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In a previous issue of Microwaves & RF magazine, an incorrect statement saying Polyfet RF Devices is no longer in business was made. In actuality, nothing can be further from the truth. Polyfet RF Devices is alive and doing well.
Polyfet RF Devices has been manufacturing RF power MOSFETs since the company's inception in 1987. Our company has met many industry milestones since that time. In 1995 we were one of the few companies in the world that developed a line of LDMOS power devices. Around that same time, the company released its second generation of VDMOS power devices (the S-series). Later in 2009, Polyfet introduced its line of 50-V LDMOS devices. Currently, we are the only manufacturer in the world that has a line of LDMOS devices in small, push-pull packages. Our most recent product is a family of gallium nitride (GaN) power transistors. Some of our GaN devices have been released for production, while others are in engineering. Our engineering parts are hitting greater than 80% efficiencies at 3-dB compression (P3dB) under Class AB CW conditions.
In the late 1990s we introduced our first power module, called the PCM001. It provided 15 W across 30 to 470 MHz with 27 dB gain. Since that time, we have released roughly 20 different broadband power modules reaching 300 W and 1 GHz.
The most common use for our product is military communications and related applications. Roughly 70% of our business is with the military market. The relationships with our military customers have stayed so strong over the years for a few reasons. One is the fact that we keep our product in production for long terms. Another reason is the quality and consistency of our parts. Finally, there is our commitment to providing technical support in the way of working closely with engineers or providing demonstration amplifiers for evaluation.
As far as our financial health is concerned, we are well positioned for long-term survival. We have been profitable every year since 1990. Polyfet holds no long-term debt. We own our building and all of our capital equipment outright. Our cash account is healthy, which enables us to continue to invest in R&D. By the end of 2011 we plan to release more GaN devices and some power modules using our GaN devices.
I trust that I was able to extinguish any beliefs or concerns that Polyfet RF Devices no longer exists. To all of our customers, we thank you for your business.
Polyfet RF Devices | <urn:uuid:ed1d0ee6-43ea-41e0-ba4b-17088c5ced71> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mwrf.com/print/content/alive-and-thriving | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959516 | 523 | 1.78125 | 2 |
This a truly remarkable collection, 18 million parish records dating from 1538 to 1980 from over a 1000 Greater London parishes have today been published on Ancestry.co.uk.
Part of the London Historical Records, 1500s-1900s collection published in partnership with London Metropolitan Archives and the Guildhall Library Manuscripts, this is really going to be a great asset to family history research. I can see that these indexed images are going to open up so much new information that was previously hidden within the sprawling mass that was/is London.
Speaking from personal experience I know how easy it is to lose people in London, but my first search in the new collection turned up three of the six missing baptisms for children of my 3x great grandfather Thomas KINGHORN, including the elusive Wybrants KINGHORN (recorded here as Webrens).
Given time I will no doubt be able to take this further and find the other three baptisms and I am sure marriages and burials will also follow. For now I have not only baptism dates, but birth dates and two new addresses (both in Upper Charlton Street, St Mary-le-bone) for the KINGHORN family.
Just like London itself I can see it is going to take some time to find my way around, and I think I could quite easily get lost in this collection for days on end. | <urn:uuid:104e78ec-797d-499d-9686-d39e6206771b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wanderinggenealogist.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/18-million-parish-records-from-greater-london-parishes-published-today-on-ancestry-co-uk/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=39eb77acf0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954843 | 282 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Breakneck Ridge Trail
Location: Hudson Highlands State Park
Length: 2.8 miles
While not as steep a trek as climbing the Empire State Building’s stairwell, the Breakneck Ridge Trail hike will give New Yorkers a run for their money. Only an hour north via the Metro-North Hudson Line, the hike is considered one of the most strenuous hikes in the East Hudson Highlands, but also the most rewarding. Take in panoramic views of the Hudson River as you rise over 1,600 vertical feet in less than three miles. Uphill travel and occasional rock scrambling is broken up by several lookout spots offering views of the Hudson Valley’s bounty, including Storm King Mountain and Bannerman’s Castle. Hikers should follow the Breakneck Ridge Trail’s white blazes until they meet up with the Wilkinson Memorial Trail’s yellow blazes leading back down to the road (the total loop is 2.8 miles). As always, hikers should not travel alone and should bring proper footwear and water as this hike is technical at times.
GETTING THERE: From Grand Central Station, take the Metro-North Hudson Line to Cold Spring station and walk north along 9D until reaching the trailhead. On weekends, there is a train to Breakneck Ridge station, which is slightly north of the trailhead along 9D.
TRAVEL TIME: About 60 minutes. | <urn:uuid:0488a54c-410f-4f99-86e9-982dbbc1d318> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.outsideonline.com/adventure-travel/The-Top-Outdoor-Adventures-Via-Public-Transportation-New-York-City.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936817 | 288 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Category Archives: Open Shop
Jon Kushigian joined the Makerspace last month as a volunteer woodshop setter-upper and operator, and he has been making incredible progress in transforming a basement storage room into a bright and usable workspace. It is amazing to see how much has … Continue reading
Through a Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) grant received through our partnership with the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, we received four new iMacs complete with video and audio editing software!! As you can see, the group at our Tuesday OpenShop … Continue reading
This past Tuesday’s OpenShop, we started to clear out the room behind the computer lab so it can be turned into our Makerspace workshop. It was a very dirty and heavy job, but with help from many of our super resourceful students … Continue reading
We had a slow Saturday openshop so we decided to upgrade the wireless network in the basement. Like most things involving IT, this took longer than expected; but with Edmund’s help we soon got it running again.
This past Thursday, reporters from “Die Ziet” in germany were at the Makerspace to see what we and others in the community were up to. Raven was happy to show them around the shop and also how to solder! Thanks … Continue reading
Elishah helped out by teaching a group how to solder with the MAKE solder badge.
One more week of open shop time before we start to more into longer classes. This open shop was filled with many interesting things all going on at once. Such as rebuilding old computers: And making ROBOTS! | <urn:uuid:33db9a6d-b2b5-42f8-b280-fec9ad900f26> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mtelliottmakerspace.com/category/open-shop/?afg0_page_id=292 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972665 | 335 | 1.789063 | 2 |
World oil prices rebounded this evening, reversing earlier losses on news of falling petrol inventories in the United States and ahead of the US central bank's interest rate decision and outlook.
London Brent jumped $2.34 to $113.29 a barrel, while US crude added 46 cents to $94.63 a barrel.
Petrol stockpiles fell by 500,000 barrels in the week ending June 17, the US government's Department of Energy (DoE) announced. That compared with analysts' forecasts for a gain of 800,000 barrels.
Petrol figures are closely watched in the US peak-demand driving season, as many Americans hit the road for their holidays.
Crude reserves sank 1.7 million barrels last week, much more than forecasts for a drop of 800,000 barrels. The drops in reserves are a sign of strengthening demand.
The weekly report is a crucial focus for the the oil market because the US is the world's biggest crude consuming nation. The DoE added that distillates, which include diesel and heating fuel, rose 1.2 million barrels last week. | <urn:uuid:f89342c2-5b23-42fd-827d-db57f01ef000> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rte.ie/news/business/2011/0622/302682-oil/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955673 | 225 | 1.585938 | 2 |
A journey of wide discovery about our food and sustainable agriculture.
Coming next, Kelly Meyers of Xico demonstrates how to make a quick variation of enchiladas, and Anthony Boutard takes us into his world as he shares his knowledge and passion about corn.
Bill Zimmerman, a small farmer in Vancouver, Washington talks about the approaching urban growth boundary (UGB) that may soon encompass his farm.
Fall is a busy time of year on Bi-Zi Farms, and is marked by their annual public harvest festival they refer to as The Pumpkin Patch designed to entertain families of all ages.
Halloween is fast approaching, and Robin Hassett of the Dessert Tray bakery shows us how to decorate a scary fondant cake.
Coming next: a look at Food.Farmer Earth upcoming episodes on the theme of halloween. Robin Hassett, of The Dessert Tray, sets a spooky graveyard scene on a halloween cake. A farm in Washington State gears up for its annual harvest public celebration.
Manuel Recio, of Viridian Farms, takes us on a guided tour of the many star attractions, his Basque peppers, that are growing on his Dayton, Oregon farm.
When Manuel Recio and his wife, Leslie Lukas-Recio, had the sudden opportunity to buy her family’s farm on Grand Island in Oregon, they saw it as an opportunity to work for themselves as well as a way to include their love of food and the culture of Spain.
Tucked away in a nondescript section of downtown Beaverton— a stones throw from Portland, Oregon— there’s a small, cozy restaurant that is known for their Central American cuisine. When in season, one of their signature dishes are authentic tamales made from fresh, roasted peppers. | <urn:uuid:0383d01d-47a2-4057-94ec-c9bac51ff81d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cookingupastory.com/category/ffe/page/12 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966729 | 370 | 1.546875 | 2 |
We’re a group of engaged and curious thinkers who understand that ideas matter. The Center for Humans and Nature partners with some of the brightest minds in ethical thinking...Learn more.
Curt Meine, Ph.D., is a conservation biologist, historian, and writer. He received his bachelor’s degree in English and History from DePaul University in Chicago and his graduate degrees in Land Resources from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During his conservation career over the last twenty years, Meine has worked on projects involving topics ranging from biodiversity conservation planning, sustainable agriculture, and international development, to crane and wetland conservation, prairie restoration, and development of community-based conservation programs. He has worked in Europe, Asia, and across North America, in partnership with organizations including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Conservation Union, the World Wildlife Fund, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. He has served on the Board of Governors of the Society of Conservation Biology and on the editorial boards of the journals Conservation Biology and Environmental Ethics.
Meine has edited and authored several books. His biography Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1988, was the first full-length biography of Leopold, and was named Book of the Year by the Forest History Society. He has edited the volumes The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries and Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision. His most recent book is Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation (Island Press). Meine is a recipient of the Bay Foundation’s Biodiversity Leadership Award and the Quivira Coalition’s Outstanding Conservation Leadership Award.
In addition to his work with the Center for Humans and Nature, Meine currently serves as Senior Fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and as Research Associate with the International Crane Foundation, also located in Baraboo. He is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is active locally as a founding member of the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance in Sauk County, Wisconsin.
Curt Meine is featured in the podcast from Sense and Sustainability: Fresh Perspectives on Sustainable Development. | <urn:uuid:0d183928-100a-4636-b673-09c1906e8a1f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.humansandnature.org/curt-meine--ph-d--people-36.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949784 | 507 | 1.75 | 2 |
Things Are True
by Pastor Dan Coburn
The day Timothy McVey was executed, he handed a copy of the following poem to the warden. It is, to me, a striking testimony of defiance in an age that exalts defiance. The poem is entitled “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul.
Sometime later, a very Godly woman named Dorothea Day wrote this in response; “Out of the night that dazzles me Bright as the sun from pole to pole,
I thank the God I know to be for Christ the Conqueror of my soul.
Since His the sway of circumstance, I would not wince nor cry aloud.
Under that rule which men call chance My head with Joy is humbly bowed.
Beyond this place of sin and tears That life with Him! And His the aid,
Despite the menace of the years, Keeps, and shall Keep me unafraid.
I have no fear, though straight the gate, He cleared from punishment the scroll
Christ is the master of my fate, Christ is the Captain of my soul.
Do you see how these two views are diametrically opposed? No wonder 1st Corr. 1:18 says “the word of the cross is foolishness to them that are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God unto salvation”. Ultimately, every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. (Phil. 2:10-11). No matter how or where it happens, it is going to happen. For some of us, it will be great joy through tear filled eyes as faith becomes sight and we marvel at the fact that He is more incredibly splendid than we had ever imagined. For others, it will be an indescribable feeling of doom, separation and loss, capped off by hopelessness. It truly is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of God’s wrath.
Let’s turn the Spiritual Switch. It is after all Christmas time, so what’s all the fuss about this time of year? Do you believe in Christmas? Do you believe in God? Do these questions make you uncomfortable? Do you believe God? The shepherds did. You know, the he-man, in their fields abiding shepherds you have sung about since you were little? After the light show, and all the angels and spontaneous uncontrollable singing and praise, and after the (he-man) shepherds could walk again they said what? “Let’s go to town and see if this is true”? NO! They said this as recorded in Luke 2:15 “Let us now go even unto Beth-lehem and see this thing which has come to pass”.
You see they believed God. “Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness”–Romans 4:3. Believing in God isn’t enough. He knows He exists. He wants you to Believe Him, and you get to decide right now if you do or not. Which poem will you recite in eternity? Merry Christmas. | <urn:uuid:cc5c4aaf-535d-406a-9c57-f338f03ffa61> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cottonwoodchronicle.com/2005/121505/whatsoever.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950822 | 793 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Carroll County Times
WESTMINSTER, Md. - Sydney and Kendal Joyce stood at the front of the camp pavilion to prepare for their above water synchronized swimming talent. From her wheelchair, Sydney joined Kendal in a longtime camp song.
"Baby shark do doo doo doo doo do," the two began singing as they made jaws out of their two hands. Their song was met with a round of applause.
Sydney and Kendal are 13-year-old twins, but they have a stark difference. Sydney suffers from cerebral palsy, and has difficulties after a brain bleed and a stroke both affected her right side.
The two attend different schools, and Kendal is in eighth grade, while Sydney is in seventh grade. Like many siblings, they have different interests, but they are able to get together once a year for the Kennedy Krieger Institute's Camp S.O.A.R., or Sibling Outdoor Adventure Retreat.
The Hashawha Environmental Center in Westminster was filled with campers recently as parents joined their children for their annual talent show. Camp S.O.A.R. began three years ago, through the Kennedy Krieger Institute.
Around half of the 34 campers were patients at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, which helps children and adolescents with brain, spinal cord and musculoskeletal disorders or injuries. The other half of the campers are siblings who join in for the weekend-long camp.
"I work in the inpatient unit and we just noticed a discord between siblings," Kelley Marcue, the camp director and therapist at Kennedy Krieger said. "We noticed that sometimes the siblings didn't know how to play or interact or have fun with their siblings. We chose to have this camp to let them know everyone can have fun regardless of their ability."
This year's theme of Camp S.O.A.R. was the Olympics. It featured opening ceremonies, creating edible Olympic rings and torches, and family Olympics, where families created various home decorations from family trees, decorating photo frames.
"Seeing how (the campers are) working together and seeing how creative they are has been one of the most touching things," Marcue said.
Sydney and Kendal have been attending the camp since it began three years ago. Kendal attends many camps in the summer, including cooking camps and cop camps. Kendal said what is the most different about the Kennedy Krieger Institute is the two girls are able to do the camp together.
"She mainly is like go off and do your own thing, I don't need you, and so she goes and I go and do my own thing," Sydney said.
Sydney and Kendal's father, Tony, said this weekend is great for the girls because Kendal doesn't feel quite as compelled to become a caretaker for Sydney.
"One of the challenges for the siblings is oftentimes when the siblings are at home; they also help be caretakers for their brothers and sisters. So here it's just time for them to have fun as well and be taken care of and be waited on," said Elisa Delia, assistant administrator of Kennedy Krieger.
Jose Quiroz, 12, came to the camp with his sister Marisol, also 12, who suffers from encephalitis, a brain injury that causes inflammation of brain tissue. This was their first year at the camp.
Jose participated in the talent show to make a human knot with the camp counselors, even though his sister didn't feel like it. There were 66 volunteers, so typically each child had two counselors with them.
The kids pulled pranks on each other in their separate boys and girls cabins. The girls from Kendal's cabin toilet papered the boy's cabin's bed. The girls from Marisol's cabin set off the megaphone alarm button while the boys were going to bed.
Jose goes to many camps, but said he definitely wants to come back to this one next year.
"It's a good weekend for them to spend together. This is a good time at least once a year where they can appreciate each other," Tony Joyce, said.
Information from: Carroll County Times of Westminster, Md., http://www.carrollcounty.com/
(Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
How much did a painting of a topless "Golden Girl" fetch?
An 800-pound alligator? That's not bad for a first hunting trip.
More cursing happens in Maryland than across the Potomac River.
How did a photographer get an inside view of a bear's mouth? (Video) | <urn:uuid:02eac4f4-7d5a-443c-9947-d6cbfd43c294> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wtop.com/41/2956421/Camp-serves-children-with-disabilities-siblings- | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974398 | 984 | 1.84375 | 2 |
|Simply Southern: With a Dash of Kosher Soul|
by Margolin Hebrew Academy
Memphis, Tennessee, is the home of Elvis, BBQ, the blues and Margolin Hebrew Academy − the only Orthodox Day School in this Southern city.
The Jewish Day School was founded in 1949 and has educated three generations of this family, which includes Dena Wruble, her father, and now her children. Dena is co-editor of the cookbook, Simply Southern: With a Dash of Kosher Soul. And a lot of kosher soul, hard work, and love—by a dedicated committee—went into creating and publishing the cookbook as a fundraiser for the school.
This is the third incarnation of the cookbook. Dena's grandmother worked on the first cookbook, which grew out of a collection of recipes stored in index boxes. Before the first book, "the recipes were passed along in index boxes that the ladies of the school sold. Every Sunday, volunteers went into school and cooked and sold food to the public to raise money for the school. They also organized a cooking school that took place at different homes...it was a fun activity and helped support the school through additional card box sales." Dena has a copy of that first book, published in 1977 and simply titled, Cookbook, Presented by the South Women's Auxiliary. It was printed in black and white, written on a typewriter, and had hand drawn artwork. The book was updated once.
Dena is also involved in fundraising for the school and told us, "We needed a project that would have a market appeal outside of Memphis." So several years ago, they decided to update the cookbook. Using the original book and the index boxes as a starting point, "we pulled out the best of the best that people still loved and use and put a new modern, updated, southern twist on it," said Dena. "Memphis has no kosher restaurants, so everyone entertains." The committee put out a call for Southern recipes and received 1,500 responses. "We hit a core that no one had seen and everyone wanted to contribute."
The result of their hard work is this wonderful cookbook, Simply Southern: With a Dash of Kosher Soul. A collection of 250 recipes that provides personal glimpses into the life and soul of this vibrant Jewish community – Memphis, Tennessee. The recipes are heirlooms, passed down by oral tradition, printed in the school’s weekly newsletter and emailed between best friends. There are Southern recipes turned kosher and kosher recipes turned Southern. Each chapter has a narrative telling the story of a kosher southern cook, their love of Jewish soul food, and their ties to Memphis. It is a delightful glimpse into the life and times of Memphis, past and present.
The book is beautifully done and a welcome addition to the kosher kitchen. The cookbook committee states it perfectly, "It has taken us years to collect, test, retest, tweak and perfect these recipes. We are ready to share them with y’all; welcome into our simply Southern homes! "
A KosherEye "gift yourself, gift others" selection. Sales benefit the Margolin Hebrew Academy. To purchase Simply Southern: With a Dash of Kosher Soul please visit their website, SimplySoutherCookbook.net.
August 25, 2011 | <urn:uuid:0480b56a-c78a-4711-8b00-67f8f2826da9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://koshereye.com/koshereye-features/cookbooks/1179-simply-southern-with-a-dash-of-kosher-soul.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968854 | 685 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Photos and VideosMore Photos and Videos
One Manhattan judge is so fed up with seeing teenagers' backsides in his courtroom that he’s taped a notice to the defense table that reads: “Pull Up Pants.”
It’s unusual for judges to implement wardrobe regulations, but Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Eduardo Padro, who hears cases primarily involving teenagers, tells The New York Post his ordinance is about encouraging defendants to look the part if they want another chance.
“One of the things I’m a stickler about is that they need to carry themselves appropriately, dress appropriately and learn how to address people properly,” Padro told the paper. “It’s about respect.”
If they don't comply, Padro may return them to their holding cells to regroup or comment on the impropriety of their attire during the hearing.
For the most part, teenagers in Padro’s courtroom appear to get his message, reports the Post.
Public opposition to saggy pants is increasingly common. President Barack Obama expressed his desire not to see the underwear of those who choose to ride their pants below their hips, and state Sen. Eric Adams posted a similar message on billboards last year. | <urn:uuid:5d5bcfcf-483f-44a9-9fb9-6f7f3d1b7b3f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Saggy-Pants-Judge-Courtroom-Manhattan-Sign-Obama-Eric-Adams-Law-131445143.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952397 | 257 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Let’s go to the movies! OK...its raining cats and dogs but we don’t mind standing in line for five minutes for the luxury of paying ten dollars for a ticket...cause its raining. Let’s get some popcorn and treats! We don’t mind waiting in line another ten minutes to pay six dollars for popcorn, another 4 dollars for chocolate treats and three dollars for a diet Coke (brown drool).
Uh oh...we're now late for the movie! But wait...the movie hasn’t started due to a lineup of poorly produced local ads serving as prologue to a string of previews...all of which hurt my ears (and my eyes). Good thing the sound of crunching popcorn filling my head is louder than the special effects. (Perhaps that is why they make the previews so loud.)
But through it all, the love of movie popcorn makes the whole experience worth it....or at least it did until I stumbled upon this latest research on the salty, buttery treat. A large tub of popcorn at Regal Cinemas, for example, holds 20 cups of popcorn and has 1,200 calories, 980 milligrams of sodium and 60 grams of saturated fat. Adding just a tablespoon of butter adds 130 calories. And don’t forget that it comes with free refills, which nearly everyone gets.
Dude...the medium size popcorn, which comes in a bag, contains the same amount as the large! And even the small, at 11 cups, delivers 670 calories, 550 milligrams of sodium and 24 grams of saturated fat...and I and others have always thought it was relatively healthy snack.
Actually, plain air-popped popcorn is low in calories, free of saturated fat and tastes like the styrofoam peanuts that conveniently are included in every UPS shipment. Movie theater popcorn, however, is popped in oil — often coconut oil, which is 90 percent saturated fat. Add salt to the enormous portions, and your once-healthy snack turns into a health offender.
“The issue here is quantity,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University. “One of those large tubs is three-fourths of a day’s calories.”
One thing is for sure, those hot actors with their perfect bodies are not eating movie popcorn. If Jennifer Anniston is eating popcorn, she is choking down her air popped with copious quantities of imported mineral water. (Air popped...air head? Naw, that’s too easy.)
Well, here we are watching Jen in yet another ultra-light romantic comedy involving either a dog, a monkey or a gold fish. Good thing we can cut the boredom with a package of M&Ms, the 12 oz movie size. Mix these with the popcorn and it adds another 1500 calories.
This salty, sugary mix is very popular with movie goers in eastern North Carolina and LA (lower Alabama) and can replace the daily meal, although it usually augments it.
The sugar and caffeine buzz from the coke and candy, combined with the blood pressure spike from the sodium creates a sort of euphoria that actors like Hugh Grant count on, such that you may be fooled into believing he is actually talented.
I sort of hit the wall on all of this when I donned 3-D glasses for a screening of Piranha! and couldn’t see the fishes teeth because of all the coconut oil smeared on the lenses.
Even worse, I had sworn off movie popcorn, but the glasses smelled of a fresh tub, and made me give in to the urge. I proceeded to eat an entire tub whilst watching the movie in 2D. I left the glasses sort of stuck in the sticky goo that comprises the floor in the theater...along with an imprint of the bottom of my sandal. | <urn:uuid:70a63f05-144f-47da-b7cb-2a1d5680d9b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://whatsupchip.blogspot.com/2010/09/popcorns-dark-secret.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939376 | 798 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Reminiscing About the Night Before
Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos
One of the sorrows of our modern age is that so much of the life one knew in one’s youth has completely disappeared, or is on the verge of disappearing. It wasn’t always like that. For most of human history, one could count on one’s favorite dishes and songs still being around when one became old. Not anymore. One evening recently, thinking about this melancholy subject, I was wondering, for example, what happened to the delicious Manhattan clam chowder that was once on the menu in every restaurant and corner luncheonette in the city, when my mind drifted—first to different neighborhoods in New York where I lived, then to small piano bars, now nearly extinct, where I spent many an evening drinking and listening to music.
Jazz clubs tend to be crowded and noisy, but a small place with a piano player, either solo or accompanied by a bass, makes for the best listening. Large midtown hotels like the Algonquin used to have bars and lounges with pianos, but what I have in mind are neighborhood dives in the Village with no more than a dozen tables where one could drop in late, stay for a set and go home to bed. Over the years, I heard Mary Lou Williams, Tommy Flanagan, Art Hodes, Ralph Sutton, Dick Wellstood, Junior Mance, Hank Jones, Sammy Price, Dave McKenna, Thelonius Monk and many other famous piano players, but an even greater number of anonymous ones who most likely never made a record, and who may have had a regular job during the day. I would be returning home, when at the spur of the moment, not quite ready yet to hit the sack, I would go in. On weekends and in the summer, these places may have been packed, but on a dark and dreary weekday night, one could get a table right next to the piano.
What made it all possible is that there was a repertory of popular songs and jazz tunes going back to the early years of the twentieth century that most Americans were familiar with and enjoyed hearing. In this setting, they were played in a variety of piano styles, in a more or less predictable fashion—emphasizing the melody, and allowing for passages of jazz improvisation. At times, however, a piano player stood out. His playing was subtle, deeply thought-out and original enough to chase away most customers and leave a few appreciative ones to linger till closing time.
In my youth, I was usually too shy to tell them how much I liked their playing, or God-forbid make a request, since, as a rule, they were wary of customers. The tipsy ones were liable to interrupt their playing and ask them for directions to the bathroom, or even worse, ask them to play “Melancholy Baby” for the fifth time that evening. I once heard a red-faced drunk, who was sitting with a young woman who appeared to be sobbing quietly, go up to Ray Bryant and shout: “Hey fellow! How about piping down; you are giving me a goddamn headache.” Consequently, if you summoned the courage to make a request, it better have been for some tune that told them that you were not just another know-nothing idiot. Some of them would nod silently, while others pretended they didn’t hear you, and then play your request an hour later. Of course, it was best to ask them to play the blues, any blues, since that’s the mood they were usually in at the end of a long evening with only a few dollars and some small change in the jar reserved for tips that they kept on the piano.
I once asked an old, tired-looking black man to play James P. Johnson’s “Snowy Morning Blues” and he obliged after first turning around to take a better look at me. That tune was written in New York in 1920s and recorded a couple of times by Johnson himself and a few others. Its name already sets up a scene in one’s imagination. Someone has woken late, drawn open the curtains and found the rooftops and streets covered with snow. It must be a Sunday, because the tune evokes the melancholy and the quiet joy of someone lounging around, reminiscing about the night before. That mixture of emotions is the quality of all the best pop and jazz tunes. If they were only sad, or only happy, they would grow tiresome after a while. Was it Al Capone who expressed the opinion that jazz was better than opera, because it didn’t just go around slobbering?
There are tunes like “Autumn in New York” that obviously evoke the city, but there was also a piano sound, I thought, that one heard only in New York. I don’t mean that the players touched the piano keys any differently than they did in San Francisco. It was the atmosphere of the city with its dark, rain-slicked streets that made it seem so to the listener. These are the hours when one wishes to hear a tune like “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise”, played slowly and soulfully. Both jazz piano and lyric poetry depend on an exquisite sense of timing and phrasing that require one to omit every unnecessary note and word. But poetry can be read later in a book, whereas sublime moments in a club remain only a memory. The piano player stops playing and gets up. We applaud. He mumbles a thank you and hurries to put on his hat, overcoat, and find his umbrella. Everyone is tired after a long day and ready to go home, but there’s always someone who wants to hear one more song. I remember one piano player telling us, after we asked him to play one more: “I’m an old man, folks, and it’s past my bedtime.” Then of course, he sat back at the piano and played us a slow, heart-breaking old blues.
October 27, 2010, 10:10 a.m. | <urn:uuid:ed336bcf-5807-4172-85d2-5f0a66f0c9a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/oct/27/reminiscing-about-night/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979928 | 1,280 | 1.578125 | 2 |
LAHORE: Despite immense potential, the agricultural sector of Pakistan lacks efficiency and global competitiveness, former CEO of Engro Corporation and current member of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Asad Umar said on Wednesday. The loss of efficiency is denting the country’s self sufficiency in production of various farm goods, he asserted.
Umar was giving a presentation to members of the Agricultural Journalists’ Association (AJA) on “Agriculture – a mainstay of Pakistan’s economy”. He claimed that production of various farm products has been as low as 90%, if compared with the global benchmark. Sugarcane yield is 40% lower, wheat yield is 20% lower, non-basmati rice yield is 40% lower, cotton yield is 20% lower and milk yield per animal is 90% lower than global standards, he added.
Pakistan, once dubbed a ‘great bread basket’, is now struggling due to these factors, and has increasingly becoming an importer of a large number of agri-commodities, he noted. At the same time, Pakistan’s agricultural sector also faces larger post-harvest losses of 40-80%, if compared with the global benchmark. This double blow — low output and high losses, diminishes the income of growers further, he explained.
Much to their dismay, agricultural credit disbursement to farmers in Pakistan declined from $3.4 billion in 2007/08 to $3.1 billion in 2010/11, said Umar. During the same period, agricultural credit in India increased from $63.3 billion to $103.4 billion, he said. Agricultural credit in Pakistan is 8% of agri-GDP; while in India, it is 31% of agri-GDP.
Water – a major input for the agricultural sector – was also overlooked; as far as increasing supply for farmers is concerned. Losses of water are as high as 40% before reaching farm gates, Umar complained. He stressed the need to plug these wastages on a priority bases. Emphasising efficient use of water for optimal benefits, Umar said irrigating an additional 5% of land can generate an extra Rs100 billion in farm incomes.
Sharing his vision about farmer cooperatives, Umar said economies of scale in agriculture can be achieved by encouraging formation of vibrant clusters of farmers.
Indian cooperatives receive around 50% of total agricultural credit disbursement and 60% of sugarcane procurement is done by cooperatives, he said. In France, 75% of agricultural producers are members of at least one co-operative, and co-operatives handle 40% of food and agricultural production, he informed.
Existing legislation in Pakistan allows formation of farmer cooperatives which can buy inputs, sell produce and obtain credit for member farmers, he pointed out. Pakistani farmers can benefit from this model by ensuring lending to cooperatives from commercial banks, and the provision of crop insurance.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 10th, 2012.
More in BusinessUS, Japanese markets to remain out of reach | <urn:uuid:923c1f8b-f215-4d47-af24-d29c49b920de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tribune.com.pk/story/376470/agriculture-sector-lacks-efficiency-competitiveness/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955527 | 642 | 1.78125 | 2 |
It is not too often that we do a post on fruit ag news, but we just recently came across an article in the Good Fruit Grower, which is based in my home city of Yakima, Wash.
In the article, a Washington State agricultural economist predicts apple production in the state for 2021. (Washington is by far the largest producer of apples, and for 2012 total apple sales may be close to $2 billion.) For many decades, the largest produced apple in our state was the Red Delicious. However, this variety is expected to decline from 33 million boxes (42 lb.) to 25 million boxes.
The Gala apple will overtake Red Delicious by about 2018 and be the No. 1 variety in 2021 with a production of about 29 million boxes. The Fuji variety will be No. 3 at about 21 million boxes.
The big mover, however, will be the Honeycrisp, which appears to be the current favorite apple with consumers. This variety is expected to jump from the current annual production of about 4 million boxes to well over 13 million boxes in 2021. This apple is probably my favorite one to eat, and we have had several plantings of this variety near our house in the last couple of years.
Let me give you some numbers on potential revenue from Honeycrisp based on current all-time prices. Assume a corn grower is able to get 250 bu. of corn at $7 per bu. This is a gross of about $1,750 per acre, which is probably an all-time high. Some Honeycrisp growers may get production in excess of 100 bins per acre, a pack-out of 14 boxes per bin and $35 or more per box. This equals gross revenue of $49,000 per acre or more in many cases. Before all the corn farmers start growing Honeycrisp, you need to realize that the costs of growing and packing this crop are extremely higher than corn growing.
Total apple production in Washington State is expected to increase from the current 105 to 110 million boxes to about 115 to 130 millon boxes by 2021. Apple growers, like most farmers, are having better revenue years than in the past, but the future trend of production still appears positive. | <urn:uuid:60a83ff0-048e-4a81-a676-06687f6e4de5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.agweb.com/farmjournal/blog/The_Farm_CPA_243/?Year=2012&Month=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957913 | 456 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Is it possible that Magnesium supplements can cause insomnia?
I have been taking magnesium citrate (100mg twice a day) at 9 am and 3 pm. After 4 days on it a developed insomnia for about 3 days in a row. I am not sure if it is magnesium, but I have taken on 2 different weeks and it has been the same story. It is supposed that magnesium helps with insomnia, but I am not sure in my case. Any comments?
