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.: A most beautiful autumn leaf fairy sharing the work of her hands! :.
We went into the woods on this crisp October day, taking in the earthy scents of the forest. The forest was decked with red, gold, and orange leaves creating a lightly percussive rhythym to our day as we walked along through them...
.: Intent on her work she paints the leaves all the colors of autumn with paint made of berries :.
We looked to our right and what did we see? The most beautiful autumn leaf fairy carefully doing her important seasonal work. With the leaves as her palette and berries for paint she carefully painted each and every leaf, turning the forest alive with brillant autumn colors!
.: Blending in so beautifully with the natural landscape all around her :.
.: She looks down to her dress at a sash made of warmly-colored autumn leaves :.
Just what was this leaf fairy dreaming up for her attire next?
.: Searching the forest for just the right leaf! :.
.:Picking a leaf to add into her sash that joins her fairy finery! :.
Up into the trees she reached, her wings lifting her to a lovely leaf that she had painted with bittersweet berries. She picked this leaf and knew just what it would be for!
.:Creating her dress for this beautiful autumn day, she adds in just one more leaf!:.
.: Her dress is now complete so she blends into the trees where she prepares the them for this season :.
.: Happy with her handiwork she smiles with a twinkle in her eye! :.
Her dress was now complete and this made her very happy indeed!
.:So gracefully she gathers up berries to mix into paints for painting the leaves!:.
.: The colors of autumn resting in her hand :.
She went right back to her work--this time gathering up more berries to mix up in acorn caps to use as her paints! Her masterpiece was almost done as the forest was shimmering from her warm colored paintings!
As we followed her deeper into the forest we noticed she sat quietly surrounded by the crisp fallen leaves. She sat there among them taking in the gallery of work all around her until...
.:A sweet and mishchivious look swept over her face--just what was she planning? :.
A sweet look of mischief came upon her face and she smiled with a twinkle in her eye the way most fairies look when they are dreaming of fun! Up from the leaves her sparkling wings took her, and before we could blink...
.: There she played with a look of pure joy as the leaves flew all around her! :.
She was taking great joy in this day and the beauty surrounding! She shared with us how to have the most enjoyable fun!
She celebrated the leaves ad the gifts found in nature and made all of our hearts warm with her laughter!
.: Quickly she turned and walked closer to the dense woods :.
Moments later she started back off into the dense growth of the trees where we first found her painting...
.:She stops for just a moment, looking at the fallen leaves at her feet. Happy with the work she completed!:.
.: The leaf fairy smiles at the work she has completed! :.
She looked at the leaves at her feet with a fairy smile...you could see she was very happy with her work! She knows very well it is the leaves that have fallen to the forest floor that will bring about joyful play in the children who visit the forest!
.: Into the woods she goes with only her wings now visible :.
To our surprise she turned around looking right at us with a bright smile and her wings carried her back up into the trees! | <urn:uuid:7735ad64-9fbc-490c-b67a-dc6e10ef0a84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gardenmama.typepad.com/my_weblog/flower-crowns/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983168 | 775 | 1.757813 | 2 |
The world of music downloads is ever-changing. Most music downloads are now available without the restrictions of digital rights management (DRM), and converting between different file formats is usually possible, though sometimes messy. The latest development is the availability of cloud storage for all your music tracks, making your music collection available from anywhere with a web connection. (Cloud storage means that your files are on a company's server, rather than on your local machine.) If you'd rather stream music than download individual tracks, see our related report on music streaming sites .
Three companies dominate the reviews of music download services: iTunes, AmazonMP3 and newcomer Google Music. Each offers similar services, prices and catalogs, yet each has different strengths. In addition, eMusic is our pick as the music download service to check out for music by independent and emerging artists.
If you're an Apple fan with an iPhone, iPod or iPad, then iTunes (*Est. $0.69 to $1.29 per track) is still the most attractive option for your music download purchases. With an extensive catalog of over 20 million tracks, including music from the four major record companies, iTunes presents a wide range of music genres, including Latin music, spoken word and music from independent musicians. All music from iTunes is now DRM-free, so it has no download or copying restrictions. However, iTunes still uses the AAC file format for its music tracks, so people with MP3 players that don't support the AAC format (many music players aside from the iPod now do, however) may need to convert these files into the WMA or MP3 format.
For fans of mainstream top-40 music who want low prices for their MP3 music downloads, AmazonMP3 (*Est. $0.69 to $1.29 per track) offers a catalog of 19 million tracks. Owners of Android-powered smartphones and tablets can download songs directly to their device. Anyone can use the Amazon Downloader to download music to a computer and direct it into Windows Media Player or iTunes. AmazonMP3 often has the lowest prices, with daily bargains and rewards for frequent purchases. ITunes compatibility makes AmazonMP3 a good choice for Apple users as well.
your main concern is to access all your downloaded music at any time on any of
your devices, then consider Google Music (*Est. $0.99 to $1.29 per track),
which launched in November 2011. Now rolled into the Google Play service,
Google Music's catalog of 13 million songs is smaller than that of iTunes and
AmazonMP3, and content from some major labels, such as Warner Brothers, is not
carried by these services. However, Google Music fills that void through
arrangements with over 1,000 independent labels and distributors. Still, it's
Google Music's full integration with the cloud that sets it apart from its
competitors. You can upload up to 20,000 songs (regardless of where you
purchased them) into your Music Locker at no cost, and access them from any
web-connected device. You can also make tracks available offline. ITunes and AmazonMP3 offer similar services, but at a cost, and their storage services are not as fully integrated.
EMusic (*Est. $12 and up per month) is a recommended option for those who listen to alternative music or who prefer not to deal with the larger companies. EMusic's catalog has over 13 million tracks, mostly from independent musicians or emerging artists. They also carry Sony's back catalog of songs, so you can purchase songs published more than two years ago by Sony artists. With eMusic, you don't buy individual tracks; you pay a monthly subscription that allows you to download a defined number of songs that you can play on any PC or MP3 player. For music by independent artists, it's also worth checking out the offerings on Google Music, as their Artist Hub service allows musicians to publish and sell their own music.
While there have not been many recent reviews of music download services, we did find some useful comparative reviews at The Huffington Post, Lifehacker.com and TopTenReviews.com. The first two compare the current three biggest music download services -- iTunes, AmazonMP3 and Google Music -- while TopTenReviews.com presents its top 10 music download services for 2012. Professional reviewers at Download.com (owned by CNET), PC World, PCMag.com and Macworld all review at least one of our best-reviewed music download services, while About.com looks at music downloads primarily for mobile devices. Only the AmazonMP3 service receives customer feedback at Amazon.com. (Note: ConsumerSearch is owned by About.com, but the two don't share an editorial affiliation.) | <urn:uuid:7e4a669f-764f-4bc8-8ab2-c1f356021eb4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.consumersearch.com/music-downloads | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942174 | 977 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Teen Fiction ABDEL-F
Summary: When sixteen-year-old Amal decides to wear the hijab full-time, her entire world changes, all because of a piece of cloth... Sixteen-year-old Amal makes the decision to start wearing the hijab full- time and everyone has a reaction. Her parents, her teachers, her friends, people on the street. But she stands by her decision to embrace her faith and all that it is, even if it does make her a little different from everyone else. Can she handle the taunts of "towel head," the prejudice of her classmates, and still attract the cutest boy in school? Brilliantly funny and poignant, Randa Abdel-Fattah's debut novel will strike a chord in all teenage readers, no matter what their beliefs.
Question about returns, requests or other account details?
Add a Comment | <urn:uuid:23ee7ce0-b9e6-40ee-98f3-618ebcc09c69> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hclib.org/pub/bookspace/discuss/index.cfm?bib=3094497&theTab=Summary | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941694 | 183 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Efficiency and Power Factor
The Enermax Revolution 85+ sets a new record as it is the first power supply tested in our labs to exceed 90% efficiency! I guess this is largely due to the above-described synchronous rectifier. The Revolution 85+ is the first PSU with a synchronous rectifier in the main transformer that I have ever tested.
As opposed to most competitor products, the standby source of the Revolution 85+ has a load capacity of 5A. It does its job well: the output voltage is 4.87V at full load, the allowable minimum being 4.75V.
I won’t say if it is revolution or evolution, but Enermax’s engineers have indeed come up with something new and original from a technical standpoint. This PSU is original not only with its exterior but also with its interior design. The capabilities of the Revolution 85+ may seem even redundant for today – the number of unused connectors for detachable cables is a clear indication of that. However, people at Enermax stress the point that they have tried to create a platform not only for today but also for near future, stuffing it with everything best that modern electronics can offer. And they seem to have succeeded.
Besides the moral satisfaction of owning one of the most technically sophisticated power supplies, the Enermax Revolution 85+ offers you good quality of manufacture, excellent electric parameters, a rich selection of cables and connectors, and quiet operation throughout the entire load range, up to the maximum 850W.
As you may have guessed, the biggest downside of this product is its price. The recommended price is $309 or €229 taxes excluded. | <urn:uuid:a891004e-fa7d-4820-9b8c-0ad958c32900> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cases/display/antec-enermax-seasonic-psus_11.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94675 | 340 | 1.765625 | 2 |
CONTACT: Linda Holtz
FAU’s Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education Holds Kick-Off Reception
Center Seeks to Establish Endowment
BOCA RATON, FL (June 3, 2009) – Florida Atlantic University President Frank T. Brogan ’81, Mrs. Courtney Brogan and Dr. John Pritchett, university provost and chief academic officer, recently hosted a reception at the Eleanor R. Baldwin House for FAU’s Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education. More than 140 invited guests were in attendance at the event that showcased the Center and raised awareness of the need to establish an endowment that would guarantee the Center’s perpetuity.
The evening was planned by the Center’s advisory committee, including Connie Packman, chair; and members Nancy Dershaw, Gerry Golden, Anita Hoffer, Linda Medvin, Shirley Solomon and Cantor Ann Turnoff. The reception was attended by prominent local philanthropists, public officials, organization members and representatives of Holocaust survivor groups. Music was graciously provided by George Brown, Boca Raton deputy city manager.
Founded 13 years ago, the Center prepares primary and secondary educators to comply with the 1994 Holocaust Education Bill, a Florida state mandate that requires that each and every school teach a unit annually about the history of the Holocaust. The Center has expanded its focus to include all genocides and human rights struggles, including those of the past 60 years, such as the genocides that occurred in Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda and currently the Sudan and Darfur.
As home to one of seven centers in the state, FAU hosts the only center exclusively dedicated to providing both professional development programs for teachers and classroom resources for teachers and students. An integral part of FAU’s public service mission, the Center serves 348 schools in seven of Florida’s counties, and today trains approximately 500 teachers annually in Broward, Palm Beach, Martin, Indian River, St. Lucie, Okeechobee and Glades counties.
In 2008, the Center felt the effects of the state’s economic shortfall and faced the possibility of closure. In an amazing six-week effort, legislators, private citizens, charitable foundations and organizations came together to raise enough funds to keep the Center functioning through June 2010.
During the reception, Packman spoke about the desire to establish an endowment, one that would sustain and expand the Center’s essential role in the region. “Private endowment gifts are eligible for matching gift programs through the state and through the FAU Foundation’s matching gift program for academic initiatives,” said Packman. “Until an endowment fund is established, the committee will continue the work of funding annual programs.”
To make a gift to help support the important work of the Center, visit http://fauf.fau.edu/CHHRE. For more information, contact Dr. Rose Gatens at 561-297-2929 or [email protected].
- FAU - | <urn:uuid:db882696-64db-4635-b489-39806e70b892> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fau.edu/mediarelations/Releases0609/060903.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932958 | 637 | 1.703125 | 2 |
That caused concerned citizens to call Kisch. "We were getting inquiries from the community about what they were doing, their tactics. They were kind of aggressive, going up to people's doors asking for a lot of money.... It wasn't really clear to the people they were soliciting that money was going to direct services," she said.
In fact, most of it wasn't. The SFHSC says only 15 percent of the money it raises makes it to the shelters and service centers. Most of the money raised goes to raising more money door-to-door either to canvassers or their support staff an effort the group calls "education." Kisch did some more research and ultimately decided "it wasn't worth it to us to be attached to a controversial organization like that." Compass ended up receiving a total of $11,250 from the SFHSC.
Daniel Rotman, founder and executive director of both the SF and the LAHSC, said of the breakup, "Maybe they didn't realize we'd be reaching so many people. I think we were just too new for them."
Rotman, a 27-year-old LA resident and UC Berkeley graduate with a degree in political science, used to work for the Democratic National Committee but decided politics wasn't for him. He transferred the grassroots machinery of fundraising for politics to the particular issue of homelessness, he told us, "because I care. I've always been taken by the issue."
He confirmed to us that the SFHSC does not interface with needy folks it just gathers money in their name. Homeless people who stop by the office are referred to other locations in the neighborhood and escorted out. Rotman said 15 percent of the net money raised is given to local groups, 60 percent goes to education, and 25 percent is for overhead, as well as a plan to buy delivery trucks for ferrying donated goods from homes to shelters.
"Our main goal is educating the community," Rotman said. "We don't just raise money and give it to other groups. It costs money to set up speaking engagements and pay for field managers." But he admitted the SFHSC hadn't done or set up any speaking gigs yet. The 10 to 11 canvassers employed at the SFHSC are paid minimum wage and earn a 30 percent bonus if they exceed a weekly office average. "They get that for going out into the community and informing people about the issue and about us. At the end we ask them to make a donation," Rotman said.
So the point of the canvassing is to educate, not raise money, but those who have received the pitch are dubious.
"It was not educational at all," one Bernal Heights resident said of her interaction with an SFHSC canvasser. "My husband works in that field, and I was surprised I'd never heard of them." She asked for a business card so she could do more research, but the canvasser had no printed materials. "Just a clipboard with names and addresses and a very vague petition." No envelope, no card, no pamphlet. "Basically, he was just asking for donations. I didn't know what to think."
Besides the soliciting foot soldiers and an office at 1135 Market that's so discreet it's easy to miss, the group's only public face is its Web site, www.sfhsc.org a copy of the LAHSC site. "Who is homeless in San Francisco?" the Web site asks, but its answers don't inspire a lot of confidence they were clearly imported from our southerly neighbor. "50% of homeless adults are African American, compared to 9% of LA's total population."
Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project and former head of the Coalition on Homelessness, said he found out about the SFHSC from people who thought its canvassers were from COH. Boden, who's been working on homeless issues since 1983, said none of his peers in LA had heard of the group, further raising his suspicions.
Most Commented On
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- Thank you for the art work at - May 21, 2013 | <urn:uuid:84d37b73-5ee8-4507-bc5d-74899c81dec6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sfbg.com/2007/10/24/door-door-education?page=0,1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984861 | 966 | 1.5625 | 2 |
My mom is on a low-fiber diet
So, not so long ago my mom (who is severely physically disabled and has been ill for years. Like, 10 years. I'm not kidding) was admitted to the hospital with what we now know to be a blood infection. She got this infection because of bacteria leaking from her intestine that was stuck in her hernia. She's been waiting for her back surgery (her back is broken. Like, in half) and has avoided the hernia surgery because the back surgery has to go through her front and it makes sense to wait. Except now her doctors are thinking maybe its not a good idea because she almost died.
After she was released from the hospital, her doctors put her on a low fiber diet to keep her stools small. Does this make sense? I guess it kind of does, because it minimizes risks of more bacteria leaking through the hernia but it also seems kinda painful. She's not supposed to eat green leafy vegetables, coconut, nuts in general, dairy in general..its a pretty exhaustive list.
On top of all this, she's very weak. I brought her some fruit and she fell asleep before she was able to finish a plum. (She's in severe pain and is on narcotics to manage it but often doesn't sleep for days and passes out a lot)
Does anyone have any idea what sorts of things I could make to help her? My dad is living there (they're divorced) and claims to be able to cook but she's obviously not getting all the nutrition she needs.
I am an excellent cook but keep getting headed off at the pass when it comes to making things.
Can anyone give me any suggestions on what sorts of foods to cook for my mom?
Peel and de-seed EVERYTHING.
Potatoes, yams, and white rice are low fiber and generally pretty digestible.
Avoid berries, but other fruits that can be peeled like apples and pears would be good.
Squashes like zucchini and spaghetti squash are good, as are cucumbers (again, peel and deseed them all), and bell peppers have little fiber.
I eat a low fiber diet to treat my IBS, and one trick that was a big help was to put fruits and veggies in a juicer and throw out the indigestible fiber part. All the minerals and vitamins will be in the juice.
Also, bone broths are good, and if she eats dairy, cultured milk products like kefir and yogurt would be good. You still want to make sure that she is eating things that are supporting good gut flora, so if she can't tolerate much fermented stuff, taking a probiotic would be a good idea.
The Asian section of your supermarket (or an asian grocery store) should have rice noodles that are made from white rice, very low fiber. You could put these noodles or some white rice in bone broth to make a soup, or you could make a pasta sauce for them (or to put over the spaghetti squash).
Last edited by BestBetter; 10-12-2012 at 01:21 PM.
Those are great suggestions, thank you!
Her diet restrictions seemed very odd to me and kind of freaked me out. She does drink/eat bone broth. I will have to bring up the subject of peeling fruit. I think she has a juicer as well.
Thanks for your help! | <urn:uuid:febd7dc1-5610-43c1-9869-a5b4781c2bb2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marksdailyapple.com/forum/thread67456.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981128 | 710 | 1.625 | 2 |
Mike Bell is inspired by 30 years of living and working on the Northumberland coast and in the wilds of the Scottish borders. The patterns of sand on beach, piles of seaweed and driftwood are cleverly incorporated into his paintings. Mike's work is created using a wide range of materials including sand, soil and coal dust, which are embedded into the paint surface to create a natural effect. He prefers to use finger, knife and trowel rather than brush, and experiments with Holographic paint to simulate the special light in Northumberland. Since studying Art and Design in Sunderland, Mike has exhibited extensively throughout the North of England and Scotland, and has also taught Art and Design for several years.
Look for more Mike Bell prints.
Redesdale Rhythms and Textures I appears in: | <urn:uuid:365d8f75-c5ee-4ce1-abbc-4e3f9bd41bb4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.indigoart.co.uk/art/332536/Redesdale_Rhythms_and_Textures_I | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966039 | 166 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Jul 07 2012 — by Rachel Jacobowski
What’s more flavorful than water, less caffeinated than coffee, and contains less sugar than sodas and most juices? The answer is Tea! Like nail polish, it’s something we wouldn’t want to live without. Convenient to our busy lifestyles, we can get a wide variety of teas in portable containers.
Below, we break down our favorite bottled teas and explain exactly what sorts of health benefits each offers. Since we like all sorts of teas, we have included a variety including black, green, white, and oolong teas. Hope you enjoy!
Honest Tea: Peach Oo-La-Long
Oolong tea contains about 15% of the caffeine in a cup of coffee, and may aid you in maintaining a healthy weight. Honest Tea is Fair Trade Certified and USDA Organic, and this peach variety contains oolong and black teas. You can taste a hint of peach flavor, and it was not very sweet-- a light and refreshing taste. However, it was a little bitter, probably because black and oolong teas are rather strong. We love that it’s only 60 calories per bottle (30 cals/serving); drinking lots of calories can feel like a waste.
Sweet Leaf: Peach Iced Tea
Black tea contains about 20% of the amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee, so it’s a good morning alternative to your usual cup of java. Black tea can also help maintain healthy cardiovascular functioning, and keep cholesterol in check. Sweet Leaf Peach Iced Tea is black tea-based and is USDA Organic. At 140 calories per bottle (2 servings/bottle) this drink is quite sweet, yet still refreshing. There is a strong, but not overwhelming, peach flavor. This tea is not bitter at all; the peachy sweetness seems to mask any bitterness the black tea may have. While we enjoyed the flavor, it was a bit too sweet to drink more than a few sips at once.
365: Mango Acai White Tea
White tea is very low in caffeine and contains antioxidants, and is beneficial to a healthy complexion. The Whole Foods store brand, 365 teas are USDA Organic and Fair Trade Certified. This flavor contains both white and green teas. It was light, refreshing, and not too sweet. We didn’t really taste the mango. Another relatively low-cal option at 80 calories per bottle, you can feel good about hydrating on the go with this tea.
Pom: Pomegranate Lychee Green Tea
Green tea contains healthy antioxidants, and is good for skin and teeth, and maintaining healthy cholesterol and blood sugar levels.Pomegranate is an antioxidant-packed fruit; pair it with green tea, and you’ve got a powerhouse! We absolutely love the flavor of this beverage. The pomegranate and lychee make it very flavorful without being too sweet. Also, green tea can often become bitter if steeped too long, but this one is not bitter at all. You can taste the green tea without it overpowering the other flavors. Pom is 140 calories per bottle but its delicious flavor and healthy antioxidants make it a worthwhile splurge. | <urn:uuid:a60994ab-4136-48b7-87a3-06863d5ec5dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://meganmillercollection.myshopify.com/blogs/megan-miller-blog/tagged/oolong | 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 | 0.930854 | 672 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Lacey Mason, wtop.com
WASHINGTON - After two weeks to allow Superstorm Sandy and the 2012 presidential election the attention they deserved, Website of the Week is back at it.
And with all the stories borne out of the big news, a website about stories seemed the perfect fit.
With the stories users submit, Cowbird finds connections with other stories in an effort to create a "vast, interconnected ecosystem, in which we all take part."
The goal, according to Cowbird, is to create a library of human experience. But one question that I had, and apparently others had too, was: How is this different from other social networks?
Cowbird says it's interested in long-lasting expression that isn't found elsewhere on the Web. It's a nice sentiment, of course, but easily copied. If this cool idea catches on, it won't be long before other sites evolve.
After you sign up, posting a story is simple. Users just click the prominently featured "Tell a story" button and get started. Writers can add text, photos and even sound - but no video.
Most stories can contain just one photo, one page of text and sound. "Cowbird Citizens," who pay $5 a month, have more options - but this fee seems to take a little something away from Cowbird's mostly genuine feel. It's understandable that they need to pay the bills, but it takes away from the "je ne sais quoi" of "We just want to tell stories!"
Also, before you look for it, Cowbird doesn't have an app. While many suggest apps are the future of the Internet, Cowbird believes they're "destined for obsolescence - they'll be the CD-Roms of tomorrow."
Still, the beauty of Cowbird is its simplicity. There are no pop-up ads. The design is the same for every story. The focus is on telling a story, not looking cool. While I was initially "iffy" about its decision to not include embedded video, it works for what Cowbird is trying to accomplish.
And if you're worried about others taking what you create, Cowbird users can select "Creative Commons" options to control how their work can be shared.
So, do you have a story to tell? Want to get something off your chest? Or maybe just sit and read something other than your Facebook feed? Take a gander at Cowbird and see where you end up.
(Copyright 2012 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)
A fallen police officer's daughter gets a swarm of support. (Photos)
The Nickelodeon star's antics continue in New York City.
She can sing, but can she act? Jewel takes on a famous role.
"Sulu" weighs in on the actor filling his shoes in the new "Star Trek." | <urn:uuid:c7a5c39a-86d6-4717-a4b9-32e4a7e02c7c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wtop.com/262/3115505/Cowbirdcom-A-place-for-stories | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962876 | 592 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Prevention Is Training - Dog Training – Dog Trainer – Behaviorist
PHOENIX , AZ AREA: (602) 708-4531
OR, if you are out of this area, inquire about a telephone or e-Lesson
A great deal of the things I teach dog owners is how to prevent behavioral problems. Yes, I can come in and solve a problem after it has started, but it’s much easier for everyone to never have a problem in the first place.
Because I’ve trained so many dogs over so many years, and owned dogs for so many years, I can see where a dog is heading, and where I’d like that dog to be. I can look ahead 3 or more years and predict what problems a dog owner might face with a particular puppy or dog. I can see it. So, I can start heading off problems long before they happen. Certain skills help the learning of other skills, so I teach lessons in a general sequence. Those simple early lessons lead to more complex behavioral control later.
It starts with Socialization. One of the first things I do when I meet a puppy or dog is get an impression of their temperament and level of socialization. A well socialized dog is much less stressed, and easier to manage, train and own. If I spot timidity, or aggression, hyperactivity or some kind of sensitivity, I will assign homework in order to counterbalance anything that might develop from that trait. I suggest a customized socialization plan for that dog, and then I follow up to see how the dog is progressing.
Next comes House Training. I believe that house training is one of the most important lessons you can teach a dog. When it goes right, all is good. When it goes wrong, not only does the dog soil the home and wreck the yard, the relationship between the dog and owner gets into a trouble zone. A well mannered, obedient dog has a good relationship with its family. If the relationship is off, then it spills out into every aspect of the dogs behavior. What some dog owners, and some dog trainers, sometimes incorrectly diagnose as disobedience, brattiness, and dominance are really the result of a bad relationship that needs to be repaired. I spend a considerable amount of time teaching proper handling skills to my students. Most people don’t get to the optimum relationship with their dogs because they only do a handful of lessons. There’s no way you can get that kind of relationship through a pet store training program, or a program that is designed to be completed in 5 weekly lessons. It just doesn’t work that way. I get offended, as a professional dog trainer, by competitors who offer quickie programs to unsuspecting dog owners. I know they are getting their wallets cleaned out for very little in return. I only see the best relationships from students who have taken their dogs through the advanced levels of obedience. Everyone is happy, including the dogs.
Manners must also be taught. Manners are those socially appropriate behaviors that make living with a dog enjoyable. A dog that is destructive, barks incessantly, digs, mounts people, gets in fights, and scratches up the kids isn’t a dog that’s going to remain in the home for very long. It’s going to end up in a shelter or dead, especially if the owner starts getting mad at the dog, and the dog starts fighting back to protect itself by biting. All that stuff can be prevented long before it gets that bad.
Then, there’s Obedience Training. I have numerous students who have told me of how they saved their dog’s lives through the training we did. I can think, right off the top of my head, of three dogs I recently trained that got loose from their owners, running for traffic, the owners commanded the dogs to Come, the dogs instantly turned around and returned. Mistakes happen to all dog owners, even to me. Dogs can slip out of collars, out doors, get out of the car, get away from you in the blink of an eye.
In one case, the leash came off the dog’s collar while on a walk. A freak occurance, but something that eventually will happen to almost every dog owner. At the same moment, a car came by, the dog (who was only half way through my Basic Obedience program) started chasing the car. The owner immediately commanded her to Come, she turned around instantly, and ran back to the owner just as we had been practicing in the lessons. Long before, when this puppy was just 8 weeks old, I had seen that this kind of thing could happen with her. So, I had assigned homework from the very start to teach her to come when called. That foresight paid off. And she’s alive today instead of dead.
I also assess my students, because training isn’t just about the dogs, it is about handler skills. I spend a considerable amount of time teaching dog handlers how to deal with emergencies. If you don’t just KNOW what to do when an emergency is happening right in front of you, then your dog is going to die. I go over and over a variety of things in my handling classes to ensure that when that day comes, and most likely it will, my students are competent to handle just about anything their dog might do. Since I started doing this in 1997, I have yet to hear of a student’s dog that died as a result of not obeying in an emergency. And I’ve also heard numerous accounts of just the opposite, life saving stories that are directly attributable to the drills and concepts I have taught in the lessons.
Prevention is better than a cure. That’s my philosophy in dog training. I’m kind of like your dad, who told you all that silly “be careful” stuff as a kid, as you rolled your eyes. And then when you grew up, that silly stuff saved you from harm. | <urn:uuid:1abad9da-b904-45de-8248-afa385a9c5a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://samthedogtrainer.com/articles/prevention-is-training/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97153 | 1,248 | 1.65625 | 2 |
1900 Dora Coulson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland, England. She was the only daughter of John Joseph Coulson and Isabella Lamb.
1915 Henry Owen Dabridgecourt Becher died - he was killed in action at Bois Grenier, Armentières, France, serving in the British Army.
1960 James Lamb died in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was born in Newcastle, England and emigrated to Canada as a young man. | <urn:uuid:32fe297c-dea6-4248-9a6a-c912419ebca8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blunderingblindlybackwards.blogspot.com/2011/03/on-this-day-13-march.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983549 | 104 | 1.539063 | 2 |
We had planned to write a blog post on systemic fraud in the US financial infrastructure, particularly as it relates to the mortgage industry, mortgage origination and servicing fraud. However, today a very good article
was published by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone
which includes colorful first-hand accounts that vividly illustrates the problem on both a macro and micro scale.
The plan was to outline these same points regarding the device of “securitization
” of mortgage lending through derivatives that allow the formation of a traditional “pyramid” scheme, or what we prefer to call in the US a “Ponzi” scheme – perhaps, within a few years we may just opt to drop the name “Ponzi” altogether in favor of something like “business model for US banks in the early 21st century”. However, rather than reproduce what Rolling Stone has already done, we thought it would be a better to simply promote the existing article, with a few additional and brief thoughts on what we feel is likely the only solution. | <urn:uuid:d9839d95-e942-4af3-b90f-5607272446f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://amvona.com/lajmet-e-fundit/ekonomi/itemlist/tag/Social%20Justice | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961719 | 219 | 1.523438 | 2 |
(CNN) – Labor Secretary Hilda Solis responded to CNN on the latest jobs report Monday showing the economy shed 85,000 jobs in December"
"If you compare the job loss from last year at this time we've actually been able to see that contraction in the last four months. We've seen that happen. But of course that's not good enough. The president and I remain very committed every single day to see that we put and add jobs back, and today we'll be talking about more incentives to provide tax credits for small businesses."
Solis also promoted so-called "green jobs."
"We also see where people want to have a career ladder in perhaps the energy efficiency arena. So they may start out as someone who's an electrician and end up later on being the owner of a small business that actually helps to install solar panels. So we're trying to provide those incentives working with community colleges, local government, private partnerships with businesses, and really getting a handle at the local level so it comes from the bottom up." | <urn:uuid:f6b3c381-6d25-46c5-915c-cd13846f3b36> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/08/solis-responds-to-jobs-numbers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978229 | 213 | 1.5 | 2 |
Saudi $4 bln lifeline to Egypt won’t come for free
By Una Galani
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.
DUBAI — Autocratic governments can act faster than multi-lateral financial institutions. Saudi Arabia’s $4 billion lifeline to Egypt comes just as the country is still discussing an aid package with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Cairo has hinted it wasn’t ready to accept the conditionality attached to both bodies’ financial help, usually in the form of stringent fiscal discipline. But it’s unlikely that Saudi money will come with no strings attached.
The Saudi package, in the form of soft loans, credit lines, bond purchases, and central bank deposits, dwarfs the financial assistance pledged last week by Barack Obama in his “Arab spring” speech. It will make the kingdom one of Egypt’s largest external creditors.
Details on the funding are scarce, but together with the $2 billion-plus support from the United States, partly in the form of debt relief, Egypt is roughly half way to plugging what it estimates could be a funding gap of up to $12 billion until mid-2012. The rest is expected to come from the IMF and World Bank.
Modest by Saudi standards, the investment nonetheless is a huge step up in the financial relations between two countries which haven’t always seen eye-to-eye. They have been at odds over Islamic fundamentalism and secular nationalism, played out through a proxy war in Yemen. Official Saudi loans to Egypt amounted to just $308 million at the end of December — less than one percent of the country’s total external debt of $34 billion. If influence is proportionate to money spent, Saudi would rank in Egypt next to America, which has significantly shaped political policy in the country over the years.
The question is what Saudi wants in return. Loans from international institutions are expected to be aimed at supporting inclusive growth and the transition to democracy and an open market economy. But the House of Saud supported Mubarak and doesn’t share the democratic ideals of revolutionary Egyptians. Still, it has a big interest in the stability of its neighbour, the region’s most populous Arab nation.
It’s still unclear which political forces the Saudis would support in Egypt, where elections are due later this year or in early 2012. For now Riyadh seems mostly to be trying to stay on the safe side of any future government. | <urn:uuid:229a2903-6151-432e-9c4a-7bf982993b93> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.reuters.com/breakingviews/2011/05/23/saudi-4-bln-lifeline-to-egypt-wont-come-for-free/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954759 | 519 | 1.710938 | 2 |
As a part of their major requirements, theatre students are asked to direct their own one act scripts. This semester, only one completely original student work will be performed: “Kids on the Run” written by Kyle Clark, a junior English major, and directed by Vaughn Davis, a senior theatre major.
The work is a piece of modern theatre, centered on the rocky and dramatic relationship concerning three best friends.
“For the past four years I’ve been on a tireless pursuit of becoming a well-rounded theatre student. In this process, I’ve realized that it’s the day-to day interactions human beings have with one another that makes watching life on stage so captivating and timeless,” Davis said.
The main characters Carter, Hope and Benny are young adults living in the city of Chicago. Clark says of all the scripts he has written, “Kids on the Run” was by far the easiest to write because it draws heavily from real life situations. He is also performing in it.
As a part of their rehearsals, the cast spends the first 20 minutes getting into character and interacting with their space, The Black Box Theatre. Less than half the size of the regular stage, the actors must find ways to maneuver in the space. But that isn’t what Davis is most concerned about.
“The challenges in this script will be the harsh dialogue. I feel that the vulgar language is an art form in itself and that it’s necessary for the true meaning of this play to effectively convey the character’s relationship. My approach is fresh, realistic. Not storybook formatted, and not for the faint of heart,” Davis said.
As the characters’ relationships begin to turn sour, the audience is brought face-to-face with an ironic story of love, betrayal and hope.
“I want the audience to reflect on their relationships with others, and hopefully see that one’s attitude can determine whether or not a relationship is deepened or damaged. We must also be careful about first impressions, because the mind’s construction is not written on the face,” Davis said.
“Kids on the Run” will be performed on Dec. 17 at 7 p.m. in the Block Box Theatre.
