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Europe vs. Islam, Continued
Timothy Garton Ash wrote a comment in today´s The Guardian, titled "The struggle to defend free expression is defining our age."
Fanatiques sans frontières (my bold) are on the march. It's wrong to describe this as a single "war on terror"; our adversaries and their ideologies are so diverse. But if you think we are not engaged in a struggle against manifold enemies of freedom, as potentially deadly as those we faced in the 1930s, you are living in a fool's paradise. Which is to say: you are a fairly typical contemporary European.
Fanatiques sans frontières? Excellent expression! But is the threat from the fanatics as dangerous as the fascist ideologies from the pre-war era? It presumes that the larger Muslim population are inclined to embrace it. I do not think so and I am stressing think because I do not claim to know. But I doubt, because societies are complex by nature and it seems to me that Garton-Ash think that the fanatics are unofficial spokespeople for the Muslim world, which is not true. Perhaps he is giving them more credit than they deserve.
There was a book in the mid-90´s, a Harvard professor explaining why the German mindset at the time accepted the Nazi ideology. You would have to explain the Muslim society and "mindset" in a similar way before concluding that the fanatics can win the hearts and soul of the peace loving people I am acquainted with.
But let us move on to the core of Garton-Ash´s argument and two points that are often overlooked in this discussion.
But self-censorship can also flow from a well-intentioned notion of multi-cultural harmony, on the lines of "you respect my taboo and I'll respect yours" - what I've described in this column as the tyranny of the group veto. And there are misguided attempts by democratic governments and parliaments to ensure domestic peace and inter-communal harmony by legislating to curb free expression. ...
We need a debate about what the law should and should not allow to be said or written. Even Mill did not suggest that everyone should be allowed to say anything, anytime and anywhere. We also need a debate about what it's prudent and wise to say in a globalised world where people of different cultures live so close together, like roommates separated only by thin curtains. There is a frontier of prudence and wisdom which lies beyond the one that should be enforced by law. ...
The fact is that the guiding principle of freedom of expression do not equal "anything said goes". International law - which is constituted by declarations, agreements and court-rulings - is full of explanations and decisions that try to draw the line between what falls under freedom of speech and what is abusing it. In the European "international" legislation, that is, principles and rulings from the European Court of Justice as well as national constitutional laws, you will find that the right is often defined as a right to hold an opinion, as opposed to express.
In other instances, it is well known that freedom of expression is limited. For example laws that state that you cannot desecrate the national flag or insult the royal family. Or that you cannot call your neighbour names or slander your workmates.
The second point I am picking up from Garton-Ash´s article is that it must be clear that the discussion of what is proper conduct is not necessarily a legal discussion. Laws typically reflect what we perceive to be right and wrong, but not all issues are always regulated by law. The law is only the codification of our position. Thus, the discussion about printed pictures of the Prophet and his head falling on a German theatre stage is primarily a discussion about how we respect each other and moral conduct in our society. It becomes a legal discussion when we start to debate whether someone ought to be punished for doing something we object to. It is perfectly possible to argue that by beheading the Prophet you are violating the principle of freedom of expression because that principle is resting on an assumption that we share a perception of morality and you are abusing it. But this is a philosophical discussion, not a political standpoint. We have this discussion because we want to strengthen the principle of freedom of expression. If we did not have this discussion we would leave the playing-field open to those who are violently attacking it and those who are allowing it to erode by thinking there is no need for a discussion.
Because of the grey zone in International law, our communities find it difficult to deal with issues of defamation, discrimination and hate-speech. It becomes extra difficult because the same communities nowadays are populated by people with sometimes fundamentally different views living side by side with people who fail to recognize that our own perception is derative from a common way of thinking at a time when a society only had to accommodate those Christians who were for the Pope and the Vatican, and those against these institutions. Facilitating a discussion that preserve values and include everybody does not have to be the same as giving up your values or excluding someone else. The point of discussion is to see what we cannot see today. Or, to clear the grey zone. That is, we have to trust that we are capable of preserve and include at the same time, even if we today do not know how.
Enough on this topic for today, please trust I will return with more to say. Please do read Garton-Ash´s article in The Guardian. | <urn:uuid:49254961-3926-4632-a0ef-73e58af5dcaf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://missmabrouk.blogspot.com/2006/10/europe-vs-islam-continued.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965476 | 1,127 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Monday, September 15, 2008
Sunday was a bittersweet day on Solano Avenue.
It was sweet because the annual Solano Stroll was as great as ever.
But it was also sad because Walker's Pie Shop closed its doors on Sunday, after 44 years of providing Albany, Berkeley and El Cerrito residents with a welcome throwback to a kinder, gentler time.
Eating at Walker's was like going to Grandma's for dinner, with homemade popovers instead of bread, old-fashioned rib-sticking entrees, and those incredible pies made from the Walker family's secret flaky piecrust recipe.
Fresh-faced Albany High grads waited tables, Walker family pictures adorned the walls, and the waitresses threw surprise birthday parties for elderly customers who otherwise wouldn't have anyone to celebrate with.
The restaurant was founded by Doug Walker and his sister Dolly, who learned the food business from their dad, Scotty, proprietor of the old Heather & Thistle in Berkeley. The son of immigrants, Scotty taught his children the traditional immigrant values: work hard, give good value and treasure your family.
When Doug and Dolly were little, they would go to the restaurant after school and sit in the back, doing their homework. As they got older they began helping out, starting as dishwashers and working their way up.
After their father's death they founded Walker's Pie Shop in 1964. When they decided to retire in 1999, they had to decide whom to sell the restaurant to.
Many lucrative offers rolled in, but they turned them all down and sold to their chef, Jorge Sandoval, instead.
Jorge came to this country from his native Guatemala in 1982 and got an entry-level job at Walker's as a dishwasher. By 1989 he was running the kitchen. Ten years after that, he and his wife, Emma, owned the place.
Their daughter, Emmeli, now 11, came there every day after school and sat in back, doing her homework - just as Doug and Dolly used to do when they were her age.
When they sold the restaurant to Jorge, I asked Doug, "Why him?"
"Because," Doug replied, "he reminds me of my father."
For the last nine years, Jorge and Emma did their best to keep Walker's afloat. Jorge worked second and third jobs, and Emmeli even offered to contribute the money she's saving up for her college education. (Her parents turned her down.) But it was not to be.
On Sunday, many customers stopped by for the final goodbye. Everyone hugged, and everyone was crying.
We reminisced about the old days, when the staff would close the shutters after work, so nobody could see them from the street, and have huge pie fights with the day's leftover pies. (Tip: Use cream pies. The stains are easier to get out of your clothes than berry pies.)
And the 1995 wedding of Walker's waitress Melinda Potts and Fatapple's waiter Matt McCormick. Longtime customers of both eateries attended the ceremony, feasting on ham by Walker's and wedding cake by Fatapples.
We drank a toast to my favorite waitress, Gina Niemeier, who died in 2002 of mesothelioma. I will always remember the big smile she had for everyone who walked in the door and her infallible memory for which customers liked extra popovers and which ones liked extra ice cream on their pies.
And we remembered waiter Remo Reggi, the nicest young man you'd ever want to meet, who was murdered at age 20 on Sept. 11, 2005, by a gang of carjackers who have never been caught.
Walker's closing has affected Emmeli most of all. She was only three when her parents bought the place, and it's been her second home ever since.
But she's holding her head high. Last week she wrote this letter to her hero:
"Dear Barack Obama,
"Next time we will send you money. Right now we lost our jobs and we can't afford to give you any, we are all sorry. But to let you know we are going to vote for you always. By the way, this is an 11 year old talking to you I am in 6 grade.
"Thank you for understanding us. | <urn:uuid:f36ce6ad-298d-45c6-94aa-889f32545e04> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.martinsnapp.blogspot.com/2008_09_14_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983866 | 904 | 1.59375 | 2 |
One of America’s most daring, outspoken citizens is dead. The New York Times offers this obituary:
Gore Vidal, the elegant, acerbic all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization, died on Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, where he moved in 2003, after years of living in Ravello, Italy. He was 86.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said by telephone.
Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent. He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of stylish, magisterial essays. He also wrote plays, television dramas and screenplays. For a while he was even a contract writer at MGM. And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment aphorism, putdown or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy.
Perhaps more than any other American writer except Norman Mailer or Truman Capote, Mr. Vidal took great pleasure in being a public figure. He twice ran for office — in 1960, when he was the Democratic Congressional candidate for the 29th District in upstate New York, and in 1982, when he campaigned in California for a seat in the Senate — and though he lost both times, he often conducted himself as a sort of unelected shadow president. He once said, “There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”…
[continues in the New York Times] | <urn:uuid:82819208-5b61-4630-aa0c-ba092b19f8da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://disinfo.com/2012/08/gore-vidal-rip/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983393 | 372 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.
The slow implosion of the Republican Party — along with the growing strength of a Democratic coalition dominated by low-to-middle-income voters — threatens the power of the corporate establishment and will force big business to find new ways to reassert control of the policy-making process.
The warning signs are everywhere.
The development carrying perhaps the most symbolic significance was the abandonment last week by 85 House Republicans and 40 of the 47 Republican senators of their longstanding commitment not to raise taxes. The tax increase was imposed on the affluent, a core Republican constituency. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page did not mince words, not that it ever does:
The Senate-White House compromise grudgingly passed by the House is a Beltway classic: the biggest tax increase in 20 years in return for spending increases, and all spun for political purposes as a “tax cut for the middle class.”
The potential institutionalization of a majority Democratic coalition of the downscale – including single women, minorities, union members and the young — is equally (if not more) ominous for members of the top 0.1 percent and for the corporations that have profited over the past 40 years.
Voters in this ascendant coalition believe “politicians help the rich get richer and corporations collect record profits while refusing to hire or increase wages or salaries for workers,” according to an extensive study conducted by the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.
Although there is a pro-business wing of the Democratic Party — associated with figures like current and former Treasury Secretaries Timothy Geithner and Robert Rubin, and with centrists like Senators Mark Warner of Virginia, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware and Max Baucus of Montana — this faction is in danger of being submerged by a surge of redistributional demands coming from voters in the bottom half, income-wise.
This isn’t the only thing causing problems for what we used to call Big Business — represented by the Business Roundtable, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Bankers Association and other trade associations — which faces a set of challenges that have the potential to threaten its clout.
Economists on both the right and left, from Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University to the Times columnist Paul Krugman, are increasingly talking about the detrimental consequences of high concentrations of economic and political power – concentrations that threaten the innovation that is supposed to be what makes unequal outcomes worth the price.
Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T., who wrote the highly regarded book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty” with James A. Robinson of Harvard, argues that concentrations of wealth and market power allow “the already well off and already well organized” to exercise excessive leverage through “lobbying, campaign contributions and otherwise” that distort market processes.
The wide range of hostility to big business is reflected in the views of Erick Erickson, the influential right-wing blogger at RedState.com who, “through a mix of incendiary posts, canny self-promotion (he has 24,540 Twitter followers) and endorsement of conservative primary candidates” has made himself “a conservative powerhouse.” Erickson contends that a central failing of the Republican Party is its subservience to the business elite:
The Republican Establishment gets their head patted as they sip wine with major C.E.O.s who want Washington to just do something. But these C.E.O.s have something in common. They want Washington to work for them. Washington working for Fortune 500 does not equate to Washington working for families or entrepreneurs or small businesses. We have an unlevel playing field with Washington picking winners and losers with cushy jobs for the elites when they leave the Capitol.
A second development that raises the level of hostility to corporate chieftains is the fact that there has been, over the past decade, a sharp decline in the reward for work.
Margaret Jacobson and Filippo Occhino of the Cleveland Federal Reserve documented this decline in a paper published in September, “Labor’s Declining Share of Income and Rising Inequality.” The following chart shows the continuing shift in the distribution of national income from labor to the owners of capital, beginning in 2000:
An additional chart put together by the Cleveland Fed demonstrates that from 1948 to 1973 compensation rose at almost exactly the same rate as productivity; in other words, workers gained proportionately as their productivity improved. Over the following two decades, from 1974 to 1995, however, the rate of compensation growth fell behind productivity by roughly 0.25 percent a year, and then fell even further, by 0.5 percent, over the years from 1996 to 2011. For a worker making $25,000 a year in 1974, the failure of his pay to keep up with his productivity growth means that he made $5,763 less in 2011, $43,225, than he would have had his pay kept up with productivity gains, $48,988.
The more workers recognize that their wages are not keeping up with their productivity gains, the more they are likely to press for redistributive government action through tax policy or by other means.
that economists have identified three long-term factors that explain why “the wage-productivity gap has widened and the share of income accruing to labor has declined.” The first is the decline of unions and the resulting weakening of the bargaining power of labor. The second has been the movement of well paying jobs overseas – the “migration of relatively more labor-intensive sectors from advanced economies to emerging economies. As a consequence, the sectors remaining in the advanced economies are relatively less labor-intensive, and the average share of labor income is lower.” The third factor is automation and technology advances which have encouraged a shift from workers to machines — “technological change connected with improvements in information and communication technologies, which has raised the marginal productivity and return to capital relative to labor.”
The shift of income from labor to capital occurs at a time (and may well be one of the causes) of huge increases in the share of income flowing to C.E.O.’s and those at the top of the income distribution.
Although the stars are lined up in favor of the anti-corporate left, American business, when its back is to the wall, has historically proved to be extraordinarily resourceful.
Just over 40 years ago, at a similarly volatile moment, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. wrote a 6,030-word memo to the United States Chamber of Commerce that has gained legendary status: The Powell Manifesto or, as it was formally titled, “Confidential Memorandum: Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” The soon-to-be-appointed associate justice of the Supreme Court warned: “We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts.”
In the face of this onslaught, business mobilized and by 1977 was back on top, defeating liberal initiatives like consumer protection and labor law reform during the Carter administration. Then, in 1980, a unified coalition of corporations and trade associations helped Ronald Reagan win the presidency, and the Republican Party wrested control of the Senate.
The 1980 election marked the start of a quarter-century of corporate political hegemony that permeated the administrations of Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush – as well as, to a substantial degree, the administration of Bill Clinton.
In other words, the current Republican implosion notwithstanding, it would not be surprising to see conservative feet on Democratic throats before too much time has passed. | <urn:uuid:7adff218-39b1-4a98-b3b9-b5a37d86b6f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/the-obama-coalition-vs-corporate-america/?src=twrhp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951417 | 1,628 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Top Hat (1935)
Fred and Ginger
. 'Top Hat' is a movie musical comedy, made in 1935, directed by Mark Sandrich and starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with Edward Everett Horton, Erik Rhodes and Helen Broderick.
It is the best known of the Astaire-Rogers musicals and justly so. It is high spirited and stylish with a fast moving, witty script and the score by Irving Berlin is one of the most famous in movie history. It was the duo's first movie made with a script specifically written for them. They perform a total of five exquisitely elegant dances, all top class and amongst the best that they ever did. "Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails" was to be the song most closely associated with Astaire throughout his career, while the romantic "Cheek to Cheek" has become an evergreen classic. The other Berlin songs in the film are "No Strings," "Isn't This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)" and "The Piccolino."
The film offers a scintillating mix of dancing genius and light comedy and, unsurprisingly, was a big hit at the box office, becoming RKO's biggest earner of the decade. It was nominated, for four Academy Awards for Best Picture, as well as Art Direction (Carroll Clark and Van Nest Polglase), Original Song (Irving Berlin for "Cheek to Cheek"), and Dance Direction (Hermes Pan for "Piccolino" and "Top Hat"), but did not win any. In 1990, 'Top Hat' was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It is ranked at number 15 on the American Film Institute's list of best musicals.
The movie's plot is really a peg on which to hang the superlative music and dancing. It relies on mistaken identity for its surprises and comedic moments. Astaire plays an American musical star Jerry Travers who is in London to star in a show produced by Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton). Jerry meets and falls in love with Horace's downstairs neighbor, Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers). When Jerry shows his feelings, Dale, thinking he is the married Horace, whom she has never met, takes offence. The action moves to Venice where many complications ensue.
After a successful opening night in London, Jerry follows Dale to Venice, where she is visiting Horace's wife, Madge. Jerry is blissfully unaware that Dale has told Madge that her husband has made illicit advances toward her. As one might expect, romantic complications ensue. there is, of course, an happy ending, when Dale is finally convinced of Jerry's true identity.
The supporting cast led by by Edward Everett Horton and Erik Rhodes is first class and we even have a glimpse of a young Lucille Ball as a flower girl.
Its a beautiful movie. A musical must see.
Main CastFred Astaire ... Jerry Travers
Ginger Rogers ... Dale Tremont
Edward Everett Horton ... Horace Hardwick
Erik Rhodes ... Alberto Beddini
Eric Blore ... Bates
Helen Broderick ... Madge Hardwick
Robert Adair ... London Hotel Clerk (uncredited)
Lucille Ball ... Flower Clerk (uncredited)
Phyllis Coghlan ... (uncredited)
Gino Corrado ... Venice Hotel Manager (uncredited)
CreditsDirector ... Mark Sandrich
Producer ... Pandro S. Berman
Screenplay ... Dwight Taylor, Allan Scott
From the play 'The Girl Who Dares' by Alexander Farago and Aladar Laszlo
Cinematography ... David Abel, Vernon L. Walker
Art Direction ... Van Nest Polglase
Music direction ... Max Steiner
Format ... B & W
Running Time ... 100 minutes
Academy AwardsNo Wins:
4 Unsuccessful Nominations:
Best Picture ... Pandro S. Berman
Art Direction ... Carroll Clark and Van Nest Polglase
Best Original Song ... Irving Berlin for "Cheek to Cheek"
Dance Direction ... Hermes Pan for "Piccolino" and "Top Hat" | <urn:uuid:e3e587aa-317a-4e5c-aa7b-fe85301bed94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hollywoodsgoldenage.com/movies/tophat.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940356 | 882 | 1.570313 | 2 |
An Iowa community college is taking a four-pronged approach to using technology as a retention-boosting tool for its expanding distance learning program.
Single-source vendor relationships can hamper an institution's ability to collect the kind of business intelligence it needs to track student retention. But it's not always possible to go the third-party route.
Iowa Valley Community College District is working on its first year retention efforts through a new program that includes the use of services from EducationDynamics.
Starfish Retention Solutions has updated its hosted retention application specifically to provide features for tutoring and advising centers.
Parature has released a new version of its customer service software for higher education with enhanced features for helping schools manage their social networking efforts.
In the high-intensity world of student prospecting, everyone is looking for a competitive edge--but one of the greatest "edges" you can have is to simply understand what prospective students want, need, and expect and align your actions accordingly. Prospecting expert Michael O'Hara suggests four strategies colleges and universities can adopt to increase success related to prospective students.
Post University, a 5,000-student for-profit school in Waterbury, CT, will be adopting Oracle CRM On Demand to update customer relationship management-related processes for admissions, financial aid, and student services.
Online advising programs can provide critical academic services to distance learning students who otherwise might feel untethered from their schools.
American University uses Twitter to communicate with prospective students, spread the news, and even handle complaints.
Winthrop University is adopting a new service to help improve student retention. The 6,500-student university, located in Rock Hill, SC, is adopting EducationDynamics' EarlyIQ, a Web-based alert program. | <urn:uuid:5b38182f-48ef-4d5e-88fa-5cdbf8793027> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://campustechnology.com/Articles/List/Retention.aspx?Page=11 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944809 | 365 | 1.625 | 2 |
This past weekend, I had the honor of visiting a Federal Aviation Administration team supporting Haiti's heroic redevelopment efforts.
It's been three months since a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti. While the emergency relief efforts may have subsided, and Haiti is no longer be front-page news in America, the Haitian people have a long road ahead.
I can't even begin to convey the scope of the work necessary. Rebuilding their infrastructure will take years.
That's why I am so proud of the crew I met in Haiti from the FAA. These men left their families behind shortly after the earthquake to install and man a portable air traffic control tower at Port Au Prince.
And three months later, they remain in-country, continuing to lend their critical expertise and assistance.
I want to thank the FAA team for showing me their quarters, a plywood structure next to the tower. I know the bunk beds the guys have been sleeping in are a far cry from their stateside homes, and I appreciate what they've given up to help keep supplies and rebuilding materials flying into Haiti.
During my visit, I met with the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Merten. Together, we met with Haitian transportation officials and discussed the transportation challenges they're facing as they work to rebuild their nation.
So DOT will send aviation, maritime, and highway experts to help assess Haiti's transportation needs. I am hopeful those experts can be on their way to Haiti within 30 days.
Flying into Haiti over Port Au Prince, I could see the bright blue tarps of the tent cities people are living in because their homes were destroyed. It's no surprise that Haitian President Rene Preval has said it may take three years just to remove the rubble from the destruction, and only then can the nation begin to rebuild in earnest. DOT will do what we can to support this difficult process.
I'm grateful that the Obama Administration has the resources to put a stone or two into that wall. | <urn:uuid:83264019-5e2e-401d-be4c-26385578ef02> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fastlane.dot.gov/2010/04/faa-crew-continues-to-support-haitian-relief.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962189 | 406 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Martti Sakari Vainio (born December 30 1950 at Vehkalahti) is a Finnish former long distance runner. His achievements in major athletic championships include gold in the 10,000 metres race 1978 European Championships in Athletics in Prague and bronze in the same distance at the 1982 European Championships in Athletics in Athens. At the 1983 World Championships in Athletics he dropped to fourth by a very short margin in the 10,000 metres race, and insenced by that caught the bronze in the 5000 metres, which was also a closely contested fixture, Vainio only assuring his medal by a palpable lunge over the finish line.
At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics Vainio finished second in the 10,000m, but was caught using steroids and stripped of the silver medal. He had already given a positive sample in Finnish Sports Association internal tests conducted at the Rotterdam Marathon on 14 April 1984, but this was covered up. The story released to the public after the Olympics alleged that Vainios neighbour, the janitor Alpo Nyrönen had given Vainio a doping-injection by accident, instead of the intended Vitamin B infusion. Later Vainio has claimed that he thought he had been using the male hormone testosterone, rather than anabolic steroids.
Initially Vainio received a life-long ban from competitive athletics, but after the domestic sports association made a plea for a reprieve, it was shortened to 18 months. After the ban, Vainio returned to the track and raced in the World Athletics Championships in Rome 1987 in the 10,000 metres race, but this comeback race can be best described as a damp squib. Not only was his speed nothing to write home about, but the officials of the race bungled and told Vainio that he had completed the race, when he in fact still had one circuit to go; as a consequence, Vainios race was recorded as a forfeit.
On the senior circuit Vainio claimed the Over 40s World Record on the 3000 metres (8.05,08 minutes) and the 10,000 metres as well (28.38,58 minutes).
The winning time he recorded 1978 in Prague - 27.30,99 - is still the domestic Finnish record and European Championship record. On the 3 km, his personal best was 7.44,42 (1984) and on the 5000 metres 13.20,07 (1983). Vainio achieved five domestic Finnish Golds on the 5 km (1978, 1980, 1981, 1982 and 1987). On the 10,000 metres he ran nine Gold Medals in domestic championships (1977, 1978, 1980-1983 and 1986-1988). The Finnish Championship for cross country running saw him on the top podium 1981, 1983, 1986 and 1987.
After his sports career, Martti Vainio has worked in the travel industry. | <urn:uuid:59c38d6f-5825-41e0-b61c-e1162ceb8f0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://everything.explained.at/Martti_Vainio/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973013 | 585 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Social Security and Medicare: The Twin Disasters That Will "Break the Bank"
Here, you get an overview of the looming bankruptcy of the Social Security/Medicare system. Politically, they are one program, which Congress is unwilling to challenge.
The unfunded liability of the two programs is now about $84 trillion. See the table, based on a 2007 estimate -- before the recession -- made by Prof. Kent Smetters of the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. Click here.
To pay for Social Security and Medicare, the government would have to raise income taxes by 81%.
Today, the combined programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid consume almost 50% of the U.S. government's budget. For a report on this, click here.
If you are willing to view a balanced, brief presentation using about 30 simple graphs to describe that is inevitably going to happen, click here.
There is no statistical escape from bankruptcy or default, either open or through inflation, yet Congress pretends that this is not inevitable. Why? Because voters will remove from office any Congressman who tells the truth about what is statistically irreversible. The question today is the form that the bankruptcy will take: outright default, mass inflation, or a salami-slicing reduction of benefits benefits.
USA Today ran a front-page story on November 15, 2005 on the looming crisis. The Comptroller General of the United States -- who monitors the government's financial books -- says the situation is "worse than advertised."
A Clergyman's Security Rev. Francis Mahaffy This classic warning against joining Social Security was written by Rev. Mahaffy in 1957. It was a warning to ministers, who were being allowed to join the program. Today, ministers can opt out for moral reasons in the first year of their ordination. They should. . . . keep reading
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1998 was the year for selecting the Palma team members
and there were many articles on the various matches used to select the
Canadian and American teams. My hat is off to the people working for
a place on a Palma Team. Shooting a 1000 yard target can be a lot
of fun if things go well, or may be very frustrating if the conditions or
your equipment is having a bad day.
The "Palma Match" has a fine heritage and tradition. This also means that it has long standing requirements and regulations. Which include controlling or issuing the ammunition used at the Palma Match by all shooters. The bullet, powder, primer, and case I believe has been selected but the only component that I am sure of is the bullet. The Sierra 155 grain Matchking or Palma has received the honor of being the Official 1999 Palma Bullet. This article is about my curiosity on just how good is this Sierra Palma Bullet at 1000 yards and just how good does shooter/gun have to be at 1000 yards to hold the X-Ring and Ten-Ring. The rules have been changed and after the 1999 Palma Matches the teams may bring their own ammuntion to future matches but it must still use the Sierra 155 grain MatchKing bullet. So how good is the 155 at 1000 yards?
The first question on how good is the Sierra 155 Palma bullet may be hypothetically answered with the aid of a ballistic program. After all, Sierra has the best ballistic information. This Palma Bullet has most likely been tested by all bullet manufacturers with the equipment to do so and by many countries for their Palma team. This bullet may not be one of the most tested bullets in history but most likely has received all the latest testing on the newest equipment using the best procedures. So how much muzzle velocity, wind speed, and wind direction variation can the Sierra MatchKing Palma bullet tolerate and stay in the X-Ring at 1000 yards? In other words how good does the ammuntion have to be in terms of muzzle velocity standard deviation and just how good does the shooter/coach have to be at reading the wind changes in terms of speed and direction?
Muzzle velocity variation is a known fact and here to stay for awhile. But what is more important for the long range shooter, low standard deviation or low extreme spread of the muzzle velocity? Both are part of the chronograph's statistical output. Both are very useful. Standard deviation is the measure of variability equal to the square root of the arithmetic average of the squares of the deviations from the mean in a frequency distribution. Thanks for the computer. So after all that square of the squares stuff, just remember that your chance for each shot fired is 68.3% for being within plus or minus one standard deviation from the calculated mean velocity. Your changes are 95.5% for ±2 standard deviation units and 99.7% for ±3 standard deviation units. The chronograph's extreme spread is telling you how lucky you were on the five or ten shot string just fired. Fewer shots per group will increase your luck for a low extreme spread. Use five shot strings to tell your friends how good your load is and 33 shot string to tell yourself.
Target 1 shows four 100 shot vertical groups for the 155 Sierra Palma
Bullet at 1000 yards. The mean muzzle velocity was 2950 fps and from
left to right the standard deviation for each group was 6, 11, 17, and 22
fps. This target was generated using one of Silhouette Ballistics
computer programs. The Bench Rest Simulation option in the exterior
ballistic program generates a table for the down range trajectory from randomly
selected velocities. The program randomly selects the velocities anywhere
between plus or minus three standard deviation units for the mean velocity.
Using 100 shot groups you pretty well get the entire spread of the ±
3 standard deviation units. The first one hundred shot group on the
left with the standard deviation equal to six (6) could be representative
of a very good lot of ammunition. The second group on the left had
a standard deviation equal to 11 which may be a better representation of the
"Palma Ammo". The third group with a standard deviation of 17 may be
higher than the palma team wishes but may be the closest. The last group
with a standard deviation equal to 22 is for palma shooter's night mares
and showing the wind affect. Using a random selection process which
selects anywhere between ± 3 standard deviation units will not produce
selected values or population that fits the normal statistical curve.
The odds of selection are even across all three standard deviation units.
Selecting a number within ± 1 units is the same as selecting a number
in the ± 2 to 3 standard deviation group. So the target may
have more than it's fare share of velocities in the ±3 standard deviation
units but "Murphy" is still alive and selecting your cartridges. For
this comparison we may be erring on the conservative side but so what.
The down range velocity variation or velocity variation at 1000 yards is
probability greater than it started out at. The ballistic coefficient
is also mean value and I have not seen anything reported which gives the
standard deviation for a ballistic coefficient, so using the full three units
equally may not be all bad and may actually be more representative of the
actual results at 1000 yards. So with no wind the 155 Sierra Palma
bullet needs ammo with a standard deviation slightly less than 6 to stay
in the x -ring and standard deviation of 11 to stay in the ten-ring.
So much for muzzle velocity variation, what about wind and wind variation? First constant wind, this is the easy part. Faster bullets drift less and slower bullets drift more.
Target 2 shows the effect of a constant 20 mph wind at 90 degrees to the
bullet flight. Blowing right to left. The faster bullets drift
less and are high and to the right. The slower than average bullets
are a little low and to the left. Shooting 1000 yards or rim
firing at 200 yards you got to know when to hold them and when to roll them
sight knobs. Target 2 is a perfect machine rest center hold and you
can not make any sights corrections from that angled vertical group.
The only thing you can do is find better ammo.
How good can you read the wind? Plus or minus how many mph? For slow winds with velocities less than 8 mph and reading the mirage in a spotting scope maybe ± ½ to 1 mph? For stronger winds when the mirage cannot be seen in the spotting scope and you are now forced to read the moving grass, waving wind flags, range flags, flying debris, and etc. maybe to within 1½ to 2½ mph. We know the wind does not blow steady. The weather reports state that the winds will be coming from some direction and blowing between something and some more something. The reports may even state that there will gusts up to some really big value.
Target 3 shows the affect of a variable wind on the palma bullet at constant muzzle velocity. The wind speed could be any velocity, the effect shown is from the variation in the wind. The top row on Target 3 shows the right to left drift difference from a wind varying ±0.5 mph. The second row from the top is ±1.0 mph, while row three is ±1.5 mph and the bottom row is ±2.0 mph. Conclusion: A small change in wind velocity can very easily move a palma shooter out of the x-ring or ten-ring. I don't know how good you are at reading wind? But I don't know if I could tell the difference between 16, 17, or 18 mph wind. Maybe I could between a 1.0 mph right wind and a 1.0 mph left wind. This is one trait of a good coach or spotter. To see or have a feel for the changes in the wind. Now there is also a direction thing for the wind and you guessed it, it's got some variability also. So how good are you at directions? Can you tell wind direction changes to within ±2.0 degrees? A straight away head wind or tail wind maybe? But a wind blowing at 45 degrees to within ±0.5°. Now add all this together, i.e. muzzle velocity variations plus horizontal wind speed variations plus horizontal wind direction variation and what does it take to hold the x-ring at 1000 yards? But for now we are not going to think about any vertical wind factors, basic gun repeatability, sight picture and alignment variations, variable light conditions, or ballistic coefficient variation. So what does it take besides lots of luck?
Target 4 is a one hundred shot simulation with perfect holding and sight pictures using the Sierra Palma Bullet with a muzzle velocity of 2950 fps with a SD=4, wind speed ±0.5 mph, and wind direction at 45 degrees ±1 degree. The simulated target was scored a 1000 - 100 X's.
Target 5 one hundred shot simulation the muzzle velocity standard deviation was increased to 9, wind ±1.0 mph and wind direction at 45 degrees ±2.0 degrees. This simulation was scored a 998 - 32 X's.
Target 6 is at 800 yards with the same variations as Target 5. It was scored a 1000 - 91 X's. If it holds the ten ring at 1000 yards it should hold the x-ring at 800 yards.
Target 7 is my expectation for the variations. Muzzle velocity standard deviation of 14 for the factory loaded ammo. Average windy day of 15 mph at 45 degrees. Shooter and or coach good for ±1.0 mph on wind speed and ±3 degrees on direction. After looking at Target 7, the chapter on "Conditions" in G. David Tubb's book the 'Highpower Rifle", makes more sense. His discussion on the wind cycle and staying ahead of the wind are very interesting. Now you add to this target the variations for light from the passing cloud, the rifle's repeatability, plus just how good is your hold and the group will open up more. Simulated Target #7 scored as 963 - 17 X's. For the stated conditions there are no sight corrections required or possible for Target #7.
Best of Luck to all 1000 yards shooters. You will need It.
Any Questions or
Web Page Comments
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Rock Star Mommy is a rallying cry for every woman who fondly recalls when she spent more time in mosh pits than “Mommy and Me” classes to adopt a rock ‘n roll attitude toward life. Based on Judy Davids’ experiences as a music fan, a mother, and the leader of one of the first “mommy” rock bands in the country, it tells the story of the Mydols’ path to success and the inspiration it gave Judy—and so many other moms—to embrace creativity and pursue their dreams. In Rock Star Mommy, Judy Davids tells her story — from using Manic Panic to dye her hair pink to donning a pair of go-go boots and hopping onstage to toting sound equipment around in her soccer mom minivan—and proves that making time to do what you love does not make you a bad parent, but a better, more fulfilled, and happier one.
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Lately it has definitely been the typical Louisiana winter. Every few days we get the rains, it rains just often enough that the ground has become saturated to the point that you wonder "will it ever dry out again". I read about the drought affecting large swaths of the nation and how it is affecting not only the production of our "breadbasket" but the farmers and families themselves. One of the funniest moments that I remember over the last few years was while watching the weather on a local channel a friend (not from here) heard the report of annual rainfall. I think it was approximately 3 feet this friend was shocked and asked "did they just report that in feet?". I had never considered the fact that might be odd to people that didn't grow up here, but I guess it is. Ok I know this was a long way to get there but I just read this and thought I would share...
Describing how off the charts our weather has become gets harder and harder. Fortunately, we have wunderground historian Christopher Burton to put things in perspective.
He tallies the datafro:m NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in his recap of “the warmest calendar year on record for the continental U.S. according to NCDC data going back to 1895″ | <urn:uuid:1f3cd8d7-8ef8-4a74-b8f5-15b0eb45e23c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.voicesonthesquare.com/discussions/2013/01/06/its-raining-again | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980633 | 266 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Hospice of Western Reserve's expansion helps to further its mission
Twelve acres skirting the shores of Lake Erie on Cleveland’s northeast border has a storied history of providing comfort and support, and now a new chapter is starting.
Hospice of the Western Reserve purchased the property — site of the former St. Joseph Christian Life Center — from the Cleveland Catholic Diocese in 2009.
Read more about the history of the St. Joseph Christian Life Center land here.
And the creation of a seamless connection to the adjacent Hospice House property on East 185th Street is in the works, though prior careful planning was required because of its landmark status.
