public health service traineeships years ago. I had one thirty years ago, gosh maybe it’s been forty…it’s been quite a while; we’re moving back towards that to give folks training in that, because the public health system is really in need of people to work in many skilled positions and we haven’t been giving much federal support for that lately. We’ve got some mid-career public health scholarships. I really don’t know how they are going to work but it could give a chance for people to reorient themselves to work that is needed out in the public health system. We’ve got fellowship programs in epidemiology and lab science, preventative medicine is going to be expanded.
What does the health care legislation do to promote innovations in health care delivery? From a workforce perspective, how will these changes affect health care providers?
Medical homes are a work in progress: that is an innovation of itself, trying to organize properly coordinated care using information technology. But we have an innovation center that is being set up in CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services). We have gotten good ideas and made them work when people are properly compensated for them. We’ve got some requirements for changing the way in which some services are paid, either organizationally, like with the accountable care organization structure, or in payment structures, bundling and episode-type grouping and things like that which are going to come out of this. It’s hard to say what exactly will come of this–the bill says: ‘Let’s get the best things that work, let’s find them, let’s make sure everybody knows about them, let’s prove that they work, let’s make them the way we do health care.’ I can’t say much more about how you can stimulate innovation than saying ‘We’re going to reward you for innovation, we’re going to allow you to do new things.’ There’s a lot in there about doing things differently, about doing things better.
This bill was finally passed through reconciliation. Are there any major health workforce issues the final legislation did not address?
Well, the Medicare payment problem with the sustainable growth rate (SGR) link that puts in automatic adjustments to payment to physicians is something that was left out and has implications for workforce, if you’re going to be cutting Medicare physician payments. It’s going to produce some changes in the incentive structure because the percentage won’t be applied uniformly. It will be applied according to the distribution of current charges which are maldistributed somewhat anyway. So that’s probably going to intensify problems. People are talking about payment issues, especially among specialties and primary care.
There’s some support for state demonstrations for tort reform but I think that we really do need to tackle that and make for a more stable, predictable, and fairer system in tort reform. I work with a lot of physicians; they really worry about this. We have a system that is somewhat haphazard. I work in other countries and I can tell you there’s a bit more predictability and probably some things run a little more effectively in terms of the way which other countries deal with problems like this. Our country has a very complex and punitive system that runs to extremes and that’s really not the best climate for any practitioner that has to live under that. I won’t necessarily say that the actual monetary effect or the response in terms of defensive medicine is as bad as people say, but I don’t have a conversation with a doctor for more than a few minutes where this doesn’t come up.
Please note that the views expressed in this article are the opinions of the interviewee and do not reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of the Health Workforce Information Center or its funder.
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Warm to secondary glazing as winter gets set to bite!
With homeowners across Great Britain bracing themselves for another hefty rise in fuel bills, a bitterly cold winter on the way and pockets tightening everywhere, a growing number of people are warming to an ecoeasy approach!
Ecoease.co.uk, established earlier this year, supplies easily installed secondary window glazing at a tiny fraction of the cost of double glazing.
John Feely, one of three founding directors based in West Yorkshire and Scotland, commented: “We are the most cost effective solution on the market and when you consider that a window that costs around £700 to double glaze, ecoease can do the equivalent for around £60!
“It really is a case of no pane, no gain, no brainer!” quipped John who has seen an incredible demand for the bespoke cut-to-size PET plastic panels which are used in this easy-to-install system.
Ecoease secondary glazing is the simplest and cheapest solution on the UK market for homeowners looking to insulate their homes against the elements. It can also be easily self installed in minutes using magnetic edging. It virtually eliminates condensation and dramatically reduces noise pollution.
As a dedicated supplier of self installed magnetic secondary glazing in the UK, Ecoease also ticks all of the environmental boxes and is proving a big hit with people looking to develop a greener lifestyle as well as those who live in period or listed properties.
Ecoease secondary glazing, manufactured from fire retardant PET plastic, costs £48 per square metre for the PET sheet and £4 per metre for the magnetic edging strip.
For more information or to order online visit www.ecoease.co.uk or call 0845 519 3230.
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The Inclusion Team
The Inclusion Team consists of the Access and Inclusion Strategy Manager, who can be contacted on 0191 372 5425, the Area SENCO's and an officer for ASC.
The team are able to provide training on a wide range of issues.
Area SENCO Team
Every nursery and childcare setting will have a member of staff who is appointed to be the Special Educational Needs Support Co-ordinator (SENCO) for that particular nursery or childcare setting. The SENCO will be responsible for implementing the SEN Code of Practice and ensuring any children with special or additional needs are identified and have their needs met.
There are four Area Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators (Area SENCos) employed by Sure Start County Durham.
We are all qualified teachers will extensive experience in early years teaching and special educational needs.
The Area SENCos are part of the Sure Start County Durham's Inclusion Team.
As a team we:
- Value individual differences and recognise the contribution all people make.
- Aim to promote children's development and start from their strengths.
- Work to promote confident practitioners and well organised, inclusive settings that welcome parents and recognise that they know their children best.
- Work in partnership with parents and other professionals in the spirit of mutual trust.
What do we do?
We support SENCos and the staff in their settings to develop inclusive practice by:
- Helping them to implement the Code of Practice for Special Educational Needs (2001), the disability Discrimination Act (1995) and the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)
- Advising settings on the role of their SENCo.
- Offering a wide range of on-site training, in all aspects of SEN, to individual SENCos and whole staff teams.
- The provision of central training courses.
- Working with colleagues from other agencies to deliver training on both local and national programmes.
- The provision of an accredited course for SENCos leading to a Level 3 CACHE qualification.
- Providing Opportunities for parents to participate in training.
We support SENCos and the staff in their setting to develop inclusive practice by:
- Giving information and advice on what to include in Equal Opportunity and Behaviour Management Policies.
- The provision of leaflets and materials to complement training.
- Offering advice to settings on all aspects of inclusion.
- Helping settings to promote a smooth transition for children with additional needs from nursery to school.
- Running an annual Inclusion Conference.
- Providing a library of up to date books and DVDs for staff to borrow.
- Publishing a SENCo newsletter
- Running SENCo Business meetings twice a term - which form a valuable part of ensuring SENCos are up to date in all issues surrounding inclusion.
- Support Settings to address issues specific to their needs.
Supporting Inclusive Practice
As Area SENCos we are committed to promoting the inclusion of all young children within early years' settings. A primary focus of our work is supporting settings in the identification of and planning for, any additional needs a child may have.
This may take the form of general advice to a setting of more specific advice tailored to the needs of an individual child. Setting must obtain parental consent before requesting specific advice for a child.
When advice is sought from the team they may support the nursery in any of the following ways or in any other that may be appropriate to the situation:
Advising staff on consulting with children
Helping staff to make focussed observations of the child
Supporting staff and mum/dads/ carers to plan for their child's needs including signposting to other agencies where appropriate
Advising on appropriate targets and resources for the child
Supporting settings to write reports for review meetings and assessments.
Delivering appropriate training or advising staff and parents on relevant conferences and courses.
Supplying or advising staff and parents on where to find relevant information - this may include support groups/networks.
They also host an annual Inclusion Conference where there is an opportunity to listen to keynote speakers and take part in a variety of workshops.
The Team have a number of resources available for loan to settings including books, videos and dvds on a variety of issues. They also have various toys including multi-cultural dolls and puzzles.
They hold twice termly SENCo Business Meetings at County Hall to which all sencos are invited to listen and discuss about current topical issues around SEN and Government guidance.
How to get in touch with us
Sure Start County Durham
Support Worker for Children and Families with Complex Communication Difficulties
Offering support, advice and guidance to children, families and settings around issues regarding complex communication difficulties. tel: 0191 3725452
‘Moving On’ – A child and family held record. ‘Moving On’ is a child and parent/carer owned file, which is designed to give the child and parent/carer greater ownership and input into the sharing of information with the many professionals they may meet. The file is designed for ALL children and families to contribute to and adapt to their own individual needs. For further information contact, Ros Collinson from the ‘Moving On’ group - tel: 0191 3725444.
Motor Skills Programme A project aimed at helping settings to promote and develop gross and fine motor skills in the Early Years. Packed full of ideas and activities designed to improve the physical development of young children. For further information contact (01388) 424901.
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Sugar and corn syrup makers in bitter clash
This file photo taken Aug. 30, 2011, in Central Illinois shows farmer Jason Podany using a combine to harvest corn near Farmingdale, Ill. A bitter battle over whether high fructose corn syrup should simply be called "corn sugar" is headed for a federal courtroom in Los Angeles. A U.S. District Court judge on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2011, is set to weigh a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the sugar industry which is upset that manufactures of high fructose corn syrup want to rebrand the product. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File)
(AP) -- The setting sun splashes warm hues across a ripening cornfield as a man and his daughter wander through rows of towering plants.
Like any parent, the dad says in the television commercial, he was concerned about high fructose corn syrup. But medical and nutrition experts reassured him that in essence, it's the same as cane sugar.
"Your body can't tell the difference," he says. "Sugar is sugar."
That key claim, made last year by the corn industry as it tries to rebrand high fructose corn syrup as simply "corn sugar," was weighed for the first time by a federal judge Tuesday after a group of sugar farmers and refiners sued corn processors and a lobbying group.
Their lawsuit alleges the father-in-the-cornfield advertisement and other national television, print and online commercials from the corn industry amount to false advertising because sugar is not the same as high fructose corn syrup, the sweetening agent now found in the bulk of sodas and many processed foods.
Sugar makers say there are numerous differences between the white, granular product and the sticky liquid that is high fructose corn syrup. Attorney Adam Fox claimed the syrup industry has even acknowledged as much in the past.
At a hearing on the corn industry's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Fox showed U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall the papers from a case in Mexico filed by the Corn Refiners Association that carefully outlined how sugar and high fructose corn syrup are different. That case in 1997 was related to the export of high fructose corn syrup to Mexico.
"Like the horse and the automobile, sugar and (high fructose corn syrup) are two different products in terms of their physical and functional characteristics, as well as in their production process, distribution and commercial application," corn industry expert Peter Buzzanell stated in an affidavit at the time.
Corn industry lawyers counter that Fox was taking such statements out of context because the Mexico case dealt merely with the physical properties of high fructose corn syrup and never addressed the manner in which the body processes it.
"Sugar and high fructose corn syrup are equivalent as far as how they are metabolized by the body," attorney Dan Webb said.
Webb and other lawyers had filed a motion to dismiss the sugar makers' lawsuit on the grounds that the advertising campaign is protected speech because it forms part of a national conversation about the merits and pitfalls of high fructose corn syrup and sugar in general.
"At the core of this case is clearly a lawsuit filed by the other side that is attempting to stifle debate," Webb said.
He also argued that because the Corn Refiners Association is an industry group and does not directly sell any products, it cannot be sued for false advertising.
Without providing a timeline, the judge said she would issue a ruling on the dismissal motion.
High fructose corn syrup's image has suffered in recent years after public awareness of its widespread use increased and some studies suggested a link to rising obesity levels. Americans increasingly blame the syrup for a range of health problems, and first lady Michelle Obama has said she does not want her daughters eating it.
The American Medical Association has said there's not enough evidence to restrict the use of high fructose corn syrup, although it wants more research.
A year ago, the Corn Refiners Association asked the Food and Drug Administration if it could start using the term "corn sugar" as an alternative to high fructose corn syrup. It could take another year for the FDA to decide on the name, but the corn industry didn't wait before it started using it in advertisements.
Sugar industry lawyers claim corn refiners have already spent $50 million trying to persuade the public to accept corn sugar as a name.
It would not be the first time a food has been rebranded. In 1988, for instance, low erucic acid rapeseed oil became much more popular after it was renamed "canola oil."
More than 100 citizens and consumer groups have written to the FDA as it weighs the name change, many of them slamming the rebranding as a cynical attempt to confuse customers who may be wary of high fructose corn syrup.
"Given the current controversy, consumers who look to avoid (corn syrup) should be able to easily differentiate among products that do and don't use (it)," the Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, wrote to the FDA.
Expert opinion was divided on high fructose corn syrup. Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has said that there was no evidence that the sweetener is any worse for the body than sugar.
Michael Goran, a professor of preventive medicine and director of the Childhood Obesity Center at the University of Southern California, said he does not give his kids products containing high fructose corn syrup because it contains high levels of fructose, which can be stored in the liver as fat and trigger gout and hypertension problems.
"As a father and as a consumer, I like to know what I am eating," he said. "The industry has done a very good job trying convince people it's sugar from corn. It's not ... it's manufactured from corn by a highly industrialized process."
Goran and other professionals say the healthiest option is consume smaller amounts of all sugar.
"The U.S is the highest consumer of sugar in the world," Goran said. "To prevent obesity and diabetes, we should be consuming less sugar in general."
©2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Classical and Quantum Mechanics via Lie algebras
Apr 15, 2011 I'd like to open a discussion thread for version 2 of the draft of my book ''Classical and Quantum Mechanics via Lie algebras'', available online at http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0810.1019 , and for the...
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Every month, Heavy Petal collaborates with Willowtree — a website for those with food sensitivities who want to find their culinary bliss — to bring you a celebration of an in-season edible. I’ll tell you how to grow it; they’ll tell you how to eat it. Yay!
With such a slow start to summer and a spring that seemed to redefine “cool and damp,” the Willowtree gals and I had radishes coming out of our ears. I have to admit that I didn’t really mind when my last sowing of radishes bolted in the recent warmth; I’d long since grown tired of radish salads and salted radishes and… well, what else can you do with a radish?
If you’re Jackie and Tina, you make salsa. Read on for the recipe and growing tips.
Grilled Tuna with Radish Salsa
Makes: 4 Tuna steaks with relish
Cook Time: 15 min
4 tuna steaks
4 large radishes, diced
1 small scallion bulb, diced
5 small strawberries, diced
10 large, fresh mint leaves, diced
Juice of half a lime
Pinch of coarse salt
Fresh ground pepper
In a small bowl combine diced radishes, scallions, strawberries and mint. Add lime juice, toss and finish with pinch of salt.
Turn BBQ to high. Lightly sprinkle tuna with salt and pepper. Sear tuna on grill for about 3 minutes per side, or until desired temperature is reached. (We prefer to serve tuna lightly seared while still pink in the middle).
Plate tuna and serve hot with a spoon full of radish salsa on top.
Radishes are one of the easiest and quickest crops to grow, maturing in as little as 25 days. They’re also one of the first crops you can sow in spring or late winter. A cool-season crop, I plant them from March through April, then again in August through October.
They’ll grow in sun or part shade, and like rich, moist soil that’s rich in organic matter (stir in some composted manure prior to planting and you’ll be rewarded!).
The real secret to growing radishes—although it’s not much of a secret—is to grow them fast and harvest before they have a chance to get woody or bitter. Plant the seeds, keep the soil consistently moist (dry soil causes growth to slow and increases the likelihood of bolting, which is when the plant gives you flowers instead of the root you really wanted), and pick as soon as you see that red, pink, white, or purple root start to peek out of the soil. Planting a few seeds every week or two is a better strategy than sowing a ton all at once. Stagger your harvest, friends.
And if your radishes do go to seed (as they’re wont to do in the summer heat)? Eat the seedpods. Just harvest when young and tender, and lightly sauté.
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One of the first things I noticed about St. Thomas -- beyond its spectacular physical beauty -- was the peculiarity of the local economy. No matter what day of the week it is, if there is at least one cruise ship in the harbor, every shop on the island will be open and bustling. But on no-ship days the commercial areas around the island feel like little ghost towns with shuttered shops and empty sidewalks. Aside from service providers like doctors, lawyers and accountants, and the local government, the economy here is almost entirely dependent on the tourist industry.
It was also obvious that almost nothing is made here. There are a few local artists and artisans who sell their wares through a handful of gift shops, or at the occasional farmer's market, but there is no manufacturing sector. Everything from clothing and food to electronics and auto parts are imported. Even the majority of the jewelery and gift shop items are Chinese imports.
So when I came up with the concept for Nayad SwimGym, one of the first things that inspired me was the thought of developing an actual production facility right here on the island. I like the idea of creating jobs for local people who have been suffering through the recession right alongside their mainland counterparts and the thought of exporting a finished product, amid countless imports, was also appealing.
Of course there are challenges. The cost of labor is high, which makes it difficult to compete with apparel manufacturers in other parts of the world. And because St. Thomas is not exactly a supply hub, all materials have to be imported at considerable expense, which cuts even deeper into our bottom line.
Still, manufacturing in the Virgin Islands is an achievable goal. Yes, our products will be a little pricey. But look at the price we Americans have already paid for exporting so much of our manufacturing overseas! The economy is stagnating, unemployment rates are up and we have allowed ourselves to become dependent on cheap foreign imports. If we continue along this path, things will only get worse.
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A tukel is a high quality room with 2 large single beds (2m x 1m). There is a bathroom with shower. All rooms have under-floor heating by solar.
In the Simiens there is a mix of various peoples from three religions, Coptic christian, Muslim and Jewish.From a historical viewpoint, one of the most interesting places to visit is Deresge Maryam in Janamora district which is where King Tewodros II was crowned.
Gelada can be seen from Simien Lodge right the way up to Bwahit. There are currently about 2700 monkeys in the park and this number is fairly static. Although the predators have declined, increased farming in the park means that the gelada do not have the same grasslands and woodlands as previously.
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Andrew J. Wakefield, MB, BS, FRCS, FRCPath; Mark Blaxill, MBA; Boyd Haley, PhD; Anissa Ryland; Daniel Hollenbeck, BS; Jane Johnson; James Moody, JD; Carol Stott, PhD (398 KB)
[What You Can Do - click for action you can take]
[Copy to others: Dr Andrew Wakefield Demolishes Ignorant US Vaccine Lobby]
The public relations arm of those who are supposed to be legally and ethically responsible for vaccine safety published “Clear Answers and Smart Advice About Your Baby’s Shots,” by Dr. Ari Brown.
“Clear Answers” is anything but. Is this dishonesty? How can it be ignorance? Aren’t these people supposed to be “experts”? How comprehensively misleading and untrue is this? Are these people “pulling the wool” over your eyes? Decide for yourself.
Published today is a detailed response by Dr Andrew Wakefield and colleagues supported by 20 child health safety organisations. We publish edited extracts below. You can read the full 16 page printed paper here.
Wakefield is the British medical doctor who put child health safety before his career and has been hounded by big money ever since.
In an interview with Richard Halvorsen for his book The Truth about Vaccines, one of the lead authors of the Cochrane Collaboration’s review of MMR vaccine safety said, “The safety studies of MMR vaccine are crap. They’re the best crap we have but they’re still crap“.
Follow the money.
Brown is an official spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Brown’s “Clear Answers” is endorsed and published by the Immunization Action Coalition (IAC), a US organization funded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the vaccine manufacturers. Given this background, any reasonable person might expect a comprehensive, well researched, and persuasive overview.
Wakefield et al say:-
Informed consent is a crucial element of the foundation upon which ethical medical practice rests. Providing patients, parents, or guardians with an honest assessment of the risks and benefits of any medical procedure not only requires the healthcare provider to be, to the best of his or her ability, “informed” of all of the risks and benefits but also requires said provider to neutrally convey all of the risks and benefits to the patients, parents, or guardians.
Since the topic of vaccination is so important and because we have major concerns about the accuracy of much of what this document says, we are providing a point-by-point response.
Follow the money? Are the 20 organisations which endorse Wakefield’s response concerned about your child’s health safety or about supporting big business and the pharmaceutical industry?
|Autism Action Network||Medical Veritas|
|Age of Autism||International Chiropractors Association|
|Autism File||National Vaccine Information Center|
|Autism One||National Autism Association|
|Autism Research Institute||NoMercury|
|World Autism Association||Schafer Report|
|Center for Autism and Related Disorders||Unlocking Autism|
|Alan D. Clark, M.D. Memorial Research Foundation||Autisme Montréal|
Here are some edited extracts of Dr Brown’s claims and of Wakefield’s response:-
BROWN: “I’ve heard autism is on the rise. Why?”
Brown’s explanation: “Displacing one diagnosis for another: In previous generations, many children were diagnosed with …. some other …. disorder. Today many of these same kids are diagnosed with severe autism.”
But what Brown says is not supported by the scientific evidence. It has been retracted, disavowed, or falsified in previous scientific studies. One study was so badly wrong they had to withdraw and state instead that “diagnostic substitution does not appear to account for the increased trend in autism prevalence“.
BROWN: “The definition of autism has changed over the years. …. By expanding the definition of autism, suddenly many more kids were declared autistic…”
Incorrect. …. autism diagnostic criteria were narrowed in 1994 ….. Despite this, the dramatic increase in numbers of children with both autism and non-autistic spectrum disorders has continued.
BROWN: “Unfortunately, many states don’t break out where kids are on the autism spectrum …. so it’s hard to get solid numbers.”
Incorrect. California’s autism numbers are provided by the Department of Developmental Services, based on DSM criteria. In order to be eligible …… a professional diagnosis is required. California data exclude those with Asperger’s … and all … non-autistic PDD diagnoses .
BROWN: “Better awareness, better and earlier diagnosis: More people ….are on the lookout for children with autism.”
Not in California. To reduce the number of new autism diagnoses, the state government in 2003 changed the eligibility criteria to exclude children who could tie their shoelaces. Despite this children with autism fail this ill-conceived test and continue to flood into the system in record numbers.
BROWN: “…. autism is on the rise. Why? Because …… Today, kids are diagnosed as early as 18 months of age. This adds many more kids to the rolls …
Wrong. Earlier diagnosis has no impact on the number in a group born in any particular year. Children will eventually be diagnosed. By the age of 10, children with autism would be diagnosed whether they were born in 1980 or 1990. California data show autism numbers were greater by a factor of over sevenfold in 2000 compared with 1989.
A new study dispels the myth that the rise isn’t real and indicates “research should shift from genetics to the host of chemicals and infectious microbes in the environment that are likely at the root of changes in the neurodevelopment of California’s children” “It’s time to start looking for the environmental culprits responsible for the remarkable increase in the rate of autism in California,” said UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute researcher Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of environmental and occupational health and epidemiology, and an internationally respected autism researcher.
BROWN: “recent legislation led to schools labeling more kids as autistic”
Brown is wrong. US law was amended in 1990 to require that autism be counted and reported separately because it was rising faster than all other covered disabilities. The change did not cause the epidemic; it was because of it.
BROWN: “Unfortunately, there are very few incidence studies of autism.”
Wrong. Several incidence studies are available, and they show a rise.
BROWN: “Today …. parents are more willing to accept an ASD diagnosis. And the diagnosis now allows for special education services, which many parents realize can help their child.”
If the numbers have always been this high, where are all the autistic adults, whom some call the “Hidden Horde”.
BROWN: “These are possible explanations ….. but we don’t have all the answers yet. The bottom line: in the 1980′s, one in 10,000 kids were diagnosed with autism. Today, it’s one in 150. ”
In 2009 this “1 in 150″ number is likely to be considerably higher. Brown bases her statement on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) …. from six years ago on eight-year-old children ….. on February 7, 2007 the CDC promised to publish an update. Two years later and this data has not yet been published or released.
In 1992 there were 15,580 affected children recorded in the US public education system. 14 years later there were 224,594 children. The autism pandemic is real.
BROWN: “Okay, so what causes autism? ….. We know genetics plays a role. Studying twins is an obvious way to detect genetic disorders.
Wrong. This 31 year old unscientific proposition has been shown here on ChildHealthSafety to be bunk – “Autism Not Genetic – Says Expert Professor Simon Baron Cohen“.
BROWN: “…. it appears that autism is caused by several different genetic defects, although researchers haven’t quite figured out the puzzle yet.”
“Haven’t quite,” unfortunately means “nowhere near.” While specific genetic deficiencies associated with autism are well documented, such deficiencies are rare and cannot explain more than a very small proportion of ASD cases. The genetics of autism has been studied extensively, at huge cost, for precious little return.
BROWN: “Abnormal brain growth”
Wrong. Abnormal brain growth is not a cause of autism. Brown herself wrote in 2004, “One interesting study…tied autism to abnormal head growth in infants under a year of age. While this is not the cause of autism …
BROWN: environmental exposure
US Government officials, including Dr. Tom Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health and Chair of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, and an emerging scientific consensus, agree that autism is caused by environmental triggers in children with undetermined genetic susceptibility.
There are known and widely accepted environmental causes of autism ranging from pre-birth exposure to thalidomide, the anti-seizure medication sodium valproate, and rubella virus (German measles) Postnatal exposure to neurotoxins, and viral infections including rubella, measles and herpes viruses, cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr virus have been causally linked to autistic syndromes. Specifically, measles and measles-containing vaccines and vaccines “unspecified” have also been causally linked BY formal research to childhood developmental disorders, including ASD and developmental regression.
BROWN: “What about vaccines? the scientific evidence does not support this theory. Research during the past ten years has …. found conclusive evidence that vaccine exposure is NOT the turn-on switch for autism.”
Wrong. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) hosted a two-day conference in April, 2007, “Autism and the Environment: Challenges and Opportunities for Research”. The workshop discussed environmental causes, including vaccines, and suggested a list of related research opportunities.
And here on ChildHealthSafety you can read of US Federal Court cases where it was decided that vaccines, including MMR, caused autism. In one case says it all. The Judgement records that the US Department of Health and Human Services had no alternative explanation beyond “Unconfirmed speculation by a few treating doctors, as with Dr. Wiznitzer’s hypothesization“:
Dr. Neal Halsey, one of the architects of US vaccine policy—now seemingly awake—when asked by parent advocates at a public meeting why they would even give a newborn infant with no risk factors a vaccine for a disease predominantly of intravenous drug abusers and the sexually promiscuous (hepatitis B), answered “Because we can”.
You can read the rest of the document yourself to see Brown’s claims thoroughly demolished. One part of the remainder stands out in particular regarding vaccine safety:-
BROWN “Before a vaccine is approved for use by the government, its safety is extensively studied. These studies look at how kids respond to the vaccine. And so-called ‘combo’ vaccines that incorporate several shots at once also consider the combined effect.”
The Cochrane Collaboration, an internationally respected body that provides independent scientific oversight. wrote, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre and postmarketing is largely inadequate“. But in an interview with Richard Halvorsen for his book The Truth about Vaccines, one of the lead authors of the Cochrane review left no doubt as to his true feelings when he said, “The safety studies of MMR vaccine are crap. They’re the best crap we have but they’re still crap“.
If you found this information helpful there are two things you can do about it.
Please share this page with others
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Here is a link for you to copy and paste :-
UK Residents – Write To Your Politicians – Do It Now!
Write to your Member of Parliament with the link to this page.
Ask your MP to ask the UK’s Secretary of State to explain why the British Government allows officials of the UK’s Department of Health to cause the human rights of children to be violated.
To email your MP, all you need to know is your MP’s name. MP’s email addresses are in the form:-
To find out who your MP is click on this link:-
Notes on terminology:-
In the US the official diagnostic definition of what we call “Autism Spectrum Disorders” or ASD are instead called “Pervasive Development Disorders” or PDD for short. That is under the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th edn)” or “DSM IV” for short.
“Autistic Spectrum Disorder” is the term applied internationally under the “ICD” or “International Classification of Disease”
Many refer to ASD and PDD as “autism” but “autism” is a subset of the spectrum and is often referred to also as “childhood autism”, “typical autism” and “Kanner autism”. [The common behaviours like hand flapping, loss of eye contact and suchlike in young children are unmistakable, whereas other spectrum disorders like mild Aspergers Syndrome can be more difficult to diagnose.]
Copyright ChildHealthSafety 2009 – The authors hereby assert their moral rights. All rights reserved.
Filed under: ADHD, Aspergers, autism, Barak Obama, Child Health Safety, Disease Statistics, Hannah Poling, John Poling, MMR, Obama, vaccination, vaccine, vaccine court, Vaccine Damage, Vaccines Tagged: | ADHD, Andrew Wakefield, Aspergers, autism, Barak Obama, Baron Cohen, CDC, David Kirby, fraud, genetic, genetics, Hannah Poling, immunisation, Jon Poling, Julie Gerberding, MMR, Obama, Professor Baron Cohen, Professor Simon Baron Cohen, research, research fraud, Simon Baron Cohen, vaccination, vaccine, vaccine adverse reaction, Vaccine Damage, vaccine risks, Vaccines, Wakefield
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With Friends Like These
How not to gain China’s respect.
Mar 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 25 • By ROSS TERRILL
Individuals, too, can find China asks more of a friend than of a skeptic. Back in the early 1970s, as the author of 800,000,000: The Real China, I was assumed by Beijing to be a friend. Expectations grew that I would agree with all of China’s positions. This did not occur. When Deng Xiaoping was purged in April 1976 and I said the charges against him were ridiculous, a senior Chinese diplomat in Washington retorted, “If you don’t understand Deng is a counterrevolutionary, you don’t understand anything about China!” Yet this stain did not reduce my access to China (and the Chinese diplomat, after Mao’s death, became Deng’s ambassador to the United Kingdom). Today, I agree with Beijing on some issues and sharply disagree on others. It makes for a more stable relationship than being a friend.
Obama may be in danger of experiencing bite-your-friend. He announced early in his presidency a shriveled notion of American exceptionalism (“I believe in American exceptionalism just as I suspect … Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism”). Fine for a law school seminar, but self-effacing from the sole superpower. Obama also promulgated the idea that if big powers behave well, rogue states will be inspired to behave well too. This view—decidedly not Beijing’s—looks like a dove’s flight into the dark. To say the least, Sudan, Iran, Burma, and North Korea have been slow to get Obama’s message.
Still genial on his visit to China in November, Obama met no dissidents, did not insist on taking questions at the Obama-Hu press conference, allowed the joint U.S.-China statement to pontificate about India and South Asia, and did not attend church. Asking little from Hu Jintao, he apparently got nothing. The next month in Copenhagen, Obama drank as he had brewed in Beijing. Premier Wen Jiabao, a man normally as polite as Obama, was tough with him, some say rude to him. The media didn’t even notice that Hu Jintao, who is Obama’s counterpart, did not turn up in Denmark, but sent Wen, his number two.
Since then we’ve had the Google shock and Secretary Clinton’s clumsy effort to define Internet freedom, American businessmen facing new barriers in China, a war of words over U.S arms sales to Taiwan, and zero results from any pressure from Obama on Beijing over egregious human rights violations.
With China, stating where you stand is more productive than trying to please. Long ago, a British diplomatic specialist on Asia, Ernest Satow, told young recruits going to East Asia for the first time: “Do not waste your time worrying about what is in the Asian mind. The main thing is to be clear what is in your own mind.” In this respect Nixon and Kissinger and Haig, devising the U.S. opening to China in 1971-72, were correct (and ahead of Congress, the Democratic party, and the media). They knew what they sought.
Obama seems content to preside at the table of world politics, listen to all, and pluck harmony (he hopes) from a cacophony of voices. China, though authoritarian, is realist, distant from Obama’s idealism. Whether Obama is right or wrong in his noble aims, the philosophic gap exists. The Chinese party-state has not lost its talent for probing a soft underbelly to its own advantage.
Ross Terrill, associate in research at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, is the author of The New Chinese Empire and several books published in Chinese in the PRC.
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By Laura Noble. Ava Publishing, 2006, Distributed by Sterling Publishing Co.; 256 pages; 200 photographs; hardback; ISBN No. 2-88479-028-4; $60 (US). Information: Ava Publishing, Switzerland; phone +41 78 600 5109; [email protected]">s [email protected]</a> , http://www.avabooks.ch ; also Ava Publishing, London; phone: +44 1903 204455; fax: +44 1903 237346; in the U.S., Sterling Publishing Co., New York; phone: +1 212 532 7160; fax: +1 212 2132495; http://www.sterling.com .
This handsome and approachable volume is an earnest primer for anyone who desires to be more than casual about appreciating, let alone collecting, photography. As a young scholar and collector of the medium, Laura Noble shows more passion, perhaps, for the gallery of great images--"Profiled Photographers"--that takes up nearly half of the book, than for the nuts and bolts of structuring, building, and curating a collection, but she provides some important details nonetheless. She also provides an appendix of galleries and dealers by country, city, and gallery--and by not presuming to be comprehensive, her apology is implicit. Her further appendix of scholarly resources cites a world of published materials, including periodicals and websites, that, while almost exclusively English-language, are nonetheless central to serious photography--from Andy Grunberg to John Szarkowski on the critical side, to Wetling's 19th-century collector's guide, Witkin's and London's 1979 tome, all the way to ebay and iphotocentral.com.
The collecting establishment may quibble with and question what's here, citing omissions and errors of fact and interpretation that future editions may have to reckon with; meanwhile, this book is concisely designed for an audience of young art admirers who possess the means to start acquiring, and not for collectors already in midstream. Noble's work seems to acknowledge the short attention span of contemporary readership, and makes things easy, in its way--without suggesting that serious collecting is anything of the sort.
That said, Noble's eye is very much on the modern centuries, and so the 15 pages she devotes to the early period of photography (1500 to 1899, by her reckoning) are desultory, scratching the surface with familiar descriptions of photo processes and quick nods to Beato and Fenton, Frith and Bourne, before leaping into a decade by decade overview of the 20th century and beyond, noting key movements, techniques, and photographers. Is it ironic that she insists on "a sound working knowledge of the history of photography" as a prerequisite for any collector, or that she emphasizes "the importance of historical context" without providing a deep context? Perhaps, and the solution would have been to fashion this book more along the lines of Wetling or Witkin, but again, this is something of a coffee table book for the contemporary market. At the very least, it points novices toward more serious contextualizing and more thorough scholarship, while at its best it provides a useful gloss on many great photographs, how they are priced, what distinguishes them, and how their creators distinguished themselves through vision and methodology.
Noble's subjectivity is most evident in the "Profiled Photographers" section which dominates the book. Many of these are clearly personal favorites, such as Gregory Crewdson's domestic surrealism, or Nobuyoshi Araki's explorations of Japan's sex industry, but there are more examples of the iconic than the idiosyncratic--classics from Nadar to Brassai, Steichen, Steiglitz, Weegee, Evans, Brandt, Hine, up to Wegman and Gursky. In the end, though, this immersion in the historic flow of photography is good for whetting the appetite of a fledgling collector but probably less helpful to the collecting impulse than Noble's dry descriptions of how one might structure a collection, be it biographical, historical, thematic, stylistic, and so on. Her practical advice on buying prints at galleries, from collectors, or at auction tends toward common-sense cliché ("If something seems a little too good to be true then it probably is!"), but it is good advice for beginners. Better yet is her concise information on protecting prints from pollution or excessive heat, and a brief section on conservation, which focuses (via an interview with Lenny Hanson, conservator of Getty Images' archival London collections) on dealing with foxing stains, water damage and preserving photographic emulsion.
Ultimately, Noble's effort is at least noble, walking a line between art and commerce dictated, in part, by the exigencies of publishing in today's very competitive market for expensive specialty trade books, which tend to face nasty, brutish, and short lifespans. At $60 (US), it's a thoughtful and entertaining holiday gift for those who may know far less about photography than they wish they did. And as a quick-study approach to the complexities of collecting, it is a fair place to start.
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An innovative Australian public journalism project has partnered student reporters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with a refugee support agency and a social media startup.
The aim of the project, #ReportingRefugees, was to tackle problematic media coverage of asylum seekers and refugees in a volatile political climate in parallel with educating students to connect with a “citizens’ agenda.” The result was a student takeover of the airwaves in Australia’s national capital and a fundamental shift in attitudes.
MediaShift correspondent Julie Posetti anchored the project at the University of Canberra where she teaches journalism. This is the first in her two-part series on #ReportingRefugees.
Problem: Divisive & Xenophobic National Debate
For the past 15 years, racist and xenophobic political memes have dominated public discussion of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia, with asylum seekers who arrive by boat demonized as threatening aliens by politicians whose divisive messages are fanned and fed by inflammatory headlines and tabloid TV.
In this climate, and on the back of involvement in a substantial national research project on the reporting of multiculturalism (which led to me theorizing about the potential transformative impact of minority encounters on journalists), I decided to embark on a public journalism project with my final-year University of Canberra broadcast journalism students.
The end result was two hours of radio journalism, fueled by collaboration and social media, that gave a much-needed voice to refugees, a better understanding for the public of the complicated issues surrounding them, and important lessons for those of us working on the project.
Journalism Partnerships For Change
#ReportingRefugees was built on partnerships that I forged with 666 ABC Canberra, the ABC’s radio station in the Australian capital; Canberra Refugee Support, the city’s best-known organization for refugees and asylum seekers; OurSay, an innovative crowdsourcing startup; and the School of Music at the Australian National University, also based in Canberra.
I made my first approach to CRS, and their initial response reflected the impact of xenophobic political campaigns and media stereotyping: They were reluctant to get involved. CRS President Geoff McPherson said concerns about resourcing the project were also paramount. But I persisted, pursuing meetings and arguing the merits of interventions in journalism education and public journalism approaches in tackling problematic reporting of marginalized communities. The proposal was for CRS to facilitate contact between student journalists and asylum seeker-refugee clients and provide advice on relevant policy and community programs, with the aim of minimizing any potential harm to vulnerable interviewees and assisting in the development of culturally intelligent reporting on a complex and often poorly reported issue.
Ultimately, just a fortnight before the project kicked off, CRS agreed to participate. “The judgment of the CRS board was that the potential return on this project far outweighed the risks and (we) decided to proceed,” McPherson said, reflecting on the project at its conclusion.
Collaborating with Australia’s Public Broadcaster
By contrast, the ABC was keen to be involved from the outset. They were even prepared to hand over two hours of airtime on their main Canberra radio station to the students. They agreed to allow the students — under the joint editorial supervision of the ABC, me and my tutors — to report, produce and present a radio special devoted to #ReportingRefugees which was scheduled for broadcast on November 27 last year — three months from the start of the project.
Jordie Kilby, ABC 666 Canberra content director, explained the network’s motivation for involvement: “We hoped for an insightful look at the local community of refugees living in the Canberra region; we wanted to build on our relationships with local refugees and asylum seekers and the community groups that help and support them. We also hoped the project would give us an opportunity to look at some future journalists and their ideas and work.”
Original Student Compositions Score #ReportingRefugees
By this stage, my ANU School of Music collaborator, Jonathan Powles, had agreed to offer his students the opportunity to produce original scores to accompany my journalism students’ stories. Apart from being an interesting cross-disciplinary education collaboration and a potentially rewarding creative merger for broadcaster, teachers and students alike, the provision of original music for the planned radio program meant that the ABC would also be able to podcast the show. (Copyright laws in Australia prevent the podcasting of commercial music broadcast on radio.)
Giving Citizens a Say
Finally, I decided to approach OurSay — a Melbourne startup which partners with media organizations, universities and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to crowdsource questions designed to address the “citizens’ agenda.” They jumped at the chance to be involved, and we launched the project’s OurSay page which asked the public to identify the questions they most wanted answered by a panel of experts on asylum seeker-refugee policy during the ABC broadcast.
OurSay’s CEO, Eyal Halamish, explained the role of the platform in the project: “Especially on such a contentious issue as that of refugees and asylum seekers, where the mainstream media latch onto sensationalist, short-termist news instead of taking a broader view, a social tool such as OurSay can help set the agenda more effectively and help express what the public feels about an issue, as sourced from their own questions and comments.” It worked like this: Over the course of a month, OurSay users were asked to submit the questions they most wanted put to the panel, and the top five questions were selected by popular vote on the site.