Natalie can be reached at [email protected] | <urn:uuid:b1845749-ad8a-4318-a535-510532f3487e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.themichigantimes.com/article/2012/12/u-theatre-student-writes-and-performs-original-work | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955738 | 494 | 1.75 | 2 |
When Hillary Rodham Clinton steps down from her post as secretary of state as expected early next year her political career will have spanned over two decades. ABC's Barbara Walters sat down with the secretary to discuss just what makes the secretary so fascinating to so many people around the world, and what the cultural and political icon finds fascinating herself.
Clinton is by far the most popular official in the Obama administration, and is already the leading candidate should she choose to run for president again in 2016. So is this really goodbye for the former first lady, senator and secretary of state? Or will Hillary Clinton, who recently turned 65 years old, re-invent herself once again?
Clinton said that while "all doors are open" for her future, one thing is for certain: She is definitely leaving the cabinet as soon as a new secretary is sworn in and a smooth transition occurs.
"It sounds so simple, but I've been, as you know, at the highest levels of American and now international activities for twenty years, and I just thought it was time to take a step off… maybe do some reading and writing and speaking and teaching," said Clinton.
She told Walters that she doesn't have a plan for what she'll do immediately after leaving political life but that she wants to continue contributing to society in some way, perhaps in philanthropy or academia. But when pressed on whether that her future includes a widely-speculated 2016 run for president, Clinton maintains that she still does not plan to run.
"I've said I really don't believe that that's something I will do again," she said. "I am so grateful I had the experience of doing it before."
When pressed, however, the secretary does admit that if she did choose to run she would not be concerned about her age. Recently having turned 65, Clinton would be 77 years old if she were to be in office for two terms.
"I am, thankfully, knock on wood, not only healthy, but have incredible stamina and energy," she said. "I just want to see what else is out there. I've been doing, you know, this, this incredibly important and, and satisfying work here in Washington, as I say, for twenty years, I want to get out and spend some time looking at what else I can do to contribute." | <urn:uuid:e4c7fdd8-9559-4d1b-8c75-eedda3cc4e20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-reveals-thoughts-secretary-state-2016-hair/story?id=17943370 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987212 | 474 | 1.773438 | 2 |
The starting point for any developer is http://www.vmware.com/developer but as there is a overwhelming amount of information available, we are trying to make it easier accessible on this site.
Hopefully we'll succeed at that over time, it is a pretty high goal. It certainly isn't the case yet, but time will tell.
Management Virtual Machines
VMware ESX 3.5 and earlier had the management Service Console, a stripped down RHEL console which was could be used for automating and managing your virtual machines. As of ESXi 3.5 this is no longer available and the future is to move away from this "fat hypervisor". In order to manage your virtual machines in a similar way as before, we now have special virtual machine that come with management software pre-installed. VMware delivers this as a virtual appliances called VMware VIMA containing RCLI (Remote CLI) and VMware VI Perl Toolkit to aide in managing your VI infrastructure. | <urn:uuid:04081b7d-101a-4ed1-8107-69bb250e06e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vi-toolkit.com/wiki/index.php/VI-Toolkit:Community_Portal | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936111 | 200 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
News September 26, 2011 04:08 PM ET Computerworld - Apple's iPhone lost share among U.S. consumers who bought a mobile phone in the last three months, while the share for devices running Google's Android climbed, Nielsen said Monday. In August, 28% of those who had purchased a smartphone in the preceding 90 days said that they picked an iPhone, down from 31% who said the same three months earlier.
Social networking is an integral part of a most people's lives today, irrespective of their profession. This is mainly due to the fact that social networks such as Facebook , Twitter , and Google+ (which is still in its initial stages) keep users connected with their friends and family. Recently, HTC showed off its ChaCha and Salsa at MWC 2011 , which took social network integration to a whole new level. The two handsets came with a dedicated Facebook button at the bottom of the phone, allowing users easy one-touch access to the social networking website. Now, rumors suggest that the next Nexus device could feature a similar button, only this time it will be for Google+ instead.
Article Excerpt Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off. These phones don't keep secrets. | <urn:uuid:8a6fe06b-b8ce-4f74-890d-0fb6d5a7b7e4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pearltrees.com/tatn/android/id2088478 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962682 | 289 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Halloween is no longer a holiday for the young children, believe student service professionals at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). “We see the holiday as a wonderful opportunity to tell our students that it is okay to take a break,” said Humberto “Humby” Baquerizo, assistant director for the NJIT Campus Center.
Baquerizo, a 1995 NJIT graduate who grew up in West New York and lives now in North Bergen, will spend the greater part of his day today dressed as Superman passing out Hershey bars, M&M’s, bubble gum and more to students. More than 100 students are walking around the usually staid science and technology campus also in costume. Later tonight, more than 150 students are expected to attend a Halloween Party in the Campus Center featuring prizes for best costumes.
Science and technology universities like NJIT, typically encourage an intense academic campus environment. Students must complete a rigorous academic workload to graduate. The course load of the typical student includes a demanding dose of math and science courses. Party school it is not.
“Halloween, though, follows closely upon the heels of our second set of midterm examinations,” said Baquerizo. “Our thinking is that as the semester wears on, students need a place to distress, hang-out and recoup their sanity. Why not use Halloween, as a way to say, kick back and have fun.”
Candy will be available today at the student services department on the first floor of the Campus Center. Anyone who wanders by the department will see student service staff members joining Baquerizo also dressed in costume. Office walls are draped in stringy, spooky trappings and oversized posters. Other departments throughout the university are also participating in the party and giving out candy to students.
Although this year is not the first one for departments to provide such trappings, it is the first time that so many staff members came dressed in costume. “Just walking around for a few hours this morning,” said Baquerizo, “we’ve seen more costumes than I can recall.”
The student activity push today ties into other recent campus changes. Along with a series of new buildings—including the Campus Center—all completed within the past five years, there’s also been the emergence of NJIT’s new sports program. Today all are changing the image of NJIT from a commuter school to a more comprehensive university. “More and more students remain on campus at nights and on weekends,” said Baquerizo. An increased number of student activities have driven the change including the new sports program.
In 2003, NJIT launched a campaign that will result in the reclassification of its overall athletic program (currently offering 15 varsity sports) to Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) from Division II. The process has included recruiting more female student-athletes. To date, one NJIT team has achieved full Division I championship eligibility, with others to follow in a process slated for completion in 2009-10. | <urn:uuid:eaebda8d-e5d8-4883-8212-a42e6ececa9b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.njit.edu/news/2006/2006-430.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955988 | 642 | 1.546875 | 2 |
1 The Ambassadors
Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533
I was asked to do a residency at the National Gallery in 1994, and almost on the first day I moved in they took The Ambassadors up to the restoration studio, and pretty much the day I moved out in 1996 it was brought back down. During my time there, I'd visit once a month to see the progress on it. They took off every vestige of painting that wasn't Holbein, so I saw it disappear, and then I saw it reappearing in the hands of the restorer. I think he repainted the anamorphic skull. For two years I was involved with that picture, the lifesize portrait of two young influential European ambassadors, and I learned all about it, but if I had to make a simple statement about why I like it – it's one of the most realistic pieces of portraiture that's ever been made.
2 No specific painting selected
I think this choice will come as a surprise to people as it's very uncharacteristic, but I like the minimalism of Kelly's work. Often the paintings are just a canvas with one colour, or two canvases simply painted and put together. My studio is like an extraordinary kind of museum, every surface is full, but I also have a secret love of minimalism. The concept of taking a canvas and painting it a single colour, like Yves Klein did with the blue paintings and Ellsworth Kelly has done in works such as the 1951 series Line Form Color, intrigues me.
3 Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hants
Stanley Spencer, 1932
When I was a student at the Royal College of Art I used to see Stanley Spencer visiting his art dealer, Tooth's, often wearing a yellow sou'wester helmet even though it might be quite sunny. In 1956 my teachers organised a coach trip to the chapel Spencer had been commissioned to paint in memory of the "forgotten dead" who had perished in the first world war. We picked up Stanley Spencer in Cookham and he came with us to the chapel in Burghclere and talked for about three hours. At one point he said: "I don't know why you students are interested in me." The concept of taking a building and completely lining it with the most extraordinary large paintings is something that intrigued me. It's one of the masterpieces of his work, a great tour de force of mural painting.
William Nicholson, 1916
He is someone I admire for his fluid style, able to paint a jug with five marks using a loaded brush. The Hundred Jugs was provoked by his son, the abstract artist Ben Nicholson, when he painted a single jug. Nicholson senior asked, why one jug? Ben replied: Well, why don't you paint a hundred? So he took 100 mundane domestic objects, put them into a rather sordid barn setting, and made something beautiful of them, an exemplar of still-life painting. I love his pictures of single objects and landscapes as well – he's a painter that I look at wishing I could paint like that but knowing I can't.
Henri Matisse, 1911
The Red Studio, which depicts Matisse's studio by showing the negative space between his artworks, is the figurehead for a great body of French painting from that time, created by Matisse, Picasso, Dufy, Vlaminck and others. I think there's a kind of oddness about it because it was offered to the Tate but they turned it down for being too modern, and of course now it's one of the great classics of modern art and is in the MoMA in New York. Every so often you get a generation of great artists, and it happened to come together in Paris in the 1910s, maybe because of the first world war. A fantastic time in the history of art, and this painting is what emerges when I think of it.
Robert Rauschenberg, 1955
The later phase of my pop art was influenced by the American painter Jasper Johns, but I was also very interested in collage makers, and among them was Robert Rauschenberg. His enormous, three-dimensional collages went further than just making a picture: for instance, he put a clock into a painting, one that was actually working, so if you looked at it you could tell the time. Bed was such a simple statement: one morning in his studio he just took off the bedding from his bed, stuck the sheet and pillow down, stuck the American quilt down, and then painted over it. An extraordinary Duchampian breakthrough.
John Everett Millais, 1851-2
I've always been a tremendous admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites. Whenever I used to go to the old Tate, as it was when I was a student, their works were stuck in the basement, so I would always go down there. I was usually by myself, because very few people were interested in them, and I would sit in front of Ophelia, Christ in the House of his Parents and A Huguenot, all the great Millais paintings. I went on to read about their methods – the Pre-Raphaelites, Millais especially, put down a kind of wet ground and painted into that, so I learned an enormous amount about how to paint by looking at their pictures. Ophelia was the one I was most interested in and it remains a favourite.
8 Las Meninas
Diego Velázquez, 1656
Velázquez's large picture about illusion, painted quite loosely but beautifully in mainly black, white and silver. Everyone who has studied it has got their own theory about what it represents and that's what makes it so enigmatic. I first saw it when I was awarded a scholarship to travel in Europe, during which time I went to the Prado in Madrid. It was early in the morning and I was the only person there. I stood in front of Las Meninas for about an hour, gazing at it.
Lucian Freud, 1981-3
This bridged his early paintings, which were very tightly figurative, almost photographic, and the way he went on to develop and paint in a much looser style. The idea of doing a transcription and putting it into a different form, taking the Watteau painting and including friends and acquaintances of his, dressing them in contemporary clothes and putting them into his studio, interested me. There's a sink in the corner, and the tap is dripping. He's painted running water. So you get this odd sense of something else happening in the picture, you're aware of time.
10 Orthodox Boys
Bernard Perlin, 1948
An exhibition came over to Tate Britain in 1956 called Modern Art in the United States. There was a whole list of extraordinary paintings on show, and one of them was Orthodox Boys by Bernard Perlin, two little Jewish boys standing on a subway platform in New York, in front of a panel that's been completely covered in graffiti. Perlin was part of the magical realist group that consisted of Ben Shahn, George Tooker and Jared French, a school of painting that depicted realism that was also a kind of surrealism. They painted situations where magic was happening, but rather than inventing the magic, it was a kind of everyday magic. | <urn:uuid:2ee3b225-2375-4704-9fd5-0b21a02b1d73> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/sep/09/10-best-paintings-peter-blake | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987299 | 1,521 | 1.609375 | 2 |
George W. Bush's twins, Jenna and Barbara, wrote an open letter in the Wall Street Journal to new first daughters Sasha and Malia Obama about what the girls can expect while growing up in the White House.
While it was a generous gesture, the twins are certainly their father's daughters. What I'm saying is, if you want a letter to be noticed by a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old, there must be a better location than the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. Sorry, Jonas Brothers. Move over, Miley Cyrus. The Bush twins know who pre-teens are really into these days, and thy
name is Peggy Noonan.
The note was a window into what it was like living in the most famous mansion in America and included recommendations like:
–Surround yourself with loyal friends.
–If you ever need a hug, go find (White House Usher) Ramsey.
–When your dad throws out the first pitch for the Yankees, go to the game.
–Remember who your dad really is.
The letter reportedly went through many drafts. We are proud to present a section of the first draft of the note, in the form of a transcript of an audio tape the Bush girls made in order to shape their initial thoughts. While it doesn't bear much resemblance to the final letter, it provides an interesting look into the creative process of these mature and selfless young women.
THE BUSH TWINS: "DEAR SASHA AND MALIA:" TAPE ONE
Jenna: OK- Shut up, we're taping.
Barbara: We're taping? For what?
Jenna: For Sasha and Malia Obama. You know, the letter?
Barbara: The letter?
Jenna: You remember, for the next first kids? Chelsea Clinton sent us one in 2000.
Barbara: The one that totally told us how to get weed delivered to the White House?
Jenna: Bingo. We should totally do that for Sasha and Malia.
Barbara: But they're like only 11-years-old. Anyway, do you have a pen and paper?
Jenna: I told you, we're taping it. How do you think I wrote that children's book? Tape now, transcribe later. You start.
Barbara: No, you. (laughter)
Jenna: OK, here goes: (clears throat) "Dear S&M," (laughter)
Barbara: Omi-gwad! S&M! Get it?! (Laughter)
Jenna: Shut up, Barbara! They're like little kids. They don't know what S&M even is!
Barbara: OKOKOK! Seriously. No laughing now. No laughing.
Jenna: OK. "Dear Sasha and Malia, we were seven when our father moved into the White House."
Barbara: No we weren't.
Jenna: Yes we were.
Barbara: We were seven when Grandpa moved into the White House.
Jenna: How old were we when Daddy won?
Jenna: Oh, that's right! We could finally drink legally.
Barbara: No, that was the second time he won.
Jenna: Daddy won twice?
Jenna: Wow. Wasn't he like, awful at his job?
Barbara: Kinda. But you're getting off track. Do you remember how you felt at his inauguration?
Jenna: I was on stage, it was outside and it was cold. I'm not sure if that was Daddy's or Grandpa's though. Which one was in January?
Barbara: It always happens outside in January, so all of them.
Jenna: Well I don't remember then. It was stupid. Say we were cold.
Barbara: Maybe we could say "being seven, we didn't quite understand the gravity of the position that he was entering."
Jenna: OK. Oh, and make sure to say that Ramsey can get you the best buds.
Barbara: How about we just say "hugs?"
Jenna: Whatever. I'm bored.
END OF FIRST TAPE | <urn:uuid:68cb28dd-4bd2-486e-80ce-2aece89a66fa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.trutv.com/dumb-as-a-blog/2009/01/22/dear-sasha-and-malia-the-raw-tapes/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970171 | 886 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Revenue sharing key to NHL CBA talks
At the end of this round of the NHL’s labour negotiations one phrase should become as familiar to hockey fans as the term salary cap did during the 2004-05 lockout – revenue sharing.
This is where the league owners and the NHL Players’ Association have their sharpest difference over a solution to the league’s lingering economic problems.
Seven years after the owners successfully won a hard salary cap based on revenue with a little revenue sharing, there are fewer of the NHL’s 30 teams in serious economic trouble – six in the estimate of one former governor – but the owners are still looking to find the solution in the pockets of the players.
In their first offer to the players earlier this month, the owners demanded the players reduce their share of hockey-related revenue (HRR) from 57 per cent to 46, but also demanded a change in how HRR is defined that would further reduce that share to 43 per cent.
Both a current NHL governor and a former NHL governor admitted the league`s richest teams are not keen even about the limited sharing the exists now. The former governor said the owners would only accept sharp increase like the NBA owners did if Fehr and the union can convince them every team will become profitable.
“You really have to get whole league profitable for that kind of revenue sharing to work,” said the former governor, who added the league is saddled by several teams in markets that will never work financially. “Otherwise, it`s just moving chairs around the Titanic.”
But a prominent sports agent, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak for the players as a group, said revenue sharing is the only answer to the NHL's problems. He said the NHL’s cap system is doomed to fail because the revenue from the richest teams inflates the salary cap beyond the reach of the poorest teams.
“If the NHL owners were smart, they’d say to Fehr, ‘Help us design a system that works for us and you guys can live with,’ and he would come up with a system,” the agent said. “All the owners do now is grab more money from the players. That works for a year, revenue goes up and the small markets start choking.
“Then they limp to the next collective agreement and Bettman promises more cap money for small markets. This is all just like a Ponzi scheme. Unless you meaningfully share revenue, the small markets will die.” | <urn:uuid:60a08b43-dc14-46ac-878f-bff031b94cb9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.njdevs.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=126629&page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976318 | 529 | 1.59375 | 2 |
There are plenty of free things you can pluck from the web as well as from libraries, parks, banks, and other businesses. Here’s a look at more than a half dozen valuable freebies:
- Free checking. Last week we wrote an article about how, at many banks, free checking was soon to become fee checking. But plenty of banks still offer free checking accounts. SunTrust, for example, offers a free plan with no minimum balance required. And you get free online and ATM service too. Wachovia and U.S. Bank still have their own version of free accounts. Chase even offers $100 for opening such an account. Indeed, a host of banks and savings and loans offer free checking. So far. When you’re looking for lower fees, including free checking, always to look smaller local banks and credit unions.
- Free credit reports. You can go to AnnualCreditReport.com for a free look at your credit history once a year. If the Financial Regulatory Reform bill passes, you might also one day get a look at your credit score. Read about other changes ahead here.
- Free cash. If you can’t find an ATM near you for a free cash withdrawal, no worries: Plenty of stores will give you cash back with no fee when you use your ATM card to make even a small purchase. You can buy a candy bar or a Diet Coke and get back up to $100 in cash from Wal-Mart. Target will give you back $40 if you use your ATM card for a purchase. Grocery stores also offer cash back. And then there are iPhone and other apps that will help you locate ATMs: Here’s one.
- Free information calls. Bing 411 (1-800-BING-411 or 1-800-CALL-411) allows you to find local shops and restaurants, as well as get driving directions, traffic reports, sports scores, stock quotes, and weather reports. 1-800-FREE411 allows you to get any number, business or residential, in exchange for listening to a brief ad.
- Free scholarship search. Plenty of websites offer free searches for scholarships, such as Fastweb. There’s even a company called Free Scholarship Searches that offers links to 40 websites that offer free scholarship searches. And check out our story, 6 Tips to Pay Less for a College Degree
- Free baggage. Sure, nearly all airlines are charging to check baggage but at least one doesn’t: Southwest. And remember carrying on bags is still free, except for on Spirit Airlines.
- Free entertainment. Your local library and parks offer lots of free fun, from books to movies to concerts. Join their e-mail list to see what’s up. And of course, there’s the Internet, offering free games as well as magazine and newspaper articles. Just go to the website of your favorite periodical.
- Free Water. While technically not free, tap water is about as close as you can get. If you’re concerned about water quality, buy a filter. But don’t ever pay for water at a convenience store.
- Free TV. Thanks to sites like Hulu, you can now watch many popular television shows online for free. If your favorite shows are free on the web, why pay for cable or satellite? Check out You Don’t Have to Pay for Cable TV for more.
- Free telephone calls. Services like Skype and AIM let you communicate with other users for free. Always calling a loved one long distance? If you both get copies of something like Skype, you can talk all you want without paying a dime. And with a service like Google Voice, you can get all of your cell phone calls free, too.
That’s a few quick ideas, but we know there are dozens more. Share your favorite and help make this list even better. | <urn:uuid:3c41cbf7-48d1-4cb5-9451-69a099a368e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-people-pay-for-that-they-could-be-getting-for-free-2012-7?pundits_only=0&get_all_comments=1&no_reply_filter=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937069 | 809 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Tomorrow, Secretary Vilsack and I will participate in the Future of Food, Food Security for the 21st Century conference, which is sponsored by The Washington Post. I am pleased to see the topic of food security getting such attention, as I believe it’s one of the biggest challenges we face now and in the next 50 years. As director of USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), I believe NIFA has a crucial role to play in addressing these challenges.
We are facing a “9 billion challenge,” in that the global population is projected to hit 9 billion by the year 2050. This challenge presents what I call wicked problems that require us to find ways to feed, clothe, shelter all people, and meet their energy needs, without wreaking havoc on the environment. Read more » | <urn:uuid:cacb0102-57f5-484d-86fa-37b4a83ddde7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.usda.gov/tag/future-of-food/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950288 | 171 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Federal law makes it illegal to “take,” “possess,” or “transport” a migratory bird except under permit. If you worry that this sweeping language might give the federal government too much enforcement power, perhaps you are one of those horrid House Republicans who, according to Bryan Walsh in Time magazine, are in the grip of “antigreen ideology” and want to “essentially prevent” agencies like the Department of the Interior “from doing their jobs.” Who else would object to laws meant to protect Nature?
It’s a pretty safe bet that Walsh hasn’t met the Capo family of Fredericksburg, Virginia. According to a report on broadcast station WUSA, and now being picked up far and wide by other news outlets, 11-year-old Skylar Capo saved a baby woodpecker in her back yard from the family cat and decided to keep it for a day or two to make sure it wasn’t injured before letting it go. The family’s problems began when Skylar took the bird into a Lowe’s to keep it out of the hot sun and was spotted by a woman in the store who confronted her and said she was a Virginia state game officer. Two weeks later, says Skylar’s mother Alison, the woman showed up at their front door accompanied by a state trooper with the news that the family owed a fine of $535; the federal law also carries possible jail time. (The bird itself was long gone by this point, having been released the same day of the store visit, the family says.)
With publicity about the case hitting the wires, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has now announced that it has rescinded the fine—the ticket had been mistakenly issued, it insists, in spite of a decision not to pursue charges. That also presumably takes care of the worry about jail time. But really, if you’re the parent of a youngster fascinated by backyard wildlife, why take chances? Order them back indoors to play video games and watch TV. It’s much legally safer that way. | <urn:uuid:b158a804-fc49-4220-a72b-723578dc7b39> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cato.org/blog/tags/wildlife | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977153 | 448 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Covering the poetic landscape of Britain
This article is from 2010.
One of those infuriating people whose expansive CV (poet, novelist, playwright, actor, television presenter) is matched only by their down to earth charm, Wales’ Owen Sheers will be presenting two very different projects at the Book Festival. The first is A Poet’s Guide to Britain, which he presented for BBC4 and will be launching in DVD format here. ‘We chose a single poem about a very specific place in the UK,’ he says, ‘and then used that poem as a doorway into the story behind the writing of it and into the place itself. It really covers the whole landscape of the country, from towns and cities to mountains to the sea, and was effectively a chance to take a soil sample of different parts of the nation.’
Among those poets whose work was explored in the series are George Mackay Brown, Sylvia Plath, Wordsworth and Keats, and Sheers particularly recommends their work as ‘not just a guide to the external landscape of the places they explore, but to the internal one as well.’ Sheers will also be presenting his new novel White Ravens alongside Russell Celyn Jones’ The Ninth Wave, both books in a series reimagining the Welsh Mabinogion folk tales. ‘These won’t require prior knowledge of the Mabinogion,’ says Sheers. ‘Our brief was more to find a contemporary resonance at the heart of the original material and run with it.’
21 Aug (with Russell Celyn Jones), 10.15am; 4pm (solo event), £10 (£8). | <urn:uuid:e4915285-35e0-430a-9725-432258b70964> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/article/28197-owen-sheers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965399 | 353 | 1.585938 | 2 |
It’s been about half a year now since I started throwing my thoughts out from Behind the Hedge (someday I may explain the blog title) and apart from a few hints and passing references, something fundamental has been missing: Science.
When I was just tiny, a few years before watching Neil Armstrong smudge his way down that shadowy ladder with the really big step at the bottom, I poured over my father’s National Geographic Magazines, enthralled by two things: the explorations of the sea, mostly by Jacques Cousteau, and the planned exploration of space, mostly by NASA. When I moved out on my own, one of the first things I did, remembering the excitement of my childhood, was to get my own subscription to National Geographic Magazine. Sometime later, my father handed over all his back issues stretching back to the mid-1950s. Now I have almost sixty years of the things and I remain subscribed, although the sense of adventure has faded quite a bit. Over and over I say to each month’s issue “You climbed a whole mountain! Wow! Did you know there’s a bunch of old men over there who WALKED ON THE MOON before you were born?! And they got there in what amounts to little more than a Volkswagen Kombi with a bunch of big bombs strapped to the back of it!!”
Shortly after the moon landing, I took Charles Coombs’ Project Apollo out of the school library and then made my father order me my own copy from some bookstore in downtown Sudbury, Ontario. I still have that book. I spent my days making. I made sharks out of plasticene and (strangly square) Saturn V rockets — complete with lunar module concealed in the top of the third stage — out of Lego. And I craftily built the lunar module upside down so that it could dock with the command module.
Guess how I was turned onto the poetry of Yeats when I was in junior high school.
An epigram to a chapter in Intelligent Life in the Universe by Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii was a bit from Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Aengus”:
Though I am old with wandering
through hollow lands and hilly lands
I’ll find out where she has gone
and kiss her lips and take her hands
and walk among long dappled grass
and pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun
And wither the threads from that poem through my life?
I reverently lifted one line for one of my few published (very obscurely published) bits of verse:
. . . on broken roads which lead nowhere
I search for unknown goals
through hollow lands and hilly lands
sun burning on my back . . .
I suspect that Yeats, together with a well timed visit to the banks of the River Wye, lead me to Wordsworth who was so obviously a pleasant uncle (but not a “funny uncle”, despite Ken Russell’s Clouds of Glory which quite probably led me to Tom Stoppard, charmingly guided by Felicity Kendall) to the child who was the father of the man I am.
And what about art? I suspect that a strange meeting in my adolescent mind between Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, and David Hardy’s The Challenge of the Stars put me on that road.
As a barely-past-tween, when I privately decided that painting was to be one of my lives, my first purchase was a big tube of Mars Black, because all I was going to paint was David Hardyesque space scenes. Now I buy huge jars of titanium white and very, very rarely buy a small tube of some very traditional earth pigment, and hardly ever use black. On the surface, my painting owes more to pre-modern traditions than to the Space Age But, when I honestly consider things, scientific exploration — which I consider art- and literary-criticism to be — is the only thing that makes me passionate. High School acquaintances told me later in life that they thought I’d follow a science path. Nope. Anglo-Saxon poetry for me.
Where did that come from?
A long, long time ago I held a copy of The Lord of the Rings in my hands in a Public Library in Windsor, Ontario and said to myself “This looks like a cheap rip-off of the Narnia stories.” In hindsight, I was an idiot at that moment, but, fortunately, my mother reintroduced Tolkien to me for a third time — I had, without making the connection, spent a moment with “Smith of Wooton Major” in some elementary school classroom. Tolkien made me learn Old English and learning Old English vastly improved my understanding of language and poetry. After five years, two degrees, and a couple of publications, I left formal academia behind, again to the surprise of professors and colleagues.
Now, decades later, I subscribe to five publications: The Old English Newsletter, which arrives at odd intervals; Canada’s History (formerly the Beaver) which comes bimonthly as near as I can figure; the comfortable old National Geographic; Scientific American; and the increasingly infrequent Planetary Report, which is a part of the real point of this post. Except for the Old English Newsletter, I read every issue of these magazines from cover to cover. In fact, I first subscribed to Scientific American after reading Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ mention that he, too, read that magazine from cover to cover every month. To me, all five magazines are about understanding the world and my place in it.
But, the Planetary Report is a voice from and to my childhood. If you haven’t heard of this wonderful little publication, it is the newsletter of the Planetary Society, a think tank/lobbying organization/fanclub/cult/bunch of really varied and smart people founded by one of the smartest, Carl Sagan and two friends three decades ago with the sole and noble purpose of teaching people that space exploration is beautiful, inspiring, artistic, fascinating, gobsmackingly neat and absurdly inexpensive considering the wonders, both practical and human, it returns and, even more, considering the insane obsenities we spend obscene amounts of our labour and humanity on.
Early supporters were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury. Bradbury, before his death intervened, was scheduled to be a part of a little Planetary Society get-together in a few days. The Planetary Society is perhaps the ultimate geek club — “I’m making space exploration happen!!!”, but for over three decades this bunch of ordinary and extraordinary people has quietly, soberly, and doggedly pushed governments to push the boundaries of knowledge and pushed the boundaries of knowledge themselves during times when governments have been remarkably loathe to learn much of anything.
Today the Planetary Society’s CEO is Bill Nye (yeah, that Science Guy) and has a remarkable board of directors, including Niel deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium and the coolest astrophysicist ever (“that black guy from PBS” as one friend of mine describes him. Sometimes Canadians can be a little too blunt.)
Some of the Advisory Council of the Society are artists, writers, Star Trek actors and, yes, one of them is an old man who has WALKED ON THE MOON!! After travelling there in what amounts to a Volkswagen Kombi with a bunch of bombs strapped to the back!!
The latest issue of the Planetary Report closes with a poem and a beautiful piece of art of the sort my thirteen year old self dreamed of painting. Inside there are stories about urban Dark Skies efforts, about the Mars Science Laboratory which should land on Mars in a few days (it’s about the size of a Volkswagen Kombi, but the technology has advanced a bit), about near-Earth asteroids and extra-Solar planets. And there are projects for kids.
Projects for kids. One of the finest things the Planetary Society has done over the years, finer than sending digital copies of classic Science Fiction literature and art to Mars, finer than launching member-financed space missions, finer even than sending my name (and those of thousands of other Society members) to Saturn — about the finest, noblest thing the Society has done is to encourage young people to dream, to learn, and to achieve. The Planetary Society provides grants to young scientists, to amateur scientists around the world. The Society has provided brilliantly creative teenagers the opportunity to conduct real scientific investigation with robots on mars — hands on!
Although U.S. based, the Planetary Society is Planetary, with members around the world and making efforts to work with space agencies of all countries. The societies grants are available to any nationality, its student outreach is global.
And, once a year they have this thing they call “Planetfest” in Pasadena and at science centres all over the planet. A whole huge crowd of dreamers, scientists, poets, artists, writers get together to look up at the sky and say
“Wow. Just Wow.”
“Thank you, Carl.”
This year Planetfest happens in just a few days, August 4th and 5th, timed to watch the landing of The Mars Science Laboratory.
I’ve never attended as I am, perhaps ironically in the context of the Planetary Society, a bit of a homebody, but if there were ever a crowd I’d have a laugh being a part of, it would be this one. I’m not recruiting for the Society. I’m not suggesting that anyone who might read this should run out and buy a membership (although that would be fine, if the fit is right). What I am interested in doing is letting people know that the Planetary Society exists, what it’s for, and what sort of person ends up as a member.
I am a working artist, a lover of theatre, a reader of poetry, and absolutely the most inspiring thing I can imagine is exactly what the Planetary Society was created to do and exactly what Art, Theatre and Poetry are for: to help us all to understand where we are in this inconceivably huge existence.
It’s a perfect fit.
Update, September 4, 2012: A few days ago I was having a silly conversation about googling one’s self and I came across this brief blog post by Charlie Loyd in which Carl Sagan and I are associated through a fairly obscure aspect of Old English poetry. It seems I have come full circle, in a sense: inspired to poetry by Carl Sagan as a child and then associated with him through poetry much later in life. It is a funny old Cosmos, isn’t it? | <urn:uuid:1fd2f41a-5baa-4264-9d7a-dd89aa6aa885> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://behindthehedge.wordpress.com/tag/planetary-report/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958336 | 2,283 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Strong winds, blowing snow and below zero temperatures are disrupting several school days in the northeast.
The Langford school has faced three missed days, an early dismissal and even more late starts. The district is in the far northeast, which has received an especially strong dose of winter recently.
"It makes it tough on classes, especially core classes we want to get in the morning. We lose a lot of those," principal Toni Brown said.
When the school day starts late in Langford, early classes shorten to ten minutes each instead of the full 50 minutes. That gives students at least some exposure to each subject.
"Sometimes we get a quick lesson. That's not very fun because then you get homework. But other times you can't really cover anything because you don't have enough time," junior Drew Planteen said.
In addition to the late starts, lately Langford has also had to cancel classes all together. Administrators say teachers want time to help prepare students for upcoming state tests.
Weather has disrupted sport schedules too.
"We're supposed to play Warner. They're in our conference in boys and we have postponed that three times," Brown said.
Brown is also Langford’s athletic director. He has rescheduled nine games at the high school level and some junior high too. It's reaching a point where even students are saying they've had enough disrupted school days, for a little while anyway.
"They're getting a little boring so if they just start to slow down a little bit. It's getting kind of frustrating with the sports too," Planteen said.
The three-time rescheduled Warner game is now on the calendar for Thursday. So those involved will be watching to see how much of Thursday’s forecasted storm makes its way north. | <urn:uuid:3baa3eab-782d-4520-81fd-51ab07ca6fe4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.keloland.com/newsdetail.cfm/weather-disrupting-school-days-in-northeast/?id=144092 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981477 | 369 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Patient Sexual History Key to Good Ob-Gyn Care
FRIDAY March 23, 2012 -- Many U.S. obstetrician-gynecologists fail to ask patients enough questions about their sex lives, which means they could lack information that provides insight into their patients' overall health, according to a new study.
The national survey of ob-gyns found that nearly two-thirds of them routinely ask patients about their sexual activity. However, only 40 percent routinely ask questions to assess a patient's sexual problems or dysfunction; only 29 percent routinely ask patients about satisfaction with their sex lives, and only 28 percent consistently confirm a patient's sexual orientation.
There's a well-established link between sexual function and overall health, and these findings point to the need for stronger guidelines for doctors on gathering a thorough sexual history from patients, the University of Chicago researchers said.
"As a practicing ob-gyn, many of my patients say I'm the first physician to talk with them about sexual issues," lead author Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, said in a University of Chicago Medical Center news release.
