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Someone important asked me to write about the biosciences in Phoenix and Arizona as the effort marks its tenth anniversary. This is fitting because I vividly remember the day I was called to the office of then Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza where he laid out the opportunity that the city had to lure star researcher Jeff Trent and the International Genomics Consortium. As a columnist for the
Arizona Republic, I wrote dozens of articles to explain and advocate for this unique chance to leapfrog out of an economy that had become dangerously dependent on housing and population growth, and was falling behind on almost every measure of economic and social well-being. One column was an open letter to Dr. Trent — both of us are natives and this was from the heart — that he later told me played a big role in his decision to come home and establish T-Gen.
With Mary Jo Waits, then of the Morrison Institute, I worked to develop a "meds and eds" strategy to leverage biosciences and education; government, non-profits and eventually for-profit organizations, to create a major bio hub. As Waits repeatedly said, what if we could lay claim to the cure for cancer being discovered in downtown Phoenix? I mention my role for the sake of those who constantly yowl that I "hate Arizona," do nothing constructive, am a "quitter" or some guy in Seattle who spends his time picking on Phoenix.
The Flinn Foundation led the development of a strong strategic roadmap, as well as providing $50 million in funding. Gov. Janet Napolitano was supportive and the Legislature was dragged aboard a statewide push including leaders in Tucson and Flagstaff, as well as the Gila River Indian Community. At City Hall, Deputy City Manager Sheryl Sculley marshaled the bureaucracy to assemble land for the venture on the old Phoenix Union High School campus and oversee its redeployment. More land north was available for expansion; it had been set aside for the abortive attempt to win the NFL stadium that instead went to a cotton field west of Glendale. New ASU President Michael Crow instantly grasped the potential and soon the U of A was planning a medical school on the site. When ground was broken for the T-Gen building, even then Rep. J.D. Hayworth, hater of all things gub'ment, showed up to bask in what appeared to be a moment of history on par with the CAP. Hard as it is to believe now, it was a time of breathtaking hope.
The plan was to use T-Gen and evolving research on the human genome to create a dense "(lab) bench to bedside" node on the Phoenix Biosciences Campus. Trent understood that the model should be the Texas Medical Center in Houston, the largest such complex in the world. It includes research, medical schools and other educational institutions, and hospitals in 280 buildings on a 1,300 acre site. Eventually, the Phoenix campus could also lure pharmaceutical and medical device companies, too. Nearby was land for "blue collar tech" sectors such as biomedical manufacturing that would have been relatively easily poached from California.
The usual "veto elite" weighed in against even trying to attract T-Gen and the IGC, prominent among them a
Republic columnist and former political operative. Among their complaints, aside from anything involving gub'ment, was that the effort would not create many jobs. True, only a small number of scientists initially went to work at T-Gen. But the wider meds-and-eds and biomed manufacturing strategies promised very large employment gains, and much better wages than are typical in Phoenix. In Houston, the TMC alone employs 92,500, as well as having 34,000 full-time students.
The anti faction — which is typically against everything that improves Phoenix but somehow is never blamed for "hating Arizona" — had little understanding of what the venture would require for sustained success. For example, the need and relatively long timeline to gain federal grants for the scientists who were leaving existing institutions to take a chance in Phoenix. Or the need for predictability in policymaking: Every time the Legislature balked at consistent funding and incentives for bio research, it sent a message that would make a scientist, entrepreneur or other innovator worry about the state's commitment. Few policymakers understood the competitive challenges or why the "cluster strategy" adopted after the 1990 real-estate crash had failed — and the lessons that were critical to apply to the new endeavor. Why sustained public-private partnerships and focus were essential (it took North Carolina decades of public funding to bring Research Triangle Park into the big leagues). Nor did most of the congressional delegation understand the need to steer federal research dollars to Phoenix. The antis never came around.
Still, not only did the project move ahead, but the Legislature was also strong-armed into helping establish Science Foundation Arizona and recruiting Bill Harris from Science Foundation Ireland to run it. The mission was to fund promising science, including that beyond biotech and biomedicine.
Two influential groups were never on board: The Real Estate Industrial Complex. And, especially as far as the downtown biomedical campus, the big hospitals: Catholic Healthcare West, which operates "Mr. Joes," and Banner, owner of Good Samaritan Hospital and many more. This would have profound consequences.
Ten years later, some progress has been made. But it has been agonizingly slow, especially for the downtown Biosciences Campus. Phoenix has not made the leap we hoped, where it would be at least within striking distance of Boston, San Diego, Seattle, Research Triangle Park and other leading bio centers.
What happened, why, and whether the situation can change for the better are topics I will discuss in a future column.
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Closing Of The Frontier, The: A History Of The Marine Fisheries Of Southeast Asia C. 1850-2000
by Butcher, John G.
About This Book
This book is the first on the history of the marine fisheries of Southeast Asia. It takes as its central theme the movement of fisheries into new fishing grounds, particularly the diverse ecosystems that make up the seas of Southeast Asia. This process accelerated between the 1950s and 1970s in what the author calls "the great fish race". Catches soared as the population of the region grew, demand from Japan and North America for shrimps and tuna increased, and fishers adopted more efficient ways of locating, catching, and preserving fish. But the great fish race soon brought about the severe depletion of one fish population after another, while pollution and the destruction of mangroves and coral reefs degraded fish habitats. Today the relentless movement into new fishing grounds has come to an end, for there are no new fishing grounds to exploit. The frontier of fisheries has closed. The challenge now is to exploit the seas in ways that preserve the diversity of marine life while providing the people of the region with a source of food long into the future.
Please note that this book may not be in stock. We will confirm availability upon receipt of your order. * Actual charges are made in Singapore Dollars (SGD). SGD1.00 = US$0.72
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By John Brown
One of the many things that the NFATCA continues to monitor are the statistics and particulars on NFA transfers. Many of you remember the days of transfers that took, on the norm, 10-12 months. The last thing in the world you would do is call and check the status of your own transfer because you didn’t want to disturb the process. Those days made you feel helpless. Thank goodness those days are long gone.
When the NFA Branch moved to Martinsburg and Ken Houchens, as the new NFA Branch Chief, took this bull by the horns and things seemed to change overnight. Most of us went from being scared of our examiners to developing a good relationship with them. At that time the NFATCA actually went to Martinsburg and presented the examiners with a special plaque recognizing them for their excellence in getting a better handle on transfers for the entire community. At the height of the best times that we have seen, Form 3 transfers were taking a mere 5 days and Form 4s were handled in 22 days, once at the Branch. Did we get spoiled by all of this? You bet we did!
If you had the occasion to go to Knob Creek in October last year you would have seen the new NFA Branch Chief Ed Saavedra explain that Form 4s were holding at 4 months in 2009. In a later article I will detail an interview with Ted Clutter who has taken the lead as the NFA Branch Supervisor and is holding the line of this tidal wave that takes transfers 4 months as best possible with the resources that are available.
Prior to the Knob Creek meeting, resources at ATF and the NFATCA pondered on why the transfer times are running at the rate they are. We all knew that with a new President that the rush was on. NFA purchases went through the roof and purchases of the AR family of rifles were unprecedented. After the election panic and with the fall of the economy everything came to a screeching halt. Not only did the panic purchases come to a full stop but prices began to fall. The decline of disposable income and the fear of a complete collapse in the economy caused an interesting phenomenon in purchasing. Most of the NFA community decided not to spend their disposable income on high end items and instead spend their money on more affordable items, such as suppressors, short barreled rifles and similar more affordable items thereby holding on to as much cash as possible. At least that’s what appeared to be happening. To verify this, we decided to study the overall numbers and present those to our readers on what was actually happening with the types of NFA transfers during the last five years.
If you carefully look over the statistics in the following chart there are some amazing conclusions that can be drawn on how the presidential election and the economy have affected our community.
It is especially interesting to see that the more economical NFA items have increased dramatically. Also of note is how the pace in purchasing machine guns has drastically slowed as compared to any of the other five years. Additional surprises are also apparent in silencer purchases and short barreled rifles over previous years. Take into consideration that short barreled rifles and silencers are more affordable and still being made, it is no wonder that machine gun purchases have fallen off over the last year.
The last point of interest is how this work load has affected the ATF examiners in Martinsburg. Since 2006 their job has been, with the same number of resources, almost unmanageable. Taking a look at what happened for the total in 2009, it is no wonder that the NFA Branch has been forced to institute a multitude of new practices to keep pace with the increases in form processing. It is also important to understand that this chart only addresses Form 4s. This combined with the many other forms that are processed by the NFA Branch has put the NFATCA and ATF at the table together on many occasions to address how the NFTCA can better communicate issues to the community to assist the Branch. Working together has proven to help us both in better managing submission and processing.
On multiple occasions since the inception of the NFATCA we have had the privilege and the honor of working closely with the NFA Branch to better understand and assist the Branch whenever possible.
Still wondering what we do for our community? Continue to follow our updates in future articles to see exactly “What we have done for you lately,” or come join us and make a difference at www.nfatca.org.
SUBSCRIBER COMMENT AREA
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Claim:Any car equipped with a remote keyless entry system can be unlocked via cell phone.
FALSE Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2004]
If someone has access to the spare remote at your home, call them on your cell phone (or borrow one from someone if the cell phone is locked in the car too!)
Hold your (or anyone's) cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the other person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the phone.
Your car will unlock. and it works. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other "remote" for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk, or have the "horn" signal go off, or whatever!)
Origins:Most new cars now come equipped with "Remote Keyless Entry" (or "Keyless Remote" or "Keyless Entry" or "Remote Entry") systems (also known as RKE systems), a mechanism which allows automobile owners to lock and unlock their car doors remotely (from up to about
But what if you accidentally lock your remote entry device in your car along with your keys? (A plausible scenario, as many people carry them together on the same keyring.) If you own a car equipped with a system such as OnStar you can contact an operator and have OnStar unlock your vehicle remotely through a signal sent via a cellular network, but otherwise you have to call a locksmith or get a friend or relative to bring an extra set of keys out to you.
Enter the idea of the poor man's OnStar. No need to pay for a fancy car-unlocking service: just use a cell phone to call someone who has access
Relaying remote entry system signals via telephone might work if the signals were sound-based, but they're not. An RKE system transmits an encrypted data stream to a receiver inside the automobile via an RF (radio frequency) signal, a signal that can't be effectively relayed via cell phone. (In any event, RKE systems and cell phones typically operate on completely different frequencies; the former in the
(More than a few people have inadvertently fooled themselves into believing the cell phone method of unlocking car doors actually works because they tried it and achieved the desired
It's possible this method might work with cars that use something different than standard RKE systems, but it doesn't work with the vast majority of models.
As an owner of a vehicle equipped with an RKE system, I've found that it has reduced the likelihood of my locking my keys in the car in an unexpected way: Since I quickly became accustomed to always locking and unlocking the car with the RKE device, and I carry the RKE device on the same ring as my keys, I have to be standing outside the vehicle with my keys in my hand in order to lock it. Now if I only had something to keep me from losing my cell
Additional information:
Remote Keyless Entry Systems Overview How Remote Entry Works Last updated:13 March 2015
Sources: Partlow, Joshua. "Keyless Remotes to Cars in Waldorf Suddenly Useless." The Washington Post.5 July 2004 (p. B1). Associated Press."Mysterous Force Knocks Out Keyless Entry Systems." TheWBALChannel.com.6 July 2004 (p. B1). Consumer Reports."Myth Busters." September 2013 (p. 9).
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Taking a moment aside from MLK’s birthday and the Presidential inauguration I want to bring forward a much discussed topic: Radical Social Work. My dislike for the term stems from the negative connotation I have against it. That doesn’t mean I’m right. Matt, very thoroughly depicted what radical social work means, the textbook definitions, and the historical context of which our entire profession subscribes to. When thinking upon the issue myself, a memory stirred from Les Miserables. A lot of people hate on Javert, the police inspector who seems to have no better hobby than prevent our lead protagonist, and his lovely ward from living a charmed life. He just so happens to be one of my favorite characters in literature. Growing up with Les Mis, I can’t tell you the number of times I have heard the songs, seen the plays, and watched the movie. It is one of those stories that will mold and give forth something different each time you view it.
My understanding of the messages have grown as I have grown, as the play as grown in my mind. Javert is the “bad guy” in the play, and yet, a “textbook” good man. His limitation is that his own view of the world is so cut into black and white, that he cannot accept there can be goodness outside the accepted law. Valjean emphasizes this multiple times, a fact that stood out in the most recent film adaptation. Valjean reiterates the phrase “you’ve done your duty, nothing more,” in what seems a compliment to Javert, is a blatant insult otherwise. Much like Marc Antony’s funeral speech against Brutus to the Romans where he turns “noble” into the darkest of slurs, Valjean turns “duty” into a slap. Going further than duty calls for is how I think radical social workers must be. It is going beyond the norm in order to do what is right and moral, even if it does not seem to abide by the strictures of the day. While far from a cry to become lawless, I think that is the sentiment missing from the title radical social work. What we’re looking for is an ability to go above and beyond what is expected of us, what is asked of us, in order for us not just to do our duty but for us to change the world.
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GroupManagementReport management-relevant figures monthly to the Management Board. In addition, both operational and strategic risks are analyzed by means of a structured reporting system. It shows developments in all relevant departments using KPIs and reports them quarterly to the Management Board. b) Finance All accounting decisions relevant to the Company’s financial statements as well as the revenue calculation process are monitored and/or executed by the global Corporate Finance department. This ensures compliance with IFRS accounting regulations throughout the Company. c) Treasury The Corporate Treasury team creates daily cash and weekly hedging transaction reports for the Management Board. All high-risk foreign-currency and hedging transactions may be conducted only by the Corporate Treasury team, which is directly below the CFO. The national subsidiaries are forbid- den by a global treasury policy from engaging in any high- risk transactions with derivatives. Regular internal audits monitor compliance with this policy. d) Internal Audit Software AG’s Internal Audit is an active component of the Company’s risk management system. Through a systematic and targeted approach, it ensures the effectiveness of risk management along with the evaluation and continual im- provement of the internal control systems and the manage- ment and supervision processes. It is also geared to the creation of added value for Software AG by optimizing busi- ness processes. Internal Audit reports directly to the CEO and operates worldwide. Risk management in the financial reporting standards process The risk of financial reporting errors was largely eliminated through implementation of the following processes: for ongoing monitoring of the risk areas identified, which address the development of the entire Company as well as department-specific issues. The Management Board receives ongoing information as to current and future risks and op- portunities as well as the aggregated risk and opportunity situation via established channels. Software AG updates and monitors the applicable specifications for preventing and reducing threats on an ongoing basis throughout the Group. Central responsibility for Group-wide processes Risks and opportunities throughout the world are managed and controlled by the teams at corporate headquarters re- sponsible for risk management for both Software AG and its subsidiaries. Corporate headquarters compiles risk and op- portunity reports, initiates further development of our risk management system and elaborates risk-mitigating guide- lines for the entire Group. We constantly review the func- tioning and reliability of the system as well as the reporting. Software AG’s internal control system has operationalized business risks by way of internal policies on business policies and practices, as well as Group-wide specification of effective internal controls, compliance with which are continually monitored. The defined policies regulate internal procedures and areas of responsibility at the global and local levels. They are designed to provide information for management and to monitor the operating business risks of the Software AG Group. In order to enhance transparency, administration, communication and compliance assessment of the policies are carried out centrally. Another component of risk and opportunity management is the transfer of operating risks to insurance carriers. The General Services department at corporate headquarters coordinates this function globally. Structure of the risk management system a) Controlling Controlling—which is under unified global leadership— monitors operating business risks in real time and reports 99 Corporate Governance Report of the Supervisory Board Consolidated Financial Statements Notes Additional Information Group Management Report Business and General Conditions Economic Report Events after the Balance Sheet Date Risk and Opportunity Report Remuneration Report Forecast Takeover-related Disclosures Statement on Corporate Governance
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I think the database developer role is on the rise and that it's better suited for agile practices - but guidance is needed make that infusion of agile practices a success. Here's why.
My impression is that fusing agile practices into the DBA role is inherently awkward since administration differs significantly from development. A DBA might be involved in development occasionally or might bundle together a series of items into a project where a SCRUM sprint could apply - but commonly a DBA is frequently interrupted by a broad spectrum of issues and must also attend to routines of ongoing maintenance and support where they're taken out of development.
That said, there are signals that database development is becoming more formalized into its own role unique from that of the DBA - with both roles overlapping each other to some extent of course. One signal is that Database development now has its own separate Microsoft certification with the 70-433 test offering the MCTS certification in Database Development.
Mind you, I'm talking about the broad-sweeping trends. No need to argue about individual cases. I'm suggesting that out in the wild, more places are cropping up for a separate database developer role - and that role could be more suited for the infusion of agile practices.
Another signal is Oslo - an upcoming approach to development involving collaborative modeling. The goal is to get the various IT professionals to work together more effectively which includes getting someone from the database side of the equation into the collaborative development space. That person I suspect is the database developer primarily and the DBA secondarily.
I think that adoption of agile practices are coming to the database world later then the world of software development at large. That's hard to prove. One hint though is that articles relating to test-driven development practices (one area of agile practices) on SQLServerCentral are not frequent and are more recent. It's somewhat of a new conversation. The question is, if agile practices are late in coming to database development, is that an advantage or a disadvantage? An important question is will we learn from the mistakes already made, or will we be doomed to repeat them? It depends, of course, but on what?