The #ReportingRefugees Curriculum
With these #ReportingRefugees building blocks in place, I was able to finalize the structure of the project within the syllabus. This was no easy task! Trying to balance learning outcomes and university assessment policies against real-world media deadlines is always tricky. But doing so on a project seeking to break new ground through multiple public journalism partnerships, on a complex and sensitive reporting assignment, proved to be the most challenging teaching project I’ve ever been involved with. Fortunately, it also emerged as the most rewarding experience of my journalism education career.
#ReportingRefugees became the foundation of the Advanced Broadcast Journalism unit (a class of 50 students) I convene at UC. I gave lectures on public journalism (featuring the work of professor Jay Rosen and others) and reporting trauma in the social media age. I also devoted a lecture to a live Skype interview with the ABC’s South East Asia correspondent, Zoe Daniel, whose beat includes the massive refugee camps and asylum seeker communities of that region.
The major assessment required students to work in reporting duos networked via loosely themed production units, on original, long-form audio or audio/video stories about refugees-asylum seekers (or policies and programs pertaining to them) which would compete for selection in the final radio program. Additionally, they had to produce images and text to accompany their stories for online publication. They were encouraged to speak with, not just about, refugees-asylum seekers and to explore personal stories and angles that the media had largely overlooked. Some reporting duos were assigned to refugee-asylum seeker families and community services facilitated by CRS, while others independently identified stories and sources.
Assessing Audience Engagement and Reflective Practice
Additionally, the students were required to maintain Twitter feeds (with a focus on community building around content, crowdsourcing and content distribution) as part of an “audience engagement” assessment. They also needed to participate in Facebook groups dedicated to editorial management. The final assessment involved publication of an academically grounded reflective practice blog which required the students to critically analyze the project, their involvement in it and their experiences of it, with reference to scholarly readings.
So, what did the students think of the project at the start? Many have admitted they were daunted by the theme and the workload when they first heard about it. One, Ewan Gilbert, conceded he was initially a tad perplexed: “I went into the assignment thinking it was all a bit over the top.” But Gilbert, now a cadet journalist with the ABC, clearly understood the project’s purpose in retrospect: “I think one of the biggest barriers people face when it comes to understanding refugee issues, is that most Australians have probably never met one,” he blogged. “Putting a face to an issue was so important to helping my understanding of the problems. You learn to treat the issue with humanity. You learn to see refugees as people and quite often extremely vulnerable people at that. If the whole refugee debate didn’t have any relevancy to me before, it certainly does now.”
Another student, Grace Keyworth, who was already working in the Canberra Press Gallery as a videographer when the project began, wrote that #ReportingRefugees was an important and timely intervention.
“I have been present at countless press conferences this year where the discussion of asylum seekers and refugees was completely dehumanized. There was a lot of talk of numbers, figures and ‘processing’ them like they’re a piece of meat, but hardly any of names, occupations or their reasons for leaving their countries,” she lamented. “It shows that as a society, we haven’t progressed beyond the racial discrimination towards immigrants that has plagued our country since federation.”
Opening Up Journalism — Critical Reflection via Social Media
The students were encouraged to openly reflect, through their social media activity, on their pre-conceived ideas about the refugee-asylum seeker issue and broadcast reporting conventions as they worked on their stories. They had to navigate very complex issues — such as balancing the need to avoid re-traumatizing refugee interviewees who’d survived torture against the need for editorial transparency and independence. Many encountered significant journalistic obstacles — from paternalism within some organizations which led (inappropriately) to one service provider refusing its refugee clients permission to speak, to nervous interviewees backing out of stories close to deadline. But in every case, these experiences delivered important learning outcomes — about the need for sensitivity and informed consent in reporting on refugees-asylum seekers, and about the need for journalistic perseverance and resilience when confronted with problems that threaten to derail stories in which many hours work have been invested.
There were logistical hurdles to mount, too. The collaborative editorial management of the project with the ABC meant that assessment deadlines had to be interwoven with ABC production deadlines. And multiple classroom visits by the busy ABC content director needed to be scheduled across four tutorials, which were timetabled for only three hours each per week.
Once the students had filed their rough-cut stories for assessment, the difficult process of selecting the content for broadcast and web upload commenced. I shortlisted stories from each tutorial with my tutors (Phil Cullen and Ginger Gorman, both of whom are experienced ABC broadcasters) but the ABC’s Jordie Kilby was responsible for selecting the final line-up of 10 stories. Meanwhile, we auditioned potential student presenters, and student executive producers attached to each tutorial began wrangling students to deliver final cut radio and web stories.
Putting #ReportingRefugees on Air
Ultimately, the students broadcast two hours of moving, human radio with a focus on personalized stories, situational reports on community programs such as a psychological service which treats traumatized child refugees, explanatory journalism that unpacked highly complex and sensitive themes, and an intelligent panel discussion, featuring the former Commonwealth Ombudsman and the UNHCR’s representative in Australia, that addressed the questions crowdsourced via OurSay in a way that allowed misconceptions to be powerfully countered.
As the program aired, students, listeners and ABC staff participated in a lively Twitter discussion triggered by the stories, aggregated by the #ReportingRefugees hashtag.
Additionally, the ABC website continues to host a bundle of additional student reports produced for the project, along with a podcast of the radio special (Hour 1 & Hour 2).
I’ll focus in more detail on the impact of the project on those involved, its reception by audiences, and the implications for journalism education in part two of this #ReportingRefugees series, but this quote from international student Linn Loken, sums up the value of the project and makes my own very substantial investment in time, energy and effort in its execution seem worthwhile:
“Knowing a few refugees now, this is not just a word to me anymore. When I hear the word REFUGEE mentioned, I think about the people I talked to during this project and I can see their faces.”
Julie Posetti is an award-winning journalist and journalism academic who lectures in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra, Australia. She’s been a national political correspondent, a regional news editor, a TV documentary reporter and presenter on radio and television with the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. Her academic research centers on journalism and social media, on talk radio, public broadcasting, political reporting and broadcast coverage of Muslims post-9/11. She’s currently writing her PhD dissertion on ‘The Twitterisation of Journalism’ at the University of Wollongong. She blogs at Twitter.
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Click here to download Tuition & Fees for the CCES Achievement Center.
We are excited about your interest in the Achievement Center at Christ Church Episcopal School. Through exceptional educational and service opportunities, fine arts activities, and athletics, Christ Church Episcopal School strives to educate each student to his or her maximum potential and value each student as an individual.
The Achievement Centerís mission is to enhance the CCES experience for all students, from Primer (K) through 12th grade. This aim is accomplished through enrichment, remediation, and support services across a wide range of disciplines and grade levels.
The Achievement Center faculty is a diverse group of dedicated specialists committed to meeting the individual needs of students while supporting and extending the rigorous academics offered at CCES.
I invite you to explore all that the Achievement Center may offer to your son or daughter. I welcome the opportunity to speak with you personally to answer any questions about the Achievement Center services available to students in the Lower, Middle, and Upper Schools.
Pam Kaizar, Achievement Center Director
Academic Support Services
The Achievement Center offers a variety of services, including organizational support, standardized test preparation, keyboarding classes, time management training, and study skills classes. Offered each year, study skills classes are designed to supplement Christ Church Episcopal Schoolís curriculum with direct instruction in test taking strategies, time management, and use of available resources such as testbooks. Courses generally last for three to four weeks and are offered throughout the school day, afternoons, and weekends to accommodate student academic schedules and extracurricular activities.
Scheduled to run from six to eight weeks prior to published test dates, individual test prep tutoring prepares students for the PSAT, the SAT, and the ACT. It includes content review as well as test taking strategies, sample test questions, and helpful hints designed to assist each student in enhancing his or her test performance.
One-to-one academic coaching is available through the Achievement Center to assist students who struggle with organization, study skills, and/or time management. Coaches guide students through the processes of homework, projects, organization of materials, and time management. Coaches also work with students to develop advocacy skills needed to be successful at Christ Church Episcopal School and beyond.The Achievement Center offers individual tutoring in specific content areas for CCES students. Content area tutoring provides support for a specific class so that students remain successful in areas that might otherwise be difficult. Examples of content tutoring include but are not limited to modern languages, algebra, geometry, English, science, and history.
Students identified as highly capable may participate in Achievement Center enrichment programs. Enrichment opportunities include computer based progams in conjunction with outside agencies and independent study classes. Working collaboratively with students and their families, the CCES Achievement Center can design and instruct independent study in a wide range of disciplines.
Language Development Program
Through the Language Development Program, students may receive one-to-one or small group individualized instruction, guided by a certified practitioner or faculty member. Intervention sessions are designed to meet the needs of a student, as outlined in his or her educational testing. Using multisensory techniques, instruction focuses on the remediation of a studentís particular area of language weakness. Small class instruction, available for 3rd through 8th grade, includes sequential, multisensory, intensive instruction in decoding, fluency, comprehension, and/or written expression. This type of instruction is intended to narrow or close the achievement gap between a studentís academic performance and their ability.
Additional Support for Students
The Upper School offers foreign language study opportunities for students who, because of a diagnosed learning difference, may need an alternate method of instruction. This Language Study Program meets all requirements for graduation at CCES. Classroom and testing accommodations, which do not fundamentally alter the schoolís mission, are also available for students with identified learning differences.
Advocates for Each Student
Our community is committed to helping each student reach his or her potenial. Our faculty members are quick to help students problem solve and are engaged with them in and out of the classroom. If you are interested in exploring opportunities available at CCES, please contact the Admission Office at 864.331.4223. A visit to our campus will highlight the many ways in which the Achievement Center benefits the Cavalier community.
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Atlantis astronaut flying high over baby's birth
Houston, we have a daddy
NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik ventured out on his first spacewalk on Saturday, just hours before his daughter was born 220 miles below.
Waking up early this morning aboard the International Space Station to the song "Butterfly Kisses," mission specialist Bresnik was informed that his wife Rebecca had given birth to daughter Abigail Mae Bresnik at 11:04 pm Saturday EST in Houston, Texas. She weighs six pounds, 13 ounces – Earthside.
It's the second time a baby has been born to an American astronaut during a spaceflight mission. Daddy Bresnik thanked the flight control team and flight surgeon for their support and reported wife and child are "doing well," the space agency said on its website. Baby Abigail Mae is the second child for Randolph and Rebecca Bresnik, who adopted a boy from the Ukraine a year ago.
Bresnik will see his daughter for the first time during a video conference planned later on Sunday, with photos and some video of the baby unlinked to Atlantis as well.
NASA said the astronaut was given the good news through a phone patch from Mission Control and the Houston hospital after he woke up Sunday morning. Bresnik was also connected to the STS-129 flight surgeon during his wife's labor Saturday night through the ISS's IP phone after his spacewalk until he had to go to bed.
Despite clearly having a lot on his mind, Bresnik and fellow astronaut Mike Foreman completed a six-hour spacewalk on Saturday, 3:39 pm EST. The duo finished all their assigned work ahead of schedule, NASA reports, and completed several get-ahead tasks as well. It was Foreman's fifth spacewalk and Bresnik's first.
"We are sending a big thank you to all of the people who have supported NASA and us for this mission and our special occasion," Randy and Rebecca Bresnik said in a statement on NASA's website.
The ISS crew will have a half day off to answer media questions and participate in an education event, then prepare for Monday's third and final spacewalk for the mission. ®
Nappies? / Diapers?
Don't think nappy-changing by a Shuttle astronaut is particularly unique..
Word "Nowak" springs to mind...OK, it was on the ground, but reasonably close to a serviceable aircraft.
Icon? I won't!!!
@James McAllister, and @Wize
10 points each!
Unfortunately you owe the pub a new keyboard. Nice one, folks.
@You know when rocket bottom is reached
"unfortunate personal circumstances"
Not really, this was a deliberate scheduling exercise to get some vague publicity for the big white elephant of manned space exploration, it's a very cost effective way of getting in the news, no outlay, a slightly stressed out mum and dad, quite a bit cheaper than sending butterflies into space.
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On Sept. 11, 2011, the campus community marked the 10-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks with a silent march across campus, a salute at the 9/11 memorial garden and a weekend of public service. Here, we share remembrances penned by students, faculty and staff at the memorial garden.
— Patrick Cavlin ’13, Meteorology, Brooklyn
I remember panic and uncertainty. I remember smoke and unsettled dust. I remember tears shed for those lost. What I see now is a country that has overcome all of those things for preservation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. God bless America.
— Joey McPartlin ’11, Freeport
I remember coming home and hearing the F-16s in the skies above, the smoke spreading through the skies, and the loving embrace of my parents. . . . Now as an adult, a proud New Yorker, firefighter and EMT, I could not even imagine if I was called to a horrific disaster such as at Ground Zero. But I know if I am [called], I hope that I have courage as the 343 did, ten years ago today.
— Luke Carbonaro ’14, Social Studies Education, Ossonma
I was 11 years old on Sept. 11, 2001. My father was in the city when the attacks occurred. I remember how frightened I felt and [then] how blessed when I knew he was OK. I pray for the victims and their families.
— Lynn Georgi ’12, Childhood Education, Walden
My heart goes out to all of the families who lost someone on 9/11. I am forever grateful to the men and women who helped save lives on that day. My father was at Ground Zero after the attacks and I am grateful to say he was lucky enough to not have his life taken on 9/11. Forever in my heart.
— Chasee Reilly ’14, Business Administration, Medford
Remembering Shelly Bratton ’00 as a great person and athlete. Shelly was a diver for the Lakers. We think of her often. Our prayers are with all those who suffered that day.
— John Moore, Oswego State Swimming and Diving coach, and Karen Moore, SUNY Oswego staff
I remember believing my mother was one of the victims on that awful day. Now I am just glad that she wasn’t and my heart and prayers go out to the families that cannot say the same.
— Charisse Thompson ’14, Public Relations, Bronx
I was serving in the Peace Corps in a Muslim village. I remember confusion and detachment as I watched my neighbor’s one-channel television, frustration as friends and co-workers asked me to explain what I did not understand myself, [and] a sense of belonging in the small community as Muslim friends offered to watch out for and protect me in the days and weeks that followed.
— Abigail Stamm ’05
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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DETROIT (AP) — General Motors is advising Volt owners to return their electric cars to dealers for repairs that will better protect the vehicles’ batteries, which have caught fire after crash tests.
The repairs— which would fix 8,000 Volts on U.S. roads and another 4,400 still for sale — fall under a “customer service campaign,” which is similar to a safety recall but allows GM to avoid the bad publicity and federal monitoring that come with a recall.
GM’s move comes after three Volt batteries caught fire at government test sites last year. The fires followed side-impact crash tests done by federal safety regulators. They occurred seven days to three weeks after the crashes, which damaged the plastic battery pack and caused coolant to leak. The coolant then caused an electrical short, which sparked the fires.
Dealers will add steel to a plate that protects the Volt battery, spreading the force of a crash over a larger area, says Mary Barra, GM’s product development chief. Tests have shown that the repairs stop penetration into the battery and prevent coolant leaks, GM and federal safety regulators say.
GM has a huge incentive to fix the problem and protect the image of the Volt. The Volt isn’t a big seller — it’s fallen short of sales goals — but it burnishes GM’s image as a greener, more innovative carmaker. “We have made the Volt even safer,” Mark Reuss, GM’s North American president, said Thursday.
GM says it wasn’t forced by the government to repair the car. The automakers and the National Highway Traffic Safety — the federal safety agency — say no fires have broken out after Volt crashes on real-world roadways.
NHTSA began studying the Volt batteries after a car caught fire in June at a test facility in Wisconsin. The fire broke out three weeks after a side-impact crash test. NHTSA opened an investigation into the Volt’s safety in November following that fire and two others that occurred after crash tests.
Then, in late December, the agency crashed a Volt with the added steel. “The preliminary results of the crash test indicate the remedy proposed by General Motors today should address the issue,” NHTSA says. The agency says it will monitor the car for another week and will continue its investigation.
GM said the Volt’s battery should have been drained after crashes but it never told NHTSA to do that. Later, two GM executives said the company had no formal procedure to drain the batteries until after the fire. The company now sends out a team to drain the batteries after being notified of a crash by GM’s OnStar safety system.
The company sold 7,671 Volts last year, falling short of its goal of 10,000. It was outsold last year by its main electric car competitor, the Nissan Leaf, at 9,674. The Volt has a T-shaped, 400 pound battery pack that can power the car for about 35 miles. After that, a small gasoline generator kicks in to run the electric motor.
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Cy Twombly spent most of his life outside the high-octane New York art world, working quietly either in his hillside house in Gaeta, south of Rome, or in his home in Lexington, Va.
Now, less than a year after his death, the artist, who is best known for canvases filled with childlike scribbles, is poised to have a presence in New York after all, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday a foundation he set up paid $27.5 million to buy a 25-foot-wide Beaux-Arts mansion at 19 East 82nd Street.
The plan is to turn the five-story building into an education center and small museum to celebrate the artist’s work. Nicola Del Roscio, a longtime companion of Twombly’s and president of his foundation, said in a statement that the artist was “a towering figure of American art. It is only fitting that there should be a permanent space in New York dedicated to his achievements.’’
Gagosian GalleryCy Twombly’s “Untitled” from 2007. He once described his work as “more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”
Cy Twombly, whose spare childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died in Rome Tuesday. He was 83.
The cause was not immediately known, although Mr. Twombly had suffered from cancer. His death was announced by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work.
Michael Stravato for The New York TimesCy Twombly in 2005.
In a career that slyly subverted Abstract Expressionism, toyed briefly with Minimalism, seemed barely to acknowledge Pop Art and anticipated some of the concerns of Conceptualism, Mr. Twombly was a divisive artist almost from the start. The curator Kirk Varnedoe, on the occasion of a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that his work was “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.” The critic Robert Hughes called him “the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.” Read more…
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Kyle: Who are the corporations?
Hippie: The corporations run the entire world! And now they’ve fooled you into working for them!
— (from “South Park”)
Ever since Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority, conservatives in America have used moral issues to convince poor Americans to vote against their economic interests. Thanks largely to convincing working-class voters — that is, the people who lost the most — that Democrats were anti-family, anti-America and, subtly, anti-white, Reagan and his followers engineered the greatest inequalities of wealth in more than a century.
Reagan’s rhetoric is still with us today, most notably among Tea Party “populists” (who studies have shown to be wealthier than one might assume), and sadly, religious communities — including Jewish ones — who unwittingly play into its cynical sleight of hand. We do this, consciously or not, by wrongly characterizing which issues are “religious.” Abortion and prayer are religious questions, but not tax policy; sexuality, but not housing and immigration. This is a highly un-Jewish way of thinking, and renders religion not just irrelevant, but also actually complicit in injustice. As we head toward a season of both High Holy Days and contentious elections, we would do well to remember the connection between them.
It almost goes without saying that ours is a society in which the yetzer hara, the profit motive, dominates. Of course, bashing corporations and consumerism is, as the “South Park” quote suggests, something of a cliché. But that’s because we usually do it in a clichéd way. The problem with corporations is not that they are sinister, dastardly conspiracies led by Montgomery-Burns-like villains. Nor is the problem the careless CEOs who cut corners, or boards that pay out huge bonuses, or any of the supposedly moral failings that compromise a supposedly sane system.
No — the problem isn’t when corporations go wrong. The problem is when they go right.
By law, the sole obligation of public corporations is to maximize profit for shareholders. Even when corporations give money to charity, or choose an ethical way of doing business, they are required to justify the decision by saying that it’ll ultimately pay off financially, perhaps in the form of increased sales or of realizable goodwill. Unlike human beings, corporations have only one motive: the yetzer hara, literally, the “evil” inclination, the part of each of us that is entirely selfish, that wants only to get as much stuff as possible. Again, this isn’t because of who runs corporations, or because of the decency of those of us who work for them (for the record, I started a software company and worked at it for five years) — this is the law.
Yet ever since an 1886 Supreme Court case, the law also holds, amazingly, that corporations are “persons.” They hold legal responsibility for their actions, and they even have certain constitutional rights, including the right to contribute heavily to political campaigns.
Imagine if these corporate entities really were people, what kind of people they would be. Enormously powerful, and richer than the wealthiest billionaire. Nearly omnipresent, with outposts of information gathering and product distribution around the globe. And yet, totally, animalistically greedy, with the single focus of profit maximization. If corporations were people, they would be massively powerful ogres, direly in need of religious or moral instruction.
Yet, mainstream religion fails to provide it. While every priest and rabbi rails against individual greed, individual ethical failure and individual transgression, few do so when it comes to the most powerful “persons” on the planet. Maybe to preach in this way, to demand that the world’s most powerful “persons” be ethically accountable the same way you and I ought to be, feels too political, or perhaps just too abstract, for the masses in the pews. But by opting out, religion becomes a kind of sideshow to the events that truly shape our time, like a quaint old chapel dwarfed by the surrounding strip malls.
What are the consequences for the rest of us? Left untouched by religious and moral reasoning, corporations have indeed run amok — again, not because villains staff them, but because the system itself is, according to the traditional Jewish definition, evil; it is yetzer hara by law.
Item: The oil spill in the Gulf. Sure, there may have been corners cut here or there, and BP might’ve done a better job in the cleanup. But the reason this happened isn’t because BP is especially bad; all the oil companies act the same way. The problem is that the oil well was put there in the first place. Accidents happen, and huge offshore oil rigs are going to have accidents. We know this. And yet, Big Oil swayed Congress to allow offshore drilling over the objections of environmentalists and community groups. (Not only “allow” — we paid for it. As The New York Times recently documented, the oil business is among the most government-subsidized industries in the world.) What happened in the Gulf is the direct result of Big Oil’s lobbying, and the Republicans (and some Democrats) who vote accordingly.
Item: The food/obesity/poison-food crises. Americans are getting sick and fat because they are eating “products” instead of food. Sure, individual choices have a lot to do with it. But it’s hard to ask working people to resist government-subsidized $1 hamburgers and snacks made of corn syrup when they’re trying to make ends meet. The reason we have a food crisis is that Big Corn and Big Food have swayed Congress to prop up the corn subsidy and other corporate welfare for huge agricultural companies. What we see on our supermarket shelves is the direct result of Big Food’s lobbying, and the Republicans (and corn-belt Democrats) who vote accordingly.
Item: The financial crisis. The financial crisis did not occur because of a few “bad apples” and shysters like Bernie Madoff. It happened because Big Money convinced Congress that deregulation was some kind of moral imperative, and that the freedom our founders talked about was the freedom for huge financial corporations to blow bubbles as large as they want. What we see in the wreckage of our financial institutions, and our own IRAs, is the direct result of Big Money’s lobbying, and the Republicans (and handful of Democrats) who vote accordingly.
This systemic turpitude, not individual knavery or malfeasance, is the real religious issue. Indeed, to look for individual bad apples and black hats — that is, traditionally “religious” ethical violations — is precisely the wrong kind of reasoning. I have no doubt that most of the officers and employees of Big Oil, Big Food and Big Money are basically good people doing their jobs. Evildoers are not the problem. The system is the problem.
There is an alternative — and it need not be socialism. (Of course, Jewish socialism is itself a venerable institution, but it is not my proposal here.) Indeed, our own religious tradition has ancient and well-worn rules requiring that the most powerful individuals and institutions in society provide for the least powerful.
One small example, among dozens I could choose, is the law of pe’ah — the corner of the field required to be left standing for the poor, in accordance with Leviticus 19:9 and 23:22 (and famous from the story of Ruth). Indeed, the entire talmudic tractate of Pe’ah, which describes in detail the requirements for public charity (including gleanings and tithings), should be required reading (and preaching) for American rabbis today. The basic principle is that those with power (the big agribusiness of the day) are required not to maximize profits, but to temper their selfishness with righteousness.
Required — not as some soft, hortatory ideal, but as a matter of law. And this, of course, is but one tiny example. Contrast the Hebrew word tzedakah, righteousness, with the Christian virtue of charity or the Buddhist precept of dana, generosity. Righteousness is not a virtue or an expression of niceness. It is a requirement, like a tithe. It is systemic in nature, and it is an economic-religious imperative. This system of righteousness — not just being nice and dropping a coin in the pushke, but also creating a system and culture of fairness — is what our religion demands.
As described in recent works such as Rabbi Jill Jacobs’s “There Shall Be No Needy,” Rabbi Michael Lerner’s “The Left Hand of God” and, before them, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writing on social justice and the concept of the “social gospel” (recently maligned by far-right blowhard Glenn Beck), these concerns are at the very heart of what Jewish religion is meant to teach. In any free economic system, there will be rich and poor. But how we treat them, whether our culture helps or hurts them — that is where our ethical reasoning, religious or secular, is put to the test.
Americans live in the land of the free, but freedom ought not mean that corporate “persons” can despoil, deceive and destroy without restraint. This is why the Exodus from Egypt was followed by the Torah at Sinai — because real freedom is both freedom-from and freedom-to: freedom from bondage, and freedom to create a just and holy society. And it is a freedom premised upon the ethical will, which corporations, by law, utterly lack.
If we fail to talk about the true causes of our financial, environmental and economic crises, all that chanting and sermonizing is just decoration. Worse than that, it is a distraction from the very evil that religion is meant to prevent. That the evil doesn’t look the way we expect is no excuse; maybe it’s even part of the point. After all, as Kevin Spacey (as arch-villain Kayser Soze) says in the classic film “The Usual Suspects,” “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
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|Religion is how this guy knows that|
you're wrong. Why do you think he's
so happy? (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
I hate religion. I would almost rather (though not quite) be called agnostic than religious, based solely on the connotations those two terms carry. Agnosticism, flawed as it may be, at least leaves room for exploration and skepticism about matters of faith.
Dictionary.com (my first stop when wrestling with theological questions, of course) defines "religion," in part, as "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe…usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs."
"A moral code governing the conduct of human affairs" — that part stands out to me like a giant red flag. Religion means rules. It often means conformity, despite what your own intellect tells you. It can mean reducing incredibly complex issues to mindless, black-and-white dichotomies. It sometimes means that questions, doubts, and dialogue are discouraged. Occasionally, it means that other human beings are patronized or even ostracized simply because they don't have the same views we do. It gives license for one group to feign moral righteousness over another.
Don't get me wrong — I'm not saying that religion needs to be a term that causes us to recoil. I'm saying that we've made it that way. I'm saying that it's become a mechanism by which we can conveniently place God into a box and thus rationalize our own folly. There's a great quote that beautifully paints this reality (I don't know who said it, but I want to be clear that it wasn't me): "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when he hates or judges all the same people you do."
That, in a nutshell, is what religion has become.
Religion is what Rick Santorum uses to justify his charge that Barack Obama espouses a "phony ideology" that isn't "based on the Bible," or what Franklin Graham uses to conclude that he isn't sure whether the president is Christian or Muslim. Presumably, both consider Obama's faith "phony" in some way because it differs from their own. Translation: We're right; he's wrong. So are you, if you support him.
Religion is what the Catholic Church uses to wage a culture war (as it's so skilled at doing) over the HHS mandate that health insurance plans, including those offered by faith-based institutions, cover birth control. Of course, we hear no similar protests from bishops that their insurance policies must cover treatment for chain-smokers, alcoholics, or others who engage in self-destructive behaviors. Contraception is a far more seductive platform from which to claim moral superiority in the name of "religious freedom."
|And this guy? "Yeah, I'm religious. Wait — |
no, I'm not. Yes, I am. No, I'm not. Wait — who's
asking?" (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
Religion is what allows people, groups, and institutions to issue edicts, even when such proclamations clearly reveal the hypocrisy of the individual or organization from which they originated. Sadly, that's because religion often becomes a strategy for concealing or minimizing one's own shortcomings by projecting them onto others.
Most of all, in an ironic sense, religion undermines the concept of faith itself — that is, the belief in something for which we have no proof. In its ugliest form, religion can reduce faith in a mysterious God to a series of norms, conventions, and rituals that are about as intellectually challenging as the speed limit on the highway. When faith becomes so simple, so concrete, is it really faith at all anymore? Or is it mere routine?
Which brings me back to my earlier reference to agnosticism. If I'm not comfortable with its overall premise, I at least respect one of its key tenets: that's there's a difference between belief and knowledge, where the two are separated by our ability (or inability) to observe and prove certain phenomena. Religion often blurs that line. It takes the deepest, most challenging questions about faith and attempts to oversimplify them into a series of absolutes that we can understand and are willing to accept. This precludes spiritual growth, and it understates the vastness of the universe and how little we actually know of it.
Call me contemplative. Call me agnostic if you must. But, please, don't call me religious.
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Bolivian Catholics welcome first indigenous bishop
The Catholic cathedral in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in southern Bolivia, was filled to overflowing as Catholics witnesses a Mass at which Cardinal Archbishop Julio Terrazas ordained Monsignor René Leigue Cesari as auxiliary bishop for the diocese. Leigue is heralded as the first indigenous man of Bolivia to serve in such a capacity.
Cardinal Terrazas referred to Bishop Leigue as "son" and "friend", thanking him for accepting the challenge despite any doubts or human weakness. The senior Catholic cleric of the country also took the occasion to remind him that the mission of Catholic bishops is to be ministers of unity and witnesses to truth.
According to the archdiocese, the solemn Mass was attended by Archbishop Sergio Gualberti, Apostolic Nuncio Monsignor Giambattista Diquattro, as well as numerous bishops, priests and deacons from all over Bolivia. After 50 years of priesthood and 34 of as a bishop, Cardinal Terrazas said he was especially pleased to ordain Bishop Leigue, who was born, raised and formed in Bolivia. The cardinal added, "I thank God that we can have a reliable guide for the people, a word of encouragement in all circumstances, and a friendly presence, a presence that encourages all ... who leads us to announce the ability that our people have to be able to receive God, to love and to say with clarity and courage to all those who ask us, why we believe, celebrate, what we live every day."
For his part, newly-consecrated Bishop Leique thanked his fellow priests for their support. "I ask that your support should be continuous and not just at the beginning, for today my work begins and I need a lot from you, especially your cooperation and prayers, I ask that you not view me any differently because I am now a bishop, and I hope that you will always consider me your friend, and I invite you to be part of the work I do within the Archdiocese of Santa Cruz. I invite the laity to become engaged in their parishes to respond to the mission that God entrusts to us, to walk together and work together and so that we will move forward. "
Obama appeared to claim that sectarian Christian education serves to divide the Irish.
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The latest on California politics and government
December 20, 2012
Following the controversy in California’s initiative campaigns over an $11 million donation from a secretive, out-of-state group, Democratic lawmakers have begun introducing legislation to increase disclosure requirements and the power of the Fair Political Practices Commission to enforce them.
Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, announced legislation this afternoon that would require donors of $50,000 or more to a non-profit group to be identified if the contribution is made within six months of an election and if the non-profit makes a large donation to a campaign within that same period.
“This is the kind of information that voters and the public need and deserve to have before they cast their votes, not find out after,” Dickinson said.
Assembly Bill 45 would also require the Secretary of State to make campaign and lobbying filings available to the FPPC and would authorize the FPPC to seek court injunctions related to disclosure.
Ann Ravel, chairwoman of the FPPC, said the bill would provide the FPPC the “clear ability” to seek those injunctions. When the FPPC sued the Arizona group Americans for Responsible Leadership over its $11 million donation earlier this year, Ravel said, “we were acting somewhat creatively in interpreting our statutes” to permit such a lawsuit.
To read entire story, click here.
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Steve Cheney takes aim at the Zuckerberg Fallacy — that we each should have a single uniform identity across all social scenes — and points out why big media is playing along with Facebook’s attempts to convert us to his overly simplistic view of the world:
Steve Cheney, How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity
Last week a bunch of massive sites across the web, including TechCrunch, adopted Facebook commenting. The integration of the formatting and fonts is so strong that when you’re reading comments you actually feel like you are on Facebook, not a tech focused vertical site.
This latest push by Facebook to tie people to one identity across the interwebs is very troublesome.
The problem with tying internet-wide identity to a broadcast network like Facebook is that people don’t want one normalized identity, either in real life, or virtually.
People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. They have numerous different groups of real-life friends. They stylize conversations. They are emotional and have an innate need to connect on different levels with different people. This is because humans are born with an instinctual desire to understand the broader context of their surroundings and build rapport, a social awareness often called emotional intelligence.
In the beginning, Facebook catered to this instinct we all have. But FB in its current form, a big graph of people who may or may not know anything about one another, does not.
And forcing people to comment – and more broadly speaking to log-on – with one identity puts a massive stranglehold on our very nature. I’m not too worried about FB Comments in isolation, but the writing is on the wall: all of this off-site encroachment of the Facebook graph portends where FB is really going in pushing one identity. And a uniform identity defies us.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t surprise me why this is happening. The carrot here for content sites is clear: even with a lower volume of comments, the potential viral effects and CTRs are something parent sites like AOL are surely extrapolating, based on their recent manifesto to boost reach, drive traffic, and maximize page views (though I’d argue they would perform much better on mainstream sites like HuffPo or TMZ than a niche vertical like TC, which your friends are less likely to be aware of).
There’s a pretty straightforward reason why FB is valued at an astonishing $75B, and it’s all about them forming a reciprocal feedback loop between Facebook.com and other sites so that you can be targeted.
But for such a massively social company, Facebook’s insistence that you have one identity across the web is both short-sighted and asinine, and people I talk to are starting to realize this.
But the media companies see us as page hits, not people, just a way to make money.
The stripmalling of the web is in full swing, and Facebook is the worst of the new chain stores. It has all the charm of Starbucks, and the same ersatz sameness in every part of the business. Facebook personalizes in the most trivial of ways, like the Starbucks barristas writing your name on the cup, but they totally miss the deeper stata of our sociality. But they don’t care: they are selling us, not helping us.
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Price Brownie troop joins National Arbor Day efforts
|Brownie Troop 1264 of Price, working with the Price City Shade Tree Commission, celebrated Arbor Day, Friday, April 25 by planting a tree on 200 East. The National Arbor Day Foundation has designated Price City, a Tree City USA, for the last 13 years. Pictured above are Jayde Moynier, Alex Richens, Erika Olsen, Shainey Hackney, Tasia Klarich and Samantha Jones.|
It has been 130 years since J. Sterling Morton founded Arbor Day. His simple idea of setting aside a special day for tree planting is now more important than ever. Utah celebrated Arbor Day last Friday, April 25. In Price the tradition continued as Brownie Troop 1264 worked with the Price City Shade Tree Commission, and celebrated Arbor Day by planting a tree on 200 East.
The National Arbor Day Foundation has designated Price City, a Tree City USA, for the last 13 years. Brownie Troop members involved included Jayde Moynier, Alex Richens, Erika Olsen, Shainey Hackney, Tasia Klarich and Samantha Jones.
The idea for Arbor Day originally came from Nebraska. A visit to Nebraska today wouldn't disclose that the state was once a treeless plain. Yet it was the lack of trees there that led to the founding of Arbor Day in the 1800s.
Among pioneers moving into the Nebraska Territory in 1854 was J. Sterling Morton from Detroit. He and his wife were lovers of nature, and the home they established in Nebraska was quickly planted with trees, shrubs and flowers.
According to Lyle Bauer, who heads up the Shade Tree Commission and supervisor of the cemetery, talks about his group's simple mission and that's to enhance community pride, health and liveability through the planting of trees, education of citizens as to the benefits and value of trees and promotion of proper tree care practices.
"Our vision for the citizens of Price is to value their community forest and are see to it that they are committed to its health, protection and growth," says Bauer.
The Shade Tree Commission is made up of five community volunteers as well as a city council representative and one area they are identifying as a need is education. "We focus on our youth because it is this group that can learn and understand how important proper procedures are in taking care of trees," Bauer explains.
He explained that topping trees was once a problem because of the lack of education. Now, as people understand the dangers involved with topping, basically because the new branches that sprout from the bark do not have the strength to sustain high winds and they easily break off, thus damaging the trees further and potentially causing other problems as they fall.
Although the group has been active in the past it has recently reorganized and are making a much more visible and proactive effort in the community.
Bauer did comment that planting trees has been a goal in Price since the beginning, sighting the mural in the city hall where Mayor Olsen, the first mayor, is pictured planting a tree in the late 1880's.
The group also works with groups and clubs to better select and care for trees. "It is important to choose the correct tree for specific areas," he says, adding, "the size of the tree and potential conflicts it will encounter, such as power lines are important factors."
|Flowering crabapple tree brightens up the Price cemetery as Arbor Day was recognized Friday, April 25.|
The commission has also worked extensively the past year with the trees that line the downtown Main Street. They believe that trees are an important part of a friendly and progressive downtown.
Morton, who founded Arbor Day, was a journalist and soon became editor of Nebraska's first newspaper. Given that forum, he spread agricultural information and his enthusiasm for trees to an equally enthusiastic audience. His fellow pioneers missed their trees. But, more importantly, trees were needed as windbreaks to keep soil in place, for fuel and building materials, and for shade from the hot sun.
Morton not only advocated tree planting by individuals in his articles and editorials, but he also encouraged civic organizations and groups to join in. His prominence in the area increased, and he became secretary of the Nebraska Territory, which provided another opportunity to stress the value of trees.
Arbor Day's Beginnings
On January 4, 1872, Morton first proposed a tree-planting holiday to be called "Arbor Day" at a meeting of the State Board of Agriculture. The date was set for April 10, 1872. Prizes were offered to counties and individuals for planting properly the largest number of trees on that day. It was estimated that more than one million trees were planted in Nebraska on the first Arbor Day.
Arbor Day was officially proclaimed by the young state's Governor Robert W. Furnas on March 12, 1874, and the day itself was observed April 10, 1874. In 1885, Arbor Day was named a legal holiday in Nebraska and April 22, Morton's birthday, was selected as the date for its permanent observance.
According to accounts from the Nebraska City News, April 1885, the city celebrated Arbor Day with a grand parade and a speech by J. Sterling Morton. Students of different grades met at their respective school rooms in the morning for the purpose of planting at least one tree. Each tree that was planted was labeled with the grade, the time planted, and was to be specially cared for by that grade.
When the plantings were completed, 1000 students formed a line to begin the parade from the various schools to Nebraska City's opera house. In the parade, each class carried colorful banners made of satin with silk lining and trimmed with gold fringe. The letters on the banners were painted in oil colors. By the time the parade reached the opera house the throng numbered well over the 1000 as towns people joined the march. Every available foot of space in the opera house was occupied, the students having the front seats and gallery while the older persons stood. At 11:00, the throng of celebrants was addressed by the founder of Arbor Day, J. Sterling Morton.
Mr. Morton was listened to with much attention, and loudly applauded at the close of his address. At the conclusion of the ceremonies, the students sang "America," and the large audience was dismissed.
This ended the first celebration of Arbor Day as a legal holiday, and, as reported by the newspaper, "... to say that it was a complete success but faintly expresses it. A celebration of this kind results in good to all, and is worthy of imitation by every school in the state."
During the 1870s, other states passed legislation to observe Arbor Day, and the tradition began in schools nationwide in 1882. Utah has been part of these celebrations for many years.
Today the most common date for the state observances is the last Friday in April, as it was this year in Price and several U.S. presidents have proclaimed a national Arbor Day on that date.
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Your Favorite Security Technology is Dead
Read ‘em and weep. Doesn’t matter what it is, how much you spent onit, or what you’ve done it implement it, its outlook is about as goodas the Cleveland Browns’ Super Bowl chances. Got your attention? That’sthe idea. This type of apocalyptic proclamation has been alive and wellin information security over the past few years and never ceases to getits share of eyeballs and chatter. Gartner fired a shot across the bowa while back with the “IDS is dead” statement and similar things arenow being said about antivirus. The siren call of these alarmiststatements has proven irresistible, but I’ll offer that while they makefor catchy headlines, they obscure a more complex, but much moreaccurate reality. In this spirit, I’ll offer up a couple of alternateheadlines that are a lot less captivating, but also do a better job ofhitting the mark, in my eyes.