"Sexuality is a key component of a woman's physical and psychological health. Obviously, ob-gyns are well positioned among all physicians to address female sexual concerns. Simply asking a patient if she's sexually active does not tell us whether she has good sexual function or changes in her sexual function that could indicate underlying problems," she explained.
About one-third of young and middle-age women and about half of older women experience some sort of sexual problem, such as low desire, pain during intercourse or lack of pleasure, according to recent studies. These problems can lead to strained relationships and feelings of worry, shame, guilt and isolation.
If a doctor doesn't ask women about their sex lives, patients often assume the door is closed to that topic.
"Many women are suffering in silence," Lindau said. "Patients are often reluctant to bring up sexual difficulties because of fear the physician will be embarrassed or will dismiss their concerns. Doctors should be taking the lead. Sexual history taking is a fundamental part of gynecologic care. Understanding a patient's sexual function rounds out the picture of her overall health and can reveal underlying issues that may otherwise be overlooked."
The study was published March 22 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about sexual health.
Posted: March 2012 | <urn:uuid:f362a98f-ff9a-4aa9-9780-c0c850ebb9f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.drugs.com/news/patient-sexual-history-key-good-ob-gyn-care-37180.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958775 | 511 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Transformers Toys And Transformer Toy Figures
The Origins Of Transformers:
Quotation from Tranformers Wiki
"They were the dream--mechanical beings able to transform their bodies into vehicles, machinery and weapons; a last line of defense against the chaos bringer, Unicron! They are at war, heroic Autobot pitted against evil Decepticon, both on their homeworld, the metal planet called Cybertron, and here on our Earth. They are the galaxy's last hope, they are-- TRANSFORMERS" -- from The Transformers comic introductory blurb.
This very well describes what Transformers are all about--a race of mechanical beings from the planet Cybertron which is continually at war with evil.
The following quotation from Sick Mind defines Transformers quite well:
"Transformers: Prime Transformers consist of a mind and body. A Transformer's mind can be transferred to another body using a cortical psychic patch, where it is possible for two minds to occupy the same body. Without a mind, a Transformer body can be kept alive by artificial means, but it is then essentially without personality".--quotation from Sick Mind
The Transformers line of collector toys was introduced by Hasbro in the year 1984 with the original Generation 1 transformers. They were a big success and have continued to grow in popularity sice then. TheTransformer line has had numerous sequels since the introduction, with the latest edition being the sequel to the line of transformers from the 2007 movie. Most of the product line consists of Transformer figures; there are also just a few added non-Transformer accessories such as bases, vehicles and smaller items.
You can buy transformer toys right now at great low prices,many with large discounts through this link to Amazon: Transformers Toys
Many Transformer toys have been marketed by other companies besides Hasbro, and there is a wide variety of Transformers on the market now. | <urn:uuid:946fbb60-4c9b-4791-85d0-166228e741a2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usfreeads.com/2874120-cls.html | 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 | 0.948161 | 390 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Although the author has created over 70 works found at Lulu.com , and the popular scribd writings on scribd (backacrewoods2) in the fiction and non-fiction markets, the book deserving the most attention is "The Jesus Factor." Simpson's other books many which are free downloads ("Lost," and "Found") provide a view of the writing style found by the writer. Many other the non-fiction books are found through Amazon.
The writer has extensive experience in the newspaper and educational world and has been recognized by a number of sources as an innovative and creative thinker and writer. In addition to writings found in local newspapers, he has also contributed to educational journals.
The writer received his undergraduate degree from Florida State University, a masters degree from Florida Altantic University, and a doctorate from Nova Southeastern University.
He has also served in the roles of a college professor at several universities and as a school administrator for over 34 years. | <urn:uuid:a104d6b9-5182-49fc-8348-b1d9b9631b9c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://authorsden.com/visit/author.asp?authorid=154379 | 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 | 0.985861 | 196 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Lawmaker Jerzy Montag of the opposition Greens party on Tuesday described Merkel's comments as "mistaken" and "not very helpful".
Rights campaigners said ranking faiths according to how persecuted they are is pointless.
Human Rights Watch noted that Muslims in Myanmar, members of Falun Gong in China and Jews in many countries worldwide also face persecution.
Merkel's comments came at a meeting of the German Protestant Church late Monday in which she emphasized Germany needed to protect Christian minorities as part of its foreign policy.
Merkel, the daughter of a pastor, also spoke out against strict separation of church and state and said Europe was built on Christian foundations. | <urn:uuid:6accf21f-afa0-43d0-956d-f6724c685695> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.contracostatimes.com/nation-world/ci_21938855/merkels-christian-persecution-comments-draw-ire | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979396 | 133 | 1.515625 | 2 |
A well-told tale about how Marlin Steel came to be, written by business author Charles Fishman, appears in the upcoming July/August issue of FastCompany. The magazine, which focuses on technology and business, hits newsstands next week. “A little maker of metal baskets shows how U.S. manufacturers can thrive against all comers” is how FastCo. summarized the piece.
Fishman’s article, “The Road to Resilience: How Unscientific Innovation Saved Marlin Steel,” is long, but this passage spoke volumes, we thought:
Even in the much more unforgiving world of high-tech factories, Marlin is earning a reputation for quality that is unusual for manufactured products today. Tom Salvador is a senior manager with Power Systems Manufacturing, in Jupiter, Florida, a small division of the $20-billion-a-year global energy conglomerate Alstom. PSM reconditions gas turbines for large commercial power plants, and it needed wire baskets to hold finished parts during a demanding inspection process. The baskets had to be made of stainless steel and able to withstand high temperatures and hot water. “It’s a manufacturing environment,” says Salvador. “We don’t baby the baskets.”
Marlin’s goods held up where the competition’s didn’t. “There are a lot of welds on these baskets,” he says. “We haven’t had a single weld on a single basket cut loose. Not one. I’m actually shocked.” Salvador has placed two orders with Marlin in five years but doesn’t need any more now because, he says, “I can’t seem to break them.” | <urn:uuid:401b0aea-403e-4422-9e4b-85661c14c6fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://marlinsteel.com/blog/?author=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950434 | 373 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Chauga Narrows – Mountain Rest, South Carolina
South Carolina | SC Picture Project | Oconee County Photos | Chauga Narrows
Mountain Rest is the home of beautiful lakes, waterfalls, and rivers. The relaxed and gentle Chauga River is well known by locals for its great fishing holes. Chauga Falls is tucked away just a short distance from town near Blackwell’s Bridge.
If you stay on the road, you might never know the falls are there. But you’ll hear them if you leave Whetstone Road and walk just over a half-mile along the river.
When you reach “the narrows,” the water becomes faster and more turbulent. The path turns rocky and the river drops 25 feet over a 200-foot run. Below the falls, Class VI whitewater rapids churn for a short distance before they smooth out again in a large pool.
SCIWAY thanks Tragena Owen of Mountain Rest for sharing this information and this picture, taken in October 2010.
You may not use them in any form without written consent.
SCIWAY does not provide contact information for photographers. | <urn:uuid:5ee136ca-f4c3-4461-b022-d1dabe4f33bd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sciway.net/sc-photos/oconee-county/chauga-narrows.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933533 | 239 | 1.804688 | 2 |
"From the kindergartners who are with us today and are just starting their educational journey all the way up to high school seniors, all children in this great state have the right to ride to school safely," he said.
Martinez was in Hillsborough today to assure parents that their children are safe on school buses.
And to prove it, the MVC makes its inspection data available on its website.
Buses can be pulled off the road for faulty brakes and steering, while others have been temporarily parked for ripped seats and incomplete first aid kits.
Martinez said the agency inspects 180 items on about 23,000 school vehicles twice a year. Of the vehicles inspected, 40 percent are placed out of service and 30 percent are given 30-day rejection stickers for violations, he said. With the majority of violations being easily fixed during the same visit, he said about 91 percent pass the second inspection.
The agency also wants to give parents "peace of mind" that their children will be transported safely.
MVC spokesman Mike Horan said the commission’s website offers inspection information on every bus in every town throughout New Jersey. Parents can log on to www.state.nj.us/mvc, click the School Bus Safety icon and select the Parents tab. After plugging in a town or zip code, the number of buses, inspection dates and details are available.
"We want more parents to take a look at it so they can have peace of mind and get involved with their child’s life," Horan said of the website. "After all, it’s not just about academics, it’s how they get to and from there as well."
And bus safety was the agenda at the Valcheck Bus Company in Hillsborough today as kindergartners buckled up on the first day of school.
Martinez helped show the kids that safety comes first.
"As with the inspection of any school vehicle that transports children, MVC inspectors are meticulous in their efforts to detect major and minor defects," Martinez said. "It is this dedication to school bus safety that demonstrates to the citizens of New Jersey that we are providing a true benefit."
The MVC’s mobile inspection team gave the 21 students from the Goddard School plastic tools and clipboards for a cursory inspection of a bus that the school uses for field trips.
Megan Kane, 5, said she had fun being one of the MVC’s youngest inspectors.
"We buckled our seat belts and then we looked around the bus to make sure it was okay," she said. "It was fun."
The students walked alongside the bus gently tapping with plastic tools and singing "The Wheels on the Bus," while the inspection team explained what the agency looks for.
"We look for major and minor things that would cause problems like brake and steering system problems, any leaks or equipment that isn’t working properly," said Jim Grandjean, inspection team leader. "Our inspections make sure that they (bus companies) are doing their inspections."
A father of four, state Sen. Christopher "Kip" Bateman (R-Somerset) said he is a big proponent of the state’s school bus policies, which he called the most stringent in the country.
"There’s nothing more precious than our children, so we have to make certain that our school buses are up to the highest standards," he said. | <urn:uuid:734a0e8b-0330-43d3-b88b-90b22bf9fe03> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/09/nj_pulls_10k_school_buses_off.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973742 | 712 | 1.6875 | 2 |
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* Iran to meet P5+1 in Kazakhstan on Feb. 26
* Obama: World powers united in preventing Iranian bomb
* Tehran has refused to suspend nuclear enrichment
By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 13 (Reuters) - European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton urged Iran on Wednesday to show flexibility at this month's talks between Tehran and six world powers aimed at defusing tensions over the Iranian nuclear program.
The five permanent U.N. Security Council members - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - and Germany will meet with Iran in Kazakhstan on Feb. 26 for the latest round of talks in a 7-year-old attempt by the so-called P5-plus-one to end the decade-long nuclear standoff with Tehran.
"We hope that Iran will come to this negotiation with flexibility and that we can make substantial progress," Ashton told the 15-nation Security Council during a meeting on the United Nations' cooperation with regional organizations.
"We're engaging in intensive diplomatic efforts to seek a negotiated solution that meets the international community's concern about the Iranian nuclear program," she said.
Ashton has been taking part in and coordinating the six powers' fitful negotiations with Iran.
In his annual State of the Union address, U.S. President Barack Obama said world powers were united in their desire to use diplomacy to prevent Iran from developing atomic weapons, though he left a door open to non-diplomatic avenues like force.
"The leaders of Iran must recognize that now is the time for a diplomatic solution, because a coalition stands united in demanding that they meet their obligations, and we will do what is necessary to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon," Obama said on Tuesday.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said last week that the six powers were ready to respond if Iran came to the talks prepared to discuss "real substance."
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has said Iran was "counting on there being positive and constructive steps made to resolve this problem at the upcoming meeting."
So far, Iran has refused to suspend its nuclear enrichment program, which the United States, EU and their allies suspect is aimed at producing fuel for weapons. Iran says enrichment is a sovereign right under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and demanding a halt to the program illegal.
Iran denies that it is seeking a weapon and says its nuclear program serves only peaceful purposes such as electricity generation and the production of medical isotopes.
The Islamic Republic has faced four rounds of U.N. sanctions and more draconian EU and U.S. sanctions due to its refusal to halt its enrichment program. (Editing by Doina Chiacu) | <urn:uuid:3d6123b5-4351-44d9-91e3-7fe789fef433> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/thomson-reuters/130213/eu-hopes-iran-flexible-at-nuclear-talks-big-powers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955163 | 561 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Before sitting down to type this article, I stumbled upon notes I had taken while attending my first Foundation Fighting Blindness (FFB) Visions conference back in 2007 in Kansas City. Buried in those notes, I had jotted down more questions than answers pertaining to the science of combating retinal degenerative diseases. These were questions the researchers and the FFB were struggling with themselves, such as is it always necessary to get genetic testing?; Is it possible to deliver gene therapy for diseases involving very large genes?; What is the potential for stem cell therapy to restore vision and can the barriers to its progress be overcome?; Which therapy or therapies should I follow, given the fact that my Stargardt Disease has already robbed the normal function of my central vision?
Knowledge can be empowering but you have to be willing to ride the roller coaster and take the ups with the downs, all the while fully appreciating the scientific process. I remember coming out of some of the 2007 scientific sessions alternately feeling so close and then so far away from stopping or reversing the progression of my disease. That was O.K., I’m living well with it, but I still wanted to ride out the scientific tidal wave that seemed to be emerging. After learning of successful gene therapy on dogs followed by successful therapy on humans with Leber Congenital Amaurosis (LCA), my siblings and I submitted blood samples to the eyeGENE® program. In 2009, we learned that no mutation of the “Stargardt” (ABCA4) gene was found. This was a bit disappointing since gene therapy is really evolving.
Turn time ahead five years to the 2012 Visions conference in Minneapolis. After attending every session I could at, I returned home with a lot of hope. Many of those questions I jotted down in 2007 have now been answered. Genetic testing is still very important given that new mutations are found every year. The mutation must be known before “classic” gene therapy can be recommended. But through a new field of research and therapy called optogenetics, there is now hope in eventually being able to treat diseases that cannot always be pinned down to one specific gene mutation, such as Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP). And for other diseases such as Stargardt or AMD, newly emerging stem cell therapy looks promising.
The conference’s closing session on Sunday built upon the science and “Doctor Is In” sessions that preceded it. First, Dr. David Wilson of the Casey Eye Institute spoke of ongoing human gene therapy trials for LCA, Usher Syndrome and Stargardt Disease. In these trials, they are delivering different virus vectors to the retina, depending on the size of the replacement gene. While the trials are going very well, Dr. Wilson stressed the importance of our continued optimism, patience, and involvement as they move forward with the research.
For those with LCA or RP caused by a mutated RPE65 gene, Dr. David Saperstein, a vitreoretinal surgeon at Vitreoretinal Associates, spoke about the success of using an oral drug to help restore the proper metabolic process in the retina. How simple is that? Some patients have experienced dramatic improvement in both visual acuity and visual field; they’re expecting FDA approval as soon as 2014.
And as for all those looming questions and obstacles about stem cell therapy in 2007, Dr. Matthew Vincent of Advanced Cell Technology, sponsor of current Stargardt and AMD clinical trials, really hit a homerun as well. He explained exactly how the study’s stem cells were obtained, and how healthy RPE layer cells were derived and stored. These cells have successfully oriented themselves in humans, improving vision for even those with very late stage degeneration. When Dr. Steve Rose of the FFB says that “it is really a tremendous time in the field of retinal degenerative diseases and the progress that is being made is astounding”, you know there is every reason to be optimistic, patient, and interested.
As usual, there was much more to the conference than the exciting, amazing science – positive coping skills and networking opportunities were also served up. You can learn more about the research I have discussed as well as snippets of the most inspiring speeches I’ve ever heard on Dr. Rose’s Eye on the Cure blog. Be sure to read about Paul Keros in Turning Suffering into Hope as well as the incredible stories from Erik Weihenmayer’s journeys in Adventures in Mountain-Climbing and Research. And I can really relate to John Corneille’s daily struggles in Putting Myself to the Test.
And of course, to learn more about current clinical trials, go to www.clinicaltrials.gov. | <urn:uuid:04c90bef-04f4-4a0e-83b8-df24c20eb136> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aisquared.com/blog/2012/07/visions-2012-continues-momentum-in-fighting-blindness/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957032 | 983 | 1.617188 | 2 |
The State Board of Education is the most dysfunctional agency in Texas government. This is quite an achievement, considering the competition: the Texas Department of Insurance, which allows the highest home insurance rates in the land; the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which changes names every few years but not its polluter-friendly policies; the Public Utility Commission, whose chairman, responding to a petition this summer to prohibit electric utilities from disconnecting low-income and elderly customers until the heat wave broke, argued that it wasn’t really unusually hot. And let us not forget the Texas Department of Transportation, which can’t abide the idea of a highway without a tollbooth on it.
But there is nothing like the idiosyncratic, bitterly divided SBOE, whose fifteen elected members are charged with overseeing public education in Texas. They decide what Texas schoolchildren are supposed to learn. They establish statewide curriculum standards. They determine whether textbooks include the required material. They set graduation requirements. They are responsible for investing the Permanent School Fund, the endowment for the public schools. They accept or reject requests to establish innovative charter schools. At least, that’s what the SBOE is supposed to do. What it has really done, for two decades or more, is argue incessantly over peripheral issues: the theory of evolution, sex education, role models for women.
For the past sixty years, the board has been composed of people from the education community: school board members, teachers, administrators. They have operated in relative obscurity and discharged their duties in a routine way. About the only time the SBOE made news was when critics like Mel and Norma Gabler, of Longview, began showing up at meetings to complain that textbooks under consideration had a liberal, anti-Christian point of view. But by the nineties, a new group of conservatives, many motivated by their religious beliefs, targeted the board for a takeover. They have been so successful that today they are the majority faction, and the SBOE has become the front line of the culture wars in Texas.
Its previous chairman, Bryan dentist Don McLeroy, waged a high-profile fight to require that science textbooks and teachers take a more critical approach to the theory of evolution. David Hillis, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Texas at Austin, helped to form a group to oppose McLeroy’s efforts, the 21st Century Science Coalition. McLeroy’s battle ultimately cost him his leadership position when the Texas Senate, weary of his and the SBOE’s antics, adjourned in May without confirming his reappointment as chairman. Governor Rick Perry named Gail Lowe, a co-publisher for the semiweekly Lampasas Dispatch Record, to succeed him. The Texas Freedom Network, the SBOE’s most vigorous critic, has described Lowe’s supporters as believing she has “the most consistently conservative voting record of all SBOE members.”
Lowe, then, would appear to represent the continuation of the status quo. But her reputation among board watchers extends beyond her voting record. On a board that is dominated by outspoken political extremists, she is more of a listener than a fighter, low-key rather than confrontational. In the optimistic and perhaps naive belief that the SBOE may yet be able to play a constructive role in state educational policy under different leadership, I offer the following advice to the new chair.
Dear Ms. Lowe:
Congratulations on your promotion. Or should I say, “Condolences”? You have a tough job ahead of you. As you know all too well, the board is divided ideologically and politically, and most of the members with whom you have been allied would be content to see things go on exactly as they have in the past, rife with rancor. Too many of them are here for the wrong reasons—to advance their personal agendas rather than improve education in this state. (You know who they are.) Unless you change the culture of the board, the public and the politicians will finally rise up and say, “Enough is enough!” Here are six things you might consider to get the SBOE back on the right track.
Stay out of the newspapers. This applies to everyone—not just you. You work in the media business. You understand the power of public opinion. Back in 2003, you were one of four members who voted against adopting biology textbooks that failed to present the creationist point of view. You could do that sort of thing when you were just a member, but now that you are the chair, you should be aware of the effect that such a position could have. It doesn’t do the board, or Texas, any good to be arguing over evolution, creationism, and intelligent design, sending a message that a bunch of flat-earthers are in charge of educating our kids.
Let the teachers write curriculum standards. Current practice, established by law, is that the curriculum for various subjects be developed by committees that include educators, parents, and representatives of the business community. These groups determine what students are expected to know, as set forth in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills guidelines, or TEKS, which publishers are expected to incorporate in their books. Board members may, if they choose, appoint expert reviewers, who may or may not be experts but who are often picked for their ideological compatibility with board members’ viewpoints—for example, David Barton, the former vice chairman of the Republican Party of Texas and the founder of WallBuilders, which seeks “to exert a direct and positive influence in government, education, and the family by . . . educating the nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country.” These outside reviewers have a legitimate role to play, but their judgment should not override teachers with expertise in their subject areas.
Protect the integrity of the Permanent School Fund. To put it another way, keep everyone’s hands out of the cookie jar. One of the few surviving powers of the board is its responsibility for managing the $19 billion PSF. Having lost the support of the Legislature on educational matters long ago, the board | <urn:uuid:fb2f89ad-c5a5-4406-bf24-f153d8281080> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/lowe-and-behold | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971175 | 1,268 | 1.648438 | 2 |
A news report out of Colorado contained a lot of the same mistakes and mischaracterizations that others have made about online schools. However, it did one thing well: highlighted the need for Colorado to reexamine its school funding model to ensure funds follow students to the school of their choice anytime during the school year.
Currently, the state funds all public schools based on a single calendar year enrollment count date (October 1). This means that if a student needs to transfer to another school mid-year, after Oct. 1, the new school does not receive any funding to support the student. Also, by making “count day” the most important school day of the year, families are often compelled to jump through ridiculous hoops (see this article in Denver Post).
Asked by Channel 7 about Colorado’s funding model, I responded:
K12 agrees that Colorado should move away from a school funding model based on a single count date to a better model, such as an average daily membership (average number of school days that students are enrolled during the year), which is used in many other states. We agree that schools and school districts should not be funded for students who are no longer enrolled with them. Average daily membership funding models are fairer for the state, its schools and students.
This has long been a policy K12 has endorsed in both principle and practice. For example, in our partnership with the Colorado Virtual Academy (COVA), a public charter school authorized by Adams 12 Five Star School District, K12 invoices the school for student-related expenses based on the number of students who are enrolled each month, not based on the October 1st enrollment count.
The Channel 7 report also focused on the past performance of Insight School of Colorado, which at that time was operated by Insight Schools, Inc. (formerly owned by Apollo Group Inc., which runs U. of Phoenix, and then owned for a short time by Kaplan, Inc. a division of( The Washington Post Company).
K12 was not involved in Insight School of Colorado last year and had no window into its past operations or its employees, so there was nothing we could add to the news report. It wasn’t until three months ago, July 2011, that K12 became involved with the school following an asset acquisition from Kaplan. As I told Channel 7, since July K12 has worked closely with the program’s sponsor, Julesburg School District, and the Colorado Department of Education on an improvement plan for the school. Virtually everything -- administrators, teachers, curriculum, assessment and instructional programs, etc. -- has changed and substantially improved. We’re investing a lot of resources to help the school turnaround.
The Julesburg School District Superintendent and new Executive Director of Insight School of Colorado outlined all the changes made to the school in a letter to parents and students.
The report highlighted some of Colorado Virtual Academy’s positive results, but left others on the editing room floor. Here are a few more results from COVA that I sent to them in an email:
- COVA high school students demonstrated high achievement and high academic growth in reading based on state test data.
- The longer students were enrolled in COVA the better they performed on the CSAP tests.
- COVA exceeded the state average on the Colorado ACT in 2009 and 2010.
- In 2010, COVA graduated 100% of students on time (in 4 years) who were enrolled in the school since their freshman year.
- COVA students showed strong academic growth scores based on widely used and nationally-recognized Scantron Performance Series Assessments. COVA students exceeded the Scantron national norm group in math and reading.
- 84% of COVA’s parents were satisfied with COVA; 88% of parents were satisfied with their child’s teachers.
These results are encouraging considering the school is serving a growing number of academically at-risk students who chose to enroll because they were struggling or failing in a traditional school. In recent years COVA has seen a spike in new students who come in below grade level, behind in their credits and not on track to graduate on time. As the COVA Board wrote in this statement, outlining the problems with how the graduation rate is calculated, the challenge of serving a growing population of academically at-risk transfer students is unique for public schools of choice, especially for those that have the capacity to serve students statewide. It’s clear the COVA team is committed to helping improve performance for all students.
Children deserve options in public education, especially when they are failing in whatever school they were assigned to attend. It’s becoming more evident that parents in Colorado and across the U.S. want more options and the freedom to choose. That is a welcome trend and one that policymakers should embrace. After all, it is children and their parents who are the customers.
Colorado would do well to begin looking at ways to update their school funding model and student data systems to reflect the new dynamic of greater student mobility and parent choice. By shifting away from a count date, and removing any other barriers, students will have more opportunities to attend the school or program they need at anytime during the school year. While reforming the state’s funding model will not erase the challenge of serving academically at-risk students, it will make it fairer for the schools that accept these students and commit to serve them. | <urn:uuid:10e19220-cf50-4496-af2e-c34eb55eb3c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://k12choice.com/index.php?option=com_rsblog&layout=view&cid=24:moving-away-from-a-count-date-in-colorado&Itemid=77 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977619 | 1,116 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Detroit Cristo Rey Receives $400,000 Grant from The W.K. Kellogg Foundation and $72,000 from The Skillman Foundation
DETROIT, Dec. 20, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Detroit Cristo Rey High School, a high school located in southwest Detroit providing high-quality education to 248 underserved students in the city of Detroit, received awards from two foundations:
- The Kellogg Foundation $400,000 award, distributed over two years, will support the school's corporate work study program. All students at the innovative school spend five days a month working with local businesses, which helps fund their education and also provides valuable professional experience. The grant will help cover costs for staffing the work study office and transportation for the students.
- The Skillman $72,000 award will be used to fund an English teacher position at the school and a work team of four students for the Skillman offices. This award marks the sixth consecutive year of giving by the Skillman Foundation, including an award that helped launch the school back in 2008.
"We are incredibly grateful," said Mike Khoury, president. "As we work to support our increasing student enrollment with academics and work study opportunities, these awards will play a key role in our financial stability. We are dedicated to being good stewards as we use these funds to educate our students, preparing them for college and beyond."
Detroit Cristo Rey High School, one of 25 U.S. high schools following the Cristo Rey model, graduated 100% of its seniors last May, with every student receiving at least one college acceptance. The only co-ed Catholic high school in the city, it serves a diverse population of both Catholic and non-Catholic students. For more information, visit www.detroitcristorey.org.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF), founded in 1930 as an independent, private foundation by breakfast cereal pioneer, Will Keith Kellogg, is among the largest philanthropic foundations in the United States. Guided by the belief that all children should have an equal opportunity to thrive, WKKF works with communities to create conditions for vulnerable children so they can realize their full potential in school, work and life.
The Kellogg Foundation is based in Battle Creek, Mich., and works throughout the United States and internationally, as well as with sovereign tribes. Special emphasis is paid to priority places where there are high concentrations of poverty and where children face significant barriers to success. WKKF priority places in the U.S. are in Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico and New Orleans; and internationally, are in Mexico and Haiti. For more information, visit www.wkkf.org.
The Skillman Foundation. Created in 1960, The Skillman Foundation is a private philanthropy whose chief aim is to help develop good schools and good neighborhoods for children. Though grants are made throughout metropolitan Detroit, most grants are directed at six Detroit neighborhoods—Brightmoor, Osborn, Cody Rouge, Chadsey Condon, Northend Central Woodward and Southwest Detroit Neighborhoods – and toward innovative and successful schools throughout the city of Detroit.
SOURCE Detroit Cristo Rey High SchoolBack to top | <urn:uuid:d27140e7-a706-4b50-9bff-1f34455255f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mlive.com/prnewswire/index.ssf?/mlive/story/?catSetID=7002&catID=290007&nrid=184283221&page=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955859 | 655 | 1.703125 | 2 |
White House sees 10 percent unemployment within months
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. unemployment rate is likely rise from already high levels to 10 percent in the next couple of months, a White House spokesman said on Monday.
"I think the president has said this, and I would certainly say this, I think you're likely to see unemployment at 10 percent within the next couple of months," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters.
The U.S. unemployment rate already stands at 9.4 percent, the highest level in about 25 years, and many analysts believe it could continue to climb despite the $787 billion economic stimulus package passed early this year by Congress.
Earlier this year, the Obama administration had predicted the unemployment rate would peak at 8 percent before beginning to fall toward the end of 2009.
President Barack Obama is expected to address the outlook for the economy at a White House press conference on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Doug Palmer; editing by Leslie Adler)
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- Digg this | <urn:uuid:7103ef34-688b-4078-8c37-32431f5b2cc4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/06/22/us-obama-unemployment-idUSTRE55L5CT20090622 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959896 | 213 | 1.625 | 2 |
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon says an agreement to end violence in Congo was delayed over "procedural issues."
Speaking at the African Union summit in Ethiopia, Ban told a news conference Monday that there are no fundamental differences holding back the agreement. A signing ceremony scheduled for Monday was canceled.
The peace deal is an effort at a large-scale political framework to end violence in Congo. Separate talks are taking place in Uganda between the rebel group known as M23 and Congolese officials. Jean Baptiste Rudaseswa, a lawyer for M23, said he was happy Ban's peace plan has so far failed because he said it risked destabilizing Congo further.
Ban said the U.N. is looking at establishing a "peace enforcement capacity" as part of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo. | <urn:uuid:1a8ec35d-4431-4c67-8d6c-6b0354114e40> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/28/peace-deal-for-congo-delayed-at-african-union-meeting-un-leader-blames/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fworld+%28Internal+-+World+Latest+-+Text%29 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967147 | 177 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Federal auto safety regulators this morning warned consumers who’ve had airbags replaced at cut rate prices that the explosive devices in their steering wheels may be dangerous counterfeits – and emphasized the warning with a video of a phony airbag blowing up.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s warning about counterfeit airbags – reported yesterday evening on WSJ.Com – came with a scary video of a phony airbag blowing up in a federal test. The video is here, and the flaming explosion starts about 25 seconds in.
The counterfeit airbag scare is a vivid reminder for strapped car owners that it’s probably a bad idea to pinch pennies when repairing complex, critical safety technology. Among those at risk, NHTSA said in a statement, are “consumers who have purchased replacement air bags from eBay or other non-certified sources—especially if they were purchased at unusually low prices (i.e. less than $400.) ” It’s not clear where customers victimized by the counterfeiters can go to get their money back, or whether insurers will be willing to pick up the tab for proper repairs.
The WSJ’s Christina Rogers says just doing the work to determine whether a replacement airbag is a dangerous fake could cost about $200, and installing a legitimate replacement could be up to $1,000, according to a spokesman for the National Automobile Dealers Association.
The NHTSA’s advice:
Consumers whose vehicles have been in a crash and had their air bags replaced by a repair shop that is not part of a new car dealership within the past three years or who have purchased a replacement air bag online should contact the call center that has been established by their auto manufacturer to have their vehicle inspected at their own expense and their air bag replaced if necessary. The full list of call centers and additional information are available at www.SaferCar.gov.
Here’s the list of the vehicle models that could be affected by the agency’s “safety advisory:” | <urn:uuid:19317899-dd48-4b31-8159-c2ee93effe7d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/tag/airbag-video/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95453 | 421 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Temple University Hospital's trauma outreach coordinator Scott Charles wants to do everything for young gunshot victims. Keeping them from returning to the emergency room is a good start.
"Violence is all around him," Charles says. "There's nobody left on his block. They're either in prison or dead. His block has been obliterated."
Charles says victims may feel like trembling, but manifest it in other ways. "Do you tremble at the corner store or do you walk in there hard as hell? You either hit back or you fold, and this kid is doing what we wish more would do--fold."
Before he leaves the room, Charles gives him his cell phone number.
"I want to remind him of what we talked about in this moment," he says.
But for 17-year-old Ronald, it's too late.
Charles has just learned that Ronald, shot last June when his program was brand-new, returned to the hospital over the weekend, DOA from multiple gunshot wounds.
Everywhere Charles goes doctors and nurses ask if he heard about Ronald.
"Yeah, I heard," he snaps.
"I feel like people are looking at me," he says. "Like, why didn't you catch him?"
Charles wants to develop more programs, to expand Cradle to Grave into a full curriculum, comparing it to antiviolence education in public schools, and he's been working with researchers at St. Joseph's University to measure whether a window of opportunity exists at all.
But at this moment, he admits his job is overwhelmingly difficult, and if he's not careful, his own window of opportunity will close.
"How do you get your arms around it?" he asks of the city's violence epidemic. "It's like digging a hole in the sand. And it's by nature going to get worse. So how can we solve it? Somebody tell me."
Charles does know at least one thing for sure: "If we can't find a way for them to get more help on the outside, they're just going to come back to us."
Kia Gregory ([email protected]) writes the 'Round About column.
Geek Invasion 2013 | <urn:uuid:5e9fdf87-37bf-4f4a-be8f-c6a6c47cafae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/cover-story/38427244.html?page=8&comments=1&showAll= | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979053 | 458 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Since the adoption of the Dodd-Frank act in 2010, family offices have been faced with new rules for determining whether or not a particular firm is subject to regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
If any family offices are still unsure about their exempt status, they need to act soon: Nonexempt family offices have until March 30 to either register with the SEC or restructure to conform with exemption requirements.
The Dodd-Frank act contained two amendments to the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 that are of particular importance to family offices. First, it repealed the so-called "Private Adviser Exemption" that exempted investment advisors with fewer than 15 clients-including many family offices-from registering with the SEC. Second, the act led to the creation of the Family Office Rule, which sets new conditions under which family offices may avoid SEC regulation.
The Family Office Rule
Under the Family Office Rule, family offices are defined as a company that only serves family clients, is owned by family clients and controlled by family members or family entities, and does not hold itself out to the public as an investment advisor. If a family office meets these requirements, it is exempt from SEC regulation.
The Family Office Rule permits a broad range of individuals and entities to qualify as family clients. However, several common pitfalls could prevent family offices from meeting the rule's requirements. What follows is an overview of these pitfalls and some of the possible unintended consequences for family offices that try to restructure to qualify for the exclusion.
Ownership and control: While the SEC has signaled that it will accept a broad range of ownership and control structures, one fact remains: The family must control the family office to qualify for exemption. In cases where professional staff controls day-to-day operations and outside advisors are members of the office's governing body, a review of organizational documents may be needed to ensure that the family has ultimate control of the entity.