Magnesium definiciency and overdose symptoms are the same. Try a lesser dose - the RDA is 6mg/kg of body weight. (Ie - if you're 100 lbs which is 45.45 kg, you would need 272 mg.) Remember that you also get Mg from food sources, and the FDA doesn't require Mg to be listed on the list (some good sources are milk, beans, avocados, yogurt, spinach…etc.) | <urn:uuid:148e12dc-b049-4b0c-99f7-44ed9f2820c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sleepsogood.com/insomnia-info/is-it-possible-that-magnesium-supplements-can-cause-insomnia/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957559 | 190 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Oaxaca México Temple
74th operating temple
Physical AddressAvenida Universidad no. 139
Fraccionamiento Real de Candiani
68130 Oaxaca, Oaxaca
Mailing AddressPouch, Mexico
P.O. Box 30150
Salt Lake City, UT 84130-0150
Telephone: (52) 951-516-9588
Fax: (52) 951-514-0206
Announcement: 23 February 1999
Groundbreaking and Site Dedication: 13 March 1999 by Carl B. Pratt
Public Open House: 28 February–4 March 2000
Dedication: 11 March 2000 by James E. Faust
Site: 1.87 acres (including adjacent meetinghouse).
Exterior Finish: White marble from Torreón, Mexico.
Ordinance Rooms: Two ordinance rooms (two-stage progressive) and two sealing.
Total Floor Area: 10,700 square feet.
Elder Carl B. Pratt of the Seventy and president of the Mexico South Area, who presided at the groundbreaking ceremony, related a declaration by President Brigham Young in 1863. He paraphrased saying, "that the Salt Lake Temple would not be the only temple built, but there would be hundreds of temples on the earth." He added, "Today, we are seeing the fulfillment of this prophecy." In his remarks Elder Pratt stated, "It is impossible to really understand the greatness of this day. I wish we were able to comprehend the existence of a temple standing here, for which we have prepared the way." He described the sacrifices of the early saints who built the Nauvoo Temple and worked day and night even though they knew that they would soon leave it behind as they departed for the west. "They sacrificed all that they had to build that temple," he said. "Today we do not have to sacrifice very much. The Church has the means, and religious intolerance is no longer significant. The Church is respected by those in authority in all the nations of the world. The temple will be a great missionary tool and the day will come when there will not be just three stakes in Oaxaca and three in the nearby Istmo region, but dozens of others, and additional temples. It is my prayer that we examine our lives, study the scriptures, that we may have family prayer, family home evenings, and keep the commandments." He requested that bishops update their lists of members and that they call family history consultants. He said that they should prepare for a great leap forward in missionary work, as well. "This is a historic day, a great day. One in which we need to examine our lives and put them in order. I know that all who have temple recommends are vigilant" (Church News, 20 March 1999). | <urn:uuid:f85ae7bc-f707-4d93-9af4-0243993dcdb7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ldschurchtemples.com/oaxaca/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966765 | 576 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Randy P. Conner, “Rainbow’s Children: Diversity of Gender and Sexuality in African-Diasporic Spiritual Traditions,” in Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World, ed. by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, pp. 145
Randy P. Conner, “Rainbow’s Children: Diversity of Gender and Sexuality in African-Diasporic Spiritual Traditions,” in Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World, ed. by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, pp. 143-144
Roots… I see so many similarities between this Misa and the Ring Shout traditions of the African American south, Hatian Vodun & Shango Baptist ceremony
The Ocha house I came out of was one that veered more towards the Nigerian way of doing things. However the way we cultivated egun/ancestors reflected our Spanish Afro-Carribean Espirtismo inheritances. Eventually our misas became a bit less “old school”. Makes me nostalgic about a time in my life when i was always having to raid the stores for white flowers and cigars nearly every other weekend.
Espiritismo can be really tough at times but so good for keeping your head on straight and able to handle life and not be handled by it…
Oriki Oshun (Yoruba, Translated by Ulli Beier)
Brass and parrot feathers on velvet skin. White cowrie shells on black buttocks. Her eyes sparkle in the forest she is the wisdom of the river. Where the doctor failed she cures with fresh water, where medicine is impotent she cures with cool water.
She cures the child and does not charge the father. She feeds the barren woman with honey and her dry body swells up like a juicy palm fruit.
Oh how sweet is the touch of Oshun’s hand!
God is too busy to rescue drowning children, too busy to stop the flow of blood, too busy to notice the suffering of Haiti, so Gina Athena Ulysse prays to other gods. From behind the curtain, before her entrance on the La Mama stage, she sings a Vodou song.
Ezili, save us as we are drowning she chants repeatedly as if in a trance, as if it were an incantation, as one endlessly says a rosary, and it is interminable this chant, as one says a rosary, Ezili, save us as we are drowning, because as one says a rosary endlessly, repeatedly, interminably, one keeps in memory events or mysteries in our history and it is true that we are drowning and it is true that we should be saved, Ezili, save us as we are drowning.
Weaving her powerful storypoems with these chants, Ulysse is ruthless, tender, sassy, and sometimes heartbreaking in her one-woman performance “Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, Me and the World”. Whether exploring her rage at the dehumanization of Haitians: because they are too dark, too rebellious, not French enough, never, never, ever French enough…the ones Soeur Cecile called burnt potatoes and for whose salvation Ulysse prayed nightly Forgive her God for she does not know what she is doing, or reminiscing about spending the night on her knees, punished by her father and praying God whom she appointed as father, disowning her real father as Ponce Pilate, she sends us messages from the interior which are at once intimate and generously collective in a fascinating interplay that blurs the lines beween herself and her country:
Look what the mortals are doing to me
I planted corn
it turned into a reed
the reed turned into bamboo
it turned into a knife
to stab me… | <urn:uuid:9917ae05-0773-4f8f-977f-43ac16ed44b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dusttracksonaroad.tumblr.com/tagged/religion | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941408 | 815 | 1.507813 | 2 |
A group that supports the proposal to build a coal and bulk cargo terminal at Cherry Point phished the email address used to accept comments on the scope of the environmental review for the terminal, according to a Washington state Department of Ecology spokesman.
The group, believed to be based in Montana, used the email address - [email protected] - to contact people and solicit comments on the Gateway Pacific Terminal, Ecology spokesman Larry Altose said.
CH2M Hill, the company that operates the comment website for the regulatory agencies overseeing the project, last week contacted the agencies about the phishing, temporarily shut down the email address, and told the group responsible to stop.
The email address was reactivated Tuesday, Jan. 15.
Comments were accepted during the shutdown, Altose said. During that time, people also were encouraged to comment on what potential impacts and mitigation for the Gateway Pacific Terminal should be studied by going to the website at eisgatewaypacificwa.gov.
"There was never any cutoffs of comments," Altose said.
People who are concerned about whether their comments got through during the phishing issue can resubmit them.
Altose didn't know how many people were contacted by the group responsible for the phishing or what the message was, adding that those weren't the primary concerns.
"We want to stress the identity or position of the group doesn't matter," he said. "The concern we have is not with the content of the message, but with use of our email address and identity. We're not in an advocacy role."
He said the agencies in charge of the review don't send unsolicited emails to people asking for comments.
Other than this most recent event, Altose said, the comment period for the scoping process has gone smoothly.
More than 14,000 comments have been submitted about the project during the scoping period, and more than 9,000 people participated at scoping meetings in November and December.
More than 5,000 or 6,000 of those comments are from a dozen organized comment campaigns, Altose added.
"Comment campaigns are a part of comment periods in general," he said.
The deadline to submit comments for this phase has been moved one day to Jan. 22 because the original deadline of Jan. 21 fell on a federal holiday, Martin Luther King Day.
The deadline will not be extended because of the phishing problem, according to Altose.
By the time the comment period ends, it will have lasted for an "unprecedented 121 days - just on scoping," Altose said. "So we believe that there has been an unprecedented opportunity for comment."
JAN. 22 DEADLINE TO SUBMIT COMMENTS
The deadline to submit comments on what potential impacts and mitigation for the Gateway Pacific Terminal should be studied has been extended one day to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 22.
To learn more about the project or how to submit comments, go online to eisgatewaypacificwa.gov.
After reviewing the comments, consultants working for Whatcom County, the state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will put together a draft environmental impact statement, which also will have a public comment period.
Reach Kie Relyea at 360-715-2234 or [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:2f80c726-e5af-49ac-a08a-1f3aa92499c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2013/01/15/2839077/cherry-point-coal-terminal-comment.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957054 | 703 | 1.632813 | 2 |
When I was 16, I was primarily preoccupied with…boys. With clothes coming in at a close second. I hate to perpetuate stereotypes, but what can I say, I was a shallow kid and am still a recovering shallow kid. So when I learned about Kaitlin, I was amazed.
Kaitlin is an example of how God uses children and youth to be His hands in this world and to teach and convict the rest of us with what faith and sacrifice look like.
Kaitlin was just a normal 16-year-old girl living in Alberta, Canada, when she was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor.
She spent a year and a half in and out of the hospital, in surgery, and in chemo. She tried to live as normal a life as possible, but her day-to-day life was punctuated by bouts of sickness and fatigue.
So when the Children’s Wish Foundation approached her to make a wish — a wish that would bring just a little relief and light into a girl’s days that were marked by trial — her wish was shocking.
Kaitlin initially thought about getting a camera or going on a family vacation, but she just didn’t feel right about any of those ideas. Ultimately, Kaitlin decided she didn’t want anything for herself, but wanted to give her wish away to help children in poverty.
Kaitlin donated the entirety of her wish to build a well in Uganda so that children there could have access to clean water.
And the faith and generosity of this young girl woke up a lot of adults.
When people heard about Kaitlin’s wish, they were inspired to follow in her footsteps. Her community held fundraisers to build more wells. People in Korea, Australia, and around the world heard about Kaitlin and donated to give even more children clean water.
Last I heard, more than $285,000 had been raised to bring clean water to children all across Africa.
It reminds me of this verse:
“Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.” — 1 Timothy 4:12, NIV
Kaitlin’s mom, Brenda, says it well.
“Everyone always thinks in order to change the world you have to be someone who stands out in a crowd, be the best in school or the one who wins all the races, but Kaitlin has changed the world for more than 40,000 lives just by being obedient to God.”
Certainly, Kaitlin was an example for all of us in her life, love and faith.
Kaitlin went to be with our Lord in May of this year. She clung tightly to her faith in God throughout her life. Not long before she passed away, Kaitlin said,
“Even though I don’t want to be sick, if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have received this wish and others wouldn’t have wanted to help and all of these children wouldn’t have benefited. It is a humbling experience.
“We are only on earth for so long, and we need to make an effort for other people. It’s like we take a picture while we are here on earth – at the end of the day, what do you want the picture to look like?”
I’m thankful for the picture that Kaitlin created with her life, and I hope she will be an encouragement and a challenge to you as well! | <urn:uuid:d24c048a-fdd4-49fe-a9c8-775912278ac2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.compassion.com/kaitlin-boyda/quote-comment-30042/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980226 | 764 | 1.546875 | 2 |
The kids are asleep. You're sitting on the couch with a glass of wine and you realize you've worked out, made a serious dent in your to-do list, and are feeling rather proud of yourself. This is no dream. We've sourced the latest science and wisdom from the pros to make it this year's reality. By Holly Corbett, REDBOOK.
Be a sugar detective
Want to lose almost 3.5 pounds by the end of the year without doing much at all? Take a peak at the ingredient lists of your favorite "healthy foods" which may be ladened with sneaky sugar. Case in point: A container of yogurt can pack 24 to 30 grams of sugar, and the RDA for a 1600-calorie diet is only 22 grams, or six teaspoons. Whole grains have no sugar, but often otherwise healthy cereals like granola have between 15 and 20 grams. Cut two teaspoons a day, and you'll keep yourself from eating a five-pound bag of sugar in 2013.
Love your body more - with a little vote of support
"It's not uncommon for women to have body image issues, but it might help you to remember that your partner loves you the way you are," says Cheryl Sloane, co-owner of G Boutique. "We have men who come shopping for holidays, and they always err on the side of getting something too small as opposed to too large - such as buying a size small in lingerie for a wife who's a size 14." Rather than worry about your cellulite when you're between the sheets, remind yourself that your partner actually loves your junk in the trunk.
Related: 50 Simple Little Ways to Feel Sexy
Consider sitting the new smoking
Planting your butt in a chair for six or more hours a day ups your odds of cancer, heart disease, and early death. With new research finding that as much as 77 percent of our workdays are spent seated and chained to our computers (not to mention the time spent camped on our couches watching Mad Men on Netflix), sitting is becoming a serious health epidemic. Even regular exercisers aren't off the hook: Working out for an hour a day can't fully negate the health damage of a (mostly) sedentary lifestyle. The good news is that the latest research from the Centers for Disease Control finds that cutting down on your sitting time by a mere hour per day is enough to boost blood flow and metabolism, burn calories, and even increase energy.
Swear off fake baking
Even though most of us wouldn't spend a day at the beach without sunscreen, skin cancer rates have skyrocketed, according to the American Cancer Society. The highest rise is among women under 39, and people over 65. "This may be because many young women are now using tanning beds, which emit carcinogens," says Vilma Cokkinides, Ph.D, Strategic Director of Risk Factor Surveillance for the American Cancer Society. Indoor tanners are 74 percent more likely to get melanoma than those who have never fake baked before, partially because tanning beds use mostly UVA rays, the deeper penetrating type that not only breaks down collagen tissues to speed up the aging process, but also weakens your immune system so you may be less able to fight off cancer.
Reduce stress by overcoming procrastination
The longer you hold on to a to-do, the more energy that gets sucked up by that task. Choose one thing that you have been avoiding each day and then just do it. "Commit to tackling one task - such as calling the phone company to correct an error in the bill or cleaning off your desk - first thing, says Dr. Elizabeth Lombardo, clinical psychologist based in Chicago and author of A Happy You. "Get it over with and enjoy the relief - and sense of accomplishment - you feel." Don't you feel lighter already?
Related: 100 Cute, Affordable Winter Accessories
Floss regularly to protect your fertility
Even if you brush twice a day, there may be dangerous bacteria growing inside your mouth if you fail to floss regularly. Not only could that lead to periodontitis (an advanced form of gum disease with symptoms such as bleeding when you brush and gum pain), but studies find that it could also make it tougher for you to have a baby: Women of childbearing age with gum disease took an average of just over seven months to become pregnant - two months longer than the average of five months that it took women without gum disease to conceive, discovered researchers in Western Australia. For best results, floss before you brush - rather than after - to swipe away any food that's stuck between your teeth and prevent bacteria from growing.
Fit in 15 minutes of exercise in the morning
Start your day with a brisk walk around your neighborhood. Getting moving as soon as you wake up helps form a fitness habit, and it's the little moves like these that you make throughout the day that help keep your weight in check. Bonus: A little alone-time first thing in the morning gives you a chance to take stock of the upcoming day, and to clock valuable time away from your desk, to-do lists, and the many demands constantly placed upon you.
Find the right food balance
Rather than counting calories, make sure that everything you eat has at least one or two servings of whole grains, protein, and healthy fats. "If you snack on 200 calories of carbs, it will spike your blood sugar and trigger your appetite," says Ashley Koff, RD, co-author of Mom Energy: A Simple Plan to Live Fully Charged. "Conversely, if you eliminate carbohydrates in favor of foods containing only protein and fat, you won't get sufficient energy. It's important to balance our food choices in order to get all the nutrients that we need." Try scrambling eggs in olive oil and eating them on a slice of whole-grain toast for a healthy carb-protein-fat breakfast combo.
Related: 25 Lazy Ways to Stay Skinny
Pledge to use all of your vacation days
If you're like most Americans, you've probably thrown away those wonderful free days off: Americans got a measly 14 vacation days last year and took only 10, compared to our French or Spanish counterparts who used all 30 of the vacation days given to them, according to Expedia's Vacation Deprivation survey. Need a reason to take a mental health day, or make it long weekend? Working too long without a break can elevate levels of chronic stress enough to actually speed up the aging process, finds a study in Biological Psychiatry. Moreover, women who don't take regular vacations are up to three times more likely to be depressed than those who take more time off, discovered researchers from the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin. A few days at a bed and breakfast without the kids might be just what the doctor ordered.
Overcome negativity by remembering the positive
It's all too easy to get caught in a circular rut of negative thinking and overlook all the good stuff in your life. "We tend to be really good at identifying what we don't like in our lives, such as what is going wrong and what you or others should do," says Dr. Lombardo. "To break that mindset, focus on ten things you love in your life right now." An exercise as simple as writing down ten people, things, or experiences for which you are grateful can make all the difference. "This will boost your happiness, reduce your stress, and help you be more resilient to whatever life throws at you," adds Dr. Lombardo.
Ditch desktop dining
Last night's sweet-and-sour chicken may make for tasty leftovers and save you money on lunch, but please, eat it outside. A study by the University of Arizona found the average desktop has 100 times more bacteria than a kitchen table and 400 times more than the average toilet seat. This may be because you clean your toilet and kitchen more than you clean your workspace. Only 36 percent of Americans clean their work areas - desktop, keyboard, mouse - weekly, finds a survey by the American Dietetic Association and ConAgra Foods' Home Food Safety program. Keep moistened antibacterial wipes at your desk, and try to take a few minutes to eat lunch outside the office - the break will likely boost your productivity, too.
Focus on fat loss, not weight loss
Carrying around excess fat, more so than extra weight, ups your risk of stroke, diabetes, and cancer. Moreover, if your new year's resolution is dropping lots of pounds quickly, you're apt to lose water weight and muscle, neither of which boasts the same long-term benefits as building muscle and losing fat, says Paul "PJ" James, a certified personal trainer and author of Take It Off, Keep It Off. That's because even though muscle weighs more than fat, it's more compact, and boosts your metabolism to help burn calories all day long. Resistance or weight-baring exercises can help you drop fat faster by improving hormonal tone and building muscle.
Practice meditation to be more efficient
You may want to stop bragging about your ability to make dinner, take a business call, and do your hair at the same time. An eight-week study of the effects of a meditation course on multitasking found that being mindful, slowing down and concentrating on one thing at a time resulted in staying on task longer. Participants were also able to see more tasks through to completion. "Everyone can meditate," says Sarah McLean, author of Soul Centered: Transform Your Life in 8 Weeks With Meditation. "Any activity can become a meditative experience if you're really present in the moment and engage your senses." Simply taking a moment to be mindful of what's happening - rather than thinking about the next thing on your to-do list - can make you more effective in the here and now.
More from REDBOOK:
25 Things That Will Keep You Young
What Vitamins Do You Really Need?
13 Love Resolutions to Make for 2013
- How to Make a Truce With Food
The Best Celeb Hairstyles for Every Length
Become of a fan of REDBOOK on Facebook and follow us on Twitter! | <urn:uuid:9a82ed6a-7297-45d1-9740-d20ee3c8744c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://shine.yahoo.com/team-mom/13-healthy-resolutions-2013-173900054.html?.tsrc=samsungwn | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954454 | 2,089 | 1.664063 | 2 |
> The NetBSD loader is, unsurprisingly, not subject to this restriction. I'd
> be tempted to go with packaging this and using it as our primary boot
> mechanism unless anyone objects. The one problem I can think of is that it
> stores the bootcode in /boot, which is a directory under Linux systems. Do
> we want to leave /boot as a directory and move the BSD bootcode in there
> (presumably patching things slightly in the process) or leave it as is?
>the location of "/boot" as a file is pretty irrelevant for i386. when
>"installboot" is run, it hard codes the inodes for it into the 2nd
>stage loader (biosboot.sym) and reloads it. so when you run installboot
>you can simply give it a pathname other than "/boot" and it will use it
>when it comes to booting.
>to be honest, i've slowly come to appreciate /boot as a directory.
FreeBSD has a directory /boot too (in -STABLE it holds the stage 3 loader
and its configuration, and in -CURRENT i believe the kernel(s) and
modules have moved in there too). So it would seem sensible to make
NetBSD follow the others. (Does NetBSD/i386 not use /usr/mdec any more?)
(i'm not suggesting i'm advocating that netbsd proper will switch
to a /boot dir -- that's someone else's problem. i was mostly
pointing out that the default /boot as a file isn't a problem.)
/usr/mdec still exists as always. (though it apparently should
be called /usr/mi386 -- /usr/mdec was for DEC [vax] machines,
but the name stuck everywhere.) | <urn:uuid:64c54abd-339d-4cea-b3e3-c5b74eee5b9e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2002/03/msg00022.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942459 | 389 | 1.78125 | 2 |
In their book they argue that brands must become more truthful in their communication.
Traditional advertising focused on either building brand awareness or selling through one way dialogue.
With the coming of age of a new empowered consumer, modern advertising must focus on telling the brand story.
The truthful one.
Jeff Bezos said it best:
“A brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”
This also applies to your personal brand. Watch this clip.
What do people say about you? Have you given it a thought? You should.
Think about your story. Does it represent your brand? If not, what are you doing about it? | <urn:uuid:37b33186-5617-49cc-b805-5cbab00f392c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.brandstories.net/2012/07/07/truth-in-advertising-whats-your-story/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962096 | 140 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Emergency personnel are preparing for the worst this week in what they're calling a "Groundhog's Day" exercise.
Everyone from The Salvation Army to high school students is jumping on-board to learn what to do in the case of earthquakes, which is a threat to our region.
The Bonneville County Courthouse will be the first place to evacuate on Tuesday. Volunteer county employees will leave the building while playing victims of a simulated earthquake.
The exercise was named after the classic Bill Murray comedy where the day keeps replaying.
Over the span of three days, emergency management will respond to a severe earthquake scenario -- starting with search and rescue on day one.
"it will be the same event the second day, only they're looking at mass care. It's the same event the third day. They're looking at evacuation," said School District Coordinator Guy Bliesner.
The drill is a regional effort involving areas in Teton, Bonneville, Madison, and Jefferson counties and originally started by the Bureau of Homeland Security.
Tom Lenderink with Bonneville County Emergency Management said public transportation system Targhee Regional Public Transportation (TRPTA) will take pretend earthquake victims to treatment locations.
"It should be a rather exciting adventure. We're looking forward to it,"said Lenderink.
Both old and young will participate in the test of skills. They plan on feeding about 2,500 students and faculty from Hillcrest High School and Sand Creek Middle School on Wednesday.
"We're providing basically mouths and stomachs for this one. The hardest thing will be keeping the high school kids from taking off to Chic-Fil-A," said Bliesner.
Police and sheriff's officers are unfortunately pulling out of the drill for the funeral of the late Dep.Mark Weaver. He died in a boating accident last week.
Gregg Losinski with Idaho Fish and Game said this week's Groundhog's Day drill will hopefully get all emergency agencies on the same page if a big disaster does strike. | <urn:uuid:026b8765-2682-43db-9608-1e539b8e5a80> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.localnews8.com/news/Groundhog-s-Day-Drill-To-Begin/-/308662/14517004/-/lvny28z/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95872 | 415 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Madeleine Albright was indeed a great hero! She was the Secretary of State under Bill Clintons administration from 1997 to 2000, the U.N ambassador and a member of the national Security Council. Believe it or not, she can speak 4 different languages, Russian Polish, Czech, and French. This enables her to communicate with other world leaders. She found out she was Jewish while on a ship about five years ago. Imagine how that would feel to find out so late!
Even though she is a lady of politics, in her free time she enjoys needlepoint and sewing. The most amazing fact about her is that she had such a high place in office. | <urn:uuid:f3691f4a-a48a-4845-8382-c5aeef0e3d7d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://itc.blogs.com/newsquest/dane/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986574 | 134 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Unlike Grandma's old-fashioned mashed potato recipe, a hearty social media presence does not come with step-by-step instructions tested over time. All the same, it's becoming harder for B2B companies to entirely avoid social media as an ingredient in their marketing mix.
Social media success lies in carefully selecting the proper tools to help a company reach specific goals—direct interaction with customers or prospects, for instance, or driving Web traffic. A company's criteria for success will help it decide which of today's tools make the most sense for them.
The biggest mistake companies make is sampling social media tools simply based on the latest craze. Even if a company isn't ready to commit to and define a social media strategy, it still stands to learn a great deal from listening to conversations occurring online.
By understanding how individual social media tools work and what users are saying, a company can begin to determine which ones work best with its resources and goals.
Because content is archived, it's easy for anyone to tune into current or past discussions online. Members of sales, marketing, and public relations departments can learn about the perception of their company and competitors by searching blogs, social networks, YouTube, and industry forums.
Beyond that, they can identify useful information through social networks, including upcoming industry events prospects plan on attending and the trends of greatest interest to key influencers.
Hearty Helping of Thought Leadership
Perhaps the greatest benefit social media can bring to B2B companies is the opportunity to cultivate thought leadership in the industries they serve. Two viable mediums for doing so are blogs and microblogs.
A CEO offering insights through a corporate blog not only humanizes a brand, but demonstrates a company's expertise and understanding of the industry as a whole. Blogs can also have multiple contributors. Engineers can suggest solutions to common questions, consultants can share success stories, and R&D staff can discuss products as they make their way through the development stage.
Some companies see maintaining a blog as a bandwidth issue. But today's social media space offers other options. Perhaps it's more convenient for a company to microblog through a site like Twitter.
Tweets can contain helpful links, industry announcements, or even present questions for the online community to consider. The time commitment for each post on these sites is minimal, but as a result, conversation moves quickly.
Bringing More Guests to the Table
Social media can help increasing traffic to a corporate Website or landing page. While blogs can also improve a site's search engine rankings, B2B companies can take advantage of social bookmarking and sharing sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and others to increase the exposure of articles, news and other content to a wider audience and lead them back to their Website.
Posting videos on YouTube can allow them to reach a larger pool of prospects or customers because helpful videos are often passed from peer to peer. Twitter also proves to be a useful tool for pushing videos, articles, and other resources out to more Internet users.
Even if upper-level management can't commit to a steadfast social media regiment, it can still prove to be a useful sales tool for business developers. Prospects are connected to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and many of them are sharing information about current projects, their struggles, and even experiences with competitor's products.
This information can be powerful, and these sites present an opportunity to engage in conversations, offer solutions to problems, and form relationships without making a sales pitch.
While having a presence on multiple social media sites is challenging for a busy company, social media has its greatest impact when multiple sites work together.
For instance, one of the best ways to reach potential viewers of an interesting video is by sharing it with followers on Twitter. Depending on the content of the video, it could be a good resource for someone you are networking with on LinkedIn. You can feed it right into a Facebook group, too.
Just as with any initiative, being involved in social media should serve a greater purpose and have solid objectives—whether it's branding, lead generation, or nurturing relationships.
It's important to remember succeeding in social media means far more then just presenting content. Starting a blog and having two posts doesn't mean that it will gain a following overnight. Posting a video on YouTube won't make it a viral hit.
It takes time to build a network of followers, but with persistence and the right social media sites, companies can see increased Web traffic, improved brand recognition, and new networking opportunities.
Allen Silveri is president of the Philadelphia-based B2B marketing agency Schubert Communications. | <urn:uuid:a7ba2507-f2fa-408a-af7f-7d96add3abe4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.salesandmarketing.com/article/recipe-b2b-social-media-success?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939025 | 943 | 1.726563 | 2 |
That's right. Seventh grade.
Given all the pomp and circumstance, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I was fairly unmoved by my daughter's sixth-grade graduation. These days--when 9 out of 10 kids actually make it through high school--matriculating into seventh grade just doesn't feel to me like a diploma-worthy experience.
Lately, it seems, our kids are always graduating from something. This month is crowded with rituals as kids finish up Tumble Tots, nursery school, kindergarten, third grade, middle school, piano class, Sunday school and the soccer season.
We seem to think that graduating validates every experience--even for those way too young to understand the significance of the occasion, not to mention use the toilet. Alana Glatzer, director of the Intown playgroup, a pre-nursery school in Washington, told me that the group's ceremony, complete with caps and diplomas for two-year-olds, is a chaotic and happy affair for the diaper-wearing graduates. "The kids don't always understand what's going on," she says, "but it's really for the parents."
Kids' lives are crowded with trophies and awards--the computer-generated commendatory certificates blow through my house like ticker tape; they get underfoot and gather on the floor of the car. All of this is part of "achievement inflation," and I think it may actually diminish the intended effect of all this acclamation, which is to make kids feel proud and accomplished for doing something difficult and important. Peter L. Sheras, professor of child development at the University of Virginia, says that while "the idea of celebrating life events can be really useful, we are becoming addicted to celebrating." He adds, "It's part of the dulling down of our experiences. When you make a big deal of something too often, then when big deals really happen, they seem less significant."
At my house, all the hoopla has created a blase middle schooler who has more diplomas than our dentist and a serious case of graduation fatigue. Recently, when she sighed and asked what we were doing this summer, I said, "I have one word for you: plastics."
You can e-mail Amy Dickinson at [email protected] | <urn:uuid:5b330913-19ea-492c-8654-49e7cb80f977> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,130960,00.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970666 | 476 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Die Hard – The Keyword Myth
I was listening to a podcast interview with Vanessa Fox this morning. I don’t spend much time with podcasts. There must be hundreds of hour uploaded each day and all but a few are, in my opinion a waste of time. But, one of my clients had sent me the link and asked for my opinion.
I knew Vanessa by reputation and her blog ‘Jane and Robot’ which is full of useful information. I had seen some video interviews she had done and found her fairly articulate – so I put on the headphones, put part of my mind on ‘cruise control’ and tried to listen while I got some real work done.
This works – to a limited extent. I really have doubts about people who claim they can actally listen to a podcast while doing anything creative. – I usually let the voices wash over me – hoping some keyword will peak my interest.
In this case it was the mention of the keyword meta tag that caught my attention.
I was working on a site where the client had insisted that we have the keyword meta tag on every page. Fortunately the CMS I was using let you switch that option on. It is normally off for one very good reason – search engines don’t use them.
As Vanessa and her hosts pointed out this is one of the most persistent of SEO myths. Again, search engines don’t — repeat DO NOT use the keyword meta tag. It just adds to the page load time and adds nothing of value.
We need to put a stake through the heart of this myth and bury it in a lead lined coffin.
It is also a good time to eviserate the related myth that your keywords and phrases should make up 5%-6%-7% (pick one) of your copy. Just write in a normal fashion – for the people reading the text – not for what you think the search engines want.
Please don’t waste your time:
- Use keywords in the page copy but only to explain the topic
- Don’t repeat keywords just for effect – Don’t repeat keywords just for effect
- Write for people – not search engines
- Use synonyms
Contact us to find out how TIMR Web Services can help your business | <urn:uuid:dbccc054-fffa-4cc6-9fb7-d5e73b6c82a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://timr.ca/seo-vancouver-island/2010/05/29/die-hard-the-keyword-myth/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955125 | 471 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP)
The NSF Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) Registration for contract manufacturers and internal manufacturing facilities of dietary supplement companies enables contract manufacturers to become independently registered by NSF as complying with GMP requirements as listed in Section 8 of NSF/ANSI Standard 173-2008. These requirements are consistent with the published GMP regulation for dietary supplements as defined in 21 CFR § 111, which was published by the FDA in May 2007.
What are GMPs?
Good Manufacturing Practices are guidelines that provide a system of processes, procedures, and documentation to assure the product produced has the identity, strength, composition, quality, and purity that it is represented to possess.
Benefits of the NSF GMP Registration Program
- Increases the creditability and offers a competitive advantage in the marketplace for contract manufacturers
- Increases senior management confidence in the preparedness of manufacturing facilities for FDA inspection
- Decreases the time and cost for companies selecting third-party testing and product certification if using an NSF GMP registered contract manufacturer
- Manufacturers of dietary supplements that comply with GMP requirements receive certificates and are listed on the NSF website.
- Available to all manufacturers of dietary supplements
- Demonstrates independent third-party verification of continuing conformance to GMPs | <urn:uuid:196411df-fdb3-4181-94fc-5708ba5d93aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nsf.org/business/gmp/index.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951731 | 262 | 1.71875 | 2 |
CTY’s Diagnostic and Counseling Center provides individualized assessments and educational guidance for students of all ages.
Our goal is to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and learning style of students based on an in-depth evaluation of their abilities, knowledge, and interests. With this information, we help individuals and their families find ways to support the student's overall educational needs.
While we serve students with a variety of characteristics, we have particular expertise in working with gifted students and twice exceptional students – i.e., gifted students with learning challenges.
Our assessment and counseling services include: | <urn:uuid:bdcc0e8f-e8d3-4b03-839c-00e58b4a9f4e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cty.jhu.edu/counseling/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960501 | 120 | 1.8125 | 2 |
RESTON, Va. — ComScore on Monday released the Digital Wallet Road Map 2013, a study which measures consumer awareness, perceptions and intent to use current digital wallet offerings. The study found digital wallets, which store a virtual copy of the contents of a consumer's physical wallet to facilitate online or offline retail transactions, only had awareness among 51% of U.S. consumers for wallets other than PayPal.