The marriage of the properties is a pleasing one, according to Hospice of the Western Reserve CEO David Simpson and Ward 11 Cleveland City Councilman Michael Polensek.
“We basically have 20 acres of prime land on Lake Erie shores. It’s fantastic because it’s going to put us on Lake Shore Boulevard,” Simpson said. Both visibility and accessibility will be enhanced. Currently, the only entrance to Hospice House is via East 185th Street.
Polensek said that “It’s a magnificent 12 acres and my goal was to keep the property intact.”
He added that it was also important to maintain and support the historical significance of the property as well as create protection for Villa Angela-St. Joseph High School and surrounding neighborhoods.
“I thought the outcome was a win-win situation not only for the community but for Hospice,” Polensek said. Continued...
Future plans include a significant amount of tranquil green space and the continuation of Hospice House’s Vista Walk. That focal point of the grounds consist of winding pathways composed of inscribed bricks and granite stones that memorialize and honor loved ones.
Healing and vegetable gardens and use of a former priests’ quarters and a carriage house also are strong possibilities, said Hospice Project Manager Kathy Gatto.
The main 44,000-square-foot building of the Christian Life Center had structural problems that rendered it unsafe for occupancy. An $11 million fee to fix heavy water damage, black mold, asbestos and an outdated electrical system made renovation financially unfeasible. Simpson said that if the building was found to be sound it would have been used.
To preserve its legacy a process of deconstruction was set in motion.
“Deconstruction is a sustainable way to dismantle a building before demolishing portions of the space that aren’t usable,” Simpson explained.
Thus, old building materials will be reused, sold or recycled.
Bricks are being carefully dismantled by workers for use in the Vista Walk. Also, 15,000 square feet of the masonry will be used for memorializing opportunities and 5,000 cubic feet will go to support walkways.
“We took out enough wood that if it was laid end to end, (it) would cover two miles,” Gatto said.
Marble bathroom dividers, vanity mirrors, wrought iron glass doors and rails, lighting fixtures and more are marked to be salvaged. Old tubing may encounter new life as artwork.
“More beneficial than the monetary aspect is that it shows respect for the building, the people in the neighborhood, and it helps build legacy,” Gatto said. Continued...
Plans are to have the building razed by the end of December.
Deconstruction, though used to dismantle homes, is a newer concept for commercial buildings in Cleveland. The former St. Joseph Christian Life Center is one of the first on which the process is being used.
Keli Keyes of Euclid works as a nurse for Hospice of the Western Reserve. Her late mother spent time at the orphanage once located on the newly acquired property.
“I feel like in some strange way that Hospice should now have that building where my mom started,” she said. “It’s serendipity that I happen to work there now.”
Gatto also thinks that the area is right for Hospice’s work.
“When you walk the grounds of the Christian Life Center you feel a sense of mission and it feels like who we are,” she said.
For those who would like to share their memories of the St. Joseph Christian Life Center, visit www.hospiceWR.org/clc.
Location, ST | website.com
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Staff Writer Jeff Schudel brings 25 years of experience covering the Browns to his regular offerings on team performance and player moves.
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The Ewa-Marine U-BZ100 housing is specially designed to fit the bulky, professional digital SLR cameras such as the Canon 1Ds or the Nikon D3, D300 and similar cameras. Smaller SLR cameras can still be used in the housing. The housing is manufactured from double laminated PVC and has an optical glass port. It is rated for dives of up to 65' (20m) depth.
Perfect for snorkeling or diving or for use in sandy, dusty, humid or foul weather conditions. This housing will give your camera the best possible protection while being fully operable. Since the U-BZ100 can be used with lenses up to 300mm, it is perfect for canoeists and other outdoor photographers who want to take pictures of birds and other wildlife while in or near the water.
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History is full of examples of the sort of evil that makes most people with living souls need to find a baby to look at to rouse their spirits.
Of course, evil on the dime-lot level surrounds us; everything from premeditated murder to child-abduction to terrorists blowing up innocent people to further political goals – when any person says “my ends justify my means”, and the “means” include depriving another of their liberty or their life, it’s evil.
There are greater, more spectacular evils; people crashing planes into buildings full of people, or blowing up buildings, or spree killings, or…the list is depressingly long.
Of course, most people know, or eventually learn, the great pinnacles of evil; when nations harness their governments’ entire political system and means to power to deprive people of their liberty, their property, their sanity and their lives. The title “Greatest Murderer in History” has several contenders; Lenin and Stalin killed anywhere from 40-60 million, maybe more, between them. Mao was probably not far off that pace. Both operated over decades, of course; there were a few great surges in killing (the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, several surges in purging), but all three of the great Communists plied their bloody trade over the course of a miserable generation or two. And they – and the other great mass-murderers, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il, Robespierre, the Ottomans in Armenia and a grim list of others – as a rule did their killing the old-fashioned way; by various flavors of pseudo-judicial murder, with firing squads or destruction of food stocks or guillotines or pistols to the back of the head; with machine guns next to ditches; with mustard gas from the air; with government-induced mass-starvation.
All very slow, brutal and inefficient.
The fact is, killing people is difficult. People want to stay alive. They fight, hard, to stay that way. And while people under dictatorships learn to be docile in order to survive (especially in the absence of any other hope), they will occasionally rise up and throw monkey-wrenches in the works. And try as you may to indoctrinate your own followers to perform evil on your behalf, there will be some that will retain some innate good; they will interfere, or at least not participate in your plans with the enthusiasm needed to get the job done.
Any good engineer knows that, when you want an efficient process – an assembly line, a decision-making process, a nuclear power plant, the code for a Nintendo game, anything – you need to factor out as many variables as possible; to strip out the moving parts.
Germans are, stereotypically, great engineers. They build things. And when an engineer builds a complicated thing – a BMW or a camera or a system to eliminate a race of people – they’ll start with a prototype or two, to test out the theories and work out the bugs before going into mass production.
And so, with teutonic thoroughness, did the Germans.
In the eighteen months since they’d conquered Poland, the Germans had been testing out methods for killing people – Gypsies, gays, the mentally ill, dissidents and, of course, Jews. They’d been through the “traditional” methods; roving units of SS troops tried go from village to village trying to herd Jews to mass graves and machine-gun them; it was slow, manpower-intensive, and left too many loose ends (including a few survivors – a precious few of whom, unbeknownst to the Germans, would survive the war to testify against their would-be murderers). They settled on poison gas, of various varieties.
And like any good manufacturer, the Germans knew that the technical solution was only part of the job; the rest is logistics – in this case, the task of identifying, assembling and transporting all of those Jews.
The Germans, working with the sort of meticulousness we’d recognize in any good process engineer today, factored out the moving parts, and arrived at the solution for an industrial killing system; a series of centralized camps.
And to tie together all the pieces of this immense project, it was seventy years ago today that the Nazis held a conference at a villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.
At the conference, the senior leadership of the various bureaucracies in Nazi Germany were gotten up to speed, with the job at hand, given a mission statement and were directed to start planning.
The “Wannsee Conference” was the project kickoff meeting from Hell.
The goal of the conference – to take the “learnings” from eighteen months of “rehearsals” in the fields of Poland, and experiments at Chelmno and Treblinka, and start the actual execution of what the Germans called the “Endlösung”, or “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem”.
The meeting was attended by a who’s who of Nazi leadership, and for an assembly focused on one of the greatest single acts of evil in human history, the proceedings were remarkably banal. From the Wikipedia entry on the subject – which, for Wkipedia, is pretty useful and concise:
Heydrich spoke for nearly an hour. Then followed about thirty minutes of questions and comments, followed by some less formal conversation. Luther from the Foreign Office urged caution in Scandinavia, “Nordic” countries where public opinion was not hostile to the small Jewish populations and would react badly to unpleasant scenes. Hofmann and Stuckart pointed out the legalistic and administrative difficulties over mixed marriages, arguing for compulsory dissolution of marriages to prevent legal disputes and for the wider use of sterilisation as an alternative to deportation. Neumann from the Four Year Plan argued for the exemption of Jews who were working in industries vital to the war effort and for whom no replacements are available. Heydrich (keen not to offend Neumann’s boss Hermann Göring) assured him that these Jews would not be “evacuated”. There were questions about the mischlings [mixed-race people of quarter-to-half Jewish anscestry] and those in mixed marriages: the details of these complex questions were put off until a later meeting.
Finally Bühler of the General Government in occupied Poland [the German term for the administration of Poland] stated that:
“the General Government would welcome it if the final solution of this problem could be begun in the General Government, since on the one hand transportation does not play such a large role here nor would problems of labor supply hamper this action. Jews must be removed from the territory of the General Government as quickly as possible, since it is especially here that the Jew as an epidemic carrier represents an extreme danger and on the other hand he is causing permanent chaos in the economic structure of the country through continued black market dealings.”
The meeting itself was of little note in the schedules of the men involved – it lasted less than two hours, one of many such meetings on the schedules of busy bureaucrats in a nation at war. No great decisions were made; the decision was in fact Hitler’s, and had been made years earlier. There was no “go/no-go” moment; the leadership, Hitler and Göring, Himmler and the rest, were already fully on board. There was no question of stopping the “Final Solution” – which was, in a sense, already well underway. The idea of killing Jews was well-enough known. but fairly oblique at the meeting; the actual killing was an internal matter for the SS.
In a sense, the meeting was a set-up; Heydrich’s way of making sure the civilian and petty-military leadership of the entire German bureaucracy was linked to the Solution, as accomplices. In a larger sense, it was to get the German bureaucracy’s buy-in to the idea of finding and deporting 11 million Jews from around the occupied world (Eichmann still planned on getting his hands on Jews in England and Ireland) to extermination camps in Poland.
Not a whole lot different than kicking of the adoption of an Oracle database, if you leave out the subject matter.
Which is, really, the point; evil is boring and banal. If evil came strutting onto the stage in a red cape with horns sticking out of its head and blood soaking its beard, it’d be easy to pick out and deal with.
Real evil walks among us, wearing a suit or a petty uniform or a Mao jacket, and speaks the same language you do.
And evil has meetings. Probably catered. | <urn:uuid:4be71c12-874b-4627-b87f-7c1ecd6c10bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=13967 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963665 | 1,862 | 1.734375 | 2 |
I'll boke on the floor if a bag isn't found,
We can't stop it now, it's that or the ground.
It wasn't so bad as I read of your 'meal',
But why buy a book to feed to your seal?
That makes no sense but then it got worse,
The seal kept eating, expanding its girth.
I said it was terrible and that it set the scene,
But why did I write it and what did it mean?
You may want to rethink what to do with your time,
Was there a point or was it just for the rhyme?
I should boke down your shirt and it's not that far fetched,
Unlike your stanzas which left me perplexed.
I once saw some vomit so ominiously coming,
Brought on by a story of a sheep and some plumming.
It was a bite sized tale about a creature so cute,
The sheep was old but also minute.
Like a borrower she lived off the scraps in a house
But sadly she hadn't the speed of a mouse.
One day on a radiator she ran out of luck,
The heating came on and she found herself stuck.
The temperature kept rising until there was steam,
Internal fluids bubbling out at her seams.
It wasn't a pleasant sight or smell to behold,
Her wool contracted, her corpse it did mould.
There on the pipes swollen with heat
Sat a woolen ball of mutton - a cute cloud of meat.
The coach we were riding in when this narrative was told
Became covered with a breakfast not very old.
But unlike this fiction of an animal in trouble,
Reading pointless poetry makes me puke double.
I hasten to remind you I'm so close to hurling
It's my own terrible poetry creating this churning.
So in order to end this I'll boke in my drink
Then force down the lumps with the plug in the sink. | <urn:uuid:3ec579c8-6d84-4334-8fdb-5862e97ddb2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://life-in-ni.blogspot.com/2011/03/sickly-poem.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97879 | 419 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Bad movie/worse book, Part I: Why 'The Help' is hopeless
Editor's note: In the run-up to this Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony, we will be writing about three nominees for Best Picture that are not only unworthy of such distinction, but are all adaptations of even worse books. Hence the title of the feature. Enjoy.
To be fair, the film version of “The Help” was working from deeply flawed source material. The book, by Kathryn Stockett, was weak in both word and deed — rife with clichés, melodrama and a soupcon of racial uplift through the lens of a white woman. | <urn:uuid:cf3b7e25-80b6-4a2a-9469-a7f5da1be819> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lisnews.org/bad_movies_worse_books | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951746 | 135 | 1.515625 | 2 |
MORROW — When Georgia officials announced plans to severely restrict public access to its state archives, it set off a firestorm not only among scholars and people tracing their family roots, but national historical groups.
Archives supporters expressed outrage at plans to limit access to appointments-only on six days a month to view some of the state’s most valuable papers, from the fading parchment of the 1798 Georgia state constitution to Jimmy Carter’s 1976 statement of candidacy. They collected more than 17,000 signatures on an online petition, rallied at the State Capitol and hired a lobbyist.
On Thursday, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and Secretary of State Brian Kemp backed off of the plan — sort of. Deal announced that he was restoring $125,000 of a $733,000 budget cut so that the archives could remain open two days a week and visitors could view records without making an appointment.
“Georgia’s Archives are a showcase of our state’s rich history and a source of great pride,” Deal said in a statement, which did not address the fate of seven workers who recently received pink slips effective Nov. 1. Three other employees — the new archives director, an archivist and a building manager — will definitely stay.
The controversy focused national attention on shrinking funding for state archives at a time when they’re processing, preserving and digitizing far more records than just a few years ago.
Georgia’s cost-cutting move was “a continuation of a trend we see at the federal level,” said Lee White of the National Coalition for History in Washington. “It’s not something we want to see spread to the states.”
While most states have had to slash their budgets in recent years, making layoffs almost routine, the proposal to slash the Georgia Archives’ budget struck a nerve in the Peach State, which celebrates a rich history from the Civil War to the civil rights movement.
Deal, a Republican, had ordered agencies to their cut spending during the current budget year by 3 percent. Kemp imposed the entire cut for his department on the state archives. His spokesman acknowledged that it was a “brutal cut” but necessary given past funding reductions for the secretary of state’s office, which is also responsible for elections, professional licensing, business regulation and the State Capitol.
The agency is already struggling to keep pace with more stringent ID requirements for professional licenses, part of a new law aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration in Georgia.
But archives supporters pushed back.
“We’ve complained for years” about budget cuts that whittled down the archives staff from more than 50 to 10 and reduced public access from five days a week,” said Kaye Manning Minchew of the Coalition to Preserve the Georgia Archives. “It takes a near disaster to get more attention.”
They were soon joined by groups such as the National Coalition for History and the Council of State Archivists.
Vicki Walch, the council’s executive director, said the number of workers at state archives has declined 20 percent since 2004 as the volume of paper records has increased from 2.4 million to 3.4 million linear square feet over the same period. She said many archivists were surprised that Georgia had been hit so hard because the archives, located south of Atlanta in a 10-year-old complex next to a National Archives satellite facility, was regarded as a premier program.
“To have this happen has just sent a shock wave throughout the community because if it can happen in Georgia, what’s going to happen someplace else?” Walch said earlier this week.
Archivists complained that no serious research could be conducted during two-hour periods. The archives contains 260 million documents, 1.5 million land grants and plats, and 100,000 photographs.
Archives backers also lamented that people wouldn’t be able to easily leaf through important documents such as the 1798 Georgia state constitution — kept in a green bound volume in a secure, climate-controlled room — or Georgia’s Royal Charter.
“I think any archivist will tell you that an archive should be open at least five days a week, if not one weekend day, because our mission is to serve the broadest possible constituency we can, said Sarah Quigley, manuscript archivist at Emory University.
In Thursday’s announcement, Deal said he would propose that the archives be shifted to the University System of Georgia, effective July 1. The state Legislature must approve the change.
Jared Thomas, a spokesman for Secretary of State Kemp, said his boss supported the changes and would be determining the effect on the laid-off employees, including those in charge of preservation, conservation and reference.
“We don’t know yet,” he said. “We’re still working through the issue. The current level of public access will be maintained.
If the staff cuts remain, Walch is concerned that three staff members won’t be able to handle the workload.
“The real shortsighted part of this is without that processing, you’ll have access to things processed years ago but the things coming in now that just get shelved won’t be open to anybody,” she said, suggesting that Georgia could become the first state to shift its archives to a university system.
Minchew said she was “delighted” by the governor’s decision to restore some funds and shelve the appointments plan, but also expressed concern about staffing levels. “Now we want to hear more details.” | <urn:uuid:24f6777c-c9a7-4aeb-a47f-7b07a8754af8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2012-10-18/after-uproar-georgia-officials-back-archives-plan | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961805 | 1,180 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Charlotte Henriette de Rothschild (born November 28, 1955) is a British soprano specializing in the recital and oratorio repertoire who is a member of the Rothschild banking family of England. The second daughter of the four children of Edmund Leopold de Rothschild (born 1916) and Elizabeth Edith Lentner (1923-1980), she is a twin to David Lionel. In 1990 she married Nigel S. Brown.
Charlotte Rothschild studied in Austria at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg, and at the Royal College of Music in London where her uncle Leopold David de Rothschild has served as a Council Chairman.
A global performer who is very popular in Japan, she created a recital called "Family Connections" in which all the songs were composed by friends or teachers of her family during the past two centuries. The programme also includes compositions by her own ancestor, Mathilde Hannah von Rothschild (1832-1924). | <urn:uuid:7d8f47a5-be23-4924-ae33-2b51746ae405> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reference.com/browse/Charlotte_Henriette_de_Rothschild | 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 | 0.977128 | 197 | 1.53125 | 2 |
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.Practice and care are two made one.
With red leaves left after frostWhen someone dies the spirit, they say, leaves. The body is experienced as vacated. I think differently.
That you gathered under the trees
You brew tea, call me in
A most generous thought!
We sit here not speaking;
The mountain window is still,
But pine winds from ten thousand peaks
Stir in the kettle.
- Gensei (1623-1668)
With death the spirit goes still and silent. It does not vacate. It doesn't move or activate or sound through. Instead, it rests. In peace. Unmoving.
Stillness is life at peace.
No wonder stillness is unrecognized.
As is God.
Britta, Erika's devoted shepherd dog, went still today. | <urn:uuid:0893026a-367b-42f5-934c-d306eb5105d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://meetingbrook.blogspot.com/2008_12_14_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947629 | 192 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Finding The Perfect Christmas Tree
Now that you're getting the decorations together for the holidays, you and your family may be looking at a few Christmas trees. Finding the perfect tree is a holiday tradition for lots of families, and you will need
different features for the tree based on your design plans. Here are some tips for finding the right Christmas trees, as well as some design ideas that you may want to consider.
If there is a place in your city or state where you can go and pick up a live tree, you should travel to the location when you know when you'll be decorating the tree. If you purchase the tree too early, it may wither by the time you want to garnish it. Once you are ready to bring the tree home, you should also make sure that your home is cool enough to keep the tree alive; traditional Christmas trees thrive in cold weather, so turning the heat down slightly will keep the pine needles from turning brown quickly.
You should also consider the size of the Christmas trees before you take one home as well. Are you going to be displaying the tree in the family room, or the largest room in the house? Will you be setting it up in the dining room this year? This will help you to figure out how tall and wide the tree should be, and you'll have an idea of what to tell the individuals cutting your tree after you've gotten the measurements for the room. A 'baby' tree may be best if you are living in an apartment or townhouse, and is just the right size for children to decorate.
Keep in mind that there are also some synthetic Christmas trees that you can purchase from local department stores. This way, you won't have to buy a real tree each year (although the smell of fresh pine is indicative of the holiday), and you can put the tree up any time you like. Check out stores like Walmart and Target for great 'fake' Christmas trees that look just like the real thing; you can also check the websites for these stores to order a tree from the internet; the site will have instructions for caring for the tree as well, in addition to some ideas for decorating the tree.
You can find great accents for real or synthetic Christmas trees when you visit sites like www.merrynews.com. The forum has all different types of links that will connect you to companies that offer one-of-a-kind ornaments and garnishes, and you'll get some suggestions for creating homemade decorations for your Christmas trees as well. Happy holidays!
- Leaning Tower Of....Christmas Tree (crazyrunninglegs.com)
- "Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall." (keepthecoffeecoming.wordpress.com)
- Trimming the Tree. (mommablogsalot.com)
- Eastern Iowa Christmas tree industry weathering economic storm (thegazette.com)
Tags: Christmas trees
Filed under: Christmas trees
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more! | <urn:uuid:ec43909d-2ae0-416c-ace6-5699acd8f1d1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://landscapeplants.landscapeliving.com/337/finding-the-perfect-christmas-tree/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95369 | 641 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Unintended Consequences Should Be The Intention
July 24 (Bloomberg) -- A ban on “naked” trading in the $26.4 trillion credit-default swaps market being considered by U.S. lawmakers would have the unintended consequence of making it more expensive for companies to borrow, traders said.
“It will inevitably lead to higher costs of funding across all U.S. corporations, significantly reduce liquidity in credit markets, and further widen the opacity” of other instruments that rely on credit swaps for pricing, said Tim Backshall, chief strategist at hedge fund adviser Credit Derivatives Research LLC in Walnut Creek, California, in an interview yesterday.
THAT WOULD NOT BE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.....that would be pricing debt to actual risk. It would prohibit the practice of selling toxic debt and rating it AAA. It would force the market to do actual research and due dilligence on the fundementals of the investment.
In the last ten years, we infected our economy with so much bad debt, primarily because the purchasers thought they were "insured" regardless of default, that the insurance/swaps became the driver of the market and not the debt.
It didn't matter if companies really made money or not, they just had to make it look like they weren't going to default. Innovation was stifled and assets were misallocated.
Once the debt started defaulting, we learned more insurance existed than the assets of those playing the game and the whole house of cards started to implode.
Soon you will realize this has been a game of high stakes gambling, not investing. The true financial conditions of many of our companies are no where close to current perception. You can only game the system for so long before the system games you.
A while back I stated, if you can't trust the data, nothing matters. Pretty soon you are going to understand just what that means.
Just look at California's "balance budget." Much of it came from siphoning off much needed money that belonged to cash strapped cities and counties. If the state needs the money, don't the cities and counties need it as well?
Balance the state's budget and bankrupt a city? And balance the budget knowing that conditions are much worse than contemplated?
We are facing very serious issues going forward. Our nation built an economy on an illusion of debt supported by swaps. Now that the debt is defaulting, we are rapidly learning there is not much of an economy behind it. | <urn:uuid:cde4ae5b-f941-48f0-b436-37b95108ed31> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/unintended-consequences-should/233385 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968245 | 521 | 1.617188 | 2 |
With President Obama likely to begin his second term with a sharp domestic focus, he’ll need a trusted foreign-policy and security team to handle sensitive, and pressing, global challenges.
Barack Obama’s reelection was barely sealed before some international voices began trumpeting how the president’s victory would mean a renewed American focus on foreign-policy issues that have languished during the campaign.
President Obama could now revive the search for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, international Middle East envoy Tony Blair said. The United States will be bolder now in pressing for a resolution of Syria’s deadly and dangerous civil war, some US allies, including Turkish officials, predicted.
Have these foreign friends heard of the “fiscal cliff”?
RECOMMENDED: Election 2012: 12 reasons Obama won and Romney lost
Obama will no doubt be looking broadly to bolster his legacy, and that will include his stewardship of America’s role in the world. But after an election in which – according to exit polls – foreign policy barely registered as a priority and a campaign in which Obama spoke frequently of a need for “nation-building here at home,” it seems likely that domestic issues such as America’s fiscal health, job creation, taxation, and even immigration reform will dominate the president’s attention.
“The president laid out his agenda in his victory speech, when he talked about priorities like continuing the economic recovery, avoiding the fiscal cliff, and getting people back to work; so he made it clear he’ll be investing his political capital in those kinds of domestic battles,” says Mark Siegel, a former deputy assistant to the president in the Carter White House who is now a partner at Locke Lord Strategies in Washington.
Page 1 of 4 | <urn:uuid:e6c5a56a-1999-4e25-8576-9727aa4693c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2012/1108/Obama-s-new-foreign-policy-and-security-team-Could-Colin-Powell-be-on-it | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963592 | 373 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted by the storms that came through the Twin Cities over the weekend. To prevent further tragedy, remember these safety tips:
- Don’t use a chainsaw unless you know how. Branches may be under pressure and snap unexpectedly.
- Stay away from power lines. You may not be able to tell if they are live or not.
- Wear sturdy footwear. Ground may be uneven and there are many cut hazards around.
- Ask for help. Work in teams when doing clean up. | <urn:uuid:e7758d14-0728-401b-acc6-a009a46acc65> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chess-safety.com/blog/?p=781 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942784 | 111 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Pope Benedict XVI has named six new cardinals as a "gesture of the universality of the Church" and "in the context of the New Evangelization."
The new members of the College of Cardinals, including one American — Vatican Archbishop James Harvey — will be appointed in an unexpected consistory, scheduled to take place Nov. 24.
Speaking extemporaneously Oct. 27 at the final session of the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization, the Pope said the "little consistory" would "complete" a previous one held in February, at which 22 new cardinals were appointed. Many of those new cardinals hailed from Europe and Italy in particular. Ten were also cardinals of the Roman Curia.
The Holy Father said these six new cardinals do not come from Europe. This shows the Church is for "all peoples, speaks in every language," the Pope added. "It is always the Church of Pentecost, not the Church of one continent, but of the universal Church."
The Pope invited "everyone to pray for the newly elected, asking the maternal intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that they will always love with courage and dedication to Christ and his Church."
The new cardinals, whom the Holy Father announced at the end of his weekly general audience Oct. 25, are: Milwaukee native Archbishop James Harvey, prefect of the papal household (the Pope also said he plans to appoint Archbishop Harvey archpriest of the papal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls); the Maronite Patriarch of Antioch, His Beatitude Béchara Boutros Raï; Archbishop Baselios Cleemis (Isaac) Thottunkal, major archbishop of Trivandrum (Syro-Malankara rite), India; Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria; Archbishop Ruben Salazar Gomez, archbishop of Bogota, Colombia; and Bishop Luis Antonio Tagle, archbishop of Manila, Philippines.
Archbishop Harvey was born in Milwaukee in 1949 and ordained a priest by Pope Paul VI on June 29, 1975. He studied at the North American College and the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome before being trained as a Vatican diplomat at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy and earning a doctorate in canon law. In 1998, he was named prefect of the papal household by Pope John Paul II, who later elevated him to the dignity of archbishop in 2003.
During his service in the papal household, Archbishop Harvey gained a reputation as a trusted and valued official, often seen at the Pope’s side on major occasions and responsible for arranging his audiences and other daily engagements.
Blessed John Paul II considered him one of his closest aides and would describe him as his "faithful collaborator in the Secretariat of State." And although he has spent 30 years as a Holy See official, he still keeps ties with the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and will occasionally return there to preach.
Other New Cardinals
Patriarch Raï, 72, is a well-respected leader of Lebanon’s Christians who studied at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome and worked in the Arabic section of Vatican Radio in the 1970s. Elected patriarch last year, he was praised for his organization of the Pope’s trip to Lebanon in September. He is seen as a unifying force among Middle-East Christians.
Cardinal-designate Thottunkal is the major archbishop of Trivandrum, India’s oldest Christian community. His appointment underlines the increasing importance the Pope attaches to India and its Christian rites. Speaking to Vatican Radio after his appointment, Cardinal-designate Thottunkal said he was only notified about the appointment the day before the announcement, but added it was "a great honor for the Church in India." At just 53, he will become the youngest member of the College of Cardinals.
Sixty-eight-year-old Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, has long been seen as deserving of a red beretta. Now that fellow Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze has turned 80, it’s also likely the Pope felt it important to have another voting cardinal from this leading African nation (only cardinals younger than 80 are permitted to vote in papal elections). Moreover, as Islamists continue to target Nigerian Catholics with weekly deadly attacks, his appointment will be seen as a sign of solidarity with the country’s suffering local Church.
Archbishop Ruben Salazar Gomez of Bogota, Colombia, 70, is known for standing up for the hostages of drug traffickers and for his work with the International Red Cross in Colombia. On his appointment as archbishop in 2010, he promised to focus on three priorities — "protecting marriage as the union between one man and one woman, saving innocent life in the womb and promoting peace in Colombia." Until his appointment, Columbia was lacking a cardinal of voting age, as three are now over 80.
Lastly, Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle, 54, of Manila, Philippines, will be made a cardinal. Some have criticized him for showing support for the "Bologna School," which believes the Second Vatican Council represented a necessary break with Catholic Tradition and the beginning of a new Church more in tune with modernity. This is at odds with the Pope’s own view, which sees the Council as a hermeneutic of continuity and reform. Nevertheless, the Pope has shown trust in Archbishop Tagle and allowed him to take a leading role in the recent Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization.
It is very unusual for a pope to call two consistories in the same year. The last time it occurred was in 1929, under Pope Pius XI. Pope John XXIII held two consistories within 12 months in the 1960s, but not in the same year (March 1960 and January 1961).
This will also be Pope Benedict’s fifth consistory, and with these appointments, he will have created 90 new cardinals. As of Nov. 24, the College of Cardinals will number 211 cardinals, of whom 120 will be eligible to vote in a conclave — in line with the limit of 120 set by Paul VI.
This means that of the cardinal electors nearly two-thirds have been created by Benedict XVI, making his own influence on the choice of his successor decisive. | <urn:uuid:986abd44-c0d9-47b5-a7ac-02b8e0af25e0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/pope-benedicts-little-consistory/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976243 | 1,332 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Thirteen months into his presidency, Barack Obama finally gave liberal supporters the kind of judicial nominee they had sought and conservatives feared.
Goodwin Liu, 39, is an unabashed liberal legal scholar who, if confirmed, could become a force on the federal appeals court for decades. There's talk that in time, the Rhodes Scholar, former high court clerk and current assistant dean and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, could be the first person of Asian descent chosen for the Supreme Court.
"I can easily imagine him" as a high court nominee, said Erwin Chemerinsky, a Liu supporter and dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine.
Obama's choice of Liu for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco drew quick and vociferous criticism from conservatives. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, described Liu as "far outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence."
For the first time, Obama seemed to be taking a page from the playbook of recent Republican presidents who nominated conservatives in their 30s and 40s with the expectation they would have enduring influence in setting policy on the federal bench.
Whether a string of younger, more ideological nominees will follow from the Democratic president is unknown. Of the four Obama nominees announced since Liu's selection on Feb. 24, three are their 50s and the other is a 45-year-old career prosecutor.
The payoff of the approach taken by President Ronald Reagan is evident today. Young judges appointed to the bench in the mid-1980s remain powerful forces on appeal courts in Chicago, Cincinnati, Richmond, Va., and San Francisco.
In an era when appeals court experience is virtually a prerequisite for the Supreme Court, five of the nine justices became appeals court judges before they were 45. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy were nominated to appellate judgeships before they turned 40, though Senate Democrats blocked Roberts' nomination near the end of George H.W. Bush's presidency.
First, though, Liu has to overcome anticipated Republican stalling tactics to win Senate confirmation.
Only six of Obama's 15 appeals court nominees have been confirmed even though the president's choices have seemed designed to avoid "high-profile fights," in the words of Curt Levey of the conservative Committee for Justice.
Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance For Justice, agreed that Obama has mainly chosen moderate federal trial judges for appeals courts.
"Unlike Reagan and the recent Bush, he certainly has not made ideology the hallmark of his judicial selection program," Aron said.
Seventeen Reagan nominees took their appeals court seats before they were 45, but the president did not immediately reach out to younger choices. The pace of those appointments quickened later in Reagan's first term, and especially, at the start of his second.
If there is a hallmark to Obama's choices to date, it is diversity, former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig said. Obama has nominated five women, five African-Americans, two Asian-Americans and a Hispanic among his appeals court choices.
White House officials said the president is filling vacancies on courts with heavy workloads or seats that have been open for years, in some cases. They noted that Obama nominated 32 judges in 2009 and already has sent 19 names to the Senate this year, with a steady stream of selections expected in the coming months.
But Heather Gerken, a Yale law professor and former law clerk to Justice David Souter, said she believes concerns about judicial salaries — lower than at private firms and top-notch law schools — and the threat of unpleasant confirmation hearings could complicate the search for judicial nominees.
"I think it's harder to find Goodwin Lius nowadays than it used to be," Gerken said. "People are less willing to give up great careers elsewhere to go on the judiciary at a young age."
If a fight over Liu's nomination emerges in the Senate, Republicans will label him a liberal judicial activist, while Democrats will defend Liu as a moderate committed to core constitutional values.
They will talk about his impact on the 9th Circuit, but the real focus will be on something else.
"The bigger concern is that he'll wind up on the Supreme Court," said Levey, a conservative.
Both parties have done this dance before. Democrats charged Republicans with delaying for more than a year Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation as an appeals court judge in the late 1990s because they saw her — correctly, it turned out — as the high court's first Hispanic justice. Sotomayor was 43 when President Bill Clinton nominated her to the appeals court. Last May, Obama picked her for the Supreme Court.
Republicans claimed Democrats repaid them in kind after President George W. Bush nominated a leading conservative lawyer and a Hispanic, Miguel Estrada, to the appeals court in Washington in 2001. Estrada was 39 when nominated and three weeks shy of his 41st birthday when he withdrew his nomination after waiting more than two years.
On the Net:
Liu's profile: http://tinyurl.com/y8bzu2d
Committee for Justice: http://web.committeeforjustice.org
Alliance For Justice: http://www.afj.org/
© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:8d6dab9d-b9e4-4dea-a3d7-f54fba6f0803> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/US-Obama-Judges/2010/03/13/id/352550 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971071 | 1,108 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Interesting - an issue on WIX that I can actually assist with!
On modern US artillery pieces, regardless of caliber, all types of artillery rounds (HE, Illum, DPICM, etc...) have a hard plastic obturating band. When the round is rammed into the tube, the obturating band is malleable enough to engage the rifling in the barrel and form an airtight seal. Once the propellant is ignited, the round (and anything with it - including your .50 bullet) will be pushed out of the barrel.
The flight of the round may or may not be affected depending on the how the bullet is lodged in the barrel. The passing of the round and bullet through the muzzle brake should not be affected either.
There probably would be, however, some scoring to the barrel from the event that would affect the performance of the barrel in the future.
I am a former Field Artillery Officer; it's nice to talk gunnery every once in awhile!
Hope this helps!
Mike the Redleg | <urn:uuid:ddf19b36-6aff-4e8c-a62b-e6afff0eccac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.warbirdinformationexchange.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=44235&view=previous | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945781 | 216 | 1.546875 | 2 |
From the January 3, 2010 Jerusalem Post
January 3, 2010
by Max Singer
Some Israelis have supported the so-called settlement building "moratorium," while others have opposed it in reasonable terms - noting, for example, how nearly impossible it will be to end the freeze if negotiations with the Palestinian Authority begin before it expires.