Investment advice for non-family clients: Many family offices have long-standing investment advisory clients who do not fit the definition of "family client." Some family offices, for example, provide investment advice to other families or to close family friends, or to collective investment vehicles that are owned by a mix of family clients and non-family clients. These clients were acceptable under the Private Adviser Exemption, if they numbered fewer than 15. However, family offices that wish to remain exempt from regulation can no longer safely assume that these types of client relationships will pass muster under the Family Office Rule. Serving non-family clients is the most common reason that entities fail to meet the requirements of the rule.
Investment advice for distant relatives: Some family offices face SEC regulation because they advise distant relatives who fall outside the rule's definition of family members. The rule permits family offices to advise "all lineal descendants ... of a common ancestor, and such lineal descendants' spouses or spousal equivalents, provided that the common ancestor is no more than ten generations removed from the youngest generation of family members." A family member's in-laws, for example, do not meet this definition. Providing investment advice to such individuals will disqualify the family office from exemption.
Non-family client funding of charitable organizations: It is common for family offices to provide investment advice to non-profit organizations, charitable foundations or other charitable organizations. However, the Family Office Rule allows exempt family offices to provide investment advice only to charitable organizations that are funded exclusively by family clients. Even charities that receive only a small portion of their funding from non-family sources are off limits to exempt family offices. There is a grace period for compliance in this instance. If a family office wishes to continue providing investment advisory services to a charitable organization, the charitable organization has until December 31, 2013, to spend all funding attributable to non-family clients.
Non-U.S. clients of non-U.S. family offices: The new rule does not clearly limit its applicability to U.S. family offices or to U.S. clients. This raises a concern for family offices that are not located in the U.S. and who count among their advisory clients individuals or entities that are not located in the U.S. (in addition to their clients located in the U.S.). The SEC has not issued definitive guidance as yet on whether a family office will be disqualified for exemption because it has foreign non-family clients. Pending further information from the SEC, family offices with non-U.S. clients should be cautious about providing investment advice to foreign clients.
Most family offices that fail to satisfy the requirements of the Family Office Rule are choosing to restructure rather than register with the SEC. If the family office is providing investment advice directly to a non-family client in the form of a managed account or other similar arrangement, this process can be fairly simple. However, restructuring can have unintended consequences and can prove more difficult and expensive than anticipated.
For example, a family office that provides investment advice to a collective investment vehicle may decide to purchase the interests of non-family clients. This may prove expensive, however, particularly if the family office has no legal right to expel investors and purchasing the non-family interests can only be accomplished at a premium.
As an alternative, the family office may seek to terminate the investment vehicle and distribute its holdings in kind. But this alternative may be complicated by limitations on the ability to transfer the collective investment vehicle's holdings, as would be the case with a fund investment or a direct investment in private placement securities.
A third option would be to liquidate the collective's holdings, but this could raise ethical issues. Family offices may have fiduciary obligations to their clients. If non-family clients suffer financial losses due to this type of restructuring they could argue the family office breached its fiduciary duties to act in the best interests of investors.
A family office that provides investment advice to a charitable organization that receives non-family funding is also in an uncomfortable position. It could stop providing investment advice to the charitable organization, but that may be counter to the family's mission. The entity could also stop accepting non-family donations, but this would exclude community involvement in the charitable enterprise.
While it is often easy to identify the changes that need to be made for a family office to qualify for regulatory exemption, devising a plan that avoids these types of unintended consequences is a greater challenge.
In conclusion, family offices that do not take the time to understand how the Family Office Rule affects them do so at their own peril. It is not safe to assume that your family office remains exempt from SEC regulation simply because it was exempt under the Private Adviser Exemption. Instead, you should undertake an analysis to determine whether you qualify under the new rule and, if necessary, devise a plan to restructure.
David S. Guin and Mark J. Tice are a partner and associate, respectively, at the law firm of Withers Bergman. | <urn:uuid:b04fbcc3-474a-4102-b401-9c249569c03f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fa-mag.com/news/a-regulatory-countdown-9324.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96631 | 1,413 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Needless rapelling? It is a way to get down from the cliff quickly.
More and more, it is turning out to be a way to get down the cliff too quickly. Since the proliferation of rappel anchors, there has been an explosion of rap accidents, including very experienced climbers.
In the case of Betty, it is questionable whether there are, in general, any significant speed advantages.
Moreover, rappellers get themselves tangled up with ascending climbers, often create unpleasant clusterfucks, and drop ropes and pebbles, if not larger things, on leaders. The Preserve, after failing to think through its bolting policies, learned fairly quickly to set up rap lines that did not go down routes. Betty is a popular route for beginners and has got to be one of the worst imaginable places to have a rap route.
There has been an anchor around this tree for the last 20+ years so there is nothing new here. People use this rappel regularly and are used to it.
None of this makes it any less poorly conceived and undesirable.
Does that make it a bad thing? If there were not a cable here, there would be a tangled mess of webbing that looks like shit and very few bother to clean up.
I think the cable is actually an attractive nuisance. It encourages people to rappel back down the route, people who might have at least thought clearly for a moment about it if there had been webbing.
Cables give the illusion of safety, but we know nothing of the competence of the installer and can be fairly certain that once installed, no one is looking out for the integrity of the system or thinking about the kind of periodic replacement that such installations require. Indeed, who knows how to judge the integrity of cables?
Climbers understand how to inspect webbing, and if it gets messy, all it takes is a knife to clean it up.
I personally like having it there and am grateful to the person who replaced the sketchy setup that was looking a little aged.
I personally thought about cutting it down, but found that I neither had nor wanted to purchase the necessary tools. I was concerned that less expensive ad hoc methods might fail, leaving a weakened installation, which would surely be the absolute worst possible outcome.
There should not be a cable rap anchor directly above an extremely busy beginner's route. | <urn:uuid:5c003868-4a0a-44cc-8d31-20887b8d6288> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gunks.com/ubbthreads7/ubbthreads.php/topics/64741/13 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966 | 485 | 1.625 | 2 |
Remarkable turnaround for Abu Dhabi roads
Please click to enlarge the image.
Road deaths in Abu Dhabi have decreased by 31 per cent while severe injuries due to traffic accidents dropped by 10 per cent during the first half of this year.
According to Brigadier Hussein Ahmed Al Harithi, Director of Traffic and Patrols Directorate at the Abu Dhabi Police, fatalities in road accidents in the first six months of this year came down to 131 from last year’s 191 in the same period. The number of people sustaining severe injuries also dropped to 131 this year as compared to 197 last year, he told reporters on Thursday.
Al Harithi said the 37 per cent decrease in the number of accidents in the first half of 2012 is a positive sign of traffic safety and attributed the good results to the “efforts, plans and methods implemented” by the police.
Police figures also showed a 60 per cent decrease in the number of deaths on the Abu Dhabi-Sila-Hamim roads, and a 44 per cent drop on the top ten most dangerous roads of the emirate. These are despite the 16 per cent increase in the number of registered vehicles and 22 per cent rise in the number of drivers. Another positive result highlighted by Al Harithi was the 21 per cent decrease in the traffic accidents caused by speeding. The undesirable aspects noticed in the period are being studied to develop effective solutions to avoid them in the second half of the year. These include an increase in the number of traffic accidents caused by motorists who jumped the red signal and failure to give priority to pedestrians in designated locations.
Al Harithi pointed out that automated speed-control devices are currently being installed at road intersections to monitor red-light crossing and speeding.
“Among the negative phenomena, we also witnessed an increase in traffic accidents due to the failure to leave a safe distance between vehicles and a high incidence of accidents involving motorists with only three to five years of (driving) experience. Such problems are being addressed in collaboration with the Emirates Driving Company.”
The directorate is very keen to improve the levels of traffic safety to reach the “Vision Zero and Traffic Safety” by 2030, he added. | <urn:uuid:36e8e6b6-5b88-4d96-95cd-87826d4a702f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dubib.com/news/32615_remarkable-turnaround-for-abu-dhabi-roads | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950772 | 448 | 1.617188 | 2 |
So Saturday mail delivery is on its way out, in order to save money for the U.S. Postal Service.
Whenever more post office woes are reported, I am reminded of Lysander Spooner, who in addition to his work in political philosophy also tried to compete against the federal government in mail delivery. Federal mail delivery is authorized in the Constitution, but nowhere is it declared to be a federal monopoly.
Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company drove down postal rates until legal challenges by the federal government forced him out of business. | <urn:uuid:245b3010-8058-4cb2-94ad-f84847831f53> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/what-would-lysander-spooner-say/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961548 | 111 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Many dads want to reach out to their baby but don’t know how. Here, 15 get-close tips to bond tightly with you little one.
Dads and babies can bond too! Yes, there will always be a special connection between a mother and her child because they co-existed for nine months. But dads can be just as good nurturers as moms.
The process of daddy-baby bonding takes time and involvement. But you get real benefits when you make that connection. Bonding is important to give the child a deep sense of inner security. If made to feel secure in his parents’ love, a child will be more ready to explore the world, learn new things, and take on challenges later in life. Since he did not carry the baby for nine months, give birth to him, or breast-feed him, a father may feel at a distinct disadvantage. But we assure dads: They can make up for that by simply being there as much as they can. Bonding happens as a wonderful by-product of just spending time together. A father just has to hold, cuddle, stimulate or play with his baby, and shower him with affection. One day, he will feel an unbreakable bond with the baby, one that is unique from what the baby has with his mother, yet is equally fulfilling.
Here are some ideas to help cement the daddy-baby bond.
01. MAKE EYE CONTACT. Even at a very tender age, babies can recognize a parent’s smell, appearance, and touch. Make your baby familiar with you by being very visible. Initially, a newborn baby can’t see more than twenty-five (25) centimeters ahead of him. So position yourself within your baby’s range of sight and watch him get to know tour eye and notice how he is reacting.
02. CHANGE HIS NAPPIES. Make diaper-changing time pleasant for you and your baby. Do not scowl that you’re doing the “dirty work.” See this as an opportunity to show your baby that you care enough to make him feel comfortable. The fact that daddy is responding to baby’s needs is being registered in his mind.
03. FEED YOUR BABY. If the mother is breast-feeding, ask her to use a breast pump to save some of her breast milk for you to use in bottle-feeding. When baby starts solids at four (4) to six (6) months, Daddy can give him his baby food and cereal. Dad can also burp the baby afterwards.
04. SUPPORT YOUR WIFE IN BREAST-FEEDING. In the early days of breast-feeding, Dad can help prop pillows and position the baby for nursing. By staying close to mom while the baby nurses, Dad can share in the warmth and special experience of the breast-feeding relationship.
05. TALK TO YOUR BABY. Babies recognize both parents’ voices from a very early age. Dad can take advantage of this by constantly talking to the baby, which provides stimulation important for the infant’s development. Chat about your day at work while you are bottle-feeding or changing his diaper. He may not understand you, but he will get used to seeing your face and hearing your voice.
06. ROCK AND HUM. A dad may easily get discouraged to handle a crying baby, and feel the urge to pass him back to mommy. But men are just as attuned as women to a baby’s cues and just as capable of responding appropriately to his needs. By picking up your distressed baby, you build his trust in you as the caregiver. We suggest that dads develop their own soothing techniques. This may include rocking the baby while humming or singing a special song that’s uniquely theirs.
07. BOND WHILE BATHING. Some dads dread bathing babies because the combination of a screaming baby and slippery skin makes them nervous. But bath time can be a special daddy-and-baby time. Provide plenty of water toys and make sure the temperature of the water is nicely warm.
08. PLAY WITH YOUR BABY. To help your baby get the most out of this toys, show him how they work first. Dad can set aside playtime for him and baby to give mom a break. Later on, when baby becomes more active and social, dad will find that playing with his baby is the easiest way to strengthen the father-infant bond.
09. TAKE YOUR BABY FOR REGULAR CHECK-UPS. This will help the father learn about and enjoy the baby’s stages of development. Be present during these check-ups instead of letting your wife handle everything. Baby’s regular check-ups will reassure you that your baby is growing normally. It also allows you to discuss any concerns you may have with the doctor.
10. ENJOY A DAY OUT. Expose baby to the outside world once in a while. If your baby enjoy a daily walk, use this time to connect with him. Stroll in the park, walk about at the malls or hang out by the beach. Babies enjoy movement and change of scenery. Sights and sounds stimulate a baby’s developing mind. Dads can put their babies in a sling or carrier for close physical contact.
11. TRAVEL WITH YOUR BABY. Nobody said that having a baby means being stuck at home. You can still plan out-of-town weekends, or even a vacation abroad on holidays or on special occasions. Just make special consideration for all your baby’s needs.
12. SHOWER YOUR BABY WITH ATTENTION. In our opinion, a baby cannot be ‘spoiled’ enough. Give your baby all the hugs, kisses, and attention he needs whenever you are around. A young baby who is picked up, cuddled and talked to is not learning about seeking attention; he is learning about love and human relationships.
13. READ ALOUD. It’s never too early for books. Start him off with a simple picture book. Point out and explain things to him. You can also get him storybooks. Even small babies like to be read to. They may not understand the words but they are fascinated by the voice they hear.
14. TAKE LAZY NAPS. A truly special moment for dad is when his baby feels so comfortable with him and falls asleep nestled in his arms or on his chest. We advise fathers to get to know their baby’s bedtime routine. Dad and baby can even take lazy naps together.
15. SNAP SOME SHOTS. Always have a camera within your reach. When you are looking after baby, get your wife to take some pictures of you and your little one. In your baby’s first year, he changes more than at any other time of his life. Don’t miss out on the chance to preserve special moments. So snap away!
Dads who take opportunities for caregiving and interaction are sure to form a strong and meaningful bond with their babies. More importantly, a father’s involvement in his child’s early life jumpstarts his exciting adventure as “Daddy.” The earlier you start, the better. Remember, every precious moment spent with baby can be bonding time. | <urn:uuid:12c94b8a-5b4b-4a90-8503-45e47b687a88> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.twenteenmom.com/cement-that-daddy-baby-bond | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962062 | 1,529 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Sponsors of Dallas ordinance always intended to include entire LGBT community
Was it a matter of choosing the easiest path or an oversight that led to the first official draft of Dallas’ progressive anti-discrimination ordinance omitting gender identity?
I posed the question last week, and the answer came quickly this week from the people who worked hardest to get the ordinance passed. At least one person was indignant at the mere suggestion anyone involved would ever consider not including gender identity.
It was at worst an oversight, according to several City Council members and community leaders who orchestrated the revision of the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance five years ago to include sexual orientation and gender identity. No comparison should be drawn between the recently proposed exclusion of gender identity from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act by U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, of Massachusetts, and what happened in Dallas five years ago, they said.
When the Dallas ordinance was first presented to the City Council for review in 2002, transgender leaders were dismayed to see it failed to include gender identity. Their complaints led to the ordinance being revised by the city attorney’s office to include both sexual orientation and gender identity.
Gay former Dallas City Councilman John Loza, who was honored by the Dallas Transgender Alliance for his support of the local Transgender Day of Remembrance ceremony, said the intent all along had been to include all members of the LGBT community. Loza was the lead sponsor of the ordinance, and he was supported in the endeavor by Mayor Laura Miller, gay former Councilman Ed Oakley, Councilwoman Veletta Forsythe Lill and Councilwoman Elba Garza.
“Those of us at City Hall who supported the ordinance and sat down and talked about it I know we talked about including gender identity because I brought that up,” said Loza, who called to complain about the question I raised. “I made it clear that I didn’t support an ordinance that didn’t include both orientation and gender identity.”
Lill said that she believes the first draft of the ordinance must have accidentally excluded gender identity. City staff, council sponsors and community members used ordinances written by other cities as models for the Dallas ordinance, and those cities had not included gender identity, she said.
“At the time we adopted the ordinance there was a shift to begin using transgender language in ordinances,” Lill said. “That was kind of the beginning of that.”
Oakley said he recalls that people working on the ordinance were unsure about what language was needed in the ordinance.
“I think our intent was to cover it all across the board,” Oakley said. “The problem was how do we get there?”
Maria Rubio, who was then president of the Dallas Gay and Lesbian Alliance, said that she and other community representatives were surprised to discover the first draft excluded gender identity.
“I know we didn’t deliberately leave it out, and I know we made a big stink about it when we saw that it wasn’t there,” Rubio said. “We wanted to make sure it got in there and if it didn’t we were going to have a fight on our hands. We told them that.”
Roger Wedell, who was then vice president of the Dallas Gay and Lesbian Alliance, said he doesn’t recall anyone ever discussing the possibility that including gender identity could harm the ordinance’s chances of passage.
“There was never a conversation along the lines of excluding gender identity,” Wedell said. “There was a never a concern about not getting it passed if we put that in there.”
The end result of all of my conversations with the people whom I talked this week is the reinforcement of my view that Dallas is far more progressive than most people in the country would ever imagine.
Maybe, Congressman Frank and his progressive cohorts could learn a few things from our local political and community leaders.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition October 12, 2007
Powered by Facebook Comments | <urn:uuid:b12c3bd3-8dbb-4d52-a6fb-35ca886dac07> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dallasvoice.com/oversight-led-to-exclusion-of-language-1023204.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978074 | 846 | 1.742188 | 2 |
As a Christian, I know we shouldn't have a "canon within the canon", but I'll admit, I just can't get worked up over Ezra. I love Malachi. I could for a long time on 2 Peter. I can even find stuff in Leviticus worth reading, but try as might, I just don't see anything interesting in Ezra. Understanding that I really do see theology in really obscure places, can someone help me see what is theological about this book?
You, my friend, have a hard heart if you can't find anything interesting in Ezra. ;-)
To me, this is a picture of the joy we will have in the Lord when He brings this age to a close and we enter the age that will last forever.
The entire book tells the story of God's influence in world history even in the operation of a worldly empire. Since the Second Temple was rebuilt, Jesus was able to enter it and, ultimately, bring the Mosiac Covenant to a close.
I was reading the last page of the Catholic Catechism where it gives the abbreviations for all the books in the Bible and I noticed
My next thought was of this question and I wondered whether Ezra is referenced in the Catechism and by golly it is.
Is referenced by CCC 2585:
I'd say that's not devoid of theological content, it's actually pretty powerful stuff.
This answer is incomplete - but I'm not sure how to resolve it. It is based on a sermon I heard a long time ago. Please help make it better if you can - if not downvote or perhaps delete?
This is not an answer to the whole question, but here is one interesting lesson from Ezra. It answers the question: should we trust in God completely or allow humans to help? E.g. should we only pray for healing or allow doctors to intervene?
Nehemiah asked for and got help from the king, though he acknowledged God's hand:
By contrast, Ezra was ashamed to ask for help, so he relied on God:
So both are supported in scripture by men of faith and a God of grace. | <urn:uuid:2fe3fbe0-31dc-433a-b60e-c6aca9125244> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/6369/why-was-ezra-included-in-the-canon/6370 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974462 | 442 | 1.789063 | 2 |
I will be monitoring closely the reaction of the Arab world to the strike, as well as the fallout from Hamas' condemnation. Check back here over the coming hours and days for more coverage.
The most important component of today's story is that Bin Laden was buried at sea, in accordance with Islamic tradition, a basic modicum of respect which al-Qaeda itself has not shown many of its Muslim victims in Iraq and elsewhere. Even more important than illustrating the obvious moral high ground of the United States, the action demonstrates the Bin Laden's failure to advance his extremist ideology.
That the US, an al-Qaeda target country with thousands of al-Qaeda-imposed casualties, still upheld the Islamic value of respect for a human being over retribution is the ultimate sign of Osama bin Laden's failure. Radical groups seek to spread their particular ideology as the "true" Islam. This ideology does not distinguish between civilian and soldier, it does not show respect for human rights, and it justifies the intentional and brutal targeting of innocent people. Osama bin Laden was given a burial with fundamental disregard for these vicious and hateful ideas by one of the governments who despised him the most.
The burial demonstrates conclusively that Bin Laden has failed. Today, the United States sent a strong message that it ultimately makes policy based on the moderate center of Islam, not its radical fringes.
Al-Qaeda is still dangerous but it is a shadow of its former self. The massive change in world order that al-Qaeda failed to accomplish with violence in ten years, the Arab people have accomplished peacefully in two months. They have done so with the support of the West, putting to rest the notions of a fundamental "clash of civilizations" which al-Qaeda worked so hard to exacerbate. And they have put Islamist terrorist organizations into a struggle to keep up with the speed at which the universal values of fair representation, freedom of expression, and personal liberty are being legitimized across the Arab world.
What matters today is the hard work and countless hours put in by analysts and service-members and the sense of closure the strike brings, tinged with the bitter truth that no number of strikes or targeted killings can undo 9/11 and its 2,819 victims. What matters is that the strike was authorized by the current president of the United States, an African American man with the middle name Hussein who spent time growing up in the largest Muslim country on Earth and granted his first interview as President to al-Arabiya. Osama bin Laden was killed last night but the fear he tried to strike in the hearts of the American people was conquered long ago.
Bin Laden's death does not fundamentally change the US strategic calculus in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It does not represent the end of Islamist extremism, and it does not change the relationship between the West and the Islamic world. There is perhaps no more fitting set of conditions in which Osama bin Laden, an infidel against humanity, should meet his end. | <urn:uuid:cc534184-5be1-4772-be0b-4a2f79a51514> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thecamelsnose.blogspot.com/2011/05/bin-laden-dies-failure.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965777 | 598 | 1.789063 | 2 |
For most teenagers, the move to University housing is the first time they will have spent any significant length of time away from their home or parents and it can be a daunting time so here are a few tips to help new student settle into life without mum or dad:
Pack the right things: You need to consider exactly what you need from home. A lot of student accommodation can be limiting with regards to space so pack your essentials and try and keep it to a minimum. However if you’re moving into rented accommodation close to your uni you may need to take other items such as furniture and appliances in which case you might need a decent shipping company such as Alliance Shipping. But in either case a trip to your new home is essential in order to plan your move.
Budget: Now you’re not living with mum and dad you need to start budgeting for things you might not have before: bills, food and toiletries all come at a cost and you need to plan ahead to make sure you’re covered for the forthcoming months. Things may change once you’re actually living the life but it’s always advisable to have a starting point.
Safety: You don’t have the security of a family to fall back on and you can often start off living with strangers until they become friends so always keep safety in mind. Secure your room / house when you’re out and be aware of your own personal safety when you’re in. Don’t leave gadgets such as ipods and laptops lying around and don’t keep cash visible. Again, once you’ve settled in you may be able to relax a little but until then be vigilant! | <urn:uuid:0b4a701e-834f-41e6-9ec6-9778527ad9aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.browardschoolsintegrity.org/getting-ready-for-the-uni-move/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953399 | 350 | 1.765625 | 2 |
US employers posted fewer open jobs in July
WASHINGTON—U.S. employers posted fewer jobs in July than in June, further evidence that hiring may stay weak in the coming months.
Job openings fell to a seasonally adjusted 3.67 million, the Labor Department said Tuesday. That's down from June's 3.72 million job openings, which was revised lower.
The data follow Friday's disappointing employment report, which said the economy added only 96,000 jobs in August. That's below July's total of 141,000 and the average 226,000 a month added in the first three months of the year. The unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent from 8.3 percent, but only because the number of people working or looking for work fell.
The drop in available positions has made job hunting more competitive. Nearly 12.8 million people were unemployed in July, meaning 3.5 people were competing for each open position.
While that's down from a post-recession high of 7 to 1 in July 2009, in a healthy economy the ratio is usually 2 to 1.
Job openings have increased 68 percent from 2.2 million over the past three years. But companies aren't filling them quickly. Total hiring has increased only 11 percent in that stretch.
There are several reasons companies aren't hiring faster, economists say. Companies may not be offering sufficient pay to entice workers to take the jobs. Some employers say they can't find enough skilled workers in certain industries, such as information technology.
Businesses are also worried about Europe's financial crisis, slowing growth in China and the pending expiration of tax breaks in the United States.
Jeff Joerres, chief executive of ManpowerGroup, an employment services firm, said those trends are making even healthy companies reluctant to hire.
"It's all I hear about," he said. Some of his company's clients say, "Our business is good, but we're worried," he added.
Employers are still posting fewer jobs than before the recession, when they advertised about 4.4 million a month.
In July, the number of available jobs fell in manufacturing, health care, and professional and business services, a category that includes engineers, accountants and lawyers.
The government's monthly employment report measures net hiring.
Tuesday's report, known as the Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey, shows the amount of hiring and firing that takes place in the U.S. each month. It provides more details than the monthly jobs report.
It also highlights one reason the job market remains weak. Layoffs have fallen steadily recently, but companies aren't stepping up hiring.
Layoffs fell to 1.6 million in July. That's the lowest level in the 10 years the government has tracked the data. It shows companies aren't cutting jobs, despite their worries about future growth. It's also likely why weekly applications for unemployment benefits have trended down recently.
But they aren't adding many either.
Overall, employers hired 4.2 million people in July, down from almost 4.3 million in the previous month. Before the recession, total hires routinely topped 5 million. | <urn:uuid:af555199-e8cd-4df8-bfed-586b82de306c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2012/09/11/us_employers_posted_fewer_open_jobs_in_july/?rss_id=Boston.com%20--%20Top%20business%20news | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975918 | 646 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Cleveland needs a miracle cure for potholes. Scott Kleiger thinks he has one.
City officials watched Tuesday as Kleiger's "Pothole Killer" rolled down East 75th Street and knocked off one pothole after another north of Kinsman Road. His specially equipped truck buried dozens of down-to-the-brick craters under eco-friendly materials shot from a spray nozzle. Each fix took only a minute or two to complete.
That should be the last anyone sees of those particular potholes for quite a while, forecast Kleiger, president of Pennsylvania-based Patch Management Inc. He boasted the repairs can last for a decade. A pothole patch done in the traditional way can break apart within days.
"We think this is a solution," Kleiger said. "Hopefully, the city thinks it is, too."
Cleveland intends to monitor the mended sections of East 75th to see how well the patches hold up to the battering of traffic, plows and freeze-and-thaw cycles. Administrators with the city's Department of Public Works seemed somewhat skeptical during the demonstration.
It took only one worker to operate the Pothole Killer from the truck cab. What looks like a video game controller next to the driver's seat allows the worker to maneuver a nozzle hanging from a mechanical arm jutting off the front of the vehicle. In a step-by-step process, the nozzle sprays a cementing and sealing substance; stones; and recycled rubber bits to patch the pothole.
Public Works Director Michael Cox observed from the sidewalk as the truck -- roughly the length of a school bus with the arm extended -- made its way down East 75th. He said the patching system will be analyzed and considered as the city searches for ways to deal with the "challenge" of potholes.
"Everyone has a miracle cure," Cox said, "but they usually don't work."
But this cure is building a track record.
Niagara Falls, N.Y., brought in the Pothole Killer the past few winters to deal with its crumbling streets. Repairs done four years ago remain rock solid, said David Kinney, who oversees the city's streets. His office used to average two dozen pothole complaints a day this time of year. Now? "We almost never get them," he said.
Kinney recommended the system to Cleveland. He contacted the city after his son visited Northeast Ohio and told him about the condition of the streets.
The Pothole Killer also has taken out potholes in Washington D.C., New Orleans and on state highways in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Patch Management formed in 1998 and has a fleet of 47 trucks. It costs about $35,000 a month to rent the machine. | <urn:uuid:6bc44c20-3fc0-43c6-bd43-e4c10571898a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cleveland.com/roadrant/index.ssf/2013/03/cleveland_reviews_new_system_f.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955969 | 586 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Date: January 10 2013
The nation's banks will freeze mortgage repayments for home owners devastated by bushfires across eastern Australia.
Many lenders will also offer emergency increases to credit card limits and defer business loan repayments, for those in fire-stricken areas.
"Banks understand this is a difficult and stressful time for those households and businesses affected by the fires. It's not a time when people want to be worrying about their finances,'' said Australian Bankers' Association chief executive Steven Mü¨nchenberg.
''If someone's home, income or business has been affected by the fires, they should contact their bank as soon as they are able to. Their bank can provide support to help households and businesses get back on their feet."
Losses from the Tasmanian fires are expected to rise sharply above current estimates of $49 million, according to the Insurance Council of Australia.
Elsewhere, homes near Ballarat in Victoria were destroyed on Tuesday night causing nearly $10 million worth of losses, while more than 135 fires burning in NSW have so far razed more than 60,000 hectares across the state.
This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.
[ SMH | Text-only index] | <urn:uuid:4f3cbeca-4289-4b94-9070-89d643e26381> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/banks-freeze-mortgage-repayments-for-victims-20130109-2cguk.html?skin=text-only | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970777 | 259 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Zig Ziglar dies at age 86
By JASON PATTERSON
Editor & Publisher
“Where you start is not nearly as important as where you finish.”
- Zig Ziglar
Once a poor boy in Yazoo City, he went on to become the Master of Motivation.
Zig Ziglar, America’s best known motivational speaker and author of over two dozen books, died Wednesday morning at age 86 in Dallas, Texas after a brief battle with pneumonia.
Born Hillary Hinton Ziglar in Coffee County, Ala., Ziglar moved to Yazoo City with his family at a young age. Ziglar was the tenth of 12 children, and his father died when he was just five years old. One of his younger sisters died just two days later.
At age 6, the first grader was selling peanuts on the streets of Yazoo City. During the Great Depression, Ziglar and his brothers served as carriers for The Yazoo Herald.
-------for the rest of the story see The Yazoo Herald printed edition or subscribe to the Digital Edition.---------- | <urn:uuid:818b1451-bfd5-4f3f-afbe-be141e0b077f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yazooherald.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3273:zig-ziglar-dies-at-age-86&catid=43:news&Itemid=1&el_mcal_month=2&el_mcal_year=2013 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976623 | 224 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Reviewed by Jesus S. (age 8)
This book made me think about when I ask a lot of questions like Ace. My favorite part was when he was sitting in the sofa. He didn't let the other animals sit next to him because he was too fat. The other animals didn't mind. If you want to know how the animals got on the sofa you will have to read the book. This part made me laugh.
I really liked this book because it was funny. There are other books by this author about different pigs. I'm going to read the other books too. My favorite character is Ace because he acts the same way I do.
I recommend this book to people that like animals because the animals in this story are friendly. I think kids in first and second grade will like reading this book. | <urn:uuid:5054dd8a-cd42-4170-9adc-3fe1c234eb27> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://spaghettibookclub.org/review.php?review_id=3030 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.991486 | 167 | 1.75 | 2 |
Community-based spam filtering catches most spam without blocking valid mail. Handles POP3, webmail-via-POP3, IMAP, or Exchange accounts. Separate versions for Outlook Express and Thunderbird support all but Exchange.
- Cons No support for Vista's Windows Mail as yet. Can't filter Web-based accounts if they don't offer POP3 access. Costs twice as much as near-identical iHateSpam 5.0.
All the algorithms in the world can't compare with the human mind as a spam-catching tool. Cloudmark Desktop uses its million-strong community to block spam accurately, and it virtually never blocks valid mail in error. It's a fine choiceas long as you use one of the supported e-mail clients.
Cloudmark pioneered the concept of community-based spam filtering, and its community is now over a million strong. Cloudmark Desktop 5.3.3 for Microsoft Outlook keeps most spam out of your Outlook inbox while marking virtually no valid mail as spamand that's what I look for in a spam filter. Separate versions of the program support Outlook Express and Thunderbird, and a version for Vista's Windows Mail is in the works.
Where many antispam products filter only standard POP3 e-mail, Cloudmark Desktop strips out spam from any e-mail account that your e-mail client supports. That includes POP3 and IMAP accounts, webmail accounts accessed via POP3, and (for Outlook only) Exchange-based mail accounts. About the only kind of e-mail it can't filter is a Web-based account that doesn't offer POP3 access.
Spammers spew their useless or harmful messages to millions of victims, and that fact is part of what makes community-based filtering work. When any community member marks a message as spam, Cloudmark Desktop boils down the message content to a unique fingerprint and sends that fingerprint to a central database. If the database receives enough reports for the exact same message (based on the fingerprint), it concludes that the message really is spam and blocks it for all other members.
If it were as simple as that, a determined spammer could undermine the system by joining the community and marking messages as not spam. To keep people from gaming the system, Cloudmark maintains a trust rating for every user. If the community as a whole agrees that a message you've blocked is spam, your trust rating goes up just a bit. If the community doesn't agree with your assessment, your trust goes down. The higher your trust rating, the more weight your opinion carries.
You can add specific domains or addresses to a whitelist and also automatically whitelist any address that's in your Contacts list. Mail from whitelisted addresses will always get through. But I can't think of a situation where this would be necessary. In order to get misfiled as spam, the identical message would have to be reported as spam by multiple community members. Thus Cloudmark should never identify a unique message from an individual as spam. Most users can ignore the whitelist and leave the other settings at their default values.Next: Don't Make Me Work! | <urn:uuid:5cf7682d-c4c2-4350-8696-a07ab2d4d85c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2279961,00.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936281 | 646 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Johnes, J (2003) Measuring the efficiency of universities: a comparison of multilevel modelling and data envelopment analysis. Working Paper. The Department of Economics, Lancaster University.
Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and multilevel modelling (MLM) are applied to a data set of 54578 graduates from UK universities in 1993 in order to assess the teaching performance of universities. A methodology developed by Thanassoulis & Portela (2002) allows each individual's DEA efficiency score to be decomposed into two components: one attributable to the university at which the student studied, and the other attributable to the individual student. From the former component a measure of each institution's teaching efficiency is derived and compared to the university effects from various multilevel models. The comparisons are made within four broad subjects: pure science; applied science; social science and arts. The results show that the rankings of universities derived from the DEA efficiencies which measure the universities'' own performance (i.e. having excluded the efforts of the individuals) are not strongly correlated with the university rankings derived from the university effects of the multilevel models. The data were also used to perform various university-level DEAs. The university efficiency scores derived from these DEAs are largely unrelated to the scores from the individual-level DEAs, confirming a result from a smaller data set (Johnes 2003). However, the university-level DEAs provide efficiency scores which are generally strongly related to the university effects of the multilevel models.