"Digital wallets represent an innovative technology that has not yet reached critical mass among consumers due to a variety of factors, including low awareness and a muddied understanding of their benefits," stated Andrea Jacobs , ComScore payments practice leader. "Low awareness, understanding of benefits and availability among retailers are among the key barriers to adoption of digital wallets," she said. "While these impediments may seem like a steep hill to climb, we have seen this story play out before in the financial services industry. There was a time when consumers were reluctant to use ATMs for similar reasons."
The current digital wallet landscape remains fragmented among providers because of low consumer adoption outside of PayPal, with only 12% of consumers claiming to have used a digital wallet other than PayPal. However, study results indicated that the digital wallet market opportunity could eventually reach 1 in 2 consumers as consumers become more aware of the offerings and educated on their benefits.
One clear barrier to use of digital wallets is that the concept is often difficult to convey and prone to misinterpretation. Even after being asked to review the web sites of particular digital wallets, respondents across all wallet brands still scored an average of just 45% in terms of demonstrated level of understanding.
The study revealed that security remains a top consumer concern, but that a significant portion of consumers are not aware of security features inherent in digital wallet usage. While 93% of consumers would prefer to use a digital wallet that has to be unlocked before use, an average of just 57% of respondents across the brands studied realized – after having reviewed the digital wallet website – that this locking feature was available. Some digital wallet providers were more successful than others in communicating the availability of this feature, with 71% awareness among Lemon web site visitors versus 42% among LevelUp web site visitors. The ability to improve communications of features addressing consumer concerns, such as security, could remove an important hurdle to adoption, ComScore noted.
Find us on Facebook for more insight, analysis and the latest in drug store news. | <urn:uuid:937dfec5-8f4e-46d8-a066-188a76847d68> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://drugstorenews.com/print/522636 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963438 | 486 | 1.796875 | 2 |
New York State’s 1,300 judges have not had a pay raise in a decade. Now the state’s Appellate Division, 1st Department has ruled on the issue, giving lawmakers 90 days to adjust judicial compensation to reflect a 30% increase in the cost of living since 1998.
The state legislature’s failure to give the state’s judges a raise violated the separation of powers doctrine, the appeals court ruled unanimously yesterday. By linking judicial pay to legislators’ pay and other political considerations, lawmakers tainted the judicial branch with politics, the court found.
The panel’s decision affirms a ruling by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Edward Lehner that the linkage of judicial raises to other issues is unconstitutional.
As lawmakers are reticent to give anyone a pay increase in the current economic environment, the issue is likely headed back to court.
The suit was brought by four judges: Manhattan Family Court Judge Susan Larabee, Cattaraugus County Family Court Judge Michael Nenno, Manhattan Civil Court Judge Geoffrey Wright and Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Patricia Nunez. | <urn:uuid:8b281c46-f587-4f8e-aa76-5fd5570886da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jdjournal.com/2009/06/03/judges-rule-that-judges-deserve-pay-raise/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942084 | 225 | 1.71875 | 2 |
- But a scaly tail, of a dolphin's growth, In the dabbling brine did soak: At last she opened her pearly mouth, Like an oyster, and thus she spoke: " You crimpt my father, who was a skate,- And my sister you sold- a maid; So here remain for a fish'ry fate, For lost you are, and betrayed!" - "The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood", Thomas Hood.
- I am dabbling in Wall street. - "Castle Craneycrow", George Barr McCutcheon.
- An overturned tallow- dip dropped in a pool of wine and rolled down against the dead man's cheek, dabbling it with the color which would never return to it again. - "Down the Mother Lode", Vivia Hemphill. | <urn:uuid:301e8733-e0e6-4658-bff0-f37b91f179c6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dictionarylink.com/dabbling | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942706 | 170 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Hillary Clinton Calls Al Jazeera 'Real News,' Criticizes U.S. Media (VIDEO)
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that Al Jazeera is gaining more prominence in the U.S. because it offers "real news" -- something she said American media were falling far short of doing.
Clinton was speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and she said the U.S. is losing the "information war" in the world. Other countries and global news outlets, she said, were making inroads into places like the Middle East more effectively than the United States has. One of the reasons she cited for this was the quality of channels like Al Jazeera. The channel, she said, was "changing peoples' minds and attitudes. And like it or hate it, it is really effective." U.S. news, she added, was not keeping up.
"Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news," Clinton said. "You may not agree with it, but you feel like you're getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners."
During the height of the crisis in Egypt, The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim wrote about Al Jazeera English's near-total invisibility on U.S. television.
Media critics like Jeff Jarvis have also contrasted Al Jazeera with American news networks. "Vital, world-changing news is occurring in the Middle East and no one-not the xenophobic or celebrity-obsessed or cut-to-the-bone American media-can bring the perspective, insight, and on-the-scene reporting Al Jazeera English can," Jarvis wrote in January.
Watch (via ABC News): | <urn:uuid:7bae0941-4b19-436b-8ad1-ee36f19a5df4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/03/hillary-clinton-calls-al-_n_830890.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965117 | 381 | 1.671875 | 2 |
03 Jun, 2009 – 327 comments
how to be happy in business – venn diagram
UPDATE!: I’m blown away by how this spread, the comments I’ve received back, and the links across the web. In almost every post about the image, someone asked for a poster, or mentioned printing it out to hang somewhere close by. So I’ve created a poster, using Zazzle, with a much higher res image:
Get the smaller (and cheaper) version
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I’ve been working at start-ups and small businesses since I was 14 years old. My father and his father before him owned and operated their own small businesses. There’s something about the fight for survival for a small team that’s coded in my DNA. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy working at Undercurrent so much. We’re small and thus we’re nimble. We’re lean and thus we’re malleable. And our age and our medium demand both.
I doodled this little venn diagram in my notepad the other day when we were talking about our own kung-fu and I realized it’s basically the conversation I’ve had for the last 12 years.
Over the years, I’ve found myself facing the following scenarios. (and I’ve added my two cents on how to move forward)
We can’t determine how to make enough money from the things we want to do, and do really well. I’m constantly surprised at what can be monetized. And on the web, there’s a market for almost anything. But this problem requires you to rapidly iterate your positioning and the type of clients you serve. Often, we’ll get transfixed on a single direction early on (because we’re desperate to solidify our business) and we’ll miss our chance to radically experiment with the market.
We’ve found things we want to do, and can be paid for, but we’re not the best game in town. Mediocrity is not a sustainable strategy. Being able to recognize your own weakness is a profound strength, and acting to improve what you do is key to any kind of long term growth and stability. Find the best talent and steal them. Learn how your competitors run their businesses, and copy what works.
We’ve come across things people want us to do, that we do well (or at least better than the competition) that we really don’t want to do. This is perhaps the most fatal trap for any business I’ve worked in. These are the sirens calling you to shipwreck. You’ll hemorrhage your best people, you’ll stop loving what you do, and you’ll lose the passion that built your business in the first place. Start saying ‘No.’
Have I missed anything? Does this resonate for you? | <urn:uuid:87c7dad5-21cf-4447-bd0f-970cf79b8d6c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://whatconsumesme.com/2009/posts-ive-written/how-to-be-happy-in-business-venn-diagram/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943961 | 636 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Sometimes, you might need to stop (kill) a process. The process might be in an endless loop. Or, you might have started a large job that you want to stop before it is completed. You can kill any process that you own. Superuser can kill any process in the system except for those processes with process IDs of 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. Killing these processes most likely will crash the system. | <urn:uuid:71366f1d-be20-45b1-80be-9567b8772319> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/817-0403/spprocess-12/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958308 | 88 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
Next actions: Both physical _and_ visible
Merlin Mann | Sep 17 2004
Just a GTD quickie, but something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
David Allen defines next actions as “the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion.” [ch. 2, pg. 34; emphasis mine]. I’m finally realizing that this subtle change in thinking can have profound effects on the way you look at the stuff in your life.
See, I’m an inveterate list-maker, and I’ve always thought I was actually pretty good at it, but when I look back now, I can see how my typical TODO list was littered with landmines.
I’ll bet you have (or had) a similar running list of all the nagging stuff that was littering your mental landscape, right?
The thing is, I now see how items like these can’t really be “done” at all; each one of those things is actually a complex, multiple-item project with built-in dependencies and waiting time. To look at any of them as a single thing I need to do is to buy into the anxiety-inducing premise that my goals and behaviors should somehow mirror each other on a one-to-one basis. If you think about it, that’s plainly ridiculous.
A more reasonable approach using GTD would be to focus just on that next physical activity needed to undertake each project; even if it seems like a trivial activity. In order:
I imagine a lot of people roll their eyes at this kind of self-absorbed minutiae-tracking, and a lot of people certainly don’t need it. But, for me, turning anxieties into projects and projects into discrete physical behaviors has a lot of appeal. It takes all the pressure off your brain and puts it back where it belongs: on your eyes, on your hands, and on that fat ass you need to get into gear.
More on GTD
|EXPLORE 43Folders||THE GOOD STUFF| | <urn:uuid:b6e424d5-67e2-4770-ac4f-4d14728a3e09> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.43folders.com/node/47127/323063 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953129 | 478 | 1.546875 | 2 |
“A Regular Guy: Growing Up With Autism” – An Adult with Autism’s Take
Two Autism Speaks employees, Ali Dyer and Kerry Magro, recently read Laura Shumaker’s book, “A Regular Guy: Growing up with Autism.” Each wrote a response to the book, unique to his/her relationship with autism. Ali has an adult brother with autism; Kerry, an adult with autism, is a rising senior at Seton Hall University, majoring in Sports Management. Below is Kerry’s response to the book.
This week I had the pleasure of reading Laura Shumaker’s book “A Regular Guy: Growing Up with Autism.” The book gives her perspective about her son Matthew’s journey from early childhood into adulthood with autism.
Before going into the book, I just wanted to say I admire what Laura has been doing to help families with children on the spectrum. I first learned about Laura’s book after she commented about one of my earlier blogs about the Autism Speaks 400 race. It was really great to see that all of this was able to come together.
The best way to describe the book would be a rollercoaster of good times and “learning” times for The Shumaker family. The one main thing that is clear, though, is the loving bond of a mother and family doing everything they can to make sure their son grows up to be okay. Whether it is early on where she is desperately looking for that special “Miracle Cure” or when Matthew gets older and it’s more about accepting him as who he is. This book gives you the whole insight to a mother’s struggle everyday with a child with autism.
Many parents look for answers and Laura’s book is sure to connect with parents with children on the spectrum as it goes through different diagnoses of ASD, school placement, family life, money complications, stress levels, babysitting options, and unforeseen struggles that come often come out of nowhere.
Being diagnosed with autism, I gained a great respect for different individuals with ASD from reading this book. As a young adult on the spectrum it makes me want to learn more about how my early childhood compares to Matthew’s. It also made me continue to understand that no one diagnosis is the same. Every diagnosis has a different rarity from individual to individual. There are thousands of treatments, yet not one cure.
What we can take from this book in the end, however, is that no one is alone and there is always someone to be there for you – whether it is Autism Speaks’ Family Services, an autism helpline, or even a brilliant author like Laura. Growing up with autism should be an experience of understanding and learning.
(And hey, no one is really “regular” anyway, right?)
Did you read Ali’s post yesterday? If you missed it, you can check it out here. | <urn:uuid:63d638dc-6203-494b-a4dd-ebf8ba56c8c6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.autismspeaks.org/2010/08/05/magro-regular-guy-response/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=8ef4095fcf | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9694 | 618 | 1.765625 | 2 |
It was just about one year ago that President Obama announced his American Jobs Act.
This Act would have helped the people in our district by cutting taxes on small business so they could grow and hire more employees. It would have helped our children by renovating school facilities, modernizing science labs and adding internet-ready classrooms. It including funding to keep and hire more firefighters, police and teachers. It would have expanded access to high-speed wireless that our district so desperately needs. And it would have invested in fixing our crumbling infrastructure.
Some blame our president, and say his policies have failed. The failure lies with an Obstructive Congress that wants make sure President Obama is a one term president. If that means no jobs, and a failed economy, then so be it. The Do Nothings in Congress put politics first, and the needs of the American people last.
My tenet, “Putting people first,” isn’t just a slogan; it’s the moral principle that guides my candidacy. Putting people first, means enacting policies that help our people and strengthens our economy. We all know that when America works - everyone benefits. And passing the American Jobs Act would have helped make that happen.
The Time is now to send our “Do Nothing” Congressman home and get America working again. | <urn:uuid:cf44688d-5c26-4940-a63c-db6029ab6edd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jackuppal.com/4/post/2012/09/the-labor-day-that-could-have-been.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977124 | 273 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Nearly 200 civic leaders, clergy and community residents came out for a forum Monday evening to hear about the importance of being counted in the 2010 Census.
With the economy in tatters, participants at the forum also wanted to know about census jobs that will be available as the country rolls out the massive effort to count everyone who lives in the United States.
Stan Moore, Chicago regional director of the U.S. Census Bureau, said four census offices have already been opened in Chicago, and 27 more will follow by August 2009 across the region.
Moore also said that more than 70,000 applications for employment had already been filed. Still, he encouraged applicants not to give up.
"The bureau does not hire on test results alone," he said. "Now we hire residents within each community because it is a more effective way to receive an accurate count of the people who live in these communities."
The census is conducted every 10 years and impacts everything from the distribution of Congressional seats to how much money communities get for schools and other services. Hundreds to millions in federal dollars are disbursed to local and state governments.
Monday night’s forum at the Illinois Institute of Technology was organized by Yvette Moyo, co-founder, and Rael Jackson, Vice President and Brand Manager of Real Men Cook.
"Being a staple in Chicago's African American community for the past 20 years, we felt it was our duty to raise awareness about this issue," Jackson said.
Panel member Donna Smith-Bellinger, Chicago Chapter President of the National Alliance of Market Developers, told the audience, "We must use the same energy to educate our community about the census as we did to get President Obama elected."
Rev. Al Sampson of Fernwood United Methodist Church, on Chicago's South Side, voiced concern about how homeowners who were in foreclosure would be counted by the census.
"We have several new programs that will be implemented to assure that everyone is counted," Moore replied. He urged Sampson and other community leaders to become involved in the Complete Count Committee Program, a volunteer program that uses a team of community leaders to help ensure that all residents are counted. Moore also said, "Many citizens are afraid of losing their privacy if they participate in the census. However, the census information is totally private and not accessible to anyone for a period of 70 years."
Forum participant Sandra Davis, 26, of the Austin neighborhood, expressed both enthusiasm and apprehension.
"I'm very excited to learn how the money is distributed simply by getting census numbers, yet frightened, because if we don't participate we will lose the money we need to improve our neighborhoods". | <urn:uuid:c717087b-f8ad-4f20-9975-7bb43b74b23a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chitowndailynews.org/2009/03/25/South-Side-Census-forum-airs-undercounting-concerns-24256.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973538 | 539 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Adj. Asst. Prof. William Stanwood (Communication) with students Tiffany Shih and Chris Bodnar, who helped produce a promotional video for the Massachusetts Association for the Blind. (Photo by Justin Knight)
The six-minute tape highlights the Team with a Vision 5K Run and Walk, a road race the Massachusetts Association for the Blind sponsors each fall in Brighton, and which this past October drew 22 blind runners who competed tethered to sighted companions.
The video has helped the charity attract thousands of dollars in support from corporate sponsors.
"We got great experience in editing, taking what we learned in class one step further," said co-producer Tiffany Shih '03, a marketing and communication major from Lexington, Mass. "But we also got to contribute to a great organization."
Co-producer Chris Bodnar '03, a history and communication major from Ridgefield, Conn., said: "I liked how we were able to do everything from scratch with this project.
"We shot it, wrote it and edited it together. We spent over 30 hours in the lab editing a six-minute video."
Jeffrey Moran '03 and Thomas Pelissero '03 helped with the camera work, while Bodnar, captain of the men's fencing team, did the narration.
The video features an interview with WBZ Channel 4 anchorwoman Lisa Hughes, honorary chairwoman of the Team with a Vision 5K Run and Walk. She ran the race this past October with Joseph Quintanilla '98, the event coordinator, who is blind.
Quintanilla had been a student in Stanwood's class at BC and approached his former teacher for help in producing a promotional video for the annual road race.
The video-makers shot footage at the road race, which follows Soldiers Field Road and Greenough Boulevard in a 3.1-mile loop around the Charles River.
Editing was done by computer, using a bank of five digital non-linear editing systems now available on campus to BC students. The project was finished in an all-nighter that stretched from 8 on a Friday to 6:30 the following Saturday morning.
"It was something so important - not just a class project. That's why we got so enthusiastic about it," said Bodnar.
Stanwood, a television-production veteran who has created award-winning programs for companies such as IBM, Mass General Hospital, John Hancock, and Sun Life of Canada, said his students did "an extremely professional job" on the assignment.
"The stakes were higher for their production," he said. "They were working for a real-world client, on something that had to be good."
Their grade? "If I could have given them an A-plus-plus, I would have," said Stanwood.
For more on the Team with a Vision 5K Run & Walk, see the event home page: www.twav.org/index.htm.
Return to April 24 menu
to Chronicle home page | <urn:uuid:244f109a-1234-4edf-b66e-a6e1d386b0eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v11/a24/stanwood.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971919 | 621 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Center for Environmental and Outdoor Education
The SUNY Cortland Center for Environmental and Outdoor Education promotes campus-wide awareness and commitment to environmental outdoor education while also managing the College’s outdoor/environmental facilities.
The facilities include:
Reasons to visit Raquette Lake (video)
The center, which is governed by an interdisciplinary advisory council, has its main office in Miller Building, Room 230, on the Cortland campus. This office serves as the headquarters for all four outdoor/environmental facilities. The center also administers an interdisciplinary environmental studies minor and areas of concentration. | <urn:uuid:85513843-92b6-4e8c-b19d-b797a588e48b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.cortland.edu/off-campus/outdoor-education-facilities/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943424 | 122 | 1.617188 | 2 |
OP, can I ask about your process? Like what tablet you used, how long it took, and how you approached completing the illustration? It's something I've been wanting to get into.
It's going to sound ridiculous, but, like almost all of my digital art, I used a mouse for this, not a tablet. Here's the step-by step process:
1. I made sketches of each dinosaur in Photoshop without any background (a mistake I won't make again) and fully rendered them in grayscale. each dino is on it's own layer. Made sure the dinos I chose to be in the picture were all from the same time period and region (For example, you can't pit an Allosaurus against a Postosuchus, that's just foolishness). I rendered scales with a combination of the basic paintbrush tool and the basic scales texture brush.
2. I thought of a background that would fit the lighting angle and contrast on the grayscale paintings.
3. Did research into paleontology regarding the flora and landscapes at the time. Had a difficult time finding anything about the landscapes of prehistoric Alberta outside of forests (which couldn't have made up the entire region) so I just stole a kind of wetlands background idea you'd see in a todd marshall drawing because it looks cool and hoped it made sense.
4. I painted the background in color, including the sky. Realized that I really, really liked the clouds in this one jpeg I used as a reference so I just used that and altered it a bit with the paintbrush tool instead of using my own sky painting.
5. I figured out a color pattern for the dinos and colorized them by going to: adjustments > color balance, brightness/contrast, hue/saturation
It took about 12 hours on and off over the weekend(I work slow)
That's basically it. | <urn:uuid:b1c374ea-74b2-4f0d-b847-7702f2873c1d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.absolutepunk.net/showthread.php?t=3015012&page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956852 | 394 | 1.617188 | 2 |
at Thursday, 07 March 2013 08:52by Shirley Pearson
|Irish soda bread: Chasing memories, crumb by crumb|
|Written by Eliza Ridgeway - Staff [email protected]|
|Wednesday, 06 March 2013|
Family recipes twist and turn, starting in one place – or one country – and changing through generations and migrations. Come March 17, Americans will be baking Irish soda breads born in the old country but transformed into something new.
I grew up in Seattle eating a delicate, crumbly soda bread studded with raisins – others in this country use currants or caraway seeds, sometimes a dose of extra sugar. These variations transform a bread that was originally deeply simple, economical food.
Long before commercially available buttermilk entered the mix, sour milk that otherwise would have gone to waste served as a key component of soda bread and scones. The soured milk reacts with baking soda to release tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide, fluffing up bread without any yeast at all. Variations using whole-wheat flour, known as brown bread or wheaten bread, add darker color and a richer flavor, sometimes augmented with treacle (akin to molasses).
A sweet, economical treat
On a quest to taste pre-American soda bread, I headed to the Avoca Foodhall in Dublin, Ireland. Avoca started as an 18th-century wool mill in County Wicklow and in recent decades transformed into a network of shops offering knits and housewares. A table of tea and cakes for shoppers grew into Avoca’s foodhall, which lured me in with the promise of soda-raised breads, served up ready for a picnic with butter and little takeaway pots of jam.
Expecting the pale rounds of my childhood, I quickly learned that hearty brown loaves are just as common on Irish tables. Leylie Heyes, executive head chef at Avoca, said soda bread sweetened with sugar would have been considered a treat saved for special occasions in Irish families that couldn’t afford making cakes enriched with eggs and butter.
But a hint of sweetness doesn’t mean the bread only comes at dessert time. Avoca’s brown bread includes the addition of bran and wheat germ, and Heyes serves it with Irish farmhouse cheeses and chutneys. It also pairs well with soups, and Heyes suggests a luncheon of the brown bread, smoked salmon and rocket (baby arugula).
“Peppery rocket helps cut the richness of the smoked salmon,” Heyes wrote in an email to the Town Crier.
After hearing stories of my friend Stephen peddling loaves of home-baked soda bread in his Dublin neighborhood of Monkstown, I consulted his mother, Susie Kennelly, for bread-making lore.
“I use a mixture of 3/4 brown to 1/4 white flour,” she said, and advised home bakers to seek out a minimally processed wholewheat flour, flecked with grains. Even if the flour comes pre-sieved, sieving yourself adds air to the mix.
Experienced bakers use floury hands to manually shape the loaf into rounds, but baking in a cake tin is an easy place to start, she noted.
“The mix should be of dropping consistency – if it’s too dry, it’ll come out hard. Wet is slightly better, as long as it cooks!”
Kennelly bakes up loaves in her AGA cooker, a heavy iron type of oven – originally coal-burning – that “cooks the bread from the outside in.”
“Bread is not something you serve as such, it’s just there,” Kennelly told me. “My mum was a great cook, and the four sisters have carried that on. Good wholesome food always.”
Soda bread has a practical appeal – it’s easier to make than yeast bread – but Kennelly says the bread’s “freshness and goodness” has a sentimental effect that also keeps her baking.
“The smell of fresh brown bread sells houses here in Ireland,” she joked.
The Avoca Café Cookbook’s bread recipes measure many of the ingredients by weight, a style of baking that can allow for greater precision but requires use of a food scale.
But given experience, precision can fall by the wayside. After growing up watching her mother bake, Kennelly worked out a recipe from scratch, noting that she never measures anything but that one quickly gets a feel for it.
When I consulted my own mother as to her recipe from my childhood, she first bluffed and then admitted: the bread may have come from a shop! But as an offering to future generations of American bakers in our family, she offered up her coworker Judy’s acclaimed version, which appears to return to its Irish roots – no raisins to be seen.
Avoca Brown Bread
• 200 grams (1 1/2 cups) white flour
• 300 grams (2 1/4 cups) whole-wheat flour
• 3 tablespoons bran
• 2 tablespoons wheat germ
• 2 heaping teaspoons baking powder
• 1 level teaspoon salt
• 1 dessert spoon (two teaspoons) treacle, or substitute molasses
• 2-3 cups milk
Preheat oven to 400 F.
Mix dry ingredients in large bowl. Add treacle and stir in enough milk to create moist but not sloppy mixture. Place in well-oiled 2-pound loaf tin and bake for 20 minutes or until risen. Reduce heat to 325 F and bake for 1 hour.
Run knife around tin to ease bread out. If it sounds hollow when tapped, it’s cooked. If not, return to oven for 10-15 minutes. No need to put bread back in tin – turn it upside down and place directly on oven rack.
Judy’s Soda Bread
• 1 cup white flour
• 2 cups whole-wheat flour
• Large handful rolled oats
• Small handful toasted wheat germ
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 1/2 cups buttermilk, with extra as needed
Mix dry ingredients, rub in butter.
Add 1 1/2 cups buttermilk or more, as needed, to incorporate all bits.
Turn out onto floured surface and roll into ball – do not knead.
Plop into buttered dish, score an X on top of loaf with back of knife.
Bake at 375 F for 35-40 minutes. Loaf should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.
Best with gobs of butter. Delicious toasted the next day.
at Thursday, 07 March 2013 08:52by Shirley Pearson
As a child, I lived on a farm where we had lots of milk, cream and butter. Our neighbors raised chickens. The sons only liked the yolks of the eggs, so the family would trade egg whites for milk and butter. The mother would put 13 egg whites in a jar and send them to us, then my mother would make angel food cake. One year, my father decided he could make a better angel food cake than my mother. They both made one to enter in the San Luis Obispo County Fair. Final result - 1st prize and blue ribbon for my father, third prize and white ribbon for my mother. Best prize - all the angel food cake I wanted, as both worked to perfect their entries. To this day, I still want angel food cake for my birthday - and it brings back many memories of my childhood.
|< Prev||Next >| | <urn:uuid:57444577-f2f3-482d-b551-2f61d33409c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.losaltosonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45681&Itemid=47 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945303 | 1,632 | 1.546875 | 2 |
There are four primary reasons risk assets can move higher than most can rationally comprehend:
- The Fed will take action.
- Open-ended QE could mean unbounded money printing.
- Spain and Italy have avoided the worst case scenario.
- The charts don't lie.
Dual Mandate Says Fed Will Act
As we noted on July 7, according to the 1977 amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, the Fed has a dual mandate to keep inflation in check and produce "maximum employment." The Fed now has six months of weak job creation numbers in hand. Last month, the economy created just 96,000 jobs. The prior month was revised to a still low 141,000 jobs. To bring down the unemployment rate, the economy needs to create at least 250,000 jobs per month. As shown via the vertical bars below, the reports from the last six months are nowhere near 250,000, giving the Fed more cover to announce a third round of quantitative easing (QE3).
On Thursday, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced a game changing bond-buying program. Not to be outdone, the Fed may have its own game changer in the form of open-ended QE (quantitative easing). According to an August 26 Reuters story:
"Some officials have said any new bond buying, or quantitative easing, could be open-ended, meaning it would not be bound by a fixed amount or time frame."
QE-friendly assets are clearly showing the market expects the Fed to move soon. The Metals and Mining ETF (XME) was up 4.79% Friday afternoon on well-above average volume. Other signals given Friday by the market that QE3 is coming: Copper (JJC) up 4.05%, silver (SLV) up 3.07%, gold (GLD) up 2.25%, and gold mining stocks (GDX) up 2.75%. We own all four based partly on Germany's bailout-friendly shift in early July.
Spain and Italy: Nightmare Averted
The market's biggest fear for the past 2.5 years has been the possibility of Spain or Italy needing a full-blown bailout similar to Greece. A full bailout involves losing access to the bond market. The ECB's bond buying plan ensures Spain and Italy will remain active participants in the credit markets. Is this a long-term solution? No, but it should be enough to allow risk assets to stage a significant rally. It stands to reason that if the market's biggest concern has been addressed in some meaningful way, risk assets can surprise on the upside.
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has gone on the offensive as he seeks a game changer in the battle against the sovereign debt crisis… Draghi's proposal involves Europe's rescue fund buying government bonds on the primary market, buttressed by ECB purchases on the secondary market to ensure transmission of its record-low interest rates, two central bank officials said July 27 on condition of anonymity. Further ECB rate cuts and long- term loans to banks are also up for discussion, one of the officials said.
The Charts Don't Lie
The bullish set-ups we outlined on August 10 remain in place and could push the stock market higher than most can comprehend. If you go back over the last four months and find managers that have been in line with the market, you can bet the vast majority of them pay attention to the market rather than talking heads. The video below shows numerous "last time this happened stocks went up" set-ups in the stock, bond, and commodity markets. Demark exhaustion counts tell us Italian stocks (EWI) are attractive from a risk-reward perspective. DeMark charts and indicators are proprietary tools from Market Studies LLC.
After you click play, use the button in the lower-right corner of the video player to view in full-screen mode. Hit Esc to exit full-screen mode.
Monitoring the charts and following central banks have allowed us to participate in gains in oil stocks (OIH), oil (DBO), silver, gold, gold stocks, Spain (EWP), Italy and the Euro Stoxx 50 (FEZ). Since the fundamental backdrop remains weak, and recent gains have been largely fueled by anticipated actions from central banks, we will maintain maximum flexibility and an open mind about future outcomes. We remained confident enough this week to add the Oil and Gas Exploration ETF (XOP) and Metals and Mining to our already central bank friendly allocations.
If the economy is too weak for stocks to push higher, ask yourself:
"How did the economy look in March of 2009 when stocks bottomed?"
The answer is "not good." Central banks take action when the economy is noticeably weak. When central banks take action, stocks and commodities tend to go up. Central banks took action in early 2009. They are taking action again. See a pattern? | <urn:uuid:7a4d7af5-4b7d-4958-a6d6-201e220f98b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://seekingalpha.com/article/854071-4-reasons-stocks-can-move-significantly-higher?source=yahoo | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950629 | 1,008 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Former U. S. Ambassador to United Nations John Bolton will be the featured speaker at Mercer University's Executive Forum, presented by BB&T, on Tuesday, Oct. 7. Bolton will give a lunch presentation in Atlanta at The Capital City Club, 7 Harris Street, and a dinner presentation at 6:30 p.m. at The University Center on Mercer’s Macon campus.
Bolton served as United States permanent representative to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006. At the U.N., Bolton was an outspoken advocate of U.S. efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, push Syria out of Lebanon and bring African peacekeepers into Somalia. Bolton helped shepherd a major sanction resolution against North Korea through the U.N. Security Council within days of Pyongyang's Oct. 9, 2006, nuclear test. Bolton and France's ambassador led the Security Council to approve a unanimous resolution to end the summer 2006 Hezbollah war on Israel. During his tenure at the United Nations, Bolton was an advocate for human rights. He arranged the Security Council's first deliberations on Burma's human rights abuses. Bolton invited actor George Clooney and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel to brief the Security Council in September 2006 on Arab mass-murder of non-Arabs in Darfur, Sudan. He engineered the Security Council's approval of 22,500 U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. Bolton pressured Sudan's government to accept these personnel atop the 7,000 African Union soldiers already on site.
Bolton is the author of “Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the U.N. and Abroad,” published in 2007.
Prior to his appointment at the U.N., Bolton served as under secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security from May 2001 to May 2005. Previously, Bolton was senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit public policy center. Bolton has spent many years of his career in public service. His previous positions in government include: assistant secretary for International Organization Affairs at the Department of State; assistant attorney general, Department of Justice; assistant administrator for Program and Policy Coordination, U.S. Agency for International Development; and general counsel, U.S. Agency for International Development. Bolton is also an attorney. Currently, he is a senior advisor for Kirkland & Ellis LLC with a focus on counseling clients on domestic and international issues in complex corporate litigation.
About the Executive Forum:
The Executive Forum is a business outreach program of Mercer University’s Eugene W. Stetson School of Business and Economics, and the Office of University Advancement. The Executive Forum provides business professionals with an opportunity to hear nationally noted speakers while networking with other business leaders. For more information, call Mercer’s Office of University Advancement at (800) 837-2911 or visit www.mercer.edu/execforum.
About Mercer University:
Founded in 1833, Mercer University is a dynamic and comprehensive center of undergraduate, graduate and professional education. The University has more than 7,500 students; 11 schools and colleges – liberal arts, law, pharmacy, medicine, business, engineering, education, theology, music, nursing and continuing and professional studies; major campuses in Macon, Atlanta and Savannah; three regional academic centers across the state; a university press; two teaching hospitals — Memorial University Medical Center and the Medical Center of Central Georgia; educational partnerships with Warner Robins Air Logistics Center in Warner Robins and Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta; an engineering research center in Warner Robins; a performing arts center in Macon; and a NCAA Division I athletic program. For more information, visit www.mercer.edu.
- 30 - | <urn:uuid:0370ce9d-6ba7-489a-8afe-14815ad945f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.mercer.edu/News/Articles/2008/081003Execforum.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936658 | 764 | 1.609375 | 2 |
With the death toll in the Occupied Territories now over 100, the overwhelming majority of them Palestinians, a summit aimed at bringing about a ceasefire began today in Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, along with international mediators U.S. President Bill Clinton and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, began talks earlier this morning in what has been described as a very tense atmosphere. [includes rush transcript]
- Simona Sharoni, teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and she is the executive director of the Consortium of Peace Research, Education and Development.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: And this news from Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt: a high-stakes summit aimed at ending the worst Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades began today in what participants said was a tense and difficult atmosphere. Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak addressed the opening session this morning in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, where U.S. President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Jordan’s King Abdullah gathered for talks on a ceasefire.