However, a sizable group of Israelis have been quite intemperate in opposition - speaking of Binyamin Netanyahu and the cabinet members who supported the temporary freeze as traitors to their commitments to the voters and calling for ministers to resign, and for civil disobedience against implementation of the government decision.
While the prime minister has justified the decision as a measure to restart negotiations with the PA, it is unlikely that his real motivation was an expectation that productive negotiations are possible or will be advanced by his action. So there is little point in discussing whether the temporary freeze is a useful part of any concern for negotiations.
It seems likely that the decision to announce a 10-month building moratorium in the settlements needs to be evaluated on entirely different considerations.
One consideration is the recognition that there is an absolute diplomatic need to maintain what pretends to be actions and policies aimed to advance negotiations, even when because of political conditions in the Palestinian and Arab worlds there are no immediate prospects for successful talks.
That is, the demand for a "peace process" is independent of - and sometimes harmful to - realistic pursuit of peace. Israeli governments have little choice but to participate in the pretense of such exercises.
More significant than this standard Israeli need was the question of how the new Israeli government should respond to the Obama administration, which is in some significant ways outside the range of all previous US administrations.
President Obama came to power with a very strong political position because of the romance of electing the first black president, Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and strong support from the mainstream media.
Although Obama continues the long-term American commitment to Israel's survival, the new administration's views differ from previous presidential dealings with the Middle East. The president apparently believed that Israel was the main obstacle to peace with the Palestinians and that the US should compel Israel to make the concessions necessary to achieve such peace. He chose to use the issue of settlement expansion as the first step toward implementing his policy - partly because settlements are a divisive issue among American Jews and among Israelis.
The US very roughly and publicly told the Israeli government that it should permanently stop all construction (new and in process) in all of Judea and Samaria and in the parts of Jerusalem acquired in 1967, because this was a necessary step toward implementing the Saudi proposal for peace. This was the problem Netanyahu faced as his government came to power.
Netanyahu understood that the Obama program would be a disaster for Israel, with no hope of achieving a peace in which Israel's survival was reasonably protected, and that Obama's initial demands would adversely affect Israel's negotiating position and were politically unacceptable within Israel. Above all, it would have been completely inconsistent with Israel's self-respect to agree to such demands.
It was clear that private discussions with the Obama administration stood no chance of convincing them of the realities of the Middle Eastern political situation. The administration, for example, was mistakenly convinced that substantial progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace was a necessary first step toward successful negotiations with Iran.
Therefore Netanyahu had two basic alternatives. He could flatly reject Obama's demands, conduct a public campaign to demonstrate the errors of the thinking behind the demands, and engage in a political fight with the US to prevent Obama from compelling Israel to accept American demands. Or he could try to negotiate a compromise with the US on its demands.
Netanyahu flatly rejected any limits on Jewish construction within Jerusalem. It was clearly a mistake by Obama to demand such an extreme measure. The move gained Netanyahu a good deal of support, as many were convinced that the US was placing unreasonable demands on Israel.
In general, the extreme Obama position, combined with his deliberate display of his intention to change the way the US related to Israel from previous practice by both parties, convinced Israelis that they needed to fear Obama and therefore to support the Netanyahu government - especially after Netanyahu's BESA Center/Bar-Ilan University policy statement of June 14 creatively seized the center of the Israeli foreign policy debate.
At this point, when it was clear that the US had overreached, Netanyahu could have chosen to fight Obama with some chance of success, or at least with an initial positional advantage. But that would have been a risky decision.
Israel's diplomacy and defense is dependent on US political support. Generally any American president should be expected to win a political fight against Israel and its American supporters if he tries hard enough. What Israel depends on - in addition to American goodwill - is the ability to force an American president to use so much political capital in imposing himself on Israel that he will choose to compromise instead.
So Netanyahu chose to save Obama the embarrassment of being forced to retreat from an untenable position, by negotiating an agreement in which both sides agreed to Israeli acceptance of a small portion of the original US demands.
The freeze was temporary, not permanent. Israeli agreed to a moratorium on new construction, but demonstratively went ahead with some 2,500 previously approved apartments and projects. No construction was stopped in Jerusalem. In principle the freeze had exceptions for "normal life" rather than being absolute as demanded.
In other words, Israel made concessions which, while painful and arguably ill-advised, were compatible with its self-respect as an independent and sovereign country.
The Obama administration decided that getting a small part of its initial demands was better than pushing Israel further at the time - particularly in view of political reactions to the extremity of the original US demands.
The critical point is that a 10-month pause in Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria does not cause permanent harm to Israel. It causes some serious personal costs and injustice to some of the people involved. It looks in the wrong direction for negotiations with the Palestinians. And it makes it somewhat harder for Israel to make the case it needs to make to various publics about its legal and moral rights and the justice of its position.
But temporary measures will not decide the outcome of Israel's long struggle. In a few years practically all traces of this concession will have disappeared.
On the other hand, while a major political fight with Obama might have produced positive results for Israel, it would have risked a fundamental, and perhaps even decisive harm to its position. Such risks should be undertaken only in dire necessity.
The real problem with the temporary freeze is that Netanyahu has to assume, and probably does, that when the 10-month moratorium comes to an end, the US will insist that Israel make it permanent, or at least extend it for another period. A permanent freeze - especially one made without a major compensating concession from the Palestinians - would do serious damage to Israel's security and to its ability to defend its moral position. And Israel cannot accept Palestinian willingness to restart negotiations as a substantial concession.
Therefore Netanyahu has to expect that some 10 months after his decision to negotiate a compromise with Obama, he will again be faced with the choice between a major political fight with the US administration and acceptance of a major reduction in Israeli security.
The basic justification for Netanyahu's decision to accept a temporary freeze is that it both postpones the fight with Obama and gives a chance that the fight will be unnecessary because Obama might be too busy with other things to put as much effort into the Middle East as he was willing to in the early months of his regime.
Obama will be substantially weaker politically next fall than he was when he came to office. Factors contributing to this decline include his failure to reduce US unemployment, his great increase in the government's debt, widespread public rejection of his health care proposals, the beginnings of resentment of his foreign stances, significant division within the Democratic Party on Afghanistan, and sharply reduced approval ratings.
There is good reason to expect that his slide will continue, and next summer he will be involved in a critical congressional election campaign. Even if Obama believes he could win a major political fight with Israel when the freeze expires in September, he might well decide that would be more prudent to conserve his political capital for the fights that he cannot avoid.
And if a fight is necessary, Israel will have a much better chance next summer.
Apart from Obama's growing weakness, international developments could change the US administration's strategic assessments and priorities in the Middle East next summer. Failure in Iran (except for the decisive new internal weakness of the Iranian revolutionary regime, for which US policy gets no credit), lack of Palestinian or Arab willingness to move toward compromise, and increasing involvement in Afghanistan may lead the administration to put its program for Israeli-Palestinian peace in the short-term on the back-burner.
If so, Netanyahu would have succeeded without having to face the dangers of a major political fight with the American president.
In brief, the wisdom of the decision to accept a temporary construction freeze depends primarily on whether the real but limited costs of the freeze are justified by the advantages of postponing and perhaps thereby avoiding a major conflict with the Obama administration.
This is clear example of the kind of tactical decision which a government has to make, and which has nothing to do with its loyalty to its principles and its commitments to its voters. Nor does it say anything about Netanyahu's ability to stand up under pressure. Regardless of his strength as a leader, a prime minister should make prudent tactical adjustments to avoid major dangers.
One peculiar characteristic of this situation is that Netanyahu cannot defend himself in Israeli discussions by presenting what seems to be his real reason for his action. To implement his strategy he must pretend that he too believes that making concessions to bring the PA to the negotiating table advances the cause of peace.
It is the responsibility of thoughtful and informed Israelis to figure out the logic of the Netanyahu decision and judge accordingly. He must defend himself from his attackers - with both arms tied behind his back.
All of the above depends on Netanyahu's readiness and ability to resist excessive US pressure at the end of the 10-month period. But it seems fair to say that we learn nothing about that critical question from his tactical decision on the temporary freeze.
Max Singer is a Senior Fellow and Trustee Emeritus at Hudson Institute. He founded Hudson with Herman Kahn in 1961.
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© Copyright 2013 Hudson Institute, Inc. | <urn:uuid:f329d6ad-92c2-4858-980a-3a9a174c4eb1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=6677 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967912 | 2,209 | 1.648438 | 2 |
A message for Wells Fargo
report on protests at the Wells Fargo shareholders' meeting in San Francisco--and discussions among activists about the action.
THE ANNUAL protest against the Wells Fargo shareholders meeting held across the street from the bank's San Francisco headquarters received a boost from the Occupy movement this year. Community groups, unions, Occupy activists, and others spent weeks planning to disrupt the meeting with civil disobedience and a mass march and rally outside the meeting.
In all, more than 1,000 people attended the April 24 action, the largest one in San Francisco in several months. Protesters highlighted Wells Fargo's responsibility for the destruction of communities across the country through foreclosures, predatory lending, investment in private prisons and immigration detention centers, and its failure to pay any taxes. Speakers from the stage included many people directly affected by these policies.
As Ernesto Viscarra, a foreclosure fighter from San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood, said, "I've been fighting the banks by myself all along...until Occupy Bernal knocked on my door and started fighting the banks." Reflecting on the trial loan modification he recently received, he said, "I won, but I'm only 1 percent happy. Ninety-nine percent of me is still unhappy until all the foreclosures stop."
The centerpiece of the action was going to be the disruption and attempted takeover of the shareholders' meeting by up to 200 homeowners, public-sector workers and union members, immigrants and others from around the country affected by Wells Fargo's policies. Through the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the demonstrators had secured proxy shares in Wells Fargo so they could legally enter and express their views to CEO John Stumpf.
Other activists from Occupy San Francisco and the community group Causa Justa: Just Cause planned a takeover of the lobby where the meeting was taking place, along with a nonviolent blockade of the sides of the building and several entrances.
As many as 30 people did successfully enter the meeting, as one protester confronted Stumpf, and others began a call-and-response "mic check" before being kicked out of the meeting, with more than two dozen being arrested. Wells Fargo, however, was able to stack the meeting with high-level employees and other shareholders, while using dozens of police officers to keep out the remaining demonstrators with proxy shares.
In a slap in the face to those who hoped to challenge Stumpf, shareholders approved his $20.6 million compensation package. The bank reportedly concluded the meeting in an unusually brief 45 minutes, with no question-and-answer period.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE WELLS Fargo shareholders meeting action highlighted debates in the Occupy movement over strategy and tactics, exemplified by those who wanted to take over the meeting versus those who planned to shut it down from the outside.
Forces organizing those affected by Wells Fargo's policies to confront the executives on the inside saw this as the most important part of the action, along with the mass march outside that could help bring out strength in numbers. Those planning the blockade of the building from the outside reflect a trend in the Occupy movement that favors tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience, including arrestable actions, as a goal in and of itself.
As a way to bridge the differences between the "inside" planners and the planners of outside civil disobedience, arrangements were to be made to allow those with proxy shares to get into the meeting before the blockades were erected and the takeover of the lobby began. However, due to a breakdown in communication, the lobby takeover began before all of the demonstrators with proxies had entered the meeting. This led to an increased police presence, and gave Wells Fargo and the police a pretext not to allow any additional proxies into the meeting.
In the end, the bulk of the foreclosure fighters, immigrant workers and public sector workers--who could have used the opportunity inside the meeting to put a human face on the economic crisis and the corporate entities responsible for it--were prevented from carrying out the action they had planned by forces engaged in action on their behalf.
Those who organized the blockade need to consider the tactics they pursued. The Occupy movement should be helping those most directly affected by the crisis to be involved in activity--in fact, these people are looking to participate. It is possible that full group of several hundred proxies would not have been able to enter the shareholders' meeting anyway. But the actions of those who organized the lobby takeover, rather than complementing the civil disobedience happening inside, detracted from it.
Despite these flaws, the protest was a step forward. It showed that Occupy activists, working together with unions and community groups, can help broaden the movement to highlight the stories of those most affected by the economic crisis, while bringing out hundreds, if not thousands of people, and putting the banks on the defensive. However, it also showed the need for continued debate over strategy, and how tactics can help reinforce, or detract from, that strategy. | <urn:uuid:89e0e3e7-9cc7-4b52-85ef-373614bb0769> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://socialistworker.org/2012/05/07/message-for-wells-fargo | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964548 | 1,018 | 1.640625 | 2 |
The U.S. House of Representatives just voted to eliminate $34 million in funding for the National Drug Intelligence Center for fiscal year 2011 (on a 262-169 vote). While this news could seem mundane on its face, it's a huge development. This demonstrates that conservatives in Congress will finally put their money where their rhetoric has been for a long time. Drug policy reformers should be encouraged that there are indeed hidden supporters in Congress. Now we need to educate them, spreading the message that the drug war represents the most dramatic expansion of the size and scope of the federal government in the history of this country.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
It's a trend blowing through electoral politics and drug policy around the Americas. Last year, Mexico's Felipe Calderon mentioned having a debate about legalizing drugs; last month, U.S. President Barack Obama told a YouTube audience that the debate needs to take place; Colombia's President Santos has joined this chorus, now for a second time; in late January Bolivia sought and failed to achieve an exception to Coca-leaf chewing via a UN treaty; and, lately debates about drug policy have entered Peruvian political life.
Watchers of the wind of global drug policy will want to follow Peru's upcoming presidential race, scheduled for April 10, 2011. Drug policies have taken something of a center stage in the Western Andean nation, of late, in part because of former (2001 - 2006) President Alejandro Toledo's current campaign to return to the presidency on a ticket which espouses socially progressive policies: drugs, abortion, gay rights. Our friends over at the Drug War Chronicle provide an excellent overview of what different presidential candidates have said or done over the issue, and whether or not the debate is actually meaningful since Peru has already decriminalized small amounts of marijuana and cocaine.
Peru's importance as a drug producer is well known, and the proximity to the wealth of cocaine affects all parts of life. Even Toledo has suggested that Peru must not become a "narco-state." Whether the country manages to offer a different approach to the "war-on-drugs" may depend on the outcome of April's election.
Posted by Patrick Timmons, Ph.D. at 2/15/2011 05:35:00 PM
Monday, February 14, 2011
Trying to figure out where the drug trafficking organizations in Mexico obtain their arms is a major task. It is widely accepted that notwithstanding some of the strictest gun purchasing laws in the Western Hemisphere, the country is awash with firepower. Making their presence felt are guns, grenades, and other materiel, many of which have helped to kill about 36,000 people since 2006 in a brutal and widening drug war.
Politics also bedevil the attempt to classify guns seized during Mexican military and justice operations, and compromise methods used to ascertain Mexico's gun market. In the United States, the right refuses to accept the Department of Justice and Department of State's calculation that ninety percent of guns in Mexico come from US sources, calling it a "myth". Senator Charles Grassley has also alleged that the DOJ's Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms division was involved in smuggling arms from the United States, arms which may have killed a Border Patrol Agent in December 2010. New Wikileaks' cables employed by the left suggest the fruitfulness of investigating questions about how US military materiel has made it to Mexico.
Some analysts have pointed out that that the US and its decommissioned military armaments are not the largest part of Mexico's secretive gun market. Firepower is finding its way from China, and in a number of cases old arms arrive from Central and South America. These analysts suggest that the DOJ and State ignore these sources as a way to criticize the sources by which guns arrive in Mexico from the United States. In one investigation, one Houston-area gun shop has had 115 guns sold through its store, all of which ended up being used in crimes in Mexico.
But the US cases are some of the best documented, notwithstanding a 2003 US law that shields the identities of gun dealers whose guns are used in crimes in Mexico. In December 2010 the Washington Post wrote a lengthy article which featured Houston, TX as it is the gun-buying capital for Mexico. Houston is preferred, one long-time ATF agent told the Washington Post reporters, because "you can go to a different gun store for a month and never hit the same gun store." About four or five years ago, ATF initiated Project Gunrunner to interdict and document gun sources. Many of the statistics used in this State briefing document about Gunrunner have been questioned by the right.
Another things is certain: drug traffickers use these arms to defend and protect their hold over an illegal drug market, defending it from rival traffickers or Mexico's authorities. The other thing that is certain is that guns and drugs are intimately linked in the mindset of US law enforcement: the Southwest Border Initiative focuses on shipment of guns and traffic of drugs.
Posted by Patrick Timmons, Ph.D. at 2/14/2011 05:28:00 PM | <urn:uuid:336ffe30-0c61-44f0-bd8d-f5ff2c5feb25> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://daregeneration.blogspot.com/2011_02_13_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963691 | 1,039 | 1.648438 | 2 |
There are any number of reasons that you can attribute to Solr‘s status as the standard bearer of faceted full-text searching: it’s free, fast, works shockingly well out of the box without any tweaking, has a simple and intuitive HTTP API (making it available in the programming language of your choice) and is, by far, the easiest “enterprise-level” application to get up and running. None of its “competitors” (Sphinx, Xapian, Endeca, etc.), despite any individual advantages they might have, can claim all of these features, which goes a long way towards explaining Solr’s popularity.
The library world has definitely taken a shine to Solr: from discovery interfaces like VuFind and Primo, to repositories like Fedora, to full-text aggregators like Summon, you can find Solr under the hood of most of the hot products and services available right now. The fact that a library can install VuFind and have a slick, jaw-droppingly powerful OPAC-replacement that puts their legacy interface to shame in about an hour is almost completely the by-product of Solr’s amazing simplicity to get up and running. It’s no wonder why so many libraries are adopting it (compare it to SOPAC, also built in PHP and about as old, but uses Sphinx for the full-text indexing and is hardly ever seen in the wild).
Without a doubt, Solr is pretty much a no-brainer if you are able to run Jetty (or Tomcat or JBoss or Glassfish or whatever): with enough hardware, Solr can scale up to pretty much whatever your need might be. The problem (at least the problem in my mind) is that Solr doesn’t scale down terribly well. If you host your content from a cheap, shared web hosting provider or a VPS, for example, Solr is not available or not practical (it doesn’t live in small memory environments well). The hosted Solr options are fairly expensive and while there are cheap, shared web hosting providers that do provide Java Application Servers, switching vendors to provide faceted search for your mid-size Drupal or Omeka site might not be entirely practical or desirable.
I find myself proof-of-concept-ing a lot of hacks to projects like VuFind, Blacklight, Kochief and whatnot and run these things off of my shared web server. It’s older, underpowered and only has 1GB of RAM. Since I’m not running any of these projects in production (just really making things available for others to see), it was really annoying to have Solr gobbling up 20% of the available RAM for these little pet projects. What I wanted was something that acted more or less like Solr when you pointed an application that expected Solr to be there, but I wanted it to have a small footprint that could run (almost) anywhere and more or less disappear when it was idle.
So it was for this scenario that I wrote CheapSkate: a Solr emulator written in Ruby. It uses Ferret, the Ruby port of Lucene, as the full-text indexing engine and Sinatra to supply the HTTP API. Ferret is fast, scales quite well and responds to the same search syntax as Solr, so I knew it could handle the search aspect pretty easily. Faceting (as can be expected) proved the harder part. Originally, I was storing the values of fields in an RDBMS and using that to provide the facets. Read performance was ok, although anything over 5,000 results would start to bog down – the real problem was the write performance, which was simply woeful. Part of the issue was that this design was completely schemaless: you could send anything to CheapSkate and facet on any field, regardless of size. It also tried to maintain the type of the incoming field value: dates were stored as dates, numbers stored as integers and so on. Basically the lack of constraints made it wildly inefficient.
Eventually, I dropped the RDBMS component, and started playing around Ferret’s terms capabilities. If you set a particular field to be untokenized, your field values appear exactly as you put them in. This is perfect for faceting (since you don’t want stemming and whatnot on your query filters and your strings aren’t normalized or downcased or anything so they look right in the UI) and is basically the same thing Solr itself does. Instead of a schema.xml, CheapSkate has a schema.yml, but it works essentially the same way: you define your fields, what should be tokenized (that is, which fields allow full-text search) or not (i.e. facet fields) and what datatype the field should be.
CheapSkate doesn’t support all of the field types that Solr does, but it supports strings, numbers, dates and booleans.
One neat thing about Ferret is that you can pass a Ruby Proc to the search method as a search option. This proc then has access to the search results as Ferret is finding them. CheapSkate uses this find the terms in the untokenized fields for each search hit, throws them in a Hash and generates a hit count for each term. This is a lot faster than getting all the document ids from the search, looping them and generating your term hash after the search is completed. That said, this is still definitely the bottleneck for CheapSkate. If the search result has more than 10-15,000 hits, performance begins to get pretty heavily impacted by grabbing the facets. I’m not terribly concerned by this, data sets with search results in the 20,000+ range start to creep into the “you would be better off just using Solr” domain. For my proofs-of-concepts, this has only really raised its head in VuFind when filtering on something like “Book” (with no search terms) for a 50,000 record collection. What I mean to say is, this happens for fairly non-useful searches.
Overall, I’ve been pretty happy with how CheapSkate is working. For regular searching it does pretty well (although, like I said, I’m not trying to run a production discovery system that pleases both librarians and users). There’s a very poorly designed “more like this” handler that really needs an overhaul and there is no “did you mean” (spellcheck). This hasn’t been a huge priority, because I don’t really like the spellcheck in Solr all that much, anyway. That said, if somebody really wanted this and had an idea of how it would be implemented in Ferret, I’d be happy to add it.
Ideally, I’d like to see something like CheapSkate in PHP using Zend_Search_Lucene, since that would be accessible to virtually everybody, but that’s a project for somebody else.
In the meantime, if you want to see some examples of CheapSkate in action:
- Here’s that VuFind instance with 50,000 MARC records (from the California College of the Arts)
- Kochief with around 10,000 MARC records (from the Library of Congress, via Blacklight)
- Drupal with just over 50 nodes
- WordPress with just under 150 posts & pages (this blog).
One important caveat to projects like VuFind and Blacklight: CheapSkate doesn’t work with Solrmarc, which requires Solr to return responses in the javabin format (which may be possible to hack out something that looks enough like javabin to fool Solrmarc, I just haven’t figured it out). My workaround has been to populate a local Solr index with Solrmarc and then just dump all of the documents out of Solr into CheapSkate. | <urn:uuid:bb43e6ab-e24a-439c-8865-92155345fcb9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dilettantes.code4lib.org/blog/2010/08/faceted-search-on-a-shoestring/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951416 | 1,691 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Just like a scene out of “Antiques Roadshow,” a woman in Hartford, Conn., turned in an old rifle to her local police station’s gun buy-back, only to discover the gun was worth anywhere from $20,000 to $25,000. The woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, inherited the gun from her father who had brought it home with him from Europe as a memento from World War II.
The two officers conducting the gun buy-back, who are resident gun experts for the Hartford Police Department, informed the owner she was in possession of a Nazi Assault Rifle, the first of its kind, that dates back to 1944.
The gun is called a Sturmgewehr 44, literally meaning “storm rifle,” and is the first “modern assault rifle ever made, ...
“It’s like finding the Babe Ruth of baseball cards,” said Officer John Cavanna. “The rarity, it was made for such a very short period.”
Wait, you mean to tell me she was in possession of an actual, fully automatic military, Nazi bullet hose, weapon of death for decades? Without federal Class III permits? A machine gun in the closet, and she’s not under arrest????
Oh, I see. It’s code. “a woman in Hartford, Conn.,” translates as “as white as you can be, with money”. Uh huh. We gets it now. If it had been Lashonda down de Camden hood, her ass be slammin in county like dat! Racism!!!
“Her father passed away. The gun was in her closet,” Cavanna said. “She did not know it was a machine gun.
“If the gun had been in the closet loaded, any second you could hit the wrong lever and discharge a fatal round,” he said of the Sturmgewehr 44. [Drew: that “lever” is called the trigger. duh]
This German-made machine gun can fire 500 rounds in minutes, according to Cavanna, who is also a gun range master.
At the time the officers received the gun, it was in such disrepair that it was inoperable, unable to shoot a bullet even if the gun had been loaded. Cavanna said ammunition would have to be especially made for this gun. [Drew: except for the WWII ammo it could have been loaded with. Ammunition can easily last 60 years in a dry environment. It may not be perfect, but it will fire.]
So will ya look at that. In 1945 some GI came home with a fully automatic weapon as a souvenir, and didn’t get stopped. Did he have ammo, did he later shoot the gun? We’ll never know. For 60+ years these people have had a machine gun in the house ... a super evil genuine NAZI one ...
Lashonda be pissed!!!
Drew, Not every white lady in Htfd. is monied. Now West Htfd.? Ah. Another thing. But Hartford is quite a mix. Or used to be. Parts that used to be white and well maintained have been taken over by a favored minority and where once everything was open down at the end of Pembroke Street, all the houses have these thick wire fences. What an eyesore my former street is today. Yuk. Used to be middle class, not sure what to call it now.
ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
Goes on everyday in America, it is a shame that it is getting worse, not better.
How well trained she was to take an antique straight to the buy back program. I can’t imagine not using my brain at all, ever (it appears).
And this story is the core of what is wrong with America - idiots being controlled by gov hacks that bend the rules for ‘certain’ people.
God Help America
Actually I was kidding about the racism thing, but a post on an obscure firearm would have been pretty boring. Even the cartridge it used, which is still manufactured, would be pretty dull.
On the other hand, learning that these rifles are still in use around the world, and that the rebels in Syria are now armed with over 5000 of them is quite interesting.
brand new ammunition: http://www.prvipartizan.com/ppu_mannlicher.php
for sale right here in the USA: http://palmettostatearmory.com/index.php/ammunition/rifle-ammunition/prvi-partizan-7-62x33-kurz-124gr-fmjbt-pp-7-8.html
The 124 grain bullet at 2250 feet per second makes it only slightly less powerful than the 7.62x39 AK-47 round, though the bullet will lose energy a bit faster due to it’s lower aerodynamic efficiency (BC is less because equal weight bullet is 0.3mm larger in diameter).
Looking at the Wiki page it seems pretty obvious where Mr Kalishnikov got his inspiration from. Typical Russian hack stole an idea and claimed it as his own, most Likely if truth were known. | <urn:uuid:8d691980-0d57-422e-9a20-ef5c07d2cc2d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.barking-moonbat.com/index.php/weblog/comments-editor/18468/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97102 | 1,123 | 1.84375 | 2 |
The Great Recession left Hernando County battered and bruised like a patient on life support. Through the trauma of record high unemployment, however, the county's health care sector prevented a catastrophic economic flat line.
The rate of job growth in the field slowed, but it never went backward.
"In 2006, there were two rocks in the economy: health care and construction" said Dave Hamilton, program manager for the Pasco-Hernando Workforce Board. "The construction industry crumbled, but the health industry remained."
To get a sense of how critical the industry is to the county's economic health, consider some numbers from the federal government's quarterly census of employment and wages.
• In June 2006, Hernando County had a total workforce of 38,505 in 20 categories.
• In June 2012, the workforce was 35,092, a loss of 8.9 percent.
• In the same time period, the number of workers in the health care and socials services sector increased 18.2 percent, to 7,257.
"If every industry had grown 18.2 percent, we'd all be smiling," Hamilton said.
By comparison, the construction labor force nearly reached 5,000 in the summer of 2006. Six years later, the number had fallen to less than half that.
Two of the county's other significant sectors, retail and food service and accommodation, also lost jobs, though the declines were not nearly as drastic.
Just about every category is showing signs of rebounding, and the county is making strides to grow the manufacturing sector at Brooksville-Tampa Bay Regional Airport.
But the health sector remains the steady pulse that keeps the county's economic lifeblood pumping.
"The important thing is not just the gross numbers," said Mike McHugh, the county's economic development manager. "They're high-skill jobs with above-average wages."
The county's three hospitals have been major contributors to the county's economic pulse as the economy soured.
In 2006, Oak Hill Hospital employed 861 people, said spokesman Rich Linkul. By the end of last year, that number had grown to 1,070.
The average salary is now nearly $65,000, and the payroll over the last six years has grown from $48 million to $69 million.
Owned by Tennessee-based HCA, the hospital in the last six years has added 20 new cardiac care rooms, opened a new pediatric emergency room and, just this year, celebrated the completion of a $50 million expansion.
"We are paying house payments, we're buying groceries at local stores, we're purchasing cars at local dealers," Linkul said. "Pretty much across the board, we've grown as an organization."
In the same period, Brooksville Regional and Spring Hill Regional hospitals have invested in technology and bought a sleep clinic, an outpatient surgical center and the Good Shepherd Medical Clinic in Spring Hill.
"One of the reasons (the sector) stays strong is our population continues to age," said Patrick Maloney, chief executive officer of both hospitals, which are owned by Health Management Associates of Naples. "We still have a lot of snowbirds who come down in the winter, and they have medical needs."
The industry faces some challenges moving forward.
As the cost of private insurance increases, consumers with higher deductibles are putting off elective procedures, Maloney said.
"They find out they have to pay $250 out of pocket for a colonoscopy and they hold off," he said.
The uncertainty created by new quality control requirements and changes to Medicare are among the reasons Access Healthcare is growing, said CEO Dr. Pariksith Singh.
Founded in 1996, the company now boasts 500 employees and 163 providers in more than 60 locations in Hernando and four other counties. About 400 of those employees are in Hernando, Singh said.
Many physicians who have brought their practices into the Access fold sought the security and improved efficiencies that come with being part of a larger group, Singh said.
"How do you keep low overhead and provide the best services? It's a give and take," Singh said. "Working as a team together is more and more of a requirement."
Local health officials said one of their biggest challenges is finding qualified employees, especially nurses. Hernando providers compete for applicants with other Tampa Bay-area businesses, and the competition recently ramped up some more with the opening of Medical Center of Trinity and Florida Hospital Wesley Chapel, both in Pasco.
Pasco-Hernando Community College is trying to meet the need with plans next year to launch a four-year bachelor's degree program in nursing. And an increasing number of visitors to Career Central's offices are going for skilled health care certifications, said Hamilton, the workforce board manager.
Some are young adults just starting out. Others are older workers who watched as "their industry left them," Hamilton said.
"They're chasing opportunity," he said, "and it's right there in front of them."
Reach Tony Marrero at [email protected] or (352) 848-1431. Follow @tmarrerotimes and @hernandotimes on Twitter. | <urn:uuid:a97f006f-731c-4511-ab79-aeba6f662160> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/health-care-sector-a-force-in-hernando/2109134 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964704 | 1,082 | 1.617188 | 2 |
A few Thursdays ago Deer Park was privileged to host a fifth grade class of twenty-two children and six adults including their teacher, Ms. Walker, from the Waldorf School of San Diego.
Our coordinated, special program with, Ms. Walker's, class included: an introduction to mindful breathing, listening and inviting the bell, cracker and tea meditation, walking with the regular Thursday Day of Mindfulness participants, a silent lunch under the Oak Trees, and total relaxation. We also spent forty minutes doing pebble meditation which carried us on a journey through a dry creek bed to find four stones. One of each stone represented the freshness of a flower, solidity of a mountain, clarity of a calm lake, and the openness and freedom of space.
The children particularly enjoyed walking meditation, the mint tea especially brewed for them by two sisters of Deer Park, and eating meditation. They commented after our time together: “The food tasted so good,” “I had so much fun,” “this was the best field trip so far,” “I would like to go on field trips like this everyday.” When they first arrived we asked them how they felt knowing they were going to come to Deer Park. Most said they were excited and some said they had no expectations. When asking how they felt after arriving at Deer Park they answered: “I felt peaceful the moment we drove up,” I feel calm,” “relaxed,” “comfortable.”
I Love the Roses, a children's song with coordinated hand gestures often sung at Deer Park was a huge hit with Ms Walker's class. The children sang it on their own without the facilitator's help after hearing it just a few times. Their joy and happiness made everyone feel so alive. It touched our hearts so deeply to hear the voices of children echo through the meditation hall and spread out into the open sky, the valley, the mountains, and the oak grove. Our time was an opportunity to water seeds of joy, happiness, and freedom in all of us. With their peaceful steps in walking meditation and holding hands together in noble silence, we experienced the gift of joy and happiness right here, right now. We offered the gift of peace to ourselves and to future generations.
The joy and happiness of children is infectious. Their joy and happiness spreads and soaks into the earth and sky creating ripples that lay a foundation for a happy present, a peaceful future, and even heals the past. Through offerings such as these, we offer a next generation a chance to live more freely than we have lived, with less anger, fear, violence, regret, and hatred. More opportunities to experience and ground ourselves in joy and happiness grows the potential for more warmth, togetherness, compassion, love, singing, and dancing in our lives and in our world.
Peace is possible if only we give peace a chance. The miracle of children is that they are naturally open to receive and to immediately put into practice a way, a life based on understanding and love. Their minds and bodies are fresh and new. Their life refreshes our own commitment to live and practice what we teach. The laughter, singing, and dancing of children is a precious, wonder of life, a world wonder.
Thank you, Waldorf of San Diego, for the blessing you have offered us. Thank you Ms. Walker's fifth grade class.
Sincerely, Deer Park Children's Program | <urn:uuid:91c3da1a-5f00-4aa9-b5c1-2831226bc575> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://deerparkmonastery.org/community/embracing-the-road/the-wonder-of-children-at-deer-park-monastery | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966564 | 716 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Why no birds that eat ticks? I don't know ... do you?