Actions (login required) | <urn:uuid:4be03be8-44b0-4937-b61e-6e75261aa9b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/48681/ | 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 | 0.93071 | 316 | 1.632813 | 2 |
This page is directly accessible at:
1. Data gathering
a. A set of three operators per country has been chosen for comparison: the incumbent telecommunications operator, the largest cable provider (if there is cable coverage) and one alternative provider, if available, over DSL, cable or fibre.
b. Offers must be advertised clearly on the operator's website
c. All DSL, cable and fibre offers are recorded, but not used in calculations if speeds are lower than 256 kbits.
d. Offers are for month to month service
e. Offers should be available in the country's largest city – or in the largest regional city for firms with only regional coverage.
a. Speeds are those advertised by operators and likely do not correspond to typical throughput.
b. Some maximum speeds have been imputed when not explicitly stated based on technological limits of the installed technologies (e.g. New Zealand’s ADSL speeds).
a. Voice subscription charges: Prices include PSTN line rental charges when they can be separated out, if subscribers are required to have a PSTN line to subscribe to DSL (these prices are designated as “with line charge”). This also applies to offers where cable television service cannot be disaggregated, including cable and fibre-based services. Some offers do include phone and television service (triple-play) which cannot be disaggregated.
b. Prices which do not include PSTN line/cable television rental charge are also presented. These are designated as “no line charge”, and provide an alternative way to compare prices. As both sets of prices provide valuable information, both have been included in the comparison.
c. Modem rental: Prices include modem rental charges (when priced separately)
d. Term commitments: Prices do not include discounts for some longer-term commitments. In some countries, operators offer significant discounts to subscribers who commit for long periods. These longer-term subscribers can often comprise a large majority of all broadband subscribers in a country (e.g. in Korea it is possible to benefit from further discounts for commitments over 24 months). Only commitments of 24 months or less are included.
e. Free calling: Some plans offer a number of included phone calls as part of the broadband plan. If simple Internet access prices cannot be disaggregated then the calls are included in the price.
f. Preselection requirements: Prices do not include discounts for also choosing certain calling plans or preselection.
g. If a plan requires a certain amount of phone use (charges) per month then these are added into the basic Internet access price.
h. The pricing information is presented in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, but is also available in USD exchange rates within the same Excel file.
4. Bit caps
a. Bit caps are given in megabytes per month
b. Bit caps are for all domestic and international traffic. However, in cases where national and international traffic are capped differently the bit caps are for international traffic.
c. Costs for additional traffic are given in price per additional megabyte.
d. When operators offer additional monthly traffic in different bundles the price reflects the lowest price per MB across offers.
e. Some operators have maximum excess charges per month which limits the total possible monthly cost of the connection.
f. When prices per additional megabyte are on a graduated scale the average of all prices is used.
g. Prices and bit cap measures do not take into account bandwidth offered during "happy hours".
OECD Broadband Portal | <urn:uuid:5254c9fd-f8c9-4266-b803-7fee063dbb79> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/criteriafortheoecdbroadbandpricecollections.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935244 | 731 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Posted by bordalix Thu, 23 Feb 2006 18:47:00 GMT
Everyone is talking about the patent granted by the US Patent Office to Balthaser, covering "methods, systems and processes for the design and creation of rich-media applications via the Internet." A lot of FUD is going on, with people saying that AJAX, Java and even Flash will need to be licensed in the near future.
So, I decided to read the patent, and it's not that bad: the usage of rich-media applications is not covered under this patent. Instead, what Balthaser is patenting is a hosted application which enables normal people to build rich-media websites (or applications), there is, a rich-media website, that previously demanded designers, flash programmers and coders, can now be accomplished by anyone.
So, Balthaser is defending is own tool, pro:FX. The thing is, isn't this patent to broad? What is the definition of "rich-media application"?
In the same day, Google launched is new service, Page Creator, a website that enables you to create your own website, with the easiness and simplicity we know from Google. And after a peek to the Page Creator interface, my first question was: "Is this under the Balthaser patent?".
If is considered that Google (and others) must license this kind of technology to Balthaser, than we have just created a strong break on innovation, and I strongly believe that is not the objective of patents. They exist to encourage innovation, by protecting intellectual property, not for some guy to decide that put a Dreamweaver on the web is innovation. That was too damn obvious to be considered as an inventive idea.
I just hope someone get is senses, meanwhile, I'm happy to live in Europe. | <urn:uuid:1aab4420-89b5-4366-aabd-d9ea18cc0324> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://joaobordalo.com/articles/tag/copyright | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954879 | 377 | 1.59375 | 2 |
On July 2, Cogeco Radio-Télévision inc. was awarded a licence for a new commercial French-language FM station at Trois-Rivières, operating on 100.1 MHz, with an effective radiated power of 43,050 watts. The station would be part of Cogeco’s Rhythm FM network (originating from CFGL-FM Laval) and provide an adult contemporary format composed primarily of hits from the 1970s to today.
CJEB-FM signed on the air in September.
On May 28, the CRTC renewed the licence of CJEB-FM until August 31, 2016.
On December 17, the CRTC approved the transfer of a number of commercial radio stations from Corus Entertainment to Cogeco Inc. Cogeco already owned CJEB-FM in Trois-Rivieres. With the purchase of the Corus stations, the Quebec cluster would now include CHLN-FM.
The CRTC approved an intra-corporate reorganization, including the transfer of the shares of Cogeco Diffusion inc. from Cogeco inc. to Cogeco Diffusion Acquisitions inc. and of the shares of CFEL inc. and Radio Sherbrooke inc. from CDAI to CDI. Cogeco Diffusion inc. was the licensee of CJMF-FM Québec, CJEB-FM Trois-Rivières, and CFGE-FM Sherbrooke and its broadcasting transmitter CFGE-FM-1 Magog. CFEL inc. was the licensee of CFEL-FM Québec. Radio Sherbrooke inc. was the licensee of CJTS-FM Sherbrooke, at the time of this approval.
In November, Henri Audet, founder of Cogeco cable died at age 94. Trained as an engineer, Audet left a job at the CBC to launch a TV station in Trois-Riviéres. He sold his house and raised $100,000 from friends and other investors as seed money. From that single television station the company became Canada's fourth-largest cable company and one of Quebec's largest media companies. Audet served as president of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters from 1961 to 1964, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 1984. Control of Cogeco Inc. and its direct and indirect subsidiaries was held by Gestion Audem Inc., a holding company whose shares were held entirely by the members of the family of Henri Audet.
Updated December, 2012
Written by Bill Dulmage - August, 2005 | <urn:uuid:0cca4ecb-c76b-4ed2-abfb-12da219e3f16> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.broadcasting-history.ca/listings_and_histories/radio/histories.php?id=1015&historyID=874 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963968 | 538 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Well, I love this quote! I’d been thinking about these things – the mutability of morality, the shifting quality of truth, the unreliability of words. It struck me as so similar to Emerson’s “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day” (Thank you, universe, for making everything connect.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I’m a very vague person, I’m blurry at the edges, and I see the world this way. I think it’s dangerous to decide the world is a certain way, and that we have to act in a certain way in the world, according to a strict set of rules. The idea that morality should come from within – that we need a core of strength despite the fact that the outlines are shifting – is so hopeful about humanity, but it’s a little frightening, too. It would be a comfort to believe that there’s some larger system to decide right and wrong – to reward the good and punish the wicked. But how often have these ideals been corrupted by the people that claim to interpret them for us? How dangerous it is to stubbornly hold onto conclusions to the point where we act out of habit, thoughtlessly, without consideration. How much better to constantly question, to actively seek answers, even though they might not exist in any definitive form, or they may shift and change the moment we catch up to them. And to struggle to express ourselves and share our thoughts, even though the words themselves are as transparent and mutable as water. The world is constantly changing, time is streaming by us, we’re never grown-up, we’re never done. It’s a silly notion, but I have a dream-like image of people as spirits, moving through the world, with some sort of light of truth inside of them, burning strong. What nonsense I’m spouting today! What extra-special foolishness! Happy shrove tuesday! A day that we confess our sins and eat pancakes! I like the idea of pancakes as absolution. I know it doesn’t quite work that way, but it’s a nice notion, anyway. I believe the original habit of pancake-eating on shrove Tuesday began as a way to use up all the fat and sugar in the cupboard before then lenten fast began. Or, more likely, it was because it was February, and everybody wanted something simple and comforting. Like this Seussically green, fat, cheesy pancake! We had some saucy chili left over, and I wanted something to eat it with. Something the boys would like, that would contain vegetables and protein, but in a non-objectionable way. And so we have this cake. It has some almonds, for flavor, texture and protein. It’s got flavorful herbs, it’s got a bit of cheese. And it’s BRIGHT GREEN for spring. After all, supposedly “lenten” comes from the old English for long, because the days are getting longer at the moment, and have such a hopeful light about them!
Here’s The Meters with Mardi Gras Mambo.
1 cup flour
1 t baking pwoder
1 t baking soda
1 t salt
1 cup milk
1/2 cup sliced almonds
1 t each rosemary, basil and thyme
2 cups, packed, baby spinach
1 cup grated mozzarella
Butter to fry.
Combine everything in a blender, and blend till smooth.
Warm a skillet over medium heat – mine was about nine inches. Ideally, you’d use a skillet with an oven-proof handle. Put a dollop of butter in the pan, and let it melt and coat the pan. When you just start to see hints of browning, pour the batter into the pan. Cook for four or five minutes, until it seems browned on the bottom, and the top loses its shine. Meanwhile, preheat the broiler.
Put the pan under the broiler, and cook until the top is brown and puffed, and the cake has pulled away from the sides of the pan. Turn out onto a plate.
Cut in wedges and serve with something saucy, or with a simple tomato sauce, spiced any way you like. | <urn:uuid:99a646d3-ce9f-4e92-a32e-9e447359b60b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://outoftheordinaryfood.com/2013/02/12/spinach-and-mozzarella-cake/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956015 | 995 | 1.648438 | 2 |
American culture can be incorporated into a schoolwide curriculum.
"We want to take enough time to do a good, thorough job with this but
not rush it," Urioste said. "It also must happen with respect to the
student timeline of required state exams."
District Supt. David Aponik requested Urioste on July 20 implement a
process to study the school's use of the Indian mascot, after the
district received a memo from the Southern California Indian Center that
described Burroughs' use of the Indian mascot as a mockery of the Indian
Urioste said he has not decided who will serve on the committee, but
his goal is to choose five to seven students of varied ethnic
"I think this will be a real leadership thing for the students, and a
unique teaching experience for me," Urioste said.
School board member Trish Burnett said she is hopeful the committee
will help educate the student body at Burroughs, but said forming the
committee is not the answer to the issue at hand.
"This is not where we need to be," Burnett said. "This is a weak
effort to deflect what really has to happen, which is to change the
Burnett added, "This is a sugar pill for the community. People stood
up and said using the mascot is wrong. That is all that matters."
The students will be asked to finalize their research and report to
the school board by late January or early February. | <urn:uuid:87bd8018-2fe1-4f16-94b4-f93419c7fdc0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.burbankleader.com/2001-11-10/news/export12063_1_indian-mascot-southern-california-indian-center-new-job | 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 | 0.977304 | 313 | 1.828125 | 2 |
The water bucket is an item that you need to locate in Early Poptropica. It’s one of the three items that were stolen from the Early Poptropicans. The other two items that were stolen are the pig and the flag. Your main objective in Early Poptropica is to find them.
How to Get the Water Bucket
The bucket can be found up in the clouds, just to the right of the giant’s vegetable garden. You’ll need to have the Golden Egg to get past the giant. From there, run to the right up over the tools and the giant vegetables. The water bucket is sitting next to the giant tomato. You’ll find it on your way to getting the jet pack, another item that is hidden up in the clouds. For the complete details on finding the water bucket and all the other items from Early Poptropica, check out the Early Poptropica Walkthrough. | <urn:uuid:2bba24b3-be4d-499b-81a3-8aea1e10ee3f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://poptropicasecrets.com/poptropica-items/early-poptropica-items/water-bucket/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932196 | 192 | 1.632813 | 2 |
NEW Therapy Gym!
We cut the ribbon on the new Occupational Therapy Gym on May 25! Team 18 and the mothers in the rehab center opened the doors to an excited giggling group of special children waiting to enter the “Quarto de Juegos” (Room of Games). It was constructed to facilitate imaginative and integrative play opportunities for children and families with special needs. The idea for the gym was conceived after Rita Correa, founder of Padres y Compadres, and the staff of Push International were privileged to met with Rosemary White, OTR/L, a very talented pediatric occupational therapist, during Rita’s visit to Seattle in the fall of 2009.
The new gym is a completely malleable environment that has multiple hooks in the ceiling where swings and different textured fabrics and materials can be connected. The idea is to give children the opportunity to construct a play environment unique to their needs and ideas. Fabric is hung from the hooks in the ceiling and then stretched down to the floor where the children can then climb through it. The fabric has different textures, stretch surfaces and colors and is used to give children proprioceptive and tactile feed back. They can climb through, under, over and between the fabrics, causing them to engage core muscles, motor plan, problem solve and interact with others.
The position of swings and fabric connected
to hooks in the ceiling can be changed at any moment allowing a hammock to
be a boat one moment and a vine hanging in the jungle the next. The room
allows children and their families to have a safe environment where they can interact and play together. Whether the family sits inside a piece of Lycra (fabric) together to roll a ball back and forth while decreasing environmental distractions, or 3 children collaborate and create an obstacle course and instruct their parents how to traverse it, the new gym allows anything to happen!
The new gym is full of endless possibilities for growth through games.
If you have questions or if you would like to get involved, please contact
Bree Lair @ [email protected]
In late May 2009 a BIG dream became a reality! Over 20 children anxiously waited as the therapy pool was officially opened on the
Padres y Compadres / Push International shared campus.
20 years ago
Annarita (the daughter of Padres y Compadres' founder) had an accidental near drowning in a pool and was left with a brain injury and cerebral palsy like symptoms. It has been Rita's dream to build a therapy pool on our campus because she knows the great gains that children can make while they are in the water. The dream came full circle when Annarita was the first person to step into the pool; the same thing that took so much from her 20 years ago. As she stepped in, she let out a joyful scream, with a big smile on her face and threw her arms up in the air.
The new therapy pool will provide Annarita and all the other children with another form of therapy for many years to come. Some of the children have already made great gains in the pool. They are having a wonderful time taking part in their therapy. Videos of the chidren laughing as they do therapy in the pool can be seen on our Facebook page.
Picture of Jasmine enjoying the new therapy pool.
May 2009 - Picture of the the therapy pool on campus.
It is located near the dormitories and the sensory integration room. A garden has since been planted around the pool and grass laid in the courtyard to the left.
The brand new wheelchair repair and refurbishing shop opened its doors on January 13, 2009! It was built with donations from supporters in the USA and is now open to serve the community in Mexico. Team 10, an energetic team of volunteers from the USA, was there to take part in the ribbon cutting ceremony where Sergio Valdez, our wheelchair repair and maintenance manager did the honor.
Push International’s new wheelchair repair and maintenance shop is open to serve the community on our shared campus in Mazatlan, Mexico! The new 'D' building is centered between the horse therapy arena and the occupational therapy and speech therapy office. The new building is a place for Sergio Valdez to adjust and repair mobility equipment on an ongoing basis. The new building was been designed by Sergio himself in order to allow him the greatest amount of efficiency and access to equipment, parts, tools and recipient records as possible.
The new shop is open three days per week to provide sustainable services to people with disabilities in need. During that time, people who have previously received equipment from Push International or other organizations, bring their equipment to the warehouse. There Sergio repairs, adjusts and teaches the recipient how to properly care for and maintain their equipment. People who are in need of new mobility equipment may also make an appointment or stop by the shop to receive equipment if it is available. If we do not currently have appropriate equipment for the recipient, they will be added to the list of future recipients. People who have been placed on the list and are in need of equipment will be contacted and individually fitted in the proper equipment as soon as a new container of equipment arrives in Mazatlan.
The old wheelchair repair and maintenance shop was located in the C building of our shared Mazatlan campus. This building has a storefront that opens to the street allowing community members to walk into the shop when it is open. In the Fall of 2008, the shop was moved off of the street front and into the new D building in order to make room for a laundromat. The laundromat will be installed in the C building and will be open to the public. The new laundromat will be used to generate income for the rehabilitation center. The laundromat installation is scheduled to begin in the winter of 2009 and we hope to have it washing and spinning by May 2009. | <urn:uuid:18cbf773-382a-4676-a2ce-df21cb2ddbc0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pushinternational.org/mzt/new%20construction%20at%20pyc.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969469 | 1,209 | 1.664063 | 2 |
June 25, 2004
Planned military tribunals for terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay are unacceptable, the UK's attorney general has said. Four British men are still being held at the camp in Cuba.
In a speech on Friday, Lord Goldsmith argued there can be "no compromise" on certain principles and the US tribunals would not offer a fair trial. The UK Government has always voiced reservations over the trial plans. Lord Goldsmith is underlining the point.
Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said the government would listen carefully to the attorney general's comments but stressed that as a sovereign state the US would steer its own course. He said the government had made its position clear to the US over the Guantanamo situation and would continue to do so, but the UK could not always guarantee to influence events. BBC Pentagon correspondent Nick Childs says the US authorities insist the military tribunals, or commissions, will be fair and will comply with international standards.
Officials cite presumption of innocence, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the promise of no adverse inference from refusal to testify, the ability to call and examine witnesses and representation by a "vigorous" defence as safeguards. But our correspondent says critics are concerned that the tribunal process will be controlled by the Pentagon and that defendants may not be allowed to see secret evidence against them.
Downing Street meanwhile stressed that plans to use tribunals to try detainees were on hold. A spokesman said: "The position is that we are continuing to work to resolve the situation with regard to the four remaining British detainees. "The attorney general's remarks haven't come as any surprise to us because we have always said British detainees should be treated in accordance with international standards, and discussion are continuing."
For the Lib Dems Menzies Campbell said the issue had the "potential to cause major damage" to Anglo-American relations. He added: "But the British Government cannot shirk its responsibility to its own citizens. If the positions were reversed the clamour from the White House and Congress would be loud and persistent."
Amnesty international's UK director Kate Allen said: "The important thing now is that the UK government seriously steps up pressure to speedily secure proper trials or the immediate release of everyone held in Cuba."
Whitehall officials say they do not see the speech as the minister ramping up British rhetoric on the issue. But former Labour attorney general Lord Morris said Lord Goldsmith's comments showed how "fed up" he has become with the situation in Guantanamo. Lord Morris told Today: "In this country we wouldn't put up with it for one minute if there were prisoners in jail for 18 months who had no access to lawyers."
Louise Christian, who represents two of the British detainees held at Guantanamo said she was "delighted" the attorney general had "come out" and made his remarks. She asked what other government ministers were doing to secure the repatriation of the remaining UK citizens being held at Camp Delta.
President Bush announced plans for the military commissions to try 600 detainees at Camp Delta last July. Britons Feroz Abbasi from Croydon, south London, and Moazzam Begg, from Birmingham, were on the initial list of six to be tried under the controversial set-up. But they have now been taken off the list while discussions continue between the US and UK about the future of all the British detainees. Five other Britons were returned to Britain in March and were quickly freed without charge.
Lord Goldsmith and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw have previously said the US should either try detainees in accordance with international standards or return them to Britain. In his speech, Lord Goldsmith said: "While we must be flexible and be prepared to countenance some limitation of fundamental rights if properly justified and proportionate, there are certain principles on which there can be no compromise. "Fair trial is one of those - which is the reason we in the UK have been unable to accept that the US military tribunals proposed for those detained at Guantanamo Bay offer sufficient guarantees of a fair trial in accordance with international standards."
Lord Goldsmith argued the international community needs to be "flexible and imaginative" in the fight against groups like al-Qaeda. But he added the right balance must be struck between security and individual freedoms. Lord Goldsmith delivered his speech first in London and he will repeat it on Friday night in Paris to France's highest court, the Cour de Cassation.
More General Articles on International Justice
More Information on US, UN and International Law | <urn:uuid:a6479015-b06d-4b96-9946-40816eb4b167> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/163/28288.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970591 | 919 | 1.625 | 2 |
Autumn woke up. He reddened nine leaves in his favorite valley and put a field of flowers to sleep on the mountainside.
Autumn found Summer at the fairy tree. He burnt the leaves gold on the branches and in her hair.
Then Autumn went to sleep again.
None approached Summer while she wore autumn colors. None interested Summer after Autumn’s morning quickie.
Summer laid in a clover patch outside Autumn’s underworld entrance. She crept closer in the moonlight and sniffed at his door, but Autumn slept soundly within.
The fact was, Autumn woke up for a night a couple weeks ago, colored a few leaves, planted a few seeds, and went back to bed. Autumn’s work came first in his life.
Summer didn’t know how to handle being No. 2. | <urn:uuid:5f504c33-259f-4aef-bc4b-22a96d80d2ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://edpilolla.blogspot.com/2011/08/burnt-crown.html?showComment=1315192115673 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97355 | 175 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Former Liberal minister Marleau championed public medicare
OTTAWA Longtime Liberal MP and former cabinet minister Diane Marleau, whose unwavering support for public health care at times put her at odds with her own party, died Wednesday after a lengthy battle with cancer.
She was 69.
Born in Kirkland Lake, Ont., Marleau first entered politics in 1980 when she was elected to city council in Sudbury.
She made the jump to federal politics in 1988 and served as Opposition critic for energy, mines and resources until the Liberals won a majority government in 1993.
Then prime minister Jean Chrétien appointed Marleau as minister of national health and welfare, where she became known as a staunch supporter of public medicare.
Chrétien later shuffled Marleau to other portfolios, including public works and international co-operation, before dumping her from cabinet altogether in 1999.
She became an outspoken critic of the Liberal government after being sent to the backbenches.
Marleau openly clashed with Chrétien and Allan Rock, then the health minister, over what she claimed was their failure to stand up to the provinces over health care.
She was also one of several Liberal MPs who backed Paul Martin to succeed Chrétien as party leader.
Marleau, who died of colorectal cancer, is survived by her husband, Paul, and their three children, Brigitte, Don and Stephane.
The Canadian Press | <urn:uuid:ce837c5f-50e2-4f6f-a9a3-abeca37a038f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thespec.com/news-story/2268988-former-liberal-minister-marleau-championed-public-medicare/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979601 | 301 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Red River crests in Fargo without floodingFARGO, N.D. (AP) — Longtime Fargo resident Dan Holm returned from his winter travels to an unusual spring sight behind his home on River Road: There was no water lapping at his back yard.
FARGO, N.D. (AP) — Longtime Fargo resident Dan Holm returned from his winter travels to an unusual spring sight behind his home on River Road: There was no water lapping at his back yard.
After dealing with three years of record flooding from the Red River, Holm and other residents in the Fargo and Moorhead, Minn., area quietly celebrated Monday after the river crested below flood stage.
This time, the 77-year-old Holm didn't have to meander around pallets of sandbags in his neighborhood, where many vacant lots have replaced houses bought out by the city and demolished.
“It has been sad to see all these houses go,” Holm said. “A lot of people have suggested that I move out, but I'm not going anywhere. I like it here.”
Jeff Makowski, a weather service meteorologist in Grand Forks, said the Red River was measured at 17.1 feet Monday morning and “looks to be on its way down.” Flood stage is 18 feet. The river was above flood stage for a record 77 straight days last year, until the middle of June.
The river has peaked the last three years between about 37 and 41 feet, including a record crest in 2009.
Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker, the leader of the city's ongoing flood fight, marked the harmless crest with Sunday brunch and a performance of the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra. He noted that Elm Street, a low road next to the river on the city's north side, has stayed open for the first time in many years.
“I think everybody deserves a break,” Walaker said. “I hope everybody enjoys it.”
Roger Gress, director of Fargo parks, said the last three years of “water and muck” have been difficult on residents, many of whom took advantage over the weekend of an early opening for parks and two of the city's golf courses.
“I think it's one of the biggest boosts we've had for morale in the F-M area for many years,” Gress said. “It's kind of overwhelming.”
Greg McCullough, the head golf professional at Edgewood Golf Course, was only half-joking when he said the course has done as much business in the past three days as it did the first three months of last spring. It took until July 6 of last year before all 18 holes were open for play.
Asked how he was celebrating the crest, McCullough said, “We're open. And I'm working.”
One building that isn't open is so-called “Sandbag Central,” an arena-sized utility building that has been used for making millions of sandbags since 2009. The mega-garage is now serving its designated purpose of storing garbage trucks.
Terry Ludlum, the city's director of solid waste, said the break has allowed him to keep up on annual reports that have been late in the past three years. He now has his office, which is located in the utility building, to himself.
“It was one of those jobs that had to be done and folks stepped up and did it,” Ludlum said. “But I don't miss the excitement.” | <urn:uuid:4b10828e-abb7-4de3-b514-b0b08a329fd7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jamestownsun.com/event/article/id/156963/publisher_ID/10/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988898 | 757 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Spreading the happy news
When your little one arrives, no parent can wait to spread the news! From the simple to the creative, from the custom-printed to the do-it-yourself, you have a lot of choices available to you.
Most commonly, birth announcements are sent via the local postal carrier. Such announcements, sent by the baby's parents, are usually in the form of a card with the baby's birth statistics. A picture of the baby can be included as an added treat. You may choose to have these imprinted with your baby's stats. Adorable blank, flat cards can be purchased and printed on your computer printer, using various fonts and ink colors. There are also some not-so-common ways parents can spread the happy news amongst family and friends.
An announcement from an older child presenting his new sibling is a nice way to include a big brother or sister in the festivities. On a similar note, Kendeyl Johansen from Park City, Utah, took a picture of her toddler son with her newborn twins. The picture was printed on a greeting card with the caption "Help, I'm surrounded!" Vital statistics of the twins were included.
Is your baby due to be born around the holidays? If you distribute a holiday newsletter to your family and friends, use that time to announce the main event of the year. If baby happens to arrive right after Christmas or the end of Hannukah, send out a New Year's newsletter instead. Everyone will understand the lateness, as you were a little busy earlier in the holiday season.
Take your career to heart -- or your mate's -- and put on your creative hat! If there's an attorney in the family, compose a legal brief as your announcement. A chef can dictate the ingredients of a perfect baby on a recipe card-type announcement. If school is in session, your baby's "grades" are sure to be an A+ on his report card.
High tech announcements
With today's easy access to printers, scanners, digital cameras, computers and telecommunication equipment, the opportunities for creativity are endless. The phone will undoubtedly start ringing off the hook before you're settled in with your new baby. Change your voicemail or answering machine announcement to include the answers to the questions your callers are likely to ask about the baby, and include a couple of your baby's gurgles. (You can return calls when it's convenient.)
You might also want to make your own computerized flyer, which can include a digital, copied or scanned picture of the baby. The flyer can double as an envelope if you wish. Just fold it in thirds, secure the bottom according to postal regulations, address, stamp and mail. This is an inexpensive way to produce an original announcement.
Build a home page on the Internet, which you can update with pictures and milestones as often as baby's schedule will allow. Include your baby's birth story as well.
A picture of a bare baby lying on his tummy can make a beautiful announcement. Tie a ribbon around his waist. Use a pipe cleaner to elevate a tag saying "from God," "made in heaven," "sent by an angel" or your own sweet sentiment. Don't forget to include birth statistics on the back.
Black and white film has become popular again. Lay baby on his back with a thick big bow tied around his waist. The bow can conveniently cover baby's privates. Use black and white film and snap a picture. After the picture is developed, color the ribbon pink or blue with a permanent marker. Next, copy the picture on stock (card-type) paper with a color copier designed to copy pictures. The end result is a black and white picture of your baby with an attention-gathering pink or blue ribbon. Add birth info and proudly distribute.
When Storm Weaver's son was born many years ago, she wanted to do something special. "I made a hundred little paper cups with plant seeds in them. I labeled them with what they were and put in little pouches of starter plant soil." Included with each cup was a card with a poem written by Storm including such words as "blossom" and "flourish", ending with her son's birth statistics.
Whether you announce your baby's birth traditionally, creatively or technically, it will be a unique one! Whatever you decide, don't forget to save an announcement for baby's scrapbook -- and hold a spot in the book for his first birthday invitation, too. | <urn:uuid:8e58ec72-ed6a-4fe9-b7aa-0d0db91c165f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pregnancyandbaby.com/baby/articles/943943/its-a-boy-its-a-girl-babys-big-premiere | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964337 | 923 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Is Social Marketing Forcing Business Websites to Disappear?
Why do you Place Social Buttons on a Website?
During a discussion on LinkedIn, a gentleman posed the question about not being able to understand the reason social media buttons are on main business websites. I thought it might be nice to cover some of the main purposes of social media strategies and what can happen from incorporating social media into your main website do’s and don’ts.
The first spot to cover is this. What is the purpose of social media share and follow buttons? The easiest answer is syndicating your web content. Allowing for options is usually a good thing, but there are times when options are not always so great. For instance, you have a web page specifically designed for capturing leads – also known as a landing page. Since this is a specific page for lead capturing, why would you want to make social media buttons available on the page?
Some say having a spiel of share buttons available on a landing page is good. Reason being the share buttons allow for your landing page to be shared with peers and others throughout your networks. While others say landing page design should include no outbound links to other locations, as this can lead to no lead; because you allowed to many options for the visitor.
Although it may seem like a great thought to allow for sharing of your landing page, truthfully; not so hot. The value from sharing a landing page can come later. For example when you page is done and you post it somewhere by sharing. Then you hope for the disbursement of your page on those social networks without the need to have the page full of social sharing buttons, which then always one to two options on the page at best. This is an exact benefit of having a strong social network doing the work for you.
By allowing fewer options on the landing page, your conversion rate for the page can increase in fold if designed properly. As for a main website, people are not being asked to leave your main site because you have placed share buttons to social networking sites on it. Your visitors are being asked to share your content with others as to spread the word about your business. This is the same principal behind the landing page almost, except they have the option to quickly navigate away from your main site.
Why Place Social Share Buttons on a Website?
Well, this one I chalk up to user discretion. Some believe social and follow buttons are great while other find those buttons to be somewhat cluttering. Some also believe that share and follow buttons drive visitors away from your site as other believe they are access for easy web promotion of your site.
Although it is at the site owners discretion to decide, I personally have been playing around with several share and follow button options on single page entities and full scale websites. At this point, my finding’s are still in a testing phase. But believe treating a main site should be more like a landing page. Less options is better.
It was also mentioned by Peep Laja that unless you have a high number of like’s, +1′s or followers, there really is not much benefit or need to display or apply social share buttons. I tend to agree with this assumption. Larger companies showing those large numbers on those buttons have something to show off while the smaller companies usually have such a small number of likes, +1,’s and followers; it almost seems as more of a detour ant to publicize those numbers than that of a benefit. This is more of a social trigger by human nature.
Social Media Marketing Tools
Keep this in mind as well when deciding on whether or not to place share buttons on your pages or web content. Now a day’s there are tons of browser plugins and social sharing options available directly from browsers. Because of these easily installed plugins for web browsers, it may be just as easy not to include sharing buttons on a main website or even a landing page. These buttons allow for easy sharing directly from the web browser plugins, but the final choice is yours. The downside of not placing those share buttons on your web content is relying on someone have those plugins installed on the web browser. Question being, what if they do not have those plugins installed?
Providing Inbound Traffic to the Site
For example, how many times a day do you find yourself on a site like, lets say LinkedIn; and then going to some article somewhere else? I bet it happens more than you realize. These social sites can be full of links to great content to read. As a matter of fact, I usually end up going directly from one of those social sites to a main business site because of some title of interest or a catchy image on the social site. Yes, this social engagement is a great way to better understand your customer base, but is also meant to provide lead options too.
Plus, there is one other thing about going to a main site. You can not capture a lead on all these other sites so easily. The first reason, the visitor can be led a stray elsewhere very quickly on these social networking sites. Secondly, not all social sites have a way to capture a lead from within the site itself. You want to lead the visitors to your main website to capture the lead with no distractions or possibilities of going anywhere else. This would be another reason I lean to less options is better.
Truth of the matter is this thought. If you do not provide quality content and engage user properly on those social networking websites, your efforts can go unnoticed; resulting in much wasted time. If you are not creating this engagement and quality content that keeps the visitors coming back. The likely hood of those visitors going to a main website are even less likely to occur. Thus providing little or not inbound traffic.
If you have decided to place those great share buttons on a website, ask this first. Is the content you are willing to share worth being shared? Meaning is it quality. Does it teach or inform someone something of signification? Does it contribute to something worthwhile? These are some of the main points I feel are of relevance to the topic at hand. So if you can answer these questions as yes, then adding share functionality to your pages is not such a bad ideal. Otherwise consider other aspects and possibilities and chose at your discretion.
“Remember – sharing is great”.
- Learn why followers, engagement and relevance lead to real growth on Twitter #LetsDoBusiness business.twitter.com/letsdobusiness via @TwitterSmallBiz 1 day ago
- Cayenne Cinnamon Ribs With Maple Glaze pinterest.com/pin/6889106927… 4 days ago
- Link Worx Seo | LinkedIn - s.shr.lc/12L3RpA via @Shareaholic 4 days ago
- @analyticsseo Great Site. 5 days ago
- Enhanced Adwords campaigns for Display Advertising fb.me/BhRTkzab 5 days ago | <urn:uuid:32e6cbaf-1be0-4d07-9eae-0fcb68645241> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://linkworxseo.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/is-social-marketing-forcing-business-websites-to-disappear/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944386 | 1,437 | 1.648438 | 2 |
I stumbled across some of these recently. Some of you may remember these shows and locations. If anyone has more to add, they would be interesting to see. In some cases, there is no "then."The Happy Days house now.The Brady Bunch house, then and now
For the sitcom, they put a fake window on the house to make it look bigger. The house actually has only two bedrooms. The current owners also added a fence to keep folks from peeking into the windows. This was unnecessary anyway because there was never any filming done inside the house. Wayne Manor, then and now
People have actually knocked on the door asking to take a tour. However, nothing was ever filmed inside the house. Most scenes were filmed at Culver Studios in California.