We turn now to a guest on the phone: Simona Sharoni, who teaches at Evergreen State College. She is an Israeli peace activist.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Simona.
SIMONA SHARONI: Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Your evaluation of the Israeli peace movement at this point, where they stand?
SIMONA SHARONI: Well, the mainstream Israeli peace movement, that is represented by Peace Now, has been paralyzed. They canceled a demonstration last weekend with a call for national unity. They have actually found themselves back a part of the consensus. At the same time, there was a large demonstration this past Saturday. And despite the paralysis that was inflicted on Peace Now — Peace Now inflicted upon itself — there were two members of the Israeli parliament, Yael Dayan of the Labor Party and Mossi Raz of Meretz, that defied their parties’ position and spoke at the demonstration. And the demonstration called on Israel to immediately stop shooting Palestinians and explore a just solution to the conflict. So, it was really unique in the sense that it really took a self-critical look at shoot-to-kill policies that have characterized the past two weeks and the responsibility that Israeli peace activists have to end the violence.
AMY GOODMAN: What do expect from the Sharm el-Sheikh summit?
SIMONA SHARONI: The violence that we have witnessed is symptomatic. It’s not the cause of this kind of crisis and uncertainty; it’s a symptom of the shortcomings of Oslo. And short of an alternative framework that will be able to address the core issues — namely, Jerusalem, refugees, settlement and final border — I think it will be a band-aid that may offer a ceasefire and put a halt to the violence in the short run, but I doubt that this would be a long-lasting solution.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is a long-lasting solution?
SIMONA SHARONI: A long-lasting solution will involve an alternative framework, not necessarily dominated by the U.S., unless the U.S. really gets serious about not only using the rhetoric of an honest broker, but also doing what that entails — namely, being evenhanded in holding Israel accountable for its violation of international law, and its responsibility in both triggering and perpetuating the violence of the past two weeks.
At the U.N., a framework that was more similar to what we witnessed with the Madrid Conference, a framework that will be able to actually look at Palestinians not simply as people that have to respond to dictates issued by Israel and by the U.S., but would really understand that the compromise that Palestinians have agreed to in the early '80s and was written into the Oslo Accord, namely to have an independent Palestinian state on 22 percent of historic Palestine, was an unbelievable compromise. And to ask Palestinians to further — to accept something less of that and a framework that doesn't address the fact that they’re the largest nation of refugees — and refugees were not offered compensation, not even to speak about an option of return, that Israel still insists on keeping Jerusalem as its eternal capital, including Palestinians in Jerusalem, and that the settlements are going to remain.
The other warning sign here, as far as the summit is concerned and future negotiations with Israel, is the National Unity government, that has rewarded Ariel Sharon, triggered the recent wave of violence, with a cabinet position that apparently came after Barak agreed to drop all concessions that were offered at Camp David.
AMY GOODMAN: Simona Sharoni, I want to thank you for being with us, Israeli peace activist teaching at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, executive director of the Consortium of Peace Research, Education and Development. | <urn:uuid:bb79b44d-3d99-4bf5-882c-dfe8cd4bbdbc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.democracynow.org/2000/10/16/occupied_territories_amid_state_of_siege | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962498 | 1,017 | 1.703125 | 2 |
The current media revolution has brought many encouraging changes, but also a worrisome decline in accountability reporting, especially at the local level. Take it from Steven Waldman, who authored the 2011 FCC report “The Information Needs of Communities,” about the future of public-interest reporting in the digital age.
Now Waldman is trying to draw attention to the issue and rally support, via a short, colorful, data-packed video underwritten by the Knight Foundation and produced by Duarte Design—the folks who helped Al Gore sharpen his presentation of An Inconvenient Truth. Among the chilling stats Waldman cites: A Pew survey of 52 Baltimore old and new media outlets showed that 83 percent of the 715 stories they produced were actually the aggregated, recycled, or reblogged work of the beleaguered old guard, mostly The Baltimore Sun. And in 2009, Pew found, the Sun produced 73 percent fewer stories than it had in 1991.
To see the video, visit cjr.org/supportreporting, where Waldman also lists his sources and suggests how consumers can help. As he says, “There are all sorts of news organizations—nonprofit and for profit, national and local—trying to fill the gaps that exist, especially in labor-intensive accountability reporting.” | <urn:uuid:555169ce-4fa3-49bd-9f6a-8fe228b9d04b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cjr.org/opening_shot/opening_shot_septoct2012.php?page=all | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951156 | 266 | 1.773438 | 2 |
UN strongly condemns terrorist attacks on civilians in Baghdad
New York, Feb 18 : The top United Nations envoy in Iraq has strongly condemned the series of bombings that struck several neighbourhoods in Baghdad on Sunday, killing and injuring dozens of people.
Several car bombs exploded across the Iraqi capital, including in busy outdoor market areas. At least 20 people were killed and scores more were wounded in the attacks, which reportedly targeted mainly Shia areas.
"Once again, innocent civilians going about their daily business have been targeted, bringing great grief to their families and communities. Nothing can justify these terrorist attacks," said Martin Kobler, the Secretary-General's Special Representative and head of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).
"All Iraqi leaders have a responsibility to stand up against these atrocious crimes targeting the social fabric of the country."
Kobler extended his sincere condolences to the families of the victims and wishes for a speedy recovery to those who were injured. | <urn:uuid:d78aa397-3264-4a36-b063-5468178efb56> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newkerala.com/news/newsplus/worldnews-138043.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97568 | 192 | 1.523438 | 2 |
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) -
Ford Motor Co. is introducing its second fuel-efficient gas-electric hybrid vehicle a year earlier than originally planned, and the company is turning to some critics in the environmental community to help sell it.
The hybrid version of the Mercury Mariner compact SUV went on sale Monday. Ford started selling a hybrid version of the Ford Escape in August 2004, making it the first hybrid SUV. Toyota Motor, the leader in U.S. hybrid vehicle sales, has since introduced hybrid versions of its Highlander and the Lexus RX-400 SUVs.
"Demand for our first hybrid was so strong that we pushed very hard to pull production of the Mercury Mariner Hybrid up by a full year," said a statement from Mary Ann Wright, director of Ford Sustainable Mobility Technologies and Hybrid Programs.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Ford sold 2,566 hybrid Escapes in 2004, or about 3 percent of the total hybrid market.
Ford said it plans to produce 2,000 Mariner Hybrids at its Kansas City, Mo., plant for the 2006 model year. The company believes volume will eventually grow to 4,000 vehicles annually.
Ford said it will team with groups such as the Sierra Club, a critic of the company's fuel economy performance in the past, to help get out the word about the hybrid Mariner to its environmentally-conscious members.
"We are taking a very non-traditional approach to marketing the Mercury Mariner Hybrid because our target customers are very progressive," said Al Giombetti, president, Lincoln Mercury division of Ford Motor Company.
The Sierra Club said it is pleased to help try to sell the new version of the Mariner.
"We hope that helping to make the Mercury Mariner Hybrid a success will encourage Ford to invest in better technology to increase the fuel economy of its entire fleet," said Dan Becker, director, Sierra Club's Global Warming Program, in a statement issued by Ford.
The hybrid Mariner is expected to get 33 miles per gallon in city driving and 29 miles per gallon on the highway. Unlike traditional gasoline engines, hybrid vehicles often get better mileage in the city by switching to use of an electric motor during stop-and-go driving. Ford said the vehicle will also meet California's Advanced Technology Partial Zero Emissions Standard.
To see how Detroit is finally starting to embrace the idea of hybrid vehicles, click here.
For more news on autos and auto manufacturers, click here. | <urn:uuid:222d71a7-7e0a-4b58-bef8-423f1a545d8b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://money.cnn.com/2005/07/12/Autos/ford_hybrids/index.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944031 | 503 | 1.8125 | 2 |
|Andromeda Tonks (née Black)|
|Also known as||
Andromeda Tonks (née Black) (b. Between Late 1951 or Early 1952 and 1955), also known as Dromeda, was a pure-blood witch, born into the Black family. She was the middle daughter of Cygnus and Druella Black, as well as the sister of Bellatrix and Narcissa. She attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the 1960s and was sorted into Slytherin house. After Hogwarts, she married a Muggle-born, Ted Tonks and was disowned by her prejudiced family. She became the mother of Nymphadora Tonks. During the Second Wizarding War, Andromeda and her husband were allies of the Order of the Phoenix, as their daughter was a member.
Nymphadora married Remus Lupin in 1997, and they had a son, Teddy Lupin. During the war, Andromeda's husband was killed by Snatchers in 1998. Remus was killed at the Battle of Hogwarts; Nymphadora was also killed by Andromeda's sister, Bellatrix. After the Second Wizarding War, Andromeda raised her grandson with the help of his godfather Harry Potter, which meant that Teddy also spent time with the Potter and Weasley families.
Andromeda was born between late 1951 and early 1955. She was the second daughter of Cygnus and Druella Black (née Rosier), and younger sister of Bellatrix Lestrange and older sister of Narcissa Malfoy. Walburga and Orion Black were her aunt and uncle on her father's side, and Sirius and Regulus Black her cousins. Evan Rosier may be a relative on her mother's side. Alphard Black was also Andromeda's uncle.
Andromeda attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s and was sorted into Slytherin house. She may have been very skilled at Charms class. It is also possible that she was good at Defence Against the Dark Arts because in her adult life she managed to resist torture without revealing any vital information or losing her sanity.
At some point during or after her education at Hogwarts, Andromeda met Ted Tonks, a Muggle-born wizard. Despite her family's steadfast belief in the importance of blood purity, Andromeda married Ted and was subsequently disowned and burned off the family tapestry in 12 Grimmauld Place by her aunt, parents and sisters. Statements by her sisters indicate that both of them cut off contact with Andromeda because they considered her a blood traitor for her marriage.
At roughly the age of twenty, Andromeda and Ted had one child, Nymphadora Tonks. Andromeda selected the name, which her daughter strongly disliked, preferring to be known simply as "Tonks" by her friends. Ted, Remus Lupin and Andromeda called her Dora for short.
Andromeda had a talent for cleanliness that her husband and daughter did not share.
Second Wizarding War
Although Andromeda and Ted did not appear to be official members of the Order of the Phoenix, they allowed their home to be one of the Order's safe-houses and were supportive of the organisation to which their daughter belonged. Nymphadora married Remus Lupin in the summer of 1997; he suspected that her parents did not approve because he was a werewolf, though it is unknown if this was true; given the fact that Andromeda wasn't supremacist these suspicions of Lupin may have not been true.
After the Battle of the Seven Potters, they were instrumental in Harry Potter's moving from Privet Drive to the Burrow: Harry Potter and Rubeus Hagrid took temporary refuge in the Tonks' home, where Andromeda took care of Hagrid's injuries. She seemed somewhat offended when Harry first reacted to her as if she were her sister Bellatrix because of their resemblance. She and Ted were both very worried about their daughter when they learned that the Order was ambushed by Death Eaters when transporting Harry, though Ted tried to reassure his wife by pointing out that their daughter had been through worse in the course of her work as an Auror.
- Andromeda: "What happened to our daughter? Hagrid said you were ambushed; where is Nymphadora?"
- Harry: "I don't know. We don't know what happened to anyone else."
- — Andromeda asks Harry about her daughter's safety[src]
When the Ministry of Magic fell under Lord Voldemort's control in August of 1997, the magical protections around the Order safe-houses were broken. Andromeda and Ted were interrogated and tortured by Death Eaters for information pertaining to Harry Potter and the Order. Their son-in-law reported that they were "shaken, obviously, but otherwise okay". Soon after this, their daughter discovered that she was pregnant and came to stay with Andromeda and Ted, as her husband temporarily left her out of fear that he would pass on lycanthropy to their child.
The Ministry soon began persecuting Muggle-borns by forming the Muggle-Born Registration Commission, which charged Muggle-borns with having stolen their magic and their wands from "real" witches and wizards. Ted refused to register on principle and was forced to go on the run; Andromeda, as a pure-blood, was safe, and stayed with her pregnant daughter. Some time before the birth of her grandson Teddy, Andromeda was left a widow, as her husband was killed by Snatchers.
Andromeda's daughter and son-in-law were killed during the Battle of Hogwarts by Bellatrix Lestrange, Andromeda's sister, and Antonin Dolohov, respectively. Bellatrix was later killed by Molly Weasley.
Andromeda is described as closely resembling her elder sister Bellatrix physically, though she has light brown hair instead of dark, and has softer and wider eyes. Thus, she is likely tall and bears the patrician beauty common to the Black family.
Personality and traits
It is safe to assume, given her marriage to a Muggle-born, that Andromeda was very different from both of her sisters: while her sisters married into "respectable" pure-blood families, she married for love despite her family's opposition, leading to her family's hatred. She is clearly a good mother showing her concern about her daughter's whereabouts after the Battle of the Seven Potters and taking care of her during her pregnancy, she is also a good grandmother raising her daughter's son after her death. Apart from her husband and daughter, her cousin Sirius considered her to be his only true family, demonstrating that Andromeda always treated Sirius with respect and kindness. In addition of being a good wife, mother and grandmother, she is a good friend, because despite that she was under torture, she did not reveal anything that could harm Harry or any of her friends. Like Molly Weasley, Andromeda is a woman dedicated to her family and friends.
Magical abilities and skills
- Healer: After the Battle of the Seven Potters, Harry and Hagrid took refuge in her house, where she healed Hagrid's injuries. Given Hagrid's half-giant nature, and concomitant natural magical resistance, this does imply she was a talented healer.
- Household Charms: Andromeda had a talent for cleanliness, a talent that her husband and her daughter did not share.
- Resistance to Dark Magic: Despite being under torture, she managed to resist and did not reveal any vital information to her attackers.
Andromeda's relationship with her parents was likely a bad one. Because she married a muggle-born against her family's ideals of blood purity she was disowned and not considered a Black after that. It is safe to assume that her parents did not consider her as their daughter anymore and like Bellatrix and Narcissa cut off all contact with her. It is also possible that Andromeda's parents never met their granddaughter.
Husband and daughter
Andromeda married Ted Tonks in spite of her family's hatred of Muggle-borns, which led to her being disowned and shunned by her own sisters. Thus, it can be assumed that the two loved each other greatly. Ted comforted his wife when they were unsure what happened to their daughter after the Battle of the Seven Potters, reassuring her that, as an Auror, Tonks had been through worse.
Nymphadora Tonks and her mother were close, though Tonks disliked the given name her "fool of a mother" gave her. Andromeda was frantic with worry over her daughter's participation in the Second Wizarding War, and opted to stay with her during her pregnancy while Ted went on the run from the Muggle-Born Registration Commission. When Tonks went to fight in the Battle of Hogwarts, she left her infant son in the care of his grandmother, who would raise the boy after his parents' deaths in battle with the help of Teddy´s godfather Harry Potter.
It is unknown what kind of relationship Andromeda had with her older sister, Bellatrix Lestrange, and younger sister, Narcissa Malfoy, when they were younger. However, both her sisters believed in pure-blood supremacy, whereas Andromeda obviously did not, given her marriage. After she married the Muggle-born Ted, Andromeda was disowned and both her sisters cut off all contact with her. Andromeda's relationship with Bellatrix was likely particularly hateful, given that Bellatrix murdered Andromeda's cousin, Sirius Black, as well as her daughter (though, given the circumstances, she likely didn't learn of the latter until after the the battle and her eldest sister's death). Andromeda also seemed to be offended when Harry Potter, upon first seeing her, reacted as if she were her older sister. Andromeda's relationship with Narcissa, however, is unknown.
Andromeda's younger cousin Sirius Black told Harry Potter in 1995 that Andromeda was his favourite cousin. Like her, Sirius was considered a "blood traitor" by their family, and was disowned for his beliefs. Thus, the two were likely close in their younger years. Sirius considered Andromeda and Tonks his only, and true, family.
The first time Harry met Andromeda, he thought that she looked a lot like her sister Bellatrix, but with softer, kinder eyes and lighter hair. Her resemblance to Bellatrix was such that Harry attempted to attack Andromeda, but upon realizing his mistake, he felt bad and apologized as her physical comparison to her sister seemed offensive to her. After Voldemort's downfall, Harry helped Andromeda raise her grandson, and his godson, Teddy Lupin. Harry liked and respected Andromeda for her ideals and because she was Tonks' mother. It is possible that after the war they would see each other regularly, and probable in such a scenario that they would develop a bond because of Teddy, Lupin and Tonks's memory. It is also highly likely that Andromeda herself was welcomed at Harry and Ginny's house as a dinner guest.
Order of the Phoenix
Andromeda wasn't an official member of the Order of the Phoenix, but nevertheless, she supported the Order's ideals (given her marriage to a Muggle-born). As her daughter and son-in-law were members, she would allow the Order use of her house as a safe house. It is likely that she has a good relation with all of the members, and as she was at Hogwarts at the same time as Arthur and Molly Weasley, so a friendship could have started there. The degree and nature of her involvment during the First Wizarding War is unknown, but it is reasonable to assume that she helped them in some way. Andromeda proved her loyalty in 1998 when she was tortured by Death Eater at her home and did not reveal anything of import regarding Harry or the Order, despite the fact that she was under torture.
Many members of the House of Black — such as Sirius, Bellatrix and Cygnus — appear to be named after stars or constellations, and the name Andromeda follows this pattern. It is a northern constellation that contains the Andromeda Galaxy and was named after the character from Greek mythology: a princess who was chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster, as divine punishment for her mother's (Cassiopeia) boasting, but was saved by the hero Perseus, whom she then married. This may allude to Andromeda Tonks' estrangement from her aristocratic, but cruel extended family.
Behind the scenes
- Due to the similarities in appearance shared by Andromeda and her sister, Bellatrix Lestrange, fans of the Harry Potter series set up an online petition to have Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Bellatrix, play Andromeda in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. However, as Harry and Hagrid escape to the Burrow rather than the Tonks' house, Andromeda and Ted were both cut from the film.
- Out of all three sisters, Andromeda was the only sister that hasn't appeared in any of the films.
- Andromeda is also the only member of the five Black cousins who hasn't appeared in the films, as her two sisters appeared in the Half-Blood Prince through to the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Bellatrix also appearing in the Order of the Phoenix, Sirius appeared in Prisoner of Azkaban through Order of the Phoenix and in Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and a younger Regulus appeared in one of Horace Slughorn's photographs in the Half-Blood Prince.
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (First mentioned)
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (film) (Appears on tapestry)
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (video game) (Seen on Black family tree tapestry)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (video game) (Seen on Black family tree tapestry)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Mentioned only)
Notes and references
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 The Black family tapestry shows that Andromeda is younger than Bellatrix, who was born in 1951, and older than Narcissa, who was born in 1955.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 In Chapter 4 of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Horace Slughorn states: "The whole Black family had been in my house, but Sirius ended up in Gryffindor!" This implies that all Blacks except Sirius were Sorted into Slytherin while Slughorn was Head of House. Andromeda presumably attended Hogwarts from the mid-1960s to early 1970s, and thus would have been a student of Slughorn, who was stated to have begun teaching at Hogwarts around the same time as Albus Dumbledore in Chapter 5 of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in 1938 or earlier. Sirius Black also states "My whole family have been in Slytherin" and in Chapter 23 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, confirming that at least those Blacks closely related to Sirius were in Slytherin.
- ↑ Bellatrix was 47 when she died on May 2nd 1998, so must have been born between January 1st 1951 and 2nd May 1951, meaning that Andromeda could not have been born until late 1951 (if Bellatrix was in January, February or March) or early 1952 (if Bellatrix was born between April and May)
- ↑ Black family tree
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- ↑ http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/HelenaBCforAndromedaTonks/ | <urn:uuid:da603fca-1a5e-4baa-bc84-3c2b4f46c157> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Andromeda_Tonks?diff=prev&oldid=766507 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986377 | 3,301 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Total healthcare costs have remained in check for three straight years. The sector's share of the overall economy hasn't budged since 2009—a welcome change from the experience of most of the past half century. But no one in Washington has conducted a careful examination of what's behind this trend. Did the recession and still-sluggish economy cause consumers to cut back? Have providers' herculean efforts to improve quality and lower costs borne fruit? Have insurers rediscovered their inner cost-control selves?
Instead, Congress in its infinite nonwisdom decided to pull out its preferred legislative tool for dealing with the nation's deficit problem: the meat ax. Earlier this month, it defaulted on its legislative responsibilities by imposing an across-the-board 2% cut that kicks in April 1.
Top hospital officials who attended last week's annual congress of the American College of Healthcare Executives weren't happy about the latest round of cuts. Yet there weren't many complaints, either. In interviews with Modern Healthcare, many said they had budgeted for sequestration by eliminating services, restricting hiring and re-evaluating capital investments
But that hasn't stopped those same executives from making the strategic investments needed to thrive in the reimbursement environment that is slowly being built through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. That world—whether reimbursed by public or private payers—will be dominated by bundled payments and shared savings in the short-run and eventually by once-a-year capitation payments for individual patients. Fee-for-service medicine isn't dead yet. But it is on life support.
To survive in this coming world, providers will need to learn a whole new set of population-management skills for deployment across the so-called continuum of care. That's why systems have purchased physician practices, built ambulatory clinics and forged links with post-acute-care facilities. It is easier to coordinate care and control costs for patients with multiple chronic conditions when you own most of the network.
Not only do these narrow networks allow for greater coordination of care at the most cost-effective sites, but also all the revenue, even if reduced, remains within the system. Ideally, there will be multiple networks within each region. That will keep the antitrust authorities at bay, and it should allow for true competition on the only issues that should matter to patients and payers: quality and cost.
However, provider organizations developing these narrow networks cannot avoid the actuarial risk inherent in managing large patient pools. Those are tasks that have traditionally been left to the insurance industry. But the last time the nation made a large-scale attempt to move toward capitation—the managed-care revolution of the 1990s—insurers bungled the job. They managed risk by denying care. And when that failed, they simply defaulted by passing along higher costs.
Should provider systems and networks take on that actuarial task now? Some systems are dipping their toes in the insurance waters by acquiring small firms. Some of the most successful integrated systems in the country—Kaiser Permanente and Geisinger Health System, for instance—have always had insurance arms. But it would be a long and difficult task for inexperienced organizations to replicate the model.
The better approach is to maintain the arm's-length relationship between insurers and providers while working together on managing actuarial risk. In America's complicated employer-based insurance world, which includes large groups, small groups and individual purchasers, not to mention the growing role of insurers in managing Medicare and Medicaid populations, it makes a lot more sense for providers and insurers to forge partnerships around specific patient populations rather than waste time and resources trying to encroach on each other's turf.
Merrill Goozner, Editor | <urn:uuid:39b96a69-cd60-498c-a10a-823e34236fe2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20130316/MAGAZINE/303169988/share-risk-not-roles | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955121 | 757 | 1.726563 | 2 |
“The mind has its own harmony, its own way of regaining balance and stability after a loss. The process is called grief.” Rodney Smith.
We have an innate means of healing. Grief is complicated because life is complicated. No medicine will be a balm for the loss before us. No steps, no workbooks, no DSM diagnosis, no false prophet will heal our grief. Our love does not die and is not contingent on the physical presence of the person we loved. But sitting with our breath, allowing ourselves compassion in the moment, to feel and be with the tumultuous feelings, thoughts, sensations that arise from our grief will allow our hearts to open and heal.
This blog is meant to be an alternative to what’s already out there in the world. What we’ve been led to believe, what we fear as the pain hurts our hearts, as book after book and specialist after specialist tells you need to be fixed… breathe it out… feel the freedom that comes from letting it all go. Prepare to go deeply within and explore with gentleness the truth you are living.
Join us as we explore issues of dying, grieving, loving, growing, healing, living, learning, and well, just being. | <urn:uuid:1b0a0149-1536-42cc-9c62-3a55558a28c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://namasteconsultinginc.com/2011/12/05/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950514 | 256 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Control and Sexuality by Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Vanja Hamzić examines zina laws in some Muslim contexts and communities in order to explore connections between the criminalisation of sexuality, gender-based violence and women’s rights activism. The Violence is Not Our Culture Campaign and the Women Living Under Muslim Laws network present this comparative study and feminist analysis of zina laws as a contribution to the broader objective of ending violence in the name of ‘culture’. Attached is the whole book, available for download for free. Please do consider making a donation to WLUML.
"I was the lawyer of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani and I had the right to defend her," Iranian lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei says of the case that has drawn international attention. Mostafaei was defending Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery when Iranian officials jailed his wife, her brother, and his father-in-law in an apparent attempt to pressure him to back down. In his first interview after fleeing Iran and surfacing in Turkey, Mostafaei talked to RFE/RL's Golnaz Esfandiari, condemning the Iranian judiciary for taking his wife "hostage" and vowing that he will never surrender to Iranian authorities. He also talked about the circumstances under which he was forced to escape Iran and leave his family, including his 7-year-old daughter, behind. (Mostafaei was reportedly taken into custody by Turkish authorities and the UN's refugee agency has said he should be allowed to apply for asylum.)
Mohammad Mostafaie, a human rights defender and lawyer of Sakineh Ashtiani, the woman whose sentence to death by stoning in Iran in June received worldwide public attention, has been arrested and detained by Turkish authorities. On 24 July 2010, his wife, Fereshteh Halimi and brother in law, Farhad Halimi, were arrested and are now detained at the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran. Prior to their arrest, Mostafaie was invited for interrogation and subsequently released by the police but was immediately ordered to be arrested again.
Press Release: Roj Women is an umbrella site that seeks to publicise the work of Roj Women’s Association, a women’s charity working on community development in the UK, and of its political branch, Roj Women’s Assembly, that campaigns for far-reaching legal and political reforms in Turkey. Roj Women strives to give Kurdish women, whether in their countries of origin or in the diaspora, a voice to publicise the gender and racial discrimination they face. Beyond raising awareness at the national and international levels, Roj Women campaigns for change and offers services to support Kurdish women and child victims of male and military violence.
Press Statement: On 06 April, 2010, Yosma Altunbey, a mother of six living in the village of Çığırgan in Kars, Southeast Turkey, was subjected to a brutal physical assault by her husband and his brother. She managed to escape to her parents’ house and filed an official complaint against the perpetrators at the gendarmerie station. According to reports, Gendarme Specialist Sergeant K.T. tried to make her withdraw her complaint, threatened her and eventually assaulted her himself when she refused.
“Insanlar mücadeleleriyle varolurlar“. Zeynep Gambetti, a scholar of Kurdish politics, found this comment inscribed in the visitors’ book at the Diyarbakir Art Centre’s exhibit of photographer Ami Vitale’s Kashmir photos. The phrase roughly translates as; “people come into existence through their struggles“. The struggle to “ensure the equal rights of men and women to enjoy all economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights” has indeed defined the existence of many ethnically Kurdish women in Diyarbakir and, more generally, in the south-eastern region of Turkey. The obstacles in this struggle for equality are manifold. While the efforts of Kurdish women in Turkey to overcome these obstacles have been remarkable, there is still considerable progress to be made.
تحدثت الأسبوع الماضي عن حصاد المرأة السعودية خلال عام بمناسبة اليوم العالمي للمرأة وبالطبع لم تكف المساحة للحديث عن الجزء الأول من الموضوع وهو ما أنجز على أن يكون الجزء الثاني لموضوع الباقي ولم يُنجز. لكني وجدت قبل الاستطراد أو المضي في حديثي الذي سوف يكون طويلاً، أن أتعرض لتاريخ هذا اليوم الذي يصادف هذا العام الاحتفاء بمئويته، أي أنه استحدث منذ عام 1910، فما الذي كان يجري في العالم آنذاك ودعا لطرح هذا اليوم كيوم خاص بالمرأة يكون مؤشراً ويوماً يُستخدم لمطالبة النساء بحقوقهن المهضومة عبر العصور والبلدان؟
The Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers is deeply concerned at reports (The Guardian, 1st Feb 2010) that a 15-year-old girl, a Turkish Kurd, named Berivan, has been jailed in Turkey for nearly eight years after being convicted of "terrorist" offences. She was arrested at a demonstration in the south-eastern city of Batman in October 2009. The 13-and-a-half-year sentence originally imposed on her was later reduced on appeal to seven years and nine months because of her age. She was found guilty of "crimes on behalf of an illegal organisation" after prosecutors alleged she had hurled stones and shouted slogans. She was also convicted of attending "meetings and demonstrations in opposition to the law" and "spreading propaganda for an illegal organisation". There are substantial concerns as to the fairness of her trial and conviction.
Turkish police have recovered the body of a 16-year-old girl they say was buried alive by relatives in an "honour" killing carried out as punishment for talking to boys. The girl, who has been identified only by the initials MM, was found in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-metre hole dug under a chicken pen outside her home in Kahta, in the south-eastern province of Adiyaman.
PEACE IN KURDISTAN CAMPAIGN: Open Letter to Prime Minister Gordon Brown: We, the undersigned, call on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to use all available diplomatic means to bring an immediate end to the repression of Kurdish politicians in Turkey and to promote a political and negotiated solution to the Kurdish conflict. The mass arrest of some 80 leading members of the new Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) that took place in Turkey on Christmas Eve is a deeply disturbing development that can only have grave consequences for the country’s future peace and stability. The action followed the banning of the popular pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) on 11 December by Turkey’s Constitutional Court. | <urn:uuid:621ccac1-1be5-4d6c-ab82-85d4c0ad8758> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wluml.org/zh-hant/taxonomy/term/12?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943482 | 1,795 | 1.734375 | 2 |
(Jacquelyn Martin | The Associated Press)
Given the number of existing loopholes and the ease with which people can buy firearms on the Internet, people printing guns might seem like adding a drop of water to an Olympic-sized swimming pool. According to an annual report released by the ATF, more than 5.5 million guns are made in the United States each year, and millions more are imported.
With a 3-D printer, you can build a real gun at home
Analysis » As the device becomes a consumer product, parts, other objects could become prolific.
By NICK BILTON
| The New York Times
First Published Oct 12 2012 05:58 pm • Last Updated Jan 14 2013 11:32 pm
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. See more about comments here. | <urn:uuid:a5d878a8-5dd3-48c3-97ee-0d92aa6cc051> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/55059084-79/gun-guns-printer-printers.html.csp?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93653 | 276 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Should you rethink online image?
As technological change has become the norm in how people and jobs connect, here are several helpful leads to tackle your larger problem of unemployment.
Minneapolis executive recruiter and job search coach Harry Urschel says, "Employers' perception of your online activity is very subjective based on their own biases and preconceptions." Urschel describes some of these in his blog, "How Employers View Your Online Presence," which you can find on his website TheWiseJobSearch.com.
GEE-WHIZ JOB SEARCH. I've heard that Google Plus is moving way up in job search power and can't be ignored. Clock a few practice hours on the site itself, Plus.Google.com, and get to know how the world's newest social network functions -- and how it differs from competitors.
DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS. Corporate hiring insiders are well aware of hidden reasons why job seekers are ignored, while most outsiders are not. A dozen of these reasons are revealed by job expert and college professor Dr. John Sullivan in his terrific new article, "Recruiting's Dirty Little Secrets -- What You Don't Know Can Hurt You." The article appears on the nation's top recruiting website, ERE.net.
In Dr. Sullivan's must-read rundown of what may be causing your search efforts to fall into the "corporate black hole," he explains that recruiters may be looking for any excuse to drop you:
"The entire screening process is often focused on finding a single error or lack of 'fit' to quickly eliminate any applicant. If you are categorized as a job-jumper, you are unemployed, you have bad credit or Klout (a test measurement of your ability to influence others) scores, you live in a distant zip code, or they find weird things on Facebook about you, you will be immediately rejected without knowing why. As a result, those who fail to make a single mistake during the process, rather than those who are the best, are the ones that are most likely to get hired."
"Why can't I find a job?" has for many years been one of the most frequent questions readers ask me. Dr. Sullivan's article is the first time I've seen such a stash of answers in one easy-to-understand explanation.
RESOURCE RESEARCH. Social media and professional networking resources are moving up the hiring hill, but don't make the mistake of assuming that job boards are over. Far from dead, the boards continue to score high in studies of how jobs are filled. Look over details chronicled in end-of-year studies, including these two:
-- "10 Earth-shattering, Mind-blowing Things That Happened in Online Recruiting During 2011" by Jeff Dickey-Chasins. His review appears on ERE.net.
-- "Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011" from Bersin & Associates at Bersin.com. Read the press release; the book is a professional work priced at about $1,000.
RESUME FORMATS. The multimedia resume VisualCV is now free, making it worth considering for your job search. You can explore the presentation's value for you on its website, VisualCV.com.
-- The self-marketing tool's big advantage: A VisualCV is useful to showcase your personal brand and to supplement your LinkedIn or Google Plus profile.
-- The site's big disadvantage: A VisualCV is difficult (if you can do it at all) to tailor to show how your qualifications closely match a specific job opening's requirements.