One possible answer from http://imageevent.com/firesat/strangedaysstrangeskies
STRANGE DAYS STRANGE SKIES
LIFE IN THE TIME OF CHEMTRAILS 1997-2012: YOU ARE NOW BREATHING ETHYLENE DIBROMIDE, VIRALLY MUTATED MOLDS, NANO-PARTICULATES OF ALUMINUM AND BARIUM AND CATIONIC POLYMER FIBERS WITH UNIDENTIFIED BIO-ACTIVE MATERIAL: "We the people have not been warned, advised or consulted but are certainly vulnerable to the outcomes." Lightwatcher.com "Biologic components have been reported in airborne samples that include: modified molds, desiccated red blood cells and exotic strains of bacteria" Additionally, award winning investigative reporter, Will Thomas, has reported findings of over 300 types of virally mutated fungi in the chemtrail fall out. The Idaho Observer has reported findings of 26 metals including barium, aluminum and uranium, a variety of infectious pathogens and chemicals and drugs including sedatives in chemtrail fallout. Dr. R. Michael Castle reports the finding of cationic polymer fibers. Dr Hildegarde Staninger and Dr. Rahim Karjoom have reported findings of tiny parasitic nematode eggs of some type encased in the fibers. Additionally Drs. Staninger and Karjoom and researcher Jan Smith have reported findings of self-replicating nano-machines and rivers of silicon running wild through the bodies of the Morgellons infected. Researcher Clifford Carnicom has reported finding chemtrails fibers & abnormal blood cells that are an exact match with the bizarre fibers & blood cells found in those suffering from Morgellons Disease. Welcome to the brave new world of toxic skies, weather control, mind control and population control through the use of chemtrails modulated with electromagnetic frequencies generated by HAARP. Our health is under attack as evidenced by the skyrocketing rates of chemtrail induced lung cancer, asthma and pulmonary/respiratory problems as well as the emergence of a bizarre and frightening new plague, Morgellons Disease, an infection with a previously unknown agent that appears to be a synthesis of a bio lab created pathogen combined with self-replicating nano-technology. Over 60,000 families in the U.S. are now infected with Morgellons. I am one of the infected. My health and the health of my family has already been drastically affected. There is a main-stream media blackout on this subject so the only way to get the word out is by word of mouth. Realized or not people are already dying from chemtrail related illnesses. People are dying from Morgellons Disease. During this time of chemtrails a shocking drop in general life expectancy in the U.S. has occurred. This situation presents an immediate and serious threat to you, your family and loved ones. We must join together to stop this insane program of chemtrail spraying now. Some of you reading this may be in a position of influence and power to take significant action to bring chemtrails to a halt. Everyone can do something to help. Whatever your position or realm of influence please do whatever you can to bring an end to the aerosol spray program popularly known as Chemtrails. ADDED 7/13/2009 FUND RAISING FOR A CURE At this point just stopping the chemtrails will not be nearly enough. It is becoming increasingly apparent to researchers that virtually the entire population has most likely been infected by chemtrail pathogens that cause Morgellons Disease. The government to date has basically done nothing to fund research to find a cure for the Morgellons problem. Scientist, Clifford Carnicom has proven himself to be a dedicated and formidable researcher into Chemtrails/Morgellons for over a decade. Working on his own without funding he has managed to make many important discoveries about the nature of Morgellons disease and about the effects of chemtrails on the environment and the population. If you wish to donate to fund research for a cure The Carnicom Institute would be an excellent place to start. Copyright Glenn Boyle 2009 | <urn:uuid:06c76b62-e1a2-4bc3-9d4e-b35874e5db09> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gunks.com/ubbthreads7/ubbthreads.php/topics/64225/Re_Ticks_Ticks_Ticks_Ticks_Tic | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934749 | 882 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Mission and Distinctives
Bryan's mission is "educating students to become servants of Christ to make a difference in today's world." The College seeks to assist in the personal growth and development of qualified students by providing an education based upon an integrated understanding of the Bible and the liberal arts.
Bryan College was established as a four-year undergraduate college of arts and sciences, although until 1958 the corporate title used the term "University." In December 2005 the College was authorized by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (Commission on Colleges) to offer its first graduate degree: The Master of Business Administration. Chartered in 1930 under the laws of Tennessee as a general welfare corporation with the basic purpose of providing "for the higher education of men and women under auspices distinctly Christian and spiritual," the College has responded to changing times with various modifications of its educational program. The goals for institutional development and the changing climate in American higher education will continue to influence the educational program. However, the original institutional purpose as a Christian liberal arts college remains unchanged.
With an awareness of its heritage and a commitment to its future, the College endeavors to serve its constituencies by traditional and novel means. Bryan College maintains the following distinctives as part of its vision for the next century. Bryan College has developed and will maintain:
- An identity as a Christian liberal arts college which is evangelical, nondenominational, and regionally accredited.
- A firm biblical emphasis, both in curriculum and in principles for everyday life, based upon unequivocal acceptance of the inerrancy and authority of the Scriptures.
- A Christian worldview as the foundation for the engagement of faith, learning, and living.
- A competent faculty committed to a quality academic program.
- A balanced position regarding theological beliefs, daily life and conduct, and educational philosophy and practice.
- A close bond of fellowship and a sense of community under the Lordship of Jesus Christ that fosters positive relationships among faculty and students of diverse backgrounds.
- A commitment to a progressive approach in addressing the technological nature of our changing society.
- A setting of natural beauty where lake and mountains meet, ideal for serious study and growth. | <urn:uuid:ca43b08d-6259-4557-aa7e-28b04852286e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bryan.edu/383 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950072 | 442 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Most of the people living in metropolitan cities of today live in small apartments and don’t usually have the kind of space at their disposal to quench their thirst for gardening. Industrial designer Marko Vuckovic wants everybody to have their share of greenery, without worrying much about the space available and to make that happen, he has come up with the Grass Lamp concept. As the name suggests, the Grass Lamp is a lamp for illumination that also facilitates hydroponic growth of plants.
The Grass Lamp, which has already won a few awards, uses no soil to allow terrestrial plant growth and instead makes them live in a mineral and nutrient rich water solution and a growing medium such as gravel, coconut husks or mineral wool.
The lamp, on the other hand, is constructed using PVC plastic and includes a hydroponic light that not only illuminates the interior space of your home, but also provide much needed light to the plant growth. Jetson Green reports that the designer has conceptualized the product in different shapes and sizes, including free-standing and hanging versions, which can be suspended from the ceiling of your living room or mounted on a wall. | <urn:uuid:2d7d8b91-66ff-4fee-864d-7a33dd49a6c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ecochunk.com/6280/2013/02/15/grass-lamp-concept-brings-greenery-into-your-living-room/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972025 | 236 | 1.820313 | 2 |
"The Totalitarian Tiptoe" - David Icke. Small steps until they achieve their final goals without the masses even realizing it. If they make one giant step (huge change), even the most indoctrinated would feel it. But small steps grant them only victories throughout history.
Previous article we wrote: U.S. Federal Reserve Admits: We Have No Gold
I am sure that bills are 100% genuine and The North American Union will happen. We have the European Union, we will have the Northern American Union. Their final financial goal is: one world electronic currency. This brings them one step closer to this goal!
But in order for the Amero to come forward, the US Dollar must collapse. And it will probably happen.
Under the Pyramid it's written in Latin: "Novus Ordo Mundi", which means "The New World Order". The bankers are so arrogant that they will add their own faces on the Amero. And even more daring in my opinion is that on the back of the 1 Amero/Dollar bill is a picture with some of the leading banking figures and above the picture it's written: "United We Stand".
This is almost like saying: "We are united against you and you are our slaves. We OWN you!"
If you are still naive enough to believe that the bankers would never do this to the American people, then you need some true history lessons: | <urn:uuid:5fa99038-31af-478e-92c7-027a301a15fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.circleposts.com/2011/06/north-american-union-and-amero-are.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957497 | 292 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Cupertino Community Hall
10350 Torre Ave.
Every election year, that thick gray booklet concerning the State ballot propositions arrives in the mail. You read it with the best of intentions only to lose your way while wading through the swamp of legal jargon. Is Proposition X confusing because it’s poorly written, or are you being deliberately mislead? Radio and television spots muddy the issues even more. You have a life, a spouse and children, a job! Maybe you should figure out how you'll vote by tacking that booklet to a wall and throwing darts at it, instead.
On Monday October 8th Cupertino Library offers conscientious but time-crunched voters a better option. Representatives from the Cupertino/Sunnyvale chapter of the League of Women Voters will walk you through the 11 state propositions on this year’s ballot. They will offer a description, non-partisan analysis, and detail the supporters and opponents of these measures. Listen and learn, and avoid feeling ambushed at the ballot box this year. | <urn:uuid:850b84ff-5a32-4a0e-8f00-4bb87e395418> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sccl.org/locations/hours-and-locations/cupertino/news/402486--the-league-of-women-voters-at-cupertino-library | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931381 | 214 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Support our Media Center by purchasing books at the Book Fair two ways: In School Store: March 21-March 28 Online Store: March 18-March … [Read more...]
This year Smith Magnet Elementary created a new opportunity for 4th and 5th grade students called Student Ambassadors. Students were appointed by their teachers based on their knowledge and … [Read More...]
"Do you have any questions?" asked many of the Exhibition teams as they … [Read More...]
This year Smith Magnet Elementary created a new opportunity for 4th and 5th grade students … [Read More...]
Copyright © 2013 — Smith Magnet Elementary
1101 Maxwell Drive, Raleigh, NC 27603
Office: 919-662-2458 · Fax: 919-662-2948
Smith Magnet Elementary is a fully authorized International Baccalaureate World School offering
the Primary Years Programme to Pre-K - 5th Grade students of the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina.
For further information about the IB and its programmes, visit http://www.ibo.org. | <urn:uuid:6b14c3e6-a94f-459f-91df-1b1dec794556> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://smithes.wcpss.net/tag/book-fair | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95547 | 220 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Posted by: David Welch on March 16, 2009
Here’s a message from Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli to the company’s employees. Chrysler is viable as a stand-alone company. The company doesn’t need an alliance with Italy’s Fiat to survive. But a tie-up with the Italian carmaker would give Chrysler $8 billion to $10 billion in value through technology and savings. That’s what Nardelli said in a companywide email sent out today.
Nardelli said Chrysler has made the same case to President Obama’s Task Force, which is weighing over the next several weeks whether to give the automaker another $5 billion in loans. In the email, Nardelli also made the case that the company’s forecasts for both its sales are quite conservative. Since its profit and cash flow projections are based on those conservative sales predictions, the plan is credible, he said.
When it comes to the size of the car market, Chrysler is quite realistic. Chrysler says that its prognosticators don’t see sales passing 13 million cars and trucks in the U.S. even before 2014. Sales barely passed 13 million cars last year and are predicted to be around 10.5 million this year. All Chrysler has to do is hold market share at about 10.7% and the company will generate enough cash to pay down its debt.
The plan isn’t crazy. Chrysler’s financial statements submitted to the Treasury Department show that the company is within striking distance of breaking even. But there are a couple of questions. The first is, how much does Chrysler have to spend on incentives to hold that market share? Chrysler actually gained market share in February, but only after spending $5,566 a car, according to Edmunds.com. That was a monthly record for incentive spending and about $2,000 more than the next higher spender, rival General Motors. The second question is whether Chrysler can hold market share in the long run as it is cutting back on capital expenditures and has trimmed capabilities to make new models.
On one hand, Chrysler won’t make a model for every purpose like it once did. On the other, the domestic carmakers have long underspent on new cars compared with the Japanese. They blew too much cash on union benefits and rebates, while short changing the cars of tomorrow. That has meant leaving cars on the market too long or cutting corners on them. The market is too competitive today to make cars on the cheap. It’s hard to see a company spending more than $5,000 a car on rebates without jeopardizing the future.
Chrysler’s cars must sell on their merits. And that’s the big question I have. Can Chrysler make cars that consumers love—not at a discount—while designing them on a reduced budget? That has been Detroit’s failed reality for a long time. And that’s why the Fiat tie-up may have to work for Chrysler to make it in the long run. | <urn:uuid:84b6503b-e951-4973-bc66-68b3fc6e7f20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2009/03/nardelli_chrysler_can_stand_alone.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959515 | 635 | 1.515625 | 2 |
I have a Kenmore 80 Series (Model No. 110.24872300) washing machine which up to this point has been working fine. Since it is near a sink, the outlet it is plugged into is a GFCI outlet. On the last load I came back after letting it run for some time to find that it had tripped the GFCI in the middle of the wash cycle - the washer was still full of soapy water. I reset the outlet and let it run again, only to come down the next morning and find it full of water still (it had tripped during the rinse cycle this time). I reset the outlet again and this time it finished the rest of the cycle.
My guess is that water is somehow getting onto the internal components of the washer and causing it to short - is there any way I can test this theory or fix the problem myself? | <urn:uuid:2b852c70-e68b-4e0d-aefb-255eaad7cca9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/how-can-i-figure-out-why-my-washing-machine-is-tripping-the-gfci-receptacle?answertab=oldest | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971521 | 184 | 1.53125 | 2 |
The event was held at the Nevada gaming institute, and was overall, a well-structured day. The driving ideology was that of the unconference – “… a facilitated, face-to-face, and participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose.”
However, it seemed that the theme or purpose of the event was not about Open Source – it was as if it were a Blackboard self-help group, trying to solve the issues and failings of this proprietary software. Some of the issues were a little shocking – someone proposed that they had “a need to search the content of [Blackboard Vista] repository” – it came as some surprise to me that this wasn’t already possible in such a mature product.
I was pleased that we were able to help and inform the other attendees about more open technology and standards, such as OAuth, resource-orientated architecture, creative commons licensing and more.
One session I lead on was titled – controversially – “Why [bother with] Portals?” – in which I wanted to get a discussion on what students actually use. The point I wanted to make was that URLs are the base currency of the internet – search engines produce lists of them, people bookmark them, and URLs are used when sharing information between people.
This means that there is a very large responsibility on the content providers not to change URLs, or they will devalue the very resources they are trying to get people to use. This is the reason why persistent URLs are a crucial thing to aim for.
I hope that we were able to bring extra value to the meeting, due to the fact that, unlike the vast majority of attendees, we do not have a Blackboard background.
However, I do think that the event needed to have more emphasis on real-world open source projects such as Sakai and Moodle, and examine how best to intergrate their systems with external systems. | <urn:uuid:0df1b3df-b797-4eaf-8993-6a40c6bb0d03> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://benosteen.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/oscelot-open-source-day-iii-views/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984826 | 403 | 1.726563 | 2 |
As Winning Progressive reported recently, 2011 was a banner year for LGBT equality. And 2012 is off to a good start. Yesterday, Washington State’s Democratic Governor Chris Gregoire signed legislation making that state the seventh to recognize marriage equality. In doing so, Gov. Gregoire reversed her previous opposition to marriage equality, and Washington became the first state in the country to recognize marriage equality after having previously banned it. Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down California’s anti-marriage equality Proposition 8 as violating the US Constitution, though the case is now going to the US Supreme Court. And yesterday, the New Jersey State Senate approved marriage equality by a 24-16 vote.
While significant progress has been made, much work remains to ensure that all LGBT Americans have the same right and opportunity to marry the person they love that heterosexual Americans have. This Valentine’s Day is a great time for all of us to step forward and support the fight for marriage equality. Here are five states where helping advance the cause of equality will be especially important in 2012:
The New Jersey marriage equality bill now goes to the state General Assembly, where it is expected to pass. However, GOP Governor Chris Christie has vowed to veto the legislation, claiming that marriage equality needs to be subject to a voter referendum. If you live in New Jersey call Gov. Christie – 609-292-6000 – and your state legislators, and write a letter to the editor in support of marriage equality.
In Maine, marriage equality supporters turned in more than 105,000 petition signatures in support of putting the issue of marriage quality on the ballot for the 2012 elections. This figure is more than twice the number of signatures needed. Assuming that the initiative gets on the ballot, we need to work to make sure it passes. The organization leading the fight is called Why Marriage Matters Maine, and here are links to helping out:
Supporters of equality suffered a setback last spring when marriage equality legislation that had passed the state Senate was narrowly defeated in the state House of Delegates. A large progressive coalition, however, is back to get the legislation passed in 2012, and Maryland’s Governor Martin O’Malley announced last week that he has made the legislation one of his administration’s handful of top legislative priorities. Equality Maryland is leading the fight by, among other things, holding weekly phonebanks throughout the state. Here are links for helping out:
Minnesota and North Carolina
Unfortunately, there are also states where we have to play defense, as conservatives have gotten anti-marriage equality initiatives onto the ballot in Minnesota and North Carolina. In Minnesota, the opposition to this initiative is being led by Minnesotans United:
In North Carolina, the effort to stop the anti-marriage equality Amendment One is being led by Protect All North Carolina Families: | <urn:uuid:271d07c5-bb23-4a3f-b64d-01e67bba07bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/02/13/this-valentines-day-help-keep-the-progress-towards-marriage-equality-going/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957271 | 580 | 1.625 | 2 |
Volunteers needed for Link Visiting Scheme
May 25, 2012
A local visiting scheme aiming to combat loneliness is calling for new volunteers.
The Link Visiting Scheme, a befriending charity based in Wokingham, needs new volunteers in the Finchampstead and Crowthorne areas.
Co-ordinator Marjie Walker said: “We have a number of elderly people in these areas who would benefit so much from a regular visit from a local person.
"We are looking for volunteers who can spare an hour a week to visit an older resident and just chat and provide some much needed company.”
The scheme has received £12,000 to help roll out replica projects in Henley, Reading and Sunderland.
Initiatives organised by the visiting scheme include a weekly computer course for those who are daunted by the world of computers.
Mrs Walker added: “The sessions have helped more than 200 people to learn about the world of computers in a relaxed environment.
“Whether they want to send emails, download photographs from their digital camera or understand Skype, this course offers something for everyone.
“We have experienced tutors who are ready to help.”
Understanding Computers runs every Wednesday morning at 10am in the Bradbury Centre in Rose Street.
To find out more about becoming a volunteer or the Understanding Computers course, contact The Link Visiting Scheme on (0118) 979 8019. | <urn:uuid:330c096c-9c77-4453-a5ab-601dacfcebf5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.getwokingham.co.uk/news/s/2114429_volunteers_needed_for_link_visiting_scheme | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942492 | 299 | 1.632813 | 2 |
There’s a big publicity poster at the El Pollo Loco down the street that proudly proclaims that they use ‘farm raised chickens’. I was perplexed. How else would one raise a chicken? In an apartment?
I looked it up when I got home. It turns out that the alternative is free-range chicken. To the extent that there’s a difference in the taste, healthiness, or quality of life of the chicken (and there’s good reason to suspect there isn’t , free range would generally be the more appealing option. So, why would you advertise that you have farm raised chickens? My guess is that most people don’t actually think about what the ad actually means. They hear the word ‘farm’ and it harkens associations with local farms, and farmers markets, as opposed to large scale industrial poultry farms. And that’s as far as they think about it, and they go away with a positive impression. The effectiveness of the ad has little to do with conveying useful information, as opposed to packing an emotional punch or giving impressions through non-conscious associations that advertisers are tapping into.
Pay attention to political ads this season. Listen to what is actually said, and what that actually means. There’s often a lot less content than you might think. | <urn:uuid:c259ef35-6aa6-4eab-8668-f103f5a6d693> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://leftfielder.org/tag/advertising/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967885 | 280 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Hmmm well I think its number 7 anyway...
My quilt blocks are doing really well so this means that I have 3 blocks to go I think.....with the Craftsy course.
But you want to see this one - right?
Well here is my first ever "chain block"
The course required you either to buy a set of templates of quarter circles or to make your own... so yes of course I made my own out of thick cardboard. I almost didn't do this but I am sooo glad I did!
These are the tools that I used:
Fiskars extra large quilt mat
Fiskars square quilt ruler
Fiskars titanium loop handle rotary cutter
Fiskars Finnish thread cutter scissors
Yes there is part two of this lesson but I haven't done it yet that block is called "Cleopatra's Puzzle block" and yes it looks awesome! But I need to get some more fabric.... arggh! I want to sew now!
Ever have that problem... run out of materials to make a project?
Believe me I have been eyeing up the summer sheets... LOL but no I need them so will be holding off till payday to get some more fabric. | <urn:uuid:9f86ad08-2140-46b3-bbb9-b0e74b0b1e96> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fiskarscraft.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/10/my-quilt-journey-7.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943676 | 252 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Palestinians in Gaza celebrating the release of a political prisoner from the "Shalit exchange." (Photo: United Nations News Centre)
Yesterday, the International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) reported in February over 380 Palestinians were arrested by Israeli authorities. Riyadh Al-Ashqar compiles detention figures from the West Bank, Israel and the Gaza Strip, and conducted the detainee research.
The article on Al-Ashqar's report also indicates nine of those arrested were prisoners released under the October 2011 Shalit exchange between Hamas and Israel. Of the political prisoners re-arrested, the most notable is hunger striker Hana Shalabi.
The other "Shalit exchange" prisoners are identified by IMEMC:
One of the kidnapped women is a lawyer, and former political prisoner, identified as Shereen Al-Esawy; she was taken prisoner after the army broke into her home and searched it, in occupied East Jerusalem.
The rest were identified as Mofeeqa Al-Qawasmi (the wife of detainee Mohammad Shafeeq Al-Qawasmi), Mona Abu Sneina (the wife of political prisoner Hamdan Abu Sneina), and Aesha Mousa Ghannam.
The four male political prisoners who were released under the Shalit Prisoner Swap Deal, and were rearrested in February, were identified as Ayman Abu Da’oud, Yousef Abdul-Rahman Shteiwy, Mahmoud Adnan Salim, and Rami Abu Haniyya.
The number of arrested Palestinian politicians also increased substantially, according to a separate study by Al-Ashqar. In January the number of imprisoned legislatures was 26. IMEMC and Al-Asqar label this practice as “kidnapping of the elected legislators" and explain that it "is carried out under direct political decisions made by the office of Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and not by regional military commanders.”
Since 1967 Israeli forces have used administrative detention as a tool to hold Palestinians in prison without formal charges. Incarceration rates for this form of imprisonment correlates to the highs and lulls in Palestinian popular resistance. For example, during the first Intifada almost two thousand Palestinians were held in detention. This number dropped to 16 prisoners in early 2001, and again skyrocketed during the second Intifada to over a thousand.
In the past two years, there has been an overall increase in the number of Palestinians in prison through administrative detention orders. After Operation Cast Lead in 2009, the number of prisoners held without charge was close to 200. Today, that number has climbed to over 300. | <urn:uuid:9ec59172-e8e5-4826-b87f-6576d5b08168> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mondoweiss.net/2012/03/nine-shalit-exchange-political-prisoners-re-arrested-in-february.html/comment-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 | 0.970826 | 548 | 1.609375 | 2 |
As a freshman from Logansport, Indiana, Berkley Conner, '15, arrived on campus looking for ways to get involved. Shortly after, she attended the fall semester activity fair and was approached by a member of the Ball State speech team. A week later, she went to the team's call out meeting, and as she says, the rest is history.
In the team's professional atmosphere, Conner, a psychology major, spent countless hours polishing her delivery as she learned from her advisors and fellow students. With this hard work came something else Conner was searching for at her new school—a home.
"I belong here," she says. "Through the hard work, the team atmosphere keeps me going. We have our own traditions, and we're like a family. Speech team is something you can take pride in individually and as a group."
Conner can certainly take pride in her first statewide tournament, where she and her teammates won the 2012 Indiana state championship for the seventh time since 2005. She was the state champion in the novice division for prose, placed second in persuasion and dramatic interpretation, and placed sixth in duo and poetry.
"Hard work paying off is such a good feeling when you move to the next round or receive a trophy," Conner says. "The more important aspect is the team, though. The better you do as an individual, the more you bring success to your team."
Ball State's award-winning speech team involves individual participation in regional and national tournaments. At the 2012 National Forensics Association national tournament, Ball State was the only team from Indiana to place in the top 10, finishing 10th overall (out of 89 teams) and second among schools in its division.
Students on the speech team receive individual coaching in public speaking and oral interpretation, which builds their communication skills and increases their knowledge of the liberal arts. Team members participate in interpretative events such as prose, poetry, dramatic interpretation, program oral interpretation, and duo; public address events that include categories such as informative, persuasive, after-dinner speaking, and rhetorical criticism; and limited-preparation events, including extemporaneous and impromptu speaking.
"Communication is a skill everyone needs to have," Conner says. "People really underestimate that. Communication is important for attaining success and building positive relationships."
Mary Moore, director of individual events in the Department of Communication Studies, says the team demands a high level of commitment and sacrifice.
“Successful competitors spend hours reading, researching, and practicing,” she says. “In fact, research in our field shows that top competitors invest effort comparable to a graduate school thesis. The students’ hard work has many rewards. Participation on the speech team develops communication and critical thinking skills, prepares students for graduate work and the job market, and helps create valuable relationships and personal growth.”
Conner stresses that students looking to join the speech team don't need prior experience, and the team's coaches help members develop their skills.
"They teach you how to engage your audience," she says. "Before we perform, one of our coaches tells us to say, 'This is my time; this is my place; and you will remember me.'" | <urn:uuid:f97c0879-ce16-42c1-9bd0-e4c4092a4634> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cms.bsu.edu/features/global/campuslife/norebuttalnecessary | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975222 | 665 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Whenever I look at a great picture in a magazine or in a gallery or even on the web, almost instantly there’s a voice in my head that says, “I should try that. It looks so good. I’m inspired.”
99% of the times there’s a much louder voice that checks me and says, “Only if I had the proper gear and the access to a studio and props and models and lenses and camera…”. The list goes on.
If you have experienced the scenario mentioned above or any of its variants, you should read further.
One of the biggest photography related hurdle I have experienced apart from ‘Photographer’s Block’ was the inability to love my gear. To come to terms with the fact that whatever lenses and camera I have are great. To accept them wholeheartedly and love every moment I spent with them. The need and inaccessibility of newer gear leads to a dissatisfaction with your present equipment.
Most of us are crippled by the thought of technologically advanced sensors and bigger and better camera and faster lenses. Ask yourself – Is my current gear really making me lag in the wonderfully adventurous and exciting photographic journey I once undertook?
Here are some of the things I did (and you should too) to overcome this hatred (if you may) of the gear I have:
1. Learn What You Have
I think it has been emphasized enough everywhere but I’m going to say it again – Read the manual. It’s the best piece of documentation you have on your camera. If you haven’t read your camera manual yet, do it and you’ll be amazed at what you can learn from it. There must be about 50 functions you don’t know about your camera yet. What does that little button next to the pop-up flash do? What’s that symbol on the display? How do I lock the focus on the subject? There’s just one answer – Read the manual.
Knowing your camera is like knowing a person. Once you know you are close and know them inside out, it’s hard keeping yourself from loving them.
2. Do-It-Yourselves and Make your own gear
Don’t have access to a studio? No problem. Make your own home studio with some white sheets and lights. Don’t have an external flash to light your portraits? No problem. Flash Lights galore!
There are many DIY websites that help you design many photography accessories yourself for cheap (external flashes, lightboxes, backgrounds – you name it!) It’s fun to make anything new and you’ll be surprised what your current gear has to offer you and how you can enhance it by just some simple DIYs. They’ll make you love your camera more and open up new genres of photography too.
The motto here is to make your own gear. You can. I did.
3. Look At Your Shutter Count
Have you used your camera enough? Are you sure you’ve exhausted and taken the most out of the kit lens before you go for that prime? In most cases it turns out we haven’t even used the current lenses and camera to their maximum potential. Check the shutter count of your camera. If you find it too low (say less than 15K), then you haven’t really used it enough and chances are you won’t be using your updated gear either.
Have you shot light trails or tried light painting? How about self-portraits? Abstracts? HDRs?
Get out with your camera and start clicking.
Light Paintings are a fun way to explore and learn your camera funtions.
So, you’ve heard the 50mm prime lens is the best for street photography and portraits. Most of the street-photographers out there shoot at 50mm on f/4 and since you don’t have it you want to buy it so you can start off with your street photography. So how does the 18-105 that came with my camera body help me here? Simply put, you can use substitution. Just adjust to 50mm and there is a fair chance you can easily get somewhere close to f/4 – f/5. You can shoot excellent portraits with the kit lens.
You want to give Macro photography a go. But macro lenses cost a lot. And you’re not even sure if you’ll like that genre of photography and don’t want to invest money in the lens. Thankfully, we have the internet which is full of ways to help you out. Check out Diopters/Reverse Mounts/ Extension tubes and see if Macro is for you. There are many products available which can fulfill these special needs and are easier on the pocket.
This picture was taken using a pair of Diopters (Macro filters in popular internet language)
EXIF Data: Camera :Nikon D3000; Exposure: 13; Aperture: f/22.0; Focal Length: 60 mm; ISO Speed: 100; Exposure Bias: +2/3 EV; Flash: No Flash
The idea is not to stop but look for things that might stand in for real gear.
5. Google Your Gear
Most of the time, we find ourselves incapacitated not by our gear but by lack of ideas. The internet comes in handy here. Most of the websites (including Flickr) offer a search filtered on the basis of your camera model and lens. Search your camera/lens and you see what can be accomplished using your gear. Even a simple Google search of “<Camera Model> + sample images” returns a huge amount of images you can work on. Now you can’t tell yourself you have used your gear. Try to take pictures like these and then better their quality.
As I said before, there’s so much to explore yet and you can’t really hate what you don’t know.
6. Join a community group with the same gear or interests.
Join a community group on Flickr or any other website that concerns your camera or lens(es). This would open you up with people using the same set of equipment and taking breathtaking pictures. There are DIY groups that post tutorials regularly and answer queries. Be socially active. Ask them for any tips they have. Join a discussion. Learn and grow.
7. Read EXIF
Flickr allows a photographer to share his EXIF values with the viewers. That’s one of the best things about Flickr. Now that you have searched an image with your camera model try reading these values. You’ll get a fairly good idea how a certain picture was taken. This would not only make you content with your gear, it will also improve your photography.
Note: Some of the photographers are not that generous and don’t share EXIFs. Don’t lose heart; there are plenty of photographers that do (including me).
8. Learn Post-Processing
When I started photography, the web disheartened me. There were so many pictures that were so much better than mine. Pictures of everyday objects, with nice popping colours and
brilliant contrasts, deep blacks and tints. I was crestfallen. Why can’t I make that soda can look that pretty even though I did everything by the book? I got my answer after I spent a little time browsing through these pictures. PHOTOSHOP. Now I’m not talking about photo manipulation. That’s a totally different area. Learn the basics. Adjust contrasts and exposure. Play around with saturations and highlights and shadows. These are things that you can’t usually achieve in camera (OK! OK! You can but that’s discussion for another day). You’ll be surprised beyond imagination what 2 minutes in Photoshop (or any other post-processing software. GIMP? Anyone?) can do to your pictures. If your camera supports exposure bracketing (read the manual my friend) why not give HDR a go?
An example of what a little time spent in post-processing can do to an otherwise bland image. Total time spent in Lightroom : < 3 minutes. Parameters adjusted: Contrasts, shadows, highlights and saturation.
I’m sure if you think and implement what I have said in this article, you’ll not only enjoy your photography equipment more, you’ll also improve a lot. The idea here is to learn and enjoy your camera with all its shortcomings (if you still want to believe they are shortcomings). Just keep clicking and learning. And when you can take mind-blowing pictures with your present equipment at all times; when you can use your camera like a Samurai uses his sword (sorry for the lame analogy but you know what I mean); and when you want to exceed that – you’ll know when the time is right for an upgrade. So until then, love what you have and enjoy.
I am adding a little description of the camera and lenses I use. Be the judge yourself of how important gear is:
- Nikon D3000 (I have read reviews calling it the worst DSLR Nikon ever came up with; I made faces when I read that and didn’t pick up my camera for a week.)
- Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D (Doesn’t autofocus on my camera body; I used to cry about that.)
- Nikkor 18.0-55.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 (The DX Model; No Vibration Reduction)
- 55.0-200.0 mm f/4.0-5.6 (The DX Model; No Vibration Reduction)
Never stop clicking!
Anant. (The Lensor)
Anant Nath Sharma, a 26 year old self-taught photographer based out of Pune, India. Currently pursuing street and fashion photography; taking pictures that tell stories and enjoying every moment of it. | <urn:uuid:3ec7ead2-a77c-41b0-8a62-cd61906b4abd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sevenbyfive.net/tag/lenses/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938763 | 2,098 | 1.515625 | 2 |
- Contemporary Poetry Review - http://www.cprw.com -
Posted By Ernest Hilbert On July 8, 2001 @ 10:44 am In Featured,Reviews | No Comments
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
The Beat Hotel by Barry Miles. Grove Press. 294 pages. $24.95.
The byronic images and locales of La Boheme, Giacomo Puccini’s nineteenth-century depiction of classically starving artists in Paris’s Latin Quarter, have come to dominate, rather predictably, portrayals of young artists, writers, and singers: whiskered rogues in whose unwashed ears the muses Aoide, Erato, and very often Melpomene whisper. This is almost too picturesque to be believed, but it is, perhaps not so surprisingly, frequently the case, as much in the outer boroughs of New York City today as Paris of 1880. With the Beatniks, who made a universal event of bohemian activity, this sensibility was magnified tenfold in the Paris of the 1950s and early 60s. Barry Miles, the Boswell of the group, returns with yet another tale of Beatnik idealism and legendary misbehavior.
[private]Miles believes that the Beat Hotel, located fittingly in Paris’s Latin Quarter, is as important a geographic locus of Beat literature as Haight Ashbury and the West Village were before it. By all accounts it was Gregory Corso who first referred to 9 rue Git-le-Cœur as the Beat Hotel, pointing some young hipsters back there to meet Allen Ginsberg, the already well-known author of Howl. The Beats were drawn there for its low rents as much as its insouciant artistic milieu. Madame Rachou, the hotel’s matron, enjoyed having artists in the hotel and was very permissive, so long as overnight guests signed the register, a perfunctory police regulation.
9 rue Git-le-Cœur was classified as the lowest grade of hotel by the French government, which meant that it merely had to maintain the simplest of ordinances and was otherwise left alone. Rats scurried through the halls and eminent editors turned back in their quests to locate the Beats after slipping on dog shit in the stairwells. Many of the walls were almost literally paper-thin. The inhabitants of multiple floors shared, sometimes reluctantly, a single bathroom (usually daubed with urine and vomit), and some rooms had a very low-voltage outlet (use of a hotplate, for instance, would often blow the fuse for the whole floor). Patrons came and went at will, so long as they were paid up.
Madame Rachou accepted canvases and manuscripts in lieu of rent but rarely kept them, as she was certain that they were valueless (it is likely that she innocently discarded an accumulation that today would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars). Three of the principal four Beat authors enjoyed remarkably prolific periods at the hotel. William Burroughs, who spent the most time there, was at first reluctant to move there from Tangiers, where pliant Arab boys and stupefacient powders were inexpensive and licit. Gregory Corso, the most exclusively poetic and bohemian of the group, relied on it as a command center during his travels through Europe. Allen Ginsberg, certainly the most famous Beatnik in the world at the time (Jack Keruoac had not yet published On the Road when the Beat Hotel was christened) was feted by moneyed Europeans and thronged by disciples, lecturing his many guests on the ways and hopes of the Beat movement.
It was in the hotel that the triumvirate of Ginsberg, Corso, and Peter Orlovsky devised (insofar as this was possible) their scheme for the “international Love Brain”, which would be brought about once sexual promiscuity of unprecedented levels dispersed “love” across all borders thus annulling jurisdictions and nations. The Beats, undoubtedly the most enduringly peripatetic literary movement in American history, treated 9 Git-le-Cœur in several ways: first as a bohemian refuge from American drug laws and claustrophobic sexual climate; second as a party den (an aesthete’s fraternity house of sorts); and third as factory and headquarters.
There is little question that the three spent a great deal of time writing while there, and this is the real reason that it is of interest to us (they could have gotten high and laid anywhere, and did). Arts patrons and literati who sought them out expecting to witness a reenactment of the gilded Paris of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce were distressed to find instead a decidedly unsartorial group that sometimes went days without eating and was nearly always drunk or stoned.
Nonetheless, Allen Ginsberg wrote some of his better poems there, including ‘To Aunt Rose’, ‘At Apollinaire’s Grave’ (he left a copy of Howl and Other Poems on the grave for Apollinaire “to read in heaven”), and an early draft of what would become the fifth section of his best long poem, ‘Kaddish’. Gregory Corso wrote ‘Marriage’ and ‘Bomb’ there, as well as most of the other poems that wound up in his most popular collection, The Happy Birthday of Death (still available after twelve printings). Burroughs hurriedly arranged and edited Naked Lunch (formerly Interzone and thenThe Naked Lunch) while there. In fact, in the latter days of the hotel, Burroughs spent long hours nearly every day, despite a sometimes nearly crippling addition to various opiates, working on his radical reformulation of language and compositional technique, which he termed “cut-ups”, and later the audio extension of these experiments, “cut-ins”, with Brion Gyson.