In this photo, you can see the Gomer Pyle Set in the background as the Batmobile whizzes by.
When Batman and Robin sent the crooks to the big house they went to Gotham State Penitentiary (which is actually the Statesville Prison located in Joliet Ill.)
The bat cave set inside Culver City Studios.Beaver Cleaver's house in 1963 and now
.The set of The Andy Griffith Show
."While perceived to be hometown, USA, the actual location of Mayberry was not in North Carolina, but in Culver City, California - just down the street from the 1965 Los Angeles race riots. But who cares? Many still enjoy in reruns, the wholesomeness of a make-believe world that has yet to be duplicated."
Myers Lake, as it was affectionately called, is shown during the opening 'fishing hole' credits and used in several episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. The lake used on the show is actually Franklin Canyon Lake (originally Upper Franklin Canyon Reservoir), located at 2600 Franklin Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, California.Beverly Hillbillies mansion with the "cement pond" in the back
.The Archie Bunker house
Last edited by Rob on Sat Jun 13, 2009 1:35 am, edited 1 time in total. | <urn:uuid:bb6fa0e3-16f7-45fe-8a97-6ba3ec2bd07d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.elvis-collectors.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=46092&mobile=mobile | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96355 | 431 | 1.578125 | 2 |
A new Sott report, featuring yours truly.
From as far back as 2008, video recordings of strange and disturbing noises that seem to come from the sky have been appearing on the internet. In the last 12 months, many more of these ‘strange noise’ videos have been recorded and uploaded by people from many different parts of the globe.
The precise origin and meaning of this phenomenon is, as yet, unknown. Are we dealing with a cosmic version of the ‘bell tolling’ for life on planet earth, or is there a more mundane explanation?
The Sott Report investigates.embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt Share | <urn:uuid:f1160309-27a4-43bd-88ed-4fbbf57d9fd7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://joequinn.net/tag/werid-noises/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958259 | 136 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Murphy: Charles, among many other things, you've worked as a teacher and have been involved in more than a few successful writing workshops. How that has influenced your writing, helped it or hindered it?
Salzberg: Overall, it's helped my own writing. Seeing what works and doesn't work with other writers, no matter how good or how experienced, can't help but make you a better writer. You learn to take things apart, and if you do that and then try to put them back together, you learn how things really work. Now this doesn't necessarily mean you can always do that, but thinking about it is good nevertheless. Also, it's inspiring to deal with other writers and see them grow. I never fail to come home from a class energized, though that doesn't necessarily mean I sit down and write. In fact, I'll do just about anything to avoid writing-but I think that just goes with the territory.
Murphy: As a teacher, if you had to say: has the writing of your students gotten better over time? Worse? The same? What are the most common mistakes you see young writers making?
Salzberg: I have people who take classes with me over and over and I'm pleased to say that almost all of them have improved. This isn't necessarily because I'm a great or even good teacher, it's because they work at improving. They listen to what the others in the class say, weigh the suggestions, which means they're thinking about writing, and then try to make those suggestions work in their own work. And sometimes, you can learn more critiquing someone else's work than you can when your work is critiqued-which is what I meant by improving my own writing.
I'm also fortunate in that several of my students have gone on to publish books or magazine articles. For instance, Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada) started her book in my classes, though it wasn't a book and it wasn't fiction at first. She just came in and started writing these fascinating essays about working in the magazine world. But there are lots of others who are publishing now, sometimes more than I am, which is very rewarding.
The most common mistake, by far, is telling not showing. Another is people who can't organize a thought, which means they can't organize a sentence or a paragraph or a page. And a third is people who think writing means they have to learn another language. Nope. I think some of the best advice I've ever seen is: Write the way you speak, but on your best day, not your worst.
Murphy: As an editor, you evaluate novel manuscripts for Algonkian, and others. Can you tell us something about the evaluation process? What do you look for? Is your intent to determine what is preventing the ms from being a publishable product?
Salzberg: It's not easy to talk about the evaluation process, because it changes with each manuscript I receive. I can tell you how I go about it, though. The first thing I do is note the competency of the writing. No matter how good a story might be, if the writer can't tell it well, it's not going to travel. Conversely, if the writing is terrific, the story sometimes matters less. Next, I look at the book as a whole--does the story hold together? Is it interesting? Is the voice compelling? Are the characters believable? Do the characters act and interact in a way that makes sense? But overall, it's just a matter of having done much too much reading over the years and getting a "gut" feeling about a book. It's kind of like one of the Supreme Court Justice's comment on pornography--I know it when I see it.
Once I've answered at least some of those questions, I'll make suggestions as to how I think the book can be improved. It's funny, because the word "publishable" doesn't mean much to me because so much that is eminently publishable isn't published, and that often has nothing to do with the quality of the book or the writing. Instead, it has to do with the commerciability of a novel, and that's impossible to predict. So, what I try to do is help writers write the best possible book they can write--and then, like a child, they just send it off into the world and see if it can find a home. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees...would that there were.
Murphy: By the way, which publishing houses and agencies do you work with?
Salzberg: Viking/Penguin, Dell, Simon and Schuster, Henry Holt, St. Martin's, M. Evans, Hyperion; and agencies include Trident Media Group, Peter Rubie Agency, Graybill & English, and the Spieler Agency, among others.
Murphy: What are some of the typical mistakes you see writers making with novel manuscripts? Weak hooks? Flat settings? Character and conflict issues?
Salzberg: Typical mistakes, include flat, unrealistic dialogue, motivations that don't make sense, telling rather than showing, lack of detail, boring writing, uninteresting characters, plots that don't hold together, and clichés. Man, I could go on and on, but I won't.
Murphy: Your book that made the NYT bestseller list. What can you tell us about it?
Salzberg: The last book I wrote was as a ghostwriter, so I can't really divulge the title, though it's been on the non-fiction NY Times bestseller list for the past two weeks. An agent I'd worked with before approached me and asked if I'd be interested in this project and, because it involved sports, politics, business and literature, I jumped at the opportunity. And, as with other books I've ghostwritten or walked on as a collaborator, it turned out to be a terrific experience.
Murphy: You are the first person profiled for "The Literary Life" who has had experience ghostwriting. Please talk about that, including pros and cons that the average writer and/or reader might not necessarily associate with that endeavor?
Salzberg: I got into ghosting accidentally. A friend had written a profile of a famous men's designer and he wanted her to write his book. But she had just taken a magazine editorial job and she suggested me. He met me for fifteen minutes, took a liking to me, although I knew absolutely nothing about men's fashion, which to me consisted of choosing which T-shirt went with my jeans. It turned out to be a wonderful experience in terms of working with this man. But it taught me that ghostwriting can be a nightmare if you're working with the wrong person. It also taught me that I had to submerge my feelings about how the book should be written, because I was hired as the "voice" of another person. My magazine work came in handy, because when you write for magazines you have to take on the voice of that particular magazine and, in many cases, submerge your own style-not always the case, but certainly the majority of magazines don't cotton to individual, idiosyncratic voices.
Okay, the pros: It's usually a nice paycheck and if the book goes wrong, your name isn't on it so you don't get the blame, i.e., the stigma attached to your career. Another pro is that you get to learn about something you wouldn't necessarily learn about, and it might even be something that's interesting.
The cons: working with the wrong kind of person: someone who micro-manages; someone who thinks they should be writing the book, not you. Another con, if the book does extremely well, critically or commercially, your name isn't on it, though everyone I've worked with gave me a nice credit inside the book.
Murphy: You started out at New York Magazine. How did that come about? And where did that take you?
Salzberg: You know, getting into magazine work was absolutely accidental. I was an English major in college and always wanted to write serious, literary novels. Unfortunately, when I got into the real world I realized that I could do that or I could eat and pay rent, but I couldn't do both at the same time. So I had to go out and get a job. And since, as a lit major, I had no discernible skills other than typing and being able to string sentences together, I took a friend's advice and got a job in the mail room at New York magazine, with promises that I'd move up quickly to an editorial position. To me, at that age, late 20s, quickly meant three months. Other than sorting and delivering mail, shining the occasional chandelier and moving furniture around, it was a great experience because I got to shoot the breeze with writers like John Simon, Ken Auletta, Jon Bradshaw, Steve Brill, and catch glimpses of Pete Hamill, Norman Mailer and Gay Talese-this was the heyday of New York, when the legendary Clay Felker was still the editor.
I used to watch the writers roll in around ten, ten-thirty, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, talk on the phone, shoot the breeze with the editors, then go to lunch at noon and come back at three, smelling of alcohol, then leave the building no later than 4:30, and I thought, hell, I can do that. So I pitched an editor a few ideas, she asked me to do one during my lunch hour and I did. They didn't buy it but assigned me another one that they did, and I sold that first one to the Daily News Sunday magazine, so I was off and running as a freelance writer.
Murphy: You've written some very successful non-fiction. Presumably that grew out of the magazine writing? How difficult is it for a novice to break into the magazine writing world?
Salzberg: For me it was easy, too easy, to break in. I was kind of cocky and thought I had it made, what with publishing the first two pieces I wrote-without any journalism background-and to major periodicals, for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500, which wasn't bad in those days. But for the rest of that year I think I only made another $1,500, so I came down to earth pretty quickly. But once I had those clips, I was in pretty good shape and other major assignments came, slowly at first, but then things picked up.
Murphy: Lastly, and far from least important, you are also a fiction writer, and have described it as your first love. Do you find that writing less "creative" material helps you maintain a focus and drive to attempt polished fiction?
Salzberg: At first, I looked down on journalists and non-fiction writers because I thought, "what's so hard about that?" But I learned that any kind of writing stretches your muscles. And I think I became a better fiction writer because of writing non-fiction, especially writing to word counts. I learned how to be more economical, more precise, more attentive to detail, all things that are very important to fiction writers. And I also learned that there isn't that much difference between writing fiction and non-fiction-there's a big crossover, using fictional techniques for non-fiction writing. I hate the term "creative non-fiction," but I'm afraid there is some truth in that.
Murphy: Other work(s) on the way?
Salzberg: I finished a quirky detective novel, called Swann's Last Song, a while ago and it's been with a publishing house for over a year, during which time I've done a couple of revisions. If it is accepted, I'll have to write a sequel--part of the deal. I also co-wrote a kids' movie, which was just made, so we might do a sequel to that, too. Otherwise, I'm very busy reading for all the writing classes I teach.
Murphy: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
Salzberg: Without a doubt, Saul Bellow-I remember when I was just a kid picking up books like The Victim, or Henderson the Rain King, or Seize the Day, or Herzog-and then, one of the most significant influences on me as a writer was Nabokov's Lolita, which I can read over and over again and still not get everything out of it that's there. And Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, or his short stories. I could go on, but I won't...
Murphy: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs?
Salzberg: I spent two weeks in an MFA program and quit. It's not that I'm anti MFA, I think that if you want it, fine. You'll need it if you want to teach; or if you want to network. But I think the way you really learn to write is to read, read, read-and then write, write, write. Writers groups or writing classes, if you get a good teacher, will do just as much for you as an MFA. Did Saul Bellow get an MFA? Ernest Hemingway? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Philip Roth? Margaret Drabble? Vladimir Nabokov? It's a relatively new phenomenon. But again, I would never suggest that someone who wants an MFA not get one. I just don't think it'll necessarily make you a better writer.
Murphy: Has your experience tended to demystify the publishing process (for good or bad-or both) or has it made it even more special?
Salzberg: Absolutely, yes, it has demystified it, but certainly not made it more special. Every writer I know talks about getting out of the business, doing something else. But unfortunately, most of us have no other marketable skills. Today, most of publishing is about making money, not necessarily publishing good books. And that's sad. But there is hope-small presses, University Presses and other independent publishers are now filling those roles. Unfortunately, I think publishing has gotten Hollywood-ized, shooting for the blockbuster.
Murphy: Lastly: any advice for aspiring writers?
Salzberg: Read, read, read. Then write, write, write. Then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. And never give up. Perseverance, that's the key.
About the Interviewer
Sean Murphy has had his short stories and poetry published in a variety of literary magazines and is currently seeking representation for his first
novel. Happy to be employed at one of the few surviving dot.coms, he lives in Reston, Va and conducts interviews for WDS/Algonkian. His email is [email protected] | <urn:uuid:2e4673d2-1d9b-4c66-baca-5a72379ed6ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.webdelsol.com/Algonkian/interview-salzberg.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980502 | 3,144 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Jane Kirkpatrick has written several short series based on historical characters and events that she brings to life with her delightful style and expert attention to detail. Each one has become my “new favorite,” and A FLICKERING LIGHT is no exception. This coming-of-age novel is based on the author’s grandmother and her passion for photography at a time when photography was considered a dangerous occupation for a man, and women were seldom considered suitable for the profession. In addition to the enlightening voyage into history, Kirkpatrick introduces us to the mores of the time and to characters who struggle with the boundaries that are imposed upon them by those mores.
Struggling with issues of right and wrong do not play as large a role in modern times as it did in earlier times. There is little mention of sin anymore when considering life decisions. In the Hebrew, to sin means “to miss the mark” or “to take the wrong path.” And, for the believer, nothing can restore one to peace but repentance, or turning away from the wrong path and getting on the right one. In light of this, throughout the first part of the story, the reader knows that the attraction brewing between a young Jessie Ann Gaebele and her forlornly married employer/mentor is not going to have a happy ending. And while we want them both to be happy, we are aware that going against one’s beliefs and morals is not the way to achieve it.
Jessie’s family is much like many we have known and loved. Each member has his or her own unique personality, like little brother Roy with his generous heart and pitiful stutter and older sister Lilly with her judgmental attitude and too keen insights. It may be difficult for some to embrace the deep effect each one’s behavior has on the others, but that was the culture and times. It is still true today, but we have somehow managed to weaken the borders and overlook the boundaries. Some would argue that it’s been for the best, others would disagree. In either case, the author gives us more to think about than “when will they finally get into bed.”
We often compliment a book by calling it a “page-turner,” and I thoroughly enjoy my thrillers. But Jane Kirkpatrick writes books that are to be savored and considered, with no rush to the finish. For example, as FJ endures yet another hurtful conversation with his wife, Kirkpatrick writes, “FJ took the words like stones and put them in the bag labeled Disappointing Husband and Poor Father. The bag never filled, just became heavier and heavier.” A FLICKERING LIGHT is the first in a new series, and it is guaranteed to make you look forward to learn what happens next.
Reviewed by Maggie Harding on November 13, 2011
A Flickering Light: Portraits of the Heart, Book 1 | <urn:uuid:224f4a64-b223-4a24-81b7-aad5e0f3718e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bookreporter.com/print/45722 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980086 | 621 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Knott's Berry Farm Log Ride, the Park's Oldest But Still Most-Popular Attraction, Gets a Rehab
No, not Gladys the Toothless 'Ho of Beach and Crescent but Knott's Timber Mountain Log Ride that opened as the Calico Log Ride in 1969, which could mean it was there the first time I entered the park holding my grandma's hand, although I'm thinking that was earlier because the only rides I recall were the train and stagecoach.
|Photos courtesy of Knott's Berry Farm|
|Log ride riders Bud Hurlbut and Walter Knott, who you can almost hear saying, "How'd that hippie get in here?"|
Housed in an eight-story building, the ride includes 24,000 gallons of water sending logs past mechanical figures and taxidermied animals before reaching the finale: a 42-foot drop. It's still Knott's most popular ride, according to the park's publicity team, whose checks are no longer signed by the Walter Knott family but Cedar Fair Entertainment Co. of Ohio.
|The log ride is still a thrill, but Knott's says the work starting this month will make it better.|
Choke down those corn dogs at your own peril.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook! | <urn:uuid:8075ca02-372a-47e5-99db-5167c338d5c6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2013/01/knotts_berry_farm_log_ride.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951641 | 273 | 1.578125 | 2 |
How does PATHS work?
Utilizing breakthrough proprietary technology, PATHS On-Line Theater Presentations feature various Modules that assist your subconscious in eliminating certain specific stress blockages that can create energy flow problems, resulting in unwanted physical, mental, psychological, and emotional challenges that may make it difficult for you from carrying out your conscious goals.
On-Line Theater Presentations are powered by RDT Generation II (Rapid Data Transfer™ )
to safely deliver Millions of instructions to the subconscious that are employed over a 7 day period. These instructions can help your mind to greatly increase your ability to accomplish things that have been difficult for you in the past.
More about PATHS RDT technology
Will I feel anything?
Because PATHS helps you to remove harmful energy blockages, many people report much better sleep in just 24-48 hours. There have also been reports of people feeling an immediate sense of joy and gratitude just after watching their first Theater Presentation. Click here
for Success Stories.
Some people can take weeks or months to feel a difference in themselves, and a few do not experience any transformation at all.
When using certain PATHS Modules, some people experience cognitive dissonance. This can occur when destructive ideals or paradigms that a person holds, and the instructions from PATHS, are contradictory of one another. A period of emotional tension can result from this as the person re-evaluates their beliefs.
What is the PATHS Satisfaction Guarantee?
The PATHS 60-Day, No Questions Asked, 100% Money Back Guarantee is vaild for first time users, for one Module only. Click Here
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What computer requirements are there?
PATHS is PC compatible and works well on newer Apples and on most Mac operating systems that mimic a PC. Any version of Windows will work. Make sure that you have at least 256 MB of RAM, it will work, but not reliably with less RAM. If you have trouble viewing the Theater presentation, either open a new browser and login from there, or restart your computer to clear out any memory conflicts, and then login.
Make sure you have stereo speakers set up, or stereo headphones are even better. (If you have a hearing impairment, PATHS will still work for you, however, you should turn the volume all the way down)
How do I know it is working?
Examine your thoughts, emotions and physical body for your desired
transformations. As each individual has different energetic blockages and patterns to
be cleared, and will naturally notice results differently, you may find
it helpful before starting a new module to write down a list of issues related
to the Module you have chosen and rate their severity on a scale of 1 to 10.
Because the transformations may happen subtly over time, it is sometimes not
until you compare where you are to where you were that you notice how much
Are there any side effects?
There are a few side effects that may be experienced.
As explained in the NUTRITION
"The brain, to function properly, needs adequate nutrition...Amino acids and minerals are of particular importance in getting the most productivity out of your unconscious brain."
Some people, IF they do not have sufficient amino acids and/or minerals in their system (from either a poor diet or lack of proper supplementation), will experience periods of tiredness as the unconscious part of their brain attempts to process the instructions but does not have the "energy" (proper nutrition-amino acids and minerals) to do it. This is easily remedied by supplementing your diet with amino acids (spirulina is the best source for that) and a good multi-mineral.
Another possible side effect is cognitive dissonance. Please read description under above question "Will I feel anything?".
And, it is possible to experience something called the Herxheimer Reaction. The Herxheimer Reaction is a Healing Crisis that applies to all types of healing. This means you may begin to feel worse before you feel better because your body is actually eliminating the source of your symptoms.
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
~ Norman Vincent Peale
How much Spirulina should I take?
Optimum Spirulina dosage varies from person to person. If you are feelings foggy, tired or irritable, try increasing your dosage by 1000mg per day. When you reach a day where you felt better the day before, go back to the dosage from that day, and that is your current optimum.
Note: Take spirulina in the morning/early afternoon. Too close to bedtime can disrupt sleep.
Can anybody do this?
Children may use PATHS only if consent by a guardian is given and the PATHS office is contacted regarding the situation.
Persons using blood thinners cannot eat Spirulina so they must get amino acid supplementation from a different source if they want to use PATHS.
If you are experiencing an imminent, life-threatening illness, you should not use PATHS.
If a person has mental challenges that require the need of a care-taker, they should not use PATHS.
Persons with PKU cannot eat Spirulina so they must get amino acid supplementation from a different source if they want to use PATHS.
Any person who is blind and deaf cannot use PATHS.
Note: Persons with Epilepsy, or those who have ever experienced a seizure, can use PATHS but must not look at the Theater Presentation. Turn your head and listen to it only. Also, for the deaf, you may watch your Theater only.
Will this work on everybody?
No, not everyone qualifies and is able to succeed while using PATHS. This is why we have a 60-Day, 100% Money Back Guarantee. Please Click Here
for more information.
How long before I begin producing results?
PATHS begins working during the first viewing of your customized Theater presentation. The transformations you experience depend upon your drive and desire to produce the changes supported by the PATHS instructions.
What if I do not feel anything?
Not seeing benefits can be due to incorrect information. If you are not feeling any benefits within one month, please contact the home office at [email protected] so that we can assist you in getting the most possible benefit out of your Modules.
I have allergies, can I still use this?
Yes. PATHS is not a medicine or supplement. PATHS uses cues, or instructions, that are given to your subconscious. If you are, however, allergic to Spirulina, you should find an alternate source for amino acid supplementation.
Do I have to continue using PATHS to continue producing benefits?
PATHS does not guarantee any specific time-frame for removing energy blockages.
That being said, some Module instructions have no limit to the amount of transformation that can occur... The longer you use them, the more you can grow.
Some Modules will aid you in eliminating destructive habits and replacing them with productive habits. New habits can usually be internalized after 60-90 days.
Some Modules help your mind to assist your body in correcting physiological issues. These Modules benefits will only be experienced during use of the Module.
However, every person is different and will produce different results.
How do I change Modules?
You may change all of your Modules up to once a month. This is free of charge! To change them, simply email us at [email protected] and let us know which Modules you would like, and which they are to replace.
If I start to feel unusual what can I do?
If you are feeling unusual, please refer to the question above "Are there any side effects?" This will help you determine the cause of feeling unusual.
How many PATHS modules can I run at once?
As few as two (sleep plus one other of your choice) and as many as five (sleep plus four others of your choice) on one Theater.
If you would like more, you may sign up for a second Theater Presentation and add up to four more Modules (plus sleep). This may be done as many times as you would like.
Can I watch the PATHS Theater Presentation more than once a week?
PATHS RDT Generation II transfers millions of instructions per minute into your brain. Two to three minutes of viewing and listening per Module are all it takes to deliver enough instructions into one's brain to last approximately 7-10 days. However, there is evidence that if one watches the presentation more than once a week it does encourage the conscious mind to "get in sync" with the subconscious more quickly.
Will my subscription work on another person?
The information you enter into the PATHS application is unique to you. PATHS then integrates this information into the process and it will have no effect, positive or negative on another individual.
There are people that do not believe this and try anyway. You are welcome to do so also. It only works on the person that it was programmed to work on.
What will happen if I do not give accurate personal information?
It will not work, you will have wasted your money.
PATHS utilizes the information that is unique to you (that you entered in the PATHS application) and customizes the Theater presentation that you spend 3-12 minutes a week watching. If it is customized with inaccurate information it will not work.
What if I miss a week watching the PATHS?
It is not recommended to miss an entire week if you go 5-6 days between viewing, or 7-10 days between viewing it is inconsequential. However, if you start waiting 12 days or more between viewing the effects will not be as consistent/effective.
Does it matter what time of day I watch the PATHS Theater Presentation?
However, it should be noted that some persons may experience slight disorientation (similar to what one feels when awakened out of a deep sleep) for 10-20 minutes after viewing the Theater Presentation. Therefore, it is advisable to refrain from driving or operating any mechanical devices for a period of at least 30 minutes.
What is the Classic Theater option?
If for some reason you do not like, or cannot use, the Generation II version of the On-Line Theater Presentation, you may click on the "Classic Theater" button to view your Modules in the original RDT format.
Please explain all the options in the RDT Generation II Theater.
After logging into your account, you will click your way to the below screen with the colored circles on it.
All you have to do is click on any color that you feel you most want to click on. It is recommended that you really take advantage of this opportunity to develop your awareness of your inner feeling. You can select the color on impulse by simply moving your mouse and clicking on the first color you can get to. Or, really try to feel which ones resonates with you the most in that moment.
There is no wrong answer here as to which color you should pick. Any color will cause you to have a powerful presentation. The different colored circles provide a fun way to have you involved in increasing the variation of how the Module's instructions can be received by your subconscious.
Once you select the color, the next screen will appear. Your particular Theater will vary according to what Module you have active in your account, but for the most part, it will look like this:
The top left box displays your own personal data. This allows you to make sure that the information in your account is accurate because an incorrect birth date, birthplace or name spelling will usually render the Module ineffective for you. You no longer need to use the Control Panel menu option to verify this information. Another benefit of this data box is that it allows a stronger conscious to subconscious association with the Module's instructions.
The bottom three boxes are live indications of Quantum Energetic FeedbackTM as well as showing the active state of the Theater. These are very visually appealing and fun ways to display this information, which has very specific values that are understood by your subconscious mind. Each movement or motion of any activity in these boxes corresponds to very specific activities related to your Module instructions. Although only your subconscious mind can translate the meaning of these indicators, having your conscious awareness see the visual equivalent enhances your experience by also having a stronger conscious to subconscious association.
The data box and the three bottom indicator boxes can be moved around the screen to any place you wish. All you have to do is click on any of them and drag them around with your mouse. Play with this option and placing them where you feel they sit the best. Take advantage of this opportunity to develop your awareness of your inner feeling.
The top right box serves three purposes. There is a background button that you can click on if you want to turn the module picture in the theater on or off. You can toggle between on or off as many times and as often as you like.
The central bar is a progress indicator for each Module. As one Module plays, the green will fill in more and more from left to right. When it gets to the far right, the Module is completed. Any successive Module that you have in your On-Line Theater Presentation will reset this progress indicator when it starts playing and will progressively grow green moving towards the right as it plays.
The Kinesthetic Input is where you have an opportunity to adjust the Quantum Energetic FeedbackTM . Simply click on it with your mouse and move it left or right and leave it anywhere that you feel it is best for you in that moment. You can also do this as often and as many times as you want. Again, please take advantage of this opportunity to develop your awareness of your inner feeling.
The central screen is the main theater presentation screen for the Modules. Each Module will have its own unique picture for viewing pleasure, as did the original RDT Theater Presentations. However, you have the choice to turn off the picture in the new RDT GEN II Theater. If the picture is turned off, you can see the aetheric energy (mist) much more prominently as well as other active components of the main theater presentation screen.
While your Theater Presentation is playing, you visually focus on anything you like. Many people like to focus on the central circle, some like to focus on the aetheric energy or different parts of the picture.
The third screenshot to be explained is about prompts that you must answer as your theater is playing. This is what they will look like:
These prompts are necessary to keep the theater presentation as optimized as possible for your benefit. Many complex considerations have been developed into very simple YES or NO questions that you must click on. When these questions come up during your On-Line Theater Presentation, simply answer as honest as you can for that particular moment.
Once your RDT GEN II Theater Presentation finishes, you will be given a link to click on to complete the session. Pay close attention to the information on that page and follow any recommendations.
Meditation Theater FAQ
What is different about PATHS Meditation Theater and other meditation products?
PATHS Meditation Theater is customized with your personal information for optimum benefits. The Theater also includes PATHS exclusive subconscious cues to supercharge your experience. These cues will assist you in getting the best possible experience from your Meditation Theater by increasing the production of calming and favorable brain chemicals as well as promoting a sense of peace and stillness during and after viewing your Theater.
What can PATHS Meditation Theater do for me?
PATHS Meditation Theater can produce a calm and enjoyable meditative state in which your mind is able to clear away mental and emotional clutter. The absence of this clutter presents you with a reduction in stress levels, physical, mental and emotional health and well-being, improved mental clarity, increases in healthy brain chemicals and reductions in detrimental ones, increased awareness, and much more.
PATHS Meditation Theater is specifically designed to help maximize benefits with PATHS Modules.
How does the PATHS Meditation Theater work?
Once you sign up for the Meditation Theater you will log in and be presented with a Theater. Get comfortable and limit any distractions. Follow the prompts to begin viewing.
Once you begin viewing the soundtrack and subconscious cues will take you into a delightful meditative state.
You may stop and restart the Theater whenever you wish and if you like, you can play it again. Just go back to Theater page and start again.
How long does the Theater last?
The Meditation Theater last approximately 30 minutes.
How often can I watch it?
You may watch it whenever you would like and as many times as you like.
How do I pay the monthly subscription?
When you make the initial purchase you agree to a monthly recurring fee of $7.95 on the card used. This is automatically withdrawn every month until canceled. You may cancel at any time.
Can I use the Meditation Theater in addition to other PATHS Products?
Yes. Any PATHS Products can be used in conjunction with one another and compliment each other wonderfully!
How do I download the Meditation Theater Soundtrack to my computer?
Just log in and go to your Theater. Before beginning there is an option to download the soundtrack to your computer. Click on it and save the file.
Terms and Conditions | <urn:uuid:8f60b720-3b54-4d44-912f-89e49b1d4302> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.paths-loa.com/faq.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937046 | 3,600 | 1.804688 | 2 |
The State of the Union--and Arizona STEM education
When President Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union address this evening, several Arizonans with ties to the state's biosciences sector will be in attendance. Most prominent among them will be the medical team that cared for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot Jan. 8 in Tucson, including University Medical Center physicians Randall Friese, Michael Limole and Peter Rhee, and intensive-care nurse Tracy Culbert.
Also on hand for the address will be someone who has spent less time in the spotlight: South Mountain Community College freshman Diego Vasquez, who will join Dr. Rhee and other honored guests in the First Lady's box.
Vasquez, the White House announced Jan. 24, will be recognized for his participation as a member of Laveen Cesar Chavez High School's 12-person team that participated in the 2009-2010 Lemelson-MIT Program’s InvenTeams celebration of innovation.
According to the White House, the Cesar Chavez team designed a "fully adjustable motorized chair for medically fragile individuals." Vasquez and fellow Cesar Chavez student Antonio Hernandez represented the team at the White House Science Fair in October 2010, where he met President Obama and demonstrated how the prototype chair works.
At the October event, the president singled out the Arizona students for commendation:
We can think of Diego Vazquez and Antonio Hernandez, representing Cesar Chavez High School in Phoenix. Where are those guys? I met them earlier. There they are, right there. (Applause.) They developed a new motorized chair to help a classmate with disabilities—and won a grant competition as a result. They did not have a lot of money to do this. They didn’t have a lot of advantages in life. In fact, the first time they were ever on an airplane was when they flew to present their invention. But they did have a desire to work together to help a friend and to build something that never existed before.
And by the way, the way they funded their project—they had—they and their folks made tamales. They had a huge tamale-making session and were selling them. And they were showing me the video of how they raised the funds to be able to enter in this competition. Unbelievable.
That’s not just the power of science. That’s the promise of America. Anybody with a good idea can prosper. Anybody with talent can succeed. That’s why we’re here today. That’s what we’re all celebrating. And that’s why it’s so important that we promote math education and science education, on behalf of not just this generation but all the generations to follow. | <urn:uuid:bf140121-865e-4649-9489-a9f911608178> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.flinn.org/bio-briefs/3164 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96215 | 579 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Favoritism In The Household: What You All Said
This week I asked readers if they play favorites with their kids. In general, there were two types of responses.
Most (not all) parents said that they don’t play favorites with their kids.
Most (not all) people who talked about their experiences growing up said that their parents played favorites.
My take on all this is the following:
- I still contend that the majority of parents do not practice blatant favoritism with their kids – but as discussed in my prior post there are differences in their relationships because siblings can be (and often are) very different in terms of personality, age, etc
- However, if there is blatant favoritism, or the perception of that, it not only hurts kids growing up – it continues to sting into adulthood
- Will they can have a more balanced perspective on growing up? Will they be able to talk about the different ways in which each were favored or slighted, and conclude that it pretty much balanced out and that they each had their own unique relationship with their parents?
- Or will one (or more) of them have the perception that there was indeed blatant and hurtful favoritism? Being attentive to that possibility while your kids are young could prevent deep hurt when they get older. | <urn:uuid:7cfec14c-6708-4fec-a1d0-12e97e715d1a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.parents.com/blogs/red-hot-parenting/2011/09/30/parenting/favoritism-in-the-household-what-you-all-said/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985002 | 267 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Frequency Dependence of Damping and Compliance in Loudspeaker Suspensions
Commonly used materials for loudspeaker suspensions have been shown to have viscoelastic properties, best known is the “creep” effect. This phenomenon, while known, is normally of little interest because it is primarily a dc issue outside of the audio frequency range. However, this viscoelasticity phenomenon also has a frequency-dependent influence on damping and compliance. Because damping is inversely proportional to frequency, a simplified model only including frequency-dependent damping is presented. The model provides an acceptable fit for empirical data.
Click to purchase paper or login as an AES member. If your company or school subscribes to the AES Journal then you can look for this paper in the institutional version of the Online Journal. If you are not an AES member and would like to subscribe to the E-Library then Join the AES!
This paper costs $20 for non-members, $5 for AES members and is free for E-Library subscribers. | <urn:uuid:50364f2b-a2ae-4dad-9b18-8e6b1afcc350> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=15507 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938672 | 213 | 1.78125 | 2 |
MANAGED CARE February 1997. ©1997 Stezzi Communications
Open a newspaper or magazine or turn on your television these days, and you'll soon see a report that casts an HMO in a bad light. Here are 10 reasons for managed care's current run of bad publicity.
A headline decries kicking new mothers out of hospitals. A TV talk show bemoans gagging doctors. A magazine offers advice on getting the most from your HMO as if readers must be on their guard against victimization. These days managed care seems to lurch from one negative news report to the next. The fact that it has done what many experts said was impossible without a complete overhaul of the health care system — dramatically slowed the growth of medical spending — has been lost in the din of scandals and scares.
Whether bad publicity shapes public opinion or taps into pre-existing views is hard to say. A Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health poll conducted last summer found that roughly one out of five Americans thought it would be a "bad thing" if they received their health care through a managed care plan. Last September, thirty-three percent of respondents to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll thought the trend toward heavier use of HMOs was a "change for the worse" nationally, and although a heftier 40 percent called the change positive, that 33 percent plainly represented more than a few grumblers or horror-story victims.