To help answer that, let me take a quick step back. I've been talking so far about agile "practices," lumping things together whereas Alistair Cockburn, one of the very founders of the entire Agile movement keenly separates out the "procedures" used in agile from the "properties" of an agile environment. In his influential book Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodoligy for Small Teams, Cockburn suggests that if a small team ensures that their environment has certain properties such as "reflective improvement," then the practices used to foster that property will follow.
That said, we can clarify here that it's the specific practices like teaming up programmers to run in dual-code mode, setting up a walking skeleton and using incremental rearchitecture and so forth, might be more awkward for the database world. The properties, however, are not as awkward.
For instance, one of Cockburn's properties is "personal safety" - (which could end up being one of the most important agile team properties of all) I think can be set up in the database world with no inherent impedance. Personal safety in a nutshell is "being able to speak about something bothering you, without fear of reprisal" (Cockburn). It can lead a developer for instance to admit that an aspect of a project is beyond their ability. They'll get help sooner and the project will move forward.
At this point I think I should lay down another impression about the whole agile movement that is taking hold of software development - because I think it can serve as a warning signal for the database world. I think there are forces acting on the agile movement from the business world to change it into a sort of magical "get something for nothing" proposition. In order to sell an agile methodology, the technical personnel and others emphasize speed and success and tend to leave out everything else.
I think developers are being talked about as if they were processors on a motherboard. Extreme programming is like working in dual-processor mode. The discussions are about efficiency, throughput and keeping developers at maximum productivity.
What doesn't get mentioned or emphasized is the human-powered side of the equation. The result can be project-seizing turnover and morale drain. Set up a series of intense sprints with little time to come up for air, adjust the methodology so that the developers aren't coming up with the timelines, and what do you think will happen?
Here's where I think the database world can sidestep some thorny issues by going back to the beginning and embracing some of the values that were discussed at the conception of the agile movement.
The history, some of which is kept at agilemanifesto.org, is that some experienced developers set up a meeting one late winter day in 2001 at a ski lodge in the Wasatch mountains of Utah. One of the original signatories of the movement, Jim Highsmith, made a statement that I think we should take particular notice of. Highsmith says "I believe Agile Methodologists are really about the 'mushy stuff' about delivering good products to customers by operating in an environment that does more than talk about 'people as our most important asset' but actually 'acts' as if people were the most important, and lose the word 'asset'."
From the beginning, the agile movement was concerned about not just the success of software projects but also about the human sustainability of the software development profession. There is a concern for the developer community. There are costs and trade-offs to be made. So to create a sustainable and humane development environment, an agile methodology can't be sold to the business segment as a cost-free trade-off free proposition. From the get-go, the signatories of the agile manifesto laid out the key trade-offs that they perceived should be made, which can be reviewed here. One of them is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" where individuals and interactions are valued more.
I'd like to venture one last speculative point in this entry - the validity of which I think doesn't negate the other points I've made. Non-database developers seem to wield suprisingly little political power in general. They're struggling to get control over setting their own sprint timelines. I think the database developers and DBAs might have a little stronger bargaining chip. They preside over not just an RBDMS these days - but with SQL Server and the likes, they've got the reigns on an entire data-centric business platform that handles a gambit of technological needs. If that added leverage exists, perhaps database professionals will become more successful at creating the agile environment that was and is actually intended by the founders.
Lastly, I recommend Cockburn's book, which reviews both the ideal properties of small agile teams, but also reviews some of the successful practices and techniques like walking skeleton, process miniature and so forth.
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The private jets have lifted off. The giant congress centre has fallen silent. Tens of thousands of canapés have been consumed. Hundreds of millions of Swiss francs have been injected into the economy of an Alpine town. But what was it all for? What has the world learned from this year's gathering of the planet's economic, political and academic elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos?
Well, we learned that the eurozone patient has been given a massive dose of painkillers by the European Central Bank but talk of a cure is woefully premature. The optimistic blustering of bankers at the beginning of the week about a corner having been turned quickly gave way to gloom after Angela Merkel's negative opening address. The German chancellor said the answer is "more Europe" but her body language suggested she wished it would all just go away. Was this the saviour of the eurozone speaking, delegates asked themselves. Few came away reassured. "These politicians - Sarkozy, Merkel - are too concerned with getting re-elected to do what is necessary," Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminium magnate complained to me.
Greece was on the minds of many. Was a deal on debt restructuring really imminent? Should the European Central Bank take a haircut on its Greek bond holdings? Was Germany's apparent bid to control the Greek budget a necessary step, or disastrous over-reach? No one - not politicians, officials or bankers - could provide a convincing answer to any of these questions. Despite the insistence of the politicians present that Greece would be a special case, there were gloomy private predictions from several quarters that Portugal would be next to need debt forgiveness.
Davos taught us that capitalism is in crisis (with news of record unemployment in Spain filtering through to the conference on the same day as confirmation of Stephen Hester's bonus - which he has now rejected), but that no one, not even the Occupy protesters in their igloo camp, have a clear idea of what to replace the system with. One Occupy member who was invited to take part in a panel on the subject tried to get the audience to provide their own answers. The audience said that they'd rather hear from the panel. We learned at Davos that a big liberalisation of world trade would be a boost to flagging global growth but that it's not going to happen. Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organisation, admitted as much. World Bank chief Robert Zoellick even warned of protectionist forces stirring.
We learned that the super-rich think that philanthropy is a good thing and are worried about rising inequality. However, we also found out that they still don't want to pay more tax. One participant at the Confederation for British Industry dinner harangued Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne about the unfairness of the UK's 50p tax rate.
Some were less than impressed with the charity talk from the super-rich too. "They always talk about philanthropy when they're under pressure, it's really just a smokescreen" one well-connected Davos veteran told me.
But was Davos useful in a practical sense? The World Economic Forum organisers claim Davos enables politicians to meet in a convivial and neutral setting and lay the groundwork for diplomatic breakthroughs. But one UK government minister had a more sceptical take: "You can meet a lot of people who you normally wouldn't bother travelling to meet."
And how about the private sector? Did "Davos man" - the hyper-connected, super-confident, global business leader - have a productive time, locating promising new investment opportunities? The general feeling seemed to be that there is simply too much uncertainty out there (mainly thanks to the eurozone mess), to strike any big deals. Money is hunkering down for safety.
There was the usual confident talk about the investment opportunities arising from the economic expansion of Asia and the internationalisation of China's yuan. But this felt more like a security blanket for the economic movers and shakers of Davos than genuine bullishness.
As the conference wound down, one business delegate blundered into a lift where some of the congress centre's catering staff were wrestling with a trolley. "Where am I?" he asked, a little desperately. Yes, Davos man is lost. What hope, then, for the rest of us?Reuse content
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Introduction
America is a complex and diverse web of individuals marked by social stratification, a system by which a society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy (Macionis, 2011, p.204). The film People Like Us: Social Class in America discusses the class system, social stratification based on both birth and individual achievement, which the American people use to define others (Macionis, 2011, p.206). It explores the many variables that contribute to the determination of a person’s class; such as, ancestry, education, and money. Ancestry will be a main focus because it has such a strong influence on the class system of today. The film provided an informative and entertaining basis for understanding inequality within our nation. Description
Part 1-Bud or Bordeaux
The film introduces the concept of Bud or Bordeaux. The meaning of this title displays how language can invoke a “feeling of class” (Alvarez & Kolker, 2001). According to the film, individuals defined class as having money, how you were raised, and your state of mind (Alvarez & Kolker, 2001). In many cases we use status symbols in order to show others were we should be within the social hierarchy. Status symbols can are displayed through what is known as conspicuous consumption, or buying and using products because of the “statement” they make about social position (Macionis, 2011, p.216). In society, the items that we buy may lead to the determination of our social class.
This first part of the film took us through the contrast of classes based on products. We were able to see the pattern of consumption of our nation, such as buying products that are not necessarily needed like a specialty blender. It also discussed the battle between classes when a co-op supermarket took over a Shaw’s supermarket in a working class community. The co-op food was organic and did not sell white bread which exposed the class differences (Alvarez & Kolker, 2001). The working class people tend to be less tolerant and therefore did not want to be told what was good for them to eat (Macionis, 2011, p.225) Part 2-High and Low
The next part of the film, takes the viewer through the visual of the high society and low society of our nation. It reveals the inside life and thoughts of the WASPS and takes us into their world of the inherited rich. The next section displays the relationship between race and social class in the Bourgeois Blues. It’s a glimpse into the black-middle class and the idea that attaining success means losing your roots in African American U.S. society (Alvarez & Kolker, 2001). After that, the film tells the story of Tammy, a single mother struggling in poverty and working at a low-income job. Part 3-Salt of the Earth
Salt of the Earth showed the values and traditions of the working and middle class people. An owner of a lawn ornament shop discusses why American’s like to dress their yards up. She simply states that “It’s America and who has the right to look down on anybody” (Alvarez & Kolker, 2001). It then transitions to the city of Baltimore, where the people value their blue-collar lifestyle and have a street festival. One man said that the working class does 80% of the work and gets 10% of the pay (Alvarez & Kolker, 2001). Many people feel a prejudice against them as being part of the working class. The section closes with a woman named Dana who is native to Kentucky, but now lives in Washington DC. It discusses her problems that she must deal with while trying to belong to the working class people of her hometown and the white-collar people in her new city. Part 4-Belonging
The final part of the film focused on how to gain acceptance into the upper classes of society. The main idea was that “all you need is cash” in order to fit into the most elite communities and that money will only get you “in”, but it will not get you “accepted” (Alvarez & Kolker, 2001). The message is also conveyed that...
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OCS is a police recorded measure of crime. One could argue that the police play a key role in how much crime there is in society. Police dispersal is much greater, and targets extra resources in particular localities, such as urban inner city areas, or target areas consisting of working class or ethnic minorities. This can then relate to the police discretion, the interpretations and meanings that the police attach to behaviour and social groups when deciding to make an arrest, this could also be associated with social characteristics of the police officer. This shows that the OCS can be deemed as unreliable, due to the police discretion.
Marxist view OCS as a bad measure of crime and deviance, as most laws are enforced to focus on the lower and working class. This means that there is less focus placed on white collar crimes, which are rarely prosecuted and the law does not define the crimes for the ‘rich’ criminals. Crimes such as embezzlement is most likely dealt with out of the public eye, and in house. Marxists argue that the working class is criminalised and that sociologists’ use of these statistics will only serve to maintain ruling class deception. OCS are seen by Marxists as a part of the ideological weaponry of the bourgeoisie. The Marxist view further highlights the negativity of people in higher status created OCS, in...
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“Building Value: Driving Wholesaler Returns through Strategic and Tactical Investment.”
The use of value in management is mostly as a concept and often found in the statement(s) value added or value chain. Wholesalers add value in their services surrounding the products they distribute and as exemplified in the classic service cycle of purchasing, receiving, picking, sales, shipping, payment, credit, warranties and returns.
Within the last decade, however, there has been a growing body of knowledge that measures tangible value and relates it to the market price of the firm. This research has been done in the public markets where data is available and linked to the share price and market capitalization of the going concern.
The output of the logic, as it affects supply chain entities, including wholesalers, is that measuring value is the single best way for wholesaler owner/operators to improve financial returns. Value far and away is superior to focusing on operating profits and variants of earnings or net profit before tax (NPBT).
The issue with value, in supply chain firms, is that service value is the relevant entity under production and worthy of measure. Service value, however, is found in the operating expenses of the income statement. Hence, operating profits have to be assigned or allocated for insight into where value is generated. Too, value is the primary product of two entities: returns and growth. The measure of Return on Invested Capital or (ROIC) needs to be gathered for each investment and where ensuing returns for discrete value are evaluated for their attractiveness and future growth.
The problem with value, for distributors, is that the measures and management process for value generation and creation don’t exist. Distributors overwhelmingly use financial accounting data for management of future value and, in the process, tend to destroy value as fast as they generate it. Our research over the past five years has been to help distributors use new measures with new knowledge of where value exists, what to do about it and how to increase the market value of the wholesale firm.
Fundamentals of valueValue is defined as ROIC of individual investments and the growth prospects of said investments. Distributors invest service labor in fulfilling transactions and investments can be measured by individual transaction, customer, sales territory, market segment and marketing program. Distributors must consider that these entities are investments and the ROIC must be measured specific to the investment to be confident it produces value.
The allocation of operating expenses to investments has been around wholesaling circles for two decades. The predominant problem in allocating expenses is that many allocation models don’t give an accurate picture of how labor is consumed by the investment. In 2006, Robert Kaplan of the Harvard Business School and inventor of Activity Costing in the 1980s, developed new standards for cost allocations including the ability to accurately measure labor capacity, usage of terminology that is actionable in the industry and use of a singular baseline logic.
At Benfield Consulting, we follow Kaplan’s standards and start with base transactions of stock, non-stock transfer, non-stock special, drop ship, counter or retail and rep order. Our work with the model, over the past five years, finds that transaction type is an accurate and actionable singular logic on which to allocate costs. The labor for individual transactions differs and we add components of outside sales coverage or not covered, inside sales entered or e-commerce, shipped to customer or pick up at branch, etc., to each base transaction ending up with 12 to 20+ transaction types for the typical wholesaler.[i] We allocate all costs that have to do with fulfilling the transaction and typically leave out fixed costs of branch overhead and executive salaries.
For all intents and purposes, approximately 80% of the allocated costs represent labor used by the wholesale firm. The explanation of allocation logic is important as we continue to find where the predominance of existing allocation models doesn’t follow Kaplan’s standards and, hence, these models are not recommended for measuring value.
We continue to find outdated and inaccurate concepts such as Average Order Size and Average Order Cost used in certain models. Our work in the costing of transaction types finds that there are significant variations in transaction costs, often exceeding $100, and using the concept of “average” in measuring value is best described by the metaphor, “An average person has one breast and one testicle.”[ii]
The Value Equation, once allocations have been measured, is: Capital Returns/Capital Investments, expressed as a percent and less than the weighted average cost of capital. For example, Bayou Plumbing Wholesaler has as an account, Thibideaux Gator Processing, with purchases of $189,663, margins of $38,829 and margin percent of 21%. These figures are secured from the financial statements of the wholesaler and while of some importance, they
don’t come close to measuring value.
Bayou Plumbing, after developing a transaction-based costing model, finds that the cost to serve is $36,110, which leaves $2,719 ($38,829-$36,110) in transaction profits. The concentration on transaction profits of $2,719, or transaction profits as a percent of sales at 1.4%, has
no meaningful correlation to the value producing ability of the account.
Returning to our definition of Capital Returns/Capital Investment, the ROIC of Thibideaux is $2,719/$36,110 or 7.5%. If the weighted average cost of capital for Bayou Plumbing is 8.5%, then the account destroys value by 1%. Hence, to accurately measure the ROIC on an investment, wholesalers need to
create two new measures, which are not found in financial accounting with a modern-day cost allocation logicand this must be compared to the weighted average cost of capital for insight. Using value for improving the value of the wholesale firmMany wholesalers don’t measure the weighted average cost of capital and consider the measure of limited use. While we find this position in need of change, we accommodate clients by referring to value investments with color codes of red, yellow and green as used in the common traffic signal.
Red Investments are some 40% of customers, transactions, sales territories, segments, etc., that have a negative value or a negative ROIC. We say they literally destroy value.
Yellow investments are typically 20% of investments that have an ROIC below the weighted average cost of capital. In essence, they yield a positive but low return.
Green investments are 40% of customers, transactions, sales territories, segments, etc., that have a positive ROIC above the weighted average cost of capital.
Many wholesalers, when measuring value, are too often “deer in the headlights” struck and fail to move toward a working logic on how to rectify the situation of investing in Red and Yellow entities. From our work, several quick and easy rules apply to improving value and they are included in the wrap-up of this blog entry.
Generating value in wholesale distributionTo create a higher than average ROIC and growth prospects in wholesale distribution, we recommend the following steps: Don’t concern yourself with differentiation between shareholder and customer value. These constructs, when used in tandem, have no technical definitions that we can find and are not actionable.The best value research uses ROIC and investing in growth areas, specific to the firm, as the best means to generate value. In essence, the companies that produce the highest ROIC with the best growth provide value to themselves and to their customers; hence, there is no measurable difference in shareholder and customer value because good shareholder value is good customer value.
A value approach to managing wholesale firms takes the use of a modern-day cost allocation logic and usage of ROIC specific to common investments of transactions, sales territories, customers, segments and marketing programs. The field is new and offers significant hope where most wholesalers, using financial accounting, tend to destroy value almost as fast as they generate it and as evidenced by research that finds 50% to 60% of wholesale firms sell for asset value.
[i] Benfield Consulting’s transaction costing model is Labor Differential Transaction Costing and is filed in the US Patent Office with Patent Pending status. [ii] Attributed to Des McHale, Assoc. Prof. of Mathematics at University College, Cork, Ireland.
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By Teachers, For Teachers
Provided by the K-12 Teachers Alliance
I recently had the enriching opportunity to collaborate with author Marc Prensky whose term “digital native” has become the moniker for today’s students since 2001 when it was first coined. Marc watched me teach a lesson and helped me guide my Mandell Prep students through a discussion regarding digital citizenship.
In our reflections afterwards, he challenged me to rethink the way I was using technology to enhance the learning experience with this question: Are we using technology to do old stuff in new ways, or are we using technology to truly transform learning?
Until he posed that question to me, I could have sworn I was doing the latter. In many ways I was, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I probably was not doing enough of that transformative stuff. In the week following our conversation, I was stuck. I asked myself,
How can we take the solid knowledge of what digital citizenship means live and make it truly action oriented and transformative?