They were, by standards then and now, a feral band. They managed to get themselves into ample trouble, and often they seem to have been deliberately glib and vulgar, posing for the international news media (the Parisians resolutely ignored them; they had seen more compelling artistic movements). France had by the late 1950s sunk into a vicious internal conflict over the Algerian bid for independence, with the colonial (known as “colons”) determination to retain the territory under French authority. The colonial position was sanctioned and actively supported by the military, creating a debilitating impasse. The gendarmes had little time to bother with a few shabby American expatriates with a penchant for boys and heroin.
There is no dearth of lewd anecdotes extending from this period of expatriation, and Barry Miles has no interest in holding any back; these stories are, after all, the warp and woof of the generation’s legacy. Ginsberg emerges as a very intelligent, if neurotic, poet with considerable ambition, taking advantage of the publicity occasioned by the San Francisco obscenity trial for his first book, Howl and Other Poems (during which he was conspicuously absent). Deluged with correspondence from overeager acquaintances and remote followers, Ginsberg complained that he rarely had time to write poetry (this condition would persist to the end of his life). LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka’s given name) posted a letter to Ginsberg on toilet paper, asking him to contribute to his new literary magazine; Ginsberg replied, suggesting a number of potential contributors, on French toilet paper, which Jones remarked was far more sturdy and better for writing. Ginsberg very actively proclaimed the putative genius of his friends (and loves), and was responsible for most of the Beat literature that found its way into print (he successfully lobbied for Keruoac’s first book Town and Country with Harcourt Brace, Burroughs’s first book Junkie with Ace Books, and Corso’s second collection Gasoline with Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books). One could successfully argue that there wouldn’t have been a Beat generation if it hadn’t been for the emissarial efforts of Ginsberg, who, despite his iconic pre-hippie façade, was a very capable editor and critic, even if his judgment was sometimes fogged by his unswerving dedication to his friends.
It is also during this period that Time-Life increased its long love-hate engagement with the constantly self-publicizing Beats. Whatever the merits of their art, they made great copy and scared straight America out of all proportion to their actual activities (J. Edgar Hoover named Beatniks one of the top three threats to American national security). Ginsberg was very literary, and he made much of his time in Paris, visiting gravesites and museums, frequenting clubs and cafés, wandering the labyrinthine medieval streets of Paris’s Left Bank. He, along with Gregory, who was always out for kicks when not pursuing women in the Parisian night, would smoke hashish and visit the Louvre or stare at gargoyles at Notre Dame.
Although he spent a short time in Paris en route to New York from Tangiers with an early version of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in his knapsack for a potential Parisian publisher, Keruoac never felt entirely at ease away from his native hangouts and, after the publication of On the Road, rarely ventured far from his mother’s Long Island home (readers often forget that the laureled bard of the open road spent most of his time drinking beer in his mom’s living room). He admitted that while among the narrow European streets he longed for Wheaties and the household aroma of pine cleaner in the American morning.
Gregory Corso, who threw himself with glee into the uninhibited Beat lifestyle in Paris, considered himself a poet in the classical sense, as touched by the muse and insulated, in a saintly way, from society at large. He lived primarily on the largesse of young women, usually of good family, who supported his various romps and jaunts around the continent. He once told Art Buchwald in an interview for The Herald Tribune: “I get money from girls. Everytime [sic] I meet a girl I ask her how much money she has and then I demand half of it. I’m not doing anything wrong with money. I just use it to buy food.” He inhabited the attic room of the hotel and strolled the boulevards with cane and cape, declaring himself a poet (at a Joan Miro opening, he shouted to Picasso “I am starving. I am starving” before being removed from the room). He lived the eccentric and generally squalid life that he and others believed suited a poet, replete with dingy garret, Shelleyan garb, pockets empty save for poems, and presumptuous belief that he, being gifted with the wings of poesy, should be permitted to do pretty much whatever he liked whenever he liked. While they may have caused a great deal of loathing and even fist-fights at the time, his exploits are amusing to recount.
William Burroughs, the elder of the group by more than a decade, is, without question, the most inexplicable and mysterious member of the Beats. He undertook his most important work while at the hotel. It is there that the bizarre Routines, originally written into letters to Ginsberg (with whom Burroughs was at that time infatuated), were revised and arranged into the manuscript of Naked Lunch for littérateur and pornographer Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, which published primarily adult books, or DBs, dirty books (usually written by literary if impecunious figures such as Guillaume Apollinaire). Girodias only agreed to publish the book after the scandal it produced in culturally-hidebound Chicago, where several chapters intended for the Chicago Review were suppressed and then later seized when published in the magazine Big Table (although he had nothing to do with the publication itself, the name of the magazine was Keruoac’s; when petitioned for a suggestion, he glanced around his desk and saw a note to himself reading “buy big table”).
Burroughs also first began with the technique of cut-ups and fold-ins at the hotel. Along with a small group of other authors, he developed a method of composition that incorporated an element of chance with an almost painterly degree of relational deliberation: sections from a newspaper or book would be cut apart and rearranged to “get at” the hidden meanings behind the original syntax. Burroughs approached this system with a gravity approaching that of science or occultism, both of which appealed to him (John Ashbery, who lived in Paris during the Beats stay there, applied the technique of cut-ups and collage in his most difficult and critically-disputed book, The Tennis-Court Oath; despite this affiliation of technique, there is no record of Ashbery having encountered any of the Beats). His second novel, The Soft Machine, was also written (assembled) in this manner and published by Olympia while he was at the hotel (though he was forced to make it more accessible for American publication by Barney Rossett’s Grove Press).
Brion Gyson’s experiments with visual Alpha Wave manipulation took place at the hotel as well, resulting in his creation, the Dreammachine (a device consisting of a band with exposures revolving around a light at a speed between eight and thirteen times per second in order to stimulate dream-waves).
The second half of the hotel’s existence as Beat center of operations, after Ginsberg returned to New York to enjoy his celebrity, is centered on the collaborative work of Burroughs and Gyson, with some interaction with Cambridge mathematics undergraduate (and Burroughs’s paramour) Ian Sommerville and South African poet Sinclair Beiles, who went mad not long after indulging in the reintegrative (and at times disintegrative) endeavor of cut-ups (Burroughs attributed Beiles’s insanity directly to revelations issuing from his cut-ups). These “experiments” continued until the hotel’s closing in the spring of 1963.
Much as David Lehman’s friendship with member of the New York School poets attributed greatly to the buoyancy and authority of his The Last Avant Garde, Barry Miles had the good fortune to have known many of the Beats personally and so was able to make use of privately recorded interviews and even bits of personal conversation. His association also provided him with unprecedented access to manuscripts and other artifacts. Though the Beat Hotel period predates his involvement with the Beats, he resides in France and is qualified where matters of geography and French language are concerned. Though he falls prey to some of the myth-making that so often clouds accounts of the Beats, this is actually a benefit in the case of The Beat Hotel, as it mirrors the boyish hyperbole with which the Beats approached their surroundings and themselves (the book, being a history, is, however, in drastic need of an index).
Miles’s intimate history is also attractive for its coverage of the brief contact the Beats had with other figures of considerable artistic importance, such as W.H. Auden, Günter Grass, and Marcel Duchamp. These meetings are fascinating, and they throw the movements and aspirations of the Beats into relief against a broader historical and artistic canvas. Like Miles’s other books, his biographies of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, The Beat Hotel rewards those seeking the clamorous ghosts of America’s most famous prodigal sons in all their exilic glory and awkward beauty.
Editor’s Note: This review originally appeared in NowCulture. [/private]
Article printed from Contemporary Poetry Review: http://www.cprw.com
URL to article: http://www.cprw.com/beatnik-bohemia
Copyright © 2009 CPRW. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:010ebf70-ccf6-4c4d-bb06-fea6d958dec7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cprw.com/beatnik-bohemia/print/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97206 | 3,396 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Originally log cabins were intended to shelter early settlers, hunters, fishermen and ranchers. These hardy folks valued workmanship and practicality. While modern people may desire a bit more comfort and civilization of their homes, this can be a good tip to try and remain in keeping with the classic earthy good thing about traditional cottage floor offers combine comfort with authenticity. One example is, choosing simple rooflines to your log cabin helps to keep your costs down as well as to include the charm and integrity from the classic cabin look.
Dormers may help boost the livability on the cottage, but designing complex rooflines inflates the dwelling costs substantially. This runs specifically true of bump outs and exterior walls placed at odd angles. The fewer complexities and corners that your log home plan has, the less pricey it can be to construct and keep. Another idea is usually to create the rooms with your vacation cabin serve different purposes. Like that the inside doesn’t require a great deal of size, this serves and keep building costs down. As an example, the dining, living, and family rooms may be combined and bedrooms can incorporate hobby or office space. The bathroom may also accommodate a laundry. By doubling on the functions in the log cabin’s interior divisions, building costs might be substantially lowered.
Also remember to consider the area building customs in your town. By learning from the locals and designing your cabin house plans along traditional architectural lines current materials favored locally, it is certain that a home will easily fit into visually and grow suitable to your local climate. This caveat applies not only to the outward model of the dwelling, but in addition to features for instance small windows or utility spaces on the north walls of homes; as well as awnings helpful to shade windows facing west. By studying under the type of local builders and homeowners you can grab many ways which will make your own personal cabin experience more pleasant.
Another key to don’t forget is always that should you not need all of your living to generally be using one level, you will obtain extra space by yourself in a cheaper price by planning for a two-story home as opposed to using one story house plans or a rambling ranch-style design. The price differential may be substantial, since long homes built one level require larger foundations, more roofing, and longer runs for plumbing, wiring, and ducts than do multi-level homes. Generally, you’ll want to squeeze your square footage whenever you can.
Look at the areas that you simply prefer with your present home and friends’ homes, and remember to consider what furniture you’ll use as part of your cabin. In bedrooms and dining rooms especially, adding closet spaces can remove the requirement of chests and dressers. Look at that happen to be living in the cabin, and what activities need what space. When you want to avoid your cabin to feel cramped, building a cabin and that is too large raises costs and undermines its simplicity and charm.
There are plenty of factors to consider in designing log cabin floor plans. By employing multi- in lieu of one story house plans and also by making best usage of available space, you may substantial lower cabin house plans costs while staying in keeping with the regular ideal of rustic simplicity. | <urn:uuid:4a57b6f4-c5a1-41cd-b1a3-6a9baacefd8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cheboyganconstruction.com/floor-plans-for-log-cabin | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953938 | 663 | 1.59375 | 2 |
PCS is finalist for grant
Local farmers nominate school districts for America’s Farmers Grow Rural EducationSM
Winning a grant of $10,000 or $25,000 can enhance educational opportunities for a school district in a rural community. Perkins County Schools in Grant was recently named as a finalist to receive consideration for an America’s Farmers Grow Rural EducationSM grant. Perkins County Schools is one of 24 finalists in Nebraska.
“We received so many outstanding applications from rural school districts across the county,” said Deborah Patterson, president, Monsanto Fund. “The finalists truly went above and beyond what was expected and stand out as top tier choices.”
More than 61,000 farmers shared their passion for rural education by nominating more than half the eligible school districts. Finalist schools were chosen for their program ideas and funding needs. Perkins County Schools also benefited from community support through numerous farmer nominations which strengthened the district’s application.
The grant review process includes an online application scoring system based on merit, need and community support, a review by science and math teachers from ineligible school districts, and a farmer advisory council.
Now that the finalists have been chosen, the America’s Farmers Grow Rural Education Advisory Council, a group of 26 farmer leaders from across the country, will select the winning grant applications.
In 2012, the Monsanto Fund plans to award nearly $2.3 million to eligible school districts across the country. To see the full list of finalists please visit GrowRuralEducation.com
America’s Farmers Grow Rural Education started with a successful pilot in Illinois and Minnesota, in which farmers were given the opportunity to nominate a public school district in 165 eligible counties in those two states. The Monsanto Fund awarded more than $266,000 to local schools in 16 CRDs. Now, the program has expanded to 1,245 eligible counties in 39 states.
America’s Farmers Grow Rural Education is sponsored by the Monsanto Fund to help farmers positively impact their communities and support local rural school districts. This program is part of the Monsanto Fund’s overall effort to support rural education and communities.
Another program that is part of this effort is America’s Farmers Grow Communities, giving farmers the opportunity to enter to win $2,500 to donate to their favorite community nonprofit organization in their county. To participate in this program visit growcommunities.com between Aug. 1 and Nov. 30. | <urn:uuid:f231069f-8e89-4601-8cce-37bc09f2a3d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.granttribune.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6803:college-news&catid=37:school-news&Itemid=56 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960342 | 499 | 1.78125 | 2 |
As women, we make a lot of New Year's resolutions—"lose 10 pounds" and "finally write that novel" and "lose 10 pounds—seriously." But this year, the two of us (that's HuffPost’s Arianna Huffington and Glamour's Cindi Leive) are suggesting you make a New Year's resolution that could improve the status of all women in this country, starting with you. Nope, we're not talking about universal child care or even banning Tiger Woods from ever texting again. If you ask us, the next feminist issue is sleep. And in order for women to get ahead in this country, we're all going to have to lie down and take a nap.
Stay with us here for a minute. Americans are increasingly sleep-deprived, and the sleepiest people are, you guessed it, women. Single working women and working moms with young kids are especially drowsy: They tend to clock in an hour and a half shy of the roughly 7.5-hour minimum the human body needs to function happily and healthfully. Cindi admits that between her work, her two young children and her wicked TV addiction, she averages only five and a bit; as for Arianna, she had a rude (and painful) awakening two years ago when she passed out from exhaustion, broke her cheekbone and got five stitches over her eye. Ever since then, she’s been working on bringing more balance, and more sleep, into her life--with varying degrees of
"Women are significantly more sleep-deprived than men," confirms Michael Breus, Ph.D., author of Beauty Sleep: Look Younger, Lose Weight, and Feel Great Through Better Sleep. "They have so many commitments, and sleep starts to get low on the totem pole. They may know that sleep should be a priority, but then, you know, they've just got to get that last thing done. And that's when it starts to get bad."
Does it ever! You probably already know about the health consequences of sleep deprivation, how cheating your body out of the R&R it needs can make you more prone to illness, stress, traffic accidents and even weight gain. (Dr. Breus swears that sleeping will actually do more to take off weight than exercise! Love that.)
But there's more to it than simple physical problems. Rob yourself of sleep, ladies, and you'll find you never function at your personal best. Work decisions, relationship challenges, any life situation that requires that you to know your own mind—they all require the judgment, problem-solving and creativity that only a rested brain is capable of and are all handled best when you bring to them the creativity and judgment that are enhanced by sleep. "Everything you do, you'll do better with a good night's sleep," says Dr. Breus. Yet women who constantly push themselves to get by on less never know what that "peak performance" feels like.
A nation of sleepy women is even less capable of greatness. Consider the fact that sleep deprivation is a strategy many cults are fond of: They force prospective members to stay awake for extended periods, up for all hours because doing so physically alters their subjects’ decision-making ability and makes them more open to persuasion. Ladies, the choice is ours. Do we want to be empowered women taking charge of our lives—or do we want to be cult members, dragging ourselves around like zombies and going along with everyone else’s crummy ideas?
We’re saying no to the zombie side of things and, as of January 4, resolving to get a full night's sleep every night for a month. Cindi's going for seven and a half hours (that's Dr. Breus' recommended minimum, since it allows for a healthy round of five 90-minute sleep cycles); Arianna's choosing eight (arrived through trial and error as the number of hours it takes for her to be at her most creative and effective and have the most fun while being creative and effective).
Getting a good night's sleep, of course, is easier said than done. You have to tune out a host of temptations, from Letterman to the PTA to your e-mail inbox—and most of all, to ignore the workaholic wisdom that says you're lazy for not living up to the example set by Madonna, Martha Stewart and other notorious self-professed never-sleepers. Of course, the truth is the opposite: You'll be much more likely to be a professional powerhouse if you're not asleep at the wheel. (Even Bill Clinton, who used to famously get only five hours of sleep, later admitted, "Every important mistake I've made in my life, I've made because I was too tired." Huh! )
The problem is that women often feel that they still don't "belong" in the boys-club atmosphere that still dominates many workplaces. So they often attempt to compensate by working harder and longer than the next guy. Hard work helps women fit in and gain a measure of security. And because it works, they begin to do more and more and more of it until they can't stop.
But it's a Pyrrhic victory: The workaholism leads to lack of sleep, which in turn leads to never being able to do your best. In fact, many women do this on purpose, fueled by the mistaken idea that getting enough sleep means you must be lazy or less than passionate about your work and your life.
In fact, we may be surprised to find out that if we sleep more, we become more powerful. After all, we've already broken glass ceilings in Congress, space travel, sports, business and the media—just imagine what we can do when we're fully awake.
Inspired? Then join our one-month sleep challenge. We'll be blogging on glamour.com and the Huffington Post every Monday and Thursday about how our quest for more sleep is going. You'll get tips from health experts like Dr. Michael Breus and answers to some of your own personal questions about how to work more sleep into your life. But most of all, you'll have a New Year's resolution that's fun and fulfilling to stick to—and a built-in answer to anyone who says, "You're going to sleep now?" Sure you are—Glamour and the Huffington Post told you to! G'night, ladies. Sweet dreams.
--Cindi Leive and Arianna Huffington
More on sleep from glamour.com:
Sleepstakes! Enter to win a Vera Wang by Serta bridal bed and Agent Provocateur pajamas!
*Diary of a Sleeping Pill Junkie
*5 Healthy Bedtime Rituals | <urn:uuid:7a03f681-8392-4ba2-87d1-bdd976394eec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/blogs/vitamin-g/2010/01/sleep-challenge-2010-women-its.html?mbid=huffposleep | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965741 | 1,394 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The Division of Environment Quality has red-flagged the Managaha Island and is advising the public not to fish or swim within 300 feet of this location for the next 48 hours or until otherwise notified.
DEQ said that samples collected from the island had excessive concentrations of fecal indicator bacteria (enterococci) that exceeded the CNMI Marine Water Quality Standards. These bacteria can indicate the presence of human and animal waste in the water. Water samples were taken from several locations on Managaha this week.
For more information, contact DEQ at 664-8500. (DEQ) | <urn:uuid:ffabe401-a6bc-47bb-b5fb-8ce7d247b561> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.saipantribune.com/newsstory.aspx?cat=1&newsID=120811 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946183 | 122 | 1.796875 | 2 |
This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we will offer a peek into the some of the challenges we tackle on the Backend Team and discuss some tips and tricks we have discovered. These posts will focus on the ways in which we use GAE and AWS to build simple features that have helped us to deliver an amazing product. We plan to dive a little deeper into topics we’ve covered before, as well as highlighting some new ones. Upcoming topics will include GAE MapReduce, Redis, Google Cloud Storage, and duplicate detection via TF-IDF. Our first entry in the series discusses how to use Google’s edge cache as a free content delivery network (CDN).
The Free CDN
At the end of last year, we briefly mentioned Google’s edge cache as a useful feature as part of our guest post on the App Engine blog. Since this is one of our favorite services, I’d like to take a few minutes to explain it in more detail. It is an extremely simple feature that has the potential to significantly improve content serving latency and can be very valuable in terms of cost savings over other CDNs. Hopefully it will be clear by the end of this post why you should think about using it for your next project.
Content Delivery Networks
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) offer several benefits that are typically desired for both web and mobile apps. They are designed to cache content on many geographically distributed servers, as close to the end user as possible, thereby minimizing latency for requests to the cached content. There are several major CDN providers, but the big ones that come to mind are Akamai and Amazon’s Cloudfront. CDNs vary in quality and price, but generally one should expect to pay a premium for this type of service.
Google’s Edge Cache (aka. CDN)
It turns out that if you’re using Google App Engine (or other Google services like the newly announced Google Cloud Storage) and you configure things correctly, you get the same service for free. By simply setting public cache control headers wherever possible, you allow Google’s edge caches to serve unchanged content directly to users. Here’s an example of a set of response headers that will activate the cache:
The most important component of the header is the word ‘public’. It tells Google’s network that the content in this response is not specific to a particular user or private in any way, so it’s safe to cache it as aggressively as possible. ‘max-age’ allows you to decide how often this content will be refreshed from your servers, and ‘must-revalidate’ is just telling the server (or client cache) to strictly follow this timeout.
This technique has been mentioned in at least one Google IO talk, but for some reason hasn’t been widely publicized. Because of the scale of Google’s network, this is perhaps the best CDN available. Best of all, there is no cost for this caching. It’s actually a win-win for both you and Google, since it minimizes the traffic that has to cross their internal networks and servers.
At Pulse we use this feature very heavily. It lets us serve high quality, mobile optimized images at < 50ms latency, while also saving us lots of App Engine instance hours by preventing these requests from hitting our frontend servers. As you can see from the graph below, for this particular App Engine app, we are serving the majority of requests out of Google’s edge cache (labeled red). I encourage you to try it out. It’s almost too easy to be true! If you have questions, feel free to leave comments below or ping me @gregbayer. | <urn:uuid:0eb86c21-cebc-4ddc-af53-71f384907ca4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://eng.pulse.me/author/gregbayer/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93442 | 785 | 1.6875 | 2 |
The families of eight Hong Kong tourists who were killed in a Philippine hostage crisis renewed their demand for an apology from Manila on Thursday as they marked the tragedy's second anniversary.
The relatives and survivors observed a minute's silence and chanted "We will never forget" as they handed a petition to the Philippines consulate.
"We're very angry and disappointed," said Tse Chi-hang, brother of tour guide Masa Tse who was killed when a sacked policeman seized a bus packed with tourists in a desperate bid to be reinstated to his job.
"From the beginning to the end, our request remains the same -- that the Philippine government should apologise to the victims and their families."
After lengthy negotiations and a bungled assault on the bus, the hostage-taker and eight tourists were killed and seven others were wounded in an incident that was broadcast live on television around the world.
The apparent incompetence of the police raiders outraged the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, which demanded formal explanations from Manila.
Hong Kong maintains a travel warning for the Philippines, citing the hostage crisis. The southern Chinese city has also complained about the light penalties meted out to officials involved in the operation.
Philippine President Benigno Aquino has expressed regret and admitted the crisis should have been handled better, but refused to apologise when the victims' families travelled to the site of the incident in Manila last year. | <urn:uuid:828aa87d-6cc7-4536-a94a-d0ff42348c48> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sg.news.yahoo.com/philippines-pressed-hong-kong-hostage-apology-165032082.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97073 | 282 | 1.546875 | 2 |
As a nonprofit organization, the Museum of Arts and Sciences relies on broad-based community support for its activities and daily operations. Museum of Arts and Sciences members and donors help the Museum to share its collection and programs with people from around the world. There are many ways to give to the Museum, with many benefits and privileges available to you in thanks for your generosity.
Next time you visit the Museum, look carefully. Behind each picture, you'll find curators and educators. With them are the people who paint and clean the galleries and those who light our spaces, mow the lawn, and sell the tickets. Contributions to The Museum of Arts and Science's Annual Fund will provide support for current operating needs and help provide memorable educational experiences to families and schoolchildren. With your support, we are better able to sponsor schoolchildren with free or reduced admissions, offer the public the best in exhibits and continue to provide a wide array of educational outreach programs to the community.
It takes much more than a nail to hang a picture. It takes a team to run a museum. Everyone has a part to play. You are part of that team. The way you can help is through a gift to Museum of Arts and Sciences Annual Fund.
Museum members recognize the importance of preserving items of cultural and historical significance and offing exciting and innovative exhibits and programs that educate and inform our community. They know this would not be possible and could not continue without their support and dedication to the museum. Join the Museum of Arts and Sciences and enjoy the benefits of membership: Download PDF
The end of the calendar year is the time when many people think about making charitable gifts. If you itemize on your income tax returns, you're able to deduct your charitable contributions during the past year. Gifts can be made to specific areas including education, acquisitions, conservation, and exhibits.
Gifts may be made outright with a check payable to the Museum of Arts and Sciences or by credit card. Securities (stocks, bonds, or mutual funds) that have appreciated in value or tangible assets, such as real estate or personal goods and services, are also welcomed.
Planned gifts of estate assets are a wonderful way to support the work of The Museum of Arts and Sciences. By including a contribution to the Museum in your will or living trust, you provide essential support for the Museum's mission. A provision in your will allows you to make a substantial contribution without diminishing the assets available to you during your lifetime.
Before making any gift to the Museum, you should consult with your accountant, counsel, or financial advisor for a thorough analysis of your individual situation. If you have already included the Museum of Arts and Sciences as a beneficiary of your will, please let us know so that we can recognize your generosity.
An endowment is a fund established within the institution that provides a predictable, independent source of income from year to year and lies in perpetuity with the Museum of Arts and Sciences. The endowed fund (the donation) is invested in accordance with the Museum of Arts and Sciences policy governing endowments. This investing creates income in the form of interest, dividends and gains. In accordance specified endowment spending policy, a portion of the income may be spent for the purpose stated by the donor in their agreement and a portion of the income is rolled back into the endowed fund to help grow the principal. This policy allows for the continual growth of both principal and income and, in this way, the fund lasts in perpetuity.
The concept of a hands-on science center has been identified as a real need in this community. Our children must engage with science at a young age in order to become part of the growing industries seeking an educated scientific and technical workforce. For several years, the scientific component of our mission has been fulfilled through the 2,500 sq. ft. Charles and Linda Williams Children's Wing and through the museum's planetarium, which together serve thousands of students annually
We are now at a most exciting point in the development of our educational programming! A new facility will be built that will be known as the Charles and Linda Williams Children's Museum. It will be defined as a specific space for children and families through its unique contemporary architectural design and, while complementing the existing facility design, it will create excitement through soaring open spaces with an abundance of windows to provide natural light and a visual link to the outside environment.
The Children's Museum will house professionally designed interactive exhibits geared especially toward children that will engage them in learning various principles of science, engineering, and physics. These exhibits, created by the award winning world-renowned design firm of Hands-On will offer inquiry-oriented experiences that will develop scientific reasoning in young students.
Make a commitment to the children and families of our community by sponsoring one of these exhibits.
The museum currently provides a comprehensive learning program for over 15,000 children each year in association with the Volusia County School District, the Head Start Program, home school organizations, and individual families. The current children's programs will be restructured to take advantage of the new exhibits and classroom spaces. As a Children's Museum Program Sponsor, you may choose to underwrite the annual costs of one of these programs. A donation of $3,000 will support 500 of Volusia County children.
The Museum offers discounted memberships to Foster Care Families. As a Foster Family Sponsor, you may choose to underwrite the total cost of these memberships on an annual basis giving foster families an opportunity to visit the Museum. A donation of $500 will provide funding for 10 foster families.
In recognition of those helping to sustain the Children's Museum, a Piece of the Puzzle Donation Wall will be installed in a prominent area of the Museum. We invite you to be recognized by having your name or the name of your child or grandchild, engraved on a piece of the puzzle.
Never before have humans known as much about the universe as we do today and never before have we acquired new information about the universe as quickly as we do now. Yet, at the same time, never has the public been so unaware about the basic facts of celestial science. This has made the need for planetariums as front line artillery in the battle for science literacy greater than it has ever been. In response to this need, the Museum of Arts and Sciences, in partnership with the Volusia County School District, is initiating a major renovation of the Museum's planetarium. It will include installation of a new state-of-the-art dome and a computerized digital dome projection system. With the new technology the Planetarium will now be able to offer spectacular full dome immersive video, surround sound educational programs.
You can be a part of the exciting new offering by making a donation to the Planetarium 21st Century Project!
A gift to The Museum of Arts and Sciences is a special way to recognize friends, family, and business associates, while supporting the Museum's mission, exhibits, and educational programs. "In Honor Of" gifts celebrate special occasions such as weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, the birth of a child, or graduations. Celebrate the holidays from Valentine's Day to Mother's Day with a gift to The Museum of Arts and Sciences.
Express your sympathy or remember a loved one through a memorial gift. Your contribution will be acknowledged with a personalized letter sent to the honored individual or family (without reference to the amount donated).
The Museum of Arts and Sciences Corporate Community Sponsorship program offers companies of all sizes the opportunity to show their leadership role in the community to employees, clients, customers and partners. In appreciation for their annual philanthropic support, Corporate Community Sponsors receive significant benefits and public recognition.
As public funding sources decrease, support from our Major Sponsors enables the Museum of Arts and Sciences to continue its mandate of providing exhibits that excite, educate and inform our community about the arts, sciences, and history. Your contribution will help to sustain the Museum's permanent exhibit space and to underwrite over 5 changing exhibitions each year, which showcase the works of major artists of both international and regional renown.
Your gift to the Museum of Arts and Sciences could be doubled! Find out if your employer (or parent company) will match your gift by contacting the Human Resources Department at your company. If your company does match gifts, use their matching gift form and mail it to:
Museum of Arts and Sciences
352 S. Nova Rd
Daytona Beach, FL 32114 | <urn:uuid:81dc2fcb-ee64-4048-8425-94670fc85cc4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.moas.org/giving.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951935 | 1,721 | 1.59375 | 2 |
George Wu, a 1959 mechanical engineering graduate, has developed a new software program to help people learn Mandarin Chinese. Wu is a native of Shanghai and came to the United States when he was very young. He pursued a college education at Tri–State, after learning about the school in a Popular Mechanics magazine.
After graduation, Wu worked as a mechanical design engineer, specializing in HVAC. His career took him to Guam, Hawaii, Taiwan, Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta, Hong Kong and Manila and California, where he resides today.
Wu couldn′t stay still for long in his retirement years, so he began teaching Spanish and Chinese to students as a part–time endeavor. In 2009, he started teaching at Southwestern Community College in Chula Vista.
He realized that "traditional" teaching was not helping students learn to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese. So, he developed a software program that emphasizes Mandarin′s authentic pronunciation instead of the ubiquitously outdated Romanized spellings for certain keywords. His software, RPC Mandarin, singles out unique sounds to facilitate the learning of authentic Mandarin.
"My ultimate intention is that from my software anyone who wants to learn to speak Mandarin will be clearly understood by those who speak it fluently," Wu said. "A language ceases to be an instrument of communication if it cannot be understood."
Tri–State University alumna Liat (Caruso) Peters, a 1984 computer science graduate, and her sister, Lisa Aldrich, both of Caruso′s Italian Restaurant in Angola, were selected as part of a team to study culinary arts abroad in France in May after winning Ivy Tech Community College′s Northeast annual Mystery Basket Competition in January.
Peters is studying culinary and pastry and baking at Ivy Tech. As part of her educational requirements in the American Culinary Federation accredited culinary arts program, Peters said she was required to compete in at least one contest. She chose this one because of the prize.
The competition this year featured entries from 17 culinary students and 7 baking and pastry students. Standards for judging are set by the department′s accrediting body, the American Culinary Federation.
The students were tasked with writing a menu and cooking dishes using three mystery ingredients. A panel of judges were then served by each student and critiqued on sanitation, organization and other kitchen skills. Aldrich′s menu consisted of spinach and mushroom–stuffed Dover sole roulade with parmesan tuille and grilled tomato slices, roasted rack of coriander–crusted lamb with fresh mint sauce, domino potatoes with dauphinois sauce and chocolate cream pie with fresh raspberry sauce.
The May 15–27 trip will take Peters and Aldrich to the South of France to study with chef Michel Bouit.
If you want to sample some of the culinary masterpieces, stop into Caruso′s at 2435 N. 200 W., Angola.
In the name of Valentine′s Day, we′re recognizing one couple who found love at Tri–State. We know multiple couples caught cupid′s arrow on campus, and we’d love for you to share your story by e-mailing it to [email protected]. Now, onto the story of Noah and Kayla.
Noah Warren, a 2007 golf management graduate, loved Kayla Cheesman, a 2006 accounting graduate, from the start. Kayla, a Kappa Sigma Alpha basketball player, met Noah at his fraternity house, Kappa Sigma. They ran in the same circles and played basketball. (Even though Noah was a golfer, he played on the scrimmage squad for the women′s basketball team).
"Having a guy you liked playing against you was a little nerve–wracking," Kayla said with a laugh, her face turning a little red. "I thought he was handsome and funny. I didn′t even know what golf was."
Noah found Kayla fun to be around, easy going and not a drama queen.
Their first date took place a year before they officially started dating. It took a Greek formal at the American Legion in Angola to seal the deal for the lovebirds.
After four years of dating, he finally popped the question in the most appropriate place – Hershey Hall. The couple went to shoot hoops. He hid the ring in a pair of shorts he was wearing. When the moment was right, he proposed to Kayla on the free–throw line.
"He would always shoot around with me on game day," Kayla recalled. "It was really romantic. It was the same court, the same basket, the same place we′d always gone."
The two were married Nov. 24, 2010, at Disney World. They just bought their first home on Fox Lake, just outside of Angola. She is the financial operation associate at PayServ, and he is the assistant golf pro at Zollner Golf Course. When they′re not lounging on the couch or at work, they′re traveling around the country and watching University of Michigan sports.
Bonus love stories as told on Trine University's Facebook page:
Amber Hartleroad – "I was a freshman and my hubby was a senior, we were put in a group together for the Chem E car competition, we met for the first time behind Fawick, been together for 11 years and married for almost 7." :)
Lisa Russakoff Gilman "Fall of sophomore year; he lived on 2nd floor Alwood and I lived on first floor Platt. We met through mutual friends. Married in May 1988; 3 wonderful kids and almost 24 years later, we still are best friends!"
Play an ′instrumental′ role in Trine University′s thriving music program.
Our young and thriving music program invites you to play an instrumental part in the continued success of our growing bands, choirs, ensembles and orchestra. In just five short years, our talented musicians have performed at home football games and have staged numerous community concerts in northeast Indiana, an area yearning for artistic and music experiences. Now, they are looking to tour European countries and give concerts around the globe.
Our program has garnered attention and popularity, expanding from 25 students in 2006 to nearly 200 students this fall, and we are now in need of unique instruments to accommodate our talented musicians.
To better serve our percussionists, we are looking to acquire a marimba, xylophone and vibraphone. In addition, we would like sousaphones, euphoniums, French horns, a bass clarinet, a piccolo and a baritone saxophone to give our bands and orchestra a full and powerful sound unlike any this area has ever heard.
We need a little over $100,000 to purchase these instruments. Can you help? Do you have a quality instrument to donate or know someone who might? Your contribution – whether it′s a monetary gift, an instrument, or pointing us in the right direction – will help us showcase the exciting work of emerging musicians in our region, and possibly around the globe.
For more information or to donate, contact Sarah Brown, director of annual giving, at [email protected] or 260.665.4316.