News flash: This technology has to evolve to stay relevant
A snoozer of a title for sure, but this is genuinely what has happenedwith both intrusion detection systems (IDS) and antivirus (AV). IDS hadto evolve into intrusion prevention systems (IPS). The false positiverates were too high, they had to move in-line, and IDS didn’t actuallyblock attacks (or customers didn’t use the capability), while producingenough data to make your head swim. Does this mean that IDS “died” andthen rose again from the ashes as IPS? There are certainly some seriousdifferences between IDS and IPS, but I think that’s a little generous,to say the least. Do you think IPS would have happened if IDS had notappeared first, contributed to industry learning, and whetted theindustry appetite for IPS? Perhaps, but I think a more reasonableexplanation is to consider it an evolutionary step rather than arevolutionary change and entirely different product category, despitemarketing claims to the contrary.
Ditto for antivirus. Purely reactive models and older products willnot keep pace with today’s ceaseless number of variants and complex,evasive threats. Nonetheless, this assumes a pure file-scanning modelis at play, without specific detections, as well as an absence ofvulnerability exploit blocking. I’d argue that those conditionsdescribe yesterday’s antivirus solutions and you’d be ill-served indeedto rely upon them as your primary defense. The majority of threatstoday find their way onto a system by exploiting vulnerabilities and itsure would be better to block them before they land on a system thanhave to clean them off, right? Symantec (and other major players aswell) have been routinely blocking file-based exploits for a while now,particularly those delivered via HTTP (for example, during the WMFoutbreak). In these scenarios, the malware may be packed andundetected, but it never has the chance to hit the system since it’sblocked at the exploit. Secondly, generic detections for families ofthreats are now commonplace. Heuristics are also increasingly common inantivirus solutions to compliment reactive definitions or signatures.We’ve had heuristics for blocking mass-mailing worms from propagatingfor some time and with the inclusion of WholeSecurity heuristics (forcapturing keyloggers and screengrabbers) in newer products such as Norton Confidential,some of the more popular tools in the crime-ware kit are renderedineffective. Lastly, Symantec has leveraged a Veritas-based technologyin a newly delivered AV engine which enables direct volume access todetect and remove the spate of threats using kernel-mode rootkits.
Does this mean that all the grim stories of poor AV detection ratesare false? Not necessarily. Nor does it mean that AV is in its deaththroes or failing to innovate to keep pace with the rapid evolution oftoday’s threat landscape. And even reactive signatures, downplayed bymany today, will continue to serve a role in the currentcompliance-oriented world where HIPAA, GLBA and disclosure laws requirean organization to know exactly what happened on a system by knowingthe specific malware variant in question. In summary, the real answeris more complex and makes for a befuddling, rather than an eye-catchingheadline.
News Flash: This technology is no silver bullet
I grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan. The winters could getbone-chilling cold. Having a warm coat and a good set of thermals wasessential. Nonetheless, you would have been nuts to walk out the doorwithout your gloves and hat on as well. Wool socks and a scarf didn’thurt either.
The way some organizations seem to be protecting their systems todayis like sauntering out into the winter chill with their coat on butnothing else. Now, it might be a great coat, but it’s just not made tokeep your hands toasty and your head warm. Ditto for firewalls andantivirus. Both are essential, but they were not designed to blockexploits inside network traffic or recognize and block a fraudulent Website. It doesn’t make much sense to curse your coat for a cold head andhands, nor should you spite your AV or firewall for not preventingevery possible bad thing from happening to your systems.
This is where the concept of security suites and defense in-depthcomes into play. Today, every major security vendor that has a stake inprotecting the host has one of these suites or setups, for the exactreason I mention above: each component of a security suite has a uniqueand important role to play in protecting the system and the user. Thethreat environment, as the prognosticators mentioned above rightly callout, is too complex and aggressive to think you can weather the stormwithout a multi-layered defense provided by a suite. And, even if youhave a suite, but it is a couple revisions behind, you might havedressed with all the right protection for the winter storm, but muchlike a fierce winter wind penetrating a threadbare jacket, the bad guyshave a way of finding the holes in aging defenses.
While AV and firewalls are essential, I’d argue that today the roleof blocking vulnerability exploits is one of the most important andleast understood. Why? Threats center their attention on important newvulnerabilities such as MS06-040.The vulnerability is released and it’s only a matter of days (if nothours) until readily available malware source is recompiled with thelatest exploit code. This is happening faster than many organizationscan test and deploy patches. Moreover, with zero-day exploits such as WMF and VMLfor Internet Explorer, there’s no initial patch to deploy to plug thehole. IPS and AV file-based exploit blocking provide criticalprotection during such a window of exposure, defending the host evenwhen it’s outside the confines of a well protected corporate network.
Does this approach work? You bet. We had IPS protection for MS06-040on 8/8 and the first worm was seen exploiting the vulnerability on8/11. To date, there have been 40+ worms seen exploiting the flaw, noneof which mattered a bit (even outside the perimeter) if you hadhost-based IPS protection. Anecdotally, I can tell you that ourcustomers on a recent version of SCS report back very few issues tosupport. Mind you, this does not mean IPS is the panacea, it onlydemonstrates that it is an essential layer of protection that shouldnot be ignored.
So, bundle up, the Internet security climate is as fierce as ever.The end of IDS, AV, or most other security technologies is not upon us,but they are all evolving technologies and expecting any one of them tobe enough protection (especially older versions) is like running outinto a blizzard in a t-shirt. (By the way, I love the Cleveland Browns,but I’m looking past my emotions and with a 1-4 start, I’m willing tobet that this year they’ll be sitting on a couch watching the SuperBowl, just like me.)
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Referrals & Appointments
What Is A Registered Dietitian?
A registered dietitian is a food and nutrition specialist who has completed a supervised practice program accredited by The American Dietetic Association and has passed a national examination administered by the Commission on Dietetic Registration. Registered dietitians can assess the nutrition status of clients who have special dietary needs and give them guidance in changing their diets to improve their health.
Nutrition Services Staff
The experience of the Outpatient Nutrition Services Department is extensive, including licensed staff who have a B.S. in medical nutrition therapy. In addition to providing full-service nutrition care, we also advise you on how to involve your family .
Nutrition is a very important part of your health. For more information, please call (630) 527-5059. To schedule an appointment, call (630) 527-3200.
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Do you spend your time doing things you love? Do you usually get done everything you really need to do? Time management is a struggle for us on in this ever-connected, 24 hour world.
I thrive on maintaining a busy life. I enjoy being active, challenging myself, and living a full and happy life! Working full time, blogging, holding a volunteer position, being an active Toastmaster, and being part of a loving family takes a lot of effective time management.
I’m not busy just to stay busy, and I enjoy plenty of downtime in addition to all my activities. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a time management ninja, but I do well enough balancing rest and activity and doing most of the things I want to do.
Time management isn’t about how much time I have, but how I use the time I have. By making the most of my time, I get more out of life! Since I want you to enjoy an awesome life, too, I’m going to share some of my top time management tips. Are you ready?
7 Tips For Effective Time Management
Image courtesy of vpickering
1. Take care of you!
Self-care is so important, which is why you may have read one or two (or three) posts about it on this blog. When I take care of myself, and put myself first, I enjoy better health, more energy, improved concentration and focus, and I get a lot more done!
When I’m not taking care of myself I tend to get irritable and frustrated, do less of what I want and spend more time doing it. That’s no fun so I’m going to keep up with my self-care and enjoy the awesomeness that inevitably follows.
2. Take more breaks.
Yeah, you read that right. If you want to make the best use of your time, take more breaks! Not only is taking breaks an excellent way to practice self-care, it’s also a great way to improve problem-solving, inspire innovation, and refocus your brain power.
I have my work calendar set up to remind me to take breaks every work day. Taking regular breaks keeps my mind sharp and I manage my time more effectively.
3. Create routines.
I have lots of routines for everything from getting ready in the morning to organizing my to-do list. Creating a routine allows me to perform routine tasks quickly and efficiently, spending less time on the day-to-day and more time doing what I really want to do.
Routines work because I’m less likely to forget something or underestimate how long it will take me to complete a task. I can plan my day better- it’s as simple as that!
4. Group like tasks.
Okay, here’s where I’m going to share a small piece of wisdom from 18+ years in Accounting- batch processing improves speed and accuracy. Batch processing is grouping like tasks. For example, I might spend 15 minutes every few hours reading and replying to emails instead of reading and answering each email as it comes in. Or I might run several errands back-to-back instead of going back and forth from home to business to home to business and back again.
Grouping like tasks allows me to quickly knock out similar activities and conserve both mental and physical energy expended. It really works!
5. Say no.
Sometimes I just gotta say no, and that’s okay! Saying no is a good thing! Saying no tells others I’m honest and reliable, and I will follow through on my commitments. When I am truly unwilling or unable to take on a request, I can say no with respect for myself and others and follow through on all my current commitments without overloading myself. ’nuff said.
6. Organize clutter.
Okay, so not everyone is a neat freak like me, but I’ve read a whole lot of studies that show keeping clutter to a minimum improves productivity. It makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s easier to stay focused on the task at hand and find what you’re looking for when your physical space is distraction-free. Keep clutter to a minimum to better manage your time.
7. Simplify your digital life.
While we’re on the topic of clutter, that goes for not only your physical space, but your digital space as well. How many hours have you wasted mindlessly surfing the web or reading and deleting marketing emails? If you’re anything like me your digital life can get quickly out of control! Isn’t it time to simplify your digital life?
Lucky for you I’ve got some ideas on simplifying your digital life and spending your time on the stuff that matters instead of the stuff that doesn’t.
I love your comments! What other time management tips can you share? What’s your biggest obstacle to managing your time?Join the Conversation
Have you dreamed of quitting your job and risking it all in pursuit of your dream career? I encourage every one of you to pursue passion and purpose in your career without buying into the idea that your life will be great when… when you get a promotion, when you get a raise, when you finally have the career you’ve always wanted.
Your happiness at work isn’t a result of an ideal work situation, it’s the result of your mindset and attitude. Choose to be happy and create love in your work-life today.
You can get the most of the career you have now and find contentment and happiness in your work-life. Dare to dream and explore, just not at the expense of your present joy.
You can love your work-life through active participation and engagement. Here are some tips to love the work-life you have:
Take advantage of training opportunities.
Find out what training opportunities your employer offers and take advantage of them. Does your employer offer tuition reimbursement? What about internal training programs? Does your company sponsor membership in professional associations?
Training opportunities engage you in learning and loving your career. They build confidence and increase commitment.
Find a mentor.
If you know someone that has what you seek in your own career, ask them to mentor you. A mentor works with you one-on-one in your career development, sharing knowledge and resources and supporting you in your career goals.
Sharing your experience and career success with a protégé builds leadership skills, and allows you to gain perspective through the eyes of your protégé.
Mentoring others can help you track your career progress and build your confidence.
Do your best work.
If you’re not passionate about your job it can be easy to check out, doing only the minimal amount of effort to get the job done.
Challenge yourself to do your best work every day. You’ll feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction and you’re efforts will likely gain notice of people who can help you achieve your goals.
Track your accomplishments.
Keeping track of your professional accomplishments will help you recognize your strengths, as well as increasing your confidence in your abilities.
As an added bonus, you can leverage your accomplishments in your performance review and during salary and job negotiations.
Volunteer for special projects and assignments.
Build your skills by volunteering for special projects and assignments.
You will feel more engaged in your job if you have challenge and variety in your work, and you’ll have the opportunity to exercise problem solving techniques.
Build positive, friendly relationships with your co-workers. Not only are your co-workers part of your professional network, having a friend at work will help you reduce stress and provide opportunity to have fun at work.
Participating in committees, groups and teams will increase your engagement at work. You will have a voice, learn how the company works, and raise your visibility.
A positive attitude goes a long way, especially in the workplace. Your co-workers will be drawn to your positive attitude and you’ll soon find you enjoy being at work.
Seek out solutions to problems without being asked and show initiative!
Try something new.
Learn a new aspect of your current job, or apply a skill in a new way. Be innovative and creative!
Do work at work, and leave it there.
Focus on work when you’re in the office, and don’t take your work home with you. Work-life balance goes a long way to increasing your satisfaction with your job.
Dress appropriately for your work environment.
We all like to be comfortable, and dressing comfortably and appropriately for your work environment can help separate work and play. Maintaining a professional persona at work is important in balancing your work and life.
Use your talents and skills.
Find ways to use your talents and skills in your current job. Not only will you keep your skills up-to-date, you’ll enjoy your work more.
Like taking on a special project, cross-training is a great opportunity to gain new experience and add variety to your work day.
Helping others strengthens your connection to your network, and can help build credibility and a positive reputation at work.
Being engaged in your work will improve your work experience. Every one of these tips will also help you transition into a career of your dreams where you can love what you do and do what you love.
I love your comments! I invite you to pick 2 of these tips to implement in your work-life. Which 2 will you try?
Photo Credit: Copyright (c) 123RF Stock PhotosJoin the Conversation
Creating an organized workspace is about more than just organization- you can create a space that inspires, engages and energizes you in the work you do every day.
Do you want a workspace that boosts your mood, productivity and creativity? Organizing your workspace can improve the quality of your work-life and add a little fun to your work day. Here are 8 tips for organization and inspiration!
1. Get rid of anything that doesn’t work for you.
If an item in your workspace isn’t working for you, get rid of it.
Do you have pens that don’t work and pencils that are unsharpened? Do you like the feel, color and point of your pens? Is your pen cup big enough for your favorite writing utencils? Does your stapler function smoothly and is the fit comfortable in your hand?
Trying to work with an item that isn’t working for you is draining your energy and minimizing your efficiency. Ask yourself if the items on and around your desk are working for you. Give away, recycle or trash unwanted items that are adding clutter and fuss to your workday.
2. Invest in the right tools.
Shop around for desk organizers, file organizers and other items that will suit your individual needs.
If you don’t have desk drawers, you may need a desktop organizer with drawers or divided cups to separate the supplies you use regularly. Make it easy to reach for and find the things you need without rooting around or sorting through miscellaneous supplies thrown together in a drawer or box.
Consider wall files and incline desktop sorters that store files and papers vertically instead of desk trays which stack papers on top of each other. Use printable file folder labels and stagger the tabs so you can quickly and easily find the file you’re looking for.
Don’t underestimate the value of adjustable monitor stands that not only raise your monitor to eye level, but can also free up desk space for supply storage.
Invest in the tools you need; it’s worth spending a little extra to get something that is going to make your work-life easier every day.
3. Keep what you need close at hand.
Keep files and supplies you use daily within easy reach. Remove any items from your immediate reach that you don’t use regularly to declutter and clear your space for productive work.
Keeping the items you use often in reach may require investing in the right organizational tools so you can have paperclips, tape, or whatever supplies you use regularly at your fingertips. Don’t put something in a drawer that you have to use over and over each day- keep it on your desk where you can grab it without changing your position.
4. Create a reference binder.
Use a 3-ring binder to keep reference materials organized and easily accessed.
My reference binder has a one-page-per year calendar with holidays and closures circled in red, a phone list, an account list, key policies and procedures, a list of desk stretches, tips for minimizing stress, and a whole lot more!
Think about the information you need to reference often and information that is important to easily access when you’re under a deadline, on the phone, or under stress and include it in your reference binder.
Consider slipping your reference papers into plastic page covers so you can put view them back-to-back and handle them frequently without tearing or soiling the pages.
5. Make it ergonomic!
Raise your monitor to eye level. Use wrist rests for your keyboard and mouse. Adjust your chair height or invest in a footrest. Take care of your body and it will take care of you! You’ll feel better and experience less mental stress if your body isn’t stressed all day long.
6. Use color!
Color-coding your files can help you quickly and easily find the documents you’re looking for and help you return items to the appropriate file so you always know where to find it next time.
In addition to color-coding, using color in your organization and decoration can boost your mood. Choose colors that calm and soothe you, like blues and greens, or choose colors that excite and energize you, like reds and pinks.
Color can add style and personality to your workspace in addition to organization and help you create a space you love.
7. Show your style.
In addition to color, use textures, artwork and designs that inspire and engage you.
Make your workspace personalized not only with personal photos, consider adding personality with your office decoration. Display art on your walls, and use artistic office supplies that come in a variety of colors, styles and designs. You can find a designer mouse, notebooks, file folders and so much more!
8. Have fun with a digital photo frame.
Use a digital photo frame to display photos, quotes and images that make you laugh, make you smile and fill you with happiness. A digital photo frame allows you to easily add or change the images and doesn’t clutter your desk or wall with multiple photos, frames and notes.
My digital photo frame has pictures of family and friends, vacation photos, and LOLcats!
Creating a workspace you love will encourage productivity, focus and increase happiness in the workplace. Don’t just organize your workspace- let it inspire you! Think of ways your workspace can engage you and help you do your best work every day.
What do you love about your workspace? What organizational tips work for you?Join the Conversation
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3D Printing Draws Closer to Mainstream with Cubify
If 3D printing is something that excites you, get ready for a rush.
The process, which involves using a machine to turn a digital file into a finished physical object by building it up layer by layer, is something that makes technophiles drool, but up until recently was too expensive for the average tinkerer.
But 3D Systems launches at CES its beta Cubify.com platform, which sounds like it might be pretty amazing once the wraps come off it. It also indicates that more people may soon be giving 3D printing a shot.
Sometime in the next few months, 3D Systems will start selling a new Cube 3D printer priced at $1299 that comes with a cartridge of plastic available in ten colors. The printer is 14-by-14-by-18 inches, weighs less than 9 pounds, and can print about ten to twelve "average size" parts, which Rajeev Kulkarni, 3D Systems VP and general manager of consumer solutions, says works out to be about $4 to $5 per part. When it’s time to reorder a new cartridge, the cost is $50.
But the really interesting part is the Cubify platform itself.
It’s a free online social platform that’s available for individuals, artists, developers, and creative partners.
As an individual, you can go online and pick a digital file of something you like -- let’s say a mug, belt buckle, or cookie cutter. Then you download an app that lets you customize it. After you’ve designed your custom product it’s just a matter of either wirelessly printing to your own Cube printer, or sending it to 3D Systems’ printing service, and they’ll produce it for you.
But some people want to do more than just play around with 3D printing.
You can use the tools on Cubify to create products that you think are marketable and sell them right there on the platform. And companies already printing their own 3D products can use Cubify as another sales channel.
While Cubify already has a pretty beefy inventory of apps created by the 3D Systems developer community, Kulkarni says Cubify is wide open for any developer who wants to market 3D apps. “We are really relying on the developer community to come up with ideas and build on this platform in various ways so that it grows 3D printing into a space where people like moms, dads and kids can use it in the house,” he says.
Artists and developers get 60 percent of the revenue from sales of products or apps on Cubify. 3D Systems takes a 30 percent share and the rest goes to sales tax, they tell me.
Geomagic, a company that transforms 3D scan data into highly accurate polygon and native CAD models for reverse engineering, product design, rapid prototyping, and analysis, is one software company already on the Cubify bandwagon. It has created a super cool Kinect-To-Print app that lets you use your Kinect to print things.
Check out this fresh video: It shows a man using a Kinect to make a 3D replica of his own head!
At CES, the company also will be showing off a variety of Tablet-To-Print content creation and manipulation apps for 3D printing. 3D Systems also will be making available 3D collection libraries as downloads.
As PCWorld has pointed out, so far 3D printers in the home have been a device in search of a niche. But with companies like 3D Systems dreaming up fun ways for regular people to play around with it, 3D printing might be getting closer to the mainstream.
[For more blogs, stories, photos, and video from the nation's largest consumer electronics show, check out PCWorld's complete coverage of CES 2012.]
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Could I write a post without somehow acknowledging Adam Darowski's favorite, Monte Ward? | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons.
After my post went up last week in which I presented Weighted On-Base Averages for the 1870's - both single-season and decade-long wOBA's - former Beyond the Boxscore writer extraordinaire Cyril Morong emailed me this link on Ross Barnes - who's talents I lauded in my post - and rule changes of the 19th century. I encourage everyone to go read that piece on Barnes before finishing this.
One of the things I haven't touched on, despite digging into 19th century baseball with stat shovels are the rule changes. It's fair to say that while the core of the game - the shape of the field, placement of the bases, goals of the game (i.e.: score more runs than you give up) - have all remained the same in the last 130+ years, the way the game is played has changed quite a bit. It's stayed the same, yet changed immensely, if you will.
Now, I bring you some of the important rule changes in the 1870's that you may or may not have known about.
First, here's a graph of the run environment from 1871-1899
Click to enlarge
This is total runs scored per game between the two teams, not just the average runs per game a team scored in a given year. Once we get beyond the 1870's, it really flattens out, but if you somehow found a sweet time masheen (I hope someone gets the reference) and attended a game in 1871, you were likely to see what would amount to a low-ish scoring modern football game rather than a baseball score you're used to today. Teams combined for around 20 runs a game from 1871-1873. That did drop to around 15 in 1874 and dropped again to just under 11 runs in 1875 where it would hover for the next couple decades.
Why the big offense and the subsequent drops in offense? Some rule changes can explain that.
1871: the first major league baseball game is held on May 4th, 1871 in Fort Wayne, Indiana between the Fort Wayne Kekiongas and the Cleveland Forest Citys. Fort Wayne won 2-0 and only played 19 games that year.
1872: Pitchers were allowed to snap their wrists which brought about the curveball. However, pitchers were still required to pitch underhand. They also regulated the weight and dimensions of the baseball.
1873: Spectator Interference is introduced. Also, the ball is also declared dead and all base runners can advance if a player catches the ball in his hat.
1874: The Batters Box is introduced. Additionally, Umpires, players and official scorers are banned from gambling on the game. The Balk rule also came into fruition.
1877: 15-inch canvas bags became the norm for bases. Home plate became placed universally in the angle formed by the intersection of the first and third base lines. Fair-foul hits were outlawed. The walk is removed from a players at-bat total. Somewhere, an unborn Collin Wyers cries at the anguish this would give future sabermetricians everywhere.
1879: The Players Reserve Clause was introduced into player contracts for the first time. The first staff of Umpires were used. A pitcher had to face a batter before pitching to him. The number of "called balls" became 9 and all balls were either strikes, balls, or fouls.
Naturally an organized, growing sport is going to change drastically but all of these changes occurred in just the first eight years of the National Association. This was also quite the feat given the league had very little power over anything that went on in the league. Anyone could field a team so long as they paid the dues - which weren't much at all - and the made their own schedules so long as they played each team a specified number of times. There was no central office and the punishment for an insubordinate club was that club forfeiting their dues - which weren't all that much to begin with. This, eventually, led to the demise of the National Association in 1875.
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Long before I knew of "Wif's" (as I called him) military service, I knew him as a gracious, welcoming, and kind individual, with a wry sense of humor. We have enjoyed many pleasant and interesting conversations throughout the forty-five years or so that I've known him.
On two recent visits, he greeted me warmly, and the time flew by as we reminisced. At one point, I examined some photos and medals displayed on the wall, and we talked about his time in the military. As platoon sergeant, he bore heavy burdens, and has some dark memories of that time. But, in his typical fashion, he also took the opportunity to poke gentle fun at the idea of himself as a "war hero." "Oh, no," he said. "it was all because I remembered my high-school German! I just told them, "Raise your arms, and you will live. I have cigarettes, food, and drink. Or, keep your guns, and you will be dead."" He said that they came to him very willingly at that point, many of them being "just kids of sixteen or so." The certificate on the wall, accompanying the Distinguished Service Cross, paints a much more frightening picture.
On another occasion, he was on a night parachute jump. The plane left Italy and headed into France, the site of the jump. He landed upside-down in a tree. Thinking he was about 30 feet up, he decided to open the auxiliary chute and climb down. At that point, he heard a private at eye level say, "Whattya doin,' Sarge?" He had come to rest in an apple tree, and only had to turn over, to be on the ground. When I mentioned that I couldn't imagine jumping out of a plane at night, with no idea what faced me at the other end, he replied modestly, "Oh, well, that was combat."
Wif's training took place in Toccoa, Georgia, with the 506th, the outfit which would come to be known in the book and film as the Band of Brothers. He freely admits that he probably would not have survived, had he continued with that unit. An officer asked him to remain behind, and continue as platoon sergeant with a new outfit, which became the 517th.
Luckily, Wif returned home, and became a devoted husband to his sweetheart, the former Phyllis Foulkes. The tender care he took of her as she became ill late in life, was another act of heroic bravery.
The greatest generation, indeed.
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DENVER - Chinese New Year begins next Sunday and it's the year of the snake. But at the Denver Dumb Friends League. It's the year of the cat.
The Dumb Friends League wants to dispel the myths that cats aren't a social, friendly or kid-loving pet.
"You can train a cat just as many things as you can train a dog: sit, stay, come, roll over and high five," Chris Gallegos, spokesman for the DDFL, said.
During this year, the non-profit will focus on educating people about felines, and try to increase the number of adoptions.
"Current statistics show that around 70 to 75 percent of people in Colorado are looking for a dog. We're trying to make sure we expand that number out for cats as well," Gallegos said
Starting now and through Feb. 15, DDFL is offering half off adult dogs and cats, those are the animals one year or older.
This will put the price on your new feline friend at around $30.
(KUSA-TV © 2013 Multimedia Holdings Corporation)
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Jay is smart, and knows that packaged food never quite turns out the way it looks on the box. It’s not physically possible. But he was surprised, when cooking a pre-packaged cup of Kraft macaroni and cheese from Costco, that the quantity of food-like substance in the cup didn’t really measure up to what was shown on the box. Is he overreacting, or is this really an unrealistic portrayal of the food product within?
We picked up this box of Kraft “cheesy and easy” Macaroni and Cheese cups at Costco. The box art shows a cup that is nearly filled to the brim with cheesy goodness. The art is believable, there is nothing on the box to suggest that this portion is unrealistic. There is no explicit fine print stating that the art is just art, there is no implicit cue that the cups are impossible to fill up to that level. The consumer should have no reason to expect the product would be otherwise.
I cooked it and realized the actual product is roughly 50% of what’s on the box. Attached are the pictures before and after cooking, using a BIC pencil end (where the entire black eraser end is only .50 inch) to show the height level of the uncooked pasta. Just for giggles after cooking I positioned the cup and angled it so it resembles what’s on the box, only it looks nothing like what’s on the box. Egads! Maybe that’s why they neglected to show consumers the truth? Who would buy this unless Kraft could sucker them with an absurdly inflated product?
There was some message on the cup wrapper to the effect that the macaroni pieces on the rim of the wrapper are blown up but that’s irrelevant unless they’re saying you have to buy it first, open it to read the message only visible clearly on the cups, then make the mental leap that inflated pieces of pasta on one piece of art implies that they inflated the pasta on another piece of art. Maybe they even want you to know how much a piece of uncooked macaroni weighs and do the math at Costco to know there can’t possibly be that much macaroni in the box. Yeah, sure or maybe they can just tell the truth which “might” be easier.
To rule out cooking conditions I tested different cooking times believing there was a possible microwave power factor influencing this. The results were the same and with that amount of pasta, blaming it on cooking conditions is not plausible. Then I thought maybe they couldn’t put that much in there because it would be impossible to stir but the roughly half inch space they show on the box should be enough. That excuse doesn’t justify lying to consumers anyway, if they did this to make it easier to stir they should show the true size on the box. Nothing justifies adding this much plastic waste and lying about it. Adding that much plastic you don’t need per cup compared to the actual food in there and making these cups so small is just so wasteful.
Maybe Kraft made that much in one cup using a specially tuned microwave but I doubt it based on my tests. The average consumer probably isn’t going to achieve those conditions anyway, losing half of what’s shown on the box due to conditions would be absurd. This is fraud at worst, disingenuous at best. Being a monolithic company they probably have some sly legalese to hide behind. Look, I’m not the kind of person to argue if the food varies by some small percentage but this is roughly 50% and that’s a LOT to lose.
If my memory of Easy Mac physics is correct, it would be impossible for the cooked pasta to reach that level without boiling over while microwaving, so the cup can’t be that full. Which might still make it an unfair marketing image, but for a good reason.
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As of May 1, 2013, the Department of the Treasury will eliminate the need for paper checks and discontinue mailing federal benefit and non-tax payments to citizens, instead, switch over to electronic payments, e.g. direct deposit.
After seeking public comment on the proposed rule issued in June 2010, federal regulations were changed to generally require all federal benefits including Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Veterans Affairs, Railroad Retirement Board, Office of Personnel Management benefits and other non-tax payments to be made electronically. Benefit recipients have the option of direct deposit into a bank or credit union account of their choice or into a Direct Express® Debit MasterCard® card account.
So what exactly is Direct Deposit?
Direct deposit delivers your Social Security or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefit into your bank, savings and loan or credit union’s account quickly and safely. The U.S. Treasury sends an electronic message to your bank, savings and loan or credit union crediting your account with the exact amount of your Social Security or SSI benefit. You can withdraw money, put some in savings or pay bills-the things you do with your money now. The difference is, your check isn’t printed or mailed.
Is this the first time you’re learning about this? Hopefully not.
The Treasury has launched a public education campaign to inform Americans about the rule change and to help them understand what they need to do to get their payments electronically, whether they already receive payments by check or will be applying for federal benefits for the first time soon. Current check recipients will receive information enclosed with their payments, and the national campaign will also include public service announcements, a newly redesigned website, www.GoDirect.org, ongoing financial literacy programming and partnerships with hundreds of national, regional and local organizations.
Make sure you don’t wait until the last-minute to sign up for direct deposit. For more information about how you can switch from checks to direct deposit, visit www.GoDirect.org, or call the U.S. Treasury Processing Center’s toll-free helpline at 1 (800) 333-1795, or speak with a bank or credit union representative.
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It only seats one person, has a 30-hp motor, takes 11 seconds to get from 0-to-60 mph and has a range of 40 miles. Stop the presses. Ok, you've heard this one before, but VW's intent on making this concept car a transformative event, so here goes.
Volkswagen says the all-electric NILS "offers a glimpse of a new form of minimalist mobility," and considering it carries minimal passengers, has minimal cargo room and offers a minimal driving range, they may be on to something. Ok, c'mon, we're just a little jaded about this stuff. Seriously, VW, we're listening.
Bet you thought Europeans took the train everywhere. If you did, you'd be wrong. In Germany, about 60 percent of commuters travel by car, according to the Federal Bureau of Statistics (the F-BS, if you're following along at home). Of these commuters, more than 90 percent travel alone. But here's the rub for NILS: 73.9 percent of commuters residing between Berlin and Munich cover less than 15.5 miles on their way to work. As the concept goes, NILS is the car for them.
Designed at the Volkswagen Design Center in Potsdam, Berlin, NILS is built from an aluminum space frame, and — as VW points out — has the same format as an F1 car — driver in the middle, engine in back, wheels at the corners. It's only around 10 feet long by 4.3 feet wide — wheel to wheel. It has low-rolling-resistance tires on 17-inch alloy wheels. It only weighs 1,000 pounds, so the 30-peak-hp (20 hp nominal power) electric motor and compact battery pack is enough for reasonable speeds. It can be charged in a max of two hours (not bad) at a conventional socket or at a charging station.
Despite the low power output, VW says NILS drives like a go-kart, and may revolutionize commuting for millions. It also has active safety gear like ESP, traction-motor braking and automatic distance control system.
VW's showing off NILS at the Frankfurt motor show later this month, though hasn't hinted at any plans to put it into production. Hey, it's no Segway, but maybe that'll work in its favor.
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"Harbor shipshape, but could use work"
June 25, 2008 · Updated 11:34 AM
"Photo: Bill Hawkins, Ray Honerlah, and Doug Allderdice talk with Langley harbormaster Ben Reams, right, about the condition of the Langley Small Boat Harbor.Matt Johnson / staff photoLangley's Small Boat Harbor is not only a haven for Whidbey Island and travelling boaters, but to scuba divers as well, and if the harbor's popularity continues to grow, its facilities will need some improvements.Showing members of the Langley City Council around the harbor Wednesday afternoon, harbormaster Ben Reams said recently expanded docking facilities and easy diving access are drawing people to Langley. That is good for the harbor's income, which could reach its highest level ever this year, at least in the area of transient and permanent boat moorage. But to keep people coming, Reams said, the city will have to spend some money to keep boaters and other harbor users happy.Reams is looking for about $19,000 this year to make improvements in the harbor. Tasks on his to do list include $1,500 in painting and repairs in the harbor's restrooms, $500 for dock bumpers, $5,000 for maintenance on the harbor's new pumpout barge, $2,000 to install walkway lights, and $10,000 to install 10 power boxes. Those boxes will allow boaters to hook into electric power and live aboard their boats while in port.In 1999, the harbor earned over $68,000 from moorage fees and is on pace to earn as much or more this year. At present, the city has no plans to expand the harbor for more moorage. The city recently installed a new, 100-foot mooring float. Last spring, the city council created four year-round moorage slips for use by Langley boat owners.The Port of South Whidbey commissioners have recently discussed marina possibilities in Langley but no concrete proposals have been made."
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A young chemist fatally burned in a UCLA laboratory was inadequately trained, lacked experience and was not given protective gear before handling highly flammable chemicals, an expert witness testified Tuesday.
Neal Langerman, a chemist with a consulting practice in advanced chemical safety, was called by the prosecution in a preliminary hearing that will determine whether chemistry professor Patrick Harran will stand trial for violating California occupational health and safety codes in the death of Sheharbano "Sheri" Sangji.
Under questioning by Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Marguerite Rizzo, Langerman said Sangji should not have been handling the chemical tert-Butyllithium without specific training and study of instructions provided by its manufacturer. He said the chemical is highly flammable if it comes in contact with oxygen.
Asked about Sangji's background, Langerman said, "She absolutely did not have sufficient skill, knowledge or training to be handling tert-Butyllithium."
He said the 23-year-old, who had a bachelor's degree in chemistry, never worked with the chemical until she came to UCLA. Equipment in the lab was inadequate and technicians were not provided with protective clothing, he said, and
In addition, Sangji made errors in procedure, Langerman said, adding that the accident was predictable and preventable.
"When you ask an untrained person to deal with a high-risk task, something bad is going to happen," he said.
Cross-examination was delayed until Dec. 18 due to schedule conflicts.
Outside court, Kevin Reed, an attorney for UCLA who is observing the case, said: "The fundamental thing is this was a terrible tragedy. Dr. Langerman's testimony has not done anything to convert what was a tragedy into a crime."
Sangji was transferring a chemical from one sealed container to another on Dec. 29, 2008, when a plastic syringe came apart in her hands and the chemical spilled, igniting on contact with the air.
Sangji's synthetic sweater melted into her skin and she suffered burns over nearly half her body. She died 18 days after the incident.
Harran is accused of failing to provide safety instructions and equipment for his lab researchers. He is charged with willful violation of occupational safety and health standards causing the death of an employee, and could be sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison if convicted.
Since Sangji's death, UCLA has instituted more rigorous lab inspections, issued more fire-resistant lab coats, offered enhanced training in the use of air-sensitive chemicals and established a Center for Lab Safety.
The Associated Press
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Donor dollars are very important to Black CAP and they allow us to support program areas that our funders do not typically support. Without your support we would be unable to provide a range of important programs and services to Black, African and Caribbean people living in Toronto. With more than 3,000 Black people living with AIDS in Ontario and the majority of them living in Toronto we depend on your support. To make a onetime or monthly donation to Black CAP click here to donate online. If you would like to provide a donation to Black CAP through an automatic withdrawal from your bank account every month please call or email us at
Thank you for helping us support Black people living with HIV and AIDS and helping us to prevent new HIV infections. Every dollar of every donation is targeted to programs and services for our clients.
Donors help Black CAP in a number of ways, including:
Emergency Financial Assistance
Programming for people living with HIV and AIDS
- Our Emergency Financial Assistance (EFA) Program supports people living with HIV and AIDS (PHAs) at moments of financial hardship. This program supports costs such as utility bills, treatment costs, transportation, immigration expenses and other costs that are hard to cover.
- For instance our EFA has helped a young mother who is living on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) when she runs out of money for groceries at the end of the month. She comes to the agency and tells our support staff that she has no food left in the house and is out of baby formula. Black CAP’s EFA program provides the young mom with a cheque for $100 to cover end of month costs and a food voucher for $50 to buy some much needed food.
- Every year Black CAP provides about $10K in EFA support to our clients, however the demand for these dollars continues to increase as the number of our clients grow. As one client tells us, “I’ve had to use the EFA program when all of my other options have run out, without it I could have ended up on the street or hungry”.
- This program is important because PHAs are a group that often face exceptional financial hardships due to barriers to employment, migration status, dependence on income assistance programs, and expensive treatments.
- Black CAP delivers a range of direct programming for people living with HIV/AIDS (PHAs)
- A young 19 year old refugee from Zimbabwe receives his diagnosis for HIV over the phone from his immigration doctor. Confused, scared and alone he comes to Black CAP to talk to someone he hopes will help him decide what to do next. Black CAP’s Settlement and Support programs help him pick up the pieces, supporting him to access treatment, housing, and a monthly support group for people newly diagnosed with HIV.
- Programming for PHAs is important because it addresses the broad range of issues that PHAs face in our community such as social isolation, access to treatment information, peer support and navigating a complex immigration system.
- Donor dollars support a range of programming for PHAs in our community. Programming includes:
- An Annual Healing Retreat where our client get time away with their peers, attend workshops related to treatment and participate in wellness programming.
- Monthly groups for those newly diagnosed with HIV, and long-term survivors.
- An annual holiday party where individual clients and families are given gift baskets and gift certificates to make the holidays more enjoyable.
- This program is a priority because there are significant gaps in programming for PHAs in Toronto. Existing programming does not address the full range of needs and challenges that PHAs face in their day-to-day lives.
- Our Mate Masie program is an innovative HIV/AIDS and STI Prevention Education Program offered to Black youth aged 15 to 24. It is a blend of Kwanzaa workshops, Yoga instruction and HIV/AIDS and STI prevention education offered in a holistic environment where participants can explore life skills such as leadership, conflict resolution, wisdom, self-love, critical thinking, and healthy decision-making.
- A young man who lives in Kingston/Galloway, is always fighting, with his peers, with his parents, and with his teachers. His youth worker recommends the Mate Masie project, hoping that he can find a space where he can escape the stresses of his life. He comes to a few Mate Masie workshops and for the first time in many months feels safe, secure and cared for by the staff and his peers in the program.
- A donation supports programming for youth, food costs, an annual graduation for youth and their families, transportation and salaries for Youth Site Coordinators.
- At a time when one in four new HIV diagnoses in Toronto are in our community and two out of every three women newly diagnosed with HIV are Black women, prevention programming is more important than ever.
- Our prevention programming is focused on priority communities, including young women and young gay and bisexual men.
- A young 13 year old girl is in a relationship with a 17 year old boy who she trusts with her life. They have sex often, but he insists on never using a condom, telling her that he is “clean”, she believes him. Then she sees a Black CAP poster at her school that asks the question, “what else isn’t he telling you?”and a link to the onenightyourchoice.com website where she finds information about better choices in her relationships and reducing her risk for HIV, STIs and unplanned pregnancy.
- A donation supports the development of resources, printing costs, events and other innovative outreach activities to spread the word about reducing HIV risk.