The answer occurred to me one beautiful Saturday when I headed outside with the goal to explore new places all day. I started posting inspirational pictures from around the city spaces to Instagram, and I watched as my two new student followers liked and commented on nearly all my posts. Then came an email from them suggesting I use some popular hashtags to gain more “likes” on my posts and a bigger following.
This experience on a Saturday was an ah-ha moment for me in a number of ways. I realized that we adults, or to use Prensky’s term, we “digital immigrants” spend a great deal of energy discussing content management with our young natives. Mostly we stay in the finger-pointing mode indicating what they should and should not post lest they be immortalized online in a negative light during their teen days; at best, we coach them on designing their image to market who they are. On the other hand, despite an often blatant disregard or naive understanding of content management, our youth counterparts have an insatiable desire to learn the most effective way to increase their reach and bring attention to their posts. These are skills I do not have...which led me to the conclusion: we could form a great partnership.
I had been listening to my students discuss how to increase awareness of their service project Finding Green, a documentary call to action focused on creating and preserving green space in our urban environment. They were reaching out by phone and email to local representatives and groups to tell them about the initiative and were very actively promoting it to friends. While promoting it via our social media profiles had been a noted goal, none of us thought of using the power of social media to create a profile for the cause itself. It was relatively easy to meet, discuss parameters of involvement, and set up a FindingGreenNYC profile on Instagram, Twitter, and Foursquare.
It started like this:
And it quickly led into this:
Three weeks later, we have reached several milestones. We have our feeds live with a growing following, we have participated in two city park events, including one planting event and one post-Sandy clean up, we have presented at one EdCamp event (the native & the immigrant together) and are speaking at the upcoming TEDxYouth@TheSchool conference. I’ve watched the students grow in their roles as citizens, native both to New York City and the digital world; I’ve seen leadership emerge and creativity ignite.
In short, the question posed to me by Marc Prensky is a tough one to think about. I’m still stuck in many areas, and the digital immigrant in me cries out frequently, “Some old stuff is good!” However, this one project has illustrated for me the importance of transformational design in our use of technology. The best applications of technology will not only inform students on the proper use of tools but will erase boundaries between the digital and offline world, merge social, learning, and community spaces, and build agency in the the development of accountability standards in our shared digital world. They were born into it, and they will lead from it.
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There are naked people at Harvard and they're not just posing for a figuredrawing class. "Oh, "you may scoff, "I haven't seen all that many of my classmates naked" (or "nekkid" if you're from the South). All I can say is, they may not show up in the buff to the Omelet Station at Special Dinners, but there are nudists among us and their name is Legion.
Actually, one of their names is Kitt. Kitt Hirasaki '96 is most comfortable sitting around his room or running up and down the halls not completely nude, but clad only in his tighty-whities. "It's a pretty recent development," he said, speaking of his penchant for pantlessness. "I guess since I came to college. I'm from Texas, where it's not that socially acceptable to sit around in your underwear in public. Still, I used to walk around in my underwear all the time when I was at home and when I came here I didn't see any reason to change that and I figured, the whole place is my home. My roommates don't seem to mind."
Mitch McClure, '96, one of the roommates in question, upholds Hirasaki's assertion. "It doesn't bother me," he says of his roommate's exhibitionistic tendencies. "But I hate to be naked. I always wear clothes, especially in the shower."
It's not just a few aberrant personalities like Hirasaki who frolic around the houses half-dressed (or undressed). Some entire sub-groups embrace nudity as a bonding ritual. The First-year Outdoor Program, in particular, has a reputation for exhibitionistic excess.
I once attended a party where four men and one woman, wearing bobby socks, penny loafers and a red scrunchy in her hair, danced completely naked. When I brought up the subject in a later conversation, the person next to me said "Oh. FOP people were there." Although skinny-dipping is a ritual part of the FOP experience, some FOPpies like to preserve the magic by getting naked whenever they're together.
Certain sports teams also like to undress en masse, to various degrees of nudity. Gaelen B. Phyfe '96 says that the women's sailing team falls into this category of athletes with a penchant for taking their clothes off. "Sailors get topless more than they get naked--at least at Harvard," Phyfe reports. "Usually late at night at a party, one person starts it...by taking another person's top off."
When asked why sailors shed their tops, Phyfe conjectured, "People are probably comfortable in their bodies. I don't know why they do it, but I don't know why they wouldn't. Everyone's pretty mellow and self-assured." After all, if you've got it, flaunt it. Many do.
Still, it's not quite as simple. There are more important issues here, questions that must be answered. For example, why are some of us more likely to enjoy getting naked than others? There are those who think that in such a diverse community, cultural background may have something to do with it.
Julia E. Starkey '95 supports those theorists who think that enjoyment of nudity, gymnophilia, may have cultural roots. "I'm naked a lot," she says. "I'm perfectly comfortable being naked when most people aren't because my mom's Swedish and in Sweden kids run around naked until they're 10. My mom never raised me to think it was wrong."
Upon arriving at Harvard, Starkey was dismayed to discover that not everyone shared a similar nonchalance Puritanical. I walk from the shower to my dorm room in my towel. She changes in the shower a lot."
As promised in the admissions brochure, Starkey and her roommate learned from each other's cultural differences. "Now she's not as traumatized if I run around half-naked. Or what she'd consider half-naked-a T-shirt and my underwear."
Starkey's ideas of what is appropriate in terms of public exposure have been modified with time, she explains. "It never occurred to me until I was in middle school that you're not supposed to run around naked."
"You're not. You are NOT," added a shocked Nathan Lump '96. Clearly Lump is not among the Harvard minority which believes that clothing is a harmful artificial construct that is far better avoided in favor of the purity of nudity, the ultimate in meta-fashion.
Starkey, on the other hand is strongly in favor of mass nudity. "I think it's weird that people don't walk around naked. If more people were naked more, it would be a better society. At this point we've all taken bio, we've all see people naked, or at least a picture of someone naked. I refuse to believe that people make it to college without ever seeing a person naked, at least obliquely if not personally."
That's tough logic to dispute, but there are those who love their clothes and believe that only the select few should exhibit their wares. Even Hirasaki, for all his love of lounging in lingerie, admits, "We thought about having a naked party, a party where everyone would have to come completely naked, but then we realized--most people, you just don't want to see them naked."
FM could not disagree more.
*Editors' Note: As true menschen, it is our Duty to inform you about fashion.
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The House GOP’s Big Immigration Fail
Despite a string of embarrassing and disheartening mistakes, the Obama administration does not have to worry about a suddenly resurgent Republican Party. The GOP has its hands full. Even with this year’s primary season behind them, sharp divides between insurgents and establishment remain. The door is sliding closed on replacing Obamacare, and Republicans won’t get another shot at running our foreign policy until at least 2017. Just because the president has lost the initiative does not mean the GOP has regained it.
Now, Republicans are held captive by narratives, not just events. And the main narrative staring them down for the rest of Obama’s term is “obstructionism.”
It’s an old story, but this time it has some bite, because now, Republicans are obstructing themselves. What’s more, they’re doing it on what leading political and media figures want to be the next big marquee issue for sweeping, top-down reform.
A critical mass of influential figures now demands the GOP act on immigration, one way or the other. And that means the House GOP.
House Speaker John Boehner has stalled on immigration with great vigor. This year, however, something’s got to give. In the Senate, big-time personal politics forged a team of Republican egos that can’t tolerate playing second fiddle to mere Representatives. They know that if there’s no vote by August, immigration is dead for the year—and the Senate will have to pass it again next year if it’s ever to return. The pressure is on from the left, as well. Democrats have given activist groups their marching orders: “Train all your fire on House Republicans from now until August,” as Politico sums them up.
As part of the Democrats’ offensive, the Center for American Progress has dutifully whipped up a survey showing that almost half of Latino respondents would blame the GOP for Congressional inaction on immigration, while just 16 percent would blame Democrats.
Those sorts of numbers are just the start of the House’s troubles, as Majority Leader Eric Cantor knows all too well. This election year, he was caught in a withering crossfire of immigration criticism from right and left alike—slammed for being pro-amnesty on the one hand and anti-reform on the other.
The justifiable concern this spectacle raises is that Republicans stand to lose no matter what they do. That same CAP poll puts a spotlight on the pitfalls: 45 percent of respondents said they’d be more “favorable” toward Republicans in general, and 61 percent more “open” to their ideas, if only the House GOP would “support immigration reform.”
Like many polls, CAP’s was carefully tailored to encourage the results desired. But the dilemma for Republicans is clear enough. Chasing after mere favorability and openness is an unbecoming act of desperation. The nightmare scenario for the GOP is a marginally more GOP-friendly Hispanic population that still breaks strongly Democratic, cycle after cycle. And there’s just no indication that, politically speaking, the Senate approach to reform will yield anything but that.
What House Republicans need, but do not have, is a cohesive approach to immigration that can be stacked up against the Senate’s. It’s got to be an approach that doesn’t go full remember-the-Alamo, like the grassroots’ preferred approach, or full dollar-sign-eyes, like the Chamber of Commerce wing of the party. But it’s also got to avoid the cloying, off-putting sentimentalism of the RINO wing that sees government as a salvific, nationalistic Santa Claus, bestowing the blessings of full American-ness on a people stuck in the “shadows.”
Now would seem like a strange time for a dispassionate, de-politicized immigration solution to emerge from the House. But there’s one waiting to be cobbled together, if only Boehner and company would think it through.
It would take shape in accordance with a three-step acknowledgement of the basic realities we confront on the issue. First, the “illegal immigration crisis” is over. Whether we keep border security about where it is or whether we ramp it up dramatically, there just isn’t going to be the kind of massive influx that got us where we are today. A future economic boom might bump up the numbers, but right now they’re around net zero—a figure that has more to do with Mexicans and Mexico than it does with the U.S. economy.
That means, second, that we’re dealing with a finite, specific population of undocumented immigrants. They’re not going to clone themselves. Like all of us, they’re going to get old, and they’re eventually going to die. The political and legal problem posed by “illegal immigration today” is only going to get smaller over time. In fact, as we all know, the American-born children of those undocumented immigrants are all going to be citizens from Day One.
And third of all, and in sum, the “immigration problem” boils down to a far more specific and narrow situation than so many of us have allowed ourselves to think. Although the Obama administration has done an energetic job of deporting some people, there just isn’t a strong enough consensus to kick out the finite population of undocumented. On the other hand, although a blanket amnesty is a far more elegant, enforceable, and principled policy than a patchwork of half-measures that plays favorites on the basis of ethnicity or education policy, there just isn’t a strong enough consensus to deliver that outcome, either.
So one thing we know for sure is that we’re not going to give the boot or give amnesty to the finite, specific population of undocumented immigrants who crossed the border illegally. And another thing we know is that birthright citizenship means we don’t have to worry about their kids’ status.
Critics of immigration reform harbor one of two justified fears. Some critics worry that reform would be like an on/off switch—suddenly and irreversibly changing America forever. Others worry that reform would be the opposite—a never-ending morass of bureaucracy, legalese, and special status, hardwiring yet more regulatory complexity and intrusive government into everything we do.
By focusing solely on the actual humans whose legal status needs to be finalized, however, we can act swiftly, safe in the knowledge that a policy tailored to them won’t transform America or make implementation a permanent process.
Give the undocumented some documentation, but not citizenship. Let them pay some back taxes. Let them learn English if they like. And let their American-born children be American citizens.
Is that a “perfect” approach? Is it “comprehensive?” More importantly, do we need to care? It sidesteps most of our political and culture-war drama, attending to our present needs in a way that wins us back the most valuable commodity of all in a democracy: time to think and talk in relative peace and quiet.
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A memorable moment in the gangster film
Pulp Fiction finds Uma Thurman’s character near death from a heroin overdose, then speedily revived when an adrenalin-filled syringe is plunged through her breastbone and into her heart.
That’s not at all how Toronto Public Health’s new opiate-reversal kits work – their antidote can be shot into any muscle. Nonetheless, distributed under the auspices of the city’s needle-exchange program, the kits’ results have been almost as dramatic in cities such as Chicago where they have been put to use.
The kits contain naloxone, an injectable antidote for overdoses of heroin, morphine, oxycontin and other opium-based narcotics that is highly effective and has long been deployed in hospital emergency rooms. Now it has a wider, buddy-system use. Toronto physician Philip Berger, who has spent decades administering to drug addicts and other street people, applauds the city’s new initiative, launched Aug. 31. So far about 75 of the kits have been handed out, worth about $25 apiece, comprising two new syringes and two 1-cc doses of naloxone.
Years ago, a patient of Dr. Berger was charged with manslaughter (later acquitted) when his girlfriend died of an accidental heroin overdose. Had naloxone been available, Dr. Berger suggests, the woman’s life might have been saved.
“It’s part of a general approach for reducing the harm, illness and death associated with drug use, rather than trying to eliminate drug use, which is totally hopeless.”
Shaun Hopkins oversees Toronto’s needle-exchange program, which dates back to 1989, and reaches perhaps a few thousand (recipients do not have to supply names) of Toronto’s estimated 10,000 to 25,000 intravenous drug-users.
Since naloxone distribution began, she’s aware of at least four instances where an addict in serious trouble was revived with a shot of the drug, also known by its brand name Narcan; two went to hospital for observation, two did not. Roughly 100 people die in Toronto from drug overdoses each year, chiefly heroin-related, and the hope is to dent those numbers.
So why now?
“I was hearing more and more about these programs and how important they’ve been in other cities,” Ms. Hopkins said.
These include Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Boston, and naloxone is also used at Vancouver’s InSite drug clinic, which last month got a green light from the Supreme Court (Toronto is currently studying the feasibility of a similar project, which Mayor Rob Ford strongly opposes. Mr. Ford’s office said he was unaware of the naloxone program).
The only other Canadian needle-exchange program that distributes naloxone is the Edmonton agency Streetworks.
“It has been very successful, we are seeing lives saved,” said Ashley Cherniwchan, the registered nurse attached to Streetworks who oversees naloxone distribution. Since the full program began in 2007, she’s aware of eight instances of successful intervention, but is sure many more have been unreported.
Junkies usually overdose for two reasons – they underestimate the strength of the drug, or they’ve resumed injecting after a break – and administering the antidote is not complicated.
Drug users are coached in spotting the warning signs: slow, shallow breathing, bluish lips, general unresponsiveness. The naloxone is injected into the muscle, even through clothing, rather than into a vein, and revival starts within one to four minutes.
The partner is also instructed to do chest compressions, roll the person on to their side to facilitate breathing, and call 911 – whether they stick around for the ambulance or not.
Naloxone has no side effects, but its main function – rapidly purging the system of opioids by blocking receptors in the brain – can be cathartic.
“The only problem is that it puts the person receiving it in a state of acute withdrawal, so they’re going to wake up and feel like using,” Dr. Berger said. “But it gives them an opportunity to use judiciously and carefully.”
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Naloxone's success in Chicago
The first street agency in North America to distribute naloxone was the Chicago Recovery Alliance, and as in Toronto and Edmonton, several years of groundwork came first.
In a city whose population is slightly larger than Toronto’s, more than 22,000 overdose prevention kits have been distributed by the CRA since 2001, and executive director Dan Bigg knows of a remarkable 2,720 instances in which a heroin or morphine overdose was reversed.
“It’s such a model of hope, even UN Global Fund has caught on to it,” he says of naloxone, which he has personally administered many times.
“It strengthens everything you do in outreach: Safer injections, safer sex, all of a sudden you have a consistent, life-affirming approach.”
In a program built around one drug user saving another with a quick, easy shot, one particular do-it-yourself client stands out: A bricklayer from Cicero, Ill., who would shoot up heroin while in the other hand holding a syringe of naloxone as he drifted off, in case he needed it.
“He just plunges it in, and he says he’s done that two or three times and revived himself,” Mr. Bigg said. “But that’s very unusual.”
As for that overdose scene in Pulp Fiction – fiction it truly is, Mr. Bigg says.
The adrenalin ostensibly used to revive Uma Thurman’s character is principally used for heart-attack victims.
“And when you overdose on opiates your heart is fine initially, the people I revived, their hearts were beating rapidly. The problem is, you don’t breathe enough, although finally with a lack of oxygen your heart will begin to stop and then you die. So keep the person breathing, that’s the primary thing we teach.”
Timothy Appleby
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The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and 12 other accounting institutes have sent an open letter to political leaders at the Copenhagen conference calling for universal accounting standards for relevant financial reporting on climate change.
The 15 organisations come from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Honk Kong, Japan and South Africa. Among the signatories are the UK’s Accounting for Sustainability project, which has been pushing for standards for several years.
The open letter is a call for a single set of universally accepted standards for climate change disclosure in mainstream financial reports. The letter maintains that an independent, stakeholder-led body with appropriate links to public authorities should be established to develop and adopt the accounting standards.
There are de-facto standards out there, including the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) surveys and in 2007 the World Economic Forum created the Climate Disclosure Standards Board which proposed a framework for climate risk-related reporting by corporations in May 2009.
It’s clear that some sort of minimum standard is required, as any sift through the annual reports from corporations shows. There are too many ways that information can be interpreted and comparisons can be well-nigh impossible.
As far as the IT implications go, most carbon management and reporting solutions offer a number of ways to slice and dice the data and even more formats for reporting, so it’s probably not going to have much of an impact on the market (except, perhaps, to lower the market entry barrier for new suppliers).
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Sell in May and go away could be the oldest stock market adage but new research indicates that it is not the most fruitful strategy — if only because you will forego the interim dividends paid by many companies. A study from Bestinvest, a wealth management group, shows that investors who kept their money in the market in the summer enjoyed average annualised market returns of 10.9 per cent — including dividend payments — over the past 25 years. Those who left received an average return of 9.8 per cent.