Thank you for taking the time to consider "playing" a lead part in our music program and working to create a tradition of beautiful music for generations to come. | <urn:uuid:2e4495b6-2181-4358-930b-afc03fa8e578> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.trine.edu/tbolt/Feb_March12/alumni.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964963 | 1,524 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Since 1946 Mensa has been bringing together the most intelligent people in the world and convincing them to pay annual membership fees for a card that proves how clever they are. Now the world's largest gathering of large IQ scores teams with Square Enix for Mensa Academy, a game aimed at training others to pay annual membership fees for a card that proves how clever they are.
Called American Mensa Academy in America (we're off to a grand start), the game aims at training players brains through a series of coaching and practice exercises to think like someone that might one day attend Mensa dances and read Mensa publications. There'll be plenty of X is to Y as A is to something questions, word problems, puzzles, and other intelligence-straining activities covering five different categories: Math, Language, Logic, Memory, and Visual.
All of this training leads to a test to determine the player's Mensa Academy score, which is like their Brain Age but someone already did that.
"We are very excited about the development and launch of the American Mensa Academy game. Many of the puzzles and quizzes are similar to the questions and challenges presented on the actual Mensa Admissions Test. What a great way to challenge yourself and your friends." said Pamela L. Donahoo, CAE, executive director America Mensa Ltd. via official press release.
Developed by Barnstorm Games, American Mensa Academy launches July 27 for Windows PC, with versions in the works for consoles, iPhone, Android, 3DS, and more.
Who knows? Maybe this is your stepping stone towards one day spending $63 a year. | <urn:uuid:e62aa790-f68c-46fa-85ed-05b602f0b14f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kotaku.com/5914233/the-worlds-largest-high-iq-society-enters-the-brain-game-game?tag=mensa | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954287 | 331 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Have a Super Healthy Super Bowl Celebration!
How to drink light and right during a Super Bowl party
By Kathleen Zelman, MPH, RD/LD
You're heading to a Super Bowl party, but you've vowed to avoid the dips, the chips, and the wings at all costs. Still, it is a celebration, so a few beers or mixed drinks couldn't do too much harm. Or could they?
We usually don't think of them in the same league as junk food. Yet the calories from beverages can add up quickly, especially if they contain alcohol. One gram of alcohol has 7 calories, compared with 4 for carbs and protein. So ounce for ounce, you can consume almost twice as much carbs and protein for the same number of calories!
So as you celebrate the Super Bowl, you need to keep track of and make smart decisions about your beverage consumption. The choice is yours to decide -- where would you prefer to get your calories?
A glass of wine or beer has roughly 125 to 150 calories, right? Maybe, it depends on the size of the glass and how often you refill that glass. It is hard to know exactly how much you have consumed because all too often, the glass is continually refilled. It is safe to say that the average serving size of wine and alcoholic beverages is usually more than you think it is.
The savvy dieter finishes one serving then switches to a nonalcoholic, noncaloric beverage such as sparkling water before considering another serving of alcohol. This way, you not only reduce the risk of over-consuming calories and alcohol, but this strategy also helps meet your fluid needs. And your head will thank you in the morning when you awake feeling chipper without a hangover!
Not only do cocktails boost calories, but they also have a powerful impact on mood and inhibitions. Your resolve can be really strong going into that party but after a few drinks, you may find yourself mindlessly overeating the nuts, dips, or whatever food is within striking distance. Yet another reason to limit your consumption!
Nonalcoholic Thirst Quenchers
Soft drinks usually come in 12-ounce cups and add a good 150 calories per serving. While 150 calories might not sound like a lot, it is mostly sugar. Super size it and you can pack away 400 calories without a blink of an eye. What's worse, the liquid calories fulfill your thirst but do little to satisfy hunger. Artificially sweetened beverages are a fine alternative but even those should be limited to a few servings per day.
Choosing a glass of fruit or vegetable juice is a great option, chock full of nutrients and disease-preventing antioxidants. Vegetable juice contains the least amount of calories and can be very pleasing. Fruit juice that is 100% juice contains almost twice as many calories as vegetable juice and while very nutritious, can add up to several hundred calories in large glasses.
One of the best thirst quenchers is good old-fashioned water. Sparkling water makes a nice substitute if you like the effervescence of soda. Jazz up noncaloric waters with fresh citrus, a splash of juice or a sprig of fresh mint. This is a great way to meet your daily fluid needs without any extra calories. And for those who don't want to look like they are not imbibing in the festivities, sparkling water with lime or fruit juice looks like you are enjoying a social cocktail.
Before heading out to the party or bar, make a game plan. Eat a light snack before you go so that you won't get tipsy with the first drink; it should also help reduce the temptation to dive into the food.
Choose drinks that are relatively simple, such as coffee, tea, juice, wine, wine spritzers, light beer, or drinks mixed with low-calorie mixers. Sweet or creamy drinks add lots of extra fat and calories. Rum and diet cola or vodka and soda with a twist are good lower-calorie drink options.
Okay, we've talked about Super Bowl party time, but what about those other winter warmers?
Snuggling up to the fireplace with a mug of warm apple cider or hot chocolate is pure bliss. Make your hot chocolate with skim milk and top with a dollop of light whipped cream for a delicious and satisfying treat. Spice up your favorite warm ciders with spices or vanilla beans to heighten your senses.
Hot herbal teas and coffees are equally tasty. At the coffee house, order up your specialty coffee with skim milk ("skinny"); hold the whipped cream and you won't find yourself 600 calories in the hole. That's right, some of those large fancy coffee drinks with syrups, whole milk, and whipped cream can set you back as much as 600 to 700 calories -- the equivalent of two healthy meals!
Staying well hydrated during the cold winter months is very important. Drink plenty of fluids, especially if you are suffering from colds or flu, and remember to choose them carefully. As you've seen, those wonderful winter warmers and holiday nogs can add lots of unwanted calories!
Originally published Jan. 23, 2004
©2005 WebMD Inc. All rights reserved.
Get the latest health and medical information delivered direct to your inbox FREE! | <urn:uuid:601dac9b-845b-484c-84a1-b412c50b16d2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=56776 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947184 | 1,085 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Getty Images / Justin Sullivan
A view of the California State Capitol in Sacramento.
California voters were fed up 32 years ago when they approved the state's term limits law. Fed up with the flamboyant deal-making of then-Speaker Willie Brown. Fed up with an image of corruption highlighted by an FBI bribery probe.
And now, it appears, voters are fed up again with the dysfunction at California's Capitol that term limits has helped to create.
A new Field Poll shows strong support for Prop 28 on Tuesday's ballot, which would reduce the maximum number of years that a lawmaker can serve from 14 to 12. But the measure would allow that lawmaker to serve all those years in one house.
Currently, the limits are six years in the Assembly and eight in the Senate.
I saw the effects of term limits kick in during the mid-1990s, when I was covering the Capitol. And while it created more diversity and eliminated some entrenched dinosaurs, it also meant an exodus of bright and talented legislators. Republican Ken Maddy, a respected budget expert, comes to mind.
At the Capitol, the term is "up or out." Once elected, lawmakers cast their eye on moving up to the next post, before they're termed out. It means less focus on developing knowledge and relationships.
As a result, there's been a power shift. Lobbyists and legislative staff are the ones who remain, and who have the institutional memory, not the lawmakers themselves.
Legislators who are new to the building find themselves occupying key leadership posts. It's become a place for learning on the job, when it shouldn't be.
It's more difficult for leaders to reach agreements. Members feel less compelled to sign on. Gridlock ensues.
Prop 28 is no cure-all. But it would reduce the revolving door that's a part of dysfunction in Sacramento.
Author Kevin Riggs, an Emmy-winning former TV reporter in Sacramento, is Senior Vice President at Randle Communications. | <urn:uuid:78b17203-a3a5-4050-b690-3fb46ca35e41> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcbayarea.com/blogs/prop-zero/Prop28-Voters-Poised-To-Alter-Term-Limits-Law-156378325.html | 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 | 0.964162 | 410 | 1.617188 | 2 |
MOORE — Question: We are a very close family and my ninth-grade son recently has not been himself. I do not know the first signs of drug abuse but I am afraid that is what I am seeing. Can you tell me what to look for?
— Bruce, Purcell
Answer: Dear Bruce,
Although we are unsure of what signs you are seeking, some signs of separation from the family are an expected part of growing up. At the same time, a shift in the dynamics of friendships could be a big sign.
Specifically speaking, statistics show most kids start by smoking weed. Things to look for are red eyes, a coated tongue, delayed reactions, and putting physical distance between them and you. There's always the sickly-sweet aroma of pot that is indescribable yet unforgettable! Since smoking weed requires papers or a pipe, for example, you might find some of this paraphernalia in cars or bedrooms.
The latest rage is for kids to have pill parties. They will raid parents' medicine cabinets and either sell them for extra money or take them to trade with others. The scary thing is not knowing what they might be getting in exchange. All parents should keep all medications locked up.
If a Valium is taken, they will be extremely tired and sleepy. If they take a friend's adderall (ADD med), they will be bouncing off the walls since its essentially speed.
Don't be afraid to email teachers to see what behavior in class is like. Let us know if we can be of further help.
Sally Phillips and Jeannie DeLancey are certified school counselors with 49 years combined educational experience. Jeannie has two children and Sally has three. The responses presented don’t necessarily reflect the views of any certain school district. Send questions to [email protected] or mail them to Class Act, The Norman Transcript, P.O. Drawer 1058, Norman, 73070. | <urn:uuid:353d8e61-a87a-464c-8f0f-2b85b680da74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mooreamerican.com/local/x520557163/Watch-for-the-signs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960194 | 404 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Forget Fixing E-Voting Machines; Why Not Just Jump All The Way To Internet Voting?
from the slow-down,-skippy dept
Just as we've been hearing more and more stories about e-voting glitches that should have everyone wondering whether we're really ready to automate elections in this manner, one company in the space is pushing in the other direction. VoteHere, one of the biggest lobbyists in support of laws that required e-voting machines, is saying we should jump right on over to internet voting. The company's founder actually can stand up and say "the technology is done" with a straight face. Considering the myriad problems with e-voting machines already (and the unwillingness of any firm to admit to the problems with e-voting) it would seem like perhaps we need a little more proof about the safety, security and accuracy of internet voting before we just accept the word of a company in the space. They point to some "small scale" tests as proof that the system works, claiming that hackers tried and failed to impact those elections. Of course, once again, there's no way to know if that's true, or if the hackers were just good enough to hide their trail. More importantly, the difference between a small scale election and a large scale, national, Presidential election is one of huge orders of magnitude in both users and importance. Hopefully the debate over problems in e-voting have enough attention that politicians won't blindly rush to an equally questionable solution -- but we're not holding our breath here. | <urn:uuid:3a3695ca-0c1d-472c-864a-6479d3104d9f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061114/104328.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963075 | 317 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Easyart ID: 427436
All images contained on this website are copyrighted property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
An original fine art litho poster published by Tate. 'No Woman, No Cry' is a tribute to the London teenager Stephen Lawrence. The Metropolitan police investigation into his racially-motivated murder was mishandled, and a subsequent inquiry described the police force as institutionally racist. In each of the tears shed by the woman in the painting is a collaged image of Stephen Lawrence’s face, while the words ‘R.I.P. Stephen Lawrence’ are just discernible beneath the layers of paint. Despite these specific references, the artist also intended the painting to be read in more general terms, as a universal portrayal of melancholy and grief. | <urn:uuid:19098f1a-a37a-40c3-8b6f-452de2e16545> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.easyart.com/art-prints/Chris-Ofili/No-Woman%2C-No-Cry-427436.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941213 | 161 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Fences : Bamboo Material
Bamboo fences are widely used in Asian countries, like China, Thailand, Filipinos, and Imdonesia. Bamboo as a material strong enough fence and have a very good testur. no miraculous way of utilizing bamboo as a fence, such as:
Live Bamboo Fencing is a great option if you live in a climate that’s warm year round. Bamboo grows at the rate of up to a foot a year, meaning you can have an effective, live fence in just a couple of years time. All you need to do is trim it annually to the desired height once it reaches maturity.
Bamboo Cane Fencing is a bamboo fence made from 3/8″ diameter poles woven together with galvanized wire. It’s wind resistant, won’t succumb to weather as quickly as other wood materials, and is harvested from renewable materials, to boot.
Rolled Bamboo Fencing is a variety of bamboo fence made out of 3/4″ bamboo poles, linked together and rolled up for easy shipping and delivery. Rolled bamboo fencing comes in heights up to 8′ tall, and can be installed onto wood posts, or over pre-existing fences, including chain link.
Bamboo Stick Fence utilizes 1/2″ bamboo slats instead of bamboo poles. It also usually comes in rolled up sections. The big difference between pole fence and slat fencing is weather resistance. You’ll want to treat your slat fencing with a weather sealer to prevent it from experiencing rotting and other weather damage.
Bamboo Twig Fence is made of small bamboo twigs interwoven and held together with galvanized steel wire. It resembles a thatch fence, is a little more open than other bamboo fencing, and won’t last quite as long. Still, if you’re searching for a tropical feel for your fencing needs, you find a better product than bamboo twig fence.
While bamboo fencing is beautiful in and of itself, many homeowners also choose to dress it up some to make it look more permanent, and to help boost its structural integrity. Building a cedar frame, including posts, crossbars, and top rails, is an excellent way to support, and solidify your bamboo fencing, making it a more permanent fence solution. Of course, while wood frames provide a solid base for installation, it’s not necessary. One of the great benefits of bamboo fencing is that can be installed anywhere it has support. This makes a favorite of homeowners with ugly chain link, since a bamboo fence up to 8′ high can be installed on, and over, a chain link fence half the height. | <urn:uuid:4eef9415-6a4e-45a2-83d1-87ec74d6d257> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://industrystandarddesign.com/home-exterior/fences-bamboo-material/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944746 | 553 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Wow, didn’t that first term of school go quickly?
There I was waiting for school to start and complaining of the long induction process and boom – it’s Christmas, the girls can read and recognise letters and have even started the add one concept.
They have weekly PE lessons, weekly trips to the library [...]
When I was going through the remainder of last year’s wrapping paper and checking to see if there were any cards leftover I came across a bag full of old Christmas cards that had been forgotten to take to a recycling unit.
Later once our tree was up and [...]
I must admit to great excitement in the house when it is our turn to have a number puppy for the night.
Today’s post is based on Number puppy 6, a puppy with a penchant for the number 6, the colour purple and the hexagon shape. Number puppy 6 is one of ten puppies [...]
Music engages practically all areas of the brain.
Research by Schlaug et al (1995) showed that music learning before the age of 7 boosted the connection between the two sides of the brain.
Music learning tends to produce more intelligent and creative children.
Moosicology is the first and only home education package for [...]
What a great school the girls are in! All parents have been invited to three workshops last week to enable us to help our children get to grips with the learning system our school are using with our children and I am so pleased they are encouraging parents to take part and help them [...]
The other day I went for my first meeting at the infant school where the girl’s will be starting in September, a very exciting time and an extremely important one too. I recently shared with you my thoughts on keeping twins together or not but whilst I sat listening to the Head Mistress [...]
Almost four years have passed since our twins came into the world and we’ve already chosen (and been accepted) at their first school. We have our first meeting on the 21st June where we’ll be told about the induction process, uniform and various other bits of information that make up the schools [...]
It’s weird that the girls were only 3 in the summer and yet we’re already looking into the start of their school career. Next September they will go into Reception class and we have until January 14th to choose our first, second and third choices.
I went on a visit [...]
Having been made redundant in the first trimester of my pregnancy I had no job to return to once my maternity leave was up. Having twins made looking for a new job impossible so the decision was made for me to stay home with the girls and enjoy their growing years being on hand [...] | <urn:uuid:0c1147a1-6be1-4847-a33d-eb2d44a01810> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://marisworld.co.uk/index.php/category/twins/education-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974059 | 560 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Earthwatch Institute, Maynard, MA, November 28, 2007 - The National Geographic Society's Adventure publication has conducted the world's first large-scale rating of adventure tour operators, rating Earthwatch as the Number One Voluntourism outfitter from over 155 of the leading operators world-wide.
‘The ADVENTURE Ratings' also awarded Earthwatch a 100% score in Education, the only outfitter to achieve such a rating. Earthwatch was second in Nature and Wildlife Expeditions and Price Range and sixth overall.
Being ranked well above most for-profit organizations was a pleasant acknowledgment for Earthwatch. Despite its focus on engaging people in scientific field research first and foremost, Earthwatch President and CEO, Edward Wilson, is thrilled with being recognized as a first-class outfitter.
"Being a nonprofit organization, it's really great to be acknowledged above organizations that are for-profit. It just goes to show that although we work on an extremely tight budget, we can still do incredible things for the environment," Wilson said.
You are not a tourist on an Earthwatch expedition. Earthwatch volunteers are hands-on with real scientific research, education and conservation, where all the skills you need are enthusiasm and a sense of adventure.
"These rankings show Earthwatch volunteers not only contribute directly toward environmental conservation and a sustainable future, but are also having a fantastic time by doing something different than your typical vacation," Wilson said.
With 120 research expeditions across 55 countries, Earthwatch also appears in National Geographic Adventure's ‘Top 25 New Trips for 2008' with their Fiji's Ancient Seafarers expedition.
This expedition offers volunteers the chance to live and interact with local villagers while excavating sites in order to help reconstruct and understand the cultural history of the region.
For further information on expeditions or for a copy of the 2008 Expedition Guide, call 1-800-776-0081.
Dates for Fiji's Ancient Seafarers are:
Team #1 Nov 25 - 9 Dec, 2007
Team #2 Dec 9 - 23, 2007
Team #3 Jan 6 - 20, 2008
Team #4 Jan 20 - Feb 3, 2008
Public Relations Director
Visit National Geographic Adventure's website for all results of ‘The ADVENTURE Ratings' or purchase a copy of the magazine's November 2007 issue.
Earthwatch is an international not-for-profit organization that supports conservation research expeditions and education by enabling paying volunteers, educator and corporate fellows, and others to work alongside scientists, collecting valuable research data and promoting the understanding and action needed for a sustainable environment. | <urn:uuid:7f5706a8-060e-445f-9a36-1a38f1da2597> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.earthwatch.org/newsandevents/pressreleases/2007_press_releases/11_28_2007_ng.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93317 | 534 | 1.570313 | 2 |
When travelling, it’s always fun to stumble upon both famous and lesser-known local bathing spots. However, while I love to be surprised by historical and natural baths in different destination, not everybody likes surprises, and the bathing experiences found on the road are often hit or miss. In fact, in my experience, local baths get misnamed, over hyped and overlooked. Here are a few cases in point:
The Namesake: Bath’s Roman Baths
The Roman Baths in England are so famous that a city was named after them. Bath, in the west of the country, has been frequented for centuries by visitors in search of soothing waters and supreme relaxation. The city of Bath became so popular that in the 19th century, it was the place to see and be seen in the high society of Jane Austen’s novels.
Nowadays, though, the original Roman Baths are nothing more than a splendid tourist attraction with murky green waters. When I visited Bath last year, I sadly learned that visitors are no longer allowed to take a dip in the original pools. There are some newer spas open for bathers to soak in geothermal splendour, but if you’re looking for a high-society remedy at the original baths of Bath, I’m afraid you’re a few centuries too late.
The Ornate: Budapest’s Thermal Baths
Budapest, by contrast, is a city where even the most famous baths are definitely open to the public. In fact, all of Budapest’s thermal baths, which are scattered throughout the city, are accessible to and frequented by locals and tourists alike.
Most visitors to Budapest head straight for the Széchenyi or Gellért thermal baths, and rightly so, considering they are the city’s two most famous and most opulently decorated. Situated in the middle of City Park, Széchenyi has indoor and outdoor baths housed in a magnificent and imposing Neo-Baroque structure surrounded by meticulously kept gardens. The Art Deco-style Gellért Baths are equally prestigious, but located near Gellért Hill in Buda, close to the Liberty Bridge.
Both the Széchenyi and Gellért can get very busy during the peak tourist season, especially in July and August. For a more local experience, head to one of Budapest’s other baths, like Király, which I visited a few years ago. We were easily the only tourists in there, and while the architecture and decor was far less impressive that of Széchenyi or Gellért, it certainly felt like a more authentic thermal soak.
The Ethereal: Iceland’s Blue Lagoon
Geothermals are one of Iceland’s many natural resources. As such, they have been used by generations of Icelanders to stay warm in the winter and keep their skin soft against the dry air.
Iceland has many hot springs, thermal baths and spas throughout its volcanic and rugged landscape, but the one that most people visit is the luxurious Blue Lagoon. Buses frequently cover the hour-long trip between the capital, Reykjavik, and the spa, making it easy for city tourists to indulge in some relaxation and pampering.
Despite not being a devout spa-goer, I had been looking forward to time at the Blue Lagoon on my trip to Iceland last year. It was one of my most memorable travel experiences, particularly since the thermal bath was only sparsely attended, and because the waters are simply incredible. Soft white clay coats the floor of the lagoon, and the pale cobalt waters release a wispy, ethereal steam. The surroundings easily allow visitors to turn off and pretend they’re in a completely different world.
The Dirty Dip: Aguas Calientes
Unfortunately, not all spa experiences are created equal. A few years ago, in Peru, I was determined to take a dip in the hot baths of Aguas Calientes, the aptly named town at the base of Machu Picchu. While the other members of my tour were enthusiastically heading off to the pools, my mum suggested that I skip the dip and wander with her through the town instead.
I politely refused and joined our tour mates. What I found was less luscious than expected. The baths weren’t ‘caliente,’ or hot, as the name promised. They also weren’t particularly clean. After a short time I decided that Mum was right and I didn’t really want to be in the baths anymore.
As I left, not only did I find someone else’s long black hair on my leg, I even saw local Peruvian men shaving and performing other ablutions in the showers next to the baths. It wasn’t until later, during our tour of Machu Picchu, that I also learned that when hikers return from their Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu, many of them make their first stop at the hot baths of Aguas Calientes to soak away four days of…well, everything.
There are some baths you can’t go to, some baths you definitely don’t want to miss and some baths you should avoid altogether… unless, that is, you’ve just finished the Inca Trail. | <urn:uuid:833d50e0-e8dc-4008-85e0-c9ad32b605b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thetravelword.com/2011/05/03/the-good-the-thermal-bath-and-the-ugly/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964498 | 1,120 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Muammar Gaddafi's son makes first appearance in Libya court Sarah Paulsworth at 1:42 PM ET
[JURIST] The son of Libya's deposed leader Muammar Gaddafi [BBC obituary; JURIST news archive] appeared in court in Zintan, Libya, on Thursday. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi [BBC profile; JURIST news archive] is accused of transferring [Al Jazeera report] information related to Libya's national security to an International Criminal Court (ICC) [official website] delegation. He is also accused of insulting Libya's new flag and attempting to escape from prison. Saif al-Islam's trial was postponed [BBC report] until May because he was not represented by a lawyer at the hearing. One of Saif al-Islam's co-defendants in the case related to information on Libya's national security is his ICC-appointed lawyer Melinda Taylor.
Earlier this month the ICC asked Libyan officials to address reports that they plan to try Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and Abdullah al-Senussi [BBC profile], the former intelligence chief for Gaddafi. Libya has refused to hand the two men over to the ICC and announced plans to try them [JURIST reports] in Libya. In October Libyan government lawyers urged [JURIST report] the ICC to allow them to be tried in Libya and promised that the trial would be fair. In August Saif al-Islam stated that he preferred to be tried by the ICC [JURIST report] out of fear that Libya would not try him fairly. In June four ICC staff members who traveled to Libya to speak with Saif al-Islam, including Melinda Taylor, were detained [JURIST report] by Libyan security forces and were in custody for nearly four weeks before being released.
Paper Chase is JURIST's real-time legal news service, powered by a team of 30 law student reporters and editors led by law professor Bernard Hibbitts at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. As an educational service, Paper Chase is dedicated to presenting important legal news and materials rapidly, objectively and intelligibly in an accessible, ad-free format. | <urn:uuid:05d315b8-3272-439c-97ac-2915b74f77ab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jurist.org/paperchase/2013/01/muammar-gaddafis-son-makes-first-appearance-in-libya-court.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974566 | 444 | 1.523438 | 2 |
It has been nearly a year since the Historic Wintersburg Preservation Task Force started its work to raise awareness of the Japanese Presbyterian Church and mission site in Huntington Beach.
The effort has been spearheaded by resident Mary Urashima, who raises awareness for the site by sharing its intriguing stories on her blog, historicwintersburg.blogspot.com.
Mary Urashima has fought to preserve the former Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Church — located on a 3.7-acre property along with a historic house, mission and minister's quarters — that has belonged to Rainbow Disposal since 2004.
MICHAEL GOULDING, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
From goldfish farming to how the site survived the Japanese internment during World War II, Urashima has uncovered a number of stories in an effort to pique local and national interest to save the site.
Q. How did you get involved in preserving Wintersburg?
A. When I first moved to Huntington Beach in the early 1980s ... I was stopped in traffic and looked over at the site.
I ... saw the cornerstone of the 1934 church on Nichols and Warner and it read, Japanese Presbyterian Church 1934, and I remember thinking, "Wow, there's a story."
It was a wonderful piece of old Orange County. I drove by that site almost every day. It was something I just looked for every day. It's like a touchstone: this little piece of old Orange County and a reminder of what life used to be like here.
A couple years ago plans to demolish and redevelop the site came up. I became concerned and asked around.
As I started looking through the official Huntington Beach history, I could not find anything about the early Japanese immigrants. I started researching and came across some oral histories. I kept uncovering more and I realized at a certain point, people really don't know what this site is. They don't know that this is the oldest Japanese church in Southern California. They don't know there is a history here.
Q. Why is it such an important site for Orange County's history?
A. We have very few sites left of the Japanese immigrants in Orange County and yet, as an agricultural county in our earliest beginnings, the Japanese farmers were instrumental in making Orange County sort of an agricultural star, not just in the county or state, but nationally.
Charles Furuta bought it prior to the Alien Land Law. That makes this site very rare because it was owned by Japanese, and in 1913, California didn't allow any Japanese to own property. The law was not overturned until the 1950s.
It is really a miracle that all the original buildings on the site are still standing considering World War II and the internment of the Japanese and what happened to some properties. Some properties were destroyed and some people were never able to recover their properties.
Q. What is your vision for the future of Wintersburg?
A. Because it has such unique history, the ideal situation would be to preserve it on site. That's the ultimate goal of historic preservation of unique sites.
If that proves not to be possible, the hope is we can raise enough funds to relocate the building to another site and create a heritage area ... so future generations can understand the life of our early immigrants and the civil liberties that this site represents.
Q. What has been the biggest challenge in moving to preserve Wintersburg?
A. The first challenge was how to convey the history of these buildings. It was kind of a leap of faith that I started putting the history out there and people would become interested.
I started the blog February 2012 and was really grateful that by July the City Council had taken notice and put it on their agenda to create a task force.
Q. What is the story behind the "Jesus Lives" mural?
A. It was in the 1960s when the original Japanese Presbyterian congregation moved because they outgrew that site. They moved to a site that was right on the edge of Fountain Valley and Santa Ana.
The church then was used by a couple different groups – a more evangelical denomination. They painted the mural on ... the building. | <urn:uuid:a37de962-5011-4bed-b149-78e958ac24ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ocregister.com/news/site-383684-japanese-county.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979714 | 858 | 1.804688 | 2 |
An Irish American Serb story
By: Tom Deignan | Published Wednesday, August 24, 2011, 2:43 PM | Updated Friday, September 9, 2011, 10:27 PM
In June of 1979, a hijacked Boeing 727 landed at Ireland's Shannon airport. The plane had been commandeered by a Serbian nationalist who had been flying to Chicago, to be sentenced on a bombing charge.
Before the plane landed, however, the Serb, named Nikola Kavaja, burst into the cockpit and claimed to have a bomb. Kavaja eventually freed most of the crew and passengers, but maintained control of the plane.
His ultimate plan was to fly the aircraft to Yugoslavia and crash it into a building housing Communist officials.
The plane, however, ran low on fuel and had to land at Shannon, where the hijacker ultimately surrendered.
Ireland did not have an extradition treaty with the U.S., though diplomats scurried to put one together in about five minutes, so that Kavaja could be handed over to U.S. authorities. He was arrested in Dublin and Kavaja was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in jail.
This is one of the few, and certainly most colorful, Irish-American-Serb stories out there. But it is not the only Irish-American-Serb story.
A close associate of Kavaja's, who went to prison for participating in the same bombing, was a man by the name of Bosko Radonjic, who died earlier this month in Belgrade at the age of 67.
Known as "The Yugo," Radonjic had earlier lived in New York City before serving three years for the Chicago bombing. Radonjic later returned to New York City, where he found work as a humble parking lot attendant.
It so happens that Radonjic settled on the West Side of Manhattan, an enclave known as Hell's Kitchen. At the time, for an enterprising young man unafraid to spill blood, this was not a bad place to be.
Within a decade, Radonjic would find himself aligned with John Gotti. The Serb would also become the unlikely leader of the most famous Irish American criminal gang in New York history.
But that's getting ahead of ourselves. The year was 1982. The bars and docks and gambling halls and loan-sharking operations in Hell's Kitchen were generally ruled by Jimmy Coonan and the Westies, the Irish American gang linked to the Gambino crime family.
Just a few years earlier, Westies leaders Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone had been in prison. But the duo had maintained control of the West Side.
Though heavily Irish, the Westies were willing to take on an associate who could earn and take care of himself. So, beginning in 1983, Radonjic -- "The Yugo" -- went to work for Coonan.
Two years later, the killing of Gambino kingpin John Castellano outside of Spark's steakhouse in Manhattan shocked the underworld. Gotti was now ruling the Gambino family, and proved willing to work with the Westies.
Soon enough, however, the Westies themselves were in decline.
Featherstone began providing the government with information about Irish associates such as Coonan, "Mugsy Ritter" and James McElroy, some of whom were sentenced to decades in prison.
This came just as the West Side was flush with cash, thanks to yuppies willing to live in the formerly rough neighborhood because of its affordable rents. Not a few of those yuppies were interested in buying cocaine.
Irish American Westies such as Kenny Shannon and Kevin Kelly spent several years attempting to exploit this market. But police pressure grew too great and they turned themselves in.
And so, as the 1990s dawned, it was time to call in "The Yugo." Bosko Radonjic became the acknowledged leader of what remained of the Westies, dabbling in high-profile burglaries.
But even The Yugo couldn't stand the heat in Hell's Kitchen. He returned to his native Serbia in the early 1990s where, during the wars that wracked that region, he became a close adviser to accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic.
The Yugo was eventually arrested on jury-tampering charges in 1999, but he was released when the main witness against him -- Sammy "The Bull" Gravano -- was deemed unreliable.
The Westies. A war criminal. Sammy the Bull. The Teflon Don.
Yup. It's just your average Irish American Serb story.
(Contact "Sidewalks" at [email protected] or facebook.com/tomdeignan) | <urn:uuid:9cc0ebb7-7f93-4292-bbec-cc23fb36d430> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.irishcentral.com/story/news/sidewalks/an-irish-american-serb-story-120539419.html?mob-ua=mobile | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981369 | 994 | 1.578125 | 2 |
The Old Child & Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck
Visiting a foreign country can often be frustrating when there’s a communication barrier. The same can be said about reading stories that aren’t written in your native language. If it weren’t for Susan Bernofsky, translator of The Old Child and Other Stories, we’d be unable to digest all of experimental prose, historical parallels and telling memories of the past that East Berlin born author, Jenny Erpenbeck offers up in this collection. This collection introduces us to the oddities and idiosyncrasies that exist in the six stories here. They intertwine love, loss and the magnificence of the human mind.
Erpenbeck is not your average ingénue when it comes to story-telling. She’s been working on operas and musical stories as well as written. She’s been busy creating alternate worlds for her characters on the page and on the stage. And it’s within Erpenbeck’s mystical words and bleak settings that we can experience such oppressive environments, eccentric relatives and a parable about a maverick-like amnesiac. Somber settings and political history serve as undercurrents throughout the collection. Most of the stories have a strong narrative voice and tend to change often.
In the title story, a 75-page novella, we find what looks to be a young girl of middle school age, who’s been abandoned and is picked up off the streets by the in-takers at a nearby home for children. The location is dreary and the rules are strict but they seem to be easy to abide by for this young girl. Dresden is gloomy and often the perfect place for mayhem among youngsters. The staff discovers this young girl has no apparent memory of her past. While she suffers from amnesia, she also remains the social outcast among her peers. She doesn’t need to be the popular one, as she can “simply allow herself to be shoved, she will keep her place in the institution forever and will never have to get anywhere, not even the ninth grade.” This mentality keeps her alone and it seems she prefers it this way. And while she makes few friends, it is her intent to stay frozen in time, thus not moving forward in school and in life alongside them. She becomes a confidant to the rebels and the mischief makers after awhile, but rather than warming up to this attention she begins to feel even more removed from them. Paralysis sets in one morning and she is sent to a local hospital where she is monitored. Slowly, they come to realize she’s indeed, a grown woman. It is painfully apparent that our main character is not playing make-believe. She is acting as if she were a child, yet in her attempt to circumvent adult life she’d become a true child. Erpenbeck alludes to her desires in fact, what she desperately wants and fears. Often times this story will break off into third person narrative and we can catch a glimpse of the psychological root of her wishes.
The story, "In the Half-Shadow of My Skull," we visit a woman who is involved with a married couple in a ménage à trois. The lover narrates a story of love and pain. She endures cigarette burns on the soles of her feet and other abuse from the husband and sporadic comfort from his wife. The wife is picky about her loyalties and often mistreats the lover as well. The Lover has inadvertently picked two masochists who have no difficulty putting her in the middle of their own issues. The husband announces the onset of his lascivious behavior in a short passage. “I heard a drill going next door, and then all at once, a little girl screaming. That’s the first time I ever felt aroused. It has to do with innocence.” While our narrator kisses the wife and tells, she also finds herself being submissive in her relationship with the husband.
"Siberia" is one of the best stories in this short collection. The narrator’s father recalls memories from his childhood about his mother who had returned from exile in Siberia during the war to find her husband now with a live-in mistress. Left for dead, the narrator’s mother finds her way home amidst post-war rubble. The narrator's tells of how his mother returned, atop a milk-truck back to their home to re-claim her family from his father’s mistress, recalling his first memory of her. “She smelled of vanilla. As filthy as she was she smelled of vanilla.” The mother’s verve for life had all but sucked the life right out of the father. One part happy and two parts broken by the return of his wife and the manner in which she removed his mistress from their home, the father slowly retreats into nothingness. While the mistress was never the equivalent to his wife, the father did treasure some of his memories with her. In the end, he never really recovered from her return, and as he became ill later in life, he resisted her. “With his last breath he was still pushing away (her) hand.”