- Black CAP has identified anti-homophobia programming as an important component of its HIV prevention and human rights programming. Homophobia is persistent and pervasive in our communities and innovative responses are required.
- Gene is a young Jamaican man who has lived a life of violence at the hands of his father, mother and siblings because he was always thought to be a little too soft. At 19 he leaves Jamaica and comes to Canada as a refugee. A friend had told him about Black CAP and that there were staff there who could help with his immigration claim. He goes to the agency, meets with staff and is soon free from the violence in his life.
- A donation in this area supports the promotion of Black CAP’s new Anti-Homophobia campaign, the delivery of workshops, and the sponsorship of emerging organizations.
Outreach at Pride and Caribana
- In 2010, Black CAP will be moving to a new space in the community. Our goal is to create a long-term space where Black CAP can deliver a full range of programming.
- Black CAP has outgrown its existing space and we expect that in 2010 we will need a space to hold approximately 30 staff. At this time Black CAP has a space for about 18 staff.
- A donation in this area will support a range of costs associated with the opening of a new office, including capital upgrades, IT, moving costs, and furniture.
- It is important for Black CAP to be visible at large community events, this allows us to get our message out to a large number of people within a short amount of time.
- At such events Black CAP distributes important information which helps people to recognize their risk for HIV and STIs, reduce HIV related stigma, and raise an issue that is not commonly discussed.
- A young man who has never seen the issue of HIV/AIDS talked about in public, until he sees Black CAP staff and volunteers handing out condoms along the parade route. He has never seen the issue raised so he always assumed that he could never get HIV/AIDS. Since Caribana and other big community events in Toronto never seem to include space to talk about HIV/AIDS in our Black communities. Now that he recognizes that he is at risk he gets his first HIV test.
- A donation supports costs such as outreach resources like t-shirts, flyers, condom wallets, special event costs,
- Undesignated gifts are very important to Black CAP. They allow Black CAP to cover unexpected costs, innovative program expansion and the pilot testing of different program areas.
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Mentoring Certification Program
Creating Lasting Relationships.
The spirit of our mentoring program is knowledge transfer--we facilitate relationships in which a mentor with expertise in a particular discipline or competency shares her knowledge with someone seeking that expertise. Historically, mentoring consisted of a long-term relationship, spanning several years, to groom the mentee for promotion or the next level in her career, but in today's fast-paced, virtual world, the focus has shifted to help anyone gain new insights and abilities in an accelerated manner. Mentoring has become an effective development tool with more immediate impact and is expanding into the world of virtual relationships.
Mentoring Womens Network has developed a state of the art program designed to help professional women build mentoring relationships; our goal is to strengthen the skills and confidence levels of women looking to benefit professionally from the experience of our certified mentors. Our certified mentors participate in a skill-development workshop to hone their mentoring skills and ensure consistency in the format and use of tools across MWN's mentoring relationships.
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Iowa pays millions to spur job creation during 2012
DES MOINES (AP) — It was an unprecedented year for economic development efforts in Iowa, with the state paying out tens of millions of dollars in tax benefits and loans to nearly 70 companies that promised to create about 2,000 jobs.
The deals included two huge fertilizer projects, each involving capital investments exceeding $1 billion. Companies receiving state incentives overall pledged to spend $3.7 billion in the state to build new facilities or expand existing businesses, but critics question whether the money spent per job created is an efficient use of taxpayer money.
The state spent about $12 million on loans to companies expanding or locating in Iowa during the year, according to Iowa Economic Development Authority records. The agency did not immediately have a breakdown of tax credits awards offered this year alone, but said it made more than $151 million in tax credit awards in 2011 and 2012.
If you have any technical difficulties, either with your username and password or with the payment options, please contact us by e-mail at [email protected]
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I bring everyone who visits me in Buffalo on a tour of its vestigial heavy industry – the grain-storing and shipping, steel-smelting, car-making Buffalo. I love its earnest heart. The grand finale of the tour is a Beaux Arts columned building of stone, marble and copper that lies on the shore of Lake Erie at the edge of town, where it turns into Lackawanna.
I felt like the building was a secret. It is behind a chain-link fence, surrounded by overgrown bushes. It seemed forgotten, so I wasn’t worried about it going anywhere between my tours. I didn’t know it had a name, or what purpose it once had.
Mystery revealed. It’s the Bethlehem Steel North Administration Building. I know this because Lackawanna Mayor Geoffrey Szymanski wants to demolish it. Recently, a court order was lifted giving the green light for demolition. What an awful way to kick off 2013 for Buffalo architecture. Panicked preservationists are picketing, petitioning and begging him not to do it. My only hope is that Rep. Brian Higgins will see the beauty and possibility in saving Bethlehem Steel to make it a part of the waterfront development he supports.
Buildings tell stories about “when” and “how” and, perhaps most essentially, “why” a place is. A city’s children need to know, its immigrants need to know, its visitors and regular citizens need to know about the hard work and great wealth that built this place so they can know what’s possible. History is inspiration.
Buffalo, Lackawanna and Niagara Falls have downtowns like once handsome faces smashed and flattened. There are gaping holes like punched-out teeth in once tight rows of houses and stores. Entire blocks are flat and weedy. Over the last 50 years, they have been cleared in the name of progress, which turned into buildings not built and parking lots for cars not coming.
It doesn’t have to go this way. In the two years I have lived here, two grand hotels that had been horrible embodiments of decline have been reopened. Their renovations have begun to revive the area and general optimism about the city. It can be done with Bethlehem Steel.
A year ago, Buffalo hosted the National Preservation Conference. Tourists and preservationists roamed the city praising its architecture. Szymanski stubbornly refuses to entertain any plan but immediate demolition for Bethlehem Steel. Sadly, he can’t picture a grand public space where the citizens of his town once lined up to get their paychecks. But preservationists can. We have real reuse plans. We need the government to help us.
The owners of Pennsylvania-based New Enterprise Stone and Lime Co. were allowed to let the building deteriorate to the point that it is forcing a demolition. I hope someone has the imagination to see his name on a plaque, to create a legacy for his family name and for Western New York.
One of Buffalo’s great shames is the 1950 demolition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building. But it also has some significant saves, like Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building. Even children gasp at its ornate engravings and carvings of terra cotta and copper. That building is on a different tour I give, one I’d like to be able to add the Bethlehem Steel Building to. The field where the Larkin Building’s broken pieces were dumped and buried is on the way to the Bethlehem Steel Building. Please help so that my tour’s grand finale isn’t a similar site in Lackawanna.
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China has launched a new regulation to curb self-immolation after several Tibetans burned themselves to death over the past months, Gannan Daily from Northwest China's Gansu Province reported on Monday.
The new regulation was said to have been drafted by the Ministry of Public Security, the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate, which pointed out that people who in any form plan, organize, incite or help others perform self-immolation will be tried for intentional homicide.
The regulation also stipulates that people who burn themselves in public places will be charged with a public security offense and those who parade a corpse through the streets or gather to watch the immolation without actively stopping the suicide will also be subject to criminal prosecution.
"To incite and help others commit self-immolation is in essence a criminal act depriving people of their lives," reads the regulation.
Xu Zhitao, a director of the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, told the Global Times on Tuesday that many of the people who perform self immolation have been brainwashed and lack basic judgment.
Photos of China 30 years ago
AK-47-equipped teacher creates buzz
Beautiful model at Guangzhou Auto Show
Former TV host accuses legislator of assault
Say no to vicious cycle of ugliness appreciation
Scariest freshwater animals
126-centimeter-tall couples' wedding
Student questions China's education system
Harbin-Dalian high-speed railway starts operation
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When the Silicon Valley Leadership Group wants to show legislators the flaws of California's 42-year-old environmental quality act (CEQA), the bus halts at Moe's Stop gas station at 33rd and McKee streets in San Jose.
Four years ago, Moe's began a laborious attempt to add three pumps under a canopy on the east side of its property. No big deal, right? Wrong. It took Moe's more than three years and a blizzard of legal and consultant bills before it got permission.
What held it up? A competing gas station across 33rd Street, Andy's BP, filed a lawsuit under CEQA to force an environmental impact report.
And when that did not satisfy Andy's owner, the competition filed a new legal action. The litigation, which is still pending, shows signs of becoming an oily version of Dickens' Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce.
The lesson the Leadership Group hopes to impart? The brave provisions under CEQA for protecting the environment are being perverted by competitors who want to stymie good development in a time of scarce jobs.
I asked San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, a former environmental lawyer, why this particular corner had become the poster child for CEQA abuse. He was typically blunt in response. "I just think it's obviously ridiculous,'' he said.
"When you have a gas station that wants to add a pump, it's already a gas station," he explained. "You think, how could that
There has been bad blood between Andy's and Moe's before. Several years ago, Andy's accused Moe's of selling gas for under cost. The two stations have quarreled about charges of underground leaks.
When Moe's owner, Amir Shirazi, submitted plans for expanding to the south and erecting four pumps under a big canopy, replacing a single island, the city welcomed the deal. In early 2009, the planning commission and council approved a permit.
Andy's, sometimes known as Gas & Shop, challenged that finding in court and persuaded a judge to order an environmental impact report, with traffic as a key issue. An environmental report in September 2011 concluded it was not a serious impediment.
Even after the council again blessed the project in late 2011 and the pumps went into operation, Andy's has been fighting a rear-guard legal action.
I couldn't reach owner Andy Saberi for comment, but in court papers, Andy's has argued that Moe's expansion has a "significant impact on traffic'' -- and that the city has not adequately examined underground pollution.
"In sum and substance, it can be summed up by saying the city has allowed Mr. Shirazi to compete unfairly,'' Saberi's Petaluma attorney, James Dombroski, told me. "If the Leadership Group is interested in fair and open competition, they should start examining the activity of Mr. Shirazi.''
Shirazi's lawyer, Gary Wesley, told me that Andy's is "doing everything they can'' to string things along. "CEQA is there because nobody ever stands up for the environment,'' Wesley said. "But it can be abused by competitors.''
When I stopped by the other day to gauge the front lines of the battle, Andy's was selling more gas. Cars were lined up on 33rd street to get in. Moe's was comparatively quiet. That reflected the price: Regular was $3.64 at Andy's and $3.79 at Moe's.
There is, of course, a bigger story here. In Sacramento, there have been attempts to change CEQA so it can be used less often for anti-competitive purposes. It is a tricky business: You don't want to remove all environmental protections for the public.
(If you doubt this point, consider what happened a couple years ago. Stymied in its attempts to process dirtier oil, the Richmond Chevron refinery went about trying quietly to get a bill through Sacramento, which environmentalists beat back).
"Nobody is saying we need to get rid of CEQA,'' said Shiloh Ballard, the vice president of housing and community development for the Leadership Group. "There are places where we want to see good types of development, and it's taking a long time to get through the process.''
For his part, Mayor Reed, favors making it harder to persuade a judge that an environmental impact report is needed -- which almost always delays things. Reed has his own name for CEQA: The California Extraction Quantification Act.''
OK, big words. You still get the idea. Like a bridge troll, someone can use it for less than noble purposes.
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Zeus Variant Targeting Online Banking Customers in UK, US
Security firm Trusteer has spotted a “concerning development” in some new Ice IX configurations that target online banking customers in the UK and US.
Ice IX is a modified variant of the ZeuS financial malware platform that captures information on telephone accounts belonging to the victims, allowing attackers to divert calls from the bank intended for their customer to attacker-controlled phone numbers.
“We believe the fraudsters are executing fraudulent transactions using the stolen credentials and redirecting the bank’s post-transaction verification phone calls to professional criminal caller services that approve the transactions,” Trusteer said.
The attackers so designed the malware such that at login the Ice IX steals the victim’s user id and password, information/secret question answer, date of birth and account balance.
Then, Trusteer further found, the victims are made to update their phone numbers of record (home, mobile and work) and select the name of their service provider from a drop-down list including the British Telecommunications, TalkTalk and Sky.
Next, the attacker modifies the victims’ phone service settings by asking them to submit their telephone account number.
Trsuteer said: “This is very private data typically only known to the phone subscriber and the phone company. It is used by the phone company to verify the identity of the subscriber and authorize sensitive account modifications such as call forwarding.
“The fraudsters justify this request by stating this information is required as a part of verification process caused by ‘a malfunction of the bank’s anti-fraud system with its landline phone service provider.’”
The security firm noted that an increasing number of fraudsters have turned to these post-transaction attack methods to hide fraudulent activity from the victim and block email and phone communication from the bank. This may shun security mechanisms that detect anomalies once transactions have already been executed by the user.
However, these security measures have been proven to be weak in the face of Gameover, another Zeus variant that, like Ice IX, can circumvent post transaction fraud prevention measures.
Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its findings on this attack, which stated that this campaign purports “to be legitimate e-mails from the National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA), advising the user there was problem with the ACH transaction at their bank and it was not processed.”
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For boys and girls ages 5th grade through seniors in high school
"SEEING YOURSELF AS GOD SEES YOU"
At age 23 Lizzie Velasquez is one of only three known people worldwide with her medical syndrome. When an Internet video calling her "The World's Ugliest Women" went viral, Lizzie set out to discover what truly makes us beautiful. She has been featured in national media and has authored two books. Audiences nationwide find her attitude is contagious. Young people will be inspired by her extraordinary positive attitude and unshakable faith in God.
Lizzie’s medical condition has made her life a study in contradictions. She eats whatever she wants, yet cannot move a weigh scale past 60 or so pounds. In a time when many people change their appearance in order to feel accepted, she has accepted herself as extraordinary. Her attitude, not her syndrome, is contagious.
Lizzie will share stories about her personal experiences, advice on being unique, dealing with bullying and negativity, how to love yourself as the gift of God you are. Her message will resonate with anyone who struggles with self-image – and if we’re honest, that’s most people at one time or another.
Her book publisher is Liguori Publications which is a ministry whose mission is to spread the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world.
Churches can download, print and post at your church and have your youth post and circulate in their schools.
This fun event will also feature a
contemporary Christian band, prizes,
and opportunities to reach out to
homeless men, women and children.
REGISTER ONLINE HERE
Space is limited. First come first serve.
Those who register in advance are guaranteed seats as available.
For questions call: (515) 265-7272 or [email protected]
Youth Groups Helping Homeless Children What your youth group can do before the event
During the WAKE UP CALL youth rally we will provide a love offering opportunity for the attendees. Church youth groups are invited to help homeless children living at Hope Ministries’ Family Center by raising money for the children to experience Christian summer camp, field trips to Adventureland, the Science Center, Living History Farms, Blank Park Zoo, the Iowa State Fair, I Cubs games and more including recreational & educational activities and provide funds to purchase Bible Study books and craft supplies. We’re hoping youth groups will sponsor fund raising activities prior to WAKE UP CALL and bring their offering to the event.
OUR GOAL IS TO COLLECTIVELY RAISE $6,250
Youth groups are creative and will come up with many different ways to help raise money for homeless children. One idea to consider is below.
Hope Ministries is providing a teachable opportunity for your youth to live out the story of the loaves and fishes by requesting a free supply of “Loaves & Fishes” cards from Hope Ministries. Each card holds 20 quarters totaling $5. Encourage family members or friends to help fill the card with quarters – and let them know their loose change can change a life! The cards can be used over and over while your youth invite others to support their drive and turn in their change to your church. We ask that you bring one check the evening of the Wake Up Call and present it during our love offering that evening. We will do a quick tally that evening of the offering and announce the result.
AN OUTREACH OPPORTUNITY
We invite churches to take advantage of an outreach opportunity by encouraging your youth to extend a personal invitation to their friends and other students from their school to attend the Wake Up Call event with them and their youth group. This is wonderful opportunity for your youth to share the love of Christ with their neighbors and schoolmates. Our keynote speaker (Lizzie) has a very powerful message that will inspire young people SEEING YOURSELF AS GOD SEES YOU – BEAUTIFUL!
PERSONAL INVITATION CARDS
Personal Invitation Cards are an affective way for youth to invite their friends to the event. Simply download, print, make copies and distribute as needed.
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Ceremony Dedicates Library Deck, Kicks off “Memorializing Vietnam” Project
In 1967, U.S. Marine Corps Capt. James A. Graham, a member of the Frostburg State Teachers College class of ’63, gave his life in Vietnam following a series of heroic actions that were later found worthy of recognition with the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor. On Saturday, Oct. 20, Frostburg State University launched the Graham Memorial Project, a living memorial to the fallen hero.
The project began with the dedication of the deck of the Lewis J. Ort Library in Capt. Graham’s honor and the unveiling of a plaque there, but it will continue with the interdisciplinary educational project, “Memorializing Vietnam.” The educational project will be a semester-long advanced colloquium that will examine the historical, political, social and economic aspects of the Vietnam War. Following that study, FSU students will work in teams to conceptualize the design of a memorial on FSU’s campus honoring Graham, while taking into account all they have learned about the conflict in Vietnam and its impact on the nation and world.
On Saturday, following the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” by members of FSU’s music fraternity, two Vietnam-era CH46 helicopters from Marine Helicopter Squadron One flew over the campus in a tribute to Graham.
Among those in attendance were Graham’s widow, Janice Clark, Frostburg Class of ’64; and their two children, retired USMC Col. John Graham, Class of ’85; and retired USAF Col. Jennifer Graham, as well as Col. Robert Golden III, Marine Corps Recruiting Command chief of staff, representing the Marine Commandant.
An honor guard from the Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 172 presented colors. The event closed with the singing of “God Bless America” and the Marines in attendance singing the “U.S. Marine Corps Hymn.”
A number of James Graham’s Sigma Tau Gamma fraternity brothers were there, as were several Marines who had served with him in Vietnam. John Graham noted the number of people present who had known his father for just a few years, yet “he left indelible images on people that he did not know very long, and here you are 45 years later.”
“Frostburg was extremely important to Dad,” John Graham said. It was where he met his wife, where he found his Sigma Tau Gamma brothers, and where he found his faith. “This is where it all changed for Dad here. … That’s why it’s so fitting that Frostburg is the place to tell Dad’s story,” John Graham said.
Retired USAF Col. Donald White, who chairs the project’s steering committee, said the group is determined to follow the wishes of Graham family that this project be about establishing a living memorial “that will instill traditions within the student population: lifelong learning, personal core values of community selflessness, integrity, excellence, service before self and an understanding that humility is an important personal trait.”
James Graham was honored for his heroism when, in June 1967 against heavy odds, he led a unit of Marines in attacking two machine-gun nests in the Quang Tri Province. With the group under heavy fire, Graham ordered his men to retreat, remaining behind with a wounded soldier unable to be moved.
“The one thing that you could count on with Jim Graham was that you could count on Jim Graham,” his son said.
The memorial is a project of the FSU Alumni Association. The FSU Foundation also has two scholarship funds honoring Graham. For more information on supporting the Graham Memorial Project Fund or the scholarship funds, contact the FSU Office of University Advancement at 301-687-4161.
Situated in the mountains of Allegany County, Frostburg State University is one of the 12 institutions of the University System of Maryland. FSU is a comprehensive, residential regional university and serves as an educational and cultural center for Western Maryland. For more information, visit www.frostburg.edu or facebook.com/frostburgstateuniversity. Follow FSU on Twitter @frostburgstate.
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The BA in Business Administration curriculum is multidisciplinary insofar as it includes all relevant fields of knowledge: marketing and advertising, finance and capital, information technology, human resources and accounting. The result is a stellar combination between familiarity with the practical aspect of business administration and the professional expertise required in advanced academic persuasions and theories.
Students learn about business processes in the domestic and global markets, simulating the complex everyday reality of the business world. As a result, students gain experience making decisions and making mistakes - without paying the price. Undergraduates are required to submit a final project which combines theoretical knowledge with practical work. In addition, they are required to complete an internship, participate in a young entrepreneurs project and in an advanced Marketing and Advertising workshop led by the International Advertising Association.
The School of Business Administration is proud to offer an internship in accounting, the largest and most sought after of its kind among institutions of higher education in Israel. It is no wonder that, for many years, the College of Management - Academic Studies (COMAS) graduates have earned the highest scores in the CPA (Certified Public Accountants) exams.
Accelerated Program for Outstanding Students
The accelerated program for outstanding students enables excelling students to finish the MA just one year after completing their BA. The program is designed for students who are able to handle the extensive demands of the MA program and attend several MA courses during their BA.
Program for Outstanding BA in Business Administration Students
The School of Business Administration is committed to nurture and promote excellence in its midst. The school's graduates are seen as the future spearhead of Israeli industry.
With this in mind, the school established a program for outstanding students – a group that includes all students with a GPA of 90 and above. This program accepts new members every year.
We believe that a successful businessman or accountant is one that boasts broad knowledge and personal depth. The school's program for outstanding students offers lectures, sessions, courses and workshops beyond the regular curriculum, aimed at exposing the top tier of students to advanced concepts that differ somewhat from the regular curriculum, thereby expanding their horizons.
Participation in this program does not require any additional tuition fees.
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| 0.947578 | 444 | 1.648438 | 2 |
By Megan Chance
Three Rivers. 417 pages. $14.95
Kitsap County historical novelist Megan Chance has written about 19th century Gotham before, and she returns to that time and place in her new book, "The Spiritualist."
Evelyn is the heroine in this whodunit, and despite her working class roots, she has recently married into the Atherton clan, one of the wealthiest families in New York City. Her husband, Peter, provides for her every material want, but he remains aloof from her emotionally. While he claims to be overwhelmed with work at his law practice, he does find time to attend spirit circles. Calling up the great beyond is all the newest rage in New York.
Evie is skeptical, but she attends one of the circles with her husband in an effort to get closer to him.
It is an ill-starred evening in any event — somebody's gun discharges during the seance. Despite everyone else's claims that it was an accident, Peter believes otherwise, and he tells Evelyn he intends to get to the bottom of the matter that very evening.
When he does not return the next day, she is unconcerned — he often works late and spends the night in his office. But several days go by with no word from her husband — until one day there is a knock at the door. The police have arrived to tell Evie that Peter's body has been found in the East River, and he appears to have been murdered.
Evie is the chief suspect, and her in-laws quickly turn on her, as does most of the rest of high society.
It is only the efforts of her husband's handsome law partner, Benjamin Rampling, and the generosity of an eccentric but wealthy widow who regularly sponsors spirit circles in her own home, that keep Evie from being locked up in jail until her trial date. Instead, she is allowed to live under house arrest in the widow's opulent mansion.
Michel Jourdain, the enigmatic medium who also shares the wealthy widow's home, offers his help. Evie is uncertain that he can be trusted, but with her life on the line, she can't afford to turn down help.
Since Peter thought that the shooting at the seance had not been an accident, she may find his murderer by uncovering what was really going on the night the "accident" took place.
Author Chance writes about this era with relish — this is New York City during the lavish Gilded Age, of course, but society has a tarnished underbelly. Deceit and scandals fester just beneath the glittering surface. Lust roils through the story. Laudanum and other spirits warp the characters' responses. And the utter dependence of women upon the charity of men is the most sickening condition of all.
Even when Evelyn eventually learns to tap into a source of power that she previously had discounted, readers will discern that this comes at a significant cost.
All sorts of things happen behind closed doors in this book. You'll have to open the covers to find out.
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| 0.980563 | 641 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Yesterday Mourning by Renita Bryant
Price: $2.99 USD. 40140 words.
Language: English. Published on May 5, 2013. Fiction » Women's fiction » General.
Yvette is a forty-one year old woman devastated from losing both parents during her twenties—one to terminal disease and the other to life’s complications. Vera is the stepsister she never imagined nor wanted. When their father's health takes a turn for the worse, both must decide if they have the strength to release yesterday's burdens or will a childhood secret damage an already broken family.
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| 0.950835 | 121 | 1.5 | 2 |
Clark's Botanicals Lip Products
Despite the fact that the skin on lips is thin and sensitive, and susceptible to becoming painfully dry and cracked, lips rarely receive the same level of skin care as other areas of the face. No more: The rich moisturizing and soothing formulas of Clark's Botanicals Lip Products can relieve rough, dehydrated and sore lips and make them smooth, full and beautiful. Lips, as with other areas of the face, are continually exposed to the elements, including temperature extremes, wind, sun exposure and airborne contaminants. In addition, hot, cold and spicy foods and drink come into contact with them, as does saliva (with its digestive enzymes) whenever they are licked. Clark's Botanicals Lip Products help overcome these dangers.
The formulas of Clark's Botanicals Lip Products provide emollients to restore needed moisture to the lips, to keep them full and healthy. In addition, soothing and healing ingredients help repair the delicate tissues to smooth out the cracked, dry surface and protect them against further damage. And, to keep things fun, Clark's Botanicals Lip Products add a little color and a touch of flavor.
Clark's Botanicals Lip Products Products
Additional Clark's Botanicals Lip Products Information
It's sometimes easy to forget, but lips are part of facial skin, too. Taking care of them should be as much a part of a skin care regimen as any other feature of the face, a task that Clark's Botanicals Lip Products are designed to perform. The lips, however, are different than other areas of facial skin, with specific needs that require special care.
Consider lip care, and the first thought is probably of moisturization. Certainly, Clark's Botanicals Ultra Rich Lip Balm provides a variety of very effective emollients, including shea butter, coconut oil, safflower seed oil, cold-pressed avocado seed oil (which also includes antioxidant benefits) and jojoba seed oil with its special qualities. In addition, the balm also contains soothing Aloe bardandensis leaf extract and anti-inflammatory Calendula officinalis (marigold) flower extract. Natural beeswax provides a permeable protective base, but without leaving the skin feeling stiff or coated. To add a wonderful touch of flavor, extracts of jasmine and Vanilla planifolia fruit are included. The result is a treatment which leaves the lips deeply hydrated, nourished, soothed and protected.
For a touch of color, Clark's Botanicals Ultra Rich Lip Tints -- Moore Nude provides all the benefits of the balm, but with an added hint of hue. This line is also available in several other shades, including Carlotta pink, Rachel red (a juicy strawberry tone), "Because I Love You" (a sheer bright coral), Madge mauve (a rich shade of cranberry, complimentary to darker complexions) and Alexandra rose (with a natural-looking shade of pink).
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| 0.943751 | 614 | 1.679688 | 2 |
This is the fourth in a 10-part series entitled ‘The Smart Job Search.’ You can find the series so far by clicking here.
All of those things are still important, but they’re no longer all you have to do. Because of the Internet, today’s recruiters and hiring managers don’t have to rely on the picture you paint in your resume – instead, they can research you online to find out “the truth” for themselves.
A recent survey showed that 67% of recruiters research candidates online before scheduling an interview. That’s a huge number and it’s only going to increase. Several other studies have shown that what they find (or don’t find) makes a huge difference to hiring decisions.
Total privacy is a thing of the past
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman caused a stir recently when he said that privacy is “an old people issue.” While crudely expressed, his dismissal of privacy concerns gets to a key point, which is that, no matter how much we object, details of our lives are increasingly available online.
Even if you have never created an online profile, your name may appear in search results for a variety of different reasons. You may have been mentioned in a trade publication article. Your company may issue a press release that includes your name. Your friends might talk about you online. And some websites (www.zoominfo.com for example) create profiles based on information scraped from the web. You may well already have a profile on there now and not even know it.
Total Privacy Isn’t Necessarily a Good Thing
If you have managed to completely protect your privacy to the extent that a recruiter can’t find you when he searches, you might think you’ve done well. But the chances are that the recruiter will see it differently. Especially if you work at the manager level or above. In those cases, the recruiter may well see your lack of online visibility as a black mark – a sign that you haven’t made an impression.
In addition, your absence from search results will raise concerns about your technical skills. A LinkedIn profile is now a basic expectation and if you don’t have even that, recruiters will question whether you are really up to speed with the latest developments.
You will be searched online whether you like it or not
The truth is that people are going to search you online no matter what your opinion of the practice, and they are going to draw conclusions from what they find. What those conclusions are is entirely up to you.
So What Can You Do?
At the most basic level, profile sites such as LinkedIn and ZoomInfo allow you to put your resume online and make yourself highly visible to recruiters looking for people like you. LinkedIn is particularly powerful and if you only build one profile, this is the one you should build.
Some sites take it a step further by offering more ability to customize your profile and show much more than you could ever show on your resume by including audio, video or work samples. VisualCV is the most well-known of these options.
But beyond even this, the Internet offers enormous opportunities to the smart job seeker. It is now possible for anyone – literally anyone – to establish themselves as a well-known voice in their field or profession provided that they have useful knowledge to share and the commitment to work at it on a daily basis.
From Wine Blogger to TV Star
Consider Gary Vaynerchuck. In 2006, this wine store owner started a video blog called Wine Library TV. His informal, irreverent videos cost nothing to produce and yet by 2009, he had become one of the world’s most influential wine critics, appearing frequently on national TV and signing a $1M, 10-book deal with a major publisher. When his book “Crush It” was released, it opened at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Now I’m not suggesting that signing up for Twitter will guarantee you a place on the New York Times Bestseller list (wouldn’t that be nice?!). But I am saying that you can dramatically increase your visibility within your field and industry by using free and easy-to-use tools that are available to everybody.
How this works in the real world
Put yourself in the shoes of a recruiter for a moment. Imagine you are considering three resumes for a sales position and you run a google search on each candidate.
The first candidate doesn’t appear in the first few pages of search results at all. The second has a LinkedIn profile and is mentioned in a company press release. But the third has a LinkedIn profile along with a blog and a Twitter account. This candidates blogs and tweets about the sales process, his industry, and the new trends and developments that affect his work. Both his blog and his Twitter page therefore give a clear insight into his approach to his work and his passion for what he does.
Which of those candidates is the recruiter most likely to call?
Need More Help?
I’m a big advocate for the power of a strong online presence. I built my own business this way and I know it works. If you’d like to learn how it’s done, download my Blue Sky Guide to Job Search which features extensive advice on both basic and advanced strategies to build a strong online presence as well as how to use you online presence to your advantage during the application process.
Creating a strong online presence is one of the most powerful things you can do to make an impression on employers. Get this right and you’ll never be short of interviews!
In my next post, I’m going to talk about a much-maligned resource – the professional recruiter (a.k.a. the headhunter). I’ll explain why recruiters often hold the key to the hidden job market, and how you use them to access hundreds of unadvertised positions in your field. Stay tuned! And if you’re not already subscribed to my email list, sign up here and get an email every time I post a new article in this series.
In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, just post them below. I’d love to hear from you.
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| 0.957335 | 1,315 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Frequently asked questions…
Does this program meet state standards?
Yes. See standards met for the states of NH, MA, and CT.
Is anything dangerous?
No more dangerous than playing a game of baseball. All activities are supervised at all times.
How much class time is needed?
The program is totally flexible to fit your needs. A minimum of 2 class
periods per class group is needed; but, of course, the longer the
exposure, the better. Class period are minimum 30 minutes, maximum 40
minutes, with 40-45 minutes being ideal.
What class size is optimal?
20 or less is optimal. 20-30 is acceptable, but the effectiveness is reduced. 30 or more is not acceptable.
Do you have programming for pre-schoolers?
No. But they are welcome to watch.
What should the students wear for the show?
Blue jeans and a white shirt. If this is not possible, the student
should wear something dark on bottom and light on top. Refrain from
logos, lettering, or inappropriate images on clothing. Each student
will be given colorful sashes to wear in their own creative way, such
as a headband, belt, or neckerchief.
What about physically challenged students?
There is something for everyone in the circus, regardless of skill level.
What about kindergarten and first grade students?
Performing solo at this age can be stressful, so K-1 students
participate in the performance as a group, not as individuals. They are
taught group acts to perform.
What other activities can enhance this program?
Study circus history and lore (see Ringling Brothers site for more).
Make circus posters. Draw tickets. Create a side show. Make circus
wagons out of shoeboxes and organize a circus parade. Your school band
can play circus music.
How can you foster an ongoing circus culture that outlasts the residency?
In three ways…
1) During the residency, a workshop can be arranged with your PE
teacher and other teachers. This can take place during or after school
hours. If your school acquires circus equipment of its own (see below),
these teachers can continue providing students with training.
2) Students can access my website (www.schoolshows.com/circus) which will have instructions for learning more circus skills.
3) The 3-day residency is deliberately structured so that not ALL
students learn ALL skills. This is done so that, even after the
residency is over, students can continue to learn by teaching skills to
How can our school acquire its own circus equipment?
Circus Friday provides all equipment for the residency, but if you
would like to purchase your own equipment, Circus Friday can advise
you.(Go to http://schoolshows.com/circus/package.htm) We
also can supply you with detailed plans for making your own circus
equipment using low-cost materials. A great school project!
Is there any way to reduce the cost of a circus residency?
50% of program cost can be underwritten by a grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Click here for more information.
You also can sell tickets and refreshments to the performance.
603-654-5875 --- [email protected]
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Pregnancy is a time of change and celebration, as well as anticipation and anxiety. Yoga brings great awareness to what is going on within you and it gives you energy, restoring what you are putting into baby while also preparing you for birth.
Breath is the key. You will learn a technique that you can use anytime and will be especially helpful during labor. The breath is combined with postures (asanas) that safely strengthen your arms and legs and stretch the torso and spine to create space for growing baby. You may be familiar with Kegal exercises and in yoga terms this is called mula bandha (root lock). By practicing pelvic floor exercises you get a good start for both labor and after baby is born. Calmness comes from correct breathing and being in a supportive environment where you can focus on baby and you.
These are drop-in classes, so no need to pre-register. We recommend starting after your thirteenth week. Ask your health care provider if yoga is appropriate for you. Our teachers are Cathy Louise
, a mom of three including twins, and Kelly
, who has two children. Read about us in Honolulu Magazine
and check out Cathy's Baby Blog
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When is the e-book boom coming to Sweden, and how does it affect the ability of libraries to make e-books available? That is the question that the National Library of Sweden’s (Kungliga biblioteket) e-book investigation set out to answer when it started its work in the spring of 2011. The question, however, is not so easy to answer. In some areas, the boom has already started, but, in others, it might never happen. The subject of e-books and libraries is multifaceted and difficult to define.
In recent years, the debate about ebooks and libraries in Sweden has intensified. When the National Library of Sweden was given an extended mandate to coordinate all publicly-financed libraries, a commission was assigned to work together with the Swedish Library Association (Svensk Biblioteksförening) to assess which problems exist in making e-books available through libraries. This is a condensed account of that assessment.
In short, the assessment shows that the situation on the Swedish e-book market is somewhat locked. The range of titles available in Swedish is extremely limited and there is also no great demand from readers. Neither the publis- hing houses, the authors nor the consumer electronics industry have made any serious attempts to launch the e-book as a product for the masses.
The chicken or the egg
The explanation for this is mainly that financial incentives are lacking. Publishers enjoy having a stable and working market for printed books where conditions have been well-known for a long time. An upcoming market for ebooks appears uncertain and is associated with a number of unsolved problems relating to copyrights, file sharing and uncertain profit margins. Neither do authors seem to see any great opportunities for financial gain with e-books; neither for new books nor older titles that are now out of print.Within the consumer electronics industry, there is little interest in marketing reading devices, since both content and customer demand are lacking.
From the user’s perspective, there is little demand for e-books, whether they are commercial products from publishers/ booksellers or are freely-available files from the library. At this stage, many people lack technical know-how and there are few who consider it worthwhile investing in a reader when there is not very much to read. In the few cases where there are new titles in e-book format, there is no established technical format. The pricing also means that e-books are not yet competitive. User surveys show, too, that people seem to prefer physical books.
“I still believe that consumers can be the driving force behind an increased range of e-books being available,” says Göran Konstenius, who is operations assessor at the National Library of Sweden and has led the assess- ment. “As more and more acquire tablet PCs and smart phones, interest in e-book reading will increase. Finding simple distribution systems from author to consumer is also an important piece of the puzzle. Currently, complicated technology and a lack of standards is often a hindrance.”
Apart from the financial forces that are missing for an e-book boom to occur, there are also a number of legal and technical problems that need to be overcome before things can start to happen in earnest. Both authors and publishers are uncertain about how to sign agreements for e-books without one of the parties losing out. As for the technology, platforms for distribution and payment are currently lacking. Meanwhile, it is not inconceivable that entities other than those who traditionally deal with books will bring out initiatives that push development forward. This could, for example, be broadband suppliers or mobile telephone operators that see a benefit in including extra services and content with their offerings.
The assessment also contains an international consideration, which suggests that development has progressed much further abroad, primarily in the Anglo- Saxon world, but also in countries with large language areas, such as France and Germany. This applies within the commercial sector as well as in the library world. Changes abroad may also come to affect the situation in Sweden. Large international players might start releasing their products on the Swedish market, making the boom hit very quickly. American company Amazon, for example, has in recent years begun releasing its Kindle e-book reader outside English-speaking countries.
Libraries and e-books
Even if the situation on the e-book market is rather locked at this stage, electronic media are nothing new for university and research libraries. Here we can say that the boom happened a few years ago. Today, these libraries spend about 80 percent of their budget on electronic material. They have drastically thinned out the shelves, reduced the size of their premises and abandoned much of the traditional library management. But the transition to electronic media has not been completely without problems. Often, the commercial entities offer a number of different technical platforms and business models that are complicated and make it difficult for libraries to keep stock and stay in control over their collections.
When it comes to public and school libraries, any potential boom has yet to occur, even though discussions and debates about it have been going on for several years. Although many public libraries offer e-books for borrowing, based on a commercial supplier, the agreement means that e-book lending would become very costly if borrowing were to suddenly increase. Additionally, the libraries’ ability to influence their collection is controlled by the interests of the publishers. But there could also be alternative functions for libraries, according to Göran Konstenius:
“When demand for e-books increases, it will become more attractive for publishers to digitise older titles that are expected to be interesting to larger audiences, but the prognosis for smaller titles is less clear. This is where digitisation by the library could be the answer.”
The conclusion reached by the National Library of Sweden’s assessment is that the e-book boom – whether it has already occurred or is drawing close – is going to require libraries to define their roles ever more clearly in the future. The digitisation of e-books will eventually require new strategies for the different kinds of library. For specialised libraries, the digitisation of unique items and collections is important in order to facilitate management and access. Hospital libraries often play a dual role in that they are for both research and patient use; two groups with completely different needs. For school libraries in the long term, the ebook boom will mean a transition to handling electronic teaching materials in a way reminiscent of academic libraries. Many within the school system are in favour of abandoning the exacting handling of printed teaching materials, therefore hopefully having more time for qualified coaching and information retrieval.
The assessment observes that, when the e-book boom reaches public libraries, they will be faced with a similar restructuring process already undergone by university libraries. The question is how public libraries will be able, financially and organisationally, to restructure in this way when there are currently great demands on the traditional library service from those borrowing books.
“Personally, I think that an interesting question is how the public library service may be affected if e-book borrowing were to increase significantly compared to today”, says Göran Konstenius. “If the download can be done from home, the number of visits to the library in order to borrow books drops. Perhaps that would open up the opportunity for other activities related to literature, reading and other kinds of cultural mediation at the library.”
Press- and Communications Officer
National Library of Sweden
Rickard.Carlsson AT kb.se
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For one month, from 27 June to 27 July, we never had the Mississippi more that a few miles from us. First we rested eleven days at a friend's home in Elsa, Illinois and then as we walked the Great River Road and it's by-ways to Moline. Here are a few images from those 32 days.
27 June - We're about to land in Illinois as we cross the Mississippi on the Eagle's Nest Ferry at the southern end of Calhoun County.
27 July - Here in southern Illinois we walk not only on the Great River Road but also at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois Rivers.