(E-mail career questions for possible use in this column to Joyce Lain Kennedy at [email protected]; use "Reader Question" for subject line. Or mail her at Box 368, Cardiff, CA 92007.) | <urn:uuid:7a028007-6c08-4c25-a2a7-54b18a1b1eda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/jobs/sns-201112281600--tms--careersntp--h-a20120101jan01,0,6630162.column | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945329 | 793 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Do You Know This Person?
April 19, 2012
If you are a Caucasian woman, aged 50 or older, possibly married, very likely working full or part-time—then there is a good chance that you are also (or will soon be) serving as a caregiver for an aging parent or relative. At least this is what a recent report released by the National Alliance for Caregiving, AARP, and MetLife indicates.
The entire report, entitled “Caregiving in the U.S., A Focused Look at Those Caring for Someone Aged 50 or Older” is 73 pages long, but you needn’t read the entire thing to get an insider’s peek at the state of caregiving today. And the report isn’t limited to caring for an aging relative; it includes statistics on those caring for special needs children, as well as family members of any age.
Some of the more interesting statistics listed in the report are:
* 40% of Caregivers are aged 50-64, and 26% are even younger (35–49).
* 63% of those receiving care are over the age of 75.
* 67% of Caregivers are women.
* 76% of Caregivers are Caucasian.
* 89% are caring for a relative (36% of the time it is the caregiver’s mother.)
* Over half of caregivers are employed while caregiving; and…
* Caregivers provide an average of 19 hours of caregiving per week (in addition to their regular employment.)
It is worthwhile to note that according to this study most of these caregivers are unpaid for the care they give, as they are caring for a family member and are doing it voluntarily—but a full 43% said that they felt they did not have a choice to take on the role.
Our office can’t prevent you from one day needing a caregiver (or one day having to serve as a caregiver) but we can help you plan for when that day may come. Thinking and planning ahead can keep you—and your loved ones—from ending up in a situation where you feel you have no choice.
Help for Alzheimer’s Patients AND Their Caregivers
September 25, 2010
Shakespeare said that old age is a return to childhood; without teeth, without voice… and in the case of Alzheimer’s patients, without memories. But if the elderly have to endure the drawbacks of childhood, shouldn’t they get some of the benefits too?
The Family Caregiver Alliance must have thought so too, because a few times a year they sponsor a weekend sleepover in Alamo, California called Camps for Caring. The program provides campers with an experience “of shared meals and stories, of activities creative and expressive, of exercise in the outdoors and of new friends and memories made over the weekend.” But the significance of the experience can go far beyond that.
According to a recent story about Camps for Caring on NPR Radio, although “campers typically don’t remember details of the retreat… the experience significantly lifts their mood.” In fact, “Post-camp surveys of family caregivers indicate that the ‘good feeling’ lingers, and it even can improve daily functioning.”
Beyond being a beneficial experience for the elderly attendees, Camps for Caring provides a much-needed break for overworked caregivers, who often attend to their elderly loved one around the clock, and can quickly find themselves dangerously close to the burnout breaking point.
Out of state residents may find it difficult to take advantage of the Camps for Caring program, but that doesn’t mean that caregivers or their elderly charges must leave themselves at the mercy of the effects of Alzheimer’s. In addition to information about Camps for Caring itself, the NPR article includes some tips from experts that can make dealing with Alzheimer’s easier on everyone. Or you can go to the Family Caregiver Alliance’s Family Care Navigator to find organizations and resources in your area.
Help For Caregivers: 10 Steps Toward Taking Care of Yourself
April 19, 2010
The number of people serving as caregivers has exploded in recent years, and according to PR Newswire the number of caregivers now tops 65 million people (29% of the population of the US.) This includes people providing care for elderly adults, special needs children, young adults with disabilities, and more. These caregivers are people who offer their time, energy and financial support to ensure that their loved one—parent, child, sibling, grandparent—lives a life of joy and comfort. It is admirable and often selfless work… and it can take its toll on the caregiver.
Many caregivers are working so hard to take care of everyone around them that they forget to take care of themselves. Their health will often suffer, their financial security goes untended, and their own social interactions fall by the wayside. All of this can quickly lead to one thing: Caregiver Burnout.
Although we don’t hear much about it, Caregiver Burnout is a very real phenomenon. Described as similar to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, Cargiver Burnout can cause depression, withdrawal from society, self-neglect, erratic behavior, and at its worst—suicidal tendencies.
But there are ways to combat the onset of Caregiver Burnout. HelpGuide.org provides an entire section on how to recognize and prevent Caregiver Burnout, including tips for family caregivers and a list of some of the warning signs of Caregiver burnout. And that’s not all, this article in PR Newswire offers 10 steps caregivers can take to ensure they take care of themselves financially.
If you are the caregiver in your family it is essential that you (and your fellow family members) recognize the difficulty of the work you do. Be aware of your limits, respect them, and don’t be afraid to put yourself first. Caring for yourself isn’t the selfish thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do.
Avoid Caregiver Burnout
July 27, 2009
Many of our clients provide care for elderly loved ones; some even providing constant, around the clock care. Care giving is a demanding, overwhelming, and often grossly under-appreciated job. In addition to giving up their own time and interests, caregivers have to watch someone they love slowly regress and lose the ability to do even the most basic of tasks. Often, the senior being cared for eventually loses their ability to even recognize the people around them… including the person giving constant loving care. For all of these reasons, it’s very common for caregivers to experience depression and fatigue… caregiver burnout.
According to this article in the New York Times, depression and burnout does not have to be the plight of all caregivers, especially if you know the symptoms and how to combat them. And the good news is that just about all the preventative strategies listed in the article are easy and readily available… the hard part for caregivers is valuing their own time and mental health enough to take advantage of them.
There is a saying that hardships shared are halved, and joys shared are doubled; this is as true of care giving as it is for anything else. Many caregivers are reluctant to ask for help, but sharing the burden could save you from caregiver burnout. Don’t be afraid to reach out.
More information about caregiver support and resources can be found at the following websites: | <urn:uuid:2c607cee-9421-4922-b100-bc4ee5989e70> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lawyerforseniors.com/tag/caregiver-burnout/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953533 | 1,584 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Chrysler Group is developing a supercharged Hemi V8 with power approaching the 640 hp of...
Ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix on June 8-10, Formula One CEO Bernie Ecclestone is rattling cages in Montreal by implying that he needs to see facility improvements to the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve before agreeing to a new contract with the event promoter, Francois Dumontier. The existing contract will expire in 2014.
According to Canadian sources, Ecclestone wants a larger paddock area at the island venue in the St. Lawrence river, where temporary, floating platforms are used to extend the facility in the rowing basin that was created for the 1976 Olympic Games in the city. Canadian sources indicate that the cost would be in the region of $15 million.
A consortium of civic bodies—the city administration, the province of Quebec and the national government—already invests a similar sum of taxpayers’ money in the event every year. According to Canadian economic impact assessments, the Grand Prix draws approximately 300,000 people over the weekend and generates approximately $90 million in revenues.
Canadian stakeholders appear to be positive about this development.
Dumontier said, "First, it is important to point out that two years remain on the current contract. Taking into consideration that the permanent facilities of the circuit, such as the [race] control tower and the pit garages, are nearly 25 years old, it is quite likely that work to be carried out on these will be an important part of the negotiations aiming at extending the contract."
Raymond Bachand, a member of the federal parliament in Ottawa, commented, “Mr. Ecclestone wants to ensure the facilities are in good condition, [so] we must find a way to fund it."
Sign up to have the latest racing news, Autoweek Daily Drive and Autoweek TV delivered right to your inbox. | <urn:uuid:8bf57430-bccf-4418-9109-164f7a28b0f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.autoweek.com/article/20120511/f1/120519944 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951355 | 389 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Non Profit Financial Management
One way to ensure that you your organization is transparent and accountable financially is to be able to rely on the guidance of others that not only know what they are doing but have the talent to be able to explain it to others so it makes sense. The team at Diversified Nonprofit Services can do just that!
Diversified Nonprofit Services can help your organization with the following:
- Provide a Financial Health Assessment to determine financial viability
- Provide sample policies and procedures that assure organizational performance and transparency
- Explain financial stewardship and its role in the organization
- Define the role of Treasurer, Finance Committee and Audit Committee of the organization
- Define the role of the Agency Executive and the Board of Directors in the Fiduciary activities of the organization
- Identify the necessary filing forms to the United States Treasury Department
- Develop a budgeting process based on Mission as well as organizational goals and objectives, including forecasts, comparison and analysis, reviews
- Identify characteristics of financial health
- Develop a cash flow and cash management analysis
- Develop a Risk Management Plan
For more information and answers to the technical questions no one seems to know, contact Kevin Bingham with DNS Associates a full service consulting firm. The DNS team of professionals have taught countless nonprofits what it takes to be successful in running a nonprofit business from the ground up. | <urn:uuid:828ed527-c4bd-404a-8049-2660ca10e513> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nonprofitexpert.com/non-profit-financial-management/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935233 | 280 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Eight Ferraris, a Lamborghini and three Mercedes Benzs - as well as two Toyotas were part of a 14-car crash in in Shimonoseki, south-west Japan, that wrecked 4,1m USD worth of vehicles - setting the new world record for the Most expensive car crash.
The Guinness world record for the First car with a constant crash-avoidance system was set by the Swedish car maker Volvo, which has released in 2008 the first car to constantly monitor the possibility of – and then avoid – a nose-to-tail crash.
Guinness World Records also recognized the world record for the First plane crash caused by a crocodile, set by the crash of a Filair internal flight in DR Congo, which killed 20 passengers and crew; it was caused by a crocodile smuggled on-board by a passenger.
Local police officials were quoted as saying that they had never seen so many expensive cars in one place, much less involved in a single accident.
The cars appeared to be part of an outing of luxury automobile enthusiasts, traveling north together from the island of Kyushu to a festival in the city of Hiroshima, on the southern end of the main island of Honshu.
As the convoy sped through rain in the western prefecture of Yamaguchi, one of the Ferrari drivers, trying to change lanes, struck the median and spun out of control. Evasive maneuvers by other cars, which also included two Toyotas, sent them smashing into each other.
Bright red sports car debris was dramatically strewn across the highway, which was closed for six hours by police as the wrecked remains of the convoy were cleared away.
Among those being questioned by police is a 60-year-old self-employed man, from Fukuoka prefecture in southern Kyushu, who may face charges for his role in the crash.
The driver, who is thought to have been leading the luxury car convoy on its journey from Kyushu to Hiroshima, is believed to have lost control of his red Ferrari while switching lanes.
Speeding has been cited by police as one possible cause of the accident, with convictions for dangerous driving resulting in an accident incurring a prison sentence of up to three months or a fine of up to Y100,000 (£820).
"We will be questioning the 14 drivers and their customers," said a spokesman for Yamaguchi Police, which is investigating the crash.
"Ten people were injured in the crash but they have all been released from hospital. These drivers weren't going to a car event. They were just driving. They are friends and they wanted to drive to Hiroshima."
One local Ferrari dealer from Kyushu, who was once visited by the driver of the red 353 Ferrari involved in the crash, warned against the dangers of luxury cars speeding in convoy.
"Normally, if we organise an event, we always make sure there are staff driving in the middle and front, to ensure people don't go too fast and start speeding.
"But these were just individual car owners. It was very dangerous."
Mitsuyoshi Isejima, executive officer for Yamaguchi Prefecture's Expressway Traffic Police Unit, went so far as to describe the luxury convoy of car owners as "a gathering of narcissists". | <urn:uuid:4fe34e26-78cd-4008-a427-876c6faa65a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.4to40.com/world_records/index.asp?p=Most_Expensive_Car_Crash&c=Transport&country=Japan | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98451 | 677 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Last Friday I attended a Study Tour of the Wellcome Trust, organised by the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA). Study tours allow research administrators to gain useful insight into a funder’s vision, values, goals, policies and funding opportunities currently available and planned.
What follows below are the notes I made as part of the various sessions I attended throughout the day. The research office is also planning information and workshop sessions specifically focusing on Wellcome funding over the coming year, in particular highlighting the significant possibilities for non-science disciplines. If you have any questions about any of the schemes in the meantime, please contact us.
The Arts Awards and public engagement with science are only one potential route. There are also opportunities for researchers from humanities and social sciences disciplines which engage with medical research, understood in the broadest possible sense, through the Wellcome Medical History and Humanities and Bioethics funding schemes.
Wellcome Trust Overview
- Many of the sessions started with the Wellcome Trust mission statement, and since this informs their vision, values, all of their funding schemes and future direction, it’s worth quoting in full here:
Our vision is to achieve extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. Our mission is to support the brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical humanities.
- Wellcome invests approximately £600M annually in funding research. They have assets of approximately £13B.
- Of the £600M, approximately £435M is invested in biomedical science research; £60M in technology transfer; £35M in medical humanities and £105M in capital spend on a Genome Campus.
- Their focus is on funding the very best researchers. The Trust seeks to invest in the highest quality researchers at various career stages and nurture them.
- There are 5 key research challenges which the Wellcome seek to address through their funding:
- Maximising the health benefits of genetics and genomics.
- Understanding the brain. Within this challenge they stress that they want to include perspectives from social science, humanities and the arts.
- Combating infectious disease.
- Investigating development, ageing and chronic disease. Here they stressed public engagement and policy development as key sub-challenges.
- Connecting environment, nutrition and health. The Trust has less profile in this area, but it is something they are seeking to develop.
- Staff were keen to point out throughout the day that they are contactable if you have any questions about the organisation or any of the funding schemes.
- Investigator awards were introduced last year across all Wellcome Trust subject areas (biomedical science as well as medical history and humanities). This scheme replaces the now discontinued Project Grants, Programme Grants, and Equipment Grants, among others.
- The emphasis here is on longer-term funding for greater impact.
- There is potential here for funding of up to 7 years for Investigator Awards in the Biomedical Sciences. Previously researchers with Wellcome funding felt they didn’t have the time or security to commit to major research projects.
- There must be a compelling, long-term vision for research.
- There are two types of award:
- Trust staff did emphasise that the level of experience would be taken into account for “senior investigators” – i.e. if a researcher is 6 years from their first academic position, although they will fall into the Senior Awards bracket, their relative level of experience will be taken into account when assessing their application.
- The awards provide between £100K – £425K / year for up to 7 years.
- They fund the direct costs of research – not full economic costs.
- The costs awarded are to be finalised after the decision has been made. The early applications need only include “ballpark figures”. However, by this they don’t mean that applicants shouldn’t cost projects – they just don’t need to see the breakdown until later in the application process.
- The suitability of the research environment is an important criterion – there should be a suitably supportive letter from the Head of School or a senior university manager if appropriate to support the bid and the researcher.
- The first stage is a CV details check which takes roughly 2-3 weeks. Trust staff will advise potential applicants whether the scheme is suitable for them on the basis of a submitted CV.
- It is possible to have joint investigators.
- There were 200 applications for the first round (60% senior/40% new), but the Trust refused to be drawn on likely success rates or numbers of applications to be funded.
- The deadline for the second round is early April 2011, but the Trust would like to move to rolling deadlines as soon as practical.
Grant Writing Tips
- Good grantsmanship will not make bad science fundable; but bad grantsmanship will make good science unfundable!
- Key considerations are:
- Excellent knowledge of area, current state of the art and how to move beyond it
- Clear research plan and robust methods
- Convincing preliminary data collection
- Appropriate expertise
- Bear in mind that reviewers are not necessarily experts in your field, so you should write for a non-expert audience.
- Costs must be fully justified.
- Submit relevant evidence including letters of support.
- Don’t just rely on your track record – you must put together a convincing case and well-written bid.
- Practice interviews for the investigator awards process.
- Medical history is now embedded in mission statement, whereas before it was important but not made explicit.
- Here, as in biomedical science, there will be the same division between new and senior investigator awards (see above).
- The research question drives the duration of these awards.
- They plan a May 2011 launch of the Senior/New Investigator schemes in the Medical History and Humanities strand, with a Sept 2nd 2011 first round deadline.
- There may not need to be a CV check in these disciplines because they anticipate fewer applications.
- As in the biomedical sciences, the focus is on fewer and larger grants.
- Investigator Awards in the medical humanities must be historically-grounded: driven by historical methodologies and/or in consultation with an historian.
- Fellowship Awards are largely unchanged: as before these include an interview stage and a potential award holder may apply before the end of his/her PhD.
- University Awards are highly competitive and very prestigious.
- Strategic Awards in the Medical Humanities are flagship projects for established groups with strong track records.
- There are still a number of smaller grants available within these disciplines though the Trust are looking to “homogenise” these. The “historical ground” component (above) doesn’t necessarily apply to small grants: Research expenses; Travel grants; Support for conferences, symposia or seminar series.
- Research Leave for Healthcare Professionals/Scientists apply to those from clinical or veterinary backgrounds, though the historical grounding aspect applies here. They provide up to 6 months of support for clinicians or scientists to undertake a short-term period of full-time research at a centre or department with academic expertise in medical history.
- PhD studentships – the preliminary stage applications here are due by 15th March 2011.
- Training and mentoring can be explicitly built into applications for research fellowships, e.g. to jump into different or related disciplines.
- Finally, they emphasised the broad applicability of these schemes: any subject that intersects with medicine/healthcare from an arts/humanities/social sciences perspective is eligible.
- The focus here is on using art – in a broad sense – to engage the public with medical science.
- Most of the presentation was devoted to showing the entertaining and informative video (embedded below) about the scheme, but unfortunately this session was lighter on in-depth analysis of the available schemes and additional insight.
- We did learn that 50% of applications to this scheme are from universities.
- Where artists want to apply to produce, e.g. an animation, they are required to work with experts from a university.
- All research papers funded in whole or in part by the Wellcome Trust must be made freely available in PubMedCentral and UKPubMedCentral as soon as possible and within 6 months of date of publication.
- Depositing the author’s final manuscript is the least favoured option because there are no re-use rights on this version.
- Wellcome Trust will fund costs of open access deposit in WT-compliant journals.
- Compliance with this policy is currently just under 50% but has improved over the last few years since its adoption.
- Barriers to higher levels of compliance have been identified as: clarifying publisher policies and reminding researchers of their obligations. | <urn:uuid:b9a62f64-e109-49e3-9df5-8a41e63dc107> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://research.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/tag/ethics/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935801 | 1,816 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Steinhagen died in December.
A judge determined that Steinhagen was insane and committed her to a mental hospital. She was released three years later and stayed out of the limelight.
"She chose to live in the shadows and she did a good job of it," John Theodore, an author who wrote a 2002 nonfiction book about the crime, told the Associated Press.
Steinhagen had a crush on Waitkus when he played first base for the Chicago Cubs and turned her room into a shrine to him. When he was traded to the Phillies, she became enraged.
The next time the Phillies came to Chicago to play the Cubs, Steinhagen checked into the same hotel the Phillies were staying in and wrote Waitkus a note saying, "We're not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about."
Waitkus went to her room and was invited in. Steinhagen walked to a closet, said, "I have a surprise for you," then pulled out the rifle and shot him.
Waitkus, sat out the rest of the 1949 season but returned in 1950, helping lead the Phillies to the World Series. | <urn:uuid:2c9e5981-6d67-4b19-9d20-7675f84f023c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kwch.com/sports/professional/sns-sports-la-woman-who-inspired-natural-dies,0,6895477.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.992541 | 239 | 1.523438 | 2 |
|Please guys read this piece and digest it. Get rid of your warped and twisted brain and look at it in a realistic and productive manner if you are a real patriotic citizen. Please make sure that patriotism is not rabid racism. Constructive criticism is not threatening one's sovereignty or coming from an LTTE agent! Change your traditional mindset.
by Ayesha Zuhair
When the Sri Lankan military defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009 ending nearly three decades of brutal terror, I alongside millions of my fellow citizens was elated.
Sri Lankan handicapped soldiers in wheelchairs call for the defeat of a U.N. resolution calling on Sri Lanka to probe wartime human rights abuses in Colombo March 22, 2012.-pic by Reuters-courtesy: DayLife
For me, Eelam War IV was without any iota of doubt a war worth fighting and I was overwhelmed. With the world s most ruthless terrorist outfit finally gone, a more peaceful and prosperous future seemed imminent.
The military victory could not have come at a better juncture in my life for I was expecting my first (and so far only) child. I felt reassured that this child would grow up in a stable and secure environment, and would know the peaceful country that I did not know in my childhood.
I was certain that Sri Lanka would rise like a Phoenix from the ashes, that it would seize the opportunity to build a cohesive and tolerant nation, and that it would accord national integration the highest priority.
Almost three years down the line, I am less certain and the hopes that I then entertained remain far from fulfilled. Yes, terrorism has been wiped out but the country is still very much in a midst of a bitter conflict and ethnic polarisation continues to run deep. We are yet to move (or at least show any real signs of moving) from a post-war to a post-conflict milieu.
In May 2010, the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) was appointed to reflect on the conflict phase and the sufferings the country has gone through as a whole and learn from this recent history lessons that would ensure that there will be no recurrence of any internecine conflict in the future and assure an era of peace, harmony and prosperity for the people.
Instead of becoming the focal point for reconciliation efforts in the country, the LLRC s final report, which was tabled in Parliament in December 2011, has now become the bone of contention.
The LLRC was conceived as a domestic mechanism that would ward off foreign intervention. However, the LLRC report is now being utilised by the international community to pressure Sri Lanka, and the government continues to resist that pressure.
With the impending passage of the US-sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council, an external mechanism looks increasingly inevitable. Though couched in subtle, diplomatic language the message in the resolution is strong and clear: stop dilly-dallying investigate allegations of war crimes and work to secure political reconciliation.
Pertinent questions have been raised in many quarters about the moral authority of Western powers to sponsor such a resolution when its own track record on human rights is highly questionable. But that is beside the point. Where did we go wrong and why have we found ourselves in such a predicament today?
To me, this government has failed on two fronts:
First, the government has failed to address the genuine grievances of the people, choosing instead to either ignore or downplay some of the most pressing problems that have long persisted. The longer the government ignores the issues of reconciliation and accountability, the more it waters poison trees. Focusing on economic development alone will not suffice.
Secondly, it has failed to engage sufficiently with the international community the US and India in particular who have now demonstrated that little Sri Lanka is no match for world powers. No matter how proud a people we are the reality is that we simply cannot afford to lock horns with the rich and powerful, and expect to emerge victorious theoretical assertions of sovereign equality have no practical validity.
The absence of a cohesive strategy has now paved open the way for international involvement. Thus while the government must be applauded for having defeated the LTTE, the same government must be blamed for having created the ripe conditions for external meddling.
Frustrated local groups were left with little option but to use the Human Rights Council to force the government to listen to its own people. Those with hidden stakes too have joined the bandwagon but this does not take away from the fact that this government has failed to fulfil the aspirations of its citizenry.
It does not help to label activists who are drawing attention to some of the real issues confronting the people of this country as LTTE agents . An attitude of either you are either with us or against us will not work. True reconciliation can only be possible if the government is willing to listen to its people. The truth is this government has been unwilling to take the key issues of reconciliation and accountability seriously.
The government keeps asking for time and space but in the enthusiastic manner in which it rushed the 18th Amendment to Parliament, the government could have undertaken many confidence-building measures which would have won the hearts and minds of all its people as well as the international community.
It is unfortunate that the government has been forced to make confessions and concessions on an international platform, further hitting home the fact that this government cannot be pushed in the right direction sans external pressure.
As a Sri Lankan citizen who is grateful to this government for having wiped off tiger terrorism, I live in the hope that at least now my government will do what is necessary to win the peace, and pursue, in earnest, a comprehensive process towards attaining t | <urn:uuid:9df4b2f0-6de8-44c9-b894-71f28a8f56a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lankanewspapers.com/news/2012/3/75470_14.html?CH11334049931687EN1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967738 | 1,171 | 1.640625 | 2 |
There’s an individual who comments on The Simple Dollar (and a few other personal finance blogs) who identifies him- or herself as “Minimum Wage.” This person is singularly focused on the issues of low wage earners, and while his/her comments can be frustrating, sometimes Minimum Wage is really effective at pointing out how some advice simply isn’t appropriate for people in that situation. What good is portfolio advice to a minimum wage earner? What good does it do to talk about how to buy a $200K+ house when you’re making $7 an hour? Not much.
I know where Minimum Wage is coming from. I grew up in a household with a far below average income, and while we may have done all right for ourselves, I grew up around people who existed in true poverty. Thankfully, I was able to take advantage of the great opportunities that life offered me – and the great foundation that my parents gave me as a person – and was able to find a better, financially healthy life where I could raise my children without a regular sense of necessity underlying day to day life.
But what can a person do if they’re in Minimum Wage’s situation? Here are the ten things I would do if I found myself only able to earn minimum wage.
1. Go rural.
It is far, far easier to make a living on minimum wage in a rural situation. There are many small towns where you can find a room to rent for $100 a month and a small apartment to rent for $200 a month. Yes, these really exist – I see them fairly regularly when I get out in the more rural areas of Iowa. Even better, these areas often have lots of jobs for minimum wage workers – I see lots of help wanted signs around these towns and notices inside of town halls and gas stations looking for workers.
2. Don’t drive.
A car is a giant money suck. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it, if you’re working minimum wage, your car is killing you. Ditch the car – get whatever cash you can from it. Then choose a place to live where you can get to work by foot or by bicycle. In a small town, it’s pretty easy to reach any other place in the town (and many places in the nearby countryside) on foot or by bicycle, and it’s something that people often do to cut corners.
3. Find the free stuff.
In towns of any size, there are resources available for the impoverished, from free dinners at churches to food giveaways to soup kitchens. The library provides free entertainment in the forms of books, music, and internet access. There are parks, recreational activities, and countless other things even in the smallest of rural towns. Look around for the free stuff and use it – it’s there for everyone to utilize. When you must spend money, be as frugal as possible. Ramen is very cheap, filling, and full of carbs, for example.
4. Don’t be proud.
Pride often keeps people from walking into a soup kitchen. Don’t let it. That kind of pride is an obstacle ground into you by a life in a consumerist society. People who are there to help you want to help you stand on your own two feet – give them that opportunity. Look for every opportunity to help you with your situation, from consulting to WIC to Medicaid to welfare (regardless of my political feelings on it, it’s definitely a resource someone in that position should use). If you don’t know where to start, start off by asking a pastor or a clergyman for help.
5. Minimize your required commitments.
Repaying debts? Call the debtors and explain your situation and ask for an abatement. This won’t get rid of your debt, but it can minimize your requirements for the time being. If you have children that you simply can’t support, look for opportunities to help you with that burden – your family is a great place to start, for example. Don’t saddle yourself with burdens heavier than you can carry or you’ll do nothing but collapse. You don’t become strong by carrying 500 pounds of weight on your back – you become strong by learning how to carry ten pounds, then adding more as you go along.
6. Take every side opportunity you can.
There are all sorts of little opportunities to make more money if you pay attention. Doing things like helping someone shingle a roof for $10 an hour cash is an opportunity you can’t let pass by. Free meals? Take them. Twenty bucks for helping an old man clean out his garage? Do it. Ask around for odd jobs and other small-scale moneymaking opportunities – perhaps even get started on your own “handyman” business.
7. Minimize your possessions.
There are a lot of reasons for doing this. The biggest one is that the more stuff you have, the more money you’ve wasted. Also, fewer possessions mean that you need less room to live. For a while, all of my worldly possessions (clothes included) fit in a single Rubbermaid tub – and that made it extremely easy to actually live in someone’s living room for a while.
8. Make a steely commitment to succeed.
Even after you’ve done all of this, it still takes some serious commitment to make all of this work. You can get yourself in a position where you’re not spending more than you make, but it takes commitment to stay there. Remind yourself every day that you’re not going to waste money and that you’re going to spend less than you earn this week – and this month – and this year. That’s the one way you can get ahead.
9. Save automatically.
So what do you do when you are making more than you’re spending? Take that extra money and put it into a savings account. But just doing that every once in a while won’t cut it. Keep most of your money in a checking account, then go to the library and use the internet access there to set up an online savings account with a big bank, like ING or HSBC. Set up an automatic savings plan there to withdraw $10 a week from your main checking – or maybe even more. Then walk away and forget about it. What will happen? After a year, you’ll have $530 or so in the account. If you’ve put in more weekly, you’ll have even more.
10. Educate yourself.
While you’re putting yourself in a better financial place, spend your spare time educating yourself. Take classes at the nearest community college and work towards some kind of degree. If you need to, transfer to a state university – if you’ve been working on minimum wage for a long time and are actually making strong progress towards a degree, they will help you big time with paying for it. The key is getting started – see what your local community college has to offer.
One final tip: don’t give up the dream.
If you’re working a minimum wage job, either you’re very young, very lazy, or very unlucky. All of these can be overcome, but they take time and commitment and a lot of hard work. It’s very easy to give up the dream of a better life when you’re doing this. Don’t. You can succeed and you will succeed if you spend every day taking steps in the right direction. Surround yourself with people who are also fighting to go in the right direction. Don’t be resentful of people in a better situation than you – instead, use them as inspiration and realize that if you keep on the path, you’ll get there too. | <urn:uuid:b1d6af3e-bd80-4279-9981-4b961da038c1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2007/10/07/ten-steps-to-financial-success-for-a-minimum-wage-earner/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955153 | 1,664 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Greeks are heading to the polls this weekend to cast their ballots in a vote that could have big consequences for the global economy. Major political parties have framed the election in pro- or anti-bailout and Euro terms, turning the election into a referendum on debt-laden Greece's economic future.
Official opinion polls are banned for two weeks leading up to elections in Greece, but unofficial polls indicate a rising support for pro-bailout parties. However, social media-using Greeks say just the opposite.
Social media analysis firm Crimson Hexagon looked at almost 33,000 opinions posted by Greeks on Facebook and Twitter about the elections, bailouts and the Euro in general from May 12 to June 5.
According to its report, of the 32% of Greeks talking about the three subjects discussing the Euro, 16% of them wanted to abandon the currency. Meanwhile, 13% of discussion around the Euro was neutral, while only 3% of discussion showed support for continuing use of the Euro.
Among the 28% of Greeks who used social media to discuss the Eurozone in general, 12% supported a Greek exit of the zone while 7% wanted to remain in the zone.
About 40% of Greeks talking economic politics during that time period debated political parties, with 16% of these commenters showing support for pro-bailout parties compared to 14% in favor of anti-bailout parties.
The margins are certainly close, and surely not all of Greek voters are using social media to talk about the elections. But if Greek Facebook and Twitter users had their way, it would seem anti-Bailout and anti-Euro parties would have a slight advantage during this weekend's voting.
Can social media predict election results? Why or why not? Share your opinion in the comments. | <urn:uuid:a7f7ff3f-795c-415d-a258-286d46b05bc2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mashable.com/2012/06/15/greece-euro/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961739 | 366 | 1.625 | 2 |
So, how would you feel if a mob of 500 rabble-rousers surrounded your house, blocked your door, trampled your lawn and terrorized your children?
And how would it make you feel to know that the police department of Washington D.C. gave this mob an escort and the police departments of Maryland did not do their duty of protecting the innocent and upholding the law?
From Investor’s Business Daily:
|On May 16, Washington, D.C., police escorted 14 busloads full of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members at least part of the way to storm the Chevy Chase, Md., home of Bank of America’s deputy legal counsel, Greg Baer.
Some 500 protestors affiliated with SEIU and their allies in the community organizing group National Political Action (NPA) trampled his lawn, blocked his doorway to his home and screamed “greed.” Legally, it was burglary, trespassing and, possibly, assault.
But Maryland cops didn’t enforce the law. And Baer had to brave the insult-hurling mob alone to rescue his 14-year old son who, home alone, had locked himself in the bathroom in fear.
Yep, Adolf Hitler and Ernst Rohm would be proud of the SEIU and their Democrat supporters. As for the Dems, you will not hear one little peep of protest concerning this barbaric behavior becasue the Dems take a great deal of money from SEIU contributions.
And somehow, the Dems want you to believe that the Tea Party protesters are the violent, lawless ones?
You can access the complete article on-line here:
Mob Rule From SEIU
Investors Business Daily
May 24, 2010
Filed under: Corruption, Government, Politics, Social Issues, Unions | Tagged: Adolf Hitler, Bank Of America, Chevy Chase, Ernst Rohm, Greg Baer, Maryland, SEIU, Storm troopers, Washington D.C. | Leave a Comment » | <urn:uuid:d838f140-a51d-41df-8c55-378c84dbf10c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://84rules.wordpress.com/tag/maryland/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940409 | 414 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Make your bedroom Feng Shui
How to Make our bedroom Feng Shui? The bedroom is the most personal space in the home. It is to relax after a busy day. Family bedroom should be comfortable and to inspire peace and harmony. Chinese philosophy of Feng Shui teaches people how to prosper by properly arranging the furniture in the house.The bed is the most important piece of furniture in the bedroom. Where great importance is placed in the room. Feng Shui puts several bans on the position of the bed and it is wise to be respected. Should be avoided over the heads of people lying to a window. Bedroom Feng Shui rule it that the bed should not be in line between the door and window.