What is interesting about this collection is that submissiveness, mental and physical abuse, even psychosis all feature prominently as themes and thus affecting the mood of each story, yet Erpenbeck manages to not over-do it. The other three stories all deal with memory. Either with the recovery or loss of it. "Sand" is an extremely touching account of a girl’s account of her failing grandmother as she becomes forgetful and weak. Each day she spends with her Grandmother she observes her distinct dissent into senility. And while the Grandmother’s actions become even stranger as time progresses, she keeps a youthful laughter that the girl decides must be her own laughter inhabiting her grandmother. Erpenbeck captures how vital language is to their relationship whether it’s spoken, written or sung. “Then she (the grandmother) gives me sentences to speak, putting stones in my mouth so my tongue will learn to curl its way around all obstacles.”
In Hale and Hallowed, we meet Maria Kainbaher who attempts to find a friend from 50 years prior to see if they can rekindle a friendship from long ago. Maria sets out on a long journey (for an old woman) to find her friend Gertrud by walking the roads of town until she finally reaches her. “She knows that her bones are more durable than those of other people, and it doesn’t surprise her that a body growing older, begins to gravitate toward the earth in which it will soon be buried.” Unfortunately, Erpenbeck cuts this story short with an unexpected ending.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s collection of stories enter into landscapes surreal and often fairytale-esque. Her prose can be dark and the stories eccentric. The collection is extremely dense and heavy yet, handled with precision and great detail. Each of her stories provide a peek at the political rumblings that shape some of the language in her stories. Redeeming in so many ways, Jenny Erpenbeck and her stories have found their way into American hands and its true there is not a word or a phrase that’s been lost in translation.
The Old Child & Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck
New Directions Press | <urn:uuid:ac060481-738d-4b2d-be49-46f2417aa7f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2006_02_007824.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97464 | 1,553 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Improvement of hydrogenation kinetics and catalytic effects of TiCl3 and TiO2 on MgH2 with LiH metal hydride synthesized by high energy ball milling
K_S. Jung, G_J. Lee, K_S. Lee
Hanyang University, KR
magnesium hydride, lithium hydride, catalyst, TiCl3, TiO2
MgH2 -X wt.% LiH (X=1, 3, 5 and 7) composites were synthesized by high-energy ball milling in order to improve the hydrogenation properties of magnesium hydride. MgH2-3 wt.% LiH sample exhibited the highest hydrogen desorption capacity of 6.44 wt.% at the 1st cycle at 400, but the capacity decreased to 4.58 wt.% after the 5th cycle. This capacity is still lower than that of pure magnesium, however, the kinetics of hydrogen absorption was greatly enhanced from 0.0002 wt.%/sec for pure magnesium to 0.0793 wt.%/sec for the MgH2-3 wt% LiH. To increase the hydrogenation properties of the MgH2-3 wt.% LiH sample, 1 mol % of TiCl3 and TiO2 (rutile) were added as a catalyst. The sample with TiO2 did not change the dehydrogenation temperature, but exhibited better cycle stability showing 5.71 wt.% of hydrogen absorption capacity after the 5th cycle. In case of sample with TiCl3, dehydrogenation temperature of the sample was slightly decreased from 380 to 350 and the hydrogenation kinetics and capacity were greatly enhanced as 0.102 wt.%/sec with capacity of 5.88 wt.% at 250 and 40 atm.
Back to Program | <urn:uuid:9cd912eb-76b4-466d-854c-a02f48d085e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ct-si.org/Cleantech2007/program/showabstract.html?absno=3017 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933818 | 397 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Why Corporations Are Persons and Fetuses Are Not
On Tuesday the Mississippi electorate will vote on a controversial amendment to the state constitution declaring that “the term ‘person’ [is] defined to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof.” The Mississippi Personhood Amendment, as it is known, is echoed by similar ballot measures in a half dozen other states.
Since it is illegal to murder a person in all states, and all states have laws dispensing jail time or even the death penalty for murder, the logical conclusion from these referenda is that they will instantly reclassify a broad swath of society as felons. Have pro-life advocates prepared state corrections officials for the flood of recently pregnant women, abortion doctors, and “morning after” pill consumers they’ll be sending to the pen or the gas chamber?
Mississippi’s law, the most extreme state personhood referendum on the ballot this year, would ban all abortions, some forms of birth control, and all embryonic stem cell research.
Jessica Valenti notes that Proposition 26 would “prioritize the rights of fertilized eggs over the rights of the women carrying them.” Passage of the law would lead to the absurdity of proclaiming unused but fertilized eggs in a Petri dish to be persons and outlawing in vitro fertilization.
Pro-life conservatives have been crowing about the recent spate of stealth victories their movement has won on the state level. In The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes explains that this progress has been possible largely because gay marriage has become the more visible social issue in recent years and has detracted attention from continuing behind-the-scenes efforts to restrict abortion. Such advances are supported, Barnes argues, by technological breakthroughs in sonogram quality, which have made fetuses seem more developed and autonomous than imagined.
Never mind that the reason new abortion restrictions have passed in multiple states is that Republicans took control of 26 state legislatures in 2010 by campaigning against Congressional Democrats’ stimulus spending and health care plan, and that the GOP did not receive some special mandate to start outlawing abortion. In the minds of the religious right, the momentum is on their side, and they are becoming increasingly bold in their attacks on abortion rights. As Barnes approvingly notes, anti-abortion crusaders have become “almost wildly ambitious, and more relentless than ever.”
To give a taste of the recently radicalized movement’s fervor, a pro-personhood newsletter in Mississippi assures voters that, while extreme, Initiative #26 would not criminalize miscarriage. Oh—well, that’s a relief, then.
Meanwhile, go back in time to January of 2010, when the left was enraged because the Supreme Court had ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations, not-for-profit organizations, and unions have the same rights as citizens to spend money to express their political views by endorsing candidates or parties in the final months and days leading up to elections.
Justice Antonin Scalia ripped into Justice John Paul Stevens’ flimsy dissent, noting, “It never shows why ‘the freedom of speech’ that was the right of Englishmen did not include the freedom to speak in association with other individuals, including association in the corporate form.” Organizations from the Heritage Foundation to the American Civil Liberties Union supported the decision.
Democrats Charles Schumer and Chris Van Hollen subsequently sponsored the DISCLOSE Act to try to squelch the free speech Citizens United had unleashed, but the bill failed to pass in the Senate.
No, of course corporations aren’t literally persons, or at least single persons. They are considered “legal persons” under the law, not “natural persons.” But they are made up of persons, and persons run them and act on their behalf. Persons own the resources they wield. Persons control how they are configured and operated to provide products and services that keep the corporations—and their employees’ jobs—in existence.
Why are liberals upset that corporations can exert political influence, when the persons that make up corporations can exert political influence separately? How is a 1,000-employee corporation that exerts political influence different from 1,000 employees doing the same?
How is a corporation’s power more offensive than a single billionaire such as George Soros virtually controlling the operations of one of the country’s two major political parties?
Because the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, which Citizens United overturned, contained an exception for media corporations, I suppose Democrats would have us believe that corporations aren’t persons, but newspapers are.
But back to Mississippi. Despite the claims of the recently ascendant “personhood movement,” a fetus simply is not a person. It is biologically attached to and dependent on its mother, who is a person. A newborn baby is incapable of surviving for long on its own; a fetus is even less so. Unlike a physically-separate baby disconnected from its mother and beginning to move about and explore the outside world, a fetus is passive and lacks agency—the ability to act on its environment to pursue life-sustaining goals.
The Citizens United decision was proper, because it correctly identified the link between an individual’s agency in influencing the political process and the agency of a collection of organized individuals influencing the political process.
The Mississippi referendum falsely attributes agency and personhood to a fetus. It should be soundly rejected. | <urn:uuid:c3b2fa29-a4e8-4929-8a8d-9a751c8a1a8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.conservativeoutpost.com/node/5744 | 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 | 0.951033 | 1,135 | 1.8125 | 2 |
|What would a younger USA Basketball team look like, and would it still be favored to win the Olympics? (AP)|
Earlier this week, my colleague, Matt Moore, made a convincing case that USA Basketball should drop the veil on working toward another Dream Team. In short, Moore believes no group will touch the '92 squad. Teams since then, having proven the U.S. proud most of the time, have and still will eternally fall short of an impossibly high bar that was left at a gods'-eyes level the day the Dream Team walked off the floor in Barcelona, gold medals dangling about their necks.
The discussion is only a topic now because, in the coming months/years, the NBA and USA Basketball will have to decide if it's going to change the way it selects its Olympic teams. In general, NBA players in their prime, particularly first-time selections, aren't going to rebuff an invitation to play for their country. Yes, Dwyane Wade offering up a scenario where he should be paid to play for Red, White and Blue is bad PR, but it's not like he was laying out an ultimatum.
We'd have to see a particularly individual or unique situation that would prevent one of the 15 best players on the planet, say around the age of 25, from playing in his first Olympics. So, yeah, the players aren't going to seek to change this rule, even if secretly some of the guys would rather spend their summers not training and playing for golds. If any change comes, the NBA itself will implement it.
Moore's post made me wonder, though: If the 23-and-under rules were in place now, what would the United States' Olympic team look like? Here's the current roster, which will but cut to size soon.
Would the U.S. still be favored to win it all? It'd really be exciting to tune into Olympic basketball and wonder how the young guys would fare. The gold wouldn't be a guarantee, and if anything, maybe the experience could truly mature and humble the best of the league's youth as they glide toward their primes. Win, lose or bronze, I think this kind of rule change would be good, overall, for the NBA, even if hoops lost some sizzle in the Olympics.
So, let's daydream here and pick a team. I'm going with the stipulation that all players would be 23 or younger by the start of the Olympics, on July 27, and also giving them the video-game option of turning off injuries. If you want to see the pool of players available for this mock exercise, this is what we're working with. And on a side note, while entertaining the notion of an all-college-players team would be fun, we've no evidence that all-amateur rule for hoops is going to, or will ever go back to, the way it was prior to 1992.
Bradley Beal. Only two out-of-college players are on this team, and while the NBA guys surely could roll their eyes at this selection, I'm going with Beal because the squad needs shooters and some wing types as well (this group is unnervingly bereft of true wings; a signal to change in the NBA?). Many have pegged Beal to be the next-closest thing to Ray Allen since Allen came into the league. I've said that comparison's loftier than a hipster hideout in SoHo, but Beal's still going to be a very good deep threat in the NBA.
DeMarcus Cousins. Cousins' character hasn't gotten too much in the way of his talent since he left Kentucky. He hasn't been an angel, but his production's been undeniable. In fact, he's closing in on averaging 20 points and 12 boards per game. I took Cousins over Greg Monroe here because of his girth. In picking two 5s, I wanted one with beef and one with deft ability to truly tilt the court. Meaning, Cousins is one of two former Kentucky players represented here, and will share a position with, of course ...
|Anthony Davis is as ready for Olympic play as almost anyone else under the age of 24. (AP)|
Anthony Davis. ... the freakiest college center we've seen in decades. It remains to be seen if Davis makes this year's team (he should, but probably won't), but if the group was pared off from all the older guys, you can best bet AD (Alien Davis, as I've dubbed him) would be a no-brainer.
Kevin Durant. Durant becomes the obvious best player on the team now. And there's no better ambassador for the sport, the country, than Durant. He's ready for the mantle of being the game's Next Great Player, and you get the feeling he may hold on to it for at least six years.
Kenneth Faried. Faried's a personal pick here. I wonder how many NBA writers would agree. He dropped about 12 spots too far in last year's NBA draft, and all he did to make up for teams' mistakes was come in third in Rookie of the Year voting this past season. He's indubitably hungry guy in the paint, and I actually think he'll go down as one of the 20 best rebounders in the history of the game when he retires. Even USA Basketball needs glue guys, and Faried would be that and more.
Eric Gordon. Like Beal, Gordon fills in spots needed from the mid-range. He's a good scorer/shooter. Right now, Gordon's in limbo and awaiting to find out if he makes the Olympic squad. I've my doubts. Overall, you could make the case Gordon's still the shakiest selection for this team outside of the offensively green Faried.
Blake Griffin. Griffin's game is a lot of flash, style and muscle, but he's getting better. He'd be a natural pick because of his star power and mismatch for so many teams, but really, it's high time we had someone supplant this highlight and create the next quintessential, embarrassing facial at the international level for the United States.
James Harden. Up until three months ago, you probably wouldn't have put Harden on the team. Or maybe I'm underestimating how renowned Harden's game and reputation has been for a year now. Nevertheless, his stock has found a rocket since March, and there's no doubt he'd be part of this group. Harden's game seems so international, too, right?
|Kevin Love: among the most versatile offensive players in the game now. (AP)|
Kyrie Irving. The 2011-12 NBA Rookie of the Year would have a backup role as a point guard for this team, but there's little doubt Irving is worthy, especially considering the other 1s on this team are different kinds of point guards. He's not as good as Stockton or Kidd, but that's what he'd be for this team, and it would be much better for it.
Kevin Love. Would there be a better all-around player than Love? He can shoot from 23 feet now, is still collecting double-doubles off the assembly line in his sleep -- and it doesn't feel like he's halfway to his prime. Love would be so valuable because, while he's a 4 at heart, he could be moved around to where he's needed. It says something about his game that, on a team filled with players who are fun to watch, Love would be amongst the most enjoyable to see play against the world's best.
Derrick Rose. I haven't talked a lot about defense, but overall, this team's D would be stout. Rose would emphasize that facet as much as any other player, save for Davis. And whereas I've been giving reasons for players' inclusion, or spotlighting how they'd work so well on this team, not much needs to be said about Rose, who's a dynamo. I'm not asking this rhetorically; I really need to know. Is there one international player who could keep up with Rose? I get the feeling he'd lay waste to anyone in a foreign uniform trying to play the break with him.
Russell Westbrook. And of course we have the third member of the Thunder closing out the roster. Westbrook's inclusion is mandatory, but he's so similar to Rose, I wonder how that would work. In fact, I think Westbrook's greatest value could come in getting him, Durant and Harden on the floor at the same time. When it doubt, rely on synergy. Well, synergy and the latest evolution of the NBA's untamed, carnal athleticism.
So, what do you think? Anybody beating these guys? | <urn:uuid:56a18c56-83f0-4257-b820-5c541da51e8a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/blog/eye-on-college-basketball/19360785/what-would-usa-basketball-roster-look-like-this-year-if-it-was-23andunder | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980943 | 1,802 | 1.570313 | 2 |
North Korea directs missiles towards Australia
A North Korean missile launch drill from 2009. Photo: AFP
NORTH KOREA'S forthcoming missile launch will be aimed towards South-East Asia and Australia for the first time, the US has warned.
The warning was delivered in person yesterday to the Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr, by a senior official in the Obama Administration, Kurt Campbell, during a visit to Sydney.
North Korea, which claimed to have successfully tested a nuclear weapon in 2009, has for years worked to improve its long-range ballistic missile capability. Previous missile tests have been launched east, over Japan. But US intelligence suggests the launch announced for mid-April will be aimed south for the first time.
"If the missile test proceeds as North Korea has indicated, our judgment is that it will impact in an area roughly between Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines," Dr Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, said yesterday.
"We have never seen this trajectory before. We have weighed into each of these countries and asked them to make clear that such a test is provocative and this plan should be discontinued."
After the meeting Mr Carr told the Herald: "The North Korean nuclear and long-range missile plans represent a real and credible threat to the security of the region and to Australia."
The launch would be "in clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions."
Mr Carr said he and Dr Campbell had "shared views on how both the US and Australia could engage our regional partners and allies to encourage North Korea to abandon its plans".
The US President, Barack Obama, will be among some 50 leaders, including Australia's Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to meet in a summit in the South Korean capital of Seoul on Monday to discuss nuclear disarmament. North Korea's abrupt announcement last week of its missile test is expected to dominate discussion.
The announcement from Pyongyang startled observers because it came less than three weeks after it had sealed a new agreement with the US in return for food aid.
South Korea has called the move a "grave provocation". Its president, Lee Myung-bak, has said he will ask Mr Obama to revise an alliance agreement that limits his country to missiles with a 300-kilometre range.
Japan's Defence Minister, Naoki Tanaka, said yesterday Tokyo was prepared to shoot down the North Korean long-range rocket if it threatened the country. | <urn:uuid:f5871379-7b69-4cfc-860d-0837693da973> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smh.com.au/national/north-korea-directs-missiles-towards-australia-20120323-1vpb7.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957274 | 492 | 1.757813 | 2 |
"Teenagers have historically shown a certain appetite for calamity; they like a little madness, sadism and disease in the books they curl up with at night."
The Wall Street Journal article about YA lit tries to be positive about the dystopian and/or what they see as darker YA books, making special notes of 13 Reasons Why and Wintergirls as examples of particularly depressing fiction that may seem, to uninformed adults perusing the copies, "fairly uncommon and overwrought." I'm glad to say that the writer does sound quite a bit more informed than many who write about YA lit (although to blame all dark books on L.H. Anderson, as the "doyenne" of such -- eh?), however, despite the popularity of The Hunger Games and If I Stay, the overarching theme of YA lit as "dark" is obviously a matter of ...opinion. Or maybe I just like "dark?" Anyway, obviously not all YA books embraced now are depressing -- or bleakly mindless. There are plenty of other options, which is why I'm glad that Colleen is looking at What A Girl Wants. Depression and snark aren't the only things teen girl readers look for, is it? These writers say no.
And speaking of Katniss -- casting calls are going to be going out soon for The Hunger Games movie. Mitali has an intriguing question about... what the characters look like. Check out her 12-second-tv spot.
Man, the Bay Area booklights a lot of us have known forever continue to go dim. Black Oak Books is closing. That's a real shocker, and the community is speechless -- as there was no warning. Ugh. WHY do they keep doing that? Can't they at least say, "Help!" so the community can rally 'round? Aargh.
On a happier note, though, I just discovered Charlotte's post which announces the new Meghan Whalen Turner Attolia book, A Conspiracy of Kings!!!! This makes life somewhat more worth living.
And this little vimeo on BookMoot's blog is so me, it made me smile. Books really are where I live. Lately I haven't been getting to read enough. Time to change that! | <urn:uuid:74276532-3b6e-4dd1-bc3c-3957f49d5af4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://writingya.blogspot.com/2009/06/drama-and-books-and-such.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959672 | 467 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Eulin ChaconPrincipal, San Francisco de Chachagua School, Costa Rica
Growing up in San Carlos, Costa Rica, Eulin Chacon quickly learned the value of education when her parents, unable to afford college tuition, offered her a job at their family shoe store to help her pay her own way. "My father believed that if I paid for it, I would value it more," Eulin says. "He was right." She valued her education so much, in fact, that she earned multiple degrees in education, curriculum, and administration, and supplemented her knowledge with courses on community projects.
Eulin has called on all of these skills as principal of the San Francisco de Chacagua School. Despite the challenges of a rural location and low-income students, San Francisco has thrived under Eulin's leadership, rivaling larger schools in terms of curriculum, quality, and efficiency. So far, this is Eulin's greatest accomplishment, but like all gutsy leaders, she dreams big: "I want my school to become a small piece of heaven where children come to learn and enjoy," she says, "and I want students who lack love and food at home to be able to find it here." In such a welcoming environment, Eulin believes that students will be better able to excel, no matter what challenges they encounter in life.
She also wants the San Francisco School to be self-sustainable—a goal that she's much closer to reaching thanks to a microfarm sponsored by Grand Circle Foundation. "It's a dream come true," Eulin says. "It's the best legacy for future generations." She also credits the Foundation's partnership with improving students' self-esteem and proficiency in English, providing teachers' training and mentoring through a teacher's exchange program, and renovating the school's facilities.
More than anything, though, the San Francisco School has Eulin's strong leadership to thank for its many successes. "As a leader, I have my own ideas, but I want to hear everyone else's ideas as well," she says. "That way, we can work together as a team, as a family, for our children."
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Monica CerutiPrincipal, La Concepcion School, Argentina
In the 40 years Monica Ceruti has worked at the La Concepcion School—for ten years as a kindergarten teacher, and as principal ever since—she has already seen tremendous change in her community. "When I started working in 1969, the community had serious social, educational, and healthcare needs," she remembers. "Parents were illiterate, and many children had illnesses that were undiagnosedand untreated." In order to rectify these important issues, the school served more of a social function than an educational one at that time. And now, as Monica sees many of the children she taught in the 1970s return to the school as parents or grandparents of current students, she can see firsthand how the overall quality of life has improved. "This makes us all very happy," says Monica, "but when you work in education you always go for more—and that's where we are now."
The next step for La Concepcion, according to Monica, is to offer a full six-year high school curriculum, as opposed to the partial three-year curriculum the school offers now. It's an ambitious goal, considering the school already offers three years of kindergarten, and six years of primary school. "This is a public school, and a large portion of our funds comes from donations," says Monica. "A six-year high school program would mean increasing our monthly costs."
While a full high school curriculum hasn't become a reality yet, Monica is thankful for the improvements she's seen at La Concepcion since forming a partnership with Grand Circle Foundation. "The school has grown more over the past five years than in 35 years," she says. "It has been wonderful to witness the changes to our buildings, infrastructure, and resources."
Of course, she's thankful for the more gradual changes, too. "It's such a gift to be in a community where I can see the results of education," she says. "You have to wait two generations to see the fruits, especially in terms of big goals like social development." Under her leadership, Monica has seen children who once lived in unfavorable conditions grow up to finish school, learn new languages, and find jobs. "I feel very happy for being a small piece of that help."
Back to top > | <urn:uuid:805938a4-b38a-4b01-ac6a-dfa65ce944e4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://grandcirclefoundation.org/gutsy-leaders/village-leaders.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982433 | 928 | 1.617188 | 2 |
WASHINGTON — If the nation goes over the fiscal cliff next month, people with a close eye on North Carolinas economy say that a combination of higher taxes and automatic spending cuts especially in defense would mean more lost jobs.
A deal in Washington between Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, and President Barack Obama might prevent the automatic austerity measures known as the fiscal cliff. But with little information on progress spilling out of the nations capital and a history of partisan battles, North Carolinians are talking about what failure in Washington would look like at home.
If the middle-class tax cuts expire, for instance, a North Carolina family of four that earns the states median income of $63,700 a year might see an income taxes increase of $2,200, according to the White House. As people with higher tax bills spend less, many experts say a recession is likely.
Meanwhile, automatic spending cuts would hit research institutions, education, social services and the military. North Carolina would see $420 million less in military funding and nearly $200 million in non-defense federal support, according to the Federal Funds Information for States, a group that tracks government spending.
Amid all these potential pitfalls, companies large and small are bracing for an economic downturn. About 29,000 people in the state might be out of work next year as a result of the spending cuts, according to Stephen Fuller of George Mason University in Virginia.
Harvey Schmitt, the president and CEO of the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce, said going over the fiscal cliff was the wrong way to reduce the budget deficit.
Basically what youre doing, youre driving down the street and you slam your gear into park. Its going to rip up the inside of your car, he said. Yes, youre going to get things stopped, but the stop would be less expensive if all the parties agreed to a compromise.
In North Carolina, the employers who do business with military bases and other military spinoff companies are seen as engines of economic growth, said James Kleckley, the director of the Bureau of Business Research at East Carolina University.
If you started to see activity at the bases being cut back again, youre more than likely to see those contractors cut back, too, he said.
The other big factor for the state is the prospect of another recession.
When we look at economic development in North Carolina, the growth of jobs, the growth of income, the biggest driver of economic activity is the health of the national economy, Kleckley said. When the national economy slows, were going to be slowing.
At the LORD Corp., a growing mechanical and chemical products company with world headquarters in Cary, N.C., Rick McNeel, the companys president and chief executive officer, said the company was concerned about military cuts because about 15 percent of its business was in defense aerospace work
Fortunately, weve been growing in that area, so hopefully it wont totally kill us, he said. But it could impact our hiring plans and eventually cause problems beyond that in terms of cutbacks in staff.
LORD, which has annual sales of more than $720 million, employs 2,940 people, about 2,200 of them in the United States. About 350 work in Cary in marketing, management, and research and development. The company manufactures and sells adhesives, coatings, and vibration and motion control devices in the United States, Asia, Europe and South America.
The sudden expiration of all the tax cuts and the automatic reductions in federal spending if no budget deal can be reached are expected to set off a new U.S. recession. That would have a major impact on 85 percent of the companys business, which is in non-defense work, McNeel said.
In Cumberland County, near Fort Bragg, N.C., about 40 percent of the regions business is defense-related. If there are cuts in military spending, that trickles down to everybody here, said Brandon Plotnick, the marketing and communications coordinator at the Fayetteville-Cumberland County Chamber of Commerce.
The automatic cuts also would trim about 8 percent from federal non-defense spending, including money for education and social services. That would mean reductions in help for the poor, including Head Start and rental subsidies.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction June Atkinson told a Senate Appropriations Committee panel in July that in North Carolina, as in other states, educational revisions supported by federal money have been aimed at raising student achievement and high school graduation rates.
The fiscal cliff would mean a reduction of $30 million in federal money for high-poverty schools in North Carolina and perhaps 500 fewer school jobs in the state, she said.
Other federal spending goes to schools that have many children whose parents are in the military.
We cant afford to lose any money for the school system, said Phyllis Owens, the director of the Harnett County Economic Development Commission.
Automatic federal-spending cuts also would mean $750 million less for science funding for research institutions in North Carolina through 2017, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Protesting the possible cuts, more than 6,000 science and engineering students delivered petitions recently to every senator and the leadership of the House of Representatives, saying the nations future economic prosperity would depend on advances in science and technology.
Colin Funaro, a graduate student in entomology at North Carolina State University who delivered the petition to Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., said that scientists, including graduate students and professors, "are fighting an uphill battle" for funding already, and "these cuts would make that struggle all the more difficult."
Email: [email protected]; Twitter: @reneeschoof | <urn:uuid:e8e0150c-0c4b-44c5-9091-8b456a258258> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.adn.com/2012/12/11/2720750/nc-jobs-defense-work-research.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956606 | 1,188 | 1.828125 | 2 |
October snow hits High Country
A rare October snowstorm produced by an uncommon East Coast
weather event resulted in poor road conditions, school closings and impromptu winter activities —
all before the last red and yellow leaves had fallen from High Country trees.
As coastal areas from North Carolina to the northeast experienced heavy rain, high winds, storm surges and flooding from Hurricane Sandy — which made landfall in New Jersey on Monday — the storm system combined with an upper low to bring colder air and snow to the mountains, the National Weather Service said.
As of 7 a.m. Tuesday, a NWS observer reported 5.6 inches of snow accumulation in Boone, according to NWS meteorologist Chris Fisher in Blacksburg, Va. The Beech Mountain Police Department reported eight inches of snow at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Fisher said.
Temperatures ranged between the upper 20s and mid-30s in the High Country on Monday and Tuesday. As heavy, wet snow combined with gusty winds, Blue Ridge Electric reported that 5,837 members were affected by power outages during the storm, with most occurring Monday night.
Watauga County Schools cancelled classes for students on Tuesday and Wednesday. Appalachian State University cancelled classes on Tuesday but held classes as scheduled on Wednesday.
Sugar Mountain Ski Resort quickly worked to take advantage of the early snowfall, announcing on Monday its plans to open on Halloween — the earliest opening in the resort’s 43-year history. As of Tuesday, the resort announced it had received nine inches of natural snowfall, and snow guns began operating on Sunday. | <urn:uuid:a06f9af4-ab83-4a76-be8e-a7ae67c4e1c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mountaintimes.com/watauga-news/articles/October-snow-hits-High-Country-id-023464 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971758 | 327 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Thursday's release of a new Pew Forum Survey of "Mormons in America" created headlines in newspapers and online journals all around the world.
Many of those who reported on the survey tried to take a broad approach to the survey's findings. The Washington Post wrote that "the first major independent poll of U.S. Mormons describes a conservative, devout community highly concerned about being accepted even as it embraces beliefs about gender roles, premarital sex and religious commitment that are well outside the mainstream."
The New York Times lead indicated the survey of Mormons in America "finds that while one of their own is making unprecedented progress in a bid for the presidency, many feel uneasy in the spotlight, misunderstood and unaccepted in the American mainstream."
"Despite this, a majority of the Mormons polled said they believed that acceptance of Mormonism was rising and that the American people were ready to elect a Mormon as president. It is a sunny outlook for a religion that is consistently ranked near the bottom, along with Muslims and atheists, on favorability surveys of various groups."
The Los Angeles Times wrote: "Call it the Mitt Moment, the Mormon Moment — by whatever name, this would seem to be a pretty good time to be a Mormon in America. And it is, according to a survey of American Mormons being released Thursday, even though many church members say they still face discrimination and hostility."
And the Chicago Tribune introduced readers to the survey this way: "Most Mormons believe their religion is not well understood by Americans and many sense hostility but a survey done as Mormonism gains political and cultural prominence shows they are also optimistic that tolerance of their faith is rising."
Other publications were more prone to focus on certain elements of the survey.
The Guardian in the United Kingdom led its story on the survey with the fact that "one-third of Mormons in the U.S. believe that American voters are not ready to elect Mitt Romney, or any other member of their church, as president." Fox News also focused on Romney in its lead for the story, indicating that "America could be standing on the precipice of the 'Mormon Moment,' according to a new survey that says most members of the religion believe the country is ready to elect a Mormon president."
The Politico blog site led with presidential politics: "With Mitt Romney leading the Republican presidential field, a detailed new poll of Mormons is shedding light on a community that feels ambivalent about whether the country is ready for a president of their faith."
And the Boston Globe reported: "With Mitt Romney, formerly a leader in the Mormon Church, considered a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, 56 percent of Mormons in America say they believe the country is ready to elect a Mormon president, according to a Pew Research Center study released today."
The LDS Church prepared its own story on the survey, posted on the church's LDS Newsroom web site. Its lead: "Mormons' faith, beliefs and practices translate to satisfaction with their lives according to a report studying members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States released today by the Pew Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life."
And Michael Otterson, managing director of the LDS Church's Public Affairs Department, wrote in his regular blog on the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog site that the survey "delivers some fascinating data."
After going through much of that data, he focused on the fact that less than a third of respondents think Mormonism has entered America's "mainstream."
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- Fire chief says search almost complete... 15 | <urn:uuid:e66a9d01-73fa-4a31-856c-5f946c85e86d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700215188/Other-newspapers-report-on-Mormons-in-America-poll-by-Pew-Center.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95304 | 894 | 1.625 | 2 |
Waukesha - The County Board's Land Use, Parks and Environment Committee on Tuesday bolstered plans for paving the Bugline Trail, a long-delayed project that has drawn some vocal opposition in the past year.
Dale Shaver, director of parks and land use, said design work is about half done on the 16-mile multiuse trail from Menomonee Falls to the Town of Merton community of North Lake. Designers are working to accommodate concerns of users who prefer the crushed gravel trail that now exists. He said a 10-foot wide pavement would serve hikers and bicyclers and a 2-foot-or-wider flattened shoulder would appeal to runners. In addition, the paved trail would likely attract much greater use, as has been the case in other trails like the state's Glacial Drumlin Trail from Waukesha to Cottage Grove and the recently paved Lake Country Trail from Waukesha to Oconomowoc, he said.
Previous design and engineering work for the trail has been budgeted at about $780,000. Construction, slated for 2013, is estimated at $3.4 million, with grants funding $2 million and the county share at $1.4 million.
The project is contained in a five-year capital plan set for County Board action Tuesday, with funding for next year's projects to be included in the 2013 county budget, set for action in November.
The Land Use, Parks and Environment Committee endorsed the Bugline Trail project as proposed, 5-2. Supervisors Jim Batzko of Sussex and Walter Kolb of the Town of Waukesha opposed. | <urn:uuid:9fea6721-7d35-4daa-a1a2-e6fb3fdf0bc0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jsonline.com/news/waukesha/paving-of-bugline-trail-advances-gj6ti4d-170216926.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960097 | 336 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Winter Storm Doesn’t Deter Special Olympics and Best Buddies From Demonstrating Impact and Need on Capitol Hill
March 07, 2013
A much-hyped winter storm that shut down much of the nation’s Capital didn’t deter Special Olympics and Best Buddies participants and supporters who converged on Capitol Hill yesterday to meet with elected officials, urging continued federal support for programs that enhance the lives of those with intellectual and development disabilities in the areas of health, education and employment.
High-resolution images from the event are available on the Special Olympics Flickr site.
Braving The Elements
Throughout the day, Special Olympics athletes and Best Buddies ambassadors from 41 states across the country braved the elements and met with their congressional delegations to advocate for services provided by Special Olympics and Best Buddies that transcend the playing field and transform classrooms, workplaces, and communities.
Delegates advocated for support of The Eunice Kennedy Shriver Act of 2013, named after the founder of Special Olympics and the lifelong advocate for the rights and abilities of those with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The legislation, introduced in the House and Senate on March 6, continues the legacy of Shriver by authorizing critical funds for specific programs supporting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities through sports, health, education, and employment program initiatives.
About The Legislation
In particular, the legislation authorizes continued federal support for the Special Olympics Healthy Athletes program, which provides free health care screenings, treatment and health education to those with intellectual disabilities, as well as work that both Special Olympics and Best Buddies are doing in thousands of schools across the country to create more inclusive school climates. In addition, the legislation would support efforts by Best Buddies to prepare and place those with intellectual disabilities in the workforce, helping them lead more productive, full and independent lives.
Best Buddies and Special Olympics self-advocates educated lawmakers and their staff about the real and significant social consequences that arise from the stigma and stereotype that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities face. They were able to effectively convey the high-impact and cost-effectiveness of Best Buddies and Special Olympics programming that addresses these issues, securing the commitment of 62 bi-partisan legislators as original co-sponsors of the 2013 Eunice Kennedy Shriver Act, as well as many more who pledged their support for the bill and the work it will support.
The bills were introduced by Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Rep. Peter King (R-NY), Senator Tom Harkin, (D-IA), and Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO).
"Build Strong Children"
Representative Hoyer shared a quote from Marylander Frederick Douglass: "Douglass said 'It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.' That’s what this bill is all about: it is easier to ensure everyone has access to participation, than to have people who are left out of society," adding, "It is a privilege to be a part of this effort."
“Special Olympics and Best Buddies programs are critically important to empowering people with intellectual disabilities and helping them to meet their great potential," said Senator Roy Blunt. “I’m proud to support the expansion and development of these programs, which make a profound difference in the lives of so many Americans with disabilities."
Senator Tom Harkin commented, "Eunice Kennedy Shriver was a forceful advocate for people with intellectual disabilities. Her longtime support of and commitment to Special Olympics and Best Buddies helped millions of Americans with disabilities live their lives to the fullest," Harkin said. "The Eunice Kennedy Shriver Act honors her legacy by ensuring that these programs can flourish, and in turn, continue to encourage worldwide acceptance and inclusion of people with disabilities."
A Clear Message
Eunice Kennedy Shriver dedicated her life to providing opportunities for children and adults with IDD to become fully integrated into society. Shriver, who passed away in August 2009, founded Special Olympics in 1968 and was a longtime advocate and board member of Best Buddies, founded in 1989.