2 July - A tug pushes its barges around the corner of the bluffs southeast of Elsa.
8 July - Beginning to walk after our 11-day rest, we look back towards Elsa hidden in the niches of the bluffs.
9 July - Along the Missouri and southern Mississippi and Illinois Rivers every conversation with locals turns sooner or later to the Flood of '93. It was a "500-year" flood, the largest ever seen. Here across from Hardin, Illinois on the Illinois River, the corner cement post (see insert) of this barn marks the highest the water came. It stretched from here seven or eight miles to the far hills. This was water that was pushed back up the Illinois by the flooding Mississippi.
10 July - The bridge into Hardin across the Illinois is old and narrow. It raises its center span to let barges like this one through. Joyce and Gery thought it not advisable for us to walk so they gave us a ride in their pickup. Thanks.
11 July - A boat beside the Illinois River.
10 July - Petra stands along a creek that passes through Larry's farm on its way to the Mississippi in Hamburg, Ilinois. Larry is the husband of a friend of a friend. He had us over for an afternoon and gave us a ride up the road to our stop for the night. So many along this pilgrimage have invited us in and spent time like this. Thanks to you all.
10 July - Boats sit along the Mississippi in the hamlet of Hamburg.
11 July - In the village of Nebo, Illinois this sign tells about Cal Rodgers who landed here in 1911 during the first flight across the US. The sign tells as much of the story as we know.
The U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission's web site has this picture of Cal's plane taking off from Sheepshead Bay Speedway in New York on September 17, 1911. The best of the day, the plane crashed many times as he crossed the country. A back-up train followed him across the country. Click the link for a lot more about the flight.
11 July - Our Walking East has turned into walking north as we head up the west coast of the state through wide corn and bean fields.
12 July - Finally many more flowers are now along the road. They have taken a long time to show themselves.
17 July - Brother, Marty, comes to meet us along the back road we are walking today.
17 July - The blades of new windmills dwarf the flatcars that are carrying them on their way to some new windmill farm.
17 July - The evening sun shins on trees across the river in Canton, Missouri.
18 July - Ready to get on the early ferry at Canton.
18 July - Marty and Petra rest as we cross.
18 July - Marty gets ready to return to his RV back in Canton as we continue north. There has been a ferry here on the Mississippi since the early 1830's, the ferry crossing on the Mississippi.
18 July - A dragonfly along the road.
19 July - Petra leaving Warsaw, Illinois (not Poland) on another very pleasant morning after staying in Marty's RV last night.
19 July - So many lilies in the river.
19 July - Petra walks ahead as we continue up the Great River Road south of Nauvoo.
20 July - A view across the river into Fort Madison, Iowa.
23 July - A covered bridge near Oquawka, Illinois
25 July - Mr. (or is it Mrs.) Turtle greets us as we walk along a country road.
25 July - Petra walks far ahead on the way to Aledo. I dallied behing taking pictures and putting on my shorter pants to cool off.
26 July - Even though we see it only the next morning, this is our welcome to Aledo.
25 July - Ex-sheriff Dick Maynard converted the old Aledo Jail into a B&B and restaurant. We stayed there and met him.
25 July - Sheriff Dick and wife Jennie flank Petra in the Aledo railroad depot he refurbished and made available to the town for meetings.
26 July - Another Sheriff Dick project: This bottom of an engine sits on the tracks next to the depot. The rest of the engine lies in various places around the grounds.
27 July - Morning fog near Edgington.
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As part of Bealtaine 2012, the ‘CREATING A NEW OLD’ global conference brought together leading experts in the field of creative ageing, drawn from the health, cultural, arts and education sectors to discuss questions raised by demographic ageing.
The conference explored the potential for creative activity to help people maintain dignity, quality of life and independent living throughout older age. It also built on the recognition that older people have the creative powers to make a positive contribution to society.
Keynote speakers included Susan Langford MBE, founder and Director of Magic Me (UK), Susan Perlstein, founder and Director of Special Projects for the National Centre for Creative Ageing in Washington, DC, Anne Basting, Director of the Centre on Age & Community at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and Liz Lerman, founder of Dance Exchange. Opened by President Michael D Higgins and addressed by Minister Kathleen Lynch and Arts Council Director Orlaith McBride, the conference attracted 150 international delegates and was supported by the Arts Council, Baring Foundation, Fáilte Ireland and Gruntvig Strand of EU Education funding.
The core themes of the conference were:
- The potential for creative activity to maximise the ability of all individuals to maintain dignity and independent living throughout older age
- How to harness the creative powers of older people to make a positive contribution to society
- The mental and physical health benefits to the older individual of engagement with creativity and methodologies to facilitate it
- The benefits to the older population and society of a creative approach to the design and planning of urban environments and residential, social and health care systems
- How to develop and sustain partnerships between groups representing older populations, creative professional groups, policy makers and service providers
- The establishment of an international network developing creative policy responding to the challenges and opportunities of an ageing demographic.
The Bealtaine festival is supported by the Arts Council.
CREATING A NEW OLD was an initiative of Age & Opportunity and the Bealtaine festival.
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My Wallet Was Stolen. Now What?
My wallet was stolen a few days ago. My driver's license was in it. I canceled all my cards immediately when I found out. I've been checking my accounts daily to make sure that there are no fraudulent charges. What is the best way to check that my identity has not been stolen or that there are no accounts opened in my name?
I'm sorry to hear about your stolen wallet. It sounds like you've made some good first steps.
It's important to notify your credit-card companies and bank immediately and to monitor your accounts for fraudulent charges. Also watch your credit reports to make sure that an ID thief doesn't open new accounts in your name.
The best way to do that is to contact the credit bureaus to make a fraud alert, which will require lenders to make some effort to verify your identity before issuing new credit in your name. The fraud alert also gives you a free copy of your credit report from each of the three bureaus. Order those copies and review them for any suspicious activity -- including accounts you didn't open, as well as strange addresses or activity on old cards, which can provide clues that a thief has your information.
It can take a while before an identity thief strikes, so it's important to continue to monitor your accounts and credit reports. An initial fraud alert lasts for only 90 days, but you can get an extended fraud alert if you have a police report documenting the stolen wallet.
This extended alert stays on your report for up to seven years and entitles you to two free credit reports from each of the bureaus every year (in addition to the free reports that everyone can get every year). To file a fraud alert, contact one of the credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax or TransUnion), which will alert the other two.
To be even more safe, you might want to put a credit freeze on your account, which won't let any new lenders see your credit report unless you specifically give them permission. Credit freezes can be expensive ($10 for each of the three bureaus to initiate the freeze and have it lifted -- and it's only effective if you do all three). Many states offer free freezes for victims of identity theft.
Still, the freeze can be a hassle if you're planning on taking out a loan soon. Depending on the state, it can take from 15 minutes to three days to lift the freeze. But it does offer even stronger protection than a fraud alert. See my column for more information about fraud alerts and credit freezes.
For more advice about what to do if your wallet is stolen, including a detailed checklist of steps to take, see the Identity Theft Resource Center's fact sheet, My Wallet or PDA Was Stolen, Now What? Also see the Federal Trade Commission's identity theft page for more information and advice.
For tips on preventing ID theft, see Your ID Theft Prevention Kit.
Got a question? Ask Kim at [email protected].
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The voting problems continue in Ohio. Some sort of computer glitch is being blamed for causing thousands of absentee ballots to be rejected because the information in the state’s Qualified Voter File didn’t match information in county databases.
Thousands of absentee-ballot requests may have been erroneously rejected statewide because of voter-registration issues, voter advocates say.
Secretary of State Jon Husted has acknowledged that a data-sharing glitch between his office and the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles likely caused some absentee-ballot applications to be wrongfully rejected because county boards did not have up-to-date information on registrants’ addresses…
Norman Robbins, research director at Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates, said group members thought that the number of absentee-ballot requests being rejected was abnormally high in Cuyahoga County. So, last week group members began their own audit of the requests and discovered some had come from registered voters whose applications were rejected when election officials could not find their registration.
The group alerted the county’s Board of Elections, which performed its own audit of the rejected requests over the weekend and determined that 865 had been erroneously tossed.
Robbins’ group performed a similar study of Franklin County’s records and determined that 38 p ercent of the rejected requests they checked also could have come from registered voters.
This could affect more than 10,000 votes. In a very close election, that’s enough to make a difference.
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| 0.972174 | 307 | 1.75 | 2 |
The Secret Underground
by Natalie Bahm
Twelve-year-old Ally is the only witness to a bank robbery in her small town. Unable to block out the memory of the robbers, a notorious gang known as the Gauze Men, Ally joins her little brother and a bunch of neighborhood boys digging a hole in her backyard.
Only the hole isn't just a hole - it's a massive set of tunnels snaking beneath the neighborhood and heading for an abandoned steel mill. Ally is old enough to know the danger, but she reasons spending time with sixth-grade heartthrob Paul is more fun than sitting at home with her worries. And dangerous it is - none of the kids' parents realize the tunnels exist, but the Gauze Men might.
100% of proceeds from this book will be donated to help a baby boy named Jayden, and contribute toward his family's massive medical expenses. Jayden suffers from a combination of congenital problems including Hirschsprung's disease.
Natalie wrote this book to help Baby Jayden and his family, who have been through untold emotional and financial hardship since his birth. The proceeds for this incredible book will go to Jayden's parents. Wow. I am blown away by Natalie's compassion and generosity. I hope you will all buy a copy, spread the word, whatever you can . . .
When I was a kid reading aloud terrified me. When I read to myself the words on the page made sense, but when I read aloud they got blurry and mixed up. I stuttered and missed words and read very slowly to compensate. When a teacher called on me to read in class I’d panic, sure that I would mess up and look silly.
I was lucky enough to have teachers who realized I was a good reader (thanks to comprehension tests), but other students teased me. I never volunteered to read aloud, and tried to keep my eyes down during class reading times so I wouldn’t be asked to read.
It was bad.
When high school came I knew I needed to get over my fear. I practiced reading aloud to myself at home. I tried to skim ahead when the class was reading something, so if I got called on I could recite bits from memory.
Then one day, I was in English and my teacher asked me to read a long poem to the class. I read the entire thing without stumbling once. I still remember the feeling of triumph in that moment. I’d conquered my fear.
Two weeks ago, I finished recording the audiobook for The Secret Underground. It was such an interesting experience. I learned a ton about narration and recording. I made all sorts of mistakes and spent HOURS fixing them. Fifteen years ago I never would have imagined I could read a whole book aloud, much less a book that I’d written. I’m pretty sure middle-grade-me would be proud.
Natalie Bahm’s The Secret Underground will come out September 28th with all profits going to the family of baby Jayden Huynh. Jayden is a two-year-old with serious health problems. You can read more about the project here. The eBook version of The Secret Underground is available for preorder on Amazon and Apple/iTunes. The print and audio versions will be available on release day at all major online booksellers.
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| 0.975545 | 694 | 1.59375 | 2 |
How would you feel if a restaurant refused to serve you because youre overweight? Well thats what one southern legislator is proposing. A Mississippi legislator is proposing a bill that would bar restaurants from serving obese customers. And while he knows the bill doesnt stand a chance... he hopes it will shed light on the obesity epidemic in the south. At the Kitchen Restaurant in Monroe... the cornbread is piled high, portions are hearty, and the sweet tea is flowing. News that a Mississippi legislator wants to ban restaurants from serving those who are a few extra pounds did not go over well: "Its discrimination, you cant keep people from restaurants, it doesnt matter what size they are," says one customer. But the state representative who proposed the bill, whose 230 pounds himself...says he did so to shed light on the Souths obesity epidemic.
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| 0.961385 | 167 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Local designs have gained prominence and dot various social and corporate events in and outside the country.
The Nigerian native attire remains the toast of many gatherings but with a difference. Its increased popularity has spurred many designers to create contemporary outfits that could be worn for all occasions. From the boutique in your neighbourhood, the market closest to you, to the high brow stores and major markets across the country, it is interesting to see an array of local fabrics sewn stylishly that make the wearer stand out at any gathering.
They are richly designed and very affordable. Almost every market has a section for local fabrics as well as tailored ones but they are cheaper at specialised markets, such as Balogun and Gotta in Lagos Island, Itokun in Abeokuta and Gbagi in Ibadan. Many notable fashion designers get their materials and accessories from these markets for their trendy designs attires which they display in malls and boutiques. Some export them abroad and make huge profit from their sales because of its high demand in various parts of the world.
In the past, people wore native attires mostly for cultural and traditional events, such as weddings, festivals, christening and burial. Even at that, it was optional – only the core traditionalists imbibed it. But today, the case is different. Local designs dot every social gathering you can think of. Many wear them at corporate events. It is also trendy in offices; many people use them to make beautiful styles with a mix of corporate flavour.
In the past, many red carpet events flaunted clothes, shoes and accessories by western designers. But these days, many are proud to say their outfits have been made from local fabrics. This was also a major observation last Saturday, during the 2013 Hip hop World award ceremony otherwise called ‘The Headies’. Unlike previous editions of the show where people made a show of wearing outfits from foreign designers, most of those interviewed by Hip TV on the Yellow carpet said their clothes were sourced locally.
The Managing Director, Faculus Fashion, a high brow fashion outfit on Adenekan Salako Close, Ogba, Lagos, Mr Dele Faculude Olowe highlighted the uniqueness of local designs and gave tips on how to shop for them.
He said: “Great respect is now accorded native fabrics and that is what it should be. This time things have changed. People wearing native to the office helps us to have customers. There are certain things to consider while buying native fabrics. If it is lace fabric for instance, look at the quality of the material. Look at the fabric and not just the embroidery. You have to be sure that it is 100 per cent cotton. The best lace is Swiss. It is our job, so we know the fabrics very well. It is also advisable to buy from different stores, except you discover a seller who is honest. You can also know the quality through the price. As far as I am concerned, I will tell you; this must be more expensive than this.”
On shopping for Guinea brocade, he said: “If you do not know it, you may buy the fake as original. Look at the label. The best among them is Jetsner. It depends on the shop and the price. The same applies to Ankara, wooden and other local fabrics. You have to know them very well, to be able to identify the fake from the original. Many of my customers rely on me to help them spot the original when they are shopping. But it is something you can also do for yourself, if you are very observant”.
His outfit, Faculus Fashion, sited between two banks is a port of call for managing directors of several companies, local government chairmen, retired generals, government functionaries, prominent men in the society and the middle class.
Having been in the trade for over 40 years, he seems to have established himself with a particular set of customers. “We sew for selected people. It is classy and not expensive. At the same time, we do not want every Tom Dick and Harry. My clients are mainly in their 40s and 50s. You know, the set of people who are highly responsible and value our native attires”, he said.
“We only sew for men. I create my designs. I give each design a number, so when you are coming again, we make sure we do not repeat it. When I do a particular design, I put it under your name. I thank God for one thing. About 80 per cent of customers for the past 20 years are still with me.”
Some of the designs are: long caftan, agbada, danshiki, buba and sokoto. Embroidery and stitches are skillfully incorporated to form unique styles.
“We receive fabrics and sew. We buy for the customer on request. The fabrics we work on are Guinea brocade, wooden, linen, lace, adire and other local fabrics.
With about N25,000 one can get a trendy Guinea brocade. You can buy five yards of the fabric for N18,000. Italian linen costs less than N20,000 while Bankok linen costs N12,000.
The company name Faculus, was coined from his name, Faculude.
Despite the progress of local designs, he noted that the erratic power supply is a major challenge in the trade.
“Power supply is a major impediment. We spend so much on alternative power. It is not helping us. If the government can do something about electricity, Nigeria will grow. If they can just take care of that area, other things will follow.”
Speaking of his sustainability in the business, he said: “I give thanks to God and my clients. They love me and assist me.”
He expressed disappointment at financial institutions saying: “Banks are not helping issues. They do not give loans. The interest rate is too high.”
He gave a piece of advice to shoppers: “Some people do not have taste. The best thing is to look out for a good designer who would clothe you properly.”
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| 0.971777 | 1,283 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Since I bought a food processor my cooking has been revolutionized. It’s nothing but a simple blender with a few functionality. It is also, and above all, the author of different recipes, new smoothies and drinks in my kitchen. The following tomato soup has baptized this new tool and warmed up one of the first rigid winter day in London.
Although basic in principle, making a good tomato soup is not an easy thing. A lesson learnt in time, after a few trials of too sour and/or too liquid soups. The perfection is achieved through a firm consistency and a smooth flavour. In fact any tomato tastes good when fresh; when cooked an processed to a sauce, it can bring lots of acidity to your palate (an stomach!).
In short, unless you’ve been so lucky to find the perfect sweet tomatoes, this soup needs a correction. Before that, make sure you have selected the right ingredients. First of all what I like to call “the unconventional tomatoes”. Those one that are pretty soft and very ripe. Those one you wouldn’t consider because too mature and you’d never buy for any other recipe.
My favourite choice? Definitely San Marzano tomatoes. Long and moist, they would be the right choice indeed. Unfortunately this kind of tomato is not often available, so I usually fall back on some well ripe tomatoes on the vine. I’ve got a good result with them: a hearty soup I enjoyed together with some tasty warm polenta.
Before leaving you to the recipe I’m going to tell you my secret for the “correction ingredient”, the one preventing the soup from being too acidic. The juice contained in any tomato has a pH of 4.3, a value rather low (low pH, high acidity).
It is good to learn how to bring the equilibrium in our recipes, through the consumption of alkaline foods, for example vegetables such as carrots in this case, to contrast the action of those more acid.
All types of dairy products produces acids in our stomach. Cream, butter and milk are among them. Fresh low-fat yogurt is an exception, providing animal proteins which nourish without producing acids. Here’s then unveiled my secret ingredient: the yogurt. Many would choice a sour cream or butter; to make my soup gentle to my stomach I choose a dense organic yogurt, instead.
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Trademarks and their limits
Posted Feb 9, 2013 23:42 UTC (Sat) by khim
In reply to: Trademarks and their limits
Parent article: Trademarks and their limits
that's what the Open Build Service is for (openbuildservice.org or in action (for free, yes, and supporting 7 architectures and 15+ distro's) on build.opensuse.org)
This is cool, but it does not solve the underlying problem: you still need to build bazillion packages to support tiny portion of [potential] users.
It's not about gatekeeping, it is about money.
Aren't they the same things? Most developers out there are commercial developers. They want to create and sell things. A lot of applications are created for a single buyer - and while it's not clear how well Linux does for these I don't think it's a big deal. But for desktop shrinkwrapped software matters, too. And this is where gatekeepers matter: they may raise investment needed to reach the audience (Linux distributions case) or they can reject your creation out of hand (Apple). When you hit this stage we are talking ROI - and ROI for Linux software is incredibly poor. Both because it's hard to distribute Linux software and because there are so few potential users.
But even when we do (on Ubuntu, for example) it doesn't happen to a great extend.
Why do you say so? Because there are no 500'000 applications? That's wrong measure to take.
Let's not talk about "big boys" (Windows, Android, etc). Let's take a look on small players. You know, webOS (less then 5 million users, 5000 applications), Chrome web store (30 millions users, about 6000 applications), Samsung's Bada (around 4 million users, around 2400 applications).
Ubuntu boasts 12 million users which means that we should expect about 3-5 thousand applications. And there are about 4000 of them, which sounds more-of-less fine. But these are Ubuntu apps, not Linux apps (all the links for RC Mini Racers will send you to the Ubuntu Software Center). Are we Ok with creation of Apple-style directory? If yes, then everything is fine: looks like Canonical knows what it does. If not, then well, we need to think about Linux's desktop future.
to post comments)
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| 0.93566 | 500 | 1.742188 | 2 |
|Paramilitarism and the assault on democracy in Haiti|
Haiti's brutal paramilitary campaigns received scant media coverage, while "political violence" was decried at length.
Last Modified: 04 Oct 2012 10:20
The Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Haiti was instrumental in the 2004 coup d'état that deposed Aristide [EPA]
|In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, certain media outlets painted a picture of a country overrun by looters and at the mercy of gang members and other criminals, including thousands of prisoners jolted free by the quake.|
Relevant details were ignored, such as the contention by prominent Haitian human rights attorney Mario Joseph that80 per cent of said prisoners had never been charged. The media effort perhaps aided in rendering less incongruous in the eyes of the international public the deployment of a sizeable US military force to deal with quake-affected people who did not seemingly require military attention.
A Reuters dispatch from one week after the disaster - which reported "marauding looters", "scavengers and looters swarm[ing] over damaged stores", "increasingly lawless streets" and "[h]eavily armed gang members" - offered the following plea from policeman Dorsainvil Robenson:
"Haiti needs help ... the Americans are welcome here. But where are they? We need them here on the street with us."The whereabouts of the ever-elusive Americans are of course hinted at two paragraphs later, when we learn that "the White House said more than 11,000 US military personnel are on the ground, on ships offshore or en route". Elsewhere, French Co-operation Minister Alain Joyandet was quoted as commenting in reference to seemingly skewed US priorities: "This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti". As foreign military monopolised the Port-au-Prince airport, teams of paramedics and first responders were delayed in the critical hours immediately following the earthquake.
Subscribers to the fantasy that the US is somehow qualified to counteract violence and install order in the Caribbean nation would do well to peruse a new book entitled Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, in which author Jeb Sprague masterfully documents - among other topics - the detrimental role of US and fellow international actors in Haitian history.
Offering new evidence obtained through interviews and a massive amount of formerly classified US government documents, the book clarifies how Haiti's post-quake reconstruction rests on a foundation of total impunity achieved by the country's most brutal paramilitaries and their financiers.
Legacy of violence
As Sprague notes, the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934 under "the pretext of possible German encroachment during the First World War… caused the deaths of an estimated 15,000 Haitians and saw the imposition of slave labour". It also imposed "a modern army, one that would continue the US occupation long after US troops were gone", functioning on behalf of the Haitian elite and their American counterparts. Observes Sprague: "The US occupation wedded the country’s future to North American business interests."
Following the transfer of power to Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, a brutal counter-insurgency force known as the Leopards was trained and equipped "by former US marine instructors who were working through a company (Aerotrade, Inc and Aerotrade International, Inc) under contract with the CIA and signed off by the US Department of State".
Prior to becoming Haiti's first democratically elected president in early 1991, the young liberation theologian, Jean-Bertrand Aristide "denounced the historic role of the United States in founding, arming and training Haiti's military, which had been responsible for so much of the violence in Haitian history".
Sprague quotes Aristide: "They [the United States] set up the Haitian Army, they trained it to work against the people". Indeed, it would be difficult to argue that the army was working for the people by massacring citizens attempting to vote in 1987, or by overthrowing the newly elected Aristide in September 1991 and slaughtering his supporters.
Aristide's coup-inducing crimes included inviting street children and homeless persons to breakfast at the National Palace and endeavouring to raise the daily minimum wage from $1.76 to $2.94. As Joanne Landy wrote in the New York Times in 1994, the latter effort was "vigorously opposed by the US Agency for International Development because of the threat such an increase would pose to the 'business climate', particularly to American companies paying rock-bottom wages to workers in Haiti".
Aside from USAID, another relevant euphemism from the coup period was the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a paramilitary organisation intimately linked to the Haitian military that assumed the task of terrorising the non-elite masses under the military junta. "Internal US government documents reveal that FRAPH was founded in part at the behest of the US Defence Intelligence Agency," Sprague notes.
After years of brutality and corruption, the military dictatorship faced growing resistance at home and abroad. Aristide was thus reinserted in his lawful post in 1994 in exchange for, inter alia, committing to be more attentive to the needs of the US agriculture industry and drastically slashing tariffs on imported rice.
Upon reinstatement, he logically moved - with overwhelming public support - to disband the armed forces and the section chiefs (the hated rural constabulary). His government, and the elected governments that followed him, also gathered testimonials from thousands of victims of paramilitary violence and undertook judicial proceedings to prosecute military and paramilitary criminals.
However, as researcher Eirin Mobekk has critically pointed out and Sprague has underscored, "only the army as an institution was dissolved… In a country where the army had run political life for decades it was an illusion to think that its networks would disappear with the removal of uniforms and the use of its buildings for other purposes".
US contributions to the dissolution of the army included maneouvering to insert allied Haitian ex-military officials into what was supposed to be a civilian police force and eliminating officers seen as overly loyal to Aristide or less than enthusiastic about the coup. Some Haitian police officers were trained in the United States, where they were susceptible to overtures by the CIA, which also funded various FRAPH leaders and other paramilitaries.
Given the high level of impunity enjoyed by military and paramilitary members who had committed atrocities - not to mention US insistence on a full amnesty for the coup perpetrators - it is somewhat less than astonishing that Aristide's re-election in 2000 also culminated in a coup d'état. Instrumental in the overthrow was the Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Haiti (FLRN), which as Sprague explains was "led by renegade police officials who were from among the same ex-FAd'H [Haitian Armed Forces] pushed into the country’s new security force by the United States in the late 1990s".
Backed by some wealthy Haitians, neo-Duvalierists, sweatshop owners, and government and army officials from the neighbouring Dominican Republic (who didn't want Aristide's anti-military, pro-human rights rhetoric rubbing off on their own citizenry), the FLRN staged incursions into Haiti from Dominican territory with the ultimate goal of forcing the re-establishment of the Haitian army.
Of course, the sign of any good army is its ability to safeguard the domestic population, and these incursions provided the FLRN with an opportunity to showcase its skills - which it did by massacring and assaulting supporters of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party, often with sickening tactics. Citing formerly classified US embassy cables, Sprague uncovers how a small but powerful fifth column within the government was also working to undermine Aristide.
As journalist Max Blumenthal has documented, the IRI benefitted in its underhanded dealings from the diplomacy of Roger Noriega, an Iran-Contra-era figure recycled into the Bush II administration along with his Cold War Manichean fantasies according to which Aristide and anyone else with less than extreme right-wing political convictions is a communist demon.
Sprague aptly comments that US' "knowledge that [sectors of] Haiti's 'business community' [were] strongly backing paramilitary terror underscores the cynicism of Washington’s constant demands that Aristide seek 'compromise' with his 'peaceful opponents'". In the end, the compromise consisted of Aristide's removal on a US military plane to the Central African Republic in 2004 and the installation of Gerard Latortue as head of state. The ensuing peace is recalled by historian Greg Grandin:
"During Latortue's brief stint in office, 2004 - 2006, Haiti experienced some 4,000 political murders, according to The Lancet - while hundreds of Fanmi Lavalas members, Aristide supporters, and social movement leaders were locked up - usually on bogus charges. Latortue's friends in Washington looked the other way."Sprague, meanwhile, observes that "Bill Clinton's [former] policy of inserting a handful of ex-FAd’H criminals into Haiti's police force… was now put on steroids" and that "in 2004 -5 the United States and the UN oversaw the recycling of 400 ex-army paramilitaries into a revamped police force" - paving the way for yet more repetitions of history.
Why is it that Haiti's brutal paramilitary campaigns received scant international press attention while quantitatively and qualitatively inferior political violence by a small number of Fanmi Lavalas supporters (which occurred in the context of clashes with the opposition) was decried at length?
Obviously, media coverage is shaped by geopolitical and financial interests, with the terms of events defined by the powerful. This is how, for example, terrorism conducted by the US and Israel becomes "counter-terrorism", "self-defence" and "democracy promotion" in the Western mainstream media.
Sprague documents how, in the case of Haiti, the press in the US, France, Canada and other locales undertook to demonise Aristide and rebrand the violent and unpopular uprising against him as non-violent and popular. As US-trained FLRN commander Guy Philippe remarked to journalist Isabel McDonald following the coup: "[The] international media, the media leaders helped us a lot. And thanks to them we were able to overthrow the dictator. And without them I don't think that we could have".
In an essay for the London Review of Books, Paul Farmer describes how Aristide was made the scapegoat for crimes committed by the very people who overthrew him. Summarising Philippe's pre-coup history, which involved reincarnation as a police chief following the demobilisation of the military, Farmer writes:
"During his tenure, the UN International Civilian Mission learned, dozens of suspected gang members were summarily executed, most of them by police under the command of Philippe's deputy. The US embassy has also implicated Philippe in drug smuggling during his police career. Crimes committed in large part by ex-military policemen are often pinned on Aristide, even though he sought to prevent coup-happy human rights abusers from ending up in these posts."Farmer also noted that "Philippe has been quoted as saying that the man he most admires is Pinochet". The bloody legacy of the Chilean dictator offers a reminder of how helpful US-backed coups and violence can be when it comes to introducing neoliberal reforms.
After the second overthrow of Aristide, Sprague writes, the temporary regime set about "securing [Haiti] as a platform through which global capital could flow freely", in accordance with instructions from the IMF and other interested parties:
"The interim government laid off between eight and ten thousand civil sector workers, many from the poorest slums of Port-au-Prince. Other programmes under the Aristide government, such as subsidised rice for the poor, literacy centres and water supply projects, came to a halt following the coup d'état."The long-fantasised-about mass privatisation of Haitian state assets, however, appeared more difficult to pull off - until, that is, the country was shattered by the 2010 earthquake and control over Haiti's energy, water and other sectors was divvied up between international players like the World Bank and USAID. The 2011 debut of singer-turned-head of state Michel Martelly, elected with the support of a mere 16.7 per cent of the electorate and described by former Financial Times journalist Matt Kennard as a "shock president" prepared to enforce economic shock therapy, seems to have set the stage for the conversion of Haiti into a neoliberal fairytale kingdom.
It is fitting that Martelly, whose presidential objectives include a resurrection of the Haitian armed forces rather than the pursuit of projects benefitting the majority of the nation's citizens, is himself a longtime close associate of Duvalier's paramilitary Tonton Macoutes.
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in 2011. She is a member of the Jacobian Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, AlterNet and many other publications.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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Tue January 22, 2013
Gov. Heineman approves new Keystone XL pipeline route
Governor Dave Heineman has approved a 195 mile alternate route through Nebraska for the Keystone XL pipeline project.
Heineman announced his decision Tuesday in a letter to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Earlier this month, Heineman received a new report from the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality for further evaluation of the route. That followed a series of public meetings over a seven-month period.
In the letter, Governor Heineman says he approved the alternate route because it avoids the Sand Hills and a shallow ground water area. Construction could bring $481 million in economic development benefits, along with $11 million in local property tax revenue.
The letter also says pipeline developer TransCanada would be responsible for an emergency plan and responsibility in the event of a spill. Heineman acknowledges that the pipeline would cross the High Plains Aquifer, but impacts in the event of a spill “should be localized.”
Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska, a group opposed to the Keystone XL project, said in a statement on the group’s website that the Governor “turned his back on landowners and citizens who asked for an unbiased review of the risks of this pipeline.”
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The artist that made these songs # 1′s ”Love to Love You Baby”, “On the Radio”, “She Works Hard for the Money”, “Bad Girls”, Donna Summer, is dead at the age of 63 of cancer.
Image by gossiponthis.com
Donna Summer was the “Queen of Disco” in an age of shiny clothing, sparkly excess. and a Studio 54 mentality.
Summer’s tried to hide her illness from everyone, and sources say even as recently as two weeks ago she seemed to not be in that bad of shape. Her close friends said she did not want everyone to know, according to a report noted in TMZ.
Beside some decisions that she said helped lead her down a road to depression and addiction, she also had little controversy in her life making statements that were seemingly judgmental and insensitive to many in an era when AIDS was becoming an epidemic and still pegged as a homesexual’s disease (though she apologized later for them).
Her greatness in opening up a whole era and style of dance club music that many artists today have embraced and/or carried into their own styles of club music will definitely keep us dancing either through remix or style.
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Time Warner/Warner Faith
For the young women in Sister Freaks by Rebecca St. James, the "audience of one" is God. St. James and the other writers describe sixty women, some from history, others contemporary, from all over the world who have committed their lives to Jesus. Many are contemporary and young: missionaries, an Olympic athlete, a single mother, college students who are reaching out to others, and women who live under persecution in other lands. A few are women from the past: Mary, the mother of Jesus, martyrs of the early church Perpetua and Felicitas, missionary Amy Carmichael, and Martin Luther's wife Katherine von Bora.
The authors have organized this book as a devotional for girls and young women, though it's enjoyable for older women, too. It is an answer to the book, Jesus Freaks. Each section contains five inspiring stories of women, which end with a scriptural passage that applies to each woman's life. The stories average about five pages--a short enough account that young readers will not feel overwhelmed. The section ends with a page of thought-provoking questions encouraging the reader to evaluate her life and walk with Christ. In a few cases, having dates earlier in the story would help the reader place the account, but most of those are contemporary. Also, Crystal Woodman's account has a few time problems related to how long her spiritual struggles went on, but the overall account is clear.
The vignettes of the women's lives are well-written, inspiring, and enjoyable. The authors did not choose celebrities to profile, instead portraying pro-life volunteers, martyrs, missionaries, an Olympic champion, and others with spiritual depth. The stories encourage girls to overcome society's pressures by giving their lives to Christ.
Sister Freaks would be a great mother-daughter devotional with junior high girls and up, a homeschooling devotional for families with girls, or a personal devotional. I could see it used in Sunday school classes for girls with some additional work on the part of the teacher.
Grammy and Dove award-winning singer and author, Rebecca St. James, leads the list of writers. Mary E. DeMuth, Elizabeth Jusino, Tracey D. Lawrence, Leigh McLeroy, and Donna Wallace complete the writing line-up.
If you know a Christian girl from junior high through early adulthood who is struggling with the world's allure, get her this book. It is excellent. -- Debbie W. Wilson, Christian Book Previews.com
Around the world, every day, young women are boldly putting themselves forth as believers-regardless of the cost. Sometimes they suffer for it, but they never waver in their conviction that God has called them to serve Him. They are confident. They are committed. They are…
"Sister Freaks." These are words that evoke strong images-images of extreme faith…of radical devotion…of sacrifice and triumph. They are life-changing words. And they are at the core of the stories related within these pages. Here you will meet both contemporary women and historical figures from around the world-from Joan of Arc to a Midwest high school student to an Olympic athlete. But whether the account is of a historical heroine or a woman of today like you, the stories are always inspiring. Their goal: to demonstrate to you that living radically for God can change your life, whether halfway around the world or in your hometown.
SISTER FREAKS is divided into twelve weeks. Each week contains profiles of inspiring women, thought-provoking questions, and space for journaling. Become empowered as you read about these very real and godly role models in whose footsteps you can follow. Become a Sister Freak!
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Did Phelps lose because he trained too hard rather than not enough?
I was definitely surprised that Michael Phelps didn’t even medal yesterday in the 400IM. He gave a cryptic comment right after the race about not managing the lead-up to the Olympics well. He also spoke about feeling like “crap” in the morning.
Certainly he didn’t have the same speed, particularly in the last 100 meter free, that he demonstrated back in Olympic Trials. And the times showed. At Olympic Trials he swam a 4:07.89, nearly a second and a half faster than his Olympic time of 4:09.28.
Barring injury, what is the major reason why a swimmer would swim that much slower even a few weeks later? The taper.
Swimmers put in enormous amount of meters swimming, keeping the body exhausted, the muscles broken down, for what is not a natural activity. To reach peak performance, swimmers engage in a taper, slowly bringing down the amount of total yards they are swimming, and often increasing the rest intervals between high-effort swims.
Tapers are about timing, about dropping the training enough so the athlete is physically and mentally ready to give a maximal effort at a race. My guess is that Phelps trained even harder right after the trials, trying to position himself to win the 400 IM. Then, with a move to a different time zone and all the distractions of the Olympics (how many interviews…), the coaches didn’t quite catch his taper right.
Summer Sanders, a former Olympic swimmer and now TV commentator, agrees with me. In this clip on Yahoo Sports Video, she notes how she saw Michael swimming low in the water during morning practices, rather than up high and fast. The reason? Not quite at the end of his taper yet.
A lot of sports commentators right now are reading too much into his comments about not being prepared, blaming the less-than-stellar two years of training post 2008 on why he swam slower yesterday. Ironically, Phelps likely lost out on a medal not because he trained too little over the past four years, but because he trained too hard over the past few weeks.
Update: Not quite sure what to think after his 4×100 swim last night, where he put in a very fast performance. Looks like he had the second fastest leg of anyone (after Agnel, who upset Lochte at the end). So perhaps he didn’t do the training for swimming a 400, and focused more on shorter events. Or maybe it was just an off day. Or maybe his taper was off. Ah, sports talk…
Maybe jet lag and a bad taper?! Look at his official Olympics photo!
Update #2: First off, many congratulations to Phelps for becoming the most decorated Olympian of all times. That was great to watch. Touching too that the gold medal came on a relay, so it was a team effort. Second, his silver in the 200m butterfly made me appreciate all the more what he accomplished four years ago. Competition at the Olympic level is so close.
But I must say I was even more shocked by Phelps losing the 200 butterfly than I was by the 4th in the 400IM. This is his signature race. Great to see the South African swimmer jam into the wall, and how ecstatic his father was over that win. Olympic glory.
For me, the main reason Phelps got second in the race was his turns. He came in short on at least two turns, though I heard Rowdy Gaines mention three. He didn’t manage a technical detail of the race right, and it cost him at the end. That really was the margin of victory, a series of small mistakes. But he still got swam down in the last 50 meters of a grueling race, which does point to fitness level, age, and all the other things that affect athletes, elite or not.
In an interview with Bob Costas, Phelps also pointed to having “lazy finishes” in practice, which then showed up in his finish at the Olympics. I love the finish to the interview:
The decisions I made over the last four years were the decisions I made. And I’m okay with it. I’m just going to have some fun.
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It’s official. The Oprah effect has worked its magic on Twitter.
Since Oprah Winfrey’s first on-air tweet Friday, traffic to Twitter has jumped 43 percent, according to Hitwise, a Web tracker. And Ryan Block, former editor in chief of Engadget, estimated that more than a million new users joined after Ms. Winfrey called attention to the microblogging service.
Personally, I’m obsessed with Twitter. I’m a fascinated voyeur, transfixed by the streams of bursts, musings, insights and complaints unfurling before my eyes.
But many people, including the Times columnist Maureen Dowd, are wondering what all the fuss is about. Why would they possibly want to add yet another technological tool to their lives, on top of e-mail and Facebook and everything else that competes for their scarce time? Here are a few observations from my own experience.
First of all, Twitter is much more than the collective musings of the tech-savvy elite. It’s a window into the public mind, as my colleague Claire Cain Miller recently reported. Since the service tugs at our innermost navel-gazing, Vanity Smurf — by asking us to share whatever we’re thinking about — the flood of messages can deliver surprising insights into the digital pulse.
Tweetmeme, which aggregates a list of the most popular links shared on Twitter, doubles as a cheat sheet to tell you what hot topics are catching the collective attention span. You can also see the most popular topics that people are currently tweeting about on Twitter’s search page, search.twitter.com. (Today, Earth Day is big.) Using the search box, you can enter any terms to see what people are saying about a topic right at that moment — a real-time view into the Internet’s hive mind that Google simply can’t provide.
As one friend and longtime devotee described it, Twitter is also a self-propagating recommendation engine. By carefully selecting which users and companies to follow, you can tailor a stream of steadily refreshed news that appeals to you, much better than any Google algorithm could. There are tools to help you minimize the noise, like TweetDeck and Nambu.
Just skimming the most recent burst of messages in my own personal feed has served up multiple revelations, like the news that Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco is running for governor of California, rumors that Michael Jackson might make an appearance at Coachella, the scoop that the electrorockers the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s were playing a secret show in downtown New York and a report that Stephen Hawking had fallen ill and been hospitalized.