What's behind the current trashing of managed care, by the media and to some extent by the public? There are genuine abuses, of course. And ignorance adds fuel to the fire, along with a rosy recall that tends to ignore the problems that long plagued fee-for-service medicine. Debate will rage over how much of managed care's bad rap is an unavoidable cost of bringing change to American medicine and how much is needlessly self-inflicted. But any inventory of the bad rap's causes must touch on these 10 points:
1. Managed care means the spree is over. The sky seemed to be the limit with medical care in post-World War II America. And the combination of low costs, indemnity insurance and, later, Medicare coverage made paying for it relatively painless for many patients. "We had everything we wanted and someone else paid for it," notes John Kralewski, director of the Institute for Health Services Research at the University of Minnesota. Now the party is over. To some extent, whatever came next was bound to feel like a hangover by comparison.
2. Physicians face new pressures — and patients know it. TV's Marcus Welby never had to call anyone for an authorization. One of medicine's most appealing aspects is the physician's ethical duty to do the utmost for the health of the patient, and one reason managed care organizations are under attack these days is that many Americans worry — sometimes with some justification — that their doctors' judgment has been affected by new incentives to limit expense.
"It is important that patients understand why they are not getting an MRI," says Carrie Gavora, a health policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank. "Is it because the doctor doesn't believe they need it? Or because their plan is limiting MRIs for financial reasons?"
Controlling costs is not an unpopular idea in the abstract. But a personal experience with the new boundaries on spending can infuriate patients, their families and their doctors. And that anger is often directed at those in the business of setting the limits — managed care organizations. "Everyone agrees that the cost of medical care must be managed, but nobody wants the cost of their care to be managed," says Paul Bluestein, M.D., senior vice president and chief medical officer of ConnectiCare Inc., a 190,000-member, not-for-profit managed-care organization with headquarters in Farmington, Conn.
Obviously, good managed care organizations let physicians practice good medicine that puts the patient's health first. At the same time, Bluestein says, let's be honest: Physicians are not as free as they once were to decide by themselves what is best for the patient. Utilization review, capitation and other cost-control mechanisms have added lots of gray to what once seemed a black-and-white picture.
3. Practice guidelines sometimes seem stingy. Few things have generated as much ill will for managed care as treatment guidelines. Postpartum guidelines, for example, became such a conspicuous target of criticism that the politicians stepped in. Last year, a federal mandate gave new mothers at least 48 hours in the hospital.
Ophthalmologists fumed about the Milliman & Robertson-generated guideline that restricted cataract surgery in older people to one eye. When Blue Cross/Blue Shield in Rhode Island and Mutual of Omaha went with the one-eye approach, there were howls of protest, and both plans backed away from it.
In 1995, ConnectiCare came under sharp criticism for using a set of guidelines that classified radical mastectomy as an outpatient procedure. Yet Bluestein says guidelines are widely misunderstood. They are supposed to be a target for what treatment should be like, not a hard-and-fast rule. "They are a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver. They are neither good nor bad. What's important is how they are used."
Managed care organizations have to explain guidelines better, he says. At ConnectiCare, after the mastectomy fiasco, the organization's front-line case reviewers have been told to use precise language when talking to physicians. The response "I cannot authorize this" is not supposed to be synonymous with denial, Bluestein stresses, and the opportunities to "climb the ladder" of authority, to a case manager and ultimately the medical director, need to be spelled out.
Bluestein says he has also learned the hard way that a set of guidelines cannot deviate too much from standard practice in a region, even if a body of research shows the guidelines to be far superior to the standard.
4. Patients often don't get famous-name care. For generations in Texas, if you had cancer there was only one place to go — the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. When the Texas legislature attempted to put "centers of excellence" language into wide-ranging managed care legis- lation a couple of years ago, the final version mentioned only one hospital: M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. And when the legislator who was at the center of that bruising legislative battle hears constituents' gripes about managed care these days, getting access to M.D. Anderson is often the problem. That legislator is Rep. John Smithee, an Amarillo Republican who chairs the lower house's insurance committee. "The most common complaint is about denying access to specialists, particularly cancer cases," he says.
Bluestein asserts that managed care organizations don't save money by denying care, but rather by changing where care is given. That means, of course, reducing utilization of hospitals, by far the most expensive place to provide care. But Texans aren't alone in equating high-quality medical care with quick and easy admission to a hospital and, depending on the disease, often a well-known hospital. Little wonder, then, that some of the strongest criticism of managed care has come from people with chronic illnesses — the people who have the greatest perceived need for access to those institutions and doctors that are widely viewed as the best.
Rep. Smithee understands what many patients don't — that for most conditions fame doesn't necessarily indicate significant superiority. "For most breast, lung and other common cancers — even in life-threatening cases — the treatment is fairly routine," he says. "It is the extraordinary cancers that need to go to M.D. Anderson."
5. For-profit health care sparks controversy. In many places where managed care is relatively popular — the states of Washington, Minnesota and Massachusetts, for example — it grew gradually and was often dominated by not-for-profit organizations such as Kaiser Permanente and Harvard Community Health Plan. The rapid growth of aggressive, for-profit HMOs in recent years has turned managed care into a big business and made it vulnerable to attacks that profit, not patient care, is what the industry is all about.
George Anders, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has done an impressive job chronicling the rise of managed care during the last several years, concludes his recently published book Health Against Wealth with the observation that the HMO/managed care industry deserves credit for bringing about a much-needed change — dampening medical spending — but that the big profits, humongous executive compensation packages and high living of some industry executives could be seen away from Wall Street as "uncomfortable hypocrisy for an industry that publicly preaches the virtues of austerity."
6. Some managed care organizations have blundered. In Tennessee, managed care companies competing for the state's Medicaid business reduced payments to doctors so drastically that in some areas of the state immunization rates actually dropped. In Florida in 1995, almost half of the 29 Medicaid managed care plans were fined for rule violations. In New York, state health investigators posing as people seeking appointments had difficulties arranging for prenatal care and immunizations, the very preventive health services that managed care organizations are supposed to excel at providing.
Dozens of similar stories about corner-cutting and foolish penny-pinching have appeared in newspapers and magazines. Medicaid, where the margins are narrow, has been an especially fertile ground for misdeeds. Efforts to weed out the bad apples and the recent spate of regulation designed to rein in the excesses of the industry may be the best things that ever happened to managed care.
"Managed care is a wonderful thing," says Texas state Rep. Smithee. "But the situation now is just like the beginning of this century, when mass production of food started. Food became more affordable and accessible then, but you had to have some controls to ensure it was safe and healthy."
7. Prevention isn't sexy — or even easy. Even managed care's critics say that for some preventive services, such as Pap smears and mammograms, it does a better job than old-style fee-for-service medicine. "HMOs are a lot better on that basic stuff," says Thomas Bodenheimer, M.D., a San Francisco-area primary care physician who wrote well-argued critiques of managed care last year for two leading medical journals. But as Bluestein points out, "Prevention isn't very exciting." The press, he says, is more likely to dwell on a patient's discharge from the hospital shortly after delivery than the fact that many people didn't get the flu because they got flu shots.
Then there's the confusion factor. It's not always simple to decide who should get preventive services and how often. Take mammograms. The National Cancer Institute says women shouldn't get annual mammograms until age 50, though that recommendation is currently under review. The American Cancer Society says regular mammograms should start 10 years earlier. If an HMO goes with the NCI recommendation (which is based in part on the underappreciated problems associated with false positives) it's an easy target for charges of skimping.
Finally, even if all the recommendations agreed, the individualistic approach many Americans take toward their medical care would cause problems. Some people are going to want to have a no- or low-risk test or a screening just to be the on safe side, even if on a population basis it doesn't make any sense. "You don't care about the population," says Joseph M. Heyman, M.D., an obstetrician and president of the Massachusetts Medical Society. "You care about what is best for you."
8. People don't like being told what to do. Remember how effective the insurance industry's "Harry and Louise" television ads were in turning public opinion against the Clinton administration's health care plan? They played upon apprehension about a faceless government entity limiting health care choices. Part of their success was due to people's distrust of government, but another part stemmed from simple resistance to any kind of dictate from above. For many people, an employer's imposition of a managed care plan can seem just as odious, says Robert Blendon, Sc.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, an authority on public opinion in health care.
Blendon offers an automotive parallel. What if a company did a study and found that Volvos were the best and safest cars, then gave employees financial inducements to drive only Volvos? How might they react? Some might be grateful for their company's good advice. Some might already drive Volvos. But many would resent interference in their choice even on virtuous grounds.
Managed care saves employers money, but few if any employees get a specifically designated "managed care" bonus at year's end. Here, as with preventive services, managed care's strength is shown by a negative: If insurance premiums had continued to rise the way they were rising a few years ago, says Bluestein, many employers might have dropped health coverage altogether.
9. Measuring quality is fraught with hazards. As envisioned by HMO theoretician Paul Ellwood, M.D., one of the HMO's chief benefits was supposed to be the development of objective measures of the quality of care. But this has proved to be philosophically contentious, technically difficult and politically delicate. Satisfaction surveys only tell so much. And the organization set up to measure the quality of care given by managed care plans, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, has come under attack from Ellwood and others for not being independent enough.
The Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) standards that NCQA uses have been widely disparaged by physicians for tallying up easy-to-administer tests rather than getting at core issues of medical care. Heyman's opinion is typical. "I think the way they measure the quality of managed care is ridiculous," he says. "They're not measuring quality. They're measuring the number of Pap smears."
Also, some quality-of-care measurements have come back to haunt managed-care plans. In October, the Wall Street Journal's Anders documented how managed care plans in New York have steered heart patients from more expensive hospitals to lower-cost ones — even though adjusted, hospital-specific mortality data showed that for heart care, the more expensive hospitals were superior. The take-home message of the story was a real black eye for managed care: Given a choice between lower cost and higher quality, some health plans chose the former.
10. Finally, bad news begets bad news. A free, independent press is an important watchdog. But like all canines, the press is a pack animal. And managed care became one of the stories of 1996 in newsrooms around the country. It seemed that every self-respecting newspaper or magazine from the New York Post to Glamour ran some sort of story on managed care malfeasance.
Besides moving in groups, pack animals tend to sort themselves into leaders and followers. The same is true of the press. The top dog, The New York Times, reported aggressively on managed care, particularly as the system made rapid gains in the New York City market. Bob Herbert recently wrote two columns based on a government report critical of managed care formularies. And Anders' reporting at the Wall Street Journal set the pace for critical coverage of the industry.
It may seem that managed care plans can do no right these days in the eyes of the press, physicians and government regulators. But recently exceptions to the doom-and-gloom stories have been popping up, suggesting perhaps the beginnings of a backlash to the backlash. On Dec. 23, the lead editorial in the Boston Globe, titled "Quality Care in Massachusetts," gave an upbeat appraisal of the managed care in the state and warned against regulatory overkill (while also expressing strong misgivings about the conduct of companies it considered too aggressive).
A few days later, a Connecticut legislative committee released a glowing report on HMOs, which it said were the target of only 19 percent of the complaints received by the state's insurance department in the past year. The report credited HMOs with lowering health care costs, generally satisfying customers and allowing longer hospital stays than those previously cited by critics.
If these developments are portents, 1997 may see the rise of a fuller understanding of managed care on the part of press and public alike. Still, for the 10 reasons cited above, critics will always be quick to spot the warts. | <urn:uuid:9afa5a1e-bd33-416e-af0c-212dfa7057bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.managedcaremag.com/print/archives/9702/9702.badrap.shtml | 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 | 0.971833 | 3,426 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Volume 26, Issue 3 (May 1998)
Measurement of Crack Arrest Fracture Toughness of a Ship Steel Plate
Two types of full thickness compact crack arrest (CCA) specimens have been used to characterize the crack arrest toughness of a 15.5-mm-thick ship plate steel in both the L-T and T-L orientations. One was a modified version of that used in ASTM Standard E 1221, and the other was based on the proposed procedure of Crosley and Ripling for non-plane strain testing. The latter specimens employed a strain age embrittled chevron notch as the crack starter. The testing was performed over the temperature range from −40° (the nil-ductility transition temperature (NDTT) of the steel) up to −5°C. None of the results from the ASTM E 1221 type specimens met the validity requirements of the ASTM procedure. Even though they had the largest dimensions allowed in the test specification, the limited thickness of these specimens meant that they were too small for valid plane strain testing. In the non-plane strain test procedure, the in-plane dimensions are scaled to the expected crack arrest toughness at the test temperature, and the main qualifying requirement is for the crack to be arrested at a point in the specimen lying within certain defined limits. Although difficulties were encountered with variability in run/arrest behavior, this specimen gave some useful crack arrest toughness data for this steel, particularly with regard to the relatively high values obtained when testing near the top of the test temperature range. The effectiveness of the crack starter technique used in both type of specimens is also discussed, as well as possible modifications for future tests. | <urn:uuid:30ee2b80-ffd7-4f71-a291-568ebca50d3b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.astm.org/DIGITAL_LIBRARY/JOURNALS/TESTEVAL/PAGES/JTE11991J.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950785 | 343 | 1.75 | 2 |
Missouri River flooding
Tue July 5, 2011
Army Corps of Engineers criticized for timing of letters to flood-besieged farmers
The letters in question are an attempt to gauge farmers' interest in selling their lands to the federal government for wildlife habitat restoration. Farmers in Missouri and Iowa have been receiving the letters.
Missouri U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D) says she’s asked the Corps to stop sending the letters until after the flooding subsides.
“It almost looks like they’re preying upon folks who are down and out," McCaskill said. "I just think that it looks opportunistic and crass, and I think it’s bad manners...I think they should hold off on any attempts to buy any land until these folks have a chance to get out from underneath the water and catch their breath.”
The Missouri Farm Bureau has also called on the Army Corps of Engineers to cease and desist. President Blake Hurst says he believes the timing of the letters was a big mistake.
“I would have hoped that there was somebody there that would have looked at those letters and said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, perhaps (at a) time when literally thousands of farmers are seeing their summer’s work washed away, this might not be a good time to send those letters.’ But obviously nobody there who saw that letter had that thought," Hurst said.
The St. Joseph News-Press quotes an Army Corps of Engineers spokesman as saying that the timing of the letters was both a coincidence and a mistake. The Corps has not yet responded to our requests for comments.
Missouri River Flooding / Vaccinations
Missouri River Flooding | <urn:uuid:f9025a79-bf8a-4491-955b-dc765e9e3110> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.news.stlpublicradio.org/post/army-corps-engineers-criticized-timing-letters-flood-besieged-farmers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982212 | 358 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Charles Ryder, a lonely student at Oxford, is captivated by the outrageous and decadent Sebastian Flyte. Invited to Brideshead, Sebastian's magnificent family home, Charles welcomes the attentions of its eccentric, aristocratic inhabitants, gradually becoming infatuated with them and the life of privilege they inhabit - in particular, with Sebastian's remote sister, Julia. But he gradually comes to recognize his spiritual and social distance from them, eventually discovering a world where duty and desire, faith and happiness are in conflict.
Born in Hampstead and educated at Oxford University, Evelyn Waugh came from a literary family. His elder brother, Alec was a novelist, and his father, Arthur Waugh, was the influential head of a large publishing house. Even in his school days, Waugh showed sings of the profound belief in Catholicism and brilliant wit that were to mark his later years. Waugh began publishing his novels in the late 1920's. He joined the Royal Marines at the beginning of World War II and was one of the first to volunteer for commando service. In 1944 he survived a plane crash in Yugoslavia and, while hiding in a cave, corrected the proofs of one of his novels. Waugh's early novels, Decline and Fall (1927), Vile Bodies (1930), and A Handful of Dust (1934), established him as one of the funniest and most brilliant satirists the British had seen in years. He was particularly skillful at poking fun at the scramble for prominence among the upper classes and the struggle between the generations. He lived for a while in Hollywood, about which he wrote The Loved One (1948), a scathing attack on the United States's overly sentimental funeral practices. His greatest works, however, are Brideshead Revisited (1945), which has been made into a highly popular television miniseries, and the trilogy Sword of Honor (1965), composed of Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and The End of the Battle (1961).
|Book:||Brideshead Revisited Excl|
|Publisher:||Penguin / Popular Penguins|
|Number of Pages:||336|
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The small town of Linschoten, Netherlands, has been named the winner of Nissan'sNissanJapan, 1932 > present Big Turn On promotion and has been named most electric car friendly city in Europe. As part of the title, Nissan donated several quick chargers to the roughly 4,000-person town. The chargers allow electric car drivers to charge their vehicle to 80% in 30 minutes. The Nissan chargers apply to the CHAdeMO charging standard.
Big Turn On was a promotion by Nissan to get one million Europeans to learn about electric cars in 100 days, but it was able to do it 84 days. Nissan has already given chargers to cities throughout France and the Netherlands.
109 hp @ 9800 rpm
annual ownership cost | <urn:uuid:d2da102a-1fd4-469e-9baf-2a2433d800fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.autoviva.com/news/linschoten_netherlands_named_most_ev_friendly_city/5459 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94819 | 171 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Wise PC Engineer offers a collection of PC cleanup and maintenance tools, designed to optimise your PCs performance.
The Disk Cleaner, for instance, scans your hard drive looking for junk that can safely be deleted. It identifies these leftovers by extension (assuming that, say, *.tmp files are temporary), which is a little riskier than simply deleting your browser cache and the contents of your Windows temporary folders, but can also recover much more drive space.
The Registry Cleaner similarly locates redundant Registry keys, but places a greater emphasis on protecting you. Once your system has been scanned, the program will evaluate the consequences of deleting each key, and recommend you delete only those that it's sure can be removed safely.
Once you've tidied up a little, the program's Registry Defrag tool will compact your Registry files to ensure they're taking up the minimum of RAM and hard drive space.
A simple defragger can then optimise your entire hard drive to improve its overall performance.
And there's also a file undelete tool, though this is poor by comparison with the rest of the package. It scans your drives for deleted files, but to locate them you must know exactly where they're stored, and navigate there through your folder tree (more difficult than usual as the folders aren't even in alphabetical order).
You can schedule the disk and Registry cleaners to run on a regular basis, at the time of your choosing.
And while they're not available in the trial, if you buy the program you'll also get a few other options. These include a secure delete tool, which wipes away confidential files so they can't be recovered; a System Optimizer will help ensure your PC's settings are delivering the best possible performance; and a 1-click tuneup option performs your chosen optimisations at a single click. | <urn:uuid:bf351b55-2998-48d7-a29e-525c7cd6f963> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/downloads/3249744/wise-pc-engineer-638/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956472 | 375 | 1.523438 | 2 |
In The Granularity of Growth, we used insights from a proprietary database of large companies to argue that executives need to pursue growth in multiple ways. We disaggregated growth into three drivers: portfolio momentum, or the market growth of the segments in a company’s portfolio; M&A; and market share gains. The exercise showed us that companies outperforming their peers on two or three of these drivers grow faster and achieve better returns than those that outperform on just one. Now, three years later, we can reiterate our advice with more assurance because it’s clear that these multi-faceted growers have withstood the test of the financial crisis and the economic downturn—and continued to outperform.
That’s the first of three findings we share in this research update, which reflects the growth of our database from some 400 companies in 2007 to more than 700 today, as well as the addition of a significant set of smaller companies with annual revenues of less than $3 billion. The second finding is that companies from emerging markets are outgrowing competitors from developed ones at a startling pace. The third is that the smallest companies in our database, with revenues of less than $1 billion, are growing by increasing their market share to a much greater extent than larger companies are. For the latter, the role of share gain is marginal or even negative.
Companies that fared better in the downturn grew in multiple ways
The downturn had a dramatic effect on the global GDP growth rate, which swung from 10 percent in 2007–08 to –5 percent in 2008–09. The global corporations in our database had an even gloomier experience: their average topline growth nosedived from 15 percent in 2007–08 to –11 percent in 2008–09. Corporate growth was harder hit than GDP growth, in part because government spending increased, dampening the effects of falling private investment and consumption on GDP.
Amid the gloom and doom, the top-quartile companies in our database on two or more of the three drivers of growth—portfolio momentum, M&A, and market share gain—stood out as relative winners. Before the downturn, they enjoyed a 24-percentage-point differential in their compound annual growth rate (CAGR) against the poor performers. During the downturn, outperformers boasted a more than 3-point advantage (Exhibit 1).
For companies defining their growth ambitions, this consistent outperformance underscores the importance of examining how they are doing on all three sources of growth and how they can raise their game.
Companies from emerging markets are growing much faster
Revenues are increasing much more quickly for companies that have their headquarters in emerging economies than for their counterparts from developed economies—overall, at home, in advanced economies, and in other emerging markets (Exhibit 2). The difference in growth rates is most startling in emerging economies where both categories of companies are off their home turf—30.7 percent growth for business units of those based in emerging markets, compared with 12.6 percent for their counterparts from the developed world. This wide gap suggests that its companies should ask themselves whether they are paying enough attention to emerging markets and allocating sufficient financial and human resources to them. Chances are the answer is no.
It’s less surprising that companies based in advanced economies are being outgrown by those in developing economies in their own home market segments. Growth is, after all, stronger in emerging markets. And in advanced economies—where companies from emerging markets are growing twice as fast as those from the advanced economies themselves—these are often attackers starting from a small base and taking market share.
Indeed, across segments, part of the outperformance may well reflect the fact that companies based in emerging markets are starting from a smaller base. In our database, the average revenue of business units from companies headquartered in developed economies was $5.9 billion, three times larger than the units from emerging economies. This relative size difference held true in emerging markets where both categories of companies compete off their own turf. Still, it’s clear in the numbers that players from emerging markets are serious competitors everywhere; their continued improvement will accentuate the growth challenge for their rivals from developed countries.
Smaller companies exhibit different growth patterns
In The Granularity of Growth, we emphasized that portfolio momentum, coupled with M&A, was much more important for corporate growth than winning market share. This advice still holds for large companies, which usually have significant share positions in reasonably mature markets. For the smallest of the new companies in our database (those with less than $1 billion in revenue), a different growth pattern emerges (Exhibit 3). Share gain represents almost four percentage points of annual growth for them, compared with a very small or negative role for the growth of larger companies.
Intuitively, this should not come as a big surprise. Smaller companies usually grow faster than their industries because they are not constrained by size, and their growth is often based on a new business model they can pursue without fear of cannibalizing revenues. Still, there may be a lesson for large corporations: study the action among smaller companies and consider whether they might be the right peer set for benchmarking the growth drivers of your smaller divisions. Looking through this new lens may help leaders set targets that stretch their ambitions yet are still realistic. | <urn:uuid:afd35c59-d210-41c3-a1ac-533a0e823948> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/growth/drawing_a_new_road_map_for_growth | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970899 | 1,084 | 1.710938 | 2 |
For a few hours yesterday, the top link on the Drudge Report led to a YouTube video in which an Ohio woman said she's going to vote for President Obama because he gave her a phone. The woman is inarticulate and she speaks loudly, and on top of those things she's black. Basically, she is exactly the kind of person many on the right envision—wrongly, it should be said—when they think of who is guzzling from the government teat these days. That she was bragging about Obama giving her "every minority in Cleveland" luxuries like cell phones was just the icing on the cake.
"Gorillas looking for gorilla phones," wrote one commenter under the video on YouTube. "Upset to see morons like this will be voting that moron in again," wrote another. "Woman probably has no idea what Obama or Romney stand for."
Actually, while she may have put it a bit—to borrow a word from Mitt Romney—"inelegantly," the woman in the video was indeed talking about a real government program that exists under Obama. And it's one that, if you take the time to actually understand it, you may very well support.
Though we can't be positive which government program the woman from the video is referencing without interviewing her, it does appear that she's talking about the FCC's Lifeline Assistance benefit. Owing to the fact that people generally need phones to apply for jobs and enroll their children in school, and elderly citizens need to be able to call their families and emergency services, the government decided in the '80s (under Ronald Reagan, no less) to institute the Lifeline Assistance program. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law, which offered either cell phones or landline services to low-income Americans.
Today, 38 states, one of which is Ohio, participate in the Lifeline program. If you live in one of those locales and your income is at or below 135 percent of the poverty line, or if you qualify for certain benefit programs like Medicaid and TANF, you can apply for a free cell phone that offers you 250 minutes of talk time per month. The people who are getting these phones aren't getting iPhones or other smartphones; they're often people in urban or rural areas who are being supplied with basic cell phones so they can call the hospital when they're sick, or receive calls if there's a problem with their child at school.
If you're upset that Obama is giving "freeloaders" gratis cell phones paid for with your tax money, don't be. Firstly, Obama had nothing to do with the Lifeline program: the "Obama phone" narrative is a myth that both liberals and conservatives have fallen for since 2009. Secondly, Lifeline isn't paid for with tax revenues. Rather, Lifeline is funded with a pool of money, called the Universal Service Fund, which is paid for with revenue donations from telecommunications providers. Some of those providers—like Verizon, for instance—pass off that cost to their customers with a Universal Service fee, but the government doesn't mandate that the money come from citizens, meaning it's technically not a tax.
It is sort of sad that the woman in Drudge's "Obama phone" video has no idea that her free cell phone has nothing to do with Obama. But conservatives who would try and hold her up as an example of a liberal president gone wild with handouts are just as sad and ignorant, and more cruel by a large margin. | <urn:uuid:c8615788-93c9-4151-b70e-f28b1ed8e461> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gawker.com/5947133/the-obama-phone-program-has-nothing-to-do-with-obama?tag=politics | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976381 | 722 | 1.789063 | 2 |
County BOE Talks Schools, Finances
Thursday, January 10, 2013
It's cooperation, not necesarily consolidation, when it comes to figuring out a solution for school finance problems, said Geauga County Educational Service Center Superintendent Matt Galemmo.
Galemmo sat down with the Geauga County Maple Leaf Jan. 4 to discuss the future of school funding for all seven county school districts, highlighting Ledgemont Schools, which is currently in financial dire straights.
He said consolidation is not the only option on the table, but it is one of several options a subcommittee for the ESC will look at in the next few months.
The ESC recently created a committee formed of the county's seven school superintendents, school board members and treasurers to look at the issue, Galemmo said, adding it's two-fold and involves finance- and programming-related needs that must be addressed.
Although no decisions have been made yet, the ESC paid about $4,000 in December to help fund two audits at the county and state levels of the county's school districts in order to get a baseline data level of the districts' finances.
Those audits should be completed over the next few weeks.
County Auditor Frank Gliha and an outside company that has done state-based audits for 250 school districts statewide are performing those audits, the superintendent said.
In addition to the ESC, the Geauga P-16 Council, a national initiative founded by Education Matters and Knowledge
Works Foundation, is involved in the decision to look at various funding options.
The P-16 Council consists of representatives from area schools, businesses and organizations and seeks to improve educational options for students.
The title symbolizes nomenclature for preschool to level 16, or senior year of college, according to the Ohio Education Matters website.
In Geauga County, the P-16 initiative was funded by a $25,000 grant from the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation a few years ago.
Remnants of that grant helped fund the cost of both December audits, which will be compared and discussed once the ESC receives them, Galemmo said.
The superintendents and Galemmo meet monthly to discuss relevant issues and financial issues are an important topic, said Assistant ESC Superintendent and P-16 Director Suzanne Allen.
"These conversations, along with the critical situation that Ledgemont (Schools) is currently facing, evolved to a point that our ESC and the Geauga P-16 Council made a decision to help our four small districts explore future options," Allen said in an email Tuesday. "What is at the heart of this exploration is not just the issue of keeping our districts financially solvent, but the need to ensure that our county's students will be able to receive the education they need to successfully transition into the 21st century workforce."
The situation Allen describes involves Ledgemont's financial issues, which have resulted in the district borrowing funds from the state to stay afloat and talk of a merger with another district.
Ledgemont Schools Superintendent Julie Ramos attended a Dec. 13 meeting with the ESC to discuss Ledgemont's situation.
Galemmo said the school boards and superintendents are slated to attend an ESC-sponsored dinner meeting 6 p.m. Jan. 16.
"We're at the discussion stage right now," Galemmo said.
Finances At The Forefront
One of the biggest challenges Geauga County faces is the State of Ohio itself.
The state has not sent as much aid to Geauga County schools recently, Galemmo said.
"All seven are struggling to pass levies and nobody wants any new taxes," he said. "Social agencies and county governments are struggling as well. The biggest concern is the state's loan fund."
Galemmo said districts are forced to take out loans from the state and pay the loans back -- along with interest -- with their general fund money.
So far, the school boards, superintendents and Galemmo have looked at three options: Consolidation; a joint district cooperative involving up to four districts; and increased emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, and more cost-sharing between existing districts.
Galemmo said consolidation is a possibility, but a remote one, because of one factor: Identity.
"That's why it's not a large-scale operation in Ohio. Very few schools have participated in it because it would mean losing their identity," he said, adding it is, however, an item being discussed and under consideration.
Each township had a school at one point.
In the '50s and '60s, the major districts sprung up and only Newbury has a single-township school district at this time, Galemmo said.
In December, Ledgemont's Financial Planning and Supervision Commission discussed the idea of consolidation.
Chairman Paul Marshall said consolidating could provide some advantages such as helping other districts reduce overflow of students.
In that situation, the other district would receive both its assets -- buildings and property -- and its liabilities, such as debt, he said.
However, Marshall told school board members the current law does not spell out what happens if a district is not interested in joining with a district in Ledgemont's situation.
Another idea is a joint district cooperative between several school districts.
In this case, the schools would share the costs of programs, buildings and levies.
However, each school building would retain its own identity.
"Having a grade or a school building with 50 kids is not cost-effective," he said, adding details on that proposal are yet to be finalized.
Nevertheless, Galemmo said talks with Ohio School Facilities Commission members and legal counsel from that organization will give the ESC more direction on that initiative in the future.
"The attorney, Rebecca Princehorn, is involved with that commission," he said. "We'd need money to build a new school."
Princehorn referred all questions about the OSFC to the ESC.
A problem for Geauga County is due to its wealthy nature relative to Ohio's other 87 counties. It ranks at the bottom in terms of receiving state aid as a result, Galemmo said.
Lack of Programs a Problem For Some Districts
The third and final idea proposed, so far, involves more STEM education and more collaboration with current vocational schools such as Auburn Career Center in nearby Concord Township.
In addition to the financial analysis, the ESC is doing an analysis of district programming, Galemmo said.
"We're looking at what we have now versus what we'd like to offer. Our students are looking to be successful in the 21st century. And if we don't provide that, they're losing out in the end," he said.
For instance, he said some school districts offer four languages, while others offer two years of Spanish only.
"We're lucky there's programs there at all for some districts," Galemmo added.
Other possibilities include online courses, a mix of both traditional and online courses and Skype-based systems.
The biggest issue for programs in districts is levy-based.
The economic downturn in 2005-2006 enabled the state to relax rules on RIF (reducing-in-force) procedures, consequently allowing districts to let people go, saving money.
However, even with relaxed RIF rules, programs are often the first things cut in a failed levy attempt, Galemmo said.
Berkshire Schools Superintendent Doug DeLong, who also expressed enthusiasm for the committee's work on future financial proposals, said the issue came down to cost savings.
"We're looking at any ways to save money and share services," he said.
Shared Services a Step in Right Direction
Today, Geauga County's administrators are learning a schoolyard adage taught to them as yesterday's student: Share with others.
Currently, the ESC shares its speech therapists, psychologists and other personnel with the districts.
West Geauga has an in-house psychologist, but that is the exception.
The ESC has a shared services subcommittee that looks at how districts can share everything from busing to equipment to programs.
"We're looking at doing things with transportation facilities," Galemmo said. "A small district should not be a transportation business. This will help cut costs in administration, utilization of vehicles if we share."
So far, in-county sharing and allocating work has resulted in 30 programs shared among the various districts, including special education.
"Why have four, five special-education programs with two or three students each, and one teacher heading each class? That's not cost-effective," he said.
Newbury Schools Superintendent Dick Wagner said his district has been in talks with the ESC for several years about shared services.
"We're always helping each other out," Wagner said Tuesday.
The district's transportation coordinator, Kim Sass, said collaboration between Newbury and other districts regarding shared services has occurred since 2004.
Each transportation supervisor attends a summer meeting in order to see "who can help where."
"Everyone helps all over the county. What we do is try to figure out where all our special needs kids are going and who can help out," Sass said. "If a Cardinal student is going by our school, we can work our route into that and help them out. And if we have a student going to the same school as one of their students, they'll pick up our student."
She added, "This cuts down on gas, wear and tear on the vehicle and salaries. That's one less driver that has to be paid for that route. You just don't take one student somewhere; you do multiple schools."
Galemmo said shared services are a step in the right direction, but work needs to be completed.
Much of the course of action will depend on findings from both audits.
Subsequently, the group will have to decide on a course of action. And it will have to fund it via grants from various sources, Galemmo added.
"If you sit back and do nothing, then school districts come under receivership. The state won't let you dissolve," Galemmo said. "We must be proactive."