Special Olympics Chairman and CEO Dr. Timothy Shriver: "With more than 200 delegates here on the Hill today, I think the message is clear. The time has come for the Federal Government to recognize a dignity revolution is underway for all citizens: that sports, employment, education, healthcare - these are all needs of a disenfranchised and marginalized population. It’s a critical human rights message that people need to hear.” Shriver added, “Every great civil rights movement has its iconic leader – I think my mother is, for many people with intellectual disabilities, that person. This legislation will continue her legacy and carry forth her vision for a world of inclusion and respect, to communities around the country."
“Helping our policymakers understand the full potential of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities is an honor and privilege,” said Anthony K. Shriver, Founder and Chairman, Best Buddies International. “The Eunice Kennedy Shriver Act, which is designed to address the needs for education, health, and employment programs for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, helps further Best Buddies’ and Special Olympics’ mission of providing opportunities for meaningful inclusion.”
Also on March 6, people around the world united their communities to Spread the Word to End the Word®, as supporters participated in the fifth annual ‘Spread the Word to End the Word’ awareness day, aimed at ending the hurtful use of the R-word (“retard(ed)”), negatively impacting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. For more information, visit the R-word web site.
About Special Olympics
Special Olympics is an international organization that changes lives through the power of sport by encouraging and empowering people with intellectual disabilities, promoting acceptance for all, and fostering communities of understanding and respect worldwide. Founded in 1968 by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the Special Olympics movement has grown from a few hundred athletes to more than 4 million athletes in over 170 countries in all regions of the world, providing year-round sports training, athletic competition and other related programs. Special Olympics now take place every day, changing the lives of people with intellectual disabilities all over the world, from community playgrounds and ball fields in every small neighborhood’s backyard to World Games. Special Olympics provides people with intellectual disabilities continuing opportunities to realize their potential, develop physical fitness, demonstrate courage, and experience joy and friendship. Visit Special Olympics at http://www.specialolympics.org. Engage with us on: Twitter @specialolympics; fb.com/specialolympics; youtube.com/specialolympicshq, and specialolympicsblog.wordpress.com.
About Best Buddies
Best Buddies® is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to establishing a global volunteer movement that creates opportunities for one-to-one friendships, integrated employment and leadership development for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Founded in 1989 by Anthony K. Shriver, Best Buddies is a vibrant organization that has grown from one original chapter to almost 1,500 middle school, high school, and college chapters worldwide. Today, Best Buddies’ eight formal programs - Middle Schools, High Schools, Colleges, Citizens, e-Buddies® , Jobs, Ambassadors, and Promoters - engage participants in each of the 50 states and in 50 countries, positively impacting the lives of nearly 700,000 people with and without disabilities around the world. As a result of their involvement with Best Buddies, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities secure rewarding jobs, live on their own, become inspirational leaders, and make lifelong friendships. For more information, please visit www.bestbuddies.org, facebook.com/bestbuddies or twitter.com/bestbuddies.
Photos for Media Use
High-resolution images from the event are available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soi-photo-stream/sets/72157632937290220/
Special Olympics North America
About Special Olympics in North America
Your Donation Matters
Special Olympics transforms athletes’ lives through the joy of sport. Help us make a difference.
Volunteer Near You
Volunteering with Special Olympics is fun and very rewarding, for both the athlete and the volunteer! | <urn:uuid:96a17e48-3e0f-4f8b-81a5-d5c512be3b5c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://specialolympics.org/Press/2013/Capitol_Hill_Day_Recap_Release_2013.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946951 | 1,723 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Earlier this week, the Obama administration decided not to ask the whole 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to hear a constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), shortening the timetable for the various cases against the ACA reaching the Supreme Court and, according to some, setting the Court to rule smack-dab in the middle of election season. Earlier this year, a three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled the law's "individual mandate" -- the provision requiring people to pay a tax if they do not purchase insurance -- unconstitutional. But before we speculate whether and when the Supreme Court will uphold the ACA, we should consider the question of whether it will decide to decide at all.
Unlike the appeals court rulings on the ACA in the Sixth and 11th circuits, the majority opinions in the two cases decided by the Fourth Circuit earlier this month -- Virginia v. Sebelius and Liberty University v. Timothy Geithner -- did not rule explicitly on whether the legislation was constitutional. Instead, both lawsuits were dismissed for a lack of jurisdiction. Under Article III of the Constitution, the power of the federal courts derives from their ability to decide "cases and controversies." Since its inception, the Supreme Court has read this to mean that federal courts cannot decide constitutional cases in the abstract. You can't sue the government because you happen not to like something it does; the party bringing the suit must have "standing" -- that is, some direct stake in the application of the law. The Fourth Circuit essentially held that there was nothing for them to adjudicate.
In Virginia v. Sebelius, the court found that Cuccinelli and the state of Virginia did not have standing. The individual mandate, wrote Judge Diana Motz, "imposes no obligations on the sole plaintiff, Virginia." The state of Virginia is not directly affected by the mandate provision and hence has no standing to challenge its constitutionality, the appeals court reasoned. In Liberty University v. Geithner, Judge Motz held that the suit should be dismissed based on the related doctrine of "ripeness." Because the relevant provisions of the ACA do not go into effect until 2014 and federal law prevents pre-enforcement challenges to revenue collection, the court also lacked jurisdiction in the case of Liberty University's suit, even though Liberty University was directly affected by the ACA's employer mandate and would therefore not have the state of Virginia's standing problem.
Ordinarily, the decision of a three-judge panel composed of Clinton and Obama appointees would not be taken as a sign of what the Republican-dominated Supreme Court will do. But because the Fourth Circuit's ruling rested on jurisdictional grounds, some pundits see them as indicative of how the high court would rule, particularly if a Supreme Court decision comes out during election season. Last term's Arizona Christian School v. Winn was the latest in a lengthy string of cases in which Supreme Court conservatives have used narrow standing rules to limit access to the courts. Given this history, is it possible that the Supreme Court will follow the lead of this Fourth Circuit panel and refuse to rule on the constitutionality of the ACA for the time being?
Perhaps, but I would not advise such optimism. In the words of Yale Law School's Jack Balkin, "standing doctrine is among the most unprincipled and arbitrary parts of American constitutional law." When the Supreme Court declines to hear a case based on lack of standing, it is almost always because they are unsympathetic to the substance of the constitutional claims being pursued. So while the conservatives on the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have consistently voted to make it more difficult to bring lawsuits regarding the separation of church and state and the environment, they have taken a much more generous view of standing where plaintiffs are challenging affirmative-action laws.
In other words, the fact that the Roberts Court has issued rulings narrowing standing rules does not mean that they will be moved by the particular standing arguments made by the Fourth Circuit. The Court rarely places priority on its self-imposed jurisdictional rules if it clashes with strongly held substantive values.
This is not to deny that, as the Atlantic's Andrew Cohen speculates, "Justice Anthony Kennedy or Chief Justice John Roberts [may] see in the jurisdictional issues a way out, a compromise, that would both dispose of the pending cases and help protect the Court from the inevitable political criticism it will receive no matter how it rules on the merits." Such an outcome is certainly possible, particularly because a ruling issued this term would probably come down right in the middle of what is likely to be the most polarized election campaign since 1964. A majority of the Court could decide that, indeed, discretion is the better part of valor. But it is only likely to do so if at least one of its Republican appointees is dubious about the constitutional challenge on its merits. If a majority of justices are convinced that the ACA violates the Constitution, they won't have any problem taking jurisdiction of the case.
Liberals who see a jurisdictional dodge as a potentially attractive escape may also want to be careful what they wish for. Any reprieve would be temporary. Once the law fully goes into effect in 2014, standing requirements will not provide much of a barrier, at least for cases like the one brought by Liberty University, even to skeptical judges. If Obama is re-elected, the chances of getting a favorable ruling can't be worse and may be better; if Mitt Romney or Rick Perry gets to select a replacement for the ailing Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on the other hand, the chances that the Affordable Care Act would survive a Supreme Court review drop precipitously.
Ultimately, the best outcome would be for the Supreme Court to reject the unserious arguments against the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and uphold the legislation. But if the Court is going to reject the bill, it is probably better for democracy that it be done during a time of maximum political visibility, rather than by dodging the issue initially and then striking it down with the campaign safely over. Should the Court dodge the issue to avoid a strong public response and then strike the bill down later, this would be the worst of all worlds. The public should be aware that, among other things, presidential elections are contests between competing constitutional visions.
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(If there's one thing we know about comment trolls, it's that they're lazy) | <urn:uuid:056d0a24-6797-4b1e-be68-aa88184ea268> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://prospect.org/comment/9898 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960922 | 1,302 | 1.6875 | 2 |
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|Improved Video with Ubuntu|
|Desktop Training - Ubuntu 8.04|
Improved Video with Ubuntu
by Donnie Tevault
Ubuntu is the world's most popular desktop GNU/Linux distro. But, you have to admit, their product quality can sometimes be hit-and-miss.
When Ubuntu 7.10--aka "Gutsy Gibbon"--came out, one of the major complaints from the masses was about video problems. Some video problems were so bad, that the machines were all but unusable. To their credit, the Ubuntu folk heard their cries, and quickly released a raft-load of bug-fixes. However, that didn't fix all of the problems.
Here, I attempted to install Gutsy on several machines. Two of my newer machines--both Athlon64's with ATI video--refused to even boot from the live CD. So, I gave up on them. I did get it to install on three older machines, and on my Extreme Edition Quad-Core machine when I built it. Ironically, the only machine on which video worked completely right--meaning, the only one with which the proprietary drivers and desktop visual effects worked--was my old home-brew Pentium III 667, with a several-year-old PCI-bus nVidia video card. (And no, applying updates didn't help the others.)
The worst problem was with the Intel Quad Core. Gutsy installed okay, and the proprietary ATI video driver seemed to install okay, as well. But, when I rebooted the machine, I got an error message that it couldn't recognize the video card, and it booted me into 640 x 480 resolution mode. Disabling the proprietary driver via the graphical utility didn't help, and neither did manually restoring the original X configuration file. So, I ended up having to re-install Gutsy. Then, with the standard open-source driver installed, the only resolution I could get to work was the super-high 1600 x 1200. (I normally like to run at 1024 x 768.) Each time I tried to change it, the video would just get all screwed-up, and I would have to reboot to get it back.
So far, though, Hardy Heron seems to be a different story. I've upgraded four Gutsy machines, and the proprietary drivers and desktop effects work properly on all but one of them. (The one exception has an el-cheapo video card, so I can't expect anything better with it.)
I haven't had a chance to put Hardy Heron through its paces otherwise, but at least it seems that the video problems are finally all ironed out. Good thing, too, since the Ubuntu team have to support this release for the next three years.
You're probably wondering, with the major video problems that my Quad-Core machine had with Gutsy Gibbon, why did I stick with Gutsy on that machine? Actually, I wanted to give something else a try when I built that machine. But, other distros that I tried had problems that were even worse. Video wouldn't work at all with BlueWhite64, and several other distros that I tried didn't have a driver for my Pioneer optical drive. So, it turned out, Gutsy Gibbon was the only one that I tried that I could even get to install. (One point, at least, in Gutsty Gibbon's favor.) | <urn:uuid:a8c550b9-9a57-4bc4-9cc5-582271f0a2dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://beginlinux.com/desktop_training/ubuntuhardyheron_cat/988-hardyheronvideo | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975382 | 721 | 1.601563 | 2 |
New powers that will allow some civil cases involving national security to be heard in secret will be debated by the House of Lords today.
Ministers argue the power is needed to allow the security and intelligence agencies to defend themselves in compensation claims without sensitive material being made public.
Currently the Government settles cases out of court to prevent such exposure and has already paid out more than £15 million.
But the Justice and Security bill, spearheaded by Mr Clarke, the former Justice Secretary, made no requirement on the Government to publicise the fact the cases were happening.
It risked a repeat of the row surrounding so-called “super injunctions”, used by high profile figures and celebrities to bar reporting of embarrassing cases, where the media were not even allowed to report they existed.
However, the Government has now relented and laid an amendment to the bill which requires the Justice Secretary to notify all relevant parties that a civil case, or parts of it, will be held in private.
It follows another concession last week which categorically ruled out inquests being brought under the power.
There were fears that secret hearings for controversial deaths, such as military inquests, may have been brought in by the backdoor but an amendment altered the bill to ensure that cannot happened.
However, it also emerged the powers could now be expanded to cases at the Supreme Court if they involve national security issues. | <urn:uuid:48966b22-9646-4440-8236-86e742729d12> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9686215/Loophole-that-could-have-made-secret-courts-even-more-secret-is-closed.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972299 | 282 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Six inducted into Hall of Fame
CANASTOTA, N.Y. -- Al Bernstein stood in front of a thousand fans as he accepted his commemorative ring, and then took the podium at the 23rd International Boxing Hall of Fame's induction ceremony on Sunday. Behind him sat a "who's who" of boxing legends.
But on this day, the stage belonged to six in particular that made up the 2012 class: Thomas "The Hitman" Hearns, Mark "Too Sharp" Johnson, trainer Freddie Roach, ring announcer Michael Buffer, writer Michael Katz, and Bernstein, the noted boxing analyst for Showtime.
As he began his speech, Bernstein glanced at the greats behind him and was humbled.
"This Hall of Fame is essentially for the great boxers you see on this stage," Bernstein said. "It is built for them. It is their house. This Hall of Fame is very generous in the way it welcomes those of us who filled another function for boxing. I take this as a supreme honor that I'm allowed to be a part of this place that is so special."
Hearns fought in the magnificent era of the 1980s, taking on Marvin Hagler, Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran in some of boxing's most famous fights. He was the first fighter to win five world titles in five different divisions. Johnson was the first African-American to claim the flyweight and super-flyweight titles.
Roach, who trains Manny Pacquiao, chartered a private plane so he and Buffer could fly from Las Vegas to Syracuse for the ceremony, just mere hours after Pacquiao's controversial loss to Timothy Bradley. Roach did not acknowledge the split decision that cost Pacquiao his welterweight crown. He merely gave credit to the legendary Eddie Futch, who trained Roach as a fighter, and later gave him his start as a trainer.
"My mentor," Roach said, "and my idol."
Others, though, did talk Pacquiao-Bradley. With the news so fresh, how could you not?
"I want to congratulate all of my fellow classmates," Katz said, "even poor Freddie."
The ceremony was filled with funny stories and standing ovations. Buffer recalled how Katz never missed a chance to remind him of the occasion when he mistakenly announced that Joe DiMaggio was in attendance at a fight. Truth was, the former New York Yankees outfielder was not there at all.
The fans showered Johnson and Hearns with applause. The two former champions returned the affection.
"To see all you folks here today to witness myself and everybody else make it into the Hall of Fame, this is beautiful," Hearns said. "I thank you for being here."
"I made it," he said, raising his arms. "This is truly, truly, truly a dream come true."
Other greats such as Leonard, Hagler and Aaron Pryor, were in attendance to honor the class.
Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press
MORE BOXING HEADLINES
- Alexander was fighting with broken hand
- Geale to make middleweight defense in U.S.
- Dominant Matthysse stops Peterson in 3rd
- Alexander pounds Purdy to gain TKO victory | <urn:uuid:ccd1265c-b240-4873-9646-6983b284529e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://espn.go.com/boxing/story/_/id/8035104/thomas-hitman-hearns-freddie-roach-inducted-hall-fame | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977548 | 671 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Rogue wave leaves high school class battered and bruised.
Several students were rushed to the hospital, left battered and bruised by rough seas Monday after a field trip off the coast of Massachusetts took a rough turn.
Teenagers from Barnstable High School were on a whale watching tour when a huge wave hit their boat.
“We were hitting big waves the whole time, but once we hit there was just one big one,” said Sean Donahu, student. “You just heard a big thump, you heard some girls scream down below.”
Shaina Holden needed several stitches in her lip.
Her mother says the wave actually tossed her daughter into the air.
“She was actually air bound,” said Laura Holden. “She says she came right up off her feet when the wave hit and she hit the ground and again, it could have been a lot worse.”
The students are studying ecology and marine biology.
The principal says field trips at sea are not uncommon, but accidents rarely happen.
“We take advantage of the natural surroundings here…but I’ve never had that type of incident where students were injured on a boat,” said Barnstable High School Principal Patrick Clark.
According to the Coast Guard the boat was about five miles north of Race Point when the wave hit with 47 Barnstable High School students on board.
Many students were standing on the bow.
“Everyone’s like, ‘I can’t move, I can’t move. Get help!’” said Liz Bradley.
“Three of them were just sitting there in shock holding their faces…the ones who got hit in the face,” said Austin Firley. “And then the other two were on the ground kind of screaming.”
Students say the captain immediately shut off the engine and turned the 106-foot vessel around.
Rescue workers met the boat at MacMillan Pier in Provincetown.
“There was one girl…she had a broken nose…blood everywhere,” said Ryan Smith. “Another kid I think busted his chin open and I think the worst injury was a knee injury. The girl might have dislocated her kneecap.”
Five students were taken to Cape Cod Hospital and treated for minor injuries. | <urn:uuid:155f9117-f8b8-4c3e-b0f2-07aa5f1f464e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kveo.com/print/node/13031 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982588 | 491 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen has accused his former business partner Bill Gates of plotting to dilute Allen's stake in the world's largest software company before he left in 1983, and tried to buy his share of the company on the cheap.
Allen, who now runs a Seattle-based investment firm and philanthropic foundation, makes the claim in a forthcoming book of memoirs, excerpts from which were published in Vanity Fair magazine on Wednesday.
Allen, 58, says he overheard a heated conversation between Gates and now Chief Executive Steve Ballmer in December 1982.
"It was easy to get the gist of the conversation," writes Allen in the memoir as reproduced in Vanity Fair. "They were bemoaning my recent lack of production and discussing how they might dilute my Microsoft equity by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders. It was clear that they'd been thinking about this for some time."
Allen, who at that time was receiving treatment for cancer, and was scaling back his work at Microsoft, says he later received apologies from both Gates and Ballmer over the incident.
Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Gates in 1975, eventually left Microsoft in 1983. Before he left, Allen claims Gates attempted to buy his shares from him at a bargain price.
"It's not fair that you keep your stake in the company," Allen reports Gates said, making what Allen described as a "lowball" offer for his stock of $5 a share. Allen says he wouldn't go below $10. As a result, Allen says he kept his share.
"As it turned out, Bill's conservatism worked to my advantage. If he'd been willing to offer something close to my asking price, I would have sold way too soon," says Allen in the book.
Gates, who is in India working on his own philanthropy projects, did not directly contest Allen's account, but sought to play down friction.
"While my recollection of many of these events may differ from Paul's, I value his friendship and the important contributions he made to the world of technology and at Microsoft," Gates said in an emailed statement.
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.
Allen is now ranked the 57th richest person in the world with a fortune of $13 billion, according to Forbes magazine, largely due to his Microsoft holdings. Gates is ranked No. 2 with $56 billion. | <urn:uuid:4aa448f1-108b-436c-8818-90cde3e11870> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2011/03/30/microsoft-founder-allen-blasts-gates-book/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988387 | 485 | 1.710938 | 2 |
The gothic world of Annne Rice is an absolute must have for both fan of the gothic, vampirism or scholar. The anthology is A direct rout into the marvellous world behind the authour. Not only does it convey an unchartered depth of her literature, but is also A direct approach to A more academic criticsim. This book is of universal appeal because it charts A thought provoking desent through her key best sellers. For any reaserching vampirism especially, or just fasinated by this tallented writer this book is essential. It provides integral essays which traverse themes of anthrapology, in which is discussed how |Rice's characters assume A place in modern society, through to her more historical novels. But more invaluable are the essays which discuss her infamous vampire characters. In these essays is disclosed the intrinsic roots of vampirism and the gothic, linking back to writters of the Romantic epoch. They also provide A rich source of information, which deals with the more academic side of the gothic as well as A direct insight into the novels themselves. It is well researched, astute and perceptive. With Rice's work rapidly becoming recognised for its academic appel this book provides A critical idiom of her work and deserves A place on the shelf of any avid fan of the gothic, vampirism, or who is just enchanted by the pen of this literary sorceress. | <urn:uuid:643deca8-58d6-4a87-936e-21c251d0ad3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Gothic-World-Anne-Rice/dp/087972708X | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953784 | 299 | 1.546875 | 2 |
The historic district in Carson City, Nevada, is so picturesque that state government workers spend their lunch breaks strolling its sidewalks and admiring its collection of late 19-century homes, which are nestled between some of the nation's oldest elm trees. The groves, miraculously spared from the Dutch elm disease outbreak of the 1960s, date back to the mid-1860s, when the town was booming as a transportation hub for the gold and silver pulled from the Comstock mines. Later, it became a major railroad stop for timber shipped from the Lake Tahoe Basin.The Houses
In the historic district they run from modest to stately. Property values range from $65,000 to $450,000. Look for 19th-century Greek Revivals and Italianates with fine details—beautiful front porches, fireplaces, bargeboards, and columns. Why Buy Now?
Carson City—about the same distance from both Lake Tahoe and Reno—offers small-town living in a capital city. Snag a home on the west side and you'll be within walking distance of the Capitol Complex, where most residents work for the state.
Among the best for: City Life
, Outdoor Activities
, West and Northwest | <urn:uuid:c441aa29-1f30-4225-98a8-920ebe59af19> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/photos/0,,20343318_20739123,00.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955165 | 258 | 1.5 | 2 |
The following article is by Jarmo Niinisalo.
A long time ago—in the summer of 2001 if I recall correctly—I ran into an intriguing page (Chaosmachine’s more recent page can be found here). The original page, which sadly resides only in the web archives nowadays, was all about this hidden “demon face” in one of Aphex Twin’s tracks, “#2” (the long formula) on Windowlicker.
This face was supposed to be viewable with a spectrograph program, so I decided to try it myself. A spectrograph basically visualizes the sound spectrum.
First I needed to extract the track from the Windowlicker CD, which was easy with CDex. The extraction of the whole track was not really necessary because the “face” is situated at the very end of the track, starting from the 5:27 mark and lasting for about 10 seconds. There are other “audio images” on this particular track as well (and one at the end of the first track), but the face is certainly the most exciting of them all.
After I had the wav-file, I used a program called Spectrogram to visualize the file. To my amazement, it worked, and I was soon staring at the “demon” face:
I was, however, not content with this. Why would the good ol’ Twin have added a “demon” face into one of his tracks? I mean, the man does have a weird sense of humor, but I always thought demons were more up BoC‘s alley…
While examining the image, I came to the conclusion that something was not right. So I started messing around with the settings of the spectrograph program, and after a bit of knob twiddling the mystery revealed itself: the face was supposed to be watched with a logarithmic frequency scale, not with a linear scale.
A linear scale provided the “demon face”, but with a logarithmic scale the end results were quite different:
Why, it was none other than the Twin himself all the time, complete with his patented grin!
The settings which I used to get the above image were roughly the same as in the picture below (they aren’t the exact same settings since I’ve lost them somewhere, but if you try them yourself you’ll find that they are more than close enough):
After this “amazing” discovery, I contacted the guy at chaos.yerbox.org and informed him of the results. He seemed interested to add this new-found info to his pages, but I suppose he never got around to actually do it.
Next, I decided to inform the good folks on the IDM mailinglist about The Face. It turned out that this “picture to audio” -thing was really not hard to do at all and there was a Windows program called Coagula that could transform any picture into soundwaves with minimum effort. Aphex Twin himself had used a Mac program called Metasynth to do his images.
I tested Coagula and found it easy enough to use. Now this new discovery raised a new question: Were there more examples of this audio imaging available?
Luckily the soundscapes that Coagula spits out are quite easy to notice in their aural form, so I didn’t have to look for long before I found another example: On Plaid‘s “Rest Proof Clockwork”, the track “3recurring” contains a continuous stream of “threes” (as seen on the cover art of their previous album, Not For Threes).
Besides the Plaid discovery I couldn’t find any more examples of audio imaging on any of the CDs I own, but I didn’t bother to look that hard either. However it is clear that this audio/image stuff was “hip” at 1999, since both of the aforementioned records were released around that time.
As a nice finish, here are is a small gallery of some audio images from Aphex Twin and other artists:
The “hand” found on “My Violent Heart” from Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero | <urn:uuid:6f1d2781-1348-451d-a938-7b1eb620ca6a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.magneticmag.com/2012/08/the-aphex-face-visualizing-the-sound-spectrum/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974726 | 899 | 1.523438 | 2 |
The South County Historical Society is proud to provide its website viewers with all seven editions of the Dune Forum, which were edited and partially written in 1933-34 at Gavin Arthurs Moy Mell, located on the nearby Oceano dunes. With contributors and subscribers around the country, Mr. Arthur decided to have a conversation in print about the pressing issues facing Americans during the Great Depression. Topics of the articles range from art to politics to science and beyond. For the most part, the Dune Forum has been replicated with the original (sometimes imperfect) spelling and grammar used by its writers and editors. In converting the Dune Forum magazines to computer format, we tried as best as possible to preserve the original formatting. We did not always succeed.
The South County Historical Society
recognizes Colin Carlberg, Evelyn Carlberg, Norm Hammond and Linda Guiton for providing
original copies of the Dune Forum in order to
make this project possible. Special thanks to volunteers Dick Jackson and Susan Rock, who
contributed their computer and editing skills in this unique effort.
- Craig Rock,
Site Developed and Maintained by: Vivian KrugŠ Copyright 2003-2009 | <urn:uuid:0922283c-17ad-4d34-b655-5782ba45fb53> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.southcountyhistory.org/duneforum.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937951 | 242 | 1.625 | 2 |
Benjamin Netanyahu's Seinfeldian bomb chart left a little something to be desired: while he surely intended to press the care for a more aggressive international posture against Iran by setting a "clear red line" for its nuclear program, he instead sowed confusion, both here and in Israel. It's not entirely his fault; these are difficult issues and, what's more, the facts weren't really on the side of what Netanyahu was trying to say.
Bibi's old pals at J Street, though, have managed to do what the bellicose prime minister could not: concisely and clearly explain some of the complexities surrounding nuclear science and Iran's program. In a video released by the group this morning, Director of Government Affairs Dylan Williams shed some light on what this talk of uranium enrichment actually means, and where Iran's nuclear program actually is:
That wasn't so hard, was it? It would probably have helped Netanyahu if he wasn't trying to create the illusion of alarm about Iran. Make what you will of J Streets conclusions or push for diplomacy, the explainers on the science of the matter and Iran's current nuclear status are welcome contributions to the debate.
Yaakov Katz on what the delivery of advanced Russian missiles would mean for Israel. | <urn:uuid:8e078d37-db2d-4caf-9f9b-bcf7d12950f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/03/explainng-enrichment.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966617 | 255 | 1.648438 | 2 |
FILE - In this Jan. 23, 2004 file photo, self-styled cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri leads his followers in prayer in a street outside Finsbury Park Mosque, on the first anniversary of its closure by anti-terrorism police, London. Europe's human rights court ruled on Tuesday, April 10, 2012 that it would be legal for Britain to extradite an Egyptian-born radical Muslim cleric and five other terror suspects to the United States. (AP Photo/John D McHugh, File)
LONDON (AP) -- A European court ruled Monday that radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri can be extradited to the United States to face terrorism charges, including allegedly trying to set up an al-Qaida training camp in rural Oregon.
The decision ends a long-running legal battle and means that al-Masri, considered one of Britain's most notorious extremists, could be deported within weeks along with four other terrorism suspects in Britain.
Authorities in the U.S. have for years asked for Al-Masri and the others to be handed over, but the process had been delayed because the men raised human rights objections.
The men had argued before the European Court of Human Rights that they could face prison conditions and jail terms in the U.S. that would expose them to "torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" in breach of the European human rights code.
In April, the Strasbourg, France-based court rejected those claims. Al-Masri and the four others lodged an appeal to the court's highest judges, but on Monday the court said it refused to hear it. "Today the Grand Chamber Panel decided to reject the request," the court said in a brief statement. It did not give a reason for refusing the appeal.
Britain's Home Office and the U.S. Department of Justice welcomed the decision.
"We will work to ensure that the individuals are handed over to the U.S. authorities as quickly as possible," said the Home Office.
The suspects, who are accused of crimes such as raising funds for terrorists, could face life sentences in a maximum-security prison.
Al-Masri was arrested in Britain in 2004 at the request of U.S. authorities, who have called him "a terrorist facilitator with a global reach."
They accuse him of assisting the taking of 16 hostages -- including two American tourists -- in Yemen in 1998 and of conspiring to set up a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon, between 2000 and 2001.
He also is accused of conspiring with a U.S. citizen to facilitate a jihad -- or holy war -- in Afghanistan and providing material support to al-Qaida and the Taliban.
The cleric, who is blind in one eye and wears a hook for a hand, lost several British court cases in his fight against extradition before taking the case to the European court in 2008.
Known for his fiery anti-Western and anti-Semitic outbursts, he claims he has lost his Egyptian nationality, but Britain considers him an Egyptian citizen. He is currently serving a seven-year prison term in Britain for separate charges of inciting hatred.
The other four suspects due to be extradited to the U.S. are Babar Ahmad, Syed Tahla Ahsan, Khaled al-Fawwaz and Adel Abdul Bary.
Ahmad and Ahsan are charged in U.S. federal court in Connecticut with running a terrorist website in London, providing material support to terrorists, conspiring to kill U.S. nationals, and money laundering. Supporters of Ahmad, who was arrested in 2004 and has been held in a British jail since then without charge, are trying to help him get a trial in Britain because his alleged offense happened in London.
Al-Fawwaz and Bary, accused of being key aides to Osama bin Laden in London, are wanted in a New York federal court for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people. Al-Fawwaz faces many counts of murder.
The human rights court said that it has not decided on the case of a sixth suspect, Haroon Rashid Aswat, who was accused of being Al-Masri's co-conspirator in attempting to set up the camp in Oregon. The court said it needed to consider more information about his case.
In Washington, Dean Boyd, spokesman for the National Security Division of the U.S. justice department, said: "We are pleased that the litigation before the European Court of Human Rights in these cases has come to an end, and we will be working with the U.K. authorities on the arrangements to bring these subjects to the United States for prosecution." | <urn:uuid:75b4e319-6c19-4314-b01c-ba1b6765f6c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wilx.com/news/worldnews/headlines/UK-to-Extradite-Radical-Muslim-Cleric-to-US-171070041.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969297 | 974 | 1.515625 | 2 |
View Full Version : Raw Kid Recipe Help!
04-29-2005, 11:47 AM
She also loves salad greens tossed in dressing and wrapped in dehydrated flatbread or a wholegrain tortilla...she loves the dehydrated cinnamon flatbread...
I am looking for Kid-Friendly Raw Recipes as well... I appreciate the all the input you have given. I made Alissa's flax seed crackers yesterday. They will be good w/ Mock Tuna or greens but I need something more neutral for almond butter and bananas. I wanted to make the cinnamon/honey flaxseed cracker that she mentions on her DVD. Do anybody know how to make those? What ingredients do you use to make the above cinnamon flatbread? Also, when you make the above mentioned dehydrated flatbread and wholegrain tortillas, what recipes do you use? Also, can you make up a batch and store to use throughout the week (for school lunches)? Do the tortillas stay pliable enough to for another day or two?
Thanks in advance for your help, Debra
04-29-2005, 11:52 AM
Alissa didn't include the recipe for the cinnamon crackers in her book, however, it's really easy tol convert flax cracker recipes to sweet ones.
You basically use the BASE of the recipe (flax seeds, sunflower seeds, etc.) and then instead of using herbs and seasonings and veggies, substitute with cinnamon and/or other spices or just cinnamon, raisins, chopped apples and/or bananas. In fact, the Banana crackers in her book work well with almond butter and bananas or other fruit!
In the recipe section, member Sweetlips posted a recipe she created based on the onion bread recipe - I'll see if I can locate it for you and post the link...
Okay here it is:
I created a recipe for Apple Spice Bread following the recipe for the Onion Bread posted by Pansy. I use Alissa's filling for the crepes as my spread - was really tasty.
8 apples peeled and cored - and chunked in the food processor next time I don't plan to peel them
1 cup soaked raisins that were chunked with the apples
1 cup sunflower seeds ground
1 cup golden flax ground
1/3 cup oil - I used walnut cause there was no olive, but that would have been my choice
2 tbs ground ginger
1/2 tbs nutmeg
1 tsp vanilla
Place on dehydrator for 4 turn over for another 4 hours or until your desired crispness. Now, work with the time factor, I was experiminting and just got it.
05-01-2005, 03:30 PM
how old are your kiddos? I just do a lot of fruit, veggies, nut milks, fresh veggie juices & fruit smoothies for my kiddo. Seems to work well. oh and nut butters too. He is happy and healthy :) He is just turning 3 though and has basically done this his entire life and doesn't really like the prepared dishes other than some deserts and the crackers.
05-02-2005, 11:10 AM
Today for lunch, I made raviollis. My 12-year old daughter liked it a lot and so did my 2-year old. By the time my 13-year old son got around to trying it, there was nothing but the sauce left over and he said it was "alright" (one of his usual responses - "okay", "alright"...)
I didn't use turnips but instead used thinly sliced (on the Spiral Slicer) sweet potatoes. I used Alissa's Marinara Sauce recipe for the sauce and RawPriestess' cheese recipe (I can't post it, but if she sees this, maybe she'll post it again). My tahini was a bit bitter and she said in the recipe that if this happens to add some young coconut - didn't have any on hand, so I blended the cheese with some of the sauce for the filling and then put sauce on top.
I then dehydrated it to warm and soften the "pasta" and it was SO good!! It was a delicious lunch and my 6-year old only got to try the sauce too (I didn't make a lot because I wasn't sure if it would go over well with them or myself - but now I must go make more!
05-03-2005, 08:38 AM
Ariella, the cinnamon flatbread is basically the same recipe Rawkinlocs posted.
As for the wholegrain tortillas, my daughter eats the Ezekiel sprouted grain tortillas from the health food store.
05-09-2005, 06:52 PM
We make Energy Flatbread from Rejuvenate Your Life by Serene Allison. It is very neutral in flavor.
Energy Flat Bread
From Rejuvenate Your Life by Serene Allison
7 ½ c. sprouted buckwheat
3 ¼ c. soaked flax seeds (measured after soaking)
3 ¼ c. carrot pulp
4 big T. raw honey
¾ c. extra virgin olive oil (can leave this out)
1-1 ½ T. sea salt
This makes about a months supply or maybe a weeks worth for large families. Mix in batches in food processor. Spread onto five Teflex sheets about 1 cm thick. Score into desired sizes. Dehydrate below 105 degrees for a few hours until a crust is formed on one side and then flip them onto mesh screen and dehydrate until thoroughly dryabout 12-16 hours. If there is any hint of moisture, store in refrigerator. To recrisp later, you can stick it back into the dehydrator for 20 minutes or so.
02-15-2006, 01:21 AM
More great ideas!
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.1.4 Copyright © 2013 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:dbc8ca4e-5ddc-42c9-945c-a18e5ed0ae00> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rawfoodtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-3201.html?s=8be96af4ede8fbce527438b65b49485a | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947436 | 1,261 | 1.65625 | 2 |
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