You can also sneak a peek at the random snippets of the live conversations happening near your current location. Most third-party Twitter clients, like Twinkle and Tweetie, offer the ability to check the most recent updates from nearby Twitter users. More often that not, they’re mostly from people hoping to solicit something a bit more stimulating than the latest gushings about Susan Boyle — but perhaps oddly, I find it reassuring that even Twitter isn’t impervious to the pervy preoccupations that consume the rest of the Internet.
Even the high-profile and celebrity accounts have their own merit. Granted, a large majority of them are self-serving marketing ploys maintained by handlers and publicists. But still, you get a level of access granted that is hard to find elsewhere. Take, for example, the TED technology conference or Coachella music festival. I couldn’t afford to attend either one, but by keeping an eye on a few key attendees, Twitter offered an instantaneous, unfiltered backchannel into what was going on.
I enjoy the peephole — albeit a tightly controlled one — into celebrities’ otherwise highly private lives because it helps break down the walled garden around their meticulously groomed public personas. Their tweets reaffirm that celebrities are, as the glossy gab rags promise, just like us — bad spellers who make the same silly mistakes and slip-ups as the rest of us.
Yet for all the reasons I’m obsessed with Twitter, it’s come close to ruining my life once or twice.
Once you get sucked in, it becomes tricky to remember when to turn it off. Exhibit A: A few months ago, I set off for a short weekend trip and gleefully tweeted about it — forgetting it was also my mother’s birthday and I had begged off her birthday dinner, citing deadlines. Shortly after, my cellphone buzzed with a call from my mother, a newly recruited Twitter citizen, who slyly asked me where I was. I was, in a word, busted. (Note to self: Twitter is not your diary.) Exhibit B: Another time, I absent-mindedly checked Twitter’s search page, only to see that “Hosea” was a hot topic on the service, spoiling the taped finale of “Top Chef” I’d been looking forward to watching for nearly a week.
But for all its flaws, Twitter in many ways delivers on the promises of the Internet. It reminds me of a quote by J.G. Ballard, whose recent death I learned about and was heartened to see mourned on Twitter.
Mr. Ballard never joined the flock of his literary peers using the microblogging service and he never mastered the art of the 140-character update. But here’s a slightly longer version: “Twenty years ago, no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper. … There’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.”
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Homecoming King and Queen. It seemed so important at the time, but we discover as adults that what leads to winning a popularity contest as a teenager is pretty superficial and doesn’t tell us what is truly important and meaningful about people. Klout, self described as, “the standard measure of online influence,” is in that same category. Having a high Klout score has about as much value and meaning as being voted onto the homecoming court. Sure, it’s great for your ego if you have a high score. However, does it really mean you are influential online, and if so, what is that influence really worth?
A few weeks ago, I attended Social Media for Nonprofits in Chicago. One of the speakers, Justin Ware, spoke about the value of finding influential online ambassadors for nonprofit causes. He referred to Klout as a valuable tool, imperfect, but a good starting place. As soon as he said that, my stomach lurched and I felt a strong desire to scream, “STOP! Don’t you know these are nonprofit professionals? They don’t have time to waste. They are here looking for help with social media.You are throwing smoke and mirrors at them.” When Justin asked for questions and comments, I expressed some of my thoughts about Klout. After Justin’s presentation, he and I continued the conversation and decided to do “dueling blog posts” about Klout. Justin’s post is here.
I have so many concerns about promoting the use of Klout to any audience, but particularly a group of nonprofit professionals. Essentially, Klout utilizes activity level on social media platforms as an indicator of actual influence. But activity is not influence, which is much more complicated and nuanced. Additionally, Twitter is Klout’s starting point, but users can grant Klout access to their profiles on other social platforms. However, those who do not allow access to multiple platforms are not differentiated from those who do. A person may be highly influential on Facebook but not allow Klout access to her profile, and is therefore penalized with a lower Klout score. Furthermore, a person with a high Klout score may be engaging heavily with a particular audience that has no relevance to a nonprofit. Since Klout doesn’t give any indication of who they believe a person is influential with other than a short list of fellow tweeters, it is difficult to determine who this audience might be. A person may be very active in the business community on Twitter. But if a nonprofit is looking to impact low income youth in the city, there is a disconnect.
Another problem is that topic expertise on Klout is so incredibly easy to impact by users. During Justin’s presentation, I mentioned in a Facebook group that I was frustrated by his portrayal of Klout as a worthwhile tool. Before he finished, Hunger Games had been moved into his top three topics of influence. Not by people who had ever met him, or by people who had any particular expertise about Hunger Games. But by four fellow members of the group who happened to have fairly high Klout scores. It is this blind trust of high scores that is so problematic. Justin suggests that there aren’t hordes of people gaming the system. However, the ability of users to determine where expertise lies when they may have no experience on a topic detracts from its reliability.
This blind trust of high Klout scores has made its way into employment hiring. As revealed in a piece on TechCrunch, Salesforce recently posted an open position in which one of the requirements was a Klout score of 35 or above. Even for an established company such as Salesforce, it is just too tempting to look at someone’s Klout score and not do the additional research that Justin recommends. And in the nonprofit world, where there is always a struggle to keep up in the world of technology, Klout may be seen as a valuable shortcut. Unfortunately, by using this shortcut, people with great skill and expertise, but less time to focus on their personal social media profile, will be passed by.
Measuring online influence is an incredibly complicated task. I’m not sure if we will ever come up with a great tool to help us determine that influence. But I am convinced that Klout is not the right place to start a search for online ambassadors for a cause, for a business, or for anything else.
What are your thoughts? Do you agree with me or do you think Justin is right that Klout is a good starting point? What have been your experiences with Klout? Please add your thoughts to the comments below.
Special shout out to the Punks, whose input played a big role in the creation of this blog post and in my life every day. You know who you are! xoxoxo
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Michigan's auto insurance industry wants to take another whack at the creation of an insurance fraud authority that would primarily focus on ferreting out medical fraud related to auto claims.
The state already has a task force that tackles the problems of carjackings and auto theft rings.
The idea is to tackle things like fake medical claims relating to an auto accident or scams that involve billing insurance companies for procedures more expensive than ones actually performed.
Questionable claims are on the rise, and Michigan ranks third in the nation, said Peter Kuhnmuench, executive director of the Insurance Institute of Michigan.
Michigan's no-fault law, which dates to 1973, is considered unique in the country because motorists are required to purchase unlimited, lifetime medical benefits as part of the policy. No other state mandates such a high level of benefits. While the concept has worked well, the insurance industry notes high medical benefits have required steady premium increases.
The provision also can be a "magnet for unscrupulous and fraudulent claims activity," said Meghan Cass, an Allstate insurance spokeswoman in Farmington Hills.
Gov. Rick Snyder's State of the State address last month put auto insurance on the agenda.
The governor talked about addressing no-fault insurance, in general, and insurance fraud. Snyder said the state should create an "Insurance Fraud Authority."
No doubt, we're going to see a fight in Lansing over Snyder's bigger-picture moves to change Michigan's no-fault system and to put limits on medical benefits. A final bill on any broad sweeping changes, including changing Michigan's status as a no-fault state, has yet to be completed.
Will discussions on a new fraud authority prove to be less divisive this year in Lansing? It's unknown whether such an authority would be created in its own piece of legislation or become part of any broader insurance bill.
Cass said Allstate supports efforts to increase awareness for consumers about potential fraud, as well as programs to detect, investigate and prosecute fraud.
The authority proposed by the industry is being touted as a program that would ferret out what scams are taking place -- and provide financial support to law enforcement and prosecutors, as well as insurance associations and others.
Kuhnmuench said insurers are estimating that they'd dedicate about $15 million each year toward such a fraud authority. The proposal calls for a five-year pilot program to start. He said it's possible to save $40 million a year in Michigan because it's estimated that 10% of all claims are fraudulent.
Auto insurers point to a similar program in Pennsylvania, which reportedly has led to nearly 3,000 convictions, more than $2 million in court-ordered fines and $32 million in restitution since its inception in 1996.
If Michigan launches such an anti-fraud program, Kuhnmuench said it would be the first time the state would have a database of suspected fraud activity in this area.
Michigan's insurance industry argues that con artists are driving into Michigan because other states, such as Florida and New York, are cracking down on auto insurance fraud.
According to the industry, questionable auto insurance claims related to medical issues rose 70% in Michigan in 2011 from 2010.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, auto insurance companies in some other states, such as Minnesota, also claim that fraudsters are heading into their towns because of crackdowns elsewhere.
The industry says auto-related scams can be sophisticated and may even involve organized crime in some areas. One scam: Set up fake medical clinics, use runners to stage car accidents and then submit medical bills to insurers for phony accidents.
Bad actors might include lawyers and doctors and so-called victims who are treated by the doctors or lawyers that are part of the scam.
Insurers made one attempt at such a fraud authority through House Bill 5701 last year. The bill passed the state House but stalled afterward.
The problem? Critics in law enforcement were concerned that the fraud authority would become part of the existing Michigan Automobile Theft Prevention Authority.
Tim Bailor, project coordinator for the Michigan Automobile Theft Prevention Authority, said a different mind-set and skills are needed to track down carjackers and theft rings than those running medical insurance scams relating to auto insurance.
"We just don't want to be rolled into that," Bailor said.
Given the threats of carjackings, many don't want to see dollars cut from auto theft enforcement in exchange for some ramped-up fraud prevention.
The Michigan Auto Theft Prevention Authority is governed by a seven-member board of directors, including representatives of law enforcement, automobile insurers and consumers.
The authority has four staff members at the Michigan State Police headquarters in downtown Lansing.
Each year, the board awards grants to law enforcement agencies, prosecutor's offices and nonprofit community organizations to prevent auto theft. It's unknown, of course, how much agreement there would be on keeping the Michigan Automobile Theft Prevention Authority -- which receives $1 a year from each insured non-commercial-use car or truck in a household -- on its own if another authority is created.
We'll see how this one plays out. If it does not get tied up in the more controversial debate ahead on the broader no-fault issue, some say this new authority might have more of a chance in 2013 than it did last year.
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Part of the confusion comes about because some people use these terms interchangeably, while others define them in specific ways. Things get muddled even more when we throw in the words vocation, ministry and career.
We can sort things out if we accept this basic definition of calling: "A calling is God's personal, individual invitation to carry out the unique task he has for you."
That sounds simple enough. But how do you know when God is calling you, and is there any way you can be sure you're doing the task he has assigned you?
The First Part of Your CallingBefore you can discover God's calling for you specifically, you must have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Jesus offers salvation to every person, and he wants to have an intimate friendship with each of his followers, but God reveals a calling only to those who accept him as their Savior.
This may put many people off, but Jesus himself said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6, NIV)
Throughout your life, God's calling for you will bring great challenges, often distress and frustration. You can't succeed at this task on your own. Only through the constant guidance and help of the Holy Spirit will you be able to carry out your God-appointed mission. A personal relationship with Jesus guarantees that the Holy Spirit will live within you, giving you power and direction.
Unless you are born again, you'll be guessing at what your calling is. You'll rely on your own wisdom, and you'll be wrong.
Your Job is Not Your CallingYou may be surprised to learn that your job is not your calling, and here's why. Most of us change jobs during the course of our life. We may even change careers. If you're in a church-sponsored ministry, even that ministry can end. We will all retire some day. Your job is not your calling, no matter how much it may allow you to serve other people.
Your job is an instrument that helps you carry out your calling. A mechanic may have tools that help him change a set of spark plugs, but if those tools break or get stolen, he gets another set so he can get back to work. Your job may be closely wrapped up in your calling or it may not. Sometimes all your job does is put food on the table, which gives you the freedom to go about your calling in a separate area.
We often use our job or career to measure our success. If we make a lot of money, we consider ourselves successful. But God is not concerned with money. He is concerned with how you're doing at the task he has given you.
As you're playing your part in advancing the kingdom of heaven, you may be financially rich or poor. You may be just getting by in paying your bills, but God will give you everything you need to accomplish your calling.
Here's the important thing to remember: Jobs and careers come and go. Your calling, your God-appointed mission in life, stays with you until the moment you are called home to heaven.
How Can You Be Sure of God's Calling?Do you open your mailbox one day and find a mysterious letter with your calling written on it? Is God's calling spoken to you in a booming voice from heaven, telling you exactly what to do? How do you discover it? How can you be sure of it?
"We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man's gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith. If it is serving, let him serve; if it is teaching, let him teach; if it is encouraging, let him encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously; if it is leadership, let him govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully."
We don't recognize our calling overnight; rather, God reveals it to us gradually over the years. As we use our talents and gifts to serve others, we discover certain types of works that feel right. They bring us a deep sense of fulfillment and happiness. They feel so natural and good that we know this is what we were meant to do.
Sometimes we can put God's calling into words, or it may be as simple as saying, "I feel led to help people."
Jesus said, "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve…" (Mark 10:45, NIV).
If you take that attitude, you'll not only discover your calling, but you'll do it passionately for the rest of your life.
Jack Zavada, a career writer and guest contributor for About.com, is host to a Christian website for singles. Never married, Jack feels that the hard-won lessons he has learned may help other Christian singles make sense of their lives. His articles and ebooks offer great hope and encouragement. To contact him or for more information, visit Jack's Bio Page.
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Internationally renowned chip tune musician Pixelh8 / Matthew C. Applegate makes his music from reprogramming vintage computer systems such as the ZX spectrum, Commodore 64, Game Boy and more.
His unique blend of Electronica has taken him across the globe, performing at Microdisco in Berlin, Apple iTunes in California, Assembly 2008 in Helsinki Finland, Game in The City Festival Holland, BBC Maida Vale Studios for Radio 1 in London, The National Museum of Computers, Bletchley Park and most recently Liverpool’s massive Abandon Normal Devices Festival for FACT.
Highly regarded in this emerging genre of music he has been featured on CNN, BBC Television, BBC Radio 1,3,4,6 and World Service, as well several magazines and websites all over the world.
In 2006 he won a MySpace competition to open for Grammy nominee Imogen Heap on her UK tour and in March 2008 he won “Playback Album of the Month” from Sound On Sound Magazine with his second album “The Boy With The Digital Heart”. Further to this he has created music for video games and stage productions all over the world as well as notable commissions from BBC World Service, Radio 1 and 1xtra.
Pixelh8 has also created software like the Pixelh8 Music Tech Game Boy Synth, Pro Performer and Music Tech Master Stroke for other musicians such as Imogen Heap, Damon Albarn and thousands of others.
Pixelh8’s most recent work “Observations” is an audio visual study of the people, machines and practices at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University, which culminated in two performances on 12th &13th of March, 2010 during the Cambridge Science Festival. The piece poses the question of “What does it mean to be an Astronomer?” and how it has evolved; from observations with the unaided eye and the first telescopic studies 400 years ago, to modern telescopes and satellites collecting data across the full reach of the spectrum, and the importance of theoretical study of astronomical concepts such as cosmology. All of the sounds in the music were recorded from the machines, people and interpreted from the data they collect at the Institute. This includes electro-mechanical, mechanical, and ambiance as well as interviews with leading scientists at the Institute. The work is supported by the researchers at The Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge and the outreach officer Dr. Carolin Crawford and was funded by the PRS for Music Foundation Live Connections award.
Prior to this Pixelh8 was commissioned to create “Obsolete?” a study of The National Museum of Computing, at WWII code-breaking centre Bletchley Park, the people, the history and the machines. Using the old computing machines such as the Colossus Mark 2, Elliot 803 and others to create a whole new palette on which to create the music with. The study culminated in two sold out evening performances on March 20th and 21st, 2009. The piece was commissioned by The National Museum of Computing and funded by The Performing Rights Society Foundation New Music Award and has already been featured on BBC News 24, BBC Look East, BBC 6 Music, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Suffolk, BBC Three Counties, BBC World Service, New Scientist, Games TM, Future Music, Dazed & Confused Magazine and many more.
Parallel to his involvement in music performance Pixelh8 lectures and runs music and computer related workshops across the United Kingdom and is patron of the Access To Music Centre Norwich and is currently studying for his Masters Degree at UCS Centre for Design Innovation a lecturer at both University Campus Suffolk and Suffolk New College. He is also a STEMNET Science and Engineering Ambassador and a supporting member of the Computing At School Working Group, a member of the Society for the study of Artificial Intelligence, and is on the 2012 Turing Centenary Advisory Committee.
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According to press accounts, Mr. Paulson is an ardent believer in a strong dollar. Regardless of what you think of the budget deficit, the strong dollar IS the reason for the trade deficit.
This is not really a contestable point. No one opts to buy imported goods rather than domestically produced goods because of the budget deficit. They buy imported goods because the strong dollar makes them cheaper. It really is that simple.
Of course, the United States cannot continue to run large trade deficits indefinitely. And the trade deficit is more than twice as large as unified budget deficit (it's more than 50 percent larger than the on-budget deficit). It might be cause for concern that our new Treasury secretary is a big advocate for enlarging the country's most unsustainable deficit, but you wouldn't get this from any of the reporting.
The high dollar policy is also redistributive since it puts downward pressure on prices and wages in the sectors of the economy exposed to international competition (e.g. manufacturing). This hits less skilled workers to the benefit of the highly educated workers in protected sectors of the economy (e.g. doctors, lawyers, accountants and economists).
It would have been worth including comments from representatives of the industrial sector about Mr. Paulson's selection. Incredibly, none of the reporting I saw even raised this set of issues.
You need to be logged in to comment.
(If there's one thing we know about comment trolls, it's that they're lazy)
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IT Directions | Feature
The Consumerization of IT: Pendulum or Wrecking Ball?
The proliferation of consumer technology on campuses has created new challenges for IT departments. Will the pendulum swing back toward centralized IT, or is consumerization knocking down the old ways forever?
- By Jennifer Demski
Illustration by Ryan Etter
Smartphones, affordable software, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, social media.... The burgeoning consumer-tech market is creating new challenges for higher education IT departments. As increased expectations of mobility and connectivity have students and faculty looking to consumer technology to meet their academic needs, IT must revamp operations and infrastructure to meet the demand, while keeping security risks and budgets in check.
Is the new consumer IT model here to stay? While some IT administrators hope that the pendulum will eventually swing back to centralized, institutionally controlled IT, experts warn that the drive toward consumerization will fundamentally change IT operations for good. CT spoke with Sheri Stahler, associate vice president for computer services at Temple University (PA); Ronald Danielson, vice provost for information services and CIO at Santa Clara University (CA); and Carol Smith, CIO of DePauw University (IN), to find out how their institutions are tackling the trend.
CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY: Do you see the consumerization of IT as something that needs to be contained and controlled, or as an inevitable evolution of the campus computing environment?
RONALD DANIELSON: We're far beyond the point where use of personally owned devices can be controlled. At SCU, we do try to contain it somewhat. For example, we require that staff accessing administrative systems from home do so from a university-owned computer, to minimize the chances of another user of that computer introducing malware.
CAROL SMITH: I see this as an evolution that we should embrace and that will provide many benefits, but how we take advantage of it will vary across the different areas of IT. Redirecting some of our focus to virtualized applications that students can run directly from their laptops, for example, has the potential to reduce the number of physical computer labs that we must maintain across campus. Understanding students' expectations about how they manage their schedules online, access their files and coursework, pay bills, or check their grades will shape the functionality that we build into our student information systems. By recognizing their needs and finding the most efficient ways to enable students to complete these types of "administrative" activities using their personal, mobile devices, we can help give them more time to focus on their academic lives--which is the core reason why they are on our campuses in the first place.
SHERI STAHLER: There are definitely concerns regarding security, but this trend is going to lead to a lot of innovation. The knowledge is out there, and when people can tap into collective knowledge so easily, that in itself leads to innovation. I've already seen a tremendous amount of creativity in how faculty and students use consumer tools to support their academic work. Plus, when you embrace this trend, you also eliminate silos both between IT and the academic departments, and among the academic departments themselves. When you are crowdsourcing and researching applications that have been used successfully in one discipline to see how they could be used in yours, those silos break down.
Talk to an IT administrator long enough, and the conversation is sure to touch on virtualization and the cloud. And it's no coincidence that virtualization in higher ed has grown apace with the consumerization of campus IT.
"The two trends absolutely go hand in hand," remarks Sheri Stahler, associate vice president for computer services at Temple University (PA). "With virtualization, our users who rely on mobile devices or personal tablets or laptops become truly untethered. They can choose the device that works best for them, and access whatever they need, whenever they need it, as long as they meet the security requirements for the network."
In the consumerized IT environment, virtualization allows campus IT to be more effective in supporting the student academic experience. By establishing a virtual computer lab that students can access from their personal devices, for example, IT can reduce the number of physical computer labs it needs to maintain--and redirect that money and energy toward other projects.
"If students access the virtual computer lab on their own devices," explains Carol Smith, CIO of DePauw University (IN), "we can refocus our funding and staff time on things like managing the specialized applications that students need for their coursework and ensuring that they always have access to solid, reliable tools--tools that they don't need to learn how to manage themselves!"
In fact, virtualization has the potential to level the playing field in the consumerized tech environment. "By creating a virtual desktop that students can access on their personal devices," says Ron Danielson, vice provost for information services and CIO at Santa Clara University (CA), "we can expose students to software that they might not otherwise be able to afford, and provide capabilities that students and faculty need but their consumer devices either don't offer or offer poorly."
Extending virtualization to include internal cloud services creates a secure infrastructure for researchers, students, and faculty looking to utilize consumer web 2.0 tools and web-based applications. Temple University set up its internal cloud to provide a variety of configurations to end users, depending on their needs, reports Stahler.
"Our users can be a member of a greater server where they have access to a number of applications, like the Microsoft Office apps," she explains, "or, if a researcher relies on his own software but needs a way to host a WordPress site internally, we can provide an infrastructure that assures him that his site is secure and backed up. Researchers are very protective of their data, and the internal cloud allows them to use consumer technology in a secure way."
CT:How do you ensure the security of your campus network in a tech environment where users rely on personal devices, social networking software, apps, and other possibly vulnerable consumer IT products?
DANIELSON: IT professionals understand we can't "ensure" the security of our networks. We can only try to make the occurrence of a security problem less likely. We're at a juncture between keeping our current (relatively restrictive) security policies and making a large part of our client population very unhappy. And I think we're going to resolve this by accepting the risk of somewhat less security to make it easier for clients to use newer technologies that help them learn and do scholarship more effectively. We've started talking to our risk management people about what we're willing to let go and what we absolutely have to retain.
STAHLER: But policies, really, are a big component of network security now. We're constantly making sure our policies are up-to-date. Sometimes they're reactive rather than proactive, but when it comes to the use of consumer devices on the campus network, you have to have policies in place. What university information can users store locally? Or what happens if a device is stolen--can you wipe out the device's hard drive? What happens if personal information or sensitive data is leaked?
SMITH: We have a number of measures in place: secure-password policies; a data-encrypted, web-enabled administrative system; secure campus wireless; wired network to all campus offices, classrooms, and student dorm rooms; a secure LAN for shared network storage with encrypted VPN for off-campus access. We also provide antivirus software to all students for their personal laptops. Finally, we work hard to educate our campus clients about healthy and safe computing habits, perhaps most notably through our participation in National Cyber Security Awareness Month each October.
CT: What is the role of central IT in this new computing environment?
SMITH: The role of the central IT department is to provide a sound, stable working environment that aligns with the mission of the institution. I'm not sure that our role has really changed because of this new computing environment, but the details and the day-to-day certainly have and continue to evolve. The IT department has to be able to balance solidity with flexibility to be most successful.
At the same time, while the core role may not have changed, some of the guiding principles that shape decision-making definitely have. In particular, the IT department has shifted from being the central entity on campus that provides and manages (i.e., "controls") all things IT to one whose most powerful function is to act as a connector and an enabler.
STAHLER: The key is recognizing this trend and making sure guidelines are put in place for social media use, for personal data, and for any factor that could compromise university assets. Protecting data has to be a university-wide priority.
The walls around our department have become much more permeable. Rather than putting blinders on and pretending that departments aren't setting up their own web servers, creating their own learning management systems, or relying on social networking and mobile apps, we need to know what's going on so we can figure out how best to support it.
At Temple, for example, every department and every researcher felt they needed their own server in front of them. In reality, those servers weren't backed up regularly and they weren't secure. In response, we created an internal cloud, so now there's a better option that's backed up regularly and undergoes routine random security checks. We specifically provided a number of cloud computing arrangements to match a wide variety of needs. We were able to provide the end users with a solution that would pay off for them in the long run. It's really about making the users better choosers.
DANIELSON: I agree. IT needs to be aware of what devices students, faculty, and staff are using on campus, what they're using them for, and what apps and services they're using. Then we need to get our staff using some subset of those devices so we know what benefits and concerns we're dealing with. There's not a lot of time after something gets introduced for us to do that (we had the first iPad network connection failure the morning it was introduced), so we have to be pretty agile.
CT: What effect does the consumerization of IT have on the tech budget?
SMITH: While it's doubtful that the consumerization trend will reduce overall expenses, it will definitely shift how we spend our budgets over time. In the future, for example, we will likely spend less on computer lab hardware and refocus those investments in areas such as virtualization, security, and even off-site cloud services. One key shift that we have already made is our transition from managing an on-site e-mail system to using Google Apps for Education [GAE]. As we were evaluating potential new e-mail systems, a big factor in our decision to adopt GAE was the fact that a large percentage of our students and faculty members were already familiar with Google e-mail through their own personal accounts.
DANIELSON: On our campus it's too soon to be able to say what the financial impact will be. There's the age-old hope that when everyone has mobile devices we won't need computer labs, but I currently see students sitting in our labs using our computers with their laptop open on the desk beside them, so I'm not counting on that.
I think it is clear that the wireless network now becomes much more important, and needs to be much more robust and able to handle many more clients pushing increasing volumes of data, and I suspect that will lead to a decline in the number of wired ports on campus over time. We put one wired port per two seats in the library that we opened over three years ago, and I wouldn't put any in at client seating if we were doing it today. Also, many of the services that people are accessing with these consumer devices are off campus, so the need for commodity internet capacity will go up faster than it otherwise would have.
Focusing on the Core
How does the trend toward consumerization affect IT strategic planning on campus? Carol Smith, CIO of DePauw University (IN), responds:
"We organize our work in the IT department around three main areas: maintaining the infrastructure, or what I call 'the stuff' (the network, devices, the ERP, desktop tools, etc.); supporting campus workflow such as learning, living, teaching, and administrative business processes (what people do with 'the stuff'); and creating points of connection between people and information. Using these broad organizers enables us to keep our focus on the core of what matters, while providing the flexibility to adapt to the changing landscape over time.
"Another thing to consider is the notion of 'core' versus 'critical' in deciding how to make IT investments. A critical system or service is one that the institution absolutely needs to have. If something doesn't make the 'critical' cut, then we probably don't even need to offer it and we set it aside. Once we know if something is critical, we determine whether it is core: If it is something that is unique or culturally specific to our institution--that only we can maintain--then it is core.
"This classification helps us decide how best to provide services. If a system or service is core, then we know that we need to maintain it. But if it is merely critical, then we should consider outsourced or cloud solutions, if they exist and are economically feasible.
"As an example, when evaluating new e-mail systems three years ago, we determined that, while having an institutionally branded e-mail account for each student was critical, hosting our own on-site system was not core. This shaped our decision to transition to Google Apps for Education. I could see this same method being useful in determining how or when to embrace particular 'consumeristic' IT elements that our clients bring to campus."
CT: What is your best piece of advice for campus tech administrators who are facing this challenge?
STAHLER: I was speaking at a conference on this topic recently, and I asked the audience--all higher ed IT people--how many of them think consumerization is just the pendulum swinging, as it does every couple of years, away from centralized IT, and that it would swing back toward centralized IT again. The majority of the people raised their hands. Wow...if you think that, you're going to be scrambling to catch up. I don't think we'll ever return to centralized IT. The network is going to be secure and centralized, but the devices? No. This "pendulum" is a wrecking ball. We need to adapt to it.
SMITH: And we need to listen. As campus technology administrators, we must balance what's important to keep the infrastructure reliable and secure with how much we let people do in order to accomplish their goals. To do that best, we must listen carefully to our constituents--in ways ranging from formal assessment to engagement with campus committees and informal dialogue with individuals across campus--so we can best gauge their needs. Then we can connect what we know about our own faculty and students with information from our external peers/colleagues and other larger studies in the field, to help us to understand where to focus resources.
DANIELSON: Study Zen. Consumerization is here now and will only increase in the future. There'll be some rough experiences, but we'll figure out a balance that's acceptable to everyone involved, and then we can move to the next crisis.
The Consumerization Gap
Do you know how many of your university's employees are using their personal smartphones for work purposes? In a 2011 IDC survey (sponsored by Unisys) of more than 3,000 workers and IT administrators in nine countries, only 34 percent of IT administrators reported that their organization's employees use personal smartphones to conduct business activities. In contrast, 63 percent of employee respondents reported using their personal smartphones for business purposes.
Similarly, while 13 percent of employee respondents reported using a tablet device for work, only 6 percent of IT respondents were aware of the tablet use.
In addition to highlighting the lack of awareness, the survey found a lag in technology adoption among IT organizations. When asked to rate their adoption and use of social networking applications and consumer devices for business purposes, 48 percent of responding IT workers considered their organizations to be "late adopters," while more than 60 percent of employee respondents considered themselves average-to-early adopters.
What's holding IT back? Among IT workers surveyed, the greatest barrier to enabling employees to use their own PCs and devices at work was security concerns, followed by the risk of viruses from social networks and challenges in developing corporate policies to support consumerization.
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Lately, it's been fun finding niche social sites. However, instead of being limited to sites that interest me, you'd rather go check the lists of social sites and pick the ones that fall in your industry.
12 Lists of Social Sites
- Social networking god: 350 categorized social networking sites from Mashable (Oct 2007)
- Digg-style applications: Hundreds of categorized custom Digg style sites, Pligg-based sites, social sites/networks in foreign languages and so on.
- 83 social sites: various social sites, cagetorized by the topic. Judging by the size of the list, I'd figure it covers most common topics and the sites have some traffic.
- Dozens of social sites with PR and Alexa ranks: the list was created by Lyndon Antcliff, one of the better social media experts. Most sites are categorized, some are not. You can use the other lists or see them yourself, I suppose.
- Top 44 Niche Social News & Bookmarking Sites List: a list of working niche social sites
- 233 social sites: a huge categorized list of sites. I suspect it also includes social networks.
- The directory of Web 2.0 sites of all categories: puts all Web 2.0 sites in voting, bookmarking, networking, sharing and other categories. If you want to see everything, this would be your first stop.
- 1000 categorized sites on one fast page: I'd suspect it is similar to the previous directory, but it shouldn't hurt to check the industry you are working in, just in case.
- List of Pligg-based social sites that drive some traffic. I doubt that this is a complete list, but this list is something to keep in mind. Also lists sites by PR, keyword and categories.
- List of social bookmarking sites: categorized list of apparently inhabited websites.
- 139 social sites with PR and topics.
- 15 environmental social sites from Bill Slawski
Will you get traffic from social sites?
You may be thinking that once you have your own list, you'll drown in traffic. Unfortunately, this isn't the case.
To get plenty of traffic, you need to:
- know the audience of the social sites, sometimes each site has its own audience and likes (and to know it, you need to get involved with the site for some time)
- create a piece of exceptionally inspiring, touching or helpful of content, based on the audience's needs/likes/values
- spend plenty of time on creating a catchy, effective title to get your story voted for
- write an equally hypnotizing description
- format the post to actually get read and linked to
If you are not well versed in link baiting, you may want to read linkbaiting articles at Cornwall SEO by Lyndon Antcliff and also site-specific articles about Digg and Stumbleupon.
You may want to read an excellent post, explaining how to create linkbait step-by-step at SEOmoz.
If anything, just read these sites
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News and Features
Beating up on Medicare won’t cut it as a platform when you don’t have the specter of bin Laden to scare voters.
Because we have not held Dick Cheney and the other war criminals accountable for their crude distortion of international law, torture continues to sneak into our national dialogue as a viable option for intelligence gathering.
In the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden, will the US alter its strategy in the 'War on Terror'? Jeremy Scahill joins Chris Hayes to explain how the death of the Al Qaeda leader will influence US foreign policy.
In every way that matters, bin Laden will fight on, barring a major policy shift in Afghanistan, and it’s we who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield of the global war on terror.
The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an irrational response that makes a nation less secure and less free. In the wake of 9/11, America became that place. Can we change course?
It's time to banish our dangerously-simplified us-versus-them mentality and recognize the world as it is: shot through with suffering and complexity.
For Jeremy Scahill, the killing of Osama bin Laden is an occasion not for celebration but rather for reflection on the hundreds of thousands of people who have died in the past ten years.
Three decades after we first decided to use Osama bin Laden and other imported Muslim zealots for our Cold War purposes, we feel cleansed by his death of any responsibility for his carnage.
It is impossible to believe the government of Pakistan did not know exactly where we could find Osama.
Jeremy Scahill appears on "Last Word" to provide insight into the men who killed bin Laden.
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I am running for school board to make changes in how we educate students. A pattern has developed where students are graduating from Huntsville City Schools and are not prepared to be career or college ready. Some of our students graduate with good grades and attend college only to take remedial classes the first year. We must work together to prepare our students for the future and that preparation begins in our elementary schools.
Q. Are you capable of and willing to do the research necessary to ask questions about the policies, procedures and recommendations that the superintendent is bringing to the board for approval?
Yes I am capable of doing the research necessary to ask questions about policies and procedures. Over the last 3 years I have attended 80% of the regularly scheduled school board meetings and one special called meeting. During that time I have participated by providing solutions to problems facing our school district or asked questions about existing policies. I am willing to ask the questions and I have demonstrated that with my actions.
Q. Do your children (or school age relatives) attend Huntsville City Schools?
I do not have any children. I do have relatives that attend Huntsville City Schools.
Q. What is your vision for the schools in your district?
I am running on my S.T.A.R.S platform. The details are below.
We need to improve the utilization of our guidance counselors in our school system. We need our counselors to create individual plans for our students to make sure that as the student reaches the end of the education process that they are career or college ready. If a student goes off the planned path then our counselors, teachers and parents can work together to help to correct the issue and make sure that our students are successful.
(T)raining for Educators
Huntsville City Schools should increase the opportunities for professional development for educators to keep them aware of the latest teaching techniques and keep them up to date with the technology that will be used in the classroom. Partnering with the local universities and the business community could help solve this challenge.
To improve the classroom management skills of our first year teachers I would like to create an educator mentoring program. I would like to see first year teachers spend time working in the summer school program paired with veteran teacher. You cannot educate students if you cannot control the classroom first.
The district needs to be accountable on a financial and educational level from the top of the organization to the bottom. Note that accountability does not stop with Huntsville City School employees that accountability extends to the home as well. Our parents must be held accountable for the education of their own children. Our schools are not daycares but a place to educate children.
(R)emove inequalities in education between schools.
We need to remove the inequalities between schools and make sure that an “A” student at one school is an “A” student at any Huntsville City School. Standardization of testing for our schools will assist in measuring the academic progress of our students. Note: I do understand that we face different challenges in our schools that place some of our students behind. Using the STAR Enterprise system is good indicator of progress and success in the classroom.
As a school district we need to increase the number of academic and athletic scholarship opportunities for our students. The way we go about achieving that goal is to expose our student’s achievements to the businesses, colleges and Universities.
For years parents of athletes have used website geared toward sports to display stats and film to help students get noticed by a university. These sites are used by universities all over the country to find talent and ultimately offer scholarships. As our school system goes digital we will have the infrastructure to offer such a site for the Huntsville City School district. This idea is not just for athletes but for those looking to display academic talents as well. It’s a one stop shopping opportunity for colleges, Universities, and Trade schools.
Q. What is your plan for working with the other school board members, superintendent, staff, teachers, community to implement this vision?
To implement this vision communication will be the key to success. The vision must be clearly explained to all stakeholders involved. Each group must have input on how the vision should be implemented. I want each stakeholder to have ownership in the process. As school board members we must look not only at what is good for our district but also what is best for Huntsville City Schools. Communicating this vision to the other board members and showing how this can positively affect the district they represent will help bring this vision into reality.
Q. What is your view of high-stakes standardized testing, and the use of those test results for the evaluation of teachers?
Our teachers should not be evaluated by test results. Standardized testing is good way to show the progress of our students. Each school has its own challenges and issues. Some of our schools have a majority of students that are on grade level in math and reading. Other schools are faced with the challenge of having students that are two or more grade levels behind. The standardized test can provide a picture of where a student is in the education process and what areas will need improvement to move to the next level. If test results alone are used for evaluation of schools with less academic challenges you would see great evaluation for teachers. Schools that have major academic challenges would see the opposite effect. The end test results do not reflect how far a teacher might have advanced a student in his or her education process. I will provide two examples.
Teacher A has a student in 5th grade and that student is on grade level in math and reading. After taking the standardized test it shows that student is still on grade level and on the correct pace to move to the next level.
Teacher B has a student in 5th grade and that student is on a 3rd grade level in math and reading. After taking the standardized test that student is not on a 5th grade level but has made progress and is now on a 4th grade level.
When viewing the end results as a number or letter grade you do not get the full picture of what a teacher has accomplished. If you review the details you can see the effort of those in education. The results are subjective depending on which way you would perform the evaluation. So again test results alone are not a good way to evaluate a teacher.
Q. What is your view of how the district’s limited funding should be divided among the needs of the district?
The first thing to remember about Huntsville City Schools limited funds is that the money is not all in one account. That means we cannot use construction funds to pay staff and vice versa.
Currently the school system has planned or has already completed construction on several schools in the area. According to the Jacobs report released recently we have over 150 million dollars of priority one facility issues in our schools. Some of the schools will cost more to repair then to rebuild. I agree with building new schools because it will bring a since of pride to the community and provide safe place to educate students. The new facilities could allow for consolidation of our schools and reduce the long term facility cost for our school district. The funds for construction will come from sources like the 6.5 mill property tax and the money that will be provided from BRAC.
Although we have limited funds from the federal and state we have been able to hire teachers using local funds. Increasing the number of teachers can help reduce the class load and increase the opportunity for more one on one education time. With limited funds it is not how much you have but how you use the funds that matters.
Q. What is your view on the superintendent’s plans to close, consolidate, “turn around”, and “restart” many of the schools in our district.
I do support the consolidations of schools when it makes since. Schools with small populations and the districts limited resources are not a good ways to educate students. With the funding from the state and federal level being cut every year we have to look at ways to reduce the school systems cost. One of the ways to reduce cost is to consolidate schools with extremely low populations. Usually the schools with low population have older facilities with high maintenance cost. One of the major costs to a school system is maintaining facilities. Removing a single facility saves our district millions of dollars a year. Below you will find the criteria that I would use to consolidate a school. The questions below are not in any particular order.
- Do we have space in a nearby school for our students without overcrowding that school?
- Can we move our most valuable resource our educators to other schools to help our district? Consolidation to me does not mean loss of jobs for our teachers and staff.
- Will consolidating a school save the system significant money?
- Can we utilize the vacated facility to relieve other issues within the system?
- How old is the facility?
- Can we sale the property and truly remove it from the school systems books?
- Can we get community buy in for the consolidation?
Restart of our schools
Schools in the district where restarted to protect against charter schools. A bill early in the year was up for a vote to bring charter schools to Alabama. Several failing schools in Huntsville City Schools where selected as potential charter school locations. To protect against that the schools had to be restarted statically. Teachers, principals and staff where moved to other locations which is part of the process for a restart of a school. I think competition can always make situations better and that is what charter schools would have brought to Huntsville. I also believe if you allow the superintendent and the school board the same flexibility as a charter school you would not need charter schools.