The “Sell in May” advice harks back to the era when City boys
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A MAJOR national conference on the uplands will be held at Newton Rigg College next month.
The event aims to address challenges thrown up by the current consultation on CAP payments and its potential impact on the way upland farms, moorland and forestry are managed.
The influential list of speakers includes Defra’s deputy director Mike Rowe, National Trust director general Dame Helen Ghosh, National Sheep Association chief executive Phil Stocker and Lake District National Park Authority chief executive Richard Leafe.
Organisers say the conference provides a forum for debate on ‘the many different and sometimes conflicting’ issues faced by uplands. Newton Rigg, near Penrith, is home to the National Centre for the Uplands (NCU) and the only UK college to have its own upland farm and grouse moor.
It is also unique in offering a specialist degree course in uplands agriculture with land management.
Douglas Phillips, who leads the National Centre for the Uplands, said: “The conference could not come at a more opportune moment, as policy makers across the UK look to finalise changes regarding the re-distribution of CAP funds, which could have a huge impact on how we manage our uplands and on the rural communities that rely upon them economically."
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Mr Phillips continued: “It will doubtless be a lively and informative two days, given the diverse range of speakers which includes practitioners, policy makers, researchers and planners. Our aim is to provide an opportunity for debate that will increase awareness of the different perspectives and thus encourage greater understanding and co-operation.
“We need to ensure that we build a vibrant and sustainable upland economy based on agriculture and positive land management that will ultimately protect some of the most vulnerable and precious landscapes in the United Kingdom for future generations.”
Entitled ‘Future Upland Management: Balancing environmental, social and economic demands’, the conference will take place on May 13 and 14. To register and for further details please contact Michaela Dixon – michaela.dixon@newtonrigg.ac.uk or call 01768-893508.
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RUTH SUNDERLAND: Lawsuit against Barclays over 'dark pool' operations in US yet more evidence of scale of Antony Jenkins' task
Thrown in at the deep end
Antony Jenkins can have been under no illusions when he took over from the unlamented Bob Diamond as chief executive of Barclays that changing the culture of the bank would be a gruelling effort.
The lawsuit filed against Barclays by the New York Attorney General alleging fraud, deceit and misrepresentation in its ‘dark pool’ operations in the US, is yet more evidence of the scale of his task.
The accusations are particularly damaging because, if true, Barclays will have been once again caught red-handed in undermining the integrity of markets, as it was in the Libor scandal.
Mountain to climb: Antony Jenkins knew that when he took over from Bob Diamond, changing the culture of the bank would be a gruelling effort
Defenders of Barclays are suggesting there might be political motivation by attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who is up for re-election this year and going after a big bank, particularly a foreign one, is seen as an easy way of courting popularity.
Be that as it may, Barclays will not be helped by the fact that the dark pool operation was known internally as ‘The Franchise’, which sounds like the title of a John Grisham novel.
Whatever the merits of its case, the odds are that Barclays will hand over a large sum to settle it, as Standard Chartered did over sanctions-busting, because the US officials hold all the cards.
Despite the sinister name, dark pools are not necessarily a bad thing in themselves.
They can provide better liquidity and pricing particularly at times when the dealing spreads on conventional markets have widened.
During the Crimea crisis in the spring, for example, the dark pool service run by trading platform Turquoise – owned by the London Stock Exchange and a group of investment banks – saw a surge in activity in Russian names such as Sberbank, as traders could deal at a more advantageous price than on the main exchanges. Allowing predators to lurk in the depths is a different matter entirely.
Barclays is unlikely to be the only bank in the firing line for this. US regulators are taking a long hard look at dark pools, which have proliferated in the past five or ten years as electronic trading has become ever faster and more sophisticated.
The old-fashioned idea that shares are always traded on a national stock exchange is far from reality: in the US there are 13 public markets – the Dow Jones, the Nasdaq and so on, but around 50 alternative trading systems, most of them unknown to the public.
This level of complexity can only make it easier for predators to game the system at the expense of ordinary investors.
According to market aficionados, between five and ten per cent of the 30-40bn euros of daily equities trading in Europe splashes through the pools. On Wall Street, the figure is around 40 per cent, making any malpractice a major concern to large and small investors.
Yet there is no single set of standards laying down common rules on investor protection and keeping out predatory high frequency traders.
As a consequence, some pools are distinctly murkier and more brackish than others. Regulators need to throw a strong searchlight on the dark pools, and not just at Barclays.
Carney’s curbs
The Bank of England’s first attempt at deflating the housing market bubble turned out to be something of an anti-climax.
There were fears that the Financial Policy Committee (FPC) might unleash draconian controls on mortgage borrowing.
In the event, the banks have been given plenty of headroom before they hit the new cap, which stipulates only 15 per cent of their total loans can go to people borrowing more than 4.5 times their income.
At present, only just over a tenth of the market is for loans that high, though the proportion is higher in London.
The impression created is that there is not an undue problem with high loan-to-income borrowers. The reality depends on the definition of ‘high.’
If the benchmark were brought down to four times income – still a very punchy multiple by historic standards – then we are talking about a much higher proportion: around a fifth of the market.
Another fascinating statistic in the Financial Stability Report is that last year almost a quarter of new mortgages taken out will run for 30 years or more, instead of the conventional 25-year term, meaning that more people will be in debt for longer.
Add to that the fact that people with large mortgages in relation to their income are also likely to have significantly higher unsecured debts such as credit cards and personal loans, and you have a chunky minority of people who are very vulnerable to an increase in rates.
Mark Carney’s belief is that household indebtedness is not an immediate risk to financial stability, but these numbers indicate he can not afford to be too sanguine.
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| 0.979437
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Vein opening is unlikely to help regenerate damaged myelin, which causes the movement difficulties, Dake said, but opening blocked veins looks like it may help alleviate fatigue, at least in people with relapsing-remitting MS. "It's a stretch to think opening up veins is going to deal with or reverse an injury that is due to demyelinating plaque, whereas the symptoms that are more general, such as fatigue and brain fog that are much more related to an obstruction in venous outflow from the brain -- those could potentially be reversed," he said.
The above comes from Dr. Dake himself fro, this article.
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/c ... 48915.html
So what about the people who claim to be able to throw their wheel chairs to the curb after receiving this procedure? According to Dr. Dake opening blocked veins is unlikely to help with movement difficulties so is Dr. Dake incorrect?
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| 0.99704
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heya
i don't have hypothyroidism. my thyroid levels like free t3 etc were tested during the diagnostic process and came back all right. not sure what end of the ranges i was in so i might dig out those results and have a look.
zinc nutrition is important for optimal thyroid function.
research shows zinc deficiency is associated with constipation, loss of libido, tinnitus, eyesight, hair loss, and skin issues.
ms patients tend to have zinc levels in the low end of the normal range. healthy controls have average levels in the high end of the normal range (around 18 umol/L).
here's a study comparing thyroid hormones and high and low zinc levels in apparently healthy controls:
Effect of Zinc on Some Biochemical Indices of Metabolism
Riitta Hartoma, E.A. Sotaniemi, J. Määttänen
Abstract
The role of zinc in some metabolic functions in man was investigated in 14 healthy male volunteers with primarily high or low serum zinc
. In all the subjects, results of laboratory tests reflecting
blood picture, metabolism of carbohydrates, fats and proteins and thyroid function
as well as serum calcium and phosphate levels varied within the normal range
. Significant differences between the subjects classified by serum zinc were found in α1-globulins. Serum thyroxine [JL edit: thyroxine is T4]
, effective thyroxine ratio and the immunoglobulins IgA showed a tendency to lower levels in subjects with low serum zinc
. Substitution with zinc sulphate resulted in an increase of
α1 -globulins, serum thyroxine
and effective thyroxine ratio, and a decrease of albumin. Other tests remained unchanged by the therapy. The results suggest that there is a relationship between zinc and some metabolic functions in healthy subjects without symptoms of zinc deficiency.
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| 0.948139
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Did you know that we are living on a smarter planet? People today are smarter than people who lived before us! Nah, that’s not true, brilliance and intellect has been with mankind since the beginning, but what has changed are the tools, technologies and ways to share information.
In tourism, marketing is a huge part of our business, sharing the right information to the right audience, via the right distribution channels, with the right message, image, video and/or audio – to make a sale! For the longest time if you could master this you were in good shape. That’s no longer the case!
Enter the world of INTER! Today’s travellers are looking towards companies that can demonstrate they skills related to their
INTER connections– how businesses link together to create a stream of opportunity that makes vacationing easy (e.g. weaving together itineraries connected by a theme focused on the visitors interest, or including FIT options within a travel package based on the connections company A has with B, and the list goes on) INTER relations– how are you connecting to, and relating to both your visitors (b2c) and your suppliers/partners/DMOs (b2b). Are you optimizing technology to create open and transparent ways to strengthen relationships, respond in real time and show the ‘human side’ of your business? INTER actions –how are you engaging your visitors? Engaging the senses to interact with people, places, and cultures is vital to differentiating your tourism product in today’s world. There are lots of kayak operators, hotels, restaurants with great chefs, festivals — but what types of interactions are you purposefully staging for your guests that are entertaining, educational, exclusive, exciting, escapist that differentiate you from the masses?
So if you haven’t stopped to think about you INTER – now’s a good time!
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| 0.999197
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Dumb Idea of the Day: Washington State's Electric Vehicle Fee Terrible Idea (At Least for Now)We all know about the concept of "win-win", an action that provides benefits to both parties. Well, Washington State's legislators seem to be more inclined to pass "lose-lose" laws... The state senate has passed a bill that would charge a $100 annual feel to electric car drivers to "to compensate for the lack of gas taxes they pay." The general concept is not without merit and the amount is not that big - after all, electric cars also use the roads and cause some wear & tear - but the timing is bad.
They're acting at cross-purpose with other governmental (state & federal) tax credits for electric vehicles. What's the point of giving on one side and then take away on the other? They'll only raise very very small sums because its so early in electric car adoption, so it won't really help maintain roads. I'm not even sure if they'll raise enough to pay for what it cost to pass that law and enforce it... In fact, the random variation in miles driven by big trucks on any given day probably causes more wear & tear on Washington's roads than all electric cars combined over 10 years. Big trucks cause exponentially more damage (ie. a truck 100 times heavier than a car might cause 1,000 or 10,000X more damage to a road).
So not only won't they raise much money and do anything for roads, but they'll also slow down electric vehicle adoption -- that's what taxes do, when you tax something, you get less of it, which is why it's better to tax bad things like pollution than good things like work. This is too bad because in a state with lots of hydro power, electric cars are particularly clean.
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| 0.999626
|
What drives small and mid-sized companies (SMEs) to incorporate sustainable practices into their business? Knowing the answers to this question will aid trade associations and other trusted advisors in developing their outreach and support programs aimed at the SME market. Sustainability4SMEs identified in a previous post that trade associations and a variety of other advisory organizations (e.g. chambers of commerce, economic development agencies) are the primary go-to sources of sustainable business information.
In the largest U.S.-based study to date on sustainability adoption and hurdles to implementation for SMEs, Sustainability4SMEs asked survey respondents to identify the drivers to implementing sustainability. Recognizing that there are myriad reasons influencing company decisions, the participants were allowed to check multiple responses.
The results of the question, shown in the figure below, were startling; inverse to what was expected.
Regulatory Compliance was the least often cited as a sustainability driving factor in spite of ever increasing regulations at all levels of government. This shows that government can impose as many onerous requirements on SMEs as it desires, but it remains unimportant in encouraging them to build sustainable practices into their ongoing operations.
From a carrot-stick perspective, adding more and more regulations for businesses only contributes to a business faltering or worse, failing. Regulatory compliance is an overhead cost adding to business’ balance sheets, certainly not a motivator for the income statement.
Upstream Supply Chain Imperatives and Financial Incentives also reside in the category of least frequently cited driving factors.
Upstream Supply Chain Imperatives include the ability to obtain a steady source of raw materials for a company’s outputs. This data is consistent with an earlier question in the survey identifying the type of business responding to the study. Respondents weigh heavily in the professional services sector (e.g. accounting, legal) which are knowledge-based industries. Raw materials are not a concern to this demographic.
Financial Incentives should have been a strong driver for implementing sustainability initiatives in small and mid-sized firms. A common market perception is that going green is expensive so one might think that the availability of a wide variety of incentives (block grants, utility rebates, federal, state and local rebates, etc.) would be a major consideration. However, based on this body of research, money is almost the least of a business’s concerns when it comes to sustainability. This may be due to a lack of knowledge of available funding sources to pursue. Here is another opportunity for trade associations, chambers of commerce and other trusted advisors to add value to their constituents.
The bulk of the remaining response options all fall within 15 percent of each other. Clearly there are numerous factors driving SMEs to implement sustainability initiatives, with Customer Demand being at the higher end of the scale.
Our study bifurcates between those implementing sustainability initiatives and those who are not pursuing a green strategy. This particular question was answered only by those who are pursuing sustainability. Our last post addressed the hurdles and barriers for those not implementing sustainability.
No matter which side of the fence your company is on regarding sustainability, we’d like your input into this body of work. Click here to complete the 28-question survey. Thanks for reading, participating and engaging with great comments. We look forward to sharing additional data from this research project.
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| 0.985923
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Written by
Staff Reports
The church needs the influences of both, so how do we reconcile the differences?
In the United States today, no two terms are more polarizing in the English lexicon than the words "conservative" and "liberal."
Time Magazine recently reported that political polls reveal an even split among conservatives and liberals. Each now claims 45 percent of the electorate, while only 10 percent remains undecided. Never before has this nation been so polarized, the article said.
What is true in the political landscape is readily apparent in the religious realm as well. While the terms can be used in descriptive ways, all too often they are used in a pejorative fashion. ("You must be one of those liberals!" or "What do you expect of those conservatives!") Both become code words for those other people who don't think or act like us.
Unfortunately, when this happens in the church, such stereotyping not only fails to build up the body of Christ, but it makes communication more difficult between people who usually have far more in common than they have differences. Furthermore, it also implies that truth can be found with only one faction or another when, in fact, the threads of both conservatism and liberalism are woven throughout the history of the Christian tradition.
The church of Jesus Christ—be it the UCC or known by another name—is by definition a conservative institution. The church is, quite literally, a conserver of values and beliefs. As such, part of its DNA is to maintain and resist changing traditional or existing views or beliefs. Anyone who has been part of a church for long understands this. It is by tradition that we are grounded, shaped and nurtured.
But the church of Jesus Christ is also a liberal institution. If we define liberal, as Webster does, as "one who is open-minded in the observance of orthodox or traditional forms," then who was more liberal than Jesus? Not only did Jesus challenge the purity codes of his day (talking to women, eating with Gentiles, healing on the Sabbath), but he also advocated a radical new understanding of God that welcomed outsiders—often at the expense of insiders—and shook Judaism to its roots. It certainly wasn't adherence to existing traditions and beliefs that led to Jesus' death. To this day, the church has been a liberating religious and social force through the world.
The church is both conservative and liberal. To insist otherwise is to ignore the contradictions of human life and the context of each local congregation.
Rather than using these terms as weapons to separate the sheep from the goats, should we not view them as gifts that can help us understand and appreciate how the God revealed in Jesus Christ speaks to so many people in so many different circumstances?
After all, the primary question for the church—including the UCC—is not "Are you liberal or conservative?" The primary question is "Do you know and have a relationship with the God revealed in Jesus Christ?"
The Rev. Stephen C. Gray is Indiana-Kentucky Conference Minister.
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| 0.707489
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In 1974 the Stanford computer science community ate at Loui's. [1] As I sat eating one evening in the fall, Butler Lampson approached me, and in the course of inquiring what I was doing, remarked that the IBM Lucifer system was about to be made a national standard. I hadn't known it, and it set me thinking.
My thoughts went as follows:
NSA doesn't want a strong cryptosystem as a national standard, because it is afraid of not being able to read the messages.
On the other hand, if NSA endorses a weak cryptographic system and is discovered, it will get a terrible black eye.
Hints that Butler was correct began to appear and I spent quite a lot of time thinking about this problem over the next few months. It led me to think about trap-door cryptosystems and perhaps ultimately public-key cryptography.
When the Proposed Data Encryption Standard was released on the 17th of March 1975 [2], I thought I saw what they had done. The basic system might be ok, but the keyspace was on the small side. It would be hard to search, but not impossible. My first estimate was that a machine could be built for $650M that would break DES in a week. I discussed the idea with Marty Hellman and he took it on with a vengance. Before we were through, the estimated cost had fallen to $20M and the time had declined to a day. [3]
Our paper started a game in the cryptographic community and many papers on searching through DES keys have since been written. About three years after the publication of our paper, Robert Jueneman --- then at Satellite Business Systems in McLean, Virginia --- wrote "The Data Encryption Standard vs. Exhaustive Search." [4] This opus was substantially more optimistic about the chances for DES breaking. It predicted that by 1985 a half-million dollar investment would get you a DES key every hour and that by 1995, $10 million similarly spent would reduce that time to two seconds, an estimate remarkably close to one made fifteen years later.
A decade later, Yvo Desmedt and Jean-Jaques Quisquater made two contibutions, one whimsical, one serious. Using a related "birthday problem" sort of approach, they proposed a machine for attacking many cryptographic problems at a time. [5] Their whimsical suggestion took advantage of the fact that the population of China was about the square root of the size of the DES key space.