This is practical Bedroom Feng Shui advice for all architects and interior designers, whether they comply with the requirements of Chinese philosophy for the Feng Shui in our Bedroom. Another taboo is to be in bed at the bottom of the sloped ceiling or a beam. Canopy can be used for protection, if no other opportunity in the room. Not allowed to bed is positioned so that the supine legs to show people the door. Experts say it is draining the lifeblood of the people. If this position cannot be overcome, it is better to have lower bed boards or any barrier. It is recommended that a person can see the door. If this rule is not met with any noise people think that someone enters. The best place is the bed is diagonally across the door near the opposite wall for perfect Bedroom Feng Shui.
Family Feng Shui bed
Great family bed should not be pushed to the wall, but there is room for passing on both sides. Beds for children are recommended to the contrary, it is against the wall and create protection and security. Feng Shui does not recommend the family bed to a work desk with desk and computer. This room is for rest and is not good to have things that carry in it the stress of everyday life. In the event that no other place in the home for the computer is working better place to be separated by a screen.
Feng Shui bedroom furniture
Under the bed should be placed boxes with objects. They stop the movement of energy. Moreover, there are practical because they hamper cleaning. Feng Shui specialist advice for the bedroom furniture people buy furniture with curved lines rather than sharp edges. Corners concentrate energy and create anxiety.With the knowledge of Feng Shui achieves excellent results at home without making large investments. Good people to know the ancient Chinese study or to seek advice from specialists. | <urn:uuid:c08efa8a-d177-4b44-b529-5f31cfd8d4e0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.minimalisti.com/bedroom/12/make-your-bedroom-feng-shui.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952426 | 524 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Well, That's what the whole thread is about up until now and there is not agreement on the subject :o)
I believe sin IS built in, but we do have a choice, and therein is the struggle.
Only grace, however, can change human nature, "If any man be in Christ Jesus he is a new creation, old things pass away, behold, all things become new."
I believe there is a "duality" or a "paradoxical paradigm" within which God operates in foreknowledge, calling, election etc.- all the while still leaving man a certain degree of sovereignty, within which man is learning about the nature of God and becoming transformed into it.
It is probably the minority opinion :o)
Since God causes "all things to work according to the counsel of His will" and " the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God." He is absolutely sovereign .
Yet He, within His sovereign will can do whatever He wants, including giving man a measure of choice- a stewardship over which man may be penalized or rewarded according to his exercise of that stewardship, in order to gain friends(Abraham the Father of faith was called, 'the friend of God') who understand Him and can fellowship with Him intimately.
Is sin built in? Yes, "For, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned"
Do we have a choice? Yes, "Walk in the spirit and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh".... "Draw near to God and He will draw near to you"
Can we do it on our own? Absolutely not, "For it is by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God".
Is there anything we can do to help ourselves and please Him? Absolutely. "Today, If you hear His voice, harden not your heart as they did in the wilderness and saw my works 40 years, as I said in my displeasure, 'They shall not enter my rest'"
Why? Because those who are in the flesh cannot please God, because they cannot receive the things of God and consider them foolishness.
How? Pray that you enter not into temptation....
Pray that you be "strengthened with might by His Spirit in your inner man"
Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you can prove what is the good, the complete, the pleasing will of God.
That's just my | <urn:uuid:9bab1609-c668-4b59-b414-352e83d40b5d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tentmaker.org/forum/christian-life/god's-will-man's-will-free-willsov-discussions/msg143960/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972766 | 576 | 1.539063 | 2 |
You can’t avoid thinking about time when in Rome. It’s not just the buildings and the history – it’s the time you have to wait for a bus, too. I waited over 40 minutes one day for a bus that is supposed to come every ten minutes.
But, you stand in the Pantheon and look at Raphael’s tomb and contemplate the fact that hundreds of years after he painted we are still seeing his work … and perusing his tomb. At the root of much of his art is a consciousness of mortality.
We shall all die. So, we are accountable for how we live in the light of that mortality. As Heidegger put it, we are ‘beings towards death’.
Today part of our group has gone to the Papal Audience – in the rain. Benedict is an old man and will not be here for too much longer (in the grand scheme of things). I had hoped to visit the tomb of John Paul II, but didn’t have the time when at St Peter’s the other day. The photo to the left is a list in St Peter’s of all the Popes. We come and go and people will come and stare at what we left behind.
The Tiber flows on and time passes by. Just as well God has a broader perspective than we do. Otherwise we’d take ourselves too seriously. | <urn:uuid:f989dbca-e502-427e-bb9a-8f600c4f0134> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nickbaines.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969734 | 296 | 1.789063 | 2 |
National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy
Nationwide Live Virtual Event
Michael Villaire, MSLM and Cynthia Baur, Ph.D.
||The IHA Health Literacy Conference team presented their second annual live virtual event, with Facebook and Twitter participation, and a remote video hookup. The purpose of the event was to highlight how various organizations are implementing the seven points of the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy. |
Michael Villaire and Cynthia Baur moderated the lively discussion in which many people were eager to share their stories. Villaire is the Chief Operations Officer for IHA; Baur, works as Lead Author for developing and maintaining the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy at the Centers for Disease Control. In her opening dialogue, Baur points out the purpose and relevance for developing the plan, which is to unite various healthcare related disciplines and provide them with guidelines to proactively and strategically identify and improve health literacy within their organization. Baur communicated that in order for the plan to be truly effective; an organization needs to embrace it as an initiative that's a part of their "culture" and present it in a way that's accountable, assessable and actionable.
Following Villaire and Baur's opening, a variety of attendees offered their own National Action Plan story-sharing stories of best practices, challenges and outcomes.
Approximately 100 people were there in person for the event and over 50 watched the live video stream via the Twitter feed. (You can watch an archived video of the entire event here and read a transcript of the Twitter feed here.) If you have a National Action Plan that you'd like to share, IHA would love to hear your story.
Write Your Own National Action Plan Workshop
Michael Villaire, MSLM
In Villaire's presentation, he communicated that starting from scratch is not always necessary. You can work the Plan into your existing organization by targeting the needs that your organization already fulfills. Think about which areas you want your Plan to focus on. See what other people have done and what is already out there. This will avoid duplication of efforts.
||Following up on the successful National Action Plan virtual event, in which attendees learned what various organizations and individuals have done to fulfill the Plan, Michael Villaire hosted a nuts-and-bolts workshop to show how to create your own Plan. |
Before getting into the Plan development, Villaire explained why you would want to create a Plan in the first place. The National Action Plan creates value by:
- Helping organizations to create health literacy culture and identity. This allows for the field to grow and expand.
- Allowing you to answer questions others may have. This sets up your organization as a key resource for health literacy.
- Challenging your organization to ask and answer the "bigger questions" about healthcare, such as how to reach as many people as possible with your message.
- Establishing a heath literacy culture and identity. This raises the credibility of the field not only among other professionals, but also among the general public.
Creating a plan may seem daunting, but it can be done. However, you need to establish accountability within your organization. This means outlining which person will be responsible for which tasks, and then making sure they complete those tasks. Building a roadmap helps with this, as it allows you to break down the entire Plan into manageable pieces.
In order to do this, you need to have both leaders and advocates. Villaire explained that leaders are those people within the organization who take responsibility for the objectives and goals set up for your Plan. They are the people who make timelines, assign tasks and verify that those tasks have been completed in a timely fashion.
By comparison, an advocate is somebody who can help you remove barriers to achieving your objectives. Villaire added that one of the strongest advocates you can have is somebody within senior management: "Getting senior managements buy-in will help you in clearing roadblocks and give you the support you need."
Attendees appeared eager and enthusiastic to further work on the Plans they had started during the session once they got home. Villaire reminded them that having these Plans in place was proof that their organizations were "walking the talk" of health literacy.
How to Write for a Low Literacy Audience
Gloria Mayer, RN, Ed.D., FAAN
||Writing for a low-literacy audience seems pretty simple, right? Well, not always. As a writer, you may be delivering a message in a style that's not completely clear to the reader. In turn, readers may disregard information or (even worse) take action that could be detrimental to their health. |
Gloria Mayer, CEO for the Institute for Healthcare Advancement, led the discussion with a variety of written examples, both good and bad. Mayer provided examples for attendees to critique. In many cases, the language was not simple enough. In other cases, there were confusing graphics that detracted from the message. One particularly striking example was a flyer offering a class in "Spanish language class" --written entirely in English. Mayer added, "I'm not sure who they think will show up for a Spanish-only class if they don't advertise it in Spanish."
She started by discussing key concepts for participants to consider when writing for a low literacy audience. First, remember that is reader is unique. Some may have learning difficulties. Others may have been taught English as a second language.
Before you start writing, think about your audience and consider who they are, if they have a language preference, what they need to know and the best vehicle for delivering that message.
Mayer shared a few key concepts to keep in mind when developing your communication:
Always start your message with the most important point. Mayer states, "If people don't understand the first sentence, they won't read any further." She also recommends using subtitles and grouping like items together.
- Limit your message to one or two items. The fewer the messages, the greater the chance of understanding the message.
- Focus on action items, or developing a "call to action." This tells the reader to take action.
- Explain the benefit of taking action.
- Make sure your message is consistent with your other messages. This provides continuity and reduces confusion.
In looking at word choices, the most important item to avoid is jargon. Mayer also suggested using contractions and personal pronouns, as well as one- or two-syllable words when possible.
In closing, Mayer reminded attendees to test messages with others or a focus group before finalizing your communication-this will provide various viewpoints and validate/correct any assumptions you are making. Why run the risk of wondering whether your message is effective? Test, test, test.
10 Tips to Make Your Health Website Easier to Use for People with Limited Health Literacy Skills
Stacy Robison, MPH; Xanthi Scrimgeour, MHEd
||Stacy Robison and Xanthi Scrimgeour from CommunicateHealth led a powerful and interactive workshop that provided 10 research-based tips for making your health website more user-friendly, particularly for people with limited health literacy skills. Topics included content strategy, design, navigation and how to involve clients/patients with limited health literacy skills in testing and improving your site.|
Robison pointed out that several factors affect how well users with limited health literacy skills can find, understand and use information on the web, including:
- Access to computers and experience online
- Ability to read and understand printed text
- Complexity of information on the web
- Usability of the web in general and websites specifically
Studies show that uncluttered content and user-friendly navigation will dramatically improve the performance and experience of web users, particularly for those with limited health literacy skills. Clean layouts and familiar language are more usable for everyone.
When developing content, you must put yourself in the mind of the user. What are their needs and wants? Outline them, and write health content your users need and in words they understand. Make content easy to find and organize it in a fashion that puts their needs first and foremost.
Scrimgeour sites research that shows that highly targeted health information is more effective in getting users' attention and promoting learning. If you are talking to people in their teens, be sure to use images, language and topics that are relevant to their age.
There are 10 key factors that you must consider when building web content:
In closing, Robison and Scrimgeour provided examples of good and bad website and discussed feedback with the audience. Attendees left the presentation well-prepared in developing their own web content.
- Involve users-feedback and suggestions from users are invaluable.
- Start with the homepage design-this is the foundation for your website and the first impression that users will see
- Review content strategy-most web users go to the web already having an idea of what type of information they need. If you are answering health information, you need to address questions quickly and succinctly.
- Write clearly-plain language is not enough. Tell them what actions they need to take and outline the necessary steps
- De-clutter-too much info is too much info. Don't overwhelm users. Keep it straight and to the point.
- Simplify your navigation-try and help readers find the content that they need without having to jump through numerous pages. Remember, you only have their attention for a short time.
- Strengthen your organization-create information categories in a way that's clear and specific
- Improve search results-allow for common misspellings while searching for content, limit the number of search results, use clear titles and avoid long URLs.
- Make it interactive-interactive tools will help you to increase user engagement and create a "voice" for users to become involved.
- Test and revise often-test, revise and repeat. If you want people to come to your site, content needs to be user-friendly, relevant and current.
Health Literacy 101: An Introduction to the Field
Michael Villaire, MSLM
||The popular "Health Literacy 101" rounded out the preconference sessions. This beginner's course, taught by Michael Villaire, provided not only data to support health literacy, but clips from a powerful video from the AMA Foundation. |
Villaire opened his presentation by defining health literacy:
- Health Literacy: "The degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions" (Ratzan and Parker, Introduction to National Library of Medicine Current Bibliographies in Medicine: Health Literacy, 2000)
- Health Literacy: "The ability to read and comprehend prescription bottles, appointment slips, and the other essential health-related materials required to successfully function as a patient." (AMA Council of Scientific Affairs, 2000)
He added that the problem with most definitions of health literacy, like the ones above, is that they put the responsibility on the patient. The problem is, "There is no class on being a good patient. We learn by trial and error."
By comparison, Villaire shared his preferred definition from the Calgary Charter on Health Literacy that puts the responsibility on the healthcare providers:
In order to act on this responsibility, healthcare providers must take into account several components. These include reading and writing, verbal communications and listening skills (both provider and patient), cultural or belief systems, and understanding any provider/patient mismatches.
- "Health literacy allows the public and personnel working in all health-related contexts to find, understand, evaluate, communicate, and use information. Health literacy is the use of a wide range of skills that improve the ability of people to act on information in order to live healthier lives. These skills include reading, writing, listening, speaking, numeracy, and critical analysis, as well as communication and interaction skills."
To demonstrate his point about the need for health literacy, Villaire then took the audience through an exercise. He read a paragraph from a very complicated academic article on nuclear physics. He then asked the audience what it meant. As expected, nobody could understand what he had just read. Villaire noted that this example proved the point that if patients can't understand what their healthcare providers are saying, they won't follow through properly.
Villaire then showed the AMA video and asked afterward for audience reaction. People mentioned that there was a huge sense of shame with not being literate. The patients in the video mentioned that they did not feel they could easily ask questions of their providers. Some even would avoid going to the doctor's altogether out of a fear that their low literacy would be revealed.
Villaire also highlighted some of the biggest health literacy myths. Among them:
Villaire then moved into a discussion of other health literacy statistics. One study cited the fact that 44% of Americans have either basic or below basic literacy skills in reading words. Thirty-four percent have low literacy when it comes to reading forms or documents. Finally, an astonishing 55% have low literacy when it comes to numbers. In comparison, only 12% were found to have proficient health literacy skills.
- Writing at a low grade reading level or using plain language is "dumbing down"
- Using plain language that is easy to read is unprofessional and insulting
- Writing at a lower grade level is easy to do
- Why do this? Most people understand what we send to them
In looking at who has poor health literacy, Villaire noted:
Poor health literacy is very costly to the healthcare system. Villaire cited one study that estimated $73 billion in annual unnecessary health costs due to low health literacy. Another study estimated an even higher annual amount of somewhere between $106 billion and $238 billion.
- Nearly 60% of those age 65 or older have either basic or below basic skills
- Those with employer health insurance have higher health literacy
- Those with Medicare, Medicaid or no insurance have lower health literacy
- 43% of those living below the poverty level have below basic skills
- 75% of those who said they had poor health had below basic skills
Once the audience understood the full scope of the problem, Villaire then went on to discuss possible solutions. One of the most important is what he called "Universal Precautions." This involves, among other things:
Another important solution is using plain language. Villaire supplied a list of common medical jargon terms, along with possible alternate words. For example, you can use the phrase "throw up," instead of "vomit." Essentially, it involves using what Villaire terms "living-room language." This would be the level of conversation you might have among family or friends on a daily basis.
- Assuming that all patients read at about a 5th grade level.
- Limiting to three "need to know" messages.
- Using the phrase, "What questions do you have?"
- Don't ask "Do you have any questions," as patients are likely to simply say "no," even if they don't understand.
Finally, use various teach-back techniques. Explain the concept to the patient. Have them repeat back in their words what you told them. Go back and forth until you are confident the patient understands.
Villaire mentioned one example of such a technique, known as the "brown-bag test." Have the patient bring in all their medications in a brown bag. Ask them to identify each medication, along with how often they take it and what they take it for. This can also serve as a quick literacy test, since patients who cannot read the instructions on the label will instead look at the medication itself to identify it.
In closing, Villaire recounted the story of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's reaction to finding out his prostate cancer test was positive. Giuliani assumed that this was good news; that he did not have cancer. Villaire gave this example to show that even a very intelligent man such as Giuliani cannot necessarily understand complex health concepts. He commented, "The word 'negative' is considered bad in every context except healthcare."
| ||© 2013, IHA Institute for Healthcare Advancement. All rights reserved.| | <urn:uuid:695529e2-976d-4c38-ab0b-adf9ee86655f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iha4health.org/(S(msqoa5vsb4w3wzrhyv13mw2l)X(1))/default.aspx/MenuItemID/371/MenuGroup/_Health+Literacy+Conference.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951061 | 3,343 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Date: December 07 2012
Prime Minister Julia Gillard says she wasn't willing to hand environmental approval powers to the states for fear it would create a "dalmatian dog" of legal risk and uncertainty for business.
The federal government on Friday backed away from its earlier plan aimed at cutting "green tape" for major projects, angering state leaders, but pleasing conservationists who fought tooth and nail against the idea.
The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) in April agreed to shift some federal powers to the state and territory governments in a bid to streamline environmental regulation and slash duplication for business.
It would have given states responsibility over their own environmental approval and assessment processes, a scenario conservation groups and the Australian Greens campaigned heavily against.
Ms Gillard said it became clear the states had conflicting views on the issue and there was a real risk of creating more legal uncertainty and litigation for businesses.
"I became increasingly concerned that we were on our way to creating the regulatory equivalent of a dalmatian dog," she told reporters after the COAG meeting on Friday.
"That for businesses would be the worst of all possible worlds."
COAG did commit to working towards achieving the "twin goals" of high environmental standards and streamlining for businesses, and will report back on progress at the next joint meeting.
Ms Gillard also indicated the federal government would legislate some measures in response to the Hawke review aimed at streamlining and bolstering environmental regulation.
Several state leaders were unimpressed, with WA Premier Colin Barnett branding it a step backwards in the fight against green tape.
"I would hope that the commonwealth would be more trusting of the states to deal with environmental assessments," he said.
He said the commonwealth would always have retained the power to intervene if it thought a project wasn't being properly handled.
The Australian Conservation Foundation's Charles Berger welcomed the "reprieve", but urged more to be done to make sure they're not revived later on.
"Giving state governments the final say on major development proposals that affect the environment would be a grave mistake future generations would find hard to forgive," Mr Berger said in a statement.
This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.
[ The Age | Text-only index] | <urn:uuid:37f0cda5-8ed0-4e3f-a0f7-d0db7ae9ce66> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/wa-angered-by-backdown-on-green-tape-20121207-2b0tp.html?skin=text-only | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96811 | 475 | 1.609375 | 2 |
It was over a decade ago that Tech Bubble 1.0 burst. IPO’s were so common that it was hard to keep up with them. Everyone was launching howtogetrichonastupididea.com.
All of these sites shared a common feature, lots of hype, but absolutely no business plan worth a lick. Even the few that did have some kind of plan mostly wallowed in the glory of the moment, rather than the harsh reality of the future. The future is unpredictable, todays Hot Product has a nasty habit of turning into yesterdays Chia Pet.
One only has to look at Netscape, AOL, MySpace and Yahoo to see the problem. What is hot today is not hot tomorrow. It matters not to the users, they just move on to the ‘next big thing’. Internet Relay Chat and its mIRC client ruled in the late 90’s, as did the world of Usenet notice boards. These ceded to Microsoft IM and Yahoo Groups, in turn, these were replaced by ‘texting’ and more sophisticated ‘Message Board’ offerings.
The basic rule is that a fad will last about as long as you can store a perishable item in your ‘root cellar’. After a couple of years people move on to the next ‘big thing’.
Netscape was hotter than the Sun when it launched. Netscape made a very successful IPO on August 9, 1995. The stock was set to be offered at $14 per share. But, a last-minute decision doubled the initial offering to $28 per share. The stock’s value soared to $75 on the first day of trading, nearly a record for first-day gain, the stock closed at $58.25.
But of course this fabulous love affair with the stock market was short lived. Netscape is merely a piece of history today.
AOL very much goes into the same category. By the late 90’s it was impossible to check your (real) mail box without finding a floppy disk with the offer of 30 days free trial. Where is AOL today? The limp along but hardly are part of the mainstream. In some ways Yahoo tell a similar story. What was hot then, is far from hot today.
Microsoft is the one company that has succeeded, but you would not think it from it’s stock price. It rarely moves from the high $20’s. It is hardly a great place to stick your money.
Microsoft does however offer some tangible products, these result in sales. The Windows OS and Microsoft Office are everywhere.
So, lets talk about FaceBook. Sure it has over 900 million users, but where does it make money? People playing FarmVille or uploading cute pictures of the family cat taking a bath does not make money. If FaceBook actually has a plan we shall have to wait and see. Right now though times look a little less rosy. For the sake of simple math, lets say that FaceBook has 1 billion users. Last Friday the IPO raised $18 billion. So each user is worth $18? Or to look at differently, based on the IPO the company is theoretically worth $100 billion. This means that everyone with a Facebook account is worth a whopping $100.
This sounds unlikely, but that is what the math shows. The IPO was hyped to the extent that it was a sell out. The man in the street with $500 he had been saving for a rainy day was out of luck. Well sort of.
Facebook has tanked. In just three days of trading it has lost more than 16% of its value. Bought last Friday for $38 it closed today at $32.
Be glad that you still have your $500!
If the trend continues it will only be a matter of time before Facebook joins the Banks and Car makers, cap in hand, looking for a bail out!
The FaceBook grumbling is in high gear, the feds are hot. Accusations of ‘selective disclosure’ by J. P. Morgan are running rampant. The thing that gets me, is why was this IPO so hot to begin with? Few of the 1 billion members actually bought anything. Advertisers had become lack luster to spending their budgets on the site.
So where is the big surprise that the IPO tanked? Where was the great opportunity for Facebook to turn the big profit? | <urn:uuid:87f1f3a3-1473-42f4-bc2d-2c370deb75d6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bloggernews.net/128145 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97471 | 951 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Long before little Nkosi Johnson captured the attention of the world, he'd already made an indelible mark on the people who loved him.
Nkosi, an HIV orphan, lost his mother to AIDS. Left on his own, he battled the disease at a time when South Africa was unwilling to talk about the growing epidemic.
At just 11 years old, he bravely spoke in front of the world at an International AIDS Conference in 2000. Nelson Mandela famously called him an "icon for the struggle of life."
"We are...Full Story | <urn:uuid:d7f7f425-7b2b-440a-ae3e-a629d4d6bad2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://abcnews.go.com/WN/person-week-gail-johnson/comments?type=story&id=10891883 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973516 | 114 | 1.578125 | 2 |
A front-page story of today's International Herald Tribune reports that:
"Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square and the Web sites of Amnesty International, the BBC's Chinese-language news, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse"
As it turns out, earlier excitement over the 'free reporting' that was to allegedly occur during the Olympic Games was unwarranted: international journalists and spectators will be subject to the same blocks that China places on the Internet for its citizens. Fabulous.
Admittedly, I was among those who hoped the Olympics would open up the black-box that is China. Would, even in some small way, liberalize the country. From my time there and my correspondences with colleagues in Beijing and elsewhere, I've developed a distinct love of and fascination with the "awakened giant" and would like nothing more than for its citizens to enjoy the personal freedoms they rightly deserve. But, as more and more indiscretions surface, I can't help but wonder if Anuradha Amrutesh from Bangalore, India was right: "The Olympics should have never gone to China." | <urn:uuid:2a3876be-186c-4b0c-8609-318fe0c2b70e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://aleksandragadzala.blogspot.jp/2008_07_31_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966679 | 272 | 1.5 | 2 |
What's Brewin': Inside the world of defense information technology
MySpace and YouTube for Command and Control?
Though Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Croom, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, issued in May the order heard 'round the world banning access to MySpace and YouTube from military computers, folks at DISA think the technologies developed by the two companies might help with the next generation of the Defense Department's command and control system, called Net-Enabled Command Capability.
Hank Beebe, DISA technical director for Command and Control programs, told me that, from a technical perspective, MySpace and YouTube have developed new ways of sharing information from disparate sources that DISA might want to use as it develops NECC.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Dave Warner, DISA C2 director, said the agency intends to cast a wide net as it looks for capabilities and software modules to add to NECC. It plans to tap multiple sources for these capabilities, ranging from traditional sources such as the four services, federal laboratories, defense contractors and outfits such as consumer-focused companies like MySpace and YouTube.
Warner said that since DISA does not have a wide range of contacts in this nontraditional world, it is looking for a "capability broker" to help it find the next great thing that could be added to the NECC portfolio.
He said he is hopeful this approach will help the agency streamline the way it keeps Defense C2 up to date. The latest version of the current system, the Global Command and Control System-Joint, took more than two years from validating requirements in January 2005 to fielding this April, Warner said. During that time MySpace and YouTube grew from audacious start-ups into companies with millions of users so valuable that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace and Google acquired YouTube.
The NECC capability broker's request for information issued by DISA last month makes it clear that the agency has a new vision to field software. Instead of rigid development guidelines, the RFI says it needs the help of the capability broker to find functionalities that can be "mashed" into the NECC to suit a particular mission.
Beebe, who joined DISA earlier this year after spearheading the successful AT&T bid for the General Services Administration's Networx contract, echoed this and said he is looking for technologies he can "mash up" to serve Defense users all the way to the tactical edge.
He does not know exactly where the broker will find these capabilities, but the broker should look everywhere including Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., where Warner's children attend college. "If we can help troops in Fallujah with something going on at Wheaton, we should do it," Beebe said.
Capabilities DISA needs for NECC, Beebe said, includes the ability to search hundreds of hours of streaming video and zero in on a key scene, person or object and improved version of Internet Relay Chat, "which is how we do business every day."
A Gesticulator? You Need an "Iconic Chat Glove"
The Navy relies heavily on chat for its C2 systems, with hundreds of chat rooms used to control the operations of an aircraft carrier strike group, according to a presentation given this year at the Chemical and Biological Information Systems Conference in Austin by LoRaine Duffy, a researcher at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center.
She said chat is the primary and often singular means of tactical communications used by the Navy, but it suffers from being solely text-based, which means it is too slow, very unstructured and often ambiguous.
Her solution is to develop a new form of chat which uses an icon-/symbol-based language that owes a lot to American Sign Language used by the deaf and the hand waving that accompanies most conversations in The Big Apple.
Gestural language can eliminate ambiguity when using a formal iconography and shared context, Duffy said, and she proposed the use of a wireless high-tech glove that can replace a keyboard or input device and is capable of recognizing static and dynamic gestures.
As someone who waves his hands during any conversation -- even when I am on the phone -- I can hardly wait until the consumer version of this hits Radio Shack.
SPAWAR on the Border
When not engaged in inventing cool stuff like Iconic Chat Gloves, SPAWAR engages in more prosaic engineering tasks for the Navy and other federal agencies, including the Homeland Security Department.
SPAWAR developed and installed a wireless network in the vicinity of Douglas, Ariz., based on 802.11a wi-fi technology that, among other things, includes a 14-mile shot that was able to maintain the maximum 54 megabits per second transmission rate.
Since I run an 802.11a network in the home office, I would like some help from SPAWAR's contactor, MeshDyamics, to boost the range of my wi-fi network. I'm not greedy. I don't need 14 miles. Just over a mile will do so I can work while enjoying breakfast enchiladas at Charlie's Spic and Span.
The Shrink Approach To Airport Checkpoints
The Defense Counterintelligence Field Activity -- described by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a few years back when he was a congressman as a military agency designed to spy on Americans -- seems to be living up to that description with a request for proposals to use psycho-physiological techniques to screen people going through high-volume checkpoints.
Since even a Brownie troop lined up for a Pentagon tour hardly qualifies as high volume, I have to imagine this psychological assault on civil liberties is aimed at airport checkpoints, or maybe to determine if any Redskin Hogette is stranger than usual before he is allowed into the stadium.
The Counterintelligence Field Activity put out the RFP on behalf of the the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment (DACA), the new and relatively benign name for what used to be called, until this January, the Defense Department Polygraph Institute.
This RFP says the counterintelligence folks are looking for contractors to support the DACA mission to conduct scientific research into fundamental theoretical and applied credibility assessment issues.
DACA wants to optimize credibility assessment of humans passing through a security checkpoint in high-volume environments and specifically investigate physiological and behavioral assessment of individuals from multiple cultures with the goal of identifying and reducing variability.
Oh, well, at least it's multicultural (which is quite politically correct) and is only a test at this stage of development. I do hope they factor into this assessment that when people hop from one foot to another at the Dulles airport checkpoint in mid February, it's not a sign of nervousness, but rather a sign that the floor is very cold and none of us are wearing shoes.
Air Force Plays Estonia Cybercard
Lt. Gen. Bob Elder, head of the Air Force's cyber command, the 8th Air Force, never misses an opportunity to promote his command as the one-stop shop for cyberwar capabilities within the Defense Department.
Speaking at the Defense Technology Forum at the Netherlands embassy in Washington, D.C., last month, Elder said the recent cyberattack against Estonia showed that agents of a hostile power can paralyze business, the media and government and cut a country off from the world. He then plumped for an expanded Air Force mission in cyberspace.
In fact, he said he intends to "redefine airpower" and extend the Air Force's "global reach and power into cyberspace." That includes, he added, both defensive and offensive operations, indicating that U.S. interest in offensive cyberoperations continues to come in out of the cold.
Elder has been at this for about a year, and I think he sees cyberoperations as The Next Big Thing and is using every opportunity to grab the kind of attention that leads to expanded roles and budgets.
The Army and Navy need to get their own Elder if they want to win the cyberspace budget battles.
Who's On The Road?
I'll be at the Army IT Day sponsored by the AFCEA Northern Virginia chapter Thursday, July 12, and anyone looking to unburden themselves should keep an eye out for the graying, semi-cranky Irish reporter. | <urn:uuid:8b30a7a2-2414-467c-aa81-5571d2926951> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.govexec.com/technology/2007/07/whats-brewin-inside-the-world-of-defense-information-technology/24811/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945637 | 1,715 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Eli Lehrer offers cautious praise for the new federal prison-rape standards:
The new federal policies take a step towards confronting this problem. They'll require tough anti-rape policies, lengthen the period in which inmates can report sexual abuse (necessary because the trauma involved can make it hard to step forward quickly), improve services for those victimized behind bars, and put into place strong protections for particularly vulnerable lesbian, gay, and transgendered inmates. Finally, all facilities will have to have their policies audited every three years.
That said, the standards have some serious holes. They don't apply to immigration lockups (even though Congress intended that they should) and still allow female guards to strip search male inmates. Although they take force in the Federal prison system immediately, states will still have a year to comply and, given the glacial pace at which the Obama Justice Department has moved to implement the standards, it's quite possible that some will take longer.
Still, within a few years, the official rape prevention rules in every correctional facility in the country will be a lot better than they were a decade ago. And, most likely, sexual assault will become less common behind bars as a result.
The problem, however, isn't going to go away until a real cultural shift takes place in America. And there's precious little sign of that happening. | <urn:uuid:5f13dd60-872b-4537-8d0b-a248047ec7ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/21/fighting-for-better-prison-standards.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962949 | 276 | 1.609375 | 2 |
And Roberts agreed with it. Therefore, it has the effect of a judicial ruling. SB 1070 isn’t dead, but significantly crippled. The following is my interpretation of my first cursory reading of the 76-page set of opinions. I’ll have to delve into the ramifications later.
DISCLAIMER: I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. The following is the personal opinion of someone who considers himself to be a well-educated and well-read amateur. Someone who is a legend in his own mind, but has trouble convincing everyone else.
Kennedy wrote, and Roberts, Ginsburg and Breyer signed on. Kagan recused herself because she helped prepare the Feds’ case while she was Solicitor General.
All of Section 3 is gone, because it was found to be substantively preemptive of Federal immigration law. Section 5c is gone because 1986 IRCA (Reagan amnesty) did not include much punishment against illegal aliens who illegally seek work in the United States because the Feds thought they needed the cooperation of the illegals themselves to nail their real targets, those Americans that employ illegal aliens. Section 6 is borked because, unbelievably, it’s not necessarily a Federal crime for illegal aliens to be in the United States, which has ramifications for a story I had in this blog a few days ago. The majority opinion references a 1984 case called INS v Lopez-Mendoza to make that point. Therefore, the illegality of illegal aliens being in the country only exists when the Federal government decides for one reason or another that it should be enforced. Section 2c is upheld because Congress has not yet disallowed sub-Federal officials from communicating with the Federal government about the presence of illegal aliens. (Though we all know that ICE will instruct the states to turn them loose in most instances).
Dissenting Opinion I
Scalia wrote. It’s more of a semi-dissension semi-concurring opinion.