Q. What is your view of the role that parents and the community should play in the governance of our schools?
Our community should play a role in helping guide and structure our school system. The community knows what direction industry is moving and can help provide feedback to the superintendent and the board. This feedback from the community can help eliminate courses that are obsolete and add courses that are relevant in today’s world.
Parental involvement is the largest keys to a student’s success. Our teachers cannot do it alone they need the help of mom, dad or the parental guardian to be successful. Our parents need to reinforce how important education is to a student and actively participate in the academic process. Below is a small list of things parents can do to be actively involved.
- Join and actively participate in PTA.
- Go to parent teacher conferences.
- Make sure students have a set time to do homework daily.
- Ask for graded papers from the student.
- Look for tutors if need for the students
The key is to be engaged in your student’s education process. If you don’t have time make the time.
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It looks a bit like a dune buggy but its tires aren't big enough. And it can't be compared to a golf cart because it has only one seat. Nor does it have the flashy lines of a Miata or a Porsche. It even has a funny name -- mini-baja.
But whenever this vehicle is on display or driven around, it turns heads and generates inquiries.
The mini-baja, named after a western off-road competition, was built by six mechanical engineering students at Lafayette College as their senior design project.
Starting with an 8-horsepower gas engine, the mini-baja's only requirement, they have spent months creating the single-seat, low-slung vehicle, translating classroom learning into practical application.
And they plan to do more. They will take their mini-baja to Ohio on May 31 for the annual Society of Automotive Engineers competition. There they will compete with more than 70 similar models made by students in some of the nation's largest engineering schools as well as those from Brazil and Canada.
Michael Pescatore and Patrick O'Meara were sophomores when their interest was piqued by the car Lafayette seniors built in 1994 that finished 21st in a field of 68 at the SAE competition that year.
When Pescatore and O'Meara started their junior year, they found out the mini-baja project had been discontinued in 1994.
Although disappointed, the two approached the mechanical engineering department and said they wanted to build a mini-baja as their senior project. They won approval, but they also were told it would not be easy and that they had to adhere to strict schedules.
Seventeen were in the mechanical engineering class, but only four others agreed to become part of the team. Joining Pescatore of Ridgefield, N.J., and O'Meara of Sperryville, Va., were Justin Engelland of Hungary, Renato Martins of Cos Cob, Conn., Christopher Ulz of Bedminster, N.J., and Ian Barberi of Lakeville, Conn.
When their senior year started, the real tests began. Because the 1994 model had been dismantled, the team had no car to study -- as many in the SAE competition have for years. However, they found some partial designs of the 1994 vehicle.
"Because we had no car or any experience in seeing how the car worked," Engelland said, "we ended up half making things work on our own and half detective work on the rest. We had no idea what alternative designs were."
What they did have were the views and perceptions of three of the team members, Pescatore, Barberi and Martins, and their adviser, Jess Comer, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, who went to the 1996 mini-baja competition in Milwaukee.
The mini-baja team was run like a corporation, consisting of six divisions: frame, drive train, front suspension, rear suspension, steering/brakes and business/project management.
The engineering department set aside $2,500 for the project, but the team was challenged to raise additional funds and to build a reserve for next year's student projects.
Engelland was responsible for that end. He did a marketing fund-raiser, sent out an appeal to alumni, sought parts from area businesses.
The first car cost about $1,200 to $1,300. The team estimates the second will require about $1,800, which will meet the competition requirement to build an off-road vehicle for the consumer market that could be mass-produced for less than $2,000.
And because Pescatore and O'Meara are Marquis Scholars, they each received $1,000 grants for their senior project. That money paid for last year's trip to view the competition and will pay for the journey to Ohio this year.
Each member tackled a specific area of the car in building it andin finding ways to refine the design to make it lighter and easier to maneuver.
Starting last October, the team built its first mini-baja, a prototype as close to the 1994 model as possible. They finished it just before Christmas and then began testing it around campus, enjoying the stares of those who wondered what the strange-looking vehicle was.
But those tests showed there was a lot of work to be done before the team started its second vehicle, the one they planned to enter in the mini-baja competition.
It was O'Meara's job to find ways to remove at least 150 pounds from the car. Engelland said the car was too slow, too heavy and could not go over 25 mph. By the time the team reaches Ohio, Engelland said it hopes the car will go at least 30 mph.
Relying on computer programs, O'Meara found ways to take weight out of the frame while Barberi did the same with the drive train and rear suspension. Other team members redesigned other parts of the vehicle, all working toward a lighter, more maneuverable vehicle.
The team had to work with one standard feature -- the 8-horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine -- and find the most efficient way to get that horsepower to the wheels.
They hope their methods have succeeded.
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At some point, we're hoping, the media and the public will start looking at what plans the presidential candidates have for helping America. When they do, Hickey's overview of President George W. Bush's "ownership society" proposal will be indispensable. Read on to learn how Bush plans to make Americans "own" the burdens of paying for their own health care, retirement and their children's education.
Roger Hickey is co-director of the Campaign for America ’s Future.
New York City —This election should be a referendum on President George W. Bush's record over the past four years in office and whether he has any new ideas that would justify voters giving him another term in the White House. Yet, friends of Bush’s have found a way to focus the presidential debate not on his plans for the country’s future or even the war in Iraq, but on John Kerry’s actions 30 years ago in Vietnam. Time will tell whether the strategy will work for Bush or backfire. But most voters tell pollsters that what they really want to hear is the candidates’ proposals for jobs, health care and the kind of country our kids will inherit.
Democrats and progressives argue that each of these problems requires concerted government action. Bush and the Republicans don’t believe in government—and they have systematically slashed public revenues. So they need an agenda that promises to address the problems, while continuing their crusade to cut taxes for the wealthy and downsize government.
So what does Bush have to sell? The following is a guide for concerned voters—and for the media who should be covering the real agenda of the candidates for president.
Defending His Tax Cut Gamble
First and foremost, Bush’s domestic agenda is wedded to the massive tax cuts he pushed through Congress in his first term. Quite correctly, Bush conservatives argue that spurring a growing economy is the best thing a president can do for Americans. “The best social program is a job for all who want one,” they argue. Unfortunately for Bush, despite his tax cuts, the economy has continued to be sluggish, poverty is growing, job growth hasn’t come anywhere near replacing the 3 million jobs lost in the Bush recession, and Americans with jobs are experiencing falling real wages, eroding benefits and general insecurity.
Since he has no other plan for economic growth and job creation, Bush will have to insist—during this week's convention and afterward—that the Bush tax cuts will eventually produce an economic recovery capable of generating substantial job growth. Most Americans understand what the Congressional Budget Office recently reported: The Bush tax cuts have benefited the wealthy far more than the rest of us, while blowing a $3.9 trillion hole in the federal budget over the next 10 years.
Even for the small minority who would find this tradeoff acceptable, the continuing failure of the Bush tax cuts to produce growth and jobs is becoming embarrassing. For the rest of us, the Bush record is tax unfairness and high unemployment— devastating cuts in public investment, rising local taxes and continuing economic sluggishness and growing insecurity.
With a record like that, even an administration that claims tax cuts will— eventually— solve all problems has an incentive to come up with some other “new ideas” if only to distract the public from the continuing failure of its major economy gamble on tax cuts.
Call It Bush’s "I Don’t Have A Plan" Plan
At the convention President Bush will unveil, not for the first time, an overarching theme designed to convince voters he has a vision for a second term: the Ownership Society. The Bush team has tried out this phrase sporadically over the last year or so— in a few unnoticed speeches, press releases, fact sheets and interviews by White House staffers like Mary Matlin. And the cover story of the latest Business Week , obviously informed by White House spinners, gives us a preview of what to expect. Bush’s ”ownership society” is an attempt to repackage a set of proposals that mainly benefit the wealthy and the corporations under the pretense of addressing real “kitchen table” concerns of the middle class and the poor. Virtually all the specific proposals, when presented and explained to average voters in polling or focus groups, are very unpopular. And there is considerable evidence that most already overwhelmed and overworked Americans reject the “big idea” that individuals must take greater responsibility for designing and “owning” their health care, retirement plans, education and work time.
In the face of new Census Bureau reports showing more Americans are living in poverty and a new CBO report showing that only the rich have benefited from Bush’s tax cuts, Bush’s handlers will have to practice some skillful spin. They must maintain that those same tax cuts—extended and made permanent— will someday soon result in revived economic growth and widespread economic prosperity. They will also have to unveil the Ownership Society theme in a way that makes it look grander and more popular than the sum of its unpopular parts.
Unfortunately, the media have shown themselves to be more than willing to report Bush administration spin as real substance. All the more important that activist groups understand what Bush is proposing— and find ways to explain to their fellow citizens what a hollow agenda the whole package represents.
Health Care: No Real Solutions
The costs of health care premiums are skyrocketing, and the Census Bureau has just issued a report showing that 45 million Americans have no health insurance at all— a 3.2 percent increase over the 43.6 million who had no coverage a year ago. (Among people under 65, almost 18 percent of all Americans were uninsured.) In the face of this certified crisis, what is George W. Bush’s proposed solution? Tax credits for people who purchase their own health care premiums (which many experts believe will give employers and excuse to bail out of paying for health care altogether). And tax deductions for the wealthiest Americans who have enough income to shelter some of it—tax free—in Health Savings Accounts to pay for catastrophic health care costs. Many observers have noted the only way these proposals would reduce health care costs would be by placing the burden of payment on individuals, encouraging them to avoid the doctor even for crucial preventative health care. And experts have already questioned Bush’s relatively modest projections about how many Americans his plan would cover. Bush’s Ownership Society forces individuals to own responsibility for their own health care themselves— and, as usual, provides help in the way of tax subsidies only to those who are rich enough to take advantage of the subsidies.
Prescription Drug Benefit For HMOs And Drug Companies
At the convention, Bush is sure to brag that he has produced a prescription drug benefit for seniors, but if he is smart he will downplay the details, because polling shows that the details of the Bush plan are unpopular with a majority of retirees. Why? Because the new law is confusing, with a truly crazy benefit structure requiring an advanced degree to understand. But the most unpopular aspect of the Bush drug plan is the way it clearly benefits HMOs and big drug companies more than seniors. The bill prohibits Medicare from using government buying power to get lower prices for drugs. And a bizarre system of subsidies to HMOs helps assure that more and more seniors will be dumped into HMOs to get their Medicare. In the Ownership Society version of Medicare prescription drug benefits, the big drug industry and HMOs do very well, while seniors get the short end of the stick. This is why thousands of activists around the country are joining together to demand to know whether candidates for Congress and the presidency stand with seniors or with the corporations who benefit from the Bush drug plan [for more information, click here ]. They are demanding a prescription drug benefit within Medicare that will bring prices down.
Undermining Retirement Security
Amazingly, the Bush Ownership Society agenda would undermine the one reliable and guaranteed leg of the three-legged retirement stool: the Social Security system. Americans are increasingly insecure about their retirement. Gone are the days when most employers provided their employees with real “defined benefit” pensions. Instead, most workers are lucky if their employer contributes to an IRA or 401K account which the employee is responsible for investing in the stock market, win or lose. Most workers have little of their income left over for retirement savings after living costs are covered— and many are in debt to make ends meet. In this environment, what is the Bush Ownership Society program for retirement? They want to privatize Social Security by cutting guaranteed benefits in order to create risky private accounts invested in the stock market. Experts have shown that privatization would require more than $1 trillion in transition costs, far less than the costs of protecting Social Security’s guaranteed benefits for the next 80 years.
Education Left Behind
Education was the signature issue that allowed Bush to portray himself as a “compassionate conservative” in the 2000 elections. But Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation imposed enormous burdens on public schools, requiring what many experts and teachers call “mindless” testing, while failing to provide the resources necessary to improve education— or even to pay for the testing. President Bush has also failed to do anything about the high cost of college, but has increased the costs of higher education by kow-towing to the private banking sector. President Bush as actually tried to increase the costs of financing student loans, costing the average student borrower about $5,500 more in interest payments, according to the Congressional Research Service. Led by the Campaign for America ’s Future, NEA and MoveOn.org, a massive nationwide movement will conduct thousands of house meetings to demand real action to improve education. [Learn more about this effort here.]
Flexibility At Work—For Employers, That Is
At a campaign speech on July 31 in Pittsburgh, President Bush tried to use the Ownership Society packaging as a framework for a set of administration proposals that have widely been seen as helping employers, not workers: “We'll help American families keep something they don't have nearly enough of, and that's time, time to be with your kids, time to take care of your elderly parents, time to help yourself by education. Congress needs to enact what we call comp-time and flex-time, to help American families better juggle work and home duties.”
But the so-called “comp time” legislation Bush is pushing—along with the new overtime rules his Labor Department has just put in place—would actually reduce the average worker’s control over their work time, and thus over their time with their kids. The new overtime rules would make over 6 million workers vulnerable to losing overtime pay when the boss requires them to work over 40 hours a week. The “comp time” law would undermine the basic wage and hour legislation, fought for and won by the labor movement. Under the new legislation, employers could not only require employees to work overtime, but, instead of being required to pay them time and a half, the boss could simply promise to give them “comp time” at some future time, not at the employee’s choosing. Here is a dramatic example of how the Ownership Society proposals are being sold as programs to enhance the freedom and self-determination of working Americans, but they are, in fact, designed to enhance the power, flexibility and bottom-line prerogatives of corporations, employers and Wall Street.
Taxes: Killing Progressive Taxation and Shifting the Burden from Capital to Workers
Like the whole Bush economic program, the heart of the Ownership Society agenda is cutting taxes for the wealthy and the corporations. Since 2001, President Bush's tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, according to the newest analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO study found that the wealthiest 20 percent, whose incomes averaged $182,700 in 2001, saw their share of federal taxes drop from 64.4 percent of total tax payments in 2001 to 63.5 percent this year. The top 1 percent, earning $1.1 million, saw their share fall to 20.1 percent of the total, from 22.2 percent.
Bush is calling on Congress to make permanent those parts of his tax cuts that are still temporary, abolish the tax on the estates of the super wealthy and he is trying for still more reductions in the taxes on capital gains and on corporate profits. On top of this, Bush recently mused that he would like to replace the progressive income tax with a regressive national sales tax. Clearly, the goal of Bush and the conservatives around him is not only to starve progressive government, but to shift the burden of taxation off of income earned by capital and investment and onto the backs of working Americans exclusively. And given another four years, they might well achieve that goal completely.
Ownership Society vs. Shared Security
Clearly, the Ownership Society program that Bush will present to the Republican Convention will contain a hodge-podge of old conservative proposals repackaged to distract public and press attention from the fact that Bush’s real domestic agenda—tax cuts for the wealthy— are failing to produce growth and jobs. If enacted, they would worsen the growing polarization of American society and concentration of wealth and power.
But here's a more pressing pragmatic question:“Will the press and the American people buy them?” Most likely, the Ownership Society proposals will serve a temporary purpose of getting Bush through the convention with the illusion of having a program. Most Americans will not notice. But if they do, they may well backfire.
In focus groups conducted in early March in Cleveland and Atlanta, public opinion analyst Celinda Lake asked likely voters their reactions to the Ownership Society proposals. After hearing a description of the phrase “ownership society”, voter perceptions shifted pretty solidly negative. The Ownership Society proposals “evoked images of an end to the social safety net. In addition, many of the participants thought the idea of controlling their own health care, retirement, and children’s education sounded burdensome and frightening. In a system where there would be clear winners and clear losers, they worried what how they and their families would fare.”
Lake found that the term “shared security” was much more popular. “In contrast to the individualism that participant associated with “ownership society”, they perceived “shared security” as a model in which people banded together to ensure the essentials and protect the vulnerable. It even assuaged the doubts of some of the skeptics, as all of the participants saw a need for some form of a social safety net, particularly in regards to Social Security and Medicare, health care and education.”
This hopeful note for Democrats requires two things to be made real: First, progressives must unmask the Bush agenda for what it is: another set of plans to aid the wealthy and powerful while undermining the rest of us. And an aggressive campaign to explain and sell an agenda of “shared security” to the America people.
Our work is cut out for us.
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“If a woman has a child [and] she abandons that responsibility in pursuit of an empty career or the idea of making her mark on the world, she has completely misunderstood the great importance and the great responsibility that she has been given by God, in that the fruit of her womb is before her.”
“So if a woman brings children into this world and then dumps them in a daycare centre … and if she thinks somehow she is doing something more important by going out and working, I think there’s something very seriously wrong with her maternal instincts. Because abandonment in the animal kingdom, abandonment is alien to animals.”
“I am amazed that there’s children out there that are really struggling to find a purpose to their life in a world that is telling them constantly, including their parents by abandoning them, that that they are worthless.”
“If you don’t listen to your soul, you’ll end up on antidepressants.”
- Interview with Hamza Yusuf, undated.
My father is a very forceful man and he looks it. In high school, my male friends tended to melt away from around me whenever my father appeared. He’s also, in many ways, very conservative: he wears a thobe on a regular basis; is an ardent supporter of the Tabligh Jamaat, which he credits with restoring his faith when he was young; and has often talked favorably about the niqab. He is a strong believer in following the sunnah, though I sometimes think that in emulating the prophet, he’s got him confused with god.
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The Big Data Conundrum
By Carsten Bruhn, Executive Vice President at Ricoh Europe
The huge volume of information flowing through organisations is increasing at an alarming rate. Dubbed ‘big data,’ this trend presents both challenges and opportunities for companies. A recent report1 states that, “the increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media….will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future”. It also suggests that “as organisations create and store more transactional data in digital form, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything from product inventories to sick days, and therefore expose variability and boost performance”.
At Ricoh, we believe the capability to manage the big data explosion will be the defining factor in European businesses’ ability to maintain a competitive advantage. In preparing to manage the data, it is essential to think about the critical business processes that will convert the data into knowledge, enable it to be shared efficiently between employees across the organisation, and converted into action as a result. By doing so, C-level executives will have unprecedented access to a data rich landscape to support or drive future decisions. By adopting the right approach to big data they can gain unique insights into their organisation and their customers, improve efficiencies and ultimately add value to the bottom line.
These benefits of increased productivity and profitability are applicable to the public and private sectors. When we speak to public sector organisations, they tell us that breaking down big data is high on their list of priorities, in particular, to ensure they remain compliant with the regulations in place to protect confidential documents and manage records.
However, a recent survey by Coleman Parkes Research2 shows that the majority of individuals in public sector organisations continue to receive and manage their own documents directly without collaboration or notification to other departments. This is true, for 41 per cent of organisations in the education sector and 34 per cent in healthcare. This approach means that the overall value of the data cannot be realised by the entire organisation, duplication of efforts is likely and the benefits of fast, access to valuable information are not being realised. What’s more it leaves them susceptible to compliance breaches as information is difficult to track and manage. But there are success stories. We recently worked with a European company in the Healthcare sector who identified the need to transform and streamline the HR and Accounts processes to maximise productivity and compliance. Since the introduction of more efficient automated processes the HR department have experienced a reduction in finding a single piece of information from 6.7mins to 30 seconds. At the same time the accounts department reduced search process time from 4 minutes to 30 seconds per document. The company has also generated annual cost savings of approximately €345k annually as a result of the optimisation.
The situation isn’t exclusive to the public sector. Across Europe, 43 per cent of all those surveyed by Coleman Parkes** stated that they were still relying on hard copy methods for their business critical document processes with just 22 per cent of organisations using a fully automated workflow. In the heavily regulated financial services industry, less than half of European organisations (45 per cent) confirmed that they have the ability to conduct audit trails for all confidential business critical documents and 20 per cent said that they have no audit processes in place at all. These figures are significant and could put companies at odds with compliance regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which mandates that organisations must ensure that business critical documents are not altered, destroyed or misplaced.
As well as compliance breaches, another big data conundrum faced by organisations across Europe is how to reduce the time and money they spend on managing it. Approximately 362 million man hours** are spent across Europe every year to manage business critical documents alone and the employees responsible, admit there is significant room for improvement, citing that just a 10% improvement in efficiency would generate a potential profit increase of €46 billion** across Europe. It is therefore essential that business leaders act now to address the situation within their own organisations and uncover the process inefficiencies that exist. A good example of the benefits to be gained is from a Ricoh customer based in Germany. The accounting firm transformed the processes used to produce its document heavy annual audit reports. Today it has a centralised management system and an automated document workflow. It is gaining approximately €600K euro cost savings per year and is enjoying a consistent and productive way of working.
By taking a closer look at the overall business processes, including those that are associated with the management of documents and information, businesses can fully harness the benefits of big data. It doesn’t have to be about problems – with the right systems in place it can be about profitability. Conundrum solved.
A whitepaper can be downloaded from www.ricoh-europe.com/thoughtleadership
1McKinsey Big Data report, May 2011 http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/big_data/
2Ricoh Process Efficiency Index, June 2011, conducted by Coleman Parkes Research – www.ricoh-europe.com/thoughtleadership
Ricoh Company, Ltd. (Ricoh Company) is a Fortune Global 500 company specialising in technology and services that transform high volume, document intensive business processes into more efficient ones. This is achieved through Ricoh’s expertise in Managed Document Services, Production Printing, Office Solutions and IT Services.
By working with Ricoh, businesses can streamline the way they work, become more efficient and profitable, and share knowledge more effectively within their organisations. With a global workforce of 109,014, Ricoh operates in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, China and Japan.
Ricoh Europe Holdings Plc is a public limited company and the EMEA headquarters of Ricoh Company with operations located in London, United Kingdom and Amstelveen, the Netherlands. In the fiscal year ended 31 March 2011, revenues from Ricoh's EMEA operations totalled ¥413.9 billion (approx US$4.99 billion). Ricoh Company's worldwide sales totalled ¥1,942 billion (approx US$23.4 billion) during the year ended 31 March 2011.
About the Ricoh Process Efficiency Index.
The Ricoh Process Efficiency Index was conducted by independent research firm, Coleman Parkes, and commissioned by Ricoh Europe. Survey respondents held full responsibility for managing the processes surrounding the critical business documents inside their organisations and were employed within: Financial/accounting, sales, HR or payroll, customer or client information, legal, warehouse and supply chain. The research consisted of 458 telephone surveys within large (1000+ employee) organisations, located in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, The Nordics (Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark), Spain, Switzerland and the UK. The organisations are based within the education, legal, utilities, healthcare, manufacturing and financial services sectors. Qualitative interviews were also completed with European CIOs to gain further commentary about their business critical document processes.
For further information, please contact:
Ricoh Europe PLC
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7465 1153
Register for the Ricoh media centre at: www.ricoh-europe.com/press
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ATLANTA — Illegal immigrants who are granted permission to stay in the country under an Obama administration policy that was announced in June will be eligible for drivers’ licenses in Georgia, the state’s attorney general wrote in a letter to the governor.
“While I do not agree with the actions of the President in issuing the directive, it has been implemented by the Department of Homeland Security, USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), and state law recognizes the approval of deferred action status as a basis for issuing a temporary driver’s license,” Attorney General Sam Olens, a Republican, wrote in a letter obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.
Olens said illegal immigrants with the special status would not, however, be eligible for a state identification card. He says such cards are considered public benefits which are not available to illegal immigrants.
Under the policy – which was announced in June and took effect last week – eligible immigrants must have arrived in the U.S. before their 16th birthday, are 30 or younger, have lived here at least five years, and are in school or graduated or served in the military.
They also must not have a criminal record or otherwise pose a safety threat. They can apply to stay in the country and be granted a work permit for two years, but they would not be granted citizenship.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed an executive order Aug. 15, the day the policy took effect, telling state agencies not to give driver’s licenses or other benefits to illegal immigrants who obtain work authorizations under the deferred status.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said this month that each state could determine whether to issue drivers’ licenses or extend benefits such as in-state tuition to immigrants who are granted deferred status.
A Georgia Department of Driver Services spokeswoman said last week that Georgia law considers those with deferred action status eligible for drivers’ licenses and that the agency would issue them unless it got other instructions. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal last week asked Olens for guidance on the matter.
Federal immigration authorities can also grant deferred action status to other illegal immigrants at their discretion.
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An Armenian soldier stands guard at a frontline position east of Karabakh. (File photo)
Tensions rise in the Caucasus region after five Azerbaijani soldiers were killed and several more wounded in border clashes with Armenian forces.
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry blamed the Tuesday fighting on "a group of Armenian saboteurs” who attempted to penetrate the Azeri military positions in the northwestern town of Gazakh, AFP reported.
The Armenian side, however, accused Azerbaijan of causing the violence, saying that "a subversive group of 15 to 20 people attempted to infiltrate Armenian territory”.
On Monday, Yerevan claimed Azeri forces had killed three of its soldiers and wounded six more after an attempted incursion ended in a gun battle on the border.
Baku, however, denied the allegation.
Azerbaijan and Armenia have long been at loggerheads over control of Nagorno- Karabakh.
Some 30,000 people lost their lives and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced in both countries in a war between the neighbors in the 1990s, which saw Armenia-backed separatists take the mountainous territory.
Years of negotiations since the 1994 ceasefire has failed yield a final peace deal, with frequent exchanges of gunfire reported along the front line.
Azerbaijan has threatened to use force to take back Karabakh if peace talks fail to yield satisfactory results, but Armenia has warned of large-scale retaliation against any military action.
The Tuesday violence erupted as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is visiting the volatile Caucasus region. Clinton expressed concern over the rising tensions and warned the use of force will not resolve the long-running territorial conflict between the two neighbors.
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Summary for the Busy Executive: Fine performances of American classics.
Randall Thompson constitutes an odd case in American music. Quite prominent in his own day, he has faded from most serious discussions and almost all concert programs. The reaction against him seemed to set in after the Second World War, when most tonal composers – including such lights as Walter Piston, Roy Harris, and Aaron Copland – began to look old-hat, washed-up, and even corny. After all the years spent building a specifically American modernism, younger composers began to look toward Europe and southern California, the bastions of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone method. We no longer wanted to be American, but international and classic. By the Sixties, professional schools simply ignored a large body of very fine work. Fortunately, enough composers of genius basically wrote the way they wanted to, so that now a fairly healthy eclecticism has become the rule. We still have committed serialists, but we also have minimalists, neo-Romantics, third-stream, and so on, all getting performances and recognition. However, we don't have many opportunities to rummage through the locker of the rather recent past. Performances of modern music (ie, anything from Pétrouchka on) tend to run to premières and near-premières. American music other than George Gershwin, Copland, and occasionally Charles Ives and Leonard Bernstein makes up an even shorter list. Thompson seemed to see this coming. Beginning in the Fifties, he withdrew from all professional venues and concentrated on writing for amateurs. One of the great composition and orchestration teachers (he, Roger Sessions, Howard Hanson, and Piston essentially created the American academic curriculum), he always had technique to burn. Now he put it in the service of church and college choirs and community ensembles. He never looked back.
As a result, his music stayed alive among amateurs. The Last Words of David, the Alleluia, The Nativity According to St. Luke, Frostiana, and the sets of "sacred songs" for chorus are still sung. As an unfortunate result, however, many professionals believe that Thompson is a "church choir composer" and have little idea that a great deal of music exists for them, and many amateur groups fail to do justice to some of the repertoire. Thompson composed in all major genres, with three symphonies, two string quartets, and at least one opera, among other things. At his best, I find him an American equivalent of Dvořák – great technique allied with early American folk music, particularly that of New England and the Appalachians, as the spring of melody. Of his symphonies, I find his second the most inspired. Bernstein (a Thompson orchestration pupil) has a killer version of this on Sony 60594.
This disc collects some of the a cappella choral works. Most of it, to judge by the dedicatees and performers (G. Wallace Woodworth, Archibald T. Davison, even Elliot Forbes), comes from the WASP hive of Harvard, where Thompson taught for decades. Thompson's choral music can be easy or hard, but it all at least "sounds." This was the first impression of his music I had as a high-school chorister (we mangled the Alleluia, but at least we got through it). Furthermore, he can get a very full texture with the fewest possible notes and without compromising voice-leading. According to Harvard luminary Elliot Forbes's liner notes, the Italian composer Gian Francesco Malipiero had encouraged Thompson to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance, which the young composer did, apparently to great profit. This led to a technique that could do anything and yet didn't rub a listener's nose in the composer's contrapuntal brilliance. Thompson's Mass of the Holy Spirit, for example, contains all manner of canon, but its communion with the listener impresses most of all. This work, by the way, needs an ace choir.
Thompson's great "hit," the Alleluia was composed for Tanglewood in an amazing four days. Technically, it's a study in declamation and rhythmic counterpoint, with the single-word text, "Alleluia," accented several different ways in different parts of the measure. Forbes points out that Thompson wrote the piece in 1941 just after the fall of France and it's hardly an ode to joy. In fact, it goes through many moods, beginning raptly and tenderly, moving through dark and anxious moments before breaking through to cascades of alleluias, like the swooping and soaring of larks, and ending with a quiet "Amen." In fact, its rhetorical movement reminds me of a sermon. As I say, an amateur choir can get through it. A great choir willing to accept its challenges, however, reveals something seven kinds of wonderful. It deserves every bit of its popularity.
"Bitter-Sweet" came fairly late in Thompson's career. It sounds like "bittersweet," but the hyphen makes all the difference. "Bittersweet" connotes sentimentality, whereas Thompson composed the chorus in response to the death of his beloved granddaughter Katie. Forbes notes that it's one of the composer's most personal works, and I agree. It's quite out of the run of the amateur works to which Thompson had been confining himself. The harmonic palette darkens and more dissonance comes in. The bitterness of pain clashes with the hope of consolation as it sets a George Herbert poem, and it takes good performers to move from one to the other without stumble or breakdown. Consolation never quite arrives. I find the ending uneasy still.
"The Best of Rooms" is an example of Thompson's "mirror writing" – ie, where the upper and lower parts move in opposite directions – if, say, the soprano line rises, the bass line falls. It's a technique Thompson keeps returning to. Again, if someone didn't point it out, most listeners wouldn't notice.
"The Last Invocation" takes the Walt Whitman poem from Whispers of Heavenly Death. Thompson wrote it in his twenties, before receiving his fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (Hanson and Sessions also worked there). It's a solid job, but unfortunately I hear William Schuman's spare setting as I read the words. As far as I'm concerned, Schuman owns this text.
The Odes of Horace, originally five with a sixth added about thirty years later, comprise the earliest fruits of Thompson's study of the Italian Renaissance and Mannerist composers. The CD presents four of them. Early, pre-Baroque Monteverdi and de Wert seem the models, although Forbes makes a case for late Monteverdi as well. This is text-setting of great sophistication and resource, and yet again one is aware mainly of the expressive power of the music.
With The Peaceable Kingdom, we begin to talk about an American choral masterpiece. Thompson wrote it at a time when American composers had begun to check out Colonial and Federal music, particularly the collections of The Continental Harmony and The Sacred Harp. From this period, we get Henry Cowell's series of Hymns and Fuguing Tunes, Virgil Thomson's 4 Southern Hymns and Symphony on a Hymn Tune, and (slightly later) Schuman's New England Triptych. Everything about Thompson's work is first-rate, from the immediate source of his inspiration ("The Peaceable Kingdom," by the early American preacher and primitive painter Edward Hicks), to his choice of texts, to his musical models from The Sacred Harp, to the actual composition. I've known the work for about forty years and bought the score before I reached twenty, but Forbes's notes to the piece tell me things I didn't realize about the work and show again the subtlety of Thompson's technique. The notes particularly help identifying the motifs that unify the entire cycle.
The work begins with "Say ye to the righteous," which sets two-part writing for the men against full chorus, an opposition which reflects the contrast between the blessings on the "righteous" and "woe" on the "wicked." The music moves from rapt, pastoral contentment (an incredibly beautiful tune, perfectly harmonized) to loud outcries and back again. Thompson carries the dichotomy throughout the work. "Woe unto them," "The noise of a multitude in the mountains," and "Howl ye" paint the punishment of the wicked in effective terms without recourse to a whole lot of notes, but to a full toolkit of choral techniques. "Woe unto them" plays with odd meters to capture a conversational declamation, but with no delving into choral recitative. A steady pulse beats throughout the number. In "The noise of a multitude," Thompson uses rhythms apparently derived from Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre. "Howl ye," which divides the choir in two, makes much of antiphony and fugato. The work reaches its peak of intensity here, and paradoxically on a pure major chord for both choirs, fortissimo on the word "howl." "The paper reeds by the brook" (often excerpted) follows with a tender quasi-chorale in Thompson's mirror writing. It manages to evoke other Biblical laments as well, notably those of Jeremiah. This is the fate of the wicked: "The paper reeds by the brook, by the mouth of the brook, and everything sown by the brook shall wither, be driven away, and be no more." For here on, Thompson prepares us for God's promise to the righteous, heard in the first number: "It shall be well with them, for they shall eat the fruit of their doings." "But these are they" has a magical section to the words: "The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the fields shall clap their hands." That last image is one of my favorites in the entire Bible, and Thompson rises to the occasion with word-painting brilliantly simple and evoking the rustle of leaves, the wind, and echoes from the far hills. "Ye shall have a song" – the finale which gives the CD its title – alternates between the women's and men's sections. The women's timbre conjures up for me yearning and hope, the men's the mystery of God's promise. The movement is largely chordal, with delightful passages of imitation and word-painting on the words "as when one goeth with a pipe to come into the mountains of the Lord." Thompson constructs not one, but two long climaxes, the second of which concludes the entire cycle with, in Forbes's words, "a majestic cadence of overpowering intensity [to bring]… the work to a triumphant conclusion." Certainly, that's how it works on me, even after all these years.
The work has suffered from amateur recorded performances. Nestor's group is undoubtedly the best choir to date to tackle this music on record. It is a very fine group indeed, very well trained, if not the acme of choral singing. Some pitch problems crop up here and there, particularly among the tenors, but the group has a yummy tone and a fabulously suave musical line. The group is based in Washington, D.C., and those of you lucky enough to live in the area should look for their concerts. As for me, I can't wait to hear their next disc.
Recorded sound is a shade too reverberant, but acceptable.
Copyright © 1998, Steve Schwartz
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San Francisco, CA (NursingSalary.org)- According to a survey, 96% of patients with back problems have been very happy with seeing a spinal clinic rather than with nurse practitioners. To see a surgeon, you may have to wait up for a year. When going to a spinal clinic, you can get in as soon as within the day you call. Less than 25% of the people were happy with waiting for a whole year to get into a surgeon. This could include the results that they got from seeing the surgeon as well.
In today’s world, waiting times for specialty consultations in public health care systems take a long time, and they also cause a lot of stress and pain on the patients needing to get in. Think about it. If you are suffering through back pain for several weeks before trying to get in to see a surgeon, then you are obviously in a great deal of pain. Then they tell you that it will take several months up to a year in order to get in, then this will obviously put a great deal of stress on you over the next year. You will have to continue going to work with pain, and it will cause more pain by just working through it.
However, by going to a spinal clinic, you are sure to get just about the same results along with getting in much sooner. There are a lot of people skeptical of spinal clinics, but I can say from firsthand experience that they are definitely worth going to. Pretty much everyone is sure to go through some sort of back pain throughout their lives; it is almost the most common kind of physical pain that a human being can get. At some point, they will have to decide which decision to choose.
As you can see, several people have vouched that going to a spinal clinic would be a much better decision than waiting up to a full year to get in and see a surgeon. Not only is the wait bad, but sometimes you may not even get the results that you were hoping for. You may still go through the same back pain that you experienced before going in to visit the surgeon. You just cannot go wrong by going to a spinal clinic.
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Fantastic Four #2
Skrulls have mastered space travel on vast scales, space and planet colonization, advanced energy based weaponry, advanced medical technology, warp drive starships, advanced robots, cyborg, and cybernetic technology, and advanced genetic technology
Currently Anarchy, formerly Monarchy
Adult Skrulls typically range from between 4 to 7 feet tall. They are bilaterally symmetric, with two legs and arms terminating with feet and hands respectively. Skrull hands have four independently moving fingers each with opposable thumbs. Skrulls have heads which have two forward facing eyes, giving them precise stereoscopic vision. Skrulls typically are covered in short, almost transparent, hair over most of their bodies but exhibit thicker tufts of hair on top of their heads. Skrulls have a green skin pigment, pointed ears, and ruffled chins. Most Skrulls also have the ability to shapeshift into other beings and objects
Since the Eternal and Normal strains have long since been eliminated from the gene pool, all Skrulls alive today possesses the Deviant gene series which endows them with ability to alter their size, shape, and color through mental concentration (some of Earth’s Deviants, like Kro, have the same ability, but to a far more limited extent due to differences in the basic genetic material between two races). A Skrull can mentally cause the unstable molecules that comprise his or her body to become pliant, enabling him or her to assume other forms through muscular expansion and contraction. Once a new shape has been assumed, it takes a conscious act of will to assume another form or revert to natural. Hence, Skrulls do not spontaneously lose their assumed form when asleep or unconscious. Skrulls in altered form will, however, revert to their original forms at the moment of death. Skrulls only take on the appearance of an object or person and none of that object or person’s characteristics. There is a limit to the size of the object or person a Skrull can imitate. The average Skrull cannot distend his or her mass any more than 1.5 times as large a volume as his or her original volume, nor can he or she contract his or her mass any more than 0.75 a volume as his or her original.
Despite these limitations, the power of mimicry has enabled the Skrull Deviants to master their own world by infiltrating and sabotaging their rival sister races. After discovering space travel, this ability also proved a valuable tool for the conquest of other worlds. Assuming the forms of a world’s natives fostered a seeming common bond between the Skrulls and the natives. Upon attaining interstellar travel, Skrulls began to build an empire. Although imperialistic, the Skrulls were not a particularly militaristic race, and set up their early empire based on free trade.
Approximately 10 million years ago, the Skrulls first ventured outside their native galaxy into the nearby Greater Magellanic Cloud and Milky Way Galaxy. In the former region, the Skrulls encountered the Kree, a humanoid race still in its rudimentary stages of civilization. The Skrulls sent emissaries to the Kree homeworld Hala to offer a gift of advanced technology so that the Kree might one day be brought into the Skrull Empire. The Skrulls discovered, however, that Hala boasted two equally intelligent races, the Kree and the sentient plants called Cotati. Arranging a test for the two cultures to determine worthiness, the Skrulls ultimately judged in favor of Cotati. Enraged, the Kree slew both Cotati and Skrull ambassadors, and confiscated the Skrull’s technology. Due to the immense distances involved, no word of this atrocity reached the Skrulls until the Kree had sufficient time to master the fundamentals of stolen technology. Decades later, the Kree ventured into the Andromeda Galaxy and began attacking Skrull outposts and finally Skrullos itself. The Skrulls, forced to become more militaristic, retaliated. Thus began the Kree-Skrull conflict which still is waged between the two empires millions of years later.
The seat of the Skrull Empire was moved about 100,000 years ago to Tarnax IV, a planet more centrally located in the empire, renamed Throneworld. The Skrull Empire is governed by a totalitarian monarchy. There is one supreme emperor or empress, and a governor for each of the 978 member-worlds in the empire. In recent years, the Skrulls emperor has been Dorrek, who was assassinated and succeeded by his ambitious wife R'klll. Empress R'klll, her daughter Anelie, and millions of other Skrulls were recently killed when the world-eater Galactus destroyed Throneworld to consume its energy. The leadership of the Skrull Empire at this point uncertain.