The year 1993 brought a watershed. Michael Wiener of Bell-Northern Research designed the most solid paper machine yet. [6] It would not be too far off to describe it as a Northern Telecom DMS100 telephone switch, specialized to attacking DES. What made the paper noteworthy was that it used standard Northern Telecom design techniques from the chips to the boards to the cabinets. It anticipated an investment of under a million dollars for a machine that would recover a key every three hours. A provocative aside was the observation that the required budget could be hidden in a director's budget at BNR.
Finally, in 1996, an estimate was prepared by not one or two cryptographers but by a group later, and not entirely sympathetically, called the magnificent seven. [7] This estimate outlined three basic approaches loosely correlated with three levels of resources. At the cheap end was scrounging up time on computers you didn't need to own. In the middle was using programmable logic arrays, possibly PLA machines built for some other purpose such as chip simulation. The high end was the latest refinement of the custom chip approach.
Exhaustive key search is a surprising problem to have enjoyed such popularity. To most people who have considered the probem, it is obvious that a search through 2ö56 possibilites is doable if somewhat tedious. If it a is mystery why so many of them, myself included, have worked to refine and solidify their estimates, it is an even greater mystery that in the late 1990s, some people have actually begun to carry out key searches.
At the 1997 annual RSA cryptographic trade show in San Francisco, a prize was announced for cracking a DES cryptogram [8]. The prize was claimed in five months by a loose consortium using computers scattered around the Internet. It was the most dramatic success so far for an approach earlier applied to factoring and to breaking cryptograms in systems with 40-bit keys.
At the 1998 RSA show, the prize was offered again. This time the prize was claimed in 39 days [9] a result that actually represents a greater improvement than it appears to. The first key was found after a search of only 25% of the key space; the second was not recovered until the 85% mark. Had the second team been looking for the first key, they would have found it in a month.
These efforts used the magnificent seven's first approach. No application of the second has yet come to light. This book skips directly to the third. It describes a computer built out of custom chips. A machine that 'anyone' can build; from the plans it presents --- a machine that can extract DES keys in days at reasonable prices, or hours at high prices. With the appearance of this book and the machine it represents, the game changes forever. It is not a question of whether DES keys can be extracted by exhaustive search; it is a question of how cheaply they can be extracted and for what purposes.
Using a network of general purpose machines that you do not own or control is a perfectly fine way of winning cryptanalytic contests, but it is not a viable way of doing production cryptanalysis. For that, you have to be able to keep your activities to yourself. You need to be able to run on a piece of hardware that you can protect from unwanted scrutiny. This is such a machine. It is difficult to know how many messages have been encrypted with DES in the more than two decades that it has been a standard. Even more difficult is knowing how many of those messages are of enduing interest and how many have already been captured or remain potentially accessible on disks or tapes, but the number, no matter precisely how the question is framed must be large. All of these messages must now be considered to be vulnerable.
The vulnerability does not end there, however, for cryptosystems have nine lives. The most convincing argument that DES is insecure would not outweigh the vast investment in DES equipment that has accumulated throughout the world. People will continue using DES whatever its shortcomings, convincing themselves that it is adequate for their needs. And DES, with its glaring vulnerabilities, will go on pretending to protect information for decades to come.
[1] Louis Kao's Hsi-Nan restaurant in Town and Country Village, Palo Alto.
[2] 40 Federal Register 12067 [3] Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman. "Exhaustive cryptanalysis of the NBS data encryption standard". Computer, 10(6):74-84, June1977. [4] R. R. Jueneman, The Data Encryption Standardvs.Exhaustive Search:Practicalities and Politics. 5 Feb 1981. [5] Yvo Desmedt, "An Exhaustive Key Search Machine Breaking One Million DES Keys", presented at Eurocrypt 1987. Chapter 9 of this book ( Cracking DES).Jean-Jacques Quisquater and Yvo G. Desmedt, "Chinese Lotto as an Exhaustive Code-Breaking Machine", Computer, 24(11):14-22, November1991. [6] Michael Wiener, "Efficient DES Key Search", presented at the rump session of Crypto '93. Reprinted in Practical Cryptography for DataInternetworks, W. Stallings, editor, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp.31-79 (1996). Currently available at http://www.eff.org/pub/Crypto/Crypto_misc/Technical/des_key_search.ps.gz [7] Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, Ronald L. Rivest, Bruce Schneier, Tsutomu Shimomura, Eric Thompson, and Michael Wiener. "Minimal key lengths for symmetric ciphers to provide adequate commercial security: A report by an ad hoc group of cryptographers and computer scientists", January 1996. Available at http://www.bsa.org/policy/encryption/cryptographers_c.html [8] http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/97challenge/ [9] June 17, 1997, See the announcements at http://www.rsa.com/des/ and http://www.frii.com/~rcv/deschall.htm (February 24, 1998), http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/10544.html and http://www.distributed.net
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| 0.516912
|
Books, newspapers, and magazines have not only gone digital, they’ve gone ubiquitous, contextual, and formless. The message is now abstracted from the medium, and the book is a channel-independent experience—whether held in its physical form, heard as the spoken word, or read on an eReader, mobile phone, or desktop computer.
The invention of the printing press transformed the physical object that is a book from the output of human transcription to that of mass production, ushering in the era of information as a
physical object. More recently, mass adoption of the World Wide Web and a plethora of Internet-connected devices has brought us into the digital era of information. But we are on the cusp of yet another technological sea change. The pendulum that swung from physical to digital is now swinging back to the real world. However, this time information has become formless, contextual, and ubiquitous. In the words of Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati, “[Information] is bleeding out of the Internet and out of personal computers, and it is being embedded into the real world.” [1] Welcome to the new cross-channel, multiplatform, transmedia information age. A Sign of What’s to Come
As goes the book, so goes every product and service under the sun. Seamless, cross-channel experiences are the way of the future, as technology fades into the background and the personal, physical, and social context determine the methods we use to interact with information. But this isn’t a problem for the distant future; designing effective cross-channel experiences is a problem that we must address here and now.
Retail
Most brick-and-mortar retailers mail out the occasional print catalog, provide phone service, and have online stores, with the more adventurous offering smartphone-friendly Web sites or applications, as in the example shown in Figure 2.
However, these channels aren’t isolated from one another; increasingly, they overlap. Forrester’s Patti Freeman Evans found that 70% of consumers research online, then buy offline. [2] A 2010 report by NCR Corporation [3] found that
43% of consumers want to use their mobile phone for price comparison while out shopping. The vast majority of consumers prefer a seamless experience across channels:
According to this report: “87% want a similar way to access products and services whether online, in the store, on their mobile phone, or using a self-service device.”
Travel
Traveling by plane is a quintessentially multichannel experience. Once you know where you want to go, there is the messy business of booking the flight—perhaps using your laptop; checking in 24 hours before your flight on your smartphone; traveling to the correct airport terminal, then using the kiosk to print your boarding pass; interacting with a customer service person to check in your luggage; running the security gauntlet, where you present either your paper boarding pass or an electronic version on your phone; and finally, sitting down in your seat on the aircraft, where you browse the movie selections on the entertainment console.
A 2011 report on the usability of travel Web sites by Webcredible [4]—in addition to placing Virgin Atlantic’s Web site at the top of its list, shown in Figure 3—emphasized the importance of providing consumers with a seamless cross-channel experience:
“As consumers become more and more demanding in the digital space, the travel industry will need to be more dedicated to the usability and user experience across all of their channels to gain customers and build loyalty.”
Banking
Managing your money often results in a dynamic interplay between channels, as Figure 4 shows. But while you could likely achieve many tasks at your local bank branch, a nearby ATM, over the phone, on your home computer, or on your smartphone, each channel is likely convenient in some situations, but a hassle in others. Your mobile phone is well suited to quickly checking your account balance on the go. However, you might find it easier to use online banking on your laptop to pay the monthly bills.
Ernst & Young’s 2011 report on global consumer banking [5] found that, while 66% of respondents were dissatisfied with their existing mobile banking, competition among banks to provide a seamless experience across channels will be fierce:
“Practical innovations across channels that leverage technology to deliver a more seamless and personalized experience will therefore be a major competitive battleground in all retail banking markets.”
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| 0.579265
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Increases in Housing Costs in Austria Have Grown At Twice the Rate of Inflation
Austrian News Brief: March 2008
Austrian households now spend every fourth Euro on housing, according to a new study by Kreutzer, Fischer and Partner Consulting, GmbH, in Vienna.
And while increased energy costs, up 31.7%, are certainly a factor, they are far from the only one and not the largest. The increases include dramatically higher costs for garbage removal (+55.4%), rents (+41%), sewage (+40.6%) and water supply (+21%), against a background inflation rate of 20.1%. In 2006, the average Austrian household spent €875 for housing costs, against an average monthly gross income of €3,500.
These increases in fees reflect a tendency “to use community infrastructure as a source of revenue,” the study’s authors suggested, in a Nov. 16 article in
Der Standard.
An additional explanation is the cost of new construction, now an average of €1,550 per spare meter, and similar increases for renovation. The average Austrian household carries a housing loan of €24,000, the study said.
Additional pressure on costs was traced to the €2.5 million annual housing subsidies, of which 80% goes for new construction, rather than renovation. Of this, most goes to large construction firms building public housing, with too little review of quality and efficiency, or application of modern construction techniques, Andreas Kreutzer who directed the study, told the Austrian daily
Die Presse.
“The construction companies earn money only when they build. Renovation doesn’t interest them,” Kreutzer said. “The results are higher maintenance fees in the older buildings.”
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| 0.984825
|
Social media optimization is using social media sites to create publicity and awareness of your products and thereby gain attention and interaction from customers.
Optimizing for social media strengthens your brand and its visibility and thereby attracts new customers. It helps them to know more about your business and recommend it to others. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are platforms for people to connect and discuss the topics they like. Here are some effective tips with which you can encourage your community to learn more about your brand.
It is very important to create valuable content which your audience will want to experience. Useful and relevant content attracts more customers. Social media posts that make people smile are great because it will make your audience and prospective customers relate more to your brand. Content that is clickable and sharable strengthens a long-term relationship with the customer. Posting emotion based content can also work wonders in ensuring constructive community engagement. Motivational and positive quotes or pictures increase customer attention and persuade them to connect emotionally.
Using the “Like” or “Share” option is one of the best ways to interact with customers. It can be used as a way to ask questions and people can respond using these options. Any audience would love participating in good contests where they can win prizes. Some businesses post content and give extra entry credits to people who share the post, comment on it, or give it a “like”. Giving an incentive to readers such as access to free course, set of videos or an e-book is one of the best ways to create a bonding between brand owners and customers.
Being transparent is another important tip for increasing
social media engagement. It gives more clarity about your brand and its updates.
The other essential tactics for increasing community engagement are
Find out when customers come online so that questions can be asked and valuable suggestions obtained in order to build a strong relationship with them. Post success stories of customers who enjoy the product and share them with your audience. Mention good comments on social media sites. Positive comments expose the brand to a larger audience.
Successful businesses use social media platforms to:
Build a lifetime connection with customers Maintain their brand at the top Expand brand awareness Let customers know about new offers Bring more qualified traffic to the websites Address customer service inquires Build credibility and trust online
It is important to use new techniques to increase community engagement through social media to attract prospective customers and maintain existing ones. It is all about letting people know more about your brand and its updates and create a sense of trust. Obtaining feedbacks is important because it will help to improve your products/services in keeping with customer requirements. When it comes to enhancing your social media presence and engagement, consider obtaining social media optimization services that will prove to be very useful.
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| 0.894418
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Bush administration officials are urging Congress to increase funding for a new office that would promote democracy and stabilization in regions prone to conflict around the world.
Acknowledging that it did not adequately plan for the post-war reconstruction of Iraq, the Bush administration has created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization at the State Department so that the United States would be better prepared to coordinate such efforts in the aftermath of future intervention in other troubled states.
The office brings together civilian experts in such fields as political administration, law enforcement and economics, and military officials to plan and carry out stability operations.
Congressional critics have said policy disputes and turf battles between the Defense Department and State Department hurt planning efforts for postwar Iraq, contributing to the rise of the insurgency and the difficulty in restoring basic services, including electricity and public safety.
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, principal deputy in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense Ryan Henry said the new reconstruction office has the Pentagon's backing.
Administration officials say the office was not created because other military missions are planned. They say the office could work to prevent politically unstable states from sliding into civil war or breeding terrorism, making less need for U.S. intervention.
James Kunder is assistant administrator for Asia and the Near East for the Agency for International Development, which will play a role in the reconstruction office.
"The U.S. government needs to better understand exactly what to do when we have a crisis," he said. "And we are looking not just at after states have fallen apart. But we are looking at countries that are beginning to show the signs of instability and trying to generate resources so that a penny spent now saves the taxpayer a dollar later."
Mr. Kunder says some of these countries are in Asia.
"We are not only looking at Afghanistan reconstruction and Iraq reconstruction, but we are also looking at Nepal, and we are looking at the fraying of the social order in Bangladesh," he explained. "We are looking at Sri Lanka. We are looking at continued instability in Mindanao in the Philippines."
Mr. Kunder says promoting democracy by investing in political parties and civil society organizations in areas where political instability appears to be growing can make it less likely that those societies will fall into conflict.
But Congress has not shown the kind of support the administration is seeking. Lawmakers approved only $3 million of the $17 million President Bush requested for the office this year.
Mr. Bush is seeking another $24 million to fund the office next year, as well as $100 million for a new conflict response fund.
Coordinator of the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization Carlos Pascual warned Congress of the impact it would have if lawmakers do not approve Mr. Bush's request.
"What we will not be able to do is to develop an active response corps that establishes the kind of standby capabilities that allows us to move into the field effectively and quickly," he said. "It will affect our ability to develop a kind of civilian reserve that all of us have underscored as absolutely critical to have that type of transformational skill that is necessary to affect a conflict early in the process so we can influence the dynamic. It will affect our capacity to deploy resources to the field quickly."
The Pentagon, which wants the State Department to take on a greater role in stability operations, has offered to transfer $200 million to support the new coordinator's office.
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The earth provides all the necessary resources for human beings to survive and prosper. But as the global population grows and develops, the demand for energy and consumer goods increases. This has led to increased pollution and misuse of natural resources, causing great damage to the environment. In turn, people’s health, food supplies and livelihoods are increasingly threatened.
Be it the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that contribute to climate change, the overuse of agricultural soil that deteriorates the ground and often leads to deforestation, the contamination of water through bacteria and chemicals or the loss of biodiversity - environmental challenges are plentiful.
Today, many people speak about “sustainability” when highlighting an alternative model of how human beings can develop economically and socially without putting too much strain on the environment. Sustainable development is defined as “development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
This clearly shows that youth are at the heart of the sustainability debate. As politicians sometimes lack the necessary long-term thinking that is needed to effectively address pressing environmental issues, it’s key that global youth have a say in environmental policies, which have a direct impact on the current and future environment they live in.
Researching issues connected to the environment, you might want to
check out these resources:
United Nations Environment Programme -
Tunza
United Nations -
Sustainable Development
YOUNGO -
Youth and Climate
Connect 4 Climate -
Connecting to Tackle Climate Change
Web Ecoist -
25 Environmental Organizations
This is a speech I made for my Architectural Essays class as an introduction to our class. Hel...
In 2017, we renew our commitment towards Zimbabwean children and its young people. For us it is a...
Do you want to be a leader? Do you have a passion? Do you want to make a difference in this world? If you answered yes to this questions, you and I already have few things in common. My name is Ximena Coronado, I'm 15 years old, and I'm an environmental activist. It all truly began when...
The biggest challenge impacting the youth of today's generation is the battle they fight from with...
The Commonwealth Youth Council is currently working on a two-year project, ‘I am Able’, to raise awareness of the lives of young people with disabilities across Commonwealth member states. The Commonwealth believes this is an important issue, as too often the voices, desires, needs and s...
After hearing about the Global Goals in 2015 by Hank Green, I was determined to help them become accomplished anyway possible. I decided that the best way to help accomplish those goals was to have a town hall meeting. It is very important to me that people become aware of these goals becaus...
Returning to fundamentals, far from perceiving compatibility on the basis of social ratings and mutual series fanatics, let’s imagine relationships as a matter of compatibility in PCs, where you get yourself a brand new clean computer, and you start personalizing this device, through inser...
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Where do I buy a walker?
Purchasing Options
Can I receive financial assistance to purchase my walker?
You have several options:
Durable Medical Equipment (DME) stores. These are stores that specialize in supplying one-stop shopping for almost all types of home health care equipment including walkers and wheelchairs. The staff can provide knowledgeable assistance in determining which equipment is right for you and may also be able to link you with a therapist if you need one.
If you are eligible for financial assistance, most government, charitable, and insurance funding agencies will usually require you to purchase your walker from a “preferred list” of DME stores. Most funding programs stipulate that you purchase your walker through a store that offers repair and maintenance service on the equipment.
DME stores often have a pool of used or rental walkers that may be sold at a reduced price. A few DME stores will sell only recycled or second hand equipment at a reduced cost. Please note that many funding agencies will not assist in the purchase of recycled equipment due to the limited warranties offered.
Pharmacies. Major pharmacies such as Shoppers Drug Mart and Jean Coutu as well as local independents often carry medical walkers or rollators.
Department stores. “Big-Box” Warehouse stores, Discount stores such as Wal-Mart, and Costco now carry walkers. This is a good option if you don’t need sales support in selecting the correct walker or if you are paying for the purchase entirely yourself.
Personal classified advertisements. You can look in local newspapers or on-line sources such as Craig’s List and Kijiji.
Bulletin boards. in nursing homes, churches, senior centers and hospitals.