Section 6 should have been upheld because Federal law that seems to preempt state action are really only limits on the power of Federal officers, therefore, states can have immigration policy that has different punishments than Federal law proscribes, even if Federal law must be the basis for states to determine who is and is not an illegal alien. Section 3 should have been upheld because Federal immigration policy doesn’t just affect the Federal government, it also affects Arizonans in Arizona, and also that the Federal government isn’t much in the business of enforcing immigration law, ergo without state enforcement, there is little real enforcement. Section 5c should have been upheld because the Federal refusal to state punishment for illegals illegally seeking employment should not be interpreted to imply preemption of states having their own punishments. Scalia answers the Federal argument about scarce resources by stating essentially that your lack of money to put a lock on your front door doesn’t preclude me from putting a lock on my front door if I can afford it, and that it was dippy for the Feds to challenge Arizona’s unique enforcement of uniform Federal immigration law when the Feds just a few weeks ago essentially ignored its own Federal immigration law by granting executive order amnesty to Dreamers.
Dissenting Opinion II
Thomas mostly agrees with Scalia, but for a different reason: The ordinary meaning test. Thomas holds that nothing in SB 1070 is preemptive of Federal immigration law because they have the same obvious intent, the same goals and substance. Thomas also fears that Kennedy’s reading of the preemption doctrine is arbitrary.
Dissenting Opinion III
Alito agrees with allowing 2b to stand because it’s outlandish for a President to state that nobody should be allowed to enforce laws that he doesn’t want to enforce, and also that the politics behind the enactment of Federal legislation isn’t necessarily the same as constructionism or the law itself on its face, and also that law should not be subservient to the ephemeral policy and budget priorities of a Federal law enforcement agency. Agrees with Kennedy on Section 3. Mostly agrees with Scalia on 5c, but notes that 1986 IRCA has a preemption clause on employer sanctions but no preemption clause on employee sanctions. Section 6 should have been upheld because sub-Federal officers making arrests on Federal laws don’t preempt exclusive Federal authority over the disposition of removal cases. | <urn:uuid:9c0b9c0f-6167-412e-b729-d139e79cc61e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://countenance.wordpress.com/category/courts-judiciary/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954155 | 906 | 1.671875 | 2 |
It is legal for the U.S. government to kill American citizens with targeted drone strikes if it has determined the individuals are high-ranking al Qaeda officials who pose "an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States," according to a Justice Department white paper. The document explains the legal reasoning behind the Obama administration's process of killing U.S. citizens without formally charging or bringing them to trial, often by drone strikes.
The document, attained by NBC News, is the most detailed look at the government's rationale for targeting Americans even if they don't appear to be involved in an active plot to attack the United States. In 2011, the United States used drones to kill two supposed al Qaeda operatives in Yemen, neither of whom had ever been charged with a crime. The memo says that such targeted killings are not assassinations because they are self defense, and are not war crimes:
A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination. In the Department's view, a lethal operation conducted against a U.S. citizen whose conduct poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States would be a legitimate act of national self-defense that would not violate the assassination ban. Similarly, the use of lethal force, consistent with the laws of war, against an individual who is a legitimate military target would be lawful and would not violate the assassination ban.
The memo allows for a very broad definition of "imminent threat," stating that the condition doesn't require a suspect to be actively engaged in planning a terror plot:
The condition that an operational leader present an 'imminent' threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the Obama administration for access to more information about such targeted killing of citizens, called the document "chilling." Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said the white paper gives the administration way too much leeway when it comes to determining who can be targeted, and why:
Basically, it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen. … It recognizes some limits on the authority it sets out, but the limits are elastic and vaguely defined, and it's easy to see how they could be manipulated.
Lawmakers have also recently requested more information on the topic from the administration, with senators writing to Obama that they needed access to legal opinions outlining the procedure so they can determine "whether the president's power to deliberately kill American citizens is subject to appropriate limitations and safeguards."
What do you think? Should the United States be able to kill Americans who are suspected to be al Qaeda leaders and pose an "imminent threat" to the country? Take the poll and comment below.
- Read Scherezade Rehman: Will Mali Become France's Afghanistan?
- Read Lamont Colucci: President Obama's Shifting Red Line on Syria
- Check out U.S. News Weekly, now available on iPad. | <urn:uuid:a44f9301-a060-4cf2-a6f8-d68ad55073fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/02/05/are-obamas-drone-strike-policies-justified?s_cid=related-links:TOP | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952626 | 628 | 1.671875 | 2 |
The Man Who’s Flown Everything
Robert “Hoot” Gibson’s priorities: (1) Fly. (2) Fly some more.
- By Robin White
- Air & Space magazine, May 2009
(Page 4 of 6)
"We didn't know if Houston really thought we were okay," remembers crew member Mike Mullane, "or if they knew the situation was hopeless and just didn't want us to panic. But we knew what we'd seen, and Hoot was seriously ticked off that mission control wasn't listening to him. Things got pretty quiet up there."
Gibson felt that if something bad was going to happen to Atlantis, Houston was going to know why. If the right wing started to burn up, he said, "the first sign would be a 'split' in the elevons as the controls tried to hold attitude against increased drag: If they differed left to right by more than two degrees, I was going to get on the mike and tell Houston exactly what I thought of their assessment. I figured I had 30 seconds. It wouldn't help us, but it might save a future shuttle crew."
Reentry began. Gibson kept his eyes on the elevons. The shuttle entered the region of maximum thermal stress. The elevons remained in synch; the wing stayed intact. Gibson brought the orbiter in for an exceptionally smooth touchdown at Edwards.
"When we got out, we saw a bunch of engineers gathered under our wing. They were shaking their heads. The damage was massive. A whole tile was missing where the L-band antenna was mounted. There was a thicker skin panel there, and the metal had partly melted. If we'd lost a tile anywhere else, it would have burned through and we'd be dead.
"We should have developed an on-orbit patch kit right after STS-27, but NASA was playing Russian Roulette, hoping nothing critical would get hit, and it finally caught up with Columbia."
In January 1992, Gibson commanded a flight of the shuttle Endeavour, the program's 50th. The landing at the end of the mission was particularly satisfying. "The officially recorded touchdown sink rate was 0.0 feet per second," Gibson said; "we were almost perfectly asymptotic." Translation: despite the shuttle's perverse flight characteristics, Gibson brought Endeavour in for the kind of whisper-soft landing that earns airline pilots applause.
Gibson showed the same precise touch on his next shuttle mission, in which Atlantis was to dock with the Russian space station, Mir. Gibson was named to command the mission.
Atlantis launched on June 29, 1995. Once in orbit, Gibson began the delicate dance to bring the shuttle closer and closer to Mir. | <urn:uuid:02c7df79-b6dd-4e6b-afdf-4c0aed6b68e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/The-Man-Whos-Flown-Everything.html?c=y&page=4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984449 | 570 | 1.742188 | 2 |
The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced today that Coffeyville Resources Refining & Marketing (CRRM) has agreed to pay a civil penalty of more than $970,000 and invest more than $4.25 million on new pollution controls and $6.5 million in operating costs to resolve alleged violations of air, Superfund, and community right-to-know laws at its Coffeyville refinery.
Under a consent decree lodged today in U.S. District Court in Wichita, the State of Kansas, which joined in the settlement, will receive a $361,562.50 share of the $970,000 civil penalty.
The settlement will benefit the environment and human health by requiring new and upgraded pollution controls, more stringent emission limits, and more aggressive leak-detection and repair practices to reduce emissions from refinery equipment and process units. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, two pollutants emitted from refineries, can cause respiratory problems like asthma and are significant contributors to acid rain, smog and haze.
CRRM's refinery has the capacity to refine more than 115,000 barrels of crude oil per day, producing gasoline, diesel fuels, and propane.
"The Clean Air Act is designed to protect people's health from emissions of harmful pollutants," said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator of EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. "Today's settlement will protect residents living near the facility and ensure that the necessary pollution controls are installed to protect the residents of southeastern Kansas in the future."
"This settlement puts CRRM on a level playing field with the more than 100 petroleum refineries that have agreed to implement aggressive pollution control measures, thereby reducing the threats posed by harmful emissions to area residents," said Ignacia S. Moreno, assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice. "The agreement reaffirms our commitment to ensure that the petroleum refining industry complies with the nation's Clean Air Act."
"EPA Region 7 welcomes CRRM's promise to control pollutants that have threatened Kansans' health and safety for too long," EPA Regional Administrator Karl Brooks said. "The company's pledge to promptly start and quickly complete pollution-control work supports this Agency's use of the federal environmental protection laws to cut harmful refinery pollutants." | <urn:uuid:8100f11b-f32a-4830-90a0-ee15d9abb309> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://farmprogress.com/story-coffeyville-refinery-fined-agrees-new-pollution-controls-0-58066 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937532 | 471 | 1.710938 | 2 |
In the original”Star Wars” trilogy (not those crappy prequels), Luke Skywalker uttered these words when he first saw Han Solo’s ship, the Millennium Falcon: “What a piece of junk.” I had the same reaction to a new policy brief from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which attacks my work with Jason Richwine on public sector pay, in particular a recent study for the Ohio Business Roundtable. (I should note that these comments are my own and that Jason is far more polite than I am).
In previous work for EPI, Rutgers University’s Jeffrey Keefe concluded that Ohio state and local government workers receive slightly lower total pay and benefits than similar workers in the private sector. We find, by contrast, that the combined value of public sector salaries, benefits, and job security exceeds private sector levels by roughly 43 percent.
Keefe questions practically every part of our Ohio paper and, trust me, we have answers to almost all of his points. If you read EPI’s paper and are tempted to believe its claims, post a comment and I’ll address it.
But pensions are where the real action is. Once you accept our view of pensions, you could buy pretty much everything else EPI says and still conclude that public employees are overpaid. EPI thinks pay studies should focus on what employers contribute toward pensions while we look at the benefits employees actually receive.
Put simply, EPI believes that government pensions can generate a given dollar of future retirement benefits at roughly one-third the cost of a private sector employer. And it’s true that, for each dollar of guaranteed future benefits, governments actually do contribute about one-third as much as private pensions. These lower contributions are based on aggressive accounting rules that let public plans “discount” their future benefit liabilities using high interest rates of around 8 percent, versus about 5.5 percent for private defined benefit (DB) plans and, implicitly, around 4 percent for 401(k)-type pensions. Based on low employer contributions, EPI concludes that public sector pensions aren’t actually all that generous. We counter that if you look at the benefits employees actually receive, most public employees’ total compensation package is well above private sector levels.
In effect, EPI’s argument rests on you believing that “Public employees are overpaid, but we aren’t overpaying them.” That is, government possesses some magic by which it can pay far higher pensions at far lower costs than the private sector. This claim is doubly wrong.
1) The vast, vast majority of professional economists don’t believe that government possesses such magic. As Keefe himself admits, most economists argue that accounting rules that let public plans contribute so much less than private pensions are simply wrong. Don’t take my word for it, though: Nobel Prize-winning economists, the Federal Reserve, and the Congressional Budget Office all say the same thing. If public pensions followed economically-sound accounting rules, their contribution rates would rise and it would be obvious that public employees receive higher total compensation.
2) Moreover, even if government can magically generate pension benefits at one third the cost, that does not imply that employees should be the beneficiaries of that little miracle. According to the theory of “equalizing differences”—which the Handbook of Labor Economics calls “the fundamental (long-run) market equilibrium construct in labor economics”—government just as well could pay lower wages and use the savings to reduce taxes or increase other government programs.
For a public/private pay comparison, what we want to know is whether that offset has taken place. By measuring the pensions people will actually receive, along with their salaries and other benefits, we can accurately compare total compensation packages between the public and private sectors. And, based on these actual benefits, it is unequivocal that public employees in Ohio, and in most other states for that matter, receive higher total pay than private sector workers.
Other public sector pay studies—such as from the (hardly conservative-leaning) Center for State and Local Government Excellence, which EPI cited in its highly-misleading blog post on our paper—note that, “the public sector contribution under-states public sector compensation,” for exactly the reasons we describe. (We have other issues with the CSLGE study, but on this point they’re correct).
So to accept EPI’s arguments regarding pensions and overall public sector compensation, you have to reject the views of both the vast majority of financial economists and the vast majority of labor economists. Nice going, EPI. | <urn:uuid:ea7ed7e6-f289-467f-9a92-a9185d8dd2de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aei-ideas.org/2011/10/what-a-piece-of-junk-responding-to-the-economic-policy-institute-on-public-employee-pay/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948743 | 961 | 1.773438 | 2 |
How Do I Invite You to Grow Food?
In this Peak Moment Television interview, sponsored by the San Francisco Film Society, Peak Moment host Janaia Donaldson interviews Jenny Pell, founder and president of Permaculture Now! based in Port Townsend, Washington.
Permaculture isn't just about food. Pell discusses the new generation of permaculture practitioners and what it means for not agriculture, but also water systems, waste streams, natural building and community.
"Sustainable is not enough," says Pell. "I don't want to keep the status quo. Staying right here is not good enough; we have to be additive at this point.
Pell discusses some of the workshops she leads, on topics ranging from fungi to grafting; a new project she is working on to support gleaning, where people can access fields after harvest; and why sustainable doesn't mean giving things up, but gaining abundance instead.
That means, we rely on support from our readers.
Independent. Nonprofit. Subscriber-supported. | <urn:uuid:dd268809-6afd-4d1b-8cb7-ecb157e61029> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/how-do-i-invite-you-to-grow-food?icl=email_wkly20100212&ica=descr_tnVideo | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95082 | 214 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Reaching Out Through the Tanzania National Voucher Scheme
Originally submitted by the Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA)
|Mr. Godwin Bana reaches out to residents in the Kayanga ward of Karagwe district, Tanzania. Source: MEDA|
Mr. Godwin Bana, a retailer from Kagera region in Tanzania, is a registered participant in the PMI-supported Tanzania National Voucher Scheme (TNVS). He accepts Hati Punguzo (HP) vouchers, which are issued to pregnant mothers and infants through reproductive and child health clinics, in exchange for insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITNs). The program provides Mr. Bana with a guaranteed market for his product, and it ensures that pregnant mothers and infants receive the protection they need from malaria.
Like many retailers, Mr. Bana has a permanent shop where he conducts most of his sales. However, he realizes that many people live in remote areas and cannot travel such long distances. As a way to boost sales and improve the program, he began joining with mobile clinics conducting outreach services to rural parts of the community. As a result, voucher recipients can now receive an ITN without making the long journey to the nearest HP retailer.
Prior to the start of the TNVS, which is part of Tanzania’s national malaria control program, many communities experienced shortages of ITNs, especially in rural areas. People were forced to travel many kilometers to town centers in search of retailers who stocked this product. Now, thanks to the guaranteed market provided by the TNVS, nearly 7,000 retailers and wholesalers nationwide sell ITNs. This large private network is helping to overcome the problem of ITN scarcity and distances people must travel, while at the same time helping local businesses to earn a sustainable living.
The President’s Malaria Initiative provides support to the TNVS for the HP infant voucher. Infants receive a voucher when they are brought in for measles vaccination. The program is implemented through a partnership of three NGOs and contractors – Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA), World Vision, and Population Services International – and operates in all 21 regions of mainland Tanzania. The TNVS is also supported by the Global Fund to Fight Tuberculosis, AIDS and Malaria. | <urn:uuid:0d68d568-c5d3-4c05-a8ea-fc90ccf4f01d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fightingmalaria.gov/news/voices/tnvs_tanzania2.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943933 | 468 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Frontex posted its 2012 Annual Risk Analysis (“ARA”) on its website on 20 April. (The 2012 ARA is also available on this link: Frontex_Annual_Risk_Analysis_2012.) The stated purpose of the ARA is “to plan the coordination of operational activities at the external borders of the EU in 2013. The ARA combines an assessment of threats and vulnerabilities at the EU external borders with an assessment of their impacts and consequences to enable the Agency to effectively balance and prioritise the allocation of resources against identified risks….”
- 86% of the detections of irregular migrants in 2011 on the EU’s external borders occurred in two areas, the Central Mediterranean (46%) and the Eastern Mediterranean, primarily on the land border between Greece and Turkey (40%);
- The 64 000 detections in 2011 in the Central Mediterranean were obviously linked directly to the events in North Africa. The flow of Tunisians was reduced by 75% in the second quarter of 2011 as a result of an accelerated repatriation agreement that was signed between Italy and Tunisia;
- There is a very high likelihood of a renewed flow of irregular migrants at the southern maritime border. Larger flows, if they develop, are more likely to develop on the Central Mediterranean route because of proximity to Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt;
- Irregular migration in the Western Mediterranean towards Spain remains low, but has been steadily increasing and accounted for 6% of the EU’s detections in 2011;
- Cooperation between Spain and Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali, including bilateral agreements and the presence of patrolling assets near the African coast, are the main reasons for the decrease in arrivals on the Western African route in recent years. The situation remains critically dependent of the implementation of effective return agreements between Spain and western African countries. Should these agreements be jeopardised, irregular migration is likely to resume quickly;
- The land border between Greece and Turkey is now an established illegal-entry point for irregular migrants and facilitation networks;
- According to intelligence from JO Hermes, women embarking from North Africa to the EU are in particular danger of being intimidated by their smugglers and forced into prostitution;
- Austerity measures being implemented by Member States are likely to adversely affect operational environments of border control by reducing resources and by exacerbating corruption;
- There is an intelligence gap on terrorist groups active in the EU and their connections with irregular-migration networks. The absence of strategic knowledge may constitute a vulnerability for internal security.
Selected excerpts from the ARA:
[***] Looking ahead, the border between Greece and Turkey is very likely to remain one of the areas with the highest number of detections of illegal border-crossing along the external border. More and more migrants are expected to take advantage of Turkish visa policies and the expansion of Turkish Airlines, carrying more passengers to more destinations, to transit through Turkish air borders and subsequently attempt to enter the EU illegally. [Turkey reported an increase in 2011 of 26% in air passenger flow. See p. 12 of ARA.]
At the southern maritime borders large flows are most likely to develop on the Central Mediterranean route due to its proximity to Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, where political instability and the high unemployment rates are pushing people abroad and where there is evidence of facilitation networks also offering facilitation services to transiting migrants. [***]
There is an increasing risk of political and humanitarian crises arising in third countries which may result in the displacement of large numbers of people in search of international protection towards the land and sea borders of the EU. [***]
Various austerity measures introduced throughout Member States may result in increasing disparities between Member States in their capacity to perform border controls and hence enable facilitators to select those border types and sections that are perceived as weaker in detecting specific modi operandi. Budget cuts could also exacerbate the problem of corruption, thus increasing the vulnerability to illegal activities across the external borders. [***]
3. Situation at the external borders
[***] 3.2 Irregular migration
[***] Consistent with recent trends, the majority of detections [in 2011] were made in two hotspots of irregular migration, namely the Central Mediterranean area and the Eastern Mediterranean area accounting for 46% and 40% of the EU total, respectively, with additional effects detectable across Member States. [***]
Central Mediterranean route
[***] Initially, detections in the Central Mediterranean massively increased in early 2011, due to civil unrest erupting in the region, particularly in Tunisia, Libya and, to a lesser extent, Egypt. As a result, between January and March some 20 000 Tunisian migrants arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa. In the second quarter of 2011 the flow of Tunisian migrants was reduced by 75% following an accelerated repatriation agreement that was signed between Italy and Tunisia. … Since October 2011, the situation has eased somewhat due to democratic elections in Tunisia and the National Transitional Council successfully gaining control of Libya. However, the situation remains of concern, with sporadic arrivals from Tunisia now adding to arrivals from Egypt. There are also some concerns that the flow from Libya may resume. [***]
Eastern Mediterranean route
[***]Undeniably, the land border between Greece and Turkey is now an established illegal-entry point for irregular migrants and facilitation networks. [***]
Western Mediterranean route (sea, Ceuta and Melilla)
Irregular migration across the Western Mediterranean towards southern Spain was at a low level through most of 2010. However, pressure has been steadily increasing throughout 2011 to reach almost 8 500 detections, or 6% of the EU total. A wide range of migrants from North African and sub-Saharan countries were increasingly detected in this region. It is difficult to analyse the exact composition of the flow, as the number of migrants of unknown nationality on this route doubled compared to the previous quarter. This may indicate an increasing proportion of nationalities that are of very similar ethnicity and/or geographic origin.
The most common and increasingly detected were migrants of unknown nationality, followed by migrants local to the region, coming from Algeria and Morocco. There were also significant increases in migrants departing from further afield, namely countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Nigeria and Congo.
In 2011, two boats were intercepted in the waters of the Balearic Islands with Algerians on board, having departed from the village of Dellys (Algeria) near Algiers. However, most migrants prefer to target the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula.
Western African route
The cooperation between Spain and key western African countries (Mauritania, Senegal and Mali), including bilateral agreements, is developing. They are one of the main reasons for the decrease in arrivals on the Western African route over the last years, as is the presence of patrolling assets near the African coast. Despite a slight increase at the end of 2010, detections on this route remained low in 2011, almost exclusively involving Moroccan migrants.[***]
3.3.4 Trafficking in human beings
[***] According to information received from Member States, the top nationalities detected as victims of human trafficking in the EU still include Brazilians, Chinese, Nigerians, Ukrainians and Vietnamese. In addition, victims from other third countries like Albania, Ghana, Morocco, Moldova, Egypt, Indian, the Philippines and the Dominican Republic have also been reported, illustrating the broad geographical distribution of the places of origin of victims. Most THB cases are related to illegal work and sexual exploitation in Europe.
In some cases, the distinction between the smuggling of migrants and THB is not easily established because some of the migrants are initially using the services of smugglers, but it is only later, once in the EU, that they may fall victim to THB. According to intelligence from JO Hermes, this is particularly the case for women embarking for illegal border-crossing from North Africa to the EU. Once in Europe, some of them are intimated by their smugglers and forced into prostitution.
A worrying trend reported during JO Indalo is the increasing number of detections of illegal border-crossing by minors and pregnant women (see Fig. 15), as criminal groups are taking advantage of an immigration law preventing their return. Although it is not clear whether these cases are related to THB, women and children are among the most vulnerable. Most of these women claimed to be from Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon and were between the fifth and ninth month of pregnancy. Minors were identified as being from Nigeria, Algeria and Congo.
Another modus operandi is for the criminal groups to convince their victim to apply for international protection. Such modus operandi was illustrated by the verdict of a Dutch court case in July 2011, when one suspect was convicted for trafficking of Nigerian female minors. The asylum procedure in the Netherlands was misused by the criminal organisation to get an accommodation for the victims. The victims were forced to sexual exploitation in several Member States. [***]
[***] 1. Risk of large and sustained numbers of illegal border-crossing at the external land and sea border with Turkey
The border between Greece and Turkey is very likely to remain in 2013 among the main areas of detections of illegal border crossing along the external border, at levels similar to those reported between 2008 and 2011, i.e. between 40 000 and 57 000 detections per annum. [***]
Depending on the political situation, migrants from the Middle East may increasingly join the flow. In addition, migrants from northern and western Africa, willing to illegally cross the EU external borders, are expected to increasingly take advantage of the Turkish visa policies, granting visas to a different set of nationalities than the EU, and the expansion of Turkish Airlines, to transit through the Turkish air borders to subsequently attempt to enter the EU illegally, either by air or through the neighbouring land or sea borders. As a result, border-control authorities will increasingly be confronted with a wider variety of nationalities, and probably also a greater diversity of facilitation networks, further complicating the tasks of law-enforcement authorities.
This risk is interlinked with the risk of criminal groups facilitating secondary movements and the risk of border-control authorities faced with large flows of people in search of international protection. [***]
3. Risk of renewed large numbers of illegal border-crossing at the southern maritime border
The likelihood of large numbers of illegal border-crossing in the southern maritime border remains very high, either in the form of sporadic episodes similar to those reported in 2011 or in sustained flows on specific routes originating from Africa.
Irregular-migration flows at the southern maritime borders are expected to be concentrated within one of the three known routes, i.e. the Central Mediterranean route, the Western Mediterranean route or the Western African route. Larger flows are more likely to develop on the Central Mediterranean route than on the other two routes, because of its proximity to Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, where political instability and high unemployment rate among young people is pushing people away from their countries and where there is evidence for well-organised facilitation networks.
On the Western Mediterranean route, the situation remains of concern because of the increasing trend of illegal border-crossing reported throughout 2011. According to reported detections, the situation on the Western African route has been mostly under control since 2008 but remains critically dependant of the implementation of effective return agreements between Spain and western African countries. Should these agreements be jeopardised, irregular migration pushed by high unemployment and poverty is likely to resume quickly despite increased surveillance.
The composition of the flow is dependent on the route and the countries of departure, but includes a large majority of western and North Africans. Mostly economically driven, irregular migration on these routes is also increasingly dependent on the humanitarian crisis in western and northern African countries. Facilitators are increasingly recruiting their candidates for illegal border-crossing from the group that are most vulnerable to THB, i.e. women and children, causing increasing challenges for border control authorities.
4. Risk of border-control authorities faced with large numbers of people in search of international protection
Given the currently volatile and unstable security situation in the vicinity of the EU, there is an increasing risk of political and humanitarian crises in third countries resulting in large numbers of people in search of international protection being displaced to the land and sea borders of the EU. The most likely pressures are linked to the situation in North Africa and the Middle East. In addition, the situation in western African countries like Nigeria may also trigger flows of people in search of international protection at the external borders. [***]
6. Risk of less effective border control due to changing operational environment
At the horizon of 2013, the operational environments of border control are likely to be affected, on the one hand, by austerity measures reducing resources, and on the other hand, by increased passenger flows triggering more reliance on technological equipment.
Austerity measures have been introduced throughout Member States in various forms since 2009. The most obvious examples are found in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and the Baltic countries. These measures could result in increasing disparities between Member States in their capacity to perform border controls and hence enabling facilitators to select border types and sections that are perceived as weaker in detecting specific modi operandi.
Budget cuts could also exacerbate the problem of corruption, increasing the vulnerability to illegal activities across the external borders.
Austerity measures will inevitably impact on the efficacy of border-control authorities in detecting and preventing a wide array of illegal activities at the borders, ranging from illegal border-crossing through smuggling of excise goods to THB. [***]
8. Risk of border-control authorities increasingly confronted with cross-border crimes and travellers with the intent to commit crime or terrorism within the EU
[***]There is an intelligence gap on terrorist groups that are active in the EU and their connections with irregular-migration networks. The absence of strategic knowledge on this issue at the EU level may constitute a vulnerability for internal security. Knowledge gained at the external borders can be shared with other law enforcement authorities to contribute narrowing this gap.”
Click here for Frontex press statement on the 2012 ARA.
Click here for my post on the 2011 ARA. | <urn:uuid:7c96c56f-808a-4423-92c7-44b418011a28> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://migrantsatsea.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/2012-frontex-annual-risk-analysis/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953164 | 2,917 | 1.65625 | 2 |
|PRISON PLANET.com Copyright © 2002-2005 Alex Jones All rights reserved.|
Bombers Know They Would Die?
LONDON -- They bought roundtrip train tickets and paid for long-term parking -- two of the details that are prompting the intelligence community to question if the four London bombers intended to die.
On July 7, Hasib Hussain, Shahzad Tanweer, and Mohammad Sidique Khan traveled to Luton, north of London, to meet with Jermaine Lindsay.
According to experts who have been briefed by police, they parked a rental car outside the train station and paid to park for seven days, then purchased roundtrip tickets to London. Police later found explosives in the car.
When the men arrived at King's Cross station in the British capital, they split up and attacked three Tube trains and a bus -- killing 52 people and themselves.
No suicide notes or videotaped messages for their families have surfaced as has happened in attacks elsewhere.
"The roundtrip tickets, the fact that one of them spent a lot recently repairing his car and one of them had a family and was the teacher of the disabled and underprivileged children, it doesn't ring right," said Paul Beaver, a security and defense expert in London with close police contacts. "If you had that much commitment, how are you going to take your life? It's happened in Palestine, but these people were brought up in the UK."
The four men could have been duped into thinking they were carrying timed bombs and would be able to get away, Beaver said. He pointed to the fact that the bombs would have caused much more damage if detonated in stations, which could suggest they were not expected to immediately explode.
"The thing is we won't know that until we knew more about the detonation systems, which is what the forensic boys are doing now," he said.
Beaver said he did not put much stock in the theory that three of the bombs must have had timers because they exploded in quick succession. "It could be, but it isn't very difficult to synchronize your watches," he said.
The bombers' behavior also could have been designed to avoid suspicion, Beaver said. "The more normal you can be, the less conspicuous you are -- you have to be a gray man," he said.
The same tactic was used by the Sept. 11 suicide pilots who lived and studied in Hamburg, Germany -- Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah -- who used legal passports, dressed as Westerners and did nothing to draw the attention of authorities.
The Sept. 11 hijackers bought one-way plane tickets. Since the attacks on the United States, airlines have been running security checks on passengers who purchase one-way tickets or pay with cash.
The July 7 bombers could simply have been cautions, said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest. Also, the least expensive Luton to London ticket costs only about 15 cents more for a return fare.
Palestinian suicide bombers often leave videotaped messages. But the July 7 attackers grew up in Britain and would have known their families could be charged as accessories if told of the planned attacks, Standish said.
The fact that they carried identification -- cited by some as evidence they planned to flee -- was more likely designed to ensure the world would know who they were, he said.
"This is not something which is done secretly," Standish said of suicide bombings.
Although London police have not yet said whether the July 7 attacks were linked to the failed attacks July 21, police chief Ian Blair did say there was a "resonance" between the two.
In the latter attempts, it's clear at least some of the bombers expected to die -- they lay on top of their explosives, which failed to go off.
Abisha Moyo saw one attempted attack on a subway train. He told the Daily Mail newspaper he broke off a cell phone call when he heard a noise like a pistol shot.
"I turned around and there was a man lying on the ground with his arms outstretched in a Jesus Christ position, lying on top of a medium-sized black and green rucksack, face up," he said. "I thought he might have been shot. I went up to him and said: 'Are you all right mate?' But he just ignored me."
London police would not comment into whether they were looking into the possibility that the July 7 attackers had not intended to die.
But Standish said none of his police contacts have indicated that they think July 7 is anything but a suicide attack.
"These guys were mass murderers," he said. "They intended to carry out what they did. If they were innocent dupes or fooled? I think that's a cockeyed theory."
However, Beaver said there are too many questions to know for sure.
"The answer is right now this is really all speculation, and we really won't know until the forensic evidence is in," he said. | <urn:uuid:37742590-78f9-4b3f-a6d4-bb90dbaad8a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prisonplanet.com/Pages/Jul05/280705bombers.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.99015 | 1,035 | 1.578125 | 2 |
- Special Sections
Robert Odegaard of Kindred partially completed a practice barrel roll 5:55 p.m. Sept. 7 before the roll slowed and ultimately stopped just prior to the pilot’s fatal crash at the Barnes County Municipal Airport, the National Transportation Safety Board has determined.
According to the preliminary report released Sept. 21, a witness reported that the practice routine proceeded normally.
“A witness reported that the practice routine proceeded normally. During the final barrel roll, the airplane pitched to about 10 degrees nose up and rolled left until about 10 degrees past inverted, at which point the roll slowed and ultimately stopped. The airplane then pitched down and started to pull through from a vertical nose down attitude. Vapor trails were visible from both wing tips from about 80 degrees to 40 degrees nose down. At this point the airplane was about 100 feet above ground level. The airplane subsequently impacted the ground in about a 10-degree nose down, wings level attitude.
“Initial ground impact was located about 500 feet from the approach threshold of runway 31, about 100 feet southwest of the edge of the runway. The debris path was oriented on a southerly bearing and was about 450 feet in length. The airplane was fragmented during the impact sequence and a postimpact fire ensued.”
According to the NTSB, “a Goodyear F2G Corsair, N5577N, was substantially damaged when it impacted terrain during an aerobatic practice routine at the Barnes County Municipal Airport in Valley City.
The pilot was fatally injured. The aircraft was registered to a private individual and operated by the pilot under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 as an air show practice flight. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed for the flight, which was not operated on a flight plan. The flight originated from BAC prior to the practice routine.
Odegaard restored the airplane, a World War II era fighter airplane. Records indicated that it entered service with the United States Navy in February 1946. It was restored and re-issued an experimental airworthiness certificate for exhibition and air racing purposes in July 2011.
The planned Wings and Wheels AirShow originally set for Sept. 8 was canceled after Odegaard’s death. | <urn:uuid:2c709a27-797d-49b6-974d-2bf79e205bb1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.times-online.com/content/initial-report-fatal-plane-crash-released-ntsb | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967127 | 465 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Unveiling of Zoe Weil Portrait as Part of AWTT Series
SURRY, MAINE—(October 11, 2012) On Saturday, October 27 from 5:30 to 7:00 pm at the Blue Hill Library, artist Robert Shetterly will unveil a new portrait in his Americans Who Tell The Truth series, of Surry-based education visionary and president of the Institute for Humane Education, Zoe Weil. The event is free and open to the public. Weil will speak about education in the U.S. and the need to embrace a larger purpose for schooling and Shetterly will discuss a number of educational changemakers whose portraits he has painted who are working to transform education in innovative ways.