While some worlds have voluntarily entered into the Skrull Empire and thus have been allowed varying degrees of autonomy, others have been conquered and their populations subjugated. In some cases, the Skrulls have colonized uninhabited worlds to extend the dominion of the empire. Among the many civilized worlds that make up to 978 member-planets of the Skrull Empire are the homeworlds of the Druffs, Guna, Kallusians, Morani, Pheragots, Queega, Tektons, and Yirbek. Among the few Andromeda Galaxy civilizations to resist Skrull takeover are the Xandarians of the Tranta System and the Wilameanis and Gegku. The Skrulls have established peace treaties with certain pacifistic races in their galaxy, including Ciegrimites and Krylorians, since Skrulls regard them as non-threatening and engage in profitable trade relations with them.
One of the Skrulls’ more unusual accomplishments was the conversion of the Kral System’s ten worlds into an amusement and resort center for the idle rich of the empire. The ten worlds feature recreations of certain alien cultures’ habitats. Kral IV boasts a replica-city of Prohibition Era New York and an Earth village of the medieval age. The Kral System is the permanent site of the galactic gladiatorial tournaments.
Although the Skrulls became aware of Earth (due to its nearness to a natural warp-space access point) eons ago, it was not until recent times that they considered Earth’s threat. Their first regular surveillances of Earth began in the 1930s. To date most of the Skrulls’ excursions to Earth have been extremely small-scale, with no more than a handful of soldier-infiltrators being dispatched at any given time. It is not yet known how the death of the current ruling family will affect official policy toward Earth or the government of the empire in general.Skrulls are basically reptilian but have certain mammalian characteristics such as hair and (in females) mammary glands. Newborn are hatched from eggs but are nursed by their mothers. Skrulls have lifespan of about 210 Earth-years. Although they are intellectually on par with Earth beings, the elimination of their Normal strain millions of years ago means they no longer have the capacity for benevolent mutation. Hence the Skrulls have existed at their current level of evolution for million of years. There is rumored to be relationship between the Skrulls and shape-changing Dire Wraiths.
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Orthodontic treatment is no longer just for teens. In fact, approximately 40% of our patients are older than 21.
Many adults are choosing to receive treatment because they understand the importance of maintaining their health, and they want to feel better about their appearance. Adults everywhere are taking advantage of the opportunity to receive orthodontic care, and now you can too.
Reasons To Consider Orthodontic Treatment
- Desire for a healthier mouth and a more confident smile
- An improper bite causing teeth to fit together incorrectly
- Teeth are crowded or spaced apart, possibly causing tooth decay or gum disease
- Abnormal jaw pain, or pressure that is caused by crooked teeth
Benefits of Orthodontic Treatment
- Straight teeth are healthy teeth — Teeth that are properly aligned are easier to keep clean with flossing and brushing, and may help prevent other health problems.
- A beautiful, straight smile builds confidence — Orthodontic treatment can help boost your self-confidence, giving you a better quality of life and the freedom to smile without holding back!
- Mouths left untreated can get worse — Not receiving orthodontic treatment when it's needed can create long-term health issues that will cost you more in the end.
Treatment Options For Adults
We offer customized treatment options specifically designed for adult patients. Our advanced technology, appliances, and techniques greatly increase comfort and aesthetics, shorten treatment time, and reduce the number of necessary appointments.
In addition, we offer nearly invisible aesthetic options such as Invisalign and Damon Clear braces. At Kim Orthodontics, it is easy to get the smile you have always wanted and still look your best in the process!
Differences Between Adult Orthodontics and Child/Teen Orthodontics
- Jaw bones – In children and teens, the jawbones are still developing and are still flexible. In adults, these bones have stopped growing, which may limit the amount of correction that can be achieved with braces alone.
- Gum or bone loss (periodontal disease) — Adults are more likely than children to experience gum recession or even bone loss due to gingivitis or advanced periodontal disease. Patients with straighter teeth are less likely to get gum disease.
- Worn or missing teeth — Over time, teeth can become worn down and shift into different positions that can only be corrected with orthodontic care. Missing teeth can cause other teeth to shift and tilt, creating a bad bite and increasing the potential for gum disease.
- Incomplete orthodontic treatment as a teen — Many adults received orthodontic treatment as a child or teen, but may have not completed the treatment. They may choose to complete their orthodontic treatment as an adult to achieve the healthy, beautiful smile they always wanted.
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Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL)
Sonja Evensen completed CGU’s Certificate of Advanced Study in Evaluation from her remote location in Hawaii, where she evaluates health and education programs around the Pacific islands with a private, non-profit group. Despite the distance, she says the sense of community she found with her cohort was as strong as any face-to-face class group. "There was a real collegial and jovial tone, and we all got to know each other's quirks. So we got to joke around a lot with each other, and [Drs.] Tina [Christie] and Stewart [Donaldson] were just so warm and encouraging."
Sonja has been involved in substance abuse prevention for nearly a decade, both as a curriculum developer, a community outreach worker, and a director for an after school program for youth in Waimanalo, Hawaii. Her work "in the trenches" led to her interest in program evaluation--one that is responsive to both federal demands and that honors community and their terms of success. Sometimes the challenges can be much more colorful than evaluators on the mainland might expect. On one occasion, she chose the local yam production as an example to help teach a logic model, only to find out that the local measurement was not in weight or volume, but a unit of mass equivalent to "How many yams four men can carry." Yet the cross-cultural values of evaluation theory helped bridge such conceptual differences, and Sonja was able to help prepare the population for dealing with globalized measures of accountability.
"Every day when I went to work, what I learned in the Claremont program was immediately applicable. As a matter of fact, while I was in the program, we discussed a lot of our work, so if I was having an issue in one of my evaluation projects while I was working on it, I would get immediate feedback and everything I learned. I felt a huge amount more confident about what I was able to do, and I was able to prevent some of the harmful things that an evaluator might be doing just because I didn't know."
"I feel like I can help my clients come up to speed with the Department of Education and their funding sources as far as accountability and evaluation are concerned. And can do it in such a way that they can understand. I've taught a number of workshops where I am sent out to the region [of the Pacific islands] to do capacity-building. I see a lot of 'Aha!' experiences when they see the logic models drawn out and they realize their activities aren’t lined up with their goals."
In her free time, Sonja windsurfs (her first career was as a professional athlete!) and is engaged in other ocean sports. She also is the 2006 Vice President of the Hawaiian Pacific Evaluation Association, and is deeply involved with Evaluation Hui, a group that develops guidelines for culturally responsive evaluation of Native Hawaiian programs.
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A common trait of founders, CEOs and in fact most executives, is the loyalty they command among their troops. During times of crisis (including most of the early years of a developing company, integration of mergers, etc), loyalty is a critical characteristic of the leadership team. But in order for a company to scale, leadership is much more important than blind faith alone. It's apparently quite difficult to separate the two. And clearly, the bonds born of loyalty are hard to overcome.
As companies mature and it becomes necessary for management decisions to distribute beyond a strong single central decision maker, loyalty alone is not sufficient to generate good decisions. So CEOs need to steel themselves to objectively view their teams as either capable or not to operate on their own. Coloring (or perhaps blinding) the decision of who sits in these important leadership seats is a mistake too often made.
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Starting a business baby, starting a business. It can be a wild ride. Sylvia Gruber co-Founder and CEO of Rubybox broke down her experiences with Rubybox into eight, bite-sized tips for burgeoning startups.
Gruber is big on keeping things basic and personal, simplicity is key — often the most difficult and the most important aspect to get right.
Rubybox is a monthly beauty box subscription service that provides its subscribers with beauty product samples. The service allows for business-to-business opportunities by being a conduit for beauty product companies, to push out product samples into the market, for research and promotion. It’s a big business, about 500 beauty products get launched in South Africa annually.
Rubybox recently extended their service to offer an ecommerce platform where beauty box subscribers can buy the sample products online.
Rubybox is a young startup, founded in September 2011, but has amassed subscribers numbering in the thousands. It’s based in Cape Town, self-funded and has seven team members.
Communication channels are great, the internet allows the word about a brand to get out in a viral fashion. It’s magical, but it can turn into a nightmare.
Drawing from a problem Gruber and her team ran into when choosing a courier service based on price, she listed eight “sins” to avoid committing.
SIN #1: Saving on the wrong things
A critical element of the Rubybox service is the courier that delivers the boxes to subscribers. When Rubybox elected to go with a cheaper courier to save on costs, it quickly ran into trouble when the courier was found to be unreliable.
Gruber advises not to scrimp on the core of your business.
SIN #2: Changing too many things at once
It’s important to change things gradually, even more so in the early stages of a startup’s life. Change is great, but it bears risk. Be prepared and have contingency plans ready.
SIN #3: Hiding
When the courier was found to be unreliable and delays started occurring, customers flocked to social media to vent. Rubybox tried to hide from the problem, which only made things worse.
Hiding from the problem or trying to cover it up also takes time and time is the most important commodity you have. Consumers will figure out there’s a problem anyway.
Competitors are intelligent, don’t underestimate them, no matter how hard you try to obscure aspects of your business, they will figure out a way to emulate it.
Operating under the radar can also cost you major opportunities for collaboration.
SIN #4: Panicking
Panicking doesn’t help, there will always be stress. Learn to to live with and manage it. Have contingency plans at the ready.
SIN #5: Undervaluing the power of brand or equity
Your brand is your equity, even more so if you are self funded startup. Try to inject personality into your service, polish is a secondary objective, but important.
When people identify with your brand, it leads to brand loyalty. It’s important to keep open communication wih your customers. Communicate calmly, don’t let them see you sweat.
When consumers identify with your brand, they will stand up for you when things go awry.
SIN #6: Not listening and conversing with your customers
Gruber says that the consumer is boss and that it does not really matter what you, the business owner likes or would buy.
She advises to listen, learn and have an ongoing conversation with your customers to learn about their needs and to use social media tools and polls such as Survey Monkey.
SIN #7: Getting side-tracked
If there are no competitors in your field, it’s probably a boring field to be in anyway. Embrace competition, it means you’re on the right track.
Don’t watch what competitors are doing too much, it will distract you, waste your time and potentially make you lose your direction.
Stay true to yourself, don’t conform, and focus.
SIN #8: Perfecting
Gruber says that perfection is a predominantly female characteristic and this leads to less females heading up startups. She advises to embrace the hacker culture, get a version out the door, worry about perfecting it later. Speed is of the essence. Get as close as possible to perfection, then move on.
Don’t ever think you’ve reached perfection.
“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” — Woody Allen
Topics for this article
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The players on the Canadian women’s soccer team set a lofty goal this season, but it was about much more than winning an Olympic medal.
They wanted to inspire a generation of young women coming after them.
The Canadians captured a bronze medal at the London Games – the country’s first Olympic medal in a traditional team sport since 1936 – with a spirited performance that tugged on the heartstrings of Canadian fans, and laid down the footsteps for so many little girls to follow.
The team was honoured for its spectacular season by being named The Canadian Press Team of the Year for 2012 in voting by sports editors and broadcasters across the country.
“The girls knew, even before going into this, they were committed to moving this country to another level,” said coach John Herdman. “It wasn’t the bronze that was driving them, it was the legacy for themselves and for this country that drove them through. It sounds corny, but it’s not.”
The women’s soccer team received 228 points, including the majority of first-place votes (68), to run away with the honour that was first awarded in 1966.
The Grey Cup champion Toronto Argonauts were second with 99 points, ahead of the men’s eight rowing team and women’s hockey team – tied with 43 points apiece – and Glenn Howard’s men’s curling rink (41).
“Canada’s first team medal in the Summer Olympics in 76 years could easily have been gold or silver,” said Sean Rooney of the Medicine Hat News. “Yet after suffering through the disappointment of their semifinal loss to the U.S., Canada’s women made the country proud with their ability to come back with a thrilling bronze medal victory.
“It’s their emotion and perseverance that made them heroes.”
No-one could have predicted the drama that would play out on sport’s biggest stage in London.
The beleaguered Canadians were coming off a last-place showing at the 2011 World Cup. Herdman was brought in to pick up the pieces. The first sign of what would be a remarkable turnaround came at the Pan American Games, when Canada defeated Brazil for gold.
Once in London, the Canadians clinched their spot in the quarter-finals with a 2-2 draw with Sweden, and topped host Britain 2-0 to set up their semifinal showdown against the archrival Americans.
Then, in what will go down as one of the most memorable games in this country’s soccer history, captain Christine Sinclair struck for three goals in Canada’s 4-3 heartbreaking semifinal loss to the Americans – a controversial result that took 123 minutes to decide and wound up getting Sinclair suspended for four games for a post-game “incident.”
In the bronze-medal match, Diana Matheson scored in the 92nd minute to provide a stunning end to a game that saw the French utterly dominate a weary Canadian side.
And in a year that saw Canada’s men’s team crash out of World Cup qualifying in spectacular fashion, the women gained a country full of fans.
“I think our women’s program transcends gender, to be honest with you,” said Canadian Soccer Association president Victor Montagliani. “Just the amount of emotion that is attached to this team. It’s not just Christine, the team is deep with character.”
It’s been an emotional four months since the players returned home from London, as they’ve seen in the faces of fans who know all their names just how big an impact they’ve had.
“It’s something we’ve all embraced and I think we understand that this is what we wanted, we wanted to bring home an Olympic medal, we wanted to change the sport within Canada,” said Sinclair, who won the Bobbie Rosenfeld Award on Thursday as Canada’s Female Athlete of the Year.
She and some of her teammates have been conducting camps across the country since returning home.
“We think it’s very important because when we were growing up we didn’t have female soccer players to look up to. I looked up to baseball players, other teammates looked up to hockey players,” said Sinclair, who still wears No. 12 for her favourite athlete growing up, former Toronto Blue Jays star Roberto Alomar.
“I’ve been a primary school teacher back in the day,” said Herdman. “I love working with kids. So it’s great to actually be able to start having a little bit more influence on the younger generation.”
Veteran goalkeeper Karina LeBlanc said fans young and old have come up to say “hi”, pose for a picture, or ask for an autograph literally every day since they returned to Canada.
“Every time we put on that jersey for Canada it’s an honour,” said LeBlanc. “The next time we put on that jersey, we’re going to know for sure that the country we’re representing is the best country in the world. Coming home with the bronze medal and being treated the way Canada has treated us, it’s bigger than gold, it’s better than gold, and it’s inspiring us to be better.
“So the best way to sum up this year is just to thank Canada for making us feel so special and making us fall in love again with playing for them and playing the sport that we love.”
Recent winners of The Canadian Press team of the year award:
2012 — Women’s soccer team
2011 — B.C. Lions
2010 — Olympic men’s hockey team
2009 — World junior hockey team
2008 — World junior hockey team
2007 — Saskatchewan Roughriders
2006 — Brad Gushue curling rink
2005 — World junior hockey team
2004 — Calgary Flames
2003 — World Championship men’s hockey team
2002 — Olympic men’s hockey team
2001 — Jaime Sale and David Pelletier, figure skating
2000 — Daniel Nestor and Sebastien Lareau, tennis
1999 — Team Canada ‘72 named Team of the Century (no team of the year)
1998 — Sandra Schmirler curling rink
1997 — World junior hockey team
1996 — Canadian 4x100 relay team
1995 — Canada’s world junior hockey team
1994 — Montreal Expos
1993 — Toronto Blue Jays
1992 — Toronto Blue Jays
1991 — Team Canada (Canada Cup)
1990 — Edmonton Oilers
1989 — Calgary Flames
1987 — Team Canada (Canada Cup)
1986 — Montreal Canadiens
1985 — Toronto Blue Jays
1984 — Edmonton Oilers
1983 — Toronto Blue Jays
1982 — Edmonton Eskimos
1981 — Montreal Expos
1980 — Montreal Expos
1979 — Montreal Expos
1978 — Montreal Canadiens
1977 — Montreal Canadiens
1976 — Team Canada (Canada Cup)
1975 — Edmonton Eskimos
1974 — Montreal Alouettes
1973 — Montreal Expos
1972 — Team Canada
1971 — Montreal Canadiens
1970 — Montreal Alouettes
1969 — Ottawa Rough Riders
1968 — Olympic equestrian team (Jim Day, Jim Elder and Tom Gayford)
1967 — Toronto Maple Leafs
1966 — Montreal Canadiens
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Visions of judgments to come upon Israel. (1-9) Amaziah threatens Amos. (10-17)
Verses 1-9 God bears long, but he will not bear always with a provoking people. The remembrance of the mercies we formerly received, like the produce of the earth of the former growth, should make us submissive to the will of God, when we meet with disappointments in the latter growth. The Lord has many ways of humbling a sinful nation. Whatever trouble we are under, we should be most earnest with God for the forgiveness of sin. Sin will soon make a great people small. What will become of Israel, if the hand that should raise him be stretched out against him? See the power of prayer. See what a blessing praying people are to a land. See how ready, how swift God is to show mercy; how he waits to be gracious. Israel was a wall, a strong wall, which God himself reared as a defence to his sanctuary. The Lord now seems to stand upon this wall. He measures it; it appears to be a bowing, bulging wall. Thus God would bring the people of Israel to the trial, would discover their wickedness; and the time will come, when those who have been spared often, shall be spared no longer. But the Lord still calls Israel his people. The repeated prayer and success of the prophet should lead us to seek the Saviour.
Verses 10-17 It is no new thing for the accusers of the brethren, to misrepresent them as enemies to the king and kingdom, as traitors to their prince, and troublers of the land, when they are the best friends to both. Those who make gain their godliness, and are governed by the hopes of wealth and preferment, are ready to think these the most powerful motives with others also. But those who have a warrant from God, like Amos, ought not to fear the face of man. If God, that sent him, had not strengthened him, he could not thus have set his face as a flint. The Lord often chooses the weak and foolish things of the world to confound the wise and mighty. But no fervent prayers, or self-denying labours, can bring proud sinners to bear faithful reproofs and warnings. And all who oppose or despise the Divine word, must expect fatal effects to their souls, unless they repent.
The seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters contain VISIONS, WITH THEIR EXPLANATIONS. The seventh chapter consists of two parts. First ( Amos 7:1-9 ): PROPHECIES ILLUSTRATED BY THREE SYMBOLS: (1) A vision of grasshoppers or young locusts, which devour the grass, but are removed at Amos' entreaty; (2) Fire drying up even the deep, and withering part of the land, but removed at Amos' entreaty; (3) A plumb-line to mark the buildings for destruction. Secondly ( Amos 7:10-17 ): NARRATIVE OF AMAZIAH'S INTERRUPTION OF AMOS IN CONSEQUENCE OF THE FOREGOING PROPHECIES, AND PREDICTION OF HIS DOOM.
1. showed . . . me; and, behold--The same formula prefaces the three visions in this chapter, and the fourth in Amos 8:1 .
grasshoppers--rather, "locusts" in the caterpillar state, from a Hebrew root, "to creep forth." In the autumn the eggs are deposited in the earth; in the spring the young come forth [MAURER].
the latter growth--namely, of grass, which comes up after the mowing. They do not in the East mow their grass and make hay of it, but cut it off the ground as they require it.
the king's mowings--the first-fruits of the mown grass, tyrannically exacted by the king from the people. The literal locusts, as in Joel, are probably symbols of human foes: thus the "growth" of grass "after the king's mowings" will mean the political revival of Israel under Jeroboam II ( 2 Kings 14:25 ), after it had been mown down, as it were, by Hazael and Ben-hadad of Syria ( 2 Kings 13:3 ), [GROTIUS].
2. by whom shall Jacob arise?--If Thou, O God, dost not spare, how can Jacob maintain his ground, reduced as he is by repeated attacks of the Assyrians, and erelong about to be invaded by the Assyrian Pul ( 2 Kings 15:19 2 Kings 15:20 )? Compare Isaiah 51:19 . The mention of "Jacob" is a plea that God should "remember for them His covenant" with their forefather, the patriarch ( Psalms 106:45 ).
he is small--reduced in numbers and in strength.
3. repented for this--that is, of this. The change was not in the mind of God ( Numbers 2:19 , 1:17 ), but in the effect outwardly. God unchangeably does what is just; it is just that He should hear intercessory prayer ( James 5:16-18 ), as it would have been just for Him to have let judgment take its course at once on the guilty nation, but for the prayer of one or two righteous men in it (compare Genesis 18:23-33 1 Samuel 15:11 Jeremiah 42:10 ). The repentance of the sinner, and God's regard to His own attributes of mercy and covenanted love, also cause God outwardly to deal with him as if he repented ( Jonah 3:10 ), whereas the change in outward dealing is in strictest harmony with God's own unchangeableness.
It shall not be--Israel's utter overthrow now. Pul was influenced by God to accept money and withdraw from Israel.
4. called to contend--that is with Israel judicially ( Job 9:3 , Isaiah 66:16 , Ezekiel 38:22 ). He ordered to come at His call the infliction of punishment by "fire" on Israel, that is, drought (compare Amos 4:6-11 ), [MAURER]. Rather, war ( Numbers 21:28 ), namely, Tiglath-pileser [GROTIUS].
devoured the . . . deep--that is a great part of Israel, whom he carried away. Waters are the symbol for many people ( Revelation 17:15 ).
did eat up a part--namely, all the land (compare Amos 4:7 ) of Israel east of Jordan ( 1 Chronicles 5:26 , Isaiah 9:1 ). This was a worse judgment than the previous one: the locusts ate up the grass: the fire not only affects the surface of the ground, but burns up the very roots and reaches even to the deep.
7. wall made by a plumb-line--namely, perpendicular.
8. plumb-line in . . . midst of . . . Israel--No longer are the symbols, as in the former two, stated generally; this one is expressly applied to Israel. God's long-suffering is worn out by Israel's perversity: so Amos ceases to intercede (compare Genesis 18:33 ). The plummet line was used not only in building, but in destroying houses ( 2 Kings 21:13 , Isaiah 28:17 , 34:11 , Lamentations 2:8 ). It denotes that God's judgments are measured out by the most exact rules of justice. Here it is placed "in the midst" of Israel, that is, the judgment is not to be confined to an outer part of Israel, as by Tiglath-pileser; it is to reach the very center. This was fulfilled when Shalmaneser, after a three years' siege of Samaria, took it and carried away Israel captive finally to Assyria ( 2 Kings 17:3 2 Kings 17:5 2 Kings 17:6 2 Kings 17:23 ).
not . . . pass by . . . any more--not forgive them any more ( Amos 8:2 , Proverbs 19:11 , Micah 7:18 ).
9. high places--dedicated to idols.
of Isaac--They boasted of their following the example of their forefather Isaac, in erecting high places at Beer-sheba ( Amos 5:5 ; compare Genesis 26:23 Genesis 26:24 , 46:1 ); but he and Abraham erected them before the temple was appointed at Jerusalem--and to God; whereas they did so, after the temple had been fixed as the only place for sacrifices--and to idols. In the Hebrew here "Isaac" is written with s, instead of the usual ts; both forms mean "laughter"; the change of spelling perhaps expresses that their "high places of Isaac" may be well so called, but not as they meant by the name; for they are only fit to be laughed at in scorn. Probably, however, the mention of "Isaac" and "Israel" simply expresses that these names, which their degenerate posterity boasted in as if ensuring their safety, will not save them and their idolatrous "sanctuaries" on which they depended from ruin (compare Amos 8:14 ).
house of Jeroboam with . . . sword--fulfilled in the extinction of Zachariah, son of Jeroboam II, the last of the descendants of Jeroboam I, who had originated the idolatry of the calves ( 2 Kings 15:8-10 ).
Amos 7:10-17 . AMAZIAH'S CHARGE AGAINST AMOS: HIS DOOM FORETOLD.
10. priest of Beth-el--chief priest of the royal sanctuary to the calves at Beth-el. These being a device of state policy to keep Israel separate from Judah. Amaziah construes Amos words against them as treason. So in the case of Elijah and Jeremiah ( 1 Kings 18:17 , Jeremiah 37:13 Jeremiah 37:14 ). So the antitype Jesus was charged ( John 19:12 ); political expediency being made in all ages the pretext for dishonoring God and persecuting His servants ( John 11:48-50 ). So in the case of Paul ( Acts 17:6 Acts 17:7 , 24:5 ).
in the midst of . . . Israel--probably alluding to Amos' own words, "in the midst of . . . Israel" ( Amos 7:8 ), foretelling the state's overthrow to the very center. Not secretly, or in a corner, but openly, in the very center of the state, so as to upset the whole utterly.
land is not able to bear all his words--They are so many and so intolerable. A sedition will be the result. The mention of his being "priest of Beth-el" implies that it was for his own priestly gain, not for the king or state, he was so keen.
11. Jeroboam shall die, &c.--Amos had not said this: but that "the house of Jeroboam" should fall "with the sword" ( Amos 7:9 ). But Amaziah exaggerates the charge, to excite Jeroboam against him. The king, however, did not give ear to Amaziah, probably from religious awe of the prophet of Jehovah.
12. Also--Besides informing the king against Amos, lest that course should fail, as it did, Amaziah urges the troublesome prophet himself to go back to his own land Judah, pretending to advise him in friendliness.
seer--said contemptuously in reference to Amos visions which precede.
there eat bread--You can earn a livelihood there, whereas remaining here you will be ruined. He judges of Amos by his own selfishness, as if regard to one's own safety and livelihood are the paramount considerations. So the false prophets ( Ezekiel 13:19 ) were ready to say whatever pleased their hearers, however false, for "handfuls of barley and pieces of bread."
13. prophesy not again--( Amos 2:12 ).
at Beth-el--Amaziah wants to be let alone at least in his own residence.
the king's chapel--Beth-el was preferred by the king to Dan, the other seat of the calf-worship, as being nearer Samaria, the capital, and as hallowed by Jacob of old ( Genesis 28:16 Genesis 28:19 , Genesis 35:6 Genesis 35:7 ). He argues by implication against Amos' presumption, as a private man, in speaking against the worship sanctioned by the king, and that in the very place consecrated to it for the king's own devotions.
king's court--that is, residence: the seat of empire, where the king holds his court, and which thou oughtest to have reverenced. Samaria was the usual king's residence: but for the convenience of attending the calf-worship, a royal palace was at Beth-el also.
14. I was no prophet--in answer to Amaziah's insinuation ( Amos 7:12 ), that he discharged the prophetical office to earn his "bread" (like Israel's mercenary prophets). So far from being rewarded, Jehovah's prophets had to expect imprisonment and even death as the result of their prophesying in Samaria or Israel: whereas the prophets of Baal were maintained at the king's expense (compare 1 Kings 18:19 ). I was not, says Amos, of the order of prophets, or educated in their schools, and deriving a livelihood from exercising the public functions of a prophet. I am a shepherd (compare Amos 7:15 , "flock"; the Hebrew for "herdsman" includes the meaning, shepherd, compare Amos 1:1 ) in humble position, who did not even think of prophesying among you, until a divine call impelled me to it.
prophet's son--that is, disciple. Schools of prophets are mentioned first in First Samuel; in these youths were educated to serve the theocracy as public instructors. Only in the kingdom of the ten tribes is the continuance of the schools of the prophets mentioned. They were missionary stations near the chief seats of superstition in Israel, and associations endowed with the Spirit of God; none were admitted but those to whom the Spirit had been previously imparted. Their spiritual fathers travelled about to visit the training schools, and cared for the members and even their widows ( 2 Kings 4:1 2 Kings 4:2 ). The pupils had their common board in them, and after leaving them still continued members. The offerings which in Judah were given by the pious to the Levites, in Israel went to the schools of the prophets ( 2 Kings 4:42 ). Prophecy (for example, Elijah and Elisha) in Israel was more connected with extraordinary events than in Judah, inasmuch as, in the absence of the legal hierarchy of the latter, it needed to have more palpable divine sanction.
sycamore--abounding in Palestine. The fruit was like the fig, but inferior; according to PLINY, a sort of compound, as the name expresses, of the fig and the mulberry. It was only eaten by the poorest (compare 1 Kings 10:27 ).
gatherer--one occupied with their cultivation [MAURER]. To cultivate it, an incision was made in the fruit when of a certain size, and on the fourth day afterwards it ripened [PLINY, Natural History, 13.7,14]. GROTIUS from JEROME says, if it be not plucked off and "gathered" (which favors English Version), it is spoiled by gnats.
15. took me as I followed the flock--So David was taken ( 2 Samuel 7:8 , Psalms 78:70 Psalms 78:71 ). Messiah is the antitypical Shepherd ( Psalms 23:1-6 John 10:1-18 ).
unto my people--"against" [MAURER]; so Amos 7:16 . Jehovah claims them still as His by right, though slighting His authority. God would recover them to His service by the prophet's ministry.
16. drop--distil as the refreshing drops of rain ( Deuteronomy 32:2 , Ezekiel 21:2 ; compare Micah 2:6 Micah 2:11 ).
17. Thy wife shall be an harlot in the city--that is, shall be forced by the enemy, while thou art looking on, unable to prevent her dishonor ( Isaiah 13:16 , Lamentations 5:11 ). The words, "saith the Lord," are in striking opposition to "Thou sayest ( Amos 7:16 ).
divided by line--among the foe.
a polluted land--Israel regarded every foreign land as that which really her own land was now, "polluted" ( Isaiah 24:5 , Jeremiah 2:7 ).
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Standard Wearing Parts
Plough bodies on Dowdeswell machines have always been a customer specified option. Almost any plough can be fitted with any of the body options available. In the early years many ploughs were supplied without bodies and the customer supplied their own either from an older plough or from another plough manufacturer.
Up until 1993 most bodies fitted from the factory were supplied by Ramsomes, but with the acquisition of mouldboard manufacturing machinery from the Ramsomes Steel case plant in Wales production of our own body, the DD became possible. Dowdeswell manufactured versions of the still popular UCN, SCN, YCN and RCN bodies still continue with some modifications and upgrades. For full details of plough body modifications see the “plough body parts history” section.
Since then the “DDS” a shallower version of the DD and the “D Slat” have been developed to add to the range of bodies available. Special bodies are also available usually for export ploughs.
Range of Bodies:
As with other body parts the first skim body assemblies were purchased direct from Ransomes. The skim shank was always manufactured by Dowdeswell.
Due to supply problems Dowdeswell’s own skim body the "J" type was introduced in 1974. The "K" skim option for fast ploughing with wheeled tractors was introduced in 1985. Both types of skim body use the same wearing parts and the same clamping bolts. All "round" skim shanks use the same U-bolt fixing and clamp block.
With the development of new models of plough new skim shanks were required to cope with different beam sizes and growing under beam clearances. Ploughs with over 29" underbeam required shanks with a re-enforcing plate down the back.
Optional skim wings were developed to cope with different soil and trash conditions. In 1996 the "XL" skim became standard on all new ploughs
The DF 130 was the first model with a square skim as standard. Due to the popularity of the "square" skim. A retrofit version was introduced for older ploughs in 1997.
Further detailed information on skim assemblies can be found in the "Skim History Guide".
Range of Bodies:
- Ransomes Skim
- Round Skim
- Square Skim
The disc and disc hub fitted to all Dowdeswell ploughs has been the same since 1975. There is an option of plain or cutaway discs, plain usually being better for grassland and cutaway preferred on stubble or when there is a high volume of trash. Standard discs are 18” (460mm) diameter although there is a 20” option, but this can only be fitted to a longer disc arm. The disc mounting assembly and disc arm are usually specific to the plough model and can be found in the individual plough parts books on the products page. All discs have shear bolt protection, see the shear bolt section for details.
All plough bodies and disc arms on Dowdeswell ploughs are fitted with shear bolt protection. To avoid SERIOUS damage it is essential that the correct shear bolts are fitted. Usage of the incorrect shear bolts can nullify warranty.
To ease indentification all shear bolts are colour coded. See Shear bolt guide to identify the correct shear bolt for your plough.
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| 0.942386 | 712 | 1.546875 | 2 |
|Uploaded:||September 1, 2009|
|Updated:||January 31, 2010|
There is a character that is part of the Sonic franchise that I just had to do a tutorial on. I received a request to do a lesson on “how to draw Dark Chao step by step”. Dark Chao is a specie of Chao that is has five different types. The basic Chao is black with red markings and a swirl like spiked shape that has a floating ball above. To obtain a Chao there are some things that you must do first. You have to go to Chao World to find a series of Chao boxes. To get to Chao World you have to find a box that has a key inside. Open the Chao box and retrieve the key which will automatically take you to Chao World. Once in the new world you have to find the second box that contains four different animals. The last box will be the box that gets you into Chao Gardens. Once in Chao Gardens you will see two eggs and one of these eggs will contain your new Chao. After that all you need to do I hatch it. You can hatch your egg by throwing it, shaking it, or leaving it alone. To get a Dark Chao you have to treat it nice while having dark characteristics. You can also turn your Chao dark by treating it very badly along with your hero characters. Chao’s are very popular in the Sonic game series. I had fun drawing out this character because he was super easy and he came out wicked cute. I hope you guys like this tutorial on “how to draw Dark Chao step by step”. I will be back with two more lessons so keep your eyes open to see what pops up next. Peace out fellow artists and happy drawing!
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A collection of news and information related to Learning Disability published by this site and its partners.
Displaying items 1-12 of 337 » View mcall.com items only1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11-29 Next >
When Annette Hickey's son was diagnosed with autism, her family paid $160,000 over the next four years to help him learn how to speak and be prepared for elementary school. Now that he's 8 years old and doesn't even know he has autism, his mother wants...
HealthYears ago, when I was a student at Penn State, a NORML activist cornered me and tried to talk me into supporting the “legalize marijuana” cause. Keep in mind that this was many years before the state of California approved the use of medical...
Capitol Ideas with John L. MicekGood Monday Morning, Fellow Seekers. The state Department of Education has rejected a request to take control of the financially troubled Vitalisitc Therapeutic Charter School in the Lehigh Valley, our Mothership colleague Steve Esack reports this...
Lehigh Valley ParentingQ: My 7–year-old son was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and I am very confused. I was told that many of his behaviors are related to the Asperger’s, but I still get frustrated when he doesn’t listen or won’t stop...
[email protected] and graduates exchanged hugs, high-fives and smiles on-stage Wednesday morning as more than 200 people celebrated the graduation of students from the Washington County Job Development Program and Marshall Street School. As each graduate was...
ReutersFRANKFURT (Reuters) - German software company SAP is looking to recruit people with autism as programmers and product testers, drawing on skills that can include a close attention to detail and an ability to solve complex problems. SAP has asked start-up...
Add three concerts, a ballet performance and a new party for an autism group to the traditional Memorial Day salutes to veterans in the city and county. Organizers are counting on families sticking around for the long weekend instead of getting out of...
Tags: Music, High Schools, Autism, Fort Lauderdale, Memorial Day
Regarding your article about the teen girl accused of plotting her father's murder with her boyfriend ("Troubled child on a dark path," May 19), I found the article filled with misleading information and misinformation. First, the article tells us she...
Tags: Family, Autism, Mental Health, Ellicott City, Mental Illness
The Philadelphia InquirerWith its imposing, Victorian-era buildings and leafy, college-like campus, the Vineland Developmental Center was in its time a state-of-the-art institution for treating young women with complex mental and emotional disorders. At its peak in the late...
Scott Beck By John P. Huston,Tribune reporter Scott Beck's brain isn't the only instrument he uses to help him excel at math and science. Beck, a Highland Park High School senior, turns to the French horn to "kind of keep me balanced and keep me...
Tags: Music, Mathematics, Autism, Teachers, Applied Physics
Morgan Lane Arnold, an emotionally frail 14-year-old freshman, navigated the hallways of her Howard County high school each day filled with anxiety, unable because of a learning disorder to decipher the social cues, jokes and emotions of her peers. Her...
Tags: Catonsville, Autism, Mental Health, Trials, Students
Go to a busy street in your community and count the next 25 adolescents who walk, bike, skateboard, stroll or saunter past. Odds are that two of those 25 kids (8.3% to be exact) would own up to having experienced 14 or more days in the last month that...
Tags: Depression, Mental Health, Autism, Mental Illness, Demographics
Apr 25, 2013 |Story| Allentown Morning Call
Nov 8, 2012 | Allentown Morning Call
Oct 22, 2012 | Allentown Morning Call
Feb 25, 2012 | Allentown Morning Call
May 22, 2013 |Story| Herald Mail
May 22, 2013 |Story| Reuters
May 22, 2013 |Story| South Florida Sun-Sentinel
May 21, 2013 |Story| Baltimore Sun
May 20, 2013 |Story| McClatchy-Tribune
May 17, 2013 |Story| Chicago Tribune
May 18, 2013 |Story| Baltimore Sun
May 17, 2013 |Story| Los Angeles Times
Original site for Learning Disability topic gallery.
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Welcome to the £2.5m hi-tech eco-home with motion sensor lighting, fresh air pumps and even its own underground reservoir
An ambitious developer has spent more than £1million turning his unassuming 1960s home into a futuristic eco-friendly pad fit for James Bond.
Visionary Nick Sandy, 59, spent 18 months transforming his large detached property into an environmentalist's dream.
His luxury home features motion sensors which flick on the lights when guests walk into rooms and fans that pump fresh air round the house every two hours.
Green: Nick Sandy shows off his futuristic £1m eco-home which features solar panels on the roof and even a rain harvester under the lawn
It also boasts a heat recovery system, solar panels on the roof and even a rain water harvester underneath the back garden.
When Mr Sandy first bought the property it cost him £3,500-a-year to run in gas and electricity - but now his bills come to just £1,000.
He said: 'I want to show people how easily this can be done. We now have a great, comfortable home to live in which meets all our needs for both work and family life.
Unassuming: How the property looked in 2008 before Mr Sandy began the spending spree which turned it into an environmentalist's dream
Drab: The front of the 1960s home in Bath, Somerset before it had the eco make-over which now sees it valued at £2.5m
Modern: The home had more than a lick of cream paint - energy-saving features have cut the monthly bill from £3,500 to £1,000
'I would say I am a green with a small ''g''. The modifications we have made are saving us a fortune - I would encourage anyone to give it a go.'
Mr Sandy has spent more than £1million transforming the two single and two double bedroom Chelsfield house, in Bath, Somerset, into a five double-bedroom home.
The father-of-one paid £10,000 for solar panels that generate electricity and manage the water supply. He then installed motion sensors in each of the rooms.
The sensors turn up the heating and flick on the lights when guests walk into rooms and even reduce the temperature when windows are opened.
Cool: Mr Sandy stands in the living room of the home, which despite the traditional look has fresh air pumped into it every two hours
Complex: The computer system which manages the heating levels throughout the home and makes the necessary adjustments
Efficient: The digital thermostat displays the times, the outside temperature and the temperature inside the property
Mr Sandy insulated all the walls of his home and installed a rain water harvester underneath his lawn - which he uses to supply his toilets and washing machine.
A heat recovery system takes in stale air from the property's bathrooms and turns it into fresh air - pumping it around the house every two hours.
Mr Sandy's dream home, where he lives with wife Sue and landscape architect son Will has even caught the eye of Government inspectors, who visited the property last week.
Mr Sandy in the modern kitchen of his home. Right, the solar thermal system in the eco house
Clean and chrome: The stylish kitchen in the eco-home - complete with motion sensor lights which activate when somebody enters the room
The 1960s home now cuts an impressive looking out to the sprawling hills in Bath, Somerset
Fiona Gruber, from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), said: 'The point of the visit was to see the work that had been carried out.
'We wanted to spread the word within DECC about the energy-saving features of the house.
'It is nice to see what he has done and it shows that it can be achieved. This house is fantastic and I am really impressed.'
Mr Sandy, who runs Bath-based housing development company ST8, has now put his eco-home on the market for £2.5 million.
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