Garage sales. Signs may be posted in your community or news spread through word of mouth.
There may be agencies in your local community that supply equipment free of charge or for a minimal charge if you need a walker on a temporary basis. You can investigate the following options:
Government funded home health care programs sometimes provide equipment depending if you are receiving nursing or therapy at home.
Associations for specific diseases/conditions (i.e. the MS Society, Red Cross, March of Dimes) often have “lending cupboards”.
Can I receive financial assistance to purchase my walker?
You’ll need to consider much more than physical ability.
What about the environment and social supports?
And if so, how do you find a therapist?
We have a number of associations you may contact.
You have options and we have recommendations.
There is also financial assistance available to you.
From basic activities to common mistakes, here’s a guide to help you use your non-wheeled walker or wheeled walker safely and effectively.
Commonly given answers. Feel free to contact us if you’d like to contribute and help others.
Professionally prepared resources that offer guidance to a successful thought process based on past experiences.
Many thanks to these companies for sponsoring Walker Facts. It's their support that keeps this resource free to everyone.
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Access to medicines is the most under-utilized opportunity for pharma to communicate with patients.
In Europe, access to medicines has, so far, been regarded a “non-issue”. Given that most treatments are reimbursed by national health coverage, patients usually did not have to worry about obtaining a drug once it had been prescribed to them. Yet, this summer, we witnessed a shift of paradigm. The European economic crisis has shaken one of the pillars of the EU healthcare system: free access to prescribed drugs.
This summer, Greek patients became hostages in a struggle opposing health authorities unable to pay their debts and pharma taking a strong stance against this by withholding delivery of some treatments to patients.
Psychologically, this had a profound impact on patients in Greece, as Kathi outlines in the video below.
The fact that pharma stopped delivering treatments, eroded patient’s trust. If pharma truly cared about its patients’, was it not in a moral obligation to communicate about what happened, why and for how long patients will have to endure this situation? What better way to utilize social media in transparent ways to inform about the motives, reassure about future availability and continuously update on delivery logistics and safety of patients?
There is a lot of talk about how trust is the foundation of any social media engagement. Maybe in this particular instance though, it is the other way around: using social media to engage on the access to your treatments might be the only way to regain trust.
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Warm welcome for retention of natural environment quangos Thursday 14th October 2010
In response to today’s publication of the Government’s review of quangos, The Wildlife Trusts warmly welcome the commitment to retain natural environment bodies. The conservation organisation depends on them to help achieve its vision for A Living Landscape and Living Seas.
Stephanie Hilborne OBE, chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, said:
“We welcome Rt Hon Caroline Spelman’s recognition of the importance of Natural England, Environment Agency, the Forestry Commission and Joint Nature Conservation Committee. Substantial reform is already underway including moves to ask the voluntary sector to take on various functions. We will continue to work in partnership with these vital bodies to make the most of our strong local presence.
Part of the reform will include looking at the future of land. Currently The Wildlife Trusts manage 44 of the 84 National Nature Reserves (NNR) not directly managed by Natural England (NE). The messages are that the rest of the series will now be moved away from the state. Each NNR will be a key element of a local ecological network and The Wildlife Trusts are keen to buy time to ensure the best outcome for each of these national treasures. Also key will be how the Forestry Commission (FC) and Environment Agency (EA) go about any land disposals and the priority they afford to securing the right ownership for their land which is of current or future wildlife value. The recent Review Group made direct reference to this1.
Stephanie Hilborne continued: “The elements of reform that relate to out-sourcing of work to the voluntary sector must be carefully managed. We are looking for open processes which can allow us to play to our strengths. The changes in Wales will also be key2.
Also welcomed by The Wildlife Trusts is the decision to retain the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) as a separate body. The HLF has helped transform the fortune of local wildlife around the UK since its formation. The continued Big Lottery Fund is also a key force for good both for nature and people. The Wildlife Trusts manage a £50m Local Food programme for Big Lottery and it has funded vital programmes which demonstrate the value the natural environment holds for people around the UK.
Stephanie added: “And finally, it is with a big sigh of relief that there is continuity for the Marine Management Organisation (MMO). The MMO will be key to securing delivery of the 2009 Marine & Coastal Access Act, for which The Wildlife Trusts played a pivotal campaigning role.”
Story by RSWT
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Feb. 24, 2014 – The Wisconsin Judicial Code would specifically authorize judges to give litigants, including self-represented litigants, information or use techniques to simplify legal proceedings, under a petition that received a public hearing today at the state supreme court.
The supreme court also heard testimony on a petition that would authorize the Office of Lawyer Regulation (OLR) to post public notice on its website when a lawyer is being formally investigated for alleged ethical misconduct (see more on this petition from a recent article in
WisBar InsideTrack).
The court did not discuss either petition as public hearings consumed the entire day and left no time for an administrative conference. Thus, the court will hold both petitions for consideration at a later date.
Judges Turn Out to Support Pro Se Petition
Numerous Wisconsin judges and attorneys appeared in support of petition 13-14, which would amend and create Wisconsin Judicial Code rules to make clear that judges can take “reasonable efforts” to facilitate the ability of all litigants, including self-represented litigants, to be fairly heard.
The petition, submitted by the Wisconsin Access to Justice (ATJ) Commission in 2013, recognizes the significant number of Wisconsin citizens who enter court proceedings each year without a lawyer, especially in family law cases.
It largely codifies the sorts of discretionary acts that many judges are already using, explained former Appeals Court Judge Margaret Vergeront, who testified for the ATJ Commission.
Specifically, judges could use their discretion in “using techniques that enhance the process of reaching a fair determination in the case.” Judges who don’t want to take such measures would not be required as the proposed language simply allows judges to use their discretion. It also aplies to "all litigants," not just pro se litigants.
For instance, judges could take reasonable steps to explain legal concepts in everyday language, provide information about the proceedings, or permit narrative testimony, among other actions included within the petition’s non-exhaustive list.
Judges, attorneys, and associations support the petition as a way to improve access to justice for the increasing number of self-represented litigants and create efficiencies for judges and commissioners who hear their cases.
The State Bar of Wisconsin supports the petition, as does the Wisconsin Trial Judges Association, the Wisconsin Committee of Chief Judges, the Court of Appeals, and the Wisconsin Association of Judicial Court Commissioners, among others.
Appeals, circuit, and municipal court judges testified in support of the petition at today’s public hearing, including Jeffrey Kremers, chief judge of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court. State Bar President Patrick J. Fiedler also testified in support of the petition, noting that the State Bar’s Board of Governors voted 37-3 to support it.
Kremers and other judges said the rule simply authorizes what many judges across the state are already doing to address the high volume of pro se litigants, and judges who are hesitant to use such techniques would have assurance that the rules allow it.
Justice Patience Roggensack raised concern that the proposal undermines the adversarial system, questioning how far judges could go in helping pro se litigants.
“I see a lot of problems,” Justice Roggensack said. “It may be that we need to change our system, but what you are portraying is not an adversarial system. I have concern that our courts could be turned into social service agencies.”
Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson seemed to support the proposal. She suggested the best solution is allowing court appointed counsel in civil cases, but that solution is not currently achievable given the costs involved. “If we can’t do the best thing, we should not be stopped from doing something,” the chief justice said.
Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Mary Kuhnmuench said the proposal addresses a "changed landscape.” Historically, litigants had lawyers, and judges are now dealing with a massive number who do not.
“That’s the bench now,” Kuhnmuench said. “We better recognize it and figure it out.”
Michael Gonring, a partner at Quarles & Brady LLP in Milwaukee and long-time advocate for access to justice initiatives and pro bono programs, said a represented side, in his experience, is grateful when a judge makes efforts to inform a pro se litigant.
“I do not see this as an assault on the adversarial system at all,” Gonring said. “Cases involving pro se litigants can get messy, and we hope the judge takes control and makes things easier because that makes things easier for us and our clients.”
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I. Introduction: Until recently I was of the opinion that Pakistani immigrants were highly intellectual learned people that decided to settle in America because they could not completely utilize their education back home, and thought that by staying in Pakistan they were doing injustice to their education. Being in America for over a year and mingling within the local Desi community (as the Pakistani immigrant community is known as) I have learned that the government of United States of America has a big social problem that is developing inside their own borders. I do not in any way intend to be discriminatory as there are some highly intellectual learned Pakistani people present in America but America's political correctness is being misused. In this paper I will try to focus on the life of a Pakistani immigrant, after settling in Southern California, and its social implications.
II. Methodology: I decided to interview three different types of families that belonged to the three classes of the Desi community, upper, lower and median.
Each of these families' shared similar characteristics; a son, a daughter, the wife and the husband. Namely, the Azariah, Mohsin and Saroia family. These interviews would help me analyze my observations about these families. I have known these three families for about a year and have noted some distinct characteristics of each family. These interviews were totally life based i.e. I talked to the families about their life before coming to America and their present life. I asked them about the factors that motivated them to relocate. I inquired about preliminary hardships. What seemed most interesting was the families' dependence upon their children's well being. These thirty minute interviews were crisp and concise and in the end I was left with a lot of notes about each family that when analyzed shocked me even more.
III. Findings: Since my method of fact finding was totally literary and no family shared the same characteristic it was virtually impossible to represent the findings with tables, graphs, pie charts etc. However, following is a jist of collected and analyzed facts about each family.
The Azariah's a small content family that is socially stratified to the median class accurately fulfilled all my speculations. Mr. Azariah a motor mechanic by profession stepped onto US soil about ten years ago. His reason for relocating was that he had dreamt of earning in dollars all his life. He came here on a visitor's visa and took advantage of his religion (Christianity) to seek political asylum. He had put no thought into post-relocating circumstances. Over here he got some teaching credentials by utilizing student loans. He is now teaching English at a public school in Pasadena. His wife is an ordinary housewife and his children have hopes of going to some of the top-notch 4-year colleges for higher education. What really hit me was that though he really wanted to succeed he did not have the means to achieve what he wanted.
The Mohsins whom I would socially stratify into the lower class have a little different but equally interesting story. Mr. Mohsin came here after completing his Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Philippines. He was laid off due to the slump in the Aerospace Industry and now is merely a sustaining engineer in a computer-related firm. He came here to make a better future but could not, this I thought was due to the pride he had. From my observation and his way of talking I deduced that he thought that his biggest accomplishment was migrating to America and for this he should receive respect in the Desi community and in his community back home. It kind of made him different from other Pakistani's because he was a so-called American now. He had no plans of making something out of himself. His wife an accountant in the Metropolitan Travel Agency leaves home at six in the morning, comes back at five, doesn't even look after the household and is always cribbing about things. All the work is left with Mr. Mohsin and his mother-in-law. Even though they both make reasonable money their standard of living is still low.
The Saroias on the other hand have a totally different story. I would stratify them in the upper class of the Desi community and I think they should be the role model for the Desi community. Mr. Saroia himself comes from a very good family and has basically earned the right to reside in America. He came here when the computer industry was short of software programmers, by proving himself in the market he got sponsored for permanent residence. His wife is in the nursing profession. The couple strives for stability and that's what I think is the key to their success. Mr. Saroia had planned everything before shifting to America and he knew that he would be an asset to the industry. Their children display proper upbringing and are planning to attend 4-year colleges. Mr. Saroia is ready for all the expenses. The couple makes good money and is constantly moving higher in their standard of living. Altogether the family is pretty humble.
IV. Discussion: Looking at all of these families one can state that they all want to enjoy the fringe benefits of America. For many of these people depression outweighs risks, as they are all desperate to come out of their community in Pakistan. Most of them don't even have a plan and completely make their decisions of relocating based upon mood swings. Let me first start on discussing the abuse of America's political correctness. The asylum processes have become so easy for these Pakistani Christians that they don't even think twice about applying for it. I mean that procedure was for people that are really in danger of their lives being taken away from them, I know so many people that just applied because they wanted to get their hands on the "dollar". In wrongfully applying they are taking the space allocated for another person who needs it more than them. Excessive and hurried appeals for asylum are one of the major causes for instability among this Desi community they don't plan about what they are going to do after receiving asylum and many resent they even applied for it because the charm of America withers away in two months time. The Azariah's are a family that adopted this process of trying to make a better living. But can you justify a motor mechanic who all his life has been studying in an education system where English is not emphasized teaching English in our public schools, schools that will produce some of our nation's top leaders. People cry that our states academic scores are falling, if they just look into these teachers' profiles they will know why. I am not saying that diversity is a bad thing, introducing our youth to other cultures is a good thing but socially thinking I would not risk the study of our youth in the hands of a motor mechanic the disadvantages of this by far outnumber the advantages. I know that the government has raised the political count of South East Asians due to the success of the ones that came a decade ago and brought prosperity to our economy. Next I will like to discuss the effects this community has on our taxes. When everything else fails for these people they start relying on social security. Not that this is a bad thing, but this is affecting our society in two ways. One, it is increasing the amount of taxes we are paying and, second, it is giving birth to a community that is socially lazy, one that does not want to work and still get all the benefits. All that I am saying is that people like Mr. Azariah, though successful in making the journey out of Pakistan are straining all our resources and are in no way benefiting tour society. These immigrant minorities will soon become majorities and then we will have a problem of unemployment. They will request employment but how can one employ some one who is not academically fit for his respective job, that's a straight loss to multinational companies. That is why many multi national companies are denying permanent residency requests to those who do not prove themselves. Looking closely into these three families one can observe that no matter how hard these individuals try to succeed their internal atmosphere is so instable that rather than working on their jobs to prove themselves they are thinking about family problems and how to get out of their economic slump. With no trace of organization within the lives of these individuals it is not hard to see why even thought they have some access to the means of succeeding they cannot succeed.
According to the Functionalist perspective, I think families like the Azariahs and the Mohsins are dysfunctional. They have no ways of improving themselves as they find themselves in economic situations they cannot get out of e.g. cars, house loans and credit cards. These people cannot succeed because one they do not have the means to achieve what they want and secondly when they have supplemental income coming in they are not motivated.
The conflict perspective says that all this instability is good for the people as if it wasn't there, there would be a lot of monotony i.e. everybody will have equal access to resources. This instability provides competition, a means for making life worth living. But the way that I see it is that if people like the Azariahs and Mohsins aren't willing to live their lives in competition because they receive help from social services how is it good for the society? According to my interpretation of the Symbolic Interactionist perspective I think that all this is a warning for our societies' downfall. We should do something about it and not let people take advantage of us. We should have stronger methods of looking into people and perceiving their future in our society.
V. Conclusion: After all of this research and analysis I can construe that the Desi community has a larger part that is not doing fairly well. With communities like these affecting our society there can be inevitable everlasting effects. I can claim that less than 10% of the Desi community is highly intellectual and learned. It is very important to be organized and disciplined in life to properly utilize the available means of achieving success. Our book classifies people on the basis of access to means of success but I think one can create his own ways to achieve success it is just a matter of focusing. Mr. Saroia was not part of a network he believed that he could achieve success by working hard and he did. There is a famous Sufi saying that emphasizes this and it goes like this "Great achievements come after hard work."
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We are certain that by now everyone that’s ever imagined a zombie outbreak scenario has put together a must-have survival kit (in their minds, at least).
And we are also perfectly aware that these sort of post have been done over and over again, but nevertheless here’s ours!
We’ve tried to keep it as realistic as possible and within one afternoon’s worth of shopping.
Having a survival kit or a BOB (Bug Out Bag) is crucial if you’re a human. It would take too long to write about all the possible situations which could occur and a few times during your lifetime definitively will. A zombie apocalypse is a good enough reason as any to get one.
Be it sirens signaling incoming strike aircraft or moaning of your neighbors, you do not want to be listening to that kind of sounds while scraping items in a plastic bag and waiting for that bottle to finally fill with water.
Even though modern day survival kits are rather ill equipped to cope with zeds (read: kill them fast, easy and above else safely), they are crucial for something most zombie enthusiast forget to think about that much: YOUR SURVIVAL!
A world in panic and rampaging entropy is not an easily lootable supermarket. Let the noobs fight over pre-apocalypse luxuries and unnecesary items – and that, my friends, is a certainty; when the shit hits the fan everyone goes mental and runs around grabbing everything they see and think has any kind of value.
For that reason it is only logical to be dependant on what you have in your backpack and inside your head than what’s in the local Wallmart’s sports and outdoors department… which will be crawling with scared hopeless humans being run by their most primitive survival instincts. Did I forget to mention there will be infected people among them? YEP! And we don’t want to face that 30 minutes after we find out Z is among us.
So let’s go! This is what your survival kit HAS to have.
For inspecting and healing small injuries like removing splinters for example. Or even for repairing items and starting a fire.
Much easier to start a fire with a candle than just your matches
You can easily make ‘em yourself by dipping the striking heads of the matches in melted candle wax.
A little harder for one person to use on a tree but you probably won’t be chopping down entire forests by yourself.
Something like this will do but try to get a hold of a few bigger needles and stronger thread as well.
Or a similar emergency fire starter.
Fish is food and food is good
… and learn how to use it. Get a hold of maps of your surrounding area and put a good map in your kit.
Be sure to pack extra batteries with it!
Something like this will do but be more prepared, learn about first aid, learn about YOUR conditions.
There’s more in learning than talent to be a good doctor. Research and prepare wisely.
Knife
A good survival knife is not essentially a good zombie knife. (check out our article on the zombie knife). And the best knife is the one you know how to use without hurting yourself (kitchen knives excluded).
With a knife you’ll also need a sharpening stone, nothing special. A small and portable sharpening tool will do.
Kits are small and do not and can not contain everything you need when emergency strikes, they only have the basic. That is why I prefer and advice everyone to have a BOB
Concerning backpacks I find them the most important and vital items you have, right next to the knife, your primary weapon and your brain.