Weil is a well-known author and spokesperson for education change who envisions a redefinition of the very purpose of education. Like all the portraits in his series, a quote of the portrait’s subject is etched into the painting. Weil’s quote reads: “Education is the root system underlying all other systems. Given the grave and potentially catastrophic problems we face, it is critical that we provide young people with the knowledge, tools, and motivation to address our pressing challenges in order to transform unsustainable and unjust systems into ones that are humane, healthy, and peaceful.”
Weil says of the portrait, “This is the greatest honor I’ve ever received, and one that I hope to live up to. Rob’s inclusion of me in the series will help bring attention to the idea that education is the root of systemic change. Rob’s whole portrait series itself serves as a model for humane education.”
Weil co-founded the Institute for Humane Education (IHE) www.humaneeducation.org in 1996. Located on 28 acres on Patten Bay in Surry, it houses space for workshops and a summer residency, as well as the organization’s office, her residence, and a guest house for students. IHE is a non-profit educational organization that offers accredited graduate degree programs, online courses, workshops, summer institutes and an award-winning online resource center. Humane education approaches human rights, environmental preservation and animal protection as interconnected global issues. Through IHE programs, people gain the knowledge, tools, and motivation to become conscientious choicemakers and engaged changemakers for a healthy, peaceful, and sustainable world for all people, all species and the planet.
CONTACT: Amy Morley [email protected] | <urn:uuid:84f2bc0d-7e10-4463-8795-81c71b629a15> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://americanswhotellthetruth.org/events/unveiling-of-zoe-weil-portrait | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946595 | 522 | 1.679688 | 2 |
But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp of such an one as goes on still in his trespasses.
Treasury of Scripture
Psalm 110:6 He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the places with the dead bodies; he shall wound the heads over many countries.
Habakkuk 3:13 You went forth for the salvation of your people, even for salvation with your anointed...
Mark 12:4 And again he sent to them another servant; and at him they cast stones, and wounded him in the head...
Psalm 55:23 But you, O God, shall bring them down into the pit of destruction: bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days...
Psalm 68:18 You have ascended on high, you have led captivity captive: you have received gifts for men; yes, for the rebellious also...
Psalm 7:12 If he turn not, he will whet his sword; he has bent his bow, and made it ready.
Proverbs 1:24 Because I have called, and you refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded;
Ezekiel 18:27-30 Again, when the wicked man turns away from his wickedness that he has committed, and does that which is lawful and right...
Luke 13:5 I tell you, No: but, except you repent, you shall all likewise perish.
Hebrews 2:1-3 Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip...
Hebrews 12:25 See that you refuse not him that speaks. For if they escaped not who refused him that spoke on earth, much more shall not we escape...
Revelation 2:14-16 But I have a few things against you, because you have there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam...
ContextLet God's Enemies Be Scattered!
1Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him flee before him. 2As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melts before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God. 3But let the righteous be glad; let them rejoice before God: yes, let them exceedingly rejoice. 4Sing to God, sing praises to his name: extol him that rides on the heavens by his name JAH, and rejoice before him. 5A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. 6God sets the solitary in families: he brings out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land. 7O God, when you went forth before your people, when you did march through the wilderness; Selah: 8The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God: even Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God, the God of Israel. 9You, O God, did send a plentiful rain, whereby you did confirm your inheritance, when it was weary. 10Your congregation has dwelled therein: you, O God, have prepared of your goodness for the poor. 11The Lord gave the word: great was the company of those that published it. 12Kings of armies did flee apace: and she that tarried at home divided the spoil. 13Though you have lien among the pots, yet shall you be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold. 14When the Almighty scattered kings in it, it was white as snow in Salmon. 15The hill of God is as the hill of Bashan; an high hill as the hill of Bashan. 16Why leap you, you high hills? this is the hill which God desires to dwell in; yes, the LORD will dwell in it for ever. 17The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels: the Lord is among them, as in Sinai, in the holy place. 18You have ascended on high, you have led captivity captive: you have received gifts for men; yes, for the rebellious also, that the LORD God might dwell among them. 19Blessed be the Lord, who daily loads us with benefits, even the God of our salvation. Selah. 20He that is our God is the God of salvation; and to GOD the Lord belong the issues from death. 21But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp of such an one as goes on still in his trespasses. 22The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea: 23That your foot may be dipped in the blood of your enemies, and the tongue of your dogs in the same. 24They have seen your goings, O God; even the goings of my God, my King, in the sanctuary. 25The singers went before, the players on instruments followed after; among them were the damsels playing with tambourines. 26Bless you God in the congregations, even the Lord, from the fountain of Israel. 27There is little Benjamin with their ruler, the princes of Judah and their council, the princes of Zebulun, and the princes of Naphtali. 28Your God has commanded your strength: strengthen, O God, that which you have worked for us. 29Because of your temple at Jerusalem shall kings bring presents to you. 30Rebuke the company of spearmen, the multitude of the bulls, with the calves of the people, till every one submit himself with pieces of silver: scatter you the people that delight in war. 31Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God. 32Sing to God, you kingdoms of the earth; O sing praises to the Lord; Selah: 33To him that rides on the heavens of heavens, which were of old; see, he does send out his voice, and that a mighty voice. 34Ascribe you strength to God: his excellency is over Israel, and his strength is in the clouds. 35O God, you are terrible out of your holy places: the God of Israel is he that gives strength and power to his people. Blessed be God.
Parallel VersesAmerican Standard Version
But God will smite through the head of his enemies, The hairy scalp of such a one as goeth on still in his guiltiness.
But God shall break the heads of his enemies: the hairy crown of them that walk on in their sins.
Darby Bible Translation
Verily God will smite the head of his enemies, the hairy scalp of him that goeth on still in his trespasses.
King James Bible
But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp of such an one as goeth on still in his trespasses.
Young's Literal Translation
Only -- God doth smite The head of His enemies, The hairy crown of a habitual walker in his guilt. | <urn:uuid:19d92b00-341c-4225-95c5-efb12f9de0e0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://biblebrowser.com/psalms/68-21.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974635 | 1,468 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Posted on October 13th, 2010 at 09:10 in Agencies, Campaigns, Random Creativity, Technology.
Sir John Hegarty – Co-founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty – was in town yesterday giving his talk on why this is a great time to be in advertising and why the new generation of creatives should embrace it. It was hosted by DMJX. According to Sir John Hegarty the fundamentals of advertising are still the same as they were before the internet: If you are doing brand communication the most important thing to remember is that a brand is made not by the people who buy it, but by the people who know about it. Fame still adds the value needed by your brand to demand a premium price, and the internet’s 1-to-1 conversation haven’t changed that. This video is from a different but similar talk. It’s stretched and out of sync, but the points come across, regardless. It has some examples of great ideas made possible through technology.
Alternatively this link may or may not start working again. | <urn:uuid:8c75bfbb-8b10-4eec-881d-a74150df6084> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.plantcph.dk/blog/tag/hegarty/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979415 | 224 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Originally Posted by dakid
if only the united states government could be persuaded of the merits of these rights.
I think that this would be a key in so many different issues of alternative culture.
If we could achieve that we wouldn't have to be fighting about definitions of polyamory, swinging, BDSM or anything like that from the point of view of keeping families together (which has been highlighted here as a major issue for some members).
Judge a family based on the individual environment, rather than based on a set of keywords. Does the family environment provide a good one for kids to grow up in or not?
It is heartening to know that some countries have already gone down this road, knowing that the country of my birth has gone there already warms my heart too, in some strangely illogical way. The fact that it is a country that doesn't explicitly have the separation of church and state in its constitution is even more encouraging.
dakid, has it made a difference? Are people really judged now on the environment for the kids, independent of how many partners someone has in their lives?
One of the other trends I have noticed in the UK that I applaud is the decreased use of "husband" and "wife" in everyday conversation. "Partner" is now used, which doesn't describe the gender or actual marital status of the people. In my experience in the USA, more often than not, using that word implies a homosexual relationship. I hope that that changes. | <urn:uuid:6cef964b-7fab-4c5b-bf9d-6160e4a96b6b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.polyamory.com/forum/showpost.php?p=18379&postcount=24 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978597 | 308 | 1.804688 | 2 |
|Zimbabwe misses MTP targets|
|Wednesday, 27 June 2012 21:37|
He told the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Budget and Finance yesterday that set targets had not been achieved in the first year of the plan, which runs until 2015.
Launched in July last year, the MTP set a number of targets across major economic sectors, all aimed at improving the performance of the economy.
Minister Mashakada told the committee, chaired by Goromonzi North legislator Paddy Zhanda, that the Zimbabwean economy had reached a “plateau”.
“We need a serious injection in our economy by way of foreign direct investment. We need a lot of support in terms of global overseas financing,” he said.
Minister Mashakada said implementation of the MTP had primarily been affected by lack of funding, policy discord and delays in approving tenders by the State Procurement Board.
Lack of implementation of Public Private Partnerships was also affecting performance, especially on infrastructure projects.
Implementation of the MTP requires over US$9 billion with the resultant effect of the failure to finance plans affecting economic growth targets.
While the MTP targets an economic growth rate of 7,8 percent this year, Government has said there will be a slowdown to around 5,6 percent. The MTP envisages an average growth rate of 7,1 percent up to 2015.
“The slowdown in economic performance in 2012 is largely due to the poor performance of the agriculture sector,” Minister Mashakada said, adding that the mining sector was, however, improving its performance.
He added that the manufacturing sector was also failing to improve its performance due to a number of factors revolving around lack of cheap finance.
The minister said only inflation targets of between 4 and 6 percent during the plan period were likely to be achieved.
He noted that while economic performance was in the positive in 2011 and 2012, no new jobs had been created.
“The growth that has been registered has been jobless and that is a challenge. We need to create a growth that creates jobs,” he said.
He said the Government was failing to improve living conditions as “poverty is on the increase”.
“We are fortunate that we dollarised and everything fell into place, but it’s very clear that where we are now is not sustainable,” he said. — Business Reporter-New Ziana. | <urn:uuid:de4f032d-169e-41bb-9ede-4d7e0a5c009c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.herald.co.zw/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=45183:zimbabwe-misses-mtp-targets-&catid=41:business&Itemid=133 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968038 | 512 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Thanks, Jack Kerouac
On this day of thanks, I'd like to say thank you for an American writer I still treasure. Oh, you can complain about his romanticism, about his self-destructive alcoholism, about his inability to get beyond his initial massive success with "On the Road." But as much as the pilgrims and the codifiers of American holidays, Jack Kerouac showed us America in a way that would change our understanding of it forever.
Yes, "On the Road" isn't perfect. It is peppered with misogynist potholes, founders for long stretches, and is stuck in an adolescent mind-set.
But it also bursts with energy; it practically bounces off the page. It's a reminder that when Kerouac imagined something grand and unnameable and just out of reach, he could be electrifying. Imagine hanging out with him, back then, him and his friends like Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, who could entice you into almost any adventure just with the draw of their enthusiasm.
Back then, they didn't have karaoke. But somehow in the late 1950s, Kerouac found himself in front of a microphone, and people nearby were taping. Some of those recordings were with Steve Allen, others recorded live with an unknown band, but all soon went missing. Then in 1999, rediscovered acetates were turned into the CD "Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road." Sure, he reads a chunk of his novel -- but more important, on a few tracks, Kerouac sings.
And today, for Thanksgiving, won't you celebrate an unusual feast of our nation's cultural heritage: author Jack Kerouac sings "Ain't We Got Fun" to a very jazzy musical accompaniment. And happy Thanksgiving -- hope you've got lots of fun, too.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
File photo of Jack Kerouac, right, with friend Neal Cassady. | <urn:uuid:5e03e18c-d16c-4fd0-88c9-7d33ed4a97ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/11/jack-kerouac-sings.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97718 | 405 | 1.71875 | 2 |
For years prominent corporate media pundits have told us that the world -- and the media -- would embrace a dramatic, non-violent Palestinian resistance movement. If only such a movement -- perhaps led by a Gandhi-like figure -- were to finally emerge, we are told, the media coverage will come, and sympathy from across the world will strengthen support for the Palestinian cause.
This is nonsense -- there has been non-violent Palestinian resistance for years. But that fact hasn't stopped pundits like Time's Joe Klein, as recently as last year, from wondering why Palestinians haven't found their Gandhi. Or New York Times columnist Tom Friedman from writing a column (5/24/11) arguing that if Palestinians would simply adopt peaceful resistance, "it would become a global news event. Every network in the world would be there."
Or consider New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, writing (7/10/10) under the headline "Waiting for Gandhi," that if Palestinians would finally pursue nonviolent resistance, "Those images would be on televisions around the world."
"So far there is no Palestinian version of Martin Luther King Jr.," Kristof wrote -- though he singled out one possible candidate, activist Ayed Morrar, who "spent six years in Israeli prisons but seems devoid of bitterness."
Perhaps that is the standard -- jailed by the Israelis, but not bitter.
But what about someone, right now, resisting Israeli detention practices? Someone whose hunger strike is attracting attention around the world? That is Khader Adnan. As Ali Abunimah tells his story:
The 33-year-old Palestinian baker, husband, father and graduate student has refused food since December 18, a day after he was arrested in a nighttime raid on his family home by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank. He has lost over 40 kgs and his wife Randa and young daughters have described his appearance as "shocking."
Adnan, whom Israel says is a member of Islamic Jihad, was given a four-month "administrative detention" order by the Israeli military -- meaning that he is held without being charged for any crime or trial, a practice continued by Israel that dates back to British colonial days.
Yesterday an Israeli military court rejected Adnan's appeal against the arbitrary detention. Having vowed to maintain his hunger strike until he is released or charged, the judge -- an Israeli military officer -- might as well have sentenced Khader Adnan to death, unless there is urgent international intervention.
Though the life in his body hangs on by a thread, his spirit is unbroken.
The pundits who tell us that they crave a dramatic nonviolent Palestinian narrative can write the story of Khader Adnan, who has drawn comparisons to celebrated Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands.
But they are not writing his story. His plight is sparsely covered in the U.S. corporate media, and would seem to go unmentioned by these pundits who seem eager to tell stories like his.
It might lead one to believe that Friedman and his ilk don't really mean what they write.
Follow Peter Hart on Twitter: www.twitter.com/peterfhart | <urn:uuid:4bb5cffc-a15f-421b-b54d-26429d563f8c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-hart/khader-adnan-palestine_b_1285227.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974638 | 640 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Offers both undergraduate and graduate programs in the areas of athletic training, health studies and physical education.
The department offers both undergraduate and graduate programs in the areas of athletic training, health studies and physical education.
At the undergraduate level the department offers a major in physical education which leads to a Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Arts degree, and majors in Athletic Training, and Health Studies which lead to a Bachelor of Science degree. Minors in coaching, health promotion, recreation exercise physiology, dance and health resources management are also offered.
Graduate study offered by the department includes a program in the area of health promotion, which leads to a Master of Education in Health Promotion; a program in the area of physical education, which leads to a Master of Science in Physical Education; and a program in the area of athletic training which leads to an entry level Master of Science in Athletic Training.
Post baccalaureate programs for initial teacher licensure in physical education and health education are available and are described under the department’s graduate programs.
The Department promotes the acquisition of and application of knowledge for diverse populations in human movement (sport, fitness/exercise, dance), teaching physical education, health education/promotion, recreation, coaching, and athletic training; and
The Department prepares athletic trainers, educators in
health, physical education, and adapted physical education, coaches, and fitness
and recreation leaders who can provide qualified leadership in their respective
fields and enhance quality of life by encouraging commitment to healthy
1. Provide a quality physical education program, supported by a foundation in the liberal arts, with seven concentrations providing advanced professional preparation.
2. Provide quality physical education activity courses to assist students in developing lifetime activity patterns and to assist in professional preparation.
3. Provide a quality health studies major program, including two concentrations, with courses that will prepare students to promote, maintain, and improve individual and community health.
4. Provide a quality athletic training major with courses that will prepare students to make successful contributions to the athletic training profession.
5. Support an atmosphere of health and well being for all students.
Last Modified: November 4, 2011
Movement Arts, Health Promotion & Leisure Studies Department
Bridgewater State University
Tinsley Center, Rm 232
325 Plymouth St.
Bridgewater, MA 02325
Our Faculty & Staff | <urn:uuid:33dfc511-a9bd-4109-8035-7172739251b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bridgew.edu/MAHPLS/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948643 | 484 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Multnomah County Democratic Central Committee
The Multnomah County Democratic Central Committee (MCDCC) is the highest authority in county party policies. This body has the authority to adopt rules (called Bylaws) or resolutions covering any matter of party government within the county. Additionally, this is the body that establishes the policies, articulates the beliefs and establishes the standard of all local Democratic candidates. These basic policies, beliefs and standards are then passed on to the State and National party for action.
The MCDCC has the power to call for and receive reports from the Administration Committee, the Executive Committee, the standing committees, and any special or ad hoc committees; Act upon proposed resolutions as provided in the County party Bylaws; Establish rules and procedures for the organization and conduct of the County Democratic Platform Convention; and takes such action as it deems appropriate to further the purposes and goals of the Democratic Party.
Members of the MCDCC are made up of all Democratic Precinct Committee Persons (PCPs) elected or appointed in Multnomah County and any Democratic legislator who lives in and is a PCP of another county and who represents a portion of Multnomah County.
The MCDCC and its membership are active locally in numerous projects and issues, on a wide variety of interests and are dedicated to making people | <urn:uuid:262f3f7b-9c90-43df-9f4d-4f3c41a17c1d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.multdems.org/MCDCC?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946517 | 270 | 1.5 | 2 |
Nairobi, Kenya (CNN) -- When I think of the story of African women, I immediately think of my mother and I want to use her story as a frame of reference in how African leaders can improve the lives of women.
My mother is a huge inspiration to me but sadly, many African women do not have the opportunities that she has.
They are the backbone of our nations and their success will lead to the success of Africa. Using this platform afforded to me, I would like to tell our leaders the five things African women need to succeed.
I was born to a woman who having completed high school in the early 1970s, got married, had me and went about the business of being a mother and wife. I must have been about seven or eight years old when my mother got her first job as a secretary.
Today my mother is Group Human Resources Manager (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania) for Car & General. She's pursuing a degree in clinical psychology. I think I should mention that my mother went back to school at 50. She turned 60 in February 2012.
It can never be said enough. Nowhere is it as clear as it is in Africa that educating a woman is educating a nation. My mother is who she is today and my siblings and I have turned out to be who we are because she went out at the age of 50, sat in the same room as people half her age, so she could learn. She already had a job she was great at but she had a thirst for knowledge.
And today, my mum is a better mother, grandmother and friend all because of the education she had and the knowledge she pursues to this very day.
2. Economic empowerment
The African woman needs to be able to fend not just for herself but also for her children. This is something my mother always drummed into me and I am largely my mother's daughter; driven, focused but also determined to be financially independent.
In my early 20s, I couldn't figure out why she went on and on about getting a job, being good at it and earning my own money -- but today in my 30s I get it.
What drives me crazy about the policy around this is that money is never allocated in a way that benefits women and home first. Instead, it feeds a handout mentality, we never give women a hand up. It's a really horrible cycle. This is why I'm very proud of what my mother did. If you can give a woman a hand up and she can stand, she'll help another woman too.
Anytime I go to an area where there's poverty, we never give just money, we give seeds so they can plant or animals they can rear. I'm involved in a greenhouse project for the areas where the land is dry. The people always have to pay us back in produce and even when they are done paying, they are so excited because they have money in their pockets, you would think they were Bill Gates. That is what happens when you empower a woman.
3. Access to health care
My mother had a job that gave her medical cover and hence access to doctors and healthcare facilities for herself and us. For as long as I can remember my mother took charge of our health.
My brother [John] was born with a blockage in one of his lungs and had the worst case of asthma I knew of, but mum's health cover took care of that and John's subsequent health needs, as he battled with asthma throughout his teens.
She was a better mum not because she understood medicine, but because she had access to health facilities and doctors. Too many women are forced to watch their children die, even from the simplest, most treatable illnesses, simply because of poor access to healthcare.
In a world where women have such few role models -- looking at my mum whose mother tilled the land -- she had no way of doing better for herself or charting a bigger and better path for me and my siblings, if it wasn't for the exposure to a wider world that she got through the working.
You cannot become what you cannot see. Today, mum pursues her dream in clinical psychology and supports a daughter who chose to adopt because my mum is more exposed to different circumstances than most. Don't just tell women what is possible, show them.
When all else is gone, nothing remains but hope. If my mother had written this piece, she would say pray and work. To an international audience , I call it hope with a purpose. As long as we give the women of Africa hope, so long as we don't tread on their dreams and those they have for their children -- these women will rise and with them their children and right alongside them this continent.
Today, the daughter of Rose Mutoko stares at the world through the lenses of CNN. Who would have thunk it?
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Caroline Mutoko. | <urn:uuid:87c1edb0-ada0-4fd7-b1cd-70795c0c1d20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/04/world/africa/mutoko-women-africa/index.html?iref=mpstoryview | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989024 | 1,016 | 1.71875 | 2 |
From Peace Corps Wiki
Many applicants first big fear is the interview. Who likes an interview? You want to feel prepared, but not overly prepared, but definitely not in the dark. The key to the Peace Corps interview is to dress professionally like you would to any job interview (slacks, button up collared shirt, tie, skirt, suit, dress shoes, blouse, primped), relax and be comfortable (many people attribute a Peace Corps interview to being like talking with an old friend about why you are joining), and be informed about the Peace Corps (but be prepared to ask questions). An interview may last anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours.
These questions have been compiled by various sources who have been interviewed during their application process. In general, it has been agreed by those who've looked at this list that this is a pretty concrete list of the questions that you will be asked during the interview. The list may not be word for word, but nearly all these questions will be asked in one wording or another, and one order or another. Usually there are a couple extra or a couple they don't ask, but they all sort of fall in sync with this list. Finally, this list should be used as a guide to help you can start thinking about why you are interested in the Peace Corps and if this is the right opportunity to seek out at this time in your life. Your responses in the interview should be authentic. Scripted responses may negatively affect your application.”
(recommend turning any response from a negative into a positive, as well as in most responses.)
MOTIVATION / COMMITMENT
- What motivates you to seek a service position as a Peace Corps Volunteer? How does Peace Corps service fit into your long range plans?
- What, if anything, might keep you from completing a 27-month commitment to Peace Corps Service?
- Do you have a specific geographic preference? If yes: what is the reason for your preference and how flexible are you? If there are specific regions where you are unwilling to serve: what are your reasons and what is your degree of flexibility?
- Please tell me about your most successful experience in a leadership role. Be as specific as possible.
- Please tell me about an experience when you were able to transfer some knowledge or skill to someone who was different from yourself. What did you learn about your interpersonal skills from that experience? What did you learn about the other person?
- Please tell me about the most frustrating experience you have had when working with others. Specifically, how did you manage that frustration?
- Please tell me about a time when you worked in an unstructured or ambiguous situation? How did you approach the task at hand? What did you learn about your personal strengths from that experience?
- All Peace Corps Volunteers learn a new language. Have you studied a second language?
- If so, what challenges did you face and what level of facility did you achieve?
- What aptitudes or abilities can you draw on to help you succeed in learning a new language?
- What situations do you typically find stressful? What do you currently do to reduce stress?
- When you are overseas, circumstances and/or cultural norms may prevent you from employing your usual ways of managing stress, boredom, and loneliness. You will also most likely be out of touch with your familiar support group.
- In such a situation, what alternative outlets might you use?
- If your support group currently plays a critical role in helping you cope with stress, how will you manage without them?
- What is the longest you have been physically separated from important people (family, friends, romantic interests, etc.) in your life? What was the most difficult part of being away from those closest to you? How did you cope?
- What kind of support have you received from those closest to you on your decision to join the Peace Corps?
- Has anyone close to you opposed your decision to join Peace Corps? If so, who was it? What were his/her concerns? How have you responded to them?
- One’s ability to work through and resolve differences or conflict is often tested in cross-cultural situations. Please tell me about a specific situation, one we haven’t already discussed, when you needed to work through a disagreement or difference of opinion. Were you able to reach a resolution? How, specifically, did you do that?
- If you weren’t able to resolve the conflict, what prevented you from doing so? In retrospect, is there anything you would do differently?
SOCIAL SENSITIVITY / CULTURAL AWARENESS
- In some countries, tattoos, body piercing, or unusual hairstyles may be culturally unacceptable. To be a successful Volunteer in such a country, you would have to modify your appearance so that it conforms to local norms. Are you willing to make such an adjustment? Give an example of a time that you had to modify your appearance.
- The following are issues that you may face in your country of service. Please note any concerns:
- different and/or lack of familiar foods
- different living conditions
- lack of privacy; isolation
- prescribed gender roles
- possible minority challenges
- personal religious requirements/possible lack of access to your own religious services
- living in a culture where alcohol may be widely consumed and accepted/living in a culture that prohibits the use of alcohol altogether
Questions to Ask
Besides giving answers you are happy with, something that is quite important, sometimes overlooked, and the interviewer is really interested in are the questions you ask them. They want to see that you know about the organization, you've done some research, but that you are still seeking more knowledge about the Peace Corps. Keep in mind that you may think you know the answer to something, but most likely, you only know part of it, so ask anyway!
- What if I get severely ill or injured and can't get to the Peace Corps office or another volunteer--what happens?
- With the PCVs recently pulled out of Georgia and Bolivia--what happens to me if that should happen?
- Will I be reassigned?
- Do I have more of a say on a new country?
- How long would a reassignment take?
- How long will I wait to see if we go back to that country?
- How do our belongings get back to us if we are very quickly evacuated?
- Will I be reassigned?
- What steps do they take to make sure they are providing their volunteers with the safest environment possible?
- I have heard in-country training consists of language, culture, technical, & safety--could you tell me anything more specific about it?
- How much of your work as a volunteer is completed solely by you and how much does the Peace Corps help with?
- If you are having trouble getting your project started, does the Peace Corps provide any help?
- If I am nominated, what can I do to make myself more competitive for placement?
- Ask about the recruiters/interviewers experience in the Peace Corps.
- Where and when did they go?
- What was it like?
- What was the most the most difficult thing they encountered?
- How did they deal with this?
- What was the thing they least expected that happened?
- What did they get out of it the most?
- If you are interested in the PC Fellows program, ask about it.
- How far apart are volunteers placed?
- In some countries you can live on your own after training, and in others you're required to live the full 2 years with a host family, is that correct?
- In countries where its required to live with a host family, why is that required?
- How is a host family chosen? | <urn:uuid:6591d068-c868-4ee3-ac67-e4bf54872929> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pcwiki.peacecorpsconnect.org/Interview_Questions?title=Interview_Questions&oldid=14093 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967962 | 1,623 | 1.507813 | 2 |
MATSYS have designed the Shellstar Pavilion in Wan Chai, Hong Kong.
Description from the designers
Shellstar is a lightweight temporary pavilion that maximizes its spatial performance while minimizing structure and material. Commissioned for Detour, an art and design festival in Hong Kong in December 2012, the pavilion was designed to be an iconic gathering place for the festival attendees. Located on an empty lot within the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong, the design emerged out of a desire to create a spatial vortex whereby visitors would feel drawn into the pavilion center and subsequently drawn back out into the larger festival site.
Working fully within a parametric modelling environment, the design was quickly developed and iterated with the 6 weeks of design, fabrication, and assembly. The design process can be broken down into 3 processes that were enabled by advanced digital modelling techniques.
The form emerged out of a digital form-finding process based on the classic techniques developed by Antonio Guadi and Frei Otto, among others. Using Grasshopper and the physics engine Kangaroo, the form self-organizes into the catenary-like thrust surfaces that are aligned with the structural vectors and allow for minimal structural depths.
The structure is composed of nearly 1500 individual cells that are all slightly non-planar. In reality, the cells must bend slightly to take on the global curvature of the form. However, the cells cannot be too non-planar as this would make it difficult to cut them from flat sheet materials. Using a custom Python script, each cell is optimized so as to eliminate any interior seams and make them as planar as possible, greatly simplifying fabrication.
Using more custom python scripts, each cell was unfolded flat and prepared for fabrication. The cell flanges and labels were automatically added and the cell orientation was analyzed and then rotated to align the flutes of the Coroplast material with the principal bending direction of the surface.
You can watch a video of the assembly and construction – here
Photography: Dennis Lo | <urn:uuid:03947027-fab4-4dff-9143-db1f74923c3f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.contemporist.com/2013/03/04/shellstar-pavilion-by-matsys/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946341 | 411 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Gov. Corbett's budget plan would cut $19 million in student aid although… (DONNA FISHER, MORNING CALL…)
Springtime on every college campus, Alvernia University included, means finals, all-nighters, ample caffeine, and a manageable dose of stress for a solid week or two.
Ultimately, the spring semester closes with a sense of academic achievement, with our graduates proudly receiving diplomas, eager to enter graduate school or the workforce.
It's not too different from the spring experience for lawmakers who, every May and June, buckle down to enact a state budget in advance of the June 30 deadline. This year, the stakes for our students, lawmakers and the commonwealth are especially high, with their fates tied more closely together than in previous years.
How we fund higher education in Pennsylvania has emerged as a critical issue for lawmakers and the Corbett administration — in this budget and beyond. In the near term, it is essential that lawmakers take every step in this budget debate to fund fully the student grant program administered by the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency.
Gov. Corbett proposed a $19 million reduction in total funding for the state student grant program, among other proposed reductions that would impact virtually every component of higher education.
Reductions in funding are inevitable given the state's budget and the large number of institutions receiving funding. But the PHEAA grant program must be treated differently. PHEAA grants can be used at any college or university in Pennsylvania because they follow the student, rather than getting allocated to an institution. This grant program represents the most effective and direct way for the state to ensure that more Pennsylvania students and families can gain affordable access to higher education. PHEAA grants — as well as federal Pell grants — are need-based and target low- and middle-income students who need the assistance the most.
This is a quite different approach from subsidies to the state's public universities. These funds are designed to help keep tuition affordable for all students regardless of their financial circumstance. If you lower the cost for everyone at public universities, those who have more ability to pay receive the same subsidy as those who don't. Given the state's financial crunch, and the need to expand rather than reduce the numbers of young people able to attend college, don't lawmakers need to ask whether or not this makes sense?
Providing grants directly to qualified students targets those most in need of support and enables them to choose the school best suited to their goals. For many, that will be a private, independent college and university since some private schools enroll a higher percentage of low-income students than some public universities.
Currently, in total, Pennsylvania's private colleges and universities enroll 51,814 Pell Grant students. These students generally come from families with incomes below $45,000. Alvernia, for example, by keeping tuition below the national average for private schools, has always reached to first-generation and underrepresented students as part of our Franciscan mission: 42 percent of our students receive PHEAA state grants, while 37 percent receive federal Pell grants.
Private colleges and universities provided more than $2 billion of their own funds in 2010-11 so that these and other low- and middle-income students can attend their institutions. And these schools are a good return on investment for the Pennsylvania taxpayer: While private colleges and universities received a mere 11 percent of the state's funding for higher education, they awarded 49 percent of the degrees granted in 2010-11.
The state budget debate represents a final exam of sorts for lawmakers. They can earn high grades by restoring PHEAA grant funding.
Thomas F. Flynn is president of Alvernia University in Reading. | <urn:uuid:a1ee5893-7075-4099-953e-9e2c140ffca8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.mcall.com/2012-06-18/opinion/mc-higher-education-flynn-yv--20120618_1_pheaa-grants-federal-pell-grants-grant-program | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960315 | 756 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Make a simple reusable sandwich bag from oil cloth. There are tons of great prints out there (look at your local fabric or craft store) and can be hand washed after each use. Stylish and good for the environment – they would also be great for your kids playdates!
Here’s the how-to:
- cut a rectangle approximately 8 1/2″ x 16 1/2″ out of oilcloth with pinking shears or sharp scissors.
- turn edges under 1/4″ and stitch with machine.
- with wrong sides facing each other, fold over oilcloth leaving 2 1/2″ of extra material for the flap.
- stitch along sides to form the pocket.
- attach velcro on flap and pocket of bag.
- enjoy your reusable sandwich bag and hand wash with soap and water.
I found some great oilcloth fabric that you can buy by the yard at Doxie Shop. Here are a couple that I think would be perfect for these sandwich bags: | <urn:uuid:80ed903a-2fe9-4cc1-8b8e-2f0aded894ce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thepartydress.net/2009/05/do-it-yourself-picnic-reusable-sandwich-bags/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945276 | 209 | 1.515625 | 2 |
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