Below, view Part I of of six videos taken from Galemmo's interview. Log onto www.youtube/geaugamapleleaf to view the others. | <urn:uuid:a6f944a9-c870-49ea-87c4-8341f46b79d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.geaugamapleleaf.com/freestory/School-Funding-Concerns-County-BOE-1-10-13 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972302 | 2,146 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Though it has become a general fashion in the liberal intelligentsia to curse Marxist analysis , it’s simply astonishing to note that it has been very accurate in explaining the complex perspectives totally missed and unresolved by liberal analysis. Global Economic Crisis and Arab Spring are just two most outstanding examples, while BBC published a leading middle east expert testifying that Egypt will not follow Tunis on the road to revolution , the masses were flexing their muscles as Marxists were telling us since last year. While a lot as been said about the politics in the Islamic Republic , the text unfortunately has a Derridian flavour of ever “said” is “unsaid”. Whatever has been said for past few years by our great anchors, intellectuals, key opinion leaders turned out to be simply rubbish. One really feels in awe about the job description of these great men and women who get paid in million for saying and writing rubbish. On the contrary it’s again astonishing that since the day PPP government took office , Pakistani Marxists have been very successful in explaining the complex perspective with a relative ease. They were accurate in their description of nature of judicial movement, the futility of black revolution , the coalition between PPP and PML N, the imperialist nature of war on terror ,and the ” relationship of mutual deception between USA and Pakistan military establishment. The parent descendant relationship between establishment and Islamists, the sharpening of national question by establishment etc. Now that every one is talking about the great vision of Imran Khan i had the pleasure to read this great piece on him by leading Marxist intellectual Lal Khan. The article explains in concrete terms the phenomenon of Imran Khan and so-called civil society. If one reads carefully it will be a treat as it provides one with tools needed to analyze the fluid political perspective of Islamic Republic. Whats he says explains Khan superbly:
Imran Khan is no Oedipus in this crime infested politics of a rotten state and system. His odd admixture of Islamic crusades, western liberalism and a redundant nationalism can only add to the prevailing political confusion. The ideology of Pakistani national chauvinism he propagates withered away in the paddy fields of East Bengal drenched in blood forty years ago. The justice he vows to impart is unaffordable in market economics. The corruption he decries is not the cause of the crisis but the need and product of debilitated capitalism. Black money and corruption run the economic cycle that is prodding the country. The British parliamentary system he espouses is still a monarchy and increasingly facing revulsion by the British masses. The Pan-Islamism he idealises is in contradiction with the Pakistan nation state that he harps upon. The American police system he wants to impose has bred more crime than anywhere in the advanced world. The US he wants to befriend on an “equal basis” will not stop leeching off Pakistan as long as capitalism exists here. (LK)
Lal Khan. www.Marxist.com
It is often said that history repeats itself, but the truth is that it never does so in exactly the same way; it repeats itself but on on a higher plane. The general consciousness of the masses in any society is neither static nor eternal. It is in a state of constant change, flux and motion. Betrayals and defeats push it back but with the new resurgence of the class struggle it rises to new heights.
However, the temperament and moods of different classes in society can vary according to the conditions and the epoch through which it is passing. In general terms the social psychology of the middle classes or the petit bourgeoisie is empirical and suffers from bouts of impatience reflecting its social and economic base. This, in times of crisis, puts it in a state of permanent insecurity, discontent and unrest, swinging from one extreme to the other – trying to ape the bourgeoisie in ordinary times and jump into the proletarian bandwagon in revolutionary situations.
While the toiling classes can endure hardships for long periods of time and from an empirical outlook sometimes they seem to be infinitely dormant and docile. There can be decades of lull and yet these working classes can explode into volcanic eruptions that can transform the politico-economic systems and change the course of history through revolutionary insurrections. Such periods are historical exceptions. Most bourgeois experts and intellectuals cannot contemplate these tremors in advance as they are mentally blocked from doing so by their philosophy of logical positivism and methods of so-called pragmatism.
At the present moment in time, apart from some sporadic struggles, Pakistan is passing through a period of relative lull as far as the mass movement is concerned, yet society is immersed in a terrible social and economic crisis that has pulverised it. This contradictory state of affairs gives rise to a political vacuum where there is no visible force on the wider political horizon that can present an economic and political way out of this misery and distress. Nature abhors vacuum, however. Hence we see peculiar phenomena that arise to fill this vacuum with rhetoric that touches upon the burning problems but has no real solutions to avert the impending catastrophe. The ostentatious nature of the petit bourgeoisie or the so-called civil society makes them feverishly attracted to these “liberators”. As a class it is the petit bourgeoisie that provides the social base for religious fundamentalism, vulgar liberalism, national chauvinism and other metaphysical and sentimentalist tendencies in periods of social stagnation. The latest episode of this series of petit bourgeois binges is the “rise” of Imran Khan.
He has been hyped up by the media and sections of the ruling oligarchy and the state as a substitute, in a situation where yet another attempt by the ruling classes to attack the working classes through a democratic façade is being foisted onto the masses. After the failure of direct rule and the loss of the cohesion of the army’s apparatus that would permit it to impose its rule once more, this weary and weak attempt to salvage a redundant system, shows the pathetic state of Pakistan’s ruling elite.
Looking at the democratic political circus in Pakistan one is reminded of the celebrated words of the 18th century British conservative politician Edmund Burke: “The tribe of vulgar politicians are the lowest of our species. There is no trade so vile and mechanical as the government in their hands. Virtue is not their habit. They are out of themselves in any course of conduct recommended only by conscience and glory. The calculators compute them out of their senses. The jesters and buffoons shame them out of everything grand and elevated. Littleness is the object and in means, to them appears soundness and sobriety.”
Imran Khan is no Oedipus in this crime infested politics of a rotten state and system. His odd admixture of Islamic crusades, western liberalism and a redundant nationalism can only add to the prevailing political confusion. The ideology of Pakistani national chauvinism he propagates withered away in the paddy fields of East Bengal drenched in blood forty years ago. The justice he vows to impart is unaffordable in market economics. The corruption he decries is not the cause of the crisis but the need and product of debilitated capitalism. Black money and corruption run the economic cycle that is prodding the country. The British parliamentary system he espouses is still a monarchy and increasingly facing revulsion by the British masses. The Pan-Islamism he idealises is in contradiction with the Pakistan nation state that he harps upon. The American police system he wants to impose has bred more crime than anywhere in the advanced world. The US he wants to befriend on an “equal basis” will not stop leeching off Pakistan as long as capitalism exists here.
He is playing the part of a right-wing populist trying to console a beleaguered people with the rhetoric of reforms that the system has no room for. The Balouch and other oppressed nationalities he wants to negotiate and patch up a deal with, have since long rejected the two nation theory that Imran Khan is trying to resurrect as its new Messiah. He may be the establishment’s black horse, but who can be in the ring without the blessings of the hierarchy of the state.
The Chinese alternative of time tested friendship is a hoax. Whenever have they made a policy not coherent with their interests? China is today the biggest exporter of capital. And capital is invested to extract profit, not to be eulogised. The workers’ rights he talks about can only be slashed in the present day investment that is capital intensive. Revolutionary parties and leaders are not built by media “exposure” and pampering, but conversely the revolutionary victories are snatched from the jaws of the hostile and belligerent media by rousing the masses against it.
Imran Khan is offering everything to everybody, that means that the status quo is retained and the rich will get richer and the poor will be impoverished even more. That is the only possible fate under capitalism in decline. But the most insidious aspect of the mobs around Khan is that as in the lawyers’ movement the ideological differentiation is being scorned. The ideological divide between the left and right is not a theoretical synopsis. It stems from the nature of the class divisions in society and the struggle for the surplus of labour that is in the last analysis the struggle of life and death. As long as class exploitation exists the ideological fight will continue to rage on. It is a line drawn in the blood of the generations of the toilers. Imran khan is rousing the petit bourgeoisie with passions sans truth. Once the mass movement erupts again, no deception will suffice. Class war will have to be fought to the finish. | <urn:uuid:90018b32-53fe-4d97-b8d2-a5f3296a2f05> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sherryx.wordpress.com/category/pakistan/ | 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 | 0.950573 | 1,987 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Oceana Reaction to Salvage of Kulluk Drilling RigAll Press Releases…
January 7, 2013
Contact: Susan Murray ( [email protected] | 907-586-4050)
Michael LeVine ( [email protected] )
After a four-day struggle involving multiple vessels and aircraft and requiring Coast Guard rescue of its crew, Shell’s drill rig, the Kulluk, ran aground near Kodiak, Alaska on New Year’s Eve. The rig was pulled from the shore and is now on its way to a safer harbor. Thankfully, the incident appears close to resolution without loss of life or substantial harm to the sensitive habitat. This latest accident comes after a drilling season full of problems and near disasters.
In response to the latest developments, Oceana’s deputy vice president for the Pacific Susan Murray released the following statement:
“Today is a good day for Alaskans and our oceans. Through the courage, perseverance and ingenuity of rescue and salvage crews, the Kulluk is off the rocks without loss of life or substantial harm to our ocean resources. The Kulluk grounding is the culmination of Shell’s ‘Keystone Cops’ year. Now that Shell’s accident-prone 2012 drilling season has ended, it is time for our government to stand up to Big Oil and do what’s best for the American people. Companies simply cannot drill safely in the Arctic Ocean, and our government should not let them.
We were lucky to avoid a major catastrophe. We were lucky the accident happened close to Coast Guard facilities. We were lucky the weather allowed for salvage. We were lucky an accident like this did not happen while the Kulluk was drilling. However, Alaskan waters demand more than luck.
Alaskans, unfortunately, know all about ‘transit incidents’ associated with oil and gas activities. In 1989, millions of gallons of oil spilled into pristine Prince William Sound after a ‘transit incident.’ One moment of negligence led to one of the world’s largest oil spills. Over and over again, Shell has not paid attention to details, has not been prepared for Alaska’s conditions and has tried to cut corners–these are the same failings that led to the Exxon Valdez tragedy and, twenty years later, to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Kiluida Bay, the destination for the Kulluk, is important for fisheries. We can only hope that Shell is more careful there than it has been anywhere else. There simply is no place for the Kulluk in Alaskan waters.
Shell is obviously not prepared for Alaskan waters. The Kulluk accident began in weather conditions for which any reasonable operator should have been ready. As the reported criminal investigation into Shell’s other drilling vessel, the Noble Discoverer, shows, Shell is incapable of protecting its own employees’ safety or our oceans.
Shell’s choices put lives and our oceans at risk. Our government is complicit in Shell’s failures. Regulators allowed operations that prioritized profit over common sense. Moving forward from this latest near-miss and Shell’s string of failures in 2012, government agencies must provide better oversight and must eliminate corporate influence from the decision-making process. The small amount of oil that might be produced from the Arctic Ocean is not worth the great risk to our oceans.” | <urn:uuid:b2ab6aa3-a67d-4c30-9f1e-3775760819ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oceana.org/en/news-media/press-center/press-releases/oceana-reaction-to-salvage-of-kulluk-drilling-rig | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943572 | 728 | 1.5625 | 2 |
uNicedmeMan wrote:Science and religion both limit creative thinking in the same way. They offer an "answer" to certain problems/thoughts/situations and often times the thought process ends there (because the bible says so / because science proves so). This is not to say that nothing good comes from either place but I think it's wise to never believe something 100% and inversely, never dismiss something 100%.
I don't agree with this. Science is based on continually questioning everything we seem to "know", and no true scientist will claim infallibility on any subject. Your statement fits only those people who view science as a religion in itself.
Take Bertrand Russell for example, who wasn't happy with established mathematic principles because they used circular logic all over the place. So he decided to start from the bottom and managed to prove that 1+1 equals 2, among other things. Mathematics and other sciences were based on those assumptions and even leading mathematicians just said "because that's how it is", and still there were others we questioned this and set to find out the real truth. Imagine if they'd found out it isn't necessarily so? This is the ace up science's sleeve. It continually questions itself and tries to improve.
People are people however, and scientist can be just as small-minded and bigoted as religious people.
What bothers me about religion is that it doesn't really supply anything. Every good thing religion gives us could just as well be handled out of religious context, and often even better because we wouldn't have to worry about "word of god". Feeding 3rd world orphans and providing schools is a GREAT thing. Especially education is an excellent thing, and sorely needed there. But the same people also hurt the 3rd world (church's stand on condoms not helping at all with the AIDS problem, among other things). I'd rather have the people helping not be bound by religious dogma. In short, I'm not questioning that some Jesus people do good things. I just think that there is no need for them to be Jesus people to do those things. The flipside of religions is that while they have some very good orders, they also have absolutely ghastly ones as well, and depending on who (which sect, religion, etc.) you listen to those are just as important as the good ones, and you end up stoning people in between feeding the homeless.
Christianity makes for a fantastic philosophy (well, the new testament at least), but it makes for a HORRIBLE religion. | <urn:uuid:bb09da7b-cdb1-4adc-8ffa-00bc59253390> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.discgolfreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=307793 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979909 | 520 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Google has published its findings regarding online shopping preferences, trends in Hungary – the research panel has interviewed 1000 Hungarian internet users about their web purchase attitudes, preferences between Dec 2 2008 and Feb 3 2009. The results of the e-commerce and internet search are showing no or not much surprises I think. There is perhaps one single country specific purchase, but the bulk of the data is just what you would expect of a maturing market in the EMEA region.
In numbers and conclusions – internet shopping in Hungary 2008-2009
ROPO (research online – purchase offline) is more prevalent in Hungary than in more mature western markets
Research online before purchase is especially high regarding electronics goods (like the new favorite LED TV) and travel related items and services (most typically searching for cheap flights and airline tickets as well as accommodation). 72% of users check out options on the web before making their purchase decisions.
As for travel, tourism, less than half of the respondents, 48% completes the act of purchase online, while 24% of the users make up their minds based on the data they found online to make their shopping offline.
However, regarding electronic goods, the purchase in webstores is only 22%! In other words, even though internet research plays a crucial role (72%) in buying all kinds of electronic goods, TV, mp3 player, DVD player, home theater, what have you, only a fraction of that impact can be measured through web conversions, the rest of the shopping conversions will take effect in the B&M (brick and mortar) stores.
Geo-specific online shopping in Hungary: the success of the obligatory car insurance
Similarly to electronic goods and travel services, compulsory car insurance research on the web is popular amongst more than 75% of the users, out of which two thirds of them actually complete the purchase process online.
What do Hungarians use before buying goods?
Search (no surprise here either) – 88% of users use a search engine to find the desired goods before shopping. And as Google.hu is THE most popular search engine in Hungary with approx. 98% of share in the Hungarian search market, you can treat this number is 87-88% of potential buyers searching for goods on google.
Brand pages – official brand pages like nokia.hu or philips.hu have scored second with 54% in the popularity game. I was somewhat surprised by this result, as my gut instinct told me the second most popular search channel before purchase would be price comparison. But it is brand pages, there you go.
Retail stores – 49% – this is understandable, especially talking about trusted stores. Oftentimes users would like to see how much an item is going to cost for them. This vital information is not on a manufacturer’s site.
Shopping comparison / Price comparison – 48%. I wonder how western users use price comparison sites compared to manufacturer sites when it comes to researching and purchasing goods online, as my instinct tells me that shopping comparison is far more popular, but in Hungary brand sites outscored price comparison sites by 6%. Not a big difference, based on a 1000 respondents, but it is telling. As I have been working for the number 1 most visited Hungarian comparison shopping site (Árukereső), I think one of the reasons for this result is that users sometimes get confused about comparison shopping sites, they simply assume they are in another retail stores and wish to complete their purchase right on the site. Besides, another percentage of internet users in Hungary do not expect to get the updated fresh and detailed product information on price comparison or web retail shops, so they go the the manufacturer page (prices missing there, so it is in the early research phase I guess). Brands are brands after all, with a weightier brand value than most retails stores or comparison shopping sites or online auction sites have so far achieved.
Auction sites – 44%: Vatera and Teszvesz are the online auction sites in Hungary. We do not even need to say the two top, they are, period. In 2008 both were bought up (majority investment not total) by Allegro group (of Naspers), and in July 2009 Árukereső, the previously mentioned comparison shopping site has also become an Allegro group asset. That’s why one of the Hungarian twitter users was referring to the news that the local ebay in Hungary is in formation…
As for advertising, it is pretty obvious that e-commerce companies, travel service providers, car insurance sites cannot live without working with Google (SEO for Google, AdWords PPC, SEO PR aimed at Google), but they are also dependent on shopping comparison sites (arukereso, argep, olcsobbat, depo, kirakat, shopmania – such a small country with 2-3 million users and so many comparison shopping sites, amazing right?). Other CPC tactics may include etarget (prevalent in a good range of content sites) and direct negotiations with major content sites (portals, catalogs, etc.)
PS: the illustration shows 4 columns representing the results for 4 products (digital camera, computer hardware, household equipment, and the 4th column is clothes and accessories). The vertical line (y axis) enlists the typical sources of information (TV, outdoor media, fliers, radio, direct mail, friends and family, papers, internet, earlier experience, browsing in the store, store assistant in shops, store assistant via remote communication) | <urn:uuid:9c2c2402-23fb-4ce7-9631-9f7c10d1d2f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gugli.wordpress.com/category/google/ | 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 | 0.940268 | 1,135 | 1.554688 | 2 |
The Pound to Euro Exchange Rate grew by 1.0% yesterday – the most in 4 months – amid a flurry of currency news announcements that favoured Sterling and the US Dollar over the Euro. The European Central Bank continued their Long Term Refinancing Operation (LTRO) in an attempt to boost liquidity by giving out €529 billion of cheap 3-year loans. The loans were snapped up by over 800 banks, which appeared to spook Euro investors into selling the single currency. The large number of banks eager to take the ECB handouts suggests economic instability in the Eurozone. Conversely, the prospect of improved liquidity points towards higher financial sector earnings in the city of London and could help the UK avoid technical recession this quarter. The Pound to Euro Exchange Rate grew to 1.194.
The ECB loans were viewed by some investors as an indirect form of Quantitative Easing; the last bout of cheap loans resulted in a drastic improvement in sovereign bond yields, especially in the southern Euro member states. Bank of England governor Mervyn King seemed to corroborate this idea when he stated that small businesses remained unaffected by the loans because they were primarily being used to shore up the banks. The Pound and the US Dollar have both suffered at the hands of QE and the devaluation of the Euro has had the same effect on the single currency.
UK ecostats fuelled the Pound’s Sterling performance yesterday with Consumer Confidence maintaining its strongest level since June. Mortgage Approvals increased by the most in 2 years and the Bank of England expanded Money Supply growth in the latest data release.
As the Eurozone felt the pressures of a veritable form of Quantitative Easing, the Bank of England made some announcements to suggest that their asset purchasing scheme could have reached its limit. Martin Weale of the Monetary Policy Committee commented that further QE is unlikely as rising oil prices, and seasonal adjustments should keep target inflation rates from being missed. | <urn:uuid:40d12fb1-83a6-4288-a1ea-be36cab5186f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.euroexchangeratenews.com/pound-to-euro-exchange-rate-grows-1-on-ecb-loans/1232 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967756 | 391 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Early Church Fathers
1 [Presuming that all who are disposed to study this work will turn to Dr. Bunsen's first volume (Hippol.), I have not thought it wise to load the-e pages with references to his interesting reviewal.]
2 kata teleiwsin twn xronwn. This is Bunsen's emendation. The textual reading is meiwsin.
3 ekousiwj: Bunsen suggests anosiwj,i,e., profanely.
4 See Irenaeus, Haeres., i. 19, 20; Tertullian, Prescript., c, xlvi.; Epiphanius, Haeres., xxi.; Theodoret, Haeret. Fab., i. 1; St. Augustine, De Haeres., 1. See the apology of Justin Martyr (vol. i., this series, p. 171), who says, " There was a Samaritan, Simon, a native of the village called Gitto, who, in the reign of Claudius Caesar, and in your royal city of Rome, did mighty acts of magic, by virtue of the art of the devils operating in him."Simon's history and opinions i are treated of largely in the Recognitions of Clement. See vol. iii. of the Edinburgh series, pp. 156-271; [vol. viii. of this series].
5 In book iv. of The Refutation.
6 Acts viii. 9-24.
7 Miller refers us to Apostolius' Proverb., s.v. yafwn. Schneidewin remarks that Maximus Tyrius relates almost a similar story concerning one Psapho, a Libyan, in his Dissert. (xxxv.), and that Apostolius extracted this account and inserted it in his Cent., xviii. p. 730, ed. Leutsch, mentioning at the same time a similar narrative from Aelian's Hist., xiv. 30. See Justin., xxi. 4, and Pliny, Nat. Hist., viii. 16.
8 The text here is corrupt. The above is Miller's emendation. Cruice's reading may thus be rendered: " So that far sooner we may compare him unto the Libyan, who was a mere man, and not the true God."
9 Deut. iv. 24.
10 The Abbe Cruice considers that Theodoret has made use of this passage. (See Haeret. Fab., i, 1.)
11 Or, ton aoraton, the invisible one.
12 nwmatoj aisan: Miller has gnwmhn ishn, which yields but little sense.
13 These powers are thus arranged: 1. Mind and Intelligence: termed also, 1. Heaven and Earth. 2. Voice and Name 2. Sun and Moon. 3. "Ratiocination and Reflection," 3. Air and Water.
14 Gen. ii. 2.
15 Prov. viii. 22-24.
16 "Brooded over" (see Gen. i. 2).
17 Gen. ii. 7.
18 1 Cor. xi. 32.
19 Jer. i. 5.
20 xwrion(i.e, locality) is the reading in Miller, which Cruice ingeniously alters into xorion, the caul in which the foetus is enclosed, which is called the "after-birth."
21 Gen. ii. 10.
22 This rendering follow- Cruice, who has succeeded in clearing away the obscurity o( the passage as given in Miller.
23 Odyssey, x. 304 et seq. [See Butcher and Lang, p. 163.]
24 Isa. ii. 4.
25 Matt. iii. 10 ; Luke iii. 9.
26 In the Recognitions of Clementwe have this passage: "He (Simon) wishes himself to be believed to be an exalted power, which is above God the Creator, and to be thought to be the Christ, and to be called the standing one" (Ante-Nicene Library, ed. Edinburgh. vol. iii. p. 196).
27 The expression stan(standinq) was used by the scholastic as applicable to the divine nature. Interpreted in this manner, the words in the text would be equivalent with "which was, and is, and is to come" (Rev. i. 8). The Recognitions of Clementexplain the term thus: "He (Simon) use: this name as implying that he can never be dissolved, asserting that his flesh is so compacted by the power of his divinity, that it can endure to eternity. Hence, there-fore, he is called the standing one, as though he cannot fall by any corruption" (Ante-Nicene Library, vol. iii. p. 196). [To be found in vol. viii. of this series, with the other apocryphal Clementines.]
28 Gen. iii. 24.
29 Homer, for instance [See Epiphanius, Haeres., xxi. 3).
30 miaroj, Bunsen's emendation for yuxroj, the reading in Miller and Schneidewin. Some read yudroj, i.e., lying: others yeudoxristoj, i.e., counterfeit Christ. Cruice considers Bunsen's emenda-: tion unnecessary, as yuxrojmay be translated " absurd fellow."The word, literally meaning cold, is applied in a derived sense to persons who were heartless,-an import suitable to Hippolytus' meaning.
31 [See Irenaeus, vol. i. p. 348, and Bunsen's ideas, p. 50 of his first volume.]
32 This rendering is according to Bunsen's emendation of the text.
33 Cruice omits the word dedokhkenai, which seems in interpolation. The above rendering adopts the proposed emendation.
34 Bunsen thinks that there is an allusion here to the conversation of our Lord with the woman of Samaria, and it' so, that Menander, a disciple of Simon, and not Simon himself, was the author of The Great Announcement, as the heretic did not outlive St. Peter and Paul, and therefore died before the period at which St John's Gospel was written.
35 Miller reads fusin, which makes no sense. The rendering above follows Bunsen's emendation of the text. [Here it is equally interesting to the student of our author or of Irenaeus to turn to Bunsen (p. 51), and to observe his parallels.]
36 The Abbe Cruice considers that the statements made by Origen (Iontr. Celsum, lib. i. p. 44, ed Spenc.), respecting the followers of Simon in respect of number, militates against Origen's authorship of The Refutation.
37 This rendering follows the text of Schneidewin and Cruice. The Clementine Recognitions(Ante-Nicene Library, ed. Edinb., vol. iii. p. 273) represent Simon Magus as leaving for Rome, and St. Peter resolving to follow him thither. Miller's text is different and as emended by him, Hippolytus' account would harmonize with that given in the Acts. Miller's text may be thus translated: "And having been laid under a curse, as has been written in the Acts, he subsequently disapproved of his practices, and made an attempt to journey as far as Rome, but he fell in with the apostles," etc. The text or Cruice and Schneidewin seems less forced: while the statement itself-a new witness to this controverted point in ecclesiastical history concerning St. Peter-corroborates Hippolytus' authorship of The Refutation.
38 Justin Martyr mentions, as an instance of the estimation in which Simon Magus was held among his followers, that a statue was erected to him at Rome. Bunsen considers that the refection of this fable of Justin Martyr's, point to the author of The Refutationbeing a Roman, who would therefore, as he shows himself in the case of the statue, be better informed than the Eastern writer of any event occurring in the capital of the West. [Bunsen's magisterial decision (p. 53) is very amusingly characteristic.] Hippolytus' silence is a presumption against the existence of such a statue, though it is very possible he might omit to mention it, supposing it to be at Rome. At all events, the jvery precise statement of Justin Martyr ought not to be rejected on slight or confectural grounds. [See vol. i., this series, pp. 171 ,172, 182, 187, and 193. But our author relies on Irenaeus, same vol., p. 348. Why reject positive testimony?] | <urn:uuid:dce4f9bf-81d7-42e2-addf-625f058923eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bible.ca/history/fathers/ANF-05/footnote/fn14.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931563 | 1,881 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Whether you’re coaching a group of Peewees or a professional team, there is a common thread that runs through the coaching ranks when it comes to dealing with today’s players.
That thread is a common ground that allows you to relate to every athlete, whether he or she is a recreational player, a blue-chip college athlete or a superstar like Jaromir Jagr.
I’ve learned that along the way, from my days at Providence College playing for Lou Lamoriello and Steve Stirling, right up to today, where I am in my third season as the head coach at my alma mater.
Along the way I have coached in the NHL, the AHL, at USA Hockey Player Development Camps and even helping out with my sons’ (Derek and Travis) teams.
Coaching At The Youth Level
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s. A lot of things that worked for us back then probably wouldn’t work in this day and age. It’s a different landscape. For one thing, kids today are more worldly because they have access to more information with the Internet, satellite television and cell phones. The demands are also a lot greater than when I was growing up.
Being the parent of two teenage boys helps me relate to kids of all ages. I try to use the same principles my parents taught me but adapt them to today’s changing environment. I try to incorporate that same philosophy into coaching at the collegiate level.
Working a USA Hockey camp is a bit more challenging because you have a short period of time in which to connect with kids, usually less than a week. That’s not a lot of time to get to know the 20 kids on your team. But it is still important to try.
Every player is different. Some are more outgoing and easier to engage. Others need to be coaxed out of their shell. Depending on the age you’re working with, it may be more of a challenge. I make it a point of doing team-building exercises and spending time with every player in one-on-one situations.
Coaching In College
Coaching at the collegiate level is similar to coaching in youth hockey. Not only are you dealing with the player, you’re dealing with his parents as well.
The recruiting process allows you to be selective of the kind of student-athlete you matriculate. And don’t let anybody fool you; you’re not only recruiting the player, you’re recruiting his parents as well. Some coaches won’t integrate with their parents. I do. That way, everyone is focused on the same objectives.
Parents are expecting us to develop their sons not only as hockey players but as people and help them mature and develop along the way. We need the parents help to accomplish these goals: Is their message at home the same message that we are establishing at Providence College?
The reality is that players competing at the Div. I level are going to have their hiccups along the way. We’ll do everything we can to keep them on the path, allowing them to grow and succeed as student-athletes.
We tell our players that if you take short cuts in school, you’ll take short cuts on the ice. That’s the reason I expect them to take full advantage of the wonderful opportunities presented to them at Providence College. That means on the ice as well as in the classroom and in the college community.
If you’re going to be successful as a student-athlete, you’re going to have to budget yourself and your time. You have to have discipline.
I don’t mandate curfews for our players. If we have to tell them when to go to bed the night before playing Boston College, then they shouldn’t be here playing and I haven’t done my job in recruiting the right student-athlete.
What I’m trying to do is to empower our players to make their own decisions. They’re going to need those skills once they leave our campus, whether they’re continuing on with their hockey careers or moving into a professional field.
Coaching In The Pros
It’s especially important if you’re moving on to a career in professional hockey. You have a lot of time on your hands, and the skills you learn early on will help you make the right decisions.
This is where some young players run into difficulty. They have time and money, and people want to be involved with professional athletes. A player can end up being around the wrong people who can be a drain on them financially, physically and mentally. In the end those wrong people will have a negative impact on their on-ice performance.
A coach may not deal with parents too much once the player reaches the professional ranks, but there are spouses and agents added to the mix.
Some pro coaches don’t want to deal with anyone but the player. I was never that way. Just like college, I would rather have everyone on the same page and doing the best for the individual. It’s a very positive learning environment allowing everyone involved to create solutions, and do what’s best for the players.
It’s a little different in the AHL because there are players who don’t want to be playing in the minors. It’s the responsibility of the minor league coach to let his players know that there are still things that need to be improved on for them to compete consistently at the NHL level.
Once you reach the NHL, the variables may be slightly different, but the dynamic is still the same. I believe it is critical to relate to each other as not only player-coach but also as people. It’s not much different dealing with Mites and NHL players. It still revolves around playing a game.
Players in the NHL are obviously better, more mature, and more intuitive. You have to know what you’re talking about because they’re very intelligent people. They have skills but also have the mind to compliment that whole package. If you want to move somebody in a certain direction, a coach must have concrete suggestions. You can’t fudge it or you’ll lose all credibility.
Dealing With People
A coach has to find a way to connect with players individually and within the team dynamic. Finding workable solutions allows a player to improve individually, but yet that improvement fits into the collective whole.
You have 20 players on your team, which means 20 different personalities, and you as a coach have to find out what makes each of them tick. The quicker you do that, whether it’s at a weeklong player development camp or over the course of an NHL season, the more successful your team will be.
Some players are maintenance-free hockey players. There are other players that you have to find a connection to help them improve. Everybody’s different. Some guys have more rope than other guys. If anyone tells you differently, it’s just rhetoric.
I was an assistant coach with the Washington Capitals in 2001 when Jaromir Jagr came to us from the Pittsburgh Penguins where he had great success. He was used to a different environment from what we had with the Capitals. And culturally he was different. Not good or bad, just different.
I had coached European players before, including Jari Kurri and Teemu Selanne in Anaheim, and Peter Bondra in Washington. But with Jagr, we had a world-class player who had some pretty strong opinions on how things should be done. He felt that he had some good ideas and wanted us to listen.
At first, head coach Ron Wilson and the rest of the coaching staff tried to put everything into black and white. We soon learned that we had to deal with gray when it came to Jagr.
We were searching for solutions and eventually found that niche. It evolved more quickly as we became open to some of his opinions instead of being closed off by his thoughts.
It was a great learning experience for me because it helped me become a better coach when it comes to interacting with players. I use all those tools on a daily basis.
The longer you coach, the more experiences you gain, and those experiences are the foundation for dealing with different circumstances. The toughest moments are when something is new and you can’t fall back on previous situations. Although you still use some of your old experiences to deal with these new situations, a coach still ends up flying by the seat of his or her pants and relying on instincts.
It’s like that old expression: “You learn something new every day.” And that’s why I love coaching.
Hall Inductees Recall Favorite Coaches
Three newly inducted members of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame made sure to give credit where credit is due as they talked about this latest honor in their storied careers.
In addition to thanking their parents, spouses and teammates, Aaron Broten, John Vanbiesbrouck and Bobby Carpenter made sure to give a special shout out to their youth hockey coaches who planted the seed of passion that bloomed into great NHL careers.
“My coaches Joe Yannetti, Eddie Rossi and “Doc” Rossi [at St. John’s Prep in Danvers, Mass.] were instrumental in getting me to think to a new level,” said Carpenter, who made the jump to the NHL out of high school.
“They taught me that I had a future in the game. They were the first ones who got me to think about how this could be.”
Broten, a native of Roseau, Minn., said that Peewee coach Dick Johnson and high school coach Gary Hokanson, were instrumental in his development as a hockey player.
“I had a lot of good coaches in the professional ranks but none of them for too long of a time because we weren’t on top of the league so it seemed like we got a new coach every year and a half,” said Broten, who will join his brother, Neal, in the Hall.
And for Vanbiesbrouck, the all-time winningest American goalie, working with coach Herb Brooks when he was just an 18-year-old with the New York Rangers, set him off on the right path.
“There’s so much that can be said for Herb, but he left an impact on me, just the way that he challenged me as an athlete. That’s what he was there to do. He wasn’t there to be my friend, he was there to be my coach and my mentor,” Vanbiesbrouck said. “That had a lasting effect.”
Legendary Michigan Tech coach John MacInnes, who influenced more than his fair share of hockey players over his 26-year college career, will also be inducted during the Oct. 12 ceremony in Grand Forks, N.D. | <urn:uuid:0a65777e-9efd-41d1-b4a2-e6feed6345ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usahockeymagazine.com/article/2007-09/dealing-modern-athlete | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981188 | 2,312 | 1.578125 | 2 |
A strong abdominal muscles and buttocks and arms is a dream of almost all women, but during the holidays most members of the fairer sex is more relaxed, and after returning home they build up surprised kilograms.
That’s why we have prepared for you a few exercises you can practice during the annual rest, of course, we talking about exercises that are performed in the water!
If you have long been engaged in any kind of exercise you know that it starts with a good stretch. So, stop at the edge of the pool with one hand to hold the edge, a second stretch over the head. At the same time stretch the upper body. Repeat this exercise for at least ten times.
Spread your feet hip-width apart, stretch your arms and doing movements that are similar to the entry. It should be noted that the legs have a maximum stretch. So fingers on your feet must also have to be stretched.
Many people found this program
Standing in water with your legs slightly apart. Hold out your hands and hold the ball lift the ball up and down. Please note have your back straight at all times.
Turn back towards the edge of the pool and extend your hand along the edge. Stretch your legs and lift them towards the chest so that your body is at an angle of ninety degrees.Repeat at least fifteen times.
- Best recomended tool is UGT | <urn:uuid:d54b0674-a2d1-4e62-b517-fd60eaff7e78> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.intervalstraining.net/exercises-water-strengthen-body-vacation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954481 | 282 | 1.578125 | 2 |
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