After all, it’s use will be to carry everything you need through thick and thin. And no one want’s to loose their lifeline while running away from zed.
Options are limitless so consider a few factors. For instance; if you’re planing on using a bicycle during the apocalypse then something like this might do DAKINE Shuttle Bike Pack
Do not buy or prepare too large a backpack if you are small in stature; sure, when push comes to shove you can put your gear down and use tactics and outmaneuver the zeds or kill ‘em and return for your backpack… but it’s a risk non the less, a risk you shouldn’t take, unless you’re absolutely confident in your fighting skills.
Something like this could be more of your style
as opposed to this
Imagine what would happen if you tried running with a fully packed backpack like that. I give you half a mile before getting either exhausted or injured.
You do not wanna get pneumonia when hiding or running or fighting with zeds. Most better backpacks and rucksacks have their own inbuilt cover from rain or are made from waterproof material so if you do not have any of that please find some fabric to protect your backpack when you stash it or have to be in the rain.
For obvious reasons
When you can’t get out of a situation you can use them to signal for help or even make a distraction. The good ones tend to be very expensive and the cheap ones are not reliable.
For use with traps, warning systems or when you just need to tie something/someone :D.
Watch a few episodes of Mythbusters concerning duct tape if you’re a non-believer. Everyone needs it!
I personally don’t own such a device cause I don’t actually like electronics that much (yeah, boo me:) ). However, most people have become rather dependent on such devices and a portable solar charger could be an excellent investment for them; with or without an apocalypse. The one listed below can charge USB devices and AA and AAA batteries, which pretty much covers everything.
You can power up your phones, radios… the whole sha-bang.
The duct tape of the zombie apocalypse! If you’re gonna use melee weapons and we all know you’re bound to do that we urge you to get yourself some overgrip tape.
This is the tape that tennis players use to wrap the handle of a tennis racket. Overgrip tape is extremely useful because it will both protect your palms and give you a stronger grip with your weapon making it a lot harder to loose control over the weapon or the weapon itself. It helps you not loose grip when your hands start sweating.
It would be a good idea to both prepare your melee weapons with an overgrip tape and have a few extra rolls if the apocalypse gets all out of control and lasts a long time.
It costs less than a dollar, and can be a difference between spilling food out of a can and eating a nice meal. You can even put it on a string and wear it around your neck,
might come handier than dog-tags when the Z’s come.
A bike repair kit
Even the simplest of transportation devices need maintenance and repair every now and then. It would not be nice to try and outrun a horde with a flat tire now wouldn’t it ;).
I do not have one, but seeing as I’ve been to the dentist a little too much for my taste I am strongly considering buying one.
Cooking equipment
Consider getting a small pot or two or even a Portable Cooking Kit.
And never leave home without a spoon/fork/knife combo.
Everyone needs water and make sure your BOB has it. If you’re gonna use PET bottles to store it make sure you throw away bottles after 6 months cause then they start letting bad chemicals into your water.
Spare clothing and at least a few pairs of good socks so your feet don’t look like the surface of the moon when you start getting blisters on them.
Duplicates of your personal identification and other essential documents.
Books you ought to read and if possible put in a safe storage somewhere or even take with you in your BOB. I can not even begin to emphasize how reading a few of these books is the best survival kit you can have. SURVIVE BY USING YOUR BRAIN!!When Technology Fails (Revised & Expanded): A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency
This book is basically a guide to do and make anything you want from scratch. From medicine to basic metallurgy. Excellent reading material and incredibly good and sound advice.SAS Survival Handbook
This is THE BEST emergency survival book on the planet… currently.
A notebook and a pen/pencil to write down any and every information you get while in a survival situation. Not everyone has a photographic memory and sometimes, especially in extreme situations, the mind can play tricks on us. So have a blank piece of paper or two to write shit down!How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times
The definitive guide on how to prepare for any crisis–from global financial collapse to a pandemic.When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need To Survive When Disaster Strikes
Entertaining and useful
If you don’t like reading :P, there’s always DVD’s but remember… you won’t be able to haul a DVD player and a TV set just like that!
All books say the best advice is to build your own survival kit and be very careful about every object and tool you put in it. If you lack interest in doing that the internet is full of ready made kits.
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ArchShowcase
Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination.
SHIZIMEN CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT in Zhuhai, China by 10 Design
November 26th, 2014 by Sumit Singhal
China Celebrated the Opening of Its World Class Central Business District in Shizimen, Zhuhai
Gordon and Miriam led the design team for the complex from the competition winning entry and worked closely with the client to the completion of the first phase. Recently the team at 10 DESIGN have been commissioned to advise on the future design phases of the development.
The overall development comprises 640,000 sqm of accommodation. The first phaseincorporates 362,000 sqm of convention, theatre, music hall, exhibition, and banquet facilities. These public and civic functions are supported with retail, F&B, serviced apartments, a 548 key Sheraton Hotelopening on 28
As the chief designer of the development, Gordon was invited as the key note speaker at the formal opening ceremony. The core message described “how convention and exhibition facilities if properly considered can play a vital role in the economic development of a region.” He explained that convention and exhibition centres facilitate communication and act as catalysts for trade and commerce regionally and globally. A summary of the keynote speech below:
Commercial sustainability is critical. There are several interactive ingredients leading to primary commercial successes: Location, Flexibility, and Diversity.
In order to cater for a wide audience, it is critical that the convention and exhibition facility can hold a multitude of diverse events with the ability to segregate or inter-mix delegates. This requires a high degree of flexibility in planning. So while the external public amenity functions of retail, F&B and office are sculpted in form, the internal planning requires to be rational and flexible.
The facility holds a multitude of functions including a theatre, a music auditorium, large scale convention and exhibition halls accommodating up to 2,000 people and large scale banquet rooms hosting up to 4,000 people.
A commercially successful development also demands a complimentary mix of uses to make it work as a standalone destination, with continual occupation beyond the requirements of the limited convention and exhibition centre operations. Therefore other functions such as office, hospitality, serviced apartments, and retail have been designed in the first phase, creating a waterfront urban destination.
The civic importance of the facility should not preclude it from being enjoyed by the general public. It was a driving factor in the original design competition concept that the facility should act as a truly public amenity as well as a civic one. This principle has been adhered to throughout the whole design process with the creation of an activated plaza linking the District Road to a waterfront plaza. This plaza is activated continually by retail, F&B, and garden spaces.
The idea of combining public and civic functions brought about the idea of an urban ribbon, linking and defining functions and spaces in the Shizimen CBD.
The ribbon houses purely public functions such as F&B and retail and also physically connects the main road (Nanwan Road) to the waterfront. The ribbon acts as a screen and separator between public and semi-public functions while at the same time framing vistas both internally and externally such as the view towards Macau.
It also wraps around special civic functions such as the theatre and convention, and lifts and opens to create a number of different special entry points to varying zones. For instance the ribbon, wrapping on NanwanRoad, forms a formal entrance by day and a vibrant arch by night while framing the entry to the music hall and theatre on the elevated plaza with its views to Macau.
The ribbon also helps to define a series of more intimate garden spaces which are key circulation areas between zones while providing sunken daylight wells to the carpark drop off areas. The combination of hardscape and planting reflect sculptural forms of the Zhuhai coastline.
The Shizimen CBD does provide a wide range of facilities that are rare to find in even the largest of convention facilities. It combines high quality, flexible exhibition, and convention space with several specialist spaces including a theatre and music auditoriums. With its distinctive coastal setting and a wide range of hospitality and commercial functions provided on site, the Shizimen CBD offers a compelling platform for businesses and communication.
Related posts: Contact 10 Design
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"It is not easily followed."
What can I say, a single guy, never a dad, about the importance of traditional marriage? How? Why? Why am I so concerned about something like traditional marriage? One important reason I can think of is because I come from a family wherein marriage was anything but 'high and noble'. My parents were completely irresponsible, negligent, abusive alcoholics. Yes, they did the best they could, but they had huge unresolved, unaddressed issues which affected how they parented. The were indiscreet in their sins, acting them out in full view of the kids, not simply through drunkenness, open sexuality, physical and mental abuse of one another, but their extramarital exploits were not well disguised or unknown.
Immorality is a horrible example to set for kids. It is an abuse.
In our day, single parents, unmarried parents, and kids of divorce are so common - in every economic strata - yet this fact can offer no justification to reorder, or redefine marriage between a man and a woman. Likewise, same sex couples, pretending to be married, cannot present a moral alternative to the failure of marriage in our culture. It is precisely because there is, and has been, such a crisis of marriage that same sex marriage is even considered as a viable and acceptable proposition. It is not.
Anyway. The Archbishops of Westminster & Southwark have issued a Pastoral letter on the redefinition of marriage to be read this weekend at all the Masses. I wanted to share a part of that text:
The reasons given by our government for wanting to change the definition of marriage are those of equality and discrimination. But our present law does not discriminate unjustly when it requires both a man and a woman for marriage. It simply recognises and protects the distinctive nature of marriage. Changing the legal definition of marriage would be a profoundly radical step. Its consequences should be taken seriously now. The law helps to shape and form social and cultural values. A change in the law would gradually and inevitably transform society’s understanding of the purpose of marriage. It would reduce it just to the commitment of the two people involved. There would be no recognition of the complementarity of male and female or that marriage is intended for the procreation and education of children. We have a duty to married people today, and to those who come after us, to do all we can to ensure that the true meaning of marriage is not lost for future generations. Most Reverend V. Nichols Most Reverend P. Smith
They might have added: "Changing the legal definition of marriage will screw kids up."
That said, I'm pretty sure nothing will stop it - it is on a trajectory of its own.
H/T St. Mary Magdalen Blog, Fr. Blake
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While taking in a Roller Derby bout over the weekend, a couple of us Bitch Beer gals were surprised to see an ad for a local brewery in the program. You see, we didn’t realize immediately that it had anything to do with craft beer, because at first glance it looked more like an advertisement for some kind of Affliction-esque clothing line or a PG13 Suicide Girls ad.
The ad (pictured left) was for South Austin Brewing and features a bottomless woman toting a bottle of beer with the tagline “Your Champagne Just Got Jealous!” Now, as opposed as we are to the use of exclamation marks, and as confused as we are about why she’s still wearing her cowboy boots, the more disturbing thing here is definitely the use of a half naked female to sell beer.
Not only did it seem to be an odd fit for roller derby, a sport that’s actually about empowering women to compete versus turning them into oversexed sidelinettes, it seemed a poor fit for craft beer. Yes, from time to time craft breweries have put things like sexy cartoon wenches on their bottle labels, and more on that later, but on the whole, the industry has never slumped to the level of the Super Bowl tit-pedaling macrobreweries of the world. Never before have I been confused about whether a craft brewery is selling beer or sex.
Ironically, Lone Star, a beer brand started by Adolphus Busch and owned by Pabst Brewing Company, advertised in the same program, and produced a female-targeted ad featuring a skater crushing a beer can on her head. The ad (pictured right) was as clever as it was badass. Frankly, if my beer purchasing decisions were based on the contrasting vibes of the advertisements alone, I’m suddenly a lot more likely to shotgun a can of the ol’ national beer of Texas than to pour myself a snifter of saison. For a gal like me, that’s saying something.
Both of these ads feature the same three things–a woman, a container of beer and a pithy tagline, though they couldn’t be further apart in connotation. In the South Austin ad, pantyless and mere picas from a snatch flash, the woman is being portrayed as something you’re pretty much expected to drink up right along with the beer. Conversely, the Lone Star ad features a strong woman interacting with the product in a very different way, I mean she’s pretty much making that can her bitch. Furthermore, in the Lone Star ad, it’s pretty damn clear that the woman is supposed to have consumed the beer herself, while in the South Austin ad it looks like the gal is just offering the beer up to horny/thirsty readers.
Now, before this turns into a full-on debate over whether the South Austin ad is sexist or just sexy, whether it objectifies women, and whether all women are likely to be offended by it or not, that’s not really the main concern here. Rather, what I would deem more troubling is the fact that an advertisement like this is alienating to female consumers.
Here at Bitch Beer, our mission has always been to make craft beer more accessible to women. We met too many ladies who had sworn off beer all together because they never experienced anything better than the watery adjunct crap some frat bro pumped them from a keg in college. To be frank, those efforts, and the efforts of so many passionate female (and for that matter, male) craft beer advocates that came long before us, are hindered when a male dominated industry puts out advertisements that feature women as titillating objects of affection rather than as valued consumers of their products.
If you don’t believe me, believe a British study conducted by Molson Coors that found that 42% of women surveyed believe that ‘changing the advertising’ is the biggest thing that could be done to make beer more appealing to women. That’s a statistic that shouldn’t be taken lightly when you consider that women are actually responsible for 85% of all consumer purchases in America.
It should be noted that South Austin Brewing is not the only offender here, and this post was certainly not made in any effort to demonize them as some kind of lady-haters, nor am I suggesting that the idea of men liking half naked women is some kind of revelation. Seeing the ad was merely a catalyst to have a dialogue about what has been an ongoing issue in beer advertising (plus, you know, like all advertising), certainly as it applies to the Big 3, but, what we’re learning is that craft breweries aren’t innocent either. Clown Shoes has received heat for their “Tramp Stamp” label (pictured right), and Texas BIG BEER Brewery (pictured left) made a similarly classy brew known as Big Ass Blonde (note the horrifying display of denim on denim) before a copyright issue forced them to change the name to Big Texas Blonde. Aw shucks, what a loss.
‘Community’ is a huge word that gets tossed around when it comes to craft beer. Hell, I’m sure a lil’ search of our website for the word would yield copious results. And, it’s true, so much of what is appealing about supporting small breweries is wrapped up in the idea of knowing exactly who is producing the beer you’re drinking and exactly who your dollar is supporting.
“Meet the brewer” nights, brewery tours, pint nights, anniversary parties, etc. all serve to heighten the vibrant community of craft beer, to introduce producers to consumers as allies in a quest for quality and the fostering of a true beer community. But, is it really a community when a brewery’s advertising has the potential to alienate half of the population? Can’t we all agree that if craft beer is ever going to surpass 5.7% of the market share of beer consumed in this country, that it’s going to take the help of more female beer drinkers? Can anybody pull off closing an article with a series of rhetorical questions
without sounding like Carrie Bradshaw?
Of only that last question am I uncertain.
-Caroline *All beer labels and photos of advertisements are displayed for educational purposes and should not be reused.
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Imagine that being your daddy was the best thing your father ever did. To hear that would be music to the ears of so many of our nation’s daughters. The little ones and those of us who have grown up to become women, women often still searching for whatever we feel we didn’t get from the first man we ever truly loved or placed upon a pedestal, whether or not he was actually worthy of such. While many of us have grown beyond the stage of finger pointing and the placing of blame, if we look back to revisit our yesterdays it is quite easy to see that our relationship (or lack of) with our father shaped the women we became.
Our feelings of not being worthy or of value in the eyes of our fathers resulted in adult women who struggled to love the face that stared back at them when they looked in the mirror. Our desire to be loved and accepted by the man who we share a genetic makeup with catapulted us to the arms of men who were so undeserving of our hearts despite us often attempting to thrust it into their hands hoping that they would love us back. For so many of us all we wanted was to matter to him, to be loved by him, for him to tell us that we were important and precious. And out of that want we went on a quest to find love.
Eventually, we would come to learn that love wasn’t giving away our body and innocence, love wasn’t spending our money to buy his affection, and love wasn’t standing still and feeling small as you were belittled and mistreated. It is a lesson that some of us are still learning. It is hard not to wonder how different life would have been if as daughters we had a daddy and not just a father. How different would life have been if someone had taught us how a woman should be treated? Had someone helped us to see that we were worthy of love and respect and that we were beautiful beings. What if someone looked into our little eyes, eyes that were brimming with hope and promise, eyes that had not yet seen how painful the world can be and told us we were the best thing they ever did?
I look at the way my husband’s eyes light up when he looks at his girls. And I wonder what that would do for so many of our daughters, to see their daddy’s eyes light up when he looks at them. To hear him say how much he loves being their father.
As referenced on The Root, according to child psychologist, Steve Biddulph, “girls with strong and involved fathers will grow up with higher self-esteem and make smarter choices later in life.” As a woman I know firsthand how true this is. As a mother I know what it means to me to be married to a man who realizes the gift and honor it is to be a child’s daddy. Even so, the reality is that for many children, a father will be nothing more than a memory or a person that we glorified because sometimes it is far too easy to fall in love with the idea of someone.
For some of us our father was the first man to break our heart. For some of us he was the man who taught us to protect it. There are numerous studies and books that will speak to the importance of having a father or father figure in your life but I believe the stories shared by women are the ones that tell it best.
Hi my name is Krishann. My father wasn’t always there and whether or not he could or couldn’t be there, in his eyes, doesn’t matter all that much. What matters is that he wasn’t there the way I needed him to be. We were inseparable and then on the brink of me becoming a teenager we were separate. I spent my teenage years making what I refer to as “a series of poor choices.” But by God’s grace I am here. I am standing, and I am still fighting to love myself and to let my husband love me the way I deserve to be loved. I’m pretty sure my dad thinks I’m awesome. In fact he has told me so but during the time when I most needed to hear that, I didn’t. And at 28 years old I still have to remind myself each and every day that I truly am enough.
While having a father is ideal we know the world we live in does not rotate on account of the things that we believe are ideal. May our children all be so blessed as to have someone who will help them to realize their value and potential. And in the event that there is no one else may
we be that person. BMWK — How did your relationship with your father shape you? Fathers how are you helping your daughters realize how valuable they are? Store
like what you're reading?
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“Never put in a fence post if there’s a full moon – by golly, it will pop right out!” As farmers, we live our lives by the rule of thumb. “Plant pumpkins on Memorial Day weekend and corn should be knee high by the Fourth of July”!
The rules can be followed, changed, and broken based on a person’s upbringing, culture, and outside influences. They’re simply assumptions, experiences, and stereotypes. My rule book is full of white out in the “when to plant” section, sarcastic comments in the margin about Ball canning recipes and botulism, and Tim’s motivational speech on replay in my head, “Who cares what the rule of thumb is? Just do it… what’s the worst that can happen? They eat ya?”
Probably the most interesting stereotype has been the public’s rule of thumb for organic farmers.
They never eat conventional or processed food – only organic and local, they only support local businesses and wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like Walmart, they’re liberal (personally and politically), they don’t drink or smoke (and if they do…. it’s an organic, local, microbrew followed by a joint grown on the farm *editor’s note to the Portage Co. DEA: I see you fly over weekly, consider this comment a stretch of the truth to humor my readers*), and they’re prepared to chain themselves to a fracking drill rig if it ever tries to poke a hole anywhere near their farm. So yesterday I went to Walmart to buy a case of Bud Light, two sandwiches from Subway and a Diet Pepsi for the ride home when I ran into one of our better customers. I approached her to say hello and she darted to guard her shopping cart that had a loaf of Schwebel’s bread and conventional bananas poking out. She was embarrassed and clearly surprised to see me. I’m not sure what she was worried about, wasn’t I the one breaking the rules?
A few weeks ago we travelled to Pennsylvania to have our soybeans professionally roasted for our new line of stone ground poultry feed. When we pulled up, I saw two old guys leaning against an Allis Chalmers tractor. One was wearing overalls and a John Deere hat (my kindred spirit) and the other was wearing coveralls and a Farm Bureau hat. I was sure they were large scale conventional farmers and I knew how the conversation was going to go, “so you’re an organic farmer, are ya?…” He looks to his partner, winks, and says, “I reckon she uses horses to plow her fields……” I would then passionately rattle off our vision (and extensive equipment list) and then they would figuratively pat me on the head and wish me good luck with my “garden”. I got out of the truck, introduced myself, asked a few questions and avoided small talk. One man started roasting our soybeans with Tim and the other man leaned against our truck, staring at me, “So you have an organic farm?” Here we go.
And this is where the story unexpectedly changes. As I shared our story, I realized he was engaged. He was asking poignant questions, listening intently, nodding in agreement and smiling. It turns out he has a small dairy, he’s been raising his herd naturally and organically for 15 years, and even drinks the ever controversial raw milk. When I asked him if he has considered organic certification, his response was simple, “No way.”
No way? “Nope. I’d lose all my friends.” Lose all of your friends? He explained that his conventional buddies that surround his property tolerate his practices, but organic certification would be the tipping point – he was too old to fight it and, “anyways…. I like hanging out and having coffee with them sometimes.”
I often wonder if my infrequent trips to Walmart or the store bought pizza in our freezer will turn off some customers. We may not follow all the rules of thumb for organic farmers, but we are genuine and there is nothing to hide at Breakneck Acres. We hope that this will be the reason customers support us and keep coming back. And the “rule of thumb”? Some say it used to mean that it was legal to beat your wife with a switch, so long as the switch was no thicker than the husband’s thumb. Tim’s got some big hands…. so we’ve agreed we really don’t need any “rules of thumb” at the farm!
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Hi everyone and Happy New Year. Yes it’s a bit late, I haven’t had a great deal to say so I haven’t said anything. Today however, I have something to say.
I’m getting a bit tired of all the dog theft posts I keep seeing on Facebook and Twitter. With just a little investigation most of them are shown to be scare mongering hoaxes. One I looked into had been reported in exactly the same text and format from as far apart as England, holland, Russia, USA and Canada. The headline grab isn’t DOG STOLEN it’s GANG USES STOLEN DOGS FOR DOGFIGHTING. What a load of bolocks. The headline got you here didn’t it?
Yes dogs are stolen but if you check the breeds that are going missing you will notice a pattern. The majority of breeds that are stolen are the little handbag type yappies as they are very easy to resell. You will also notice a lot of the show-off type breeds like Akitas and Huskies, again because of their resell value.
No Staffordshire Bull Terriers are being stolen as they are unfavourably common and the resell value is nil, A Staffy pup can be picked up for nothing on Facebook so why go steal one? And if you were using dogs for dog fighting, surely you would want something that would at least exercise your mighty K9 destroyer and not run the risk of it chocking on poopoo’s diamanté collar.
This problem is an extension of the “Backyard Breader” issue. If you had to be licensed to breed dogs then you wouldn’t have all of these unqualified idiots letting two dogs shag then trying to sell the pups for a grand a time.
I am the owner of a large thorough bred dog and I got her at 6 weeks old. As soon as her first season had ended I had her spayed. So many people said to me “you could get £500 per pup from her”. My opinion is that if you had to have a certain qualification to get the breeder license, you would cut down on the backyard breeders, you would then cut down on the amount of unwanted dogs going to the RSPCA and other dog rescue centres.
I also think that bitches should be spayed and dogs should be neutered as a matter of course. There is no need for the animal to have the reproductive ability if you are not going to breed from it. If you didn’t have the license to breed then you wouldn’t be allowed to anyway.
Yes I can hear a lot of voices saying “it’s my right to choose” but no it isn’t, it is proven that neutering helps in the majority of cases to reduce aggression in dogs and spaying reduces the risk of certain cancers in bitches. If you want to breed from your own dogs then you would need a license. The penalty for unlicensed breeding should be all animals removed from the home and a complete ban on keeping an animal, no matter how small, for 10 years. It would need to be harsh to enforce it. A mandatory 2 year prison term for those who ignore the ban with their assets being seized to pay for their prison stay would reinforce how we as a nation feel about or four legged buddies.
To get such licenses, as I mentioned earlier, one would need to gain some form of dog husbandry qualifications. This would also eliminate things like interbreeding and would go a long we to reforming the Kennel Club (KC). The KC actively ignore Father/Daughter, Mother/Son and Sibling/Sibling inbreeding to the point that many many breeds of dog are unrecognisable from their original strains. Along with this inbreeding comes the inevitable health issues.
In German Shepherds for example you see Hip Dysplasia and Elbow Dysplasia. This results in the hind quarters of the dog colapsing. In King Charles Spaniels you see Syringomyelia. This is caused by the skull being to small for the brain and has been proved to cause the animal serious suffering. Who in their right mind would allow someone who is willing to do this to a dog to become a breeder or a judge at a dog show? Let alone be responsible for a dogs welfare.
There are other stories of a property being marked with coloured stickers on the garden gate or the letter K being chalked on the path outside a house that contains a desirable dog. Again there have been reports of this from all over the world on social media but no official Police reports have been filed.
So please, please, please. Before you go and click SHARE, have a quick look on Google and see if the subject you are about to pollute my timeline with has been hoaxed. If it has, the chances are you are going to look a bit silly at best, at worst you could be distributing false or illegal information and you could leave yourself open to ridicule or even prosecution.
I feel better for that.
Thanks for reading
Craig xx
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Cults use mind control techniques to keep their members from leaving the group and reinforce adherence to the common cause. Damanhur is no exception to this.
If someone unwittingly becomes member of a cult then it is obvious that psychological coercion has been employed in some form. The mind control techniques used by cults are many and varied but a basic list of 26 is shown below: I have added my comments in Italics to the original Ce.S.A.P forum post to illustrate how these techniques manifest in Damanhur.
DIO Editor What is Mind Control? Mind Control techniques include: Hypnosis
Inducing a state of high suggestibility by hypnosis, often thinly disguised as relaxation or meditation.
– Meditation School courses and ‘Serata’ with Falco. Peer Group Pressure
Suppressing doubt and resistance to new ideas by exploiting the need to belong. –
Belonging to the Spiritual and Magic People of Damanhur – a spiritual elite that will save the planet. Love Bombing
Creating a sense of family and belonging through hugging, kissing, touching and flattery.
– Emotional bonding within Meditation School groups – promoting group loyalty and a love of Damanhur. Rejection of Old Values
Accelerating acceptance of new life style by constantly denouncing former values and beliefs.
– The outside world is full of ignorance, the Catholic Church is our Enemy, the outside world does not and cannot understand Damanhur. Confusing Doctrine
Encouraging blind acceptance and rejection of logic through complex lectures on an incomprehensible doctrine.
– Meditation School courses, Falco’s courses and the study of Esoteric Physics and attendant yearly MCD exams. Meta-communication
Implanting subliminal messages by stressing certain key words or phrases in long, confusing lectures
. – Obligatory Serata with Falco on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. Removal of Privacy
Achieving loss of ability to evaluate logically by preventing private contemplation.
– Overcrowded residential spaces, the sharing of rooms, lack of personal time because of endless meetings ‘voluntary’ work and community commitments. Time Sense Deprivation
Destroying ability to evaluate information, personal reactions, and body functions in relation to passage of time by removing all clocks and watches.
– Removal of watches/banning of telephones during Meditation School sessions and Falco’s courses. Disinhibition
Encouraging child-like obedience by orchestrating child-like behavior.
– The ‘Game of Life’ initiatives. Uncompromising Rules
Inducing regression and disorientation by soliciting agreement to seemingly simple rules which regulate mealtimes, bathroom breaks and use of medications.
– The School of Meditation disciplines, preparations for rituals and the practices of certain of the ‘Spiritual Ways.’ Verbal Abuse*
Desensitizing through bombardment with foul and abusive language.
– Not known. Sleep Deprivation and Fatigue
Creating disorientation and vulnerability by prolonging mental and physical activity and withholding adequate rest and sleep.
– Keeping people ‘busy’ obligatory unpaid hours of work ‘Terrazzatura’, work for the Nucleo, Nucleo turns, Nucleo meetings, ritual observances, prayers, spheres, local political commitments, attending conferences, meetings of the Spiritual Ways, ‘volunteer’ construction work in the Temple etc ,etc Dress Codes
Removing individuality by demanding conformity to the group dress code.
– Wearing of Meditation School ritual robes, encouragement to observe the color of the day in personal dress Chanting and Singing
Eliminating non-cult ideas through group repetition of mind-narrowing chants or phrases.
– Group prayers, ritual prayers, Meditation School practices. Confession
Encouraging the destruction of individual ego through confession of personal weaknesses and innermost feelings of doubt.
– Tecnarcato group work, the Tecnarcato Diary, fortnightly and monthly personal reports, personal letters at the full and dark moon, interviews with heads of Spiritual Ways and Tecnarcato leaders. Financial Commitment
Achieving increased dependence on the group by ‘burning bridges’ to the past, through the donation of assets.
– Donation of all personal and inherited wealth to the Community on becoming a citizen A. Finger Pointing
Creating a false sense of righteousness by pointing to the shortcomings of the outside world and other cults.
– The outside world is ignorant. Damanhurians represent humanity on this planet. No other community can match Damanhur‘s achievements. Flaunting Hierarch
Promoting acceptance of cult authority by promising advancement, power and salvation.
– Damanhurians are destined to become Gods in their lifetime. Damanhurians are saving the planet. If you leave Damanhur you will lose your soul. Falco is the reincarnation of Horus. Isolation
Inducing loss of reality by physical separation from family, friends, society and rational references.
– Becoming a citizen A and working inside the Community means there is no time for outside pursuits, old friends or family connections. Visiting family members outside is frowned upon during public holidays. Obligatory rituals and Meditation school meetings are always organized at holiday times to keep people on the territory. Controlled Approval
Maintaining vulnerability and confusion by alternately rewarding and punishing similar actions.
– Meditation School disciplinary procedures without right of appeal. Esoteric grades and Game of Life bracelets. Change of Diet
Creating disorientation and increased susceptibility to emotional arousal by depriving the nervous system of necessary nutrients through the use of special diets and/or fasting.
– Meditation School disciplines, ritual fasting, the disciplines of the Way of the Monks. Games
Inducing dependence on the group by introducing games with obscure rules.
– Battles in the Woods, Horusian Games, Meditation School courses, Magic Journeys in the Woods. Falco’s courses. No Questions
Accomplishing automatic acceptance of beliefs by discouraging questions.
– Meditation School groups and courses. Guilt
Reinforcing the need for ‘salvation’ by exaggerating the sins of the former lifestyles.
– Before Damanhur your life had no direction or meaning. The outside world is doomed to extinction, only Damanhurians will be saved. Fear
Maintaining loyalty and obedience to the group by threatening soul, life or limb for the slightest ‘negative’ thought, word or deed.
– Meditation School disciplines, humiliating apologies before the entire school. Warnings from the Damanhurian Department of Security, disciplinary procedures by the School of Meditation, the College of Justice, and the King Guides with no right of defense. Replacement of Relationships
Destroying pre-cult families by arranging cult marriages and ‘families’.
– The Nucleo is your ‘real’ family. Outside relatives are less important as they are not members of the Damanhurian spiritual elite. In the early years of Damanhur Falco arranged the marriages of citizens. Talon First posted 2008/04/11 21:49 to the Damanhur Forum of www.cesap.net under the title’ LE MIE RIFLESSIONI’. The only aspect of this list which is not true of Damanhur is that of ‘Verbal abuse’. Here is an extract from the UK, Cult Information Centre site on the dangers of mental manipulation ‘The average cult uses a combination of the majority of the above described techniques, which result in a potential recruit being broken down physically and mentally and made highly vulnerable to suggestion. This pressure usually continues to a breaking point referred to as ‘snapping’ by Conway and Siegelman (Conway & Siegelman, Snapping. New York: Delta Books, l979). After snapping, the subject is left in a state of hyper suggestibility where critical ability is severely impaired. Simultaneously there is usually a sudden personality change, a change for the worse. It is this change of personality and the relative inability of the subject to critically evaluate, that provokes family and friends of the average victim to react. Unless they are given some guidance on how to cope, the cult member will rapidly become more and more alienated from them.
With cults representing such a threat to the individual, the family and society, how can we cope?
There are many things that can be done as follows:
1. Society needs to become aware of how everyone is vulnerable to manipulation.
2. People need to be educated about mind control techniques, so they can recognize and leave an environment where psychological coercion exists, before becoming a victim.
3. Society needs to become aware that there is a lot of good material on cults to be found in the media. It is useful for updating one’s information.
4. People need to learn to question, be discerning and feel it is OK to say NO!
5. More mental health professionals need to be trained to help cult victims.
Hopefully some of the popular misconceptions have been overcome in this article. They are as follows:
Exploding The Myths
1. People don’t join cults. They are recruited.
2. People are recruited by a method not a message.
3. People do not stay in cults because they have nothing better to do with their lives, but because psychological coercion holds them there.
4. Cults intend to retain a hold on people for life, or for as long as they are valuable to the cult. It is not a fad or a phase.
5. Normal people from normal families are recruited into cults.
6. Cult leaders should be blamed for the problems caused, not the individual members, ex-members or their families. (Blame the victim syndrome). It can happen to anyone.
7. Cult members are sincere. (Sincere victims, but sincere.)
8. Cult members are victims and need to be treated with love. They are people who need help, not hostility.
9. Cults recruit people of all ages, not just young people.
10. Cult recruiters are rarely visually identifiable. They usually look like quite normal people who appear to be very friendly.
11. Anyone can become a victim of cult techniques of psychological coercion. The safest people seem to be the seriously mentally ill, or those that know how to recognize a cult.
12. Accurate information on cults is not best obtained by trying to infiltrate a cult. This is far too dangerous.’
Ian Haworth, General Secretary, Cult Information Centre Link: Check out these two pages on the ‘Spirit Watch’ site for a description of how mind control works in groups like Damanhur.
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Author Tim Talbot and Gary Messing responded to the case in PORAC Law Enforcement Vol. 38 NO.7 July 2006 in the following ways.
Welfare and Institutions Code (WIC) section 625 specifically permits peace officers to take a minor into temporary custody without a warrant when an officer reasonably believes a minor committed a crime.
California courts find no meaningful distinction between a temporary custody and an arrest in the application of WIC section 625. In re Ian C., 87 Cal. App. 4th 856, 860 (2001). Moreover, the warrant less arrest of minors charged with misdemeanor offences has been held constitutional. In re Samual V., 225 Cal.App.3d 511 (1990)
Once inside, a police officer’s rights are limited to the scope of the consent given on entry to the residence. People v. Ramey, 16 Cal.3d 263 (1976). In this instance, Ly merely asked if he could come into the family’s home and the father consented to Ly’s entry.
As for the propriety of arresting a minor at night, Penal Code Section 840 specifically authorizes the arrest of anyone charged with a misdemeanor before 10 p.m.
Certain individuals suggested that because the father paid for the damage to the victim’s vehicle, without ever admitting responsibility for the damage, no crime was committed. In actuality, the law requires the victim to appear in court and acknowledge receiving satisfaction for the injury before the court may dismiss a criminal prosecution. Penal Code 1378-1379.
In People v Tischman, 35 Cal.App.4th 174 (1995), the court stated that misdemeanor hit and run accident can and should be resolved through civil compromise, unless there are extenuating circumstances. It is implied that those responsible acknowledge responsibility for causing the damage, which never occurred in this case.
Tim Talbot and Gary Messing are partners in the Sacramento office of Caroll, Burdick and McDonough. They helped to convince the District Attorney's office to make information about the case public. They are lawyers for the Davis Police Officers' Association.
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